The Outside Thing, by Hannah Roche (introduction)

INTRODUCTION Locating the Lesbian Writer, or “We Inside Us Do Not Change”

This book examines the relationship between romance and “the outside” in the works and lives of three “lesbian writers.”

This book examines the relationship between romance and “the outside” in the works and lives of three lesbian writers.

I

n her lecture on “Portraits and Repetition” (1934), Gertrude Stein insisted that “expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”1 The insistence or changing emphasis in my almost-­repetitive epigraph serves to foreground a problem that has proven decidedly knottier and more prone to circularity than the most challenging of Stein’s claims. The Outside Thing, which began as an investigation into themes of distancing and dislocation in the lives and fictions of lesbian women writing in the first half of the twentieth century, is about lesbian writers and “the outside.” “The outside” remains in quotation marks throughout this book because “the outside” remains a mysterious and multifarious quantity: it is located, in the coming six chapters, in discussions of sexuality, nationality and expatriation, and literary genre. But lesbian writers are not “the outside”: they do not belong in scare quotes.

2 Introduction

“Who hasn’t had a problem with lesbian definitions?” asks Jodie Medd in the introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature (2015).2 Although recent work has shifted focus away from “the lesbian” as identity category and toward more fruitful discussions of lesbian historiography, lesbian desire, and lesbian feeling, the question of how to handle the slippery “lesbian” signifier continues to pose difficulties. It would be odd—­queer, perhaps—­for any post-­1990s study of female homosexuality to begin without either an acknowledgment of the limitations of certain signs or an attempt to defend and expand their value and applicability. To quote from the introductions to three of the most significant works from the past two decades: for Ann Cvetkovich, “the category lesbian occupies a range of meanings and can be more and less foregrounded within individual cases”; Jodie Medd’s “qualification (or equivocation)—­ the suggestion of lesbianism—­is intended to keep the term unstable while emphasizing questions of representation and interpretation”; and Susan Lanser “prefers ‘sapphic’ to ‘lesbian’ to designate discourses, representations, and social phenomena that inscribe preferential desires, behaviors, and affiliations.”3 Paradoxically, the very instability of “lesbian” has allowed it to act as anchor for Cvetkovich and Medd, while Lanser has been troubled by the “identitarian canopy” that “lesbian” might continue to evoke.4 Yet in spite of Lanser’s favoring of “sapphic,” all three of these projects have taken important steps toward both untethering “the lesbian” from identity and highlighting the ongoing need for, and elasticity of, specific labels in queer times.

More recently still, Valerie Traub has drawn attention to the epistemological importance of “the lesbian” not merely as subject but as sign. Setting aside the issue of identity’s “strong gravitational pull,” Traub has proposed new ways of “think[ing] ‘the lesbian’ not in terms of identity or subjectivity, but in terms of historiographic method and the practice of theorizing it.”5 Traub’s chapter on “The Sign of the Lesbian” in her Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015) asks “what it would mean to take ‘the sign of the lesbian’ not as a de facto sign of identity but as a sign of a historiographic problem” (276), ultimately reclaiming and repurposing “the lesbian” as a “useful category of theoretical analysis” (293) in history-­ versus-­theory and queer-­versus-­lesbian debates. While Traub’s work cannot resolve the problem of definition—­on the contrary, definition-­as-­ problem and “unmanageable contradictions” (291) are its driving

Introduction 3

force—­Thinking Sex nonetheless marks the beginning of “a new paradigm for lesbian history” (84) and for lesbian scholarship. In her endeavor to “lesbianize queer theory” (273), Traub succeeds in reinvigorating the “embarrassing” (281–­82) field of lesbian studies and in demonstrating the significance of “the lesbian” as both resource for sexual knowledge production and site of resistance to knowing.

But lesbian writers, I have claimed, do not belong in scare quotes. Medd has rightly observed that “lesbian’s definitional instability can prompt a desire to surround the term in perpetual quotation marks, simultaneously protecting and exposing its vulnerabilities.”6 Quotation marks and italics clearly serve as aids or buffers for those who are hesitant about making (what they fear to be) potentially misleading claims: as both noun and adjective, “lesbian” or lesbian indicates an anxiety about falsely categorizing subjects. But if we are to acknowledge that “lesbian” is unstable—­ indeed, that the sign is valuable in its instability—­and that it can no longer be said to point solely to identity, then the use of quotation marks in “lesbian writer” or “lesbian” writer is unnecessary. Traub’s quotation marks function differently and usefully, as reminders of the space between signifier and signified, but quotation marks otherwise place the lesbian, and lesbian writing, beyond the reaches of knowability: trapped within scare quotes, the lesbian can only remain apparitional, invisible, or mythically mannish.7 The ongoing problem of lesbian signification and categorization was the subject of rich debate at two recent conferences. Queer Modernism(s) II: Intersectional Identities (2018) featured two panels and a roundtable discussion on “Lesbian Modernism,” while delegates at 90 Years Since “The Well of Loneliness”: A Radclyffe Hall Symposium (2018) considered all that would be lost in defining Radclyffe Hall not as lesbian but as queer.8 If the advent of queer theory in 1990 marked a retreat from “the lesbian,” then scholars have begun to take important steps—­ not to retrace steps—­in her direction. In 2013 Traub included the question of “whether the moment of queer theory is over” on her list of “hot topics” in contemporary queer studies.9 I do not reject or ignore either queer or queer theory here, but nor do I argue in favor of essentialism: my argument is not that the essential lesbian exists but rather that lesbian remains essential.

In any case, queer and lesbian are not mutually exclusive: as Sharon Marcus has argued, “While queer foregrounds the belief that sexual identity

4 Introduction

is flexible and unstable, gay and lesbian do not assert the contrary.”10 In the introduction to a collection of essays on Sapphic Modernities (2006), editors Laura Doan and Jane Garrity argue that “sapphism is a useful term in that it distances us from the more rigid contemporary categories of identity, such as butch or femme.”11 Lanser favors sapphic over lesbian “for its very vagueness, for its emergence but not overdetermination in the eighteenth century, and for its relative disappearance from contemporary use.”12 I value lesbian for the very reasons that others have rejected it: lesbian is in contemporary use, its distinction from romantic friendship is clear, and it has long provided women-loving-women not simply with a means of self-­k nowledge and self-­identification but with strength, solidarity, and a sense of community.

In the polemical introduction to The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), Terry Castle quotes lesbian playwright Holly Hughes: “There is something about the experience of being an outsider that’s embedded in the word [queer]” (13).13 As a book about “outside” lesbian spaces, The Outside Thing naturally makes use of queer. But while I cannot share the cultural perspective of Gloria Anzaldúa, who claimed in 1990 that “there are no lesbian writers” and for whom “the term lesbian es un problema,” I fully agree with her view that “queer is used [by white middle-­class lesbian theorists in the academy] as a false unifying umbrella which all ‘queers’ of all races, ethnicities and classes are shoved under.”14 Anzaldúa might have included “genders” on her list: Lanser has rightly pointed out that “projects using queer, homosexual, or sexuality as their banner often focus more heavily on men” (5). Contrary to Anzaldúa’s argument, Madhavi Menon’s Indifference to Difference (2015) makes a bold case for “queer universalism,” observing that “a craze for identity flies in the face of how we actually live” and that an acceptance of how queer “refuses the predeterminable cohesion of identity” places us “in the domain of the universal.”15 With a focus on how we actually read, this book attests to the value of labels in literary criticism, tracing dialogue between different forms of both queer and normative writing while investigating the gains to be made by approaching lesbian writing as a form or category in itself.

My fifth and sixth chapters, in which I introduce the possibility of bisexual writing, demonstrate the necessity for a critical vocabulary that acknowledges the many differences too often forced or “shoved” under the queer umbrella. Significantly, Jana Funke’s keynote lecture at Queer

Introduction 5

Modernism(s) II imagined queer ways of reading heterosexual moments in modernism, at once broadening queer and threatening to call its fundamental otherness into question. The continued expansion of queer as signifier might hint toward the possibility of “queer universalism,” but it also encourages a return to more specific designations or categorizations, as is indicated by the ever-­growing LGBTQ+ acronym.

T H E H ISTORICA L L ESBIA N IN QUEER T I MES

The problem of how to write the queer past—­or, to paraphrase Heather Love, of how to feel backward—­continues to drive scholarship on queer and lesbian lives and loves. Love’s Feeling Backward (2007), which centers on late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century histories and texts, argues that the effort to recapture the past is “doomed from the start. To reconstruct the past, we build on ruins; to bring it to life, we chase after the fugitive dead.”16 In the preface to Disturbing Practices (2013), Laura Doan expresses a sense of regret about having “believed I knew more about female sexuality in the 1920s than the individuals I was researching.”17 Doan goes on to draw readers’ attention to “the vexing problem [facing historians and historicists] of using identity labels to describe sexual subjects in the past” (6). As a lesbian woman in 2018, working on closeted or censored lesbian texts written as early as 1903, I am routinely reminded to check my cultural privilege. I am not laying claim to a greater knowledge of female homosexuality than Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, or Djuna Barnes. Judith M. Bennett has suggested the use of “lesbian-­like” to signify love between women in the distant past, while Traub has intervened in ongoing debates around queer temporality and teleology with her detection of “circles of salience” that disrupt continuity by enabling us to consider “forms of intelligibility whose meanings recur, intermittently and with a difference, across time.”18 In this study of twentieth-­century writers and texts, I am working with Stein’s assumption that, despite an ever-­evolving social, political, and cultural landscape, “we inside us do not change”: The composition we live in changes but essentially what happens does not change. We inside us do not change but our emphasis and the

6 Introduction

moment in which we live changes. That is it is never the same moment it is never the same emphasis at any successive moment of existing. Then really what is repetition.19

In a review of Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) for the Nation and Athenaeum in August 1928, Leonard Woolf described Stephen Gordon as a character who “is born a Sapphic or Lesbian, a woman who falls in love with and is physically attracted, not by men, but by women.”20 In its straightforward definition of the “Lesbian” as a woman desiring women, Woolf ’s review usefully demonstrates how lesbianism in 1928 could be understood as distinct from gender difference, as different desire rather than a different sex or mode of dress. Desire has not changed. Stein’s private correspondence with Alice B. Toklas, which I discuss in chapter 2, indicates that expressions of desire and sexual practices have not changed.

Barnes’s claim that “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 had born a child” describes views that should be consigned to history, but the language and anger of Barnes’s response suggest that the gap between the present and the first half of the twentieth century may be narrower than we often think.21 “We inside us do not change but our emphasis and the moment in which we live changes.” Elizabeth Freeman’s “erotohistoriography” (2010), which “admits that contact with historical materials can be precipitated by particular bodily dispositions, even pleasurable ones, that are themselves a form of understanding,” helps us to recognize our proximity to the erotic pleasures of the past.22 More recently, in an essay on “The Queer Time of Lesbian Literature” (2015), Carla Freccero has described a queer “anachronistic desire” that “reads history for the pleasures of identification and desire rather than for the more sober and serious answers to questions such as ‘what really happened.’ ”23 However, as in Freeman’s work, research toward this book has uncovered desire, affectivity, and, to quote Cvetkovich, an “archive of feelings” that are remarkably similar to our own. The (hi)story told by The Well of Loneliness may be famously “sober and serious,” but to claim that the private lesbian lives of Stein or Hall were marked by loneliness, struggle, or oppression would amount to a refusal to acknowledge “what really happened.”

Bennett has observed that “even recent lesbian history is dominated by women who were wealthier, better educated, more powerful, and more

Introduction 7

articulate than most.”24 Djuna Barnes knew what it was to face financial hardship, but there is no denying the wealth, social standing, and worrying conservatism of two of the three white women in this study. It is significant and troubling that all three writers here have been accused of fascism.25 The racist tendencies of Stein and Hall are apparent in letters to their lovers, as examined in chapters 2 and 4. Ultimately, these women are not “history’s losers,” as Love describes queer figures from the past; nor can they fulfil Bennett’s wish “to know about the actual practices and lives of ordinary women.”26 Barbara Will is right to claim that we “want our good writers to have good politics,” but Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus are also right that “literary criticism alone is not sufficient to effect change.”27 Any work dealing with reactionary politics of the past must acknowledge both its subjects’ flaws and its own limitations. This book does not claim to present “ordinary” experience, but it does focus on the often surprising ordinariness of both its privileged lesbian lives and experimental lesbian texts.

L ESBIAN N ORMATIV I T Y ?

Of course, the women in this study lived and wrote at a time when understandings of lesbianism had been shaped by sexology: theories of sexual inversion had married homosexuality to gender difference. Radclyffe Hall was a self-­diagnosed congenital invert and, as such, considered herself a rarity: “We inverts are about 20 per 1000,” she wrote to her lover, Evguenia Souline, in 1934.28 In the twelfth edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (1903), Richard von Krafft-­Ebing had claimed that “careful observation among the ladies of large cities soon convinces one that homosexuality is by no means a rarity. Uranism [homosexuality] may nearly always be suspected in females wearing their hair short, or who dress in the fashion of men, or pursue the sports and pastimes of their male acquaintances. . . . ​At times smoking and drinking are cultivated even with passion.”29 Stephen Gordon, the heroine of The Well of Loneliness, adheres to Krafft-­Ebing’s description of the female sexual invert as possessing a “masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom” and finding “pleasure in the pursuit of manly sports, and in manifestations of courage and bravado.”30 In the wake of the prizewinning success of her “clever novel,” Adam’s Breed

8 Introduction

(1926), which I discuss in chapter 3, Hall’s own masculine habits and appearance were attracting attention across the world. Photographs of Hall in dinner jacket and cravat, cigarette in hand, appeared in newspapers and magazines from the Parisian Minirva (“Voici un tout récent modèle de smoking féminin. Il est porté par miss Radclyffe Hall”) to the Houston Chronicle (“You are wrong—­it’s not a man”).31 Jay Prosser is right to read congenital inversion and The Well as “key to the emergence of the transsexual.”32 It goes without saying, however, that to categorize Stephen as transsexual or transgender is not to define her sexuality, and we cannot claim with confidence that Stephen would identify today as a heterosexual trans man. Like Hall or “John” herself, Hall’s most famous protagonist—­who was constructed with the most useful sexological tools, representational strategies, and markers of difference available—­is “she” and “her.”

Sexologists did make use of Lesbian as a signifier denoting sexual relations between women. But Krafft-­Ebing’s short section on “Lesbian love” (607–­11) as a “vice” acquired in prisons—­“ hot-­beds of Lesbian love” (608)—­or in prostitution, occurring when “unfortunate creatures” have been subjected to “disgusting and perverse” sexual acts by men (608), does not apply here. Havelock Ellis, who provided the “commentary” to The Well, distinguishes between sexual attraction among persons of the same sex and the “comparatively rare phenomenon” of congenital sexual inversion.33 “Lesbianism,” in Sexual Inversion (1897) as in Psychopathia Sexualis, features in discussions of prisons and prostitutes, though a note from “a friend” to Ellis includes the admission that “I do not personally know of a single prostitute who is exclusively Lesbian” (101). Krafft-­Ebing reports the case of a prostitute “who, while intoxicated, tried to force another to Lesbian love. The latter became so enraged that she denounced the indecent woman to the police” (608). Is it any wonder that Hall and privileged others chose to identify with sexology’s congenital invert rather than the behavior of the corrupt, abused, or abusive “Lesbian lover,” a woman with an unstable sexual identity who was disposed to intense jealousy, coercion, and even “beatings”?34 At a time when medical science had not yet established firm boundaries between sexuality and gender, how could women like Hall, who had always been attracted to the same sex, be certain that they were (or were not) congenital inverts? Although Hall remains famed for her masculine sartorial style, a number of accounts testify to her femininity. “Brains and Domesticity” was the heading of a short

Introduction 9

article in New Zealand’s Auckland Star on February 12, 1928, in which Hall was celebrated as an “outstanding example” of a writer who “prove[s] beyond cavil that good house-­keeping goes naturally with good brains: . . . ​ culinary genius is the feminine writer’s special domestic gift.” Another New Zealand newspaper printed an interview in which Hall revealed that “Lady Troubridge sees to the food. . . . ​My province is the house itself. I am a fussy housekeeper with a perfect mania for cleanliness.”35 Housekeeping aside, a reporter for Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine recalled a memorable evening spent with the “distinctly feminine” Hall: Let me try to give a sketch of Radclyffe Hall’s unique and most attractive appearance. Her fair hair is cut very short and brushed severely back—­ Eton crop. Her costume consisted of a black velvet jacket, cut like a man’s smoking jacket, a white pleated shirt, a stiff white collar, black satin stock embellished with a stunning emerald pin. A short narrow tailored skirt. Sounds mannish, doesn’t it? And yet the curious thing is that her personality is distinctly feminine.36

Unlike Stephen, then, Hall may not have possessed a “masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom.” Doan has established that “in the decade prior to the publication of [The Well], and even for a short time after, boyish or mannish garb for women did not register any one stable spectatorial effect.”37 An article on “Feminist Fashions” printed in the Devon and Exeter Gazette on July 20, 1927, presents masculine dress as a marker of class, reporting that “all the smartest ladies nowadays, particularly if they belong to the intellectual or feminist group, are wearing men’s dinner jackets for evening occasions.” Though Hall was frequently named as “one of the pioneers of the dinner jacket mode for women,” her masculine style was not immediately interpreted as a symbol of her sexuality. Krafft-­Ebing’s earlier claim that homosexuality “may nearly always be suspected” in cross-­ dressing women did not hold true for those “smart” women who adopted Hall’s style.38 While I return to a discussion of ­masculinity as representational strategy for lesbian women at various points in this book, I nonetheless read sartorial and stylistic mannishness as separate from sexual identity. Clothing is merely “the outside,” or public representation; in Love’s words, “social life happens out there, psychic life, somewhere inside.”39

R

10 Introduction

All three writers here, to some degree, criticized or challenged heteronormative convention via fictional portrayals of unhappy or unsuccessful marriages. Gertrude Stein quotes sculptor Janet Scudder on marriage in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937): Janet Scudder always says how is it possible that a couple a husband and wife can be good for anything. It is hard to find one person in this world both useful and pleasant but what chance is there that one person could marry another person useful and pleasant. Better give it up, says Janet. 40

But elsewhere in her work, and in her private correspondence with Alice B. Toklas, which I discuss in chapter 2, Stein did not condemn marriage; instead, she playfully made the roles of “hubby” and “wifey” both useful and pleasant for a lesbian relationship and for her own creative process. Together, Stein and her “blessed baby wifey” made writing, or “babies.” 41 It is significant that Radclyffe Hall similarly played the part of a protective husband to her lover, Evguenia Souline, describing her work as their “child”: having written the third chapter of “Emblem Hurlstone,” Hall informed Souline that “our child has at last cut its 3rd tooth.” 42 For both Stein and Hall, to produce was to reproduce, and literary creation was equal to procreation.43 Crucially, however, neither writer straightforwardly imitated or attempted to reproduce heterosexual structures or traditions.

Marriage and family were removed from heteronormativity and remade as lesbian. Djuna Barnes, in Ladies Almanack, goes one step further by gifting the following dialogue to Tilly-­Tweed-­In-­Blood and Lady Buck-­and-­Balk, caricatural incarnations of Hall and her partner Una, Lady Troubridge: 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? Nothing! Should she not be brought to Task, that never once through her gloomy Weather have two dear Doves been seen approaching in their bridal Laces, to pace, in stately Splendor up the Altar Aisle, there to be united in Similarity, under mutual Vows of Loving, Honouring, and Obeying, while the One and the Other fumble in that nice Temerity, for the equal gold Bands that shall make of one a Wife, and the other a Bride?44

This hilariously camp extract may show Barnes at her satirical best, mocking the normativity and Englishness of the stately yet fumbling Hall and

Introduction 11

Troubridge, but the proposal of lesbian marriage nonetheless symbolizes a prescient moment in queer history. A special issue of differences published in 2015, Queer Theory Without Anti-­Normativity, proposed new ways of “think[ing] queer theory without assuming a position of antinormativity from the outset.” 45 While queerness has indeed demanded that we criticize or reject marriage as one of a number of “normative” traditions (the list at the beginning of differences includes monogamy and Christmas and could be extended to include literary genres), The Outside Thing shows how the articulation of lesbian love in apparently heteronormative terms may be seen as both progressive and queer, not as a marker of heterosexual superiority or lack of lesbian imagination. The “normativity” of both marriage and the heterosexual romance genre is at once called on and called into question by the writers in this book.

In the advertisement for Useful Knowledge (1928), a collection of short pieces published in the same year as The Well, Stein observed that “Useful Knowledge is pleasant and therefore it is very much to be enjoyed.” 46 Barnes’s humor, Hall’s dry wit, and Stein’s insistence on enjoyment and all that is “pleasant” remind readers of the role of pleasure, play, and fun. While Lee Edelman has focused on queerness as “the bar to every realization of futurity” and Love has revisited “the negative, shameful, and difficult feelings that have been so central to queer existence in the last century,” this book argues for optimism.47 In other words, The Outside Thing concentrates on neither a negative future nor a difficult queer past—­after all, the promiscuous Hall successfully wooed married women long before the fictional Stephen was defeated by a marriage proposal—­but rather on all that has long been useful, pleasant, and procreative about lesbian romance. In the coming chapters, the all-­too-­familiar tales of The Well’s oppression or Stein’s dominance over her dour “wifey” give way to a celebration of play-­ acting, (re)production, and the ins and outs of lesbian sex.

LES BIAN WRITING / L ESBIA N REA DI N G

The problem in defining the “lesbian writer” might be summarized thus: is the lesbian writer a writer who herself is lesbian or whose texts are lesbian? The Well is a “lesbian novel”—­or, as Doan punctuates it, a “classic lesbian novel”—­because it features a lesbian heroine, not because its author

12 Introduction

desired women.48 When Julie Abraham claimed in 1991 that “Barnes was a lesbian writer,” she was presumably referring to Ladies Almanack (1928) and Nightwood (1936) rather than Djuna Barnes’s own romances with women.49 As she famously declared that she was “not a lesbian: I just loved Thelma,” Barnes would surely reject the “lesbian writer” label.50 But if a lesbian writer is one who writes about lesbian attraction, then certain male writers would be classed as lesbian: The Rainbow (1915) and The Fox (1922) would secure D. H. Lawrence’s place in the “lesbian writer” category, for instance, alongside the satirical and derogatory Compton Mackenzie.

The Outside Thing addresses the sexuality of both writers and texts.

While I do not propose that any novel here, with the possible exception of Hall’s “Emblem Hurlstone,” should be read as a straightforward roman à clef, I am nonetheless invested in interactions between lesbian living and lesbian writing.51 Three novels studied here—­Stein’s Q.E.D. (1903), Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and Barnes’s Nightwood (1936)—­are explicit (in the loosest sense) in their depictions of lesbian relationships. But in my reading of Hall’s Adam’s Breed (1926) in the latter part of chapter 3, I demonstrate how a text that does not feature same-­sex attraction may be read as lesbian. The first two decades of the twenty-­first century have seen the development of spatial modes of reading, from “distant reading” to “surface reading.”52 While this book favors deep or careful reading, it also proposes a new critical approach of “lesbian reading.” In “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1978), Barbara Smith writes: At the “Lesbians and Literature” discussion at the 1976 Modern Language Association convention Bertha Harris suggested that if in a woman writer’s work a sentence refuses to do what it is supposed to do, if there are strong images of women and if there is a refusal to be linear, the result is innately lesbian literature. As usual, I wanted to see if these ideas might be applied to the Black women writers that I know and quickly realized that many of their works were, in Harris’ sense, lesbian. Not because women are “lovers,” but because they are the central figures, are positively portrayed and have pivotal relationships with one another. The form and language of these works is also nothing like what white patriarchal culture requires or expects.

I was particularly struck by the way in which both of Toni Morrison’s novels, The Bluest Eye [1970] and Sula [1973], could be explored from this

Introduction 13

new perspective. In both works the relationships between girls and women are essential, yet at the same time physical sexuality is overtly expressed only between men and women. Despite the apparent heterosexuality of the female characters I discovered in re-­reading Sula that it works as a lesbian novel not only because of the passionate friendship between Sula and Nel, but because Morrison’s consistently critical stance towards the heterosexual institutions of male/female relationships, marriage, and the family.53

I have quoted such a large portion of Smith’s essay because so much applies and so much does not apply to the white lesbian writers in this study. In (many, though not all) works by Stein and Barnes, women “have pivotal relationships with one another,” narrative linearity is disrupted, and sentences “refuse to do what they are supposed to do.” But in Hall’s case, while strong women tend to dominate, from a manipulative mother in The Unlit Lamp (1924) to a masculine grandmother in Adam’s Breed, novels are not ostensibly subversive in terms of genre or style: even The Well, stylistically speaking, is presented as “what white patriarchal culture requires or expects.”

Lesbian reading, as I define it, interrogates boundaries not only between queer and “normative” texts but also between a writer’s lesbian fiction and her “nonlesbian” work. Sharon Marcus’s Between Women (2007) practices “just reading,” warning against falsely “restoring lesbian desire to Victorian fiction.”54 But lesbian reading does not imagine what is not there.

Instead, reading with an eye toward lesbian narrative strategies enables us to recognize women-loving-women as a driving force behind texts that may otherwise have been read “straight.” In her reading of Morrison’s Sula as an “exceedingly lesbian novel,” Smith is “not [attempting] to prove that Morrison wrote something she did not” (25). Smith does, however, imply that lesbian writing is brought into being by lesbian reading. Of course, to favor interpretative modes over surface meaning is in some ways straightforwardly Barthesian, though it is perhaps worth noting that Barthes’s analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine in S/Z (1970) has rightly been criticized for its perpetration of “the ellipsis of homoeroticism in an essay whose whole design is to bring to the surface all the possible meanings of Sarrasine. . . . ​In fact it is less an ellipsis than an eclipse.”55 While it is clear that lesbianism may be read into a text, and that a novel can invite

14 Introduction

plural identification or any number of potential readings, I want to expand understandings of what lesbian writing and lesbian reading might be. Throughout this book, I attempt to go “outside” the parameters of lesbian writing, exploring ways in which lesbianism has too often been eclipsed (see, for instance, Barnes’s “Paprika Johnson” in chapter 5).

Adam’s Breed, a straightforward bildungsroman with a male hero who marries a woman, is arguably the least queer text here, yet it provides an example of lesbian writing and is an important precursor to The Well.

Although this study spans the decades between the completion of Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D. (1903) and its publication (1950), I argue that all three writers here borrow from Victorian tradition. The impact of this is twofold: I suggest that “difficult” modernism by Stein and Barnes owes more to popular fiction than has been acknowledged, and that certain Victorian novels anticipate lesbian modernism in ways that have not yet been explored. I read the sexuality of texts in specific terms, moving from analyses of lesbian romances by Stein and Hall to a reading of Barnes’s work as bisexual. The inclusion of Barnes’s bisexual writing, as I define it, in a book on lesbian romance should not be considered problematic or provocative.

Female bisexual identity is neither lesbian identity nor a variation on lesbian identity, but lesbian relationships and lesbian desire develop alongside heterosexual connections in Barnes’s fiction. In chapter 6 I read Nightwood as a bisexual romance even though the romance of primary interest is that between Robin Vote and Nora Flood. This book may be about “the outside thing,” but what constitutes lesbian modernism is far from exclusionary.

THE OUTSIDE THIN G

“We have the triple theme,” writes Stein in Blood on the Dining-­Room Floor.56 The “triple theme” pervades this book and its texts, from the Victorian three-­volume novel to triangular relationships in Q.E.D. and The Well of Loneliness. Stein formulated her Three Lives (1909), Hall dedicated a number of her novels to “Our Three Selves,” and Barnes’s early short fiction (chapter 5) reveals a preoccupation with tripartite romance—­or, rather, with protagonists caught between two potential partners and narrative possibilities. As in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985),

Introduction 15

the “graphic schema” of the “erotic triangle” shapes the romance plots constructed by all three writers here.57 Along with triangles, imagined lines of demarcation between the internal and external have helped to structure this book. The first chapter takes as its starting point Stein’s definition of romance as “the outside thing, that . . . ​is always a thing to be felt inside.”58 In the introduction to Inside/Out (1991), Diana Fuss considers the various uses and limitations of the dichotomous inside/outside model in theories of homosexuality.59 Fuss writes: To be out, in common gay parlance, is precisely to be no longer out; to be out is to be finally outside of exteriority and all the exclusions and deprivations such outsiderhood imposes. Or, put another way, to be out is really to be in—­inside the realm of the visible, the speakable, the culturally intelligible (4).

George Chauncey has observed that gay men in America in the 1930s “did not speak of coming out of what we call the gay closet but rather of coming out into what they called homosexual society or the gay world.”60 While Stein may not have used “the outside” to refer to coming out or being outed as lesbian, she was, in her own words, “tormented by the problem of the internal and external.”61 Stein’s definition of romance as “the outside thing, that . . . ​is always a thing to be felt inside,” taken from a meditation not on sexuality but on expatriation, the lecture “An American and France” (1936), operates in line with spatial interpretations of homosexual experience and neatly summarizes a number of this project’s key questions and concerns. Are fixed lines of separation—­between the in and the out, America and France, fiction and life writing, the real and the romantic, the Victorian and the modernist—­ever really useful? How might we understand sexuality, nationality, and genre as overlapping outside spaces? What does it mean to be both expatriate and lesbian? Is there an inside space—­a home—­for lesbian writing, or must it always seek refuge elsewhere?

As I noted at the beginning of this introduction, this project began as an investigation into themes of distancing and dislocation in the lives and works of lesbian and bisexual women writing in the first half of the twentieth century. I was interested in intersections between expatriate and lesbian identity; in travel and distancing in lesbian novels; and in lesbian writers’ uses of temporal, geographical, and stylistic shifts. It soon became

16 Introduction

apparent, however, that in considering sexuality in spatial terms—­or “embracing lesbianism as a kind of geographical identity,” as Barnes scholar Frann Michel describes it—­and in reading lesbian novels as sexual spaces, my concern was not only with “outside” sexual and national identity but also, more pressingly and more compellingly, with the romance genre.62 My attention was drawn to the ways in which articulations of desire, both in fiction and in lesbian writers’ lives and relationships, borrowed from an outside heterosexual space. I began to consider romance, in terms of both literary genre and the articulation of amatory attachments and desire, as a heterosexual space or plot on which lesbian novelists had willfully set up camp. Elizabeth English has argued that lesbian writers after The Well turned to popular genre fiction as a means of evading censorship. Genre fiction, English suggests, “allowed women to write about lesbian sexuality and identity when faced with the threat of reprisals.”63 I argue here that lesbian writers’ use of the romance genre was less about avoiding retribution and more about staking a bold claim on a heterosexual institution. My book begins with a lesbian novel that precedes The Well by twenty-­five years, Stein’s Q.E.D. In chapter 3 I read The Well’s obscenity trials not as a warning or a threat to lesbian writers but as a marker of Hall’s success in drawing public attention to “the unpopular lost cause.”64 As Hall wrote to her lover, Evguenia Souline, in 1934: And today comes a request that I will open a bay or something for Barnardos Homes—­you know, that charity for waifs and strays—­not dogs or cats but children, my sweet, and very excellent work they do, and for my sins I accept the invitation. I only tell you this dull news because I am an invert, and all the world knows precisely what I am—­and all the world is accepting the fact we people have got our nitch [sic] in nature, and my book: The Well of Loneliness, has helped this on by bringing about a better understanding. Yes, dearest, I can say this now without conscients [sic], because I have fought and at one time greatly suffered.65

In chapter 3, I argue that Hall’s decision to house The Well’s lesbian romance in the domain of the heterosexual and the familiar should be read as a well-­planned, and ultimately successful, tactical maneuver.

If modernist lesbian romance occupies a geographical space, then the French capital is surely it. In etymological as well as geographical terms,

Introduction 17

romance is rooted in France. Broadly speaking, this book is about the locating of lesbian romans (novels) as much as it is about the romance genre or romantic love. In Paris France (1940), Stein writes that “foreigners should be foreigners and it is nice that foreigners are foreigners and that they inevitably are in Paris and in France.”66 In 1896, seven years before Stein settled in Paris, Havelock Ellis had published the first German edition of Sexual Inversion, which referred to a note from a friend stating that “lesbianism in Paris is extremely prevalent, indeed, one might almost say normal.”67 By the 1920s Paris had become the “inside” for expatriate lesbians: sapphic salons, dances at the Moulin Rouge, and all-­new same-­sex drinking establishments in Montmartre had set the city apart as a lesbian metropolis.68 Strangely enough, six months after Stein delivered her lecture on “An American and France,” her claim that “Americans go to Paris and they are free not to be connected with anything ­happening. . . . ​France was friendly and it let you alone” was echoed in a letter sent from Emily Coleman to Djuna Barnes: “My point is your love for Paris is a romantic passion, having little connection with Paris’s reality, i.e., as the French capital; you love it because it is the past, and your past. . . . ​You don’t feel pressed upon in France because you are not in the least aware of French life that is going on around you.”69 Stein’s investment in romantic Paris as the “outside thing” was evidently not as idiosyncratic as it may have initially appeared. A turn to the French language is valuable here: aside from romance and romans, the proximity of jouer (to play) to jouir (to enjoy, but also to reach orgasm, as Lacan famously reminds us) highlights the eroticism of the play and performance in the lesbian texts and three lives examined in the coming six chapters.

R The Outside Thing is presented in three distinct yet overlapping parts.

Although the line between the romantic and the real is impossible to define—­and, in many ways, the imagined boundary is the point of interest here—­part 1, on Stein, is divided into one chapter on fiction (Q.E.D.) and a second chapter on biography or life-­writing (specifically, Stein and Toklas’s love notes). The fiction/life-­w riting model allows me to set out clearly the various ways in which Stein’s early engagement with the romance genre was then re-­created or reenacted in her private romantic

18 Introduction

life with Toklas. Paradoxically, “the outside thing” encourages me to look inside: as I move from Q.E.D. to lesbian domesticity at the rue de Fleurus, I read Stein’s definition of romance as a playful commentary on lesbian relationships and lesbian sex. Part 2, on Hall, is structured along the same lines as my work on Stein. In my shift from a chapter on fiction to a chapter on personal love letters, I trace the interplay between the romantic and the real in Hall’s numerous endeavors to appropriate spaces that were never entirely her own. Access to the extensive collection of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, allowed me to see inside Hall’s affairs, both professional and personal.

My work on Barnes diverges from parts 1 and 2 in that I do not begin with a chapter on fiction before discussing life-­writing. Two recent Barnes scholars have initiated a move away from the seemingly endless game of cat and mouse between Barnes and her biographers and critics. Daniela Caselli has rightly pointed out that “the complexity found in [Barnes’s] published work is not compensated by a clearer, less obscure, less (or more) disturbing dimension which we can call life.”70 Julie Taylor “strongly agree[s] that it is futile and reductive to look for an originary biographical event to ‘disclose’ the texts,” going on to explore productive ways of reading and theorizing the fundamental unknowability of Barnes’s work.71 I did not want to attempt to locate the lesbianism of a writer who claimed that she was “not a lesbian”; nor did I want to categorize or pigeonhole Barnes’s texts as something that they are not. Setting aside Barnes’s private life, it became clear to me that the sexuality of her work could usefully be defined as bisexual. In chapter 5 I position Barnes in an altogether new romantic and theoretical space, proposing a reading of her early short fiction as performative bisexual writing. Chapter 6 discusses the real and the romantic in Barnes’s early journalism, before presenting Nightwood (1936) not as a “lesbian novel” or as a “transgender classic” but as a bisexual romance.72 I argue that Barnes’s allusions to the recent literary past represent a parodic performance of the Freudian bisexual experience.

R It is unsurprising that modernism’s debt to nineteenth-­century romance is rarely acknowledged. English is right that despite significant remapping

Introduction 19

by Shari Benstock and others, modernist studies remains focused “on high art, radical politics and ideas, as well as a privileging of stylistically experimental texts for their encrypted representation of sexuality.”73 In the past decade, Anna Vaninskaya has drawn attention to the “late-­ Victorian romance revival” as a “period-­specific departure” that in many ways anticipates modernism, and Katie Owens-­Murphy has written persuasively on modernists who advocate romance “even as they resist its traditionally harmonious ending by closing on notes of dissonance and uncertainty.”74 The Outside Thing intervenes in the fields of both literary modernism and queer studies, reading genre as a sexual space. The romance, like marriage, is a heterosexual institution that lesbian writers have made, and continue to make, their own.75 Given its focus on ways of reading both lesbian writing and normativity, it is perhaps fitting that my work is informed by critical perspectives articulated before the advent of queer theory. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Writing Beyond the Ending (1984) is vital here, and Janice A. Radway’s seminal Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984) remains relevant even though both reading practices and perceptions of (the) patriarchy have changed. Radway’s claim that the heroine of a romance escapes from solitude and “emptiness” and embarks on “her quest for a new self and new connections” is true of novels by all three modernist writers in this book.76 Nancy K. Miller draws attention to the “laws of genre” that have bound women writers and their heroines to narratives of love: “in so much women’s fiction,” Miller argues, “a world outside love proves to be out of the world altogether.”77 Miller’s claim is pertinent here, despite the fact that my concern is with the world inside love, and with the ways in which lesbian writers have purposely situated their work in the realm of romance. While I am by no means, to quote Peter Brooks, simply reading for the plot, lesbian writers’ various yet strikingly similar engagements with the heterosexual romance plot drive the narrative of The Outside Thing forward.78 Brooks argues that “with the advent of Modernism came an era of suspicion toward plot” (7). However, the expectations or “laws” of plot are stretched but not broken by the lesbian writers here: modernists Stein and Barnes make use of linear romance narratives, and Hall’s “ordinary” fiction borrows from both the middlebrow and the modernist. In her famous attack on the middlebrow, Virginia Woolf asks, “What will become of us,

20 Introduction

men and women, if Middlebrow has his way with us, and there is only a middle sex but no husbands or wives?”79 Although I challenge both Woolf’s and her husband’s criticisms of The Well in chapter 3, her derisive take on “Middlebrow,” for all its irony, is relevant here. I argue that lesbian writers effectively “had their way” with the middlebrow, the normative, and the conventional. Lesbian writers did not submit or surrender to the heterosexual romance plot. Instead, they turned it to their advantage.

6.125 × 9.25 SPINE: 0.75 FLAPS: 3.5

HANNAH ROCHE

“This theoretically sophisticated reading of three lesbian writers—Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes—is at once playful and serious. Hannah Roche’s insistence on the queerness of desire, romance, and love between women takes feminist

—Laura Doan, author of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War

“In its lively endorsement of lesbian modernism, The Outside Thing extols the possibilities and pleasures three canonical writers find as they playfully occupy, exploit, and expand conventions of romance and marriage in their intimate lives and iconic writing.

Affectionately championing Stein, Hall, and Barnes as liberating the romance plot from its heteronormative constraints, Roche also aims to rescue these writers from timeworn scholarly assumptions that have held them hostage.”

—Jodie Medd, author of Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism

“The Outside Thing is a valuable contribution to current debates about modernism, sexuality, and women’s writing. Roche’s provocation—that the term lesbian is a critically and theoretically necessary one—is borne out convincingly in her lively and thorough readings of romance in the lives, writing, and writing-lives of Stein, Hall, and Barnes.

This is a book that subsequent scholars will learn from.”

—Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University

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the Outside thing Moder nist

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Cover Design: Rebecca Lown Design Cover image: © Maurice-Louis Branger/Roger-Viollet

In

HANNAH ROCHE

modernist studies in an exciting new direction.”

the Outside thing

is lecturer in twentieth-century literature and culture at the University of York. She has published articles on lesbian modernism in Textual Practice and Modernist Cultures.

The Outside Thing

ROCHE

Praise for

L e sbian R omance COLUMBIA

a lecture delivered before the University of Oxford’s Anglo-French Society in 1936, Gertrude Stein described romance as “the outside thing, that . . . is always a thing to be felt inside.” Hannah Roche takes Stein’s definition as a principle for the reinterpretation of three major modernist lesbian writers, showing how literary and affective romance played a crucial yet overlooked role in the works of Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes.

The Outside Thing offers original readings of both canonical and peripheral texts, including Stein’s first novel Q.E.D. (Things As They Are), Hall’s Adam’s Breed and The Well of Loneliness, and Barnes’s early writing alongside Nightwood.

Is there an inside space for lesbian writing, or must it always seek refuge elsewhere? Crossing established lines of demarcation between the in and the out, the real and the romantic, and the Victorian and the modernist, The Outside Thing presents romance as a heterosexual plot upon which lesbian writers willfully set up camp. These writers boldly adopted and adapted the romance genre, Roche argues, as a means of staking a queer claim on a heteronormative institution. Refusing to submit or surrender to the “straight” traditions of the romance plot, they turned the rules to their advantage. Drawing upon extensive archival research, The Outside Thing is a significant rethinking of the interconnections between queer writing, lesbian living, and literary modernism.