CHAPTER III

.

FROM THE ROMANTICS TO THE MODERNS

Introduction

Imaginative works featuring variant women have thus far been few, widely separated in time, and for the most part written with literary intent only. Thus, it has sufficed to present them with slight orientation in literary history. During the nineteenth century such items averaged better than three per decade and the majority were novels, a form

## particularly apt to reflect drifts of contemporary thought and even to

be written for ulterior ends. If even tenuous patterns are to be traced in this mass of material it will be necessary to sketch as background the general trends of interest from which the novels grew.

Probably the most significant feature of the decades just following the French Revolution was the rapid spread of democratic efforts toward political, economic and educational betterment of the common man. This was reflected slowly in variant literature, and then only indirectly as it multiplied readers, writers, and subjects of relatively modest social status. Outside the field of social reform the same revolutionary sentiment appeared under such different guises as the Romantic Movement in literature and a scientific rather than a philosophic attack upon the problems of human personality.

Most closely allied to practical politics was the Woman’s Movement. The eighteenth-century French rationalists who championed the rights of man included women in their thesis; however, for various historical and psychological reasons their own countrywomen never as a whole embraced the feminist cause. In England and America, on the other hand, where the property rights of women or their inability to vote on such humanitarian issues as abolition of slavery were sore points, feminists embarked upon a battle for legal equality which ran on into the present century.

The Romantic Movement in literature represented a swing away from eighteenth century rationalism toward the glorifying of emotional experience. Whereas the sexual licence in pre-Revolutionary France had reflected a _galant_ indifference to moral standards, the new and more general claim to emotional freedom was a matter of philosophic principle. However unsatisfactory from a pragmatic viewpoint the lives of such men as Rousseau and Shelley may have been, these “mad idealists” were acting upon conviction. The keynote of romanticism was, as always, the exaltation of Love and of every individual’s right to follow its dictates, a theme which figured prominently in nineteenth century literature and which still persists in popular fiction and films. While this philosophic tolerance did not extend to homosexual love, it enabled the subject to be treated seriously in other than underground erotic literature.

Yet another aspect of the rebellion against hitherto revered authority was the extension of scientific method to the study of human consciousness. Ever since the renaissance, science had been advancing steadily in physical fields. Its practical applications had produced the Industrial Revolution, and its unfettered intellectual attitude had helped, via the French Encyclopedists, to sow the seeds of political revolution. During the late eighteenth century students of geology, biology, and human anatomy were accumulating the evolutionary data so dramatically systematized in 1859 by Darwin. At the same time scientific travelers, observing primitive societies, assembled the raw materials of what later became anthropology. Finally at the beginning of the nineteenth century a few pioneers, defying heavy odds of religious and popular prejudice, began to explore the relation of mind to body. In Germany laboratory experiment was concentrated on the neurological bases of sensory experience. In France medical aspects of the problem took precedence, focussing on mental aberration, and by the 1860s Charcot, best known for his therapeutic use of hypnotism, had founded the first great neurological clinic.

As to the objective study of homosexuality, nothing which could be called scientific by modern standards was attempted until the last third of the century, but the phenomenon was noted extensively in the pre-anthropological records mentioned above, and a considerable group of studies on human hermaphrodites antedated 1850.[1] A single descriptive article on homosexuality appeared as early as 1791, when a German periodical, _Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde_, published the biographies of two men who “manifested an enthusiastic love for persons of their own sex,” and one of whom attributed his predilection to childhood experiences at home and at school. For the next fifty years the only pertinent contributions seem to have been some articles on “the Scythian madness” (male homosexuality) in the ancient Greeks. Then, in 1852, a Dr. Casper published in his _Vierteljahrsschrift_ a number of comments on contemporaneous pederasty,[2] and a few years later he brought out a volume of male case histories under the title _Klinische Novellen_. During the following two decades Karl Ulrichs (writing under the pseudonym Numa Numantius) produced upward of a dozen pamphlets, controversial rather than scientific, which defended male homosexuality as hereditary and therefore not justly subject to legal penalty. All these studies, it should be noted, dealt exclusively with men.

What is considered the first essentially scientific publication, however, was a clinical report in 1870 on a female homosexual patient by a German physician, Westphal, after which similar descriptive case studies multiplied rapidly. In 1886 Krafft-Ebing brought out his lengthy _Psychopathia Sexualis_, a large section of which was devoted to “contrary sexual feeling,” and before the end of the century Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis, and Magnus Hirschfeld produced even more extensive treatises.[3] Although all these later studies included female cases, women still did not receive much emphasis. A Spaniard, Casán, was apparently the only writer to treat women exclusively. (His volume, listed in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Catalog as _El Amor Lesbio_, 1896, has not been available for examination.)

The mounting stress upon an objective approach to psychological phenomena had its effect on alert literary minds. (It was not restricted, of course, to sex or variance). Balzac was the first to embark deliberately upon a “naturalistic” study of human experience, and although literary critics observe that his plots are often based on more or less abstract concepts, none deny that his individual characters show the fruit of minute observation. By 1857 Flaubert also was maintaining that “it is time to give it (literary art) the precision of the sciences by means of a pitiless method,”[4] and later in the century Zola pointed out that his own practice, as well as his theories set forth in _Le Roman Experimental_, were “based upon the application of experimental science to physiology as developed in the writings of Dr. Claude Bernard.”[5] Each of these three major novelists contributed to the understanding of female variance, and the same spirit can be detected in the fiction of several lesser writers who attacked the subject.

Even in the many cases where direct connection cannot be demonstrated between scientific thought and the imaginative writing under consideration, there is a perceptible correlation from decade to decade between quantitative developments in both fields.

Precursors of Modern Fiction

The transition from _galant_ writing of the eighteenth century to modern fiction with its psychological preoccupation and its elevation of women’s roles to a position of romantic importance could hardly be better exemplified than by Diderot’s _La Religieuse_. Superficially, this novel appears to be a typical pre-revolutionary anti-clerical effort. As it was undertaken in 1760, only a year after the second suppression of its author’s major project, _L’Encyclopédie_, it is tempting to imagine that the Jesuits’ share in that act of censorship may have been the immediate spur to its inception. Actually _La Religieuse_ broke new ground, for Diderot’s preoccupation was not so much the religious shortcomings of the convents depicted, as the morbid physical and psychological effects of celibacy upon women, especially when this way of life was not freely elected but enforced by church and family.

The tale was first conceived as a practical joke on an impressionable philanthropist, the Marquis de Croismare, who in 1757 had exercised his influence in behalf of a nun seeking release from her vows. Not even personally acquainted with the young woman, he engaged legal aid for her but had no success, and she was forced to remain in her convent. A few years later, when she was unobtrusively transferred to another religious house, Diderot, Grimm, and other friends of de Croismare’s conceived the idea of pretending that she had escaped, and Diderot forged a series of letters in which she appealed to her former benefactor for some means of support in a place where her religious “persecutors” could not find her. The victim of the hoax was so moved by it that he offered her (by mail) a position as companion to his daughter, and the perpetrators were forced to fabricate an account of her sudden death. It was not till eight years later that the marquis learned the truth, and “was able to laugh at the incident over which he had earlier wept.”[6]

In the meantime Diderot had invented a complete autobiography supposedly written by the girl during her last illness, and though this was not completed in time to become a part of the deception, it so engaged its author’s interest that he continued to work on the whole story intermittently for a couple of decades. It was pretty certainly finished by 1780, but was not published until 1796, when it appeared in its present form, along with the account of its composition. Written as her own artless journal, it gives the story of an illegitimate girl forced into convent life by a guilt-ridden mother and her suspicious husband. The victim resists her fate with extraordinary intelligence and ingenuity, but her struggles are futile, and she is merely transferred from one religious house to another, each exemplifying some pathological aspect of conventual sex-repression. Under the best abbess she meets nothing worse than a rather hysterical exaggeration of piety with slight variant overtones; in the second institution she encounters outright sadism, and in the third rampant homosexuality.

The Superior in this last house is an overt lesbian, and her efforts to seduce the girl occupy nearly a third of Diderot’s whole volume. The young nun, steadfast in her desire for freedom—and marriage, though she has not yet known love—remains almost wholly blind to the meaning of the other’s blandishments and of her own partial response to them. The Superior is described as vain, frivolous, flighty, and wholly without religious feeling. The scenes in her quarters where her favorites gossip, fawn on her, and compete for her favors are more in the spirit of _galant_ eighteenth century canvases than that of a religious house. Ellis says that for the Superior “Diderot found a model in the Abbess of Chelles, a daughter of the Regent (Philippe of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV) and thus a member of a family which for several generations showed a marked tendency to inversion.”[7] Wherever Diderot gathered his material, his picture of fevered intrigue, jealousy, skilled seduction, and finally of the frustrated Superior’s decline into acute neurosis, is unparalleled in fiction before the present century. Indeed, for clinical accuracy of detail it had no equal until Westphal’s scientific case study of a homosexual woman was published in 1870. Thus it stands as a landmark in the literature of female sex variance.

Equally a landmark, though of a very different sort, is Mary Wollstonecraft’s _Mary, a Fiction_, which since it appeared in 1788, actually antedated Diderot’s from the viewpoint of open publication. It is the first novel on female variance to be written by a woman, and its significance is augmented by its being an English work, written before its author’s lengthy sojourn in France at the beginning of the Revolution. The writer of this now forgotten volume (only a handful of copies are extant here or abroad) is more generally remembered for her _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ (1798), for her liaison in Paris during the Revolution with Gilbert Imlay, an American soldier of fortune, and for her later and comparatively unromantic marriage to William Godwin. In their recent _Modern Woman, the Lost Sex_.[8] Lundberg and Farnham devote much space to establishing the _Vindication_ as the germ of all subsequent rebellion of women against their normal social and biological roles. But though Wollstonecraft strongly defended the right of women to the individual liberty which was being generally claimed for all men, an impartial review of feminism hardly appears to justify so complete an assignment of responsibility to this single work.

The authors of _Modern Woman_ have done an excellent job of analyzing the unhappy home environment and early experiences that made Wollstonecraft a champion of her sex and a mordant critic of male dominance. They pass over, as not germane to their theme, one major factor in her life, her consuming attachment to Fanny Blood, a young woman slightly Mary’s senior, which began when the latter was about fifteen and continued until Fanny’s death twelve years later. Of this attachment William Godwin in his _Memoirs_ says that it was “so fervent as ... to have constituted the ruling passion in her mind.”[9]

This friendship is the theme of _Mary_, though the fictional version is less moving and significant than the known facts on which it was based. As biographers and critics are agreed that Wollstonecraft had little creative imagination and drew for all her fiction with almost embarrassing literalness upon her own experience, a parallel analysis of the tale and its source incidents will be enlightening. The fictional “Mary” is the child of wealth, with a single brother and an ailing mother sentimentally addicted to novel reading. In reality, Mary was the second of six children of a violent drunken father and a masochistically submissive mother. The family was so impoverished that from childhood Mary was acquainted with the bitterest contriving, and in late adolescence faced earning her own living, a problem not easily solved in her time for a woman above the servant class.

The father in the novel, dangerous when in his cups and given freely to wenching, is the only accurate family portrait aside from the heroine herself. That “tenderness and compassion” for the ill-treated mother became “the governing propensity in her heart through life” was as true of the real as of the fictional Mary. As a mere child Wollstonecraft had often slept on the landing outside her mother’s door so that her father should not misuse his wife when drunk. Ann, the beloved friend in the novel, lives, as did Fanny Blood, in wretched poverty and suffers from unrequited love for a man who has trifled with her affections. Thus “Mary’s” passionate devotion to Ann is not returned in kind, and she is “often hurt by involuntary indifference.” Rushing to Ann with glowing delight and seeing no answering emotion in her friend’s face, “Mary would check her warm greeting and seem of chilling insensibility.” Then, perceiving her friend’s hurt surprise, she forces a contrite and disciplined warmth.

Upon the death of both mother and brother, “Mary” submits to her mother’s dying wish and to pressure from her father, and marries a boy who is joint heir to the family property. Her only thought is of providing a stable home for Ann. Without the marriage’s being consummated—the mere approach of the husband sickens “Mary”—the weak and egocentric boy embarks on the conventional Grand Tour of the continent to complete his education, and Ann moves in as “Mary’s” companion. “Before she enjoyed Ann’s constant society she imagined it would have made her completely happy; she was disappointed, and yet knew not what to complain of.”[10] At her father’s death her husband proposes to return, but the thought of him still makes her ill. “There was no previous attachment to give rise to her revulsion. Her friendship with Ann had occupied her whole heart and resembled a passion.”[11]

This husband, so pallid a figment, was extraneous to the real Mary’s experience. Actually she and a sister had launched a school for young girls, for which she had had superficial preparation as a governess, in order to provide a home for Fanny. The latter had once expressed a wish to live with Mary, but after much procrastination and one brief trial of life with the two struggling sisters, she returned to her own wretched home. Presently she married her vacillating suitor, whom in fact Mary had brought to terms with a few privately delivered home truths—quite simply that Fanny’s incipient tuberculosis was due to his long indecision. After achieving this selfless end Mary fell ill, for the second time in her life, the first having followed her mother’s death five years earlier.

In the novel Ann, unmarried and ailing, is taken to Lisbon by “Mary,” and dies there despite the beneficial change of climate. In reality it was her husband’s business which took Fanny there, and pregnancy which aggravated her pulmonary weakness. Gravely ill, she sent a desperate appeal to Mary, who threw over her teaching, borrowed ruinously to finance the journey, and even so, arrived in Lisbon only a few hours before Fanny’s confinement and a few days before her death.

The _Fiction_ was written subsequent not only to that loss but to Mary’s first efforts at journalism and her resulting encounter with the artist Henry Fuseli. Almost at once she loved Fuseli passionately. He, however, was married, and his wife quite naturally vetoed Mary’s incredibly naïve proposal to become one of the household. The girl, now twenty-six, believed her own passion to be purely “platonic.” One biographer of Fuseli reports her as saying to him, “If I thought my passion criminal I would conquer it or die in the attempt, for immodesty in my eyes is ugliness.”[12] In the _Fiction_ “Henry” figures as an ailing violinist met in Lisbon during Ann’s last illness and loved later in maternal fashion, but made inaccessible by Mary’s own married state.

He told her that the tenderest father could not more anxiously interest himself in the fate of a darling child than he did in hers ... He had called her “My child!” ... His child, what an association of ideas. If I had had such a father! She could not dwell on the thoughts, the wishes which obtruded themselves. Her mind was unhinged, and passion unperceived filled her whole soul.[13]

Another speech of “Henry’s” is significant in the Ann-“Mary” relationship: “I would give the world for a picture with the expression I have seen in your face when you have been supporting your friend [in your arms].”[14] As to the final relation of “Mary” to her husband, after her return to England she faints at the sight of him, and finally, demanding her freedom, retires to the country where she devotes herself to good works and waits for death, in which she will be reunited with Ann, and “where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”[15]

This whole cathartic outpouring raises interesting questions as to the author’s own understanding of its emotional significance. It was published anonymously, but her own name and that of Henry appear unchanged, their relations in the tale, as in life, being beyond question blameless. So were “Mary’s” with Ann on the surface, though the author states openly that “Mary always slept with Ann, who was subject to terrifying dreams.” Yet she substituted “Ann” for Fanny, even though the latter had passed beyond the possible reach of slander. Was she perhaps aware of criticism directed against their relationship? Mary had, at twenty, been governess to the children of Lady Kingsborough in Ireland, and was dismissed because the children grew too fond of her.[16] The fourteen-year-old daughter in particular was so attached as to become ill during a brief separation from Mary. In a letter preserved in Godwin’s _Memoirs_, Mary refers to the pleasure she derived from the girl’s “innocent caresses,” an odd adjective had Mary not been aware of possible caresses between women that were otherwise.

The answer seems to lie in two passages, one from the _Rights of Women_ in which she refers to physical love as “perhaps the most evanescent of all passions,” and the other in a letter to Imlay written after it was all too plain that his infatuation had burned out:

Ah, my friend! You do not know the ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from the unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous. Yes; these are emotions over which satiety has no power and the recollection of which even disappointment cannot disenchant, but they do not exist without self-denial. These emotions, more or less strong, appear to me to be the distinctive characteristics of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begetters certainly have no idea. You will smile at an observation that has just occurred to me: I consider those minds as the most strong and original whose imagination acts as the stimulus to their senses.[17]

Here is a summing up of the wisdom gained from three love affairs, two physically unfulfilled, the third disillusioning. The passage also foreshadows her relations with Godwin, whose own description of their courtship runs as follows:

The partiality which we conceive for each other ... grew with equal advances in the mind of each.... One sex did not take the priority which long established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil spreader or the prey, in the affair.... It was friendship melting into love.[18]

In Mary’s eyes, Fuseli, Fanny, and she herself evidently bore some of the stigmata of genius. Imlay, business man, extrovert, casual adventurer, impetuous lover, was of “the common herd of child-begetters.” Hers is definitely the feminine romantic ideal of the subjective aspects of Love outweighing the physical to a point where the sex of the partner is less important than his personality.

Thus, we have in the last dozen years of the eighteenth century two novels which sounded the keynotes of much that has followed. Diderot analyzed an overtly homosexual woman and pronounced her wholly pathological and destructive, even though he assigned much of the responsibility for her divagations to the environment in which her entire life was spent. Wollstonecraft’s novel idealized an innocent variant relationship as the highest form of emotional experience. Numerous variations on both these themes appear in the succeeding century and a half.

The Novel Before 1870

For the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century variant fiction was so nearly an exclusive product of France that traces appearing elsewhere may be left for separate consideration. The first pertinent French item was a typical Romantic Period novel of indifferent literary quality, Philip Cuisin’s _Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne_ (1819). As its title indicates, intersexual anatomy is responsible for the heroine’s variant personality, which is used merely as mainspring for a plot of the wildest extravagance. _Clémentine_ is a beautiful child of unknown antecedents cast ashore near Carcassone as sole survivor of a shipwreck. With the approach of puberty her ambiguous sex makes her the object of so much superstitious hostility among the peasants of the neighborhood that she is sent by her wealthy protector to a physician in Cadiz who is glad of the chance to observe such an anomaly.

A child’s unawareness of her own peculiarity had betrayed her to the peasants of Carcassone. Shocked into neurotic prudery she manages in Cadiz to avoid suspicion though not curiosity on the part of the physician’s daughter, who becomes strongly attached to her and is hurt by her refusal of the easy intimacy common among growing girls. Clémentine canalizes her waxing male eroticism into strenuous physical exercise and becomes a proficient fencer. This unfeminine skill and her habit of going about occasionally in men’s clothing produce violent infatuation in a bold young woman of the neighborhood who believes her to be a man, and who plays thereafter the role of villain in the piece. Because of this woman’s advances, Clémentine is forced to leave her second home in Cadiz and is subsequently involved in a series of stormy adventures. She is too feminine to live out her life disguised as a man, too relentlessly pursued by her evil adorer to settle down as an independent woman and win a man she has come to love. An interim in a convent, where she takes refuge from the law after killing a man in a duel, naturally only produces fresh complications. Here she, herself, is passionately drawn to the urbane Superior who cherishes her, and a novice is similarly attracted to her; but she resists all temptations (and they are many) to give way to her feelings. At last obstacles are overcome according to the best romantic pattern—she marries her male beloved, who understands and accepts her anomaly, encourages her to fence and hunt with him, and enjoys her love, which has “la force réuni des deux sexes.” The author must have read the contemporary literature on hermaphroditism, but was evidently shy of attributing his heroine’s passionate intensity to her anomaly after once he had her settled as a married woman, and so lays it in part to prenatal influence. Her mother, we are told, had during pregnancy been very friendly with a Persian ambassador to the French court, and had been “saturated” with his oriental tales. Thus, the daughter was predestined to love “avec l’exaltation d’une Persane.”

The second and slightly more artistic French narrative is a two-volume novel by Henri de Latouche entitled _Fragoletta_ (1829), which is concerned primarily with the Napoleonic wars and anti-British propaganda. Emotional interest centers about the hero’s love for the title figure, whom he first meets as a boyish girl of fourteen, daring, brilliant, and free of coquetry. Her Sicilian guardian, knowing himself pursued by political assassins, implores d’Hauteville to marry and care for Fragoletta, but d’Hauteville feels that his love for her has roused no response save lively friendship and so waits for her emotions to mature. On the guardian’s death he becomes her protector until the misfortunes of war separate them. Later he hears she has returned to her native Austria from which she was removed as an infant.

She writes him of discovering there a twin brother, Adriani, who eventually visits d’Hauteville in his Paris home and falls in love with his sister, an untouched innocent a year Adriani’s senior. Sent as a spy to Naples, d’Hauteville sees Fragoletta there at a court ball given by Queen Caroline, at which Lady Hamilton is a guest. He hears that Adriani is a spy on the English-Neapolitan side, but because of the need for concealing his own identity he can neither reveal himself to Fragoletta nor penetrate the mystery of her presence among the English and her brother’s treasonous activity.

He then learns from a frantic letter from his sister that Adriani has seduced her and that she no longer wishes to live. Her mother also has fallen gravely ill of the shock. D’Hauteville pursues the boy to Paris only to find him gone again and his sister on her deathbed. Subsequently, he tracks the traitor-seducer back to Naples and challenges him to a duel. Fragoletta, still in Naples, begs him not to expose himself to certain capture by the enemy merely in order to avenge “un tort exagéré ou peut-être imaginaire,” implying that only his sister’s naïvete led her to believe herself ravished. D’Hauteville persists in duelling, however, and overcomes his opponent without effort. Adriani retreats almost without resistance over the edge of a cliff and falls to death in the sea below with a feminine cry which reveals to d’Hauteville that Fragoletta and her twin are one. The reader is left in doubt whether Fragoletta was, like Clémentine, a hermaphrodite, or (as seems more probable) was simply an exclusively lesbian woman. (Similarly the Chevalier d’Eon moved in international diplomatic circles alternately as man and woman, his true sex being known only upon his death in 1810.) In the course of the story the author incorporates a scene between Queen Caroline and Emma Hamilton which takes place in the former’s sunken marble bath. The queen first plays the part of lady’s maid in disrobing her beautiful friend, and later indulges in erotic play until the two drowse off in one another’s arms in the warm pool. Latouche may have intended this lax court background to account for Fragoletta’s transformation from a rather engaging tomboy into an active lesbian.

Far superior from a literary viewpoint to either of these novels was Balzac’s first venture in the intersexual field, _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ (1834). The heroine of this tale has been mentioned by Natalie Clifford Barney, a twentieth century writer of lesbian verse, as one of those androgynes who lend rarity to the Human Comedy.[19] But Seraphita was not, like Clémentine, a physical anomaly. The novel of which she is the title figure is a lengthy excursion into Swedenborgian philosophy, and the girl is raised in an undiluted atmosphere of that particular mysticism. The result is a sexless and wholly ascetic personality. To the man who loves her she seems the perfect woman. To a younger girl whom she leads in fearless ascents of rocky heights above the fjords and who loves her equally, she seems the perfect man, although there is never any mystery about her true sex. With neither man nor girl does she exchange even the most innocent of physical caresses. After her early death the girl and the man marry one another, their common half-mystical worship of her constituting a stronger bond than exists between ordinary lovers.

In the following year Balzac published his much better-known novel, _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_, a romantic tale involving an overt lesbian, though the latter enters the story only at the end, the main theme being her effect upon her passive victim. The story describes the conquest, by the very flower of Byronic heroes, of a mysterious beauty sequestered in a Paris mansion with all the vigilance surrounding a caliph’s harem. Once reached by the hero, the golden-eyed girl proves a paradox of virginity and voluptuous sophistication until a _lapsus linguae_ betrays that it is a lesbian of enormous wealth who has initiated her sexually and kept her hidden from the world of men. This woman, returning from an absence which made the adventure possible, at once detects the girl’s infidelity and, in a jealous and sadistic frenzy, kills her. She then discovers that her rival is her own half-brother and almost physical twin (they were both illegitimate, their father but one step removed from royalty), and, consequently, it was his resemblance to her that made his fatal conquest of the girl so easy.

In the extravagance of the plot and the description of the hero, which occupies a good quarter of the tale, one might suspect satire upon the Byronism which was sweeping Europe, except for the romantic seriousness of the whole. Another long interpolated essay is an arraignment, mordant in brilliance, of the cruelty, stupidity, and license of Parisian life, in which one detects echoes from Rousseau: in such an “unnatural” milieu excesses of evil are only to be expected. Such romantic social philosophy concerned Balzac here more than the psychology of either woman. That the golden-eyed girl, sold by her mother at the age of twelve and a passive partner throughout, should first learn complete love from the hero, is barely credible. That after a decade in which she has suffered neither physical nor nervous ill-health she should be so instantly changed as to prefer death to her former life might be questioned by the modern psychologist. The lesbian Marquise is hardly better accounted for. Her cool purchase and long imprisonment of the girl, whose physical beauty is the only tie suggested between them, make poor preparation for her heartbreak and sudden desire for convent life because she has lost “that which seemed the infinite.” Possibly her half-Spanish, half-royal blood are intended to account for both her lesbianism and her vagaries of temperament, for gossip credited the Spanish ruling dynasty as well as the house of Orléans with tendencies toward homosexuality.

In _Cousin Bette_ (1846), Balzac, with a realism in sharp contrast to both his earlier tales and in keeping with literary trends of the intervening dozen years, presents rather casually the half-realized infatuation of the thwarted spinster, Bette, for Madame Marneffe, the human instrument she employs to satisfy her much stronger passion for revenge upon the family who have humiliated her. Valérie Marneffe, who “spent her days upon a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments and intrigues ... had discovered the true nature of this ardent creature burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself.”[20] Both women have had lovers, Bette having striven in vain to hold a Polish artist several years her junior. But “in this new affection she had found food ... far more satisfying than her insane passion for Wenceslas, who had always been cold to her.”[21] Little of physical intimacy is implied between the two women beyond frequent kisses, and since Balzac is not

## particularly reticent about such details, it is not safe to assume any

such relation as existed in _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_. But later in the book he speaks of such attachments as “the strongest emotion known, that of a woman for a woman.”[22]

Thus, the faithful observer of the Human Comedy presented three contrasting types of emotional variance and offered three distinct explanations of it. In the first, intellectual conditioning was the causal factor; in the second, a possible inheritance of temperament plus the certain freedom for self-indulgence provided by limitless wealth; and in the third, poverty of both circumstance and emotional opportunity. The resulting experiences also show the writer’s imaginative range. The first seraphic heroine is as innocent and passionless as the biblical Ruth. The Spanish Marquise is violent to the point of melodrama. The warped spinster is confused and groping in expression as well as feeling.

In the same year that _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_ appeared, Gautier published _Mlle de Maupin_. The former enjoyed a few months’ priority, but Gautier’s volume had been promised to the publisher a year before its appearance, and as the two men’s long friendship began only with Balzac’s reading of the younger man’s story,[23] there is no question of influence in either direction.

From the standpoint of modern psychology Gautier’s is the more careful and complete study. Indeed, having humor, vitality, and a tolerant bisexual attitude, it is probably the most generally popular of all variant “classics.” In it an orphaned heiress dons men’s clothes and sets out to discover how men live when uninhibited by the presence of ladies. In the course of her adventures Maupin is loved by a young man of poetic temperament who has had mistresses but found them physically satisfying only, and by a young woman of good social standing who has been one of those mistresses. Maupin also has with her for a time a young girl disguised as a page whom she has rescued from exploitation by an old rake and on whom she lavishes a devotion both erotic and maternal. The young man suffers from believing his passion abnormal until he learns Maupin’s true sex, but then recognizes that for the first time he has found complete love because he has so many more tastes in common with this girl than with his previous feminine paramours.

As to the young woman, her passion survives the revelation of Maupin’s sex, her persistent caresses prove as exciting as the man’s, and Maupin finishes by spending half the final night depicted with each of them and by riding off in the morning with markedly unfeminine detachment. Physically, we have for the first time in modern fiction the explicit description of a type which has since become associated with homosexual tendencies in women—the tall, wide shouldered, slim hipped figure endowed with perfect grace and with great skill in riding and fencing. Temperamentally we have Maupin’s own description of herself as “of a third sex, one that has as yet no name above or below.” As a girl she was “six months older but six years less romantic” than her bosom friend, for whom her friendship had “all the characteristics of a passion,” but for years she “burned in her little skin like a chestnut on the stove” to satisfy what is described as an intellectual curiosity about the lives of men away from women and their real attitude toward women.[24] It is this unemotional detachment which Gautier emphasizes as peculiarly masculine.

Scattered through the story is a quantity of very canny analysis of intersexual characteristics, and though the tale is supposedly based upon the life of a seventeenth-century actress, it departs so far from the known facts about her that it must stand as a monument to the author’s psychological acumen alone. Since he wrote it at the age of twenty-four, one cannot escape the suspicion that it was drawn from personal or at least close secondhand acquaintance with George Sand, so newly come to Paris in her male costume and so prominent in literary circles at that moment. It certainly marks a long step forward in the serious study of a variant personality. (The actual history of Madeleine Maupin d’Aubigny,[25] late seventeenth-century singer and actress, is perhaps worth attention because of its contrast to Gautier’s artistic modification. As a young woman Maupin came to Paris from the provinces determined upon a stage career, and married her vocal teacher, d’Aubigny, who was connected with the Opera and who got her the position upon which she was set. The marriage was apparently a mere strategic move on her part and was short-lived. A tall woman, and a fencer of extraordinary ability, Mme. d’Aubigny frequently played young men’s parts, and soon took to wearing men’s costume off as well as on the stage. One of her diversions was roaming the streets at night and provoking men to cross swords with her for the pleasure of worsting them. She inspired passion in many young women, one of whom, a girl of good family, ran away with her when her repeated embroilments forced her to leave Paris. The girl’s parents overtook the eloping couple and put their daughter into a convent at Avignon.

Being apparently infatuated herself, Maupin resumed woman’s dress and gained entry to the convent as a novice for the purpose of manoeuvering her friend’s escape. The means which presented themselves were macabre enough. A nun died and was buried within the convent enclosure; Maupin exhumed the body, put it in her friend’s bed, and set fire to the cell; during the resulting confusion the two young women escaped. But their subsequent precarious vagabondage apparently cured the girl of her taste for bohemian freedom and for Maupin; she returned to her parents. Maupin’s later career was comparatively seamy and unromantic.)

* * * * *

In 1851 Lamartine included in _Nouvelles Confidences_[26] an innocent infatuation between two adolescent girls which is reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Balzac’s _Seraphita_. (Though a reference in Havelock Ellis seems to place Regina among Lamartine’s poetic works, it is actually prose. His statement that here the theme is treated with “more or less boldness”[27] also appears unjustified.) Although the initial attachment between the heroine, Regina, and her school friend, Clothilde, might be considered “normal,” since it occurs between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, its later effects compel attention. The two girls, thrown together in a declining Roman convent school where supervision is lax, contrive regularly to spend their nights together. Lamartine describes their hours of long talk and tenderness with such skill and delicacy that one can doubt neither the basic innocence of both girls nor the ultimate passion in their embraces.

During their years together Clothilde talks so much of a twin brother Saluse that Regina falls half in love with him vicariously, but at seventeen she is married unwillingly to a titled dotard. In the same year Clothilde’s mother dies, and Clothilde does not long survive this double loss of her only parent and beloved friend. At Clothilde’s grave Regina and Saluse meet and fall in love at sight. Their passion runs a stormy but blameless course, which leads eventually to Regina’s seeking formal release from her marriage. While she is away from Rome her petition is granted by the church, but only on condition of Saluse’s permanent exile from the city. Saluse decides in her absence on exile for her sake rather than on elopement and public scandal. On learning of his decision the girl cries out that he who would sacrifice love to conscience cannot be the brother of Clothilde. ‘At Clothilde’s tomb it was not she I found again, it was a phantom.... He had her features but not her heart.’[28]

Lamartine’s effort to explain the girls’ passionate friendship is interesting if seemingly somewhat confused. Primarily, like Diderot, he lays responsibility upon the convent environment, where not only are women segregated but every aspect of their life—music, incense, pageantry, solitude and idleness—inflames the ‘imagination,’ while the feeble pretense at education includes nothing to stimulate or discipline the intellect. Such life produces ‘veritable orientals, fit only for the harem.’ The specific occasion of their emotional involvement, however, he says, is Regina’s identification of Clothilde with the unknown brother of whom the latter talks so eloquently. ‘I should never have believed in this phenomenon, which reflects and thus redoubles the beloved object, I should have taken it for the imaginative creation of poets, had I not seen it with my own eyes in the spirit of Regina.’[29] This seems a rather feeble attempt to gloss over any homosexual implication, for Clothilde, though more intellectual and less passionate than Regina, is in no way masculine. And, in the end, it was precisely the masculine element in Saluse’s sacrifice of their love which repelled Regina. It was a man’s decision and not a woman’s, ‘of the head and not the heart.’ Lamartine’s treatment here of the variant theme gains added interest from the fact that earlier, in _Jocelyn_, he had sailed perilously close to the implication of male variance. In this story, popular enough to supply the libretto for Godard’s opera, a hermit priest becomes so attached to the “boy” left in his charge that he suffers agonies of conscience before discovering that his ward is a disguised girl. Evidently the whole matter of possible intrasexual attraction held a kind of fascination for Lamartine, though he treated it with a reserve more Victorian than French.

Toward the end of this decade (1858) a novel appeared, _La Sapho_, cited by Lewandowski in _Das Sexualproblem ..._[30] as definitely lesbian, and of added interest in that it was written by a woman, Céleste Venard comtesse de Chabrillan; but unhappily this has not been available for examination.

At the beginning of the following decade (1862) Flaubert published _Salammbo_, of which Krafft-Ebing says that the author made his heroine homosexual.[31] If this is true at all by modern standards the condition is latent and of short duration, but because of the expressed judgment of so prominent an early authority on sex variance the story will be examined in some detail. It will also be interesting to see with what “pitiless method” Flaubert dissects the emotional economy of an inhibited girl. To be sure Salammbo’s adolescent devotion to the virgin moon-goddess Tanit (comparable to the Greek Astarte and the Roman Diana, and allied also to the Roman Bona Dea) verges upon passion, but it is so described as to suggest the sexual overtones in any ecstatic religious experience rather than to imply a variant element.

Daughter of Hamilcar of Carthage, Salammbo grows up in a time of such peril that she is raised in solitary seclusion; her only companions are an aged nurse and the eunuch who is chief priest in the temple of Tanit. She would like to become a “devotee,” but Hamilcar designs a politically profitable marriage for her, and forbids her initiation into the inner mysteries of the cult (which would involve ritual defloration, though Flaubert does not mention this fact).

She had grown up in abstinence, in fastings and purifications, always surrounded by exquisite and solemn things, her body saturated with perfumes and her soul with prayers.... Of obscene symbols she knew nothing ... (she) worshipped the Goddess in her sidereal aspect.

She says to the priest:

It is a spirit that drives me to this love of mine.... [The other gods] are all too far away, too high, too insensible; while She—I feel her as a part of my life, she fills my soul.... I am devoured with eagerness to see her body.

This may seem suggestive, but she denies physical interest when under the fires of spring and the full moon, she cries out to her nurse:

Sometimes gusts of heat seem to rise from the depths of my being.... Voices call me ... fire rises in my breast; it stifles me, I feel that I am dying ... it is a caress folding about me and I feel crushed.... Oh! that I might lose myself in the night mists ... that I could _leave my body_ [author’s italics] and be but a breath, a ray, then float up to thee, O Mother [Tanit].[32]

Her nurse, wise in the signs of physical ripening, does not take this for religious ecstasy.

“‘You must choose a husband from the sons of the Elders, since it was [your father’s] wish,’ she says. ‘Your sorrow will vanish in the arms of a man.’ ‘Why?’ asked the young girl. All the men she had seen had horrified her with their wild bestial laughter and their coarse limbs.”[33]

These men are her father’s barbarian mercenaries, and Flaubert’s picture of their drunken orgy after victory would revolt a stronger spirit than that of a sheltered girl. Her first direct encounter is with Matho the Libyan, “his great mouth agape, his necklet of silver moons tangled in the hairs on his chest.” Crazed with passion for her, he steals the Zaimph [sacred veil of Tanit] from the temple as a love charm, breaks into Salammbo’s chambers at midnight, and attempts to ravish and abduct her. Naturally terrified, she summons aid in time to save herself, but she does not understand what it is he wants of her. Later she tells him: “Your words I did not understand, but I knew you wished to drag me toward something horrible, to the bottom of some abyss....”[34]

The story then centers around her personal conflict between her desire to retrieve the Zaimph and her horror of the barbarian who has fled the city without returning it. Finally, under religious compulsion to save Carthage by regaining its sacred talisman, she makes her way to the Libyan’s tent. She has been instructed by the high priest to resist Matho in no way, and consequently she submits to his embrace.

Salammbo, who was accustomed to eunuchs, yielded to amazement at the strength of this man.... A feeling of lassitude overpowered her ... all the time she felt that she was in the grip of some doom, that she had reached a supreme and irrevocable moment.... Some power from within and at the same time above her, a command from the gods, forced her to yield to it; she was borne up as on clouds, and fell back swooning.[35]

But on being questioned subsequently by her father as to what occurred, she is evasive.

Salammbo told no more, perhaps through shame, or else because in her extreme ingenuousness she attached but little importance to the soldier’s embraces.... Then she examined the Zaimph and when she had well considered it, she was surprised to find that she did not experience that ecstasy which she had once pictured to herself. Her dream was accomplished; yet she was melancholy.[36]

Although she does not see Matho again and feels only hatred for him “... the anguish from which she formerly suffered had left her, and a strange calm possessed her. Her eyes were not so restless, and shone with limpid fire.... She did not keep such long or such rigid fasts now.... In spite of her hatred of him, she would have liked to see Matho again.”[37]

This is a master’s account of the effect of physical release on an unawakened girl.

Considerably later Salammbo is married, according to her father’s plan, to the effete prince, Narr’ Havas.

He wore a flower-painted robe fringed with gold at the hem; his braided hair was caught up at his ears by two arrows of silver.... As she watched him, she was wrapped about with a host of vague thoughts. This young man with his gentle voice and woman’s figure charmed her by the grace of his person and seemed like an elder sister sent by the Baalim to protect her. She did not understand how this young man could ever become her master. The thought of Matho came to her and she could not resist the desire to learn what had become of him.... Although she prayed every day to Tanit for Matho’s death, her horror of the Libyan was growing less. She was confusedly aware that there was something almost like religion in the hatred [sic] with which he had persecuted her, and she wished to see in Narr’ Havas a reflection, as it were, of a violence which still bemused her.[38]

These two passages indicate quite the opposite of homosexual emotion.

When, after months of carnage, Matho is taken captive and literally torn to pieces by the people of Carthage, Salammbo is witness to his terrible death. Instead of sharing in the shrieking triumph of the populace, she “could once more see him in his tent, clasping his arms about her waist, stammering gentle words. She thirsted to feel and hear those things again and was at the point of screaming aloud.” And when Matho “fell back and moved no more,” Salammbo also collapsed into unconsciousness from which she never recovered. The concluding words of the book are: “So died Hamilcar’s daughter, because she had touched the mantle of Tanit.” Flaubert’s novel carries symbolic overtones not apparent in brief summary, and since Tanit was allied to the Roman Bona Dea, goddess of sexual fulfillment and fertility, her Zaimph doubtless represents heterosexual passion. Salammbo, conditioned to asceticism throughout her early life, dies of the unresolved conflict between these two dominating drives.

* * * * *

A minor novel which Krafft-Ebing mentions as also “mainly lesbian in theme”[39] may shed some light on what he intended by the term. It is Ernest Feydeau’s _La Comtesse de Chalis_ (1867), in which a dashing Parisian beauty neglects her children and tubercular husband for a spectacular career in _le haut monde_. An idealistic and infatuated professor of the new _Ecole Normale_, who is keenly aware of belonging to a lower social class, ruins himself financially in his attempt to maintain a place in the countess’s world. The story, told by him, is chiefly concerned with his efforts to save her from the frivolous and corrupt life of her circle. Her evil genius is a fabulously wealthy Prince Titiane, diseased and depraved at twenty-one, whom she repeatedly promises to dismiss from her life but to whose influence she continuously succumbs. She goes gradually from bad to worse, and ends by consorting _à trois_ with him and one of the city’s celebrated courtesans, his long-time mistress; however, this situation develops only in the last pages of a lengthy volume. The Prince is described throughout as so effeminate in appearance, dress, and appurtenances that it would be easy to imagine him a woman in disguise, but there is no textual support for such an inference. Late in the story it develops that it is solely his use of the whip which binds the countess to him, and that this flagellation is without sexual sequel, since Titiane is impotent.

Aside from being unusually tall and arrogant, the countess has no masculine attributes whatever, either physical or psychological, and it is never she who wields the lash. Her dominant motive is an egotistic compulsion to be the most dazzling figure in Paris. Since the fantastic young Croesus, Titiane, is the arbiter of social destinies in her

## particular world, she is slavishly submissive to him. Her interest in

the courtesan, though it is charged with emotion throughout, appears to be the obsession of an ambitious woman with the techniques of a serious rival, and the emotion is predominantly jealousy. Her final indulgence in sexual promiscuity results from her determination to be outdone by that rival in no field whatsoever. Analyzed by a modern psychiatrist, the countess would be diagnosed as a complete narcissist, unable to care the slightest for anyone but herself.

Consideration of these two novels suggests that to Krafft-Ebing any failure of feminine heterosexual adjustment was included in that “contrary sexual feeling” which was equated throughout his later study with active homosexuality. As we have seen, modern psychoanalysts consider narcissism and homosexuality as closely related in etiology; yet it is confusing to have the more specific term applied to experiences which, like Salammbo’s and the countess’s, include relations with men and none with their own sex. “Mainly lesbian in theme” _La Comtesse de Chalis_ certainly is not.

The fact that in a contemporary novel considered later, Feydeau’s _La Comtesse_ was bracketed with Gautier’s _Mlle Maupin_ and Balzac’s _Girl with the Golden Eyes_ may also have contributed to Krafft-Ebing’s thinking it more “lesbian” than it is. Indeed, the modern investigator sometimes suspects that scientific writers had not read all of the belletristic titles they referred to but were satisfied to rely on the word of others with respect to them. Another detail which might have strengthened an impression of similarity to Balzac is Feydeau’s denunciation of _le haut monde_ in imitation of Balzac’s earlier indictment of metropolitan life in general. The new element in Feydeau is acute class consciousness in his condemnation of the “idle rich.” However second-rate from an artistic standpoint _La Comtesse de Chalis_ may be, it is a remarkably exact contemporary record of “the mixture of splendor and misery ... the sense of uneasy satiety, of restless torpor, of indefinable dread” described by the modern Albert Guérard as prevailing in the late Second Empire.[40]

Evidence from Poets

Although fiction made up so preponderant a part of variant writing in the nineteenth century, poetry also made a sizable contribution. In 1816, Coleridge, who with Wordsworth is generally thought of as initiating the Romantic Period in England, published two parts of a narrative poem, _Christabel_, which was never finished. All college students of literature know that eerie fragment of medieval romance with its occult overtones.

Christabel, the innocent heroine whose betrothed is “far away” on a knightly quest, steals out from her father’s castle at midnight to pray for her lover beneath a giant oak hung with mistletoe—a test of maidenly courage in the face of both natural and occult darkness, for oak and mistletoe still retain pre-Christian connotations. In the moonlit wood she finds a distressed lady, Geraldine, who tells a story of kidnaping and violence designed to win her sympathy. As she helps the fainting lady into the castle certain signs forebode evil to a reader acquainted with demonic lore: Geraldine’s eyes gleam in the dark like an animal’s, she is so faint that she requires Christabel’s aid in crossing the sill, and once she is inside a mastiff moans in its sleep and embers on the hearth shoot out tongues of flame.

In Christabel’s maiden chamber while the two are disrobing Geraldine (and she alone) sees the “spectre” of Christabel’s dead mother come to guard her child, and bids the hovering spirit be off. Though she has shown fear at sight of a carven angel in the room and has made poor work of feigning prayer, Geraldine still has power to prevent Christabel’s seeing the vision or being warned, and presently the two lie down together “in appropriate medieval nudity.”[41] With fascinated loathing Christabel notes that Geraldine’s “breast and side” are those of a withered hag; still she is powerless to resist the other’s spell, and in Geraldine’s arms she falls into a trance.

With open eyes (ah woe is me!) Asleep and dreaming fearfully, Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis, Dreaming that alone, which is— O sorrow and shame! Can this be she The lady [Christabel] who knelt at the old oak tree?

Afterward “Her limbs relax, her countenance Grows sad and soft,” and in her sleep she both smiles and weeps, while Geraldine “Seems to slumber still and mild As a mother with her child.”

In the morning Christabel wakes to find her guest already clothed, but “fairer yet and yet more fair!” for now her shriveled bosom has the fullness of a young woman’s, a subtle allusion to the widespread folk superstition that sexual contact with innocent youth heals sickness and restores old age. Christabel is troubled by “such perplexity of mind As dreams too lively leave behind,” and delivers her morning greeting in “low faltering tones.” “Sure I have sinned!” she feels, but is uncertain precisely how, and prays merely that “He who on the cross did groan Might wash away her sins unknown.”[42]

Roy Basler, in his _Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature_, devotes a long chapter[41] to the poem which is recommended to the reader for its minute analysis of Coleridge’s skill in handling the whole episode. As he points out, it is “too realistic psychologically ... for one to avoid an erotic implication.” The remainder of the poem contains nothing further of variant significance. The spell of Geraldine’s touch has made it impossible for Christabel to give her father anything beyond the simplest objective account of how the woman came there, and the action merely prepares for later events never written.

Of the content of these three projected “books” we have only a brief account by Dr. James Gilman, with whom Coleridge lived later while undergoing treatment for his addiction to opium. The relevant points follow: Complications force Geraldine to abandon her feminine form and to assume that of Christabel’s absent lover. In this guise she woos the girl and gains the father’s consent to a marriage, even though Christabel is filled with inexplicable loathing for her at the altar. Had Coleridge carried through this outlined narrative, he could scarcely, as Basler says, “have avoided even more harrowing suggestions of a sexual nature” in Geraldine’s disguised courtship. Significant of her sexual duality are repeated references to her height and her arrogant bearing.

Basler points out that after 1801, Coleridge’s moral reputation was precarious because of his opium habit, and that “no man ever feared calumny more keenly.” Although the poet began _Christabel_ and had the entire plot worked out at that time, he published none of it for fifteen years. When it finally appeared, the _Edinburgh Review_ attacked it with “charges of obscenity” and “implications of personal turpitude,” while “parodies and vulgar continuations of the poem made the most of leering improbabilities.” The dread of further personal attack discouraged Coleridge from completing the work, and no other English poet seems to have approached the subject of variance for nearly a half century.

The next poem that appeared in England, however—Christina Rossetti’s _Goblin Market_, written in 1859—is so akin to _Christabel_ in its overtones of folk magic and so alien to the temporally intervening French poetry on variant themes that it is best to examine it here. It is generally regarded as variant or even lesbian, but the vivid narrative is too symbolic for precise sexual interpretation. On the surface it recounts that two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, as they stroll at dusk are daily tempted by “goblin men” to buy the most luscious of ripe fruits. Though knowing the fruits to be forbidden, Laura succumbs, pays with a curl of her golden hair (having no money), and partakes alone, Lizzie having fled. “She sucked their fruit globes fair or red ... sucked and sucked and sucked ... until her tongue was sore....” After this indulgence she can no longer see or hear the goblins, and wastes away with pining for their delicacies.

When she seems “knocking at Death’s door,” Lizzie, aware that another girl in like case has recently died, goes to purchase fruit for her sister with honest coin. The goblins refuse her money and use every means to force their wares between her own lips, but she resists and returns so dripping with crushed fruit that she is hopeful of bringing some satisfaction to her sister. Laura kisses her hungrily, but more in gratitude for the dreadful risk she has run than in greed for what lingers “in dimples of her chin.” Indeed, the fruit now scorches Laura’s lips and is wormwood on her tongue, so that from loathing she is seized with violent convulsion and falls unconscious. In the morning she awakes cured, and Lizzie suffers no ill effects at all.

As a translation of voluptuous experience into decorous terms the poem cannot be equaled, but any attempt at literal reconstruction of the experience bogs down in the symbolic details. Certain points however are implicit in the text: Laura’s experience is a complete sexual release which it needs no acquaintance with Freud to recognize as oral-erotic. All the goblins are male, but they are grotesque, repulsive, more animal than human save for their ability to hawk their wares, and these irresistible wares take the shapes of ripe cherries, peaches, plums, melons, “figs that fill the mouth”—in short, the whole catalog of age-old symbols for female charms. Although the sisters are described as “Sleeping in their curtained bed Cheek to cheek and breast to breast,” there is no more incestuous lesbian implication here than in Sidney’s _Arcadia_. These embraces are plainly symbols of the innocence from which Laura lapses and to which she returns by virtue of Lizzie’s steadfast purity. Perhaps the only safe inference is that Laura’s “fall” is solitary, even subjectively induced (psychiatric records prove fantasy to be an adequate agent). Her subsequent neurotic inhibition is the product of guilt, and ends in a releasing hysteric convulsion somehow brought about by Lizzie’s ministrations.

This mundane analysis of an exquisite work of art does reveal its author’s emotional pattern. It is known that Miss Rossetti had a somewhat cloistered life, largely spent in the company of a mother to whom she was intensely devoted and a sister who later became an Anglican nun, all three women being almost fanatically devout. She was twice passionately in love with men, but refused them both on the grounds of religious incompatibility. The first of these episodes occurred when she was barely seventeen. The man, a recent convert to Catholicism, returned to the Church of England when he discovered that Christina would not marry a papist, but later reverted to Rome, and the whole affair seems to have constituted a two-year span of acute emotional disturbance in the girl’s life. (She subsequently fainted upon meeting him unexpectedly in the street.) It may well have been that any man’s ability to switch religious camps so readily under the stress of passion produced a reaction to the whole business of sex such as we find in _Goblin Market_, which was written when its author was nearing thirty. Tragically enough, her lifelong ascetic repression broke during her last illness in a protracted delirium which revealed at what cost it had been maintained.

* * * * *

France was as always more tolerant of sexual latitude in literature than England, but even there the open-mindedness which made _Mlle de Maupin_ acceptable in 1835 was not constant. Since it is impossible to give in short compass any account of the alternating waves of liberalism and conservative reaction that swayed public opinion there during the middle decades of the century, it must suffice to note that Charles Baudelaire published his _Fleurs du Mal_ during an interim of clerical dominance, and in consequence the volume was condemned by the _Tribunal Correctionnel_ in August 1857. As early as 1846 the publisher Levy had announced on advertising pages of other works a forthcoming title by Baudelaire, _Les Lesbiennes_,[43] which never appeared as such, probably because the title was too daring. Only three poems in the _Fleurs_ touch upon lesbianism, but the longest of these was one of the six which were ordered removed from the volume and which were not publicly printed again until 1911.

This poem, “Femmes Damnées, I,” some twenty-six quatrains in length, describes rather explicitly the conquest of a feminine and passive young girl, half reluctant because still dreaming of heterosexual love, by a more aggressive feminine partner who decries the physical brutality and spiritual incompatibility of any male lover. In “Femmes Damnées, II” the poet watches a band of lesbians at a shore resort behaving much as any uninhibited heterosexual group might do, and accords them more than even his customary despairing compassion. Such love as theirs is doomed to go unsated, and they themselves, he says, will pass progressively to drink and drugs and “loveless loves that know no pity.” And yet in “Lesbos” he holds Sappho guilty of a “crime of the spirit” when, faithless to her own earlier teaching and practice, she “flung the dark roses of her love sublime To a vain churl (Phaon.)”[44] (Note: “Lesbos” had appeared in 1850 in an anthology, _Les Poètes de l’Amour_, published by Lemerre. It was omitted from the 1858 edition of that volume, but reappeared in the edition of 1865.)[45] The Catholic Baudelaire was essentially a mystic, not a romantic with that faith in Love which had been the gospel of the preceding decades. Obsessed as he was by the failure of all passion to satisfy the human craving for perfection, it is natural that homosexual passion, inevitably “unassuageable, sterile and outcast,” should seem to him the essence of pitiable futility. This negative judgment, however, is not given in terms of conventional morality.

Within a decade the wave of conservatism had so far receded that Paul Verlaine’s _Les Amies, Scènes d’Amour Sapphique_ (1867), though published in Brussels for safety, apparently encountered in France no harsher judgment than a comment in the _Bulletin Trimestriel_ that they were by a poet of the school of M. Leconte de Lisle, and were “fort singuliers.”[46] The slim sheaf of sixteen pages contained six poems, subsequently included in his volume _Parallèlement_, which described lesbian love and its overt expression more explicitly than Baudelaire’s condemned verses, or indeed than any other non-erotic work up to that time. The “Pensionnaires” are sisters in the middle teens, the younger of whom still ‘smiles with innocence’ despite the elder’s far from innocent ministrations. The pair in “Sur le Balcon,” dreaming only of the love between women, are ‘a strange couple, pitied by other heterosexual couples.’ “Printemps” and “Eté” reproduce the situation in Baudelaire’s “Femmes Damnées, I” except that here the younger and more innocent girl is neither reluctant nor apprehensive. In “Per Amica Silentia” the poet applies for the first time the adjective “esseulées”—solitary, left alone—to those who ‘in these unhappy times’ are set apart by “le glorieux stigmate,” thus foreshadowing the social isolation lamented sixty years later in the _Well of Loneliness_, but indicating by the adjective “glorieux” that his sentiment, unlike Baudelaire’s, is one of championship. In the final “Sappho” he describes the poet, hollow-eyed, pacing a cold shore, restless as a she-wolf, weeping and tearing her hair over Phaon’s indifference until finally she plunges into the sea in despair at the contrast between her present state and the ‘young glory of her early loves.’[47] It is more than likely that it was from this poem that Rilke derived his interpretation of Sappho’s “Lament” heretofore mentioned.

During the preceding year (1866) there had appeared in England Swinburne’s _Poems and Ballads: First Series_, which raised an outcry on several counts—its general “paganism,” its evidence of French influence (particularly that of Baudelaire), and its scattering of poems with a homosexual tinge. Swinburne had, in his youth, been intimate with the much older Sir Richard Burton, famous translator of the _Arabian Nights_ and author of an appendix on that “sotadic zone” in the Mediterranean region which in his opinion favored the development of homosexual tendencies. Later Swinburne fell under the influence of Richard Monckton-Milnes, famous for a library of variant erotica. As both of these friendships were matters of common knowledge, when _Poems and Ballads_ appeared, attention focussed naturally on such poems as “Erotion,” “Hermaphroditus,” “Fragoletta,” “Hesperia,” and the fairly numerous group with a lesbian coloring, though none of these were explicit or described a realistic contemporary situation in the manner of Verlaine.

“Anactoria” is a ten-page plaint from Sappho to a girl who no longer reciprocates her love, but it differs little from Swinburne’s many laments celebrating all love as pain. The “Sapphics” describe life on Mitylene, “place whence all gods fled ... full of fruitless women and music only.” A half dozen stanzas scattered through other poems—notably “Dolores,” “Faustine,” and “Masque of Queen Bersabe”—echo the same note. Swinburne’s attitude is unsympathetic, colder even than Baudelaire’s and more scornful, with emphasis always upon the barrenness of lesbian love, as might be expected from a poet who occasionally made almost a fetish of baby-worship.

All of the longer biographies of Swinburne give some account of a projected narrative in mixed prose and verse upon which he worked intermittently between 1864 and 1867 but never finished. What remains of manuscript and galley proof is now in the British Museum, after a half-century in the possession of the notorious rare-book dealer and literary forger, Thomas Wise. It was finally edited and given private publication in 1952 by Langdon Hughes, an idolatrous admirer of Swinburne, for whom it held the promise of becoming, if completed, one of the greater English novels. Unhappily, neither the scant surviving text nor Mr. Hughes’s overwhelming volume of annotation and championship convey to the reader much of that promise or of the author’s projected intent. As Swinburne himself gave it no title it is generally known by the suggestive name of its central figure: _Lesbia Brandon_. Georges Lafourcade, in his scholarly two-volume study of Swinburne, suggests that this character was drawn from Jane Faulkner,[48] daughter of one of the poet’s friends, who also inspired “The Triumph of Time” (fifteen pages of bitter reproach for failure to love him and save him from other fateful loves). For this dark, spirited young girl he seems to have nursed briefly his only “normal” passion; she responded to his half-hysterical romantic proposal with a helpless burst of laughter, and it needed but the one touch of ridicule to snuff out the hardly lighted spark.[49] Lafourcade believes that Jane herself “avait quelque chose d’anormal,” and certainly the description of Lesbia is suggestive: dark, heavy-lidded, taciturn, Byronically proud, with a pathological hatred of men. When, on her deathbed, she is tenderly embraced by the man who adores her she shows only “mad repugnance, blind absolute horror.” In her youth she had loved a governess and threatened suicide when the woman talked of marrying. Later she was an enthusiastic student of Sappho and wrote many love poems from the masculine viewpoint.

The emotional life of the hero, Hubert, up to the time of his meeting with Lesbia is said to be a quite frank parallel of Swinburne’s own. The critical first encounter occurs while Hubert is dressed as a girl, and this disguise is responsible for Lesbia’s immediate interest. Their subsequent relations are not developed in the portions of the story that Swinburne committed to paper, nor is much of Lesbia’s experience save her eventual slow suicide by opium, in an atmosphere heavily fragrant with flowers and eau de cologne. Among the disconnected residual fragments are two: “Turris Iburnea” and “La Bohème Dédorée,” in which the poet presents Leonora Harley, a beautiful but vulgar and stupid demi-mondaine. This character was said to be drawn directly from Adah Isaacs Menken, who was also the original of his “Dolores”—a fifteen page description of an insatiable nymphomaniac. There is reason, as will appear later, to believe that Menken’s temperament included a variant strain. That Swinburne intended to make use of this in his plot is strongly suggested by the following:

Over their evening Leonora Harley guided with the due graces of her professional art [that of courtesan]. It was not her fault if she could not help asking her young friend [Hubert] when he had last met a dark beauty: she had seen him once with Lesbia.[50]

Further evidence that he planned to incorporate a lesbian element in the story is found in his correspondence of 1866, where he boasted that having won an undeservedly scandalous reputation because of that element in _Poems and Ballads_, he meant to live up to it in his current effort, which would give his countrymen real cause for Philistine horror.[51]

It is known that Swinburne was still at work on the manuscript in 1867 when his meeting with Mazzini deflected his interests into new channels. After the years of political discipleship which produced _Songs Before Sunrise_, he returned to the interrupted narrative. Following that, its history becomes confused. Certain passages in the hands of his publishers reached the stage of galley proof but became mixed with proofs of other incomplete work. Sections of manuscript entrusted to his good friend, Watts-Dunton, were “mislaid,” and the poet’s repeated pleas and complaints never stimulated him to find them. Though Langdon Hughes finds Watts-Dunton guilty of criminal rascality,[52] one cannot help wondering whether all this apparent carelessness may not have been well-meant discretion.

The text as it now stands is almost wholly in prose, and the few songs it contains have, like “The Triumph of Time” and “Dolores,” been published among Swinburne’s other poems. Nothing in it is at all daring; there is nothing to account for Lesbia’s variance, nor any indication of how far the relations between her and Leonora would have gone. But it is clear that Swinburne, like his hero, worshipped the repressed, intense and melancholy Lesbia, and despised Leonora, the bisexual wanton. A reasonable conjecture is that Lesbia’s early passions had been innocent; that even though despising Leonora she was unable to resist the other’s seduction; and that self-contempt motivated her suicide—a plot allowing plenty of latitude for the author’s intent to shock the British reading public.

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