Cherchez La Femme: Looking for Lesbian Femininities in Literature, 1850–1928

Parker, Sarah

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_11

Cherchez La Femme: Looking for Lesbian Femininities in Literature, 1850–1928

Sarah Parker³

Chapter
First Online: 30 December 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

Abstract

Parker’s chapter focuses on the representation of lesbian femininity in the literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, relating this to present-day femme identities. Parker begins by asking why queer feminine identities have been overlooked in present scholarship, contrasting this with the focus on female masculinity or butch identities. Through readings of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Rebel in the Family (1880) and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Parker reveals the complexity of lesbian femininities, particularly as they relate to ideas of family, class and race. Whiteness emerges as a signifier of femme identity, problematically contributing the erasure of black femme identities. In conclusion, Parker proposes an alternative tradition of femme identity, inspired by Sappho and neo-Paganism, opening up contemporary understandings of lesbian femininity.

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Notes

1.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. R. J. Rebman (New York: Rebman, n.d.), 399.
2.
Elaine Showalter, “Introduction,” Daughters of Decadence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), x.
3.
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1992).
4.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 43.
5.
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Oscar Wilde, Effeminacy and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
6.
Ibid., 4.
7.
Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer, 1984): 559.
8.
Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 113.
9.
Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 104.
10.
Jewelle L. Gomez, “Femme Erotic Independence,” Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, ed. Sally R. Munt and Cherry Smyth (London: Cassell, 1998), 104.
11.
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2–3.
12.
I use the terms “lesbian” and “queer” interchangeably throughout this chapter, although I am aware others prefer to maintain distinctions between them.
13.
See “Femme Histories Roundtable,” February 16, 2017, chaired by Lauren Gutterman; the participants are Alix Genter, Anastasia Jones, Amanda Littauer, Shannon Weber and Cookie Woolner. The two-part roundtable can be found at http://notchesblog.com/2017/02/16/femme-histories-roundtable-part-i/ (accessed March 30, 2017).
14.
Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian,” 575 (see note 7).
15.
Jones, “Roundtable Part I” (see note 13).
16.
Woolner, “Roundtable Part I” (see note 13).
17.
During 1950s McCarthyism, homosexuals were viewed as security risks due to their susceptibility to blackmail. They were also seen as potential communist sympathisers. See David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004).
18.
Weber, “Roundtable Part I” (see note 13).
19.
Melanie Maltry and Kristin Tucker, “Female Fem(me)ininities,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 6, no. 2 (2002): 93.
20.
Weber, “Roundtable Part I” (see note 13).
21.
Joan Nestle, “The Femme Question,” in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, ed. Joan Nestle (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1987), 141.
22.
Genter, “Roundtable Part II” (see note 13).
23.
“Femmeinities” is a term coined by Clare Whatling, see Sally R. Munt, “Introduction,” in Butch/Femme, 5 (see note 10).
24.
Marcus, Between Women, 3 (see note 11).
25.
Maltry and Tucker, “Female Fem(me)ininities,” (see note 19).
26.
Virginia Blain, “Sexual Politics of the (Victorian) Closet; or, No Sex Please – We’re Poets,” Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian, Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999), 142.
27.
Dorothy Allison, “Every Book Is a Lesbian Book,” Salon, June 10, 1999, http://www.salon.com/1999/06/10/lesbian_books/ (accessed April 13, 2017).
28.
Deborah T. Meem, “Introduction,” in The Rebel of the Family, by Eliza Lynn Linton (Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2002), 13.
29.
Gomez, “Femme Erotic Independence,” passim (see note 10).
30.
Qtd. in Miriam Allott, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London: Kegan Paul, 1974), 182.
31.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Helen Cooper (London: Penguin, 2004), 546. For the ending of the novel, see note 9, 603 of this edition.
32.
Ann Weinstone, “The Queerness of Lucy Snowe,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 18, Issue 4 (1995): 367–84.
33.
Patricia Duncker, “The Suggestive Spectacle: Queer Passions in Brontë’s Villette and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” in Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, ed. Martin McQuillan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 67–77.
34.
Brontë, Villette, 58 (see note 31).
35.
Lindley Nolan Swift, “Lesbian Texts and Subtexts: [De] Constructing the Lesbian Subject in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca” (MA diss., North Carolina State University, 2006), http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/handle/1840.16/2145 (accessed April 10, 2017).
36.
Brontë, Villette, 93 (see note 31).
37.
Ibid., 94.
38.
Ibid.
39.
Ibid., 96
40.
Ibid., 97.
41.
Marcus, Between Women, 103 (see note 11).
42.
Brontë, Villette, 100 (see note 31).
43.
Ibid.
44.
To contextualise this, a girl could be married at 12 without parental consent in this period, although 20 was considered a desirable age to marry. At 17, Ginevra is therefore considered mature and marriageable.
45.
Brontë, Villette, 155–56 (see note 31).
46.
Duncker, “The Suggestive Spectacle,” 67–77 (see note 33).
47.
Kate Millett, “From ‘The Sexual Revolution’,” in The Brontë Sisters: Critical Assessments, ed. Eleanor McNees, Vol. 3 (Mountfield: Helm, 1996), 651.
48.
Brontë, Villette, 161 (see note 31).
49.
Ibid., 162.
50.
Ibid., 164.
51.
Ibid., 94.
52.
Marcus, Between Women, 106 (see note 11).
53.
Ibid., 108.
54.
Swift, “Lesbian Texts and Subtexts,” 22 (see note 35).
55.
Mallory Ortberg, “Femslash Friday: Jane Eyre,” The Toast, May 9, 2014, http://the-toast.net/2014/05/09/femslash-friday-jane-eyre/ (accessed April 10, 2017).
56.
Brontë, Villette, 524 (see note 31).
57.
Ibid.
58.
Meem, “Introduction,” in The Rebel of the Family, by Linton, 11 (see note 28).
59.
Eliza Lynn Linton, The Rebel of the Family, ed. Deborah T. Meem (Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2002), 48, first published in 1880.
60.
Ibid., 174.
61.
Ibid., 27.
62.
Ibid., 54.
63.
Ibid., 56.
64.
Sheila Jeffreys, “Butch and Femme: Then and Now,” Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History, 1840–1985, ed. Lesbian History Group (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 166.
65.
Linton, The Rebel, 173 (see note 59).
66.
Ibid., 49.
67.
Ibid., 56.
68.
Ann Bannon, Odd Girl Out (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001), 3; first published in 1957.
69.
Radclyffe, “The Hero and The Lady,” in The Emergence of the Lesbian Romantic Hero and the Plot She Thrives in, DC Bardfest, October 2004, http://www.lorillake.com/Lady-Hero.html (accessed April 10, 2017).
70.
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 2.
71.
Lisa Walker, Looking like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 45. Walker specifically addresses the racial politics of lesbian pulp in her chapter “Lesbian Pulp in Black and White,” 103–38.
72.
Ibid., 207.
73.
Linton, The Rebel, 140 (see note 59).
74.
Ibid., 143.
75.
See Karen L. Blair and Rhea Ashley Hoskin, “Experiences of Femme Identity: Coming out, Invisibility and Femmephobia,” Psychology & Sexuality 6, no. 3 (2015): 229–44.
76.
Lindon, The Rebel, 183 (see note 59).
77.
Deborah T. Meem, “Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 4 (April 1997): 550–51.
78.
Linton, The Rebel, 188 (see note 59).
79.
Ibid., 186.
80.
Ibid., 188.
81.
Ibid., 187.
82.
Eliza Lynn Linton, In Haste and at Leisure, 3 vols (London: Heinemann, 1895), 1: 71.
83.
Constance Harsh, “Eliza Lynn Linton as New Woman Novelist,” in The Rebel of the Family, by Eliza Lynn Linton (Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2002), 463.
84.
Ibid., 462.
85.
Linton, In Haste and at Leisure, 259–60 (see note 82).
86.
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928), 144.
87.
Walker, Looking like What You Are, 44 (see note 71).
88.
Brontë, Villette, 94 (see note 31).
89.
Walker, Looking like What You Are, 45 (see note 71).
90.
Ibid., 46.
91.
Hall, The Well of Loneliness 145 (see note 86).
92.
Ibid., 201–02.
93.
Walker, Looking like What You Are, 46 (see note 71).
94.
Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 318 (see note 86).
95.
Ibid., 279.
96.
Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia, PA: Davis and Co, 1901), 133.
97.
Karla Jay, The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988), 116.
98.
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank (Austin: Texas University Press, 1989), 11.
99.
Ibid., 303.
100.
See Jane McIntosh Snyder, Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and Barbara Hughes Fowler, “The Archaic Aesthetic,” The American Journal of Philology 105, no. 2 (Summer, 1984): 119–49.
101.
Snyder, Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho, 80 (see note 100 above).
102.
Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 281(see note 86).
103.
Walker, Looking like What You Are, 47 (see note 71).
104.
Ibid., 51.
105.
Ibid., 54.
106.
Deborah Saville, “Dress and Culture in Greenwich Village,” in Twentieth-Century American Fashion, ed. Linda Welters and Patricia A. Cunningham (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), 53.
107.
Lady Diana Cooper qtd. in Guillermo de Osma, Fortuny: His Life and Work (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2016), 129.
108.
Diana Collecott, H. D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 140.
109.
Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 177 (see note 98).
110.
See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004) and Leila Rupp, Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
111.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Female Female Impersonators: The Fictive Music of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore,” in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3: Letters from the Front, by Gilbert and Gubar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 57–120.
112.
Rebecca Ann Rugg, “How Does She Look?” in Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls, ed. Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker (New York: Routledge, 1997), 175.
113.
Maltry and Tucker, “Female Fem(me)ininities,” 96 (see note 19).

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School of the Arts, English and Drama, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
Sarah Parker

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Parker, S. (2018). Cherchez La Femme: Looking for Lesbian Femininities in Literature, 1850–1928. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_11

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