Lesbian Images: Essays Read online

  Lesbian Images

  Essays

  Jane Rule

  For Elizabeth Marie Pope

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  Myth and Morality, Sources of Law and Prejudice

  From Sin to Sickness

  Radclyffe Hall 1886–1943

  Gertrude Stein 1874–1946

  Willa Cather 1876–1947

  Vita Sackville-West 1892–1962

  Ivy Compton-Burnett 1892–1969

  Elizabeth Bowen 1899–1973

  Colette 1873–1954

  Violette Leduc 1907–1972

  Margaret Anderson 1893–1973

  Dorothy Baker 1907–1968

  May Sarton 1912–

  Maureen Duffy 1933–

  Four Decades of Fiction

  Recent Nonfiction

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  A Biography of Jane Rule

  Preface

  THIS BOOK IS NOT intended to be a comprehensive literary or cultural history of lesbians. It is, rather, a common reader—or not so uncommon reader—a statement of my own attitudes toward lesbian experience as measured against the images made by other women writers in their work and/or lives. Though much of the literature I consider has been importantly influenced by psychology and sociology, the bias of art is still to see truth in the rich particular rather than in the lowest common denominator of a hundred case histories. Social scientists too often reduce human experience in order to understand it. Insight into the complexity of life is still, for all the “scientific” studies, the province of literature. For anyone who wants to know what it is to be lesbian, this book offers as many answers as there are voices to speak. Though I am obviously more in sympathy with some than with others, no view need cancel another, for this is an exploration into variety rather than a thesis to prove my particular.

  From the ugly masochism of Violette Leduc to the lyric wonder of Margaret Anderson, from the moral earnestness of Gertrude Stein to the ambivalent cynicism of Colette, from the neutered sexuality of Ivy Compton-Burnett to the blatant sexual hunger of Vita Sackville-West, from the silence of Willa Cather to the confessions of May Sarton, the reality of lesbian experience transcends all theories about it. If this book astonishes simply by the number of women, and very gifted women, who have been concerned about love between women, it will have fulfilled its purpose, for no one can comfortably dismiss all those who find a place in these pages.

  Introduction

  WHEN MY FIRST NOVEL, The Desert of the Heart, was published in 1964, the majority of reviewers agreed in their frank disapproval of the subject matter. “The Desert of the Heart is extremely frank in its treatment of lesbianism. Perhaps a little too frank. The author almost makes it seem desirable.”1 “I learned a lot more about Lesbians than I care to know.”2 “There are facets of mental illness that are not particularly pretty and although these things are no longer discussed behind closed doors, is it necessary to bring them into print for display?”3 “But all the time you keep turning to the photograph of the author on the jacket and wondering how such a nice looking woman could ever have chosen so distasteful a subject.”4 “Miss Rule’s writing has a kind of perverted good taste about it.”5 Such phrases as “the moral suicide of homosexuality”6 and “the disaster of lesbian love”7 were common clarities of attitude just ten years ago. When my reappointment as a university lecturer was challenged because of the book, my more liberal colleagues defended me with the argument that writers of murder mysteries were not necessarily themselves murderers; therefore it followed that a writer of a lesbian novel was not necessarily a lesbian. I was reappointed. Eight years later, when my third novel, Against the Season, came out, reviewers—some of them the same people—were generally less certain in their moral smugness, and some could review the book without discomfort. The result of this change of climate is critical confusion. About the style and tone of the book, for instance, one critic says, “Intelligent, well-bred, skillful, sensitive and always in good taste. But it never breaks through into the roughness and mystery of fully rounded life.”8 But for another, “there’s more hairy-chested hormones in this one book than the first six from the pen of Truman Capote, but it’s all coursing through ostensibly female veins.”9 Though the estimates of vitality and taste are in direct conflict, both reviewers are still essentially objecting to the subject matter. Of the kinds of people in the book, it is said, “There is something so very ordinary about these people that they become terribly familiar,”10 and it is also said, “She appears to have a fascination with human aberrations.”11 Of the appeal of the characters, one reviewer claims I have the skill of “giving her characters strong life and making most of them likeable, which is more than many contemporary novelists can do.”12 But another complains, “if personalities have little more than names to distinguish them, I cannot bring myself to feel for them.”13 In this year, no one, as far as I know, questioned my appointment as visiting lecturer in a creative writing department though I had long since worn the public label of lesbian.

  All judgments of books involve subjective morality whether the language of that judgment is frank or veiled in aesthetic terms like “good taste” and “bad taste.” Because the reviewer’s bias is so often undeclared, all a reader can hope for is some indication of what the book is about, but until very recently many reviewers were reluctant to mention homosexuality even in novels majorly concerned with the subject. Even publishers have been shy in their descriptions of the few lesbian novels they have agreed to publish. The blurb for Han Suyin’s lesbian novel, Winter Love, published in 1962, reads, in toto, “Winter Love is entirely different from anything she has done so far. It reveals another facet in the wide range of human emotions which Han Suyin studies with the objectivity of the physician, and the compassion which is an inseparable part of the equipment of any writer worthy of more than a temporary fame.”14

  Moral smugness, prejudice veiled in literary language, and embarrassed silence are poor tools for saying anything significant about literature. One reviewer put the problem with refreshing honesty: “Oh! for the simple past when all that was needed was an appreciation of the English language and the ability to express it for a man to be a qualified reviewer of contemporary fiction. Nowadays any reviewer with educational qualifications below those of a Ph.D. in Applied Psychology is less than fully qualified to register an opinion.”15 Though such a training would corrupt rather than educate the reviewer, at least he is admitting to his limitation in experience and understanding.

  I do not often make literary judgments in this book since my concern is to discover what images of lesbians women writers have projected in fiction, biography, and autobiography. Involved in literature as I am, both as a writer and a teacher, I have not always resisted the temptation to make comments on craft since its excellence can clarify and convince, its failure distort and disappoint. But I am preoccupied here not with literary ability so much as with the interaction of these writers with their culture, that is, how they are influenced by religious and psychological concepts and by their own personal experience in presenting lesbian characters. I have often been limited by lack of information, and I have tried to make a clear distinction between what is based on fact and what can only be conjecture. But the scholarly care I have taken does not exempt me from my own moral subjectivity. I am so far from objective disinterest that my life, or at least the quality of my life, depends on what people think and feel about what it is to be lesbian.

  I read Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness first when I was fifteen years old. I knew nothing about her real life and not very much about my own, but I was badly fr
ightened. Like Stephen Gordon, the main female character in the book, I was six feet tall. I had broad shoulders and narrow hips, no bosom, and a deep voice. Though I had a feminine interest or two like needlework and collecting miniature animals, I had spent most of my childhood trying to horn in on my older brother’s activities, whether it was touch football (when I split open my elbow, my mother sighed for the permanent damage to my feminine future, doomed at six to long-sleeved evening dresses) or fishing trips with my father (who indulgently defended my right to be the youngest and only female even though I was always car sick on the way and rarely caught anything but trees from which I had to be untangled). At twelve I was sent to a girls’ school, grateful because I was already too tall, too active, and too bright to make anything but the most grotesque transition into heterosexual adolescence. Among girls I could still take pride in all those attributes my brother could carry into maturity without apology. I didn’t want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me. Since I could not hide the one fault, I decided there was no point in hiding the other. In a girls’ school to play basketball and argue the fine points of Latin grammar were not considered abnormal. But in The Well of Loneliness, I suddenly discovered that I was a freak, a genetic monster, a member of a third sex, who would eventually call myself by a masculine name (telephone operators were already addressing me as “sir”), wear a necktie, and live in the exile of some European ghetto. I don’t remember how I came upon the book in the first place. I was not, in those days, a great reader. I do remember that it radically changed my understanding of my childhood and my perception of the more important friendships in my life at the time.

  In uncertain conversation with women older than I, I got a garbled notion of psychology, which had to do with conditioning. It was natural to go through a lesbian phase, but the solution to it was to be seduced by the first available male. Once a woman had thoroughly enjoyed heterosexuality, a lesbian experience now and then could be happy seasoning for a rich life. But, if the initial experience were with another woman, one would be sexually fixed like a poor bird on a door knob for life. I tried that idea on, and it fit me no better than the size eighteen button-down-the-front golfers that I belted around my telephone-pole body. I was used to looking ridiculous, but I could not get used to feeling ridiculous. I had never been as resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because, although I couldn’t sew, I could think.

  I am not sorry that the guilt I carried about my first sexual experiences was tempered with real love rather than with correct heterosexuality. Nor do I regret that there was nothing of conventional pairing in that first relationship which required of me, instead of jealous exclusiveness, real generosity and love for someone else’s husband and children. It confirmed for me very early the value of loving, the awareness of sex as one of the languages for loving rather than either an identity or an act of possession. To be a lover was no more a label, under these circumstances, than to be a daughter or sister or friend, responsibilities and pleasures I have not, even now, devalued in order to own and be owned by another person. Cleaving is an activity which should be left to snails for cleaning ponds and aquariums. Multiplicity of relationships does not create the number of conflicts the morality tales of our culture would have us believe if the basis of each relationship is the autonomy of the self and the freedom of the other.

  It may have been simply my misfortune to encounter men whose only concept of freedom was their own. The Second World War ended not long before I went to college, and by the time I had the delayed revelation of heterosexuality, callow boys and veterans had declared a new war over female property. While other women seemed to be able to think of themselves as prizes in the contest, I could never feel anything but victim. Even when I was selected for size and intelligence the better to breed fine sons, I could not feel flattered. Ancestor worship had been dying out in my family; therefore to be looked at as a set of ongoing genes neglected another of my outsized attributes: my self. I got practiced in defensive argument. Giantism was one of the first signals of coming extinction of a species. One of my grandmothers was a redwood tree. What if I produced nothing but Amazons? That was not a vision altogether unattractive to me, but it acted like a body blow to any man with a dynasty in his eyes. When I tried being friendly instead, occasionally offering up hope for my own life, the answer was, “But you don’t have to be anything but mine.” That argument saved any number of young women I knew from a defeating term paper or threatening comprehensive examinations. Some got as far as the language requirements for the Ph.D. before they admitted that it was easier to marry than earn one. After all, this was the early fifties when even our college president was flogging his book Educating Our Daughters (to be wives and mothers) and instituting more and more child psychology and child development courses. Our education was simply part of our dowry.

  I have my great-aunt Etta’s hope chest. Mother, looking at it the other day, said, “Poor Etta.” She never married, though she was engaged a couple of times and collected some fine pieces of persuading jewelry which she didn’t return. (I have one of her diamond and sapphire bracelets.) She was said to have been in love with the blacksmith on one of my great-grandfather’s ranches, but he was not acceptable to the family. Once her parents had died, Etta spent every summer at the ranch in the big house at the top of the hill, and Charlie, the blacksmith, lived in a cottage at the bottom. She designed a beautiful garden there, an acre of rare azaleas and rhododendrons against a background of redwood trees. Charlie did the heavy work. As a child, when I stayed with Etta, she taught me needlework and the tending of flowers. Charlie taught me to sight the ears of a jackrabbit just at dusk by the vegetable garden fence and aim well. He also taught me to clean pigeons. In the winter Etta lived in town or traveled. Her older sister, Ida, died during the birth of her first child. Her younger sister, Carlotta, married twice. The first marriage ended in a scandalous divorce, the second when her alcoholic husband died. Poor Etta?

  When I offer this evidence to my mother, she laughs, surprised and recognizing. A psychologist friend of hers has recently given her a new term, “divergent thinker.” I am a divergent thinker.

  My skepticism about the rewards of marriage did not come essentially from the study of the unhappy marriages in my family or among my friends’ parents though there was enough evidence everywhere to discourage the blindest of optimists. My own parents were and still are that myth rarely discovered outside of ladies’ magazines, a genuinely happy and deeply devoted pair. Often one person of a couple has the talent and desire to be mate and parent—the terms for it are martyr or saint for the female, henpecked and castrated for the male (curious: noble nouns for the female, denigrating adjectives for the male). Rarely two people share an avocation for family life and bring to it all the intense imagination usually associated instead with careers, religious service, or the arts. People who have envied my parents’ relationship “blame” one or the other for its success. “Art wouldn’t be such a good husband if Jane weren’t such a good wife.” “Jane wouldn’t be such a good wife if Art weren’t a remarkable husband.” Both statements are true. I admire them in their lives as I admire great violinists in duet, but I have never wanted to practice being a wife or a violinist long and faithfully enough to aspire to that kind of performance, and I also suspect that I have the native talent for neither.

  People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives. My mother has never said vengefully to me, “Just wait until you have children of your own and see how hard it is.” She hasn’t complained for lack of grandchildren, nor do I think she would even if she weren’t adequately provided by my brother’s and sister’s children. Someone once asked her when one should start letting one’s children go. “When they’re born,” she replied. Apparently conventional, my mother has little respect for any
position of authority, even her own. People earn her good opinion of them or don’t enjoy it, and she has taught us the same kind of testing independence. Father, sometimes concerned at the high cost of our rebellions, would say against our “I’d rather be right than President,” “You know, sometimes it’s better to be President.” My father and I agreed recently that there’s one perversion of an old saw that won’t ever cut butter any more.

  Being that rare peculiarity, the product of a happy marriage, I used to complain good-humoredly that I never had anyone to blame but myself for my own shortcomings and the disasters in my life. Less cheerfully, I wondered why two such good and loving people would, sooner or later, have to be confronted with the social pariah I was on my way to becoming. I had read enough psychology then to know that, if I finally lived as I wanted to, I might be excused, but they never would be. I have tried to solve most of my problems for myself. That one I could never have sorted out without their help, which I could have asked for much earlier than I did.

  I was thirty years old when I finished writing The Desert of the Heart. I had lived the last five years with Helen, who had left her husband, her family, and her country to join me in Canada, and we were both teaching in the English Department at the University of British Columbia. Having written a number of short stories, some of which had been published, having discarded two earlier novels as useful only to me, I knew I’d finished a book that could be published. Because it dealt with a lesbian relationship, our privacy could be jeopardized as well as our jobs. My family, who had accepted Helen as a loved friend with whom I lived, would also have to deal with implications they either had not suspected or chose to ignore. For Helen there was never any question that the book should be published. If there were problems, we would cope with them as they arose. Three generations of women in her family had established a tradition of long and loving domestic friendships of which ours was only one example. My family had no such models for reassurance. I went home on holiday alone with the manuscript and asked them to read it. The comment I brought back with me was my father’s. “I think you are very courageous.” We did not at that time talk about my life. In fact, the subject of homosexuality has become an easy topic of conversation among us only since I started work on this book.