Inseparable Read online

  ALSO BY EMMA DONOGHUE

  Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801

  We Are Michael Field

  Poems Between Women: Four Centuries of Love,

  Romantic Friendship and Desire (editor)

  The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories (editor)

  Stir-fry

  Hood

  Ladies and Gentlemen

  Kissing the Witch

  Slammerkin

  The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits

  Life Mask

  Touchy Subjects

  Landing

  The Sealed Letter

  Dedicated to my remarkable mother,

  Frances Donoghue,

  who has never asked me to put down a book

  and do something useful.

  Contents

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Introduction

  1. Travesties

  The Female Bridegroom · The Male Amazon

  2. Inseparables

  Shall We Be Sunder’d? · Jealousies

  3. Rivals

  Rakes vs. Ladies · Feminists vs. Husbands · The Beautiful House

  4. Monsters

  Sex Fiends · Secret Enemies · Not Quite Human

  5. Detection

  Now You See It · Crimes of Passion · It Takes One to Know One

  6. Out

  Case Histories · On Trial · First Love · Devil May Care · Places for Us

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (better known as Girodet-Trioson), “Songe de Sapho” (Sappho’s Dream), engraved by Henri-Guillaume Châtillon, in Sappho, Bion, Moschus. Receuil de compositions dessinées par Girodet [1827] (1829). (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

  Walter H. Deverell, “Viola and Olivia,” in Art and Poetry (formerly The Germ), no. 4 (May 1850). (Courtesy of Yale University Library)

  Pieter van der Borcht, “Jupiter Seizes Callisto,” in P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses (1591). (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)

  Hubert François Gravelot, “Le premier baiser de l’amour” (“Love’s first kiss”) (1760), engraved by N. Le Mire, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloïse (1761). (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)

  C. Carleton [attributed], “Love felt her soft lips on her cheek,” in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Love of Parson Lord and Other Stories (1900). (Jeff Kaylin, www.wilkinsfreeman.info)

  H. Gray, “Miss Temple Rejecting Miss Hobart’s Caresses,” in Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Count de Grammont [1713] (1889). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Suffrage Parade, New York City, May 4, 1912. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Frank Walter Taylor, “‘You’re an unutterably philistine person,’ said Sylvia,” in Catherine Wells, “The Beautiful House,” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (March 1912). (Courtesy of Yale University Library)

  Achille Devéria [attributed], in Alfred de Musset, Gamiani (1833). (Courtesy of Editions Dominique Leroy)

  “Your strength will wear out against my will and you will exhaust yourself in useless struggles,” in Adolphe Belot, Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife (1891). (author’s collection)

  David Henry Friston, in J. Sheridan LeFanu, Carmilla, in The Dark Blue (March 1872). (Courtesy of Yale University Library)

  Irving Politzer, jacket of Gladys Mitchell, Speedy Death [1929] (1932). (Courtesy of Jason Hall, creator of www.gladysmitchell.com)

  Gordon Frederick Browne, “‘The Great Madame Sara is dead,’ she said,” in L. T. Meade, The Sorceress of the Strand (1903). ((c) The British Library Board. Shelfmark 012638.dd.45)

  “The strangeness and peril of my situation,” in Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White [1860] (c. 1900). (Courtesy of Yale University Library)

  John Cosmo Clark, in a review of Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, in The American Sketch (March 1929). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Jacket of John Wesley Carhart, Norma Trist; or, Pure Carbon: A Story of the Inversion of the Sexes (1895). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Elsie Anna Wood, “To the music of Karen’s fiddle, they danced on the turf,” in Elsie J. Oxenham, The Abbey Girls Go Back to School (1922). (Courtesy of the Abbey Chronicle, the Elsie J. Oxenham Appreciation Society)

  Jacket, Marlene Longman [Robert Silverberg], Sin Girls (1960). (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University Library)

  “Le Sémiramis-Bar,” in La Vie Parisienne (March 27, 1909). (Courtesy of Yale University Library)

  Introduction

  WHEN I WAS A SMALL CHILD I read fairy tales. I carried straining plastic bags of them home from the library every Saturday: Grimm, Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Arabian Nights, Br’er Rabbit, Celtic myths, Polish folktales, Italian ones, Japanese, Greek…Soon I started spotting repetitions. It thrilled me to detect the same basic shape (for instance, the motif of the selkie, or wife from the sea) under many different, exotic costumes. When I announced my discovery to my father, he broke it to me gently that others had got there first: a Russian called Vladimir Propp, and before him a Finn called Antti Aarne, who published his system of classifying folk motifs back in 1910. Ah well. This disappointment taught me, even more than the fairy tales had, that there is nothing new under the sun.

  I remained a greedy reader, and when I found myself falling for a girl, at fourteen, I began seeking out stories of desire between women. The first such title I spent my hoarded pocket money on was a truly grim Dutch novel first published in 1975, Harry Mulisch’s Twee Vrouwen (in English, Two Women). Sylvia leaves Laura for Laura’s ex-husband, Alfred—but, it turns out, only to get pregnant. The two women are blissfully reunited for a single evening of planning the nursery decor before Alfred turns up and shoots Sylvia dead, leaving Laura to jump out a window. Shaken but not dissuaded, I read on, for the next twenty years and counting. You would be forgiven for thinking that my book list must have been rather short. But the paradox is that writers in English and other Western languages have been speaking about this so-called unspeakable subject for the best part of a millennium.

  What I am offering now in Inseparable is a sort of map. It charts a territory of literature that, like all undiscovered countries, has been there all along. This territory is made up of a bewildering variety of landscapes, but I will be following half a dozen distinct paths through it. Despite a suggestion in the New York Times in 1941 that the subject of desire between women should be classified as “a minor subsidiary1 of tragedy,” in fact it turns up across the whole range of genres. Reading my way from medieval romance to Restoration comedy to the modern novel, mostly in English (but often in French, and sometimes in translations from Latin, Italian, Spanish, or German), I uncover the most perennially popular plot motifs of attraction between women. Here they are, in a nutshell.

  TRAVESTIES: Cross-dressing (whether by a woman or a man) causes the “accident” of same-sex desire.

  INSEPARABLES: Two passionate friends defy the forces trying to part them.

  RIVALS: A man and a woman compete for a woman’s heart.

  MONSTERS: A wicked woman tries to seduce and destroy an innocent one.

  DETECTION: The discovery of a crime turns out to be the discovery of same-sex desire.

  OUT: A woman’s life is changed by the realization that she loves her own sex.

  At this point you may wonder, are the women in these plays, poems, and fictions lesbians? Not necessarily, is how I would begin to answer. But perhaps we are better off postponing that question until we have asked more interesting ones.
In the first five of my six chapters, I will be looking at relations between women, rather than the more historically recent issue of self-conscious sexual orientation. Although I occasionally say lesbian2 as shorthand, the twenty-first-century use of that word as a handy identity label does not begin to do justice to the variety of women’s bonds in literature from the 1100s to the 2000s. The past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door.

  Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (better known as Girodet-Trioson), “Songe de Sapho” [Sappho’s Dream], engraved by Henri-Guillaume Châtillon, in Sappho, Bion, Moschus. Receuil de compositions dessinées par Girodet [1827] (1829).

  This is the third of the French Romantic painter’s designs in the “antique vase” style to accompany his translations from Sappho. They were published three years after Girodet’s death by his student, friend, and executor, Marie-Philippe Coupin de la Couperie, who claimed that this image showed Sappho in the arms of the goddess Venus, dreaming of her ideal husband.

  It is customary to lament the fact that desire between women, before the twentieth century, was one long silence. After all, everyone has heard the story about Queen Victoria, whose ministers wanted to make lesbian sex illegal in 1885 but could not bring themselves to explain to her that it was even possible…Except that it turns out that never happened. (Dating from 1977,3 the Victoria story is a popular urban myth that allows us to feel more knowledgeable and daring than our nineteenth-century ancestors.) On the contrary, literary researchers over the past few decades have unearthed a very long history of what Terry Castle calls “the lesbian idea”; her eleven-hundred-page anthology The Literature of Lesbianism (2003)—by far the best available—can only sample the riches.

  In writing Inseparable,4 I have had to be very selective. A hint or a glimpse5 does not constitute a plot motif: I include only texts in which the attraction between women is undeniably there. It must also be more than a moment; it must have consequences for the story. The emotion can range from playful flirtation to serious heartbreak, from the exaltedly platonic to the sadistically lewd, but in every case it has to make things happen.

  Take, for instance, “The Man of Law’s Tale,” the fifth of the Canterbury Tales (1400) by courtier and diplomat Geoffrey Chaucer. It tells how Custance, daughter of a Christian Roman emperor and bride of the sultan of Syria, is cast adrift in a boat through her mother-in-law’s machinations. Shipwrecked on the Northumberland coast, Custance immediately arouses the protective passion of Dame Hermengyld, the constable’s wife: “Hermengyld loved hire6 as hir lyf.” Over months of prayers and tears, Custance wins Hermengyld from paganism to Christianity, and Hermengyld manages to cure a blind man in the name of Jesus—which prompts her husband to convert too. But a knight whom Custance has rejected is jealous of the women’s closeness; he sneaks into the room where they are sleeping together and slits Hermengyld’s throat, leaving the bloody knife beside Custance to frame her for murder. The people are not fooled by this circumstantial evidence, since they have witnessed the women’s relationship with their own eyes: “For they han seyn hir evere so vertuous, / And lovyng Hermengyld right as hir lyf.” (For they have seen Custance be virtuous all the time, and love Hermengyld as her life.) The people’s suspicion is confirmed by divine intervention: as the knight tells his lies in court, his eyeballs suddenly drop out of his head. This is an excellent example, perhaps the earliest in English, of how a mutual passion between two women can be not just an ornamental extra, but what moves the story along.

  ⋅ ⋅ ⋅

  Because of the time frame7 I have chosen, most of the texts discussed in Inseparable are by British or French men. For the purposes of this book,8 I do not much care who wrote them, nor why. What interests me is the stories themselves, and the ways they connect. Though love between women can be found in some medieval romances, it was in the sixteenth century that it really moved into the spotlight, and from that point on it has taken up more and more space, growing from a mere theme into a literary tradition of its own.

  But as traditions go, it is a peculiar one. One reason is that—if I may state the obvious—lesbian storylines begin with two or more women, rather than a man and a woman. This means that gender roles are up for grabs. Those who write about love between the sexes, from the book of Genesis on, have relied on a certain consensus about the differences between husband and wife, say, or lover and mistress, or rake and ingénue. Even if they bend those hallowed cultural rules, they are playing a familiar game. And those who write about love between men—although the subject is fraught with danger—have the classical past to draw on, and especially the Platonic ideal of the older male lover/mentor and the beautiful young beloved/protégé. Those who write about love between women have no such agreed starting point.

  Here, for instance, is the moment in Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) when Lakey’s old college friends fret over the fact that she has come home with a female lover.

  On the one hand, there were Lakey-and-Maria,9 as you might say Polly-and-Jim, a contented married pair; on the other, there was an exquisite captive of a fierce robber woman, locked up in a Castle Perilous, and woe to the knight who came to release her from the enchantment. But it was possible to see it the other way around. Supposing it were Lakey, the inscrutable, intelligent Lakey, who had made poor Maria, who was not very bright, her slave? The fact that it was possible to reverse the relation like an hourglass was what the girls found so troubling.

  If this easily flipped “hourglass” was still a puzzle in the 1960s, how much more so in the 1100s. Perhaps this is one reason the theme has aroused the interest of so many writers, who, like Lakey’s friends, find the notion of desire between women a lasting source of wonder and fantasy, as well as anxiety.

  Another oddity of this literary tradition is that it includes as much denial or coyness as assertion. I picture this literature as an archipelago: thousands of stories, but scattered like islands in little pools of silence. Interestingly, you might expect that the earlier texts would be veiled, and the later ones explicit—but I have found that erotic situations between women are sometimes presented frankly in medieval or Renaissance romance, whereas well into the twentieth century many novelists evoke passion with the discreet vocabulary of friendship.

  Passion between women has never had a settled status in Western culture, or even a definition with fixed parameters. Right through the hymns of praise to noble love between ladies crash discordant rants against lust between wicked females. In every generation, it seems, writers have asked themselves whether desire between women is unprecedented or omnipresent, holy or evil, heartwarming or ridiculous. No matter how often it is written about, it remains somehow unofficial, lurking below the radar: an unsolvable puzzle, a perpetual novelty. Unlike say, flowers, or food, or the weather, this subject could be extremely tricky for writers. Queen Victoria—myths aside—probably knew more or less what could go on between women, but that does not mean that the subject was a safe one in her time, or before, or after. In 1921,10 twenty years after her death, the House of Lords did defeat an attempt to add lesbianism to the law against male homosexuality; the peers feared to “advertise” this vice by naming it. Quite a few of the books and plays I discuss in Inseparable were censored, suppressed, or prosecuted in their day. And even if there were no legal consequences for writers who tackled this subject, there was always the risk of mystifying or outraging part of their audience.

  So what did they do, these men (and eventually women) of the scribbling tribe, who were troubled or intrigued by the idea of passion between women, but unsure how to shape it into a story, and wary of how people might take it? They looked over their shoulders. They relied heavily on their reading (either of their contemporaries or of ancient sources), whether by copying without scruple, self-consciously echoing a name or a speech from a previous work, borrowing aspects of several different storylines to make something new, confirming or countering or defying previous literary models.

  Being a novel
ist and playwright by trade, I say this by experience as much as observation: writers like old plots because they work, and for all our claims of originality, we do a lot of recycling. If all writing is intertextual,11 writing about desire between women—because of its controversial status—has been particularly so.

  So Inseparable could also be called a family tree, because it lays out certain motifs that have been repeated over the centuries, hybridizing and mutating in every generation. Or you could think of it as a field guide to the flora and fauna of lesbian-themed literature. It calls attention to what is there, but generally goes unnoticed, and reveals how the rare is related to the common-or-garden variety.

  Which begs the question, if literature has been full of the theme of women in love for so many centuries, then why has it so often gone unnoticed? Why is desire between women still generally presumed to be a late-twentieth-century theme?

  Some of the texts I look at here have been forgotten because they did not reach many readers in the first place, or because, although popular in their day, they have long since dropped out of circulation. But given that this tradition includes such canonical authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sidney, Richardson, Rousseau, Johnson, Diderot, Dickens, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Maupassant, Hardy, James, and Lawrence—given that, as Terry Castle puts it, “virtually every author12 of note since the Renaissance has written something, somewhere, touching on the subject of love between women”—how can we have collectively forgotten it, let it slip out of the history of ideas, or not registered it in the first place?

  Writers must bear some of the responsibility. Very often they break a same-sex story up and scatter the pieces across a longer narrative, or limit the story to the subplot where it will attract less attention. Judith Roof argues, of Sigmund Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), that