CHAPTER IX

.

FICTION IN ENGLISH

Introduction

The variant novels still to be surveyed in English number well over a hundred. In part this surprising count reflects the general growth of interest in sexual psychology and the increase in the number of feminine authors, both of which trends developed slightly later in the English-speaking countries than elsewhere. But beyond doubt it is also due in some measure simply to the greater accessibility of material in our own language. Book reviews in English and the indexes locating them have multiplied enormously since 1900, and, non-committal though reviews may be with regard to variance, a practiced reader grows sensitive to significant evasion. Even more fruitful, of course, is the wide, if superficial, skimming of each year’s output, a habit which nets not only unreviewed trivia but minor variant incidents in better novels as well. Had titles in French and German been equally ready to hand, the score here would certainly be more equitable.

In rapid survey of this century’s English fiction certain rough divisions emerge. The first fifteen years might be called the age of innocence, in that no published work referred to overt lesbianism, variance was not a subject of dispute, and no particular school of psychological thought had come to the fore. After 1915 more sophistication was apparent and variance became a controversial issue,

## particularly in England where the struggle for suffrage exacerbated any

reference to women’s departure from the feminine and domestic role. Thereafter, for a decade or so partisan shots echoed intermittently back and forth as they had in France a quarter-century earlier, with the difference, however, that now the attack frequently employed the batteries of Freud. During the first of these decades World War I exerted a perceptible influence, quickening cross-fertilization between continental and Anglo-American attitudes in general, and, in particular, leading to the translation after 1920 of enough French fiction so that occasionally specific influences could be detected in our own novels. Another aftermath of war was that relaxing of all sexual strictures which characterized the Twenties, and, in line with the growing freedom, literary treatments of variance multiplied rapidly, reaching a first peak in 1928.

In that year Radclyffe Hall’s _Well of Loneliness_ incurred legal prosecution for its explicit defense of a lesbian woman.[1] The restrictive effect of this action was no more than local and temporary, and as usual in cases of censorship the long range result was wide publicity for the banned title and for others on related themes. Consequently, the number of novels giving attention to variance swelled to a second peak in the middle Thirties, but the general tone was altered. Authors were now more self-conscious. The best, if at all sympathetic, dealt more gingerly with the delicate subject than before the attack. The majority, of intermediate popular quality, were careful to sound a disparaging note. And there sprang up also for the first time in English the wave of mediocre work which always follows profitable publication of better material in any field. Some of these inferior tales were censorious, some defensive, but all were so unrestrained that in this country, at least, certain pressure groups, notably the Catholic League for Decency, were roused to crusade for wholesale suppression.

A less obvious influence was also at work. The “flaming youth” of the Twenties, product of war and of general rebellion against Victorian inhibitions, had reached a point of disillusionment with sexual freedom, and now, as the “lost generation”, were groping toward emotional stability. This quest for adjustment called forth a quantity of popular psychology and sociology, stemming largely from Freud, which deprecated irregular attachments, especially the homosexual, and exalted marriage and family life. Thus, some decline in variant fiction was evident before the end of the Thirties. Then, in 1939 the second World War exerted initial pressure in the same direction, for, as always, the younger generation’s urge to perpetuate itself before too late threw added emphasis upon heterosexual relations and parenthood. And finally, in the publishing business, to usual wartime handicaps was added the new military requisition of cellulose for explosives, which resulted in an unprecedented shortage of paper and stringent selectivity in published fiction. Altogether it was inevitable that during the early Forties the variant literary stream should run low.

It did not, however, cease entirely, and since the end of World War II, trends in fiction suggest that variance is on its way to becoming a recognized if not accepted segment of human experience. The probable underlying reasons for this change are varied. One is the usual aftermath of war. Besides regularly producing a bumper crop of infants, war has, since the days of Sappho, swelled the number of variants by segregating the young to some extent during just those years when sexual interest is at its height. More conscious effort was made to combat this tendency during World War II than ever before, both in the armed forces and on the home front. Preventive measures this time were as much educational as disciplinary, so that the war generation emerged with some grounding in “psychiatry at the fox-hole level.” One result is that among women there was no such deliberate post-war affectation of masculinity as occurred in the Twenties. Another is that many incipient authors were prepared to write of variance with some balance and perspective.

A further possible reason for the relaxing of at least the American attitude toward variance is the publication of the Kinsey reports on sexual behavior.[2] The appearance of the male volume in 1948 encouraged the production of several serious novels featuring male homosexuality, a subject hitherto stringently banned from English fiction. It is not safe to say that this lifting of taboo significantly affected the feminine picture, since female variance was never so rigorously outlawed, and the count of pertinent titles was as large in 1943 and 1944, for instance, as in 1949 and 1950. For this same reason Kinsey’s second volume on the female (1953) seems unlikely to produce an effect comparable to his first. But one fact is certain—the inclusion of incidental variant and even lesbian episodes and characters is on the increase in popular current fiction.

This statement leads to consideration of a third and purely practical reason for the increase—post-war innovations in the publishing business. Before 1941 experiments in producing books of high readability and low cost had not achieved financial success, but four years of government subsidy to the end of providing the armed forces with reading matter put the venture on a paying basis. At present, fiction available at magazine cost and from all magazine outlets has become a commonplace of daily life. While these paper-covered novels were at first reprints of titles notably successful in other editions, since 1950 a number of companies have issued originals in the same format. Quite naturally one sure-fire selling feature on the newsstands is frankness with regard to sex, and the multiplication of both reprints and originals dealing with female variance provides objective evidence of interest in that subject. Another requisite for fast sales is a not-too-exalted literary level, and the combination of sex latitude and popular quality has alerted would-be censors. For some years these self-appointed groups have sought to control the paper-backed market and have here and there succeeded. Variant titles have been conspicuous in all lists under fire from moral vigilantes, and the current question is whether censoring agencies will succeed in once again checking quantity circulation of such material.

The Age of Innocence

The last mentioned variant narrative in English was Henry James’s novelette _The Turn of the Screw_ (1898). Treating as it did the seduction of a girl of eight by a depraved governess, it was considered along with French titles of its decade which it resembled more closely than did any of the novels soon to appear in English. Of these last, none offered more contrast to French sophistication or could more fittingly have ushered in twentieth-century fiction in our own tongue than the innocuous tale published in 1900 by a now-forgotten British novelist, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.

Within the first quarter of _The Farringdons_ Mrs. Fowler includes a series of three passionate attachments experienced by the motherless heroine. These occur before Elisabeth is twenty, but they are noteworthy because of the author’s peculiar stress upon them.

There are two things which are absolutely necessary to the well-being of the normal feminine mind—namely, one romantic attachment and one comfortable friendship. Elisabeth was perfectly normal and extremely feminine, and consequently she provided herself early with these two aids to happiness.[3]

Despite this insistence on normal femininity, the object of the girl’s comfortable friendship is a boy neighbor; that of her passionate attachment a tall, handsome and witty Cousin Anne, a decade older than she is.

All the romance of Elisabeth’s nature—and there was a great deal of it—was lavished upon Anne Farringdon.... The mere sound of Anne’s voice vibrated through the child’s whole being, and every little trifle connected with her cousin became a sacred relic.[4]

Deep in the reading of mythology, Elisabeth sees her cousin as Diana, builds a shrine to her in the garden, and practices a ritual of burnt offerings before it. She also takes great interest in the Book of Ruth, sensing “a parallelism to herself and Cousin Anne (in feeling at least).”

People sometimes smile at the adoration of a young girl for a woman, and there is no doubt but that the feeling savours slightly of school days and bread and butter. But there is also no doubt that a girl who has once felt it has learned what real love is, and that is no small lesson in the book of life.[5]

This devotion occupies Elisabeth from twelve to sixteen, when the cousin’s death plunges her into melancholy which threatens her health. She is accordingly hurried off to boarding school, where during the next four years she experiences a case of passionate hero-worship for the headmistress, and a “devoted friendship” with a schoolmate who became for a time “the very mainspring of Elisabeth’s life. She was a beautiful girl ... and Elisabeth adored her with the adoration ... freely given to the girl who has beauty by the girl who has not.” Upon this girl Elisabeth lavishes

that passionate and thrilling friendship ... so satisfying to the immature female soul, but which is never again experienced by the woman who has once been taught by a man the nature of real love.[6]

The latter experience she meets at twenty. All these careful statements indicate the author’s full awareness of the nature of variance and her taking a deliberate stand with regard to it. Equally definite is the implication that none of these early adorations involved physical intimacy.

Two years later (1902) a Canadian-American girl of twenty-one published _The Story of Mary MacLane_, written as a journal covering three months during her nineteenth year and purporting to be literal autobiography. Like the comparable “Story of Opal,” printed as authentic by the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1920, but partially “debunked” by discerning critics, it was probably laced with more than a dash of fiction. In its day it created sufficient sensation to be burlesqued in Weber and Field’s revue of that year, and sold well enough to allow its author a half-dozen years in Boston and New York.

Conspicuous in its self-revelation is undying hatred of the father whom Mary lost at the age of eight.

Apart from feeding and clothing me ... and sending me to school—which was no more than was due me—I cannot see that he ever gave me a single thought. Certainly he did not love me, for he was quite incapable of loving anyone but himself....[7]

Of her mother she says later,

How can one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round with a certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!... My mother has some fondness for me—for my body because it came out of hers. That is nothing—nothing. A hen loves its egg.[8]

Mary feels herself unloved also by the rest of her family—older sister, older and younger brothers, and stepfather—all of whom are “strictly practical and material, seeing close human relations as the stuff of literature, not real life....” She is herself a genius, infinitely apart from the crude barrenness of Butte, Montana, though she owns to keen sympathy for women there who are “outside the moral pale.” All this, of course, is once again the “dark hero complex,” that sense of being outcast but superior, which has since been so well analyzed by Romer Wilson in Emily Brontë and others. For 1902, three decades _before_ the era when parents could do no right, it was fairly strong meat.

As for men, MacLane is certain none can ever rouse or possess her except the Devil. “He will be incarnate, but he will not be a man.” He will hurt her, and passion for him will free her from herself, but it will last only three days, and “there must be no falling in love about it.”

My shy and sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and polluted. The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life. And so everything in me that had turned toward that too bright light would then drink deep of the lees of death.[9]

It was this devil fantasy upon which Weber and Fields seized, and on the stage the Dark Gentleman, played by William Collier, fled in terror before the _enfant terrible_.

The pertinent point to which all the foregoing leads is an attachment to a high school teacher of literature first encountered when Mary was eighteen, “the first person on earth who ever looked at me tenderly,” to whom she refers with adolescent sentimentality as the “Anemone Lady.” About this woman she spins passionate reveries, wishing they might live together high on a mountainside away from the world. With the beginning of this friendship “I felt a snapping of tense-drawn cords, a breaking away of flood gates—and a strange new pain ... a convulsion and a melting within.”[10] Nevertheless, caresses went no farther than “your hand in mine,” and the association seems to have lasted but a year. Still Mary says:

Sometimes I am seized with nearer, vivider sensations for my friend the Anemone Lady ... I feel a strange attraction of sex. There is in me a masculine element that when I am thinking of her arises and overshadows all the others.... So then it is not the woman-love but the man-love set in the mysterious sensibilities of my woman-nature. It brings me pain and pleasure mixed.... Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?[11]

This pseudo-naïveté wakes a suspicion of literary influence which is strengthened by her second volume, _My Friend Annabel Lee_ (1903). Here she proclaims her few early literary loves to have been Poe, the juvenile books for boys of J. T. Trowbridge, and “‘Three Grains of Corn,’ by a woman named Edwards,” and she voices acute loathing for Archibald Clavering Gunter without citing reasons. Mathilda Betham-Edwards was an Englishwoman who lived in France during the late nineteenth century, and the _Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_ includes a sonnet of hers, “A Valentine: The Pansy and the Prayer Book,” ending with the following sestet:

The while I knelt, I let a pansy glide Between her grave sweet face and open book And whispered as she turned with chiding look— “Heaven has not willed, dear heart, that aught divide Love pure as ours, nor blames if thought of me Come like this flower between thy God and thee.”[12]

This MacLane would have loved, as she would have hated the farcical treatment of variance in _A Florida Enchantment_, and to assume her acquaintance with both would explain her otherwise unaccountable singling out of these two authors alone for special mention. Both of MacLane’s volumes betray a disingenuous effort to present herself as a child genius springing as it were by parthenogenesis from the intellectual wasteland of Montana. It is probable that her reading had been more extensive and had influenced her more than she admitted.

As to the volume of 1903, it is not only less startling than the first but seems more youthful. The “friend” of the title is a Japanese statuette in which her fantasy sees “a woman of fourteen” who has known love for a week, after which “the strong stranger went away,” leaving life drab. Here is the Devil again, and “Annabel” is obviously no more than Mary’s own _persona_, hard, experienced and self-contained even before adolescence. One wonders whether MacLane may have suffered some early traumatic experience with a man which produced this recurrent fantasy and prompted her sympathy for the déclassées of Butte. As for women, “Annabel” is her only admitted friend. The volume records nothing beyond Mary’s roaming alone in Boston, falling in love momentarily with Minnie Maddern Fiske as the Magdalen, and adoring the Puvis de Chavannes murals in the Public Library—those delicate wraiths so remote from reality. Of human contacts there is no mention; she is solitary and bitterly nostalgic for the Anemone Lady, or, rather, for their mountainside eyrie of her own imagining. Passages in her third volume, _I, Mary MacLane_ (1917) shed some light on her actual experiences at this time, but must await discussion in proper order because the later volume reflects the comparative emotional sophistication which had permeated this country in the intervening years.

The next variant item was an historical novel by John Breckenridge Ellis (1902), but precedence will be given to the recently published _Things As They Are_ (1951), written in 1903 by Gertrude Stein, because of its closer similarity to MacLane’s autobiographical volumes. This earliest effort of Miss Stein’s, written when she was twenty-nine, is recognized as very near to her own experience by Edmund Wilson, a long-time student of her total work.[13] It records the emotional entanglements among three young American women over a period of two years, and opens on a transatlantic liner carrying them to Europe. Adele, the central figure from whose viewpoint the whole story is written, is oppressed by exhaustion and “the disillusion of recent failures” in Baltimore, and as Mr. Wilson points out, Miss Stein herself went abroad in the summer of 1902 after having abandoned hope of a degree from Johns Hopkins where she had pursued the medical course for five years.

The three girls are characterized at length. Helen is

the American version of the English handsome girl. In her ideal completeness she would have been unaggressively determined, a trifle brutal and entirely impersonal; a woman of passions but not of emotions, ... incapable of regrets,[14]

that is, definitely a masculine personality; but actually she is no more than “a brave bluff.” Sophie is a New Englander with “the angular body of a spinster but ... a face that would have belonged to the decadent days of Italian greatness,” and with “the unobtrusive good manners of a gentleman.” Events prove her, however, to be both feminine and feline. Adele has “the freedom of movement and the simple instinct for comfort that suggests a land of laziness and sunshine.” Very early in the narrative she exclaims, “I always did thank God I wasn’t born a woman,”[15]—this surprising statement is neither then nor later elaborated in any way—but everything about her save her intellect is passive to the point of inertia, and she struggles against being drawn into the “turgid and complex world” of passionate intimacy.

She finds it impossible, however, to remain indifferent to Helen’s subtle courtship, which includes “fluttering” caresses as the three lie on the deck under the stars. Her familiarity with attraction between women is evident from some early self-searching:

As for me is it another little indulgence of my superficial emotions or is there any possibility of my really learning to realize stronger feelings. If it’s the first I will call a halt promptly.[16]

At one point Helen charges her with “middle-class morality,” to which Adele retorts:

I simply contend that the middle class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life.[17]

But that (says Helen) means cutting passion quite out of your scheme of things. Adele replies:

Not simple moral passions, they are distinctly of it but really my chief point is a protest against this tendency ... to go in for things simply for the sake of experience.... [That] is to me both trivial and immoral. As for passion, it has no reality for me except as two varieties, affectionate comradeship ... and physical passion in greater or less complexity ... and against the cultivation of the latter I have an almost puritanic horror and that includes an objection to it in any of its many disguised forms.[18]

In accordance with these principles Adele spends her summer in Spain, happy in the mere “family” comradeship of a cousin. But during the subsequent winter she plays a divided game. She cannot resist going repeatedly from Baltimore to New York to see Helen, though once there she is not only passive but resistant to the other girl’s wooing. She even says explicitly that they have few interests in common, but still it is she who does all the traveling to make their growing intimacy possible, for Helen’s resources are sharply curtailed by unsympathetic parents.

Thus far, the third girl, Sophie, has remained surprisingly passive in view of her long-established intimacy with Helen, but in the course of this winter she enlightens Adele as to the precise nature of that intimacy. Adele is so shocked that it is implied clearly that the relation is physical and, up until then, wholly outside her own acquaintance. Not even this revelation, however, can detach her from Helen, although she deliberately elects a second summer abroad alone and suffers when Helen’s letters are stopped by a visit from Sophie. During the subsequent winter her own relations with Helen reach the stage of physical expression, but the change is not a happy one.

Their pulses were differently timed. She could not go so fast and Helen’s exhausted nerves could no longer wait. Adele found herself constantly forced on by Helen’s pain. It was a false position ... her attitude was misunderstood and Helen interpreted her slowness as deficiency ... and the greater her affection for Helen became the more irritable became her discontent.[19]

This is trite enough to readers of modern sexual psychology as set forth in marriage manuals. It was not trite coming from an unmarried American girl in 1903.

At this juncture Sophie invites Helen to accompany her on another European trip. (As Mr. Wilson drily remarks, for the more prosperous American college graduate, Europe was then an imperative.) Helen accepts, and although Adele is certain that Sophie is financing the trip she dares not put the question directly. Or perhaps she does not want to, for Helen has urged her to spend the summer abroad also, not with them, but within easy reach.

And so the lover of serenity travels for her third summer as a kind of semi-detached appendage to the other pair, and the remainder of the

## action is almost as tedious and confusing to the reader as to Adele

herself. Because of the physical incompatibility so well described above, Helen has now cooled considerably in that respect, but her emotional dependence upon Adele increases with Sophie’s balking of private communication between them—one more testimonial to the soundness of “Proust’s law”: the inverse proportion between “love” and accessibility. Because Adele, on the other hand, is now rather more than less physically attracted, her health and peace of mind suffer noticeably during her frustrating periods with the other two. But she is bound not only by her genuine love for Helen but by her confidence that the other girl really loves her. When she reads Helen’s final desperate letter promising that she will never again allow such a situation to develop, Adele exclaims with impatience:

Hasn’t she learned yet that things do happen and she isn’t big enough to stave them off? Can’t she see things as they are and not as she would make them if she were strong enough...? I am afraid it comes very near to being a dead-lock.[20]

This sentence concludes the book, to which Miss Stein originally gave the title _Quod Erat Demonstrandum_, the implied proposition being that such an emotional game could never be worth the candle. The current title, chosen by the editor, throws the emphasis upon Helen’s inability to be honest with herself or others, in contrast to Adele’s ruthless clarity. If Adele acted against her own middle-class convictions, it was at least without self-deception at any stage of the game. Mr. Wilson suggests that continued preoccupation with women, and her unwillingness to abandon herself again or to write openly about it, was responsible for the increasing obscurity of Miss Stein’s work and the lofty emotional detachment of her viewpoint.[20]

* * * * *

John Breckenridge Ellis’s _The Holland Wolves_, published late in 1902, was largely in the cape-and-sword tradition of the time, but he inserted a variant touch by making its central figure a transvestist and treating the emotional consequences seriously. Rosamunda, daughter of a Spanish leader in the war with the Netherlands, has been bred in a convent where flagellation was a common practice. When, at nineteen, she must choose between becoming a nun there or accompanying her father to the Low Countries, she elects the latter course. Disguised as her father’s squire, she engages in espionage and from expediency pays court to Anna, a Dutch girl in her teens. The latter falls deeply in love with her and abandons family and reputation to follow her. But Rosamunda’s fancy has been caught by an officer in the Dutch forces, to whom she confesses that she is a woman. When he pronounces Anna no better than a camp follower, Rosamunda challenges him to a duel, worsts him, and consequently is cured of her passion for him. Thereafter she becomes one of the most cruel of the inquisitionary soldiers.

Since she has never been in love with Anna, and the latter throughout much of the story believes her to be a man, the variant issue is as confused as always in a romance of sex disguise. Like Gunter’s farce, however, the tale bears witness to interest in intersexual types even among superficial American readers, for Rosamunda has no feminine characteristics. It also indicates the author’s belief that such types result from environment rather than heredity. Rosamunda, despite her Spanish coloring, is revealed at the end as Anna’s sister (stolen from Holland in infancy), and not related at all to the Spaniards upon whom she has modeled herself. The blood kinship between the two girls, moreover, is evidently meant to account for Anna’s spontaneous attraction, which after the revelation of Rosamunda’s sex becomes a profound sisterly devotion. Readers were thus provided with a spicy morsel but spared the slightest moral indigestion. (If this account makes the tale seem one of mere sex disguise, comparison with Compton Mackenzie’s _Sylvia Scarlett_ of a few decades later will make the difference apparent.)

The first of the century’s openly published titles by a major writer was John Masefield’s _Multitude and Solitude_ (1909), its author’s least-esteemed novel to judge from the neglect accorded it by literary historians, libraries, and secondhand catalogs. It is true that from the standpoint of artistry it falls into two almost unrelated halves; but it is, nevertheless, a convincing study of a young dramatist in search of his soul—that is, of the “high and austere” character he feels essential to a great artist. He does achieve his end via some gruelling years with a medical unit in South Africa, but he is driven to this heroic measure by a series of major and minor frustrations reminiscent of the tricks of Fate in Thomas Hardy’s work. Among the major tragedies is the death of the woman he has long loved, and this calamity is the end of a chain of trivial mischances in which the detonating factor is jealousy on the part of his beloved’s woman friend. There is an artistic preliminary sounding of the variant note early in the book when, depressed at failing to find Ottalie in her London apartment, he stops at a café where he sees

a red-haired fierce little poet who sat close by reading and eating cake. The yellow back of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ was propped against his teapot. Something of the fierceness and passion of the Femmes Damnées ... was wreaked upon the cake.[21]

After Ottalie is drowned while crossing to Ireland, her friend Agatha tells the lover what he had already guessed: Ottalie’s visit to her Irish relatives was partially the result of his not having definitely proposed marriage. And his failure to do so was (again in part) due to Agatha’s jealously interrupting a tête-à-tête between the lovers, and later delaying a letter from Ottalie to him. Agatha confesses all this during her prostration after her friend’s death.

“I was jealous. I was wicked. I think the devil was in me.” ... He would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained in the presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not flick her jealousies.[22]

There is no suggestion that Ottalie reciprocated Agatha’s love, nor any implication of lesbian intimacy. Ottalie’s brother, however, tells the hero that although she loved him she thought him “too ready to surrender to immediate and perhaps wayward emotion”—an obvious hint at the heroine’s physical coldness or Victorian repression in the heterosexual field.

Two years later and half a world away the Australian woman known to letters as Henry Handel Richardson recorded the emotional development of an adolescent girl in _The Getting of Wisdom_ (1910). At fourteen Laura is already too hard and independent to feel close to her emotional widowed mother, and at boarding school she is subjected to refined cruelty by her mates because she is so “different”—partly in her precocious literary interests but most of all in her dislike of boys. To gain face among them she invents a romance with a curate; the exposure of this fiction brings more ridicule which hardens her further. Her inner withdrawal becomes complete after the expulsion of an adoring younger girl who stole in order to buy her a keepsake.

In the midst of her bitter isolation she is chosen as roommate by a popular girl a few years her senior, and at once succumbs emotionally to the first kindness and championship she has ever known. It is clear, however, that no physical intimacy ensues—Laura kisses Evelyn only once, and then impulsively when the latter, in a fit of pique, remarks that all men are fools. The friendship is slowly blighted by Laura’s passionate jealousy if the older girl goes out with men or shows attention to other girls, a “tyranny” to which the senior will not submit. The school gossips about this conspicuous attachment, but without censure or apparent awareness of questionable possibilities even on the part of the mistresses. After a brief and abortive religious “conversion” Laura sets herself to cultivate her literary talent by way of emotional outlet, for there are hints that she will never feel attracted to men. The wisdom gained during this difficult adolescence is summarized at the end by the author, who says that though the girl returned home feeling that she “fitted no hole,” she could not yet know that

just those mortals who feel cramped and unsure in the conduct of everyday life will find themselves ... in that freer world where no practical considerations hamper, and where the creatures that inhabit dance to their tune.[23]

That is, in the somewhat narcissistic world which they, as writers, create. This is a penetrating recognition of authorship as sublimation, written as it was several decades before psychiatrists began to take the writing fraternity apart.

Another novel with rather stronger variant overtones appeared in England in 1914, Ethel Sidgwick’s _A Lady of Leisure_. This pleasant social romance had for its main theme a muted echo from the Women’s Movement: the wealthy and idle girl’s need of a routine occupation. Violet Ashwin, daughter of a frivolous social belle and a Harley Street physician, is driven by a sense of utter futility to fly in the face of convention—and her mother’s prejudices—and apprentice herself to a modiste. Her co-worker, Alice Eccles, is an enterprising cockney who supports a neurotic mother, preferring this burden to marriage with a suitor whom she suspects of engaging in illegal enterprises. Alice is tall, handsome, high-spirited, and infinitely more self-reliant than the sheltered upper-class girl, whom at first she assists and patronizes with a kind of affectionate raillery. Soon, however, the two are close personal friends, to the horror of Violet’s snobbish mother. Between Violet and her father, though, a close alliance has always existed, and he applauds both her job and her new friendship, seeing at once the solid quality beneath Alice’s unpolished surface.

When Violet works herself into a collapse and is sent to the country for the summer,

Alice longed to have news of her—but she was not going to ask for it.... Her adoration for Violet, violently repressed, since its torrential force made her almost ashamed, was a thing unique, unheard of, as Miss Eccles believed, in the world before. The revelation of woman to woman is often just as remarkable, for all the truisms on the subject, as the revelation of woman to man.[24]

Somewhat later, Mrs. Eccles’ mental condition having become a danger to her daughter, Dr. Ashwin copes with the mother and engages Alice as lady’s maid to his wife, hoping that her companionship may restore his still convalescent daughter’s interest in living. When he tells Violet that Alice is in the house she colors visibly and runs upstairs, “her face still pink and her heart thumping.”

Alice dropped her hands and coloured gloriously, far more gloriously than Violet at her best could have accomplished. Her work slipped from her knees and she spread her splendid arms.... [Violet] went straight to her and fell upon her breast.[25]

The only further detail mentioned is Alice’s kissing the other girl’s hands. The friendship survives Alice’s marriage and the birth of her first child, and she is the only person save Violet’s parents to attend the latter’s subsequent wedding. Here, then, is an unmistakably passionate relationship between adults—both girls are in their middle twenties—presented with complete sympathy and approval, and encouraged by an established physician. It is, of course, quite innocent of lesbian implications.

Since Miss Stein’s novelette remained unpublished for half a century, MacLane and Ellis would be America’s only representatives in this early period but for short stories which appeared sporadically. One of Josephine Dodge Dascom’s _Smith College Stories_ (1900), “A Case of Interference,” just skirted the variant field. A junior, prominent because of her literary ability, enters the despised arena of campus politics to save an unpopular gifted freshman who worships her from leaving college. A little later the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ published a slighter college story, “The Cat and the King,” by Jennette Lee, in which a freshman shams illness in order to join her senior idol in the infirmary, and is extricated from ensuing complications by a wholly sympathetic woman physician. These were both written on an adult level. The only known variant juvenile, _The Lass of the Silver Sword_ by Mary Constance Du Bois, ran in _St. Nicolas Magazine_ during 1909 and was published in book form later.[26] Centered about the adoration of a fourteen-year-old girl for a senior of nineteen in her boarding school, it was sympathetic but so circumspect as to lack full vitality. Catherine Wells’s “The Beautiful House” (_Harper’s Magazine_, 1912) pictures an idyllic relation between two adult artists, for the older and less feminine of whom the connection ends tragically with the marriage of the younger woman. Helen R. Hull’s “The Fire” (1918) will be discussed later with its author’s longer narratives.

It is noteworthy that none of this early fiction records disapproval of variant experience on the part of either the authors or society. It is seen as educative and beneficial during the teens, or even in the following decade for the single woman, and it provides the only happiness during adolescence for several girls more gifted than their peers. If in Masefield’s novel its sequel is tragic, jealousy rather than variance per se is responsible, and Miss Stein condemns the experience she describes, not as lesbian, but as generally spineless and unintelligent. In the cases (Miss Stein’s and Miss Richardson’s) where antipathy or indifference to men is noted, women’s attraction to their own sex is not responsible, but is rather a concomitant product of unspecified factors.

Sophistication and Dispute

In 1915 D. H. Lawrence, with _The Rainbow_, hit the first ringing blow upon the anvil of controversy. As the messiah of robust heterosexual passion, Lawrence needs no introduction, and in this early novel he attacked right and left all factors which militate against it in modern society—unhealthy urban and industrial life, sterile intellectuality (especially among women), and lesbianism. It is in the final portion of his three-generation panorama that the current representative of the Brangwyn clan, sixteen-year-old Ursula, contracts a passion for a schoolmistress. She has just had a brief but complete heterosexual experience, and Lawrence implies that the tide of emotion which overflows toward Winifred Inger is little more than an aftermath of that physical awakening. A ten-page chapter significantly entitled “Shame” gives the history of their affair, which reaches its first climax at Winifred’s river cottage when the two bathe nude at night. Immediately after this episode the girl’s one desire is to get away. Over a period of months, however, “the two women became intimate. Their lives seemed suddenly to fuse into one.” During the long vacation, Ursula, as always when away from the older woman, is desolate and afire for her, but with their reunion

a heavy clogged sense of deadness began to gather upon her, from the other woman’s contact. Her female hips seemed big and earthy, her ankles and her arms too thick.[27] [The last touch is a highly original bit of anthropometry.]

Winifred, deeply in love with the younger girl, wishes to leave the school and live with Ursula in London where they can mingle in literary circles and participate in the Women’s Movement. Ursula repudiates the suggestion and goes on to other heterosexual adventures, but—possibly as a result of her lesbian experience?—she is always too much concerned with her own emotions to become a satisfactory partner for men. Her leaving a lover and going out to steep herself in the light of a full moon is offered as symbolic of her narcissistic self-absorption.

This novel was published by the solid firm of Methuen, but was withdrawn after a police court verdict of indecency which was based on attacks by three or four reviewers. The charge was general, only one (Robert Lynd) making an oblique allusion to its lesbian aspect. Lawrence was not notified directly of the court order, and since he had neither funds nor influence to launch a legal protest,[28] this act of censorship raised few echoes in comparison with some cases to be noted later. It did, however, postpone general circulation of the novel, and undoubtedly focussed some attention on lesbianism.

A year later the American Henry Kitchell Webster touched briefly but scathingly on the subject of variance in _The Great Adventure_ (1916). In this history of a marriage the girl who has looked forward to motherhood is frustrated by the birth of twins, the implication being that she desired merely an object upon which to project her own personality, and the self-abnegation demanded by two young entities, boy and girl, is beyond her. Accordingly while the children can still be cared for by nurses, Rose leaves her home and seeks self-realization on the stage. In the course of her first year she takes an artist’s interest in a beautiful but inferior colleague in the chorus of a revue, whom she coaches in diction and for whom, among others, she designs flattering costumes. But when her Galatea becomes infatuated with her she is disgusted.

Rose understood this better than Olga did, having had to evade one or two “crushes” while at the University. It was a sort of thing that went utterly against her instincts.[29]

Olga’s efforts to persuade and caress her into intimacy are worse than futile, and in retaliation for Rose’s contempt Olga spreads gossip of an affair with the director which does Rose grave professional injury. After some further experiment, Rose returns to her family a more mature and humble woman. Olga is presented as a strongly antipathetic personality, and Rose’s quest for self-expression proves sterile and unrewarding for all concerned. Learning unselfish adjustment in marriage is “The Great Adventure.”

In January 1917 the first British novel appeared which was devoted wholly to variance, and the first in English since James’s _The Bostonians_ of 1855—Clemence Dane’s _Regiment of Women_. Its attitude is as bitter as Lawrence’s in _The Rainbow_, but any question of influence is excluded by the author’s indication that it was written before the latter was published. Title and initial quotation announce the theme as “the monstrous empire of a cruel woman,” and its four-hundred-page plot revolves about a subtle sadist, outstanding mistress in a girls’ day school. Clare Hartill (the surname is surely symbolic), brilliant, sardonic, and never attractive to men, has colleagues and pupils alike well under her domination. The other mistresses stand in awe of her superior intellect, her uncanny success as a teacher, and her mordant tongue. The girls—she is really interested only in the higher secondary classes—are emotionally subjugated by her alternation of warm praise and stinging raillery, the praise intensified by “sudden brilliant smiles” and the discreet laying on of hands.

Clare is a woman of feverish friendships and sudden ruptures, “unmaternal” to the core

and pitiless after victory: not till then did she examine the nature thus enslaved, seldom did she find it worth the trouble of the skirmish.... To the few that pleased her fastidious taste she gave of her best, lavishly ... to them she was inspiration incarnate.[30]

But her interest even in these favorites “required their physical nearness” and died with their departure from school. Just as Clare has reached the “dangerous age” of thirty-five a new teacher of nineteen enters upon the scene:

... vehement Alwynne—no schoolgirl—yet more youthful and ingenuous than any mistress had right to be, loving with all the discrimination of a fine mind and all the ardour of an affectionate child. Here was no ... fleeting devotion that must end as the schooldays ended. Here was love for Clare at last, a widow’s cruse to last her for all time. Clare ... relaxing all effort, settled herself to enjoy to the full the cushioning sense of security.

But even so, Alwynne was “too obviously subject through her own free impulse to entirely satisfy. Clare’s love of power had its morbid moments, when a struggling victim pleased her.”[31]

So great is the older woman’s magnetism that Alwynne, wholesome and spirited enough to hold her own at first, does not detect the other’s egotistical cruelty until it is exercised upon a student. This hypersensitive child of thirteen, Louise, whose precocity approaches genius, Clare has forced intellectually beyond her strength and reduced emotionally to half-hysterical subservience. Alwynne’s strong maternal instinct moves her to intervene on Louise’s behalf, and a dangerous triangle develops. When, ill from tension, Louise fails in an important interscholastic competition, Clare turns suddenly hostile and excoriates her, not only for the failure, but for her interpretation of a dramatic role rehearsed in addition to her school-room load. Playing the tragic child Prince Arthur in _King John_ has already driven Louise past the limits of stability, and after this double humiliation at the hands of her idolized persecutor, she leaps to death from an attic window. (This antedated by fifteen years Winsloe’s _Mädchen in Uniform_, of which the denouement and certain other details are so similar that some influence seems beyond question.)

The tragedy and its aftermath—Clare, crowding her own guilt below the threshold of consciousness, persuades herself and Alwynne that the latter is in part to blame—brings Alwynne to the verge of breakdown, and so she goes on leave to relatives in the country. A sympathetic cousin who is something of an amateur psychiatrist gradually probes to the root of her trouble and offers an impersonal estimate of Clare, whom he has never met and has reconstructed solely from the girl’s still loyal accounts. His opinion gives her pause, and subsequent encounters with Clare, so shaken by the suicide and by Alwynne’s long absence that she lacks her usual finesse, complete the girl’s disillusionment. She finally marries the cousin.

This overlong narrative carries psychological conviction but suffers from blurred focus. Clare’s heartlessness once her victims are enthralled supports the initial claim that sadism is its thesis, but the spell she casts is variant passion no less intense for being subjectively induced and never allowed expression (the one real caress in four-hundred pages figures early in her conquest of Alwynne). This passionate element assumes primary importance during her final struggle against a male rival. Close to the end a woman who has known Clare all her life tells her:

When you allow [a girl] to attach herself passionately to you, you are feeding and at the same time deflecting from its natural channel the strongest impulse of her life.... Alwynne needs a good concrete husband to love, not a fantastic ideal that she calls friendship and clothes in your face and figure. You are doing her a deep injury.... I tell you, it’s vampirism. And when she is squeezed dry and flung aside, who will the next victim be? One day you’ll grow old. What will you do when your glamour’s gone? I tell you, Clare Hartill, you’ll die of hunger in the end.[32]

Egotism is implied here, but the main issue is variant seduction, and Clare’s retort is a long boast as to her prowess in that line amply justified by earlier incidents. She concludes defiantly that she and Alwynne “suffice each other. Thank God there are some women who can do without marriage.” The reply is: “Poor Clare! Are the grapes very sour?”

Surprisingly, this “final triumphant insult” touches the quick.

The insult could cut through her defenses and strike at her very self, because it was true. Her pride agonized. She had thought herself shrouded, invulnerable.... She sat and shuddered at the wound dealt; ... at the arrow-tip rankling in it still.[33]

Clare’s reaction is not prepared for in advance. Moreover, this episode is so placed and treated as to make it the supreme climax of the plot, and the implication is clear: it is the sex starvation of spinsterhood which produces variance, a barren substitute for married love. If the spinster is brilliant and proud, a sadistic egotism constantly requiring fresh victims will be a concomitant. Clare’s spinsterhood is involuntary; she is, then, a potentially tragic figure, and the novel would have gained in power had she been so presented throughout. But she is shown only as momentarily pathetic, and after such moments her recoveries are too ready and her retaliations too mean to permit of sustained sympathy. One is left with a sense that the author had known a Clare Hartill all too well, had emerged hating her, and had not yet achieved the detachment necessary for producing artistic unity.

Later in 1917 _I, Mary MacLane_ provided an autobiographical sequel to the author’s volumes of fifteen years earlier. Like her first book, it is an impressionistic journal of the preceding year which includes considerable retrospective information. Once more Mary is in Butte, convalescing from a grave illness induced by a half-dozen hectic years in Boston and New York. She still hates men, who have never stirred any emotion in her, and with whom in their “crude sex-rapacity” she has been careless as no “regular woman” would dare to be. One gathers, then, that the heartbreak from which she has suffered for a year is not the work of a man.

It is one thing I do not dwell upon in this book of Me. Much of Me had nothing to do with my heart when it broke: though I loved with all of Me ... one who lives in New York—and I lost and lost, all the way. There was mere human ordinariness, about which I built up a strangely sincere temple of grace which I looked to see shed light on my life like the eternal beauty of a Daybreak. I gave the best I knew to it, from a distance, and I lost.... All was broken without so much as a clasp of hands.[34]

That Mary is now well aware of all potentialities between women is clear from other comments; for example, that she “wasted” several years in the two eastern cities on friendships (with women) from whose ill effects she will never recover, having given too much of herself in the “headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after long young loneliness.”[35] Elsewhere, she mentions translating Sappho, and says:

I am some way the Lesbian woman, ... [but] there is no vice in my Lesbian vein, ... [though] I have lightly kissed and been kissed by Lesbian lips. I am too personally fastidious, too temperamentally dishonest ... to walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in freest moods.[36]

She believes lesbianism to be subjectively induced, as against those who consider it due to “prenatal influence.” Some women are lesbian because they are born aggressive, some feel themselves challenged by the limitations imposed on women, some are merely so lonely that the first understanding person “wins a passionate adoration the deeper for being unrealized.” She believes that all women “except two breeds, the stupid and the narrowly feline,” have a lesbian strain; that is, there is always some “poignant flair” of sex in their close friendships, though all “good non-analytic creatures” would deny it with horror. (This last suggests at least an acquaintance with Freud.)

She has now returned to cultivate in solitude the _Me_ neglected during her preceding distracted years. There are evidences that she has more than dabbled in oriental philosophy and believes in reincarnation, which, she says, gives her many buried selves to delve for—surely Valhalla for a narcissist. Mild as this volume is in its condemnation by comparison with the preceding two, its stress upon the suffering and “waste” in variant friendships, and its reference to lesbianism as “repellent vice,” align it with them as opposed to variance.

Such pointed attacks as those of Lawrence and Miss Dane were bound to stimulate counterattack. The first appeared in A. T. Fitzroy’s _Despised and Rejected_ (1918), though women’s variance was of secondary importance in a novel whose main issue was the tragic wartime persecution of Conscientious Objectors; particularly of male homosexuals who took refuge in that camp. Because both “Conchies” and homosexuals were anathema in 1918, the publisher was prosecuted and fined some £160.[37] The author, wife of the composer Cyril Scott, apparently weathered the storm without major consequences, though she wrote nothing more under the same name.

The feminine incidents in the novel concern an actress who, at thirteen, had adored a boarding school teacher; however, she cooled when the latter responded, because she hated to be caressed. Her teens included similar attractions, and she had several unpleasant experiences with men during her years of becoming established in the theatre. These experiences precede the opening of the story. The action begins with amateur theatrical activities at a summer hotel, in the course of which Antoinette falls in love with a taciturn dark woman reminiscent of her first idol, and, on the other hand, rouses emotional interest in an effeminate young man in the cast. The summer interlude ends without resolving either affair. Both amours are continued by letter, a medium which frees Antoinette of her physical inhibitions. Thus, she learns that Dennis has previously been much drawn to men; and on her part, she becomes so attached to the dark Hester that she visits her in Birmingham. She is as yet unaware of any “abnormality” in her feeling, knowing only that Hester represents the promise of some imperative emotional release. When she discovers that Hester has had a liaison with a man, her love is instantly chilled, although it had reached the verge of overt expression.

Meanwhile, Dennis, obtaining no response from her, has become involved with a poet in desperate circumstances for whom he feels a maternal tenderness. From this point on, the long narrative is concerned chiefly with its male cast, but it includes Antoinette’s finally considering herself in love with Dennis. He has now, however, irrevocably elected the homosexual path; he tells her that he recognized her at first meeting as another homosexual and that that was the reason for his instant attraction. Despite his immediate detection of her proclivities, Antoinette is presented as feminine in both appearance and temperament. The cause of her narcissistic failure in either normal or variant adjustment is that throughout adolescence she was always awaiting the charmed age of eighteen, when the thrilling business of Real Life would begin. That is, she nursed a romantic ideal impossible of realistic achievement (cf. Gourmont’s _Songe d’une Femme_). At the end she complains:

Everybody seems to think you’re abnormal because you _like_ to be.... As if being different from other people weren’t curse enough in itself.... People judge the fine by the sensual, of whom there are plenty also among the “normal.”[38]

This is a fair enough statement of a variant argument which will be encountered again later.

A more oblique and much more artistic species of defense is incorporated in Arnold Bennett’s _The Pretty Lady_ (1918), of which the main theme is the relation between a wealthy London bachelor and a Parisian courtesan war-bound in London. Despite the outcry the book raised among reviewers, the sexual aspects of this affair are subordinated to the soothing effect of the French woman’s simple and cosy subjective complaisance, in contrast to the hectic wartime mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape is thrown together. One of these, Concepçion Smith, is the daughter of a British financial magnate who operated in Lima, and it is not wholly clear whether her mother or merely her given name and her upbringing were Latin-American. Orphaned at eighteen, she returned to London and kept house for her bachelor uncle, a cabinet minister, earning a reputation as hostess and wit. Having married for love, and lost her husband within the first few weeks of World War I, she leaves for Glasgow early in the story to dull her sorrow through canteen work in a munitions plant. She is described as having a masculine mentality, being relatively indifferent to feminine graces, and lacking somewhat in obvious sex appeal. She is at this time about thirty.

Her closest friend has been Lady Queenie Lechford, perhaps a decade younger, a spoiled only child, capricious, flippant, the type of hectic and brittle “flapper” who was to become so common a figure in the fiction of the 1920s. That the two quarrelled bitterly over Concepçion’s leaving London one learns only when they are reunited late in 1916, after Concepçion has broken under the strain of overwork and the shock of a horrifying accident to a factory girl. The two women’s reunion is delineated with the subtlest indirect touches, but it is clearly passionate. Of the two, Concepçion seems the more deeply involved. Though there are hints that she herself is not uninterested in Hoape, she tells him Queenie is in love with him and urges him to marry the girl in spite of the considerable difference in their ages. She would do anything in the world, she declares, to win even a few weeks’ happiness for her young friend. Even while Hoape is evading her suggestion, Lady Queenie, given to reckless watching of air-raids from the roof of her parents’ town house, is killed by falling anti-aircraft shrapnel. Concepçion, with nothing now to live for, plans suicide, but is dissuaded by Hoape’s concern for her, and one foresees that these two will eventually marry. Bennett thus appears to diagnose variant (possibly lesbian) connections as one phase of wartime hysteria, induced mainly by the shortage of eligible men. Though there is a shade of satire in his picture, there is certainly no disapproval.

The next two novels, both American and both published in 1920, made relatively brief but quite significant additions to variant literature. By a count of lines, Kate Chancellor occupies little space in Sherwood Anderson’s _Poor White_, story of a shanty-town boy’s rise to prosperity and a good marriage. But she supplies the most vivid thread in the pattern of his wife’s emotional development. When Clara leaves her father’s farm for the state university she is wholly uninformed in matters of sex. From some bungling early experience she is wary of men, though conscious of a certain power over them. The relatives with whom she lives while in college play little part in her life save to repeat her father’s misunderstanding of trivial “petting” incidents which are unsought and distasteful to her.

Clara finds her college courses no help toward the practical conduct of life in any field, and her one fruitful contact is with a girl two or three years her senior who plans to study medicine. Kate Chancellor, as masculine as her musical brother is effeminate, is quite frank in admitting her homosexual nature (thus implied to be innate), though she never mentions lesbianism. For three years the girls are constantly together. Their avid discussions range through politics, religion, and philosophy, but center most often on sex differences in temperament, and the problem facing all women in marriage: how to continue as individuals and not become mere colorless stereotypes like most housewives of their acquaintance. Kate is more drawn to Clara than to any other woman she has met, dreads marriage for the girl, and yearns to take her along as companion in the free and purposeful life she means to live. But she is honest enough to admit that her own pattern is not Clara’s, and that to bind her emotionally would only increase the groping girl’s confusion. Her closest approach to physical expression occurs during one of their customary walks together, when to drive some point home she stops and takes Clara by the shoulders.

For a moment they stood thus close together, and a strange gentle and yet hungry look came into Kate’s eyes. It lasted only a moment and when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed and taking hold of Clara’s arm pulled her along the sidewalk. “Let’s walk like the devil,” she said, “come on, let’s get up some speed.”[39]

On her return from college Clara becomes involved at once in the business of getting married. She manages to resist her father’s pressure toward a match profitable to him, but soon is plunged by circumstance into marriage with the book’s main character—the union is emotionally a premature step for both of them. Throughout this troubled period Clara tests all that happens against her memory of Kate’s honesty and gentleness, and on her wedding night itself, offended by the crude “surprise party” sprung by the farm hands, she thinks of Kate, “who had known how to love in silence.”

Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in the room. “If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have come to a man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage,” she thought.[40]

In the end, however, her marriage proves no worse than the average in understanding and happiness. There have been few such sympathetic and unexaggerated pictures of a variant woman in our literature; and none of the others was written by a man.

The year’s total balance of sentiment was evened by James Gibbons Huneker’s _Painted Veils_. This picture of musical and literary New York was so continental in its cynical frankness that it was first issued privately, though it soon found regular publication and is now available in paper covers. As its epilogue states, its hero Ulick is a young man whose favorite authors are Thomas à Kempis and Petronius, and whose experience reflects this duality of taste. Heroine of the Petronian chapters is a dynamic girl, Easter, who rises by her own efforts—in more fields than one—to the status of world-famed prima donna. Early in her career she considers sources of revenue for European study. To accept support from her lover would give the man too much claim upon her. So her thoughts turn to a fellow student of voice, a dilettante with whom already “an intimacy had developed.”

She began thinking of Allie Wentworth and her set. Allie was an heiress ... a masculine creature who affected a mannish cut of clothes. She wore her hair closely cut and sported a walking stick. Her stride and bearing intrigued [Easter], who had never seen that sort before.... Allie was always hugging her when alone.[41]

Although Allie makes relatively few appearances, it is clear that she financed and accompanied Easter for a number of years. It is also implied that the cause of Easter’s duel with Mary Garden in Paris was not, as the newspapers claimed, a man. “When Allie Wentworth, who was Easter’s second, read this in _Le Soir_ she burst into laughter.” (When the book appeared, gossip claimed that Mary Garden was the model for Easter, and that this duel naming her as opposite was inserted for camouflage.)

Upon Easter’s return to New York she says to Ulick, who is jealous of Allie:

That girl helped me over some rough places in Europe. I shall never give her up, never.... I love sumptuous characters. That’s why I love to read _Mlle Maupin_. Also about that perverse puss Satin in _Nana_. She reminds me of Allie and her pranks—simply adorable, I tell you! Toujours fidèle.[42]

Later, Easter, now the pursuer because Ulick has turned cool, follows him to the apartment of his current mistress, a vulgar little creature who is transported at

being treated as a social equal by the greatest living lady opera singer.... Emboldened by her success Dora persuaded Easter to go with her into the dressing room, from which much later they emerged wearing night draperies. A queer go, this sudden intimacy, ruminated the young man.[43] [A _queer go_ is a bit of _double entendre_ worthy of Spanish comedy.]

Finally, there is a party in Easter’s quarters including a handful of lesbians, one or two smoking cigars, and Allie Wentworth, whose jealous rage is so childish that she must be publicly reproved. With this Zolaesque portrait of a lesbian woman who is unscrupulous, ruthless, and promiscuous, there is no need for Huneker to articulate his opinion of variance.

Few contrasts could be sharper than that between the continental sophistication of Huneker and the midwestern simplicity of Helen R. Hull. As early as 1918 she had published in _Century Magazine_ a short-story (“The Fire”) of a small-town girl’s love for the middle-aged spinster who gives her not only art lessons but her first contact with a mellow and cultured personality—a benign reverse of the destructive relationship in _Regiment of Women_. The innocent friendship is broken off by the girl’s jealous mother on the grounds that “it’s not healthy or natural for a girl to be hanging around an old maid.” Miss Hull’s _Quest_ (1922) records the effect upon a growing girl of constant tension between her parents. As precocious as Miss Dane’s Louise, Jean falls in love at twelve with a high-school teacher, and simultaneously forms a feverish alliance with a classmate considerably older and less naïve who adores the same woman. Because the other girl is so much more accessible than the teacher, it is the former who draws the mother’s fire here, and she terminates the connection with a touch of melodrama which leaves her daughter wary of variant emotion, in the same way that the family situation has affected her with regard to heterosexual love. Jean’s subsequent relations with men are inhibited, and her two or three very warm friendships with girls and women during college and her early years of teaching never approach the intensity of her first love.

In _Labyrinth_ (1923) Miss Hull attacked from a feminine angle the problem posed in _The Great Adventure_: the frustration of a versatile woman cut off from personal and intellectual contacts by housework and the care of children. After a decade of marriage Catherine returns to a challenging position which she held during World War I, though her husband, a professor, disapproves of the venture. A series of domestic crises plus the professor’s calculated move from New York to a small midwestern campus finally thwart his wife’s efforts to escape unrelieved domesticity. No variance complicates Catherine’s problems, but through minor characters three other emotional adjustments are presented, one involving two women.

The ménage of a professor whose wife is nothing but a _Hausfrau_ is dull beyond endurance for all concerned. A woman physician and her husband appear happy, but the man privately mourns his wife’s sacrifice of maternity to her professional career. Catherine’s younger sister, a social worker and unmarried, has broken away from her mother because “I can’t be babied all my life—all sorts of infantile traits sticking to me,” and is living with an older fellow-worker. When her sister advises marriage, she retorts:

Husband! Me? I’m fixed for life right now.... Anybody needs someone loving ’em, smoothing ’em down, setting ’em up, brushing off the dust ... I know a little thing or two about love. But [this way] you can do that ... through and around whatever else you’re doing ... I know lots of women who prefer to set up an establishment with another woman. Then you go fifty-fifty on everything. Work and feeling and all the rest, and no King waiting around for his humble servant.[44]

This is Miss Hull’s nearest allusion to physical intimacy, and while not explicitly implied, neither is it repudiated. Sympathetically as the variant pair are portrayed, they are no more romanticized than the heterosexual couples. The older woman has been a fanatic in many causes and a hunger-striker for suffrage, is moody and violent, and quarrels with any critical male at sight. The younger is cool, practical, and a bit hard. But the alliance apparently stands as good a chance of survival as any in the book, and the author accepts it as a matter of course. The only dissenting voice is the professor’s; he is bitter in his animosity and contempt.

Publishing simultaneously with Miss Hull but more nearly in the vein of Huneker was England’s Ronald Firbank, whose delightful absurdities began to flower with _Vainglory_ in 1918. Firbank was particularly fascinated by all aspects of homosexuality, and not one of his brief novels is without some reference to it. To render these allusions delicate he cultivated a frivolous obscurity, but it was no more designed to conceal than are a dancer’s veils to hide the form beneath. Probably the most significant in our field is _The Flower Beneath the Foot_ (1923).[45] Its setting is a principality the approximate size and importance of Monaco, with a court circle madly international. Here, as always, the lesbian glimpses are oblique, but there are three of them. A visiting Queen Thleeanouhee of the Land of Dates becomes so openly enamoured of the blonde and bovine English ambassadress that the whole court fears an “incident.” A lady in waiting in love with the Prince, after her romance is shattered by his diplomatic marriage, flees to an adored Sister in the convent where she was educated, dreaming of a return to earlier delights. She is a bit chilled at being invited, as an adult now, to wield a whip. And last, two of the queen’s ladies are becalmed for a summer afternoon alone in a small sailboat. One (she reminds her colleagues of Anthony Hamilton’s Miss Hobart) is a girl of “delicate sexless silhouette, whose exotic attraction had aroused not a few heart-burnings (and even feuds) among several of the _grandes dames_ about the court.”[46] Her companion is a ripe and languishing widow. The exiled count upon whom they intended to call catches sight of their motionless craft and trains his telescope upon it.

Oh poignant moments when the heart stops still! Not since the hours of his exile had the count’s been so arrested. Caught in the scarlet radiance of the afterglow the becalmed boat, for one brief and most memorable second, was his to gaze on. In certain lands with what diplomacy falls the night.... Those dimmer-and-dimmer twilights of the North were unknown in Pisuerga. There Night pursues Day as if she meant it. “Oh, why was I not _sooner_?” he murmured distractedly aloud.[47]

Needless to say, no judgments are even hinted in Firbank’s tales. If his paired ladies are rather ridiculous, so are his pretty gentlemen and his mixed couples young and old, his kings and social climbers and mad old ladies. Since all life is clearly so absurd, he seems to say, what to do save sit back (with all possible grace) and titter at the spectacle? Edmund Wilson’s diagnosis of Gertrude Stein might apply also in some measure to Firbank, though he did not retreat so far into literary obscurity.

Post-War Crescendo

These novels of Firbank’s, shot through with allusions to both male and female homosexuality, remind one that two-thirds of the volumes of Proust’s _Recherche du Temps Perdu_ had been published in France by 1923, and were, of course, known to many English and American writers before being translated. It is easy to overrate the influence of Proust, especially as both James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson had anticipated him in “stream of consciousness” technique, the one with _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ (1915), the other with _Pointed Roofs_ (1917). But in no one else of Proust’s quality was homosexuality so integral a part of the narrative fabric. Translations of Proust’s most significant volumes appeared in English between 1924 and 1930. It might also be noted that Margueritte’s _La Garçonne_ was translated in 1923.

A second increasingly important influence was that of Freud, already discernible in _Regiment of Women_ (though a good case could be made there for Adlerian overtones also), and becoming more and more obvious in other novels of the same calibre. A striking example was Harvey O’Higgins’ “Story of Julie Cane,” which ran serially in _Harper’s Magazine_ during 1924, and was as much a dramatized psychiatric case-record as the earlier work of Dubut de LaForest in France. Its main emotional themes are a virtually incestuous devotion between the male protagonist and his mother, and the passion of a spinster school mistress for the young heroine, her ward. The author, who delivers a good many brief lectures along the way, labels this last emotion thwarted maternity, but by the time Julie has reached late adolescence he is describing Martha Perrin’s feeling for her as follows:

It had come to this, that Martha put herself to sleep at night imagining that Julie was in her arms.... She kissed the undergarments that were to touch the beloved young body; and when she had made a dress she caressed it and hugged it to her breast so that it might by proxy be her arms around Julie.... When she had Julie in the sewing room to try on the clothes she had made, her hands shook, her heart suffocated, and she turned away and wept while she fumbled over some pretense of taking up a tuck in the back of the garment.... After Julie had gone she sat with her face in her hands, her cheeks burning against her cold fingers, her mouth aching, seeing still the dimples in Julie’s shoulders, kissing them in her imagination and crying weakly, starved.[48]

Few passages have been so explicit since Sappho’s famous Ode, which was less extended.

When Julie is about to leave for college, Martha suffers complete collapse, one symptom of her illness being that, though starving, she cannot touch food. A new physician, in the act of taking her pulse as Julie enters the room, at once prescribes Julie as nurse. During the period of sickroom intimacy the two fall into each others’ arms and have some weeks “as happy as a honeymoon,” though O’Higgins is careful to repeat that the rapture is essentially that of mother and daughter. If the sensations described above are offered as maternal, one can only say that the author was convinced of an incestuous element in all parent-child relationships. One rather remarkable aspect of the whole is that though patently psychiatric, the book does not express that condemnation of the emotions described which was common to later disciples of Freud. Indeed, a physician encourages the intimacy of Julie and Martha, as did Violet Ashwin’s father in _Lady of Leisure_, though, of course, without advocating lesbian activity. In the situation as presented by O’Higgins, however, some physical release would have been inevitable.

In the same year there appeared in England a much subtler treatment of variance in Radclyffe Hall’s early novel _The Unlit Lamp_. Unlike her better known _Well of Loneliness_, this narrative relegates love between women to secondary importance, its focus being the forced martyrdom of unmarried daughters in the name of filial duty. Joan Ogden is the one competent and unselfish member of a neurotic family bent on maintaining social position in their country village. Elizabeth Rodney, a dozen years older, has won a degree from Cambridge before coming, under pressure, to keep house for a bachelor brother in the same community. Her one interest is tutoring Joan, whom she hopes to see achieve a college education and some sort of life beyond small-town domesticity. Mrs. Ogden believes herself bent upon a successful marriage for her daughter, but her actual purpose is to hold her beloved child at any cost; her chief weapon is hypochondria. Joan wants to become a doctor, and Elizabeth offers to provide joint living quarters in Cambridge and to help finance the medical course, but the two girls’ long struggle ends with the mother victorious. Elizabeth, unable to endure repeated frustration, leaves the town, eventually marries, and settles in South Africa, refusing to return or to communicate with Joan.

Beneath this drama of parental tyranny runs a strong current of variant emotion. Mrs. Ogden is fragile, jealous, hysterical and over-demonstrative. Both younger women are unfeminine in appearance, cool and fearless in temperament, both affect a masculine simplicity in dress, and Joan crops her hair decades before fashion sanctions that mode. Elizabeth has a masculine distaste for easy caresses and meticulously conceals the depth of her feeling, so that Joan’s shy reciprocal emotion never finds outlet (the “unlit lamp” is the passion Elizabeth refuses to set alight). The basic situation, then, is a variant triangle in which the clinging and helpless mother wins against a rival who will employ none of the tactics of seduction, and the result is the virtual ruin of both girls’ lives. There are intimations here of what was to become open championship of lesbian love four years later in _Well of Loneliness_. But they are only implicit.

Also in 1924 Arnold Bennett contributed a short draught of his cool common sense in _Elsie and the Child_. With customary realism and irony he presents a London physician’s household centered about Miss Eva, aged twelve, an only child. The doctor, busy day and night earning every advantage for his daughter, sees little of her. His wife is a domestic perfectionist and strict disciplinarian. The emotional center of the child’s life is Elsie, the wholesome but rather dull servant who was hired originally because Eva (like Metta in _The Scorpion_) took an instant fancy to her. Elsie is all heart, quick only in her intuitions, humbly devoted to the aristocratic young mistress whose care falls largely upon her. A crisis is precipitated when the parents, aware of their daughter’s too-great dependence upon Elsie, attempt to send the girl to boarding school. She is acquainted with the headmistress, a hearty tweedy friend of her mother’s, quite the type to captivate some schoolgirls, but not Eva. Having shot up like a weed to Elsie’s considerable stature, the child is all nerves, and when crossed by her mother she breaks out with the hysterical declaration that it is not her parents but Elsie whom she loves and from whom she will not be parted.

Elsie realizes at once that the outcome will be the dismissal of her and her husband. The latter, a victim of shell shock in World War I, is a bemused introvert given to dangerous fits of temper. It is he who turns upon Eva with the charge that her feeling for his wife is not love, since she does not care if her stubborn whim brings ruin on Elsie and himself. Made aware for the first time of the problems of others, the girl gives in and goes off to school. Bennett contrives with great skill to imply strong emotional undercurrents in Eva’s childish demands for personal service and caresses, and in Elsie’s doting ministrations. He also makes clear that the husband’s violence is actually aroused not by fear of losing his place but by jealousy, though none of the three persons involved are aware of this.

Concerning as it does a girl of twelve, this story might not be classed as variant by psychologists, but one cannot help feeling that Bennett contributed it to the rapidly swelling count of variant fiction as testimony to his own stand in the matter. Despite Eva’s unusual height and her susceptibility to Elsie’s spontaneous warmth, she is not conceived as a prospective homosexual. Stimulated one summer night by watching a sophisticated garden party from her window, she slips down to the servants’ quarters to practice a nascent coquetry on Joe as well as Elsie. There could hardly be a clearer statement of Bennett’s opinion that variant emotion is as natural to puberty as growing pains,

## particularly where maternal affection is wanting, but that its natural

span runs out with early adolescence.

In 1925 four novels dealing with variance reached the English reading public—the translation of Rolland’s _Annette and Sylvie_ and Virginia Woolf’s _Mrs. Dalloway_, both treating it briefly and with sympathy, Sherwood Anderson’s _Dark Laughter_, touching upon it even more casually and with disfavor, and Naomi Royde-Smith’s _Tortoiseshell Cat_, devoted wholly to the theme and wholly condemnatory. Rolland’s lesbian interlude between the half-sisters Rivière has already been described. Anderson’s heroine, a married woman on the verge of taking a lover, recalls privately her first trip abroad under the guidance of a couple whose sophistication she did not suspect until on shipboard. The woman had made skillfully veiled lesbian advances which she recognized for what they were and resisted with equal skill. Anderson clearly condemns this deliberate attempt at seduction, but no more severely than he condemns the woman’s ruses to snare wealthy subjects for her portrait-painting husband. The episode is slighter than the one in _Poor White_ and of little weight in its chief actor’s life.

Mrs. Woolf’s passages are much more subtle, though most of them, like Anderson’s, are incorporated in Clarissa Dalloway’s reminiscences of her girlhood. Even preliminary to these, however, we learn that Mrs. Dalloway is happy that her husband insists on her sleeping in a separate room after an illness.

She could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet; ... through some contraction of this cold spirit she had failed him again and again. She could see what she lacked.... It was something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For _that_ she could dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl ... like a faint scent or a violin next door. She did undoubtedly feel then what men felt. It was a sudden revelation which one tried to check and then yielded to, and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation.[49]

Her first experience of this sort came to her in her late teens or early twenties in connection with the delightful madcap Sally Seton.

Had that not after all been love?... At some party she had a distinct recollection of saying to the man she was with, “Who is _that_?” And all that evening she could not take her eyes off Sally.... The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was protective on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they always spoke of marriage as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry.... She could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy ... and dressing and going downstairs, feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling—all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!

[Sally] stood by the fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice which made everything she said sound like a caress ... when suddenly she said, “What a shame to sit indoors!” and they all went out on to the terrace and walked up and down. She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down![50]

When the men of the party (one of them in love with her) return and make casual, half-teasing conversation,

It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible. Not for herself. She felt only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break their companionship. “Oh this horror!” she said to herself, as if she had known all along that something would interrupt, would embitter her moment of happiness.[51]

There is no further reference in the novel to Sally, and Clarissa Dalloway lives on for us into her mid-fifties, wife and mother, never again in such intimate touch with life, unless it is in her relation to her daughter. For although above she has said that the charm of a girl never moves her, her love for the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth is the most vital element in her current existence. The girl is undergoing a spell of inexplicable devotion to a shabby, unkempt, embittered woman tutor, for whom Mrs. Dalloway finds it difficult to repress a burning hatred, and one realizes that this hatred is but the obverse of the emotion she will not recognize for the beautiful daughter so different from herself and so aloof.

The reader will remember that in the other strand of the dual narrative Septimus Smith, shell-shock case from World War I, fails to regain his mental balance or to respond to his devoted wife because he cannot admit to consciousness the love he felt for a fellow-officer who was killed. In her preface, the author says that Smith is intended to be Clarissa Dalloway’s “double,” and that in its first conception the story, lacking him, ended with Mrs. Dalloway’s death. It would seem that her contribution here to the problem of variance is the possibility of its being a happy experience where innocence is easy—as for a woman; but for a man too scrupulous to accept the almost inevitable outcome in the male, it may be fatal.

It is a radical step from _Mrs. Dalloway_ to the forthright _Tortoiseshell Cat_, in which a lesbian woman plays a sinister part. The central figure, a motherless girl in her late twenties, is still a pristine innocent, thanks to her exclusive devotion to a scholarly father lost a short time before. Gillian is baffled by her worldly-wise younger sister’s hold upon men, and by the quixotic devotion of a girl who leaves her private school in protest when Gillian (a teacher there) is dismissed. It is this innocence which cost her her teaching position—she chose French poetry to read aloud on the basis of its beauty alone, genuinely unaware of its sexual connotations—and presently it leads her into even more serious danger.

After her sister’s marriage, left alone in a dreary residence club and bored with a part-time secretaryship, she meets a fellow resident, half American and completely bohemian and fascinating. The initial encounter is significant:

But as V.V. came with a swift steady stride, the free rapid movement of a woman who had been much with horses, who had ridden from childhood, Gillian knew, with a thrill of recognition so strange, so new to her experience that the shock of it took away all sense of every other consideration, that she beheld in the flesh the very image of a perfection wrought by her own imaginings in the secret places of her dreaming mind. This was not a beautiful creature for all the world to gape at, it was the figure—unique of its kind—for which the shrine of her spirit had stood empty and waiting until now.[52]

A definitely masculine figure, as the passage goes on to emphasize, and a masterly analysis of romantic love-at-first-sight. The woman’s voice is flat and unlovely, but Gillian, for all her musical ear, is too enthralled to care. All that she is aware of for some time are the lavish personal ministrations and caresses with which she is showered. She learns without grasping the implications that V.V. has lived with a long succession of women, many of them minor actresses. Early in her life there was one, mentioned seldom and cryptically, on whose account she was evidently disowned by her family and incurred debts not yet paid.

Before long, Gillian’s emotional preoccupation evokes remonstrance from her sister, the once-adoring student, and the latter’s recently acquired sculptor-husband; but to her their warnings are absurd. The sculptor lived before his marriage with a faunlike musician whom he loved and protected from fortune-hunting women. This elfin Heinrich is as bewitched as Gillian by V.V.’s physical beauty, and as V.V. has an eye to the main chance, she inveigles him into an engagement. As soon as he becomes importunate and “boring,” however, instinct conquers interest and she shakes him off, clinching the matter one evening by refusing an invitation because she must bathe Gillian and put her to bed. With a stolen key, V.V. manages to enter the apartment where Gillian is actually bathing in a meager British “portable” before an open fire, and attempts to embrace her. Gillian, though excited by the caresses, fights her off in sudden horrified realization of what their long ambiguous dalliance has been leading to. For the first time in her life she comprehends the passion she has observed in others, and her revulsion is violent. Heinrich, however, reads quite another meaning into the shadow-struggle he sees silhouetted on her drawn blind, and goes home to shoot himself.

Gillian falls gravely ill from shock, but finally, safe in her sister’s comfortable home, regains her balance.

The only person who had escaped unhurt was V.V. But she was unhurt because long ago she had been so maimed, her soul had been so warped and stunted by the influence she could still recall though she was too vitiated to resent it, that nothing now would make very much difference. V.V. had gone her own way and Gillian could not follow her. She had taken the first steps on the road down which V.V. was disappearing, and had come back to the place where it started. And now that road was closed.[53]

However marred it is by such expository passages and by its sudden melodramatic suicide, the story carries more conviction than _Regiment of Women_ through coming to grips with the physical issue and through its more sympathetic presentation of the lesbian woman.

* * * * *

In 1926, drama for the first time took precedence over fiction, of which the year’s sole example was the translation of Louis Couperus’s _The Comedians_. This historical novel laid in the reign of Domitian includes a pair of lesbians, the emperor’s cousin and his wife’s niece, who frequent the inns of Rome disguised respectively as gladiator and street wench. Life at court is such a nightmare of intrigue and surveillance that only their mutual passion and their secret adventures make existence tolerable. The “gladiator” is shortly killed in a street brawl, and the other girl, though her interests have seemed bisexual, fades into melancholia.

As to the theatre, the international success of Bourdet’s _La Prisonnière_ has already been cited. Its New York run as _The Captive_ began in September, and its drawing power very likely led to the presentation of two related plays later in the season. Thomas Hurlbut’s lesbian _Hymn to Venus_ opened in Atlantic City in late November and was scheduled for further trial in Chicago before appearing on Broadway. Its initial performance rated a single brief review in the _New York Times_,[54] chilly and vague, saying of the play only that its theme was that of _The Captive_ and that it ended with a suicide. There was no indication whether the treatment was sympathetic or otherwise, and the text of the play has not been available. It was withdrawn after a second performance and reached neither Chicago nor New York.

The second effort, _The Drag_ by one “Jane Mast,” made its debut in Boston in February 1927 with Mae West among the cast. Because, as the title indicates, it dealt with the stringently tabooed subject of male homosexuality, it was at once suppressed, and sufficient adverse sentiment was aroused to bring about the closing of _The Captive_ after a successful run of five months,[55] especially interesting in view of the strong condemnation of lesbianism in the French play. This official

## action seems to have had only local effects, for no difficulties

attended the publication in England of the translation of Lacretelle’s _La Bonifas_, or of Rosamund Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_, in which the middle section is a study of variance. There were also oblique variant allusions in Mrs. Woolf’s _To the Lighthouse_ (1927).

Lacretelle’s stout championship of Marie Bonifas needs no further comment. _To the Lighthouse_ was Mrs. Woolf’s most subtle study of the contrast between masculine and feminine personality. Here Mrs. Ramsey personifies the selfless unifying influence of woman’s intuition in her dealings with an intellectual husband, a diverse brood of six children, and a swarm of family friends of all ages and temperaments. The individual most devoted to her is an artist of thirty-three, who “with her little Chinese eyes and puckered up face ... would never marry.... She was an independent little creature.”[56] With masculine honesty Lily Briscoe recognizes that she is not so much in love with Mrs. Ramsey as with the mysterious force, intuitive and emotional, which she radiates and which Lily herself must always lack. And so she masters her own emotions in moments when Mrs. Ramsey is maternally tender, and quivers with uncontrollable laughter at the older woman’s failure to understand the situation when she urges marriage upon her. Still, nearly a decade after Mrs. Ramsey’s death, she weeps for her loss when she returns to paint again at the site of their earlier association, “feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have.”[57]

Miss Lehmann’s _Dusty Answer_, like many first novels written before their authors are wholly mature, was autobiographical in structure, following its heroine from childhood to her early twenties. Daughter of a scholarly father who tutors her at home and a frivolous mother who lives much abroad, Judith grows up in virtual solitude, her only acquaintances a group of children who occasionally visit an adjoining country house. These exotic cousins, four boys and a girl, fascinate the lonely child, who looks forward to their infrequent appearances and does her best to achieve some personal relation with one or the other, but they continually elude her. The object of her secret first love is Roddy, most elusive of all; at the moment when some mutual spark seems about to leap between them, his friend Tony comes for a weekend, a jealous effeminate boy who at once absorbs Roddy completely.

During Judith’s course at Cambridge she and a very beautiful classmate are mutually attracted and spend two rapturous but innocent years scarcely out of one another’s sight. When Judith returns after her last “long vac,” however, she senses a profound change in her friend, who spent her own free time in residence making up delinquencies. From a gossiping classmate Judith learns that Jennifer had a guest for much of the period, and that the two indulged in “wrestling matches” on the lawn which many of the girls found in doubtful taste. This dark Geraldine, a deep-voiced older woman of powerful physique and personality, presently reappears. Though Judith pointedly avoids the pair, Geraldine seeks her out and commands her to “let Jennifer alone,” since the latter is “beginning to find herself” and Geraldine plans to take her abroad. This

## scene is a triumph of subtlety; presented from the viewpoint of the

innocent Judith, it still conveys the exact nature of Geraldine’s feeling for and hold upon Jennifer. Judith withdraws completely, leaving Jennifer so torn between her old love and her new passion that even after Geraldine’s departure she cannot regain nervous stability, and is forced to leave college.

After a melancholy last term, Judith goes home to a single passionate summer night with Roddy, but upon discovering that what to her was a pledge of lasting love was to him but a casual episode, she breaks with him forever. In the course of the next year or so she wins from each of the remaining cousins just such personal responses as she once craved, but these are now empty. Her only vivid moment comes with a letter from Jennifer, incoherently half-explaining their broken friendship (which Judith has long since comprehended) and begging for a meeting in Cambridge. But when Judith keeps the appointment, Jennifer fails either to appear or to send a message, and the final flick of irony is a distant sight of Roddy and his friend Tony strolling past in intimate absorption. While Miss Lehmann takes artistic pains to point no moral, first Roddy’s and then Judith’s absorption in a variant friendship seem deterrents to happy emotional resolution through other channels.

First Peak: 1928

In contrast to the two preceding years, 1928 offered a harvest as rich and varied as any single season until then: Radclyffe’s Hall’s _Well of Loneliness_, Compton Mackenzie’s _Extraordinary Women_, Elizabeth Bowen’s _The Hotel_, and Virginia Woolf’s _Orlando_. Not foremost in literary rank but certainly best known is _The Well of Loneliness_, for its censorship became a _cause célèbre_ in the publishing world. Issued in January by the solidly established firm of Jonathan Cape, with an introduction by Havelock Ellis, the work was reviewed favorably in reputable literary periodicals. Shortly, however, it was attacked in the sensational London newspaper, _The Express_, with the result that it was banned in England and its publisher sued. Forty-five leading British authors, from Lascelles Abercrombie and Arnold Bennett to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, signed a letter of indignant protest, and a half dozen physicians and legal authorities volunteered to testify at the publisher’s trial, but their testimony was not allowed.[58] The reason for its condemnation while so many other variant novels were passed without action was its explicit defense of lesbian experience.

Although for a decade or so the novel has been freely available in inexpensive editions, a brief summary may be offered. Stephen Gordon, only child of solid county parents whose dearest desire is a son, receives the name and upbringing that would have been his. From infancy she is the image of her father, masculine in build, mannerisms, abilities and tastes. At eight she experiences unmistakable passion for a housemaid; throughout adolescence she despises feminine garments and amusements; in her late teens she rejects a first suitor, long her good friend, whose sudden amorousness seems to her unnatural. The death of her father leaves her without an ally and bitterly solitary. At twenty she becomes infatuated with a new neighbor’s wife, a former American chorus girl, who plays the coquette and accepts lavish gifts but evades caresses by pleading her husband’s jealousy. Stephen’s discovery that a male rival has been successful drives her to frenzy, and the American, fearful that the girl may inform her husband of her infidelity, forestalls the possibility by showing him Stephen’s last letter. This outpouring of naked passion, at once passed on to her mother, leads to Stephen’s being turned out of her home and virtually driven from England. Soon she achieves a literary reputation of sorts, but her lack of passionate experience proves an artistic handicap. In London and Paris she meets both male and female homosexuals but shuns them, hating their immediate interest in her because she hates her own “difference” and wants only to be accepted as a normal human being.

Then World War I gives her, along with others of her sort, the chance to do a man’s job in an ambulance unit. She falls deeply in love with a younger co-worker, innocent and feminine, whom she struggles to protect from danger. After their release by the armistice, a holiday together forces both to admit the nature of their love—an interlude less specifically detailed than Lawrence’s lesbian passage in _The Rainbow_, but, of course, presented with complete sympathy. Now united, the two girls attempt to make a life for themselves in Paris, but neither finds tolerable the bohemian existence which is open to them, and both suffer under the slights which exclude them from conventional society. Eventually, Stephen’s early suitor seeks them out and falls in love with Mary, who responds but will not consider disloyalty to Stephen. The latter, realizing that Mary can never be happy with her outside the social pale, makes the dramatic gesture of pretending intimacy with a distinguished lesbian she has known superficially for years. She achieves her purpose—Mary accepts the man, and Stephen is left once more to loneliness.

The story is more engrossing than _The Unlit Lamp_ because of swifter pace and greater intensity, but inferior in literary art, since it is often over-emotional and occasionally lapses into bald special pleading. Moreover, there is a blur in the explanation of Stephen’s variance. Emphasis on her physical masculinity indicates hereditary causes, as does her father’s early recognition of her anomaly. But his consequent indulgence of her proclivities, and the stress laid on both parents’ desire for a male child, hint at belief in prenatal as well as childhood conditioning. Miss Hall’s evident purpose was to absolve Stephen of the slightest responsibility for her temperament, and inevitably one is reminded of Lacretelle’s _Marie Bonifas_, translated in the preceding year but probably known to Miss Hall in French upon its appearance in 1925. The two differ in that Lacretelle lays Freudian stress on negative childhood conditioning, while Miss Hall’s comparative hereditary emphasis marks her a disciple of the older school of Ellis and Hirschfeld. Despite its shortcomings, _The Well of Loneliness_ made a heroic gesture for tolerance of lesbian relations among persons of integrity, and the author had the satisfaction before her death of seeing it widely accepted.

Compton Mackenzie entered the variant lists armed with gentle satire. _Extraordinary Women_, like Norman Douglas’s _South Wind_ to which its foreword pays respect, is laid on the island of Capri, here called Sirene. It includes almost as many lesbian individuals as Peladan’s _La Gynandre_ of forty years earlier, and considering its author’s Catholic affiliation, it may have been written with some similar, though milder, intent. Every nationality is represented and every age, from Lulu de Randan, sent vacationing with her governess to break off a flirtation with a tradesman’s son, to a fading Roman wife given to tearful sentimentality over the boyish young beauty she adores. Roughly there are two generations of lesbian women, among the older a poet who poses as a modern Sappho, a tailored Englishwoman who has bred bulldogs and supported _boxeuses_ in Paris for a few decades, and Lulu’s Anglo-French mother. The younger group includes a stormy and self-defeating Greek concert pianist, an American hypochondriac, millionaire’s daughter, and the picturesque and irresistible poseuse, Rosalba Donsante, child of the third of her Swiss mother’s five international marriages. What plot there is centers about Rosalba and Aurora Freemantle, the Englishwoman, who finds the girl an incarnation of the boyish ideal she has celebrated in her lesbian verse for years. “Rory,” dreaming of permanence at last, remodels a villa halfway up to Anasirene at reckless expense, but her beloved is of no mind to be caged there, and leads practically every woman in the cast a hectic chase before the curtain falls upon her unheralded departure in pursuit of a last inamorata, leaving poor Rory in tears in her empty paradise.

The tale offers a potpourri of sophisticated intrigue fertilized by idleness and wealth. Its various types are superficially convincing enough, but they are largely unaccounted for beyond the influence of their frivolous environment. Many of the older women have been married at least once, and even young Lulu has narrowly missed a heterosexual entanglement before succumbing to Rosalba’s glamorous seduction. Few men enter upon the scene save hotel servants and one or two twittering homosexuals and eccentrics. Rory alone (physically as masculine as Stephen Gordon) is treated with some gentleness as a victim of hereditary forces, although even she is more ridiculous than appealing, and the total effect of the novel is one of cool detachment, the report of a witty and superior observer.

Among these outspoken narratives Miss Bowen’s quiet social comedy, _The Hotel_, is conspicuous for a sexual reticence as absolute as any before 1915. The hotel of her title, a conservative Riviera establishment frequented by professors, clergymen, retired officers and their families, provides a lively background for her understated central drama. In this, the actors are two: a British girl of twenty and a cosmopolitan widow twice her age with a son at school in Germany. (The

## action antedates World War I.) Sydney is ostensibly recuperating from

overstudy for a recent university degree, and acting as companion to a married cousin. Actually, as she is wretchedly aware, her relatives have financed her holiday in the expectation of her capturing a husband. But Sydney is wholly absorbed in Mrs. Kerr. This exquisite worldling, of whom the other guests stand a bit in awe, accepts the girl’s small services and gifts with just enough warmth to keep her enslaved and the onlookers socially envious. Malicious gossip naturally flourishes over the bridge tables, and though it stops just short of slander, Sydney finds the association all in all more wearing than rewarding.

When the son arrives on holiday it is clear that he is held captive on a similar emotional leash, and Sydney’s intelligence recognizes that their charmer is playing one against the other and battening on their mutual jealousy. But not until, piqued at a black mood of Sydney’s, Mrs. Kerr accuses her of playing for a passionate response, and voices disdain for “emotions so unbalanced,” is she moved to rebellion. The injustice of the charge, when she has all but broken under the strain of emotional control, finally dissolves the spell. On the rebound Sydney tries being engaged to an estimable but rather colorless clergyman, but Mrs. Kerr’s brilliant subtlety has spoiled her for finding happiness in a commonplace association. Her final saddened conclusion is that the whole Hotel interlude has been a kind of lotus-eater’s dream bred of idleness in an artificial environment, and her only hope is that all its cloying preoccupations will fade with return to “reality” in England.

This study of heartless egotism may owe something to _Regiment of Women_, but it achieves the unity and detachment which Miss Dane’s study lacked. The problem here is simpler, of course; Mrs. Kerr’s beauty and assurance lead to conquest without effort, and aside from her vanity her own emotions are little involved. Of the pair, then, Sydney alone is variant, a telling example of that protracted adolescence which is common among the intellectually precocious. Her attaining adult perspective without benefit of a happy heterosexual romance marks Miss Bowen’s independence of current Freudian theory, a point of artistry in her favor. Another is her humorous vignette of a pair of elderly spinsters whose one-time variant devotion has withered into querulous possessiveness. All in all, pale aquarelle though _The Hotel_ is among the year’s more positive canvases, its quiet statement carries authority.

Any cursory treatment of Mrs. Woolf’s _Orlando_ must do it grave injustice, but here the emotional thread must be drawn from the rich fabric and examined as nearly as may be alone. No one yet has analyzed _Orlando_ fully, and such critics as have not slighted it in discussing Mrs. Woolf’s work have tended to find it uneven and confusing. Complex it is indeed, but a part of the critical confusion has come from failure or refusal to recognize as perhaps its main theme the relation of intersexual traits to creative ability. It attempts in fact to sustain four parallel motifs. The most obvious is the biography of a timeless individual who enters as a boy of sixteen acquainted with Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, and is still living in October 1928 as an English woman of thirty-six. A second is the changing social roles of the two sexes from century to century and their consequently shifting relations to one another. A third is the corresponding fluctuation—perhaps resultant, perhaps only concomitant—in the emotional “Spirit of the Age” in English literature. This is least coherently traced and may be ignored here. The fourth and most cryptic is a parallel between the history of Orlando and the literary and perhaps personal biography of Mrs. Woolf’s colleague and friend, Victoria Sackville-West, more than one of whose photographs illustrate Orlando’s later career, and whose family estate of Knole is clearly pictured in the descriptions of Orlando’s ancestral house. (For judicious comment on this last motif and on Mrs. Woolf’s other variant references, the reader is referred to David Daiches’s laudatory study of her work published in 1942.[59])

In the sixteenth century Orlando is a budding poetic dramatist (as was Thomas Sackville, of the family living even then at Knole). As a debonair boy he lives the sexual life of a lusty age, and is far from innocent when in his late teens profound passion overtakes him. With a Russian girl-princess, niece of the ambassador from St. Petersburg, he lives out a burning romance worthy of the period, which ends tragically when Sasha sails for home without adieu. The Russian girl is no innocent either; she is secretive, older than he emotionally, though younger in years; he suspects her of dalliance with a muscovite sailor and even, after her desertion, of being the ambassador’s mistress rather than his niece. Though anything but masculine, she is robust and by spells cruel in temperament; she wears Russian trousers against the cold, and skates, rides and loves with the zest and endurance of another boy. But her desertion has a woman’s cruelty, and it throws Orlando presently into a state of delayed shock which produces a seven-day trance.

He emerges a melancholy seventeenth-century philosophic poet, ridden by a passion for fame. Soon he is stalked by a ridiculous and masculine Roumanian bluestocking who—perhaps because she is six-feet-two—plays the man’s role in the game of hearts. For a moment “Orlando heard ... far off the beating of love’s wings.” But at the point of becoming ensnared, suddenly “it was Lust the vulture, not Love the bird of paradise, that flopped foully and disgustingly upon his shoulders. Hence he ran....”[60]

He escapes by accepting a diplomatic post in Constantinople, where he achieves brilliant success until a local uprising terminates his mission. He lives in the ornate luxury befitting an emissary of Charles II to the Sultan, and becomes “the adored of many women and some men,” but only from a distance. In private he is still melancholy, and escapes to write poetry in the hills by day, by night to roam the city streets, where he meets a gypsy dancer, Pepita. With her he contracts a marriage of sorts and, rumor hints, has a trio of offspring. This episode is sketched so briefly that one can only guess at its significance. It cannot well have repeated the early romance with Sasha, since she was a court lady of brilliant culture and Pepita is a daughter of the streets. But neither can it have echoed the passage with the Archduchess Harriet. Honest passion for an illiterate woman does not inspire the self-loathing bred of an itch for an otherwise hateful social and intellectual peer. Whatever it meant to Orlando, after the uprising ends his official services, he bestows a farewell embrace upon the gypsy and falls into his second seven-day trance. It may be that this one registered inability to endure an emotional impasse any longer.

From it he awakes a woman, but Mrs. Woolf lays stress on the fact that the change is merely one of physical sex and not at all of temperament.

The sound of trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being since the world began has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.[61]

With the gypsies (not apparently Pepita’s clan) to whom Orlando escapes, she still lives a man’s life, for among nomads, temperament and daily duties are much the same in both sexes. After some seasons of successful adaptation to this barbaric simplicity, nostalgia for England and for literary pursuits turns Orlando toward home. And now she faces the difficult business of learning to act the lady. High comedy attends her efforts, particularly in connection with a renewed pursuit by her former _bête noire_, the bluestocking, who now through a transformation corresponding to her own is an absurd and lachrymose Roumanian nobleman. Amid the relaxed proprieties of the eighteenth century, Orlando often roams London in man’s dress, more at home in the honest company of daughters of joy than in the artificial salons of her peers.

There were many stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel, served on one of the King’s ships as a captain, was seen to dance naked on a balcony, and fled with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady’s husband followed them.... She enjoyed the love of both sexes ... for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive.[62]

The neatness with which fantasy here dodges any scandalous implications may well account for the difficult _tour de force_ which the whole volume is.

With the advent of Queen Victoria, a depressing social change occurs: humankind is rigorously divided into Men, whose role is to lead, protect, support; and Women, who must submit, be timorous, and cling. The results, both personal and literary, Mrs. Woolf plainly considers lamentable. Orlando’s history turns emotionally barren and housewifely, and neither reading nor writing afford her any relief. Though she suffers from personal loneliness and social disapprobation, she refuses to consider marriage under such a regime. She waits instead for the twentieth century:

There was something definite and distinct about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a distinction, a desperation....[63]

In this century she meets a man with the spirit of a poet—he knows Shelley by heart—but who has also been “a soldier and a sailor and ... explored the east.” Mutual love is instantaneous, and complete union follows swiftly upon the intuitive moment when both cry out together: “You’re a woman, Shel!” “You’re a man, Orlando!”

For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.[64]

The natural and happy results are marriage and a son, but not a Victorian ménage. “Shel” is gone the greater part of the time on his adventurous voyages, and Orlando is free to “write and write and write” and win literary prizes.

Clearly Mrs. Woolf felt that to be an integrated, and above all, a creative personality, one needs freedom from the Procrustes’ bed of sex. She was not preaching license in the name of some bohemian deity of Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village. She was begging psychological _Lebensraum_ for the creative artist. Nevertheless, the total sum of Orlando’s experience is, beyond question, bisexual.

Among these four novels of 1928, Mackenzie’s satire was mild rather than sharp; Miss Bowen pictured variance as an unhappy state but treated her variant girl with entire sympathy; and Mrs. Woolf pled as it were in the abstract, Miss Hall in passionate particular, for the variant, even the lesbian woman of personal integrity. The annual balance was, therefore, on the whole positive, and it is clear that the verdict early in the year against _Well of Loneliness_ restrained British publishers only from issuing lesbian propaganda.

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