Abstract
In late July or early August, 1935, as Djuna Barnes was revising her elegiac novel Nightwood, she wrote to her friend, Emily Holmes Coleman, about her former lover, Thelma Wood:
Had a letter from Thelma, possibly the last in my life if the book does get printed. She will hate me so — it’s awful — God almighty what a price one pays for 200 pages.1
On the 20th of September, she wrote again:
I am apprehensive that perhaps I’ve written my best, my life and my love. What shall I write now that will be as good? Nothing I should think …
In private at least, Barnes was not at all reluctant to admit that she had structured Nightwood around her ‘life’ and her female ‘love’. And while she was anxious about Wood’s potential reaction to the novel, she was not at all reticent about claiming a representation of personal experience as her ‘best’ work. On the other hand, in presenting the novel to the public, Nightwood’s editor, T.S. Eliot, argued strenuously against reading the novel as anything other than a study of ‘the human misery and bondage which is universal’. With his pre-emptive and revealing warning against reading Nightwood as ‘a horrid sideshow of freaks’, Eliot implies that ‘good’ literature is impersonal, and defies the reader to question Barnes’ objectivity.2
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Notes
T.S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, in Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 5.
Many of Eliot’s editorial decisions reveal a concern with the potentially ‘obscene’ contained in the text. For Eliot’s excisions from the original manuscript, see Cheryl Plumb (ed.), Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, by Djuna Barnes (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (1990; repr., Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008), 71.
See Sir Chartres Biron, ‘Judgment’, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 49. When Chief Justice Biron ruled to ban The Well of Loneliness in the Bow Street Police Court, London, in 1928, he stated that he had ‘no hesitation in saying that it [was] an obscene libel, that it would tend to corrupt those into whose hands it should fall’. Biron had no trouble producing evidence of obscenity in spite of the fact that the novel is explicit about love and attraction between women, but not about their sexual practices — he cited passages from the novel at length as though their obscenity was self-evident.
See an unsigned review published in Newstatesman and Nation, cited in Jane Marcus, ‘Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 197. This reviewer argued against Nightwood’s hypothetical censorship on the grounds that ‘the test of a book’s obscenity is said to be its power of corrupting those who are open to corruption’ and ‘a more thorough-going deterrent [to lesbianism] it would be hard to imagine’.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin, 1928), 152. The idea that Orlando ‘screens’ lesbianism is taken from Adam Parkes, ‘Lesbianism, History and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’, Twentieth Century Literature 40.4 (1994): 437.
For illuminating discussions of the trial, including the simultaneous hysteria and reticence of the press response, see Cohler, ‘Sapphism and Sedition’; Jodie Medd, ‘“The Cult of the Clitoris”: Anatomy of a National Scandal’, Modernism/Modernity 9.1(2002): 21–49; Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 14–20; and Lucy Bland, ‘Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome and the “Cult of the Clitoris” Case’, in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998): 183–98.
See in particular Cohler, ‘Sapphism and Sedition’; Wachman, Lesbian Empire, 103–99; and Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 153–5. See also Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (New York: AMS Press, 1983). Carpenter was a strong campaigner for socialist reform, who argued that because the homosexual was in the unique position of possessing the best qualities of the male and female, he had the insight required to write across boundaries of race, class and gender, and a responsibility to lead the struggle against oppression.
Trudi Tate and Suzanne Raitt make the point that ‘censorship, propaganda, and the sheer scale and complexity’ of the war made it ‘impossible to grasp what was happening at any particular moment’ (‘Introduction’, in Womens Fiction and the Great War, eds Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1. In a discussion of Bloomsbury’s response to the war, Christine Froula discusses the lengths authorities went to in order to suppress opposition to, and explanations of, the war. See Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 4–16.
See, in particular, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; repr., New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965); and Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Volume II, Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company Publishers, 1928).
See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (1920; repr., London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 6:145–72; and Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1963). Both of the case studies in which Freud considers female homosexuality were unfinished — in each case, the analysis was incomplete due to the analysand’s rejection of Freud’s approach. In ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, Freud argues that his patient’s turn away from heterosexuality was precipitated by the birth of a brother, which interrupted her working through of the Oedipus complex. In ‘Dora’, Freud briefly discusses his patient’s affection for the wife of ‘Herr K’, who has made sexual advances to her, arguing that Dora harbours an erotic attachment to her father, and jealousy of her father’s attachment to Frau K, with whom he is having an affair.
Chris Waters, ‘Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourses of Homosexual Identity in Interwar Britain’, in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 166.
Suzanne Raitt discusses the relationship between ‘love’ and the sexual sciences in her article, ‘Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body in Early Sexology’, Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 150–64. It is worth noting that Carpenter’s ‘urning’ was attributed a greater capacity to love than the heterosexual, while for Ellis, homosexual love was real but was nevertheless symptomatic of a congenital abnormality.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1976; repr., London: Penguin, 2008), 1:44.
See ‘Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), Criminal Law Amendment Bill’, 4 August 1921, reproduced in The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970, eds Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 166. The Acts of Indecency by Females clause of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill (1921) proposed that ‘any act of gross indecency between female persons shall be a misdemeanour and punishable in the same manner as any such act committed by male persons under … the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885’.
Laura Doan, ‘“Acts of Female Indecency”: Sexology’s Intervention in Legislating Lesbianism’, in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 205.
The first argument was put forward by Lord Desart; the second by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead. Cited in Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams, Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 74. Other arguments against the clause included the difficulties of enforcement and the opportunities it would provide for blackmail. See Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 37–8.
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 67, my emphasis.
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 8–9.
Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 4.
Authors like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound imbued modernism with ‘legitimacy’ by insisting upon ‘highly antisubjectivist or impersonal poetics’, in spite of the fact that modernism’s reaction against classic realism was apparently grounded in subjectivism (see Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990], 27). The associations that emerged between rational impersonality, masculinity and serious writing were the consequences of this approach.
Georgia Johnston, The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle and Gertrude Stein (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman à Clef (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9.
Donald H. Reiman, The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential and Private (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 40.
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4.
Love, Feeling Backward, 4–5. Love borrows the term ‘archive of feeling’ from the title of Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 12–13. Edelman’s argument is invested in a psychoanalytic reading of the ‘death drive’. However, I am interested, here, in the way ‘queer’ operates in relation to particular social formations, and Edelman’s formulation illustrates this effectively.
Shari Benstock recounts this story in Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 254.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin, 1928), 153.
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© 2012 Sashi Nair
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Nair, S. (2012). Introduction: Screening desire in the Sapphic modernist roman à clef. In: Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230356184_1
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