CHAPTER IV

.

THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY

Fertility in France

The sultry uneasiness in French society recorded by Feydeau in 1867 soon broke in the storm of the Franco-Prussian war, which ended monarchy in France. As is usual in time of war, all fiction concerned with emotional subtleties dwindled, and the years from 1870 to 1880 produced comparatively few variant items. One, however, was significant in being the first novel to attack lesbianism as a moral and medical problem. It was Adolphe Belot’s _Mlle Giraud, Ma Femme_, and it began in 1870 as a serial in the newspaper _Le Figaro_. Westphal’s clinical report on a lesbian woman had appeared in Germany early in the year, and it seems probable that Belot capitalized at once on the interest it aroused in medical circles, turning out instalments with journalistic facility, for he produced popular novels by the dozen. Westphal had concluded that his patient’s compulsive homosexuality was not an isolated pathological streak in an otherwise sound nature, but a general state related to manic-depressive insanity (“_sogenannte folie circulaire_”), and Belot mentions early in his novel the sad difference between the French casualness with regard to lesbianism and the serious concern prevalent in Germany, although he does not enlarge upon the latter.

The serial was stopped “in the interests of morality,” but it soon appeared in book form and ran to several editions (printings) before 1880.[1] All Belot’s novels exploited sex, the boldest requiring anonymous private printing, so that he was experienced in skirting the limits of acceptability. When the serial version was censored he had only to delete or alter condemned passages, amplify the virtuous tone of the unpublished portion (there is a moral harangue interpolated baldly in the middle of the book) and profit by the publicity which censorship always provides.

_Mlle Giraud_ follows the course of a man’s marriage to a girl who stubbornly refuses to consummate the union. Adrien has been warned against marrying Paule by a young matron of his acquaintance, but since Mme. Blangy will give him no reason for her warning, he ignores it. After several months he suspects this woman, still his wife’s inseparable companion, of being a blind for some illicit affair of Paule’s. He tracks the two to an apartment which he examines in their absence and finds to be a lush love-nest, with some details reminiscent of the boudoir of the _Girl with the Golden Eyes_. Among other things, he finds there that volume, along with Diderot’s _La Religieuse_, Gautier’s _Maupin_, and “Feydeau’s latest, _La Comtesse de Chalis_.”

Adrien’s life as a civil engineer has kept him out of Paris for some years and left him so unaware of homosexuality among respectable women that none of these suggestive details arouses his suspicion. It is only upon his meeting M. Blangy, separated for several years from his wife, that Adrien learns of the lesbian relationship between the two women. The two husbands institute a joint campaign to separate their wives, but it is too late. For the few months Adrien has spent in travel to escape insupportable domestic tension, Paule has been free for the first time in her life to indulge her tastes as freely as she likes, and her health has been gravely affected. During the collapse which follows upon Adrien’s taking her to North Africa, Paule cries out one day against the wickedness of segregation in boarding schools where loneliness drives girls to emotional dependence upon their own sex. ‘I believe it is not so often men who ruin women,’ she says. ‘It is women who ruin each other.’[2]

At this her husband begins to regard her as morally ill rather than depraved, and his new sympathy brings her to the verge of normal passion for him. But at this crucial moment, Paule’s recapture by Mme. Blangy destroys all possibility of subsequent adjustment. The conflict ends with Paule’s complete subjection by her lesbian friend and her death from meningitis, supposedly the direct result of sexual excess. Adrien, learning later that Mme. Blangy has begun the conquest of another girl, manages under the guise of accident to drown the seductress. M. Blangy, who guesses the truth, tells him he has done the world a service in removing “cette reptile,” and the author leaves little doubt that he himself agrees.

Neither girl shows any sign of masculinity except that Paule’s voice is unusually low and penetrating. Mme. Blangy, the aggressor, is the essence of flighty femininity. But Paule shows a ripeness of figure unusual in an unmarried girl, which Adrien naïvely takes for promise of unawakened _volupté_, and both exhibit a cool and intelligent competence in dealing with practical details of their secret liaison which is overmature for their years. The cause of both girls’ abnormality is the time-worn segregation in boarding school, Mme. Blangy’s having begun earlier in her life than Paule’s.

Heterosexual frigidity as a direct result, however, makes its pioneer literary appearance in this novel. To the majority of variant women thus far encountered, heterosexual experience was also attributed, and of the handful to which it was not, only five—Mary Frith, Wollstonecraft’s Mary, Lesbia Brandon, and one each in the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine—have expressed antipathy to the male. Even in these cases revulsion was presented as a part of what Ellis calls the “homosexual diathesis,” not as the result of previous lesbian activity. Although the present writer has not encountered earlier scientific authority for Belot’s claim, his was not a mind likely to originate such an idea. His attributing meningitis to sexual excess was derived from contemporary medical theory, and it is probable that his holding homosexuality responsible for heterosexual failure was similarly grounded. Certainly the thesis was too popular with moralists and educators of the next half century to have stemmed from the passing comment of a minor novelist.

During the decade in which _Mlle Giraud_ was the outstanding variant title, Barbey d’Aurevilly, nearing the end of a long career, published _Les Diaboliques_, and in one of these short stories, “The Crimson Curtain” there is a rather boyish girl, the pink of propriety when under the eye of her guardians, but unfemininely bold and aggressive with a male boarder in their house. Since none of her hidden sophistication is attributed to homosexual experience, and as the macabre end of the tale is her death from heart failure during a night of unrestrained heterosexual activity, the only implication seems to be that women with masculine traits are also “masculine” in the intensity of their sexual endowment, an idea previously hinted in Cuisin’s _Clémentine_. The notion has reappeared more modernly in ordinary as well as variant fiction, but in the 1870’s it would have run counter to growing scientific opinion that male secondary characteristics in women implied homosexuality.

In the course of the same years Zola’s literary torrent was beginning to flow, and it is known that many of his novels, notably those treating of metropolitan life in Rome, London and Paris, include incidental sketches of variant women. No pretense can be made here to having read or even skimmed his entire output, but _La Curée_ (1874) may be cited as a sample appearing during the decade in question. The significant figures are a pair of wealthy young married women who appear intermittently among the numerous background figures who are regularly referred to as “the inseparables” by their friends, and by the author, and who are strongly reminiscent in both appearance and behavior of Mlle Giraud and Mme. Blangy. As with the latter pair, their friendship is said to have begun in boarding school and to have continued uninterrupted by their respective marriages, but it has no dramatic outcome nor any important significance to the plot.

As was said in introducing the nineteenth century, the last two decades saw a sharp increase in all sorts of writing on variance. In the scientific field the great names were Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Ellis, and Hirschfeld, the last three being crusaders for official leniency and general tolerance on the grounds that homosexuality is inborn and therefore should not be penalized. There was much talk of an “intermediate sex,” whose condition was referred to as “inversion” (Ellis’s term). The term _perversion_ was confined to those who were able to find heterosexual satisfaction and whose homosexual activities were therefore judged to be willful and unjustified. This hereditary view did not gain popular currency until late in the century, but as it spread, the controversy it engendered began to be reflected in fiction.

* * * * *

With 1880 the steady stream of variant fiction began to flow, starting with Zola’s _Nana_. In this well-known life history of a courtesan the reader will recall the gradual progress of the robustly heterosexual heroine from revulsion against an affair between her friend, Satin, and Mme. Robert and against the lesbian society of the fat Laure’s cafe, through indifferent tolerance of such activity, to her own final active relations with Satin which end only at the latter’s death. (This premature death carries a faint implication that Satin’s long sustained lesbianism was less healthy than Nana’s predominantly heterosexual life). All the stages of Nana’s habituation to homosexuality are presented with the same naturalism which marks Zola’s portrayal of her other affairs, and there can be little doubt that his material was drawn from direct observation of the Paris underworld.

The physical types described at Laure’s cafe are noteworthy. The majority are women in their forties or over, obese and repulsive, whose outcropping of masculine tendencies might thus seem to be a biological result of menopause. A few hoydenish younger women appear, but only one of them is a transvestist. None of their relationships is distinguished by love or constancy. Even Mme. Robert’s superficially generous attempts to hold Satin by supporting her seem motivated largely by jealousy. While Zola’s attitude is not one of approval, the lesbian episodes are presented with less harshness than several of the heterosexual affairs in Nana’s career, and they entrain no tragic consequences to compare with the suicides and utter demoralization resulting from the latter. In the particular segment of Paris society portrayed, that of the high grade prostitute or courtesan, lesbianism is not only tolerated—Nana’s titled lovers are well aware of her relations with Satin—but taken for granted. Evidently those cafés already flourished which were to be celebrated later on the canvases of Toulouse-Lautrec and in occasional cynical verses by Donnay.

In _Pot-bouille_ (1883) Zola included two minor lesbian episodes at a respectable middle-class level. One involves the adolescent daughter of a mother so “particular” that the child is tutored at home for fear of evil influences at school. No account is taken, however, of the family servant, from whom the girl undertakes to learn ‘what happens when you are married.’[3] The lessons are given in the daughter’s room after the family has retired, and are apparently adequate. The second episode occurs between two young wives, each of whom has been drawn into a liaison with the same irresistible bachelor living in their apartment building. One of them, on the point of being caught by her husband before regaining her own apartment, takes refuge with the woman who has been her predecessor in the young rake’s affections. Strangers till now, though curious about one another, the two women become much excited by their mutual exchange of unhappy confidences. It is three in the morning, and neither is fully clothed. They conclude by giving one another what comfort they can.[4]

In 1881 “Paul’s Mistress” was published in de Maupassant’s volume entitled _La Maison Tellier_ and has appeared subsequently in only three editions in either French or English. (The English translations are very poor.) One of his lengthier short stories, it presents the tragedy of a boy of very good family, intelligent and sensitive, lost in infatuation for “a small thin brunette with a stride like a grasshopper’s.” At a riverside amusement park the couple encounters four women (two in men’s clothes) who are hailed by the holiday crowd with enthusiastic shouts of “Lesbos! Lesbos!” That Paul is revolted infuriates his companion, and in the course of the ensuing quarrel the boy faces the hitherto unacknowledged fact that he and Madeleine have nothing in common but their passion. Over his protests they return in the evening to dance in the pavilion, and his partner soon slips off with one of the transvestists. After an hour of fevered search the boy comes upon the two in a thicket, and in a frenzy of revulsion escapes unnoticed and throws himself into the river. When some hours later his body is recovered Madeleine weeps copiously, but then goes home with the lesbian, “her head on Pauline’s shoulder, as though it had found refuge there in a closer and more intimate affection.”

Here, as in _Nana_, homosexuality is pictured at the prostitute’s level, but an additional causal factor is suggested in Madeleine’s boyish build and gait. (One of the women in trousers, however, is described with corrosive accuracy as fat-hipped.) De Maupassant’s judgment is quite clear. The exquisite beauty of the countryside, evoked with all his genius for description, is presented as the symbol of Paul’s spirit, the strident vulgarity of the dance hall as that of Madeleine’s. Every phrase of this sustained contrast points up the tragedy of fineness destroyed by depravity. Socially significant again is the comparative tolerance of lesbianism and transvestism among the respectable resort population. The two lesbian couples, living in a riverside cottage and entertaining so noisily that their neighbors protest to the police, are “investigated” with stupid solemnity. However, there is no more serious result than “a voluminous report of their innocence.” This caricature of official action produces only hearty laughter among the other cottagers. (Bernard Talmey, however, quotes a less complaisant report by Fiaux to the Municipal Council of Paris in 1887 on lesbian prostitution.)[5]

Another short story in which lesbian action plays some part is Dubut de Laforest’s “Mlle Tantale” (1884),[6] one of a group of psychological novelettes comparable to Casper’s _Klinische Novellen_ of thirty years earlier in that the author gleaned his material from his friend Charcot’s clinic. Mary Folkestone, the “Mlle Tantale” of the title, and the illegitimate daughter of a dancer, has, throughout childhood, been the witness of too many intimate scenes between her mother and the latter’s lovers to feel anything but loathing for sex. As an adolescent she is revolted even when her friend Camilla opens her blouse on a hot day; at the same time she is so aroused by the sight of the other girl’s breasts that she falls ill. The story outlines her lifelong struggle to overcome her inhibitions. Following a first experiment with her maid’s lover, which disgusts her, she tries a second with an artist who is her social equal. Although this is less repellent, she finds no complete satisfaction. She then enters upon a liaison with Camilla who, after experience with men as disillusioning as her own, has become a lesbian. This effort, too, is a failure. Finally, neurotic from lack of emotional outlet she resorts to aphrodisiacs and dies of their excessive use; not, however, until the first scorned lover has found her in time to receive a contrite dying kiss. This ending indicates a belief in heterosexual passion, however unromantic, as the remedy for sex-engendered neurosis, and reminds one that Freud began as a pupil of Charcot.

Paul Bourget’s _Crime d’Amour_ (1886) will be touched on in passing only because Havelock Ellis mentions it as “dealing with the (lesbian) theme,” but actually it offers only half a dozen lines on the subject. The night before becoming the lover of a good friend’s wife, the hero reviews his very full amatory past. This reminiscence occurs early in the book and the cynicism about women which it reflects is an important factor in the story. The following quotation, however, gives the entire lesbian passage:

On the mantlepiece between the likenesses of two dead friends he kept an enigmatic portrait representing two women, the head of one resting on the shoulder of the other. It was the constant living reminder of a terrible story—the bitterest faithlessness he had ever endured. He had been cynical or artificial enough to laugh over it earlier with the two heroines, but he had laughed with death in his heart.[7]

No further reference is made to the women, nor is there the slightest implication that this affair is more responsible for his disillusionment than his many others, some of which are recounted at length.

* * * * *

In contrast to the comparative realism of the last five authors stand such imaginative flights as those which follow. The first was the _Monsieur Vénus_ of Rachilde (Marguérite Eymery Vallette), published in Brussels in 1884. According to André David,[8] the book was condemned, all available copies confiscated and the author heavily fined. Living in Paris, however, she was happily outside Belgian jurisdiction—the chief reason why so many daring French titles of the late century bore Brussels imprints. A year later the novel was brought out in Paris with some deletions and a preface by Maurice Barrès, and only this second version has been accessible for study.

It is the story of a wealthy orphaned girl, ward of an ascetic aunt who but for the necessity of raising her niece would have taken the veil. At the age of twenty-five Raoule encounters an effeminate man of the working class a year her junior to whom she is hopelessly attracted. Her pride is stung by her weakness, and to avoid accepting Jacques as an equal she virtually buys him and subsequently maintains him in luxury. By degrees she forces him to wear feminine clothing and play the woman’s part, to which he proves readily adaptable after an initial rebellion. She herself assumes the masculine costume and role. Jacques’ avaricious older sister is at first agreeable to his being kept, but when she discovers the real nature of the relationship she uses the threat of exposure to force a marriage which appears to her even more advantageous. This plebeian match estranges the aunt and most of Raoule’s own world, leaving a handsome military man, a former suitor of the girl’s, as the couple’s only frequent visitor. But so completely has the husband become effeminized that presently he makes advances to the officer. A duel ensues which the jealous Raoule urges the latter to carry through to the death. After the loss of her faithless love she has a wax figure of him enshrined in the room that had been their “temple of delight,” and she continues to visit it in secret.

In a significant early conversation with her military suitor, Raoule tells him that she is at last in love. “Sapho!” he cries. “Continue, Monsieur Vénérande, mon cher ami!” But she hotly denies the charge. Her intelligence and pride preclude that amusement of boarding-school girls and prostitutes. In Sappho such love may have had dignity because it was her invention, a new thing, but mere imitation is shameful weakness. She herself will also splendidly create a new vice. She then tells of meeting Jacques, with whom she fell in love as with Beauty. “She said ‘Beauty’ because she was unable to say ‘_Woman_.’”[9]

Jacques is described elsewhere as a dazzling Titian blonde, well-fleshed in breast and hips, only his voice, hands, and coarse hair betraying his sex. Raoule herself is taller than he, a handsome brunette with level brows and a boyish figure. On the occasions when she ventures out in men’s clothes her own sex is never suspected. That the method of satisfaction employed between the two is the kiss, and that only in its usual manifestation, is made unequivocally clear. Late in the story Jacques discovers that impotence has resulted.

Rachilde accounts with care for her heroine’s behavior pattern. Throughout Raoule’s childhood the aunt had harped upon the vileness of physical passion. At the same time the girl’s emotional endowment was such that the mere reading of an erotic book threw her into a violent fever. Hence, both the compulsive experimenting with many lovers and the frigidity which prevented satisfaction. Raoule herself lays the blame for the latter squarely upon her lovers, whom she has taken as she has read books, in order to learn what passion is. But men, she says, offer a woman either brutality or weakness, never the one aphrodisiac—Love—which might teach her real passion. And to become the slave of mere sensation is unthinkable. If one is merely to indulge one’s senses, then to preserve self-respect one must remain, like a man, indifferent to the experience and master of oneself.

Barrès, in his preface, says that Rachilde was only twenty when she wrote the tale, a well-bred and innocent girl with nothing but wishful dreaming from which to spin her fantastic plot. He singles out pride as the chief handicap of both heroine and author, pride which cannot endure domination of any sort by a man.

To what mysterious cult are they pledged, these men and women whom love of self draws one to another [of their own sex]?... One sees with alarm men losing their taste for women, as Monsieur Vénus displays hatred of male traits.... It is _la maladie du siècle_ ... it smells of death.[10]

What he naturally dared not say more plainly is that the tale gives clear evidence of severely repressed homosexual inclinations on the author’s part.

Additional, though less marked, evidence of her bias appears in Rachilde’s second novel, _Madame Adonis_, which came out in Paris in 1886 without serious moralistic repercussions. From a literary viewpoint it shows some advance in maturity, being fairly free of florid description, vague philosophy, and erotic purple patches. There is even a touch of satire in the delineation of a miserly provincial woman lumber-dealer and her despotic persecution of her son and his Parisian wife, as well as in the Dickensian portrait of the girl’s alcoholic father. But although comparative realism makes it more convincing, the plot is hardly less bizarre than that of _Monsieur Vénus_. It details the havoc wrought upon the young couple by a picturesque individual who first in the guise of a romantic artist woos the wife, and later as a _galante_ and domineering woman captivates the man. Continuing to pose alternately as twin brother or sister, this person convinces each of the young people that the other is unfaithful, and so manages to consummate affairs with both. Only when, goaded too far, the jealous husband surprises and kills his wife’s lover, do they learn that only one person is involved—a woman. She has deceived the wife as to her sex by artificial means. No etiology is suggested for the woman’s sexual dualism beyond her rebellion, like that of Raoule de Vénérande, against a feminine role. Light is shed upon the author by the tingling vitality of her descriptions of the central figure in the male role as compared with her parallel pictures of the same character as a woman, and also by the love scenes between the woman and the young wife. These are more convincing than the conquest of the man which is motivated largely by vindictive arrogance.

Seasoned readers of biography will not be surprised to learn that beyond her marriage in 1899 to Alfred Vallette, then editor of the _Mercure de France_, few facts about Rachilde’s own emotional life are available. André David compares her personality to that of the Chevalier d’Eon, famous diplomat and transvestist of the eighteenth century, whose sex was an enigma to all Europe not finally solved until his death; Ernest Boyd refers to her assumption of men’s clothing in her teens when she came to Paris and was befriended by Sarah Bernhardt;[11] but neither alludes to homosexuality. David does mention, however, her long and close friendship with Verlaine, whose homosexual connection with Arthur Rimbaud was a scandal in the late nineteenth century.

Rachilde continued for several decades to produce novels, in some of which lesbian women made brief appearances too slight to consider here. Her one later sustained treatment of homosexuality, (which ran serially in the _Mercure de France_ as _Les Factices_ and was published in book form as _Les Hors Natures_) dealt with men. In the reviews of fiction which she contributed to her husband’s periodical from 1896 to the 1930s, she maintained the same attitude of superiority to female variance expressed by her own Raoule de Vénérande, but she regularly included lesbian novels in her review list and seldom failed to indicate their theme. Thus she provided an index of sorts to such fiction over a period of nearly forty years. When, during the 1890s, criticism was leveled at the _Mercure_ for its consistent noting of fictional “decadence,” Vallette replied in a sharp editorial that theirs was the only periodical whose reviews gave anything resembling an honest picture of contemporary writing.[12]

The Shadow of Feminism

In Rachilde’s two novels just considered, women’s deliberate adoption of male attire and outlook figures for the first time in half a century; that is, since the appearance of _Fragoletta_ and _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. No significant rebellion against the feminine role is evident in Zola’s or even Maupassant’s references to transvestism among prostitutes nor in other variant French fiction before 1890. In other countries, however, what is now termed the masculine protest was receiving considerable attention. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James in America, Olive Schreiner in South Africa, and August Strindberg in Sweden all contributed observations, even though the phenomenon appears in their work under widely differing guises and sometimes is only tenuously related to variance.

Dr. Holmes, versatile contributor to both medicine and letters, would today undoubtedly have been a psychiatrist. Throughout his life he was preoccupied with intersexual personality in women, and he explored it at least tentatively in each of his three novels: _Elsie Venner_ (1859), _The Guardian Angel_ (1867), and _A Mortal Antipathy_ (1885). Of these a modern psychiatrist, Dr. Clarence Oberndorf, has observed:

The theory of bisexuality and the importance of bisexual components in influencing the character of individuals is more than implied in each one of his abnormal personalities. The masculine traits in childhood of both Elsie Venner and Myrtle Hazard [in _The Guardian Angel_], something of a tomboy, are unmistakable. The bisexual theme becomes even clearer in _A Mortal Antipathy_, where Holmes repeatedly contrasts the femininity of Euthemia Tower with the masculinity of Lurida Vincent, and it is apparent that he has but little sympathy with the latter.[13]

Strictly speaking, Elsie Venner alone deserves the adjective “abnormal.” Her eccentricity is due to her mother’s having suffered a rattlesnake bite during late pregnancy of which she died shortly after giving birth to her child. The girl grows up unafraid of rattlers if not immune to their poison (there is no account of her being bitten), and possessing something of the reptile’s power to hypnotize a sensitive individual with her steady ophidian gaze. As a result she is shunned by her mates, and develops a solitary and arrogant personality. She is a fearless mountain climber and not infrequently spends the night on dangerous and snake-infested rocky slopes above her home. During adolescence she exhibits for a teacher in the select female academy she attends “a special fancy” so intense it frightens the woman. On the girl’s side the obsession seems more a desire to test her power than love. The reaction of the overworked and half-hysterical teacher is one of terrified revulsion until Elsie in her last illness calls upon her to act as nurse and companion. Elsie’s only feeling of normal warmth is directed toward a young male instructor to whom she virtually offers herself, but he, too, is unable to respond as she desires, and she dies as an apparent result of subduing the innate drive to overpower those she loves.

Myrtle Hazard in _The Guardian Angel_ was born in the tropics and lived her early years amid a luxury not only of natural beauty but of parental love and adulation from native servants. The strength and self-assurance thus bred enable her when orphaned to survive the efforts of a couple of puritanic aunts to break her spirit. At fifteen, precociously mature in both mind and body, she crops her hair, dons boy’s clothes, and runs off to return to India where she spent the few remembered years of happy childhood. The accident which foils her plan wins her new friends, among them a young man whom she eventually marries. Although in appearance and behavior she is the most masculine of Holmes’s heroines, variance plays the least part in her history. Her “best friend,” the only person for whom she leaves any word upon running away, is merely the bosom companion natural to an adolescent, and there is no hint of passion in Myrtle’s feeling for the girl.

As for Lurida Vincent in _A Mortal Antipathy_, despite Dr. Oberndorf’s emphasis on her masculinity, she is physically fragile, underdeveloped, and anything but boyish. We see her only in boarding school and learn nothing of her antecedents or early history. The factors conditioning her against a feminine role are that she is plain and unappealing to men and abnormally brilliant. Her only masculinity consists in a resolute ambition to best her male acquaintances in intellectual achievement. Envious of her schoolmates’ charm and athletic prowess, she reacts by becoming the school prodigy and an ardent feminist. Jealously, and with unconscious passion, she adores Euthemia Tower, who returns her fondness with marked moderation and common sense. Euthemia is obviously more Holmes’s ideal of womanhood than a convincing individual. She is beautiful with the wholesome beauty of youth, modest, warm-hearted, and admirably well-balanced. She is also the school’s champion athlete, strong enough to carry an unconscious young man, whom she later marries, from a burning house without assistance.

From these novels one gathers that the good doctor was partial to women who were physically not much inferior to men, but he firmly believed that such equality did not breed masculine emotions. His scientific acumen had made him aware of passionate attachments between women[14] (a secondary character in _The Guardian Angel_ is so devoted to her mother that the latter says, “I should think you were in love with me, my darling, if you were not my daughter”), but such attachments appear to concern him so little that one wonders if he was even aware of their ultimate potentialities.

The same question arises in reading Thomas Hardy’s earliest novel, _Desperate Remedies_ (1871), even though some early chapters give more details of a variant episode than anything in Holmes. Circumstances force the well-born Cytherea at eighteen into service as a lady’s maid, and Miss Aldclyffe, a spinster of forty-six, employs her despite her frank admission of inexperience wholly from infatuation with her beauty and physical grace. Since both women are headstrong and mercurial, Cytherea’s term as servant lasts a matter of mere hours, but its stormy ending promotes her to the status of companion and (ultimately) partial heiress of her mistress’s fortune. This transition occurs during their single night together, in the course of which the older woman learns that the girl is already in love with a man and does her best to turn her adored against him and all of his sex. Miss Aldclyffe is a “tall ... finely built woman of spare though not angular proportions,”[14a] but her aversion to men is the result of early seduction and desertion and not innate, and her passion for Cytherea, half-maternal, stems from years of emotional starvation. The girl, though also strong-willed and independent, is wholly feminine and quite unable to satisfy her mistress’s pleas for some warmth of response to her caresses.

Although _Desperate Remedies_ shows some immaturity in its Victorian elaboration of plot, its grasp of character foreshadows the mastery Hardy was later to attain, and an already developed ironic detachment saves the night incident from being either mawkish or offensive to British readers. Nothing in it betrays the least awareness of lesbian possibilities on the part of either Miss Aldclyffe or her author, nor is there any conscious feminism in her disparagement of men. Actually, she at once sets about contriving to marry Cytherea to a man of her own choice—her unacknowledged illegitimate son. The variant episode is thus brief and incidental, but it is significant in having no known antecedent in British fiction save Wollstonecraft’s _Mary_ published nearly a century earlier.[15]

The feminist theme so uncongenial to Holmes’s taste had been presented with passionate sympathy two years earlier in Olive Schreiner’s _Story of an African Farm_. This novel is reminiscent of _Mary, a Fiction_, both in its championship of women and its naïvely autobiographical pattern. The similarity is due, however, only to the authors’ comparable life circumstances and not to any possible influence, for by 1880 when Schreiner was writing, Wollstonecraft’s volume was rare even in England, and Schreiner had not then left the Transvaal. She brought her manuscript to London in 1882 and it was published in 1883. _The Story of an African Farm_ is a sensitive girl’s outcry against the masculine violence and brutality of a frontier society, and its heroine is obviously a self-portrait of the author. Lyndall (Schreiner _mère’s_ maiden name) has been turned against men by the villainy or contemptible weakness of the only specimens of the sex in her lonely milieu, and equally turned against passion in women by her coarse and callous aunt’s susceptibility to it. Snared later by her own emotions, she revolts against her lover’s domination, refuses marriage, bears his child secretly and alone, and falls fatally ill in consequence. An effeminate boy, long in love with her, traces her to her hiding place, disguises himself as a woman, and without revealing his identity nurses her until her death.

All her life, at least on the conscious level, Lyndall has sought “something nobler, stronger than I, before which I can kneel down.” Religion, the obvious answer to her need, has been spoiled for her by the pitiable weakness of the one man she has known who professed it. Her lover is stronger than she but signally lacking in the nobility she craves. Her only help, and subconsciously her only real love, is her own fearless strength. At one point she is reduced to crying: “Why am I so alone, so hard, so cold? Will nothing free me from myself?” But on two other occasions, notably the deathbed scene where she communes with her own image in a mirror,[16] her naïve and passionate narcissism reveals itself so clearly and is so lovingly transcribed as to betray it as the author’s own. (One cannot help wondering whether Barrès had read the _African Farm_ before writing his preface to _Monsieur Vénus_ in 1885.) Schreiner’s heroine is drawn to no individual woman save herself, but she is an impassioned champion of the whole female sex as well as a hater-of-men. The novel is filled with revolt against the subjugation of women and their limited opportunities for individual development.

Henry James’s early novel, _The Bostonians_, published in 1885, stands in sharp contrast. This story ran as a serial in _Century Magazine_. Before it was finished Richard Watson Gilder, the editor, wrote James that “he had never published anything so unpopular.” The novel came out as a book a year later but met with no warmer reception, and was not subsequently reissued until 1945, being omitted even from the twenty-nine volume Scribner edition of James’ _Novels and Tales_ in 1923. Philip Rahv in the preface of the 1945 edition of _The Bostonians_ indicates several reasons for its unpopularity, but says that undoubtedly the “most disquieting” was its keen analysis of “the emotional economy of the Lesbian woman.”[17]

Because of James’s subtlety his work suffers more than most from condensation, but as the text of the novel is now readily available, its nearly four hundred pages can be reduced here to the barest skeleton. In essence, the plot is the eternal triangle. At its apex is Verena Tarrant, ultra-feminine, passive and suggestible, whose antecedents bear witness to James’s interest in recently published theories of heredity. The rivals for possession of her are Olive Chancellor, Boston intellectual and feminist spinster a decade her senior, and the latter’s cousin from Mississippi, a young man who has come out of the Civil War on the losing side with something of the present day’s critical pessimism toward modern society. Olive sees in the girl, who has inherited a spell-binding oratorical gift, a powerful potential ally for the Woman’s Movement to which she herself is devoted. Subconsciously, however, her motivation is a love-at-first-sight quite as passionate as that of her male cousin. Olive manages virtually to adopt Verena and by degrees to estrange her from her family and her previous suitors. Olive’s cousin, Basil Ransom, is not so easily disposed of, so she must finally resort to exacting a promise from the girl that she will not marry. For several years the two women are wholly absorbed in their feminist efforts, traveling in Europe where they meet the prominent leaders of the movement, and studying intensively. Olive’s emphasis is always upon the wrongs women have suffered at the hands of men.

Olive is increasingly obsessed by her love for Verena. Of Verena, James says: “Her share in the union, ... was no longer passive, purely appreciative; it was passionate too, and it put forth a beautiful energy.”[18] At last Verena is ready for public appearance, and invites Basil to her first lecture, since he has been forbidden his cousin’s house in Boston. He takes the opportunity to talk long and seriously to her about herself, Olive’s influence, and his own love for her. He tells her that what the times need is not more feminization but less, that “it’s a ... hysterical, chattering ... age of false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities.... The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality ... is what I want to preserve.”[19] He tells her, too, that she has allowed Olive to imprison her in “a false thin shell” of devotion to feminism, when actually she has a genius for giving herself, not to a cause, but to normal life with a man. The girl is so moved that she dares not see him again and cannot hide her disturbance from Olive. The story then records a rapidly accelerating struggle between the man and the older woman for possession of the girl. The climax comes on the night of Verena’s great Boston debut, when, just before speaking before an audience of thousands, she falls ill in the dressing room from inner emotional conflict. Basil attempts to reach her; Olive, beside herself, tries to keep him out; but Verena is aware of his presence and of her own accord chooses him in preference to public triumph and a potentially brilliant career.

As to the precise nature of the relationship between the two women, no more is specified than a good deal of quiet kissing and holding of hands, more symbolic than passionate except for a general “tremulousness.” At one point the following appears: “It was a very peculiar thing, their friendship: it had elements which made it probably as complete as any (between women) that had ever existed.”[20] This is included as part of a mental soliloquy of Verena’s, and so Rahv, who comments on the “prescience with which [James] analyzed ... the lesbian woman,” may possibly be justified in adding that “one cannot be sure that James understood her precisely as such.”[21] Had Verena’s rumination above been presented as James’s own, there could be no doubt of its significance, for he had spent a year in Paris during the 1870’s, had known Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, and could not have escaped awareness of all emotional potentialities between women. It is interesting that he was careful not to speak in the role of author, nor to venture recording any comparable fragment of the strongly variant Olive’s stream of consciousness.

The last novel dealing with feminism, violent in its condemnation of the Movement and also of female variance, is Strindberg’s _Confession of a Fool_. This story is now known to be a thinly veiled report of the author’s relations with his first wife, Siri von Essen, Baroness Wrangel, whom he married in 1877. It was written in 1887-1888 as an _apologia pro vita sua_ intended for publication after his projected suicide. When he decided instead to live and divorce his wife, he kept the manuscript sealed for five years, until public sentiment aroused by the circumstances of the divorce led him to publish it “in self defense.” In view of the fact that his second marriage in 1893 was followed a year later by his second divorce and a third matrimonial venture in 1901 came to a similar end in 1904, the _Confession_ provides a valuable document on the psychology of the unhappy misogynist, but scarcely an unbiased portrait of the wife.

The hero of the story, Axel, is a bookish introvert with what today would be termed an obvious mother fixation. He falls in love with the wife of an officer, his friend, partly from pity because her husband is involved in a flirtation with her sophisticated young cousin; the Baroness Marie, however, is rather less concerned about the affair than Axel. “I’m in love with the little cat myself,” she says early in their acquaintance. Like Belot’s Adrien, Axel is not warned. In the idealism of first love he searches the art books in his library for a likeness of his beloved. She is a goddess—not Venus, definitely not Juno, not even Minerva, but Diana, “more boy than girl,” who never forgave Actaeon for seeing her nude. Axel is naïvely enraptured by this seeming evidence of his love’s purity.

Presently Marie leaves her husband for a stage career, living with Axel rather incidentally and marrying him only upon discovery that she is pregnant. It appears later, however, that the child is the Baron’s, conceived after their formal divorce. After a masquerade for which she has dressed as a man, Marie is caught fondling a servant girl. To Axel’s reproaches she retorts that his suspicions are groundless and vile, as are police reports and medical treatises which term “vicious” all caresses of any warmth. The birth of a second child—Axel’s, this time—briefly relaxes domestic tension; however, Marie soon farms the child out to a nurse, installs an actress friend in a neighboring apartment, and creates a scandal by caressing her new love in public, though still protesting innocence.

The lengthy plot continues to oscillate between brief periods of marital peace during Marie’s pregnancies, and tempests over her increasingly scandalous connections with women. Most of these are with Marie’s countrywomen, artists, and other bohemians who dress and act as much like men as possible, make love openly to one another, and “wallow in the lowest depths.” Many are militant suffragists, and all are devoted to the cause. Once Axel reaches the point of wanting to drown his wife, but he spares her for the sake of their children. Most of the action thus far has occurred in Paris or in Swiss resorts. There follows an interlude in Germany, “land of militarism where the patriarchate is still in full force.” There no one will listen to talk of women’s rights, and, for the first time, Marie is out of public life; consequently, Axel flourishes. Even his voice, “which had grown thin from everlastingly speaking in soothing tones to a woman, regained its former volume.”[22] When his wife rages against his new dominance he reflects that he has always known it was the weakling in him, “the page, the lap-dog, her child” that she loved. He now makes an effort to leave her, but is helplessly bound by his masochistic passion. This sign of dependence softens her for a few months. Then Marie is caught caressing the adolescent daughters of guests, and the rupture is final.

Axel, intellectually concerned as to the cause of her aberration, tries to discover whether Marie had been a prostitute before her first marriage, but all evidence is negative. He does learn, however, that her lesbian habits and those of the Paris circle with whom she had most conspicuously misbehaved were common knowledge to everyone else. He finally decides to leave her and “to write the story of this woman, the true representative of this age of the unsexed.” The novel was published in Berlin in 1893, two years after his divorce from Siri von Essen, but “in a corrupt and mutilated text, so crude in its language that it was suppressed.”[23] The first authorized edition appeared in Sweden in 1912 after the author’s death.

Before leaving Strindberg it will be interesting to return parenthetically for a moment to _Mlle Tantale_, since the modern analyst Dr. Clarence Offenbacher has suggested that it may have given Strindberg the plot of a much better known work, his drama _Miss Julie_.[24] To be sure the two have in common the unrewarding liaison of a girl with a man who is her social inferior, in Julie’s case a groom. But in personality and in conditioning circumstances Julie differs sharply from Mary Folkestone. Julie is the daughter of a domineering feminist who, in her effort to equalize the sexes, assigns the labor on her estate to men or women with complete disregard of its customary division between them. Quite unlike Mary’s parent, the sensual courtesan, Julie’s mother scorns passion. She gives her senses rein as rarely as possible and then merely for the purpose of nervous catharsis. Julie also is wilfully self-contained, taking the groom in a callous spirit like her mother’s.

Offenbacher points out that Strindberg was in Paris in the 1880s and probably knew of both Dubut de Laforest and Charcot. It is even more likely that he was aware of women like Rachilde and the more notorious Mme. Jeanne Dieulafoy, lifelong transvestist and author who was made a member of the Legion of Honor about 1890. At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, Dieulafoy was a girl of nineteen, convent bred, who had just married and who fought beside her husband during the siege of Paris wearing men’s clothes, “to which she was long accustomed.”[25] Subsequently, she accompanied him on archeological expeditions to Egypt, Morocco and Persia. To her grief she was unable to have children, but she devoted herself to those of her friends, and she and her husband for a time conducted a private school in which they educated the girls to be independent and fearless, the boys to show gentleness and consideration. This training they believed, doubtless from their own experience, would lead to better adjustment in marriage.

Since at the time of writing _Miss Julie_ Strindberg was deep in the stormiest phase of his quarrel with Siri von Essen, he would have been more sensitive to masculine women than to clinical literature. No model for Julie’s mother could have been readier to hand than this virile ex-soldier, archeologist, and “progressive” educator. _Miss Julie_ may well be Strindberg’s dark prediction as to the results of child-training by such a woman. The fact that there is no trace of variance in _Miss Julie_ seems another reason for questioning whether it derived from _Mlle Tantale_. Strindberg was so exercised over that issue at the moment that he would not have missed a chance to attack it openly unless his models were actual persons and might conceivably be recognized.

The central figures of the more or less feministic novels considered above are not marked by unanimous sexual antipathy to the male. A number of them had husbands or lovers and bore children. Their common feature is rebellion against the domestic role imposed upon them in nineteenth-century society, and often their variance is merely one aspect of that rebellion. In contrast, the novels that follow have variance per se as their predominant theme, and the authors’ attitudes toward variance are equally disapproving.

Fin de Siècle

Dubut de Laforest’s second approach to the subject appeared in _La Femme d’Affaires_ (1890), a vertical section of Paris life as sensational as was _Mlle Tantale_ in the field of individual psychology. The title figure is a grasping Jewess, and her contrast to her Catholic daughter-in-law (almost the only irreproachable character in the book) would reward a student of religious and racial prejudice; however, neither of these women is directly concerned in the variant action. The latter involves a self-centered musical comedy star, bisexually promiscuous, and a lesbian amazon, Faustine, who supports her when necessary. Faustine, we learn, was expelled from a school at fifteen for corrupting its dormitory, and her subsequent excesses with a governess contributed to the latter’s early death from tuberculosis (cf. _Mlle Giraud_). She then tried a couple of husbands, and at the time of this tale’s action she still experiments with men—which is inexplicable since she never ceases to loathe heterosexual experience. She is violently jealous of her actress friend, especially of the latter’s connection with a fantastic titled Englishman who has turned circus clown. During an ether ‘drunk,’ Faustine surprises the two together and cuts out the woman’s tongue, thus destroying “the instrument of love.” No etiology is suggested for her variance except her amazonian build. The unsavory trio are apparently incorporated in the novel to illustrate the types to whom the Business Woman will rent apartments at sufficient profit, but the author devotes more space to them than such reason requires. It was more probably his own literary profits due to sensationalism that he had an eye on. His is the most specific reference thus far to the techniques of lesbian activity, a detail doubtless reflecting his clinical connections, and one seldom repeated in openly published literature.

More concentrated upon variance is Catulle Mendès’ _Méphistophéla_ (1890), mentioned earlier for its long popularity and its present rarity. It is also notable for the immense detail of the lesbian life history presented in its more than five hundred pages. It must have escaped the censor in its day because of its heavily moralistic tone and its literary style. Mendès, like Flaubert and Maupassant—though artistically far from their equal—was more subtle than naturalistic, and veiled his lurid facts in generalities that might glitter or smoulder but were unlikely to put specific notions in a reader’s head.

Its prologue gives a sinister sketch of a drug addict in the act of a self-injection of morphine—a reassuring indication that no matter how she may appear to flourish in the course of the tale, she will come to no good end. Wealthy and proud as the heroine of _Monsieur Vénus_, modish as the Comtesse de Chalis, she has the debauched remnants of beauty; however, her lack of natural brows and lashes implies syphilis. She takes morphine to blot out some abysmal horror which has left its scar upon her. The author then unfolds the heredity and the erotic career which have brought her to her present pass.

Sophie is the child of a bisexually promiscuous dancer by a Russian nobleman who laments his mistress’s pregnancy because his ‘rotten and accursed line’ should never be perpetuated. He dies almost immediately and the dancer, now fabulously wealthy, takes a house in Fontainebleau and raises Sophie in strict respectability. But even in childhood Sophie becomes so attached to a neighbor’s daughter, Emmaline, that a temporary separation brings on hysterical convulsions, dangerous fever and somnambulism. The two children have ‘played at marriage,’ a game of innocent embraces which brought vague shame to the other child, but seemed natural and acceptable to Sophie. With the approach of puberty the game is discontinued. During adolescence Sophie’s powerful but still unconscious sex drive leads her into emotional excesses, first in connection with confirmation, and later in the study of music and poetry. Through all these storms she sweeps the passive Emmaline along with hypnotic intensity, and the two girls are sometimes brought to the verge of fainting through unrelieved excitement. Recognizing the danger signals, Sophie’s mother arranges her daughter’s early marriage to Emmaline’s brother. Sophie, still physically ignorant, is so delighted at not losing her friend that she accepts the arrangement without question.

The disillusionment of her wedding night drives her to an attempt to leap out the window, which her husband prevents. However, as soon as he is asleep she flees to Emmaline. Awakened by marital initiation to the significance of her feelings for her friend, she kisses the sleeping girl’s breast. The husband who has been searching for her, surprises her in the act, reviles her, and beats her senseless.

Her brother’s brutality moves Emmaline to run away with Sophie, but in a cottage where they spend an idyllic week she is unwilling to accept the caresses the other girl now consciously burns to bestow. When circumstances finally overcome Emmaline’s reluctance, she does not share Sophie’s transports. Somewhat repelled, and afraid for her reputation, she slips away and returns home. Sophie is left broken-hearted by her desertion. She realizes that she has failed Emmaline exactly as her own husband has failed with her, and she determines to find out how one woman can satisfy another.

Hiding in Paris from her husband, she allows herself to be initiated by a lesbian show girl, Magalo, with whom she lives for some time, physically captivated but hating herself for inconstancy to Emmaline. The discovery that she is pregnant as a result of her wedding night brings her to the verge of suicide. She loathes the very thought of maternity; when her child is born, she consigns it to an orphanage without a qualm. Her partner, Magalo, is shocked and hurt, being genuinely in love with her and having envisioned a life _en famille_ for them and the child. Sophie turns against Magalo in distaste because of the girl’s interest in motherhood. Upon her mother’s death, Sophie, left enormously wealthy, makes plans to recapture Emmaline. She is confident that she can now both support her and adequately fill the role of husband. In Fontainebleau, however, she learns that Emmaline has married, her family has dispersed, and her whereabouts are unknown. Once again, heartbroken, she returns to Paris.

Now she establishes a smart ménage and acquires an enormous lesbian following. Under her spell, actresses, artists and women of title neglect careers, male lovers, and husbands. She is known as ‘a giver of incomparable joys, violent and sophisticated, deliciously and frightfully inventive.’[26] Into this spectacular brilliance breaks Magalo, destitute, broken, and ill. In a scene of deathbed repentance the girl, claiming guidance from Heaven, implores Sophie to give up her empty and miserable life and return to her husband and child. There can be no other happiness on earth. ‘We both have had a demon in us,’ she says, ‘but for you it is not too late.’

Sophie’s response is to go directly from Magalo’s funeral to an orgiastic lesbian banquet where she glories in her role of presiding goddess (or demon). With this defiance, a third stage in her disintegration begins. Her liaisons, always loveless, now fail to give even sensual satisfaction, and she knows only boredom, relieved less and less frequently by flashes of desire. Haunted by memories of her only real love, she ferrets out Emmaline’s whereabouts in the hope that even a brief encounter may rekindle her own jaded emotions.

In seeking to discover how she can reach Emmaline alone, she finds herself one evening spying through an open window upon a family scene centering about Emmaline’s four children. The two men, father and uncle (the latter her own husband) are fatuously devoted to them. Emmaline has become wholly maternal, plump and placid. The climax occurs when Emmaline offers the youngest, an infant of six months, her breast. Revolted to nausea, Sophie plunges away through the darkness with demonic laughter.

‘Now Emmaline was no longer worthy of her passion. Was her own life wrong? Must one be like such clods to be happy? Should she have had four children? ... No! She repudiated such spineless notions. She was what she was. She thrust from her her old dream of Emmaline’s breast, she jeered at Emmaline’s bovine happiness.’[27]

This further repudiation of maternity heralds the final stage of her degeneration, a round of infamous adventures stimulated by drink and drugs. ‘Unwilling to believe there could be so little pleasure in vice, she chose to think she simply had not learned enough,’ and she frequents the most debauched Paris haunts, no longer bothering to select her partners, but seizing indifferently on servants and waitresses, to whom she becomes an object of terror. At last, suffering from hallucinations, largely of sexual odors, she consults a physician. His first advice is marriage; however, when he learns that she has already tried that and even borne a child, he advocates as a last therapeutic experiment the actual practice of motherhood.

Accordingly she fetches her sixteen-year-old daughter from the convent orphanage. The girl is graceless and unappealing and on sight awakens no sentiment but boredom. But while watching her asleep and half-clothed, Sophie is stirred by violent desire. And now in real horror of herself she leads the girl to the gate of Emmaline’s house where she can find her father and a true home, and entreats her to enter it and stay there. The book closes with an epilogue almost the literal duplicate of the prologue, for now the reader knows from what nightmare the doomed woman was seeking to escape when she plied her hypodermic needle.

Marred though it is by excess in length, incident and style, this novel holds interest because of its effort to present a complete life history and to account for its lesbian element. The chief trouble is excess in this respect also. While the “morne demon” possessing “Méphistophéla” seems at the outset an hereditary syphilitic taint, the author says at one point:

‘Why, if a scientist today diagnoses hysteria from the same symptoms that for Bodin [Attorney to Henri III and author of _Démonomanie des Sorciers_, 1580] proved demonic possession, should not current neuroses be, under other names, simply the old spells used by sorcerers? If divine grace is present in the bread and wine [of the sacrament], why not diabolic malice in opium, hashish, morphine? He who takes alcohol imbibes Satan. An emetic is an exorcist.’[28]

This could be sailing close to a biochemical explanation of psychopathology, or, employed by Mendès who was at least a nominal Catholic, it could indicate a half-serious suspicion of supernatural influence.

At another point he distinguishes between relatively harmless and “serious” homosexual activity.

‘Rejected lovers, deceived wives, may console one another and forget to mention it to their confessors. Brilliant young belles dizzy with champagne and dancing may fall into each others’ arms as they undress at dawn. Prostitutes may seek the tender love they have never known, or consolation for men’s brutality. Only the conscious, cool, deliberate players of man’s role are courting damnation.’[29]

There is no indication of heredity bearing the burden here. Indeed, Mendès seems to absolve his heroine from responsibility for her actions up to the time of her desertion by Emmaline and her escape to Paris; that is, so long as she is physically innocent and motivated by love. But from that point on, each step in her downward course results from a deliberate refusal of motherhood, the final one involving repudiation of even her early love for Emmaline. Interesting to a modern analyst would be her obsession with Emmaline’s breast, which had a parallel in Mlle Tantale’s reaction to her friend Camilla.

Josephin Peladan, author of _La Gynandre_ (1891) states differently the same thesis: there is no such thing as lesbian Love, it is simply one of the sexual vices. This novel is one in a long series designed to expose all these vices under the heading _La Décadence Latine_, which unless checked, he says, forebodes the end of French civilization. (He also proclaims the volume to be in part a satire on current lesbian fiction.) The hero of the tale, a young intellectual known merely as Tammuz, is, like his author, both Catholic and Rosicrucian, his mission the conversion of Lesbos to a constructive worship of Eros. The only other male protagonist is a novelist, Nergal. These names are derived from Assyrian-Babylonian mythology and represent sun gods and the generative principle, in opposition to all the female lunar divinities.

A prologue incorporates the two men’s rapid survey of previous literature on female variance, from classical references through Catholic confessors’ manuals to Balzac, Gautier, and Baudelaire. Sappho’s influence, Tammuz decides, operated in so segregated a community of girls as to engender the cathartic intrasexual play common in such environments. In short, ‘Lesbos is the story of a pagan convent.’ The Catholic literature, of course, supports the thesis that lesbianism is merely ‘female sodomy.’ So also do belletristic works from Brantôme to Diderot. _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_ is pronounced Balzac’s weakest effort because it represents lesbian passion as a motivating force for murder. Gautier gives them momentary pause, because _Mlle de Maupin_ records lesbian activity between two women of high social status; however, it is the Catholic Baudelaire who offers them the most convincing evidence that the lesbian experience may approach real passion. Tammuz claims that such error merely foreshadowed Baudelaire’s mental collapse. After this formidable spearhead of symbolism and avowed moral purpose, the novel presents, with only faint satire, a cross-section of contemporary female variance. Interestingly enough, it claims that the vice had become general in Parisian society only within the previous decade, but it does not attempt to account for that sudden burgeoning.

Tammuz, an impoverished nobleman enabled by a windfall to spend a year studying life and love in Paris, is first introduced to the Orchids. This group is no more than a salon, its hostess a woman architect nearing forty. Her circle comprises a dozen idle young women, some married, ranging from a wide-eyed orphan of seventeen who has been “taken” in her lonely innocence by the first man who showed her any attention, to a beauty who worships her own dazzling skin far too much to risk its damage by male caresses. The presiding spirit, Aril, is sufficiently the diplomat to make each of her protégées feel valued and to avoid tension by playing no favorites. Tammuz is unable to discern much real passion among the group for either Aril or one another, and no lesbian activity save as outsiders stimulate it. A seductive actress-courtesan may strike a momentary spark, or curious provincial women in Paris for a brief fling may provoke some of the girls to exhibitionistic petting, but all soon lapse again into emotional indolence. Their common need is mainly companionship and freedom from the male aggression from which all have suffered in one fashion or another. Aril’s need is scope for her powers of domination.

That the whole business is rather a pose is apparent in the women’s adoption of picturesque nicknames—not masculine—and is further attested to by the confession of a senior member. While protesting her own and the group’s willingness to die for Aril, she makes clear to the young man that all of them are more thrilled by his masculine interest than by anything happening among themselves.

Tammuz’s next field for study is the Royal Maupins, a fencing club housed and headed by a deserter from the Orchids too masculine to submit to Aril’s dominance. Whereas the Orchids were all passive-feminine, even though one or two were tall, small-breasted and narrow-hipped, the Maupins consciously affect masculinity, in their nicknames, and in wearing fencing hose and men’s silk shirts exclusively in the privacy of their quarters. Here the prime favorite is not the hostess and nominal leader but “the Chevalier,” a woman who has avoided overt expression of all emotion, variant or normal, and whose “purity” Orchids and Maupins alike hold in such reverence that they forbear trying to win her from it. She shows an immediate predilection for the young man whose self-mastery in the pursuit of an ideal equals her own, and this semi-defection from the lesbian cause wakes violent jealousy among the pettier Maupins. A trio of them provokes Tammuz to a match with their most skilled fencer, fitting his opponent with a plastron beneath her tunic and substituting untipped blades for regulation foils. Their apparent plot is to kill him in the guise of accident. But the young man divines the trick, makes the sign of the cross with his blade, and contrives to break off the tip of it in his opponent’s concealed guard, escaping with a superficial wound. The exposure of the trick results in the expulsion of the offending trio and in the Chevalier’s betrayal of an overmastering love for him. Although he feels an equal attraction, he goes his way. He diagnoses the Maupins as poseurs whose prototype is the swashbuckling male adolescent, still encumbered by feminine weaknesses while lacking the male virtues of intelligence and impersonality.

His further “studies” in Paris lead him to a bathing club where the sexual play of “socialites” is indistinguishable from that of courtesans, and to the dressing rooms and studios of actresses and artists where similar behavior is even more brazenly manifested. Along the way he accumulates male gossip in the best clubs and sensational stories from the yellow journals, all of which he holds heavily responsible for nurturing the legend and cult of Lesbos.

There remains a famous lesbian group secluded in a chateau on the coast of Normandy to which he makes an unannounced visit. Here the leader is a Russian princess, whose name has become a byword for lesbian excess—possibly a satiric imitation of Méphistophéla. Tammuz finds the Princess Simzerla a proud but pathetic stripling of thirty whose excursions into vice have been, like Méphistophéla’s, a sterile quest for some satisfying love. Knowing all the gossip about her before leaving Paris, he offers his sympathetic and seemingly clairvoyant analysis of it to the princess while she is disguised as her own brother and unaware that he knows her identity. This kindly understanding, the first she has ever met, leads her—with time out for a quick change into feminine costume—straight into his arms. Tammuz, as always, has sufficient control to treat her as a sister, for he has decided that the way to ‘save Lesbos’ is not by converting any single individual to heterosexual passion, not even the notorious archetype, Simzerla, but by completely foregoing that physical victory against which most of them have rebelled. If he gives himself to one, his imaginative hold on all the rest is lost.

He finds Simzerla’s group more mature and diversified than those previously encountered, most of them near thirty and fugitives from Parisian notoriety. He spends some weeks studying them individually and collectively, leading them into such literary and philosophical discussion as they are capable of, and spying for passionate attachments. He is unable to discover that more than one couple indulges in any physical expression, and that is rather anemic. Furthermore, in the course of their group effort to write a lesbian drama he obtains final evidence to support what he has felt throughout his study (and, one might add, before he began): women have no powers of impersonal or abstract thought nor any creative intellectual capacity. It is he who contributes as much of the drama as is written.

His final observation is made aboard the yacht of a Swedish-American transvestist known as the Phantom Princess, though she has acquired the actual name of Limerick from a British [sic!] peer, her deserted husband. Rumor has credited her with maintaining a floating ‘Lesbos’ to equal Simzerla’s, but Tammuz finds it no more than a luxury craft of masculine simplicity manned by a hard-bitten male crew. “La Fantôme” has experimented with both men and women more lustily than Simzerla, and is completely disillusioned about the existence of Love. Weary of sensual indulgence, she now permits herself no more than occasional voyeurism, having her crew bring aboard waterfront women for orgies which she observes from the captain’s bridge.

Because she is the most masculine of all the women he has encountered, Tammuz enjoys more intellectual companionship with her than with the others. He finds her capable of understanding his concept of woman’s proper role in the scheme of things—that of Frea, goddess of fertility. She is quite in accord with his refusal to deify Love aside from its procreative aspect, and shares his unreadiness to sacrifice an impersonal quest or even personal liberty on the altar of Romance.

Informed early by one of the Maupins that many women’s inability to respond to men is due to the ugliness of modern male garb, Tammuz has assumed on occasion a more graceful costume—modified Directoire—and with the Princesse Fantôme he dresses in gray silk fencer’s hose and a jacket of violet velvet. She reciprocates by appearing at dinner in an evening gown of ivory moiré, above which her white shoulders, deeply tanned face and cropped hair create a ludicrous effect. Tammuz, however, is touched by this effort at refeminization, and before long the two are enjoying a passionate interlude against that grandest of all settings, the open sea.

The inevitable sequel is La Fantôme’s holding him captive aboard the yacht in obedience to a newborn feminine hunger for permanence, and only a providential near-shipwreck frees him. Her desire is that they die in each other’s arms; his, that he be spared to pursue his mission against Lesbos, and their escape from death can be attributed only to supernatural intervention in his behalf.

He now returns to Paris, and in completing his study of Lesbos he accumulates as it were the dregs of naturalistic data—lesbian sadism, gross exhibitionism, the gift to his mistress by an infatuated nobleman of his fifteen-year-old daughter, an excursion into lesbian prostitution on the part of a countess in order to earn a fortune for her beloved who is a “regular” prostitute. As his money and his time run out, Tammuz, as was foreseen, is convinced that his findings prove his initial thesis: lesbianism is not a distinct psychological entity but merely one of the sins of the flesh. Its causes are numerous—comparative frigidity, feministic rebellion, defiance of undeserved social opprobrium, cynicism about all love. And productive of, or augmenting, all these is the brutality or carelessness of men, their indifference to individual personality in their approach to women. Tammuz knows that by virtue of his sexless sympathy he could have had any one of the scores of lesbians he has studied. Believing, then, that he has achieved a far-reaching psychological victory, he risks clinching it by a ruse which, as he himself observes, ‘would make the angels of orthodoxy hide their eyes with their snowy wings.’ In short, he stages a celebration of the rites of Eros, on the grounds that the proper cure for emotional aberration is not orthodox denial of the flesh but pragmatic trial of the normal.

With the aid of Nergal, who knows his Paris, Tammuz invites an attractive (and eligible!) male partner for each of his lesbian semi-converts, and amid a classical decor complete with Roman dining couches and phallic decorations, he treats the company to a banquet accompanied by aphrodisiac wines and incense. Then extinguishing the lights he leaves nature to take its course. Peladan fails to record the percentage of error in this quantitative experiment. (But at least one sadistic lesbian survives to figure in _La Vertu Suprême_.)

Easy as it is to ridicule Peladan’s second-rate symbolism and although his _reportage_ may not be dependable, there is much psychological soundness in his analysis of lesbian types, however melodramatic the personal histories he fabricates to account for them (and perhaps also to forestall attempts to identify their originals). The composite personality of Tammuz and Nergal is sound—the idealistic, somewhat effeminate man such as variant women are often drawn to. And in _L’Androgyne_,[30] the complementary study, in his “épopée,” of homosexual tendencies during male adolescence, he shows sympathy with the very type he scorned the Maupins for imitating, so long as it is a passing stage in male development. Just as evolutionary ideas were in the air long before Darwin systematized them, so the theory of emotional maturing now attributed to Freud was antedated in literature.

Even after discounting Peladan’s and Mendès’ Catholic bias and their romantic extravagance, their canvases give evidence to widespread lesbianism in _fin de siècle_ Paris, and echoes of it and of the crop of fiction it bred must have been far reaching. Amusing proof of this fact is at hand in a light-hearted farce written in 1892 by two Americans, Archibald Gunter and Fergus Redmond, entitled _A Florida Enchantment_. A transvestist tale, it involves no real intrasexual experience (in this respect harking back to medieval and renaissance romances), but its intent must have been unmistakable burlesque of such novels as Rachilde’s and Peladan’s. In Part I, “The Metamorphosis of Miss Lillian Travers,” the heroine discovers that her fiancé is dallying with a ripe widow, and at about the same time she acquires four seeds from an African “tree of sexual change.” Since the casket containing these is a relic from a slave-trading grandfather long dead, there is no chance of replenishing the supply. Embittered by her lover’s faithlessness, Lillian decides to move from the category of deceived woman into the obviously happier one of philandering man. To gain an ally in the venture she persuades her negro maid to join her in swallowing a seed, and both become sexually male, though to all ordinary appearances they are still women.

## Part II, “The Boyhood of Lilly Travers,” recounts the hilarious and

salacious adventures of the two ‘trans-sexists,’ to coin the only appropriate term. Lilly’s young cousin Bessie falls in love with her, as does also the widow hitherto involved with her fiancé. Lilly wholeheartedly reciprocates Bessie’s love, but the cousins’ bedroom scenes are kept at the level of farce and never go the implied lengths of Ariosto’s or d’Urfé’s in similar circumstances. At one point Lilly attends a ball where she dances exclusively with women, apparently without incurring social criticism—a detail which, if as realistically accurate as the rest of the winter resort setting, gives evidence of American naïveté in the 1890s. The negro maid’s adventures are naturally somewhat more rabelaisian than those of her mistress but stop short of being censorable.

## Part III, “The Wonderful Adventures of Mr. Lawrence Talbot,” presents

Lilly’s life after she has managed to assume male garb and name. The former fiancé suspects Lawrence of having murdered his cousin Lilly for her fortune, and challenges him to a duel intended to be fatal. To protect himself Lawrence forces the man to swallow the third magic seed, whereupon he becomes a grotesquely masculine woman, just as Lawrence is a beautiful and beardless youth. Now Lawrence and Bessie marry and set out for Europe, but the unhappy ex-fiancé pursues them, threatens Lawrence with exposure, and points out that Bessie, on learning the truth, will certainly swallow the fourth seed in order to learn the delights of being a man, and will thus be lost forever as a wife. The only solution is to present the villain with the means of regaining his manhood, so that he can get the widow, who is still infatuated with Lawrence, out of his way by marrying her. There is no evidence that this jolly bit of satire (discovered quite accidentally by the present writer) was reviewed or otherwise noted either at home or abroad, nor did it deserve to be from a literary viewpoint. It is worthy of mention here, however, as showing that America was aware of variant fiction other than that of Henry James.

To return once more to France, during 1896 the _Mercure de France_ carried serially Remy de Gourmont’s _Le Songe d’une Femme_, a work of higher quality than any since James’s _The Bostonians_. In the form of correspondence among some dozen persons it presents an exhaustive analysis of what constitutes a satisfactory sexual relationship. The central figures are a sensitive intellectual, Paul; a simple, sensuous, and radiantly happy Annette; and a fascinating but physically inhibited Claude whose emotional pattern closely resembles that of Mlle Tantale without being similarly accounted for. Claude is married and has also experimented sexually with an artist for whom she posed in the nude, but she has never achieved satisfaction. She exerts an irresistible charm over women but has found relations with them equally unrewarding. For a time she falls under the spell of Annette’s open-hearted warmth, but Annette scorns lesbianism as childish. Claude dreams of a perfect love which will be more than fleshly, and for a time she is hopeful of realizing her ideal with Paul. During what might be called a probationary period she holds him captive by giving him “all her thoughts,” and permitting generous caresses without complete surrender. Paul has cherished a similar dream and has found Annette too exclusively sensual. In the end, however, he abandons Claude for the simple and more “natural” woman. Claude, he finds, can bring happiness to no one, not even herself. The implication is that for anyone who seeks romantic perfection all love must end in failure—a direct echo from Baudelaire. De Gourmont’s title pronounces such an ideal typically feminine: a woman’s dream.

The last important negative item before 1900 was Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). If his delineation in 1885 of the Bostonian Olive Chancellor was moderate enough to leave critics dubious whether he intended her as a lesbian, there is nothing ambiguous in his later story. In one of his letters, James himself says that his intention was to give “the impression of ... the most infernal imaginable evil and danger.”[31] In this novelette, an innocent young governess goes to a remote English country estate to take charge of two orphans, a boy of ten and a girl of eight. The children’s precocious beauty and charm strike her at once as more than normal, and apprehension dawns with her learning that the boy has been expelled from his school for reasons carefully evaded in the letter of dismissal.

Soon she has glimpses about the grounds of a repellently attractive man and an equally sinister woman, who prove to be apparitions visible only to herself. From a reluctant housekeeper she extracts that the man, a former groom now dead, had “had his way” with any woman in the household or neighborhood that he chose, and that the female spectre, in life her predecessor as governess, had departed pregnant by him and died in London of an abortion. These indelicate facts James characteristically conveys by indirection, never by the bald word. Both these personalities had been evilly intimate with the children.

Discovering that her awareness and antagonism can hold the spectres at bay, the governess devotes herself to protecting the children from them. She soon learns to her horror, however, that the little girl not only sees the dark woman but exerts self-control and histrionic talents beyond the capacity of most adults in order to conceal the fact. The boy becomes genuinely devoted to the governess and tries to cooperate in resisting the male ghost, but, always fragile, he succumbs to the emotional conflict and dies of a heart attack. The little girl, more completely dominated—might an affectionate man have weakened the spell for her as a woman did for the boy?—realizes now that only she and the governess can see the apparitions. With precocious acumen she accuses the governess of insanity, sensing that a child’s word will stand against that of a potentially hysterical spinster, and achieves her enemy’s removal.

This is the first literary appearance of lesbian corruption of a child by an adult, and is probably attributable to the increasing publication of clinical case studies, for the theme has recurred at least twice in the subsequent half-century. James’s aversion can be explained on a number of counts. Where in _The Bostonians_ he studied well-bred women, his antagonists here are debauched members of a lower class. Then, too, it is known that he had abandoned an original plan of taking up permanent residence in Paris because he found the atmosphere there morally uncongenial, and he had settled in England, which had been rocked only three years earlier by the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality. It is conceivable that a desire to deny unequivocally any sympathy with that phenomenon helped to motivate _The Turn of the Screw_.

The final French writer of importance to treat of lesbianism before the turn of the century was Pierre Louÿs, who wrote more in the spirit (though not the style) of Gautier, Verlaine or Zola than in that of his contemporary anti-lesbian crusaders. His _Chansons de Bilitis_ (1894) and _Aphrodite_ (1896) purported to be the fruit, respectively, of translation and intensive classical research, and to give accurate pictures of life in early Greece and Alexandria. Classicists promptly exploded his claim and accused him of sensational exaggeration; nevertheless the two works enjoyed enormous popularity at the time and have since been reissued every few years in English as well as French. The _Songs of Bilitis_, in free verse reminiscent of the Greek Anthology, pictures the life of a girl from her bucolic childhood in Pamphilia, through young womanhood on the isle of Lesbos, to her end as a prosperous courtesan in Cyprus. In her teens she bears a child but leaves it behind without a qualm when adventure leads her on. The emotional highlight of her roving existence is the period in Mitylene, during which she loves and marries another girl with whom she lives happily and faithfully for a decade. However spurious their Hellenism, the poetic quality of the _Chansons_ is high, and they have been repeatedly imitated and translated in English, German, Swedish, and Czech. One German translation of twenty-four of the songs was made by Richard Dehmel, a poet in his own right.

In _Aphrodite_ lesbianism is only incidental, but still it recurs throughout, including the daily ministrations of a slave girl to a courtesan mistress who accepts them as she does her bath or food; the courtesan’s intermittent play with a pair of younger flute-girls; and the flute-girls’ marriage, like that of Bilitis, in which they find solace for the depravities they must see and endure as paid entertainers. That Louÿs was aware of every possible sort of lesbian

## activity is evident, but confining his attention as he does to

courtesans, he adds little to an understanding of variant relationships among other classes of women. It is the taller and stronger of his pairs who always plays the male role, and the only other suggestion of etiology is the excessive worship of female beauty, dominant in the cults of Isis or Aphrodite. It was in this respect particularly that he was accused of distorting historic fact. As Louÿs pictures this worship, it is closely related to feminine narcissism.

Louÿs’s _Adventures of King Pausole_ published at the turn of the century is a rollicking tale, supposedly contemporary, but wholly fanciful in setting. One of its characters preaches the saving grace of healthy promiscuity as opposed to the prudish constraints of romantic love. Wholesome citizens, he says, come from the slums where children run loose. Strictness in raising the young, breeds maladjustment and neurasthenia. Voluntary exclusive devotion to one individual leads to the madness of an Orestes, the tragic end of a Marguerite, or the suicides of Romeo and Juliet.

The lesbian pattern in his fantastic design is woven about Mirabelle, a danseuse reminiscent in physique and temperament of Maupin. She easily captivates the kings’ daughter, Aline, for, although the royal Pausole himself has a harem of 365 women, he has kept his child as secluded as Salammbo. Brought to his senses by Aline’s “elopement” with Mirabelle, and by several adventures he has while searching for the pair, the king embraces the doctrine of freedom for the young to the extent of smiling on Aline’s marriage (at fifteen) to a page who speedily converts her to the joys of heterosexual love. The dancer happily encounters a young noblewoman who, like herself, has known men but has dreamed of a woman partner, and their union apparently becomes permanent. Thus, Louÿs compromises between the promiscuity advocated by his spokesman in the book and the current romantic ideal.

In the factual literature on homosexuality one finds ambiguous allusions to more variance in French fiction between 1880 and 1895 than it has been feasible to pursue, but considering the returns on those verified it is unlikely that any important lesbian works even of low quality have gone undetected. In 1896 Rachilde’s signed reviews began in the _Mercure de France_ and a little later the first bibliography of belles-lettres in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_ listed a few retrospective titles along with current notes. These two systematic sources show that perhaps a dozen minor French novels appearing during the last half dozen years of the century (none were available for examination), dealt with variance to some extent. Such titles as _Mlle Wladimir_, _Mon Mari_ and _Satana_ indicate close imitation of such earlier successes as _Mlle Giraud_ and _Méphistophéla_. The majority seem to have made at least a pretense of condemning lesbianism, but Rachilde remarked acidly in reviewing one of them (Jane de La Vaudère’s _Les Demi-Sexes_, the theme of which was ovariotomy undergone by women sufficiently eager for masculinity) that she wished novelists would stop peddling sensationalism under the guise of medical instruction or moral preachment.[32] The cheery insouciance of _King Pausole_ was clearly an innovation and marked the beginning of a new period. As for the few novels published in Germany before 1900, since they were the first of their kind they will be left for consideration with twentieth-century material from which they are indistinguishable.

Summary

Before leaving the nineteenth century a brief summary of its variant writing will be illuminating. That a preponderance of the material was in French will not surprise English readers, who have long recognized the comparative frankness of France in matters of sex, at least until our own last decade or so. In view of the quantity and variety of attention devoted to the subject, however, the proportion of sympathetic treatment is low. Of the more than a dozen authors who took overt lesbianism as a major theme, seven—Coleridge, Baudelaire, Belot, Mendès, Peladan, Strindberg, and Gourmont—condemned it explicitly, though with differing degrees of severity. Seven others—Latouche, Balzac in _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_, Rossetti, Swinburne in _Lesbia Brandon_, Maupassant, Rachilde in _Mme. Adonis_, and James in _The Turn of the Screw_—made lesbian affairs responsible for murder, suicide and ruin, and so implied equally strong condemnation. Only three were tolerant, and of these Louÿs, for all his championing of sexual freedom generally, hurried Aline in _King Pausole_ into a heterosexual match at fifteen, and depicted Bilitis as promiscuous from puberty to death save for her lesbian interlude. Gautier was sympathetic to a single lesbian experience but predicted an unhappy future for Maupin. Verlaine alone, himself homosexual, let his portraits stand without comment. The several authors who included minor lesbian episodes pictured them as involving gravely maladjusted women or as the pastime of prostitutes and other questionable characters.

Of the four novelists who used variance as a major theme but avoided or denied lesbian implications, James in _The Bostonians_ considered it a menace to society, Lamartine showed it as contributing to failure in heterosexual adjustment, Balzac in _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ made it a mystic apprenticeship for marriage, and only Wollstonecraft exalted it above experience with men.

Quite as notable as this limited sympathy for variance is the frequency of heterosexual action. Some eighty primary and as many or more secondary characters are involved in the total of variant scenes, and of these only half a dozen indubitably never knew men. (For a number of the minor figures definite evidence is lacking, but indications are that they belonged in the bisexual group.) To be sure, several women had involuntary and/or distasteful experience with men, but the majority eventually found such experience preferable to variant relations.

When it is noted in conclusion that the proportion of male to female authors is even larger than that of French to English, one cannot avoid inferring some causal relation between the fact and the statistics above. This impression is confirmed by noting that the four feminine writers, Wollstonecraft, Schreiner, Rossetti and Rachilde, pictured no successful heterosexual relations. “Mary” refuses to consummate her marriage; Lyndall commits slow suicide to escape hers; Raoule achieves a fantastic evasion, and Mme. Adonis takes the man of the couple she captivates in a spirit of vindictive sadism. The hypothesis of a very natural sex bias with regard to feminine variance will be amply supported in studying twentieth-century authors.

##