Abstract
In this chapter, Hess analyzes Dorothy Baker’s Trio: A Novel (1943). She illuminates age and sexuality as narrative mechanisms of exclusion that converge in such a way that they permit only certain visions of the future while eliminating others. The analysis draws attention to Baker’s heavy reliance on the dichotomy of older lesbian predator and younger innocent victim in her depiction of lesbian aging and highlights the novel’s construction of deviations from the heteronormative timeline as corrupting, “unhealthy,” and ultimately fatal if not corrected in time. The latter part of the chapter engages José Muñoz’s and Elizabeth Freeman’s views on queer futurity, addressing Trio’s ending and the more critical glimpse it allows of the violent policing mechanisms which uphold the system of chrononormativity.
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Notes
- 1.
The film These Three (1936), an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour (1934), provides a good example of Hollywood censorship of same-sex desire in this period. Whereas in the play two female schoolteachers are accused of having a lesbian relationship by one of their students, in the film the lesbian theme was removed by “changing the rumors of lesbianism into rumors about two women fighting over a man” (Benshoff and Griffin 2006, 30).
- 2.
While the categorization of same-sex attraction as un-American and foreign would become more pronounced in the Cold War era of the 1950s, Austen notes that this attitude was already a widespread mechanism of rejection much earlier:
For centuries the British liked to think that homosexuality was a product of Italy and arrived in England via France, while during the nineteenth century the Italians referred to it as “il vizio Inglese” and the French blamed the Arabs or, depending on political winds or the latest scandal, liked to think of it in terms of “le vice anglais” or “le vice allemand.” (1977, 48)
In a similar vein, Americans liked to “consider homosexuality a more or less foreign importation” that could however “be burned away in the melting pot of [their] staunch masculine and commendably female characteristics” (La Forrest Potter 1933, as cited in Austen 57).
- 3.
This does not mean that homosexuality was widely accepted, and it could still become the subject of a court case if minors were involved, or in the context of public indecency. But France was the only European country in the inter-war period where same-sex sexual acts between consenting adults were not as such condemned by law (Tamagne 2006, 336–339).
- 4.
Enfolding patients in wet sheets was a common practice in mental institutions early in the twentieth century, before the invention of sedatives (Townsend 2014, 49).
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Hess, L.M. (2019). The Older Lesbian as Predator: Dorothy Baker’s Trio: A Novel (1943). In: Queer Aging in North American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03466-5_2
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