Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism: Reading Romans à Clef Between the Wars

Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism Reading Romans à Clef between the Wars

Sashi Nair

Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism

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Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism Reading Romans à Clef between the Wars Sashi Nair

© Sashi Nair 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–29837–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Heather, with love and for dear Oscar, whose birth marks the start of the next chapter

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef

1

1 ‘Moral poison’: Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness

36

2 ‘On her lips you kiss your own’: Theorizing desire in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood

69

3 ‘Truth & fantasy’: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as Sapphic roman à clef

95

4 ‘Gertrude, the world is a theatre for you’: Staging the self in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

119

5 Conclusion: ‘Two alert and vivid bodies’: Desire and salvation in H.D.’s HER

152

Notes

167

References

195

Index

204

vii

Acknowledgements The writing of this book was made possible by the support offered by the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. In particular, I would like to thank Clara Tuite, who supervised this project in its original incarnation as a PhD. Her intellectual generosity, encouragement, insightful feedback and constant willingness to provide advice have been invaluable. Thanks, too, must go to David Bennett and Deirdre Coleman for their feedback, advice and encouragement. I conducted archival research at the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne; the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Special Collections at the Hornbake Library, University of Maryland; and Special Collections, Morris Library, University of Delaware. I am grateful to the librarians and archivists who facilitated my research at each of these institutions. An earlier version of chapter two appeared elsewhere, and I thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing for permission to reproduce ‘“Dressing the Unknowable in the Garments of the Known”: Reading Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and the Sapphic Modernist Roman à Clef’, which appeared in Remaking Literary History, ed. Helen Groth and Paul Sheehan (Cambridge: Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010). Quotes from the letters of Bryher are used by permission of the Schaffner Family Foundation (copyright © 2011 by the Schaffner Family Foundation). A quote from a letter by Leonard Woolf appears courtesy of The University of Sussex and The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Leonard Woolf. Quotes from the letters of Djuna Barnes are copyright © The Authors League Fund, as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes. All quotes by Emily Holmes Coleman are copyright © of the Estate of Emily Holmes Coleman. I thank the managers of each of these estates for granting permission to reproduce the words of these authors and editors. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for the estate of Jane Heap. The friends who have provided stimulating conversation over coffee or wine over the last few years are too numerous to name, but they have proved indispensable throughout this process. Particular mention must go to Georgie Arnott, Angela Hesson, Amelia Scurry and Meredith Martin – their words of wisdom have been, and continue to be, invaluable. My final thanks must go to Heather Cummins, who is kind, generous and always supportive, and who brightens even the most difficult day. This book, about love and desire, is dedicated to her. viii

Introduction: Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef

In late July or early August, 1935, as Djuna Barnes was revising her elegiac novel Nightwood, she wrote to her friend, Emily Holmes Coleman, about her former lover, Thelma Wood: Had a letter from Thelma, possibly the last in my life if the book does get printed. She will hate me so – it’s awful – God almighty what a price one pays for 200 pages.1 On the 20th of September, she wrote again: I am apprehensive that perhaps I’ve written my best, my life and my love. What shall I write now that will be as good? Nothing I should think … In private at least, Barnes was not at all reluctant to admit that she had structured Nightwood around her ‘life’ and her female ‘love’. And while she was anxious about Wood’s potential reaction to the novel, she was not at all reticent about claiming a representation of personal experience as her ‘best’ work. On the other hand, in presenting the novel to the public, Nightwood’s editor, T.S. Eliot, argued strenuously against reading the novel as anything other than a study of ‘the human misery and bondage which is universal’. With his pre-emptive and revealing warning against reading Nightwood as ‘a horrid sideshow of freaks’, Eliot implies that ‘good’ literature is impersonal, and defies the reader to question Barnes’ objectivity.2 Eliot’s aesthetic ideals informed his introduction to Nightwood, but he was almost certainly equally concerned with circumventing criticism and even censorship,3 revealing an anxiety over public reception that Barnes appears not to have experienced, at least 1

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not to the same extent. Instead, she was preoccupied with the personal implications of a textualization of the private – she feared that the ‘price’ of publishing Nightwood would be a final loss of contact with Wood, and she doubted her ability to write once she had exhausted the material provided by her ‘life’ and ‘love’. Nightwood is a celebration of same-sex love, in the form of an elegy for its passing. Barnes was reflecting upon the suffering that characterized a failed lesbian relationship, yet her intention was to insist upon the significance of this relationship. Writing again to Coleman, she explained her decision to marry Robin, her fictionalization of Wood, to Felix Volkbein, with the claim that it was a necessary plot device that attests to the authenticity of same-sex love: people always say, ‘well of course those two women would never have been in love with each other if they had been normal, if any man had slept with them, if they had been well f----- and born a child’. Which is ignorance and utterly false, I married robin [sic] to prove this point …4 The kind of dispassionate objectivity that might be expected to underpin a study of universal human misery is notably absent here. The very narrative of Nightwood is structured by an intention to challenge common perceptions about ‘two women … in love with each other’ – to insist upon the intensity and reality of same-sex love and desire – and in spite of Eliot’s protests to the contrary, this is what the novel does. Eliot’s strategic misrepresentation of the novel, informed by a concern that an elegy for same-sex love was more likely to be censored than an objective study of human nature, works against Barnes’ stated intentions. That Eliot perceived a necessity for a depersonalizing and depoliticizing introduction raises the question of whether Barnes was ignorant of, or unconcerned about, the potential consequences of writing same-sex desire. Yet she was not unfamiliar with the pitfalls of pushing literary boundaries: the US postal service had refused to ship her bawdy, heterosexual family saga, Ryder (1928), while her lesbian satire, Ladies Almanack (1928), privately printed in Paris, had been banned by US customs. In spite of these incidents, and the fact that she was desperate for any income, she published a meditation on same-sex love that is explicit in its sexualization of that love. So why wasn’t Nightwood banned, like Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, which was declared obscene in Britain in 1928? Is it due to the fact that it was too obscure for the general reader to understand?

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 3

Can it be attributed to Eliot’s mediating introduction; his warning that ‘pride’ necessarily motivates any reading that attributes individual psychologies to Nightwood’s characters?5 Or is it a function of the tragedy of the novel, which does not present homosexuality as a key to happiness? To a certain extent, each of these questions can be answered in the affirmative. This novel of the Parisian underworld – of expatriate outcasts and their non-normative desires and bitter disappointments – is an at times indecipherable representation of the pain and loss that can accompany love. However, this explanation does not tell the whole story, and it underestimates the role played by the author in negotiating the potential consequences of publication. In a strategic circumvention of censorship, Nightwood cloaks the personal in a performance of critical objectivity and formal experimentation, providing a legitimization of same-sex desire only for those with the knowledge, and will to knowledge, required to find it there. I will examine Nightwood, and the critical responses it has attracted, in detail in the third chapter of this study. However, the brief discussion above has implications for our understanding of the very means by which women were able to write novelistic accounts of same-sex desire during the interwar period, and it raises important questions: What was the particular configuration of secrecy and openness that enabled writers to circumvent censorship even as they wrote about same-sex desire and female couplings? How did authors negotiate a public/private dialectic that located women and sex within the private sphere, particularly given that ‘perverse’ sexuality could be discussed in public only on terms set by those men (scientists, politicians, moralists, magistrates) whose public speech around sex went unpoliced? What might it mean that some readers would fail to recognize the lesbian desire contained in novels that embedded such representations in personal references, or that some readers might see these novels as dismissing or even condemning such desire? This study will argue that in order to answer these questions, critical attention must be given to the way in which anticipated reception influenced literary production, in a period when same-sex desire was representable through the careful, layered address to an imagined heterogeneous audience characterized by unevenly held knowledge. I will argue that novels such as Nightwood can be productively characterized as romans à clef, and that to do so is to take full account of personal references and private addresses expressed and encrypted within literary texts of the early twentieth century. American and English female authors of serious ‘Sapphic’ modernism, which represented same-sex desire via personal references yet circumvented censorship, mobilized

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a layered, simultaneous address to public, counterpublic and coterie audiences in order to represent same-sex desire. The Sapphic modernist roman à clef was palatable, or at least inoffensive, to a mainstream reading public, yet it did not rely upon dominant discourses that pathologized sexual otherness or characterized it as obscene. Differentiating the Sapphic modernist roman à clef from other forms of ‘life-writing’ is the careful negotiation of multiple, imagined points of reception contained within the novels in question. To identify this as a generic characteristic is to acknowledge the interdependencies of production and reception and mobilize these interdependencies as interpretive tools; it is to facilitate a discussion of the tensions between public, counterpublic and coterie readerships; and it is to acknowledge the significance of the dialectic between public and private when it comes to the representation of a subject that is necessarily structured by secrecy. The Sapphic modernist roman à clef exploits the relationship between public and private in ways that transform our readings of these texts. I will argue, then, that in the period between the world wars, a number of female modernist authors mobilized a particular version of the roman à clef genre in order to represent a desire that was seemingly unspeakable, strategically deploying references to personal experience as a means to simultaneously reveal and encrypt same-sex emotional and physical attachments. I will suggest that representations of same-sex desire penned by Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein circumvented censorship and transformed the terms upon which such desire could be conceptualized and spoken. These authors’ negotiations of revelation and dissimulation provided the contemporary reader with multiple points of potential identification while at the same time rendering allusions to same-sex desire too slippery to fail any purportedly objective test of ‘obscenity’. The layered address written into the novels in question may have directed the most subversive references to friends and lovers, but the performed elision of same-sex desire played not only to the private reader’s knowledge, but also on the general reader’s will to knowledge – a counterpublic address was grounded in the assumption that while some readers could recognize (or at least guess) what was left unsaid, those who ‘did not want to know’ were not compelled to look beyond the surface. Any study of homosexuality and secrecy in modernist literature must consider Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet. Although she is concerned with the particularities of male modernist writings, her interpretation of the ‘mappings of secrecy and disclosure’ that have surrounded homosexuality since the late nineteenth century provides a productive axiom for this project.6 As part of her discussion of the

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 5

binaries in Western thought that underpin a culture ‘structured … by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition’, Sedgwick argues that: ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary dark, are produced by, and correspond to particular knowledges and circulate as part of particular regimes of truth.7 It was an awareness of this epistemological logic governing homosexual representation that enabled the authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef to push the boundaries of what could be said. As long as no potentially censorious reader was forced to acknowledge a ‘truth’ that might be deemed obscene, these writers could draw attention to the unspeakable without ‘speaking’ it, producing a space for the representation of samesex desire that could only be filled by the knowledge of the reader. Where The Well of Loneliness was suppressed because it was seen to force knowledge upon the impressionable (the purportedly ignorant and innocent), novels like Nightwood and Woolf’s Orlando (1928) could only be described as obscene if extra-textual knowledge of same-sex desire was publicly spoken, and veiled references to the pleasure of same-sex desire publicly revealed.8 So if the intensity of Nora’s love for Robin in Nightwood could equally be read as a study of the misery of lesbian relationships,9 and if the female Orlando’s passion for Sasha and desire for Nell could be read back onto her earlier incarnation as a man, then these were the ‘truths’ most readily available to a general readership. In a period when ignorance functioned as ‘truth’, then, elliptical accounts of same-sex desire could be carefully constructed in order to address those ‘in the know’, or those who wanted to know, while capitalizing upon the impossibility and unspeakability of same-sex desire. Woolf, in particular, was always conscious of the epistemological limits of homosexual representation, and she overtly, and somewhat derisively, occupied the space between the sayable and the unsayable, explicitly ‘screening’ revelations of female homosexuality: it cannot be denied that when women get together – but hist – they are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print. All they desire is – but hist again – is that not a man’s step on the stair?10 ‘Hist’ draws attention to what cannot be written, blatantly substituting a call for silence for that which has been deemed unspeakable. Woolf

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invites the reader to find desire and sex between women in Orlando, but does not insist upon it, instead using a heterogeneous readership’s knowledge of, and attitude toward, ‘Sapphism’ as a way of representing same-sex desire. Sedgwick argues that as a result of the unacknowledged crisis of male ‘homo/heterosexual definition’, the ‘performative aspects of texts’ and texts’ ‘reader relations’ come to be ‘sites of definitional creation, violence and rupture in relation to particular readers, particular institutional circumstances’.11 For authors of Sapphic romans à clef, the unpredictability of textual reception is mitigated by the fact that the particular silence adhering to lesbian desire is characterized by the purported impossibility of such desire. Nevertheless, what is significant about these texts is that ‘reader relations’ and the pressures that adhere to them are deliberately relocated from the point of reception to the address written into texts themselves. Textual negotiations manage an imagined readership characterized by heterogeneity and potential hostility, such that same-sex desire is representable – it is not eclipsed, and nor was it censored. Female homosexuality in the interwar period was simultaneously impossible (and therefore unspeakable), pathological and dangerous. I will move on now to an examination of the limited language that was available to discuss lesbian desire, and the very particular contexts in which those discussions occurred. This will provide an essential backdrop to an interrogation of the linguistic manoeuvres contained within Sapphic romans à clef.

Lesbian desire in print and on trial In 1918, two trials transformed the terms upon which same-sex desire could be spoken in Britain in between the wars. Rose Allatini’s novel of pacifism and homosexuality, entitled Despised and Rejected and published under the pseudonym A.T. Fitzroy, was banned; and dancer Maud Allan unsuccessfully sued independent Member of Parliament, Noel Pemberton-Billing, for libel after he published an article implying that she was a lesbian. In both cases, national loyalty was at stake, as Allatini’s novel was banned under the Defense of the Realm Act, and homosexuality was positioned by Pemberton-Billing as an example of treacherous German allegiances. A number of critics have provided excellent analyses of these cases, and of their relationship to each other, and as such, I am not going to attempt to do the same. However, the implications of these trials for my own study are significant, and as such, I will address them briefly here. In particular, I am interested in the impact of these trials upon the particular configuration of secrecy and disclosure that

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 7

characterized speech and writing about homosexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. I am concentrating on the semantic, social and legal shifts that occurred in the United Kingdom because they so effectively reveal the means by which a particular configuration of secrecy, knowledge and ignorance came to circulate around female same-sex desire, where that configuration impacted upon all writing in English. The Pemberton-Billing libel trial was characterized by hysterical and hyperbolic claims, made against Maud Allan as well as homosexuality more generally, and by the absurdity of the defence proffered by PembertonBilling. Pemberton-Billing was an anti-Semitic, anti-German independent member of parliament, who strenuously campaigned for military expansion and against ‘aliens’ via his ‘Vigilante Society’ and its magazine, first entitled the Imperialist, then renamed the Vigilante. In January 1918, he published an article (written by his assistant, Captain Harold Spencer, discharged from the British army on grounds of insanity) entitled ‘The First 47,000’, which ‘revealed’ the existence of a German ‘black book’ that contained the names of 47,000 British homosexual men and lesbians. According to the article, these individuals – including ‘wives of men in supreme position’, in a not-so-subtle reference to Margot Asquith, the purportedly lesbian wife of the former Liberal Prime Minister – had been corrupted and then blackmailed over the course of two decades, and they had betrayed state secrets in the throes of ‘ecstacy’ (sic).12 When no libel charge, or the public forum that it would provide, was forthcoming as a result of Pemberton-Billing’s accusations, he grasped the next opportunity to provoke, publishing a comment on Maud Allan’s forthcoming private performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Again, Harold Spencer wrote on his behalf: The Cult of the Clitoris To be a member of Maud Allan’s performances in Oscar Wilde’s Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9, Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of these members, I have no doubt they would secure the names of several thousand of the first 47,000.13 This somewhat cryptic paragraph sparked what was labelled in the popular press as the ‘Trial of the Century’, as Maud Allan brought proceedings against Pemberton-Billing for implicating her in the homosexual debauchery of the ‘47,000’ who had contributed to the nation’s perceived failures in the war, and threatened the British Empire itself. The Pemberton-Billing trial marks the first time female homosexuality

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caught the attention of the British press, and the first time it was coupled with male homosexuality as a threat to national security. Yet at the same time, lesbianism itself remained unmentionable – the precise nature of the scandal was never articulated in the popular press, as the very phrase ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ remained unsayable and uninterpretable.14 The trial of Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected was a far quieter affair, and the court itself seemed unwilling to concede that what was at issue was not only the novel’s supposedly seditious support of pacifism, but also its validation of homosexuality. At the centre of Allatini’s novel is the friendship between Dennis, a male homosexual pacifist, and Antoinette, a lesbian. Theirs is a friendship that reveals identifications between male and female homosexuals, as well as the particular associations between male homosexuality and pacifism. According to Despised and Rejected, the ‘weak’ male homosexual – who doubles, in the national imagination, as the cowardly conscientious objector – is refigured as a harbinger of superior civilization. A number of scholars have provided astute readings of the novel itself, in particular of its mobilization of Edward Carpenter’s vision of the homosexual (or ‘Urning’) as a more insightful and evolved breed of human; as well as its curious representation of the female homosexual as one who is naturally attracted to the feminized, male-oriented male (a representation that cements Antoinette’s identification with the feminine and with pacifism, but undermines the novel’s identification of lesbianism as a ‘real’ orientation).15 What interests me here, however, is the novel’s trial and its subsequent banning. While the novel was prosecuted under the Defense of the Realm Act, and banned on the grounds that it made ‘statements … likely to prejudice the recruiting, training, and discipline of persons in his Majesty’s forces’,16 the judgment was loaded with indirect censure of its apparently unmentionable sexual immorality. According to the judge, Despised and Rejected was an ‘immoral, unhealthy and most pernicious book, written to attract a certain class of reader’, a pointed characterization that prompted Solomon Eagle to question, in the New Statesman, whether the ‘authorities’’ reticence to refer to the homosexuality in the novel was a product of the ‘evil odour of a recent trial still cling[ing] to the air’.17 Eagle commented on the fact that for Allatini, ‘moral perversion and conscientious objection … go very largely together’, suggesting that if this went unmentioned at the trial it must be due to the distaste that resulted from the ‘recent’ proceedings against Pemberton-Billing.18 In spite of the absence of the public hysteria that adhered to the earlier trial, and the fact that the homosexuality that loomed over the proceedings was assiduously ignored inside the courtroom, the trial of Despised

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 9

and Rejected can be productively paired with that of Pemberton-Billing. Together, they make a strong statement about the complex relationship between female same-sex desire and public discourse in the years immediately following the war. These trials marked a critical moment in the public life of lesbianism, and their effects, along with the critical commentary they inspired, must necessarily inform any study of the expression and dissimulation of homosexuality during the interwar period. The Pemberton-Billing trial was underpinned by a politically motivated investment in the scandal of female homosexuality, the limitations of a language in which to publicize it, and the unfamiliarity of such language to the potentially scandalized public. Added to this already-confusing configuration was the necessity for both defence and prosecution to appear reticent in their discursive dealings with an unpalatable subject that had the potential to corrupt the ‘innocent’. This tangle of motivations and prohibitions positions the Pemberton-Billing trial at a crucial nexus with the trial of Despised and Rejected, during which homosexuality was not spoken, yet could not be ignored. As Deborah Cohler points out, in her intriguing analysis of the shifts in lesbian representation instituted by the trials of Despised and Rejected and of Pemberton-Billing, ‘twentieth-century lesbian representations were produced not only through the medical discourse of late-nineteenth-century sexology and female homosocial traditions … but also through discourses of xenophobic nationalism’.19 Allatini deliberately yoked pacifism to lesbianism, via male homosexuality, and although her novel’s detractors attempted to sever this connection to avoid a discussion of sexual ‘obscenity’, their inability to disentangle the points of contention emphasizes the extent to which the dominant national narrative relied upon sexual normativity. The claims that tied Allan to sedition by way of lesbianism were, of course, entirely spurious, yet she was blindsided, at the trial, by the discursive connections that could be believably drawn between anatomical knowledge, homosexuality and sedition. In both cases, the epistemological limits of female homosexuality advantaged those who claimed to be on the side of national pride and heterosexuality. When Maud Allan took the stand in her trial, and conceded that she knew what ‘clitoris’ meant, she revealed her ‘perversion’. Indeed, the very fact that she sued Pemberton-Billing cast suspicion upon her, for innocence was not compatible with the knowledge required to decipher the accusation made against her. In spite of the apparent failure of ‘clitoris’ to signify anything at all to most people, and in spite of the anatomical nature of its actual definition, it stood in for ‘lesbian’ at the

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trial, functioning as a code that could only be broken by the layperson if she possessed too much knowledge. Medical witness for the defence, Dr Serrel Cooke, stated that only the word ‘lesbian’ could have been substituted for ‘clitoris’ in Pemberton-Billing’s article, given that both are words interpretable only to those who should know their meaning (the ‘medical man’) and the perverted (‘people interested in that kind of thing’).20 The fact that the terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘clitoris’ were ‘equally well known to the initiated and equally unintelligible to the uninitiated’ would protect the innocent reader from corruption, while simultaneously incriminating the seditious pervert.21 The epistemological trap set by Pemberton-Billing relied on the public unknowability of lesbianism, yet as Cohler convincingly argues, this trial marked the moment that female homosexuality was ‘established … as a concept for public consumption’, even as what was consumed was characterized by ‘confusion, fear and indeterminacy’.22 The unrepeatability of the phrase ‘Cult of the Clitoris’, and the material danger that adhered to any understanding of what the trial was actually about, fed a scandal characterized by national anxiety and moral panic. In her analysis of the Pemberton-Billing trial, Jodie Medd argues that female homosexuality: operated as a figure of heightened suggestion and potential-but-alwaysforeclosed knowledge that enticed only to frustrate the possibility of disclosure or interpretation. What cannot be known or comprehended about the ‘reality’ of the war is translated into a fantasy of the epistemologically elusive category of female homosexuality.23 The national paranoia and frustration that was symptomatic of an unknowable and seemingly unending conflict provided fertile ground for a moral crusade that centred upon the figure of the lesbian, where the lesbian was characterized by her very lack of defining characteristics.24 Pemberton-Billing was motivated by a desire to incite public resistance to any negotiated peace, and his conspiracy theory positioned the figure of the lesbian in close proximity to forbidden knowledge. That the knowledge in question was knowledge of lesbianism itself, rather than of state secrets, was immaterial – as was the fact that in defining the figure of the lesbian according to her apparently over-developed vocabulary, he was introducing that vocabulary to a heretofore ‘uncorrupted’ public. If this was the first time lesbianism, as a sexual identity and practice, made an appearance on a public stage, and if it instigated the circulation of knowledge about female homosexuality (in spite of the confusion about

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 11

what was actually at issue, and the continued illegibility of the figure of the lesbian), it also loaded knowledge about female same-sex desire, as well as the desire itself, with danger. Semantic and epistemological shifts may have occurred following the trial, but to write or speak about lesbian desire without attracting moral outrage or even legal action continued to require a careful negotiation of the limits of public knowledge. For authors of Sapphic romans à clef in the 1920s and 1930s, the effects of the trial were manifold – lesbian desire was increasingly recognizable, yet its definitional instability provided authors with the tools and space to simultaneously represent and veil it, as they played upon readers’ continued reluctance to be implicated in a knowledge economy where the boundaries between knowledge and identification appeared to be permeable. At the same time, rapid social and linguistic shifts presented increasing risks to authors who encrypted private addresses and personal stories in their narratives. Tenuous associations between sexology and Germany were also exploited in the Pemberton-Billing trial, as sexologists were credited with the development of a language in which to describe the ‘debauchery’ of Wilde’s Salomé.25 Knowledge of sexology, outside of the medical profession, was apparently another symptom of perversion and the sedition it entailed. In reality, however, the attitude of the sexologist to the sexual ‘pervert’ was never one of straightforward support, and sexology provided a language for non-normative desires and behaviours that was seen by many same-sex attracted men and women as limiting or even insulting. It may have been positioned as itself obscene at the Pemberton-Billing trial, but by the 1920s, sexology was beginning to provide a language in which homosexuality could be legitimately couched for the purposes of appropriately scientific, legal or political discussion. While sexologists tended to argue against punitive responses to sexual ‘abnormality’, and many homosexuals used sexology to understand themselves, the relationship between homosexuality and sexology was complex. The best-known sexological explanation for homosexuality was the theory of ‘congenital sexual inversion’, which proposed that the ‘true’ homosexual was born with certain (rarely quantifiable) characteristics of the opposite sex, and as a result of the fundamental heterosexual orientation of desire, were sexually attracted to members of the same sex.26 Whether the ‘invert’ was identifiable by physical characteristics was the subject of some debate, but some natural disjunction between biological sex and gender was the primary feature of the afflicted individual, although sexological theories were often marked by a certain circularity, whereby the characteristic that gestured towards inversion might be the

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same-sex desire that the theory of congenital sexual inversion purported to explain. The first edition of sexologist Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion, the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, was itself banned on grounds of obscenity in the late 1890s, due in part to the argument it made for a (contingent) tolerance of congenital homosexuality. However, by the 1920s, sexology had attained a level of authority and validity that Radclyffe Hall attempted to appropriate and superimpose onto The Well of Loneliness. The perceived distinction between the anticipated audience of a scientific study and that of a novel was key to the banning of The Well, as I will discuss in some detail in Chapter 1, but the circulation of sexology in the interwar period was less predictable than The Well’s detractors might have hoped. Literate men and women whose affective and sexual attractions remained unmentioned and untheorized within texts aimed at a general readership found a rational explanation for their non-normative sexual identification in pseudo-scientific studies like Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) and Ellis’ Sexual Inversion (1897). If such accounts pathologized same-sex desire, rendering it the product of a congenital abnormality rather than a legitimate alternative to heterosexuality, sexology’s emphasis on ‘nature’ and instinct and its turn away from the discourse of religion and morality appealed to some who wished to understand their own homosexuality, particularly if their experience of homosexuality entailed a disidentification with the supposedly ‘natural’ characteristics of their biological sex.27 Sexology was resonant for women like Hall, then, who identified as fundamentally homosexual and masculine and perceived a naturalized and inexorable association between gendered characteristics and sexual object choice. However, for women whose experience of samesex attraction was about same-sex identification (as opposed to an identification with men), who perceived a cultural basis to the naturalized relationship between biological sex, gender and sexual desire, or who simply could not attach any unalterable identity to their sexual orientation, sexology was inadequate to the task of explaining their emotional and sexual relationships. For authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef, the terms on which sexology purported to explain same-sex desire were limited by the conventional heterosexual paradigm upon which they were based, as well as by the immutability of their terms of reference. All of the authors discussed in this study were undoubtedly familiar with Freud’s theories of female homosexuality, which attributed adult homosexual desire to a deviation from the narrative underpinning a healthy sexuality.28 Indeed, Hilda Doolittle was a devotee of analysis, and

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 13

her unpublished romans à clef can be read as manifestations of a desire to fully understand the trajectory of her psychosexual development. Yet although a number of modernist writers and artists demonstrated an interest in psychoanalysis as a means to self-understanding, sexology tended to be of more use to those wishing to write about female same-sex desire.29 Chris Waters demonstrates that same-sex attracted authors writing between the wars mobilized the language of sexology, as opposed to that of psychoanalysis, to structure their ‘life-stories’ and ‘pleas for tolerance’.30 Waters explains that British reformers, including members of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP), saw sexologists like Havelock Ellis as providing a justification for the tolerance of the incurable congenital invert, while psychoanalysis was seen to advocate the ‘treatment’ of the homosexual and did not necessarily invalidate legal sanctions.31 On a less pragmatic level, too, sexology provided the terms upon which non-normative sexual attraction might be equated with emotional attachment – with a version of ‘love’ that was celebrated in spite of the pathology attached to it.32 As Suzanne Raitt notes, in Three Essays, Freud positions love as a ‘sexual aberration’ – as an ‘“overvaluation” of the love object’ – and it is this configuration that enabled him to ‘write about homosexuality as a sexual identity’.33 Sexology positioned homosexuality as more than a developmental phase of an inevitably heterosexual identity – the congenital sexual invert could legitimately fall in love with a member of the same sex, and that love would not be characterized as a ‘phase’. Waters and Raitt are interested in the relationship between the sexual sciences and homosexuals who saw their lives reflected in sexological texts. However, sexology was also mobilized by writers who engaged with it more critically – crucially, such writers were not immune to the attractions of a discourse that explained homosexuality in terms of tolerance and love, even if they were uncomfortable with its terms of reference. For authors of Sapphic romans à clef, sexological discourse operated as linguistic currency in the fledgling economy of knowledge that surrounded same-sex desire, even as they revealed its logical incoherencies and substituted the scientific explanation for same-sex desire with their own. The language of sexology was useful for authors who wished to reference desire between women, regardless of whether or not they adhered to its scientific and social position, for it structured an address to those with a pre-existing investment in the subject of non-normative sexuality. Stylistically experimental novels provided an accommodating vehicle for a modern scientific discourse that readily invited parody, and for authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef, that

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parody was tied up in sexology’s failure to adequately represent their own experience or understanding of same-sex desire. Sexological theories were called into question by layered romans à clef that disputed the capacity of a single explanatory narrative to encompass all experiences of same-sex desire, as the complex address of these novels provided new points of identification between same-sex attracted women. The proliferation of discourses surrounding sexuality, and in particular non-normative sexuality, that had occurred since the late nineteenth century, produced human ‘specimens’ or ‘types’ that could be classified according to a catalogue of ‘symptoms’. Foucault writes with regard to a range of ‘perverse’ sexualities: The machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical, visible and permanent reality: it was implanted in bodies, slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d’être and a natural order of disorder.34 The ‘natural order’ to which Foucault refers had come to include the identifiable species of the ‘congenital sexual invert’, yet female homosexual desire was also structured by a specific silence; one that was instituted by a fear of its extraordinarily potent capacity to corrupt, and coupled, paradoxically, with the disbelief that sex between women was even possible. In the decades between the wars, then, the ‘machinery of power’ had extended its taxonomic reach to the unmarried masculine woman, while the feminine and/or married woman remained more or less unintelligible according to the ‘natural order’ of homosexual abnormality – she may have been corruptible, but she was alarmingly unrecognizable. Unlike male homosexuality, rendered intelligible and visible via the language that circulated around its prohibition, female homosexuality was less frequently discussed because it was deemed simultaneously unthinkable and liable to be universally appealing. Thus, in 1921, a proposal that an ‘Acts of Indecency by Females’ clause be added to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was defeated in the House of Lords, effectively scuttling the legislation.35 The representational limitations upon female homosexuality were again revealed by the course of this debate, which began when Metropolitan Police Magistrate, Cecil Maurice Chapman, introduced an amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill 1920, to include an extension of legislation on the age of consent to encompass female same-sex relations. Chapman was reluctant to explicitly discuss lesbian sexual relations, however, and Laura

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 15

Doan points out that this reluctance resulted in a failure to ‘distinguish between non-consensual, cross-generational sexual relations and samesex relations between consenting adults’.36 As a result of Chapman’s circumlocutory testimony, the Joint Select Committee proposed to criminalize sexual acts between women by extending the Labouchère Amendment.37 When the Bill went before parliament, the speakers were no longer coy about the terms of reference, but debate was centred upon the extent of women’s knowledge of lesbian practices, and the capacity of the transfer of such knowledge (from parliament to the public) to function as an ‘advertisement’ for lesbian sex.38 Among the arguments against amending the original Bill was the ‘mischief’ that would be done if such an ‘offence’ was brought ‘to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamt of it’, and the view that ‘of every thousand women … 999 have never heard a whisper of these practices’.39 Sexology was mobilized, somewhat erroneously given its critical approach to criminalization, by supporters of the amendment. Sir Ernest Wild, for example, made reference to sexology in order to make a case for the prevalence of lesbian practices, having introduced his arguments with an apology for addressing a subject that was rarely spoken (in a somewhat paradoxical move, that undermined the central contention of his argument).40 Female homosexuality could be discussed at length within the walls of parliament, then, but the language required to criminalize lesbian sexual practices was attributed a power to corrupt that outweighed its power to police. Female homosexuality in the interwar period was marked by semantic and epistemological contradictions and strange stretches of logic. The perceived and extraordinarily potent power of same-sex desire to corrupt (as well as the inherent corruptibility and sexual naivety of women) resulted in legal prohibitions on lesbian representation and a glaring absence of female homosexual behaviour from criminal law; the scientific classification of the female homosexual as a type of person was marked by the impossibility of accounting for the feminine samesex attracted woman (thus undermining the scientific logic of sexological taxonomy); and same-sex desire was simultaneously impossible to describe and described using language that was euphemistic and defamatory. Authors of Sapphic romans à clef rendered same-sex desire in print through the very contradictions that seemingly defined it. Writing about a desire that was signified by a loaded silence, and which threatened woman’s supposed fundamental innocence and played to her fundamental impressionability, these writers worked within a unique configuration of publicity and privacy, of the sayable and

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unsayable, and they enacted unique interventions into the dominant discursive regime.

Readers of the roman à clef: public, coterie, counterpublic The Sapphic modernist roman à clef (or ‘novel with a key’) can be identified by the layered address contained within its pages – each of the novels in question can be interpreted using multiple ‘keys’, where each key is constituted by the particular knowledge brought to the text by the reader. Barnes, Woolf, Stein and to a lesser extent H.D. used the epistemological gaps and silences surrounding same-sex desire to address a representation of that desire to readers in possession of the knowledge to recognize personal references, but also to those readers with a will to knowledge about an unspeakable subject. The way these authors imagined their readers is therefore a more useful interpretive tool, from my point of view, than a survey of real reader responses. Nevertheless, it is impossible to read authors’ textual addresses in the absence of a consideration of the kinds of readers they anticipated. A potentially censorious general public was anticipated by each of the authors under consideration, but so was some configuration of private individual (or ‘ideal’) reader, coterie audience and counterpublic readership. Michael Warner argues that a ‘public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself’ – that it ‘exists by virtue of being addressed’41 – while a counterpublic, also constituted by a textual ‘address to indefinite strangers’, consists of individuals ‘socially marked by their participation’ in the discourse that organizes the counterpublic in the first place.42 Address is clearly central to this formulation. Thus, in spite of the fact that sexological studies were consumed by samesex attracted women in the first decades of the twentieth century, it is worth noting that these texts enacted an address to an ‘objective’, nominally male readership, and their circulation among the objects of scientific enquiry was clearly unanticipated (even the comparatively tolerant Ellis recommended that the predatory sexual invert be isolated from potential converts). The public that was imagined and shored up by this scientific material was characterized by its critical distance from the subject matter, regardless of the number of sexual ‘deviants’ who consumed the texts and passed them onto friends and lovers. Negotiating this contradiction as they intervened in the narratives commonly imposed upon same-sex desire, authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef executed an address that was invested in readers’ assumed knowledge of the sexual sciences, of the sexual potential contained in

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 17

affective relationships between women, and of the strategies by which the ‘obscene’ was obscured in public discourse. Private references, indecipherable to the censors, could also be indecipherable to an imagined, same-sex attracted readership, but the discourse associated with shared ‘scientific’, social and emotional knowledges could be mobilized and refunctioned, critiqued or parodied (often with an intimation of personal identification) for a counterpublic readership that was constituted by virtue of its reception of a literary address that would implicate (or ‘socially mark’) those who received and acknowledged it. Discourses surrounding the sexual sciences and questions of obscenity were emptied of their power to pathologize the sexual ‘other’, and were transformed into the currency of a discursive exchange within a counterpublic addressed and called into being by authors referencing personal experiences that did not fit into received frames of reference. In her recent work on ‘women’s culture’, Lauren Berlant has argued for a theoretical differentiation between the ‘intimate publics’ that are structured by ‘a commodity culture’ and an aspiration to belong and to feel ‘normal’, and counterpublics, inflected by the ‘taxonomies of the political sphere’.43 She argues that most publics are intimate publics, in that they ‘foreground … affective and emotional attachments located in fantasies of the common, the everyday and a sense of ordinariness’, and while the identifications that constitute an intimate public ‘can indeed become mobilized as counterpublicity’, they ‘usually aren’t’.44 Berlant’s discussion of intimate publics is emphatically grounded in the specificities of North American culture after the Second World War, and is not readily translatable to the context I am interested in.45 Nevertheless, in the course of her discussion of intimate publics and their relationship to counterpublics (that latter of which I am particularly concerned with), Berlant poses an important question: ‘what is the relation between feeling detached and being detached from the political, between feeling invested and exercising agency?’.46 This question is key to theorizing the connection between the Sapphic modernist roman à clef and different kinds of public address, for those writers who performed an address to a Sapphic counterpublic were invested in a complex web of attachments to, and detachments from, the public sphere – they may have felt ‘detached from the political’, but they were also invested in the good opinion of the public; and if they acted to engage a counterpublic (and a coterie), they also had personal as well as financial and political reasons to engage the mainstream. For Barnes, Woolf, Stein, H.D. and Hall, public approbation was vital to their sense of their own status as writers, and Stein, H.D., Hall and even Woolf lived relatively privileged

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lives, economically speaking. Where these authors did experience marginalization, it was more in relation to gender than sexual orientation, even though Woolf was the only one of the five to engage seriously with the issue of women’s political rights in her writing, while Hall and Stein both identified with male privilege in a way that required the ongoing subordination of women. And if homosexuality was anathema to public life, it is worth noting that Barnes, Woolf and H.D. did not identify as homosexual (or as ‘lesbians’, ‘Sapphists’ or ‘inverts’) in spite of the serious sexual and emotional relationships they had with other women. A range of complex identifications – with the prominent men who supported their work, with the prominent and unrecognized women who did the same, with the work of male writers and artists, with the women who were the centre of their emotional lives and about whom they wrote, with the men upon whom they were emotionally dependent, with particular political movements and positions, with particular sources of oppression – structured the relationship between these authors and the public sphere. Authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef addressed a counterpublic marginalized by moral and scientific discourse and positioned in critical relation to the public sphere, but they also acted within a public sphere that provided few opportunities for women to do so, locating themselves outside, or only partially inside, of the counterpublics they imagined and addressed. Somewhat paradoxically, the presence of a private or coterie readership at the anticipated point of reception enabled authors to address a public and a counterpublic simultaneously. The strategic veiling of same-sex desire – the sense that there was something unspeakable and personal hidden within a text, even if it could not be decoded – provided the impetus for sympathetic readers to interrogate the multi-directional address written into romans à clef, and to examine the text more closely or even gather the kind of extra-textual information that may constitute a ‘key’ to interpretation. At the same time, the apparent direction of certain textual references toward a coterie in possession of private knowledge cordons off the ‘coterie elements’ of a text from those who would not actively pursue interpretation in this mode because of its triviality, or because of what such an interest implies about the knowledge and associations of the reader. In his study of Frank O’Hara and the ‘Poetics of Coterie’, Lytle Shaw argues that for those ‘uninterested in biographical interpretation generally or in a particular biography’, the attribution of the adjective ‘coterie’ to a writer and their work ‘implies a secure perjorative judgment’.47 He explains: A coterie writer is, in common usage, someone whose writing depends upon a small and implicitly anti-democratic model of audience,

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 19

a model in which particularity has hijacked the universality ‘we’ all know and want.48 Shaw points out that the concepts of ‘universality’ and ‘particularity’ are far less immutable than the common ‘charge of coterie’ would suggest, given the reliance of such terms upon historical and cultural context.49 For writers who wished to be taken seriously, there were undoubtedly dangers associated with addressing a coterie, and as I have implied throughout this introduction, the authors of Sapphic romans à clef carefully negotiated the public desire for ‘universality’, using ‘particularity’ to represent same-sex desire. An acute consciousness of the cultural climate was required in order for writers to structure an address that was taken seriously by the public, in spite of its mobilization of private references. Even inside the artistic circles within which many female modernist authors lived and wrote, and within which their work was edited, published, circulated and reviewed, the representation of same-sex desire, and in particular of personal experiences of same-sex desire, was met with resistance. Thus, Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) was generously edited and emphatically depersonalized by T.S. Eliot, whose publication and promotion of the novel nevertheless rendered it a modernist classic; the ambivalence evident in Woolf’s rendering of Sapphism prior to her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, and the consequent playfulness of Orlando, can be attributed in part to the critical perspectives of the men of Bloomsbury, who were also her most ardent supporters; Gertrude Stein was notoriously critiqued and constrained by her brother, Leo, whose disdain for her work extended beyond a disapproval of her subject matter; and Ezra Pound supported the work of his protégé and onetime fiancé, H.D. only where that work was impersonal and ‘objective’ (read masculine). This study will re-evaluate female-authored modernist texts in light of the connection between the representation of same-sex desire and the representation of the personal, for these novels belied the apparent requirement that serious modernist writing be rational, detached and in many ways impersonal. Of course, the encryption of the personal enabled editors like T.S. Eliot to ignore or elide references they almost certainly understood, and I will discuss Eliot’s strategic, depersonalizing preface to Nightwood in more detail in Chapter 2, yet the praise bestowed upon the stylistic achievements of female authors whose emotional investment in their work was relatively obvious is itself worth examining. By the 1920s, serious maleauthored modernism made a claim to a ‘truth’ bound up with associations between the masculine and the impersonal or ‘antisubjective’,50

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raising the question of whether woman artists were subject to requirements that were more or less stringent than those governing the work of male artists. In some ways constrained by the knowledge that they were less likely than their male counterparts to be taken seriously, these women were nevertheless willing to test the definitional limits of high modernism, experimenting with address, and with deploying and obscuring personal references, in order to establish new ways of engaging with supposedly unpalatable subjects. In this study, then, I will demonstrate that Sapphic modernism is characterized by stylistic and thematic interrogations of the terms upon which writing could be described as ‘serious’ high modernism.

The Sapphic modernist roman à clef The authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef performed a careful negotiation of the boundaries between private and public, and between the textual and the social, circumventing censorship, writing outside of dominant pathologizing and moralizing discourses and refusing to adhere to the terms upon which serious writing was defined as such. It is worth emphasizing, then, that the term ‘roman à clef’ is being put to very specific use, here, and its particular function in this context requires further explanation. The texts I will be discussing are not autobiographies, although some of them contain autobiographical elements. I am classifying them as romans à clef because they make unique claims upon their audiences, deliberately encrypting the personal, rather than revealing it. These Sapphic romans à clef are structured not by any overt claim to self-revelation, but rather by their careful, layered address to public, counterpublic and coterie audiences. As I have suggested, this is an address that simultaneously reveals and dissimulates homosexuality, most readily providing evidence of lesbian desire to those with a personal relationship with the author or a shared experience of homosexual affect, and denying evidence to those who recognize lesbian desire only when it is expressed in terms of obscenity and perversion. There can be no doubt that a number of female modernist authors resisted prevailing assumptions about same-sex desire, yet because this resistance is overlaid by deliberate encryption, few studies of femaleauthored modernism have identified a strategic approach to same-sex desire that is common to multiple authors. In a project that bears certain resemblances to my own, Georgia Johnston has made a case for reading works by female modernists as examples of specifically ‘queer’ autobiography.51 Queer autobiography, according to Johnston’s definition, is

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 21

barely recognizable as autobiography, as she argues of the lesbian autobiographer that: these writers queer the terms of autobiography by multiplying their ‘I’s, manipulating subject and object divisions, undermining boundaries between writer and audience, and using repetition and masks to code and expose erotic moments.52 Johnston complicates the terms upon which autobiography itself is defined, but her focus upon this genre nevertheless limits the scope of her study to texts that mobilize a ‘narrative I’.53 Johnston’s work is productive – the proliferation of subject positions apparent in her formulation, as well as the transformation of boundaries between writer and audience and the encryption of the erotic that she describes, are all important features of modernist articulations of lesbian desire. However, the various techniques of ‘coding’ and ‘exposing’ lesbian desire such that it is available for interpretation only by those who share the author’s sexual and affective allegiances are characteristic of a number of modernist ‘lesbian’ works that do not mobilize a ‘narrative “I”’ or make any overt claim to self-revelation. The strategies Johnston describes, then, are characteristic of ‘queer’ autobiographies, but also of texts that cannot be classified as such, yet mobilize the personal and are key to the development of ‘queer’ representation in the period. To read these novels as Sapphic modernist romans à clef is to acknowledge that the representation of same-sex desire in the period was often reliant upon the mobilization of the personal, but also that these texts are doing work that contrasts with that performed by an autobiography – particularly in that they are defined less by their content than by the reception they imagine and the audiences they address. To read these works as romans à clef is particularly productive for a study of the textualization of same-sex desire because it provides access to the process by which that textualization took place. For those with the knowledge to decode private and/or subcultural references, the text’s negotiation of available social, medical and political discourses, of the lines between public, counterpublic and private, and of modes of address all reveal the boundary between world and text. And while it may seem paradoxical that this perspective is most readily available to those who already have access to the personal and social references and resonances contained in the text – making interpretation less efficacious for those who don’t come to the text armed with some of the answers they anticipate finding there – this is perhaps key to the roman à clef,

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which provided the generic foundations for authors to write publicly about lesbian desire while allowing the text itself to secure the limits of interpretation at the point of reception. The generic features of the roman à clef thus invite a reading not only of the text itself, but of the cultural circumstances governing its production, the kinds of audiences its authors imagined, and the circulation of language around lesbian desire and the figure of the female homosexual. Critical discussions of the roman à clef aspects of literary works rarely go beyond the identification of characteristics shared by world and text (where the ‘text’ is frequently deployed as evidence for a particular interpretation of the ‘world’ that produced it), as though texts written in this mode are simply cryptic renderings of biography, autobiography, history or gossip. However, I will demonstrate that the genre is in fact characterized by a far more dynamic interplay between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. If, as I have argued above, anticipated audiences are always already written into modernist Sapphic romans à clef, such that what is revealed by the text is to a large extent determined by the knowledge taken to it by the reader, then the point of the genre is not its claim to revelation or self-revelation, for neither the text itself, nor what is outside of it, constitute the endpoint of interpretation. Instead, the multiple and shifting ways in which the text can be understood are contingent upon the position occupied by the reader at any given moment in time, even as the text already contains an implicit address to multiple and shifting reading positions. Critical approaches cannot be grounded in the claim that they occupy some authoritative position outside of this system, and because the language mobilized to represent lesbian desire is enriched by its negotiation of the boundary between text and social and personal context, textual agency is never superseded by some claim to an authoritative interpretive position outside of the text (or inside it, for that matter). In his recent study of modernism and the The Art of Scandal, Sean Latham argues that the roman à clef can only be defined according to the ‘conditions of its reception and circulation’; and that ‘to learn the key is to encounter a different text’.54 Latham makes the important observation that the definitional limits of the roman à clef are determined by the fact that it can be recognized only in relation to ‘complex networks of circulation and reception’, not ‘clear generic criteria’.55 He argues that critical engagement with the genre is problematized by the fact that ‘even those in possession of a key have no idea where precisely to draw the line between fact and fiction’.56 To a certain extent, this is accurate – the possession of material required to identify a novel as a roman à clef does not guarantee that the entire work is available for interpretation

Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 23

along these lines. However, I would argue that this feature of the roman à clef need not be characterized as an impediment to interpretation. If the layered address contained in novels that encrypt references to the ‘real’ is acknowledged as itself a characteristic textual feature, then the imperative to extricate the ‘truth’ gives way to a reading that locates interpretive potential in the coexisting ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ contained in every reference. That the Sapphic romans à clef I will discuss in this study are structured by their anticipated heterogeneous audience tells us more about the novels themselves than the confirmation of which textual events ‘really happened’ (although this information is not irrelevant to interpretation and nor will I be treating it as such). My focus on the interpretive potential contained in the layered address of the roman à clef guarantees that my conclusions differ from Latham’s. Exemplifying this distinction is his identification of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that was ‘transformed retroactively into a roman à clef’, as ‘readers and critics sought clues that might expose the secrets of London’s gay subculture and its social elites’.57 Latham argues that in spite of Wilde’s repeated and emphatic rejection of such readings, the author was: nevertheless called to the stand and asked to confess Dorian’s crimes as his own. Understanding how this could happen means thinking about genre as an essentially pragmatic rather than positivistic category, as a particular relationship of both production and consumption fully delimited by neither authorial intention nor ideological function.58 Latham makes a strong case for defining the roman à clef according to a configuration that takes into account the specificities of production and consumption, yet this does not account for the claim that The Picture of Dorian Gray can be classified as a roman à clef because Wilde was called to the stand to testify to the similarities between his life and his work. The fact that a writer publicly disavows the relationship between his or her work and life does not preclude the classification of that work as roman à clef – indeed, the dangers of revealing too much render this kind of disavowal common. However, the argument that The Picture of Dorian Gray can be defined as a roman à clef because certain readers assumed that it was (or perhaps wanted it to be), and the complete disregard for address and anticipated audience that this argument necessitates, places too few limitations on the genre. If the roman à clef is not defined according to the anticipated reader responses written into

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the text, but is instead categorized in relation to an actual audience response, then the usefulness of the generic classification as interpretive tool is compromised – interpretation is purely a product of the public afterlife of a text, and the question of whether a negotiation of public and private occurs within a text itself becomes irrelevant. Not every author of Sapphic modernist romans à clef would have classified their work as such, but they were nonetheless conscious that they were using personal references to represent the unspeakable. Donald Reiman points out that published texts are always already mediated by the process by which they have been transformed from manuscript to print. He argues that the ‘social intentions of the writer’ determine whether a manuscript is ‘private, confidential or public’, where each of these categories informs the author’s address and reflects the assumed knowledge of the reader, invites particular kinds of editorial intervention, and prefigures the nature and scope of a text’s circulation and reception.59 Reiman suggests that a text is imbued with meaning by the ‘precise relations between the writer and the recipient(s)’.60 He argues that when a private or confidential text is published and read by someone other than its intended reader or group of readers, its meaning is altered by the editing and annotation required to render it legible, and by the assumptions about particular knowledges and likely reader responses that are necessarily contained in a personal address. When a public text is published, too, its meaning is often a product of the particular relation between author and editor, as well as the author’s and editor’s perceptions of what is politically and socially appealing or appropriate, and, of course, a public text edited years, decades, or centuries after it was written will be inflected by a new set of social and political values and understandings. To read a novel as a roman à clef implies a degree of knowledge of authorial intention, and, of course, the question of authorial intention is a fraught one, its unequivocal determination close to impossible and to many critics, less than desirable. However, the configuration Reiman establishes connects author and text via a physical object available for analysis in its own right, where the distinctions and similarities between an original manuscript and published ‘copy’ provide insight into decisions made by the author and subsequent editors: that is, into the public text itself. Although it is outside the scope of this project to analyse original manuscripts, I will be concerned with the way in which particular decisions, made by authors and editors, impacted upon published texts, and in particular, upon published texts that represented the private.

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In some ways, Sapphic modernist romans à clef are no different from any other published text. Mediated by editors, the final published works are representative of editorial decisions, and of the social, political and stylistic bases for these decisions, as well as of the author’s intentions. Yet what is unusual about these works is that they were prepared by authors and editors to be released to the public, even as they were constituted by an address that is ‘private’ or ‘confidential’ or both. The conditions under which a manuscript written for multiple (private, confidential and public) audiences was transformed into a public text that did not attract unwanted attention or scandal tended to involve the editorial input of friends and lovers, who were able to decipher encrypted personal references, and filter the private address as well as the public one. The effect of these kinds of personal relationships on the published texts is debatable. In some cases, the relationship between author and editor served to protect the author’s intentions, while in others it resulted in a different kind of self-censorship to that generated by the anticipation of a particular public reception, and usually, some combination of these effects impacted upon the works in question. What is noteworthy, here, is the significance of the personal connection between editor and author to the publication of modernist texts that represent personal relationships and contain a private or confidential address, and the importance of reading texts in relation to the process by which they were edited, as well as the process by which they were written. Not every modernist roman à clef was published in its author’s lifetime, and the decision not to publish was often a consequence of the anticipation of friends’ and lovers’ responses, as much as it was a product of the potential response of the reading public. Before Gertrude Stein met Alice B. Toklas, who was tireless in her practical and emotional support and was willing and able to discuss Stein’s writing and ideas about literature more generally, Stein’s literary endeavours were discouraged, and even ridiculed, by her brother, Leo. Her first attempt at writing was a lesbian roman à clef, Q.E.D., written in 1903, and after Stein showed it to Leo, she shelved it. It remained unpublished until 1950, four years after her death. Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) was heavily influenced by (and for a while, engaged to) Ezra Pound, and his opinion of her work dictated the terms upon which her work was publishable. Pound directed H.D.’s career as Imagist poet, insisting that only the objective and impersonal were the proper subjects for serious fiction. H.D. questioned Pound’s personal and professional dogmatism in her romans à clef, Her, Asphodel and Paint it Today, all written in the 1920s, and it is likely that her decision

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not to publish was influenced by her relationship with him, which had been both beneficial and constraining. My examination of H.D.’s manuscripts, unpublished until the late twentieth century, along with my comparison between Stein’s Q.E.D. and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, will emphasize the distinction that must be drawn between romans à clef written for publication and those written for purely personal reasons. Reiman’s analysis of the relation between manuscript and published text facilitates the explication of works that became public without the author’s consent, for these texts generate meanings that contrast with those structured, at least in part, by a public address performed by the author. Unpublished texts bear different relationships to the personal and the social, they evidence less reticence in their revelation of the private, and they enact a less structured address. In some ways they reveal more than published works about the author’s experience of same-sex desire and the way in which homosexuality exists in a particular society at a given moment in time, yet in other ways they reveal less, for they are less likely to register an anticipated public response to, or scrutiny of, a tale of same-sex desire. Given the extent to which representations of same-sex desire and references to the personal were obscured within published Sapphic modernist roman à clef, it is worth asking what it might mean for a general audience if an author’s perspective is most easily apprehended by those readers with ‘inside knowledge’ of some kind, be it knowledge of the author’s life or of shared emotional, affective and sexual experiences. Is it possible to argue that in Orlando, Woolf deconstructs the binary that characterizes biological sex and the naturalized relationship between gender and sexuality if its contemporary mainstream readers were more likely to read it as little more than a lighthearted fantasy? Can it be argued that Barnes critiqued an exclusive, heterosexist culture by insisting upon the passion and intensity of Sapphic desire if Nightwood was read as a deterrent for potential same-sex lovers and was mediated by a preface that framed it as an objective study of human misery? A disjunction between the responses of different kinds of readers is, of course, inevitable. Texts are always open to a range of interpretations, and readers close to the author or who share the life-experience of the author will probably be at an advantage when it comes to interpretation (or will, at least, read the texts in question differently). However, the silence that surrounded homosexuality in the 1920s and 1930s was particularly loaded, and the framing of references to lesbian desire particularly fraught. The point, here, is not to create or emphasize an opposition or hierarchy between readers bringing different knowledges to bear upon

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the novels in question, but is rather to suggest that the texts and the addresses they performed were very deliberately constructed in order to ensure that some readers recognized references to same-sex desire while others could read around them.

Reading loss and grief: the Sapphic roman à clef as elegy The language mobilized by modernist woman authors to represent samesex desire in the interwar period was dictated and constrained, to some degree, by an unstable definition of obscenity that did not leave room for overt, or overtly positive, representations of same-sex love and desire. As well, authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef had to contend with the loss and ‘impossibility’ that was inevitably associated with same-sex desire in the 1920s and 1930s. As I have suggested, the absence and impermissibility of certain perspectives on lesbian desire were not necessarily unproductive, as formal experimentation provided new frames that would accommodate difficult subject matter. However, the experience of the failure of homosexual love and relationships, and the apparent inevitability of that failure, were in some ways more difficult to textualize. In this period, generic features of the roman à clef facilitated a strategic disavowal of the assumed correlation between same-sex desire and shame and perversion, while at the same time allowing authors to figure personal loss and failure in their literary texts. Sapphic modernist romans à clef challenged the reader to interpret the failure of that desire as something other than the inevitable result of non-normative sexuality. In her study of queer affect and literature of the early twentieth century, Heather Love argues that, ‘queer experience and representation’ has been marked by negative feelings ‘tied to the experience of social exclusion and to the historical “impossibility” of same-sex desire’.61 Using evidence taken from the works of ‘queer’ authors including Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall and Sylvia Townsend Warner, Love compiles an ‘archive of feeling’ designed to ‘underline both the losses of queer modernity and the deeply ambivalent negotiation of these losses within the literature of the period’.62 Love’s work on intersections between the affective and the social and political and her particular interest in the decades preceding the Second World War, as well as her compelling articulation of the productive relationship between queer politics and the negative feelings that often go unacknowledged within an increasingly mainstream gay and lesbian culture, have rendered her work an invaluable resource for this project. Any critic seeking to analyse the literary texts that emerged from this period runs the risk of misinterpreting

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the past if he or she does not acknowledge that the rhetoric of ‘gay pride’ that has dominated political campaigns for gay and lesbian ‘liberation’ has instilled in politically ‘progressive’ literary criticism a compulsion to elide evidence of the failure or tragedy of homosexuality where it is represented in ‘queer’-authored literature. A dichotomous critical paradigm has emerged, whereby pre-Stonewall texts are either ‘redeemed’ for a modern audience via the identification of their ‘progressive’ elements and the misappropriation of their negative ones, or they are dismissed as potentially damaging within a resolutely optimistic political climate. The grief and tragedy of lost love and of the ‘impossibility’ of a happy outcome for same-sex desire feature prominently in the works I will discuss in this study. However, the elegiac content and tone of works by Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, H.D. and, to a lesser extent, Gertrude Stein, bears stark contrast to the shame of pathological sexual difference represented in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, raising the question of whether the ‘archive’ of queer affect could be expanded with an analysis of the Sapphic romans à clef of the interwar period. Love argues that ‘even when modernist authors are making it new, they are inevitably grappling with the old’, and she adds that [t]his historical ambivalence is particularly charged … in the works of minority or marginal modernists. For those marked as temporally backward, the stakes of being identified as modern or non-modern were extremely high. Reading for backwardness is a way of calling attention to the temporal splitting at the heart of all modernism …63 ‘Feeling backward’ constitutes an affective denial of a cultural insistence upon progress, and the works I will discuss ostensibly met the modernist criteria for ‘making it new’, even as they engaged critically with the dominant cultural preoccupation with the ‘future’ and played with temporal certainties in order to represent grief and loss. In Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936), for example, Nora is incapable of forgetting the grief of losing same-sex love, and its eternal return punctuates her present and promises to haunt her future; in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), time itself is the subject of parody, as ‘progress’ emerges as a historical construction; in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), to be discussed briefly in Chapter 3, the psychologically sanctioned ‘progress’ from adolescent lesbian desire to adult heterosexuality is marred by the constant interruption of the past and of the eponymous character’s grief for the loss of youthful same-sex desire; and in H.D.’s HER and Asphodel, youthful samesex desire is mourned, even as narratives of (hetero)sexual development

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are interrupted by same-sex relationships that repair the psychological damage perpetrated by cultural and familial expectations. I will argue that aesthetically ‘progressive’ works like these offered a coherent critique of the dominant cultural imperative to eschew the past, mobilizing particular negative feelings associated with homosexual affect in order to question the efficacy of a politically charged version of social progress grounded in the exclusion of certain emotions and desires (as well as of certain kinds of people). These authors’ elegiac reflections upon their own losses emphasized the importance of looking backwards, as a way of celebrating the intensity of homosexual desire and questioning the narrative that would marginalize it. The roman à clef genre provided the frame that would support a new language to reflect upon lesbian desire outside of the language of perversion and shame, as I discussed above, yet it also provided new ways to reflect upon a past that was often tragic or disappointing. In some ways prefiguring the queer critique of the politics of gay liberation, these authors did not ask for inclusion in the mainstream narrative of ‘progress’, but instead drew attention to the cost of the narrative itself. Given the elegiac tone of Sapphic modernist romans à clef, and the resonance of this tone with the concerns of contemporary queer literary studies, I would suggest that ‘queer’ is a useful category to apply retrospectively to Sapphic modernist romans à clef. In explaining ‘queer’, Lee Edelman argues that ‘the social’ is grounded in a future-driven narrative that appears to constitute reality itself, but is always only imaginary. The ‘queer’ destabilizes this paradigm, pointing to the exclusions instituted by the ‘endlessly postponed … vision of futurity’ that underpins every mainstream ‘political vision’.64 This formulation posits an opposition between the queer and the teleological narrative governing the social and the political, and it is an opposition that reveals that narrative’s unreality. In the 1920s and 1930s, in a period flanked by two world wars and an overwhelming sense of political, social and economic uncertainty, a dominant narrative of futurity was countered by the ‘decadence’ that accompanies the anticipation of approaching annihilation. The writers I will discuss in this study had varying political perspectives, particularly with regard to the rise of fascism. However, in different ways their representations of same-sex desire can be described as ‘queer’, inasmuch as they figured a critical perspective upon the narrative of futurity that seemed increasingly fantastical in the lead up to the Second World War. The cultural and political differences between these writers are significant, for they inevitably informed work that was grounded in the personal. And if concerns shared by Woolf, Barnes, Stein, H.D. and to a

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lesser extent Hall are what led me to structure my analysis around their work, then the differences between their social and cultural experiences draw attention to the pervasiveness of restrictions that governed the representation of same-sex desire, to the growing cosmopolitanism of literary circles, and to the increasing ‘globalization’ of the literary market. Stein and Barnes were both Americans resident in Paris in the years between the wars, although Barnes left in 1931 for London then New York following the breakdown of her relationship with Thelma Wood and increasing political and economic instability, while Stein stayed on until her death in 1946. The women met, but were not friends, and Barnes was more involved with Natalie Barney’s primarily female intellectual and artistic circle than with Stein’s primarily male one (and she was horrified that on the occasion the women did meet, Stein commented upon her legs, and ignored her intellect65). Nevertheless, as same-sex attracted American expatriates in Paris they shared a number of experiences: the freedom to live relatively openly in same-sex relationships, an involvement in artistic circles that supported their work (to varying degrees), and a productive distance from their native culture, which would have been more likely to censor them. Where Woolf and Hall were writing from within a conservative, sometimes punitive culture, writers publishing in Paris were unlikely to be censored, and same-sex couples and affairs were less likely to be frowned upon. In the early part of the century (long before Barnes arrived in 1921), lesbian writers from America and England, including Stein, Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien, settled in Paris, while others, such as H.D. and Bryher, spent more time elsewhere in Europe, but remained on the periphery of the Parisian expatriate community. For writers who wished to represent same-sex desire within fictional texts, Paris’ expatriate community provided English-speaking publishers, booksellers, editors and readers, although this extraordinary cultural and sexual haven merely held constraints upon subject matter at arm’s length. Djuna Barnes could publish a limited run of the Ladies Almanack and sell it to friends and on the streets of Paris, for example, but she had to take elaborate precautions to ship a few hundred copies to New York. Expatriate writers in Paris who wanted to publish for the larger English-speaking audiences in their own countries were conscious of the culture they had left behind. In this study, I will argue that coteries provided the conditions under which Sapphic modernist romans à clef could be conceived and produced, yet like Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Paris was less a utopia than it was a buffer between a censorious culture and writers and artists eager for artistic freedom. I will argue that in spite

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of the very different social contexts in which these authors wrote, they were addressing similar questions and constraints in their works. I will introduce my reading of Sapphic modernist romans à clef via an examination of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), which was not only censored, but also provided a problematic representation of the (singular and uncomplicated) figure of ‘the lesbian’. Hall grounded her conceptualization of ‘congenital sexual inversion’ in physical and psychological ‘abnormality’, while for Barnes, Woolf and Stein, the irrelevance of any dichotomized and universalizing notion of sexual ‘normality’ was precisely the point. Hall’s address was not complex, although its very directness is worthy of discussion: she pleaded the case of the invert to the masses, normalizing heterosexuality and the subordination of women, idealizing marriage, and ultimately publishing a novel that was simultaneously politically conservative and too ‘perverse’ for the establishment to tolerate. I will argue that the novel’s insistence upon a specific, and in some ways exclusive, taxonomy to define ‘the lesbian’ contributed to the evolution of a lesbian ‘identity’, but simultaneously secured its boundaries. This chapter will establish the terms of reference for subsequent chapters, examining the consequences of writing overtly about lesbian desire, the influence of sexology on an emerging lesbian ‘identity’, and the nature of the debates over sexuality and obscenity that circulated around Hall’s popular book. These were debates that involved questions over high and low culture and the reluctance of a literary elite to throw the full weight of their support behind a novel like The Well. In the same year as The Well was published, Djuna Barnes published the Ladies Almanack (1928), which is in many ways The Well’s opposite. Explicit, rollicking and celebratory, rather than earnest and tragic, and published for a coterie audience rather than a popular one, the Almanack parodies everything from the coterie that constituted its subject and its audience to the sexual sciences that claimed to explain same-sex desire. The Ladies Almanack implies that sex between women is no more unnatural than any other kind of sex and that women who have not experienced it do not know what they are missing out on, and it marginalizes heterosexuality and mocks the conventionality of marriage and procreation. Chapter 2 is primarily concerned with the elegiac, often tragic Nightwood (1936), but I will argue that the presence of the Ladies Almanack’s smaller audience as implied readers of the later novel is key to its interpretation. In this chapter, I will argue that when Nightwood is analysed in terms of its roman à clef aspects, and in relation to its treatment of themes addressed explicitly for a coterie audience in the Ladies Almanack, it is clear that the later work calls into

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question the distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and reveals the cultural underpinnings of privileged heterosexuality. Barnes wrote Nightwood after she left Paris and a failed eight-year relationship, as the political situation in Europe grew increasingly unstable, and the novel’s elegiac tone contrasts sharply with the care-free romp that is the Ladies Almanack. Nevertheless, Nightwood addresses an ironic appropriation of the sexual sciences to a couterpublic, privileges the intensity of same-sex desire, and addresses private references to a coterie audience in order to represent Barnes’ own, tragic same-sex relationship. In the year that Radclyffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness and Barnes published the Ladies Almanack, Woolf published Orlando, a pseudo-biography of Vita Sackville-West. Taking a break from her increasingly experimental stream-of-consciousness technique, Woolf wrote a stylistically accessible, fantastical narrative about an aristocratic figure born in the Elizabethan era, who has only reached her thirties by the ‘present’, changes from male to female in the seventeenth century, and ‘enjoy[s] the love of both sexes equally’.66 In Chapter 4, I will argue that Woolf’s Orlando is a roman à clef addressed to Sackville-West (rather than the men of Bloomsbury, who constituted the most important readers of Woolf’s earlier novels), and concerned with the intersections between class, gender and sexuality. Orlando asks how each of these categories is naturalized in spite of its vulnerability to shifting political and cultural circumstances. I will compare Orlando with Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published three years earlier, arguing that the latter reveals the shift Woolf’s writing underwent as she became increasingly intimate with Sackville-West, yet ultimately relegates homosexuality to the status of memory or interruption. If Mrs. Dalloway reflects Woolf’s shifting conceptualization of same-sex desire, Orlando reveals a newfound position on that desire, structured by an encrypted address to Sackville-West and a strategic mobilization of her class privilege and her gender non-conformity. Unlike Hall, who insisted upon a naturalized opposition between male and female that deemed ‘normal’ women incapable of participating in public life, championed their suitability for domesticity, and questioned their intellectual capacity, Woolf suggested, in Orlando, that the distinctions between the genders were purely a product of society. Gender and sexual desire are inextricably linked according to Woolf’s formulation, for sexual desire constitutes an example of gendered behaviour, where gendered behaviour is always naturalized, and always a cultural construction. Orlando provided a heretofore impossible space in which the unspeakable could be

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represented, drawing attention to same-sex desire via the language used to obscure it. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is more readable than the majority of Gertrude Stein’s works, and it contains no direct references to lesbian desire, yet its clarity is a function of Stein’s appropriation of the voice of her lover, Alice Toklas. In Chapter 5, I will argue that in the thirty-year interval between the writing of Q.E.D., not published until after Stein’s death, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein transformed the way in which she presented her experience of lesbian desire. Where Q.E.D. marked a moment of self-censorship and the ultimate screening of sexual different by racial difference (with the publication of Melanctha [1909], based upon Q.E.D. but transformed into a tale of unconventional heterosexuality), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was grounded in what appeared to be a publicly available lesbian collaboration and exchange. Ostensibly written for a mainstream audience eager for insight into the European avant-garde, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas calls into question the veracity of assumptions about subjectivity and authorship, inviting the reader to ask whose perspective is being offered, and what it might mean that for all her claims to genius and appropriation of masculine privilege in relation to her ‘wife’, Stein chose to tell her life-story in the ‘voice’ of her lover. For those who knew Stein and Toklas, and for a counterpublic who appreciated the nature of their relationship, this novel came to represent the intense connection between them as much as it told the story of Stein’s life. I will argue, then, that by 1933, Stein was willing to experiment with a literary strategy for staging the self that was invested in a specifically lesbian relationship. H.D.’s decision not to publish her romans à clef, HER, Asphodel and Paint it Today, in spite of the stylistic obscurity that may have shielded them from charges of obscenity, underscores the problems inherent in writing lesbian desire in the period. The near-impossibility of representing same-sex desire in a way the public would understand, and the pressure to eschew the feminine and emotional in order to be taken seriously as a modernist artist (pressure to which H.D. was particularly vulnerable having once been under the guidance of Ezra Pound), ensured that much lesbian material did not make it into print. In my conclusion, I will argue that although the roman à clef genre facilitated the literary representation of lesbian desire, even an encrypted expression of such desire was deemed by some authors to be too risky for publication. This chapter focuses on the production of romans à clef that remained

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unpublished – in particular, HER – and I will argue that the decision not to publish reveals something about the different ways authors imagined publics, and the means by which they balanced the risk of revealing the personal against its usefulness in facilitating lesbian representation. This chapter argues that although an imperative for secrecy influenced the publication history of H.D.’s novels, secrecy does not structure the frank privileging of same-sex desire contained within the texts themselves. Each of the writers I will discuss in this study chose to write about a personal experience of same-sex desire, directing a layered address to public, counterpublic and coterie readerships, both imagined and demonstrably ‘real’. Because any public or counterpublic address simultaneously constitutes and reflects publics and counterpublics that can only be imagined,67 even as anticipated coterie audiences are far more readily quantifiable, I am less interested in empirical evidence of reader response than in the anticipation of patterns of circulation that is written into the texts themselves. Nevertheless, documentary evidence of public and private responses to the novels in question – including reviews, diary entries and letters – has provided me with the means to conceptualize those patterns of anticipated circulation, enabling me to map each complex address onto a particular set of social, cultural and personal circumstances. As well, my textual analysis throughout this study will make reference to documentary evidence of the thoughts and feelings of the authors themselves, where it is apparent that those thoughts and feelings shaped and reflected the context in which each author wrote. Culturally and geographically, those contexts are vastly different: by the time she was editing Nightwood for publication, Barnes had returned to New York (and much of the novel was written in England), Woolf spent little time outside of England, Hall travelled to Paris periodically but privileged English conservatism over Parisian decadence in her life and her writing, Stein remained in Paris from 1903 until her death, and H.D. moved between America, England and Switzerland, and also spent time in Paris. This was a period in which cosmopolitanism was valued, particularly in artistic circles, and it was a period in which rapid social change was embraced by some and emphatically resisted by others. For authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef, the new freedoms and ongoing constraints that influenced their approach to the subject of same-sex desire differed according to time, location and personal circumstances, yet because the United Kingdom and the United States were the largest markets for English literature, these authors were required to perform

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similar negotiations in order to address their representations of samesex desire to an increasingly complex audience. Through the representation of personal experience, the authors I will discuss wrote about a desire that had heretofore been pathologized or rendered as obscene. The Sapphic modernist roman à clef challenged dominant approaches to gender and sexuality, prefiguring the more radical transformations in sexual politics that took place after the Second World War.

1 ‘Moral poison’: Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness

Reflecting upon Radclyffe Hall’s decision to write a novel about the suffering of the female homosexual, Hall’s lover of almost three decades, Una Troubridge, wrote that: ‘it was her absolute conviction that such a book could only be written by a sexual invert, who alone could be qualified by personal knowledge and experience to speak on behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority’.1 There is little doubt that Hall’s own life, and the lives of friends and acquaintances provided material and inspiration for The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928. However, The Well, as a whole, is not a roman à clef, and this chapter provides invaluable insight into the cultural and social backdrop against which authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef were working. Like many writers, Hall inserted aspects of her experience into her novels. What differentiates a novel like The Well from those novels that I will identify as Sapphic romans à clef is its address, which aimed to determine the reaction of an uncomplicated, mainstream audience, rather than anticipating and negotiating multiple simultaneous audience reactions. Hall aimed to change minds, and to elicit a single sympathetic response, and this motivation is written into the pages of her novel. The importance of this chapter, then, lies in what it reveals about the limits of the speakable in the interwar period; its establishment of an understanding of the configuration of public and private that governed such speech; its illumination of the strategies that enabled writers to write about samesex desire (as well as those that failed); and the work it does in differentiating the roman à clef from novels that simply borrow from life. Critical work by Ann Cvetkovich and, more recently, Heather Love, has demonstrated the political currency contained in The Well’s investment in shame, failure and the emotional responses to social isolation. As I will discuss in this chapter, the novel cannot be dismissed on 36

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the grounds that it does not pre-figure the rhetoric of ‘gay pride’ that has structured much post-Stonewall critical commentary. However, I will argue that The Well’s mainstream address, and the failures of that address, reveal the significance of address itself as a structuring device in a period characterized by secrecy and willed ignorance; and I will argue that because such a structuring device has been largely overlooked, key features of each of the novels examined in this study have also been overlooked. In the case of The Well, the nature and concomitant failure of address resulted in certain failures of the novel itself. The Well cannot simply be dismissed as a failure. The novel drew attention to the social isolation of the homosexual woman; it has certainly been more widely read than H.D.’s romans à clef, and has probably been more widely read than Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, if not Woolf’s Orlando or Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Yet Hall’s old-fashioned style and the novel’s censorship ensured that it was more likely to be read by lesbians than by the heterosexual majority Hall addressed, after the brief period of intense interest that followed its release. What is most indicative of the failure of the novel’s address is contained within the novel itself: Stephen Gordon’s suffering and self-sacrifice are purely a product of her congenital ‘abnormality’, and provide no point of identification for the mainstream (sexually ‘normal’) reader. Stephen is eager, with society’s acceptance, to take her place as an upper-class gentleman, and to ‘protect’ her feminine lover. There is no room, in this narrative, for the identification of points of intersection between discrimination against women and discrimination against the sexual invert, or for an examination of the particular exclusions and prejudices of the ruling class. Instead, the novel shores up these inequalities, effectively, if inadvertently, narrowing its appeal to those least likely to open their minds, class or gender to the female ‘congenital sexual invert’. Because The Well does not enact a careful negotiation of secrecy and disclosure according to an evaluation of audience knowledge and will to knowledge, it was seen to be more disruptive, or potentially disruptive, than more reticent and ultimately uncensored romans à clef. In contrast with the structuring of Sapphic modernist romans à clef, which distinguished an address directed toward those in the know from one to the willingly ignorant, Hall placed all her cards on the table in a polemical and unambiguous address. The Well does, however, occasionally represent personal or ‘real life’ experience, where that experience underpinned Hall’s message. As such, it is worth noting the ways in which real life and personal experience play into The Well, if only because they reveal the extent of Hall’s investment in convincing her readers of the plight

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of the congenital sexual invert. Early biographer Lovat Dickson assumed connections between Hall’s life and her art with no apparent evidence (he argues, for example, that the development of Stephen Gordon’s relationship with her young lover, Mary ‘no doubt … more or less accurately reflects [Hall’s] wooing of Una’ and that Una ‘must have heard the words’ Stephen spoke to Mary2). However, Sally Cline points out that the fall-out from Hall’s decision to base a character in her earlier novel The Forge (1924) on her friend, painter Romaine Brooks, convinced Hall to limit the autobiographical content of her novels.3 Where such content is included in The Well, it serves to further the plot in a way that emphasizes Stephen’s courage and isolation (in the case of her representation of the all-woman ambulance corps stationed in France in the First World War, which emerged from the experience of her friend, Toupie Lowther, for example); and recognizing such connections does not influence interpretation as it does in the romans à clef I will discuss later in this chapter. The exception to this general rule governing interpretation of references to reality in The Well of Loneliness is the inclusion of the character of Valérie Seymour. Valérie Seymour bears strong resemblance to American heiress Natalie Clifford Barney, who resided in Paris for decades, and is best known as a patron of the arts and seducer of women. Barney featured in a number of fictional works produced around this time – including The Well, Compton Mackenzie’s satirical Extraordinary Women and Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack, all published in 1928 – demonstrating the reach of her renown. She provides an alternative, if not privileged, perspective on ‘sexual inversion’ within the pages of The Well, and although this perspective is accessible to those unfamiliar with Barney, it is perhaps emphasized for those who recognize the connection. In Valérie Seymour, Stephen Gordon sees a ‘charm that lay less in physical attraction than in a great courtesy and understanding, a great will to please, a great impulse towards beauty in all its forms’.4 Valérie sees beauty in the sexual inversion that repulses Stephen, who struggles to accept her own congenital ‘abnormality’. And Valérie’s acceptance of sexual difference in herself and others is repeatedly invoked throughout the novel: ‘… Valérie, placid and self-assured, created an atmosphere of courage, everyone felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour’s’.5 When Stephen asks Valérie for her assistance in driving Mary into the arms of a male suitor who will be better equipped to ‘protect her’, Valerie asks, with the kind of calm common sense that is absent from much of the novel, ‘Aren’t you being absurdly self-sacrificing? You can give the girl a very great deal’.6 Valérie declares that Stephen was ‘made for a martyr’, yet Stephen’s perspective – that

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as a woman, she can give Mary neither ‘protection’ nor ‘happiness’ – is pressed upon the reader by the novel. The limits of Valérie’s influence are perhaps revealed by her reflection that inverts ‘should learn to be proud of their isolation’.7 With her weekly salons, seemingly endless series of female lovers, her patronage of male and female artists, and her description of her lesbianism as a ‘perilous advantage’, it is difficult to imagine that Barney saw herself as isolated.8 She had little interest in the kinds of people who would seek to ostracize the homosexual (‘[w]hat do I care if they vilify me or judge me according to their prejudices?’9). To a certain extent, then, Hall folds Seymour/Barney into her political project of emphasizing the invert’s shame and isolation. Rebecca O’Rourke argues that the character of Valérie ‘serves as a useful check against the temptation to see Stephen as the archetypal lesbian’,10 and Cline suggests that Valerie ‘give[s] the novel its alternative standpoint’.11 Yet ultimately, the novel directs the reader to see Stephen’s suffering as representative, while Valérie provides an exception to the rule of homosexual suffering. Hall did not resist, or attempt to transform, publicly available categories of identification. Indeed, she used them to construct an address that would relay the plight of the homosexual to as large an audience as possible. Writers like Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein wrote romans à clef in order to facilitate representations of lesbian desire that were both personal and conceptually innovative. They constructed their own frames of reference, eschewing the moral rhetoric that would condemn any ‘positive’ representation of same-sex desire, and they resisted a pathologizing alternative that insisted on the equation of such desires with a ‘scientific’ sexual taxonomy and a quantifiable sexual identity. On the other hand, Hall’s campaign for tolerance was invested in the sociopolitical framework that had guaranteed her exclusion in the first place. She rendered same-sex desire as imitative of, and secondary to, a heterosexual model, and shored up a gender hierarchy that relegated women (but not the ‘inverted’ woman) to the sphere of domesticity. In a courageous move that effectively inscribed a publicly available lesbian identity upon a recognizable body (Hall’s own) for the first time, Hall revealed her own sexual orientation when she published The Well and defended it in court. However, in using her novel to construct the ‘closet’ she wanted to come out of, Hall closed the door on those who did not adhere to a particular configuration of biological sex, gender and sexuality; she insisted upon the medical basis of non-normative sexuality, and she structured her novel so that it echoed scientific case studies of congenital sexual inverts. Hall’s attempt to bring the female homosexual to visibility and

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contingent tolerance was largely unsuccessful because it was grounded primarily in the project of extending exclusive heterosexual privilege to a scientifically defined few. The apparent misogyny and homophobia contained in The Well’s pathologization of lesbianism has been addressed numerous times, in critical literature produced after the advent of second-wave feminism and the late twentieth-century movement for gay liberation. More than thirty years ago, Lillian Faderman and Ann Williams critiqued the novel in an essay that appeared in Conditions, and Faderman elaborates upon her condemnation of the novel’s ‘morbidification’ of lesbianism in her landmark study of lesbian literature, Surpassing the Love of Men, arguing strenuously that sexology’s sexualization of women’s relationships stigmatized love between women.12 In her famous 1979 essay, ‘Women Alone Stir my Imagination’, Blanche Wiesen Cook distances her own lesbian feminism from The Well’s representation of lesbianism as a product of male identification; in ‘Zero Degree Deviancy’, published in 1982, Catharine Stimpson describes the novel as a ‘narrative of damnation’; and in No Man’s Land (1989), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar emphasize the novel’s tragedy.13 Essays that have condemned The Well for its ‘misrepresentation’ of female homosexuality are plentiful, and the novel’s irrelevance to a lesbian identity that is palatable to a modern audience has been demonstrated repeatedly since the 1970s. However, the romantic and social failures of Hall’s heroine, Stephen Gordon, and the homophobia contained in the novel, are central to understanding all literary representations of lesbian desire in the interwar period, for The Well of Loneliness was key to the creation and stigmatization of a lesbian ‘identity’. As Heather Love has argued: Critics tend to regard Hall’s deployment of the discourse of inversion as a mistake or an unfortunate consequence of her historical situation. But this essentialist discourse was extremely useful to Hall in her attempt to articulate loneliness as a structure of feeling. In the novel Stephen’s intimate and social alienation is underwritten by an ideology of failure. Loneliness is an effect of her experiences of public and private refusal; Hall traces how social experiences line up with the discourse of inversion and become sedimented in both the psyche and the body.14 For Love, the physical abjection and social isolation – the ‘failure’ – of The Well’s heroine, Stephen Gordon, are central to Hall’s ideological project, and this point is critical to any reading of the novel that takes

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into account its address to its original audience. The critical tendency to examine The Well in order to refunction it, or dismiss it as dangerously inaccurate, has elided the significance of its investment in shame and failure – an investment that is significant regardless of whether Hall’s ideological project (to ‘change minds’) succeeded. The uncomfortable social conservatism that is built into The Well’s insistent revelation of sex and desire between women has also functioned to obscure the political importance of the novel’s representation of the shame of lesbian experience. Love argues that a critical concern with the novel’s misogynistic and homophobic ideological allegiances has ‘deflected attention from the novel’s representation of homophobia and feeling’.15 That an unequivocally political critical frame has superseded an emotional one is not surprising, particularly given the insistent rhetoric of ‘pride’ (where pride is opposed to ‘shame’) that has characterized much literary criticism produced after the advent of the gay and lesbian rights movement, yet the political implications of an overt representation of the emotional consequences of homophobia are not insignificant. The terms upon which the invert can inhabit a misogynistic, homophobic society are implicitly and paradoxically called into question by a novel that appears to be invested in that society’s prejudices. Shame and stigma structure Stephen’s experience of the world, and this is an important aspect of the contextual framework through which the novel must be read. The rendering of lesbian identity as pathological and fundamentally shameful is indicative of a politically and artistically conservative conceptualization of sex, gender and sexuality, but it is also symptomatic of an inexorable association between homosexuality and alienation. For Hall, then, a lesbian identity becomes more plausible if it is positioned as an affective response to society’s exclusion of the ‘other’. The Well is steeped in a narrow version of the culture and values of the English upper classes, and it is this society from which Stephen is excluded. As such, its political usefulness for a contemporary audience is not immediately obvious. The novel is set in an England where country houses situated in verdant fields adjacent to hills and forests are populated by kindly men who long for sons to hunt with, and who will carry on the family name; the wives of the kindly men also long for sons, and hope to marry their daughters off to men just like their husbands; old money marries old money; and women are intellectually disengaged but are well ‘protected’ by their more learned spouses. When Stephen is forced into the Parisian underworld, in order to find some sense of community, it is clear that she belongs elsewhere. Observing the patrons of a

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Parisian homosexual bar – ‘that meeting-place of the most miserable of all those who comprised the miserable army’ – Stephen reflects that ‘[m]ore pitiful even than her lot was theirs’, and that ‘she could not dance in this place with Mary’.16 The Well idealizes the upper-class country gentleman, and although it critiques a society that will not admit the honourable, upper-class invert to the ranks of such gentlemen, this exclusion is never deemed to be a function of a broader social conservatism. Nevertheless, the shame, failure and trauma that situate Stephen Gordon as a worthy object of sympathy also situate The Well as what Ann Cvetkovich has described as an ‘archive of feeling’. In her study of lesbian trauma, Cvetkovich argues that ‘cultural texts’ can be read as ‘repositories of feelings and emotions’, and the usefulness of this formulation, in relation to The Well, lies in its privileging of feeling as a political category.17 If political movements like feminism do not touch The Well or its protagonist (Stephen Gordon’s courage and intellect are the products of her upperclass masculinity, while ‘normal’ women, like her lover, Mary Llewellyn, are satisfied with the trappings of femininity), then the text’s political engagement with a culture of exclusion lies in the ‘archive of feeling’ that is compiled through its representation of trauma. When Stephen is ejected from her family estate by her disgusted mother, the loneliness that has shadowed her childhood, and which Love argues is key to the novel’s staging of the tragedy of inversion, reaches a pitch of desperation: All the loneliness that had gone before was as nothing to this new loneliness of spirit. An immense desolation swept down upon her, an immense need to cry out and claim understanding for herself, an immense need to find an answer to the riddle of her unwanted being.18 Cvetkovich argues that trauma ‘forges overt connections between politics and emotion’,19 and that ‘lesbian sites give rise to different ways of thinking about trauma and in particular to a sense of trauma as connected to the textures of everyday experience’.20 According to this formulation, The Well’s particular mobilization of loneliness is politically charged. Stephen’s ‘immense needs’, her ‘immense desolation’, and her ‘new loneliness of spirit’ mark the trauma of the loss of family and of her home, and they also magnify the loneliness of a childhood of ‘everyday’ physical and emotional difference. The experience of inversion is punctuated by moments of violent refusal, yet it is not what happens to Stephen that is positioned to elicit audience sympathy as much as

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Stephen’s emotional responses, which are located in the context of the ongoing trauma of social isolation. The Well privileges a plea for sympathy over a more radical deconstruction of heterosexist assumptions surrounding gender and desire, but its rendering of trauma is itself a political intervention, into a homophobic culture that denies the emotional damage of its refusal of homosexuality. Hall’s version of female homosexuality, which insisted upon physiological as well as psychological manifestations of a congenital medical condition, enabled her to envisage a politically useful lesbian body, the visible otherness of which underpinned the trauma of isolation. From the moment the ‘narrow-hipped, wide shouldered’ Stephen is born she carries the physical signifiers of her sexual otherness,21 and although Stephen’s is an extreme case, inversion is always accompanied by physical ‘stigmata’, which are always manifested on the body. Hall writes: ‘the grades were so numerous and so fine that they often defied the most careful observation. The timbre of a voice, the build of an ankle, the texture of a hand, a movement, a gesture …’.22 Stephen Gordon’s sexual difference is readily available for all to read on the surface of her body, and in spite of the continuum of ‘otherness’ that limits the extent to which inversion can be observed in its ‘finer gradations’, there is always a physical ‘symptom’ to accompany the underlying condition. Where the invert’s lover has the capacity to reassimilate into heterosexuality, the ‘stigmata’ carried by the invert guarantees her alienation. That she is ‘other’ from the moment of her birth grounds her sexual orientation in her inalienable disidentification with ‘normal’ sexuality, naturalizing a non-normative sexual desire that can be traced to the innocence of early childhood or even infancy. The Well spectacularizes shame and failure by inscribing it upon Stephen’s body: if Stephen is ‘hideously maimed and ugly’, ‘marked’ by the same God who ‘set a mark upon Cain’,23 this is not merely metaphorical. Stephen’s physical otherness precipitates her abjection, marking her for loss, grief and tragedy before she falls in love with a woman (or fails to fall in love with a man). When Stephen is seven, her mother reflects that she is a ‘blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction’ of her father.24 At seventeen, a neighbour suggests that Stephen’s height and athleticism are ‘almost a wee bit unnatural’ and that ‘young men do hate that sort of thing’.25 And later, a stranger ‘nudge[s] his companion’ and says of Stephen, ‘look at that! What is it?’.26 The physical symptoms of sexual inversion guarantee Stephen’s isolation when no evidence of actual lesbian sex or desire is apparent. The spectacle of her abject body both portends and manifests her shame and loneliness, and Hall invokes images of Christian martyrdom to demand a sympathetic response.

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Hall converted to Catholicism before the First World War, and her mobilization of Catholic iconography in order to represent suffering in the face of persecution evidences her strategic reconciliation of her sexual orientation with the Church. Stephen repeatedly refers to the ‘mark of Cain’ in order to position God as the source of her ‘abnormality’: when she is banished from the family home, she asks her former governess, ‘[w]ould you go with Cain whom God marked’,27 and she explains to Mary, ‘I am one of those whom God marked on the forehead. Like Cain, I am marked and blemished’.28 If the curse of sexual inversion is sent by God, and Stephen is doomed by her body and concomitant desires to a life of loss and suffering, then the stigmata of the congenital homosexual also symbolizes her courage and honour in the face of a hostile world, a point which is literalized, somewhat heavy-handedly, when her face is scarred as she drives an ambulance in the war. The doctor who stitches her cheek tells her, ‘Mademoiselle will carry an honourable scar as a mark of her courage’,29 the ‘red scar on her cheek [stands] out like a wound’ when she considers pursuing a love affair with Mary,30 and after she explains the implications of her inversion to Mary, the latter begins to cry ‘because of [Stephen’s] dear, scarred face’.31 Stephen is already ‘maimed’ by inversion, and her willingness to be maimed again, literally this time, for a country that has effectively exiled her, represents the martyr’s capacity to stage suffering for the greater good. At the novel’s conclusion, Stephen’s loneliness and suffering finally eclipse any hope of a ‘normal’ life, as Mary, unblemished by the stigmata of sexual inversion, retreats to the security of heterosexuality. Yet Stephen is not simply deserted by her lover, and her carefully planned sacrifice of Mary further imbues her loneliness with the rhetorical authority of martyrdom. Stephen’s final, melodramatic plea to God takes place as she is assailed by a mob of desperate, spectral inverts, ‘tearing her to pieces, getting her under’ as they struggle to ‘become articulate through her’.32 In order for these inverts to achieve ‘their right to salvation’, they must rely upon Stephen to bear the ‘burden’ of their pain: Rockets of pain, burning rockets of pain – their pain, her pain, all welded together into one great consuming agony. Rockets of pain that shot up and burst, dropping scorching tears of fire on the spirit – her pain, their pain …33 Stephen suffers not only because she has lost Mary, then, but also because she must absorb the suffering of all inverts, and her pain is repeatedly described in physical terms. At the novel’s conclusion, her

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suffering is overtly positioned as encompassing the suffering of the masses (‘now there was only one voice … her own voice into which those millions had entered’34), and she addresses God on their behalf in the final paragraph of the novel: ‘God’, she gasped, ‘we believe; we have told You we believe … We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!’ Stephen’s sacrifices – of Mary, and of her own happiness – align her with Christ. Her faith (in God, as well as her own right to ‘exist’) in the face of adversity, and the spectacle of her abject body, which ‘must stagger and all but fall beneath this appalling burden’ as the suffering of all congenital inverts takes the place of the burden of the cross, dares the reader to disbelieve in the proximity between God and the martyred Stephen.35 The consistent deployment of references to Stephen’s martyrdom identify her shame, failure and suffering, as well as the spectacle of her abject body, as tactical, rather than as an unintended consequence of Hall’s decision to construct the homosexual woman solely in terms of sexual inversion. Yet Hall’s mobilization of religious symbols to elicit a sympathetic response from the reader sits uncomfortably with the agenda it ostensibly supports. When Stephen’s abjection, located in the grating disjunction between her masculinity and her female body, is staged as martyrdom (where the strength, courage and independent will required of such martyrdom is purely a product of her Christ-like masculinity) her particular claim to audience identification is compromised. Stephen’s suffering is not that of heterosexual and homosexual women whose female bodies render them always already excluded from a self-determined, public life; and nor is it the suffering of the idealized, Christian man, given that her inversion – her emphatic failure to be equal to a ‘real’ man – is what engenders her suffering in the first place. Hall is reluctant to locate the invert’s suffering in relation to anyone else’s, or to critique the social and cultural structures that underpin the strictly enforced connection between biological sex, gender and desire. She insists that God is the cause of sexual difference, and contends that Stephen can effect the invert’s salvation via sacrifice and a display of failure, loss and tragedy. The suffering of the congenital sexual invert thus emerges as strangely sacrosanct, and the sympathetic identification of the sexually ‘normal’ audience Hall addresses is difficult to imagine. The Well and its trial – itself a public performance of the refusal of female homosexuality, which inevitably drew attention to homosexuality

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itself – consolidated and publicized narrow terms upon which lesbian identity could be understood. The novel demanded of its audience an identification with Stephen’s suffering, even as it implicitly argued for a disidentification with those feminine characters who contributed to that suffering. Stephen’s first love, Angela Crossby, is thus a bored heterosexual who toys with the affections of an honourable, masculine invert, while Mary is dismissed as heterosexual after years of devotion to her female lover. The staging of physical abjection as religious martyrdom positions Stephen’s body as spectacle, while same-sex attracted women who physically resemble the ‘normal’ are attributed a fundamentally heterosexual identity. In spite of The Well’s plea for sympathy, then, this very deliberate spectacularization of the body of a ‘congenital sexual invert’ alerts the reader – including the non-heterosexual reader – to his or her status as spectator. The narrator’s identification with a single, idealized version of the same-sex attracted woman renders the novel too obviously manipulative to be convincing. It demands a very specific emotional response, even though a reader’s emotional response to a text is always unpredictable, and, when it comes to representations of homosexuality, too liable to remain undisclosed. Eve Sedgwick argues that the label ‘sentimental’ cannot be applied to a text, but instead describes ‘a structure of relation, typically one involving the author- or audience-relations of spectacle’,36 such that what is interesting about the attribution is not the subject matter it purports to describe but is instead the particularity of a reader’s response to that subject matter. The Well’s bid for sympathy and identification is grounded in a claim to a particular, sentimental relation between Stephen and the ‘normal’ reader, yet such an address inevitably misses the mark: the reader is more likely to label the author ‘sentimental’ in relation to the spectacle of abjection she constructs, than he or she is to identify with Stephen or the experience of inversion. Hall’s staging of shame and failure for the purpose of eliciting sympathy from her audience is shadowed by her own failure to conceptualize an explanation and justification for same-sex desire that exceeds the boundaries of a narrow, often contradictory and incoherent, definition of identity. Sympathy for Stephen Gordon cannot translate to sympathy for every same-sex attracted woman, for it is Stephen’s congenital physical ‘otherness’ that guarantees her lesbian identity and locates her outside of the ‘normative’ paradigm. Stephen’s lovers, always subject to the lure of a ‘normal life’, and to the inherent weakness of their femininity, are only temporarily homosexual, and if Stephen is positioned as The Well’s tragic hero, victimized by desertion, as well as inversion,

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then Angela Crossby and Mary Llewellyn must number amongst its villains. According to the logic of the novel, a reader sympathetic to the plight of the born invert will be less sympathetic to the ‘normal’, feminine woman who ultimately rejects her, if not because she chooses heterosexuality over the marginalization and sterility of its second-rate imitation, then because she chose a homosexual relationship in the first place, when for her, it was not ‘natural’. And if Mary is not a villain, but is instead a heterosexual women who naïvely fell in love with a masculine one, then the congenital sexual invert is again rendered the corruptor of innocent girls, inviting the kind of interpretation that Hall was writing against in the first place. According to The Well, then, lesbian identity relies upon social alienation precipitated by pathologized, non-sexual ‘otherness’, but it does not extend to those whose homosexuality is not available for visual interpretation. It is for this reason that it has proved difficult to provide satisfactory terminology with which to refer to the ‘invert’s lover’, as she appears in The Well – her identity is purely the function of somebody else’s birth defect, and she is relegated to a no-man’s land of sexual identity because as long as she is in a same-sex relationship she is not heterosexual, yet she cannot be identified with the ‘invert’. The label that can most readily be applied to Mary, albeit retrospectively, is that of ‘femme’ (at the risk of insinuating that the femme lesbian is not really a lesbian at all), yet this is accurate only if we are using the term in its loosest sense: Mary is a feminine woman who is attracted to another woman, but ‘femme’ is not a homosexual identity acknowledged within the novel. Clare Hemmings notes, in her essay on theorizing the ‘femme narrative’ in The Well, that Mary need not be read as heterosexual because ‘there is no evidence for [Mary’s] presumed heterosexuality outside [Stephen’s] masculine viewpoint’,37 yet according to the terms of the novel, it is precisely the possession of this masculine viewpoint that determines whether or not a woman can be read as homosexual. And although there is no evidence that Mary’s narrative ends with heterosexuality other than Stephen’s interpretation of a scene she views from her window,38 Mary herself identifies Stephen, rather than a more general attraction to women, as the single obstacle to her heterosexuality (‘But for you I could have loved Martin Hallam!’39), rendering her desire for another woman as anomalous, rather than as the product of a femme version of homosexual identification. Where the address that structures Sapphic romans à clef anticipates multiple points of reader identification, in order to circumvent a potentially hostile mainstream public reception and take into account

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the heterogeneity of knowledges surrounding homosexuality, The Well delimits interpretation and the scope for reader identification. Hall’s project relied upon this strategy – The Well implies that public sympathy is more likely to adhere to the victim of a congenital abnormality than to a woman whose sexual orientation is indeterminate, invisible, or of her choosing. However, in insisting upon a singular and easily intelligible version of homosexuality, Hall assumes a will to knowledge and dictates the terms upon which an uptake of knowledge will take place. Her address casts a wide net, providing every reader with knowledge of homosexuality underpinned by a plea for sympathy, inadvertently encouraging reader disidentification and emphasizing the good fortune of the ‘normal’. To some extent, the scope of The Well’s address imbued it with more potential to disrupt than many Sapphic romans à clef, which perform a layered address reliant upon knowledge brought to the text by the reader. Yet in other ways, its reach is more limited, for in regulating reader identification it alienates the same-sex attracted reader who may not feel ‘inverted’, and in reducing interpretive possibilities it forecloses the avenues by which the general reader might engage with it. The Pemberton-Billing trial of 1918 and the parliamentary debates of 1921, which I discussed at length in the introduction, effectively demonstrated that the silence adhering to female same-sex desire was characterized less by what was unknown, than by what could not be spoken. A negotiation of the boundaries between speakable and unspeakable, and public and private, facilitated the evasion of censorship and an appeal to a complex audience constituted by the willingly ignorant and the knowing. In her attempt to render the lesbian visible, via the imposition of physical markers of sexual ‘otherness’, Hall guaranteed that alternative versions of same-sex desire remained ‘closeted’. Her failure to acknowledge a correlation between lesbian invisibility and the oppression of women more generally, and her insistence that true homosexuality was heterosexuality under a surface marred by a congenital abnormality, provided a narrow window for lesbian visibility within a wider framework that supported the invisibility of the non-normative. For Hall, bringing the figure of the lesbian to the attention of a public sphere long invested in maintaining her invisibility was an exercise in consolidating the sexual hierarchy that positioned her as invisible in the first place. Hall’s attempt to represent the lesbian relied heavily upon her location of the ‘congenital invert’ at the bottom of a sexual hierarchy, such that she could be defined only inasmuch as her sexual orientation resembled, but failed to be equal to, that of the ‘normal’ heterosexual

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man. Her consolidation of the secondary status of female homosexuality ultimately justified the hostility of those to whom she directed her plea, while her assumption that ‘invert’ was an ontologically stable identity category (worthy of representation, but less so than the category of ‘heterosexual’) delegitimized the claims of those same-sex attracted women who might have disagreed with her, but who did not have an alternative language of lesbian representation available to them. In Inconsequence, Annamarie Jagose engages with the history of critical attempts to render the lesbian ‘visible’, questioning an impulse that has paradoxically reinforced that figure’s invisibility: The persistent rhetorical figuration of lesbianism as unrepresentable, invisible, and impossible brings to representation the very thing that, this figuration claims, remains outside the visual field. Because lesbian invisibility is precisely, if paradoxically, a strategy of representation – even a strategy of visualization – lesbian visibility cannot be imagined as its redress.40 Jagose deconstructs this impasse, interrogating the ‘structuring mechanisms’ that position the figure of the lesbian as a ‘reversal of the cultural conventions that naturalize (hetero)sexuality as visible’,41 and suggesting that the location of the lesbian at ‘the limits of sexuality’s cultural visibility’, is actually a ‘strategy of representation in the maintenance of the ideological bulwark of gendered and sexual hierarchy’.42 The lesbian’s apparent ‘invisibility’ is here revealed to be the means by which she is represented in relation to male and female heterosexuality and male homosexuality, each of which is constructed in relation to the invisible lesbian and each other. Jagose argues against the redress of the secondary status of lesbian sexuality via its elevation within the sexual hierarchy, suggesting that the repeated representation of lesbianism in relation to heterosexuality or male homosexuality evidences the derivativeness of all sexual categories. Jagose’s formulation provides a key to the conceptual failings of The Well of Loneliness, and of Hall’s taxonomy, which is, as I have argued, heavily invested in rendering the lesbian ‘visible’, but only according to the terms of the hierarchy that render her ‘invisible’ in the first place. The 1920s had seen an increase in anxieties surrounding women’s sexual and non-sexual relationships among those who had campaigned against women’s suffrage and those who were eager to re-establish a traditional gender hierarchy following the social chaos of the war and the euphoria of its conclusion. The increasing independence of

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women, dramatically facilitated by the necessities of wartime, fostered a consciousness, on the part of same-sex attracted women themselves, that friendship could no longer be conflated with sexual relationships. Definitions that were a hangover from nineteenth-century assumptions about women’s sexuality devalued the bonds between them, and provided ammunition for those who wished to locate the figure of ‘the lesbian’ as a threat to reproduction and the postwar recovery of the nation. In her important essay, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian’, Esther Newton argues that lesbian writers, and especially Hall, appropriated sexology’s terms of reference ‘primarily because they wanted to break out of the asexual model of romantic friendship’.43 However, if Hall redressed the desexualization and invisibility of same-sex attracted women, the alternative she proposed was no less problematic, for her strategy entailed locating the lesbian as a pathological figure with a congenital abnormality, whose sexual relationships with ‘normal’ women were ‘sterile’, in comparison with an idealized reproductive heterosexuality. Ultimately, The Well insisted that the congenital invert was an imperfect heterosexual; her ‘normal’ lover fundamentally heterosexual. The invert is rendered a poor imitation of a heterosexual man, her visibility contingent upon her secondary status, while, as I have suggested, the invert’s lover remains ‘in the closet’, in some ways even less visible than before, because where she was once a spinster upon whom mild suspicion fell, she is now a heterosexual woman whose heterosexual affections are directed towards a masculine woman. The Well evidences a preoccupation with the ‘real’ woman’s need for protection, and with the question of whether the inverted lover is capable of providing it. Masculinity is grounded in chivalry and in the adoration of the passive feminine – according to Hall’s peculiarly Catholic version of English gender-relations, a pre-Reformation, almost medieval vision of strength stands in for a (contemporary) weakened, marginal, English Catholic Church. The novel is invested in masculine courage and martyrdom, and in feminine frailty. Stephen’s masculinity is necessarily inadequate, for the binary upon which the text relies is constructed around the idealized heterosexuality embodied by her parents – by her father, who protects his wife from the world’s unsavoury truths, including Stephen’s ‘condition’, and her mother who adores him. The female invert’s masculinity is inevitably unequal to the task of ‘protecting’ her lover, particularly given the authenticity of that lover’s ‘normal’ femininity and her concomitant potential for heterosexuality. Thus, Stephen knows that when they are persecuted and Mary comes to her for protection she will have to say ‘I cannot protect you, Mary, the

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world has deprived me of my right to protect’.44 Hall’s repeated insistence upon Mary’s need for protection, and Stephen’s failure to provide it, in spite of her best efforts, gestures towards something fundamental that is lacking in lesbian relationships. Stephen states that it is the ‘world’, rather than homosexuality, which has deprived her of her right to protect, yet this claim is belied by the imitative nature of her relationship. Masculine strength and emotional and intellectual superiority coupled with feminine weakness and dependence underpin the ideal heterosexual marriage, and Stephen and Mary are carefully positioned as attempting to reflect this ideal, without ever living up to it. And this is underlined by the fact that the ‘truth’ about, and consequences of, homosexuality are precisely the truths Stephen cannot protect Mary from, while Sir Phillip was able to preserve his wife’s ignorance until his death. Stephen complains, ‘I am not complete and I never shall be’;45 she sacrifices Mary in order to provide her with ‘all that was lacking’ to her (including the children that can never result from a ‘bitterly sterile’ homosexual relationship46); and the couple’s estrangement from ‘normal’ society impacts more upon Mary than upon Stephen, because Mary belongs with ‘the normal’, and because her status as an unprotected feminine woman is naturalized. In an interview for the Daily Mail that appeared before The Well’s publication, Hall asserted that ‘generally speaking, woman’s place is in the home’ and ‘to be a good wife and mother’ is the ‘work’ for which woman was intended, according to the dictates of ‘Nature’.47 In a year when English women were finally granted suffrage, as feminists continued to campaign for equal access to education and employment, Hall reaffirmed woman’s ‘natural’ role as a wife and mother, in ironic accordance with the rhetoric of conservative social commentators like James Douglas, who viewed both female suffrage and Hall’s novel as a threat to family life. O’Rourke argues that Hall’s view of gender is not as straightforward as it may appear, given that Violet Antrim’s childhood exaggeration of her femininity raises the possibility that gender in The Well is a performance structured by societal expectations.48 However, within the novel, the result of this brief reference to ‘normal’ childhood femininity is ultimately little more than a confusion of the text’s frame of reference: Hall does not deconstruct gender, and although she briefly raises the possibility that ‘nurture’ is as likely a cause for gendered behaviour as ‘nature’, she emphatically obscures this possibility as the novel continues. And it is interesting to note that only femininity is painted as performative. Masculinity, whether it belongs to a boy or a female invert, is privileged as ‘natural’, while femininity is inherently (naturally)

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artificial. When Hall writes that Stephen’s friend Violet ‘loved dolls, but not so much as she pretended’, that she would ‘become still more touching’ when people admired her ‘touching … instinct’ like a ‘little mother’,49 she may call into question the disapproval that is readily supplied by unthinking adults to a little girl who is inherently boyish, but she does not question the distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ or the validity of such labels. Here, she again contrasts Stephen, who is simply acting in accordance with her ‘nature’ but is frowned upon, to the obsequious Violet, who deserves little encouragement, but receives it because she adheres to what is expected of her, where what is expected of a girl is an affectation of femininity. What she does not do is question the ‘naturalness’ of the distinction between the children. The ‘intolerably silly’ Violet might be ‘full of feminine poses’50 but they are poses Stephen is incapable of and that Violet is, paradoxically, naturally equipped for. Stephen is too honourably masculine for feminine poses, but she can ‘throw straighter’ than Violet’s brother Roger, and hunts with her father, while Violet is frightened even of riding side-saddle.51 And nor does the novel question the necessary relationship between these childhood differences and their adult gender-identification and sexual orientation. A naturalized distinction between ‘real’ women and their inverted counterparts is reiterated throughout the book, culminating in Stephen’s sacrifice of Mary, and, importantly, in Mary’s desire to escape the world of the ‘abnormal’, where she will never be satisfied, due to her inherent femininity and normality. Mary’s femininity was represented by statements such as, ‘[s]he was at the stage of being in love when she longed to do womanly tasks for Stephen’ (as a congenital sexual invert, Stephen herself is not required to respond in such a fashion to the fact that her beloved’s stockings do not require mending);52 or ‘[Mary] discovered that … like many another woman before her, she was well content to feel herself protected’.53 That Stephen ultimately sacrifices Mary in order to provide her with ‘all that was lacking’ to her – that is, ‘children, a home the world would respect, ties of affection that the world would hold sacred, the blessèd security and peace of being released from the world’s persecution’54 – emphasizes Hall’s fundamental social conservatism, and the extent to which her representation of gender relations reinforces an ingrained system designed to oppress not only feminine women but also women like her, who deviate from the sexual ‘norm’. Hall’s construction of the figure of the lesbian according to a model of gender inversion relies upon a gender binary, and the fundamental resemblance and inequality between heterosexual and lesbian relationships. The masculine woman must

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find in her ‘mate’ one who is ‘all woman … with a clinging woman’s dependence’,55 and because this feminine woman is more than capable of a heterosexual attraction (given that female inverts ‘attract’ as men do56), homosexual relationships are tenuous at best. Hall attempts to foreclose definitional possibilities when she credits God with the act of creating the ‘congenital sexual invert’57 and implicitly repudiates the ‘perverse’ homosexuality that is not the result of ‘inversion’. Sedgwick famously argues that an ‘internal incoherence’ characterizes a ‘crisis of modern sexual definition’, whereby a ‘minoritizing’ view of ‘homo/heterosexual definition’ as an ‘issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority’, competes with a ‘universalizing’ view that positions it as an ‘issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities’.58 Sedgwick is primarily concerned with male homosexuality, yet The Well of Loneliness, and Hall herself (as one of the first women to ‘come out’ as an ‘invert’, where ‘invert’ denotes an identity) are emblematic of this ‘crisis’. Although Hall is addressing a plea for understanding to the masses, The Well explicitly minoritizes ‘homosexuality’ by limiting its descriptive capacity to a clearly defined group of pathologized ‘inverts’. That a minoritizing model is always in tension with the universalizing model, such that any claim to one definition is marked by its ‘other’, complicates The Well, however. Hall cannot define the congenital invert without some reference to the object of her desires, and the possibility that the feminine woman might fall somewhere on a spectrum that bridges the gap between normal heterosexuality and abnormal inversion hangs over the novel. While this has the unfortunate consequence of referencing the cliché of the predatory lesbian, it also reveals a definitional instability that belies Hall’s authoritative address. Hall’s struggle to render the female homosexual interpretable always constitutes a struggle against the contradictions inherent in her own taxonomy. Hall’s promotion of mainstream tolerance for the congenital invert who cannot help her condition, and her depiction of the invert’s feminine lover as superficial or weak and better suited to heterosexuality, establishes a hierarchy within the ranks of same-sex attracted women. A tragic and apologetic frame of reference within which lesbian identity could be articulated was perceived, by Hall, to be essential for such a novel to impact upon a wide audience, yet this frame relied upon the foreclosure of possibilities for same-sex identification and desire – possibilities that were manifest, but not acknowledged, within the pages of her own novel.59 Whereas avant-garde authors have been accused of

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elitism because they did not write for a popular audience, Hall’s address to a popular audience relied in part upon her identification with, and consolidation of, its perceived prejudices. I will argue throughout this study that the importance of the roman à clef genre and stylistic obscurity to the representation of lesbian desire lies in the capacity of such techniques to circumvent the trappings of restrictive frames of reference, or even to deconstruct them, sometimes with direct reference to The Well, and often with reference to the sexological framework Hall adopted. Hall’s courage in ‘coming out’ as a lesbian and bringing a particular version of the homosexual woman ‘out’ with her is undermined by the boundaries she established between different types of women – the masculine, the feminine, the inverted, the perverted, the passionate friend, the lover. According to the terms of The Well, women who could not locate their sexual identity within such categories, or frame their identity with the terminology of sexology and psychoanalysis, a ‘closet’ one could ‘come out of’ simply did not exist. Hall’s debt to Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing in establishing the parameters of a female homosexual identity is unequivocal. Ellis wrote a brief ‘commentary’, which acted as The Well’s preface, in which he credits Hall with having written ‘the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us today’; and Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis is mobilized within the novel itself by Stephen Gordon and her father, Sir Phillip, in order to explain her gender confusion and sexual orientation.60 Hall’s version of sexual inversion does not adequately reconcile the ideological distinctions between the work of Krafft-Ebing and Ellis’ later, more socially liberal work, and this reflects the incoherencies at play within the discipline of sexology itself, and a refusal to call into question the scientific authorities that underpin her urgent claims for recognition. The Well makes manifest Hall’s particular investment in the distinction Ellis draws between ‘sexual inversion’, which is congenital, and the perversion that results from the ‘accidental absence’ of the opposite sex.61 Hall insists that Stephen’s ‘abnormality’ is ‘natural’, that she cannot help her sexual orientation, and that this is attributable to the fact that she cannot help her masculinity (which provides corporeal evidence of the authenticity of her abnormality). As well as being born ‘wide shouldered’ and ‘narrow hipped’, she grows to be tall, with large hands, a ‘resolute’ jaw and cleft chin like her father, her physical prowess sits uncomfortably with her gender, and she attracts stares from strangers.62 At the age of seven, she asks her father if she ‘could be a

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man’ if she ‘prayed very hard’, when she rejects Martin Hallam she lies awake wondering ‘what’ she was, ‘what manner of curious creature, to have been so repelled by a lover like Martin’, and when she is contemplating beginning a relationship with Mary, she questions whether ‘inverts’ are ‘entitled to their passions’ given that they live ‘lives that to them [are] perfectly natural’.63 There is never any danger of confusing Stephen, who will only feel brotherly affection and comradeship for a man like Martin Hallam, with Mary, who is ‘normal’, if naïvely open to advances from both sexes, or Angela Crossby, whose interest in Stephen is aroused by boredom and amorality. Hall’s contention that inversion should invite pity rather than condemnation is enabled by Ellis’ work, and she echoes the authoritative tone with which he argues that: in England, more than in any other country, the law and public opinion combine to place a heavy penal burden and a severe social stigma on the manifestations of an instinct which to those persons who possess it frequently appears natural and normal.64 With no cause to represent the ‘penal burden’ placed upon male homosexuals, Hall concentrates on the burden of social stigma, which weighs heavily on Stephen because society, and her own code of honour, demand that she resist her ‘natural’ urges (urges that are, incidentally, unnatural in an individual who desires someone of the same sex but is not ‘inverted’). When Stephen struggles to write, she says to Puddle (Miss Puddleton), her one-time governess, sympathetic companion and an ‘invert’ herself, ‘It’s unfair, it’s unjust. Why should I live in this great isolation of spirit and body …?’;65 and when she writes to her judgmental mother to limit contact between them, she tells her: I have tried to think that your yoke was a just one, a just punishment, perhaps, for my being what I am, the creature whom you and my father created; but now I am going to bear it no longer. If my father had lived he would have shown pity, whereas you showed me none, and yet you were my mother.66 As I have suggested, throughout The Well, Hall promotes pity as the ideal response of the ‘normal’ to her heroine’s abnormality, and she constructs Stephen’s desire as both natural and a natural source of shame. Both Ellis and Hall argue for tolerance of homosexuality, then, and both privilege heterosexuality. Ellis encourages ‘sound social

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hygiene’ as a means to ‘render difficult the acquisition of homosexual perversity’, and Stephen cures Mary of her ‘homosexual perversity’ when she drives her into the arms of a man.67 In the light of her socio-political project, Hall’s mobilization of the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing is more difficult to understand than her reliance upon Ellis. Krafft-Ebing places less emphasis than Ellis upon the ‘inversion’ of gender identification and/or physical sexual characteristics, arguing that homosexuality is essentially a matter of inversion of the ‘sexual instinct’ and does not necessarily depend upon ‘abnormalities’ of sex and gender.68 As a result, he does not draw the distinction between congenital sexual inversion and acquired homosexual ‘perversity’ – and this is a distinction that was vital to Hall’s campaign for the legal and social acceptance of homosexuality, although she does not address its absence from Krafft-Ebing’s sexual taxonomy. Published in 1886, during a period characterized by increasing anxiety over Western society’s perceived decadence, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis is presented as a diagnostic aid for the maintenance of the health and vitality of ‘civilization’. He provides a detailed explanation of the necessary relationship between the civilized, Christian West and an ideal, heterosexual love,69 and describes homosexuality as ‘a manifestation of functional degeneration’.70 His sympathy for the inverted is limited: he states that ‘love … can only exist between persons of different sex capable of sexual intercourse’.71 Psychopathia Sexualis features prominently in The Well, for Sir Phillip reads it to better understand his daughter’s gender disorientation, and Stephen finds it in a locked cupboard, following her father’s death. Stephen’s discovery of this book provides her with the tools to describe herself and her ‘condition’, and she is finally able to comprehend her involuntary repulsion of Martin’s advances and her attraction to Angela Crossby. As she examines the book, she reflects: Krafft Ebing [sic] – she had never heard of that author before. All the same she opened the battered old book, then she looked more closely, for there on its margins were notes in her father’s small, scholarly hand and she saw that her own name appeared in those notes …72 As she contemplates her sexual inversion, newly revealed and inscribed by her father (emphasizing the genetic basis of her abnormality), Stephen internalizes Krafft-Ebing’s pathologizing approach. Self-understanding leads her to describe herself, and others like her, as ‘miserable’, ‘unwanted’,

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‘hideously maimed and ugly’ and ‘flawed in the making’.73 Hall does not attempt to dispel these initial perceptions, although I will argue that she does complicate them, and from the moment Stephen stumbles upon Psychopathia Sexualis, she carries the ‘mark of Cain’, thanks to her sexual abnormality.74 Stephen’s discovery of a discourse in which she can situate her heretofore incomprehensible desires does not liberate her, but leaves her permanently branded by the mark of otherness, closing down the aspirations she holds to live a ‘normal’ life.75 Hall attributes to Krafft-Ebing a theoretical link between physical stigmata and inversion that naturalizes inversion and more closely resembles Ellis’ position on the mutually dependent relationship between gender and sexuality. The most obvious explanation for this misreading is the imperative of chronological accuracy: after all, according to the (vague) chronology of The Well, Sir Phillip would not have been able to access any work on inversion by Ellis until 1897 when Sexual Inversion was published, well after he had recognized his daughter’s condition and chosen to raise her as a boy. However, this is probably an underestimation of Hall’s knowledge of sexological theories of homosexuality, and it is more likely that she mobilized Krafft-Ebing’s work in order to lend scientific authority to her text, while at the same time emphasizing the social and psychological consequences of a failure to acknowledge medical explanations for homosexuality. It is Hall’s use of the work of radical sexologist and socialist reformer Edward Carpenter, as an at times unlikely complement to that of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, that marks the most radical element of her political position, and was probably damaging to her legal case.76 Carpenter’s argument that ‘new types of human kind may be emerging’,77 with the ‘gift’ of a ‘double point of view, both of the man and the woman’78 is reflected in Puddle’s words to Stephen immediately after she is banished from Moreton: ‘just because you are what you are, you may actually find that you’ve got an advantage. You may write with a curious double insight – write both men and women from personal knowledge’.79 This moment of optimism is all too brief, and it contributes to the incoherence of Hall’s position on homosexuality, which has proved too pessimistic for many lesbian and liberal readers, even as it was too ‘perverse’ for a conservative establishment to tolerate. Hall’s investment in the pseudo-science of sexology was strategic. The Well was not her first treatment of passion between women, but sexology provided her with a means of sexualizing that passion, and it secured an association between signifiers of masculinity and an underlying lesbian identity.80 Sexual love between women has a medical explanation, The

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Well suggests, but only if it is between a congenital sexual invert and her feminine lover. According to Hall’s formulation, the boundaries of what had heretofore been socially acceptable, and of what constituted a publicly available sexual identity, needed to be shifted, but not far. As I have suggested, outside of the terms of congenital inversion, same-sex desire remained invisible and unspeakable, set adrift from any sexual identity. At best, it was an example of avoidable perversion rather than pathology, at worst, it simply did not exist. Hall’s earlier novel, The Unlit Lamp (1924), which is concerned with a pathological relationship between a mother and daughter, and a passionate female friendship, contains a more nuanced rendering of same-sex desire that is unconcerned with questions of sex and sexual identity. Thematically, it contains clear similarities to The Well, yet the differences between the texts evidence the shift in Hall’s preoccupations. By the time she wrote The Well, her central concern was social and political, rather than literary, yet the less polemical Unlit Lamp makes a stronger argument for woman’s right to independence from men, and for the acceptance of their relationships with each other. The Unlit Lamp is the story of the brilliant Joan Ogden, who loses her chance of happiness to the whims and demands of her pathologically possessive mother. Yet just as significant as the mother-daughter relationship, in this novel, is the story of the relationship between Joan and Elizabeth, Joan’s one-time teacher and passionate friend. When Joan is a child, her mother reflects that her oldest daughter is ‘so like a boy – one felt that she was a son sometimes’, and by the age of seventeen, Joan stands in stark contrast to her ‘very normal’ sister, Milly, and ‘suggest[s] a well set-up strippling who had borrowed his sister’s clothes’.81 When the very eligible Richard Benson proposes to her, she replies that she is ‘not the marrying sort’,82 while she is thrilled at the prospect of sharing a life with Elizabeth: She realized now how necessary, how vitally necessary it was that they should live together … In the past she had known two Elizabeths, but now she knew a third; there had been Elizabeth the teacher and Elizabeth the friend. But now there was Elizabeth the perfect companion.83 In The Unlit Lamp, the combination of non-heterosexual affect and physical difference does not signal an agonizing conflict between biological sex and gender identification, as it does in The Well. Joan’s gender is simultaneously more complex and less pathological than that of The Well’s heroine, Stephen Gordon.

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In The Unlit Lamp, Hall’s representation of gender and the differences between the sexes is relatively complex: Richard, Joan’s would-be fiancé, points out that Joan ‘may not be the marrying sort … but [is] a real woman for all that’, and Joan later downplays the differences between herself and her sister, when she points out to her mother that ‘Milly likes men too much, and I like them too little, but here we are, we’re your daughters’.84 Joan may want access to male privilege (‘[s]he wanted to be a doctor. She knew that it was not easy and not very usual; but that made it seem all the more desirable in her eyes’), and she anticipates happiness with another woman, but these traits are positioned, by the novel, as legitimate for a ‘real’ woman. By the time she came to write The Well, Hall’s perspective on gender had narrowed, perhaps as a result of her push to represent an ‘authentic’ version of the experience of the homosexual woman, and to enact political change. Her belief that such change cannot be engendered by a veiled representation of same-sex desire resulted in the construction of a direct and uncomplicated address and the mobilization of unequivocal, if at times contradictory, homo/heterosexual definitions. An effect of The Well’s investment in sexology is its investment in the pathologization of women and young girls who prefer intellectual and physical pursuits to marriage, babies and other feminine activities such as sewing, gossiping and mending a lover’s stockings. The Well is the story of those aspects of Stephen Gordon’s life that relate to her sexual inversion, and she is deemed deserving of male rights and privileges because she is an invert, not because greater equality between the sexes is desirable. From early childhood, Stephen defies the expectations placed upon girls and women born into her class in the late nineteenth century. She rides astride, hunts with her father, fences, drives ambulances in the First World War and becomes an award-winning writer. However, this is far from a feminist tale, as Stephen’s interests and achievements are symptoms of her inherent maleness. According to The Well, the only women who are free of stereotypical feminine traits such as dependence, physical incompetence, intellectual inferiority and the singular ambition of marriage are sexual inverts, and Stephen’s struggle is grounded not only in her ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation, but also in her inability to reconcile her female body with her masculine interests and sense of honour. Gillian Whitlock and Laura Green have suggested that The Well is a künstlerroman, yet although the novel does gesture toward the possibility that it will trace the career of an artist, this classification is to some extent misleading.85 Hall has far less interest in the development of the

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artist than she does in the development of the invert, and the narrative of Stephen Gordon’s youth is always directed toward her adult sexuality rather than her chosen profession – indeed, her profession is positioned as a consequence of an insight born of marginalization and masculinity. The Well is, first and foremost, a detailed fictionalized case study, which promotes a particular political and scientific position on sex, gender and sexual desire. As I have argued, according to Hall’s formulation, desire is always contingent upon the gender-difference between lovers, but it is a difference constituted by a pathological inborn discrepancy between the gender and biological sex of the invert. Thus, Stephen Gordon, born to parents who mistakenly anticipate that their perfect heterosexual love will provide them with a perfect son (leading them to provide their daughter with a male name, and undermining Hall’s insistence on the purely congenital nature of inversion), strongly resembles her father, is stronger than boys her age, prefers breeches to dresses, dislikes dolls and silly little girls, is rejected by male and female peers, and develops an infatuation, at the age of seven, with a housemaid. That many sexually ‘normal’ prepubescent girls share Stephen’s experiences is written out of Hall’s text, which rests upon a taxonomy that eliminates ambiguity. Stephen’s mother, Anna, is uncomfortable with her daughter’s gender indeterminacy, but remains ignorant of its cause, as her husband spends long hours in his study reading the works of Krafft-Ebing while protecting his feminine wife from the truth. Stephen’s coming-of-age is marked by her panic as she involuntarily refuses the advances of Martin, her only male suitor; and by her passionate but ‘sterile’ love for the morally dubious Angela Crossby. Her relationship with Mary is comparatively successful, because Mary is young, feminine, working class, and in need of guidance and ‘protection’, and as such, she is precisely the kind of impressionable ‘normal’ woman who inverts attract, according to Ellis’ formulation. What sets The Well apart from The Unlit Lamp is the sex The Well alludes to but does not explicitly describe, along with the strict classification of a homosexual ‘type’ upon which the possibility of sex appears to rely. In spite of the subversion contained in the suggestion that two women might engage in a sexual relationship, then, The Well’s narrow conceptualization of the homosexual woman diminishes possibilities for non-heterosexual modes of affect and sexual desire, while Joan and Elizabeth’s ambiguous passion for each other, grounded as it is in intellectual equality rather than the inherent masculine superiority of one woman and the girlish ignorance of the other, provides the same-sex attracted reader with multiple points of identification, and the general public with a more nuanced understanding of bonds between women

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(albeit a less confronting one).86 The Well’s significance for lesbian readers and homophobic critics undoubtedly lies in its insistence upon the sexual nature of lesbianism,87 yet as I have argued, it is sexuality grounded in a dubious imitation of heterosexual gender difference. On the other hand, in The Unlit Lamp, attraction does not require the polarization of gender identification, and it is the similarity between Joan and Elizabeth that underpins their passion for one another. Unlike The Well’s Mary, neither of these women is positioned by the novel as capable of a happy marriage, and if their desire for each other is nonsexual (although this is unclear), it nevertheless transcends the bounds of friendship, replacing heterosexual desire as the ideal. The Unlit Lamp is an unremarkable and somewhat depressing novel, which, like much fiction of the time (fiction against which Hall rebelled, with The Well), refuses to be explicit about the existence of lesbian sexuality. Its pathologization of the mother–daughter relationship is also problematically misogynistic at times. However, in spite of its unhappy ending, The Unlit Lamp provides same-sex attracted women with an agency that is denied The Well’s invert. Stephen Gordon and those she represents do not deliberately exclude themselves from society (Stephen’s reaction to Martin’s proposal is involuntary, and she is unable to comprehend her feelings for Angela Crossby) and, indeed, they aspire to ‘normality’, which condemns them to a life constrained by conventions that they will never be able to adhere to. On the other hand, Joan and Elizabeth make reasoned decisions regarding their relationships with men and women, and these decisions are in no way influenced by societal expectations or inexorable pathology. The absence of an aspiration to be ‘normal’ creates possibilities for the characters and for the readers who identify with them, and if their dreams do not come to fruition, it is due to personal circumstances, rather than the limitations of lesbian identity. The Unlit Lamp, (like many of the romans à clef I will discuss in this study), privileges bonds between women over a male-female bond that idealized institutionalized inequality; while The Well’s insistence upon gender difference as a prerequisite for desire, even between female lovers, and its equation of female masculinity with pathology, provided further ammunition for those most anxious about women’s increasing economic and sexual independence. Because Hall wrote The Well with the expressed intention of ‘bring[ing] normal men and women of good will to a fuller and more tolerant understanding of the inverted’, her approach was to emphasize the ‘otherness’ of her homosexual subjects.88 Hall’s decision to demand public recognition of a lesbian identity via a popular, polemical novel,

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in a period when lesbian ‘identity’ was difficult to define and privacy facilitated same-sex relationships and affairs, raised a number of questions about the often unstable constructions of public, counterpublic and private that prevailed at the time. The implications of Hall’s taxonomy are perhaps most apparent when viewed in relation to The Well’s early critical reception. In a collection of essays published in 1931, Rebecca West argues that without the publicity generated by the trial, ‘the life of The Well of Loneliness would not have extended beyond four months’.89 The often impassioned discussion surrounding The Well’s trial resulted in its lasting renown as the quintessential lesbian novel, while the position of early reviews – that it was unexceptional in literary terms, courageously addressed an interesting subject, and was unlikely to stand the test of time – has been forgotten. For three weeks after The Well’s publication, it appeared that Hall had successfully paved the way for writers to experiment with style and narrative in order to represent their own version of same-sex desire to a mainstream audience, and reviewers were free to treat the novel on its merits, rather than in relation to its impending censorship trial. In 1930, writer Ethel Mannin suggested that early sales of the novel were attributable to ‘the author’s previous reputation and an almost unanimously eulogistic press’,90 and reviewers of the calibre and reputation of Arnold Bennett and Leonard Woolf praised the novel’s treatment of its theme even as they criticized its stylistic weaknesses. Bennett describes the novel as ‘[d]isfigured by loose writing and marred by loose construction’, yet ‘honest, convincing and extremely courageous’ with a ‘cry for … recognition’ that ‘attains genuine tragic poignancy’;91 while Woolf argues that it is ‘extremely interesting’ as ‘a study of psychology’, but that it ‘fails completely as a work of art’.92 Other reviews that appeared in the weeks prior to The Well’s release and James Douglas’ condemnatory editorial take a similar approach to its literary elements and its subject matter, barely raising the question of whether a book about lesbianism should have been written, published and marketed to the general public. Douglas did publish his incendiary editorial in the Sunday Express, however, and from there, the focus of reviews shifted to questions of morality, sexual inversion and artistic freedom, setting the pattern for criticism of the book for decades to come. Hall’s publisher, Cape, had strategically refrained from sending a review copy of The Well to The Sunday Express, for Douglas was known for his sensationalist moralizing. A copy found its way into Douglas’ hands, however, and on Sunday the 19th of August, 1928, he published his article under a banner headline

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that read: ‘A Book that Must Be Suppressed’.93 Sales of both The Well and The Sunday Express benefited, in the short term, from Douglas’ editorial, as Douglas must have known they would. By the time the trial began, the level of interest in and debate surrounding ‘Sapphism’ and censorship had far exceeded that generated by the novel itself. Campaigns for public morality are notorious for the hypocrisy of their public address. In this case, the question of whether The Well was obscene was positioned, by its detractors, in relation to its capacity to corrupt an innocent public, yet it was Douglas and the trial that drew the most public attention to Hall and the subject of sexual inversion. Douglas’ famous statements that he would ‘rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel’, and that the novel is ‘moral poison’, allude to the dangers of publicizing female homosexuality, while simultaneously serving to publicize the novel themselves.94 In his judgment, Sir Chartres Biron declared that in this case, the test for obscenity was contained in the question of whether ‘this book … defend[s] unnatural practices between women’, and whether it ‘glorif[ies] them’, and he describes Mary as ‘an innocent girl who has been debauched’.95 His fear that other innocent young girls like Mary might fall prey to the temptation of glorified lesbian sex was clearly the basis of his decision to suppress the novel. The anxiety surrounding the potential publicization of lesbian sexual practices and relationships evidences an implicit acceptance that such practices would continue in private. Because the public policing of the private lives of female homosexuals was not worth the risk of homosexuality’s proliferation, the ‘closet’ inhabited by same-sex attracted women allowed for greater freedom, within its boundaries, than that inhabited by their male counterparts. For many women who had enjoyed clandestine homosexual relationships and affairs, often within private circles that accepted or even celebrated revelation within a certain context, Hall’s novel was an inconvenience they were reluctant to support. The reticence of women and men to defend The Well and thus expose their own nonnormative sexuality to public scrutiny was coupled with a distaste for sexological theories on the part of certain same-sex attracted women who were open about, or comfortable with, their sexual orientation, and with an ambivalent critique of censorship by those who considered The Well to be ‘bad art’. For a range of reasons, then, those who disagreed with the censorship of a lesbian novel – whether they were champions of artistic freedom, same-sex attracted women (and men) or both – tended to be less than enthusiastic when it came to throwing the full weight of their influence behind Hall and her novel.

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The well-known writers who attempted to offer some kind of public support for Hall qualified that support by focusing upon artistic freedom instead of on the novel itself or the right of an artist to represent same-sex desire. Thus, when E.M. Forster and Leonard Woolf decided to put together a petition protesting the proposed banning of The Well, the letter was premised upon the importance of artistic freedom, rather than the novel’s artistic merits. Although the signatures of well-known writers had already been gathered, Hall withdrew her agreement to the petition, for she felt that the letter attached to it compromised her standing as an artist.96 It was unlikely that the writers who signed the petition would have put their names to the kind of letter Hall believed she deserved. For Virginia Woolf, The Well and its author clearly qualified as ‘middlebrow’, which she described as: the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.97 ‘Popular’ literature, written to appeal to a mass audience, and providing the author with fame and money, was a manifestation of the ‘middlebrow’ that Woolf found distasteful, and the support offered to Hall by the members of Woolf’s artistic milieu was always tempered by their compulsion to distance themselves from work of this kind. In private, Woolf described The Well as ‘stagnant, lukewarm, and neither one thing or the other’,98 where the middlebrow of her essay are also ‘neither one thing nor the other’, and middlebrow fiction is ‘betwixt and between’.99 Hall’s representation of lesbian desire flew in the face not only of a conservative establishment, but also of a literary elite that disdained the ‘old-fashioned’ realism that sold popular novels, and relied upon literary encryption and personal privacy to veil and enable their own homosexuality.100 Woolf’s position is, of course, a manifestation of intellectual snobbery towards both Hall and the ‘middlebrow’ public that consumed her novels. Nevertheless, her response to The Well reveals Hall’s impossible position – as emphatic in an address to the popular audience most likely to find her subject matter intolerable. Hall’s ambivalent defenders were reluctant to take the stand to support The Well, and Woolf, who had prepared herself, albeit reluctantly, to defend the novel in court, commented dryly on the fact that those who avoided it ‘generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a

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cousin who is about to have twins’.101 Following the trial, Rebecca West stated that: Everybody who knows Miss Radclyffe Hall wants to stand by her. But they are finding it far from easy to stand by The Well of Loneliness, for the simple reason that it is, in a way which is particularly inconvenient in the present circumstances, not a very good book.102 The defence of lesbianism and the defence of art needed to be consistently qualified in order to preserve the professional and personal reputation of the defender, and this not only weakened the public case being made for The Well, it signalled a demand for alternative frames through which same-sex desire could be conceptualized and represented. However, the banning of the novel guaranteed its ongoing status as ‘the’ lesbian novel and closed down possibilities for the publication of overt or mainstream literary renderings of female homosexuality. Because of its suppression, The Well’s frame of reference was imbued with a significance that was disproportionate to the number of women who identified with it.103 A number of modernist authors, including Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and H.D., as well as Decadent precursors like Renée Vivien, found ways to critique sexology while strategically mobilizing it in order to reference sex between women. Yet although these women clearly objected to Hall’s explanatory narrative (with the exception of Vivien, who died in 1909), none offered a mainstream readership a coherent, appropriable alternative. Woolf and Barnes both positioned congenital sexual inversion as an inadequate and even laughable explanation for same-sex desire – something I will discuss in my analyses of the Ladies Almanack and Nightwood, and Orlando – yet both couched their objections to the explanatory framework appropriated by Hall in language most accessible to those who already shared their views, or at least doubted conventional wisdom. H.D.’s construction of same-sex desire in Asphodel, Paint it Today and HER stood in opposition to Hall’s inasmuch as it referred to the identification between women with a shared experience of gender, yet these romans à clef, written in the 1920s, were not published in their authors’ lifetime. The New Yorker’s (lesbian) Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, commented upon the ‘curiosity’ aroused by The Well among ‘the Paris Latin Quarter denizens’, many of whom identified as lesbian or conducted same-sex affairs, and who expressed ‘little admiration’ for the novel ‘as a literary or psychological study’, given that its ‘whole analysis was false’,104 yet this critique was an afterthought, not included

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in the original ‘Letter from Paris’ of 1928, but appearing only in 1972, in Flanner’s commentary on the collection of ‘Letters’ from the period. In a socio-political environment characterized by the anxious censorship of artists intent upon pushing the boundaries, as well as vitriolic debates over women’s independence and their emergence from enforced domesticity, the negotiation of public and private – and of strategies and contexts for revelation and secrecy – was fraught with danger. However, it was not only fear of exposure, or the absence of an alternative frame for same-sex desire, that deterred women from publicly identifying as a homosexual, lesbian or ‘invert’, or from producing literary representations of these identities. Some writers, including those who mobilized the roman à clef genre in order to write about their own lesbian experiences, had no clear ‘revelation’ to make when it came to their own sexuality or their conceptualization of sexual desire. In the midst of her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, for example, Virginia Woolf described her lover as a ‘Sapphist’, herself as a ‘eunuch’; and Barnes was rarely reticent about stating that Thelma Wood was the love of her life, and did not attempt to disguise the nature of their eight-year relationship, but she did not identify as a ‘lesbian’.105 Writers who obscured lesbian desire with a difficult style and veiled references were interested in constructing a frame for their experience which did not accept dominant hypotheses about the homosexual woman’s inherent mannishness, moral culpability, or sexual immaturity. They refunctioned the terms that framed same-sex desire to parody the notion that a homosexual identity was readily quantifiable, and represented the culture of secrecy itself, as a way of figuring what that culture concealed. Hall’s spectacular, very public emergence from the ‘closet’ was in many ways productive for the development of a lesbian community and political solidarity, but it also had the effect of creating and delimiting something that she claimed simply to be bringing to light. To a certain extent, The Well’s investment in sexology and tragedy is a manifestation of the threat of censorship. According to Katrina Rolley and Elizabeth Ladensen, censorship structures Hall’s articulation of a lesbian identity, providing an impetus to ground desire in tragedy and pathology. Rolley argues that censorship was not only an effect of The Well’s publication and distribution, but also functions as the novel’s ‘thematic skeleton’;106 and Ladensen suggests that the ‘unhappy fate’ of The Well’s inverts ‘represents … an unsuccessful attempt to conform to societal and literary expectations and ward off censorship’, thus imbuing the novel’s tragedy with a level of noble sacrifice.107 Yet although the prospect of censorship undoubtedly provided Hall with the tools and

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motivation to figure the lesbian as a victim of a hostile society, her motivation for situating the lesbian as tragic invert is arguably more complex than this. Self-expression, within The Well itself, is constrained not by a hostile, censorious society, but by the ‘sterility’ of the invert’s ‘passions’. Thus, Jamie, a struggling composer, fights ‘for expression through her stiff and scholarly compositions’, while Wanda, ‘[o]utraged by her body’, is driven to drink by ‘desire’, and ‘struggling to ease the ache of her passion’, turns to the easel.108 Wanda wants to befriend Stephen because ‘everyone’ says she is ‘a great writer’ in spite of the fact that she is an invert (that she is ‘surely even as Wanda’),109 yet even Stephen, who has overcome her affliction to create a work of ‘outstanding literary merit’110 has struggled to write something ‘complete’: her complaint to Puddle that she is ‘not complete and … never shall be’, comes as she attempts to write a second novel that exceeds her debut, The Furrow.111 Stephen’s great work, which stems from her desire to protect Mary, is the exception that proves the rule, as she is repeatedly positioned as having achieved in spite of her congenital condition. The paradox here is clear: artistic production provides the invert with a substitute for biological reproduction (and occasionally with the ‘curious double insight’ discussed earlier), and with a mode of self-expression within a hostile society, yet it is something she is fundamentally unequipped for.112 Hall’s mobilization of sexological theories of inversion are in part a function of censorship, then, as Rolley and Ladensen suggest, but within The Well, inversion is simultaneously identified as a condition that precipitates an involuntary self-censorship. There is a certain irony in the fact that Hall’s insistence upon revelation and a publicly visible lesbian identity was made manifest in a novel that was itself underpinned by censorship. And, of course, the trial that followed The Well’s publication resulted in the novel’s suppression and a culture of self-censorship that structured writing about women’s relationships for years to come. Yet although the controversy surrounding The Well almost certainly explains why writers of the kind of conservative realist fiction Hall was famous for did not test the boundaries of writing lesbian desire until the 1950s, the modernist mobilization of the roman à clef genre marks a different mode of representation, that was perhaps more suited to an era structured by loaded silences. Indeed, the prospect of censorship almost certainly provided experimental writers like Barnes and Woolf with further impetus to address ‘forbidden’ subjects and push the stylistic and cultural envelopes, while maintaining a distance from the mainstream. Nevertheless, if The Well of Loneliness was not the inspiration for the authors of less overt literary representations of female same-sex

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desire in the period, then it did structure a publicly available lesbian identity which other writers engaged in a number of ways. As we will see, the sexological version of the lesbian, which came to be fixed to a publicly available sexual identity through The Well (throughout England, in America, and in the expatriate lesbian community in Paris), provided a reference point for a number of writers – including high modernist writers – representing female same-sex desire. For writers who mobilized the roman à clef genre and performed a layered address to the general public as well as a lesbian counterpublic and private readers, The Well, produced subcultural signifiers, enabled the parody of recognizable constructions of lesbian desire, and facilitated renderings of same-sex desire that arranged more nuanced visions of sexual identity around a complex web of identifications and disidentifications with Hall’s vision of the congenital sexual invert.

2 ‘On her lips you kiss your own’: Theorizing desire in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood

Nora Flood’s quest to ‘understand’ her estranged lover, Robin Vote, whose promiscuity, drunkenness and nightly disappearances end only with the end of their relationship, emerges on page 125 of Nightwood as the novel’s central question, when Nora says to her confidant, Dr Matthew O’Connor, ‘It means – I’ll never understand her – I’ll always be miserable – just like this’.1 Nora’s search for understanding can be readily interpreted as Djuna Barnes’ rationalization of her own relationship with silverpoint artist, Thelma Wood. The temptation is there, then, to read Nightwood as a purely autobiographical text, in which a difficult style partially obscures the story of Barnes’ victimization at the hands of a disturbed alcoholic.2 As well as being implicitly homophobic, readings such as this validate a typically modernist misogyny that renders personal writing less than ‘serious’, thus explaining Shari Benstock’s warning about the dangers of reading Nightwood in terms of its ‘roman à clef aspects’.3 However, with its subtle negotiation of style and subject matter, Nightwood is equally open to misinterpretation if its roman à clef aspects are denied or dismissed. Benstock suggests that the immediate reception of Barnes’ writing was marked by the insistent denial that a ‘woman as beautiful as Barnes might be lesbian’.4 In order to accommodate the urge to claim Barnes for the heterosexual reading public, a misreading of the text was required, and it was a misreading that could be conveniently disguised by what Benstock describes as the ‘problem of style’.5 The absence of moralizing overtones from what was thought to be an objective study of degeneracy and depravity, for example, could be ignored thanks to the impenetrability of the writing. However, Nightwood brings the marginalized to the centre, and although the ‘freaks’ Barnes parades through her text can be, and have been, described as such by its readers, within the 69

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novel itself they are positioned in relation to a norm revealed to be little more than a matter of perspective. Joseph Boone argues that Nightwood exists as a ‘conceptual space’ in which the ‘normative becomes … the excluded’.6 Yet although the ‘normative’ is certainly Nightwood’s ‘other’, the implication that Barnes simply ignores the ‘normal’ is misleading. The roles played by her cast of abject characters in both Nightwood and the Ladies Almanack (1928), destabilize the category of normal, revealing its linguistic foundations and refiguring them to demonstrate the impossibility of reducing any sexual desire to a single explanatory narrative. In the Ladies Almanack, Barnes enacts this deconstruction explicitly, for the enjoyment of its coterie readership, but her approach in Nightwood is more pragmatic. She subtly directs this text’s most subversive aspects toward the readership that would have had access to the Almanack, well aware that publication for a comparatively large, potentially mainstream audience relied upon a careful address structured around the level of sexual transgression palatable to the general public.7 As such, Nightwood is perhaps best examined with reference to the Almanack, for each of these generically divergent texts parodies classificatory categories when it examines the relationships of a single circle of same-sex attracted women. In this chapter, then, I will perform a close reading of both texts that rests upon the fact that they each address the same coterie readership and strategically critique the discourses that would pathologize lesbian desire. The Ladies Almanack, described by Barnes as a ‘slight satiric wigging’, parodies many of the members of Natalie Barney’s circle of friends, lovers and ex-lovers (attendees of her Académie des Femmes) along with the sexology that claimed to define them.8 It is inhabited by a formidable cast of well-known characters, which the general public would nevertheless have been hard-pressed to identify. These include Barney (Dame Evangeline Musset), Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge (Tilly-Tweed-InBlood and Lady Buck-and-Balk), Janet Flanner and Solita Solano (Nip and Tuck), Dolly Wilde (Doll Furious), Romaine Brooks (Cynic Sal), and Mina Loy (Patience Scalpel, the Almanack’s one heterosexual). The Almanack, which revolves around Dame Evangeline Musset’s busy sex-life, parodies the idea of the ‘normal’, refusing to define the lesbian in relation to a naturalized point of reference. Unlike Radclyffe Hall’s, The Well of Loneliness, also published in 1928, Barnes does not position the ‘lesbian’ as a pathological deviation from the ‘normal’, and nor does she seek to prove that the lesbian is just like everybody else. For Hall, ‘normal’ is the unproblematized descriptive term for the ‘invert’s’ opposite: she refers to the ‘tolerant normal’9 and the unique ability of Valérie Seymour (also

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based on Natalie Barney) to make her fellow ‘inverts’ feel ‘very normal and brave’.10 Barnes, on the other hand, renders such oppositions ridiculous, writing of Musset’s father’s ‘most normal of Night-Shirts’.11 Dressed in this night-shirt, he paces his library ‘trying to think of ways to bring his erring Child back into that Religion and Activity which has ever been thought sufficient for a Woman’, and away from the sexual proclivities that ‘would by no Road, lead her to the Alter’,12 his own normativity somewhat tenuously located in a less-than-masculine male garment. This conventional father’s authority over the boundaries between sex, gender and sexual acts, and between ‘normal’ and abject, is compromised, and anxieties surrounding lesbian sexuality are tied to masculine privilege and culturally sanctioned gender roles. Evangeline’s immediate response to her father’s protests is to argue that she is ‘doing after’ his ‘Desire’ for a son ‘without the Tools for the Trade’, and while this description invites references to the sexological model of gender inversion, it is a model that can no longer be taken seriously.13 If Musset is the son her father never had, it is not because she is a man trapped in a woman’s body, for ‘normal’ masculinity has itself been located on the surface of the body (in a night-shirt, no less), while ‘normal’ femininity has been located in marriageability and the ‘Activity … thought sufficient for a Woman’. Rather, Musset describes herself as a ‘Son’ because she has sex, and lots of it, with girls. And if gender follows from sexual object choice, the culturally sanctioned narrative that explains desire is turned upside down. Far from constituting a congenital deviation from the natural progression from biological sex to gender to desire, Musset’s sexual desire renders her masculine, in spite of the fact that for much of the text she is described as Woman with a capital W. Gender is a performance constituted, for Musset, by her powers of seduction. And if desire forms the foundations of gender, rather than the other way around, then it is plausible that some women only ‘discard Duster, Offspring and Spouse’ after ‘reaching an uncertain Age’, even as Musset was ‘developed in the Womb … to be a Boy’ but ‘came forth an Inch or so less than this’.14 Barnes’ approach to gender and desire reveals the impossibility of establishing a definitive causal relationship between them. More importantly, by privileging lesbian sexual desire, she establishes a subversive paradigm that prefigures the modern category of ‘queer’, where queer is most usefully explained, in this case, in Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal. In arguing for the subversive potential of ‘queer’, Warner explains that the liberal approach to gay and lesbian ‘rights’ has focused, in recent years, upon the issue of marriage, shoring up

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a value system that privileges some sexual relationships over others. Sexual shame, which is loaded with coercive power, is implicitly sanctioned by a movement that seeks to prove that gay men and lesbians are the same as everybody else. Warner contends that the ‘dominant culture’ institutes ‘the inequalities of access and recognition’ that associate some kinds of sex with shame while rendering others acceptable.15 He suggests that by demanding access to the category of ‘normal’ via marriage, monogamy and an implicit denial of sex, the gay and lesbian rights movement has failed to live up to its potential to undermine the hierarchies that reinforce this category in the first place. This strategy of liberal ‘rights’ campaigning becomes, according to this formulation, curiously reminiscent of Hall’s more conservative approach to the ‘invert’s’ rights, for both rely upon a sexual hierarchy and an argument for exclusivity, although the modern movement extends the boundaries of the ‘normal’ further than Hall. The ‘queer world’, on the other hand, is marked by its ‘refusal to repudiate sex or the undignified people who have it’16 and an awareness that the ‘norms of the dominant culture would quash’ it.17 The stigmatization that adheres to those who participate in queer culture positions that culture as a ‘counterpublic’.18 Barnes addressed her sexually explicit Ladies Almanack to a lesbian coterie readership and a sympathetic underground audience, rather than at a potentially censorious general public, explicitly repudiating the ‘normal’ and demarcating what can be described as a ‘queer’ counterpublic. Wary of censorship and desperate for money, Barnes and her friends sold the Almanack on the streets of Paris,19 and the fact that its readership consisted largely of those who knew Barney and her circle is also attributable to its impenetrability for those without inside knowledge (of references as private as Barney and Dolly Wilde’s system for coordinating their meetings according to their menstrual cycles). From the first page, the Almanack inverts what Warner describes as a ‘hierarchy of respectability’ that makes ‘some pleasures … normative, and others either forbidden or just inarticulate’.20 Sex between women is clearly articulated, if occasionally obscured by the language that is more a function of the entire book’s encryption for its coterie audience than a discomfort with sex itself, and the privileged reading position belongs to those with knowledge of lesbian sex. Evangeline Musset is described in the Almanack’s opening sentence as being: in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their

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Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts Did suffer them most, lament Cruelly.21 This sexual tension, building up ‘in the Spring of the Year, or at those Times when they do sit upon warm and cozy Material … or … warm Stoves’ cannot be relieved by a man.22 The narrator asks why it is that ‘no Philosopher … has discovered, amid the nice Herbage of his Garden, one that will content that Part’.23 Woman’s sexual desire, brought to a ‘yelping Pitch’, is best ‘solace[d]’ by ‘other Parts as inflamed, or with the Consolation every Woman has at her Finger Tips, or at the very Hang of her Tongue’.24 Barnes is not writing about love or commitment, she is writing about woman’s sexual desire for woman (but no woman in particular), and an apparently logical preference for the sexual acts associated with lesbianism. The Almanack also explicitly rejects the appropriation of the marriage model for lesbians, parodying the ambitions of Tilly-Tweed-In-Blood (Radclyffe Hall) and Lady Buck-and-Balk (Una Troubridge). They ask, ‘Just because woman falls, in this Age, to Woman, does that mean that we are not to recognize Morals? What has England done to legalize these Passions?’25 The law should protect same-sex couples, ‘should One or the Other stray’, they argue,26 to which Musset replies that ‘there are Duels to take the place of the Law, and there’s always a Way out, should one or both be found wanting’.27 Her suggestions, involving a ‘strong Gauntlet struck lightly athwart the Buttock’ followed by the taking of ‘Satisfaction’ by ‘Rapier or Fowling-Piece’ which should ‘end[ ] it for both, in one way or another’,28 make a mockery of the privileges marriage is thought to bestow. Marriage, in the Almanack, is of little significance, for it is a heterosexual institution grounded in procreation, and procreation is deemed less than appealing. Immediately following the discussion of marriage (which Musset deems inapplicable to lesbians), Masie Tuck-and-Frill is heard bemoaning the drop-off in demand for her midwifery skills. Although ‘she still cherished a fond Delusion that in one Way or another, the Pretties would yet whelp a little Sweet’,29 the text’s marginalization of motherhood is clear. While Hall laments the ‘steril[ity]’ of the lesbian’s ‘barren womb’,30 for Barnes, such ‘sterility’ is a cause for celebration. Patience Scalpel, the text’s single heterosexual, derides the lesbianism that surrounds her, decrying the fact that ‘there will be no Children born for a Season’ and asking ‘Where, and in what dark Chamber was the Tree so cut of Life, that the Branch turned to the Branch, and made of the Cuttings a Garden of Ecstasy’.31 Sex, once a

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means to achieve ‘Life’, now results only in ‘Ecstasy’, a state of affairs that Patience Scalpel cannot comprehend. Yet as she speaks, ‘Merry Laughter [rises] about her’32 and it is no coincidence that ‘Wisdom’ comes upon Musset suddenly at ‘fifty odd’, when she has ‘no cause for Children and no effect for Babes’.33 Sex in the Ladies Almanack is explicitly divorced from procreation, marriage and even commitment, and if the practices it describes are not ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ it is because these categories are not to be taken seriously. According to Warner, as well as other queer theorists including Lee Edelman and Heather Love,34 ‘queer’ is constituted by an acknowledgement of both sex and the politics of the shame associated with it, and if this is the case, Barnes’ approach to lesbianism can certainly be described as queer. The Almanack addresses the shame to which Musset is apparently oblivious. Of women who are not ‘shy … with their Loves’, the Almanack’s narrator declares: ‘Oh fie! Oh shame! She fouls everything she touches with the Droppings natural to her lost Condition! She is shameless and shameridden!’35 And while ‘many a Man speaks no better’, he speaks ‘ever far more naturally in this Vein, it is but his Nature whining’.36 This double standard emphasizes the ‘queerness’ of Barnes’ subversion, for the Almanack is itself an example of a woman ‘speaking’ about lesbian sex in a society in which only men should speak of sex at all. By emphasizing the shame attached to sex, she parodies the hypocrisy and hyperbolic panic that would see a woman described as shameful for that which is ‘natural’ in man. In the Ladies Almanack, then, Barnes creates a space in which the idea of ‘normal’ is laughable. With its parody of the sexological theory of ‘inversion’, the Almanack implies that those who pathologize lesbian eroticism do not know what they are missing out on, and if Evangeline Musset corrupts ‘Women who had not told their Husbands everything’,37 it is cause for celebration. To read Nightwood through Barnes’ rendering of lesbianism in the Ladies Almanack is to appreciate her ‘queer’ understanding of the category of ‘normal’, where queer must be applied strategically, with an awareness of its anachronism and the specificity of its definition in this context. And to read Nightwood as a roman à clef is to dispute those interpretations of the novel that have categorized it as a critique of the non-normative and have followed it since its publication in 1936.38 That the novel lends itself to such a reading emphasizes the importance of engaging with this text in terms of its anticipated reception – Nightwood must be interpreted in terms of its invocation of the coterie readership and counterpublic which had the knowledge to decode it, for its stylistic complexity and focus on

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those who exist on the extreme margins of ‘civilized’ society render it most accessible to those who knew Barnes, or at least know her story. Nightwood is clearly not a straightforward retelling of a bad relationship, and I will argue that Barnes’ interpretation of the relationship between Nora and Robin, and by implication, of her own relationship with Wood, absorbs and comments upon the political and socio-cultural climate of the time in a range of intersecting ways. Nightwood is Barnes’ most widely read work, and it eludes comprehensive interpretation if consideration is not given to the intimate contemporary audience with access to both the Almanack and the details of Barnes’ relationship with Wood. For those who did not have access to these kinds of interpretive tools, T.S. Eliot’s preface promised to mediate between an obscure text and its mainstream audience.39 Ultimately, however, this preface says little about Nightwood, for although Eliot was undoubtedly aware of the connection between the novel and Barnes’ own life, his project was to frame the text for a mainstream, ‘normal’, reading public. The critical focus on Barnes’ style has often tended to operate as a way for readers to direct attention away from subject matter they do not understand, but Eliot’s certain familiarity with Barnes’ personal circumstances places his selective reading of the text in a different category. Eliot clearly had little interest in providing Nightwood’s mainstream audience with the tools to locate Barnes’ life in her narrative, for reasons that were aesthetic as well as strategic – as the novel’s publisher, he had a vested interest in ensuring that Nightwood remained uncensored, and as Fuchs suggests, Eliot expressed a distaste for writers who ‘express’ rather than ‘subsume’ their own ‘emotions and personality’.40 Yet the fact that he does not mention the text’s central lesbian relationship at all in his preface is worthy of note. Nightwood’s preface is written so that readers are able to ‘appreciat[e]’ the novel with greater ease than Eliot claims to have been able to on first reading,41 and their appreciation will be channelled through Dr Matthew O’Connor and the text’s rendering of the ‘human misery and bondage which is universal’.42 Eliot also preempts any misinterpretation of the characters as a ‘horrid sideshow of freaks’ with a manoeuvre that raises the question of whether he is, in fact, referring to his own first impression, even as he attributes it to a misguided review.43 Such a reading is ‘not only to miss the point’, he argues, ‘but to confirm our wills and harden our hearts in an inveterate sin of pride’.44 The characters may be ‘freaks’, Eliot implies, suffering ‘abnormalities of temperament’,45 but their abnormality symbolizes a suffering that is present in ‘normal lives’ and ‘mostly concealed’.46 Eliot

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arms the reader with the authority of his or her position outside of the text, as part of a public that would not identify with the main characters without Eliot’s guidance, but would read, instead, with the judgmental objectivity of the dispassionate, ‘normal’, observer. At best, the unmentioned lesbian comes to symbolize the ‘sickness’ of all members of society, and Eliot’s attempt to bridge the gap between the text’s ‘freaks’ and its readers only serves to emphasize how wide that gap is, and how difficult it will be to understand the text from the perspective of the mainstream. Eliot reassuringly adds that ‘[t]his is a work of creative imagination, not a philosophical treatise’,47 ensuring that Nightwood is read as both purely fictional and apolitical. Eliot’s description of Nightwood’s characters as ‘abnormal’, at least on the surface, is probably his most accurate observation, and given Barnes’ approach to normality, is one with which she would have agreed. However, Eliot distances himself and the text’s readers from this implied ‘abnormality’, and he must have known that he was discussing Barnes and people she knew. In ignoring Nightwood’s treatment of lesbianism, Eliot elides not only the relationship between Barnes’ text and her life, but also the way in which her focus on subcultural space upsets the stability of the norm. Eliot found himself promoting a text populated by disenfranchised Jews, lesbians and a homosexual transvestite, a text that rejected the cultural narrative of motherhood along with bourgeois narratives of ‘progress’, and focused on subcultural spaces such as the circus, the ‘night’, Paris cafés, and Nora’s salon of misfits. He provides a means for mainstream readers to appreciate the text and distance themselves from it, treating it as the kind of ‘freak show’ against which the ‘normal’ defines itself, while at the same time offering less voyeuristic reasons to read it (the universal ‘human misery’ its ‘freaks’ represent). To ignore Nightwood’s roman à clef aspects and the implied presence of a coterie readership, then, is to elide its fundamental rejection of mainstream values and cultural norms. The extent to which Barnes positions Nightwood in opposition to the pathologizing versions of lesbianism that emerged from sexology and psychoanalysis in the first half of the century is brought into sharp relief if the text is contextualized in terms of both its roman à clef aspects and the women who would have best understood them. Emily Holmes Coleman, Barnes’ closest friend in the years following the demise of her relationship with Wood and preceding the publication of Nightwood, was instrumental in bringing about the novel’s publication. In 1935 and 1936, Barnes was residing in New York City, attempting to complete a difficult, personal novel, and heavily reliant upon the editorial advice provided by Coleman.

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Their lengthy correspondence, currently held at the Universities of Maryland and Delaware, attests to the extent of Coleman’s influence (she was living in England at the time). Coleman orchestrated Eliot’s initial encounter with Barnes’ manuscript, and insisted that he view it in its entirety when he expressed his ‘certain[ty]’ that the excerpt he had seen ‘would not do as a novel’.48 She oversaw subsequent arrangements between author and publisher; she arranged for Peggy Guggenheim to provide Barnes with an allowance (‘on account of [her] very great talent’49) that would enable her to concentrate on writing; and she was a constant source of encouragement, stating, on one occasion, that ‘there are pages and pages in this book which are the best writing ever done by an American’.50 Even more significantly, she played the role of editor before the novel had a publisher, and her editorial approach was informed by her knowledge of Barnes’ relationship with Wood. Some of Coleman’s editorial suggestions are purely practical, intended to help Barnes avoid censorship – with regard to Nightwood’s final chapter, for example, she states, baldly, ‘She puts her hands on the “upper parts of her legs.” That will have to come out’.51 However, much of her editing is bound up in her role as supportive friend, and observer of Barnes’ private life. She argued that the novel was ‘a little romantic still, about Thelma’, and her criticism often collapses into personal advice.52 Coleman recognized that Nightwood was an elegy for a very personal loss, and her editorial advice contrasted with Eliot’s inasmuch as it was informed by the centrality of the novel’s roman à clef aspects. Eliot is often credited with, or criticized for, the editing of Nightwood, yet it was a personal friend, editing the text in private, who effected the most significant transformations of the manuscript. Where Eliot’s editorial decisions were concerned with eliminating obscenity – just as his introduction was written to distract from the ‘obscenity’ that remained – Coleman’s advice secured the personal, lesbian framework around which the novel was constructed. Critical work that mentions Coleman, and even work that fully acknowledges and explicates her editorial role, tends to position her as supportive friend, while privileging Eliot’s input into the final version of Nightwood by interrogating the nature and extent of his influence over Barnes.53 However, without Coleman, it is unlikely that Nightwood would have been published, as she provided the conditions of emotional and intellectual support under which a personal, high modernist, lesbian roman à clef could be completed. Coleman was a member of the private audience to which Nightwood’s private references were directed, but she was also an invaluable resource for Barnes’ negotiation of a public that she could not afford to offend,

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and the private audience with the potential to read too much into the novel (and, in the case of Wood, to be offended by it). By the mid-1930s, Barnes’ life in Paris was in the past, and she corresponded more frequently with Coleman than with the women of her Parisian circle. However, the roles played by Thelma Wood, Paris and a lesbian circle in inspiring Barnes’ ‘two most memorable books’ cannot be underestimated.54 Carolyn Allen argues that ‘poetic language … afforded [Barnes] the perfect medium in which to write about a taboo topic – love between women’.55 I would add that Paris and her lesbian friends provided the ‘perfect’ context and implied readership. While Hall’s Well of Loneliness enacts a campaign for mainstream tolerance of the evermarginalized ‘congenital invert’ that is imported from scientific studies of homosexuality, Barnes directs her recollections to an audience that understands both the intensity of same-sex desire and the suffering it can cause. Her assumption that her reader will take seriously the relationship between Nora and Robin and its demise denaturalizes the dichotomy between ‘normal’ and ‘other’. Within Barney’s circle on Paris’ Left Bank in the 1920s and early 1930s, Barnes’ sexual orientation and her relationship with Wood were common knowledge. Indeed, the Ladies Almanack was sold to raise money during Wood’s hospitalization for a spinal injury.56 As she wrote the Almanack, Barnes’ position within what can be described as a lesbian community afforded her a readership, subject matter and the freedom to publish without fear of censorship.57 And while Doughty argues that the Almanack contributed to a lesbian subculture that needed to be ‘visible to itself and invisible to the larger society’ in order to survive,58 equally significant is the fact that this subculture facilitated the writing and circulation of the Almanack. With its explicit representation of the coterie that also constituted part of its intended readership, the Ladies Almanack highlights the presence of a ‘queer’ subculture in which texts are produced, bought and sold. Years later, when Barnes was no longer in Paris, the implied presence of this community of readers – now only imagined – contributed to Nightwood’s layers of meaning, enabling it to be both the impersonal modernist creation envisioned by Eliot and a personal response to the demise of a passionate lesbian relationship. The Ladies Almanack provides fertile soil for a serious text about a lesbian relationship, its caustic satire replaced by the inexorable tragedy of Nightwood. Both texts privilege women’s relationships, positioning Barnes’ writing in relation to feminism, both play with sexological definitions of ‘inversion’ and the ‘third sex’, and both legitimize lesbian eroticism by taking it for granted. Every character in the Almanack is a

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target for Barnes’ parody, from Dame Musset, whose dexterous tongue outlives her and continues to dispense sexual pleasure, to Lady-Buckand-Balk who ‘sported a Monocle and believed in Spirits’ and TillyTweed-In-Blood who ‘sported a Stetson, and believed in Marriage’,59 to Patience Scalpel whose ‘Daughters shall go amarrying’.60 And when the narrator asks ‘why so witless about a witty Insanity?’ of the sickly sweet language of love, she adds a qualifying ‘And yet!’ that suggests her own identification with the subject matter she parodies.61 The Almanack may parody the sexual lives of Barnes’ friends and acquaintances, but it is for their own enjoyment, and lesbian desire is consistently privileged over heterosexual desire. Positioning Nightwood in relation to the Almanack invites a reading of Nora and Robin that locates their suffering in the specificities of their situation: if they are troubled it is not because the object of their sexual desire is another woman. The Ladies Almanack and Nightwood are both lesbian romans à clef, and it is because of this shared generic affiliation that a comparative analysis is so useful. However, Nightwood is not a satirical rendering of difference written for a private (or semi-private) audience. Rather, it responds to the tragedy of Barnes’ relationship and an urgency engendered by the rise of fascism. Barnes’ response to the socio-cultural influences shaping perceptions of lesbian relationships, and particularly to the definitions provided by the sexual sciences, along with her application of these responses to a critical reading of her own relationship with Wood, are significant features of Nightwood. By rejecting the anxiety that marked the slippery distinction between platonic and erotic love between women, Barnes revised pathologizing notions of same-sex sexuality. By performing a complex interpretation of her own relationship and adding a layer of meaning to it by directing references toward a particular circle of friends and acquaintances, Barnes used the roman à clef genre to represent lesbian desire. In her article on Djuna Barnes’ ‘Obscene Modernism’, Dianne Chisholm convincingly locates Nightwood within a ‘tradition of avantgarde nihilism’, a nihilism that can be best understood in terms of Walter Benjamin’s dialectical ‘history without progress’.62 In her later work, Queer Constellations, Chisholm argues that the capitalist narrative of ‘progress’ is countered by a ‘negative dialectic that “ends” with an eternal return of the same’.63 That Nightwood’s conceptualization of history (tied to its representation of sexuality) can be productively described as ‘queer’, inasmuch as it rejects the dominant narrative, is supported by its particular relationship with this paradigm. Barnes resists both the narrative of ‘progress’ that legitimizes bourgeois capitalism, and fascism’s

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totalizing narrative of perfectibility, replacing them with a ‘queer constellation’ that explicitly rejects any association between improvement or transcendence and the passing of time. Nora’s desire to stop time before Robin leaves her represents a rejection of the notion that improvement is a necessary corollary of time’s passage: as ‘time passe[s]’, Nora stops following Robin through the night in the hope of stemming the ‘increas[e] in the rhythm’ of her ‘departures’.64 By this time, Nora has already ‘deposit[ed]’ Robin’s ‘fossil’ in her heart, placing her ‘beyond timely changes’.65 After Robin has gone, Nora refuses to leave her in the past, and repeatedly rehearses the circumstances of her departure. Much of the novel, following the separation, consists of Nora and Matthew’s elaborate discussions of how and why Robin’s betrayal with Jenny Petherbridge occurred. In spite of Matthew’s entreaties (‘Why not rest? Why not put the pen away?’),66 Nora cannot let Robin go, but continues to write to her compulsively, because the only alternative is to ‘sit here for ever – thinking’.67 Nor do Matthew’s pleas offer any hope for transcendence or transformation: ‘Can’t you be done now, can’t you give up? Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it’s about nothing?’68 Ultimately, the ‘constellation’ Barnes establishes gestures towards an annihilation characterized by its focus on non-reproductive sexuality, the physical and emotional dangers of reproduction,69 and the impossibility of achieving what you hope for. Perhaps most profoundly, Felix Volkbein, who originally nursed the bold ambition of securing his immortality (and that of his false title) through his son, relinquishes his dream of finding the ‘secret of time’70 and contents himself with the comfort of alcohol and the ‘innocent’ but intellectually disabled child who will mark the end of his line. Barnes’ resistance to narratives of progress upsets a discursive regime that would seek to position lesbianism as both derivative and mnemonic. Psychoanalysis positioned same-sex desire as an adolescent phase in the narrative of healthy psychosexual development, while sexology’s medical explanation for sexual ‘deviance’ offered another ‘logical’ narrative that sought to define lesbianism as derivative, heterosexuality as originary. Sexology provided the theory of lesbianism that Barnes turned most frequently to her own ends, and her suspicion of its naturalized terms of reference is apparent in both the Almanack and Nightwood. Annamarie Jagose argues that any attempt to stabilize lesbianism’s secondary status can only reveal the ‘secondariness and derivation that indispensably animate the reification of all sexual identities’,71 and Barnes’ reluctance to define or explain her characters’ lesbianism,

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even as she takes its primacy for granted, invokes a theoretical paradigm that blurs the ‘scientific’ distinction between heterosexual and homosexual erotics. In the Ladies Almanack, Barnes provides a catalogue of ‘signs’ of ‘Acute Melancholy’ that makes a mockery of sexological attempts to attribute desire to a congenital disorder or medical condition.72 This long list of absurd ‘symptoms’ includes a ‘light giggling, dancing Fancy’ in the ‘first Stages’, coupled with a ‘Tendency to hop, skip and jump, and to misplace the Eye at every single or several Manifestation of Girl in like Distemper’.73 This is succeeded by ‘Chill … and Restlessness at Night, or unaccountable Tabulation of unimportant Objects’, and, in ‘six to eight Weeks’, the ‘Eye trickles, the Breath is short, the Spleen is distended, and the Epiglottis rises and falls like the continual swallowing of the Heart’.74 Even more alarmingly, a ‘fully Robed on-marching Figure of Venus no larger than a Caraway Seed, a Trident in one Hand and a GosWasp on the left Fist’ can be found in the urine, and one poor victim is ‘said to have passed a whole School of Trulls, couched on a Conch Shell’.75 However, following this detailed inventory, and in a move that echoes sexologists’ half-hearted attempts to explain the feminine lesbian, Barnes immediately undermines her taxonomy: ‘Be this as it may’, she says, ‘there have been some and several who hold the Sickness and the Signs of such are diverse to the Point where Classification becomes almost impossible’.76 Moreover, ‘Others’ do not suffer ‘Grief and Agony’ at all, but are instead ‘of a Temper that nothing will discountenance them save Vanity’, and ‘Still others are of a different Dye, and are sweet and tender always’.77 The ‘evidence’ that Barnes provides to enable the identification of ‘the lesbian’ is not only diverse, it is ridiculous. The futility of a project that would seek to medicalize desire is demonstrated by the contrast between a hyperbolic and alarmist description and the series of qualifiers that follow it. In both the Almanack and Nightwood, Barnes undermines the scientific study of sexual ‘deviance’, demonstrating that the theories and evidence it provides will inevitably raise more questions than they answer. Barnes suggests that lesbian desire can be privileged or taken for granted within a given (sub)cultural context, just as heterosexuality is in the mainstream. And if the categories that produce the lesbian’s secondary status are grounded in culture rather than nature, subversion does not rely upon the denial of lesbian difference or the repositioning of lesbianism in a new stable relationship with ‘normal’ heterosexuality. The importance of approaching the subject of lesbian desire in this way is emphasized by Jagose in her discussion of the well-intentioned late

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twentieth-century project of recuperating lesbianism from its position within the ‘logic of sexual sequence’. According to this logic, heterosexuality or even male homosexuality precede and therefore marginalize the category of ‘lesbian’, and attempts to re-order this sequence implicitly naturalize heterosexuality’s foundational status.78 If a same-sex attracted woman whose erotic or emotional attachments pre-date sexology is anachronistically described as a self-identifying ‘lesbian’, then the secondary ‘type’ defined as lesbian by modern sexual identity categories is written into a past in which she was not yet constructed. The ‘heterosexual’, who emerged as a ‘type’ in anxious response to the earlier ‘scientific’ identification of the ‘deviant’ homosexual, becomes, according to this formulation, the norm against which all sexuality is to be measured, while the lesbian’s deviation and derivation from this norm underwrites her naturalized historicity. And while the value of identifying lesbian desire in a pre-sexology past cannot be underestimated, nor can the importance of recognizing the unstable basis of assumptions underlying all modern sexual identity. Barnes’ Ladies Almanack and Nightwood provide a strategically unstable means of representation that neither elides lesbianism nor subjects it to the dominant discursive regime. And while the Almanack playfully deconstructs sexology’s version of the ‘lesbian’, Nightwood, with its comparatively mainstream address and serious subject matter, is perhaps even more subversive. As I discussed in some detail in the previous chapter, prominent sexologists argued that lesbianism is the result of a congenital ‘mannishness’, or positioned it as an adolescent phase. According to this theory, then, lesbianism is the province of the masculine woman, or belongs in the past. When sexologists like Havelock Ellis elaborated upon the construction of congenital inversion, they eroded their own distinctions. Who, for example, does the congenital invert attract, if her same-sex desire is based upon her masculinity, and sexual attraction can always be traced to a heterosexual model of gender difference (that is, if the lesbian couple must consist of both a mannish woman and a womanly one)? Ellis suggested that some plain women with good ‘figures’ are open to the advances of congenital inverts, yet these women are described as ‘always womanly’.79 And if some ‘womanly’ women can be attracted to members of their own sex, how clear is the distinction between heterosexual femininity and lesbianism? What are the chances that a heretofore ‘normal’ woman might succumb to the advances of the congenital invert?80 Attempting to define lesbianism with reference to heterosexuality as its organizing category, Ellis found himself on a slippery slope. His conclusions suggested that every

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woman may potentially be attracted to members of her own sex, even as his taxonomy explicitly rejected this possibility. In attempting to secure the boundaries between lesbianism and heterosexual femininity, Ellis ironically revealed their permeability, gesturing alarmingly towards the corruptibility of all women and prefiguring the parliamentary discussions of the ‘Acts of Indecency by Females’ clause of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill in 1921. Barnes adheres neither to the ‘logical’ narrative that positions lesbianism as secondary to heterosexuality, nor to that which locates it in the past, although this reading is most readily available to those who situate Nightwood in relation to the Ladies Almanack and the scientific discourse that both works invoke. In her landmark study of female friendship and lesbian representation, Lillian Faderman argues that this novel is socially conservative, its unhappy characters taken from male-authored homophobic literature rather than Barnes’ own life.81 This reading is grounded in an oversimplification of the text’s generic composition. Most obviously, Faderman fails to recognize the text’s elegiac roman à clef aspects, and, significantly and concomitantly, she also misses the point of its tragedy. Barnes’ portrayal of Robin and Nora’s suffering is ultimately more subversive than any ‘utopic’ text could be, for it does not establish an alternative narrative of lesbian origins that stabilizes the classifications, if not the value judgments, of sexology. Same-sex relationships, for Barnes, are certainly not secondary or derivative, but their primacy within her texts does not equate to an absence of failings, or of material for parody and tragedy. Instead, she draws attention to the linguistic and theoretical inadequacies surrounding their representation. The spectrum of ‘unnatural’ sexualities that emerges from Nightwood reveals all sexuality as a construction. Sapphism is clearly no more ‘derivative’ than heterosexuality, male homosexuality, asexuality or racially stigmatized sexuality. Indeed, ‘unnaturalness’ is repeatedly invoked in Nightwood as a characteristic of all sexuality, emphasizing the performativity that characterizes every sexual relationship. Thus, the text’s most normative relationship, that of Guido and Hedvig Volkbein, is grounded in the lie of Guido’s aristocratic heritage: Hedvig had ‘stalked … Guido’s assurance that he was a Baron’, but only believed it ‘as a soldier “believes” a command’.82 The ‘dislocation’ and comedy of Guido’s ‘imitat[ion] of [Hedvig’s] goose-step of a stride’ illustrates the failure of his desire to ‘be one with her’.83 And Felix Volkbein is even less successful than his parents when it comes to heterosexual love. His friend Frau Mann is, ironically, the ‘property of no man’ because her costume has become a part of her, the stitching across her crotch

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rendering her as ‘unsexed as a doll’.84 And if Frau Mann is so sexless that it is only with the ‘utmost difficulty’ that Felix can ‘imagine her “mixed up” with anyone’,85 his relationship with Robin is equally impossible, and she leaves him for a woman not long after she gives birth to the child she does not want.86 Robin’s marriage to Felix, predicated upon his desire for a son (a fact he discusses with Matthew before he speaks to Robin for the first time) is grounded from the start in her inability to mount a resistance. Frau Mann’s literal performance has negated her capacity for heterosexuality, yet Robin’s attempt at procreative heterosexuality is itself a performance: she prepares herself for the child she does not want with ‘a stubborn cataleptic calm, conceiving herself pregnant before she was’.87 Lesbianism in Nightwood does not provide a ‘utopic’ space, or even a happy one, yet it is not minoritized or marginalized. (Nor is it universalized, if the universalizing tendency in literature of this kind could be said to establish a ‘lesbian continuum’ that fails to account for the specificity of erotic relations between women.88) No sexuality is logical, Barnes’ novel suggests, yet the opposite of ‘logic’ is not ‘nature’, but simply an absence of the hierarchies that organize sexuality in terms of cause and effect and take heterosexuality as the stable point of departure. Nora and Robin’s relationship is privileged because it is frozen in time. Eternally returning (for Nora at least), this lesbian relationship cannot be ‘put away’, thus it is not subject to the logic of a sexological or psychoanalytic narrative that would relegate it to the past. Nora, whose future depends entirely on Robin (she will ‘always be miserable’ because she will ‘never understand her’), instead situates the lesbian relationship in an interminable present. Constructing her narrative around the significance of lesbian desire, Barnes again disturbs the foundational status of normative heterosexuality, identifying the paradox characterizing a love that is simultaneously impossible and interminable. In her desperate search for rational explanations for her inability to move on, Nora insists upon the unique intensity of a relationship that cannot be left in the past: ‘Only the impossible lasts forever,’ says Nora. ‘Robin’s love and mine was always impossible, and loving each other, we no longer love. Yet we love each other like death.’89 One woman’s love for another is ‘impossible’ and therefore self-defeating, yet if this is the case, ‘only’ the impossible is permanent. The lesbian relationship cannot be memorialized, then, but its tragedy and careful deployment of competing discourses shielded it from potential charges of obscenity. The complexity of the negotiations required to guarantee the novel’s immunity from prosecution is perhaps

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best illustrated by its particular appropriation of sexological and psychoanalytic tropes, which simultaneously appeals to the expectations of a heteronormative audience and confounds those expectations. Barnes mobilizes sexology and psychoanalysis to construct a space in which any woman could be a lesbian, in spite of the explicit eroticism that distinguishes same-sex sexual desire from friendship. In both the Almanack and Nightwood, Barnes reveals the slippages that destabilize sexological theories of lesbianism, and interrogates the anxieties surrounding all women’s same-sex relationships. In Nightwood, conflicting ‘scientific’ or ‘psychological’ explanations for same-sex desire work against each other, providing an ironic address to those with a will to knowledge, while couching homosexuality for the general reader in terms too confusing to be either obscene or straightforwardly pathologizing. Nightwood refers to a range of clichés regularly invoked to explain the ‘anomaly’ of same-sex attraction, including ‘inversion’ or a ‘third sex’, lesbian love as immature love between ‘child’ and ‘mother’, and narcissism. However, if Barnes appropriates these sexological and psychoanalytic tropes in order to explain the love of one woman for another, she also reveals the inherent misunderstanding contained in these heterosexually oriented discourses. Nightwood ultimately demonstrates that society cannot adequately represent its outcasts, for its institutionalized discourses are already implicated in its project of the exclusion of the other. For financial reasons, Barnes hoped that Nightwood would appeal to the public, but her invocation of sexology and less frequently, of psychoanalysis, were not grounded in scientific ‘truth’, and were instead directed towards those who shared her suspicion of such theories. Her use of sexology in particular is explicit, making reference to a language her readers would have recognized by 1936. And for those who had read her Ladies’ Almanack and witnessed the mixed reactions to the Well of Loneliness, her scepticism would have been obvious. Barnes does not use sexology to define or defend her characters (or, implicitly, herself), nor does she exhibit any anxiety about adopting its terminology and inviting potential misreadings. Rather, she uses it to illuminate the relationship between society and ‘other’ and the damaging effects of institutionalized discourses, again demonstrating her consciousness of the novel’s coterie readership. Kaivola argues that ‘Barnes refuses to let the language of Nightwood serve as a vehicle for power: labels are suspect and subjectivities exceed categorization and purification’.90 I would add that she is aware that public opinion will not be swayed by polemical texts that are more interested in preaching to the mainstream than accurately conceptualizing the subjects it claims to represent. Barnes’

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text is not overtly political like Hall’s – she does not conclude her novel with an impassioned plea for her heroine’s ‘right to [her] existence’ – yet it destabilizes dominant modes of thinking about the figure of the lesbian, rejecting those definitions that have constructed her as other. In an explicit invocation of the language of sexology, Robin is described as an ‘invert’ within Nightwood, and it is a description used by both Nora and Matthew. Nora concludes her statement about God and man with a reference to the attraction Robin’s ‘inversion’ holds for her: Man … conditioning himself to fear, made God; as the prehistoric, conditioning itself to hope, made man … And I, who want power, chose a girl who resembles a boy.91 This reference to the primary characteristic of the ‘congenital sexual invert’ is placed in the context of a denial of religion and history. The significance of Robin’s ‘resemblance’ is thus immediately suspect, for inversion is grounded in institutionalized discourse of the kind Nora has just destabilized. Readers of the Almanack would notice the similarity between descriptions of Robin and Musset, the latter of whom was defined as a boy more by virtue of her desire for women and a handful of superficial characteristics illogically associated with masculinity, than for an identification with men (indeed, she had little interest in men in any capacity). As well, Nora, whose need for ‘power’ causes her to judge Robin from a ‘high plane’, distances herself from the category of the ‘actively inverted’ woman’s sexual object. For example, she does not adhere to Ellis’ description of a passive recipient of ‘lover-like advances’ that would ‘repel[ ] or disgust[ ]’ if she were not the ‘pick of the women whom the average man would pass by’.92 Rather she is the one who makes the active ‘choice’, choosing a girl whose resemblance to a boy does not bear upon her personality in the ways sexologists may have predicted. If Barnes had not elaborated upon Robin’s ‘inversion’, it would not have been necessary to implicate contemporary sexology in her reading of homosexuality. However, Matthew’s reply to Nora’s statement invokes it more explicitly: You never loved anyone before, and you’ll never love anyone again, as you love Robin. Very well – what is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance that we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found? The Prince on the white horse that we have always been seeking.93

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According to Matthew’s formulation, the ‘invert’ as a type is clearly the beloved rather than the lover, which further complicates his or her status as the ‘active’ partner (particularly as, in this case, Robin has already been positioned as the passive love object of a heterosexual man). The invert becomes an ideal, rather than a medical anomaly, and already positioned apart from God and outside of history, exists only in the realm of fantasy, to be made real by someone with power like Nora’s. The ‘girl lost’ and the ‘Prince on the white horse’ are cultural constructions: they do not exist except as the projection of the desires of others. The invert, then, is the object of desire because any fantasy can be projected onto the blank slate he or she provides. Both Felix and Nora can love Robin because she appears to be what they want: in Nora’s case, a girl who resembles a boy, in Felix’s, a ‘sensation of beauty, without its details’.94 In Nightwood, the designation of ‘congenital sexual invert’ becomes society’s way of explaining those who exist on the outside of what is intelligible. He or she is the sexologists’ projection as well. Although Robin’s ‘inversion’ is symptomatic of the projections of others rather than of an inherent masculinity, she is hardly perfectly feminine: she is tall, with short hair and a slightly ‘clumsy’ walk,95 she wears trousers, and she does not embrace motherhood. Barnes empties gender itself of significance by consistently destabilizing the reader’s assumptions of what its manifestations should signify. If Robin, to Nora, resembles a boy, it creates none of the ‘sexual opposition’ that Ellis suggests is a necessary aspect of all sexual attraction.96 Indeed, it is the resemblance between Robin and Nora that makes Nora’s suffering so unbearable: ‘There’s nothing to go by, Matthew,’ she said. ‘You do not know which way to go. A man is another person – a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself’.97 Robin is above all else a woman, and although her ‘otherness’ in relation to Nora has been clearly delineated throughout the novel, the fact that she is gendered feminine evokes an inalienable identification. Allen argues that in discovering Robin is a part of herself as well as other, Nora finds ‘not self-annihilating sameness, but crucial resemblance, a relation of identity layered with figures of alterity’.98 Yet although this is an important distinction, and one that is ultimately supported by the text, I would argue that in an erotic sense, Barnes does raise the cliché of homosexualityas-narcissism (‘on her mouth you kiss your own’), if only to undermine it. And this occurs even as the implications of narcissistic eroticism are

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working to undermine references to congenital sexual inversion, which conjures up an erotic framework that mirrors heterosexuality’s requirement of difference. Nora identifies with Robin because she is a woman, and she also describes her as ‘my lover and my child’, explaining that ‘Robin is incest too, that is one of her powers’.99 However, if Robin is incest, the child who Nora must take care of, in this context she also becomes the other again, this time regardless of gender. Throughout the novel, Nora plays the role of Robin’s protector and idol, which shifts power in Nora’s direction and attributes to her the privilege of judgment, ultimately driving Robin away. When the relationship is described as ‘incest’, Robin becomes the child who should be loved unconditionally. Her need for a caretaker, for someone to wait at home for her and ‘tell her that she [is] innocent’,100 is the entitlement of the child whose power over its mother requires no volition. An erotics of difference is at play in this scenario, but it is grounded on the dynamic of mother and child, rather than that of ‘male’ and ‘female’, as is the case when the lesbian relationship is described as resulting from inversion. By positioning Robin and Nora’s relationship in terms of inversion, narcissism and incest, Barnes rejects each as an accurate medical or psychological explanation for lesbianism. Her use of the kind of discourse Radclyffe Hall takes up unproblematically is laced with an irony that reflects the response to Hall’s book by those who did not feel it represented their experience of same-sex attraction. Yet Barnes does not deny such discourses their descriptive force. Their terms are extraordinarily loaded, and by invoking and undermining them, Barnes mobilizes them for her own purposes. Marcus argues that the ‘uprightness’ of the ‘white Christian male’ is the ‘ethic that the characters’ abjection opposes’, in spite of his absence from the text,101 and it is this ‘ethic’ that was gaining momentum, in a sinister form, as Nightwood was written. In the 1930s, as fascism gained footholds across Europe,102 Barnes undermined the ‘fixity and authority of fascistic discourses and positions’,103 an approach that facilitated her understanding of a relationship located outside of a society that sought to define itself in relation to a series of norms. Thus, Nora, who attempts to superimpose normative notions of fidelity and commitment onto her relationship with a woman who embodies ‘otherness’, only begins to understand her former lover when she recognizes her own culpability in attempting to enforce rules that mean nothing to Robin, or Robin’s conception of their relationship. As in the Almanack, lesbian relationships can only exist outside of the ‘norm’, although in Nightwood,

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Barnes reveals a certain ambivalence about the appeal and value of such a norm – Nora’s desire for a homosexual relationship that adheres to the rules of marriage is one that Barnes shared (personally, if not ideologically), in the face of a partner who wanted her ‘along with the rest of the world’.104 Readers of the Almanack, in which Barnes parodies heterosexual marriage and the same-sex lovers who would emulate it, are best equipped to read the irony that underpins her characterization of the committed, monogamous Nora. Nora’s desire for a commitment akin to marriage is shadowed by its impossibility, for if heterosexual unions are grounded in a tradition that proclaims the immorality of infidelity, often hypocritically, homosexuality is ‘immoral’ within that tradition whether it is based upon fidelity or not. The difference between Nora and Robin, then, is not that Nora is socially acceptable while Robin is not, but is rather that they bear different relationships to the society that would exclude them. Nora exercises agency to enact an explicit rejection of the terms upon which society delegitimizes her desires, even as she attempts to appropriate some of its rules. On the other hand, Robin’s ‘otherness’ results not from an active choice, but is marked instead by her apparent lack of agency (where agency is understood only if it is grounded in an intention that relates actions to specific consequences), and her inability to conceive of herself in relation to other individuals or society as a whole. Nora can reject society’s definitions of the lesbian because she realizes that ‘Man … conditioning himself to fear, made God’.105 She knows that the fear governing a God-fearing society is a construction, and this enables her to escape society’s definitions of her, and to make choices about which of society’s mores she adopts and which are incompatible with her desire. Robin, on the other hand, cannot rationalize her relationship to society, and her lack of real agency is repeatedly emphasized. When she is married and awaiting the birth of her son, she ‘wander[s] to thoughts of women, women that she had come to connect with women’,106 on the night she meets Nora, the woman of whom she becomes ‘haunted’, she is unable to articulate where she wants to be (only that she does not want to be ‘here’), and when they have moved in together, the forces of ‘love and anonymity’ are ‘working in her’, through no action of her own, signalling the betrayal for which she will not be responsible.107 Nora realizes too late that Robin’s infidelity is what enables her to stay, sustaining her feeling of innocence by reinforcing her estrangement from a society that wants to implicate her in its guilt. Ultimately it is Nora’s judgment rather than Robin’s faithlessness that has the power to ‘make everything dirty’,108 because to Robin, Nora becomes complicit with the society that

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would consume her desires and force her to confront what she ‘was powerless to alter’.109 Matthew O’Connor argues that Robin ‘feel[s] innocent’ because ‘Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her “escape” again’.110 Robin has ‘escaped’ the requirements of the mainstream society that has cast her out, by rejecting the social and emotional norms – or ‘rules’ – under which that society purportedly operates. In spite of her own non-normative sexuality, committed, monogamous, trusting Nora comes to symbolize mainstream morality to Robin. When Matthew adds that Robin ‘knows she is innocent because she can’t do anything in relation to anyone but herself’,111 he locates configurations of guilt and innocence in the sociocultural paradigm that has already guaranteed her exclusion. Matthew’s subsequent suggestion that Nora ‘almost caught hold of [Robin], but she put [her] cleverly away by making [her] the Madonna’112 provides further evidence that to Robin, being ‘caught’ by Nora equates to being caught in the web of social relations that can only ever incorporate her in terms of guilt, shame and condemnation. The notion that Robin equates Nora with the ‘Madonna’ is particularly apt, because in spite of her amorality, and just as she sought salvation from Nora herself, Robin searches for salvation in the Catholic Church. The association between Catholicism and the perceived Decadence of European religion is significant here – for the reader, Robin’s turn to the Church works to represent the irrationality of her apparent deterioration, and, paradoxically, the impossibility of salvation for the ‘abnormal’. Robin takes the ‘Catholic vow’ during the pregnancy that drives her from Felix, and although she visits ‘St Julien le Pauvre, the church of St. Germain des Prés, Ste. Clothilde’ and the ‘Russian Church’, the nuns recognize her as one who ‘would never be able to ask for, or receive, mercy’.113 Her struggle with religion comes to symbolize not potential salvation, but her abjection: ‘she knelt alone, lost and conspicuous, her broad shoulders high above her neighbours’,114 and when she prays, her ‘prayer [is] monstrous’, for ‘those who cannot conceive a bargain cannot be saved or damned’.115 With a rationality that contrasts with Robin’s religious quest, Nora has reasoned God out of existence (‘man … conditioning himself to fear, made God’), robbing religious symbols of their power, and the appeal Catholicism holds for Robin serves to emphasize the abjection associated with the denomination itself. Yet the ultimate incompatibility of Catholicism with ‘deviant’ sexuality ensures that the former retains some credibility, appealing to the reader who might otherwise balk at the absence of any moral framework from the novel. Robin’s abjection, and the impossibility of her redemption, is thus the result of her inability to conceive of herself in relation to others, and

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within mainstream society this inability is positioned as animalistic. Nora notices her at the circus because ‘the animals, going around and around the ring, all but climb[ ] over at that point’, and a lioness circling the ring stops and bows down to her, ‘regard[ing] the girl, as if a river were falling behind impassable heat, her eyes flow[ing] in tears that never reached the surface’.116 Robin’s apparent influence over the non-human emphasizes the absence of volition behind her coercive power – power that is exercised that night over Nora, as well as the lioness. More importantly, her discomfort and urgent need to escape – ‘Let’s get out of here!’117 – points to her identification with those who have been thoroughly subordinated. While Robin’s abjection enables a mainstream reading public to distance itself from same-sex desire, for the reader who is invested in representations of such desire or who has access to the personal story that structures the narrative, her ‘otherness’ is grounded in a culture that forces inhumanity upon the non-normative. Robin’s unpredictable and involuntary identifications position her as a forcibly subordinated femme fatale (like the lioness), and unworthy of salvation (on the terms of the Catholic church), yet they are not a symptom of lesbian pathology but of the society that insists upon that pathology. Nevertheless, Robin is forced, by the power of Nora’s faith in her, to recognize the moral framework in which she has been implicated. Nora, as Matthew points out, ‘had the conceit of “honesty”’, but all Robin had was Nora’s ‘faith in her’, faith that Nora ‘took … away’ but ‘should have kept … always, seeing that it was a myth [and] no myth is safely broken’.118 Nora’s faith in Robin was based upon unspoken suspicions, lies and evasions: lies that Nora believed because the truth would have added to her suffering. ‘[W]as it a sin that I believed her?’ Nora asks later, to which Matthew replies, ‘Of course, it made her life wrong.’119 When Nora’s faith crumbles in the face of indisputable evidence, Robin is forced to recognize the difference between reality and Nora’s perception of her. Nora realizes too late that she is the one to implicate Robin in a moral code she does not share, attributing ‘rot’ and corruption to her: I saw her come awake and turn befouled before me, she who had managed in that sleep to keep whole … . I didn’t know, I didn’t know that it was to be me who was to do the terrible thing! No rot had touched her until then, and there before my eyes I saw her corrupt all at once and withering, because I had struck her sleep away … .120 It is Nora who ‘do[es] the terrible thing’, yet in divesting Robin of responsibility for the demise of the relationship, the novel robs her of humanity.

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It is in its representation of the demise of the relationship between Nora and Robin, along with its representation of Jenny Petherbridge, the woman for whom Robin leaves Nora, that Nightwood is at its most blatantly subjective. Because of this, Barnes’ attempt to explain the loss of her ‘great love’ carried personal risk – indeed, I opened this book with her reflection upon Thelma Wood’s likely response to the novel. Barnes wrote to her friend, Emily Holmes Coleman, prior to Nightwood’s publication: Had a letter from Thelma, possibly the last in my life if the book does get printed. She will hate me so – it’s awful – God almighty what a price one pays for 200 pages.121 The private address contained in Nightwood, directed towards Wood and to those who witnessed her betrayal, came at a price, but it was not the price of public condemnation. It could certainly be argued that Barnes’ representation of Nora’s culpability in the demise of her relationship with Robin is, to some extent, disingenuous, given that her only crimes appear to be trust and misunderstanding. For those who knew Wood, Barnes’ literary treatment of her was shadowed by a poignant sense of loss and regret, as well as some bitterness. Her representation of Jenny Petherbridge, on the other hand, serves as a barely disguised, savage and almost certainly unfair critique of American heiress Henriette McCrea Metcalf with whom Wood began an affair in 1928. In possession of the ‘strength of an incomplete accident’,122 and described as a ‘thief’ or ‘squatter’, Jenny loves Robin only because she wants to ‘appropriate[ ] the most passionate love that she [knows], Nora’s for Robin’.123 Jenny is driven by a desire to possess what does not belong to her, and she displays a level of conscious manipulation that contrasts sharply with Robin’s passivity. Playing at lesbianism as at love, she argues with Matthew, when he proffers a theory on lesbian relationships, beating her fists: ‘What could you know about it? Men never know anything about it, why should they? But a woman should know – they are finer, more sacred; my love is sacred and my love is great!’124 Robin tells her to ‘shut up’, objecting to Jenny’s identification with God.125 Jenny strikes Robin in response, ‘scratching and tearing in hysteria’ until blood ‘run[s] down Robin’s cheeks’, and she sinks onto the floor ‘as if she ha[s] no will’.126 Not long afterwards ‘Jenny and Robin sail[ ] for America’, leaving Nora behind.127 Barnes fictionalizes her usurper in a way that reads as more vindictive than rational, and for a public readership, Jenny has the potential to serve as yet another example of lesbian pathology.

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However, it is the misery that shadows all of the characters in Nightwood, regardless of their sexual orientation, that guards the novel against such a charge, and provides Barnes with the room to complicate the terms on which mainstream society imagines same-sex desire. Nora and Robin are in different ways responsible for their own suffering, but this has little to do with the fact that they are in love with each other, and everything to do with the specific details of their story. This roman à clef is not the story of how lesbians suffer, it is the story of how Robin and Nora suffer, and the fact of their lesbianism requires no explanation or justification. If their relationship is difficult, it is also legitimized by the text, rendered more powerful by the pain it causes. Nightwood was written with the intention that the public would read it, but it was not written for the public. Unlike Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, which is directed toward a public that misunderstands the pain of the ‘congenital invert’, Nightwood’s suffering belongs only in the context of Barnes’ feelings toward her ‘great love’, and it addresses a reader who values the lesbian relationship. Thus, while the mainstream audience without knowledge of the connection between Barnes’ life and work could read the novel according to Eliot’s directions – in terms of the characters’ ‘abnormality of temperament’128 – for those who were aware that Nightwood was a representation of Barnes’ own relationship, samesex desire was rendered as uniquely meaningful. Novels like Nightwood undermined moral and pathologizing discourses, without denying that loss and failure were the necessary products of same-sex love at a moment characterized by the persistent institutionalized denial of the very existence of homosexuality; by the homophobic policing of homosexuality’s representation; and by the repeated transmutation of intense emotion into pathologized physicality – as Nora says of her love for Robin, there was ‘nothing to go by’.129 Nora and Robin are located outside of the society that seeks to implicate them in its taxonomy of normalcy and difference, and although this invites a voyeuristic reading of their ‘difference’ by the mainstream audience, they are always also available to readings that recognize their potential to undermine the system that institutes this difference in the first place. If mainstream society positions them as marginal, then in a society of the marginalized, they are central – just as the Almanack envisages a society where the lesbian is the ‘norm’, Nightwood normalizes lesbian desire by insisting that the attribution of ‘abnormality’ is always imposed, never natural. It is the ‘site of literary production’ that determines the means by which a private subtext will become available in a public forum for

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those who are able to decode it.130 To find a major publisher and the endorsement of someone like Eliot, Barnes needed to couch her novel in discourse that could be incorporated into mainstream formulations. Yet with her consciousness of sites of reception, Barnes parodied and undermined the terms of reference available within the mainstream, not only for those who knew her and were familiar with the Almanack, but also for those who were equipped to contextualize the book and locate its coterie readership, and those with the knowledge and will to identify the satire in Barnes’ mobilization of contradictory discourses.

3 ‘Truth & fantasy’: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as Sapphic roman à clef

Towards the end of 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote to her close friend and sometime lover, Vita Sackville-West: Yesterday morning I was in despair … I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till 12. … But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind ….1 Driven by inspiration apparently provided by her own ‘pen’ and the fantastical title ‘Orlando’, as well as Sackville-West, Woolf published Orlando: A Biography a year later. It had ‘turned out’ to be about ‘Vita’, generations of Vita’s aristocratic family and, simultaneously, a fantastical subject of indeterminate gender whose sexual proclivities were excused by her unreality. At play in Orlando is a careful negotiation of ‘truth’ and ‘fantasy’, a rendering of same-sex desire via the discursive conventions that generally obscure or erase it, and a concern with doing justice to Sackville-West. In her diary, Woolf wrote that Orlando might provide a way of ‘writing the memoirs of one’s own times during people’s lifetimes’;2 that ‘Sapphism is to be suggested’;3 that ‘it should be truthful; but fantastic’;4 and that she was ‘writing Orlando half in mock style very clear & plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth & fantasy must be careful’.5 Woolf was apparently preoccupied with a ‘truth’ that could only be manifested in a literary text via a combination of ‘memoir’ and fiction – a seemingly paradoxical formulation that would obscure the potentially unpalatable, even from readers 95

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who could ‘understand every word’. Written into Orlando, then, was a layered address to an anticipated heterogeneous audience, constituted by those with the knowledge to differentiate ‘truth’ from ‘fantasy’, and those without it. As Orlando’s subject and dedicatee, and probably the only reader who belonged unequivocally in the former category, Vita Sackville-West was this novel’s ideal reader. In this chapter, I will argue that Orlando marks a shift in Woolf’s conceptualization of same-sex desire, which was underpinned by a shift in the direction of her private address from her Bloomsbury coterie to Sackville-West as ideal reader. I will suggest that Orlando can be productively described as a Sapphic roman à clef, which I have defined as a novel that uses the distinction between public and private to perform a layered address to a heterogeneous readership.6 Like the other Sapphic romans à clef discussed so far, Orlando played on unevenly held knowledge in order to encrypt references to same-sex love and desire in a period marked by the censorship of representations of homosexuality.7 Orlando is the product of an intimate attachment realized, in literary form, not only as a pseudo-biographical tribute – via the lightly veiled, fantastically embellished story of a life – but also through an address to its subject. This chapter will posit that unlike Woolf’s earlier works, such as the comparatively explicit Mrs. Dalloway (1925), which evidences an interest in same-sex desire, but is ambivalent about the place of such desire in society, Orlando critiques the cultural and discursive marginalization of the non-normative. Same-sex desire in Orlando is represented via the explicit representation of its unspeakability, drawing attention to the fact that ‘knowledge’ and ‘ignorance’ are curiously loaded when it comes to homosexuality – a configuration Woolf capitalizes on in order to present a ‘gift’ to her intimate friend and one-time lover. Orlando brought Woolf acclaim and commercial success (‘I think I may say that I am now among the well-known writers’8), at least in part because it indulged in a playful exploration of the romance of the English aristocracy. Woolf was conscious that her appreciation of her lover’s gentility was ‘snobbish’, and observed in passing that Knole was ‘capable of housing all the desperate poor of Judd Street’, but she was fascinated by the culture represented by Sackville-West and her beloved family estate.9 She wrote of Sackville-West in her diary: ‘snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back, & they become romantic to me’.10 The private address contained in the text provided Woolf with the justification for an exploration of the aristocracy that was less critical than it was affectionately parodic. Orlando’s status as Woolf’s gift to Sackville-West is grounded in the literal presentation of a unique copy of the novel to its subject, and

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in the fact that it constituted the fictional reinstatement of Knole to the woman whose gender precluded her from inheriting it. Orlando is a cultural artefact with transformative power, simultaneously private and publicly performative, for it guarantees that Knole ‘belongs’ to Sackville-West indefinitely. And it was the novel’s private address – which rendered it, as Nigel Nicolson has famously pointed out, the ‘longest and most charming love letter in literature’11 – that provided Woolf with the motivation and material to represent same-sex desire via a careful critique of the necessity for its encryption. Even as Orlando addresses Sackville-West via a celebration of Knole and aristocratic culture and an explicitly encrypted representation and expression of same-sex desire, it produces versions of Sackville-West, the aristocracy and same-sex desire for a more general readership. Orlando addresses both the public sphere, which refused knowledge of homosexuality, and private and counterpublic circles in which knowledge facilitated relationships between women, as well as their representation.12 Any public denunciation of the subject matter implicated the denouncer within the economy of knowledge and desire required to interpret the texts as immoral. As I argued in the introduction, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes that ‘silence is rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in relations around the closet’,13 and she argues that ‘ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary dark, are produced by and correspond to particular knowledges and circulate as part of particular regimes of truth’.14 Certain sexualities are rendered ‘unspeakable’ by the silence that figures as ‘truth’ in relation to them. In Orlando, Woolf plays on the loaded silence that adheres to homosexuality – ‘silence’ overtly denotes the reality of lesbian representation, but refutes the culturally inscribed ‘truth’ of lesbian impossibility. Silence, explicitly enacted, comes to denote lesbianism itself, ultimately privileging the reading position of those ‘in the know’, rather than that of the persistently ‘ignorant’. Orlando reveals the machinations that were required to manage knowledge about same-sex desire in the period. Although Sackville-West was, for the most part, politically disengaged, she inadvertently provided Woolf with the conceptual tools to represent not only her own experience of sexuality, but also a politically loaded interrogation of mainstream society’s marginalization of non-normative sexuality. To read this novel as a roman à clef – in this case, as a novel addressed to, and written about, Vita Sackville-West – is to attain greater insight into Woolf’s position on non-normative sexuality. Reflecting upon her feelings for Sackville-West early in their relationship, Woolf wrote in her diary that ‘these Sapphists love women; friendship

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is never untinged with amorosity’. This generalization recalls sexological descriptions of the predatory lesbian, and Sackville-West’s adherence to the circulating lesbian stereotype is further emphasized by her occasional indulgence in cross-dressing, especially during her now-infamous affair with Violet Trefusis. In this instance she and Trefusis ‘passed’ as a heterosexual couple, and they described their final flight from England as an ‘elopement’. (Woolf makes direct reference to this incident in Orlando as she describes the rumours that circulated about her subject in the period of her cross-dressing.15) Yet although Sackville-West appears, at first glance, to embody the typology of the ‘congenital invert’, she was far removed from the isolated masculine lesbian represented in Hall’s Well of Loneliness, and her performed masculinity did not connote a disidentification with women. Woolf described her as ‘being in short (what I have never been) a real woman’,16 she was happily, if largely chastely, married with children, she had a wide circle of friends from whom her lesbianism was not concealed, she was not short of male admirers, and not averse to returning their affection, and she was renowned more for her sense of style than for her cross-dressing. The impossibility of locating Sackville-West’s sexual orientation within any single explanatory narrative is emphasized by the comparisons Woolf drew between herself and her lover: Sackville-West was described as a Sapphist, the implication being that Woolf was not one, yet Woolf was a ‘eunuch’, where SackvilleWest was a ‘blazing beaut[y]’.17 In her literary representation of SackvilleWest, Woolf denaturalizes the external signifiers of gender difference along with the inequalities between the sexes, parodying those classificatory categories that would purport to define and contain Sackville-West and Orlando. Sackville-West’s sexual orientation was an ‘open secret’ – she did not hide it from people she knew, yet the outwardly conventional nature of her family life provided her with the privileges and acceptance bestowed by heterosexuality. In its representation of this aspect of Sackville-West’s life, Orlando meets the requirement that homosexuality remain hidden, yet paradoxically represents it through its overt dissimulation – the ‘screening’ of non-normative desire is thus key to the novel.18 Orlando carefully publicizes that which had been deemed unrepresentable, mobilizing the insistent closeting of homosexuality as a stand-in for homosexuality itself, and parodying the schema of knowledge and willed ignorance that underpins the public representation of sexuality. That is, the novel relies upon a mass-cultural will to ignorance to simultaneously represent and obscure homosexuality. For example, the narrator’s refusal to articulate just what occurs between Orlando and the prostitutes

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of Drury Lane reveals just that, particularly to those who desire such knowledge. Because this is the period in which Orlando ‘enjoyed the love of both sexes equally’, it is also the period in which ‘to give an exact and particular account of Orlando’s life … becomes more and more out of the question’.19 The female Orlando, cross-dressed with Nell, an attractive prostitute, on her arm, has ‘roused’ in her ‘all the feelings which become a man’.20 And although her ‘feelings’ along with her clothing are deemed, by the dominant culture, to be most ‘becoming’ to the male sex, identification between women is ultimately revealed to underpin attractions between them. Orlando is not interested in reframing her desire with a culturally sanctioned narrative of fundamental heterosexuality (although given her sex-change, this would not be difficult), for the pleasure of female company far surpasses the frustrating company of even the most intelligent and sociable men. Following Orlando’s apparently seamless transition from male to female, and prior to her first encounter with Nell, she plays hostess to some of the great English writers of the eighteenth century. Yet she is aware that Pope, Addison and Lord Chesterfield consider women to be ‘children of a larger growth’. Even worse, she has already expressed her dissatisfaction with this (well-known) ‘secret’ by ‘let[ting] the sugar fall with a great plop’ into Mr Pope’s tea, incurring his wrath, and the presentation of ‘a certain famous line in the “Characters of Women”’.21 Thus, it would appear that Orlando dons the attire of a ‘young man of fashion’ and sets out in search of female company because, A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body with his pen.22 Orlando’s identification here is clearly with the women who are the subject of the poets’ disdain, and the fact that she was once a man does nothing to alter the fact that her female body is now available to be ‘run through’ by a man’s pen. It is not because she was once a man, or because she continues to identify with men, that Orlando finds herself bowing to a young woman with lustrous eyes and an exquisitely shapely head,23 but because she is a woman who would prefer the company of women. And although the sensation of Nell ‘hanging lightly yet like a suppliant on her arm’ provokes a reaction in Orlando that best ‘become[s] a man’, such gender-specific characterizations are immediately called into

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question. Orlando ‘suspect[s] that the girl’s timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in the latch and the fold of her cloak and the droop of her wrist were all put on to gratify her masculinity’, for she has ‘been so lately a woman herself’.24 Gender, here, is clearly not determined by biological sex, for by appropriating the external signifiers of maleness Orlando has rendered herself ‘lately’ a woman, even though it is precisely because she is a woman that she can interpret Nell’s femininity as a performance for the ‘gratification’ of men. Making implicit reference to Sackville-West’s past experiences of same-sex coupling (her dancing in the South of France dressed as a man with her lover, Violet Trefusis, for example), and taking full advantage of the confusion of gender and desire her fantastical narrative provides, Woolf refuses to frame Orlando’s sexuality with any suggestion of abnormality. Orlando’s arousal is predicated upon the performance of femininity Nell enacts for her benefit, as well as her astute and gendered recognition that this behaviour was designed to ‘gratify … masculinity’. Yet the relationship between Nell and Orlando, initiated by a playful transgression of the unstable boundaries between masculine and feminine, is cemented by the revelation of their sameness. Orlando ‘flung off all disguise and admitted herself a woman’, whereupon ‘Nell burst into … a roar of laughter’, and, ‘by no means sorry to hear’ that she was not in the company of a man, could afford to ‘drop[ ] her plaintive, appealing ways’.25 What subsequently occurs between Orlando and the prostitutes of Drury Lane is only hinted at, but female intimacy clearly subverts a patriarchal understanding of femininity: it cannot be denied that when women get together – but hist – they are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print. All they desire is – but hist again – is that not a man’s step on the stair? All they desire, we were about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women have no desires, says this gentleman, coming into Nell’s parlour; only affectations.26 As I discussed in the introduction, ‘hist’ – a call for silence – stands in for same-sex eroticism here, and this blatant performance of the dissimulation of lesbianism parodies those who perpetuate ignorance in the face of indisputable evidence, and privileges those readers who are both willing and able to interpret Woolf’s references. When the narrator states that, ‘when women get together – but hist – they are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print’, the text is appealing to those who know

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what cannot be said.27 The misinformation perpetuated by ‘gentlemen’ who justify a refusal of women’s agency and ‘desire’ with a denial that such agency and desire are even possible, is rendered both shocking and ridiculous. However, if woman’s ‘desire’ is denied by men, women need only to ‘get together’ behind closed doors, and as long as there is no ‘man’s step on the stair’, they are free to pursue that which has been deemed an impossibility. ‘[L]et us … merely state that Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex’, Orlando’s narrator suggests, ‘and leave it to the gentlemen to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible’.28 Such ‘society’ is not necessarily sexual, of course, but Orlando’s physical response to Nell’s hand on her arm, the narrator’s provocative and self-conscious refusal to specify what women ‘desire’ when they ‘get together’,29 the pronouncement that Orlando ‘enjoyed the love of both sexes equally’,30 and Sackville-West’s own ‘proclivities’ imply a level of intimacy in which the ‘gentlemen’ in question would have refused to believe.31 The level of knowledge or ignorance brought to the novel by the reader informs his or her interpretation of these same-sex interactions, and the novel circumvents accusations of ‘obscenity’ by addressing potentially offensive material to those who were willing to acknowledge it. With a tribute to a subject who lived her homosexuality as an ‘open secret’, Woolf represents the will to ignorance that characterized discussions of sexuality in her socio-cultural milieu. Although Orlando’s foray into the society of women in Drury Lane ostensibly takes place in the eighteenth century, it reflects trials and parliamentary debates of the late 1910s and early 1920s. Woolf was undoubtedly aware of the events of the Pemberton-Billing trial and the debate surrounding the ‘Acts of Indecency by Females’ clause of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, and she mentions the censorship trial of Allatini’s Despised and Rejected in her diary.32 The unfolding of each of these events, which I discussed at length in the introduction, emphasizes the extent to which ignorance was privileged over overt censure when it came to lesbian sexuality, due to homosexuality’s apparently potent power to corrupt even when framed by condemnation. Deviation from ‘normal’ heterosexuality was deemed so rare that few women could even conceive that such a thing was possible, yet the power of Sapphic suggestion was apparently so strong that exposure to the very idea of lesbianism was dangerous.33 Valerie Rohy observes that lesbian sexuality in ‘patriarchal culture’ is doubly ‘impossible’ in that it is ‘supposedly nonexistent and at the same time intolerable’.34 However, it is also worth noting that for women equipped with the practical means to negotiate

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the mechanisms of repression institutionalized by such a culture, there is also freedom attached to the public repudiation of same-sex desire. That is, when men entrusted themselves with the task of protecting women from lesbian desire by pretending that such desire did not exist, they inadvertently provided a space for intimate relations between women to continue, if only in private. Orlando and the women of Drury Lane take advantage of the ‘impossibility’ of women’s pleasure in each other’s company to meet behind closed doors, the very denial of same-sex desire facilitating its fulfilment. It is this configuration – of willed ignorance and unspeakable desire – that structures Orlando itself. Same-sex eroticism in Orlando comes to exemplify the knowledge that provides escape from cultural repression, and it shapes an address to those readers who do not resist such knowledge. With an explicit relegation of same-sex ‘love’ to the private sphere, the narrator addresses readers who are in possession of the knowledge of its existence. This strategy simultaneously provides space for the censorious or willingly ignorant reader to attribute Orlando’s (cross-dressing, lesbian) behaviour to the ‘fantasy’ of her mutable biological sex – to adhere to the perspective of the ‘gentlemen’ who argue that same-sex desire is ‘impossible’. Yet Woolf’s deliberately unknowing, ‘gentlemanly’ readers are not regarded uncritically, and although the text incorporates an address to the ‘still very numerous … tribe of the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know not; love the darkness’, this address is laced with mockery, denaturalizing the underpinnings of such opinions.35 Sexual shame is positioned within the constructed mores of a specific cultural context, and also works to screen desire, while offering a critical commentary on a culture that insists upon conformity at the expense of ‘truth’. Sexual shame is rendered most compellingly in Orlando at the moment when it is apparently most authoritative. Emerging into the nineteenth century and the reign of Queen Victoria, Orlando is suddenly shocked by the masculine attire she has been wearing, intermittently, for years: a blush, vivid and singular, overspread her cheeks as she passed Buckingham Palace and her eyes seemed forced by a superior power down upon her knees. Suddenly she saw with a start that she was wearing black breeches. She never ceased blushing till she had reached her country house, which, considering the time it takes four horses to trot thirty miles, will be taken, we hope, as a signal proof of her chastity.36 Orlando’s ‘vivid and singular’ blush is a corporeal effect of desire that stands in for what has been deemed impossible, specifically in the

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nineteenth century.37 In her study of gothic literature, Sedgwick argues that the ‘veil’ that purports to ‘conceal and inhibit[ ] sexuality comes by the same gesture to represent it, both as a metonym of the thing covered and as a metaphor for the system of prohibitions by which sexual desire is enhanced and specified’.38 Orlando’s ‘blush’ functions in a way that resembles Sedgwick’s ‘veil’, although in this case the symbol of desire is literally manifested on the surface of the body – repression produces a visible physical response that immediately denaturalizes it. Woolf transforms a symbol of sexual shame into a symbol of the source of that shame, for this blush is precipitated by a cultural shift, rather than a personal one. By ‘veiling’ sexuality with a chaste ‘blush’, that simultaneously represents it, Woolf draws attention to the illogic that requires that sexuality be privately shameful and publicly unrepresentable. Orlando may blush involuntarily, then, but the advent of her shame and resultant modesty is blatantly heralded by the cultural shift that accompanies the beginning of the Victorian age. Evidence of Orlando’s ‘chastity’ is suddenly required, and that evidence is constituted by the duration of a blush that simultaneously draws attention to her sexual history.39 The virtue of chastity, according to Orlando, is itself a construction, written upon the surface of the body but signifying no underlying morality. Woolf’s suggestion that the duration of Orlando’s blush should be ‘taken … as signal proof of her chastity’ is ironic, for the blush stands in for sexuality itself. The external manifestations of the ‘natural’ shame that characterizes Victorian sexuality are revealed to signify a social phenomenon, rather than an inherent morality. Far from constituting a natural response to sex, shame entrenches the importance of keeping up appearances, and ideally facilitates self-regulation. In the nineteenth century, Orlando’s writing begins to suffer as a result of her unmarried status. She involuntarily composes insipid verse, and experiences a violent vibration of her ring finger, which ‘seemed … to assume a note of interrogation … till poor Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand’.40 Although she believes that the ubiquity of marriage is ‘repugnant’, Orlando’s observations are ‘accompanied by such a tingling and twangling of the afflicted finger that she could scarcely keep her ideas in order’.41 Succumbing to the ‘spirit’ of the age, and searching for an answer to the question ‘whom could she lean upon?’, Orlando dismisses the possibility of female companionship, in spite of her preference for it: ‘the Nells and Kits of Drury Lane, much though she favoured them, scarcely did to lean upon’.42 Orlando reveals the process by which morality is naturalized and internalized – even for a timeless heroine of mutable gender, the coercive power of the prevailing regime is irresistible. In spite of the fact that marriage was ‘against her natural

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temperament’,43 Orlando marries Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire, following a whirlwind romance that parodies the dramatic and romantic conventions of the nineteenth-century novel.44 Having succumbed to the pervasive pressure to marry, Orlando again begins to write, and her first literary effort as a married woman provides further evidence that wedded bliss does not erase the past: And then I came to a field where the springing grass Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries, Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower, Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls –45 Orlando stops on ‘Egyptian girls’, for the ‘power’ of the age, which curtailed the unmarried Orlando’s literary efforts, is ‘reading over her shoulder’.46 Drawing attention to the implications of a woman writing about ‘girls’, this ‘spirit’ asks, ‘girls? Are girls necessary?’47 It is immediately placated: ‘You have a husband at the Cape, you say? Ah, well, that’ll do’.48 Marriage provides Orlando with an effective decoy, enabling her to ‘perform[ ] in spirit … a deep obeisance to the spirit of her age’ even as she recognizes that if the ‘power’ reading over her shoulder ‘examined the contents of her mind carefully’ it would find ‘something highly contraband’.49 Orlando’s ‘performance’ of spiritual deference enables her to be ‘of’ her age, ‘yet remain[ ] herself’,50 and as such, she is able to write, establishing yet another façade of social acceptability even as she indulges in visions of metaphorical ‘Egyptian girls’. Here, Orlando again screens same-sex desire, while simultaneously using that screen to stand in for sexuality and the hypocrisy governing its representation. The humour of gender indeterminacy that characterizes Orlando’s marriage to Shelmerdine was perhaps intended, at least in part, as an in-joke, addressed to Sackville-West, who sustained a happy marriage to Harold Nicolson even as both engaged in homosexual affairs. As soon as Orlando declares to Shelmerdine, ‘I’m passionately in love with you’, she suspects the worst, crying ‘You’re a woman, Shel!’ as Shelmerdine cries ‘You’re a man, Orlando!’51 Orlando’s exclamation gestures toward a confusion of both desire (for in spite of the supposedly logical correlation between gender and desire, she has never experienced passionate love for a man) and gender (for if she desires Shel, who could be a woman, how heterosexual can she be?). Thankfully, Shel describes his penchant for sailing ‘round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale’ demonstrating that he partakes in enough adventure to satisfy the requirements for masculinity.52 Similarly, when Shel tells Orlando of his adventures, concluding

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with the depletion of his ‘supply of biscuits’, and Orlando replies, ‘Yes, negresses are seductive, aren’t they?’, Shel is first ‘surprised and delighted to find how well she had taken his meaning’, then requires further confirmation of her sex, asking, ‘Are you positive you aren’t a man?’53 If Shel resembles a woman, and Orlando’s resemblance to a man is characterized not only by her ‘sympathy’, but also by her identification with her husband’s attraction to ‘negresses’, it is ironic that their marriage clears them of all suspicion of ‘unnatural’ sexuality. Orlando and Shelmerdine’s connection via a shared experience of androgyny has been criticized as threatening the productive potential of bonds that do not rest upon a resolution of difference. Karen Kaivola observes that ‘idealized androgyny represses those bodies and experiences that confound patriarchal ideologies of dimorphous sex, dichotomized gender, and compulsory heterosexuality by resisting the binary logic upon which such ideologies depend’.54 According to Kaivola, then, Woolf’s denaturalization of the preconditions for gender difference and sexual oppression relies upon a ‘binary logic’ that inadvertently reproduces that which it claims to disable – an idealized heterosexuality. However, in Orlando gender is always already a set of learned signifiers – it is not grounded in an internal core, but is instead an ever-shifting product of an ever-shifting society. Following the sex change, the narrator argues that ‘as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved’,55 revealing that the correlation between gender and biological sex is purely arbitrary, and denaturalizing heterosexuality.56 As a woman whose gender is still constituted by unusually deliberate ‘acts’, and who has not yet learned to desire men, she reveals that heterosexual desire is not a necessary corollary of gender: ‘if the consciousness of being the same sex had any effect at all’, the narrator argues, ‘it was to quicken and deepen those feelings [of her love for Sasha] which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark’.57 Increased understanding of gendered experience (that is, sameness) increases desire: aware that gender is a cultural construction that favours men, Orlando is yet to be conditioned to desire the opposite sex. And if gender is not grounded in a natural ‘organizing core’, androgyny cannot itself be essentialized. That is, although in the late nineteenth century, androgyny offers Orlando a solution to the problem of her ‘age’ (that is, the necessity of finding a husband), it is not grounded in an idealized ‘blend’ of some essence of masculinity and femininity, but is instead an example of a particular performance of gender. And because

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both Orlando and Shelmerdine enact gender in a similar way, their understanding and sympathy rivals that of two people who have had similar experiences of gender. Arguably, then, in Orlando, both homosexuality and idealized heterosexuality rely on sameness, and Woolf’s perspective on sexual desire, emerging as it did from the complexities of Sackville-West’s experience of gender and sexual orientation, is proved to be original. In spite of the longevity of her own marriage, Sackville-West was perplexed by Woolf’s decision to wed Orlando to Shelmerdine. She wrote to Nicolson: ‘[m]arriage and motherhood would either modify or destroy Orlando, as a character; they do neither’.58 However, this marriage is hardly the ‘indissoluble’ union of ‘bodies’ that so dismayed Orlando earlier in the novel. Indeed, after some days of courtship and a frantic wedding, Shelmerdine is again sailing for the Cape, and Orlando is left to determine whether marriage will enable her to return to her work on the Oak Tree (work originally interrupted by the intrusion of servants, the spread of an ink-blot and the ‘twangling’ of her ring finger). She is ‘extremely anxious to be informed whether the steps she had taken in the matter of getting engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying him met with [the] approval’ of the ‘spirit of the age’, and what she discovers is that a married woman can write without being troubled by the vibrations of her finger or the explosion of ink onto the page. However, the requirement that a woman privilege marriage above all else is revealed to be arbitrary, again grounded in appearances rather than any fundamental transformation, as Orlando asks: if one’s husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.59 Orlando’s surprise at her capacity to write even as she doubts the sanctity of her union emphasizes the disjunction between marriage and the sexual and social morality that it is purported to symbolize. One woman’s scepticism toward the oppressive cultural conventions that govern her is rendered less significant than the ring on her finger. According to Orlando, the screening of desire is indicative of the repressive forces at work within a culturally specific framework. Written in a time when dissimulation was necessary, Orlando reveals the culturally contingent nature of associations between shame and sexuality

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while itself maintaining the culturally prescribed level of discretion. The eighteenth-century Orlando refuses to internalize shame. She refrains from making excuses or providing explanations for her desire when she ‘professe[s] great enjoyment’ in the private company of women. Yet the nineteenth-century Orlando evidences the impact of culturally and temporally specific circumstances upon the association between shame and desire – Woolf suggests that both shame and the ‘normal’ are products of time and place. Orlando attributes sexual shame to a misguided social construction serving the interests of the patriarchal establishment, her rapid progress through centuries providing her with a unique insight. The humour that underpins interactions between Orlando and Shelmerdine may be a facet of Woolf’s playful address to Sackville-West, but it verges on parody, of both Victorian prudery and Sackville-West herself. Orlando’s sudden capitulation to the social mores of the nineteenth century effectively illustrates the layered address that characterizes the novel as Sapphic roman à clef. Marriage in Orlando works to obscure the non-normative or morally reprehensible from the willingly ignorant; to denaturalize marriage for those who may question its universal appeal; and to playfully parody Sackville-West’s use of her marriage as a foil, mobilized with little compunction, to satisfy a society still governed by values that were a hangover from the reign of Victoria.60 Yet although there are moments in Orlando where Sackville-West is the subject of an affectionate parody, her role as ‘ideal reader’ – as present at the point of reception – placed pressures on the text that were distinct from those that emerged from Sackville-West’s role as Orlando’s ‘inspiration’, for Woolf was courting Sackville-West’s approval.61 The resemblance of the relationship between Woolf and Sackville-West to that between a working artist and a wealthy patron is perhaps one characteristic of the text’s production that enabled Woolf to indulge the ‘snobbish’ elements of her view of aristocratic heritage. Although her admiration of SackvilleWest was genuine, grounded not in remuneration, but in friendship and a love affair, the text was literally a gift, and its presentation to Vita on the day of Orlando’s publication engendered some anxiety.62 After Sackville-West received the novel and wrote to Woolf that she was ‘in love with Orlando’, Woolf replied: ‘What an immense relief! … It struck me suddenly with horror that you’d be hurt or angry, and I didn’t dare open the post’.63 Orlando engages in some playful mockery of aristocratic culture and Sackville-West’s obsession with her family history, but its subject matter and ideal reader also provided Woolf with a licence to elide the serious concerns raised by the privilege of the aristocracy, and

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to focus, instead, upon the discriminatory basis of primogeniture, as well as on the romance of an aristocrat and her estate. When Orlando’s sex is ‘pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a doubt … female’ and she simultaneously ‘enter[s] … into the undisturbed possession of her titles, her house, and her estate’, Woolf symbolically returns to Sackville-West that which she lost because she was born a girl (while emphasizing the compatibility of femaleness and property ownership), and slides around the problematic fact that what is at issue is property on a scale that few could comprehend.64 Orlando’s exploration of Sackville West’s aristocratic heritage provided a convenient distraction from what Woolf saw as her intellectual mediocrity. As compelling as Woolf found Sackville-West, and as passionately as she felt about her, she was never convinced that her work was anything more than ‘middlebrow’. Yet as a member of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ whose family boasted an ‘intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching … through the upper middle classes, the country families, and the aristocracy’,65 Woolf often blurred the lines between the aristocracy of intellect and that of birth. Although Woolf describes the ‘highbrow’ man or woman as one of ‘thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea’,66 and argues that she has ‘known duchesses who were highbrows, also charwomen’,67 her disdain for the ‘middlebrow’ is clearly a disdain for the values of the middle classes. Middlebrow taste, for Woolf, was grounded in a middle-class propensity to act in accordance with fashion, and to work not to live, but to support an investment in tasteless, fashionable commodities.68 The distinction she drew between that ‘highbrow’ taste grounded in intellectual superiority, and the aristocratic taste grounded in birth and tradition, is equally spurious. As Raymond Williams points out, Bloomsbury’s tendency was to draw a distinction between the ‘aristocracy of birth’ and that of ‘achievement’, yet ‘opportunities for intellectual distinction’ were grounded in the ‘generational effect’ of families’ ‘social position’, and often, blood relationships secured membership of a group ostensibly constituted by friendship between intellectual equals.69 If Woolf believed that Sackville-West’s work was middlebrow, then, she overcame this ambivalence via an emphasis upon the latter’s aristocracy – the middlebrow appeal of Orlando’s work, which is drawn directly from Sackville-West’s own, is excused by his/her social status. There is a certain conflict of interest here – Woolf’s usual disdain for the middlebrow is subordinated to her desire to please her ideal reader, and recedes behind a delighted exploration of aristocratic life, in a move that is characteristic of the roman à clef genre, which requires the author

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to juggle literary and personal concerns. And if the resultant ambiguity is politically problematic, in this case at least, this negotiation of public and private address does provide the scope to indulge in the kind of subtle satire that would sit far less comfortably in a more private tribute. Thus, when Orlando reflects that Shakespeare was ‘[n]ot a Nobleman; not one of us’, the narrator comments upon the ‘effect noble birth has upon the mind and incidentally how difficult it is for a nobleman to be a writer’.70 In the twentieth century, as Orlando’s The Oak Tree (which quotes Sackville-West’s The Land) is about to be published, long-lived poet laureate Sir Nicholas Green compliments the fact that it contains ‘no trace … of the modern spirit’, and adds that this is a ‘rare’ quality in ‘these days of unscrupulous eccentricity’.71 In spite of the parody, here, of the social and intellectual effects of a hierarchical class system, and in spite of the fact that Sackville-West’s work is implicitly compared unfavourably to Woolf’s modernist ‘eccentricity’ (a compliment from Nick Green, who has compromised his artistic integrity to attain public recognition, is dubious at best), nobility emerges triumphant, prevailing over the inadequacies it engenders. Orlando inherits her family estate, and her circumspect response to the popularity of her pastoral epic suggests that her aristocratic sense of entitlement enables her to transcend the ‘middlebrow’: ‘[w]hat has praise and fame to do with poetry?’ she asks, as she surveys her estate and its surrounds and reflects upon what ‘the land’ has ‘given’ her.72 In many ways, Orlando’s representation of sexuality and gender relies upon both the generic allegiances of its ‘highbrow’ author, and the nobility of its protagonist. It was perhaps inevitable that Woolf’s treatment of gender and sexuality in a roman à clef about Vita Sackville-West would be filtered through a vision of the English aristocracy, for as David Cannadine points out, Sackville-West’s identity was in many ways determined more by her ‘famil[y] histor[y] and social position’ than her sexual orientation.73 Woolf wrote of her first visit to Knole in her diary, punctuating a lavish description with the statements that, ‘its [sic] the breeding of Vita’s that I took away with me as an impression’ and, more enigmatically, ‘I did not keep my human values & my aesthetic values distinct’.74 In the writing of Orlando, it was Woolf’s address to Sackville-West that enabled her to indulge her ‘aesthetic’ appreciation of aristocratic ‘breeding’ with a clear conscience. Orlando’s affectionate parody of Sackville-West and her obsession with her aristocratic credentials emerge as thinly veiled admiration. Woolf parodied certain elements of aristocratic culture but she also celebrated its most romantic trappings, and paid tribute to one of its most devoted adherents. Thus, when the novel’s narrator reports on Orlando’s

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contribution to the furnishings of his estate, her approach serves a dual purpose. She begins by listing the lavish purchases he made: ‘To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and white taffeta; the valence to them of white satin embroidered with crimson and white silk … ‘To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools, suitable with their buckram covers to them all … ‘To sixty-seven walnut tree tables … The inventory continues in this vein for a while longer, before the narrator breaks off: Already – it is an effect lists have upon us – we are beginning to yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it is finished. There are ninety-nine pages more of it and the total sum disbursed ran into many thousands … And The tale, we say, is tedious, for one cupboard is much like another, and one molehill not much different from a million.75 The declaration that interrupts the rehearsal of Orlando’s inventory is clearly a parody of Vita Sackville-West’s Knole and the Sackvilles, published in 1922. In the chapter of this book entitled ‘Knole in the Reign of Charles I’, Sackville-West lists the ‘household stuff’ sent to Knole in 1624. This list runs for three pages, and includes items almost identical (if rendered in even more lavish detail) to those that bore Orlando’s narrator.76 And when Orlando reflects on the ‘obscure generations of [his] own obscure family’, wondering why he seeks fame when they sought only to improve Knole, Woolf is perhaps parodying Sackville-West’s insistence that the uneventful life of the most ‘obscure’ Sackville was worth recording, simply because he or she lived at Knole and carried the family name.77 However, this parody of both Sackville-West’s pride in her family’s accumulation of wealth and her obsession with her family estate also emphasizes Knole’s magnificence. Given the anxiety that accompanied Woolf’s anticipation of Vita’s response to Orlando, it is clear that Woolf was motivated, at least in part, by a desire for her friend’s approval. Prior to the composition of Orlando, Woolf’s Bloomsbury coterie constituted the implied private audience for her work – its members

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were usually her first, most critically engaged readers – but they were a less obvious anticipated readership for this playful ‘biography’ of, and tribute to, a lesbian aristocrat.78 In her diary, Woolf describes her most significant critic, fellow-novelist E.M. Forster, as a ‘sodomite’ who is disgusted by Sapphism, ‘partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men’;79 more comically, Vanessa Bell was intrigued by the story of her sister’s affair with Vita, asking in a ‘chemists shop’, ‘do you really like going to bed with women[?]’, and ‘how d’you do it?’, all the time ‘talking as loud as a parrot’.80 Woolf’s immediate social circle had an interpretive capacity that exceeded that of the public, for they knew Sackville-West and were aware of her relationship with Woolf. When Woolf solicited Sackville-West’s permission to write Orlando, she was less concerned with the potential reaction of the general public than she was with the prospective ‘chaws’ and ‘guffaws’ of their mutual friends.81 Woolf’s tribute to Sackville-West constituted a reconfiguration of textual address and a reconsideration of the anxieties that generally accompanied her anticipation of a novel’s reception. Woolf was always particularly eager and nervous awaiting Forster’s reactions to her work, and Michael J. Hoffman and Ann Ter Haar demonstrate that Forster’s praise of Woolf’s work became increasingly ambivalent as Woolf ‘assume[d] her more distinctive voice’,82 following the publication of The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919). In spite of Woolf’s relief that her friend was impressed by Mrs. Dalloway – apparently he ‘admire[d]’ it83 – she mentions in her diary a critique that she decides is not worth elaborating on (‘He thinks – but I won’t go into detailed criticism’84). Orlando is the result of a shift in Woolf’s address, while Mrs. Dalloway manifests the beginnings of this shift as well as an ambivalence, on Woolf’s part, towards same-sex desire itself. Forster had been an important influence and mentor for Woolf,85 yet as she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, her relationship with Sackville-West was gaining in significance, as was her perception of the significance of relationships between women more generally. She reflects upon both Vita and Mrs. Dalloway in a single diary entry in September, 1924,86 and an entry less than two months later, written as she began revisions on Mrs. Dalloway, suggests that friendship with women had become a lens through which to view her novel. She writes, ‘If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret & private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? truthfully?’87 Regardless of her shifting interests, however, Woolf’s anticipation of, and responses to, individual readers’ assessment of Mrs. Dalloway indicate that her anticipated private readership was constituted primarily by her Bloomsbury coterie.

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She awaited Forster’s verdict on Mrs. Dalloway with ‘trepidation’, and his praise lifted a ‘weight’ from her ‘mind’.88 On the other hand, in 1925, Sackville-West’s response to the same book was met with little concern – ‘Hah ha! I thought you wouldn’t like Mrs. Dalloway’.89 I want to turn, briefly, to Mrs. Dalloway itself, which reflected the beginnings of the shift in Woolf’s conceptualization of same-sex desire, but remained ambivalent in its treatment of the subject. That the resolution of this ambivalence is ultimately made manifest in a novel about Vita Sackville-West points to the significance of personal experience to Woolf’s work. And to acknowledge the significance of the relationship between the personal and the literary is to grasp, in finer detail, the author’s position on non-normative sexual desire, in a period where that position was necessarily obscured. To examine Mrs. Dalloway in the context of this chapter, then, is to reveal the significance of the shift engendered by Woolf’s relationship with Sackville-West, and by the interpretation of Sackville-West’s life made manifest in Orlando. Mrs. Dalloway revealed an interest in sexual development, and in the possibility that a ‘normal’, heterosexual adulthood may not always be what it seems, yet unlike Orlando, it does not imagine an alternative. In her compelling analysis of the trajectory of Clarissa Dalloway’s psychosexual maturation, Annamarie Jagose argues that ‘Mrs. Dalloway ultimately confines homosexuality to the register that enables its most voluble articulation – that of memory’.90 By treating lesbianism as though its relegation to memory is inevitable, Mrs. Dalloway implicitly (if inadvertently) validates one of the male-authored myths that characterizes sexological and psychoanalytic studies of homosexuality. In Woolf’s ‘study’ of ‘the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side’, Clarissa Dalloway’s ‘sanity’ is marked, in part, by the fact that she has apparently confined her lesbian experience to the past. This representation recalls Havelock Ellis’ assertion that ‘the inversion of later life, if it persists, [is] largely due to arrested development’, as well as Freud’s insistence that healthy sexuality entails a linear progression from homosexuality to heterosexuality.91 Jagose discusses Woolf’s relegation of homosexuality to the ‘mnemic register’, and she posits that within the novel, homosexuality’s ‘surfacing in the present’ is ultimately ‘a temporary glitch in that future-directed temporality that is, as the novel’s closure attests, contracted to heterosexuality’.92 By the end of the novel, the potential homosexuality of returned soldier Septimus Smith and his officer, Evans, have been curtailed by their deaths, while Clarissa’s homosexuality is always characterized by its ‘pastness’ and is limited by the heterosexual resolution that has always already happened. Clarissa’s passion for Sally,

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who was arguably the most significant love of her life, is consistently described in terms of its ‘purity’, where purity is a ‘quality which could only exist between women … just grown up’.93 In spite of disparities in age, sex, class and experience, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith both bear the consequences of the impossibility of articulating homoerotic love and desire within the ‘marriage plot’ that has swept them into its inexorable trajectory. Unlike Septimus, who sits in Regent’s Park and sees the long-dead Evans ‘behind the railings’ or hears him singing from ‘behind the tree’,94 Clarissa possesses the ability to distinguish between the ‘self’ that others will see and the memories, doubts, fantasies and anxieties that interrupt her enjoyment of ‘life; London; this moment of June’.95 However, neither she nor Septimus have the capacity to completely suppress the past. Clarissa’s sanity, then, is contingent upon her repression of the memories of Sally and lesbian desire, and because these memories persistently resurface, she is constantly forced to insist that they have no bearing on the present. Yet although Clarissa claims that she cannot ‘even get an echo’ of the ‘emotion’96 that Sally’s presence once inspired, she recalls her kiss with an intensity that belies its temporal otherness: Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life … Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!97 What Clarissa represses when she denies the lasting significance of these feelings is not lesbian desire itself, but what Jagose describes as the ‘interrupting presence’ of lesbianism, the fact that even as she emphatically locates her desire for Sally in the past, she is reacting to a series of memories that repeatedly find their way, unbidden, into her present.98 If Clarissa is able to rationalize homosexual desire with recourse to the past, and if she is able to distinguish between that which belongs in the past and that which has a place in the present, she has nonetheless failed to achieve the seamless progression from youthful homosexuality to adult heterosexuality. Contemplating her ‘virginity preserved through childbirth’, along with what she ‘lack[s]’ when it comes to the ‘contact of a man and a woman, or of women together’ (only the latter of which she can ‘dimly perceive’), she reflects that she

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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 ….99 And if we are left in any doubt as to the eroticism of this ‘charm’, she continues: she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered 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 over the cracks and sores.100 This passage is more sexually suggestive than anything that appears in Orlando, yet it is invested in a particular interpretation of sexuality that delimits lesbian possibility. Clarissa, ‘resent[ing]’ her involuntary reaction to the proximity of ‘a woman’, attributes her ‘scruple’ to ‘Nature’, denaturalizing her adult experience of the rush and quiver of this feeling that ‘men felt’. On one level Clarissa’s description of her physical response to women as ‘what men felt’ reveals the inadequacies of the heterocentric language that is available to express same-sex desire, for it is an identification with women and away from men that underpins her attractions – her relationship with Sally is characterized by a ‘quality which could only exist between women’.101 Yet the assumptions and conventions that Clarissa’s desires call into question function to normalize her arousal, when that arousal is located within a narrative of heterosexual development – it is rationally connected with a ‘purity’ that can ‘only exist between women … just grown up’.102 Thus, Clarissa transposes the eroticized description of her continuing physical response to ‘a woman, not a girl’,103 from this ‘question of … falling in love with women’, onto her (acceptable) ‘relation in the old days with Sally Seton’.104 For Clarissa, then, the repression of lesbian desire is thoroughly selfconscious, and if she exemplifies a ‘healthy’ sexual trajectory, she also suggests that it is performative, rather than natural. Yet this is less subversive than it seems, for when it comes to lesbianism in Mrs. Dalloway, the implication remains: if Clarissa follows her desires to their logical conclusion, she will cross the lines that must be drawn (by medical authorities and ‘women … just grown up’) between past and present, immaturity and adulthood. This is evidenced not only by Clarissa’s

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turn to Sally and her ‘pastness’ whenever a glimmer of the potential for female intimacy emerges into the present, but also by her reaction to the physically and socially repulsive Miss Kilman, who, with a name that gestures unsubtly towards lesbianism, is unmarried and emotionally attached to Clarissa’s daughter, Elizabeth. Clarissa’s description of Doris Kilman is contemptuous, in spite of her awareness that ‘one must make allowances’ for the fact that she had ‘been badly treated’, and when she begins questioning Miss Kilman’s influence over Elizabeth, she quickly shifts to a more personal attack: Anyhow they were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired …105 Miss Kilman is reduced, here, from noble, disagreeable proselytizer to the sweating inhabitant of an unflattering mackintosh coat. And although this reduction might be dismissed as a straightforward manifestation of maternal concern or resentment, or as evidence of Clarissa’s superficial investment in the social mores of her class, it is followed by an unexpected analysis. For as soon as Clarissa deconstructs the revulsion Miss Kilman inspires, she reveals a complex emotional attachment. Enamoured of the young student under her influence, Miss Kilman takes her place in a tradition of predatory spectral literary lesbians that dates back to the eighteenth century,106 and Clarissa readily positions her in relation to the figure of the lesbian vampire: it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up our life-blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.107 For Clarissa, the ‘idea’ of Doris Kilman conjures an image of a vampiric spectre, yet this rapacious spinster does not stand astride Elizabeth

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drinking her blood, she stands astride Clarissa, and it is Clarissa who unexpectedly considers the possibility of loving her predator. Clarissa’s fear can be attributed, in part, to maternal jealousy (where the ‘lifeblood’ Doris Kilman is ‘sucking’ is the blood she shares with her increasingly distant child), yet it is also the fear that Miss Kilman represents the reification of a heretofore impossible desire.108 The heteronormative plot of family life that Clarissa has obediently enacted, even when her mind has been elsewhere, is threatened by the interruption of Miss Kilman and her ‘possession’ of Elizabeth. Clarissa might ‘have loved Miss Kilman’ in another ‘world’, but the lesbian desire of an adult woman does not belong in Clarissa’s temporally compartmentalized narrative of psychological and sexual development. Always able to explain away her own lesbian desire by superimposing it onto an acceptable adolescent ‘love affair’, Clarissa appropriates a conventional narrative of intergenerational vampirism in order to explain Miss Kilman’s adult infatuation with Elizabeth. Seemingly arbitrary triggers bring Miss Kilman to Clarissa’s mind, and although she is referred to as an ‘enemy’, her significance lies not in the hostility she arouses, but rather in the fact that such hostility is ‘satisfying’ and ‘real’.109 And the satisfaction such hatred provides brings hatred and love into close proximity: ‘Ah, how she hated her – hot, hypocritical, corrupt …. She hated her: she loved her’.110 The repeated and explicit suppression of the possibility of loving Miss Kilman reveals the connection Clarissa perceives between herself and a woman who repulses her. In spite of her passionate love for Sally, there was never any doubt that Clarissa would marry: if she had not, she may have ended up like Miss Kilman, unattractive, bitter and alone, perspiring ‘in a green mackintosh coat’.111 Woolf may question the validity of naturalized sexological and psychoanalytic narratives, but she appropriates the sequential ‘logic’ that guides them, using lesbianism to mark the tipping point from ‘normality’ into ‘otherness’. Miss Kilman’s many failures and failings – her repulsive physicality and her struggle to assuage her bitter resentment of women like Clarissa – function as a warning of the dangers of resisting normativity, even where that normativity is structured by culturally ingrained expectation. Miss Kilman is vampiric because she inhabits a role and exhibits an infatuation that is inappropriate for someone long past adolescence, whereas Orlando is timeless and ageless, her attraction to women never a symptom of personal failing. In contrast to Miss Kilman’s abnormal, unsavory desires, Clarissa’s memory of Sally, safely grounded in its pastness, is laced with ‘ecstasy’.112 Their relationship was characterized by the feeling that when their

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‘affair’ passed, as it was bound to, nothing would match it. Implicit in the statement that their kiss was ‘the most exquisite moment of her whole life’, is the knowledge that nothing has equalled it before or since; the ‘quality’ reserved for women ‘just grown up’ is shadowed by ‘a presentiment of something that was bound to part them’ (this ‘something’ is subsequently identified as marriage, which they ‘spoke of … always as a catastrophe’);113 and Clarissa recalls her feeling, ‘coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton’, that ‘if it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy’.114 When Clarissa sees Sally at her party, ‘older, happier, less lovely’ and very much in the present, her physical response is undeniable, yet she attributes this ‘kindling all over’ to ‘pleasure at the thought of the past’.115 Clarissa sublimates her desire by framing it with a narrative that renders it socially and psychologically acceptable, yet as I have argued throughout this chapter, this does not represent Woolf’s final word on sexuality. Orlando’s playful transcendence of temporal logic is perhaps exceeded by its scepticism toward any ‘logical’ and naturalized organization of sex, gender and desire. Although Mrs. Dalloway is not, in the main, a roman à clef, moments in the text reflect Woolf’s own experience of same-sex attraction, and the ambivalence about mature homosexuality that was resolved by the time she came to write Orlando. In 1921, Woolf wrote in her diary of her own experience of adolescent same-sex desire, and of its dissipation upon entrance into adulthood. Woolf recalled her infatuation with her cousin, Madge Vaughan, in terms that are echoed by the description of Clarissa’s feelings for Sally. Woolf wrote, ‘I see myself now standing in the night nursery at Hyde Park Gate, washing my hands, & saying to myself “At this moment she is actually under this roof”’116; while in Mrs. Dalloway, 18-year-old Clarissa ‘stand[s] in her bedroom … holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, “She is beneath this roof … She is beneath this roof!”’117 In both of these instances, the memory of excitement fails to inspire excitement itself: Clarissa ‘could not even get an echo of her old emotion’, and Woolf is bored by the adult conversation of Madge and is unable to believe that ‘this was the woman I adored!’118 Yet by the time she was finalizing the first draft of her novel, Woolf was writing in her diary of ‘peering across Vita at my blessed Mrs. Dalloway’, then reflecting of Vita that ‘I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time’.119 The burgeoning of Woolf’s intimacy with Vita Sackville-West coincided with the writing of Mrs. Dalloway, and probably inspired the late addition of the passage on Clarissa’s adult interest in women.120 Orlando evidences the extent to which Woolf’s relationship with Sackville-West influenced her representation of same-sex

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desire – Sackville-West was no longer simply the subject of a passing thought, worth noting, but only in private. Rather, she had become the subject of Woolf’s roman à clef. Same-sex desire is not marginal to Orlando, but the novel’s ‘careful’ negotiation of ‘truth & fantasy’ facilitates the novel’s layered address to readers in possession of different levels of knowledge, and varying wills to knowledge. Orlando plays with temporal and biological certainties, using what is logically impossible to complicate the differentiation of the ‘truth’ about Sackville-West from the fantasy, and to screen samesex desire from the willingly ignorant. The dedication and presentation of a novel to Sackville-West, along with the culture of secrecy surrounding the representation of same-sex desire, provided Woolf with both the material and the motivation to ‘screen’ that desire. Woolf revealed the hypocrisies and contradictions that characterize the dominant discursive frame within which same-sex desire was speakable, and she used the structures that obscure same-sex desire to represent it without risking censorship. Orlando is a Sapphic roman à clef, and with it Woolf was able to represent Sackville-West and present her with a ‘gift’ that did her justice, while making her Sapphism available to the knowing reader and simultaneously commenting upon the necessity for such encryption. The ‘shift’ in Woolf’s conceptualization of same-sex desire that I have discussed throughout this chapter was shored up in her later works – in particular, the less playful, non-fictional A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which Woolf writes, ‘“Chloe liked Olivia …” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women’.121 Orlando is not an anomaly, then. Rather, it, and the relationship that inspired it, mark a more significant change in Woolf’s conceptualization of same-sex desire and the strategies by which she represented it.

4 ‘Gertrude, the world is a theatre for you’: Staging the self in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

In 1903, in the aftermath of a disastrous love affair, and four years before she met Alice B. Toklas, the woman who would become her lifelong partner, Gertrude Stein wrote Q.E.D., a roman à clef that remained unpublished until after her death. In it, she recorded the complications of her first serious relationship, persistently analysing her emotional and intellectual responses to the interactions within the triangle of women in which she found herself. Towards the end of the narrative, she writes of Adele (who plays the part of Stein herself): She had no real misgiving but she was deeply unhappy. Her unhappiness was the unhappiness of loneliness not of doubt. She saved herself from intense misery only by realizing that the sky was still so blue and the countryside so green and beautiful. The pain of passionate longing was very hard to bear. Again and again she would bury her face in the cool grass to recover the sense of life in the midst of her sick despondency.1 Thirty years after this outpouring of intense pain and desire, Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was her first commercial success and told the story of her 25 years in Paris with Toklas. In the Autobiography, Stein expressed an emphatic rejection of the literary expression of emotion: Gertrude Stein … knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry or prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality.2 119

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The Autobiography, framed as Toklas’ memoir of avant-garde Paris, is thus ostensibly unemotional. It is not the story of the love-affair between two women, but is instead an apparently dispassionate account of their shared experience of a period that is clearly perceived, by the narrator, as culturally and historically significant. Yet although the presence or absence of emotion and overt lesbian desire appear to explain why Q.E.D. remained unpublished, while The Autobiography attracted mainstream public approbation to Stein and her writing for the first time, I will argue that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas can be productively read as a roman à clef, which was directed to the general public and which encrypted the more private story of a lesbian romance. The Autobiography is Stein’s most readable and popular work, and I will suggest that it is structured by lesbian collaboration and exchange that was not readily recognizable to the public that received its author as a celebrity. Stein’s appropriation of the voice of her lover renders the work a tribute to their relationship and to the reciprocity that underpinned it. Yet this tribute is constituted by a complex address that facilitated the simultaneous representation and elision of same-sex desire and emotion. When The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is read as a roman à clef, it reveals the extent to which secrecy structured a public understanding of lesbian desire. It tells the story of a partnership, but importantly, it does not simply reveal that partnership as a homosexual love affair. To read this work as a roman à clef is to recognize the strategic negotiations of secrecy and disclosure that structured writing of lesbian desire in the period, and it is to acknowledge the extent to which Stein was aware of what Sedgwick describes as the ‘privilege of unknowing’. Stein pushed the boundaries of what could be said, but she did not step over them. Unlike Hall, she did not compel the wilfully ‘ignorant’ reader to acknowledge the homosexuality contained in the text, yet that homosexuality was available to readers who knew Stein and Toklas or could recognize personal experiences of same-sex desire in Stein’s representation of her relationship. Secrecy, in this text, works to preserve a reputation and safeguard against censorship, but it is also a way of representing lesbian desire as it is – itself structured by the necessity for public discretion, by its status as an ‘open secret’. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written with a mass audience in mind, for Stein’s work had not attracted publishers, in spite of her established status as an iconic champion of avant-garde art and literature. By 1933, and in spite of Toklas’ efforts publishing and promoting her lover’s work (a subject to be discussed in more detail later in the chapter), Stein had attracted limited critical interest, and even less commercial

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success. When The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published by Harcourt Brace in January 1933, Stein suddenly became a popular public figure,3 and in 1934, her tour of America after a 30-year absence was widely characterized as the triumphant return of a hero. Her arrival was heralded in lights on the New York Times building, as she stepped off the S.S. Champlain with her female partner on her arm. Alice Toklas was described as Stein’s ‘companion’ or ‘friend’ by the journalists and commentators who responded to the success of the Autobiography and covered Stein’s lecture tour of America,4 in a public delineation of the parameters of what could be spoken, and what would be elided, no matter how obvious. However, if Stein’s relationship with Toklas could be discussed only in euphemistic terms, these were euphemisms that were loaded with Sapphic implications by the fact that the woman whose voice structured the Autobiography clearly never left Stein’s side. ‘Miss Alice B. Toklas is the friend who lives on the Rue de Fleurus with Gertrude Stein’, wrote Janet Flanner in a ‘Letter from Paris’ published in the New Yorker in 1933. Yet she added, ‘And certainly any autobiography of the one must necessarily be a biography of, if not even by, the other’.5 Flanner, who was a friend of Stein and Toklas, never revealed her own lesbianism to her readers, and nor did she reveal the sexual predilections of the artists and writers she wrote about, yet her ‘letter’ insists upon the immutability of the relationship between Stein and Toklas, and positions the Autobiography as public testament to the necessity of rendering that relationship in writing. This chapter will ask how this very public text, which appears, to the modern reader, to have overtly recounted the shared life of two women (women who are, less obviously, in a romantic relationship), could have catapulted a relatively obscure author to celebrity status in 1933. I will argue that central to Stein’s success was her insistence upon her ‘otherness’ – where otherness exempted her from acting in accordance with her gender, but was primarily the product of ‘genius’ – which ultimately rendered her unique, rather than identifiably and quantifiably homosexual. Although the lives of Stein and Toklas prior to their first meeting are presented as of limited interest, that meeting is not presented as the inception of a romance or marriage. Instead, the Autobiography’s Toklas states that she was ‘impressed by the coral brooch [Stein] wore and by her voice’, and that the ‘bell’ that rings ‘within’ her alerts her to Stein’s ‘genius’ – it does not signify romantic or sexual attraction.6 Genius is the mark of Stein’s difference, and as Catharine Stimpson has argued, it is ‘crucial to the packaging of lesbianism’ in the Autobiography,

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because there is no need to ‘fear that the habits of the genius will become a common part of daily life’.7 Central to this strange substitution of ‘genius’ for homosexuality is the fact that it also functions to set Stein apart from other lesbians. She is rendered unique, rather than a ‘type’ marked as ‘perverse’ or marginal. Stein’s otherness is further evidenced by her lack of interest in feminism, and the fact that she did not identify with other women or their literary and artistic endeavours. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas may be sexually subversive, then, but it is subversion grounded in the play of perspectives that characterizes its narrative ‘voice’ and calls into question the apparent division between exceptional author and her admiring narrator. Stein’s interest in Cubism, which manifested itself in her more experimental texts (particularly prior to the First World War), and her mobilization of a version of the stream-of-consciousness technique that was grounded in her study of psychology at Radcliffe in the mid-1890s, informed an aesthetic that called into question the division between objectivity and subjectivity, and between fiction and autobiography. I will suggest, then, that although Stein did not identify with the ‘cause of women’, or with women themselves, in the Autobiography she provides a representation of a same-sex relationship that is grounded in something other than gender difference. Although the division of labour and of intellectual credibility represented in the Autobiography points to a same-sex partnership modelled upon a heterosexual marriage, the merging of the perspectives of Stein and Toklas calls into question the assumed correlation between gender difference and sexual attraction. If Stein leaves traditionally feminine pursuits to Toklas, this is less an identification away from Toklas and femaleness than it is a mark of a genius’ incompatibility with the quotidian. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein uses her relationship with Toklas – the exact nature of which is undisclosed – in order to confound the generic expectations that adhere to ‘autobiography’. The Autobiography announces its genre on its cover, then thwarts the reader’s expectations of what that genre should entail. Numerous critics have reflected upon Stein’s unique rendering of a literary form that is usually dependent upon the integrity of the autobiographical ‘I’, drawing attention, in different ways, to Stein’s playful take on the genre. Georgia Johnston identifies Stein as one of a number of female modernists who queer autobiography by ‘multiplying their “I’s”’ and ‘manipulating subject and object divisions’;8 Catharine Stimpson points out that the Autobiography’s conclusion ‘demonstrates Stein’s theory about the impossibility of autobiography if autobiography swears that

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it is the narrative of a unified self’;9 Franziska Gygax argues that with her autobiographical writings, Stein ‘questions a stable self and realizes that the dynamic of writing does not create one “right” meaning’;10 and Cynthia Merrill suggests that the Autobiography ‘exposes and mocks the illusion of a unitary self’.11 What is at issue, for these critics, is the way in which Stein’s doubling of the autobiographical ‘self’ complicates the generic classification announced by the title, or negates it altogether.12 However, in important ways, this work is not a literary rendering of the self at all. It is undoubtedly worth discussing the ways in which Stein plays with the assumptions that structure autobiography, but what is equally significant is the way in which the autobiographical frame, stripped of its key claims to revelation and authenticity, constructs and celebrates Stein’s role in the Parisian art scene while revealing little about Stein herself. This emphasis upon artistic taste and society enables the narrator to slide around the equally fascinating details of Stein’s romantic and sexual life, inviting the reader to privilege the key figures of an artistic epoch over personal history, affect and emotion. To read the Autobiography as a roman à clef is to acknowledge the careful encryption that is written into it, for whether or not we read ‘truth’ into autobiography, it makes a version of the ‘self’ available, while the roman à clef genre invites interpretation that is dependent upon the knowledge of the reader. All autobiographies are inevitably characterized by gaps and omissions, but in this case the ‘gaps’ invite the knowing reader to fill them. The Autobiography’s narrative voice emphasizes the ‘relational’ quality of the autobiographical self,13 binding Stein and Toklas to each other via the apparent impossibility of autonomous identity, but to a large extent, the narrative conveyed by that voice is not a story of the self at all, relational or otherwise. And the difficulty of classifying The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as straightforward autobiography is compounded by the complexity of its address. Where autobiography makes a claim to veracity that requires the faith of the reader, this work reveals the lie of its authorship on the front cover and the final page, calling into question the ‘facts’ that are contained between them. While the Autobiography is undoubtedly a biography and/or autobiography in certain respects, then, it is also a Sapphic roman à clef, which encrypts an address to a private audience, attesting to the intensity of the romantic relationship between Stein and Toklas and distancing itself from the genre announced by its title. Like the other romans à clef I have discussed in this study, the Autobiography addressed a public readership that would not readily interpret it as a representation of same-sex love or desire, while simultaneously

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addressing those who knew that the romantic relationship between Stein and Toklas structured the text. While there is little doubt that evidence of Stein’s lesbianism was available to the general reader of the Autobiography, the text did not provide any imperative to read Toklas as anything other than a friend and ‘companion’. Stein encrypted any information that would compromise the Autobiography’s success, ensuring that only those who wanted to read lesbian desire into the text would find it there. So, for example, Stein refers dispassionately to the passionate portrait ‘Ada’, which was written for Toklas in 1910 but reached a limited audience when it was published in the collection Geography and Plays in 1922. The Autobiography recounts the moment at which Stein showed ‘Ada’ to Toklas, as their food cooled ‘one Sunday evening’: I can still see the little tiny pages of the note-book written forward and back. It was the portrait called Ada, the first in Geography and Plays. I began it and I thought she was making fun of me and I protested, she says I protest now about my autobiography. Finally I read it all and was terribly pleased with it. And then we ate our supper.14 By suggesting that Toklas’ response to both texts was protest against potential ridicule, Stein simultaneously reveals that Toklas is ‘Ada’s’ subject, to anyone who may be familiar with that obscure piece, and reminds the observant reader that the Autobiography is authored by Stein as a tribute to Toklas. The Autobiography obliquely directs the interested reader to ‘Ada’ for a more explicit reflection upon the relationship between Stein and Toklas, for the earlier text is far more overt in its expression of love and desire than the Autobiography, even though it is more obscure stylistically: Trembling was all living, living was all loving, some one was then the other one. Certainly this one was loving this Ada then. And certainly Ada all her living then was happier in living than any one else who ever could, who was, who is, who ever will be living.15 This passage illuminates the relationship that is desexualized for a mainstream audience in the Autobiography. And if the Autobiography’s reference to ‘Ada’ is directed toward readers who want to know more about the nature of the relationship between Stein and Toklas, it is also directed at those who had already read ‘Ada’ (including those who knew Stein and Toklas, and knew that they were a couple), identifying its eponymous subject as Toklas herself, and drawing attention to the emotion

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and intensity of their relationship. Indeed, the confusion of authorship and subjectivity fostered by the Autobiography is rendered, in ‘Ada’, as a consequence of sex and love: ‘trembling’, ‘living’ and ‘loving’ appear in the same sentence as the statement that ‘some one was then the other one’. On the other hand, for readers with only a passing interest in Stein and the Autobiography, the reference to ‘Ada’ carries no lesbian connotations, protecting Stein from charges of sexual impropriety or pathology.16 The layered address of the Autobiography enabled Stein to represent her relationship with Toklas as both emotional and physical, while simultaneously providing a key to the interpretation of ‘Ada’ itself. When the influential editor of transition, Eugene Jolas, published an essay collection entitled Testimony against Gertrude Stein (1935) in response to the Autobiography and its apparent lack of ‘accuracy’, he and his cocontributors revealed a misreading – or perhaps, more plausibly, a refusal – of the public address Stein had constructed.17 Acting under a similar misapprehension, Stein’s brother Leo identified the Autobiography’s inaccuracies in a letter to Mabel Weeks (herself one of Gertrude Stein’s many disaffected friends), listing incidents in which he claims to have been misrepresented.18 For those offended by the Autobiography, it made little difference that Stein did not claim to present the reader with the ‘truth’, but necessarily imagined Toklas’ impressions of the people around her.19 Of course, the Autobiography is populated by ‘real’ people, easily recognizable to the general public, and it is not surprising that some of them were angered by their representation, yet those who criticized Stein’s work for its inaccuracy failed, or refused, to grasp the extent to which even Toklas’ character was fictionalized. In some ways, the ‘key’ to the Autobiography lies close to the surface, in contrast to the other romans à clef discussed in this study. Picasso represents the ‘real’ Pablo Picasso, Spanish Cubist painter and sculptor, Hemingway is Hemingway, American modernist writer, and Stein and Toklas themselves are presented via a series of facts that are demonstrably ‘correct’. Nevertheless, if Stein wrote an ostensible ‘memoir’ of her famous friends because of its potential popularity, for a public that had always been more interested in what she did than in what she wrote, she also found a way to represent lesbian desire by embedding it in a narrative that inhabits the boundaries between fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity. Stein’s association with Cubist painters was the source of much of her renown, and her aesthetic affinity with the tenets of Cubism enabled her to present subject matter that was not intended for the general public. Stein featured in the public imagination as a visionary early collector of paintings by the likes of Picasso, Cézanne, Braque and Matisse, and her

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experimental writing reflected her interest in Cubism in a number of ways, although she did not garner the attention or acclaim ultimately bestowed upon the painters whose early success was in part attributable to her patronage. Stein had lesbian friends and acquaintances in Paris, including Natalie Barney, Jane Heap, Sylvia Beach and Janet Flanner (some of whom she alienated, and others to whom she endeared herself), yet the circle in which she was ensconced, socially and intellectually, in her early years in Paris, was neither lesbian nor literary. In the Autobiography, Stein includes her own Three Lives in a list of revolutionary works of art produced in the first years of the twentieth century: In the long struggle with the portrait of Gertrude Stein, Picasso passed from the Harlequin, the charming early italian period to the intensive struggle which was to end in cubism. Gertrude Stein had written the story of Melanctha the negress, the second story of Three Lives which was the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature. Matisse had painted the Bonheur de Vivre and had created the new school of colour which was soon to leave its mark on everything.20 No writer possesses the vision that would couple them with Stein, whose work heralded the new age of literature, while Picasso and Matisse have taken the kind of ‘definite step’ in their painting that was apparently manifested in Three Lives. The Autobiography claims that Stein wrote Three Lives ‘under [the] stimulus’ of a large portrait by Cézanne,21 and her particular debt to Picasso’s Cubism is rendered explicitly in her 1938 book on Picasso. She writes: ‘I was alone at this time in understanding him, perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature’.22 Stein repeatedly positions herself and Picasso as pioneers who share aesthetic goals, ‘genius’23 and a great ‘intimacy’.24 She raises no questions, as Woolf and Barnes do, about the inevitable inequalities that characterized relationships between male and female artists at the time. For decades, the nature of Cubism’s influence over Stein has been debated. Most (but not all) critics identify Stein’s early work as that which was most heavily influenced by Cubism, yet the question of whether she emulated the techniques of Cézanne, Picasso and others, or whether she was merely inspired by their experimentation, remains open to question. So, for example, Randa Dubnick offers a careful account of the parallels between Analytic Cubism and Stein’s work prior to 1912, and Synthetic Cubism and Stein’s work from 1912 until World War I; Donald Pizer suggests that all of Stein’s work appropriates the

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central tenets of Cubism more generally, making particular reference to the Autobiography; and Marianne DeKoven makes a convincing case for differentiating between the ‘spur to … daring’ that Cubism may have provided Stein, and the notion that Cubism provided Stein with a ‘source of technique’.25 This is not the appropriate forum for a detailed comparative analysis of the paintings of Picasso or Cézanne and Stein’s writing, but it is worth noting that whether Stein appropriated Cubism and developed her technique in line with its innovations, whether she was conscious, throughout her career, of a handful of its key concepts, or whether she was merely inspired to experiment by her innovative friends, she undoubtedly shared with her Cubist counterparts an interest in destabilizing assumptions surrounding perception and perspective.26 The experimentation that structures the Autobiography does not confound coherent perception in the way that Cubism does – indeed, Stein’s earlier works, which deliberately and consistently detach signifier from signified so that individual words and phrases reference only themselves, are far more readily comparable to Cubist paintings that assemble shapes, seemingly arbitrarily, in order to simultaneously present multiple perspectives. Nevertheless, this seemingly conventional work is the product of the influences and experiments that structure Stein’s entire oeuvre, rendered via a doubling of perspective that brings into view the compatibility and complementarity of the minds of Stein and Toklas. Stein’s representation of Toklas’ opinion of Stein’s perspectives calls into question the objectivity and autonomy of the author of conventional autobiography, pointing to the division that is inevitably present between author and subject (even when they are the same person), and asking how any text can make a claim to accuracy when subjectivity always governs perception. Even as the line between fact and fiction is obscured by the Autobiography’s destabilization of the assumption of authorial objectivity, the coherence of the individual perspectives of Stein and Toklas constitutes a tribute to their relationship. When the Autobiography states that the ‘second story of Three Lives’ was ‘the first definite step away from the nineteenth century in literature’,27 it is not clear whether this is the author’s opinion or the author’s account of the narrator’s opinion, but it is a confusion that is itself testament to the impossibility of disentangling Stein’s perspective from Toklas’. With the Autobiography, Stein pares her experimentation down to a relatively straightforward integration of two points of view, yet there is a certain irony in her stylistic conventionality, for it is grounded in a same-sex relationship that is too subversive to be explained, and an insistence that

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no matter how conventional an autobiography or memoir may appear to be, it cannot provide the reader with access to an objective ‘truth’. Playing with an audience that required her to write in a conventional genre and style yet would probably have rejected an honest representation of her unconventional ‘lifestyle’, Stein wrote a Sapphic roman à clef that was cloaked in the conventions of autobiography, using Toklas’ ‘voice’ to call into question the ‘truth’ associated with a genre that was inevitably grounded in the subjectivity of the author. Toklas’ voice is unapologetically inauthentic, even as it reveals the depth of Stein’s understanding of her lover to those who knew both women, and it is only those with inside knowledge who can gauge the text’s ‘accuracy’. Caramello argues that the Autobiography ‘melds the conventions of biographical memoir with those of autobiographical memoir’, and while this is undoubtedly true inasmuch as Stein mobilized certain characteristics of each genre in order to construct an appealing memoir of her life in Paris, what is missing from this description is the extent to which she simultaneously undermined those conventions.28 To suggest that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a roman à clef is to suggest that it is a novel, which belies the title of the text, and its framing as autobiography, biography and memoir. I have already argued that the Autobiography’s framing as ‘accurate’ account of Toklas’ memories of her life in Paris is complicated by the fact that Stein imagines those memories, yet this does not automatically render the text a novel. The famous final paragraph of the Autobiography, which constitutes a deliberate revelation of generic disruption and performs a different function from the logically impossible configuration of title and author, provides insight into the text’s generic affiliations (or lack thereof): About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.29 This moment is significant not only because it confirms Stein’s authorship, but because it assumes that the act of ventriloquism that structures the text has been successful – so successful, in fact, that the reader will be surprised by the blatant admission of what he or she already assumed to be fact. Unlike the extra-textual title page, this statement relies for effect upon the reader’s investment in the reality of the narrator, whose voice and perspective have been so carefully constructed that her

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fictionality has been forgotten, or put aside. If Toklas can be identified as a fictional autobiographer like Robinson Crusoe – one who has succeeded in convincing the reader that she is ‘real’ – then the authenticity of the genre itself is called into question. Stein implies that the narrator of realist fiction is as ‘authentic’ as the autobiographer, foreclosing the possibility of any strict generic differentiation where genres are defined by the nature or extent of their claim to ‘truth’.30 The relationship between authorial subjectivity and generic classification is central to the Autobiography’s final paragraph, then, just as it is central to my definition of the Sapphic modernist roman à clef. I argued, in my introduction, that the roman à clef can be distinguished from autobiography by the fact that it encrypts the personal, rather than making a claim to revelation, and the final paragraph of The Autobiography undermines every personal revelation contained in the text, retrospectively encrypting the ‘truth’ in an account that can no longer be taken seriously. The revelation that Toklas is in part a characterization is both shocking and indicative of the irony that inheres in this, one of Stein’s most conventional works. Toklas is undoubtedly presented as more than Stein’s invention, and, of course, her literary incarnation closely resembles a widely recognizable ‘real’ person. Yet if, as I have suggested, Stein presents the story of her own life from more than one perspective in order to make explicit the way in which subjectivity and individual perception structure any account of a moment in time, then this is concomitant with her characterization (and fictionalization) of Toklas. Stein’s perspective and Toklas’ are pointedly complementary, and as a result, the deliberate revelation that Toklas’ perspective is imagined draws the reader’s attention to the impossibility of providing an objective account of a life or a period of time. By the time she came to write the Autobiography, Stein was well practised in the characterization of people she knew. Her portraits, which included ‘Ada’, ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, and later ‘Picasso’, implied depth via the representation of surfaces, and as Caramello has pointed out, it is William James’ ‘theory of the stream of consciousness’ that ‘drove Stein to see both other people and herself as subjects whose inner reality could be approached only from external perspectives’.31 It is clear that Stein’s interest in the relationship between surface and depth was an interest she shared with Cubist painters, and the affinity she perceived between her work and the principles associated with Cubism can almost certainly be attributed to her study of psychology under James. Before she moved to Paris and developed an interest in the collection of avant-garde painting, Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe and

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medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Although she did not complete her medical training, she enjoyed considerable success as an undergraduate, publishing the results of her research into ‘Normal Motor Automatism’ in the Harvard Psychological Review, and building upon James’ earlier work.32 James’ theory that consciousness was a stream, rather than an atomistic ‘train’ or ‘chain’33 fell rapidly out of favour within the psychological fraternity, where it was regarded as ‘subjective and unscientific’,34 but as a literary technique it proved far more popular. Many variations fall within the definitional boundaries of literary stream of consciousness, but I would suggest that Stein’s representation and understanding of consciousness is more obviously drawn from James than from a literary tradition that was well established (and attracting relatively limited interest) by 1933. In addition to the argument that ‘[c]onsciousness … does not appear to itself chopped up in bits …. It is nothing jointed; it flows’,35 James argues that: Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds.36 No matter how close two minds may be – in time, space, quality or content – the mind of an other is unknowable, and while all authors who mobilized the stream of consciousness technique appeared to be at least vaguely familiar with this theory, Stein had absorbed it as scientific fact rather than literary device. On first glance, the Autobiography appears to be grounded in the assumption that one person can inhabit the consciousness of another, but as I have suggested, when Stein draws attention to the distinction between the subjectivity of the author and that of the narrator she dramatically fictionalizes the narrator’s perspective. With reference to James’ work and the fiction that emerged from his theory, Johnson and Henley observe that: [i]f there is one aspect to the human world unassailably rendered by stream of consciousness technique it is that of personal perspective: each character renders the world in unique terms.37 In stream of consciousness writing, consciousness constitutes character, and differing individual perspectives upon a single event constitute the event itself. There is no overarching ‘truth’ revealed by novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927),

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James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), to name just a few of the most famous examples of literary stream of consciousness. Rather, what is revealed is the impossibility of a singular objective rendering of a given event. The Autobiography appears to make a claim to a kind of truth far removed from the novels listed above, yet Stein uses her knowledge of the impenetrability of consciousness to insist that any representation of perspective – of consciousness itself – is ultimately a characterization rather than an accurate reconstruction. If Stein had narrated the Autobiography, it would have made a claim to the kind of objective truth she did not believe in, but in integrating her perspective with Toklas’, she created a space where she could examine subjectivity in fiction and non-fiction while at the same time telling a version of the story of her life. The Autobiography appears to adhere more closely to the conventions of memoir, biography and autobiography than to the (very general) conventions of the stream of consciousness novel. It represents a real person purportedly describing her memories, rather than a fictional cast of characters observing, and responding to, the present moment. However, if Stein is not indebted, in this case, to a particular literary tradition, she clearly engages the key tenets of the scientific theory from which literary stream of consciousness emerged. Toklas’ reflections are disorganized, interspersed with tangential observations, and evidencing little concern for temporal specificity or the consistent provision of detail. Lines such as ‘[s]peaking of Spain also reminds me that once we were in a crowded restaurant’; ‘I must say I would not have believed it was true that knees knocked together as described in poetry and prose if it had not happened to me’; ‘How it all happened I do not at all remember …’; and ‘I remember my impression of her very well’,38 all serve to construct an individual consciousness that is ‘interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others’ and ‘seems to be an alternation of flights and perchings’.39 It is as if Toklas simply wrote down her thoughts as they came to mind, reflecting upon her responses at times, and paying little mind to the gaps in her recall. Obviously, the purpose of this technique is to render Toklas’ character realistically. However, somewhat paradoxically, it also emphasizes her fictionality, for the reader knows that Stein authored the text, and that the level of insight she is providing into another person’s psyche could not be anything other than an imaginative (re)construction. The Autobiography is thus as much an exercise in the creation of character, via consciousness, as it is about recounting events. I am by no means suggesting that no claim made by the Autobiography is truthful, or was intended to be taken less than seriously by its author.

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Indeed, Stein would almost certainly have defended her recollection of events, and Toklas’ perspective upon those events. However, accuracy is not the point of the text, for as I have argued, the reader is invited to question his or her assumptions about the relationships between authorship and narration, subjectivity and objectivity. And the confusion of truth and fiction at play in the Autobiography works to ground the representation of the relationship between Stein and Toklas in the careful negotiation of what can be revealed and what must be concealed. To describe this text as a Sapphic roman à clef rather than an autobiography or biography is to acknowledge Stein’s consciousness of the limits of the representable. The coupling of perspectives that renders Toklas’ textual voice a function of Stein’s authorship but also, and more importantly, provides a testament to the inextricability of the women’s lives, in some ways functions to screen desire, rather than to reveal it. Thus, I would argue that a passage that is often interpreted as making overt reference to the ‘marriage’ between Stein and Toklas actually provides little evidence of sexual desire, and works, in some ways, to deflect attention away from the relationship and towards the practical benefits of their arrangement: Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The Wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.40 The assumption that Stein is claiming Toklas as her wife in this passage has long underpinned much commentary on the text.41 Feminist analyses and critiques of Stein’s apparent appropriation of a heterosexual marriage model for her own lesbian relationship tend to produce the Autobiography as evidence, reading Stein’s perspective upon her lesbian ‘marriage’ as in some ways undermining the assumptions that underpin a heterosexist society, even as they assume that Stein intended to position Toklas as her ‘wife’, and question whether this wife is intentionally subordinated.42 However, the playful irony contained in the passage cited above serves to complicate the text’s very definition of ‘wife’, and as such, it calls Toklas’ status in relation to Stein into question. The idea

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of ‘genius’ and ‘wife’ emerge as equally mutable (geniuses and wives that are not ‘real’ are nevertheless described as ‘geniuses’ and ‘wives’), compromising the usefulness of each as a descriptive term, and raising a series of questions: if Toklas sits with ‘wives’, is she a wife herself? And if ‘wife’ and ‘genius’ are both subjective terms, is there any way to determine whether Toklas is a wife or not? Does it cease to matter either way? Toklas’ unique capacity to recognize genius, via the ‘bell’ that rings to guarantee that she is ‘not mistaken’,43 provides an amusing reflection upon the subjectivity that inevitably structures the identification of genius; and the equation of ‘geniuses’ (and ‘not geniuses’) with ‘wives’ (and ‘not wives’) suggests that the identification of a ‘wife’ is equally subjective. As well, Stein’s insistence upon her genius as a way of distracting her audience from other characteristics that render her different, is clearly apparent here – she is rendered a ‘genius’ rather than a woman who may, or may not, have a wife. In spite of its play with uxorial definitions, the Autobiography makes repeated reference to the division of duties between Stein and Toklas – where Stein contemplated and conversed, Toklas oversaw ‘domestic complications’.44 However, Stein also complicates the paradigm whereby lesbian relationships were grounded in sexual difference, emphasizing the similarities between herself and Toklas, and disputing the medicalization of sexuality, which explained same-sex desire as a manifestation of a congenital abnormality. With reference to Stein’s study of ‘pathological psychology’ at medical school, prior to her arrival in Paris, the Autobiography states that Stein ‘always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting’.45 Where Hall suggested that Stephen Gordon was not a ‘real’ woman because she was ‘abnormal’, then, mobilizing a dichotomy between health and illness to justify a desire otherwise marked as obscene or immoral, Stein suggests that the scientific propensity to label the ‘abnormal’ constitutes an oversimplification of normality itself. To this end, she relates a story of her study of psychology under James, where she had failed to provide results in another undergraduate’s study of the subconscious, and the undergraduate wished to ‘cut’ her ‘record’ out of his conclusions. James’ purported refusal attests to Stein’s psychological health, for he declared that ‘if Miss Stein gave no response I should say that it was as normal not to give a response as to give one’.46 In scientific terms, Stein positions herself as the control – the standard against which all others are measured. Far from mapping her own experience onto definitions of the ‘normal’, then, Stein constructs such definitions according to her own experience, ensuring that if she is a

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woman ‘married’ to a woman, this is evidence not of pathology, but of the inadequacy of psychology to define ‘normal’. However, in the Autobiography, Stein also refers to her unpublished roman à clef, Q.E.D., a work that calls into question the notion that Stein’s confidence in her ‘normality’ dates back to her time in medical school. Q.E.D. was Stein’s first venture into writing fiction following her study of psychology and medicine, and it tells the story of her struggle to understand and accept her first lesbian romance. Q.E.D. is a more traditional roman à clef than the Autobiography, and it provides insight into Stein’s perception of her own experience of lesbian desire. Perhaps more importantly, for the purposes of this chapter, it provides insight into the distinction between the Autobiography’s public address and its private one, and the concomitant distinction between Stein’s private persona and history and her characterization of herself for public consumption. In the Autobiography, Stein writes of Q.E.D., composed upon her arrival in Paris in 1903: The funny thing about this short novel is that she completely forgot about it for many years. She remembered herself beginning a little later writing the Three Lives but this first piece of writing was completely forgotten, she had never mentioned it to me, even when I first knew her. She must have forgotten about it almost immediately.47 There is no mention here of what Q.E.D. was actually about and, indeed, it is never identified by name. It would appear that Stein only showed this early work to a handful of close friends, including Toklas, and, if the next paragraph of the Autobiography is to be believed, Louis Bromfield,48 although she did show it to her brother, Leo, immediately after it was written.49 It can thus be safely argued that the reference to Q.E.D. in the Autobiography was directed to Toklas, who had purportedly been outraged to discover the literary evidence of Stein’s earlier affair with May Bookstaver (Helen in Q.E.D.) and had forced Stein to burn Bookstaver’s letters.50 Stein’s insistence, in the passage cited above, that she had forgotten her first effort at writing fiction, constitutes a dismissal of the affair itself, and she writes of her discovery of the long-forgotten novel that ‘she was very bashful and hesitant about it, did not really want to read it’.51 Of course, Stein’s reflections and explanations are narrated by Toklas, here, and this gestures toward a private dialogue whereby Toklas accepts without question Stein’s explanation for an affair that was at one time serious enough to be turned to fiction. According to this representation, the only logical explanation for Stein’s failure to ‘mention’ Q.E.D. or May

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Bookstaver to Toklas is that she ‘forgot[ ] about it almost immediately’. Toklas’ character is thus imbued with trust and rationality, Stein’s with loyalty and honesty. The Autobiography’s private reference to Q.E.D. constitutes a public gesture of contrition, the exclusivity and encryption of which obscures the relationship it is smoothing over. The mainstream audience of the Autobiography would not have understood its reference to Q.E.D., and nor would the majority of Stein’s friends and acquaintances. And, of course, any reader who wanted to track down this early novel, in pursuit of ‘clues’ such as those provided by ‘Ada’, would have been unable to do so until after Stein’s death. However, the obscurity of this reference is itself of interest, for it evidences Stein’s rejection of the literary representation of the passion, romance, desire and loneliness of same-sex relationships. Shari Benstock argues that Q.E.D. provides a ‘portrait’ of a woman ‘imprisoned … by the contradictions of emotional commitments to her own sex and … by the resulting isolation of those attachments’, and it is equally true that by the time she wrote the Autobiography, Stein insisted upon her sociability and the irrelevance of emotion to her literary representations of the self. Q.E.D. is apparently worth mentioning in the relatively brief section of the Autobiography dedicated to Stein’s life pre-Toklas, perhaps because of the domestic tension it had recently incited, yet its subject-matter was seemingly irrelevant to Stein by 1933. Richard Poirer argues that ‘Q.E.D. did little more than reveal that [Stein’s] clumsily conventional writing was matched by what was then her clumsy, inexperienced, and reticent sexuality’, yet what is particularly interesting about Q.E.D. is precisely that it does reveal Stein’s sexual confusion, her vulnerability, the emotional instability that accompanied her first difficult affair, and her moral equivocation over her sexual desire for another woman.52 In Q.E.D., Stein writes of Adele and Helen as they sit together ‘lost … in happiness’: It was a very real oblivion. Adele was aroused from it by a kiss that seemed to scale the very walls of chastity. She flung away on the instant filled with battle and revulsion. Utterly regardless of Helen she lay her face buried in her hand. ‘I never dreamed that after all that has come I was still such a virgin soul’ she said to herself, ‘and that like Parsifal a kiss could make me frantic with realization’ and then she lost herself in the full tide of her fierce disgust.53 Adele’s response to an unchaste kiss from the woman she is clearly in love with is one of ‘fierce disgust’, evidencing a reaction against

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homosexuality that is absent from Stein’s later works such as the erotically charged and celebratory ‘Ada’ and Lifting Belly, and the unemotional and un-erotic Autobiography. Adele goes on to attempt to justify her response to Helen: ‘“You see”, she explained, “my whole trouble lies in the fact that I don’t know on what ground I am objecting, whether it is morality or meaningless instinct”’.54 Adele’s struggle to determine whether her aversion to same-sex desire is the product of morality or social conditioning forms one of the central tenets of Q.E.D., rendering the text highly ambivalent in its approach to homosexuality. Q.E.D. can be characterized as an attempt to work through a personal crisis, and it was addressed only to the author herself then put aside, to be re-read when that crisis had been relegated to the past. However, in spite of the absence of an anticipated public, or even coterie, audience, Q.E.D. points to a more generalized association between shame and homosexuality that characterized much pre-Stonewall writing about same-sex desire. Like Nightwood and Mrs. Dalloway, Q.E.D. is an elegy for lost, seemingly impossible love, which emphasizes the confusion and doubt that was an almost inevitable result of same-sex desire within a heterosexist society, but which simultaneously gestures towards the intensity of that desire, and calls into question the efficacy of a culture that renders certain kinds of desire impossible. Q.E.D. belongs in Heather Love’s ‘archive of feeling’, for it registers ‘the losses of queer modernity and the deeply ambivalent negotiation of those losses’ in a way that the Autobiography does not.55 In Feeling Backward, Love points out that ‘the association between love’s failures and homosexuality is … a historical reality’, and she argues that it is important to recognize the intersections between negative feeling and politics, in order to ‘engag[e] with affects that have not traditionally been thought of as political and also deal[ ] with the disjunction between the affective and the social’.56 And although Love is particularly concerned with twenty-first-century readers who elide the affective pain of queer history, it is interesting to note that in the Autobiography, Stein herself refuses to explicitly acknowledge the losses that had characterized her early lesbian affair. Her reference to Q.E.D. assures Toklas, and the modern reader, that her early romantic failure and the novel she wrote about it have been forgotten. Stein’s refusal of certain elements of her past is obviously not the product of the movement for ‘gay liberation’, but it underpins a similar political effect, for her insistence upon the incompatibility of literature and emotion is tied up with a refusal to engage with the political and social implications of her lesbianism. And where many modern gay and lesbian critics

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focus their attention on the promotion of positive representations of homosexuality, the historical and cultural moment at which Stein wrote ensured that such a representation could only be oblique. I argued, in my introduction, that Sapphic modernist romans à clef can be described as in some way ‘queer’ because they critique the dominant narrative of futurity that excluded the non-normative. According to Lee Edelman’s formulation, the ‘queer’ can be explained as that which engages critically with the social, where the ‘social’ is the product of a future-driven narrative that is always only imaginary, but which creates the impression that it is reality itself. Where Barnes and Woolf offered a careful critique of a social structure grounded in the kind of social and cultural exclusion that was justified by a demonstrably constructed future-driven narrative, Stein demonstrated fascist sympathies,57 and did not anticipate the Second World War with the kind of foreboding that is manifested in works like Nightwood or Three Guineas. Nevertheless, the comparatively cheerful and optimistic Autobiography resists a teleological narrative, and Stein complicates the notion of a coherent subject and life-narrative when she ventriloquizes her lesbian partner. With her portraits, Stein had experimented with the Cubist aim of ‘eliminating memory from perception’,58 yet the Autobiography does not render a series of ‘present moments’, but is instead a reflection upon the past that refuses the notion of a singular ‘truth’. Memory is purely subjective, the Autobiography suggests, yet when it comes to representing consciousness it is central to one’s perception of the present. The narrative presented by the Autobiography can be described as queer, then, because it is ‘present-driven’ rather than future-driven, supplanting a traditional heterosexual trajectory of love, marriage and implied reproduction with a relationship between two women that has culminated in the production of the Autobiography itself. If the Autobiography is a queer roman à clef, it is paradoxically both the most open and the most obscure of the romans à clef I examine in this study. While Stein repeatedly refers to her long relationship with Toklas in a work clearly written for public consumption, she also desexualizes that relationship, and direct references to same-sex desire (personal or otherwise) are non-existent. In some ways this is not surprising, for Stein is the only author I discuss who inserts her own name into the story that she tells. However, her refusal to acknowledge her negative experiences of desire, rendered in detail in Q.E.D., guaranteed that she could not write about same-sex desire at all in her mainstream, stylistically accessible work. In 1933, lesbian desire could only be safely expressed publicly in terms of shame and tragedy, and where Barnes

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and Woolf appropriate and parody such expectations, Stein refuses to acknowledge them. This is in some ways politically progressive, yet it is also evidence of Stein’s tendency to set her own experience apart from that of other same-sex attracted women. Stein characterizes herself as exceptional, distancing her experience as anomalous genius from the failures and losses of other women as well as of other lesbians. There are few references to feminism in the Autobiography, but those that are included are dismissive of the ‘cause of women’. Thus, when Stein decided to withdraw from medical school and her ‘very close friend Marion Walker pleaded with her’, saying ‘but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women’, the Autobiography tells us that Stein’s response was, ‘you don’t know what it is to be bored’.59 The implication, here, is not only that Stein cannot remain in medical school for the sake of other women, but also that the cause of women is itself in some way ‘boring’, a sentiment that she is quick to expand upon a few paragraphs later: It was only a few years ago that Marion Walker, Gertrude Stein’s old friend, came to see her at Bilignin, where we spend the summer. She and Gertrude Stein had not met since those old days nor had they corresponded but they were as fond of each other and disagreed as violently about the cause of women as they did then. Not, as Gertrude Stein explained to Marion Walker, that she at all minds the cause of women or any other cause but it does not happen to be her business.60 The ‘cause of women’ is now not merely an ineffective antidote to boredom, it is the cause for ‘violent’ disagreement. Stein may purport not to ‘mind’ the cause of women, but her coupling of feminism with ‘any other cause’ and her claim that it is none of her business, belies her stated tolerance. As a student, Stein weighed the interests of ‘women’ against more personal concerns (such as boredom), but after decades in a same-sex relationship, her indifference is inflected with hostility. While many same-sex attracted female writers living on Paris’ Left Bank in the early twentieth century, including Natalie Barney, Renée Vivien and Djuna Barnes, identified a link between a heterosexist culture and the oppression of women, Stein’s persona precluded any identification with causes that would obscure her inimitability. Stein appropriated many of the privileges associated with maleness, and men formed the core of her artistic circle, suggesting that she viewed ‘genius’ as a primarily male characteristic, although if she identified away from women

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as a (subordinated) group, there is little evidence to suggest that she identified as fundamentally male or masculine. Regardless of her gender identification, her refusal to identify with other women depoliticizes her work and shores up the dominant gender paradigm from which she excludes herself. Caramello defends Stein’s treatment of women in the Autobiography, arguing that: if she pays considerable attention to male friends, particularly the celebrated artists and writers, as commentators emphasize, she also pays a great deal of attention to the women; in fact, the men represent less durable and less stable friendships than do the women.61 However, I would argue that the issue is not whether Stein had, or represented, friendships with other women, but is rather the limitations she imposes upon women’s professional standing and abilities. Women may make good friends, but as writers and artists they barely rate a mention. Thus, Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell is referred to only as Mrs Clive Bell, and the fact that she is an artist goes unmentioned, in spite of the fact that her perspective on art is equated with that of Roger Fry, and contrasted with that of her husband who simply ‘went along with the other two’.62 And if this could be explained as an ironic reflection upon Toklas’ identification with wives (such that she describes women in terms of their husbands, regardless of who they are), a more glaring omission is that of Virginia Woolf, who is not mentioned at all, in spite of the fact that multiple members of the Bloomsbury group feature in the Autobiography. Like Stein, Woolf was one of only a handful of women writers known for their literary innovation – Woolf had published her most experimental novel, The Waves, in 1931 – and both refused to structure their work around heterosexuality or the lives of men. In spite of this, Woolf goes unmentioned as Stein describes the visit to Paris by Fry and the Bells;63 recounts her trip to England with Toklas, where they ‘went to Roger Fry’s house’, to ‘Lady Otoline Morrell and met everybody’, and ‘to Clive Bell’s’;64 and reflects upon a meeting with Lytton Strachey ‘at the house of Miss Ethel Sands’.65 Most strikingly, Stein credits Leonard Woolf with the publication of ‘Composition as Explanation’,66 ignoring the fact that Virginia Woolf was Leonard’s wife, and the more relevant fact that she was co-owner of the Hogarth Press and participated in the decision to publish Stein’s text.67 It is impossible to know whether Stein’s apparent reluctance to refer to Woolf was the result of jealousy, a genuine dislike of her work, a reluctance

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to give credit to writing by another woman or to take a woman writer seriously, or the fact that the Woolfs had refused to publish The Making of Americans (a refusal that was probably more insulting coming from a fellow writer than from a publisher).68 We do know that Stein met Virginia Woolf at the Sitwells’ in 1926 – Woolf wrote in her diary that Stein was ‘rather formidable’ – and that this meeting is not noted in the Autobiography.69 A few years after the Autobiography’s publication, Virginia Woolf wrote of herself that she was now a ‘secondrate’ writer, having been ‘exalted to a very high position’ then ‘decapitated by W[yndham] Lewis and Miss Stein’.70 Woolf’s popularity had undoubtedly waned, in the 1930s, for a number of reasons, while Stein’s had risen sharply, in part because she presented a series of fascinating, seemingly light-hearted anecdotes about interesting people, unlike Woolf, whose work came to be perceived as politically heavy-handed. However, Woolf’s own light-hearted, rollicking biography of a lover had been published five years before the Autobiography, and like the later text, it played with the representation of another person’s perspective and with the fictionality of a purportedly ‘truthful’ genre. Woolf’s interrogations into the nature of biography and autobiography pre-date Stein’s, for with Orlando: A Biography (as it was originally titled), she turned a well-known female lover into a fictional character, and asked the audience to question the supposed objectivity that structured published accounts of people’s lives. Orlando is unlikely to have appealed to Stein, for as I argued in Chapter 3, it provides a scathing and relatively overt critique of a society that marginalized women and refused same-sex desire. Stein shared many of Woolf’s concerns surrounding the limits of the representable and the permeable boundaries between fact and fiction, but she demonstrated no sympathy with Woolf’s political position. It is unlikely that Stein’s decision not to mention Woolf is attributable to a simple distaste for her writing, for she was more than willing to discuss the male writers she disapproved of, along with those she admired (she writes that ‘Gertrude Stein and George Moore, who looked very like a prosperous Mellins Food baby, had not been interested in each other’71 and Ezra Pound is described as ‘a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not’72). Woolf was undoubtedly a successful, critically acclaimed, serious writer, at a time when serious writers tended to be male, and, of course, she had unapologetically promoted the ‘cause of women’ in A Room of One’s Own in 1929, yet for Stein, she was apparently not significant enough even to warrant a critique. Stein’s failure to acknowledge Woolf provides further evidence

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of her disinterest in the ‘cause of women’ and particularly in the lives and careers of other women writers. Even Stein’s friend, Mina Loy, is not described as a poet, although the narrator of the Autobiography expresses respect for Loy as both friend and critic: where Loy’s husband, Haweis, ‘plead[ed] for commas’ to be inserted into The Making of Americans, Loy ‘was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand’.73 This is, perhaps, the most generous comment Stein makes about another female author throughout the Autobiography, yet if Loy is endowed with the capacity to understand Stein’s work, she is certainly not recognized as an author of merit herself. Stein presents herself as unique in part because she is a great writer and a woman, as though this is somehow oxymoronic. She is special, rather than abnormal, independent in spite of her gender, rather than because she is essentially male. Stein’s independence does not signal masculinity, for it is predicated upon the assumption that she may need the help of men, but is neither inferior to them, nor anxious – or even aware – of any cultural or political inequality. Stein’s femaleness is most obvious when she represents herself as in need of the help of men, yet she circumvents any suggestion that gender has anything to do with her helplessness: ‘whenever there was a soldier or a chauffeur or any kind of a man anywhere, she never did anything for herself, neither changing a tyre, cranking the car or repairing it’.74 Stein elaborates upon her talent for procuring male assistance, rendering it more complex than a straightforward example of chivalry: This faculty of Gertrude Stein of having everybody do anything for her puzzled the other drivers of the organization. Mrs. Lathrop who used to drive her own car said that nobody did those things for her …. Gertrude Stein said that the others looked so efficient, of course nobody would think of doing anything for them. Now as for herself she was not efficient, she was good humoured, she was democratic, one person was as good as another, and she knew what she wanted done. If you are like that, she says, anybody will do anything for you. The important thing, she insists, is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality. Then anybody will do anything for you.75 Emphasized via Stein’s characteristic repetition is the statement that ‘anybody will do anything for you’, as though the ‘anybody’ in question does not refer solely to men. And this passage is laced with additional irony by the fact that the men who will ‘do anything’ for Stein thanks

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to her ‘sense of equality’ are her social inferiors (soldiers and chauffeurs) who may rush to her aid precisely because she commands authority. The claim that ‘Mrs. Lathrop’ is too ‘efficient’ to invite assistance preemptively dismisses any suggestion that Stein receives assistance because she is a woman; while at the same time gesturing towards the possibility that Mrs Lathrop may simply not be ‘democratic’ enough – that is, that she may be socially inferior, or simply lacking in the kind of charisma that draws people to Stein. And Stein’s capacity to attract ‘anybody’ to ‘do anything’ for her provides additional insight into the division of labour that characterizes her relationship with Toklas: perhaps Stein plays the part of genius and Toklas of housekeeper and admirer because Stein is both inefficient and in possession of a ‘sense of equality’, rather than because she is playing the role of patriarchal ‘husband’. Where Barnes and Woolf addressed inequality between the sexes, and Hall sought to appropriate male privilege for the inherently male congenital ‘invert’, Stein seems unconcerned with sex and gender – like the ‘cause of women’, it is ‘none of her business’. And if Stein has been criticized for simply attributing the role of ‘wife’ to Toklas, it is worth noting that Toklas was not simply Stein’s housekeeper and admirer, and nor is she presented as such. Rather, the Autobiography reminds the reader that Toklas was instrumental in the publication of Stein’s work, and was more than capable of championing it. The Autobiography imagines and reconstructs the moment at which she decided to take on the role of publisher: I now myself began to think about publishing the work of Gertrude Stein. I asked her to invent a name for my edition and she laughed and said, call it Plain Edition. And Plain Edition it is.76 That Stein includes a representation of this moment in the Autobiography points to Toklas’ significance as Stein’s practical support, and it also emphasizes the central role played by women, and in particular female friends and lovers, in editing and publishing experimental Sapphic modernism. Toklas goes on to detail the practical considerations of the amateur private publisher: ‘All that I knew about what I would have to do was that I would have to get the book printed and then to get it distributed, that is sold’.77 In a way, this representation downplays Toklas’ contribution – where the writer is an inspired genius, the publisher’s task is functional and straightforward. However, in another way, the Autobiography in its entirety is testament to Alice’s faith in Gertrude, and Toklas’ decision to publish work that has heretofore been considered

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unpublishable marks a climax in the narrative. Caramello argues that the Autobiography provides a ‘portrait of Stein and [Toklas] as equal partners in marriage and … as successful partners in the production of books that serve the cause of women’.78 The ‘equality’ between the women may be questionable, given that Stein’s ‘genius’ positions her as exceptional, and the object of Toklas’ admiration, but Toklas’ role in the ‘production’ of Stein’s work renders her a significant player in the making of Sapphic modernism. I would also suggest that if Stein was reluctant to acknowledge the literary contributions made by other female modernist writers, she was more generous in her approach to the women who published, edited and promoted experimental writing. This is hardly surprising: the unapologetic statement that Stein ‘realizes that in english literature in her time she is the only one’, evidences a disinterest in other writers that manifests itself as a dismissal of other female writers.79 Stein’s representation of herself as exceptional emerges from her parent culture’s reluctance to take woman writers seriously, it relies upon her own resistance to any association with her female contemporaries, and it guarantees that the writers Stein positions as her ‘competition’ are men like Hemingway, Pound and Joyce.80 Discussed in more detail than the likes of Woolf (who is absent from the text, as I discussed earlier), Barnes (who warrants one passing mention81) or Loy (rendered as friend, rather than fellow writer), are Sylvia Beach and Jane Heap, both of whom played an instrumental role in the promotion of experimental writing amongst the expatriate community in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. Stein writes of Sylvia Beach and the ‘lending library’ that was attached to her English bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, on the rue de l’Odéon: Some one told us, I have forgotten who, that an American woman had started a lending library of English books in our quarter …. We investigated and we found Sylvia Beach. Sylvia Beach was very enthusiastic about Gertrude Stein and they became friends. She was Sylvia Beach’s first annual subscriber and Sylvia Beach was proportionately proud and grateful.82 Beach’s role as publisher is not mentioned, for she is best known for the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, a project that created tension between her and Stein. And the statement that Beach was ‘proportionately proud and grateful’ to receive Stein’s patronage is perhaps disingenuous, given

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that the women had ceased to be close years before the Autobiography was written: the word ‘proportionately’ connotes an appreciation inappropriately delimited by the calculating utilitarianism of a businesswoman (who would publish a rival’s work) rather than a friend.83 Nevertheless, some indication of Beach’s significance to Stein’s career is provided in subsequent paragraphs: Sylvia Beach from time to time brought groups of people to the house …. She later ceased coming to the house but she sent word that Sherwood Anderson had come to Paris and wanted to see Gertrude Stein and might he come ….84 At this meeting, Sherwood Anderson praises Stein, expressing what her work ‘had meant to him in his development’, first in person, then ‘in print immediately after’. Toklas adds, ‘I do not believe even he realizes how much his visit meant to her’, and that he ‘thereupon wrote the introduction to Geography and Plays’.85 Stein is more grateful for the appreciative response of a male writer than that of a female shopkeeper or librarian, and there is no overt acknowledgement, here, of the significance of Beach’s contribution to the formation of a productive coterie of expatriate writers. Even so, Beach is implicitly given credit for her work as facilitator of a literary community. Jane Heap, too, is presented as a woman who facilitated the bourgeoning of experimental writing in Paris prior to the Second World War. Stein embarks upon her description of her relationship with Heap with the statement that ‘Jane Heap turned up one afternoon. The Little Review had printed the Birthplace of Bonnes and The Valentine to Sherwood Anderson’.86 That Jane Heap is the editor of The Little Review appears to be a given, and if the friendship between Stein and Heap is underpinned by the fact that Heap’s journal published Stein’s work, this passage also implies that Heap and The Little Review benefited from association with Stein. The Little Review provided a forum for the kind of experimental writing that would have gone unpublished without it – a fact which Stein implicitly acknowledges when she states that the journal printed her own work – yet in the Autobiography it is Heap who actively seeks out Stein following the publication of ‘The Birthplace of Bonnes’ and ‘The Valentine to Sherwood Anderson’, as though she is the more grateful of the two. In fact, Heap worked tirelessly, and largely unsuccessfully, to find American publishers for Stein’s work. She wrote to Stein, in February 1925, that ‘Boni and Liverwright have had The Long Day Book and Three Lives for months … trying to decide’; in March

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that Liverwright cannot be ‘press[ed] for an answer’ because they ‘get “huffy”’; later in the year that Boni and Boni had ‘taken’ Three Lives; later still that the ‘arrangement won’t go through’; and so on. The letters continue, detailing negotiations with Boni into 1927, and talks with a ‘young man from Harcourt Brace’ that began in 1928.87 Heap’s extensive work on Stein’s behalf goes unmentioned in the Autobiography – she is credited with enough taste to publish Stein’s work herself, but not with her tireless struggle to convince others to publish it. In other ways, too, the professional approval Stein bestows upon Heap is complex. Stein follows a relatively detailed description of her lengthy first meeting with Heap with the statement that ‘Gertrude Stein then and always liked Jane Heap immensely, Margaret Anderson interested her much less’.88 Both Anderson and Heap edited The Little Review, and Anderson founded it. This final declaration, which Stein does not explain, raises the question of whether Stein’s respect for Heap is purely personal, again positioning a woman as a friend, appreciated because she is personable, rather than a respected colleague. However, I would argue that this reference to Anderson appears in the Autobiography for a different reason, one that has very little to do with her role as editor of The Little Review, and more to do with her status as Heap’s long-time partner. In terms of the Autobiography’s narrative, this reference to Anderson is gratuitous, yet the coupling of her name with Heap’s gestures towards their coupling in life, as editors and, for those ‘in the know’, as lovers. The text suggests that any discussion of Heap invites a discussion of Anderson, ensuring that Stein is bound to refer to her, even if only to dismiss her. And the dismissive reference to Anderson in turn constitutes an oblique reference to Heap’s lesbianism, registering Stein’s ‘knowledge’ of Sapphic affairs to those readers who shared that knowledge, while obscuring it from those who did not need, or want, to know. Along with a reference to Natalie Barney, who is characterized as a friend (rather than as the host of a salon within which modernist women’s writing – including Stein’s own – was heavily promoted89), references to Beach and Heap gesture towards Paris’ lesbian expatriate community, directing attention away, however briefly, from its community of male artists. The handful of women who reside on Paris’ Left Bank and are not described as ‘wives’ emerge, in the Autobiography, as tools for representing Paris’ lesbian community, positioning Stein within a Sapphic coterie that existed alongside the male-dominated artistic coterie of which she is more famously a member. If The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is framed, in part, as a memoir of Stein’s association with the ‘great’ (by definition, male) artists and writers of her day, then it is also a representation – albeit

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a far less detailed one – of a ‘Sapphic’ coterie that certain readers would have been familiar with. Stein represents her relationships with Heap, Beach and Barney as entirely independent of one another, and there is no indication, within the Autobiography, that these women knew each other. Nevertheless, in the cases of Heap and Barney, in particular, little effort on the part of the reader would have been required to identify them as lesbian, and many readers would already have been aware of their sexual orientation. In a work that refuses to refer to sexual desire, and uses a stylistic device – namely, the doubling of the narrative ‘I’ – to establish the seriousness of a lesbian relationship, Paris’ Sapphic coterie is readily recognizable to those who are already aware of its existence and available, albeit equivocally, for those who wish to search for it. On the other hand, for those with no will to knowledge about same-sex relationships, the closet door remained closed, and no imperative to open it was contained in the text. Michael Warner argues that although the ‘closet’ is ‘experienced by lesbians and gay men as a private, individual problem of shame and deception’, it is in fact ‘produced by the heteronormative assumptions of everyday talk’.90 Such assumptions may be damaging, yet as I have argued throughout this study, they also facilitate the representation of same-sex romance and desire because they work to deflect unwanted negative attention away from references that may be relatively obvious. The public construction of the limits of the sayable, via the silencing of the ‘other’, and the naturalization of a heterosexuality that does not need to be explained but always simply is, guaranteed that any ‘coming out’ in the 1920s and 1930s was a deliberate act, grounded in a declaration, rather than in obscure hints or an absence of heterosexual desire. As a result, neither the repeated invocation of Stein and Toklas’ 25 years together, nor the ventriloquism that structures the Autobiography, serves to reveal their homosexuality unequivocally, while references to Heap, Anderson, Barney, Beach and Barnes reveal even less about their sexual identifications, in spite of the fact that unlike most women represented within the Autobiography, these women are not described in terms of their marital status. The assumption of heterosexuality, and the closet that assumption maintains, enabled Stein to write about her life with Toklas and her lesbian friends with caution characterized by omission, rather than fabrication. Stein does not imply that she and Toklas have a sexual relationship, and for anybody else to do so would itself be a violation of the boundaries of the speakable. The notion that the Autobiography identifies a lesbian coterie or subculture may seem far fetched, given the lack of detail contained in its

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representation, yet it is worth noting that references to these women were probably not of interest to a mainstream readership, which would have perceived them to be less interesting than the far more detailed references to Picasso or Matisse. When Stein positions Heap in relation to Anderson, or mentions that Natalie Barney brought a ‘friend’, the ‘Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre’, to lunch one day (Barney was having an affair with the Duchess, Elizabeth de Gramont, at the time),91 she is inserting Sapphism into her mainstream text for the benefit of those who will already know which of her characters is Sapphically inclined (and, of course, these inclusions have proved fascinating to the informed modern reader). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues: ‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence – not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularly by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it.92 The ‘silence’ enacted by the Autobiography structures a closet that would have been open to those readers who recognized the particular performance required of an author who wanted to write about her experience of same-sex desire in 1933. For readers who were aware that if Natalie Barney was bringing the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre to lunch they were probably having an affair; for those who knew that Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson had more than a professional relationship; and, most importantly, for those who understood the nature of Stein’s relationship with Toklas, the silence enacted by the text constitutes a performance of ‘closetedness’ that reveals Stein’s perception of the unsayable and her position within a Sapphic subculture. For those without this knowledge, on the other hand, it is a silence not even recognized as such. Mary E. Galvin argues that Stein ‘considered her writing to be accessible to anyone who would listen’, and that she: believed strongly in the intelligence of her readers, and in publishing her writing, she was inviting her readers to listen alongside her to the inner being of the subject at hand, as well as to the play of her own consciousness in its encounter with her subject.93 Galvin is referring, here, to Stein’s more stylistically obscure ‘queer’ writing, yet her reading provides insight into the Autobiography, which was necessarily evasive precisely because of its accessibility. Stein did not cater to her readers, Galvin suggests, but relied, instead, upon a reader’s

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capacity to ‘listen’, and to interpret her work not according to some predetermined meaning, but in relation to the essence of ‘a subject’ and her response to it. According to this formulation, the Autobiography’s representation of the subject of Sapphism is available to anyone, where ‘anyone’ is always limited by each individual’s willingness to listen. There is little doubt that Stein relied upon a culturally entrenched resistance to non-normative sexuality when she wrote of her relationship with Toklas in the Autobiography while making oblique reference to more explicit works like ‘Ada’ and to members of Paris’ lesbian community, yet it is equally true that she gave her reader credit for being in possession of the knowledge that she could not provide. The fact that Stein does not explain or define her relationship with Toklas exemplifies the unstable silence that circulates around the closet, while at the same time making manifest an assumption that the reader possesses the knowledge of her homosexuality. For example, Toklas narrates: [Stein] began to tease me and say that I should write my autobiography …. She then began to invent titles for my autobiography. My Life With The Great, Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With, My TwentyFive Years with Gertrude Stein.94 No attempt is made to conceal or explain the fact that Toklas’ life-story revolves around Stein, and what is at issue here is not so much the reader’s intelligence (as Galvin discusses in relation to Stein’s more blatantly ‘difficult’ work) but is instead the reader’s will to certain kinds of knowledge – knowledge that could be regarded as obvious, were it not so frequently rendered as impossible. Sedgwick demonstrates that the ‘knowledges’ and ‘ignorances’ that circulate around the ‘closet’ do not constitute a politically neutral dichotomy, but instead ‘circulate as part of particular regimes of truth’, and the ‘truth’ represented in the Autobiography is always contingent upon the ‘truth’ brought to the text by the reader.95 In each of the Sapphic romans à clef discussed in this study, the ‘truth’ brought to the text by the reader – where that truth is governed not by objective knowledge but by a subjective will to knowledge – determines the reader’s interpretation of that text’s representation of same-sex desire. However there is a distinction to be drawn here between those Sapphic romans à clef published for a general audience, and those that are written with no expectation that they will be published at all. Works like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas are shaped by a careful address to

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a mainstream audience, to which no direct evidence of Sapphism could be provided, a coterie audience ‘in the know’, and a counterpublic lesbian audience more willing to read non-normative sexuality into a text than their mainstream, heterosexual counterparts. On the other hand, the address of works like Q.E.D., which was ultimately destined to be placed in a drawer for almost thirty years, and which remained unpublished for close to fifty, was less complex, and more overt. And while romans à clef that remained unpublished within their authors’ lifetimes provide valuable information about that author to the modern reader or critic, they often provide a less detailed reflection of the society and culture in which they were produced, because although they respond to a series of cultural norms and interdictions, they are not constructed according to the response they might receive from the society they reflect. Both public Sapphic romans à clef and private Sapphic romans à clef are in some way structured by the closet, then, but where public texts like the Autobiography put the closet to good use, relying upon the assumptions of universal heterosexuality that they apparently uphold in order to represent same-sex love, desire or relationships in a public forum, private texts are censored, in their entirety, by the expectations that inhere in a heterosexist society. Q.E.D. documents Stein’s first experience of sexual desire, which occurred within a triangle where Stein (Adele) lacked money and control and as a result could not demand loyalty. It is a novel in which men and female masculinity do not appear at all. By 1909, Stein had reframed her story of a sexual triangle, and ‘Melanctha’, which appeared in Three Lives, told a tale of desire, confusion and love amongst African American heterosexuals. The similarities between Q.E.D. and ‘Melanctha’ were first noted by Carolyn Copeland in 1975, and although this is not the place for a detailed comparison between the works, the extent to which both address similar concerns evidences the lengths Stein was willing to go to, in the first decade of the twentieth century, to ensure that her own sexual orientation could not be identified in her writing.96 Stein’s decision to give voice to a racial minority rarely written about at the time is both admirable and problematic, yet what is most interesting about it, for the purpose of this study, is the extent to which it redirects the sense of marginalization that characterizes Q.E.D., and particularly the character of Adele. The characters in ‘Melanctha’ are as marginalized as Adele (from society, and by each other), but this time Stein is able to direct them from the perspective of the dominant culture and she enforces their marginalization – she is no longer a character exposing her own social isolation and personal crisis.

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Stein took the unusual step of writing about the emotional lives of ‘negroes’, yet she assumed a direct correlation between intellectual capacity or emotional complexity and the percentage of ‘white’ blood each character possessed. Melanctha’s friend, Rose, has been ‘brought up by white folks’, which ‘made for habits, not for nature’, guaranteeing that she exhibited the ‘simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people’, while Melanctha, ‘graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive’, had been ‘half made with real white blood’.97 And if Melanctha’s whiteness accounts for her intelligence and beauty, it is her ‘big black virile negro’ father who passed his ‘power’ to his daughter – power that ultimately leads to daring and promiscuity.98 Positioning her reflections upon love and desire within a minority culture that appeared to bear no relation to her own life, yet ensuring that her ‘black’ characters were imbued with enough ‘whiteness’ to justify the emotional intensity that was congruent with her own emotional experiences, Stein superimposed the story of her first affair onto a situation that she had control over, using racial stereotypes to secure her own position away from the margins of the socially acceptable. The Autobiography was written more than 25 years after Stein began writing Three Lives, and although these are the most widely read of Stein’s works, due to their relative clarity, they evidence a very different perspective on ‘otherness’, in particular, Stein’s own. Where Three Lives represents Stein’s desire to distance herself from her own social and cultural isolation, in the Autobiography she embraces her differences, characterizing herself as ‘genius’, and as ‘the only one’, and transforming marginalization into inimitability. The accusation of egotism was repeatedly directed at Stein following the publication of the Autobiography, and the most scathing criticisms came from contributors to the Testimony against Gertrude Stein (Jolas remarked upon her ‘egocentric deformations’99), and from her brother, Leo (who wrote to Mabel Weeks that he ‘suppose[d]’ it was ‘a great pleasure, provided one is financially independent, to have so good an opinion of oneself as Gertrude has’100). However, Stein’s was egotism with a very specific purpose, at least when it was included in her work: if she has ‘always known’ and ‘now says’ that she is ‘in english literature … the only one’, and if, upon the accusation of ‘inordinate pride’, she responds ‘yes of course’,101 then her exceptionality obscures the marginality that would potentially adhere to her. Benstock argues that Stein adopted an ego-driven, ‘self-assured’ persona (in life and in her writing) in response to ‘doubts, fears, failures, and the scars of prior relationships’,102 and the assertion, in the

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Autobiography, that she is the ‘only one’ is followed by the explanation that, ‘[s]he understands very well the basis of creation and therefore her advice and criticism is invaluable to all her friends’.103 Stein, once socially isolated, due to a desire that she could not accept, morally, or speak about honestly to the important people in her life (including her brother, Leo, to whom she was very close at the time she wrote Q.E.D.), is now apparently ensconced as an indispensable part of the social fabric of avant-garde Paris, judged by her brilliant creativity rather than by the peculiarity of her writing and her domestic arrangement. As well, for those who knew Stein and Toklas, the egotism that punctuates the Autobiography underlines the commitment that underpinned their relationship. All observations of Stein’s genius are attributed to Toklas, whose ongoing support contrasts with the moral confusion and uncertainty that characterized relationships in Q.E.D. and ‘Melanctha’. Gygax argues that Stein mobilized Toklas’ voice in part so that she could ‘describe herself as a genius without seeming self-centered or arrogant’, and although this may be true, it is important to note that this strategy also attests to the strength of their relationship.104 For a knowing audience, Toklas’ admiration for Stein would have signalled the depth of her commitment after so many years. In spite of its failure to make an explicit claim as to the nature of the relationship between Stein and Toklas, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas presents a frank account of their commitment to each other, deflecting attention away from the question of whether or not their relationship is sexual precisely because it provides the reader with the impression that its narrator has nothing to hide. And if the ventriloquism that characterizes the narrative voice belies this impression to a certain extent, it is nevertheless true that the Autobiography’s refusal to justify, explain or apologize for the same-sex relationship that structures it is key to its circumvention of censorious attention. For readers ‘in the know’ and for the mainstream reader, then, the Autobiography makes a compelling case for the potential longevity and productivity of relationships between women, while the difference between these groups of readers was their perception of the nature of the relationship between Stein and Toklas. Stein refers to her relationship with Toklas as though its precise nature is self-evident, even though when it comes to women’s relationships in 1933, what is ‘self-evident’ will vary widely from reader to reader. Stein’s deceptively complex aesthetic provided the reader with a digestible account of life in Paris’ expatriate artistic community, yet it blurred the boundary between fact and fiction, enabling her to ‘invent’ her lover while at the same time paying tribute to her.

5 Conclusion: ‘Two alert and vivid bodies’: Desire and salvation in H.D.’s HER

The novels discussed throughout this study have been complicated by the public address that shapes their representation of the private. Indeed, my interest in the roman à clef genre is largely located in the particular negotiations required to represent same-sex desire via the simultaneous address to private and public readerships. Yet the implications of a decision to leave a text unpublished are significant, particularly when the subject matter in question is personal, potentially scandalous and carefully constructed as roman à clef rather than as autobiography or memoir. Perhaps more significant than attempting to ascertain the motivations of authors who chose not to publish their lesbian romans à clef, even as their contemporaries were using the genre to express the seemingly inexpressible, are questions surrounding the way we read address in posthumously and unintentionally published romans à clef. The answers to such questions can tell us something new about the specificities of the social and cultural climate within which an author was writing and the particular repressions and restrictions placed upon the same-sex attracted woman writer; and they can provide insight into editorial and personal influences upon a writer. This concluding chapter will be concerned with Hilda Doolittle’s roman à clef, HER, which remained unpublished until the late twentieth century, decades after H.D.’s death in 1961. Explanations for H.D.’s decision to leave this novel unpublished, along with her other ‘Sapphic’ romans à clef, Asphodel (1992) and Paint it Today (1992), have been cautiously attempted by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose work on H.D. in the 1980s and early 1990s remains the most significant on the author. Friedman and DuPlessis identify the social and cultural conditions structuring the representation of same-sex desire in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the personal and professional experiences 152

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underpinning H.D.’s work, and they synthesize this material to offer a plausible explanation for H.D.’s reluctance to publish her Sapphic romans à clef. Less pressing, then, than an explanation of the public and private constraints on lesbian expression in the 1920s and 1930s, upon which much work has been done in the early chapters of this book and elsewhere, is an examination of the difference between those Sapphic modernist romans à clef unequivocally written for immediate publication, and those that appear to have been written for other, more nebulous, reasons. At issue in this chapter is the apparent reliance of the roman à clef genre on the anticipation of public circulation; the retrospectively available distinctions between the textual address contained within published and unpublished romans à clef; and, with reference to the foundational work of the likes of Friedman and DuPlessis, the particular intersections between personal and artistic experiences that inspire private, rather than public, artistic expression. This examination of one of H.D.’s unpublished novels will reveal as much about the published Sapphic romans à clef discussed throughout this study as it will about HER. Paradoxically, H.D.’s textual representation of the world in which she lived and wrote constitutes an address to a reader who she must have imagined would never see her novels precisely because in such a world they were unpublishable. HER is written in the third person, and begins with the rhythmic expression of a loss of self that stems not only from her circumstances, but also her name: Her Gart went round in circles. ‘I am Her,’ she said to herself; she repeated, ‘Her, Her, Her.’ Her Gart tried to hold on to something; drowning she grasped, she caught at a smooth surface, her fingers slipped, she cried in her dementia, ‘I am Her, Her, her.’ Her Gart had no word for her dementia, it was predictable by star, by star-sign, by year.1 The representation of Her Gart’s perception of herself as ‘other’ rather than ‘self’ – of the fact that she cannot save herself from ‘drowning’ without emphasizing who she is to others – relies upon the slippage between proper noun and pronoun. In the first paragraph of this roman à clef, then, the clever naming of the central character operates to express a crisis that is almost impossible to articulate, and it is a technique that simultaneously draws a distinction between Her Gart and Hilda Doolittle. That this is H.D.’s personal story is undeniable – the blurb of the Virago Modern Classics edition of the novel (published in 1984 and constituting the first UK publication of the novel, three years after its initial publication in the US in 1981), provides the ‘key’ to HER’s

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interpretation, explaining that the character of ‘George Lowndes’ represents Ezra Pound, to whom H.D. was engaged, and that ‘Fayne Rabb’ represents H.D.’s first female love, Frances Josepha Gregg. Nevertheless, the distancing of Hermione Gart from H.D. that occurs in the opening paragraph and in the many subsequent, and significant, plays upon Her Gart’s name, is indicative of an address that is not straightforwardly private, raising questions about what the textual differences may be between published and unpublished romans à clef. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis argue that H.D. decided not to publish her romans à clef because they are more obviously personal, and more explicitly concerned with same-sex desire, than novels such as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or her fantastical Orlando; because they are less obscure than the novels of Gertrude Stein; and because they challenge dominant heterosexuality in a way that the lives and works of the anti-feminist Stein and Radclyffe Hall do not.2 They also explain H.D.’s apparent reluctance to publish even for a coterie audience, arguing that Djuna Barnes’ sexually explicit, privately published Ladies Almanack is based upon an assumption of a lesbian sexual identity and ignores the heterosexual mainstream, while these ‘materials’ constitute the very substance of H.D.’s ‘struggles’.3 My chapters on Barnes, Stein, Hall and Woolf serve to complicate the brief assessments of these authors’ work that Friedman and DuPlessis provide. Nevertheless, H.D.’s feminist challenge, via same-sex desire, to controlling versions of heterosexuality that stifle creativity and personality, and the explicitness with which she engages critically and unforgivingly with a range of personal relationships, do provide a plausible explanation for H.D.’s refusal to release these novels to the general public. Less clear is whether the addresses contained in H.D.’s romans à clef differ from the addresses constructed by authors anticipating a specific audience for their romans à clef. Where authors of the published romans à clef discussed throughout this study provide alternative interpretive possibilities at those points where same-sex desire is revealed – such that revelation is always coupled with concealment, and a consciousness that the reader who can find samesex desire in the text will possess private knowledge of the author’s circumstances, or a will to knowledge of non-normative sexuality – H.D.’s romans à clef are not structured by an address that negotiates a range of anticipated reader responses. H.D. frames relations between women in multiple, but unexpectedly complementary, ways in order to emphasize the complexity and intensity of same-sex desire. However, her particular negotiations are not enacted in order to screen samesex desire, but instead manifest a struggle to represent such desire in a

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period when the language available to do so was inadequate. In HER, Hermione Gart reflects upon her new relationship with Fayne Rabb: Things are not agaçant now I know her. I know her. Her. I am Her. She is Her. Knowing her, I know Her. She is some amplification of myself like amoeba giving birth, by breaking off, to amoeba. I am a sort of mother, a sort of sister to Her. ‘O sister my sister O fleet sweet swallow’.4 A young woman’s intense identification with another woman, and her capacity to define herself only in relation to that woman, is emphasized here. While the amelioration of ‘aggravation’ has not occurred as a result of Her Gart’s engagement to George Lowndes, simply knowing Fayne Rabb is enough to change Her’s life. And while Her Gart’s identification of herself as a ‘sort of mother, a sort of sister’, as well as the quotation of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Itylus, point to the realization of a largely non-sexual desire for mutual understanding, H.D.’s subsequent mobilization of Swinburne’s decadent poetry reflects an evolving and increasingly sexual relationship: Her bent forward, face bent toward Her. A face bends towards me and a curtain opens. … Curtains part as I look into the eyes of Fayne Rabb. ‘And I – I’ll make you breathe, my breathless statue.’ ‘Statue? You – you are the statue’. Curtains fell, curtains parted, curtains filled the air with heavy swooping purple. Lips long since half kissed away. Curled lips long since half kissed away. In Roman gold. Long ere they coined in Roman gold your face – your face – your face – your face – your face – Faustine.5 This passage marks the climax of a series of reflections in which Her considers Fayne as Faustine, and, in particular, Fayne’s lips as Faustine’s ‘curled lips long since half kissed away’.6 The confusion of self and other continues to characterize Her’s desire (‘Her bent forward, face bent toward Her. A face bent towards me …’), but this time ‘curtains part’ as Her ‘look[s] into the eyes of Fayne Rabb’, and she is able to think about little other than ‘lips long since half kissed away’. And H.D.’s citation of Faustine deviates from Swinburne’s original where it emphasizes ‘your face – your face – your face – your face – your face’, pointing to a desire not simply for a sister and self, but also for an ‘other’. Where the citation of Itylus is open to readings that would deny the possibility of same-sex desire, the same cannot be said for H.D.’s mobilization of Faustine.

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Cassandra Laity’s important article on H.D.’s aesthetic and political interest in, and appropriation of, the romanticism and decadence of Swinburne, offers an exhaustive analysis of the mobilization of Itylus and Faustine within HER. Laity views the shift between the poems that takes place in the novel as symbolic of Hermione’s increasing doubt concerning her relationship with Fayne, and Fayne’s faithfulness, arguing that: [b]oth Hermione’s and Fayne’s re-entrance into the heterosexist discourse of the novel is signalled by their shifting attitude toward Swinburne who once articulated the non-hierarchical ‘sister-love’ and now speaks the erotic perversities of a religion of vice.7 Laity concedes that the scene cited above, in which ‘curtains part’ to reveal ‘Faustine’s’ lips and face, ‘effectively conveys the powerful eroticism which is lacking in Hermione’s clumsy encounters with George Lowndes’; however, she identifies Faustine as representative of the ‘dark side’ of Swinburne, and argues that this citation ‘demonstrate[s] the rupture of the “sister-love” that climaxes in Fayne’s betrayal of Hermione with George Lowndes’.8 For Laity, this contrasts with the effect of the citation of Itylus, where ‘the line, “sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow”, which dominates the narrative of HER, inscribe[s] the homoerotic and sympathetic love between Hermione and Fayne’.9 There is little doubt that the image of the femme fatale is evoked via the lines from Faustine in order to signal the potent combination of eroticism and loss that characterizes Her’s relationship with Fayne. However, in its insistence upon the purity of the relationship as viewed through Itylus, and its exposition of the nature of the shift signalled by the citation of Faustine, Laity’s appraisal of the novel and, in particular, of the effect of Faustine upon the narrative, constitutes an oversimplification of the relationship between Her and Fayne, and of same-sex desire as it appears in HER. The citation from Itylus, with its ambiguous invocation of ‘sister-love’ is itself complicated by its coupling with the unmistakably erotic Faustine – rather than drawing a clear distinction between the events and emotions signified by these quotations, the citation of multiple works by a single decadent author draws ‘purity’ and betrayal together. Philomel’s shocking, murderous betrayal of her son, Itylus, enacted in order to punish her husband for the rape, mutilation and imprisonment of her sister, emphasizes the significance of bonds of sisterhood, but the inevitable ‘rupture’ of these bonds is written into the poem itself – such rupture is not merely signified by the introduction of Faustine into the novel, as Laity suggests. The relationship between Her and Fayne may begin

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as one of ‘pure’ identification, and conclude with unambiguous eroticism and ultimate betrayal, but the repeated mobilization of Swinburne brings these narrative elements together, ensuring that the relationship’s demise and its intensity inhabit it from the very beginning. As I have argued in earlier chapters (in particular Chapter 2, on Barnes’ Nightwood), the representation of grief for the loss of a same-sex relationship can be as powerful as the representation of a relationship’s success. In this case, same-sex desire is not concealed by the citation of multiple texts from Swinburne’s oeuvre – rather this extensive citation works to slowly reveal the intensity of such desire. H.D.’s repeated invocation of the first line of the final stanza of Faustine constitutes an unambiguous revelation of eroticism for those readers who are familiar with Swinburne’s work (who will also recognize these lines as signalling Fayne’s betrayal) as well as for those who are not. Gazing at Fayne, Hermione repeatedly recalls Swinburne’s description of Faustine’s ‘Curled lips, long since half kissed away’. And where Laity interprets the repetition of this line as ‘reinforc[ing]’ a ‘suggestively sadistic strain of sensuality’, and argues that the lines taken from Faustine ‘transform[ ] Fayne from sister-child to lesbian vampire’,10 I would argue that although the decision to quote this passage undoubtedly gestures towards betrayal, it also insists upon the intensely erotic experience of same-sex desire, suggesting that sister-love and identification are not enough to reveal the ‘lips’ and ‘face’ behind the ‘curtain’. In its entirety, the final stanza of Faustine reads: Curled lips, long since half kissed away, Still sweet and keen; You’d give him – poison shall we say? Or what, Faustine?11 Lips ‘long since half kissed away’ are lips that ask to be kissed – ‘still sweet and keen’ – but they are also lips that have been kissed before, in centuries past. They are lips that belong to an ‘other’, in a face ‘coined in Roman gold’. When the ‘curtains part’ to reveal ‘lips, long since half kissed away’, they also reveal Fayne to Hermione for the first time, along with the undeniable intensity of her desire – perhaps Fayne will poison those who she kisses, but Hermione is, nevertheless, seeing her, and seeing her as ‘other’, for the first time. And it is the revelation of the erotic, rather than the poison, that is available to those readers who are not familiar with these final lines of Faustine.

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Knowledge of Faustine is not required by the reader of HER in order to determine the nature of Hermione Gart’s relationship with Fayne Rabb, then, and if the mobilization of this poem signals her betrayal, it is a betrayal that is revealed all too quickly within the narrative itself. Unlike the other romans à clef discussed in this study, the complexity and occasional obscurity of H.D.’s address is not designed to conceal same-sex desire from certain readers, and this complicates the generic classification of H.D.’s novels, and the roman à clef genre itself. The Sapphic modernist romans à clef discussed earlier in this study rely, for their definition, upon the anticipation of public circulation written into their very address, yet no such anticipation characterizes HER, or H.D.’s other Sapphic romans à clef, Asphodel and Paint it Today. As I discussed in the introduction, Donald Reiman argues, in his important Study of Modern Manuscripts, that an author’s intentions with regard to the public status of his or her manuscript – that is, whether it is ‘private, confidential or public’ – informs the text itself, as the ‘precise relations between the writer and the recipients’ imbue it with meaning.12 Reiman suggests that the process of publishing a heretofore ‘private’ or ‘confidential’ text alters the meaning of that text, and although he is more interested, here, in the publication of documents such as diaries and letters, than in unpublished novels, his theory provides an interesting insight. It is impossible to know whether H.D. initially anticipated a public audience for her novels – certainly, HER was re-drafted and edited, although not extensively, in consultation with Norman Holmes Pearson (who would become her literary executor) – but as I have argued, her work does not evidence the cautious negotiations that characterize her counterparts’ representations of same-sex desire. More importantly, when editions of the previously unpublished novels HER, Asphodel and Paint it Today emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, they were framed by detailed introductions that provided the reader with the kind of personal information required to readily decode these romans à clef. These were not novels, then, that were presented, unmediated, to a complex readership with a varying capacity to interpret personal references, and nor were they refined and edited by an author in the process of establishing a relationship between herself and her reader. As I argue in the introduction, reader relations are crucial to defining and interpreting the Sapphic interwar roman à clef. Textual negotiations performed by authors in anticipation of a potentially hostile and inevitably heterogeneous readership are characteristic of those romans à clef that presented same-sex desire publicly and circumvented censorship. On the other hand, the editions of H.D.’s novels that we now have

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available to us were prepared for publication not by the author, but by late twentieth-century editors and publishers eager to add more modernist novels to the ‘canon’ of lesbian writing. The last of H.D.’s lesbian romans à clef to be published was Paint it Today (1992), included in the ‘Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature’ series, edited by Karla Jay. In her foreword, Jay states that: Like so many other works containing homoerotic themes … Paint it Today here receives its first publication, all too long after the death of H.D. … Though H.D.’s lesbian affairs have received far less attention than her relationships with Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, her lesboerotic passions take centre stage in this lyrical novella, as H.D. explores her love for Frances Gregg and Bryher, two women in whom she sought both love and family as well as an emotional partnership.13 Before the reader even reaches this novel’s introduction, he or she is informed of its status as roman à clef and of the homoerotic nature of its content. Jay’s preface is followed by an introduction by Cassandra Laity that details the connections between H.D.’s life and the novel (as do introductions to early editions of HER and Asphodel), ensuring that editorial framing, rather than authorial address, determines the nature of ‘reader relations’ characterizing the text. Similarly, Robert Spoo, the editor of the first edition of Asphodel, published in 1992, added an Appendix to the novel entitled Asphodel à clef: Brief Lives of the Persons behind the Fictions, explicitly providing the ‘key’ to a roman à clef that had never been published without one. The ‘reader relations’ established by the first published editions of H.D.’s Sapphic romans à clef are, first and foremost, the product of textual framing by late-twentieth-century editors living under political and social circumstances very different from H.D.’s own. This, coupled with the distinction between the address contained in a novel such as HER and that of Sapphic interwar romans à clef written for publication, compels the reader to differentiate between H.D.’s novels and those of Barnes, Woolf, Stein and even Hall. I have argued elsewhere in this study against Sean Latham’s definition of the roman à clef genre – while Latham argues that ‘clear generic criteria’ cannot be applied to the roman à clef, which should be defined only according to ‘complex networks of circulation and reception’,14 I have suggested that the notion that the identification of roman à clef can only occur from outside of the text is problematic. Latham does not recognize the significant negotiations of anticipated audience that are contained

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within crucial examples of the genre. Nevertheless, his emphasis upon the generic significance of contexts of circulation and reception is one that is worth acknowledging, and has been taken into consideration throughout this study. My approach to the genre, which takes in both textual negotiations of anticipated audience and the response of the audience itself, is complicated by works like H.D.’s. HER, Asphodel and Paint it Today, raising questions about what we are to make of novels that do not perform a layered address to a complex readership and have not circulated in any ‘networks’ that are not already equipped with a key to interpretation. Can we even classify such texts as romans à clef? We need to ask what to make of a text that does not enact the complex negotiations and address that I have argued are characteristic of Sapphic modernist examples of the genre. And although audience response cannot be isolated as the defining characteristic of the roman à clef, as Latham suggests, the question of what we make of audience response when the said audience is first exposed to the text decades after it is written is nevertheless well worth asking. In the simplest terms, of course, there is little doubt that H.D.’s autobiographical novels can be defined as romans à clef, for they blatantly echo the trajectory of her own romantic life, and are characterized by a straightforward substitution of ‘real’ names for imaginary ones. This substitution does not ‘screen’ same-sex desire, but readers who grasp literary references – in particular those of Swinburne, in the case of HER– will gain more insight into the nature of the relationship between Hermione and Fayne and, by extension, between H.D. and Francess Gregg. There is no easy explanation for why this substitution is included in private texts, although the answer could be as simple as an abandoned plan to eventually publish the novels in question. However, they do constitute a very different kind of text from those examined elsewhere in this study. The distance H.D. places between herself and Hermione Gart in HER and Asphodel (or ‘Midget’ in Paint it Today) is less significant than the many similarities between Hermione’s life and H.D.’s biography, and they invite the reader to make assumptions about the ‘truth’ of every experience and response contained in these novels. There is a certain creative licence provided by the decision to write a roman à clef rather than an autobiography, and a concomitant danger that the reader will make no attempt to differentiate truth from fiction, but will instead assume that demonstrably accurate references gesture towards the truth of the text as a whole. The complexity of the other romans à clef discussed in this study guarantees that careful shifts between fact and fiction provide a certain protection for private references, obscured

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by their own potential to be fiction. In the case of H.D.’s romans à clef, however, the strength of the resemblance between her life and its representation presented more of a risk of personal exposure, revealing even more than the ‘truth’ as the weight of ‘facts’ belied the possibility that events and responses contained in the texts might be fiction. The strong relationship between H.D.’s Sapphic romans à clef and her life experiences has been well documented, particularly by Friedman, DuPlessis and Laity.15 There is not the scope in this conclusion to reexamine every parallel between H.D.’s life and relationships and her work, but what is of particular interest is the way in which she represented her romantic relationships with men and women. In HER, the most complete and polished of H.D.’s three romans à clef, Hermione’s relationship with George Lowndes provides an obvious representation of H.D.’s engagement to Ezra Pound. Given Pound’s fame, this is a representation that would have incited public interest – if the novel had been published, this representation may have reflected badly on both Pound, with whom H.D. maintained an ongoing friendship and professional relationship, and H.D. herself, given that the novel demands respect for Hermione’s decision to privilege her romantic feelings for another woman over her conflicted feelings for her fiancé. Hermione’s feelings for George and for Fayne come into conflict when Hermione and George attend a performance of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which Fayne takes the title role: ‘Oh Gawd – now that thing’ George was saying ‘Pymalion in Philadelphia. Poor damn Shaw would be delighted’ and Hermione hated George with his affectation of familiarity with crowned (so to speak) heads and saw that Fayne Rabb was Pygmalion.16 Revealed to Hermione within the space of a single sentence is the stark fact that she ‘hated’ George (at least at that moment), and the startling knowledge that Fayne, an object of growing fascination, ‘was Pygmalion’. Where George’s arrogance is a source of increasing irritation for Hermione, Fayne’s potential to transform her – to save her – emerges in her literal and figurative characterization as Pygmalion. (That Henry Higgins, in Shaw’s play, transforms Eliza Doolittle cannot be coincidental). The contrast between George and Fayne, is reiterated a few paragraphs later, as Hermione and Fayne come face to face following the performance: ‘I’m glad I waited in this corridor.’ ‘Oh – then you recognize me?’ ‘Recognize you? But I always knew you.’ And George was shoving her

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in. ‘Who are these wretched dramatists, these highbrow art sort of college girls?’ George, who is simultaneously clueless and sexist, provides the backdrop against which the significance of Hermione’s relationship with Fayne is revealed. Whether or not this particular encounter occurred in ‘real life’, George Lowndes’ unknowing participation in the burgeoning relationship between Hermione and the woman she ‘always knew’ reflects upon Pound, and on H.D.’s relationship to him. Following the demise of their romantic relationship in around 1908, H.D remained in contact with Pound. She travelled Europe with Frances Gregg and Gregg’s mother in 1911, and after they returned to the United States, she remained in London, where she, Pound and Richard Aldington founded the ‘Imagist’ movement. Benstock observes that it is unclear whether H.D. remained in London in the hope that she and Pound would reprise their engagement.17 Whether or not she did – and what we do know is that H.D. ultimately married Aldington, in 1913, upon hearing the unexpected news of Gregg’s and Pound’s respective engagements – H.D. certainly relied upon Pound’s professional support at this time. Lacking in confidence since her failure to finish her degree at Bryn Mawr in the first years of the century, she relied upon Pound to promote her work. A once-common critical approach underplaying the significance of H.D.’s work credits Pound with the ‘creation’ of ‘H.D. Imagiste’, on the grounds that he provided her with the enigmatic and gender-neutral abbreviation of her name; established the central tenets of Imagism; and promoted H.D.’s work as exemplifying the movement. Without Pound, this argument goes, H.D. would not have been noticed, let alone identified as a ground-breaking modern poet. It is now well documented that H.D.’s poems, written independently, inspired Pound to launch the movement – they did not follow his development of the Imagist rubric. However, there is no denying that he was instrumental in publicizing her poetry and introducing her to the London literary scene.18 H.D. had known Pound since she was 15 (born in 1886, H.D. was 26 in 1912), and it was not until she was in her late thirties that she began to write about the arrogance and frustration that characterized his relationship to her work. The complexity of the intersecting personal and professional relationships between Pound and H.D. are not fully represented in H.D.’s Sapphic romans à clef – represented, instead, are H.D.’s frustrated responses to a relatively brief, but intense and intimate, period in their long relationship. Over several decades, the relationship between H.D. and Pound underwent multiple

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transformations, and he was not always simply her arrogant, controlling and often misogynistic lover. The risk of publishing the account of their relationship contained in HER, which characterized Pound in precisely this way, was that it would be identified as constituting ‘the truth’ about H.D.’s perceptions of Pound. And complicating the situation even further is the very fact that men like Pound constituted H.D.’s greatest supporters and potential critics – while Barnes, Woolf and Stein enjoyed the intellectual support of a coterie interested in the subject same-sex desire, little of H.D.’s network of potential coterie readers was likely to be sympathetic to her Sapphic romans à clef. The male modernist aversion to romanticism – particularly the kind of Decadent romanticism represented by Swinburne – featured heavily in Pound’s work. He insisted upon the integrity of the ‘thing’ itself, which should be treated directly. At the forefront of a modernism that rejected the purported femininity of much nineteenth-century poetry (which he describes as ‘soft’19), Pound viewed H.D. in terms of her capacity to escape her femaleness within her poetry, stripping back her name to gender-neutral initials in order to add to the illusion that H.D. the poet was genderless, if not masculine, and therefore able to write objectively.20 Pound’s critical work on Swinburne reveals the literary characteristics that Pound found least appealing: Moderns more awake to the value of language will read him with increasing annoyance, but I think few men who read him before their faculty for literary criticism is awakened … will escape the enthusiasm of his emotions, some of which were indubitably real.21 Unlike the Imagists, who understood the ‘value of language’, Swinburne was too concerned with the expression of emotion. If a ‘faculty for literary criticism’ guarantees annoyance, then any other response to Swinburne is delegitimized. It is ironic, then, that it was upon reading Swinburne’s posthumously published Lesbia Brandon, in 1952, that H.D. observed that the ‘tide’ had ‘turned’ and she no longer had to ‘swim[ ] against the breakers’, for the ‘“romantics” had come really back’.22 Decades after she wrote HER, H.D. finally asserted, albeit privately, that she could write in the style she preferred without attracting the kind of criticism Pound and his cohort dealt to those who would appropriate the ‘perverse’ romanticism of the likes of Swinburne. This observation, made so many years after H.D. rose to some prominence as an Imagist poet, was probably misguided, given that the shift she heralds appears not to have taken place. Nevertheless, it is significant because it reveals

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the time it took for H.D. to believe that she could resist the dominant male modernist position, and her perception of the public and private reception a ‘romantic’, personal, emotional text would receive. Although H.D. inhabited the periphery of Natalie Barney’s Parisian circle, and was a fan of Virginia Woolf’s writing, she did not work within a circle of woman writers, as Barnes did in the 1920s, and nor did she enjoy the kind of intellectual support Woolf did in her largely male but primarily homosexual circle. Like Stein, H.D.’s professional associates tended to be male, but unlike Stein, her relationships with men were complicated by sexual attraction. Many of the men who formed the core of H.D.’s potential private audience had a sexual history with her and their support of her work had been inflected by aspirations to win her affections – Aldington and Pound competed for her affections as the trio developed the tenets of Imagism; she married Aldington after she was rejected by Pound and Gregg; he left her during the war following an affair on his part and the stillbirth of their child; and her relationship with poet Cecil Gray ended when she became pregnant with Gray’s child. These events and relationships are represented in H.D.’s Sapphic romans à clef, and it is unlikely that the men who participated in them would have welcomed their publicization or appreciated H.D.’s responses to them. Only Bryher, who was H.D.’s companion from 1919 until the latter’s death in 1961, could be said to constitute an ‘ideal’ reader for H.D.’s Sapphic romans à clef; in particular of Paint it Today and Asphodel, in which she featured. Bryher was sympathetic to H.D., supporting her personally and professionally, and although her approach to non-normative sexuality contrasted with H.D.’s, she too used writing to explore the nuances of non-normative sexual development. Annie Winifred Ellerman, or Bryher, was a British heiress who met H.D. at the end of the First World War. H.D. credited Bryher with saving her life as she lay ill with influenza having just given birth to her daughter, Perdita, abandoned by her husband and by the father of her child. Bryher credited H.D. with saving her from suicide. Unlike Una Troubridge or Alice Toklas, Bryher did not play the role of faithful wife in a monogamous relationship. Indeed, she married writer Robert McAlmon in 1921 to distract her family from her lesbianism, providing McAlmon with the money to fund the Contact Publishing Company. Although this was a marriage of convenience, it is probable that both she and H.D. slept with McAlmon during the 1920s. Following her divorce from McAlmon in 1927, Bryher married photographer Kenneth MacPherson, with whom H.D. was probably in love, and the pair adopted H.D.’s daughter, Perdita. These marriages were in different ways orchestrated to support

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H.D. (and H.D.’s bisexuality), and Bryher saw herself as unequivocally lesbian. Bryher’s autobiographical novels, Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923), address the pull of male and female identities upon the lesbian heroine.23 A letter from Bryher to H.D. describes a meeting with Havelock Ellis, and she states, ‘We agreed it was most unfair for it to happen but apparently I am quite justified in pleading I ought to be a boy – I am just a girl by accident’.24 This perception of cross-gender identification as characteristic of lesbian sexuality contrasted with H.D.’s approach to the question of same-sex desire. Hermione’s search for ‘a sort of sister’, which culminated, in Asphodel, in her relationship with Beryl (Bryher) contrasts with the meeting of opposites that Bryher imagines constitutes the lesbian relationship. In both Asphodel and Paint it Today, Bryher is characterized primarily by her childlike quality, although in Asphodel she is also described repeatedly in terms of her resemblance to Eros, gesturing towards both sexual attraction and gender difference. In Asphodel, Hermione’s early reaction to Beryl is one of surprise at the many contradictions that she embodies: [S]he sensed something that was wrong, something that was dangerous. Eyes don’t look normally out of faces like that. Small chin, small Eros chin, mouth more than a child-Eros, a mouth that was a youth Eros, a perfect bow of slightly too wide mouth but lips narrow, coral …25 Repeatedly referred to as ‘the child’, Beryl is nevertheless potentially dangerous, in her resemblance not only to Eros, but to a statue (‘eyes don’t normally look out of faces like that’). Yet her nurturing of Hermione and of Hermione’s child, Phoebe, cements their relationship and concludes the novel. When she agrees to take Phoebe ‘for [her] own … exactly like a puppy’, the equality characterizing the relationship contrasts sharply with Hermione’s relationships with men. Ultimately, it is important to these narratives that Bryher is represented as female, for her female qualities save H.D. from the powerlessness in heterosexuality that she almost died to escape. As such, in Paint it Today, the character Althea, who represents Bryher, ‘looked serious, not so childlike, a woman’,26 as Midget (H.D.) comes ‘alive’ after the trauma of war, childbirth and influenza.27 H.D.’s sexual confusion, which she explores in each of her Sapphic romans à clef, was, in part, the product of a society only just beginning to construct the language to explain non-normative desire. While Bryher found the solution to her sexual orientation in discussion with Havelock

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Ellis, H.D.’s attractions to both men and women complicated the supposed causal link between a congenital abnormality of gender identification and sexual desire. Her intense interest in psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on primary bisexuality, stems from the inadequacy of sexology (and certainly of legal and moral discourse) to explain her own experience. Although it was not until the 1930s that she began analysis (with Hans Sachs from around 193128), HER gestures towards a psychoanalytic approach to sexuality, with its focus on substituting adult bonds (with a ‘sister’, or ‘mother’) for those that were absent in childhood. Nevertheless, any psychoanalytic reading of these novels will inevitably be complicated by their romantic, literary quality. Desire for someone of the same sex cannot be adequately explained by childhood absences and concomitant gaps in psychosexual development, for it is only upon the lifting of ‘curtains’ – of seeing someone clearly, as other, for the first time – that it is truly realized. The struggle, experienced by all the writers addressed in this study, to come to terms with cultural and personal tensions between homosexuality and heterosexuality, and to find a language to represent conflicting desires, is thrown into sharp relief in H.D.’s Sapphic romans à clef. Because of her personal circumstances and intellectual allegiances H.D. was unable to write a roman à clef that overtly addressed same-sex desire and that she deemed publishable. The work of H.D. emphasizes the dangers associated with writing same-sex desire between the wars. Every author addressed in this study anticipated a potentially censorious general readership, but for H.D., whose potential coterie audience was largely unsympathetic, and who represented fraught relationships that she was still negotiating in ‘real life’, that danger was insurmountable.

Notes Introduction: Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef 1. Djuna Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman, undated letter, July–August 1935, Emily Holmes Coleman Papers, University of Delaware, Newark. 2. T.S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, in Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 5. 3. Many of Eliot’s editorial decisions reveal a concern with the potentially ‘obscene’ contained in the text. For Eliot’s excisions from the original manuscript, see Cheryl Plumb (ed.), Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, by Djuna Barnes (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). 4. Barnes to Coleman, 8 November 1935, Emily Holmes Coleman Papers. 5. Eliot’s introduction appeared for the first time in the first American edition of Nightwood, published in 1937. Barnes had already attracted the attention of the United States Postal Service and US Customs with Ryder and Ladies Almanack, which might explain why this introduction was added to the second edition of the novel, although it was not included in the original British edition. 6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (1990; repr., Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008), 71. 7. Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, 8. 8. See Sir Chartres Biron, ‘Judgment’, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 49. When Chief Justice Biron ruled to ban The Well of Loneliness in the Bow Street Police Court, London, in 1928, he stated that he had ‘no hesitation in saying that it [was] an obscene libel, that it would tend to corrupt those into whose hands it should fall’. Biron had no trouble producing evidence of obscenity in spite of the fact that the novel is explicit about love and attraction between women, but not about their sexual practices – he cited passages from the novel at length as though their obscenity was self-evident. 9. See an unsigned review published in Newstatesman and Nation, cited in Jane Marcus, ‘Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 197. This reviewer argued against Nightwood’s hypothetical censorship on the grounds that ‘the test of a book’s obscenity is said to be its power of corrupting those who are open to corruption’ and ‘a more thorough-going deterrent [to lesbianism] it would be hard to imagine’. 10. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin, 1928), 152. The idea that Orlando ‘screens’ lesbianism is taken from Adam Parkes, ‘Lesbianism, History and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, Twentieth Century Literature 40.4 (1994): 437. 11. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 3. 167

168 Notes 12. ‘As I See It – “The First 47,000”’, Imperialist (26 January 1998): 3. The existence of this book has never been proven, and Billing did not claim to have seen it himself – rather, an anonymous ‘officer’ had informed him of its existence and ‘outlined’ its ‘contents’ (quoted in Deborah Cohler, ‘Sapphism and Sedition: Producing Female Homosexuality in Great War Britain’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16.1 [2007]: 84). 13. ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’, Vigilante (16 February 1918), cited in Gay Wachman, Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 16. 14. For illuminating discussions of the trial, including the simultaneous hysteria and reticence of the press response, see Cohler, ‘Sapphism and Sedition’; Jodie Medd, ‘“The Cult of the Clitoris”: Anatomy of a National Scandal’, Modernism/ Modernity 9.1(2002): 21–49; Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 14–20; and Lucy Bland, ‘Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome and the “Cult of the Clitoris” Case’, in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998): 183–98. 15. See in particular Cohler, ‘Sapphism and Sedition’; Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 103–99; and Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 153–5. See also Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (New York: AMS Press, 1983). Carpenter was a strong campaigner for socialist reform, who argued that because the homosexual was in the unique position of possessing the best qualities of the male and female, he had the insight required to write across boundaries of race, class and gender, and a responsibility to lead the struggle against oppression. 16. Alderman Sir Charles Wakefield, who ruled on the book, quoted in Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 117. 17. Solomon Eagle, ‘Books in General’ (12 October 1918), 33, cited in Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 118. 18. Eagle, ‘Books in General’, 33. Wachman points out that Eagle’s approach was that of ‘urg[ing] freedom of speech for pacifists but not for perverts’ (Lesbian Empire, 118). 19. Cohler, ‘Sapphism and Sedition’, 68. 20. Quoted in Lucy Bland, ‘Trial by Sexology?’, 188. 21. Dr Serrell Cooke, quoted in Lucy Bland, ‘Trial by Sexology?’, 188. 22. Cohler, ‘Sapphism and Sedition’, 90–1. 23. Medd, ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’, 26. 24. Trudi Tate and Suzanne Raitt make the point that ‘censorship, propaganda, and the sheer scale and complexity’ of the war made it ‘impossible to grasp what was happening at any particular moment’ (‘Introduction’, in Womens Fiction and the Great War, eds Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1. In a discussion of Bloomsbury’s response to the war, Christine Froula discusses the lengths authorities went to in order to suppress opposition to, and explanations of, the war. See Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 4–16. 25. English sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter were, of course, of less interest to the defence than European sexologists like the Austro-German Richard von Krafft-Ebing and German, Iwan Bloch. Although

Notes

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

169

Allan claimed not to recognize the names of these sexologists, Alfred Douglas took the stand to testify that Wilde was passionate about Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, and that he drew many of his ‘perverted’ ideas from that work. See, in particular, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; repr., New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965); and Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Volume II, Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company Publishers, 1928). See Doan, Fashioning Sapphism. Doan points out that for some ‘writers, artists and other professionals’, sexology ‘offer[ed] modern conceptualizations of sexual relations between women that they could in turn accept or reject’ (130). Education is clearly significant here – Doan suggests that these texts were not readily accessible, but for those who did have access to them, and to the kind of education that would enable them to either ‘accept or reject’ the theories they presented, sexology was a sign of ‘progress’ in the public discourse surrounding homosexuality. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (1920; repr., London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 6:145–72; and Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1963). Both of the case studies in which Freud considers female homosexuality were unfinished – in each case, the analysis was incomplete due to the analysand’s rejection of Freud’s approach. In ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, Freud argues that his patient’s turn away from heterosexuality was precipitated by the birth of a brother, which interrupted her working through of the Oedipus complex. In ‘Dora’, Freud briefly discusses his patient’s affection for the wife of ‘Herr K’, who has made sexual advances to her, arguing that Dora harbours an erotic attachment to her father, and jealousy of her father’s attachment to Frau K, with whom he is having an affair. Barnes and Woolf referenced and critiqued psychoanalysis in their work. Chris Waters, ‘Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourses of Homosexual Identity in Interwar Britain’, in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 166. Waters, ‘Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State’, 169. Waters argues that psychoanalytic language grew in popularity amongst reformers and homosexuals themselves after World War II, and that this was largely due to the campaigns of Interwar criminologists, who were interested in penal reform and advocated a psychoanalytic approach to the ‘convicted homosexuals’ sent to them for treatment (167–8). Suzanne Raitt discusses the relationship between ‘love’ and the sexual sciences in her article, ‘Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body in Early Sexology’, Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 150–64. It is worth noting that Carpenter’s ‘urning’ was attributed a greater capacity to love than the heterosexual, while for Ellis, homosexual love was real but was nevertheless symptomatic of a congenital abnormality. Raitt, ‘Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body’, 159–60.

170 Notes 34. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1976; repr., London: Penguin, 2008), 1:44. 35. See ‘Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), Criminal Law Amendment Bill’, 4 August 1921, reproduced in The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970, eds Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 166. The Acts of Indecency by Females clause of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill (1921) proposed that ‘any act of gross indecency between female persons shall be a misdemeanour and punishable in the same manner as any such act committed by male persons under … the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885’. 36. Laura Doan, ‘“Acts of Female Indecency”: Sexology’s Intervention in Legislating Lesbianism’, in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 205. 37. See Doan, ‘“Acts of Female Indecency”’, 205. 38. A Colonel Wedgwood was horrified at the idea that the House would pass the Clause, because it was ‘a beastly subject’ and was ‘being better advertised by the moving of this clause than in any other way’ (Oram and Turnbull [eds], ‘Parliamentary Debates [House of Commons] Criminal Law Amendment Bill’, 167). 39. The first argument was put forward by Lord Desart; the second by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead. Cited in Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams, Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 74. Other arguments against the clause included the difficulties of enforcement and the opportunities it would provide for blackmail. See Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 37–8. 40. The particular use of sexology at the parliamentary hearings is discussed at length by Doan, ‘“Acts of Female Indecency”’, 199–213. 41. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 67, my emphasis. 42. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 120. 43. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 8–9. 44. Berlant, The Female Complaint, 10–11. 45. David R. Shumway argues that the very idea of ‘intimacy’ as a discourse that structures romantic relationships is a product of social shifts that took place in and after the 1960s. Yet Shumway also observes that one shift that occurred in the 1960s was the emergence of ‘relationship’ as a term that encompassed ‘the new variety of commonly practiced, erotically invested bonds between individuals. Marriage was now only one alternative … in which intimacy may occur’. The role of a discourse that could be retrospectively described as intimate, within relationships between women struggling to establish community, cannot be summarily dismissed. It would, however, require a broader project than this one to accommodate it (Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis [New York and London: New York University Press, 2003], 24–5). 46. Berlant, The Female Complaint, 8. 47. Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 4. 48. Shaw, Frank O’Hara, 4–5.

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49. Shaw, Frank O’Hara, 5. 50. Authors like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound imbued modernism with ‘legitimacy’ by insisting upon ‘highly antisubjectivist or impersonal poetics’, in spite of the fact that modernism’s reaction against classic realism was apparently grounded in subjectivism (see Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990], 27). The associations that emerged between rational impersonality, masculinity and serious writing were the consequences of this approach. 51. Georgia Johnston, The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle and Gertrude Stein (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 52. Johnston, Formation, 2. 53. Johnston, Formation, 10. 54. Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman à Clef (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9. 55. Latham, The Art of Scandal, 11. 56. Latham, The Art of Scandal, 13. 57. Latham, The Art of Scandal, 11. 58. Latham, The Art of Scandal, 11. 59. Donald H. Reiman, The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential and Private (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 40. 60. Reiman, The Study of Modern Manuscripts, 53. 61. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4. 62. Love, Feeling Backward, 4–5. Love borrows the term ‘archive of feeling’ from the title of Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 63. Love, Feeling Backward, 6. 64. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 12–13. Edelman’s argument is invested in a psychoanalytic reading of the ‘death drive’. However, I am interested, here, in the way ‘queer’ operates in relation to particular social formations, and Edelman’s formulation illustrates this effectively. 65. Shari Benstock recounts this story in Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 254. 66. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin, 1928), 153. 67. See Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 11–12. Here, Warner argues that ‘the notion of a public enables a reflexivity in the circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity’. He goes on to explain that the ‘making of publics is the metapragmatic work taken up by every text in every reading’.

1 ‘Moral poison’: Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness 1. Lady Una Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hammond and Hammond, 1961), 81–2. Hall was prepared for the attention the publication of The Well of Loneliness was likely to draw to her own sexual orientation. According to Una Troubridge, Hall consulted her on whether she was willing

172 Notes

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

to be subject to the public scrutiny such a novel would bring to their private lives. Troubridge responded that she was ‘sick to death of ambiguities and only wished to be known for what [she] was’. See Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall, 82. Lovat Dickson, Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle (London and Toronto: Collins, 1975), 132, my emphasis. Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (London: John Murray, 1997), 196. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago, 1928), 246. Hall, Well, 356. Hall, Well, 443. Hall, Well, 413. Diana Souhami, Wild Girls: The Love Life of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, (London: Phoenix, 2004), 69. Souhami, Wild Girls, 68. Rebecca O’Rourke, Reflecting on The Well of Loneliness (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 85. Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 228–9. See Lillian Faderman and Ann Williams, ‘Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Image’, Conditions 1.1 (1977): 31–49; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), 317–23. Blanche Wiesen Cook, ‘“Women Alone Stir my Imagination”: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition’, Signs 4.4 (1979): 718–39; Catherine R. Stimpson, ‘Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English’, Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 363–79; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 218–21. Gilbert and Gubar position ‘the lesbian’ and the lesbian couple as outsiders, although they also discuss the novel in terms of its subversive approach to ‘gender categories’ (Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, 354). Heather Love, ‘Spoiled Identity: Stephen Gordon’s Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4 (2001): 499. Love, ‘Spoiled Identity’, 498. Hall, Well, 393–4. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 7. Hall, Well, 206. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 3. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 3–4. Hall, Well, 9. Hall, Well, 356. Hall, Well, 207. Hall, Well, 11. Hall, Well, 70. Hall, Well, 164. Hall, Well, 208. Hall, Well, 303. Hall, Well, 295.

Notes 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

173

Hall, Well, 303. Hall, Well, 316. Hall, Well, 446. Hall, Well, 446. Hall, Well, 447. Hall, Well, 447. Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (1990; repr., Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008), 153. Clare Hemmings, ‘“All My Life I’ve Been Waiting for Something …”: Theorizing Femme Narrative in The Well of Loneliness’, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 194. See Hemmings, ‘All My Life I’ve Been Waiting for Something’, 194. Hemmings argues that ‘we have no way of knowing which way Mary went’ when she left Stephen, especially given that the femme is always interpreted by the male gaze as passive, regardless of the agency she exercises within the relationship. Hall, Well, 440. Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 2. Jagose, Inconsequence, 2. Jagose, Inconsequence, 3. Esther Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman’, in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr (London: Penguin, 1991), 283. Hall, Well, 304. Hall, Well, 217. Hall, Well, 431. Hall quoted in Evelyn Irons, ‘Woman’s Place Is the Home’, The Daily Mail, 10 July 1928, 4, cited in Parkes, Modernism and the Theatre of Censorship, 155. O’Rourke, Reflecting on The Well of Loneliness, 25. Hall, Well, 44. Hall, Well, 44. Hall, Well, 37-8. Hall, Well, 325. Hall, Well, 428. Hall, Well, 438. Hall, Well, 357. Here, Hall is referring to Barbara, the companion of povertystricken composer, Jamie. Hall, Well, 302. ‘They attracted too, that was the irony of it, she herself had attracted Mary Llewellyn …’ Hall’s belief in God’s role in creating the ‘invert’ is apparent throughout The Well and in Hall’s extra-textual discussion of the topic. At the wedding of Violet Antrim and ‘her Alec’, the narrator refers to the fact that ‘God, in a thoughtless moment, had created in His turn those pitiful thousands who must stand for ever outside His blessing’ (Well, 188); in the letter Stephen Gordon writes expressing her love for Angela Crossby she declares, ‘I’m some awful mistake – God’s mistake’ (Well, 199); and in the final lines of the novel, Stephen pleads with the God who made homosexuals to ‘[a]cknowledge us

174 Notes

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

before the whole world’ (Well, 437). Similarly, in her notes for a lecture she was to give to Southend Young Socialists (during her brief dalliance with socialism following her trial) Hall was insistent upon not only the ‘naturalness’ of homosexuality, but also its sanctity (although she does run into some confusion when it comes to God’s intentions). Cited in Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, 155. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1. Hall was not the only writer to articulate her belief that homosexuality could only be expressed in English literature via tragedy. E.M. Forster shelved his homosexual novel, Maurice, in 1915, and it was not published until after his death in 1970. Maurice ended happily, and Forster expressed his opinion, as late as 1960 that it would have been publishable if it had ended with misery and suicide. Yet Hall’s tragic frame obviously did not go far enough, the novel’s banning occurring in spite of her attempt to pre-empt censorship. The failure of Hall’s attempt to buy into a culture that insisted upon the lesbian’s failure points to the central problem of an approach to homosexuality that is invested in the paradigm that excludes it. Havelock Ellis, Commentary on The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall (New York: Doubleday, 1928), 6. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Volume II, Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company Publishers, 1928), 1. Hall, Well, 9, 70, 164 (‘People stared at the masculine looking girl …’). Hall, Well, 22, 98, 302. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, v. Hall, Well, 217. Hall, Well, 237–8. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 325. See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; repr., New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 83–4, my emphasis. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 29–41. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 415. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 41. Hall, Well, 207. Hall, Well, 207. See Hall, Well, 207–8, 303 for examples of Hall’s use of ‘the mark of Cain’ as a symbol of the congenital basis of Stephen’s affliction. Hall’s personal conception of her own sexuality was undoubtedly informed by sexology, but it is important to note that it was less fixed than that manifested in the character of Stephen Gordon. A number of critics have commented upon the distinctions that need to be drawn between Hall’s life and that of her most famous protagonist. Particular attention has been paid to the stylishness of Hall’s female masculinity, which did not equate to ‘inversion’ at the time (see Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 111–12); her sense of humour (see Terry Castle, Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996]); and the fact that she had many great friends, both heterosexual and homosexual, and lived a life of ‘privilege, seduction, freedom and fun’, rather than of isolated anguish (see Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, 160).

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76. For a more detailed discussion of Hall’s mobilization of Carpenter’s work see Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 143, 146. 77. Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1908), 11. 78. Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex, 14. 79. Hall, Well, 205. 80. For a detailed discussion of this process, see Doan, Fashioning Sapphism. 81. Radclyffe Hall, The Unlit Lamp (London: Virago, 1924), 55, 116. 82. Hall, The Unlit Lamp, 124. 83. Hall, The Unlit Lamp, 202. 84. Hall, The Unlit Lamp, 125, 163. 85. Gillian Whitlock, ‘“Everything Is Out of Place”: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Literary Tradition’, Feminist Studies 13.3 (1987): 561; Laura Green, ‘Hall of Mirrors: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Modernist Fictions of Identity’, Twentieth Century Literature 49.1 (2003): 292. 86. For one of few relatively recent critical works on The Unlit Lamp, see Trevor Hope, ‘Mother, Don’t You See I’m Burning? Between Female Homosexuality and Homosociality in Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp’, in Coming out of Feminism, eds Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal and Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 123–53. Hope performs a psychoanalytic reading of the novel, and is particularly preoccupied with its mother–daughter relationship. This relationship is undoubtedly the most significant in the book, yet I would argue, in opposition to Hope, that in spite of Joan’s mother’s success in transforming her daughter from a feminist lesbian to a copy of herself, the novel sets out possibilities for same-sex affect that are not present in The Well. 87. This argument is made by Hope, ‘Mother, Don’t You See I’m Burning’, 123; and Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian’, 283. 88. Radclyffe Hall to Gorham Munson, cited in Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, 151, my emphasis. 89. Rebecca West, ‘Concerning the Censorship’, in Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log (New York: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1931), 10. 90. Ethel Mannin, Confessions and Impressions (London: Jarrolds, 1930), 226. 91. Arnold Bennett, review of The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall, Evening Standard, 9 August 1928, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 56. 92. Leonard Woolf, review of The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall, Nation and Athenaeum, 4 August 1928, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 53–4. Hall strongly objected to the tenor of these reviews, for she insisted – to the point of paranoia – that she be taken seriously as an artist. 93. Douglas’ editorial carried an inch-high headline, and ran for five columns. 94. James Douglas, ‘A Book that Must Be Suppressed’, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 38. 95. Biron, ‘Judgment’, 40, 47. 96. For more detail, see Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 248–9. 97. Virginia Woolf, ‘Middlebrow’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 155.

176 Notes 98. Woolf to Quentin Bell, 1 November, 1928, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 3:555. 99. Woolf, ‘Middlebrow’, 155–7. 100. Many of the Bloomsbury group were themselves homosexual, or had engaged in homosexual affairs, and their reticence about revealing this to the general public (in spite of their openness within left-leaning intellectual society) provided them with a motivation for focusing their support for Hall upon artistic freedom, while ignoring the issue of whether the literary representation of lesbian desire was ‘obscene’ and homosexuality itself deserving of greater tolerance. 101. Woolf to Quentin Bell, 1 November, 1928, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 3:555. 102. West, ‘Concerning the Censorship’, 7–8. 103. See a selection of reader responses to The Well in Rebecca O’Rourke, Reflecting on The Well of Loneliness (London, New York: Routledge, 1989). 104. Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday: 1925–1939 (London: Angus and Robertson, 1972), 48. 105. I will discuss the sexual identifications of Woolf and Barnes in the following chapters. 106. Katrina Rolley, ‘The Treatment of Homosexuality and The Well of Loneliness’, in Writing and Censorship in Britain, eds Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 224. 107. Elizabeth Ladensen, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 120. 108. Hall, Well, 354. 109. Hall, Well, 378. 110. Hall, Well, 370. 111. Hall, Well, 217. 112. Whitlock has suggested that through the characters of Stephen, Jamie and Wanda, Hall makes a case that the ‘tools and modes of artistic expression speak of heterosexual norms and values that need to be deconstructed and rethought by the lesbian writer’, or the lesbian artist more generally (Whitlock, ‘Everything Is Out of Place’, 576). Yet as I demonstrate here, it is almost impossible for the invert to ‘deconstruct’ the restrictions upon her self-expression, in spite of the fact that the success of her artistic endeavours requires her to do so.

2 ‘On her lips you kiss your own’: Theorizing desire in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood 1. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1936), 125. 2. See Elizabeth Hardwick, American Fictions (New York: Modern Library, 1999) and Andrew Field, The Formidable Miss Barnes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985) for interpretations along these lines. 3. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 233. 4. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 245. 5. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 246.

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6. Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 235. 7. T.S. Eliot edited the some sexually explicit passages out of Nightwood, but it is likely that Barnes also limited her elaboration on such themes, for her hope was that Nightwood would find a wide audience. 8. All references to this text will be taken from Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1928). 9. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago, 1928), 413. 10. Hall, Well, 356. 11. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 8. 12. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 8. 13. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 8. 14. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 7. That the description of Musset emerging from the ‘Womb’ an ‘Inch or so less’ than the boy she was intended to be is clearly ‘tongue in cheek’ (see Susan Snaider Lanser, ‘Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Discourse of Desire’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], 159), is further supported by Barney’s repeated claim that she was a born lesbian, and her refusal to accept that the necessary corollary of this was an inherent ‘mannishness’. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 178. 15. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 8. 16. Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 75. 17. Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 178. 18. Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 178. 19. Philip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), 152. 20. Michael Warner, ‘Queer World Making’, interview by Annamarie Jagose, Genders 31 (2000): 28. 21. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 6. 22. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 6. 23. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 6, my emphasis. 24. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 6. 25. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 19. 26. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 19. 27. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 20. 28. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 20. 29. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 22. 30. Hall, Well, 446. 31. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 12. 32. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 12. 33. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 74. 34. See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 35. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 49.

178 Notes 36. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 49. 37. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 83–4. 38. The unsigned review of Nightwood published in the Newstatesman and Nation on the 17th of October, 1936, describes Nightwood as ‘extremely moral’ and states that ‘had I a daughter whose passions for mistresses and older girls were beginning to cause scandal and alarm, I should certainly insist that she read Night Wood’. (Review cited at length in Jane Marcus, ‘Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood’ in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], 198.) More recently, Susan S. Martins has suggested that ‘it is the ambiguity of Barnes’ position on political issues in … Nightwood – namely, her treatment of Jews, blacks, lesbians, gay men, prostitutes – that her readers have found most unsettling’. See ‘Gender Trouble and Lesbian Desire in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20.3 (1999): 109. 39. T.S. Eliot, introduction to Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1936), 1. 40. Miriam Fuchs, ‘Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot: Authority, Resistance and Acquiescence’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 12.2 (1993), 293. 41. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, 1. 42. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, 5. 43. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, 6. 44. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, 6. 45. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, 5. 46. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, 6. 47. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, 7. 48. Emily Holmes Coleman to Djuna Barnes, 5 November 1935, Djuna Barnes papers, The University of Maryland. 49. Coleman to Djuna Barnes, 10 July 1935. 50. Coleman to Djuna Barnes, 27 August 1935. 51. Coleman to Djuna Barnes, 27 August 1935. 52. Coleman to Djuna Barnes, 27 August 1935. 53. See Fuchs, ‘Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot: Authority, Resistance and Acquiescence’, 289–313; and Cheryl Plumb, foreword to Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, by Djuna Barnes (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). Plumb acknowledges Coleman’s contribution, but attributes the significant excisions to Eliot. 54. Carolyn Allen describes Nightwood and the Ladies Almanack as such in, ‘Looking Like a Lesbian/Poet’, in The Modern Woman Revisited, eds Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick, London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 148. 55. Allen, ‘Looking Like a Lesbian/Poet’, 148. 56. Herring, Djuna, 162. 57. Barnes’ membership of this circle was somewhat tenuous at times, and she is thought to have been closer to fellow journalists Janet Flanner and Solita Solano and their friends, than to her one-time lover Natalie Barney and her wealthier associates (see Frances Doughty, ‘Gilt on Cardboard: Djuna Barnes as Illustrator of her Life and Work’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], 151). Karla Jay suggests that Barnes’ satire

Notes

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

179

is motivated by the bitterness of poverty, yet this argument is difficult to support unless the humourous element of the text’s parody is refused, its tongue-in-cheek aspects ignored. Nevertheless, Jay does make some interesting observations with regard to Barnes’ self-imposed distance from the women whose financial assistance she required (‘The Outsider among the Expatriates: Djuna Barnes’ Satire on the Ladies of the Almanac’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], 184–93). Doughty, ‘Gilt on Cardboard’, 152. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 18. Una Troubridge’s relationship with Radclyffe Hall was cemented by her willingness to document Hall’s (somewhat obsessive) visits to a medium in order to contact her dead lover, Mabel Batten. Hall often said she would have married Troubridge if she had been born the man she felt she was. See Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 13. Mina Loy would not allow her older daughter to associate with Natalie Barney, for fear Barney would seduce her (Diana Souhami, Wild Girls, Paris, Sappho and Art: The Love Life of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks [London: Phoenix, 2004], 185). Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 46. Dianne Chisholm, ‘Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes’, American Literature 69.1 (1997): 173. Chisholm’s article on Nightwood appropriates Benjamin’s writing on French Surrealism in terms of its ‘profane’ juxtapositions, which shock the reader to a ‘“nihilistic” awareness of capitalism’s devastating progress’ (172). In her later work, Queer Constellations, she discusses Sarah Schulman’s late twentieth-century ‘nihilism’ in terms of ‘Benjamin’s conceptualization of history as dialectics without progress’. Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 246. Barnes, Nightwood, 89. Barnes, Nightwood, 85–6. Barnes, Nightwood, 178. Barnes, Nightwood, 179. Barnes, Nightwood, 177. Hedvig Volkbein dies giving birth to Felix, while for Robin, pregnancy raises her awareness of a ‘lost land in herself’, and birth results in physical pain, fury and probably depression. It is certainly clear that procreation in Nightwood is the result of a male desire ‘to pay homage to our past’ with a ‘gesture that also includes the future’: that is, to shore up one’s own lineage, however tenuous (Barnes, Nightwood, 63). Barnes, Nightwood, 174. Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), xv. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 27. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 27–8. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 28. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 28. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 29.

180 Notes 77. Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 29. 78. Jagose, Inconsequence, 24. 79. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897), 87. 80. The ‘womanly woman’s’ inability to find a husband and her exposure to more women than men are explanations proffered by Ellis. Yet such theories are far from scientific: impossible to quantify, they could be applied to any woman. 81. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), 365. For Faderman, Nightwood represents Barnes’ internalized homophobia, and her inability to transcend dominant literary images of lesbians. She uses Matthew’s assertion that ‘love of woman for woman’ is an ‘insane passion for unmitigated anguish’ as evidence that this is Nightwood’s message: apparently only happy lesbians have the potential to subvert the dominant paradigm. 82. Barnes, Nightwood, 16. 83. Barnes, Nightwood, 14. 84. Barnes, Nightwood, 28. 85. Barnes, Nightwood, 27. 86. As I discussed in the introduction, Barnes wrote to her friend Emily Coleman that she had married Robin to Felix because otherwise people would say ‘“Well of course those two women would never have been in love with each other if they had been normal, if any man had slept with them, if they had been well f----- and had born a child.” Which is ignorance and utterly false’. See Barnes to Coleman, 8 November 1935, Emily Holmes Coleman Papers. 87. Barnes, Nightwood, 70. 88. See Jagose on the work of Adrienne Rich, in Lesbian Utopics (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 11–12. Valerie Traub suggests that the privileging of the ‘universalizing’ over the ‘minoritizing’ view of female homoeroticism is often productive, especially when piecing together a ‘lesbian’ history, yet it must be employed ‘strategically’. See Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13. In her study of early modern ‘lesbianism’, Traub examines the intersections of universalized and minoritized ‘representational figures’ (the ‘friend’ and the ‘tribade’ respectively). 89. Barnes, Nightwood, 197. 90. Karen Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Maguerite Duras (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 76. 91. Barnes, Nightwood, 194. 92. Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 87. 93. Barnes, Nightwood, 194. 94. Barnes, Nightwood, 65. 95. Barnes, Nightwood, 64. 96. Barnes, Nightwood, 118. 97. Barnes, Nightwood, 202–3. 98. Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 32. 99. Barnes, Nightwood, 221. 100. Barnes, Nightwood, 168.

Notes

181

101. Jane Marcus, ‘Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 223. 102. See Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 (London: Angus and Robertson, 1973), 156. In a ‘Letter from Paris’ drafted in 1935, Flanner criticizes the lack of French resolve to combat Fascist aggression (more specifically, Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia), as the Right press criticizes the call for sanctions and the Left ‘says nothing’. That political conservatism was not restricted to countries under Fascist rule is a point worth noting in relation to Nightwood. 103. Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded, 71. 104. Barnes cited in Herring, Djuna, 160. 105. Barnes, Nightwood, 194. 106. Barnes, Nightwood, 72, my emphasis. 107. Barnes, Nightwood, 84, my emphasis. 108. Barnes, Nightwood, 203. 109. Barnes, Nightwood, 220. 110. Barnes, Nightwood, 207. 111. Barnes, Nightwood, 207. 112. Barnes, Nightwood, 207. 113. Barnes, Nightwood, 71. 114. Barnes, Nightwood, 71. 115. Barnes, Nightwood, 72–3. 116. Barnes, Nightwood, 83. 117. Barnes, Nightwood, 83. 118. Barnes, Nightwood, 199. 119. Barnes, Nightwood, 199. 120. Barnes, Nightwood, 206. 121. Djuna Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman, undated letter, July–August 1935, Emily Holmes Coleman Papers, University of Delaware, Newark. 122. Barnes, Nightwood, 142. 123. Barnes, Nightwood, 103. 124. Barnes, Nightwood, 112. 125. Barnes, Nightwood, 113. 126. Barnes, Nightwood, 113. 127. Barnes, Nightwood, 114. 128. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, 5. 129. Barnes, Nightwood, 202. 130. Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 142. Brake is referring specifically to the means by which Oscar Wilde transformed The Woman’s World when he edited the journal in the 1890s.

3 ‘Truth & fantasy’: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as Sapphic roman à clef 1. Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 9 October 1927, in The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, eds Loiuse De Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 251–2.

182 Notes 2. Woolf, 20 September 1927, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 3:157. 3. Woolf, 14 March 1927, Diary, 3:131. 4. Woolf, 20 September 1927, Diary, 3:157. 5. Woolf, 22 October 1927, Diary, 3:162. 6. In her excellent article on the way in which Woolf ‘move[s]’, in Orlando, ‘between the real and its representation’ in order to ‘foreground the doubleness that is needed to produce the self as woman in language and in culture’ (58), Victoria Smith argues that Orlando has been ‘described as a roman à clef a kunstlerroman, an anti-novel, metafiction, an autobiography …, and a biography’ (60). She argues that the most apt descriptions of the novel are ‘fairy tale à clef’ and Nigel Nicolson’s ‘“the longest and most charming love letter in literature”’, for ‘both play the line between the real and its representation, and both neatly encompass the idea that Woolf’s public, Sapphic love letter to Sackville-West necessarily had to be a fairy tale, necessarily had to turn fact into “fiction”’ (60–1). Smith’s differentiation between the roman à clef and the fairy tale à clef relies upon the definition of the roman à clef as representing ‘actual persons presented in a realistic world under fictitious names’ (61). Smith’s reading emphasizes the complexity of Orlando – the extent of the work it is doing, and the negotiations required to represent a same-sex relationship in a public text – yet she underestimates the complexity of the roman à clef genre, which I would argue enabled the encryption of same-sex desire in this period in unexpected ways. Smith argues that Orlando produces ‘not only Sackville-West’s “biography” but Woolf’s own story of the inadequacy of language and the inadequacy of representation for women’ (59), while for the purposes of this study, I am more interested in its production of an ecrypted story of same-sex desire for the consumption of an ideal reader – a story which evidences an original understanding, produced by same-sex desire itself, of the place of homosexuality in psycho-sexual development and in society. (See ‘“Ransacking the Language”: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, Journal of Modern Literature 29.4 (2006): 57–75.) 7. In the same year that Orlando was published, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was banned by Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron. The suggestion that Woolf constructed Orlando with the specific intention of confounding the censors is not a new one, and critics who take this approach include Shari Benstock, who suggests that the ‘style and tone’ of Orlando obscured its subject matter (‘Expatriate Sapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History’, in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, eds Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow [New York and London: New York University Press, 1990]: 192); and Louise DeSalvo, who suggests that Woolf solved the problem of not being able to ‘deal overtly with lesbian love at this time in English history’ by ‘creating the form of Orlando to contain her love for Sackville-West’ (‘Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf’, Signs 8.2 [1982]: 206). On the other hand, Sherron Knopp points out that Quentin Bell ‘attribut[ed]’ the ‘success’ of Orlando to the ‘sudden ‘topicality’ of its ‘sexual theme’’ following the Hall trial (‘“If I saw you would you kiss me?” Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, PMLA 103.1 [1988]: 28). Woolf was undoubtedly wary of revealing too much, but she was also interested in highlighting the effects of censorship.

Notes 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

183

Woolf, 7 November 1928, Diary, 3:201. Woolf, 5 July 1924, Diary, 2:306–7. Woolf, 19 February 1923, Diary, 2:235–6. Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 202. Leslie Hankins explores the layers of address contained in Orlando in her essay, ‘Orlando: “A Precipice Marked V” between “A Miracle of Discretion” and “Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible”’, arguing that much of the ‘wit, delight, and power of the novel’ emerges from the ‘tension’ between seemingly incompatible addresses (in Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, eds Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer [New York: New York University Press, 1997]). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Privilege of Unknowing: Diderot’s The Nun’, in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 25. She supposedly ‘fled with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady’s husband followed them’, to which Woolf adds ‘but of the truth or otherwise of these stories we express no opinion’, ironically invoking the biographer’s claim to ‘truth’ in a ‘biography’ in which truth is impossible to determine (Woolf, Orlando, 153). Woolf, 21 December 1925, Diary, 3:52. This sentiment is expressed in a letter to Sackville-West, in which she argued that there were some advantages to being a ‘eunuch’ rather than one of ‘you blazing beauties’, for ‘women confide in one’ (Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 31 January 1927, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 186.) I take the notion that Orlando ‘screens’ lesbianism without rendering it secondary from Adam Parkes, ‘Lesbianism, History and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, Twentieth Century Literature 40.4 (1994): 437. Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin, 1928), 152–3. Woolf, Orlando, 150. Woolf, Orlando, 148–9. According to note 45, the line Woolf had in mind was probably ‘Nothing so true as what you once let fall,/Most women have no Characters at all’ (Brenda Lyons, ed., Orlando, 254). Woolf, Orlando, 148–9. Woolf, Orlando, 150. Woolf, Orlando, 150. Woolf, Orlando, 151. Woolf, Orlando, 152. Woolf, Orlando, 152. Woolf, Orlando, 152. Woolf, Orlando, 152. Woolf, Orlando, 153. Woolf referred to Sackville-West’s sexual interest in women in this manner on the 30th of August, 1928, when she wrote to Sackville-West about the impending trial of The Well of Loneliness, advising her not to sign the petition against its censorship because her ‘proclivities [were] too well known’ (Woolf cited in Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998], 185).

184 Notes 32. Woolf, 25 February 1919, Diary, 1:246. 33. As I noted in Chapter 1, the furore over the Well of Loneliness, which erupted in August of 1928, also provides examples of the particular constructions of lesbianism being established by those men with the social or judicial power to determine mainstream terms of reference: James Douglas’ famous statement, published in the Sunday Express, that he ‘would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of Prussic Acid’ than the Well (‘A Book that Must Be Suppressed’, in Palatable Poison, eds Jay Prosser and Laura Doan [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001], 38) was echoed by less hysterical authorities like Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir George Stephenson, who argued that ‘this book would tend to corrupt the minds of young persons’ (Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, 180), and ultimately, by Sir Chartres Biron in his final ruling (Biron, ‘Judgment’, in Palatable Poison, eds Jay Prosser and Laura Doan [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001], 39–49). In each of these cases, the power of suggestion is deemed to be so strong that exposure to the very concept of lesbianism is potentially disastrous. 34. Valerie Rohy, Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2. 35. Woolf, Orlando, 97. This quote is taken from the passages that frame Orlando’s sex change, during which ‘Our Lady of Purity’, ‘Our Lady of Chastity’ and ‘Our Lady of Modesty’ enter and attempt to redirect the narrative away from ‘THE TRUTH’. 36. Woolf, Orlando, 161. 37. It was rumoured that the Labouchère Amendment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 excluded female homosexuality because Queen Victoria refused to legislate against a practice she did not believe could possibly exist. 38. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), 143. 39. In the nineteenth century, sexual shame is associated even with procreative sex within marriage. Thus, Orlando’s housekeeper weeps because weeping is appropriate and pleasurable for a woman, and asks: ‘Were they not all of them weak women? wearing crinolines the better to conceal the fact; the great fact; the only fact; but, nevertheless, the deplorable fact; which every modest woman did her best to deny until denial was impossible; the fact that she was about to bear a child?’ (Woolf, Orlando, 161–2). 40. Woolf, Orlando, 165. 41. Woolf, Orlando, 167. 42. Woolf, Orlando, 169, my emphasis. 43. Woolf, Orlando, 167. 44. Woolf, Orlando, 173–4. 45. Woolf, Orlando, 183. This poem is taken from ‘Spring’ in Sackville-West’s The Land. 46. Woolf, Orlando, 183. 47. Woolf, Orlando, 183. 48. Woolf, Orlando, 183. 49. Woolf, Orlando, 183, my emphasis. 50. Woolf, Orlando, 184.

Notes 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

185

Woolf, Orlando, 174–5. Woolf, Orlando, 175. Woolf, Orlando, 178. Karen Kaivola, ‘Revisiting Woolf’s Representation of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality and Nation’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18.2 (1999): 239. Woolf, Orlando, 115, my emphasis. The poststructuralist resonance of this argument cannot go unmentioned. D.A. Boxwell has argued that with Orlando, Woolf demonstrates an ‘astute understanding of gender identity as a performative “act”’ (‘[Dis]orienting Spectacle: The Politics of Orlando’s Sapphic Camp’, Twentieth Century Literature 44.3[1998]: 323). Woolf prefigures Judith Butler’s argument that ‘acts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause’ (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [1990; repr., New York and London: Routledge, 1999], 173). In a sense, Orlando is the impossible subject who proves Butler’s theory, for she has come into being outside of the discursive realm that establishes the effect of a gendered organizing core. Woolf, Orlando, 115. Vita Sackville-West, cited in Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (London, Penguin, 1984), 204. Woolf, Orlando, 182. Somewhat ironically, Sackville-West’s many female lovers included BBC producer Hilda Matheson, who introduced Sackville-West to the airwaves in the late 1920s, providing her with a forum from which to publicly extol the virtues of marriage, along with her husband, almost two decades later. Sackville-West’s significance as Orlando’s inspiration has received much critical attention, from critics including Blanche Wiesen Cook, ‘“Women Alone Stir my Imagination”’; DeSalvo, ‘Lighting the Cave’; Knopp, ‘“If I saw you would you kiss me?”’; and Elizabeth Meese, ‘When Virginia Looked at Vita, What Did She See; Or, Lesbian: Feminist: Woman – What’s the Differ(e/a)nce?’, Feminist Studies 18.1 (1992): 99–117. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (eds) note that a ‘specially bound copy’ of Orlando was presented to Sackville-West (The Letters of Vita SackvilleWest to Virginia Woolf, n. 1, 306). Sackville-West to Woolf, 11 October 1928, and Woolf to Sackville-West, 12 October 1928, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 306. Woolf, Orlando, 176–7. Raymond Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: NLB, 1980), 150. Virginia Woolf, ‘Middlebrow’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 152–3. Woolf, ‘Middlebrow’, 155. Woolf, ‘Middlebrow’, 156. Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, 150–1. Woolf, Orlando, 56. Woolf, Orlando, 195. Woolf, Orlando, 225. David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy (London: Penguin, 1994), 240.

186 Notes 74. Woolf, 5 July 1924, Diary, 2:306–7. 75. Woolf, Orlando, 75. 76. See Vita Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (1922; repr., London and Tonbridge: Ernest Benn Limited, 1958), 100–2. Items that are listed in Knole and the Sackvilles and correspond to those listed above include: ‘a fustian down bed, bolster and a pair of pillows, a pair of Spanish blankets, 5 curtains of crimson and white taffeta, the valence to it of white satin embroidered with crimson and white silk and a deep fringe suitable; a test and tester of white satin suitable to the valence. A white rug. All these first packed up in 2 sheets and then packed in a white and black rug and an old blanket.’ Later in the list: ‘There goes a yellow satin chair and 3 stools, suitable with their buckram covers to them’ and ‘2 walnut tree tables to draw out at both ends with their frames of the same’. 77. Woolf, Orlando, 73. 78. This is evidenced by Woolf’s surprise at her husband Leonard’s response to Orlando. She wrote in her diary ‘L. takes Orlando more seriously than I had expected’, revealing that she anticipated a relatively unenthusiastic response from those who were used to her serious style and subject matter (31 May 1928, Diary, 3:185). 79. This entry apparently followed a discussion with Forster over the trial of The Well of Loneliness (Woolf, 31 August 1928, Diary, 3:193). Although the tone here is one of personal rather than ideological distaste (a distinction which Forster recognized) it is indicative of the limited exposure the Bloomsbury set had to ‘Sapphism’. It would appear that his views on Sapphism were representative of many of Bloomsbury’s men, who emerged from the male culture of the Cambridge Apostles (see Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 79–80). 80. Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 5 April 1929, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 351. 81. Woolf to Sackville-West, 9 October 1927, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, eds Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977), 3:429. Sherron Knopp suggests that this warning was motivated by Woolf’s intention that Orlando be a ‘public proclamation’ of her relationship with Vita, described as the novel’s ‘private inspiration’, yet this is, perhaps, an oversimplification of the relations between public and private implied by Woolf’s statement, which is far more concerned with the reactions of friends than with that of the general public (Knopp, ‘“If I saw you would you kiss me?”’, 27). 82. Michael J. Hoffman and Ann Ter Haar, ‘“Whose Books Once Influenced Mine”: The Relationship between E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’, Twentieth Century Literature 45.1 (1999): 47. 83. Woolf, 20 May 1925, Diary, 3:24. 84. Woolf, 20 May 1925, Diary, 3:24. 85. Forster and Woolf were close in age (Forster was three years older), yet thanks to educational opportunities and relative health, Forster had published four novels by the time Woolf published her first, The Voyage Out, in 1915. Forster’s fourth novel, Howards End, had been published in 1910. 86. Woolf, 15 September 1924, Diary, 2:313. 87. Woolf, 1 November 1924, Diary, 2:320. This statement is made with reference to a meeting the mistress of Woolf’s brother-in-law, Clive Bell.

Notes

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88. Woolf, 17 and 20 May 1925, Diary, 3:22, 24. 89. Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 27 May 1925, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 66. 90. Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 82, my emphasis. 91. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897), 39; Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 6:145–72; and Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1963). The Freudian resonance of Clarissa’s experience of sexuality has been noted by critics, including Elizabeth Abel, ‘Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway’, in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, eds Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover and London: The University Press of New England, 1983), 149–61; and Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 92. Jagose, Inconsequence, 82. 93. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: Vintage, 1925), 28–9. 94. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 20, 60. 95. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 2. 96. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 29. 97. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 30. 98. Jagose, Inconsequence, 97. 99. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 26. 100. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 27, my emphasis. 101. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 29. 102. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 28–9, my emphasis. 103. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 26. 104. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 27 105. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 8–9. 106. Both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Terry Castle have discussed Diderot’s La Religieuse (1760) in some detail, as a significant early example of the lesbian vampire figure. See Sedgwick, ‘Privilege of Unknowing: Diderot’s The Nun’, 23–51; and Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 31–4. 107. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 9. 108. Eileen Barrett makes the point that with her reflections upon Miss Kilman, Clarissa ‘constructs the other, just as the sexologists do’ in order to ‘contain her own sexuality within acceptable private boundaries’. She adds that ‘Clarissa half acknowledges what she is doing’ when she reflects that it is the ‘idea’ of Doris Kilman, rather than the woman herself, that she imagines as vampiric spectre. See Eileen Barrett, ‘Unmasking Lesbian Passion: The Inverted World of Mrs. Dalloway’, in Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, eds Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer (New York and London: New York University Press), 161,

188 Notes 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 154. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 154–5. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 9. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 29. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 29. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. 29. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 152, my emphasis. Woolf, 2 June 1921, Diary, 2:122. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 29. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 29; and 2 June 1921, Diary, 2:122. Woolf, 15 September 1924, Diary, 2:313. Julia Briggs makes this observation in Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 152. 121. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 1929), 81.

4 ‘Gertrude, the world is a theatre for you’: Staging the self in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 1. Gertrude Stein, ‘Q.E.D.’, in Three Lives (London: Penguin, 1990), 235. 2. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1933). 3. See Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein, The Language that Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 546. Dydo points out that the acceptance of the Autobiography by Harcourt Brace marked a new ‘phase’ in Stein’s career, which was characterized by ‘the marketing of the Autobiography, [and] of Stein herself’. 4. See, for example, Janet Flanner, who describes Toklas as the ‘friend’ who ‘lives with’ Stein (Paris Was Yesterday: 1925–1939 [London: Angus and Robertson, 1972], 90); and Edmund Wilson, for whom Toklas is Stein’s ‘friend and companion of twenty-five years’ (‘“27 rue de Fleurus”, A Review by Edmund Wilson’, review of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein, The New Republic, 11 October 1933, reproduced in ‘Review-a-Day’, The New Republic Online [2003], http://www.powells.com/ review/2003_07_31.html). 5. Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 90, my emphasis. 6. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 5. 7. Catharine R. Stimpson, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie’, in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 154. 8. Georgia Johnston, The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle and Gertrude Stein (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. Johnston is primarily concerned with Lifting Belly in this work, rather than with the Autobiography, but the citation above refers to lesbian modernism more generally. 9. Stimpson, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie’, 157. 10. Franziska Gygax, Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 62. 11. Cynthia Merrill, ‘Mirrored Image: Gertrude Stein and Autobiography’, Pacific Coast Philology 20.1 (1985): 14.

Notes

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12. The critics discussed above are not the only ones who make note of Stein’s manipulation of the autobiographical ‘I’: others include Leigh Gilmore, who argues that Stein ‘displaces the function of the autobiographical signature and the autobiographical “I”’ (Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994], 200), and Sidonie Smith, who argues that Stein was dissatisfied with the ‘I’, which could not ‘do the textual work she wanted to do’ (Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 65, see also 67–8). 13. Gabriele Griffin argues that the Autobiography ‘present[s] a female protagonist focusing on an other as opposed to a self’, in her discussion of the way in which women’s autobiographies are interpreted in terms of an ‘autonomous’ self, in spite of the fact that the ‘self’ is often defined in such works as ‘relational’ (‘What Is [Not] Remembered: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’, in Women’s Lives/ Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/Biography, eds Trev Lynn Broughton and Linda Anderson [New York: State University of New York Press, 1997], 143). 14. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 114. 15. Gertrude Stein, ‘Ada’, in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 277. 16. Stimpson points out that the reference to ‘Ada’ brings lesbian eroticism into the Autobiography, providing a ‘trail’ for readers who ‘know the score’ and those ‘trying to learn the score’ (see Stimpson, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie’, 159). 17. This ‘misunderstanding’ was almost certainly very deliberately constructed in order to avenge past grudges, for Jolas had long been critical of Stein’s work and of her supporters. 18. Leo Stein wrote to Weeks: ‘It’s the first time I ever read an autobiography of which I knew the authentic facts, and to me it seems sheerly incredible’ (cited in Diana Souhami, Gertrude and Alice [San Francisco and London: Pandora, 1991], 194). 19. See Eugene Jolas, ed., Testimony against Gertrude Stein (The Hague: Servire, 1935). For a comprehensive reading of Testimony against Gertrude Stein, see Darcy L. Brandel, ‘The Case of Gertrude Stein and the Genius of Collaboration’, Women’s Studies 37.4 (2008): 371–92. 20. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 54. 21. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 34. 22. Gertrude Stein, Picasso (New York: Scribners, 1940), 16. 23. Toklas narrates ‘only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang … The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead’ (Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 5). 24. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 46. 25. See Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language and Cubism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 4–5; Donald Pizer, American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 35; and Marianne DeKoven, ‘Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism’, Contemporary Literature 22.1(1981): 82.

190 Notes 26. Dubnick, Pizer and DeKoven appear to agree on this very general point: Dubnick argues that in ‘eliminating memory from perception’ Stein’s portraits ‘paralleled Picasso’s’ (The Structure of Obscurity, 20); Pizer argues that both Cubist painting and Stein’s writing ‘bring various angles of perceiving an object into a single simultaneous vision’ (American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment, 35); and DeKoven argues that Cubism and Stein’s work ‘both shatter or fragment perception’ and ‘render multiple perspectives’ (‘Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting’, 81). 27. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 54. 28. Charles Caramello, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 123. 29. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 252. 30. The authenticity of autobiography has been repeatedly called into question since the genre was first identified. Most pertinently, in this case, Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey had demonstrated an interest, in the 1920s, in rebelling against the Victorian perception of biography as ‘scientific’ (an idea promoted and emphasized by Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography). On the basis of his theory of biography Strachey published Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928). Woolf published the pseudo-biography Orlando, originally subtitled A Biography, in 1928. Their generic play was characteristic of the period (and of Woolf’s and Strachey’s breaks with Victorian ‘certainties’), and although Stein’s experimentation is distinct from Bloomsbury’s, there is little doubt that her take on biography is connected to a similar questioning of authorial subjectivity. 31. Caramello, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act, 141. 32. Caramello, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act, 35. Stein published this study along with her undergraduate research partner, Leon Solomons. 33. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (1892; repr., Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 145. 34. Michael G. Johnson and Tracy B. Henley, Reflections on The Principles of Psychology: William James after a Century (Hillsdale, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990), 271. 35. James, Psychology, 145. 36. James, Psychology, 141. 37. Johnson and Henley, Reflections on The Principles of Psychology, 285. 38. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 101, 157, 156, 129. 39. James, Psychology, 140, 146. 40. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 14. 41. See, for example, Robert S. Lubar, ‘Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture’, The Art Bulletin 79.1 (1997), 68; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 2:250–1; Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, 77; and Blanche Wiesen Cook, ‘“Women Alone Stir my Imagination”’, 730–1. Cook does not actually refer to the Autobiography, but hers is an interesting early critique of the heterosexism and misogyny that she perceived as grounding the relationship between Stein and Toklas.

Notes

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42. So, for example, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore the importance the Autobiography attributes to wives of geniuses (No Man’s Land, pp. 250–1); Catharine R. Stimpson insists that the Autobiography institutes a heterosexual division between the ‘husband’ who is the ‘male-identified woman’ and the ‘wife’ who is ‘the lady’ (‘Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie’, p. 158); Leigh Gilmore argues that Stein establishes a division between ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ that is nevertheless ‘ironic’ and ultimately ‘short-circuits the compulsory four-square equivalences between man/woman, husband/wife’ (Autobiographics, p. 210); and Sidonie Smith suggests that ‘Stein reinforces the relationship of self-sacrifice to femaleness and genius to maleness’, although she adds that the conventionality of the relationship is in some ways parodic (Subjectivity, Identity and the Body, p. 77). 43. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 5. 44. For example, when Toklas states, in reference to a meeting between Sherwood Anderson and Stein, that ‘[f]or some reason or other I was not present on this occasion, some domestic complication in all probability’, she gestures towards their constant togetherness, but also to the distinction between the roles they played in their shared life. See Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 197. 45. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 83. 46. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 79. 47. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 84–5. 48. The autobiography states that Louis Bromfield was ‘at the house’ on the evening Stein found Q.E.D., and she handed it to him saying ‘you read it’ (Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 84). 49. Leo Stein was consistently and publicly critical of his sister’s work, and although there is no record of his appraisal of Q.E.D., it is unlikely that he would have encouraged her to publish it, or to continue writing. Benstock discusses Q.E.D. and Leo Stein’s response to it in Women of the Left Bank, 152. 50. See Janet Malcolm, Two Lives (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 62; and Ulla E. Dydo, ‘Stanzas in Meditation: The Other Autobiography’, Chicago Review 35.2 (1985): 12. 51. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 84. 52. Richard Poirier, Trying it Out in America: Literary and Other Performances (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), 193. 53. Stein, ‘Q.E.D.’, 240. 54. Stein, ‘Q.E.D.’, 241. 55. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5. 56. Love, Feeling Backward, 21, 14. 57. Stein had a very close relationship with collaborator Bernard Fäy, who protected Stein and Toklas during the Second World War, in spite of his antiSemitism, and she sided with the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War (see Janet Malcolm, Two Lives, 51–2). 58. Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity, 20. Dubnick discusses Stein’s portraits in relation to Picasso’s, arguing that ‘both wanted to preserve each individual present moment of perception before those moments are synthesized by intellectual knowledge of reality’. 59. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 82.

192 Notes 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 83. Caramello, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act, 137. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 122. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 122. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 127, my emphasis. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 132. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 236. Although Leonard Woolf, and not Virginia, wrote to Stein following her successful lecture at Cambridge in 1926 and asked to publish ‘Composition as Explanation’, there is no implication, in his request, that he, and not Virginia, was the interested party. He wrote ‘We should very much like, if possible, to publish the address which you delivered at Christchurch in our Hogarth Essay series. Would you allow us to consider it?’ (Leonard Woolf to Gertrude Stein, 11 June 1926, Gertrude Stein papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT). Woolf had written to Roger Fry that she was unsure whether Stein’s ‘contortions [were] genuine and fruitful’ or only ‘spasms’ (cited in J.H. Willis, Leonard and Virginia as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917–41 [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992], 126). Virginia Woolf, 9 June 1926, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) 3:89. Woolf, 22 November 1938, Diary, 5:188. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 151. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 202. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 132. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 174. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 174. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 242. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 242. Caramello, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act, 128. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 77. Of Hemingway, the Autobiography states ‘Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway …. Hemingway had been formed by the two of them and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds’ (Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 216). Of Pound, Stein writes: ‘Gertrude Stein liked [Ezra Pound] but did not find him amusing’ (Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 200). In these cases, Stein’s claim to intellectual superiority is clear, and although the Autobiography did not make the same kind of claim in relation to Joyce, she clearly believed that he was her rival in the field of experimental literature, and she justified her lack of success in comparison with him with the argument that ‘it is the people who generally smell of museums who are accepted and it is the new who are not accepted’ (cited in Souhami, Gertrude and Alice, 149). Toklas narrates that Kate Buss had ‘brought lots of people to the house’ including ‘Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy’ who had ‘wanted to bring James Joyce but they didn’t’; and she goes on to state that she and Stein were ‘glad to see Mina’, while nothing more is said of Barnes (Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 200).

Notes

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82. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 195. 83. Stein ceased to patronize Beach’s lending library after Beach published Ulysses in 1922. 84. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 196. 85. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 197. 86. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 220–1. 87. Letters from Jane Heap to Gertrude Stein 1923–1928, Gertrude Stein papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. 88. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 221. 89. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 229. Stein probably did not take Barney’s promotion of her work terribly seriously: Barney’s feminism, her blatant enjoyment of the re-enactment of Sapphic rituals, her seemingly frivolous refusal to commit to any one partner and her failure to take her own writing seriously would have been anathema to Stein, and although the women were friends, their approaches to literature and lesbianism were widely divergent. 90. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, Zone Books, 2002), 52. 91. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 229. 92. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (1990; repr., Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008), 3. 93. Mary E. Galvin, Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1999), 42. 94. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 251. 95. Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, 8. 96. Carolyn Faunce Copeland, Language & Time & Gertrude Stein (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1975). 97. Gertrude Stein, ‘Melanctha’, in Three Lives (London: Penguin, 1909), 60. 98. Stein, ‘Melanctha’, 61. 99. Jolas cited in Souhami, Gertrude and Alice, 193. 100. Leo Stein to Mabel Weeks, cited in Souhami, Gertrude and Alice, 194. 101. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 77. 102. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 167. 103. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 77. 104. Gygax, Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein, 67.

5 Conclusion: ‘Two alert and vivid bodies’: Desire and salvation in H.D.’s HER 1. H.D., HER (London: Virago, 1984), 3. 2. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘“I had two loves separate”: The Sexualities of H.D.’s HER’, in Signets: Reading H.D., eds Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 215–16. 3. Friedman and DuPlessis, ‘“I had two loves separate”’, 215. 4. H.D., HER, 158. 5. H.D., HER, 163–4. 6. H.D., HER, 162–3.

194 Notes 7. Cassandra Laity, ‘H.D. and A.C. Swinburne: Decadence and Modernist Women’s Writing’, Feminist Studies 15.3 (1989): 479. 8. Laity, ‘H.D. and A.C. Swinburne’, 479. 9. Laity, ‘H.D. and A.C. Swinburne’, 475. 10. Laity, ‘H.D. and A.C. Swinburne’, 479. 11. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Faustine’, in Poems and Ballads, First Series. The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 6 vols (London: Chatto, 1904), 1: 106–12: lines l61–4. 12. Donald H. Reiman, The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential and Private (Baltimore and London:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 40, 53. 13. Karla Jay, ‘Foreword’, in Paint it Today, by H.D. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), xii–xiii. 14. Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman à Clef (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11. 15. See in particular: Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian fin de siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and ‘Introduction’, in Paint it Today, by H.D. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), xvii–xxxviii; Friedman and DuPlessis, ‘“I had two loves separate”’, 205–32; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 16. H.D., HER, 138. 17. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986), 315. 18. See Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 316; and Guest, Barbara, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (New York: Doubleday, 1984). 19. Pound writes ‘for the softness of the “nineties” I have different degrees of antipathy or even contempt’. See Ezra Pound, ‘Lionel Johnson’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 362. 20. For discussions of Pound’s attitude towards H.D. and feminine or ‘women’s’ writing, see Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 330–2, and Laity, ‘H.D. and A.C. Swinburne’, 465. 21. Ezra Pound, ‘Swinburne versus his Biographers’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 292–3. 22. H.D., letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 8 August, 1952, cited in Laity, ‘H.D. and A.C. Swinburne’, 461. 23. Bryher, Two Novels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 24. Bryher to H.D., 20th March 1919, H.D. Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, accessed July 2007. 25. H.D., Asphodel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992), 185. 26. H.D., Paint it Today (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), 81, my emphasis. 27. H.D., Paint it Today, 83. 28. H.D. visited Freud for the first time in 1933.

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Index Note: an ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates a note number on that page. Addison, Joseph, 99 Aldington, Richard, 159, 162, 164 Allan, Maud, 6–8, 9 Allatini, Rose, 6, 8–9, 101; Despised and Rejected, 6, 8–9, 101 Analytic Cubism, 126, see also Cubism and Synthetic Cubism Anderson, Margaret, 145, 146, 147 Anderson, Sherwood, 144, 191, n.44 androgyny, 105–6 Asquith, Margot, 7 autobiography, 20–1, 22, 122–3, 127–9, 132, 140, 152, 160 Barnes, Djuna, 1–3, 4, 16, 17–18, 19, 26, 28, 29–30, 31–2, 34, 37, 38, 39, 65, 66, 67, 69–94, 126, 137–8, 142, 143, 146, 154, 157, 159, 163, 164; Ladies Almanack, 2, 30, 31–2, 38, 65, 70–4, 78–9, 81, 82, 83, 85, 154; Nightwood, 1–3, 5, 19, 26, 28, 31–2, 34, 37, 65, 69–94, 136, 137, 157; Ryder, 2 Barney, Natalie Clifford, 30, 38, 39, 70, 71, 72, 78, 126, 138, 145, 146, 147, 164 Beach, Sylvia, 126, 143–4, 145, 146 Bell, Clive, 139 Bell, Vanessa, 111, 139 Benjamin, Walter, 79 Bennett, Arnold, 62 Benstock, Shari, 69, 135, 150, 162 biography, 22, 32, 111, 123, 128, 131, 132, 140, 160 Biron, Sir Chartres, 63, 167, n.8 bisexuality, 165, 166 Bloomsbury Group, 19, 30, 32, 96, 108, 110–11, 139 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), 30, 159, 164–6; Development, 165; Two Selves, 165

Boni and Boni, 144–5 Bookstaver, May, 134–5 Braque, Georges, 125 British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP), 13 Bromfield, Louis, 134 Brooks, Romaine, 38, 70 capitalism, 79 Carpenter, Edward, 8, 57, 168, n.25, 169, n.32; The Intermediate Sex, 168, n.15 Cather, Willa, 27 Catholicism, 44, 50, 90, 91 censorship, 1–6, 20, 25, 30, 37, 48, 62–3, 66–7, 77, 78, 96, 118, 120, 158 Cézanne, Paul, 125, 126, 127 Coleman, Emily Holmes, 1, 2, 76–8, 92 Contact Publishing Company, 164 counterpublic, 4, 16–18, 20, 21, 33, 34, 62, 68, 72, 74, 97, 149 Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 1921, 14, 83, 101 Cubism, 122, 125–7, 129, see also Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism Daily Mail, 51 Decadence, 29, 56, 65, 90, 155, 156, 163 Defense of the Realm Act, 6, 8 Defoe, Daniel, 128; Robinson Crusoe, 128 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 12–13, 16, 17–18, 19, 25–6, 28–9, 30, 33–4, 37, 65, 152–66; HER, 28, 33–4, 65, 152–66; Asphodel, 25, 28, 33, 65, 152, 158, 159, 160, 164, 165; Paint it Today, 25, 33, 65, 152, 158, 159, 160, 164, 165

204

Index Douglas, James, 51, 62–3, 184, n.33 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 152–3, 154, 161 Eagle, Solomon, 8 Edelman, Lee, 29, 74, 137 Eliot, T.S., 1–3, 19, 75–7, 78, 93, 94, 171, n.50 Ellerman, Annie Winifred, see Bryher Ellis, Havelock, 12, 13, 16, 54, 55–6, 57, 60, 82–3, 86, 87, 112, 165–6; Sexual Inversion, 12, 57, 86, 112; Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 12, 55, 57, 86, 112 Faderman, Lillian, 40, 83; Surpassing the Love of Men, 40 fascism, 29, 79–80, 88, 137, 181, n.102 Faulkner, William, 131; The Sound and the Fury, 131 feminism, 40, 42, 51, 59, 78, 122, 132, 138, 154, see also ‘women’s rights’ ‘femme’, 47, 173, n.38 femme fatale, 91, 156 Flanner, Janet, 65–6, 70, 121, 126, 178, n.57, 181, n.102, 188, n.4 Forster, E.M., 64, 111–12, 174, n.59, 186, n.79, 186, n.85; Howards End, 186, n.85 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 13, 112, 169, n.28, ‘Dora’, 169, n.28; ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, 169, n.28 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 152–3, 154, 161 Foucault, Michel, 14; The History of Sexuality, 14 Fry, Roger, 139, 192, n.68 gay liberation movement, 29, 40, 136 gay pride, 28, 37 Gray, Cecil, 164 Gregg, Frances Josepha, 154, 159, 160, 162, 164 H.D. see Doolittle, Hilda Hall, Radclyffe, 2, 12, 17–18, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36–68, 70, 72, 73, 78, 86, 88, 93, 98, 120, 133, 142,

205

154, 159; The Unlit Lamp, 58–9, 60–1; The Well of Loneliness, 2–3, 5, 12, 28, 31, 32, 36–68, 70, 78, 85, 93, 98, 167, n.8 Harcourt Brace, 121, 145 Harvard Psychological Review, 130 Heap, Jane, 126, 143, 144–7 Hemingway, Ernest, 125, 143, 192, n.80 ‘high’ modernism, 20, 68, 77 Hogarth Press, 139, 192, n.67 homophobia, 40, 41, 180, n.81 Imagism, 25, 162, 163, 164 ‘intellectual aristocracy’, 108 Jagose, Annamarie, 49, 80, 81, 112 James, William, 129–30, 133 Johns Hopkins University, 129–30 Jolas, Eugene, 125, 150, 189, n.17; Testimony Against Gertrude Stein, 125, 150 Joyce, James, 130–1, 143, 192, n.80, n.81; Ulysses, 130–1, 143 Knole, 96, 97, 109, 110, 186, n.76 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 12, 54, 56, 57, 60, 168, n.25; Psychopathia Sexualis, 12, 54, 56 Künstlerroman, 59–60, 182, n.6 Labouchère Amendment, 15, 184, n.37 Lewis, Wyndham, 140 Little Review, 144, 145 Liverwright, 144–5 Love, Heather, 27–8, 36, 40–1, 42, 74, 136 Loy, Mina, 70, 141, 143, 179, n.60, 192, n.81 Mackenzie, Compton, 38; Extraordinary Women, 38 MacPherson, Kenneth, 164 McAlmon, Robert, 164 Mannin, Ethel, 62 Matisse, Henri, 125, 126, 147 Metcalf, Henriette McCrea, 92 ‘middlebrow’, 64, 108–9

206 Index Moore, George, 140 Morrell, Lady Otoline, 139 New Yorker, 65, 121 Nicolson, Harold, 104, 106 Nicolson, Nigel, 97, 182, n.6 pacifism, 6, 8, 9, 168, n.18 Pater, Walter, 27 Pemberton-Billing, Noel, 6–11, 48, 101 Picasso, Pablo, 125–6, 127, 129, 147, 189, n.23, 190, n.26, 191, n.58 Plain Edition, 142 Pope, Alexander, 99 Pound, Ezra, 19, 25, 33, 140, 143, 154, 159, 161–3, 164, 171, n.50, 192, n.80, 194, n.19 psychoanalysis, 13, 54, 76, 80, 85, 166 reader relations, 6, 158, 159 Queen Victoria, 102, 103, 107 ‘queer’, 20–1, 27–8, 29, 71–2, 72, 74, 78, 79–80, 122, 136, 137, 147 Radcliffe College, 122, 129 Reiman, Donald, 24, 26, 158 Sachs, Hans, 166 Sackville-West, Vita, 19, 32, 66, 95–118; Knole and the Sackvilles, 110, 186, n.76; The Land, 109 Sands, Ethel, 139 Sapphism, 6, 18, 19, 63, 66, 83, 95, 97–8, 111, 118, 147, 148, 149 Schaffner, Perdita, 164 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 4–5, 6, 46, 53, 97, 103, 120, 147, 148, 187, n.106; The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 103; The Epistemology of the Closet, 4–5, 6, 53, 97, 147, 148 sexology, 9, 11–14, 15, 31, 40, 50, 54, 57, 59, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 76, 78, 80–1, 82–3, 84, 85–7, 98, 112, 116, 166, 168–9, n.25, 169, n.27, n.32, 174, n.75, 187, n.108 sexual inversion, 11–14, 16, 18, 31, 36–61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71,

74, 78, 82, 85, 86–8, 93, 98, 112, 142, 174, n.75, 176, n.112 Shakespeare and Company, 143 Shaw, George Bernard, 161; Pygmalion, 161 Solano, Solita, 70, 178, n.57 Spencer, Harold, 7 Stein, Gertrude, 4, 16, 17–8, 19, 25, 26, 28, 29–31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 119–51, 154, 159, 163, 164; ‘Ada’, 124–5, 129, 135, 136, 148; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 26, 33, 37, 119–51; ‘Birthplace of Bonnes’, 144; ‘Composition as Explanation’, 139, 192, n.67; Geography and Plays, 124, 144; Lifting Belly, 136; The Long Day Book, 144; The Making of Americans, 140, 141; Melanctha, 33, 126, 149–50, 151; ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, 129; ‘Picasso’, 129; Three Lives, 134, 144, 145, 149–50; Q.E.D., 25, 26, 33, 119, 120, 134–6, 137, 149, 151; ‘Valentine to Sherwood Anderson’, 144 Stonewall, 28, 37, 136 Strachey, Lytton, 139, 190, n.30 stream of consciousness, 32, 122, 129, 130–1 suffrage, 49, 51 Sunday Express, 62–3, 184, n.33 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 155–7, 160, 163; Faustine, 155–8; Itylus, 155–7; Lesbia Brandon, 163 Synthetic Cubism, 126, see also Cubism and Analytic Cubism Toklas, Alice B., 25, 33, 119–51, 164 Trefusis, Violet, 98, 100 Troubridge, Una, 36, 70, 73, 164, 171, n.1, 179, n.59 Vivien, Renée, 30, 65, 138 Warner, Michael, 16, 71–2, 74, 146, 171, n.67 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 27 Weeks, Mabel, 125, 150, 189, n.18

Index West, Rebecca, 62, 65 Wilde, Dolly, 70, 72 Wilde, Oscar, 7, 11, 23, 169, n.25, 181, n.130; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 23, Salomé, 7, 11 Williams, Raymond, 108 women’s rights, 18, 122, 138, 140, 141, 143, see also feminism Wood, Thelma, 1–2, 30, 66, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 92 Woolf, Leonard, 62, 64, 139, 192, n.67

207

Woolf, Virginia, 4, 5–6, 16, 17–18, 26, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 64–5, 66, 67, 95–118, 126, 137, 138, 139–41, 142, 143, 154, 159, 163, 164; Night and Day, 111; Mrs. Dalloway, 28, 32, 96, 111–17, 130, 136, 154; Orlando, 5–6, 19, 26, 28, 32, 37, 65, 95–118, 140, 154; A Room of One’s Own, 118, 140; To the Lighthouse, 130; Three Guineas, 137; The Voyage Out, 111 World War One, 7–10, 38, 49, 122 World War Two, 17, 27, 29,137, 191, n.57