Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 3 - The Goblin Market
(Originally aired 2016/10/29 - listen here)
Sheena had an idea to do a collection of Halloween themed podcasts from all the regular contributors to the Lesbian Talk Show, so I wanted to come up with a special Lesbian Historic Motif episode. It took me a while of brainstorming before I hit on a topic: Christina Rosetti’s poem “The Goblin Market”.
Rosetti was part of a talented family of Italian immigrants to England in the mid 19th century. Her father was a painter, but the more famous painter in the family was her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was one of the founders of the Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood, a movement known for medievalism and sensuality. Another brother and a sister were writers. And Christina’s mother, Frances Polidori, was the sister of John Polidori, a close friend of Lord Byron and the author of what may be the first modern vampire story. (You see, lots of Halloween references.)
The Goblin Market indulges in a number of long flights of description. But before reveling in the beauty of the language, I want to focus specifically on the erotic imagery. So I’ll start by alternating excerpts from the poem with a synopsis of the overall story.
Two sisters, cautious Lizzie and daring Laura, encounter the goblin men who sell mysteriously tempting fruits.
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
There is a long catalog of the fruits they sell, and then we meet the sisters:
Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bow’d her head to hear,
Lizzie veil’d her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger tips.
“Lie close,” Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
Lizzie warns her sister not to take the goblins up on their offered wares and continues on home, but...
Laura stretch’d her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
Definitely a description of someone giving in to temptation! Laura doesn’t have a coin to buy the fruit so instead they demand a lock of her golden hair in payment. Hair had a strong sexual symbolism in the Victorian era, and for a girl to give a man a lock of her hair was practically the next thing to handing him her virginity.
She clipp’d a precious golden lock,
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,
Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flow’d that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She suck’d until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away
Lizzie scolds her when she gets home, and reminds her of the cautionary tale of their friend Jeanie:
Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Pluck’d from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the noonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey;
This is foreshadowing Laura’s fate. Even as she scoffs at Lizzie’s warning, she says:
I ate and ate my fill,
Yet my mouth waters still;
To-morrow night I will
Buy more;” and kiss’d her:
“Have done with sorrow;
I’ll bring you plums to-morrow
Laura describes for Lizzie all the delicious goblin fruits she’ll bring back to share, and then they go to bed together.
Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings,
They lay down in their curtain’d bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipp’d with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars gaz’d in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
Not a bat flapp’d to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Lock’d together in one nest.
The next day they go about their usual chores, but Laura’s mind is elsewhere. And as they walk home in the evening, she listens for the calls of the goblins in vain. Lizzie can still hear the goblins, which day by day drives Laura to distraction.
So crept to bed, and lay
Silent till Lizzie slept;
Then sat up in a passionate yearning,
And gnash’d her teeth for baulk’d desire, and wept
As if her heart would break.
Laura begins to pine and waste away, just like Jeanie did. Her golden hair grows dull and thin, her spirit fades, she has “sunken eyes and faded mouth”. She stops eating and sits listlessly in a corner.
Lizzie watches her sister decline and decides the only option is to go buy goblin fruit to revive her, even though Lizzie is afraid of what price she might pay.
Till Laura dwindling
Seem’d knocking at Death’s door:
Then Lizzie weigh’d no more
Better and worse;
But put a silver penny in her purse,
Kiss’d Laura, cross’d the heath with clumps of furze
At twilight, halted by the brook:
And for the first time in her life
Began to listen and look.
The goblins come to meet her and not only offer her fruit but harass her physically:
Hugg’d her and kiss’d her:
Squeez’d and caress’d her:
Stretch’d up their dishes,
Panniers, and plates:
“Look at our apples
Russet and dun,
Bob at our cherries,
Bite at our peaches,
Lizzie tosses them her silver coin and holds out her apron for the fruit, but the goblins keep urging her to eat them, right there and then. When she steadfastly refuses, they turn nasty. It’s a bit reminiscent of street harassers when rebuffed. And the goblins try to force Lizzie to consume the fruit in a scene that feels a lot like sexual assault.
One call’d her proud,
Cross-grain’d, uncivil;
Their tones wax’d loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbow’d and jostled her,
Claw’d with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking,
Twitch’d her hair out by the roots,
Stamp’d upon her tender feet
Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
Lizzie holds steadfast against this assault and is described as a citadel being unsuccessfully besieged.
One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.
Though the goblins cuff’d and caught her,
Coax’d and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratch’d her, pinch’d her black as ink,
Kick’d and knock’d her,
Maul’d and mock’d her,
Lizzie utter’d not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in:
But laugh’d in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syrupp’d all her face,
And lodg’d in dimples of her chin,
And streak’d her neck which quaked like curd.
Having successfully resisted eating the fruit, Lizzie hurries homeward because, of course, she does have goblin fruit to bring home to Laura--the fruit that the goblins have smeared all over her while trying to make her eat.
She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”
Somewhat belatedly, Laura realizes that Lizzie might end up sharing her fate for trying to save her.
Laura started from her chair,
Flung her arms up in the air,
Clutch’d her hair:
“Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
And then, not from the addictive hunger for goblin fruit, but in gratitude and fear:
She clung about her sister,
Kiss’d and kiss’d and kiss’d her:
Tears once again
Refresh’d her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,
She kiss’d and kiss’d her with a hungry mouth.
Laura kisses Lizzie and in the process consumes the juice of the goblin fruits. But that juice has been transformed by Lizzie’s selfless deed.
Her lips began to scorch,
That juice was wormwood to her tongue,
She loath’d the feast:
Writhing as one possess’d she leap’d and sung,
Rent all her robe, and wrung
Her hands in lamentable haste,
And beat her breast.
The fruit burns within her and Laura falls into a swoon. All through the night, Lizzie tends to Laura as if she were in a fever, but when morning comes:
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laugh’d in the innocent old way,
Hugg’d Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks show’d not one thread of grey,
Her breath was sweet as May
And light danced in her eyes.
The poem ends with Lizzie telling the frightening cautionary tale to the next generation. A tale appropriate for a Halloween night.
Laura would call the little ones
And tell them of her early prime,
Those pleasant days long gone
Of not-returning time:
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat
But poison in the blood;
(Men sell not such in any town):
Would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote:
Thus, the fruit-inspired sensuality has been left behind, as in a fever dream. The sisters have settled down to live conventional lives. What remains is the memory of the deep devotion that risks its life for the beloved.
Despite the rather striking homoerotic imagery in her poem, there is no evidence that Rossetti’s relationships with women went beyond sisterly devotion. On the other hand, she received three proposals of marriage from men and rejected them all so who knows? But my interest here isn’t on Rossetti’s personal life, rather on the strongly sensual imagery in her poem, depicting an intense devotion between two sisters that is expressed in language more suited to lovers.
The Goblin Market’s sensuality--not only the intense kissing and the more subdued scenes of cuddling in bed or “clasping arms and tingling finger tips”--occurs not only in the context of sisterly devotion, but also in scenes where the goblins tempt the women with their sinister fruit, or even try to force it on them. There isn’t a clear correspondence of the sensual with the forbidden.
This was an era when the trope of decadent lesbian sensuality tinged with the supernatural was becoming “a thing”, though primarily among male writers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” is a long supernatural-themed poem with lesbian elements that were strong enough to get it condemned as obscene. The content falls in the “monstrous seductress” genre where the noble maiden Christabel encounters the mysterious Geraldine in the forest and brings her home to her father’s castle where Geraldine has a strange and sinister influence on all she encounters. Christabel shares her bed with Geraldine and the significance of this is emphasized with descriptions of disrobing and embraces.
Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around;
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!
Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs;
Ah! what a stricken look was hers!
Deep from within she seems half-way
To lift some weight with sick assay,
And eyes the maid and seeks delay;
Then suddenly, as one defied,
Collects herself in scorn and pride,
And lay down by the Maiden's side!—
And in her arms the maid she took,
But Geraldine’s eventual goal is not to win Christabel but to supplant her in her father’s affections. The poem shares with the Goblin Market a supernatural force that causes the innocent woman to waste away. But here there is no sister to save her.
The same process of wasting away by the influence of a supernatural intruder who feigns same-sex affection occurs in Sheridan LeFanu’s vampire novel Carmilla. Carmilla appears at the residence of the protagonist in the guise of a young woman, said to be something of an invalid. Despite Carmilla telling little of her background, the two girls become close.
She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, "Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die--die, sweetly die--into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit."
And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.
...
In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling.
...
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever." Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.
Other works from the mid 19th century that carry this association of sensuality between women tinged with a mysterious and malevolent decadence include Honoré de Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes, and Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. All these works have two things in common that contrast with The Goblin Market: they are written by men, and the sensual relationship shown between the women is destructive and a source of guilt rather than being a source of redemption.
Christina Rossetti’s work comes out of an entirely different tradition: that of Romantic Friendship, where close emotional relationships between women were idealized and valorized. Such relationships were not considered to partake of sexuality--though we know that in some cases they did. Within the Romantic Friendship tradition, descriptions of sisters cuddling together in bed or kissing passionately would not have been considered sexual, as such, and so could be portrayed without any sense of self-consciousness or guilt.
The Goblin Market is easily interpreted as an allegory--though an allegory for what is debatable. A Christian interpretation is certainly possible, with its themes of temptation, of a fall, and of redemption through an innocent person’s suffering on behalf of another. It’s also possible to see it as an allegory for drug addiction, and it’s thought that that part of the poem may have been inspired by Rossetti’s work at a charity house for former prostitutes--a context where she may have seen the effects of addiction to drugs or alcohol. Alternately, it can be viewed as an allegory of predatory male sexuality and sexual trauma. It’s worth noting that the goblins are referred to consistently as male and no other male characters figure in the poem.
Given all these considerations, interpreting the sensual imagery and passionate embraces of the poem as depicting lesbian eroticism is not entirely unproblematic. These complexities are always present when modern readers try to find connections with literature from another era.
And now, an entertainment for the night of Halloween, when pathways open up between the worlds, and someone who lingers on the path at twilight may hear goblins calling out, “Come buy, come buy.”
The Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti, published in 1862 and read by Heather Rose Jones
[The text of the poem has not been included in this transcript. It can be found in many places on the web, including the following page belonging to the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market]
Show Notes
This is an analysis and recitation of the poem “The Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, with special attention to its homoerotic themes.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
Links to Heather Online
There's a special Halloween episode of the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast live at the Lesbian Talk Show: a discussion of Christina Rossetti's poem "The Goblin Market" in the context of 19th century literature with themes of lesbian-tinged decadent sensuality and predatory supernatural creatures. The podcast concludes with a reading of the entire poem. I think I'm finally starting to feel ok about listening to the sound of my own recorded voice! One of the things I'd like to do with the podcast is include more readings from some of the texts discussed in the LHMP. So let me know if this is a sort of thing you'd like more of.
Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).
III.A.5 Internalization and Rebellion
Women who loved women in the early to mid-20th century no longer lacked public models for their relationships--the problem was that all the public models they now had were toxic. With the voices of authority insisting that they were deviant, the women who dared to be “lesbian in public” tended to be those who had little to lose, or whose living relied on notoriety: bohemians, courtesans, and the like. And it is these individuals that Faderman considers in the current chapter.
Even those women authors who were known publicly to some degree as lesbian or bisexual often employed the same tropes of aesthetic decadence as male writers. Nathalie Barney, Renée Vivien, Djuna Barnes, and Anaïs Nin fall in this category, writing of intense, desperate, doomed passions. More rarely, writers such as Colette evoke an older romantic sensibility: “What woman would not blush to seek out her amie only for sensual pleasure? In no way is it passion that fosters the devotion of two women, but rather a feeling of kinship.” But her work also employed imagery of a sexual underworld.
The biographies of women like Vita Sackville-West show how the pressure to enter into heterosexual marriages combined with the lack of strongly positive models for relationships between women often led to confusion and self-hatred when the inherent contradictions couldn’t be resolved.
Supportive social circles were most possible within the dense population of urban centers such as New York and London, and the literature produced for internal consumption within these circles, such as Barnes’ Ladies Almanack, reflects a less tragic and more realistic view of lesbian communities. Natalie Barney’s salons in Paris were an open gathering place for a large circle of lesbians, including prominent writers and artists, to the point where the men who attended the salons made snide digs about it in their own writing. And--perhaps fulfilling the fears of contemporary men--her love for women was inextricably linked with her feminism and her support for the careers of women writers.
The lives of less prominent lesbians of this era are harder to trace unless they left some autobiographical record, though Faderman presents a number of speculations on what they must have thought and felt about their desires.
Bella Distributing is holding a "Scary Good Paperback Sales" lasting through this whole weekend. Check it out for some stupendous deals on lesbian genre fiction--including Daughter of Mystery and The Mystic Marriage! If you've been waiting for a great deal to get caught up with the series in paperback in time for the release of Mother of Souls, it won't get any better than this. (If you want a chance to get caught up in e-book...well, you never know.)
And now, on to the movie review.
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This is a series of reviews of lesbian-themed movies originally inspired by a request for recommendations of "good movies involving lesbian romances that don't end up with the protagonists deeply unhappy, dead, or both." To this set of criteria I’ve added the question, “Is the story primarily about coming out?” This set of index questions can involve some spoilers, but I will usually only hide them for new releases.
Many of these movies are not currently in print. I'll link each to their imdb.com entry for reference. But for those currently available, Wolfe Video [https://www.wolfevideo.com] is the go-to distributor for lgbt movies.
I'm going to confess that I've been putting off watching Imagine Me and You (2005) for quite some time because I was afraid of getting punched in the face. Somehow the "meet-cute" premise of a bride falling for the (female) florist at her wedding, combined with the cover image of two m/f couples with the women surreptitiously holding hands behind the men's backs, didn't feel very promising for a f/f happy ending. I expected a lot of angst, a traumatic coming out, and probably the women being tragically separated due to one or the other sacrificing her own happiness for the sake of the other. And despite several people assuring me (in a non-spoilery way) that it wasn't like that, I think there was a gap of a couple years between when I bought this DVD and when I finally watched it.
It wasn't like that.
There was a certain amount of angst--but only as much as one would expect when a newlywed discovers that, although she married her best friend, she hadn't married the love of her life. There was a fair amount of comedic confusion around coming out, but not in the "I'm revealing a secret" sense but more in the "um...why have you assumed I'm heterosexual?" sense. The second man in the cover poster--the groom's best man--starts out as a lecherous sexist boor, but is only moderately annoyingly persistant once he's been clued in to the sexual preference of the woman he's been set up with. Because, you see, the bride's initial reflex to feeling an instand emotional connection with the florist is to invite her over for dinner and then try to set her up with her husband's best friend.
What makes the biggest difference between my expectations (fears) and the movie is that it's set in the 21st century, when sexual preference is considered by the characters of no more moment (and equivalent comedic potential) to being vegetarian or some such. So the angst is all about respecting commitments versus following your heart and admitting to someone you care deeply about that you've made a dreadful mistake. And, in the way of the best romantic comedies, in the end, following your heart leads to a happy ending for everyone.
Evaluation: No one dies. No one recants. Everyone ends up happy (though some teeter on the edge of happy and bewilderment). The bride goes through coming out, but it's not the major focus and isn't traumatic. Once she realizes the nature of her feelings for the florist, the question is how to balance the imperative of True Love with having just made vows to someone else. And her friends and family don't react with shock and horror, only confusion concern.
So if you, too, have worried about whether this movie will punch you in the face, I'll echo what I was told and didn't entirely believe: It doesn't.
Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).
III.A.4 Fiction as a Weapon
The 20th century saw the rise of new genres of fiction that demonized lesbian relationships and inextricably linked them to social structures that had historically nourished women’s friendships, such as single-sex schools. Curiously, it has been revealed in retrospect that many lesbian novels of the 20th century were written by women who were, themselves, lesbian.
The “vampiric” lesbian became established as a trope, joining with the predatory schoolmistress motif in Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women (1915). Although Faderman identifies the central character as a “vampire” it isn’t clear to me from the discussion that this is meant in the sense of literally drinking blook, rather than simply causing a physical decline in her “victim”. Faderman explains “it is not the victim’s blood that the villain lives on but her youth and energy” although in another novel mentioned in this category (White Ladies by Francis Brett Young, 1935) the word vampire is used by a character for describing this psychic effect.
In addition to the lesbian schoolmistress, scholarly and academic women come in for identification as predatory lesbians. Depictions of close, emotional, dependent friendships between women are given a sinister sexual spin in works such as Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death (1927) [Sayers also invokes the “lesbian academic” trope in Gaudy Night but there it is challenged and countered by the character Harriet Vane], G. Sheila Donisthorpe’s Loveliest of Friends 1931), of Edouard Bourdet’s play La Prisonnière (1926). These stories typically involve an older, dominant, often ugly lesbian who seduces a younger, pretty, “normal” woman who may or may not be “rescued” by a male character by the end of the story.
Some anti-lesbian literature of this era purports to present “true case history” type stories, such as D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox (1922) in which the male protagonist considers the breaking up of a female couple to be something of a masculine biological imperative, likened to hunting down prey, with marriage to the more feminine of the two little more than an excuse. Perhaps more pointedly, Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women (1928) satirizes and ficionalizes a real-life circle of upper-class lesbians living on the island of Capri, whose models included Natalie Barney, Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge, Romaine Brooks and, others.
The “mannish lesbian” became a stock figure of genre novels by popular authors such as Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart. And with the rise of the paperback novel, the “lesbian pulp” genre emerged, no longer veiling their characters’ sexuality with allusions, and following a contractually-required plot formula that punished lesbianism with tragedy, loneliness, or death. But out of the pulps, eventually a different type of lesbian literature emerged.
Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).
III.A.3 Keeping Women Down
The rest of these entries are going to get shorter and more condensed as we work though the 20th century.
This chapter details a variety of English and American cultural responses to feminism and to women’s greater independent present in the public sphere in the early parts of the 20th century. Women had entered traditionally masculine professions during the upheavals of World War I and suffrage movements in both England and America pushed for political equality.
Satire and caricature were major tools of the backlash, depicting independent and/or feminist women as agressive, ugly man-haters who are destined to be lonely old maids. Only abandoning their ideals for a traditional role of wife and mother can redeem them. The strongest tool was to depict independent/feminist women as “mannish” and on the road to lesbianism.
The 20th century saw several cycles of increased freedom--often associated with the economic and demographic disruptions of war--followed by social attempts to retrun women to traditional roles by stigmatizing the most assertive movements as unwomanly and deviant. In the 1970s, this tactic intersected with the “Gay Liberation” movement which undermined some of its success.
The Lesbian Talk Show, which hosts my Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast episodes, is doing a holiday special series currently, with special episodes of regular shows and additional episodes that mix and match the regular contributors. I was matched up with Suzie Carr who does a regular postive-thinking series called "Curves Welcome" and we brainstormed the intersection of our two topics and came up with "The Masks We Wear", discussing both phyiscal and psychological masks and costumes and how we use them to interact with others and negotiate our identities in the contemporary world and in history.
You can listen to the show directly online, or even better, you can subscribe to The Lesbian Talk Show through iTunes, Podbean, or Stitcher. (And if you like the show, we'd love it if you give it a rating to help others find it.)
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I apologize for not posting my wrap-up of A Little Princess yesterday. It's being a demanding week--I have an intense investigation at work that is eating up my lunch hours, and the final proofs of Mother of Souls came in for review and took priority over other things in my non-work hours. You'll have to wait until next Wednesday to find out how the story ends!
Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).
III.A.2 The Spread of Medical “Knowledge”
By the 1920s, Freud was the primary source of attitudes in America towards same-sex love. Where Kraft-Ebing had considered sexual orientation to be inborn, Freud blamed childhood trauma and considered homosexuality to be “curable”. Both lumped men’s and women’s experiences together without considering the differences in social context.
Broad surveys showed that romantic and sexual relationships between women were statistically “normal” and not correlated with pathology, but the medical approach now considered all such relationships unhealthy. Freudian language and concepts became part of everyday conversation.
There were stirrings of homosexual activism in Europe, mostly by men, who latched onto the idea that their desires were “inborn” but rejected the idea that those desires were a “defect”. Some popular fiction took up the themes of “no-fault homosexuality”, sometimes urging pity for homosexuals, sometimes rejecting any sort of negative framing. Those medical theories that attributed homosexuality to “nature” rather than “nurture” provided ammunition for those who agitated for acceptance. This position countered the charges that homosexuality constituted immorality.
Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) fell in the “pity and acceptance” category. Its themes of “congenital inversion” and the framing of a same-sex couple as composed of a lesbian and a “normal” partner aligned in some ways with a transgender framing. [This echoes, in some ways, earlier medieval theories that one could determine true gender based on the object of desire. I.e., that anyone who desired a woman was inherently masculine.] There is a long discussion of the themes and implications in Hall’s novel. The Well of Loneliness, despite its publication difficulties, became a significant influence on lesbian self-perception, given the scarcity of other models written by lesbians. (As opposed to the “decadent” male-authored novels.)
There was a strong contrast between the “official” psychological framing of same-sex love and the broad-based case studies of women in such relationships when the selection of examples was not driven by medical or emotional problems. In the 1920s and 1930s, some studies found that 50% of all women had experienced intense emotional feelings for other women, and half of those had recognized those feelings as sexual. Surveys of lesbians that were not biased by physical or psychological problems found them on average to be more educated and better employed than heterosexual women.
The 1920s and later decades brought a general increase in sexual freedom (outside marriage). Self-reporting by lesbians concerning their relationships show a wide range of degrees of sexual interest, although the popular view assumed that sexual activity was the primary defining factor in their relationships. Jumping ahead to a 1978 survey, it found that women in lesbian relationships valued romance, affection, hugging, and kissing, and didn’t consider “sex acts” as the focal point of their relationship. [One wonders, given this description, what would distinguish these relationships from Romantic Friendship in terms of desires and behaviors.]
Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).
III.A.1 The Last Breath of Innocence
As this book moves into the 20th century, I’m largely omitting tags for specific individuals and publications, as this is outside the scope of my core project.
In the first decade of the 20th century, love poetry between schoolgirls could still be published “innocently” as an expression of praiseworthy sentiments. Periodicals for women’s and children’s literature were still depicting Romantic Friendship positively. Likely there were several reasons for the delayed shift in attitudes in in the US. In Europe, images of lesbian “vice” (or “vice” in general) were closely tied up in Catholic ideas of sin and Catholic-based reactionary sensationalism. [But see also English literature of the 17-18th centuries which portrayed lesbianism through an anti-Catholic lens.] The geographic distance of America from the (German) centers of sexology probably slowed diffusion of those ideas. And American ideals of individualism may have contributed to less hostility to women’s social freedoms.
In spite of this, there are scattered examples in late 19th century America of generally anti-sex writing, including cautions against situations that might lead to masturbation or sexual activity between girls. But as a more general social reaction, suspicion of close romantic friendships between women didn’t come to prominence until the wake of World War I, accompanied by much greater female autonomy and the influence of Freud both on psychiatric thought and on popular culture.
The transition from “innocence” to suspicion of passionate friendships can be traced fairly precisely in published works. In the 1928 novel We Sing Diana by Wanda Fraiken Neff, the protagonist contrasts her experiences at college in 1913, when “crushes” between girls were widespread and considered normal, and the 1920s when she returns there to teach and finds everyone talking about Freud and assuming the stereotype of the “masculine” lesbian. A similar comparison can be made between two autobiographical publications by Mary MacLane, written in 1902 and 1917 that show the same shift. From these examples, it can be seen that the change was not in what women were feeling and doing, but in how they had been taught to understand those feelings and actions. In the later publication, MacLane admits to having kissed lesbians but is quick to assure the reader that she isn’t one herself.
In the first decade of the 20th century, the New Women were engaging in new opportunities while still holding on to old attitudes toward Romantic Friendship. Stories about college romances between women are common, and the gender-segregation of colleges encouraged these friendships to have the trappings of courtship and dating, via activities such as all-women dances. The expectation is that the women engaged in these “crushes” will move on to heterosexual marriage after graduation.
The unselfconscious publication of stories involving women in passionate friendships may have been enabled, Faderman suggests, by the relative “unsophistication” of American readers. (I.e., presumably this means they weren’t reading decadent French novels.) Many specific examples of such stories are given. [I wonder if anyone has ever considered collecting an anthology of the genre.]
Stories of passionate friendships between adult women often portrayed one or both as artists or in professions that “explained” their single state. These positive portrayals were written by both female and male authors.
By the 1920s, this unselfconsciousness disappears. Positive treatments as in the works of Gertrude Stein are now veiled in stylized poetic language and allusions. Alternately, the women’s friendship may be displaced elsewhere in time and space, as in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play “The Lamp and the Bell” (1921). [This is an interesting parallel to the continuing theme over the centuries that lesbianism existed in a different place and time than the writer’s. Only now it is the “innocent” version of the relationship that is displaced.] There is something of a generational divide, with women raised in an earlier age still writing positively of Romantic Friendships.
The younger generation cannot ignore the potential implications. Vera Britain, writing in 1940, acknowledges the suspicions of sexual impropriety cast on the Romantic Friendship of her characters and tries to deflect suspicion with the argument of “it’s just preparation for being a good wife and mother.” This conflict of models can also be seen in debates of the possible sexual content of the friendship between Eleanor Rooseveldt and Lorena Hickok. Hickok had a history of (presumably sexual) relationships with women, but some have argued that the strongly passionate correspondence between them belongs to the earlier tradition of platonic Romantic Friendship and nothing more. [I always have a hard time around discussions of this sort because I keep thinking, why should it matter? Why would one particular set of expressions of desire turn a “beautiful friendship” into something to be ashamed of? But then, I’m a product of my own age.]
The attitude of sexologists of the 20th century was that the sex drive was the most important and central determiner of human behavior in both men and women, and this understanding was then projected retroactively to all of history. This made it difficult for women to experience love for other women without feeling the weight of social disapproval, although anecdotes can be found into the 1970s of girls experiencing same-sex love and affection “innocently” until encountering sex ed literature that assured them they were depraved and sick.
The events and concerns in Daughter of Mystery were very parochial. We heard about secondary and tertiary effects of the French Wars (i.e., Napoleon) but ordinary people's everyday lives didn't concern themselves much with international affairs. When I brought in the character of Kreiser, the Austrian agent, in The Mystic Marriage, I started digging a lot deeper into what was going on elsewhere in Europe. What was his political context? Who might he be working for or against? I was already laying the seeds for the mystical peril that forms one of the major plot strands in Mother of Souls and I needed to know who was doing what, and when and where and why. Barbara likes to think of herself as fairly politically savvy for internal Alpennian affairs, but once she started playing games of intrigue with Kreiser, she needed to scramble to keep up.
Judging by feedback, readers aren't quite sure what to make of Kreiser. Is he a villain? Antuniet certainly thinks so. Is he simply an entertaining antagonist? Barbara treats him as such. And Serafina's interactions with him will be more complex. What's his angle? Why is he spending so much time hanging around in Rotenek? And when he taunts Barbara into intellectual skirmishes with him, is it purely for amusement or is there something he hopes she can provide to further his aims? If the reader isn't entirely certain at this point, that's pretty much what I intend.
During the summer of 1824, when Barbara is making the usual circuit and survey of her properties, she has an appointment to meet up with Kreiser in Saveze, as he returns over the border from Switzerland. They fence with each other, trying to determine how much trust to offer in pursuing a mutual goal. Or are they both pursuing the same goal at all?
* * *
Chapter 16 - Barbara
“It had been suggested back at the Congress of Verona,” Kreiser continued, ignoring her stumble, “that a larger, more balanced force should intervene in Spain. Moving across the mountains here and then by ship. But…”
“But they couldn’t get through,” Barbara finished for him. “They would have been stopped before the pass. But wasn’t the mystery already in place by then?”
Kreiser waved aside the objection. “By the time anyone gets to talking, the moves and counter-moves have already been made. Someone wanted to prevent that army from traveling to Spain. And even leaving behind artillery,” he continued, “by the time they could march through under those conditions, the battle would have been decided. The debates were a meaningless show. The army never moved and France had a free hand in Spanish affairs.”
“So you think it’s France?”
Kreiser’s sidelong glance was both amused and suspicious. “Do you?” He leaned back in his chair and seemed to be enjoying himself greatly. “If it were only that simple! I suspect everyone. There were some who signed to the accords who were quite happy to have had the matter taken out of their hands. Within my own government there are forces who have moved in the past to pre-empt the ministers’ decisions. And there are companies of thaumaturgists on every side. Not all have the power to work something of this sort, but the ones who do are rarely those who boast that they could.”
For a brief moment, all masks seemed to drop away and Kreiser looked more tired than Barbara had ever seen before.
“There’s a good reason why my activities in Alpennia have not fallen under the most official channels,” he said. “And why my public mission has been cloaked in playing at marital intrigues.”
If it were a ploy for sympathy, it fell short. Kreiser’s “playing” had left bodies in its wake the year before, and it was only good fortune that none of them had been people she cared for. But she could believe it had been nothing more than misdirection, for it had come to nothing in the end.
Barbara was no longer certain how much of Kreiser’s tale was belated honesty and how much was still part of that game. If he could pretend to bluntness, so could she. “Why Alpennia? Why me? Why haven’t you brought this directly to Princess Anna’s ministers or to your own ambassador? Why quiz me like a catechism rather than stating what you need outright?”
Kreiser exhaled, halfway between a sigh and a grunt. “Alpennia is at the heart of it, I’m certain. Not in the way my superiors think, but they wouldn’t take my word for that, and—” He leaned forward in a move that might still be playacting. “—I don’t trust them any more than I trust you or the Russians or the French, though perhaps more than I trust the English. I have been tasked with determining whether we’re dealing with external enemies or with hidden forces within the Empire itself. If this is the work of foreign thaumaturgists, I am to cripple them as best I can. And that is where I hope to have your support.” His gesture took in the entirety of Alpennia. “No one in Vienna has the power to work at this distance, and we don’t have anyone with the right talent in place in Paris. The Russians don’t do this type of work. The English won’t even admit to having thaumaturgists. The last thing I want is to get tangled up with the disaster that is Rome. You have the mystical traditions and people with the skills to help carry it off, as well as the will to do so. I can’t be seen to be working directly with your government, but no one will notice my dealings with you.”
Yes, Barbara thought. She had played at cat-and-mouse with him over most of his false distractions. No one would find anything suspicious in their continued entanglements.
“And if it turns out to be agents within Austria itself?” she asked.
Kreiser’s face settled into grimmer lines. “Then it’s possible I will be a dead man as soon as I make my report.”
Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).
II.B.4 Lesbian Evil
Ordinarily, my Project will skim over content from the 20th century. I'm going to continue covering the entirety of this book because the through-line of the argument is important. But the 20th century material will include fewer tags and more high-level summaries of the content.
The theme of evil predatory lesbians was taken up by others from the French aesthetic writers, but stripped of any hint of sympathy. In these works, the lesbian aspect may be concealed in vague ambiguity while still retaining sexual overtones. Coleridge’s poem “Christabel” (published unfinished in 1816) was declared obscene for these overtones, but although modern readers tend to see clear lesbian themes, some contemporary reviewers assumed that the antagonist was meant to be a man in disguise, and thus that the obscene content was the seduction of Christabel’s father by the antagonist, rather than the seduction of Christabel herself. [The ambiguity allows for this and speaks to one of Faderman's themes: that there are shifts over time in what sorts of sexual possibilities can be imagined, given the same external evidence.]
Most “evil lesbian” works appeared later in the 19th century and were clearly influenced by the aesthetic writers. Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife (1891) is given as a typical example. The point of view character comments on the French casual acceptance of lesbianism compared to the greater concern showed by Germans. In the story, A young married woman refuses to have sexual relations with her her husband (the protagonist) because she is sexually enthralled by a passionate friendship with a woman she’s been involved with since their school days. The narrator resolves this problem by killing his wife’s female lover, but the wife dies of a brain fever cause by excessive sexual activity.
Faderman notes that “in France, innocence regarding love between women was virtually at an end by this time” though such “innocence” persisted in England and the America for a while yet. [The cyclic nature of “innocence” regarding the possibility of sexual relations between women is not noticed. French texts of the 16-17th century were quite aware of those possibilities.] Belot’s position was that schoolgirl romances led inevitably to lesbianism, while writers in America contemporary to him were still praising school friendships as a noble ideal. This attitude persisted among some American writers as late as the 1920s.
Belot’s novel provides archetypes of the decadent “lesbian love-nest”, with its black and crimson decor, draperies that shut out the light, and bookshelves stocked with well-known lesbian-themed novels. Although Belot claimed his writing to have a moral purpose--to bring this danger out into the open and to attack the very concept of Romantic Friendship--it’s clear that his work was driven by fascination and hatred and the desire for sensationalism. Belot’s protagonist describes lesbianism as a “new vice” [a claim made repeatedly over the centuries, though Faderman seems unaware of this cyclicity] that must be countered by “a man strong enough or with enough authority” to rescue the innocent partner from the lesbian’s clutches.
The term “vice” was generally popular in sensational literature of all types in this era in France, but the specific association of lesbians with vice and evil appears regularly in French literature for the next several decades. It is speculated that one motivation for the focus on lesbianism was the falling French birthrate and anxiety about the French population being overwhelmed by foreigners.
Another regular theme in French literature of the 1880s and 1890s that uses lesbian motifs is the association of lesbians with prostitution. Faderman suggests that this might be grounded in the exposure of the (male) writers to real-life lesbian relations primarily in the context of the demi-monde, where prostitutes turned to other women as an escape from the brutality of their professional interactions with men. This demi-monde shows up in novels such as Zola’s Nana (1880). Yet another trope popular at this time is the idea of organized “cults” of lesbians, such as are seen in Guy de Maupassant’s “Paul’s Mistress” (1881), but where the practices of these supposed cults are clearly drawn from male-authored lesbian literature itself. [Compare also the accusations of organized cults of lesbians in late 18th century France, such as the Anandrine Sect.] One feature of these literary lesbians is that only the “active” partner is considered a true lesbian--and is portrayed as masculine in nature and physically ugly--but they are mysteriously attractive to “normal” women. The title character of “Paul’s Mistress” commits suicide when his lover deserts him for one of these groups of lesbians, and as he is drowning his last vision is of his mistress in the arms of a woman “as though she had found a refuge in a closer and more certain affection, more familiar and more confiding.” This description is quite similar to those found in positive portrayals of Romantic Friends but here the context turns it sinister.
If the violence, jealousies, and disfunctionality of lesbian relationships in such literature was, indeed, drawn from observations of the demi-monde, then the same conclusions about evil and vice could also be made about the heterosexual relations in that part of society, but there was no similar movement among sensational authors to treat those as universal, just as there was little recognition among psychiatrists that the disfunctions they saw among their lesbian patients were found equally among heterosexual patients.
The middle and upper-class lesbians of late 19th century France such as Rosa Bonheur and Nathalie Micas lived lives that had no resemblance at all to the lesbians in sensational literature, but their type of lives weren’t reflected in the fiction of the time.
Accusations of lesbianism became a weapon for misogynists who saw any personal rejection by a woman as evidence for that woman’s sexual proclivities. August Strindberg’s A Madman’s Manifesto (1887) was basically a screed against his first wife’s feminist tendencies and desire to continue her professional activity, couched in over-the-top accusations of sexual activity with a wide variety of women in all manner of circumstances--activity that Strindberg claimed to have personally witnessed by spying on his wife over several years. Although his wife acknowledged having close passionate friendships with women, she didn’t consider them problematic and described them using the traditional language of Romantic Friendship.
The motif of the evil lesbian appears outside France in examples like Sheridan LeFanu’s vampire story “Carmilla” (1872), which uses a subtle parody of romantic friendship themes, interspersed with the tropes of French sensational novels. Some modern critics question whether LeFanu understood that his story was referencing lesbianism in particular (though from a modern viewpoint the equation appears obvious). Another non-French writer who inserted sinister themes into a story of passionate friendship is George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886). The monstrosity of the lesbian character is symbolized by physical deformity, as well as being expressed in general antipathy toward men and love for women. Her orientation is explained as being congenital, caused by her mother’s hatred for sexual activity with her father. In contrast to positive or neutral depictions of passionate friendship, her beloved is shown as being uncomfortable with her expressions of love, and this anxiety is depicted as normal and expected. The protagonist eventually accepts being rebuffed and goes into a convent. The sentiments she expresses would have been unremarkable and framed positively in other works of the same era that still took a positive approach toward women’s friendships.
In America, anxiety about love between women starts appearing occasionally in the 1890s at a time when translations of the French decadent writers begin appearing. Doctors begin repeating second and third-hand accounts of lesbian orgies, whose details are modeled after the decadent writers. The sensationalized murder in 1892 of Freda Ward by her female lover “to make it sure that no one else could get her” was treated as proof that the sexologists were right about the inherent pathology of lesbianism. In 1893 an American doctor could write about how “morbid sexual love” between women started among schoolgirls. But it took a while for these ideas to dominate the discourse. In real life, 19th century America had a tradition of being accepting of cross-dressing and passing women, even when overtly connected with feminist sentiments. But in the 1890s Romantic Friendships began to be framed in fiction as morbid, connecting lesbianism with murder and portraying lesbian villains as assertive, feminist, intellectual and sophisticated. Yet at the same time, novels such as Diana Victrix (1897) could still present female romantic partnerships in a neutral or positive light.