LESBIANS; HOW NOVEL
By
Steven Robert Ambrose

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
English—Doctor of Philosophy
2017

ABSTRACT
LESBIANS; HOW NOVEL
By
Steven Robert Ambrose
Lesbians; How Novel is a series of three, curated case studies that works to reorient our approach
to the lesbian novel genre in the context of twentieth-century American, British, and French
literature. Rooted in a feminist politics of recuperation, this dissertation centers primarily on
texts that were either out of print when the project began or have been largely underserved by
scholars: Stone Butch Blues, Crybaby Butch, Thérèse et Isabelle, The One Who is Legion, and
L’ange et les pervers. The third chapter includes an analysis of The Well of Loneliness that reads
it as an experimental novel in the larger context of modernism as its iconic status makes this
novel inescapable. The primary goal of this dissertation is to bracket the historico-biographical
from my analysis of lesbian novels in order to highlight the value of their fictional dimension.
Using “lesbian” as metaphor for genre, Lesbians; How Novel redefines the genre in terms of
reader interpretation and intertextuality rather than authorial identity, demonstrates how the
investment in reading the autobiographical in(to) a novel limits the genre’s value to one
dimension, and argues that the genre did as much to create our understanding of what it means to
be lesbian as it did to represent it. Lesbians; How Novel concludes with a coda meditating on the
use of fiction to imagine sexuality into being. At its core, this dissertation reflects my investment
in discovering the import of fiction to lesbian existence.

Copyright by
STEVEN ROBERT AMBROSE
2017

I dedicate this work to all the lesbians in my life who’ve made me who I am today.
And to myself. Because I wrote it.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work would have been impossible without the support, encouragement, and friendship of
the following people, a community connected only through me, and to whom I owe an unpayable
debt of gratitude. To my parents who were blessed with one difficult, only child and never
waivered in their support of my academic endeavors. To Veronica Fitzpatrick, my best friend, to
whom I turned in my darkest time. To my cohort—Jennifer Royston, Sarah Panuska, Sandra
Beals, Anna Green, and Laura McGrath—without whose relentless friendship (in the form of
late-night group texts, countless cigarette breaks, carpools, feedback on drafts, inside jokes, and
family dinners at the Olive Garden) I wouldn’t have survived my first year in a doctoral
program, let alone made it to the finish line. To Astro Coffee and Cairo Coffee in Detroit for
giving me a sense of community, an office, and the best quality caffeine. To Dr. Penny Gardner,
whose public challenge lit a fire in me to prove a gay guy could write about lesbians, and to Dr.
Marilyn Frye for confirming it, so many years ago now. To Dr. Lisa Fine and the Center for
Gender in a Global Context who gave me unbelievable teaching opportunities without which I
couldn’t have afforded to pay my bills. To Dr. Aminda Smith for her mentorship and being the
first professor to make me feel like a colleague. To Dr. Julie Lindquist for making me a better
teacher. To Dr. Anne Violin-Wigent for always entertaining my questions when I needed the aid
of a linguist and native French speaker. To the late Dr. Anna Norris, without whose help I would
have misrepresented grammar in twentieth-century French literature. And, of course, my
committee. A Dr. Valentina Denzel, mon amie, ta gentillesse est sans pareil. To Dr. Robin
Silbergleid for having a calming effect when I felt frantic (which was always). To Dr. Zarena
Aslami who always finds a way to make incisive critic feel generous rather than debilitating.

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And of course, to my chair, Dr. Ellen McCallum who, in setting an at-times frighteningly high
standard, pushed me to produce work of a quality I never imagined myself capable.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………..…viii
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1
The Lesbian Menace………………………………………………………………………2
Lesbian: A Metaphor for Genre………………………………………………………….11
Text Selection and Methodology…………………………………………………………13
Chapter Order and Descriptions ………………………………………………………..17
The Personal is Political…………………………………………………………………21
CHAPTER 1: CRYBABY BLUES…………………….……………………………………......23
Which shelf is it on?....................................................................................................……23
Looking for the Lesbian…………………….………………...………………………….26
Lesbian Intertextuality; Butch Hermeneutics …………………………………………...37
Epilogue ………………………………………………………………………………... 61
CHAPTER 2: LES ESPACES RAVAGÉES, LE TEMPS RAVISSANT: LESBIAN SPACE-TIME
IN VIOLETTE LEDUC’S THÉRÈSE ET ISABELLE..………………………………………….63
The Intuitionist.…………………………………………………………………………. 63
Thérèse et Isabelle: A Biography of a Book…………………………………………… …… 65
À la recherche du « temps » perdu – A Speculative, Anecdotal History of Revision.…...78
Temporary Love…………………………………………………………………………….…… 88
CHAPTER 3: CHIMERAS, ANGELS, REVENANTS: THE GROTESQUE COALESCENCE
OF THE LESBIAN NOVEL…………………………………………………………………...106
Introduction: Hatching…………………………………………………………………106
The Animal……………………………………………………………………………...114
The Angel……………………………………………………………………………….122
The Revenant....................................................................................................................142
Genre Bender…………………………………………………………………………...148
Gender Bender………………………………………………………………………….152
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...157
CODA: MUSINGS, SPECULATIONS, POLEMIC CONCLUSIONS....……………………..158
END NOTES…………………………………………………………………………………...165
WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..193

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. A handwritten page included with dactylogramme one (LDC 6.1: dactylographie
corrigée) as page 190 of Thérèse et Isabelle. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette
Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe,
France………………….......…………………………………………………………...69
Figure 2. Page 144 of the dactylogramme two with handwritten corrections by Violette Leduc.
Leduc’s signature appears on the page. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut
mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe,
France………………….....…………………………………………………………….70
Figure 3. Pages 10 and 11b of Violette Leduc’s notebook manuscript of her autobiography, La
Bâtarde. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition
contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France…..………………………...72
Figure 4. Page 4 of the “faux manuscript” of Violette Leduc’s Thérèse et Isabelle commissioned
by Jacques Guérin in 1955, printed as an édition de luxe via photolithography. Image
courtesy of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, SaintGermain la Blanche-Herbe, France…………………………………...………………..73
Figure 5. Page 206 of the “faux manuscript” of Violette Leduc’s Thérèse et Isabelle
commissioned by Jacques Guérin in 1955, printed as an édition de luxe via
photolithography. The text reads: « Tiré à 25 exemplaires numérotés de 1 à 25 N 1 »,
which translates to “25 copies printed, numbered from 1 to 25, No 1.” Image courtesy
of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain
la Blanche-Herbe, France………......…………………………………………………..75
o

Figure 6. Page 14 of dactylogramme one (dactylogramme corrigée) of Thérèse et Isabelle with
handwritten annotations/corrections by Violette Leduc. Image courtesy of Fonds
Violette Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la
Blanche-Herbe, France………………………………………………………………...80
Figure 7. Page 172 of the dactylogramme one (dactylogramme corrigée) of Thérèse et Isabelle
with handwritten annotations/corrections by Violette Leduc. Image courtesy of Fonds
Violette Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la
Blanche-Herbe, France………………………………………………………………...83
Figure 8. Page 205 of the “faux manuscript,” the ending of Violette Leduc’s Thérèse et Isabelle
commissioned by Jacques Guérin in 1955, printed as an édition de luxe via
photolithography. Leduc’s signature appears on the page. Image courtesy of Fonds
Violette Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la
Blanche-Herbe, France. ……………………………………………………………...103

viii

Figure 9. Beginning of “Zodiac” column and accompanying image of twelve angels, banner, and
egg from Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack . . ., 1928, pp. 24-25. Courtesy of Michigan
State University Library’s Special Collections. Banner reads, “This is the Part abou
[sic] Heaven that has never been told,” the same as the opening line of the column...107
Figure 10. End of “Zodiac” column from Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, 1928, p. 26.
Courtesy of Michigan State University Library’s Special Collections ………………108
Figure 11. Note from the first edition publishers found on the left, inside dust jacket of Natalie
Clifford Barney; The One Who Is Legion,1930. Courtesy of University of Chicago
Special Collections. Text reads, “The publishers suggest that the Author’s Note be read
first.” …………………………………………………………………………………146
Figure 12. Painting by Romaine Brooks of androgynous figure looking down, four beams of light
come down from their fingertips coming to a central burst. Included in Natalie Clifford
Barney’s The One Who Is Legion, 1930, pp. 8. Courtesy of University of Chicago
Special Collections. ………………………………………………………...153
Figure 13. Painting by Romaine Brooks of an androgynous falling through a crevice. Included in
Natalie Clifford Barney’s The One Who Is Legion, 1930, pp. 72. Courtesy of University
of Chicago Special Collections. ……………………………………………………...154
	

ix

INTRODUCTION

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with hard pains,
O lady, my heart
but come here if ever before
you caught my voice far off
and listening left your father’s
golden house came,
…
Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my ally.
-Sappho, “Fragment 1”

If one were seeking a succinct description of what Lesbians; How Novel is or does, I can
think of no better place to look than the title itself. It is unusual as titles of dissertation go, so
perhaps a brief close reading might be in order. I see my title not as descriptive, but as an
abstraction of the shape of my dissertation, if you’ll allow the metaphor. And here I’m thinking
of abstraction in terms similar to how Henri Matisse approached abstraction; over the course of
his career, he grew increasingly less interested with an image’s fidelity to reality in favor of the

1

finding the simplest lines to convey the essence of an object. I see my title functioning in a
similar way. It signals how our understanding of what it means to imagine and be lesbian, and
how to inhabit lesbian as sexual identity, necessitates an understanding of how the novel’s form
functions to produce it across the twentieth century and beyond. The semicolon—a punctuation
mark I never imagined would be so controversial as it turned out to be—signals the place at
which my analysis exists: the conjunction of the novel form and lesbian representation. It
similarly signals the place in which I situate this work in relationship with other scholarship: the
conjunction of Lesbian Studies and scholarship on the novel. Word order is important to note as
well in this case as it indicates that, while literary studies is integral to this dissertation, Lesbian
Studies is the primary focus and field in which it is situated. In eschewing a more didactic title,
these three words and semicolon also gesture towards the curated nature of my dissertation.
Rather than a comprehensive overview of the genre’s many iterations—a kind of macroscopic
approach that would examine as many lesbian novels as possible—my analysis looks at
particular examples of the lesbian novel to stretch the boundaries of how we understand this
genre, specifically, how genre formation is an interpretive practice rather than an exercise in
simple categorization or naming via fixed terms, and, hopefully, a slightly different
understanding of what the (lesbian) novel can do.

The Lesbian Menace
In writing this dissertation, I came across a final paper I wrote as an undergrad, the
culminating artifact of an independent study I did with Marilyn Frye on (unsurprisingly) the
definition of the word “lesbian”:

2

In order for me to begin studying any “thing” I need a definition. I do not
understand “definition” like the dictionary explains it, as “an exact statement or
description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something” but rather I understand
definitions as launching pads, points of departure from which my spinning into a
true-er [sic] understanding of a given topic begins. (Ambrose 2-3)
I have, from the beginning of this project, felt the same impetus, that in order for me to study the
lesbian novel as a genre—and Lesbians; How Novel is, at its heart, a genre study—then I must
have, at the very least, a working definition. But whereas, normally, it’s a question of finding
which definition with which to work, finding any definition of the lesbian novel was surprisingly
difficult. In her “The Novel: Lesbian” entry from The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage,
Sherrie A. Inness writes, “Exactly what features make a novel “lesbian” are difficult to specify.
Critics have different ideas about how to define a lesbian novel, but most agree on two points:
The author must be a lesbian, and the central character or characters must be lesbians” (524).1
Oh, how I wish I knew to whom or what she is referring, as her reference list leads to no other
definitions. Rather, her question—“what features make a novel ‘lesbian’?”—speaks to the all too
common problem Lesbian Studies scholars seem to have; they, like I, are preoccupied with
figuring out how “lesbian” becomes attached to a given literary term. Working from an opera in
particular but writing about narrative more generally, Marilyn R. Farwell writes:
In order, then, to find a lesbian opera, I must first determine what or who in the
text can be termed “lesbian,” particularly who or what can be called a “lesbian
subject.”
Although this task is formidable in opera, it is no less problematic in literature.
At first glance, lesbian literary narratives appear to offer no major definitional

3

problems. Identifiable lesbian characters, themes, and authors inhabit much of the
twentieth-century literary landscape. … The lesbian subject, variously defined,
appears in a number of coded, indirect, and subversive as well as literal ways. As
a result, both forms provide the reader or listener with abundant definitional
problems. Instead of a recognizable genre, lesbian literary narrative is, in reality, a
disputed form, dependent upon various interpretive strategies. In fact, the
definition of a lesbian narrative is as problematic and requires as many
interpretive skills as my search for a lesbian opera. The ultimate question for both
is where and how to posit the “lesbian” in a lesbian text. (3-4)
The problem, which Farwell highlights, is summed up well in her introduction’s title, “When Is a
Lesbian Narrative a Lesbian Narrative?” Looking at the problem she outlines in its broadest
terms, we begin to see a the pattern emerge: the difficulty in finding a definition lies in the
deceptive notion that defining will be easy, since there are so many lesbian texts to be found in
the twentieth century (implying, of course, that “lesbian” is a twentieth century term), followed
by the realization that multiple variables must be brought to bear when creating the definition—
the most problematic being, of course, what we mean by “lesbian,” such that we can attach it to
something like “opera,” “text,” “literature,” “narrative,” or, in my case, “novel.” At least, unlike
Farwell, I don't have the extra hurdle of a critic denying the existence of the genre I’m
examining.2
Another example. In The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989, Bonnie
Zimmerman presents a similar problem, wavering between defining “lesbian fiction” and
“lesbian literature”:

4

Among the products of lesbian culture is the flourishing genre of lesbian fiction.
What defines this genre? What do we mean by “lesbian writing” and “lesbian
writer”? Like the category “women’s literature,” “lesbian literature” is not defined
by inherent, static characteristics that can be easily and uniformly identified and
agreed upon, but by the perspective of a community of writers and readers. The
boundaries of the genre are and always will be fluid, since writers may enter or
leave and readers may disagree over its exact parameters. “Lesbian” is not an
ethnic or national designation, nor is it a stylistic or historical one, although it
combines elements of each.
Instead, lesbian writing can best be defined through a cluster of factors; if a
writer or text exhibits enough specific characteristics we can call her or it
“lesbian.” … [T]he following are the factors I use to identify lesbian writing. (14)
Like Farwell, Zimmerman proposes questions that feel rhetorical but, nonetheless, must be
answered. She locates the problem in the difficulty of defining “lesbian” and the variety of
factors one must consider in order to attach it to, in this case, a “text” or, following her use of the
female pronoun “her,” a (female) writer. For Zimmerman, while the definition will always be in
flux, the concept of lesbian as identity is key to her project, and lists the specific factors she
considers when determining if a given text is lesbian: the writer herself (though she
acknowledges the difficulties associated with this criterion), the literary text itself, the audience
reception (specifically the lesbians’ reception), and, finally, style, though she is very suspicious
of this final criterion. Sadly, what Zimmerman does not do is provide a litmus test of what
combination and to what degree each must be present in order that she (and by extension we) can
determine if they are “enough” to call a text a “lesbian” text (or for my purposes a lesbian novel).

5

Like Zimmerman, Terry Castle illustrates the difficulty of using “lesbian” as the
organizational force of a genre and anthology respectively. In her impressively thorough tome,
The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, Castle cites the
problematic dimension of relying on an author’s identity as a way to call a text lesbian, and
therefore, eschews it:
Even with better-known writers we may find ourselves reluctant to pronounce
upon the intimate feelings of those long dead. … At the very least the “literature
by lesbians” mode ineluctably entangles one in gossipy biographical conundrums
unlikely to be resolved in our own day or any other. More damagingly, even as
we labor (with greater or lesser unease) to pigeonhole individual women, we are
confronted with aggravating ambiguities of the term lesbian itself: its psychic and
behavioral imprecision, its obscure historical reach, its annoying failure to refer
unequivocally, precisely at those moments when one wants most that is should.
(4)
Zimmerman’s and Castle’s choices of how to approach using “lesbian” as both description and,
by extension, vector of analysis reflect the time period each wishes to cover. Because the
influence of lesbian feminism on the literature of the period Zimmerman analyzes is central to
the methodology of The Safe Sea of Women (1969-1989), Zimmerman feels that a known, selfproclaimed, lesbian identity is the vital criterion around which she categorizes something as
“lesbian,” and, therefore, means for lesbian to function as an adjective. Because her time period
extends to the Renaissance, Castle feels that authorial identity is a trap, at least for her goals,
though the tone of the above quote would suggest that Castle finds the investment in authorial
identity a dubious way to approach the analysis of literature at all. Still, she faces the problem of

6

using “lesbian”—itself a twentieth-century term—to describe the work she does in The
Literature of Lesbianism. The solution, for Castle, is found in the subtle semantics of the title
itself; by transforming “lesbian” as adjective to “lesbianism” as noun, further distancing it from
“literature” by making it an object of preposition, Castle argues that she can use the term to
better describe and investigate the term:
My own approach is different: less ideologically fraught, perhaps, and I hope less
compromising. Instead of presuming at the outset what lesbianism is—then trying
to find writers who somehow fit the bill—I start with the assumption that it is
precisely the category itself that is in need of historical examination. How (and
when) did it first become possible in modern Western culture to think about erotic
desire between women? From whence derive our sometimes wildly contradictory
notions of what lesbianism is and how it can be recognized? And how to
comprehend, more broadly, the curious enduring intellectual fascination that
fantasies of love between some have exerted over the Western popular
imagination since the Renaissance? … Far more useful than chasing down the
elusive facts of dead women’s lives, it seems to me, is to begin exploring the
“idea” of lesbianism itself—its conceptual origins, how it has been transmitted,
transformed, and collectively embellished, how it has served over the centuries as
something to talk about. I am less interested in what lesbian is, in other words,
that what people have said about it—its role as rhetorical and cultural topos. …
But by choosing as my title The Literature of Lesbianism I mean to suggest
something far more capacious than the relatively small corpus of works that
would result were one to case about for “authentic” lesbian-authored texts. One of

7

the most provocative discoveries I have made … has been just how commonplace
… the lesbian theme has been in Modern Western writing. … A final advantage
of the “literature of lesbianism” rubric, then: how easily it converts to the
“lesbianism of literature”—a phenomenon that this work should also do
something to illustrate. (4-7)3
Setting aside the wonderful shade that I, as a gay man, adore in this passage (you can imagine
her looking at Zimmerman’s book with disdain while writing this), the change in semantics
allows her to side-step the problem of defining what lesbian/ism is, a well-rehearsed argument
found in any number of works of lesbian studies.4 It also allows Castle to use the term transhistorically, avoiding the compelling argument of Lillian Faderman (among others) that, prior to
the 1890s, lesbians (as sexual identity) did not exist. Faderman, instead, uses the term “romantic
friendship,” while Kathryn Kent uses “protolesbian,” both implicitly following the canonical-inSexuality-Studies assertion by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality, Vol. I that the
homosexual became a “species” in the twentieth century—that is, it changed from actions in
which anyone might partake into something one is.5
“Is,” then, becomes the problem with which we all must tangle when dealing with
definitions. And when one can’t solve that problem directly, semantic acrobatics become one
possible solution. If “is” is a problem, try a different verb. For Castle, that verb is “thinks.” For
others, defining the Lesbian Novel for example, becomes a question of what it does. Take, for
example, Catharine R. Stimpson’s “Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English.”
While she begins by defining—firmly and “conservatively”—what she understands a “lesbian”
to be, having done so, she feels no such need to define what a lesbian novel is, instead describing
what lesbian novels (in English) do. Initially she writes:

8

Lesbian novels in English have responded judgmentally to the perversion that has
made homosexuality perverse by developing repetitive patterns; the dying fall, a
narrative of damnation, of the lesbians suffering as a lonely outcast attracted to a
psychological lower caste; and the enabling escape, a narrative of the reversal of
such descending trajectories, of the lesbian’s rebellion against social stigma and
self-contempt. Because the first has been dominant during the twentieth century,
the second has had to flee from the imaginative grip of that tradition as well. (98)
And then later she writes, simply, “Lesbian novels thus map out the boundaries of female
worlds” (108). This approach of describing patterns one finds across various iterations seems like
a more productive approach in that it acknowledges the variety that exists within a genre, though
it ignores how Stimpson was able to choose her texts to begin with. Annis Pratt and Andrea
Loewenstein make a similar move in “Love and Friendship Between Women.”6 Finding and
describing thematic connections across various texts, then, becomes Stimpson’s methodology for
moving toward what a lesbian novel (in English) is, locating the stakes of her project in the effect
lesbian novels have: mapping the boundaries of female worlds. While this description reads
rather poetically in context, it nonetheless describes well the stakes of my own project, that is,
why lesbian novels are important at all. Novels, like maps, have a reciprocal relationship to
reality; they both represent and work to create it. This is the crux of How Novels Think: The
Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900, in which Nancy Armstrong opens the door to many
scholars of the novel, allowing me to locate value in the novel form by arguing the creative
aspect of the novel, that is, the ability for novels to not reflect realty, but to produce it:
This book argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern
subject are, quite literally, one and the same. The British novel provides the test

9

case. It came into being, I believe, as writers sought to formulate a kind of subject
that had not yet existed in writing. Once formulated in fiction, however, this
subject proved uniquely capable of reproducing itself not only in authors but also
in readers, in other novels, and across British culture in law, medicine, more and
political philosophy, biography, history, and other forms of writing that took the
individual as their most basic unit. … To produce an individual, novels had to
think as if there already were one, that such an individual was not only the
narrating subject and source of writing. (3)7
This may be, for those of us who take the concept of individualism for granted, a revolutionary
assertion, that the concept and, therefore, how we live our lives, locates is source in the
imaginative dimension of the novel. The reason lesbian novels matter is because they serve the
double purpose of documenting the history of actual lesbian existence, while also creating the
concept/way of being in the world. But if Lesbians; How Novel’s stakes are rooted in the effects
that lesbian novels have had on the material reality of actual lesbians, I’m still left with my initial
problem of definition.
In a way, iterating the various problems of definition feels like ritual. How to solve it,
then? Appease the rhetorical goddess? Do I simply take Sherrie Inness’ definition and forget it?
Do I follow Castle and figure out a way to reword things? Do I take Stimpson’s approach and
initiate a methodology of pattern recognition? Or, perhaps, as Laura Doan does in the preface to
Lesbian Postmodern, do I simply refuse the organizing impulse of definition entirely?8 Rather
than find a way to circumnavigate, circumvent, or traverse the definitional problem, Lesbians;
How Novel revels in it, arguing that, in order to better understand what lesbian novels are, a
change in methodology is required.

10

Lesbians; How Novel locates its intervention in methodology, arguing that too much
attention has been paid to the biographical dimension of lesbian novels at the expense of their
imaginative dimension. Rather than using a novel’s lesbian content to argue that a given author is
a lesbian by using an author’s sexual practice to read lesbianism into a novel, or comparing a
given novel’s representation of lesbianism to reality in order to locate its value in authenticity,
Lesbians; How Novel is invested in how novels have worked to imagine lesbians into being.
Following the work of Nancy Armstrong, specifically, and the spirit of Terry Castle, Lesbians;
How Novel argues that the definition of the lesbian novel should be rooted in a methodology of
pattern recognition, analyzing portrayals of female same-sex desire irrespective of its mimetic
authenticity. As such, this work offers as its definition of the “lesbian novel” any novel in which
female same-sex desire is integral to its narrative or form. We might better be served to think of
the genre as not the lesbian novel but the lesbianovel, suggesting graphematically that “lesbian”
is not merely description, but, by working to create actual lesbians (either through emulation or
resistance against given representations), it constitutes its own form.9 It also demonstrates that
lesbian, as sexual identity, is itself inextricable from the influence of the novel, that the lesbian
novel did integral work to produce it.

Lesbian: A Metaphor for Genre.
There is, in literary studies, a debate as to whether to use “lesbian” or “sapphic” when
naming texts that represent female same-sex desire. The crux of the debate resides in what each
evokes differently. For the likes of Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, sapphic disconnects from the
rigidity of identity that lesbian evokes.10 Elizabeth English, on the other hand, argues that
sapphic is a limiting term, invested in including lesbian authors/texts with so-called “high

11

modernism.”11 My take on the difference between the two is a bit more pedantic. As Lesbians;
How Novel is a genre study, the utility of using lesbian, for me, also lies in understanding it as a
dead metaphor and, through its revivification, a metaphor for genre.
In Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory, David Fishelov writes:
Anyone who has done even some casual reading on the theory of literary genres
will be amazed by how often writers use analogies . . . in trying to understand and
illuminate the nature of literary genres. This tendency to resort to analogy
suggests, among other things, that the literary genre is an elusive and multifaceted
phenomenon that resists explanation by any one simple, straightforward approach.
(1)
While his tone is a bit confusing (“amazement” at the phenomenon and “resort” suggest Fishelov
values a “straightforward” approach), he nonetheless dedicated a large amount of time writing a
book on four main analogies used to describe genres: literary genres as biological species,
families, social institutions, or speech acts. And the phenomenon itself—so ubiquitous that even
the “casual” reader would pick up on it—suggests there’s something generative about using
analogies to think through what genres are and how they function. Lesbian, then, functions as the
metaphor for how I approach genre.
Both “sapphic” and “lesbian” are dead metaphors, which is to be expected if we consider,
as Chris Baldick notes, that “[m]uch of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical
words and phrases that pass unnoticed as ‘dead’ metaphors, like the branch of an organization”
(Kindle Locations 7713-7714). However, revitalizing them shows how they work differently and
why, for this project, “lesbian” is the better term.12 Same-sex desire becomes attached to sapphic
because the speaker in Sappho’s poetry is assumed to be female (because Sappho is) and her

12

object of address is also female. With sapphic, we have a comparison to a person (and her
desire), an ideal, and, implicitly, her body of work. In relation to literature, it also signals a
connection to a Classical (and classed) literary tradition. And while “lesbian” is certainly
connected to Sappho in the way that it signals female same-sex desire—it alludes to the island on
which she lived and infuses it with her perceived desire for women—it doesn’t call to mind a
direct comparison with her as a person, as a speaker in her work, or to a smaller extent, the
historical figure. Taken literally, rather than being like a person, lesbian is of a place, a
metaphorical inhabitant of the isle of Lesbos. Thinking of lesbian novels as individual members
that make up a constituency, unique, yet having shared characteristics, we then understand how
Fishelove came up with his rather straightforward, if open-ended, definition of “genre” as “a
combination of prototypical, representative members, and a flexible set of constitutive rules that
apply to some levels of literary texts, to some individual writers, usually to more than one
literary period, and to more than one language and culture” (8). The texts I’ve chosen for this
project represent this understanding of genre, looking at central models like The Well of
Loneliness and lesser-known works, and novels that, while they might require reading against the
grain, point to the limits of generic citizenship.

Text Selection and Methodology
As one may have guessed from my opening reading of my title, close reading is my
primary literary method. Close reading is vital to my project of reorienting our understanding of
and approach to analysis of lesbian novels because, rather than bringing a particular lens to bear
upon a given text, rather than looking for a kind of lesbian or finding some totalizing description
of “what’s going on,” it allows me to theorize outward, to take each text’s representation to

13

detect the variation and difference in how female same-sex desire has been portrayed.13 Though I
would categorize my dissertation as primarily a work within the literary branch of Lesbian
Studies, my approach differs from dominant modes of analysis in two main ways. First, I resist,
as much as possible, the comparison of representations of lesbians with “real” lesbians. Doing so
allows me to eschew a line of inquiry that focuses on mimetic accuracy and authenticity, a
method that too often results in the dismissal of texts on the grounds of inaccuracy, rather than
engaging critically with the “hows” and “whys” of a representation. Secondly, and relatedly, I
am completely uninterested in reading lesbian novels as authorial biography. While I see the
political value in using novels to claim an author as a lesbian or to “get to know her better”—for
certainly the work of any author tells us something about her—when one approaches a novel in
search of biographical information, it does a disservice to the genre; it misses out on what the
fictional dimension is doing and ultimately produces a very different reading of a text. Consider,
for example, the columnar side bar that describes the birth of “the first woman born with a
difference” in Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack. This brief moment is very relevant to my
analysis, because Barnes’s mythology of the birth of the first lesbian (as the result of a celestial
orgy) places it within a context of other novels of the time that imagine the lesbian as gender
hybrid (the subject of my third chapter). A biographical reading would likely overlook this
aspect of the novella because it has nothing to do with one of the roman à clef ’s characters, who
stands in for Barnes’s friends. While the lesbian novel as a genre is heavily influenced by
autobiographical material, thereby making biographical readings of the text relevant, I’m more
interested in limiting my analysis of the text to the text itself rather than to a reality to which it
may or may not refer.

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Making close reading primary also allows me to bracket the paratextual (front/back
matter) that frequently reads biography into lesbian novels, in order to focus my analysis on the
novel’s form, attend to how female same-sex desire is being represented, and talk about the
figure of the lesbian in the context of the novel’s diegesis.14 This approach will be extremely
important for my first chapter, which investigates the interaction of Stone Butch Blues within the
text of Crybaby Butch, and my third chapter, which examines how the generic hybridity of the
novel and the theory of congenital inversion are working together, though in very different ways,
in The Well of Loneliness, L’ange et les pervers, and The One Who is Legion.
In addition to close reading, I bring archival research to bear, as the difference in iteration
is important to my second chapter’s argument about the shape of Violette Leduc’s representation
of female same-sex desire Thérèse et Isabelle. Bracketing the paratextual, intertextual, and
biographical marks a decided shift in Leduc scholarship as it has been particularly invested in the
biographical, motivated by how censored excerpts of the original text of Thérèse et Isabelle
appear verbatim in her autobiography (and a rather intriguing life to begin with). But perhaps
more importantly, the original, private printing of Thérèse et Isabelle is absent from the
characterization of the novel’s publication history. I find myself first asking: do we ignore the
impact the censored version has had over the past fifty years? Why do we (I) value the
uncensored version? What do we do with the censored version as it goes out of print and new
audiences only have access to the texte intégral? Etc. It seems important when talking about
Thérèse et Isabelle’s various iterations (and why the most recent is my focus) that I at least try to
gain access to the first, and almost forgotten, version. Archival research is also brought to bear in
my third and final chapter as part of the recuperative politics of this dissertation, bringing to light
information from first editions that are otherwise inaccessible to the public.

15

While the primary intervention of Lesbians; How Novel is methodological, a secondary
goal is one of recuperation; save for The Well of Loneliness, the texts selected at the outset of this
project were, in some way, marginalized, often in the most practical sense of being out of print or
ignored by the academy. Stone Butch Blues has, until very recently, been out of print. Having
only two printings, for many years copies were selling for hundreds of dollars. Until recently,
Leslie Feinberg’s prolonged illness and death kept hir from being able to realize hir Marxist
dream of the removing the novel from capitalist systems of exchange. Now, the novel is
available for free digital download or at-cost printing. Crybaby Butch, which offers a fascinating,
complex take on how Stone Butch Blues functions as a lesbian cultural artifact, has not, at the
time of writing, been considered by academics. Thérèse et Isabelle has been available since 1966
in various printings, but in a censored version. In 2000, an uncensored version was published in
French and translated into English in 2012. While censorship in itself can be understood as a
kind of marginalization, the marginalization that matters to me is how it’s been viewed in the
broader scope of Leduc scholarship—as incidental, as adjacent to the import of her larger works,
and valued only in terms of the larger narrative of her struggle as a writer. This novel, more than
all the others, resonates with my methodological intervention, helping to illuminate why focusing
on the auto/biographical dimension of lesbian novels is a reductive methodology. The One Who
is Legion is doubly marginalized; though marketed as a book in conversation with Virginia
Woolf, its initial run of 560 copies meant that it would only ever reach a minimal audience. Its
republication in 1987 worked to recuperate the book, yet failed in another way, as it seems to be
largely ignored by academics except as it relates to the romantic relationship between Natalie
Clifford Barney and Romaine Brooks or Renée Vivien. L’ange et les pervers has a similar fate:
difficult to obtain in the original French, and having only one translation into English in 1995,

16

it’s been nearly ignored by everyone except the translator, Anna Livia, who considers it only
briefly in her work. Jennifer Waelti-Walters, who distinguishes herself as an expert on the
French roman lesbien, explicitly dismisses L’ange et les pervers as “unimportant” in Feminist
Novelists of the Belle Epoque: Love as a Lifestyle, only mentioning it because it represents
Natalie Clifford Barney in fictional form (28).15 My curation of these books allows me to stretch
and exceed the definitional limits of the lesbian novel as a genre imposed by the field’s primary
methodology. By investigating its boundaries, I illustrate why there is a need to define this genre
in terms of its imaginative, rather than mimetic, representational dimension.

Chapter Order and Descriptions
There is, in general, a backward movement temporally in Lesbians; How Novel. Chapter
one is set securely at the end of the twentieth century; chapter two examines the republication of
Thérèse et Isabelle and therefore echolocates between the year 2000 and 1955, the year of its
first publication; chapter three investigates three texts from the end of the 1920s, the historical
moment at which the genre coalesces. As the politics of my project could be described as
recuperative of the genre itself, rather than on specific texts, it follows that the dissertation
begins where we are now and moves backwards.16 But this order also allows for the creation of
the larger trajectory of reorientation: the first chapter demonstrates the need for eliminating
authorial identity from our definition of the lesbian novel genre, advocating instead for
intertexuality and interpretation as a way to understand the genre’s shame; the second will stand
as a critique of the biographical approach to analysis of the lesbian novel, demonstrating how
much more is available to us if our analysis leaves biography behind; the third looks at the
flexibility of the novel, illustrating the lesbian novel’s generic birth in varying degrees of formal

17

experimentation, the novel’s imaginative dimension, capitalizing on how the novel “disregards
the constraints that govern other literary forms, and acknowledges no obligatory structure, style,
or subject-matter” “[t]hriving on this openness and flexibility” (Novel Kindle Locations 85628563). This backward look mirrors a formal progression of the first three chapters, in which I
move from realism backward towards experimentation; this move will highlight what I would
argue is the false, unidirectional understanding of the novel’s form as representing reality, an
understanding rooted in realism’s dominance in the twentieth-century novel more generally. By
moving away from realism, chapter by chapter, I aim to highlight the false conflation of realism
and the real and distance the figure of the lesbian from her human counterpart.
My first chapter focuses on Stone Butch Blues’ place in the lesbian novel genre, both on
its own terms and as portrayed through the lens of Judith Frank’s lesbian novel, Crybaby Butch.
The first part of this chapter looks at Stone Butch Blues’ resistance to categorization, especially
under a lesbian heading. Stone Butch Blues falls short of meeting the current accepted definition
of a lesbian novel—a novel by a lesbian, about a lesbian—because the author was largely known
to be a transman, the main character resists the moniker, and the word “lesbian” is largely absent
from the novel. What then do we do when a novel feels “so obviously” a lesbian novel but
doesn’t meet the criteria of the accepted definition? My analysis of Feinberg’s complicated
identity demonstrates why authors’ sexuality is an unstable foundation on which to define a
genre. My close reading of Stone Butch Blues offers another avenue for understanding it as a
lesbian novel while also illustrating less rigid approach to definition more generally. I then move
into an analysis of how Judith Frank claims Stone Butch Blues for the lesbians. First, I examine
the formal similarities between the two (such as the opening with second person); then, I argue
that Frank’s use of Stone Butch Blues is a exercise in lesbian canon-building because 1) it

18

presents a theory of the (import of) lesbian novel as a lesbian cultural artifact that mediates
relationships, thereby illustrating a theory of what we imagine novels being capable of doing,
focusing on Stone Butch Blues in particular; and 2) it interpolates the reader as a (butch) lesbian
to delineate her audience, forming a connection between her own novel and Stone Butch Blues.
This chapter argues that interpretation and intertexuality are more useful and flexible criteria for
organizing the genre.
My second chapter focuses on the recently released texte intégral of Violette Leduc’s
Thérèse et Isabelle. I will open this chapter with a short look at the publication history in order to
do two things: 1) show that the novel’s publication history can provide more than just the
salacious tale of censorship and hardship, in my case demonstrating how the minute change in
verb tense between iterations calls out for privileging the fictional over the biographical; and 2)
examine the politics of the publication more generally, putting into relief things we take for
granted, such as the supremacy of authorial intent and the inherent “evil” of censorship, while
thinking through the ontology of the book. Publication puts the words into a body all their own
(what I’ll now call, tentatively, publication as vivification). How do we reconcile authorial intent
with the reality that Thérèse and Isabelle’s story was separated from its parent text, Ravages,
nonetheless?17 If this is what the public has had access to, a text embodied separately, how do we
characterize the relationship? As the censored version goes out of print and the uncensored
version proliferates across continents, do we simply let the censored version fade away? Or do
we honor the impact of each iteration? This is where archival research will become important to
my argument, because it is the only way I can examine and account for the first, private
publication of Thérèse et Isabelle. It is the biography of the book, rather than the book as
biography. My archival research reveals Leduc’s intense revisionary practices, especially when it

19

came to verb tense. I argue we should locate Leduc’s brilliance as an author in this revisionary
practice and pay attention to how verb tense makes scenes feel different—especially in sex
scenes.
Leduc’s obvious obsession with grammatical time, present in her handwritten revisions,
makes all the more obvious how the novel’s anxiety with time is integral to its representation of
same-sex desire. My close reading of Thérèse et Isabelle is therefore focused on style and
setting. Leduc’s use of figurative language, lack of detailed description, and a style that eschews
realism in general often leaves the reader confused and unsettled on the level of plot. This style,
combined with the places wherein female same-sex desire manifests (the cell, the outhouse,
steps, and brothel), reveals how this version of the novel imagines female same-sex desire as
something unsustainable, something that will always be contained and, eventually, eliminated.
My third and final chapter scrutinizes three iterations of the lesbian novel as it is
coalescing as a genre, Radclyffe Hall’s inescapable The Well of Loneliness (1928), Lucie
Delarus-Mardrus nearly forgotten L’ange et les pervers (1930), and Natalie Clifford Barney’s
seemingly incomprehensible The One Who is Legion (1930). Each imagines congenital
inversion, though in very different ways, via the so-called “mannish lesbian,” a “hermaphrodite,”
and an undead being. Each in its own way functions as a kind of experiment in what and how the
novel is capable of representing. As such, this chapter as guided by a line of inquiry rooted in
general thematic similarity, rather than in the more common thesis-driven presentation of
evidence. This method honors what I see has happening within the texts themselves: they are
experiments. They are exercises. They are trying to figure out what it means to represent female
same-sex desire by capitalizing on the novel’s inherent flexibility as a fictional form. My reading
of these novels illustrates how the lesbian novel genre is, and has always been, beholden to the

20

imaginative dimension of the novel form, more so than its mimetic properties. Rather than acting
as detectives searching for the biographical clues we want to find, we can better understand what
we mean by “lesbian” when we focus on how that understanding has been created and attending
to the nuances of the texts’ representations, rather than locating their value in how accurately
they reflect reality. In valuing the fictional over the real, we acknowledge and appreciate how
lesbian novels have created lesbians in the twentieth century.

The Personal is Political
One of the glibbest accusations about literary scholars is that our work is esoteric, that is,
it has no worth outside academia. Heck, some even question the worth of our research to
academia. The recuperative aspect of my dissertation is rooted in a deeply personal queer and
feminist politics that feels that sentiment about lesbian literary studies is, frankly, bullshit. I
know what it means to grow up in representational desert, to see yourself reflected nowhere, to
be, in the public imagination, unimaginable. I would argue and hope that I am ever present as
you read my dissertation that, through my writerly voice—at times leaving behind the formality
one comes to expect from academic writing—you hear Steven. One might then return again to
the obvious pun in my title, suffused with a tone Wildean droll humor. This conscious effort is
meant to illustrate my personal investment in the politics of this dissertation, to stand in
solidarity with lesbians as a queer brother in arms.
Writing this dissertation about these novels, dedicating six years of my life to this project,
is meant to illustrate that these texts mattered to twentieth century queer people and, more
importantly, matter now. And as academics we have an obligation to use our relative privilege to
fight representational erasure from our research and, more importantly, from our teaching, which

21

is, after all, where our research has the most impact. Highlighting the import of how lesbian
novels imagined new ways of being lesbian into existence in the twentieth century illustrates
how representation creates ways for us to exist at all. The politics of this work are perhaps more
simply put thusly: these novels matter because queer people matter, a concept that in a time
when they are throwing us off buildings,18 when we’re stabbed by our mothers,19 when we are
beaten into unconsciousness on public transport,20 when beaten to death in the streets while
people film, laughing,21 when they’re rounding us up in camps22—well I think that sentiment
bears repeating, even if only in some esoteric dissertation.

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CHAPTER 1: CRYBABY BLUES

When butches cry
They weep, they wail
They gnash their teeth
and moan.

Strong woman's pain
It's just the same
Except it's mostly done
Alone.
-Bonnie Barringer, “When Butches Cry”

Which shelf is it on?
On November 17, 2014, posts slowly began filling up my Facebook feed with the news
that Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warrior, had died. I quietly got up, closed the door to my
office, and cried. “Wept” is, perhaps, more accurate. This, of course, wasn’t first time I’d cried
because of Leslie Feinberg; if you can read Stone Butch Blues—the novel for which ze is best
known—without crying, I question your humanity. 23 When sufficient endorphins had flooded
my bloodstream, such that I could return to a more poised state, I braced myself to read Minnie
Bruce-Pratt’s obituary on Advocate.com, whereupon I was immediately confused by the
ubiquitous use of female pronouns throughout the piece.
The editors of The Advocate anticipated this reaction from its readership and included the

23

following note; “Though we have often used ‘he’ in reference to Feinberg at The Advocate, we
recognize that this obituary was written by Feinberg's wife, Minnie Bruce Pratt, while at the
author's bedside. Thus we are using her preferred pronouns here, despite our previous
reporting” (Advocate 1).24 Pronouns can be tricky when referencing trans folk; honoring a
person’s gender presentation—assuming it’s readable within the gender binary—is often the
safest linguistic position to take, unless that person has personally or publically requested a
specific set of prounouns. The one time I met Leslie Feinberg, ze requested the gender neutral
pronouns “ze” and “hir”, thereby placing hirself outside the (linguistic) binary. For the nineteen
or twenty year old me who had never used gender-neutral pronouns on a regular basis, it made
me supremely aware of my language, calling attention to how unconscious my use of language is
by forcing me to be conscious of it.
You can almost feel my brow furrowing if you consider that, upon reading of this
obituary, I became aware of three sets of pronouns referring to the same person, marking
grammatically Feinberg’s multifaceted and complicated experience of identity. In fact, “identity”
may be a misnomer as it implies a singularity of being—a sense of a cohesive “I” moving
through the world that the use of varying pronouns undermines. The list of adjectives with which
Bruce Pratt opens her obituary highlights this reading of Feinberg’s self as simultaneously
multiple, rather than “simply” one: “Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white,
working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on
November 15.” Of course I’m hardly the first person to consider individuals as multiple at once;
it’s the heart of the concept of intersectionality. But the different sets of pronouns referring to
Feinberg illustrates that gender, however integral or essentially experienced, can change, even be
seemingly contradictory or opposite, depending on the setting of any given moment.

24

Consider a quotation that Bruce Weber pulled from a 2006 interview with Feinberg from
Camp for his New York Times obituary in which ze is quoted as saying:
I like the gender neutral pronoun “ze/hir” she continued, “because it makes it
impossible to hold on to gender/sex/sexuality assumptions about a person you’re
about to meet or you’ve just met. And in an all trans setting, referring to me as
“he/him” honors my gender expression in the same way that referring to my sister
drag queens as “she/her” does. (qtd. in Weber)
Initially, gender-neutral pronouns become a strategy for interacting with new people;
assumptions must be set aside, active thought put into one’s interaction with Feinberg. In this
context, Feinberg embodies a gender that refuses to conform, that refuses to suture all that we
think we know about gender, sex, and sexuality, and refuses to allow those around hir to do so.
In the very specific, all-trans setting, male pronouns connote “honor,” but notably not to
Feinberg’s gender (something someone is), but gender expression (something someone does).
But the difference in context—the all-trans setting—suggests that, in that space, the use of “he”
does not bring to bear traditional conceptions of gender upon Feinberg, that other trans folk “get”
the complexity, and their use of “he/him” is an informed acknowledgement of alterity. But it’s
the use of “she” and the category of lesbian that I still struggle with, as Feinberg’s existence
outside the gender binary (ze/hir) and being (perceived to be) an FTM trans man seems
incommensurable with being female and lesbian.
The variety of pronouns used to refer to Leslie Feinberg suggests a potentially
revolutionary approach to gender ontology and phenomenology; it suggests that that one can be
male in the streets (based on gender expression), lesbian at home (as it’s her partner who deploys
the female pronouns), and gender non-conforming at public events. It suggests that being lesbian

25

and being female can be entirely private identities, left behind at one’s apartment door. It
suggests that the gender one performs can be differently named, using seemingly antithetical
terms, and remain accurate. It also points to the unreliability of public perception when attaching
any identity category to a person.
This chapter examines Stone Butch Blues in relation to the lesbian novel genre, arguing
that Stone Butch Blues is, in fact, a lesbian novel, that a new definition of the genre is necessary,
that an author’s identity should no longer be the organizing principle for categorizing any one
novel as a lesbian novel, and that we need a new approach to understanding what makes a novel
a lesbian novel.

Looking for the Lesbian
In her “The Novel: Lesbian” entry from The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, Sherrie
A. Inness writes: “Exactly what features make a novel ‘lesbian’ are difficult to specify. Critics
have different ideas about how to define a lesbian novel, but most agree on two points: The
author must be a lesbian, and the central character or characters must be lesbians” (524).25
Keeping in mind the tension at play in how Minnie Bruce-Pratt characterizes Feinberg’s identity,
we find an interesting corollary in the categorization of Feinberg’s most famous novel, Stone
Butch Blues. The majority of the (surprisingly paltry) published scholarship on Stone Butch
Blues characterizes the novel as a transgender novel, not a lesbian novel.26 Following the form of
Inness’ definition, it therefore makes complete sense that most scholars would characterize Stone
Butch Blues as a transgender novel, as Feinberg’s public persona was understood to be trans
male or non-binary, and since the novel’s protagonist, Jess Goldberg, transitions from female to
male as a means of survival.

26

Heck, even the word “lesbian” is hard to find in Stone Butch Blues. While there is a
constellation of words that mark queer women in the novel—butch, he-she, bulldagger, dyke,
kike, femme—the rarity of “lesbian” is such that, when it first appears, it stands out. The novel’s
protagonist, Jess Goldberg, narrates: “The new bar was closer to the Tenderloin strip in
downtown buffalo. It was called the Malibou—a jazz bar that would welcome us after the 1:00
A.M. show ended. Organized crime owned the Malibou, too. But a lesbian ran it. We figured that
would make a difference. Her name was Gert” (53). I read that unconjoined independent clause
over and over and I can’t get a handle on its tone. That “But” reads as both afterthought, as if this
fact is the simple and obvious reason they attended the club, or else an insistent exception, a kind
of “Look, look!” A lesbian gave us a place to be!" The exceptional use of the word “lesbian”—in
terms of its rarity—is mirrored by the exceptional rhetoric in which it’s located, that “But”
signaling a fact that changes the circumstances of an otherwise hostile world. Yet, other than this
initial iteration, we don’t see the word “lesbian” again until much later, when it appears in the
historical confluence of gay liberation and the feminist movement:
We heard about weekly gay liberation and radical women’s meetings at the
university, but Theresa was the only on in our crowd who knew her way around
campus. It was still another world to the rest of us. Everything was changing so
fast. I wondered if this was the revolution.
One day I came home from work and found Theresa stewing in anger at the
kitchen table. Some of the lesbians from a newly formed group on campus had
mocked her for being a femme. They told her she was brainwashed. “I’m so
mad,” Theresa thumped the table. “The told me butches were male chauvinist
pigs!”

27

I knew what male chauvinist meant, but I couldn’t figure out what it has to
with us. “Don’t they know we don’t deal the shit, we get shit on?” (Feinberg 135)
The mention of “weekly gay liberation and radical women’s meetings” implies that the place
lesbians exist in (or, perhaps more accurately, in between) is separate from the larger social
movements to which the narrator, Jess, refers; the lesbians have no movement of their own, no
political platform that’s extricable from either gay liberation or the women’s movement.
Occupying an interstitial place wherein they must swear allegiance to both without ever being
full members of either marks the lesbian as both double outsider and bridge. The rapidity of
change (“changing so fast”) makes consciously processing the changing social and political
landscape difficult to the point where Jess can only (hopefully?) speculate that this could be “the
revolution.” The unfamiliarity the “us”—which we can assume to be Jess and Theresa’s butch
and femme bar friends—has with the campus, indicates the class transition—or, at the very least,
crossing—Theresa is making, and the place of lesbians in the university setting. And yet,
Theresa being mocked marks her alterity, indicating that the class differential between lesbians
who attend the newly-formed group on campus and the working class butch and femme lesbians
of the bars is not erased by some sense of lavender sisterhood. The temporal setting and physical
location (“campus”) then marks “lesbian” as both an historically significant and a classed
identity category. However, it would appear the lesbians on campus aren’t necessarily interested
in the butches and femmes joining them under the lesbian banner. Calling Theresa
“brainwashed” and calling butches “male chauvinist pigs” represents a classic critique of secondwave feminists: they take on a condescending demeanor, speaking down to those who, unlike
them, have not yet raised their consciousness to the same place. And by not only aligning
butches with men, but calling them “male,” these university lesbians push butches further away

28

from incorporation under the term “lesbian”; they become, implicitly, not quite lesbians, but the
lesbian allies of patriarchy who have brainwashed their femme counterparts as a result of what,
as Jess’s blind date in the opening chapter puts it, “this society has done to ‘women like [Jess]’
who hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men” (Feinberg 5-6).
The idea that the butch/femme formation emulates straight culture suggests that butch
and femme are not merely subcategories of a lesbian umbrella, a fact that is born out in how
female same-sex desire plays out among the butch-femme community in the novel. Femmes are
often portrayed as having sex with men, often as a result economic or social pressure, thereby
distancing them from the idea of the exclusively female sexual object choice that “lesbian”
implies. The spectrum of gender expression represented in the butches of the novel blurs the idea
of a distinct line between male and female, as some present as male on the weekend (the
Saturday night butches) and others transition medically, leaving womanhood behind to pass as
men. The variety of representations all marked as “butch” makes a simple subjugation of the
term under the heading “lesbian” problematic, to say the least.27 Rather, in terms of the novel’s
nomenclature, “lesbian” becomes an overlapping term with which characters must reckon. But
more important than if they are “allowed in,” taxonomically, is whether Jess and Theresa are
allowed to exist at all. It would appear that the combination of hetero-patriarchy—most often
embodied in the novel in the form of the police—and the exclusivity of gay liberation and the
women’s movement leaves working class butches and femmes with no place at all. For example,
Jess and Theresa have this conversation: [Jess speaking] “You know what I wish there was still a
gay bar where we could go dancing, like we used to.” Theresa sighed. ‘They have lesbian dances
on campus. I wish we could go there. I wish we could go somewhere and be welcome’” (147).

29

There is now nowhere left for Jess and Theresa to socialize; they are therefore left as a kind of
two-person team against the world, longing for just one place to hold on to each other and sway.
As a means to cope with this violence and the isolation the world exacts from Jess, she
decides to transition to living as a man, complicating Jess and Theresa’s already insular
existence:
“You’re a woman!” Theresa shouted at breakfast. She pushed her plate away. Her
part-time temp work had put that meal on the table.
“No I’m not,” I yelled back at her. “I’m a he-she. That’s different.”
Theresa slapped the table in anger. “That’s a terrible word. They call you that
to hurt you.”
I leaned forward. “But I’ve listened. They don’t call the Saturday-night
butches he-shes. It means something. It’s a way we’re different. It doesn’t just
mean we’re. . .lesbians.”
Theresa frowned. “What’s the matter?”
I shrugged. “Nothing, I just never said that word before. It sounds so easy
when you say it. But to me it sounds too much like lezzie and lesbo. That’s a
tough word for me to get my tongue around.” (147 – 48)
And though they laugh after that rather obvious pun, the difficulty Jess has using the word
“lesbian” makes sense. It’s not a word that appears often in the linguistic landscape of the book,
and the first time Jess encounters it in the diegetic timeline is during a violent, public gang-rape
by five members of her high school football team, during which she is called a “lezzie.” How can
one expect her to identify with a term whose primary association is with hateful violence at the
hands of heterosexual men? The discomfort Jess feels in using the word is a part of her attempt

30

to place herself within a constellation of overlapping identity markers. The fact that this arises in
a moment of dialogue is telling, as gender identity is a push and pull between the one who
identifies and expresses her gender and the one who recognizes it; the solidification of gender
identity, if it ever occurs, happens in the moment wherein the other acknowledges that identity.
And this argument illustrates the difficulty of attaining recognition, of getting someone on board.
Jess recognizes in herself that the use of different language, “he-she,” however maliciously
intended, nonetheless denotes something different about her, a difference in language marking
the specificity of her difference that “lesbian” does not.
So here, even though both “he-she” and “lezzie”—an ironic diminutive of lesbian—have
been used as hateful slurs, Jess nonetheless recognizes something accurate in one, but not in the
other; he-she describes her difference in a way that resonates with her, whereas “lesbian”
generates dissonance. And in realigning her understanding of how language refers to her, she’s
coming to a new understanding of her very being, that the difference she’s felt from an early age
that so excluded her from the world, the difference in which she thought “butch” was a home,
was, in fact, not inaccurate, but imprecise and insufficient. But by choosing different language,
and by choosing to not be a lesbian, she is choosing to be alone, because being with a man is a
deal-breaker for Theresa.
This reading is meant to highlight how, by resisting the lesbian moniker in terms of the
author’s public identity, the protagonist’s identity, and even within the linguistic field of the
novel, there is a very strong case for calling Stone Butch Blues a transgender novel. But this
resistance also makes those that characterize the novel as a lesbian novel that much more
striking, suggesting that attaching “lesbian” to “novel” requires interpretation. Take for example,
in hir now seminal Female Masculinity, how J. Jack Halberstam uses Stone Butch Blues as way

31

of thinking through how butch masculinity is a particular kind of female masculinity, separate
entirely from male masculinity.28 Ann Cvetokovich, in stark contrast, appears to take the
lesbianness of Stone Butch Blues for granted. In the second chapter of An Archive of Feelings:
Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Cvetkovich writes that, in the ten years leading
up to her book’s publication in 2003:
[T]here has been a flood of literature on butch-femme that includes historical
work on pre-Stonewall bar culture . . . and contemporary butch-femme
formations. Butch-femme identities and cultures have also served as a resource
for queer theory’s understanding of gender and sexuality, and butch-femme
writings constitute a valuable archive of explicit representations of not only
sexuality and desire but also emotion. (51)
In this moment, Cvetkovich is describing the context in which she situates her own work, at the
site of overlap between Lesbian Studies and Queer Theory. Among this “deluge” of literature,
she names historical works within the body of her text and footnotes an extensive list of other
genres—lesbian anthology, autobiography, personal testament, lesbian feminist theory, queer
theory, and historiography—and frames her chapter in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis. In
doing so, Cvetkovich connects her text to a network of scholarship, ostensibly engaging in this
decades-long discussion, while simultaneously differentiating her work explicitly in terms of
“trauma theory alongside” this “important repository” (51). But, while Cvetkovich cites all of
these texts as being notable, when it comes to analyzing butch identities, not all texts are
weighted equally in this chapter; Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues comprises several pages
and two subsections, nearly twenty percent of the chapter’s analysis. Her extensive use of the

32

novel to explore lesbian public culture and lesbian affect would seem at odds with most of the
criticism of Stone Butch Blues that names it a trans novel.
So why does Cvetkovich give it so much airtime? Perhaps because of its “popularity”
(73). Of the novel, Cvetkovich writes, “I would argue that a major source of the novel’s appeal is
in its emotional power, especially its use of sentimental and melodramatic narrative modes” (73).
However, buried in the footnote attached to this quote is a confession that her argument is rooted
in a sense, an impression (304). Somehow, making a judgment about a novel’s “appeal” or
“popularity” or its import based only on her (lesbian) feeling seems completely apropos to her
project, a project whose underlying methodology is the import of feelings as a site of knowledge
production. The reading of Stone Butch Blues that follows is a compelling formal and narrative
analysis of the novel that speaks to the heart of what makes the novel important to Cvetkovich’s
argument: its emotional impact on a reader.
And yet, Cvetkovich uses her analysis to comment not on the literary or effect of reading
such an emotionally brutal novel, but on how we understand butch emotional style, that is to say,
how the novel teaches us something about the way things actually are, rather than a way they can
be. She makes the connection rather brilliantly by making an argument about that the line from
the letter that opens Stone Butch Blues, which reads, “Since I can’t mail you this letter, I’ll send
it to a place where they keep women’s memories safe. Maybe someday, passing through this big
city, you will stop and read it”—Cvetkovich argues that this is referring to The Lesbian Herstory
Archives.29 She justifies this reading by citing that this opening letter from Stone Butch Blues
was first published in Joan Nestle’s The Persistent Desire, Joan Nestle being a founding member
of the Archive, and the fact that Jess lives in New York at the time of its writing, which is of
course where the Archive is located. (Feinberg 12, Cvetkovich 78). By connecting Feinberg’s

33

work to reality, in the form of the real-world referent of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and via
the publication history of the book itself, Cvetkovich takes her work outside the realm of literary
analysis—which can limit itself to how things such as style, structure, and deployment of
language for particular effects function within and among texts—and into cultural analysis,
which examines how various artifacts produce and are representative of cultural values and
meaning making. Her interest is in what the representation of butches in Stone Butch Blues can
reveal about how real butch lesbians feel and express their emotions, using a literary approach to
open outward rather than turning her analysis back in on the text itself.
One cannot fault Cvetkovich for not making a different argument, for not writing a
different book. For Cvetkovich, verisimilitude and affect are key to her argument (she would
likely have had a more difficult time using a novel like Nightwood to make a commentary on
“real” lesbians). But her masterly analysis of the novel still leaves one wondering: how does she
understand this Stone Butch Blues as a lesbian novel?
If Stone Butch Blues resists the definition of a lesbian novel on two fronts, both in terms
of the author and main character’s identity, how can we conceive of it as a lesbian novel? Can
we at all? And why? Does it require a simple recategorization, i.e. shelving it with the
transgender novels? Or does it force us to reconsider how we attach “lesbian” to “novel?” If it
were simply Stone Butch Blues that were a fluke within the genre, I’d argue for recategorization.
But if we consider that other, canonical lesbian novels resist the label based on the criteria of a
lesbian author and a lesbian protagonist, then one must consider whether it is the genre that
needs redefinition. Take Virginia Woolf, for example. Much work has been done to recuperate
her as a lesbian author.30 While posthumously labeling her a lesbian allows one to help form a
lineage of females whose desire for women and general queerness have been (and still are)

34

systematically erased from history, doing so can also be a kind of violence to the dead who can
not speak back to complicate our own understanding of how they conceived of themselves.
Calling Virginia Woolf a lesbian or a lesbian author elides the reality of the deep, complicated
relationship she had with her husband, Leonard Woolf; it erases a facet of her identity in the
same way those who ignore her romantic relationships with women do.
Djuna Barnes is another prime example of someone whose work has been labeled
“lesbian” by way of labeling her a lesbian. In her contribution A Companion to the Modern
American Novel 1900-1950, Heather Love writes:
Even Djuna Barnes, who was involved in the lesbian subculture of 1920s Paris
and whose 1936 experimental novel Nightwood is central to the canon of lesbian
modernism, cannot be unequivocally identified as a lesbian novelist. Regarding
her decade-long relationship with Thelma Wood, Barnes famously remarked, “I
am not a lesbian. I just loved Thelma.” Does that mean that Nightwood is not a
lesbian novel?” (394)
Love’s use of “even” is very striking, as if to say Djuna Barnes is so obviously a lesbian author,
not only because of works like Nightwood (or Ryder or Ladies Almanack), which Love
categorizes as canonical, but because of the company she kept (the lesbian subculture) and who
she loves (Thelma). By asking the rhetorical question at the end of this paragraph, Love (and
many like her who make a similar rhetorical move) doesn’t actually deal with the problem;
pointing it out and then bracketing it becomes the work. At times, the (likely impossible) task of
teasing out inextricably imbricated and at times frustratingly contradictory identity categories
feels like one the tortuous tasks of the Abramović method.31

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Rather than point out the problematic nature of identifying historical figures as lesbians
(especially in times before the concept of lesbian-as-identity existed), rather than using authors’
work as evidence of a lesbian identity and vice versa, the use of a lesbian identity to categorize
their novels as lesbian novels should be disqualified. Instead, how the novels themselves imagine
and depict lesbianism, broadly conceived, should be the determining factor for calling a novel a
lesbian novel. We are, after all, literary scholars, and I wonder what it says when our
argumentation must go outside the text in order to make our case for an argument about the text.
How, then, does one articulate a working definition of the lesbian novel based solely on
the content of the novels that represent it? How does one account for the sheer breadth of
diversity in representing lesbianism in the novel without losing the level of specificity that a
definition requires? The problem is daunting. I propose we consider a lesbian novel any a novel
in which female same-sex desire is integral to the novel’s narrative or structure. Using this
definition certainly untangles the immediate problem of how we can conceive of Stone Butch
Blues as a lesbian novel. First, I’ve eliminated Leslie Feinberg’s complicated identity as
expressed in hir writing and reported by Minnie Bruce-Pratt. Second, the obviousness of the
novel’s same-sex desire, while not always easily located in Jess Goldberg, is easily located in
any number of secondary characters and, most importantly, in Theresa. By taking the author out
of how we define the genre, we reorient our attention to the parts of the text that are often
overlooked. It allows us to find value in places other than the degree of a given lesbian novel’s
referentiality or its ability to serve as evidence of an author’s lesbian identity. More importantly,
by making primary the representation itself, we open up our understanding of how lesbian novels
do more than simply reflect the reality of lesbian life; they produce it. The import of the
productive dimension of lesbian novels—creating ways of conceptualizing lesbian sexuality,

36

gender expression, and imitable behaviors, in general for better or worse—is intensified when we
consider the impact of an entire genre of novels. The impact of one lesbian novel is not
necessarily great, though some (The Well of Loneliness, Rubyfruit Jungle, and Stone Butch
Blues) seem to carry more weight than others in terms of how they speak to a given generation. It
is, rather, in the cumulative weight of lesbian representation in lesbian novels that gives it the
power to transform culture.
I’d like to return Feinberg’s identity. In arguing that Stone Butch Blues is emblematic of
the problem of the current understanding of the lesbian novel, and in arguing that Stone Butch
Blues is a lesbian novel, I am not arguing that that is all it is. What Feinberg’s complicated,
seemingly irreconcilable mélange of identity categories illustrates is how the use of any one,
identity category should not be the limit of how we understand a representation or, more
importantly, a person. Foregrounding the lesbian dimension of Stone Butch Blues does not
foreclose the many other readings and, therefore, ways of categorizing the novel. I always tell
my students that either/or is a bad formation for asking questions because built in to it is a limit
of only two responses. Asking whether Stone Butch Blues is a lesbian novel or a transgender
novel disallows the most obvious answer. It’s both.

Lesbian Intertextuality; Butch Hermeneutics
Leslie Feinberg’s identity, in all of its multifaceted glory, illustrates how (sexual) identity
is a sandy foundation upon which to build a definition. Implicitly, it also shows how many
approaches to analyzing lesbian novels are preoccupied with their relationship to reality: what
they reveal to us about the author’s identity (Djuna is a lezzie!), how well they represent a
specifically female masculinity (Halberstam) or lesbian public cultures (Cvetokovich). But

37

redefining the genre in terms of what the texts represent is more than just a means to get one
book into the lesbian section of Amazon.com. My redefinition points to how genre formation is
about the dynamic interpretation of textual elements; it’s about seeing how texts speak together.
Foregrounding the text as the place where we ground our definition of the lesbian novel
also allows us to move our analysis beyond a novel’s mimetic dimension. Certainly, lesbian
novels can and do represent actual lived experiences of lesbians, but not always; novels also
function to imagine how a lived experience could look. This distinction, so often imperceptible
in realist novels, is one of the genre’s strengths because in producing new ways of thinking about
reality, they affect how people live their reality.32 The danger in not attending to this distinction,
especially in realist novels, is that reality can become the litmus test for a fictional work’s worth.
The imaginative dimension of Stone Butch Blues, unattended in both Halberstam and
Cvetokovich’s work, is the place where literary analysis can be best brought to bear. As such, I
turn now to a novel contemporary to Halberstam’s Female Masculinity and Cvetkovich’s An
Archive of Feelings, a novel whose narrative extensively investigates the influence and import of
Stone Butch Blues: Judith Frank’s novel, Crybaby Butch.33
Crybaby Butch is the story of one year in the lives of two butches: Chris Rinaldi and
Anna Singer. Chris is an illiterate stone butch, hardened in the pre-Stonewall bar scene. A car
accident makes it impossible for her to work, and while she waits for a settlement check from her
insurance company to come in, she decides to go back to school to learn how to read. Anna, a
Victorianist trying to survive a tortuous break up and three unsuccessful years on the academic
job market, is her teacher. Anna wants to find her work in adult education meaningful, and yet
cannot help feeling like a failure when all of her friends have gotten jobs at prestigious
universities. Rather than functioning as a feel-good story about two outsiders finding common

38

ground by way of their butch lesbian identity, the novel changes things—their differences,
specifically in class, age, and life experience, make it impossible for them to connect or
communicate effectively. Still, Anna is drawn to Chris and attempts to bridge their experiential
gap by giving Chris a copy of Leslie Feinberg’s seminal novel Stone Butch Blues. The
intertextual play of this novel within a novel is, I argue, an exercise in lesbian canon-building,
elevating Stone Butch Blues in terms of its relative position within the larger queer literary canon
by characterizing it as something worth referencing. Frank’s deployment of Stone Butch Blues
achieves three main objectives: it legitimates Stone Butch Blues as a work of lesbian literary
fiction; it demonstrates how queer communities are bound to and created by an engagement with
literary fiction (in this case Stone Butch Blues, specifically); and, through her writing style, it
creates community by marking a specifically lesbian audience for her own novel. If we think
about what canonization means in the most basic sense, it is about the valorization of a given
work based on what we perceive to be its literary merits, be it the beauty of the language itself,
or how a given work illuminates something about human experience. But the crucial aspect of
canonization is who claims authority to beatify. In this case, Frank is claiming that authority and,
implicitly, invokes the collective voice of the lesbian community to do so.
The number of intertextual references in Crybaby Butch is, perhaps, higher than one
might normally see in other lesbian novels, but are also not unexpected, considering that one of
the main characters and several of the secondary characters are literary scholars. Early on in her
mourning for her lost relationship, Anna Singer receives a poem in her mailbox from her friend
Monica:
[Anna] stood on the tile floor of the little foyer, her book bag on the floor between
her feet, scanning the poem quickly and curiously, until she came to the last lines:

39

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive. . . . .
She crawled into bed, and guessing Monica would be in class, called Scott. “Of
course,” he said when she asked if he knew the poem . . . . (74-5)
Anna lives in the world of intertextual play, and this moment illustrates the effect the literary has
on her; it opens up a wound still too fresh to withstand the power of the lyric. When she calls
Scott, her former graduate school roommate who now works at Cornell, not only is he familiar
with the poem, he completely understands the effect it had on a fellow literary scholar. The
connection between the poem’s meaning and Anna’s own situation comes to him in a beat, and
he immediately consoles her. Unsurprisingly, the poem’s sender, Monica, is a freshly-tenured
professor at Northwestern University and, as Anna says, who else but an academic would send
“Emerson as a cure for heartache!” (82). Other literary references pepper the novel, including
works such as Edmund Spencer’s epic poem The Faerie Queen, Henry James, James Baldwin,
Tennessee Williams, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Sapphire’s Precious, and Dorothy Allison’s
Bastard Out of Carolina. Even Susie Bright gets a shout out. All have differing levels of
legitimacy (one doubts the possibility that Bright’s work in sexology or Sewell’s children’s book
are considered equally important contributions to the literary world as Spencer or James,

40

however spurious that judgment may be), but their canonicity is undeniable; they are extensively
read, taught, and scrutinized by scholars.
And then there’s Stone Butch Blues. It enters the novel seemingly out of nowhere,
literally landing with a thud at Chris’s feet when Anna tosses the book at her. Amongst these
other works of “literature,” Stone Butch Blues stands out like a bulldyke in Pottery Barn. Even
Bastard Out of Carolina, the novel Anna reads to her class over the course of the year and which
is contemporary to Stone Butch Blues, is considered to have more cultural weight, since it
received widespread recognition and a mainstream publisher (Plume, an subsidiary of Penguin),
success that can be more easily quantified than Cvetkovich’s “sense.”34 On a day when getting
through to Chris had been particularly difficult, Anna sits her down and reads her a passage from
Stone Butch Blues that leaves Chris visibly unnerved:
Looking down at her lap, Chris’s face slowly reddened. You can take it, Anna
thought. “Here, it’s a novel, a fiction book. Remember what that is? It means it’s
a made up story. It’s called Stone Butch Blues. Read it if you want. I’m lending it
to you.” She tossed it at her. Chris fumbled and it fell on the floor face down, its
pages splayed open. . . . Chris looked down at the book; there was a picture of a
butch on the cover. . . . (174)
This is the perfect metaphor for Anna and Chris’s relationship: Anna throws things at Chris, and
Chris fumbles. Anna wants to push Chris, wants her to try harder in class, to open up. She
recognizes that reading her a passage about a child butch who is unable to conform to the
standards of her family causes Chris discomfort, and yet she continues. This moment also
demonstrates the power dynamics at play between these two butches. Anna has power in terms
of her literacy and class privilege, but a more important fact—or perhaps more accurately, the

41

dimension of the characters’ intersectional identity that has more purchase in their interactions—
is Chris’s unquestionable butchness. Anna’s insecurity about her own butch identity (brought
about by her girlfriend dumping her and the fact that she was a late bloomer, among other things)
is only exacerbated by Chris’s refusal to recognize any commonality between them but, most
importantly, is underscored by any connection via a masculine-presenting gender expression.
Reading out loud to Chris about a topic that she realizes makes Chris uncomfortable
demonstrates Anna’s proficiency and Chris’s lack; it triggers all kinds of negative emotions
associated with being an illiterate adult (a fact of which Anna is well aware), in order to force
Chris to submit. And so the giving of Stone Butch Blues is a way for her to reassert her authority,
making Chris literally bow down to pick up the novel. Anna even thinks to herself, “you can take
it,” echoing the words her new lover, Star, uses only four pages earlier when she dominates Anna
sexually.35 Invoked in this moment are questions around gift-giving and the symbolic power of
the written word. Who has the power to give? For what reason? To what effect? Is reciprocity
expected? What does it mean for one lesbian to give another a lesbian novel, Stone Butch Blues
in particular? And perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for Anna to give Chris this
novel? It suggests that Stone Butch Blues is a lesbian cultural artifact, a common point of
reference, a story lesbians should know, at least in Anna’s mind. In that sense, we can call Stone
Butch Blues a lesbian novel because that’s how it’s represented to be. And because, unlike Stone
Butch Blues, there’s no generic overlap with the trans novel—either in terms of author or the
primary or secondary characters—the reader of Crybaby Butch will add Stone Butch Blues to
ranks of the lesbian novel genre.
Sadly, what Anna doesn’t realize is how her tough-love motivation only serves to further
alienate Chris; like so many of Anna’s gestures, Chris will see this novel as a kind of

42

bewildering, hostile act. After all, who gives a novel to someone for whom it takes twenty
minutes to decipher one sentence?
Unlike the other literary references, of which a reader can be unaware and still
understand and enjoy Crybaby Butch, Stone Butch Blues is not mentioned in passing, is no mere
allusion; rather than adding flavor to a single moment—the literary equivalent of the
contemporary hashtag, if you will—it mediates relationships, becomes a common point of
reference for the queer folks throughout the novel, and raises questions about how one reads and
interprets lesbian novels, and how one sees oneself in relation to a them. Its presence within
Frank’s narrative functions to create an inescapable dichotomy: one has either read Stone Butch
Blues, or one has not, and it becomes quite clear what the ramifications of not having read it are.
One night, when Chris is in a bar, she runs into Sam, a baby butch who rang up Chris’
replacement copy of Stone Butch Blues at the famous Chicago bookstore, Women and Children
First, after Anna’s copy was accidentally ruined.36 Chris begins,
“You kids got no idea,” she said to Sam. . . . “Is this where I get the lecture about
how you old bulls got busted so we young ones can have a life that’s all sunshine
and roses” she asked “Well get a good look at my face lately?” . . . Chris, who had
been about to take serious umbrage, was disarmed. . . . “In the old days you’d of
got your ass kicked for talking like that,” she grumbled. “In the old days, I’d of
been dead long before you could kick my ass,” Sam retorted. . . . “Where do you
know so much about the old days?” she barked good-naturedly. Sam slugged back
her beer. “I’m not an idiot, I can read.” (250)
Minutes before this moment, when Sam initially sat down next to Chris, she asked Chris if she
enjoyed reading Stone Butch Blues. Implicit in the fact that it was Sam who sold it to Chris, it

43

seems likely that Stone Butch Blues is the source of Sam’s knowledge about the “old days,” or at
the very least, a source. Sam could not know how her comment would deeply wound Chris, who
felt such a connection with this young butch. But what Frank illustrates in this moment is how
the new generation of lesbians and trans-men (Sam’s gender identity is ambiguous) perceive
Stone Butch Blues; it provides them with cultural knowledge that feels as real as any history text
even though it’s a work of fiction and is therefore taken as such. In this representation of how
Stone Butch Blues operates within lesbian culture, Frank is operationalizing the lesbian novel’s
creative force elided in its verisimilitude; regardless of whether Frank’s representation is mimetic
or imaginary, the reader is seduced into taking for granted the reality of Stone Butch Blues realworld significance. And if the reader is one of those people who have not read Stone Butch
Blues, it is nonetheless clear what they are, in Sam’s words: idiots.
In terms of the literary references in Crybaby Butch, one can perhaps shrug off, for
example, not having read Emerson’s poem, because its significance is explained and a
connection with that particular reference is not necessary to understand Crybaby Butch itself. Not
being familiar with Stone Butch Blues, however, means the reader lacks access to an entire layer
of meaning within Crybaby Butch. Readers’ reactions to this alienation may results in one of two
possible outcomes: either they will add Stone Butch Blues to their list of must-reads, or else their
reading of the novel will be overpowered by a feeling of outsiderness and they will not. In either
case, Frank wins, because she has elevated Stone Butch Blues to a place of something that should
be read by her audience, or more significantly, should have already been read. A reader who
goes out and gets a copy of Stone Butch Blues has been convinced of its merit. A reader rebelling
against that impulse still serves to canonize the book because that rebellion is predicated on
Frank’s positioning of Stone Butch Blues as something against which one can rebel.

44

Within Crybaby Butch, Stone Butch Blues is made integral to the novel’s structure in a
way that other allusions are not. While Anna’s giving of the novel to Chris is the obvious place
at which Stone Butch Blues becomes a structural feature of Crybaby Butch (it is present from that
moment right up until the end), there are subtle moments in the opening chapter of Crybaby
Butch that foreshadow the appearance of Stone Butch Blues while simultaneously establishing
what kind of novel this will be in relation to Stone Butch Blues. Crybaby Butch begins with a
list:
Not a Harley butch, not a working-class he-she with a D-A; a soft-cheeked Kevin
Costner butch, a Paul Mitchell hair products butch. Not a breast-binding butch,
not a cigarette-pack-in-the-sleeve butch, not a square–jawed butch with calloused
hands, not a handy butch; neither shattered nor wired: a glad-handing butch. Not
off-kilter, not maddening, not hard to see: a sight-for-sore-eyes butch. But God
help you: a cat under a human’s touch butch, tail flickering. A guiding hand at the
small of the back butch. A here, let me take that butch. A sleight-of-hand butch,
between her thighs. A baby don’t leave me butch. (1)
Besides dating the book a bit with references to Kevin Costner and Paul Mitchell hair products,
the novel begins by defining a butch in negative terms, by what she is not; all of these
characteristics—motorcycle riding, having a D.A., breast binding, cigarette smoking, calloused
hands from a life of hard work—all describe Jess Goldberg, the protagonist of Stone Butch
Blues, to a tee.37,38 This as-yet unnamed butch, however, is not a stone butch, unwilling to be
touched; rather, she craves human contact, responding to it with the pleasurable abandon of a
feline, another quality antithetical to Jess Goldberg. And yet, the gallantry of the last four clauses
are qualities shared by both. These, then, are the places of overlap, similarity. Implicitly, Jess

45

Goldberg (or at least a butch very much like her) is the literary standard by which the butches in
this book will be judged.
As one moves into the rest of the opening chapter, we still do not yet know who this
(crybaby?) butch is. But there are other, subtle references that point to Stone Butch Blues’
implied presence in this chapter. The fifth paragraph ends with:
You wish that at sixteen, holding your breath, you’d walked into your first gay bar
and seen women like yourself. That you’d been astounded, sized up, mentored.
For lack of imagination, or audacity, it didn’t happen that way. It took another ten
years for a femme to take you home, to teach you that you’d always known what
to do. (Frank 9)
Sixteen is exactly the age Jess Goldberg was when she first entered a gay bar and was
subsequently brought up and mentored by the butches of the bar scene.39 It seems like a very
specific image and a very particular desire to be mere coincidence. One could perhaps infer that
this merely speaks to the commonplace nature of this image in lesbian experience—a teenage
youth entering a gay bar to see the first reflections of herself. But that simplification is
undermined by the fact that in next paragraph we read, “The butch you jokingly call your
sponsor . . . gives you things to read about butches, which your eyes gallop over so madly that
you dizzy yourself” (10). This “you” (whom we subsequently learn is Anna Singer) understands
her butchness through the lessons she learns from her first girlfriend (“for a femme . . . to teach
you”) and from reading. Certainly later we learn that Stone Butch Blues must have been among
the texts the “sponsor” gave this “you” (Anna). The pervasive presence of Stone Butch Blues in
later chapters and details in these early images that align so closely with those of Jess Goldberg,
reveal how it haunts Frank’s narrative, structuring it even in moments when it is not explicitly

46

referenced. By representing this desire to walk into a gay bar at sixteen, by repeating this image
of lesbian desire (to be), Frank makes this desire into a trope of the lesbian novel genre. And by
implying that characters like Anna and Sam are learning what their desire could be/is via a novel,
Frank is illustrating and emulating the way in which lesbian novels constitute how we understand
lesbian existence.
Additionally, the fact that Frank opens her novel using second person—after the list, that
is—echoes the opening of Stone Butch Blues. But while both novels use second person in their
initial chapter, they are used very differently, and to very different ends. Stone Butch Blues opens
with a letter, making the second person implicit in the address “Dear Theresa” (Feinberg 5). The
majority of the narration continues in first person, giving the reader the sense of either listening
in on a conversation, being in the head of the writer (Jess) as it is being written, or reading the
letter after it has been written, occupying the space of the addressee. In this opening, the second
person address in Stone Butch Blues is a means for the addresser, Jess Goldberg, to reveal hir
thoughts and feelings; 40 “Dear Theresa, I’m lying on my bed tonight missing you, my eyes all
swollen, hot tears running down my face. There’s a fierce summer storm raging outside. Tonight
I walked down the streets looking for you in every woman’s face, as I have each night of this
lonely exile. I’m afraid I’ll never see your laughing, teasing eyes again” (5). This opening, and
really the entire novel, is about Jess expressing hir feelings—“missing” Theresa, yearning for her
(looking for you in every woman’s face), being lonely and afraid. It is also about Jess’s
physicality: their “face,” the heat of tears (evoking the feeling of internal body temperature), and
swollen eyes, connected to Jess’s crying but also foreshadowing the many beatings Jess will
endure throughout Stone Butch Blues. Even the fierce summer storm raging outside gives a sense
of her physical presence within the diegesis—Jess is indoors—though the image of the storm

47

outside coinciding with the expression of Jess’s inner turmoil is, perhaps, a heavy-handed
metaphor, evidence of the melodramatic nature of Feinberg’s prose.41
Frank’s use of the second person is equally intense but evokes a very different feeling, a
feeling of compulsory identification that delineates her audience as lesbian or queer. The opening
list lacks any personal narration; it is a collection of clauses that makes the reader ask, “who is
speaking?” and more importantly, it makes one ask, “who is the butch being described?” Frank
soon answers that question—you are: “After dinner, shuffling by in your slippers, you glance in
and stop on a dime” (8). Suddenly, not only is the reader brought to the narrative, s/he is brought
into the diegesis. The effect of “you” without any other obvious addressee makes the reader feel
s/he is the “you” in question. This effect is similar to the Althusser’s concept of interpellation,
illustrated by the famous example of the police hailing “you,” from his essay “Idéologie et
appareils idéologique d’État (Notes pour une recherche)”:
Nous suggérons alors que l'idéologie « agit » ou « fonctionne » de telle sorte
qu'elle « recrute » des sujets parmi les individus (elle les recrute tous), ou « transforme » les individus en sujets (elle les transforme tous) par cette opération très
précise que nous appelons l'interpellation qu’on peut se représenter sur le type
même de la plus banale interpellation policière (ou non) de tous les jours : « hé,
vous, là-bas ! »
Si nous supposons que la scène théorique imaginée se passe dans la rue, l'individu interpellé se retourne. Par cette simple, conversion physique de 180 degrés,
il devient sujet. Pourquoi ? Parce qu'il a reconnu que l'interpellation s'adressait «
bien » à lui, et que « c'était bien lui qui était interpellé » (et pas un autre). L'expérience montre que les télécommunications pratiques de l'interpellation sont tel-

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les, que l'interpellation ne rate pratiquement jamais son homme : appel verbal, ou
coup de sifflet, l'interpellé reconnaît toujours que c'était bien lui qu'on interpellait.
C'est tout de même un phénomène étrange, et qui ne s'explique pas seulement,
malgré le grand nombre de ceux qui « ont quelque chose à se reprocher », par le «
sentiment de culpabilité ». (49)
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it
‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the
individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation
which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the
lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you
there!’
Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street,
the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree
physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that
the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’
(and not someone else). (Lenin 174)
Lost in the translation of «hé, vous, là-bas !» to “Hey you, there!” is the difference in valence
between the French «vous» and the English you. French has two words for ‘you’, with vous
functioning in instances of plurality (you all), and formality (as opposed to «tu»). In the case of
the policeman, the use of «vous» also emphasizes his power in relation to who is being addressed
and similarly implies the possibility of any one in the street (or even everyone in the street) as
being the addressee. In English, all of the nuances of address have collapsed into the word “you”
as the language has evolved. With the loss of “thou” in opposition to “you” (which functioned in

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a similar capacity to the French «vous»), so too is lost the distinction between singularity,
plurality, formality, and intimacy. Similarly, the translation of «l'in- dividu interpellé se
retourne» into “the hailed individual will turn round” is missing the nuances of meaning in the
use of the reflexive verb «se retourner» which indicates both the individual turning around under
his own power and the possibility of being turned around by the power of the interpellation itself,
which would require a passive voice construction of the sentence to mask the “doer” of the
action. And, technically, the translation changes from a French present tense to an English future
tense, though arguably that translation is in line with the hypothetical nature of the example.
The linguistic mechanisms of Frank’s use of second-person differ from Althusser’s
example, which uses the French «vous», but the results are similar, making the reader into the
subject to which the “you” refers. Unlike first-person narration, where one identifies with the
main character—a commonplace, often pleasurable incarnation of identification in relation to
narrative (especially in fiction and narrative cinema)—second-person narration in Crybaby
Butch’s opening chapter makes a reader identify as the character; suddenly, the reader is a butch
lesbian: “You were never like the rest of the girls, you beat the boys at all their games. You fled
when ordered to wear a dress, brooded in your private hiding place, played the husband when
you played house, skinned your knees, kissed the pretty girl next door, were looked at askance”
(9). Frank’s use of second-person narration in her opening chapter is not direct address (dear
reader), but it operates similarly, making the reader both the subject of description and the
subject of the sentence; the separation of reader from the diegesis present in direct address is
collapsed in Frank’s use of second-person narration and exerts a similar degree of power over the
reader. In a sense, then, we might think of Crybaby Butch as a lesbian novel not only because,

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following my definition, female same sex desire is integral to its narrative, but because is
deploys a lesbian ideology, turning its reader into a lesbian subject.
The “you” in the opening of Stone Butch Blues is clearly marked as “not me,” the reader,
but the “you” in Crybaby Butch is, especially in the initial chapter. The lack of person or narrator
in the opening list is disorienting, making the reader vulnerable to the subsequent you-ing,
reorienting them. Of being oriented (or “orientated” to use the rather aurally disorienting BritishEnglish version of the word), Sara Ahmed writes, “In order to become orientated, you might
suppose that we must first experience disorientation. When we are orientated, we might not even
notice that we are orientated: we might not even think ‘to think’ about this point. When we
experience disorientation, we might notice orientation as something we do not have” (5-6). The
effect of Crybaby Butch’s opening list to disorient the reader calls attention to the fact that the
reader is being intentionally oriented by the narrator—and oriented in a particular way.
In the book’s next chapter, this effect is diminished when the narration shifts to third
person, and we learn that this “you” was actually Anna Singer. While Frank recontextualizes the
opening chapter, and uses the second person in the rest of the novel as a means of disseminating
background information about Anna—and then again in later chapters about Chris Rinaldi—it
nonetheless remains a tool for identification in subsequent chapters. The use of second person
queers the reader, forcing him or her to identify at different moments as either Chris, Anna, or, at
the end of the novel, Kathleen, Chris’ partner. If that identification is too difficult for the reader,
it becomes a tool of exclusion and alienation, saying, “You might be reading this story, but it’s
not your story.” Conversely, if the reader easily slips into this identification—and perhaps even
has a dog-eared copy of Stone Butch Blues in her bookcase—she feels like a good little queer

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who has done her reading. It induces a feeling of belonging, of having a common language with
other lesbians and queer folks.
If the narrative style of Crybaby Butch imagines Stone Butch Blues’ (and its own)
audience as lesbian or queer, that imagined audience is echoed in novel’s story by who is
represented as reading or having already read Stone Butch Blues. In Crybaby Butch, Frank gives
us three in-depth perspectives on Stone Butch Blues, one from Anna, one from Chris, and another
from Kathleen. We also get cursory opinions from six other lesbians in the novel, a gay man, and
a young butch with an unspecified, masculine-presenting gender identity. What is more easily
telling than the content of the differing interpretations of Stone Butch Blues within the diegesis of
Crybaby Butch is which characters are given the power to give their opinion: queers. Chris’s
initial thoughts after encountering Stone Butch Blues speaks volumes:
The book was exactly like her life, exactly. Only she didn’t think of her life as
that violent. Was it? She thought of it as a hard life, as a hammer pounding a wall.
She never thought of it as a drama you’d write about, discussing all your miseries
and pain. Why would you want everybody to know about it? What if straight
people read it? (Frank 189)
This moment points to the feeling of vulnerability Chris has at seeing a presentation of a life so
like her own in a novel. The rhetorical question of “What if straight people read it?” underscores
Chris’ horror at the thought; the answer to the question is unthinkable, unrepresentable, and
therefore must go unanswered. The thought that, because this book exists, anyone could have
access to her most personal life experiences petrifies her, punctuated by the horror of straight
people having access. The fact that no straight people are represented as even encountering Stone
Butch Blues, let alone reading it, suggests who Frank thinks the audience of Stone Butch Blues

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(as well as Crybaby Butch) is and, perhaps more importantly, who it should be: lesbians and
queer folks.
To be clear, I am not arguing that Frank’s use and depiction of Stone Butch Blues
suggests that straight people do not or should not actually read either her own novel or Stone
Butch Blues, reflecting some sort of Lesbian Separatist politics.42 Nor am I arguing that Chris is
represented as being comfortable with people reading about a life like her own as long as the
reader is a lesbian, because she isn’t, and this fact is demonstrated in the sentences immediately
following the above quote: “Anna Singer must have read it. That thought brought a surge of
mortification; she curled her knees up to her chest and hugged them with a groan. It took her an
hour and half to fall asleep” (189). The thought that anyone could use a novel as ingress to her
most personal experiences is so distressing that it causes what seems like an involuntary response
to stress, making her groan and lie in the fetal position, unable to sleep. What I am arguing is
this: Frank creates a specifically queer, primarily lesbian audience through her representation of
Stone Butch Blues’ readership; her use of second person illustrates how Frank is claiming Stone
Butch Blues as a lesbian novel, categorizing it, and revealing its import to a particular group of
people, while also positioning her own book as a member of the lesbian novel genre through her
representation of female same-sex desire, lesbian relationships (sexual and non-), and lesbian,
intertexual referentiality.
But while the strategic use of second person and literary allusions illustrates the practiced
literariness of Crybaby Butch, the affective power of Stone Butch Blues to lesbians and queer
folks within Frank’s own narrative is the most compelling commentary on lesbian novels’
influence on people. Let’s return to the moment when Anna first gives Chris Stone Butch Blues:

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Looking down at her lap, Chris’s face slowly reddened. You can take it, Anna
thought. “Here, it’s a novel, a fiction book. Remember what that is? It means it’s
a made up story. It’s called Stone Butch Blues. Read it if you want. I’m lending it
to you.” She tossed it at her. Chris fumbled and it fell on the floor face down, its
pages splayed open. . . . Chris looked down at the book; there was a picture of a
butch on the cover wearing a jacket and tie. That must be the butch in the story,
she thought. She looked at Anna, who had her back turned to her. She was clearly
dismissed. (174)
In this initial encounter with Stone Butch Blues, we see that Chris has a physical reaction to
hearing words read aloud that seem to represent her own experience; she looks down as her face
reddens, implying embarrassment—a moment echoed in Chris’s physical reaction on 189 at the
thought of Anna having read the book (curling up into a ball in mortification). Chris, a normally
adept and handy butch, fumbles when the book is tossed to her, emphasizing how disconcerting
this reading has been to her. Yet, we get a hint that Chris is intrigued nonetheless; she notices the
butch on the cover. Still, it takes months for Chris to be able to open the book, herself.
The holidays pass, and a new year begins before Stone Butch Blues reemerges. However
it is not Chris we find reading the book; it is her partner Kathleen: “Kathleen was deep into Stone
Butch Blues. Way deep into it. . . . . ‘Are you going to be reading that book all day?’ . . . . ‘I have
the right to spend one goddamn day in bed enjoying myself.’ . . . . ‘Shit,’ [Chris] said . . . ‘It’s
not even your book, my teacher lent it to me’” (184). In this moment, Stone Butch Blues begins
mediating Chris’ relationship with Kathleen. Kathleen’s reading of the novel becomes an
emblem of the power Kathleen holds over Chris and her dependence on Kathleen for access to
the written word. Kathleen is completely aware of this power, and when Chris becomes insecure

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and hostile, Kathleen uses the novel as a weapon; “Kathleen raised her eyebrows and gave her a
vicious smile. ‘Oh, so you want to read it? Fine.’ She sat up and hurled the book at Chris . . . .
‘You can tell me what it’s about later,’ she said with the same smile. Chris stared at her, then at
the book . . . . This was the second time someone had thrown it at her” (184-5). The tension
between Chris and Kathleen is about a lot more than this one incident. The presence of Stone
Butch Blues becomes the thing that brings these other issues to a head: Chris’ lack of confidence
because of her illiteracy, her feelings of dependence on Kathleen, who provided the down
payment for their house and is now paying the mortgage on her own since Chris’ car accident,
and Kathleen’s unexpected feelings of ambivalence and hostility toward Chris finally learning to
read. Frank is able to attach the weight of these issues to Stone Butch Blues because of how
novels become a shared experience, a common reference point, and cultural object in which
people can invest emotional energy and a sense of identification.
But Chris’s feelings of insecurity about her illiteracy do not outweigh her desire to know
what this book is about, and who the butch on the cover is:
The truth was she’d opened it herself, a few days ago. . . . But the book didn’t
start the way she’d expected, the way Anna had read it, about the butch that didn’t
ask to be this way. . . . It started with a very long title she didn’t understand,
acknowledgements . . . . When she flipped forward a little, her heart in her
stomach, she found Chapter I, but that didn’t start the same way either. (186)
Anna was evidently correct that Chris could “take it” and got her attention. While she was
clearly embarrassed when Anna was reading to her, the passage touched something deep in
Chris, a place starved for representation. What is striking about this passage in terms of literacy
is that, even though Chris is struggles to read, she has certain knowledge or expectations about

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how books should operate; she assumes, quite rightly, that one starts reading a story at the
beginning of the book. It does not initially occur to her that Anna began reading to her, not at the
beginning of the book, but with a passage she thought would pique Chris’s interest. In that sense,
Anna is successful. But because Chris has only an elementary understanding of how books work,
she needs to find that familiar moment in order to find her literary bearings; she needs to find the
moment that spoke to her own experience. Lacking the skills to access that representation, Stone
Butch Blues becomes a cruel and disheartening gift, a constant reminder of Chris’s own
inadequacies:
Chris swallowed, felt the coffee taste in her mouth turn to ashes. She obviously
could not read this book. Well what had she expected? – that three months at
school would turn her into a college professor? That she could just waltz in and
open a book and start reading? But then why had Anna given it to her? . . . . If her
teacher thought she could read this, she was even further behind than she thought.
(186)
This misreading of Anna’s intention feeds Chris’ insecurities, reinforcing her tendency to belittle
and minimize her own achievements. It also speaks to how Anna and Chris are unable to read
each other, each misinterpreting the other’s intentions. Every attempt Anna makes to form a
rapport only serves to further alienate Chris, not only from her, but from the experience of
learning to read in general. Perversely, this alienation, or perhaps more properly antipathy, does
in fact keep Chris and Anna connected, just not in the way Anna had hoped.
Still, Stone Butch Blues is not easily dismissed from Chris’ life because it has now
become a part of Kathleen’s. Sitting in her cubicle at Illinois Masonic, Kathleen cannot help but
see the parallels between Chris and the protagonist of Stone Butch Blues, Jess Goldberg:

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Jess reminded her exactly of Chris when Chris was younger, only much nicer if
truth be told – although maybe Kathleen suspected . . . that maybe if you’re
writing a book about your life, it’s only natural to portray yourself as a nice
person. . . . [R]eading this book about all the violence in the world of a he-she
made her feel really bad about being mean to Chris lately. It made her remember
all the things Chris had been through in her life. . . . Sometimes she marveled that
Chris even got up in the morning. (187)
This passage speaks not only to the power of Stone Butch Blues as a lesbian novel, but to how we
react to realist novels more generally. While the verisimilitude of the novel can never correlate
exactly to “real life,” Kathleen is still able to map her own life in relation to Stone Butch Blues; it
“reminds” her, makes her “remember.” She does not necessarily discount the obvious difference
between Chris and Jess Goldberg. Rather, she acknowledges and then brackets them. In allowing
herself to see a part of Chris in the story, Kathleen becomes conscious of her own behavior. In
Kathleen’s response to Stone Butch Blues, in her moving beyond the simple dissemination of
plot, Frank illustrates how readers interact with novels, how they do work on us, emotionally and
intellectually. And whereas Cvetkovich uses Stone Butch Blues as evidence to formulate a theory
about how butch lesbians feel, Frank’s novel reveals how to feel about Stone Butch Blues.
Her reaction to the text causes Kathleen to take a new tack with Chris, and she decides to
begin the book again, this time reading it aloud to Chris:
. . . [Chris] couldn’t believe her ears. . . . .What Kathleen had read was full of
crying and sex and fighting, and getting creamed and bloodied and humiliated by
the cops, and her shame and her stone, and saying you understand to this Theresa,

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who Kathleen had explained was at one time her femme. It was about a butch in
the bars. They wrote books about that! She just couldn’t get over it. (188)
Chris is utterly shocked by the fact that an experience so similar to her own is worth writing
about. Again we see that, even though she has never actually read a book in her life, Chris is not
without an understanding about what books are and what they should be. And that they shouldn’t
be a reflection of her. Reading together becomes a nightly ritual for the couple; the novel allows
them to come together, for a time setting aside the problems in their relationship. As they slowly
make their way through the book, Chris begins to access emotions that she has long suppressed.
At times, “[l]istening to the book had become agony” (190) and at others “Kathleen and Chris
laughed all the way through the . . . scene” (194).
As they move through the pages of Stone Butch Blues and Chris progresses at the adult
learning center, an important change occurs in the way Chris approaches the novel. Kathleen and
Chris come to one of the most controversial scenes in Stone Butch Blues where Jess, passing as a
man, fucks the straight waitress, Annie, sporting a condom-clad strap on:
“Jesus Christ, “ Chris said. She sat bolt upright as Kathleen read the passage, her
fingernails digging into the knees of her jeans, terrified that Jess would be caught,
and then incredulous and a little outraged that she wasn’t. Her mind was flying.
Wouldn’t Annie notice there was no dirty condom left anywhere? How did Jess
keep her from touching the harness? (195)
This scene initiates Chris’s first real experience “reading” a text, not in the literal sense of the
recognition of signs, but on the level of interpretation. Chris becomes enthralled by this moment
in Stone Butch Blues, beginning a debate of the scene’s realism and the ethics of Jess Goldberg’s
actions, which spans several days in the time of Crybaby Butch’s diegesis. This is perhaps the

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greatest victory Anna achieves by giving this book to Chris; it takes her to a place of
interpretation, past reading to just get the how’s and why’s of the story. Chris ultimately refuses
to believe the veracity of the scene, saying, “Nobody’s that good” (196). The fact that Stone
Butch Blues gives Chris the self-confidence to trust in her ability to see and interpret a text in
relation to the world around her is perhaps Frank’s most compelling argument for the novel’s
value. Chris’ experience illustrates the deep connection that readers feel in relation to a fictional
narrative, and the cultural capital inherent in the printed word that we, the literate elite, often take
for granted.
Anna’s desire to be an inspiration to a fellow butch, mirroring the actions of her
“sponsor,” is a fundamentally selfish act. When it comes to Chris, Anna’s motivations are
consistently personal rather than pedagogical. Because the copy Anna had given her was ruined
with coffee stains, spaghetti sauce, and cigarette smoke, Chris tries to pass off a new copy as the
original when she gives it back months later. As Anna takes it back, she asks Chris if she had
able to read the book. Chris denies it and “Anna made a regretful face. ‘Yeah, after I gave it to
you I realized it would probably still be too hard.’ Chris looked at her with hurt incredulity, and
put up her hood. Why hadn’t she said something then, when Chris was thinking the whole time
that she was behind in her reading?” (232). And in her haste to assuage her own guilt, she
completely eliminates what little good Chris got out of the novel:
“I’m really sorry,” Anna said quickly, reaching and touching her arm. “I was just
so excited by the idea that you’d be interested in it, because it’s about a butch in
the ’50s who fights for social justice.’ . . . Chris had never thought of the book
that way. She had thought it was about a butch in the ’50s who gets the shit
knocked out of her. She had obviously gotten the whole book wrong. (232)

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And yet, even in that moment where Chris believes her reading of the novel is completely
incorrect, she has implicitly learned the lesson that different readings are possible. Frank’s use of
the novel as a narrative tool has illustrated the complex relationship between a reader’s personal
experience and her ability to interpret a text. Anna is able to disassociate from the violence of
Stone Butch Blues because of her privileged position relative to the novel’s depiction of lesbian
existence, while Chris’ experience makes it impossible for her to see the hope in the novel; it
“ripped up [her] insides like a power drill” (209).
At her birthday dinner, Anna discusses giving Stone Butch Blues to Chris with her
academic friends: “‘How could I do that?’ she wailed. ‘I thought, Oh gee! She’ll love a novel
about a ’50s butch! It’ll be empowering to her! Never mind that she’d read scene after scene of a
butch like her getting gang-raped and beaten to a pulp!’” (346). Evidently, Anna only realizes a
portion of her error. She recognizes the real possibility that reading Stone Butch Blues might
have been traumatic for Chris because of its representations of violence, and that reading
violence could potentially repeat it, but she still seems unable to realize the impact it had on
Chris’ journey toward literacy. Her friend Janice, yet another tenure-track literary professor in
Anna’s life, defends the decision: “‘Yeah but so what?’ she asked Anna. ‘It’s not like you did the
wrong thing, giving her that book. It’s just that you can’t predict how people will read—whether
they’ll be inspired or demoralized, or pissed off by characters who resemble them. You just can’t
tell . . . Scott agreed. . . . Her friends had sure let her off the hook’” (347). While her friends
dismiss any sense of culpability or responsibility of a teacher for her students with the fatalistic
“there’s nothing one can do” attitude, Anna’s understanding of the situation is more nuanced.
Whereas her friends can absolve her from any ethical responsibility and, therefore implicitly
themselves—who else but the academic elite have the power to do so?—the tone of “sure let her

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off the hook” implies that Anna feels no such absolution. This isn’t to say that she has a solution,
either. She is, however, willing to recognize the complicated power relationship between reader
and text, and the teacher who uses her authority to have a student read a novel.

Epilogue
When I was coming up in Lansing’s queer community, it seemed like there wasn’t a
lesbian, trans-man, or socially conscious queer who hadn’t read Stone Butch Blues. If you
happened to be one of the few gaybys who hadn’t read it, in less than twenty-four hours, a copy
would find its way into your possession, tattered and marked up, left in your campus mailbox, or
stealthily slid to you in a coffee shop, freshly stolen from Barnes and Noble. Though anecdotal,
moments like this reveal how Stone Butch Blues, and by extension lesbian novels, can function
as a powerful cultural artifacts. It is a story of our people whose import we make sure to foster. If
such a thing as a lesbian canon can be said to exist, Stone Butch Blues’ position within it was
secured long ago. All the traditional kinds of evidence are there; it won both the Lambda Literary
Award and American Library Association Gay & Lesbian Book Award in 1994.43 It has received
glowing reviews and been taught in high schools.44 Jennie Ruby, former contributor to off our
backs wrote, “Not until I read Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues did I understand the full
force of the hatred, anger and violence that is leveled against those who truly cross gender lines.
No lesbian-feminist who did not live the butch and femme experience of the 50s and 60s should
speak about this topic without reading this book” (20). While I would not generally argue for
canon per se, the benefits of alternative canons are undeniable; they function to preserve history
in representation for those who would otherwise go un(der)represented. Yes, canonization is
fundamentally proscriptive and exclusionary, but there is something to be said for the

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maintenance of specificity, of saying this is a lesbian novel and part of a larger history of lesbian
representation. Frank makes her own novel a kind of disciple of Stone Butch Blues, supporting
that nomination for literary veneration. Frank also illustrates another way of thinking about genre
formation; by making Stone Butch Blues a stylistic and structural referent within Crybaby Butch,
Frank demonstrates how intertextuality and style can function as a means of genre formation. In
this case, Frank is implicitly argues that Stone Butch Blues is a lesbian novel by making it
integral to both the style and narrative of her own lesbian novel. Taking advantage of how, as
Gayle Rubin notes, “butch is an indigenous lesbian category,” Frank pivots us away from the
novel’s trans* dimension to its lesbian valence; Frank claims Stone Butch Blues as a lesbian
novel by representing (perhaps imagining?) Stone Butch Blues as something lesbians read and
then interpret their lives against. And while I wouldn’t necessarily argue that Frank puts her own
work on the same level as Stone Butch Blue in terms of cultural import, she does put them both
on the same shelf.

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CHAPTER 2: LES ESPACES RAVAGEES, LE TEMPS RAVISSANT: LESBIAN SPACE-TIME
IN VIOLETTE LEDUC’S THÉRÈSE ET ISABELLE

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
…
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
-Adrienne Rich, “Poem III”

The Intuitionist
French literary mythology calls Violette Leduc “France’s greatest, unknown writer.”45
Publishing in France between 1946 and the early 1970s, it was her autobiography, La Bâtarde,
that brought her to international attention. Because this is the work for which she is best known
and because her work was not commercially unsuccessful relative to such literary friends as
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet, much effort in Leduc scholarship has focused on the
recuperation of her work as a means of propagating her life story; thus, the “scandal” of her

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life—being born out of wedlock, being of a lower class, being openly bisexual, and surviving
battles of censorship and depression—has outpaced literary analysis of her work as fictional
texts. Of Leduc’s oeuvre, Susan Mason writes, “Reading these texts as autobiography is not only
possible, but, when thinking of the scholars consecrated to this author, inevitable” (13).46 For
example, the premiere Leduc scholar, Carlo Jansiti, has produced a rather epic biography of
Leduc, wherein her novels serve as source material in the same way that personal
correspondence or diaries do; their fictional status is ignored as merely a thin veil masking a oneto-one correspondence with the reality of Leduc’s life.47 And while his biography raised Leduc’s
profile among French readers, the success of her 2013 biopic, Violette, will only increase interest
in her life on both sides of the Atlantic.4849
Leduc scholarship is emblematic of the dominant methodological approach to the
analysis of lesbian novels—using novels as evidence that the author is a lesbian or using their
(sometimes perceived) sex lives to read lesbianism into a particular novel—Orlando is really
about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West;50 Une femme m’apparut… is really about Renée
Vivien’s obsessive love of Natalie Clifford-Barney;51 Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Oranges are
Not the Only Fruit, may as well be called a memoir.52 Leduc’s slim novel, Thérèse et Isabelle, is
especially imbricated in this approach to Leduc scholarship because its publication history, rife
with censorship, fits into the broader narrative of Leduc’s life.53 The result has been a very
specific but limited approach to our understanding of this novel; if it’s acknowledged at all, it’s
mostly considered in relation to the other texts of Leduc’s oeuvre—most especially Ravages, the
novel for which the story of Therese and Isabelle was the intended first part. And because, for
more than four decades, the public only had access to a heavily censored version of the text

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(published in 1966), most of the scholarly inquiry into the text’s depiction of female same-sex
desire lacked access to a large amount of the novel’s representation of lesbianism.
This chapter shifts its perspective on Thérèse et Isabelle and its publication history in
favor of approaching it	as an independent, fictional work, taking it out of the double shadow of
Ravages and Leduc’s life. And while I begin to account for the large passages that were cut from
Thérèse et Isabelle—now available with the publication of the so-called texte intégral in 2000—
I’m just as interested in locating the smaller, more nuanced differences as well, especially
differences in verb tense. By accounting for how the story evolved through various manuscripts
and published versions from 1955 to 2015, I hope to dispel the illusion that the most recent
version is the version of the novel, that is to say, the version we should privilege by virtue of its
being the author’s “intended.” Instead, I wish to locate the novel’s worth in Leduc’s writing
process and its representation of lesbianism, rather than in the mere victory over Gallimard’s
prudery.

Thérèse et Isabelle: A Biography of a Book
In the summer of 2015, I spent two weeks examining the various materials at the Violette
Leduc archives, housed at IMEC (l’Institut Mémoire de l’édition contemporaine), located in the
former Abbaye d’Ardenne. On one of my last days at IMEC, sitting in the réfectoire for lunch—a
dungeon-like, garden-level room, bare of any décor save the black utilitarian Ikea furniture—I
found myself surrounded by Francophones, try as I might have to isolate myself in the corner to
save myself the embarrassment of illustrating just how poor was my conversational French.
Trapped, I was asked why I was here, what was I researching, this time by a woman who spoke
with her mouth so full of food I’m not sure how I comprehended her. Responding in French:

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—I am here to consult the Violette Leduc archives; I am studying her novel Thérèse et
Isabelle.
—Oh you’re the one studying Leduc, she said in English.
However, unfamiliar with the particular text, a young, resident Leduc scholar across from me
explained to her in French,
—It’s the beginning of Ravages, eyes closed, smirk patronizing.
She nodded in comprehension and returned to her chewing.
While anecdotal, this moment is demonstrative of how Thérèse et Isabelle is perceived:
victim of censorship and really a part of Leduc’s other, more impressive novel, Ravages. For
example, Isabelle de Courtivron writes that, “Although this short text can be read and
appreciated on its own, it must be viewed as part of Leduc’s third novel, for Ravages is best
understood in the context of the narrator’s brief but pivotal experience of adolescent love” (22).
To her mind, while other readings of the text are possible, the use of the imperative “must” and
superlative “best” indicate the (barely) implicit lack of quality those other readings would
produce. Similarly, though her position is less entrenched, Catharine Violett—who dedicated
much of her life’s work Leduc scholarship—characterizes Ravages as incomplete without the
inclusion of Thérèse et Isabelle: “As conceived by Violette Leduc, tracing Thérèse’s sexual
evolution from adolescence to maturity, Ravages would have been, without doubt, a true
bildungsroman” (“De la censure” 197).54 This of course implies that Ravages fails to be a
bildungsroman because it lacks the starting point, the sexually uninitiated Thérèse as
characterized in Thérèse et Isabelle. You’ll also note that Violett invokes authorial intention,
locating the failure of Ravages in the censors’ coming between the writer and her vision. Both of
these scholars were making reference to the 1966 version, but this characterization of Thérèse et

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Isabelle’s inextricable connection with Ravages haunts the 2000 texte intégral; in the novel’s
postface, “A Story of Censorship”—included in the French, English, and American editions—
Carlo Jansiti writes: “Thérèse and Isabelle formed the first part of a novel called Ravages….”
(133). It will appear that the two novels will be forever sutured, if only in Thérèse et Isabelle’s
paratextual materials. But what I want to highlight is that any discussion of Thérèse et Isabelle
always turns into a discussion about Ravages such that, in terms of analysis, Thérèse et Isabelle
is almost ignored.
Considering the novel independently of Ravages is made possible via the process of
publication; publication vivifies a text, gives it a body and a life in the public sphere. To my
mind, this argument is strengthened if we consider the pre-production of Thérèse et Isabelle: the
story never appeared in the hand-written manuscript of Ravages; rather, Leduc produced the
story in the form of two typed dactylogrammes (typed manuscripts) and supposedly presented it
alongside the cahiers in which she wrote Ravages.55 So while Leduc may have presented the
story to Gallimard as the “beginning” of a larger novel, the story of Thérèse and Isabelle never
shared a body with Ravages to begin with. This is perhaps too existential a consideration, for
what does it matter the media in which the story is assembled for presentation to a publisher? It
nonetheless sets a precedent worth considering: Thérèse et Isabelle can be considered on its own
because it’s always already been separate from Ravages.
Regardless, outside the supposed scandal of censorship, the publication history calls into
question the idea that the most recent edition is the version the author intended. Carlo Jansiti’s
narrative that accompanies latest texte intégral, glosses the rather complicated history,
streamlining it into a tale of unfair censorship, despair, and perseverance on the part of Violette
Leduc in order to characterize this publication as a victory of the authorial vision: “Now we have

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Thérèse et Isabelle as a whole work of art, with its original coherence and trajectory at last
complete” (133).56 Bracketing the contradiction that he also asserts its “original coherence” as
part of another novel, it’s still not quite as simple as Jansiti would have us believe. Combining
my own archival research with the work of other scholars, I have produced a complete version of
the publication history of Thérèse et Isabelle in English:
•

1948-53: The manuscript of Ravages is written by hand in many small notebooks.
These notebooks are currently housed at IMEC under the code LDC 1.4

•

1953: Two nearly identical dactylogrammes are produced. There are slight
variations in each in terms of phrasing, adjective choice, and verb tenses; both
contain hand-written corrections in blue ink. These dactylogrammes are also
housed at IMEC. One is listed as LDC 6.1 “Thérèse et Isabelle: dactylographie
corrigée” (hereafter dactylogramme one) the other is listed as LDC 6.2 Thérèse et
Isabelle: dactylographie (hereafter dactylogramme two). Notably, the first, thirtyone pages are missing from this second dactylogramme and pages 43-45 are
inexplicably kept separate, listed as LDC 6.3 “Thérèse et Isabelle (fragment).”
Though it is unclear which is produced first, one could make a case that the one
with fewer corrections was written second. More compelling is how the
handwritten in dactylogramme one appears typed in dactylogramme two (though
both are ultimately crossed out), perhaps suggesting the later was produced after
(see fig. 1 vs. fig. 2):

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Figure 1. A handwritten page included with dactylogramme one (LDC 6.1: dactylographie
corrigée) as page 190 of Thérèse et Isabelle. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut
mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France.

69

	

Figure 2. Page 144 of the dactylogramme two with handwritten corrections by Violette Leduc.
Leduc’s signature appears on the page. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut
mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France.

70

	

Still, as not all corrections from dactylogramme one appear in dactylogramme
two, a definitive progression remains unclear.
•

1955: Though heavily edited and censored in its own right, Ravages is published
without the initial story of Thérèse et Isabelle.

•

1955: With the assistance of friend Jacques Guérin, Leduc writes a kind of “faux
manuscript” of Thérèse et Isabelle—one intended for copying rather than one
given to a publisher for typesetting. Using a fountain pen with black ink with
neat(er) and generally legible writing on large, white paper, this manuscript exists
as notable contrast with her at times barely-legible handwriting in blue ballpoint
pen found in the cheap cahiers which compose the vast majority of her
manuscript materials; the “corrections” are minor and perfunctory, written in
black ink with the same fountain pen as the manuscript (compare fig. 3 and fig.
4):

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Figure 3. Pages 10 and 11b of Violette Leduc’s notebook manuscript of her autobiography, La
Bâtarde. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine,
Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France.

72

	

Figure 4. Page 4 of the “faux manuscript” of Violette Leduc’s Thérèse et Isabelle commissioned
by Jacques Guérin in 1955, printed as an édition de luxe via photolithography. Image courtesy of
Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la BlancheHerbe, France.
73

	

These differences point to the effect Guérin wanted: a sense of authenticity, of
writerly process, while also accommodating the realities of how this version of
the novel would be published, as a small-scale édition de luxe, made via
photolithography rather than as a typeset publication.57 The original manuscript is
housed at IMEC as LDC 12.10. One of the lithographed copies is housed at the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. There exists a discrepancy among
scholars as to whether or not 25 or 28 copies were published, but at the end of the
faux manuscript, it reads: « Tiré à 25 exemplaires numérotés de 1 – 25 No 1 »,
which translates to “Twenty-five copies printed, numbered from 1 – 25, No 1”
(see fig. 5):

74

Figure 5. Page 206 of the “faux manuscript” of Violette Leduc’s Thérèse et Isabelle
commissioned by Jacques Guérin in 1955, printed as an édition de luxe via photolithography.
The text reads: « Tiré à 25 exemplaires numérotés de 1 à 25 No 1 », which translates to “25
copies printed, numbered from 1 to 25, No 1.” Image courtesy of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut
mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France.
75

	

•

1963: La Bâtarde is published. The third “chapter” includes text from Thérèse et
Isabelle, which would correspond to the missing 31 pages from dactylogramme
2—in the French versions, there’s simply a break in the text, beginning on a new
page; English versions have it named as a “chapter.”

•

1966: Thérèse et Isabelle is published in a censored form, notably missing the
beginning that was published in La Bâtarde. Comparison with the published
version and the two dactylogrammes confirms the second dactylogramme (LDC
6.2) is the source for this version of the novel.

•

1967: Derek Coltman translates the novel into English.

•

1968: Film adaptation is released, directed by Radley Metzger (IMDB).

•

2000: Thérèse et Isabelle: Gallimard publishes texte intégral. Comparison with
the two dactylogrammes confirms that it is the first dactylogramme that was used
as the source for this version of the novel.

•

2012: Salammbo Press publishes an English version, translated by Sophie Lewis.

•

2015: The Feminist Press at CUNY releases an American edition using Sophie
Lewis’ translation, with the addition of an Afterward by Michael Lucey. There
are, however, minor differences between the British and American versions,
editorial Americanizations such as the changing of the word “pocket torch” to
“flashlight,” swapping Z’s for S’s at the ends of words like “recognize,” the
removal of U’s from words like “color,” and the use of double quotes for speech
rather than single quotes used in the British version. Unless otherwise stated, any
translation of the French is quoted from the British version.

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The edition published in 2000, then, is not so much a restoration of a censored text but is rather
the published embodiment of a fraternal twin. There is of course the practical reason for this; the
first thirty-one pages used in La Bâtarde are no longer with the rest of the second dactylogramme
and, as far as anyone knows, are lost.58 You can’t publish what you don’t have. But if three
different source texts (the two dactylogrammes and faux manuscript) were used to create three
different, published versions of the novel, how can we claim which version is the author’s
intended? And more importantly, why does that matter? Technically, the faux manuscript
commissioned by Jacques Guérin was the final, written version of the novel, so why isn’t the
édition de luxe the version of the novel? Or if the dactylogramme that was used for the 1966
version of the novel was the one Leduc selected for publication why isn’t that the version of the
text? It seems that the claim of authorial intention is a rather effective marketing ploy, which
extends the tragedy of Leduc’s life decades after she died. The reality is simple, really; the socalled texte intégral is in print, translated into English in 2012 in England and released by the
Feminist Press at SUNY in the summer of 2015, though amid some scandal of its own.59 The
édition de luxe is rare and will never be widely read, and, as it goes out of print, the 1966 version
will be lost to contemporary readers. The thing that makes the 2000 version of the novel the
version is not authorial intent or the restoration of artistic vision—that would require the
integration of Thérèse et Isabelle into some new, as yet unpublished version of Ravages. Rather,
it is the reality of publication processes and marketing that authorize this version.
The reality of this substitution is, therefore, bittersweet. While contemporary readers now
have access to a version of the text that has more material—which they can choose to read as
autobiographical, as part of Ravages, or as merely pornographic, though none of those are my
own hermeneutic—it is the censored text that influenced the network of lesbian novels for forty-

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four years and shaped Leduc scholarship in the twentieth century. However we feel about the
pieces of the novel that weren’t published—the pages that the reading public couldn’t read—the
1966 version of Thérèse et Isabelle was still years ahead of its time in terms of what it was
willing to represent on a page. And while we don’t know what impact the new version of
Thérèse et Isabelle will have on Leduc scholarship or lesbian novels in the twenty-first century,
dismissing and forgetting its previous iterations, characterizing it as incomplete and therefore
supplantable, does a disservice to the novel’s legacy and import to the lesbian novel genre.

À la recherche du « temps » perdu – A Speculative, Anecdotal History of Revision
While certainly less glamorous than its resection from Ravages, or the censorship of
much of the novel’s meat in the 1966 publication, when I first started comparing the 1966
version to the 2000 version, I noticed a subtler variation between the two—one of verb tense.
When I looked at the two typescripts I found that, although extensive handwritten revision is
obvious, the revision of verb tenses are the most extensive type of Leduc’s modifications, found
especially in scenes when Therese and Isabelle are having sex, and thus revealing a potentially
significant dimension of this novel. Leduc’s meticulous revision of verb tenses demonstrates an
awareness of the subtle effects that grammatical time has on the narration. Perhaps the most
interesting example is in how and when she uses two past tense verbs: passé composé or passé
simple.
The passé simple tense “expresses a state or an event which is seen as localized in the
past time with no necessary relation to the present. The phenomenon is seen as fully
accomplished” (Rosenberg et. al 13). The passé composé may function in the same way, but may
also “express a past event or state which has some bearing on the present” (Rosenberg et. al 15).

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In common usage today, French speakers use the passé composé to communicate things that
happened in the past while Anglophones use a combination of the simple past and present perfect
tenses. So whereas, for example, a literal translation of a phrase using passé composé like “J’ai
lu le roman” would be “I have read the book,” any first year student of French would be told to
translate that phrase as “I read the book” for a more accurate continuity of meaning. This
phenomenon is the result of the French passé simple going out of common parlance, occurring
currently in either official, governmental proclamations and, more usually, as a literary tense. In
“Remarques sur l’usage du « passé simple » français,” André Martinet cites a study conducted by
Croation linguist, Ivanka Cindrić, on fifteen French-speaking respondents, asking them “to
summarize a fiction and communicate a personal experience. Out of the twenty-seven
recordings, a single one made use of the « passé simple » as the normal tense for fiction. But that
tense was not used for his personal experience by the same informant” (87). While the statistical
relevance of only fifteen participants in a study is questionable—and indeed Martinet laments the
fact that Cindrić did not continue with her work, instead of becoming a secretary in Italy—it
suggests that, by 1960, the passé simple had all but died out as a spoken tense. Today, for the
French, there is a clear delineation between the passé simple versus the passé composé—the
former is read, the latter is spoken. Leduc is, of course, not alone in mixing the two tenses; we
see this happening in other works of the early twentieth century in French, perhaps reflecting the
larger lingual shifting that Cindrić notes.
But regardless of whatever this mixture might indicate about evolution of the
contemporary French language (if anything), the presence of both in the novel suggests there was
a palpable difference in meaning between the two at the time of the novel’s writing. Leduc’s
numerous, hand-written revisions of verb tenses suggest a significant sensitivity to the subtle

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difference in how one expresses completed actions and of states of being in the past. Let’s look
at one example of these changes from passé composé to passé simple (see fig. 6):

	
Figure 6. Page 14 of dactylogramme one (dactylogramme corrigée) of Thérèse et Isabelle with
handwritten annotations/corrections by Violette Leduc. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette
Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France.

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Isabelle m’a tirée me tira en arrière, a m’a couchée me coucha en travers de
l’édredon, elle m’a soulevée me souleva, elle m’a gardée me garda dans ses bras:
elle me sortait d’un monde où je n’avais pas vécu pour me lancer dans un monde
où je ne vivais pas encore; les lèvres ont entr’ouvert entrouvrirent les miennes, ont
mouillé mouillèrent mes dents que je serrais. Le langue trop charnue m’a effrayée
m’effraya: le sexe étrange n’est pas entré n’entra pas. (Dactylogramme One, 14)60
The most noticeable, initial change for a contemporary Francophone would be a sense of
formality; before its revision, it would “sound” more conversational, and less literary.
Interestingly—or perhaps unfortunately—this would have been translated into English in the
same way, regardless of her revision: into the simple past. As Anglophones, the only way to
access a difference in meaning between the two versions of this passage is via a literal
translation, comparing the text in the present perfect and the simple past. If we consider the first
sentence, the difference would be “Isabelle has pulled me back” versus “Isabelle pulled me
back.” The former has a sense of immediacy, of action that has just been completed. The latter
has more of a sense of temporal distance, narrating action the completion of which occurred at
some unmarked time in the past. Arguably, then, Leduc’s revision temporally distances the
narrator from the action. Either through formality of tone or temporal indeterminacy, Thérèse is
not narrating these actions as soon as they occur so much communicating that they have occurred
already. Assuming some identification on the part of the reader—something Elizabeth Locey
argues Leduc does expertly—this revision in turn distances the reader from the action as well.61
This distance also suggests that the time of narration is of particular importance in how the
reader will apprehend the story. Sadly, the English translation doesn’t maintain the distinction
between two French verb tenses, subtly changing the perhaps-subconscious affect of the novel.

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Leduc’s consideration of the effect of verb tense on the experience of narration isn’t
limited to the nuanced difference between the passé composé and the passé simple; she also
changes moments of passé composé into imparfait. Thinking about the effect of this change is
difficult for Anglophones; whereas before I argue that via the close correspondence of passé
simple and passé composé to English verb tense, the imparfait doesn’t have an English
equivalent,
The imperfect, unlike the passé simple and passé composé, expresses a past state
or event which is seen as nonlocalized in time. The phenomenon is viewed as
being in progress rather than fully accomplished or as being indefinitely repeated.
The imperfect is thus used to present the framework within which localized events
or states (passé simple or passé composé) may be expressed. French tenses are
such that the distinction between localized and nonlocalized past phenomena is
necessarily expressed. This is unlike English, which often implies the distinction
instead of making it explicit. The possible English equivalents of the French
imperfect, the choice of which always depends on a particular context, are—to
use the very play as an example—played, did play, was playing, used to play,
would play. (16)
So when analyzing the effect changing something form passé composé to imparfait, we can think
of it as dislocating events, taking them out of sequence or at times eliminating a sense of causal
relationship. It erases a sense of actions completed in favor of a sense of continuous actions or
actions as a state of being. Maintaining this feeling is an unenviable task for the translator.
Looking at one example of Leduc changing a passage from passé composé, we see the obvious
change in how the passage feels and the difficulty maintaining that feeling in English (see fig. 7):

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Figure 7. Page 172 of the dactylogramme one (dactylogramme corrigée) of Thérèse et Isabelle
with handwritten annotations/corrections by Violette Leduc. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette
Leduc/Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France.

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From page 172 : “Je l’ai aspiré l’aspirais, je l’ai refoulé le refoulais, je l’ai changé le changeais
en sexe de chien, rouge, nu.” Part of what this change does is to bring these verbs in line with the
next sentence, which is also in imparfait: “Il montait jusqu’à l’oesophage. J’écoutais Isabelle qui
se faisait légère, qui suivait la montée, qui profitait du reflet.”62 So, on the practical level, Leduc
is maintaining the consistency of how the passage feels. Leduc’s revision of this sentence to
imparfait would seem to make sense as it also emulates the continuous action of Isabelle
manually stimulating Thérèse as actions happening all at the same time, rather than a succession
of things that happened, implicitly, one right after the other. Simultaneously, while the imparfait
marries a sense of action that happened before the time of narration with no definition location in
time, it also evokes a sense of indeterminate duration; its happening is only marked in terms of
“before,” but not in terms of “for how long,” highlighting the process of finger fucking. But it
also changes the meaning quite a bit: rather than a succession of actions—“I sucked it in, I drove
it back, I changed it into a dog’s phallus, red, naked”—it illustrates continuous action and then—
following Lewis’ translation, an action of the past whose completion is indefinitely located in
time —“I was sucking it in, driving it back, I changed into a dog’s phallus, naked, red” (2012,
116). The indefiniteness of the imparfait works well with the metaphor (as we know, of course,
Thérèse doesn’t literally became a dog’s penis); it links the metaphor to a change in her being or
nature, which becomes something defined by sexuality. The passé composé would have elicited
a more immediate feeling of completion—of something that has just happened—and something
more literal. But with Lewis’ choice to translate “je le changeais” to “I changed”—since in
English, from the context, we understand that that change isn’t linked to one particular moment
in time—she emphasizes the completedness of the change. A translation of “je le changeais” into
“I was changing” would emphasize process, the continuousness of what Thérèse was

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(metaphorically) becoming. Hypothetically, both of those senses are maintained in the one
conjugation “changeais”—and I say “hypothetically” here because one cannot anticipate how
any one Francophone will interpret or feel that moment’s sense of completion or process. But
what we see in this revision is Leduc capitalizing on the interpretive possibilities one verb tense
allows over another, compelling the reader to feel, as Thérèse, a sensation of getting lost in the
moment.
This revision is then followed by sentences in which the verbs are changed from
imparfait and passé composé to passé simple: “Le doigt sortaitit d’un nuage, entrait dans l’autre.
Mon ardeur a gagnéa Isabelle…” In the second sentence, “My ardour has claimed Isabelle”
becomes “My ardour claimed Isabelle,” again creating a kind of temporal distance between the
narration and the time action. The former could also be read has having a reflective quality, as if
Thérèse was realizing it the moment after the action was completed. The latter signals that this is
a moment relayed by Thérèse at a later time, taking herself and by extension the reader outside of
this moment. It’s an interesting moment to emphasize the distance as it coincides with narration
changing from literal description to a mix of literal (finger) and figurative (cloud standing in for
vagina).
Examples of verb tense revision are numerous in both dactylogrammes, though the one
that would be used for the 2000 texte intégral has far more than its sister text. However, we can’t
discern which dactylogramme was produced first, since handwritten changes in one don’t always
appear as typed corrections in the other. These inconsistencies are then reflected in both
published versions, meaning that French readers in the twentieth century experienced the novel
differently than those of the twenty-first will, not only because there’s more text, but because of
minute differences in scenes that inflect the narrator’s relationship to the action she describes.

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Let’s look at a side-by-side comparison of a passage that demonstrates how same-sex desire is
experienced differently in the twenty-first century:
—Tu as trouvé, dit-[Isabelle]. Elle se tut, elle

—Tu as trouvé, dit-[Isabelle]. Elle s’est tue,

guette ce qu’elle ressentait. Je recevais ce

elle a guetté ce qu’elle ressentait. J’ai reçu ce

qu’elle recevait, j’étais Isabelle. Mon effort,

qu’elle recevait, j’ai été Isabelle. Mon effort,

ma sueur, mon rythme m’excitaient. La perle

ma sueur, mon rythme m’excitaient. La perle

voulait ce que je voulais. (1966, 52-53)63

voulait ce que je voulais. (2000, 87)

“You’ve found the way,” [Isabelle] said. Then

‘That’s it,’ [Isabelle] said. She fell silent, she

she fell silent, intent on her own sensations. I

kept watch over her sensations. I received what

was receiving what she was receiving: I was

she was receiving, I was Isabelle. My effort,

Isabelle. My efforts, my sweat, my rhythm

my sweat, my rhythm were exciting me. The

were exciting me too. The pearl wanted what I

pearl wanted what I wanted. (Lewis 82, 2012).

wanted. (Coltman 45, 1967)64
Bracketing for the moment that are several idiosyncrasies about Lewis’ translation—things such
as a shift from past to present tense/copula in the dialogue when translating to a more colloquial
phrase in English, or the changing a verb into noun (“elle ressentait” into “her sensations”)—
here we find an example of how both the passé simple and the passé composé are translated into
the simple past in English. What we can come to see, then, is that while both English and French
native speakers have access to the represented action, they experience different, nuanced tonal
and temporal encounters of the text. In the 1966 version, this would sound more formal and
literary, whereas the 2000 version would sound more “colloquial.” In the 1966 version, there is
also a more pronounced feeling of simultaneity in the sexual act of cunniligus with the use of
imparfait—Thérèse is receiving what Isabelle is receiving—whereas in the 2000 version,

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Thérèse’s experience is that of a completed action (I received) in conjunction with Isabelle’s
continuous one she was (receiving).
This temporal difference is mirrored in the statement translated by both Coltman and
Lewis into “I was Isabelle.” The use of the imparfait conjugation of être, “étais,” (left column)
marks a state of being over time: this state of being is contemporaneous and of the same implicit
duration as the “receiving” (sex act). The use of passé composé in the passage on the right makes
the conjugation of être, ai été, into one of a succession of events: Thérèse “is” Isabelle only after
she received what Isabelle “was receiving.” It also further underlines that the action is over; the
use of imparfait in the 1966 version points the reader to the time of action, whereas the passé
composé points the reader to the time of narration. In that sense, the 1966 version highlights the
sex rather than taking the reader away from it. Sophie Lewis’ translation of “J’ai été Isabelle”
into “I was Isabelle” erases the distinction between the time of narration and the time of action
that passé composé creates in such a way that a literal translation into “I have been Isabelle”
would have maintained. It’s unfortunate that neither English edition maintains the distinction
between these two tenses, in particular, especially in moments representing sex between Thérèse
and Isabelle.
I’m reminded of a passage from a textbook by Mary Oliver in which she analyzes Robert
Frost’s use of phonemes in the poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
I don’t mean to suggest that Frost sat down and counted mutes, aspirates, etc.,
while writing the poem. Or than any poet does anything like this. I mean to
suggest that poets select words for their sounds as well as their meaning—and that
poets make good initial selection. Of course they also revise. But they have
already—“naturally,” one wants to say—worked from such a font of knowledge

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and sensitivity that often near miracles of sound and sense have already happened.
(28)
It’s easy, then, to imagine a corollary in Leduc’s writing. This variation in tenses may have been
less of an intellectual endeavor for Leduc than I have made it and, rather, a more a visceral
experience of the language, the kind of sense a native speaker has when something technically
expresses a meaning, but just sounds wrong because “no one would say it that way.” Regardless,
if what we’re after is an appreciation her of her abilities as a writer as a means of recuperating
her work more generally, it seems to me a that a more compelling route to that goal is a fuller
analysis of her revisionary practices, which locates Leduc in her meticulous process rather than
in how her life converges or diverges from the diegeses of her novels—a task that will prove
increasingly difficult as the 1966 version goes out of circulation. While attention to grammatical
time might seem esoteric (or nerdy), that so much can be made of it illustrates how limiting the
biographical approach can be, how, in turning away from the text, we lose sight of its
complexities. By advocating that we consider how same-sex desire is portrayed in lesbian
novels, I’m not restricting that call to an analysis of the novel’s content, exclusively; “how”
demands just as much attention to style and its relationship to the content of a given work.
Archival research and consideration of editions makes obvious a microcosmic (read
grammatical) iteration of the novel’s anxiety with time more generally, an anxiety that, as we
will see, is inextricable from how the lesbian desire is portrayed in Thérèse et Isabelle.

Temporary Love
What makes this novel stand out from the rest of Leduc’s work is its depiction of sex
between two, young girls; this dimension of the novel is the heart of its controversy and its

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marketing strategy since its publication. And because of its removal from Ravages, it became her
only work that depicts sex only between women. At its simplest, Thérèse et Isabelle is a story
about two girls who fall in love at boarding school, a common setting in lesbian fiction.65 With
graphic, intense, and (at times) violent sex scenes between two young women comprising almost
half of the texte intégral, Thérèse et Isabelle depicts adolescent love and desire as acutely urgent,
even obsessive. And yet, few have gone beyond merely raising their eyebrows at its publication
history to open the book and address what the novel says about l’amour entre deux femmes.
While Leduc is universally lauded for the “frankness” of her depiction—certainly a
commendable quality, unthinkably brave at the time of writing—we need to move beyond that
she depicted lesbianism to reflect more on how she depicted it, especially as we now have access
to an more extended version in the texte intégral. Alex Hughes and Elizabeth Locey are notable
exceptions, here; both dedicate a chapter to the novel, but their analyses predate the 2000 texte
intégral.66 Examining the version that will, now, shape the lesbian novel in the twenty-first
century, the depiction remains ambivalent. Leduc’s style interrupts descriptions of the (at times
painfully-) quotidian life of a poor, French schoolgirl with intense imagery that often leaves the
reader confused and unsettled on the level of plot, location, and temporal relations of action.
Leduc’s use of space (the cell, the outhouse, and the staircase) and the narrator’s obsession with
time depict lesbian desire as something unsustainable, something that will always be contained
and, eventually, eliminated.
Due either to issues with censorship or the practical reason that the beginning of
dactylogramme 2 was used in the third chapter of La Bâtarde, how Thérèse and Isabelle become
romantically linked is unknown in the 1966 publication; we begin that novel with them already
sexually involved. Turning to the 2000 version allows us to see how Thérèse and Isabelle’s

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relationship forms and is integral to the space they inhabit. Because Thérèse and Isabelle are
students at boarding school, it is therefore unsurprising that their first intimate encounter occurs
in the dormitory, though this initial sex scene was cut from the 1966 publication. While the exact
configuration of the sleeping quarters is never really made clear, the reader learns that Thérèse’s
bed is just opposite Isabelle’s and the only privacy a student has is behind percale curtains that
surround each “box.” And so it is with ease that Isabelle enters Thérèse’s room for the first time:
A night-train left the station, left it to follow the monstrous whistle that was
piercing the school’s alien shadows. I threw back the bedcover; I was afraid of the
comatose dormitory. Someone was calling from behind the percale curtain. I
played dead. I pulled the cover back over my head and relit my pocket torch. . . . .
Visiting me, Isabelle came no further than my percale curtain. I was suspicious of
her shyness, suspicious of her long, loose hair in my cell. (14)67
This detail of the curtain, the “percale curtain,” is repeated frequently—in terms of setting,
Leduc spends little to no time on descriptive prose in favor the repetition of key images. The
specificity of “percale” evokes the precariousness of their privacy; percale is tightly woven,
making it difficult to see through, but is also extremely thin. Simultaneously, it signals the
precarity of heteronormativity’s power in this space, transgressed as easily as pulling a curtain to
one side. The barrier separating Thérèse and Isabelle is an illusion, as secure as the proverbial
line in the sand. Thérèse’s fear in this moment is directly linked the space she inhabits; this
school is not her home; its shadows are alien to her. This suggests not only a foreignness, an
unfamiliarity with the configuration of the space at night, but also signals the length of time
Thérèse has been at this school—a mere 30 days (8). Her fear is also linked to having a visitor,
unusual not only because of the hour, but because Thérèse is admittedly unpopular (she hates

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everyone and everything at the school), and it’s even more surprising that the visitor is Isabelle,
as Thérèse describes her specific hate for Isabelle on two separate occasions before this
encounter, a scene absent from the 1966 version of the novel.
Thérèse’s suspicions prove to be justified, as Isabelle’s intentions are, in fact, less than
honorable. On the pretense of having Thérèse read to her, Isabelle invites Thérèse to her “room”
and as soon as the flashlight goes out:
Isabelle pulled me backwards, she laid me down across the eiderdown, lifted me,
held me in her arms: she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to
launch me into one I could not yet inhabit. With her lips she parted mine,
moistened my clenched teeth. The fleshiness of her tongue frightened me: the
foreign sex did not enter. I waited, withdrawn contemplative. My heart was
beating too loudly and I wanted to listen to this seal of sweetness, this soft new
tracing. Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself. (17)
Isabelle me tira en arrière, elle me coucha en travers de l’édredon, elle me
souleva, elle me garda dans ses bras : elle me sortait d’un monde où je n’avais pas
vécu pour me lancer dans un monde où je ne vivais pas encore ; les lèvres
entrouvrirent les miennes, mouillèrent mes dents que je serrais. La langue trop
charnue m’effraya : le sexe étrange n’entre pas. J’attendais absente et recueillie.
Les lèves se promenaient sure mes lèves : des pétales m’époussetaient. Mon cœur
battait trop haut et je voulais écouter ce scellé de douceur, ce frôlement neuf.
Isabelle m’embrasse, me disais-je. (Texte Intégral 21-22)
Though, in making this excerpt grammatical in English, the insistent, almost poetic repetition of
“elle me + verb” (four times) is lost—particularly interesting, as the repetition of the subject and

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direct object pronouns almost eliminates the phonemic separation between the two, in a sense
sonically erasing the distinction between subject (Isabelle) and object of action (Thérèse). The
sense of Thérèse’s shock and passive participation is nonetheless maintained; Isabelle is the
agent of action, and all Thérèse can do is narrate the action in spare prose (though in a very long,
French sentence). This initial encounter is admittedly tame compared to later sexual exchanges in
Isabelle’s cell, encounters in which Leduc describes, in varying degrees of detail, cunniligus,
analinigus, mutual masturbation, anal and vaginal finger fucking, and my personal favorite, a
moment when Thérèse uses her teeth to clean the dried blood from her own digital defloration
out from under Isabelle’s finger nails. However, this scene sets the stage and, over the course of
the next three nights, the cell becomes the primary, though not sole, location for their lengthy
late night sex sessions, rendezvous that seem to go on for hours and leave them exhausted in the
day time. But Leduc’s word choice of “cell,” as well as “tomb,” both of which Thérèse often
uses to describe their sleeping quarters, is striking in the connotative valences these words evoke
and how that evocation colors Thérèse and Isabelle’s romance.
“Cell” and its French iteration, la cellule, call to mind incarceration, inhabiting a prison
cell. It also evokes the sense of a nun’s cell in a cloistered convent—an important setting in
history of French, literary representation of female same-sex desire.68 The equation of school
with prison almost borders on cliché—ask any school child (or any of my students, for that
matter)—as is homosexuality occurring as a result of incarceration. But Leduc doesn’t explicitly
describe their situation as prison-like, instead kindling that connection by way of diction (cell)
and description of the regimented routine of the boarding school:
We began the week every Sunday in the shoe room. We polished our shoes,
which had been brushed at home that morning in our kitchen gardens. . . . . We

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polished in a poorly-lit, windowless room of monotony; we daydreamed with our
shoes on our knees, those evening that we came back to school. The virtuous
scent of polish that revived us in pharmacies here made us melancholy. We were
languishing over our cloths, we were awkward, our grace had left us. . . . We
would rise at half past six. The monitors would push the curtain-rings along their
rails, coming into our cells to see that we were up. We would strip our beds, wash
in cold water while our mattresses grew cold, remake our beds once we had
dressed. At a quarter to seven, the girl on duty would open the cupboard, take out
the dustpan and broom, clean her cell, leave the broom outside her neighbors box.
At twenty-five past seven, we made sure our hands and nails were impeccable, at
twenty-five past seven the bell would ring: we lined up two by two. (7, 28)69
And so it continues. The texte intégral begins with this routine, and the resentful boredom
Thérèse feels—that they all feel, according to her—thus sets the tone for how the reader
approaches this text. On page twenty-eight, we get a sense of how this regimentation shapes her
entire experience: no real privacy as the monitors come to wake them; cold water to wash; not
even permitted the comfort of one’s own body heat left in sheets as they each make their bed; the
monitors’ presence, only long enough in the text to remind the reader that she—the gender is
unclear in the English though is made clear to be female in the French with the use of feminine
third person plural subject pronouns “elles”70—could appear at any moment, and each student
must answer to her authority. In that sense, Thérèse and Isabelle’s sex is not just transgressive
because it is homosexual—though of course that is obviously not unimportant—but because it is
simply against the rules and outside the routine. The space of the cell, however makeshift, is
meant for a single inhabitant, not two: “‘I have strict orders,’ whispered the new monitor. ‘No

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visitors in the boxes. Each girl in her own.’ We were always under threat of an evening
inspection by the Headmistress.” (12).71 Box: the simplest form used for containment, and the
cell, used specifically to hold the guilty.
And then of course there’s Leduc’s use of the word “tomb,” which the text makes
synonymous with cell. Here, not only is she playing with the idea of the similarity between sleep
and death as states of “unconsciousness,” Leduc is imbuing the space, and therefore their
relationship, which thrives almost entirely in that space, with a sense of finitude. As Thérèse tells
us in the beginning, “my future is nothing like theirs. I have no future at the school. My mother
said so. If I miss you too much I’ll take you home again. . . . She might take me back at any
moment” (7).72 And of course, in the end, she does. The uncertainty of when she will be swept
away is also reflected in Thérèse’s attention to time. Time, then, structures the novel, measuring
the monotony of life as an élève (as seen in the above quotation) and soon after marking the time
until Thérèse can be alone.
Thérèse and Isabelle’s second, slightly more graphic, sexual encounter happens, oddly
enough, in an outdoor lavatory. This is the scene that begins the 1966 version; the reader of that
version thus arrives in medias res, as it were, and the sense of needing to know what led up to
this moment is palpable—this is perhaps why Henri Peyre slammed the novel as “exaggerated,”
“childish,” “feeble.”73 Thérèse narrates:
I held her in my arms, with all the strength of my repentance, I breathed her in, I
pressed her to my belly and she became my loincloth; I tottered with my darling
embedded in me. Isabelle was making my ankles drunk, rotting my knees with
ecstasies. I was like a fruit stewed in heat, I have the same liquorous seeping.

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Pincers softly tortured me. Her hairpin fell into the toilet bowl, we lost our
balance. I plunged my hand into the water, fixed the pin back in her hair. (36)74
This metaphorical language woven into the erotic encounters between Thérèse and Isabelle is
characteristic of Leduc’s style throughout the text. While Leduc does often describe the actions
between the two in explicit terms, she is equally prone to veiling it (thinly) in figurative
language. Of Leduc’s depictions of “love-making,” Jennifer Waelti-Walters notes that Leduc
frequently turns to natural imagery, “where natural images serve as metaphors to evoke the
pleasures of the body, where power of the image-making and the pleasures of the female body
are interrelated to re-create the immediacy and transient nature of passion” (133).75 But it’s never
solely pleasurable. While “became my loincloth” implies a covering of Thérèse’s naked flesh, or
the very least pressing against her groin, we don’t actually know what “part” of Isabelle is
“embedded” in her. She carries the idea of intoxication through the following two sentences with
the use of “drunk” and “liquorous,” but has tainted it with a sense of decay with the word
“rotting,” making something like getting wet feel simultaneously heady and morbid. Similarly,
she is tortured “softly,” seemingly contradictory words that add a dimension of pain in pleasure.
But then Leduc seems to foreclose pleasure by bringing reality back into the situation with
Isabelle’s hairpin falling into the toilet. The reader is thus reminded that this pleasure is located
in a space for waste, however ironically ventilated by a “heart-shaped hole” in the lavatory door
(35).
If the reader is denied pleasure by Leduc’s reminder of the space, Thérèse and Isabelle
continue undaunted. Until, that is they are reminded of the space they inhabit:
Someone was rattling our door, entering the cubicle next to ours; they were not
after us. Tip-tapping on the cement floor betrayed that the little girl had held on

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’til the very last minute. She was pulling up her apron, her skirt, her petticoat. I
closed my eyes, dispelled the hairless sex of this unknown child. The rags of my
flesh fell upon lace. . . . . The child relieved herself but we were embarrassed by
the endless flow into the toilet bowl. I guessed this memory would stay with us.
(38)76
As it will with me. Whereas before, Leduc stifled the pleasure of the reader by way of Thérèse’s
manual rescue of Isabelle’s hairpin from the depths of the toilet bowl, here, Leduc has doubly
foreclosed Thérèse and Isabelle’s pleasure, first through the taboo of the child and sexuality
(dispelling “her hairless sex”), and through their embarrassment over hearing this little girl’s
very lengthy urination, an embarrassment so strong it would create a lasting memory. As with
the cell, Thérèse and Isabelle must find a space wherein they have enough privacy to hide their
illicit affair. But in this example, they (and we) are reminded that there is no proper space for
what they’re doing. And by repurposing those spaces to suit their own desires, they run the risk
of punishment and separation, their greatest fear.
The third, and perhaps oddest, place Thérèse and Isabelle have sex is on a small staircase.
Like doorways and other thresholds, stairs and stairways are liminal spaces, spaces of transition
meant only for moving through rather than inhabiting. Even more than the cell and the outhouse,
which are more implicit places of temporary inhabitation, the introduction of sex on stairs
highlights the provisional nature of their love. After faking a fainting spell, Thérèse meets
Isabelle in the music room:
‘Quarter to twelve!’ said Isabelle. ‘Come on, come on…’
We fell together on the steps to the stage.
‘Quarter to twelve, Thérèse!’ . . .

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I was afraid of demeaning her by lifting up her skirt.
‘Almost ten to twelve, Isabelle!’
‘If you don’t speak more softly, we’ll be caught,’ said Isabelle. . . .
I ventured beneath the crumpled skirt: her knickers frightened me. She was quite
indecent beneath her dress. My hand advanced between skin and jersey.
‘Let me do it. Don’t look if it shocks you,’ said Isabelle.
I looked.
She lifted herself up, she released my hand.
‘Such impossible knickers,’ she said.
The hand of one entranced tugged them off, stuffed the garment into the pocket of
her smock. Isabelle revealed herself there on the steps. . . . I was sadistic. Waiting
and making her wait is a delicious perdition. . . . I fell to my knees . . . . I ventured
in like a smuggler, my face first. Isabelle gripped me between her scissoring legs.
. . . My tongue was searching in the salty darkness, in the sticky darkness, over
fragile flesh. The more I laboured, the more mysterious became my efforts. I
hesitated around the pearl. . . . I was losing it, regaining it. . . . I spoke to her
between the lips of her sex. . . . Tears of my sweat are soaking her public hair.
‘Teach me… Teach me…,’ I said. . . .
Lying on the steps of the stage, Isabelle sought within herself . . . . (79-81)77
This encounter on a staircase is rather different from the one at the beginning of the novel where
Thérèse muses at length about her hatred for Isabelle. Of all the places that Thérèse and Isabelle
have sex, this is the most public. Each of their encounters is tinged with a level of paranoia that
“someone is coming” or that they will be “caught” but this instance is their closest call; their

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attention to time, here in particular, is nearly manic, though Thérèse revels in it, waiting, making
Isabelle wait, exposed on the stage. But what an odd place to end up? Not on the stage, not on
the floor, but on steps leading to the stage. The encounter teases with the feeling of exhibitionism
as they are in a larger space for performance and literally on the cusp of being on stage. But
Thérèse and Isabelle are not ostensibly seeking an audience (evinced by their fear of getting
caught); they simply must utilize any space that will do, making do with what’s available.
It would be difficult to argue that Thérèse and Isabelle queer the spaces in which they
fuck; at no time does it seem like they are making a space their own, that is, at no time do they
have any sense of security or ownership. Only the cell comes close to being their refuge—and
therefore the site in which most of the sex in the novel occurs—but even then, there are moments
that hint at the possibility of their fellow dormers knowing what they are up to: “[Isabelle]
stretched out against the partition, in her bed, at ease. I took off my gown, I felt too new standing
on the carpet of an ancient world. I had to rush to her straight away for the ground would not
support me. I lay down on the edge of the mates; ready to creep away like a thief. ‘You are cold.
Come closer,’ said Isabelle. A sleeping girl coughed, tried to divide us” (18).78 How do we take
Thérèse’s interpretation of the cough? She is admittedly nervous, breaking the rules, taking off
her clothes and getting into bed, so perhaps it’s meant to reinforce that sense of nerves. After all,
she’s attaching intentionality (trying to divide them) to a sleeping girl. But the cough echoes a
moment only a few pages prior, before Isabelle first enters Thérèse’s box, where Isabelle’s cough
signals that, unlike normal, Isabelle is awake at 2 a.m. The fear lies in the ambiguity, the
uncertainty. A less ambiguous moment that suggests fellow élèves know about their love affair
occurs on their way to the refectory: “Renée was gazing at the photograph, guessing, probably, at
the couple next to her, for she dared not look up. I was caught between the false innocence of the

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one and the other’s audacity. Isabelle’s hand, through the folds in her apron, was stroking me. It
was crazy. I was rotting away, my flesh was bursting ripe. . . . I collapsed, clutching the
landscape in my hand” (73).79 Thérèse hedges a bit with “probably,” suggesting that she is
uncertain whether or not Renée is aware of Isabelle’s actions at this moment; it’s not certain, but
probable. Thérèse assigns intention to Renée—not daring to look up from the photograph—and
then personifies her as “false innocence” in the following line. As the narration focalized through
Thérèse, a human character who can’t know, for certain, what’s in the mind of her classmate, this
moment is more about characterizing Thérèse as nervous, thus reinforcing the general feeling of
paranoia and heightened pleasure that interrupt each of their sexual encounters.
Using the excuse of going into to town to see the doctor, Thérèse and Isabelle go on their
first and only excursion outside the school’s walls. And on this little romantic jaunt, we find the
most striking example of setting indicating the impossibility of sustaining their relationship: a
secret boarding house operating under the guise of a women’s dress shop. Entering alongside a
gentleman (who is apparently familiar with the operation of entry and owner) and surviving
some pointed ribbing by the patroness, Mme. Algazine, Isabelle secures them a room. This room
is arguably the only space in the novel intended for sexual activity and yet Thérèse is assailed by
her own paranoia and is unable to perform:
. . . I heard the groans of the bedsprings in the room next door. I came back into
our room. . . .
‘The sound our bed makes at night…’
‘It isn’t the sound of our bed at night,’ said Isabelle. I listened. The regular
rhythm was not like our fitful rhythm in Isabelle’s box. . . . I could not tear myself
away from that regular cadence. . . . I was trapped by the rhythm, condemned to

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follow it, to hope for it, fear it, to edge closer to it. . . . I was listening hard. (9697)80
Elided in my use of ellipsis are the exchanges between Thérèse and Isabelle: Isabelle
encouraging Thérèse, initiating sexual activity. But this sound is inescapable and Thérèse always
stops. The comparison of their neighbor’s “regular rhythm” with their “fitful” one underscores
both the fervor as represented in their nocturnal interactions and, implicitly, their relative lack of
experience—“regularity” suggests “the couple’s” practiced acumen. Isabelle’s insistence, just
before, that this isn’t the sound “their bed” signals a similar feeling, but also suggests that the
couple is heterosexual. Writing about the corresponding version of this scene found in the 1966
edition, Alex Hughes has a similar take on this moment, connecting the rhythm to
heterosexuality based on the context both in which this space is situated and therefore recreates:
Like the collège, Mme Algazine’s establishment is a ‘maison de rendezvous’;
however, its effect upon the lovers’ homoerotic unity, unlike that of the collège, is
wholly injurious. Because it’s a public space, a site of ‘normal’, heterosexual, and
commercial love, it represents the very antithesis of the ‘private space of desire’
to which the school affords Thérèse and Isabelle access. That is will impose
division and disharmony upon the lovers is suggested even before they enter it.
(97-98)
While Hughes’ chapter emphasizes, perhaps too generously, the collège’s ability to engender
homosexuality, his use of “wholly” implicitly acknowledges that the school is bound by the same
basic investment in heteronormativity—otherwise they wouldn't fear (and at times derive
pleasure from the thought of) getting caught at school. It’s not so much that Mme. Algazine’s is
marked as “public,” because it’s in town; after all, it’s hidden away in an alley, misrepresenting

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its purpose to the public with its moniker “Algazine, Dresses and Coats,” its door “camouflaged
by imitation stained glass” (90-91). One might even argue that Mme. Algazine’s is therefore
more private than the collège. Rather, it is the implicit disclosure (to adults, no less) that they are
transgressing heteronormativity by running into a customer and assertively speaking to the
patroness. This exposure before they even get to the room agitates Thérèse, setting the tone for
their failed day out.
The fact that Thérèse feels doomed to both follow and hope for this “rhythm”
foreshadows their final separation at the end of the novel:
Isabelle stood up, she took me in her arms:
‘Will you come every evening?’
‘Every evening.’
‘We’ll never leave each other?’
‘We’ll never leave each other.’
My mother took me back home.
I never saw Isabelle again. (124)81
The abruptness of this ending—part of a hand-written addition to the otherwise completely typed
source document— reflects two things. In terms of the diegesis, it’s the confirmation of
Thérèse’s feeling that she has no future at the school, that her mother will come and remove her
“at any moment.” For the unjaded, romantic reader, the affect of the end is made that much more
poignant by the perhaps-naïve superlative that Thérèse uses to assure Isabelle, immediately
followed by the knowledge that these two never spent another night together. On the level of
style, Leduc effected this abruptness by editing out her initial transition between the dialogue and
the mother’s removal; it creates a sense of immediacy of Thérèse’s removal. The severity of this

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abruptness is particular to the texte intégral since both the 1955 édition de luxe and 1966
versions of the novel have the transition “The following month” (Le mois suivant) before “My
mother took me back,” which one can see reflects the different source material for each
published version (compare fig. 1 vs. fig. 2 and fig. 8).

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Figure 8. Page 205 of the “faux manuscript,” the ending of Violette Leduc’s Thérèse et Isabelle
commissioned by Jacques Guérin in 1955, printed as an édition de luxe via photolithography.
Leduc’s signature appears on the page. Image courtesy of Fonds Violette Leduc/Institut
mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France.
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This one difference, the removal of a single, dependent clause, changed the entire timeline of
Thérèse and Isabelle’s relationship; rather than having a month-long love affair, their
relationship is limited to a three-day period. While any kind of intentionality remains
inaccessible, we can still discuss the results of this ending. It further underscores the importance
of time both to the novel’s diegesis and Leduc’s style/writerly practice.
What I want to stress is that the cell, lavatory, and steps, even the room at the brothel, are
only ever intended for temporary inhabitation. Thérèse and Isabelle are never given a space of
their own. Part of that has to do with their age; they are on the cusp of adulthood, so really
nothing is theirs, not yet. And the starkness of their school suggests that they are not wealthy,
which could have counteracted, at least hypothetically, the double limitation of being young and
female. One could dismiss this as a common reality among representations of any young lovers,
but Leduc’s descriptions of sex—indeed her insistence that this is a relationship between young
women—makes aligning Thérèse and Isabelle’s story with examples of young, heterosexual
couples difficult; one can’t ignore how the precarity of their relationship is rooted in its illicit
nature. While Leduc is bold in her explicit representation of sex between two young women in
novelistic form even by today’s standards, the subtler message—that this form of desire is
unsupportable, unsustainable, that there is no place for their love—makes the uncensored
publication of her novel that much more bittersweet. And any pleasure, passion, and intensity
between the Thérèse and Isabelle are always tempered by the spaces’ temporary temporality,
because we are never given any hope that they will live happily ever after. In terms of their
representations of lesbianism as something that, in the end, will end, the legacy of all versions of
Thérèse et Isabelle would seem to align with many other lesbian novels of the first half of the
twentieth century: for example, Leda is committed to a mental institution in Spring Fire and

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Mitch realizes she never loved Leda. Stephen Gordon ends up alone in The Well of Loneliness.
Joan Ogden dies in The Unlit Lamp. Clare dies in Passing. Robin and Nora don’t end up together
in Nightwood. Beth chooses Charlie (a man) in Odd Girl Out. Leo packs up her things, intending
to leave Helen in The Friendly Young Ladies. And my personal favorite is the double whammy
of Mrs. Danvers’ (Danny) disappearance at the end of Rebecca and how “the eponymous heroine
always already [been] dead” (de Laurentis 88).82
But if, as I argue, we can’t limit our praise of this novel to its explicit representation of
lesbian sex, it feels somehow hypocritical to condemn Leduc for writing an unhappy ending. If
the how is what matters, then the brilliance of novel is connected to how time is at play. The
cold, startlingly abrupt ending feels shocking; one feels the body tense as the novel comes to its
conclusion. The ending evokes a sense of cruel spontaneity, especially after Thérèse and Isabelle
have just promised to be together forever. But the ending’s spontaneity mirrors the beginning of
their relationship; seemingly out of nowhere, Thérèse and Isabelle go from relative strangers to
lovers. If the spaces of the novel are inflected with a sense of temporary inhabitation, lesbian
relationships are marked by a sense of spontaneity. Removed from the larger context of her life
and oeuvre, the pessimist will, as I have, focus on the brevity of their relationship, indicting
Leduc for its lack of place and permanence. The optimist should, however, take heart in their
relationship’s commencement; it suggests that a lesbian affair could happen at any moment—it’s
as easy as pulling aside a curtain. 	

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CHAPTER 3: CHIMERAS, ANGELS, REVENANTS: THE GROTESQUE COALESCENCE
OF THE LESBIAN NOVEL

How they came into the world
the women-loving-women
came in three by three
and four by four
the women-loving-women
came in ten by ten
and ten by ten again
until there were more
than you could count
-Judy Grahn, “A History of Lesbianism”
Introduction: Hatching
Tucked away in plain sight, in a marginal column entitled simply “Zodiac,” found at the
end of the “March” chapter of Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Alamanack, we find a brief and amusing
lesbian origin story (see fig. 9. and fig. 10).

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Figure 9. Beginning of “Zodiac” column and accompanying image of twelve angels, banner, and
egg from Djuna Barnes; Ladies Almanack . . . ; Paris, 1928, p. 24-25. Courtesy of Michigan State
University Library’s Special Collections. Banner reads, “This is the Part abou [sic] Heaven that
has never been told,” the same as the opening line of the column.

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Figure 10. End of “Zodiac” column from Djuna Barnes; Ladies Almanack . . . ; Paris, 1928, p.
26. Courtesy of Michigan State University Library’s Special Collections.

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In its entirety, it reads:
THIS is the part about Heaven that has never been told. After the Fall of Satan
(and as he fell, Lucifer uttered a loud Cry, heard from one End of Forever-and-noend to the other), all the Angels, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo,
Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, Pisces, all, all gathered
together, so close that they were not recognizable, one from the other. And not
nine Months later, there was heard under the Dome of Heaven a great Crowing,
and from the Midst, an Egg, as incredible as a thing forgotten, fell to Earth, and
striking, split and hatched, and from out of it stepped one saying “Pardon me, I
must be going!” And this was the first Woman born with a Difference. After this
the Angels parted, and on the Face of each was the Mother look. Why was that?
(Barnes 24-26)
Rather than being created from the rib of a man, or springing forth from the head of Zeus, the
lesbian owes her origin to a kind of celestial orgy immediately following the fall of God’s most
beloved angel, Lucifer, from heaven. The inclusion of this parenthetical about Lucifer’s “loud
Cry”—within a section already set aside from the body of the chapter itself, almost intensifying
its importance through its segregation—colors the orgy, not only with the sense of Lucifer’s
despair, but, implicitly, with a sense of change (an end of an era, the beginning of something
new) as well a sense of cause and effect (he falls, the orgy begins). “[F]rom one End of Foreverand-no-end to the other” demonstrates the magnitude of the event, since it suggests the cry
echoed across infinite time. There are two curious things to note about this description of time.
First, the use of “from” and “to” when describing the time of “Forever-and-no-end” depicts time
in terms of immeasurable space rather than as a measure of linear, causal events. Second, the use

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of the verb “heard” means that agency is not given to the cry, itself; its infinite movement is
measured by the unnamed listeners who “heard” it. The distinction is subtle, especially because
those who heard this cry—such that we now “know” it was heard throughout all time—are
elided from the text. Nonetheless, one can assume that the members of the orgy (all the angels
and select constellations) were at least part of Lucifer’s audience. This moment signals the
magnitude of the event, itself—so great that it breaks the boundaries of linear space-time
(rhetorically and therefore diagetically) in which “regular” humanity plods—and therefore the
gravity of the story’s elision from history; it was heard throughout all space and time and no one
knew of it, until now.
The use of “uttered” is also striking in that it likens the cry unto communicative language
rather than simply a wail of pain. One could then read the orgy not as simply caused by Lucifer’s
cry or as coincidental event, but perhaps as something called to order by Lucifer, himself,
suggesting the subsequent birth will work against God’s heteronormative designs. The ninemonth gestation aligns this new life form with humanity, though the emergence from an egg at
the moment of “Crowing” evokes a more avian origin, as does the image of the egg
accompanying the text, itself. This, of course, follows the logic of angels as parents, themselves
chimeric beings that have both human and avian physical attributes. And hatching from an egg a
fully formed (polite!) adult already initiated into the ways of language, the “first Woman born
with a Difference” would appear to be a fairly capable creature, though the moniker is made a bit
ironic if one considers the relative uniformity of her angelic mothers as represented in Zodiac’s
accompanying illustration.
The description of the egg as something “incredible as a thing forgotten” is also curious.
Do we take the literal meaning of “incredible” as something that lacks credibility, something

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impossible (or, at the very least difficult) to believe? Or do we accept the more colloquial
meaning of something amazing, in the positive sense? The egg’s incredibility is linked via a
simile to “a thing forgotten” and the poetic feel of this comparison is heightened through the
inversion of noun (thing) and adjective (forgotten). This would seem to suggest the literal
meaning of “incredible,” that this origin story, like other forgotten or other of Heaven’s untold
stories, is difficult to believe because it’s unfamiliar to the reader. After all, we’re talking about a
type of human not created by God (or, as with Pandora, formed of clay and breath by Hephaestus
and Athena respectively at Zeus’ orders to punish mankind), but through the fusion of lowerorder celestial beings. It’s also worth noting that each of “all the Angels” have the “Mother
look,” implying that, while sexual difference may exist among the angels and other celestial
parents, this was a woman-identified experience; this Woman born with a Difference has a
multitude of mommies. The brief question that the end of “Zodiac” indirectly poses to the reader
offers no answer. This could suggest that the narrator of this story doesn’t know the answer, but
more likely continues the satirical tone of “Zodiac,” as if the answer is obvious and the question
is, therefore, rhetorical. Still, it directs the reader, however gently, to contemplate the
implications of that mother look: regardless of whatever sex(es) we may imagine angels or
creatures of the Zodiac to have or be, this process of begetting the lesbian made them all into
mothers. The tongue-in-cheek tone of this section, and indeed the entire novella, raises a
question: how seriously should a reader take this origin story?83
Reactions have been ambivalent.84 Certainly, no one would argue for a literal
interpretation of this scene; I feel rather secure asserting that Barnes did not believe this to be the
actual origin of lesbians, reporting her conversation with Lucifer. Its brevity and status as a
satirical roman à clef make it easy just to read it, have a chuckle imagining we know something

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about Barnes’ lesbian cohort, and put it back on the shelf.85 Various paratexts included in recent,
recuperative publications of Ladies Almanack offer the “key” to the cast of characters—Karla
Jay’s introduction to the Kindle version, Steven Moore’s afterword to the Dalkey Archive press
version, for example—reinforce this approach to the book, teaching us what Ladies Almanack is
“really about.” However, if we bracket that, we find that this moment in Ladies Almanack, in
particular, is emblematic of tropes in a constellation of novels at the end of the 1920s, in which
the origin of the lesbian as a distinct identity is characterized as different form of human life,
measured by the degree of her sexual difference. In the case of Ladies Almanack, the extremity
of the satire—i.e. the mixture of Judeo-Christian mythology, the number of parents involved, and
“the Woman’s” matter-of-fact demeanor at birth (upon hatching?)—indicates the degree of
difference this book imagines the lesbian to have, a difference that is inherent, fundamental,
inborn.
“Zodiac” is an easy entry toward an understanding of the anxieties present in the lesbian
novel genre at its experimental beginnings. This chapter examines three iterations of the lesbian
novel as the genre coalesces at the end of the 1920s: Natalie Clifford Barney’s seemingly
incomprehensible The One Who is Legion (1930); Lucie Delares-Mardrus nearly forgotten
L’ange et les pervers (1930); and Radclyffe Hall’s inescapable The Well of Loneliness (1928).
Each of these imagines the idea of congenital inversion as the point of departure for imagining
the lesbian, though in very different ways. While other lesbian novels could easily be included in
this chapter—Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) being the most obvious—this configuration also
illustrates the lesbian-as-analogy for genre, taking often very different individual texts and, via
their commonalities, establishing them as a constituency. If we go by author, each text represents
different a different country of origin—British, French, and American, thus following Fishlov’s

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understanding of genre as “a combination of prototypical, representative members, and a flexible
set of constitutive rules that apply to some levels of literary texts, to some individual writers,
usually to more than one . . . more than one language and culture” (8). Since my methodology
brackets the author in my analysis and definition of the lesbian novel—important here especially
since, with the exception of Hall, the authors sexualities are difficult to name as “lesbian” and
would therefore fall outside of Sherrie Inness’s definition—the distinction is nonetheless
maintained on the level of language, with the use of English and French. The linguistic interplay
is heightened as each novel uses, to varying degrees, a mixture of French and English, further
emphasizing how more than one language is at play in the formation of this genre. The
international dimension is also maintained on the diegetic level, with Stephen Gordon being of
British and Irish nobility, Marion de Valdeclare being of British and French aristocracy, and
A.D. being a combination of the human and spiritual. The juxtaposition of Hall’s Well of
Loneliness, the genre’s standard-bearer, against the nearly forgotten L’ange et les pervers and
The One Who is Legion also illustrates my recuperative praxis. But most importantly, this group
of texts underscores how the imaginative dimension of the novel form is vital to our analysis of
lesbian novels, and what is gained when we focus on more than the parts that represent actual
people. Each takes advantage of the Novel’s hybridity and malleability, reveling in its
imaginative rather than mimetic dimension during the height of Modernism’s ethos of formal
experimentation. Each imagines the lesbian in varying degrees of the grotesque, mixing familiar
parts to create a new, often unsettling whole. In playing with the Novel’s potential to imagine
reality into being, these lesbian novels work to create our understanding of what it meant to be
lesbian in the twentieth century.

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The Animal
I characterize The Well of Loneliness as “inescapable” because, at every turn, it seems to
enter the conversation, at least in conversations about lesbians. I challenge the reader to find any
text in my bibliography focused on lesbians that doesn’t, at the very least, mention it in passing,
if not engaging with it at length. As Laura Doan and Jay Prosser outline at length in their
introduction to Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on the Well of Loneliness, the critical
engagement with The Well spans the entirety of the twentieth century and beyond. Part of its
gravity is attributed to the scandal of its publication history: “[T]he intense and sensational
publicity surrounding the trial and obscenity ban guaranteed The Well of Loneliness—the only of
Hall’s eight published works to remain in print—a place in literary history” (Doan and Prosser 12). Part of its ubiquity in Lesbian Studies, then, is related simply to it being the most widely
available lesbian novel in the first half of the twentieth century. And while the picture of lesbian
loneliness would, sadly, permeate so much of subsequent representation of lesbians in novels, it
nonetheless becomes the archetype of genre, the thing against which all define themselves. But
rather than take a Sapphic approach to genre, which would look for the ways in which novels
emulate The Well, the lesbian approach seeks to find commonalities among many. As such, my
approach to The Well is interested in the ways in which its representation overlaps and diverges
with those of its contemporaries, suggesting that its value is not limited to fame, but in how it’s a
member of the party, as it were.
The Well of Loneliness opens with an origin story of a woman born different than the
others its world: Stephen Gordon. After a decade of childless happiness, Anna Gordon becomes
pregnant with what she knows will be the son her husband, Sir Philip so desires:

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But: ‘Man proposes—God disposes,’ and so it happened that on Christmas Eve,
Anna Gordon was delivered of a daughter; a narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered
little tadpole of a baby, that yelled and yelled for three hours without ceasing as
though outraged to find itself ejected into life. Anna Gordon held her child to her
breast, but she grieved while it drank, because of her man who had longed so
much for a son. And seeing her grief, Sir Philip hid his chagrin, and he fondled
the baby and examined its fingers. . . . . He insisted on calling the infant Stephen,
nay more, he would have it baptized by that name. ‘We’ve called her Stephen so
long,’ he told Anna, ‘that I really can’t see why we shouldn’t go on—’ (13)
In the birth of Stephen Gordon, Hall outlines the thesis of the lesbian as congenital invert—a
female-bodied person with the essence of a male. That inversion is at the heart of this novel is
made obvious both diegetically and extradiegetically, with the inclusion of the work of
sexologists Richard von Ebing and Havlock Ellis, respectively.86 The “congeniality” of
Stephen’s inversion is expressed by way of her birth, against the will of her parents (who
represent the heterosexual ideal), but by the will of divine disposition. Her inversion is marked
physically with narrow hips and broad shoulders—two attributes reiterated with a notable
frequency throughout the novel—her body expressing, if only partially, the disposition of her
“male” soul.87 In the passage above, the metaphor of “tadpole” functions in two ways: it signals
as yet incomplete formation (a proto-frog), but more importantly, it emphasizes Stephen as
grotesque in the literal sense of being a combination of human and animal in representation. The
sight of their child, bringing mother grief and father “chagrin,” highlights the hetero-patriarchal
values into which Stephen is born, that for more sons, women’s concern with pleasing their
husbands (Anna’s grief is rooted in the disappointment of her husband), and male embarrassed

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irritation upon failure to achieve his will. The solution to their negative emotions is to go on as if
they had been given the son they’d both assumed for the last nine months would arrive, sealing
their failed desire forever to their child through the institution of the Anglican Church as if to
say, “We will have our son oh Lord!” However, as the reader will find, not even the addition of
the three feminine names of Mary Olivia Gertrude—an insistence of the local vicar to balance
such an obviously masculine name as Stephen—could counteract what would become the child’s
unavoidable, unignorably “grotesque” masculinity.
However, it’s important to recall that “grotesque” does not convey a wholly negative
connotation. Take, for instance, a moment when the narrator describes Stephen as grotesque.
Enraged by the constant bullying of Roger Antrim, a young Stephen balls up her fists and
prepares to fight him:
She stood there an enraged and ridiculous figure in her Liberty smock, with her
hard, boyish forearms. Her long hair had partly escaped from its ribbon, and the
bow sagged down limply, crooked and foolish. All that was heavy in her face
sprang into view, the strong line of the jaw, the square, massive brow, the
eyebrows, too thick and too wide for beauty. And yet there was a kind of large
splendour about her – absurd though she was, she was splendid at that moment –
grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of
transition. (52)
The narrator’s perception (though it feels focalized through Roger) is of an incongruous tableau,
a child exuding light (splendid) yet appearing illogical, or silly. Stephen’s body (hard, boyish
forearms) and outfit (Liberty smock) are at odds. All the parts of her face that signal her
masculinity are what stand out. There is certainly a mixture of connotations with the evaluative

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diction used in this above quotation, with “splendor” and “absurd” implying a kind of beauty
outside of reason, logic, or propriety, then the reiteration of Stephen’s magnificence with
“splendid,” and then my primary adjective of interest, “grotesque,” quickly combined with yet
another repetition of “splendid,” making inseparable the idea of heavenly beauty and the
fantastical combination of human/animal, male/female. The use of “grotesque” suggests that,
while components of Stephen’s appearance are obviously recognizable, their configuration is
unsettling and estranging. Finally, a simile compares Stephen to some “thing” unspecifiable
beyond its obvious primitive nature (like the tadpole). “Primitive” may imply that Stephen’s
existence is some form of lesser-evolved human, but, implicitly, that women like her have
always existed, that this new formation is not so new. But “conceived in a turbulent age of
transition”—echoing the source of Stephen’s deformity in her (parents’) conception—suggests
that inversion is connected to the changing times of the diegesis, that it’s a condition of
modernity.88 Reading the passage this way, Stephen is a new type of being, and the narrator is
unsure if this being is wholly human. This resonates with the birth of the first “Woman born with
a Difference” we see in Ladies Almanack, whose origins are decidedly different than the rest of
humanity. In both of these examples, we see the lesbian as a figure of modernity being presented
as something new, related to humanity and yet different. This link between Stephen’s grotesque
body and female same-sex desire (congenital inversion) is further underscored when Angela
Crossby, Stephen’s first, female love interest, regards Stephen:
And now she stood up, very tall, very strong, yet a little grotesque in her pitiful
passion, so that looking at her Angela trembled – there was something rather
terrible about her. All that was heavy in her face sprang into view, the strong line
of the jaw, the square, massive brow, the eyebrows too thick and too wide for

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beauty; she was like some curious, primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of
transition. (150)
Using “grotesque” to question Stephen’s humanity also works to emphasize her
connection to the animals of the novel if we think of grotesque in fine arts terms, as a
representation that mixes human and animal.89 “Stephen must submit to Mrs. Bingham, fidgeting
under the nurse’s rough fingers like a dog in the hands of a trimmer. There she would stand
pretending to shiver, a strong little figure, narrow-hipped and wide-shouldered; her flanks as
wiry and thin as a greyhound’s . . . (37). Here, Stephen is compared to a dog through two similes
and the specific “deformity” of her birth; her body is not only unwomanly, it is inhuman. The
comparison to the greyhound, a very thin, athletic dog, emphasizes the degree to which her body
differs from the female, wide-hipped ideal, and Stephen’s inhumanity is reinforced by the arrival
of her first horse. As she is isolated in an English country estate and unable to befriend the
children of the county since she is seemingly unable to “act like a girl” (exemplified in the foil of
Violet Antrim), Stephen’s primary companionship becomes her first Pony:
‘Come up, horse!’ she commanded, slapping the pony, ‘Come up, horse, and let
me get close to your ear, ’cause I’m going to whisper something dreadfully
important.’ Laying her cheek against his firm neck she said softly: ‘You’re not
you any more, you’re Collins!’ So Collins was comfortably transmigrated. It was
Stephen’s last effort to remember. (39-40)
Though a reader’s initial impulse in this moment is perhaps to feel sympathy for a child who
must seek out fellowship in the family stables, this moment underscores the power of naming.
Through the performative act of naming, Stephen changes the pony’s very being; he is no longer
himself. Instead, Stephen transfers the soul (transmigrates) of her first belovèd, Collins, the

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recently dismissed domestic, into the body of her horse, implicitly creating a fellow invert, a
male horse with a female (human) soul. In doing so, Stephen creates another like herself, actively
identifying not with the humans around her but with the animals.
The representation of Stephen as grotesque is also mirrored formally in the novel’s
narrative. While the majority of the access to a character’s interiority is focused on Stephen
herself, the reader gets an uncommon amount of access to the minds of animals as well, such that
they become not part of the setting, but characters in their own right. Unsurprisingly, the animal
who gets the most attention is Stephen’s first proper horse (as opposed to the pony, Collins),
Raftery, named thusly for his Irish lineage;
And Raftery, who was not really thinking of the corn-bin, but rolling his eye in an
effort to answer, would want to say something too big for language, which at best
must consist of small sounds and small movements; would want to say something
about a strong feeling he has that Stephen was missing the truth. But how could
he hope to make her understand the age-old wisdom of all the dumb creatures?
The wisdom of plains and primeval forests, the wisdom come down from the
youth of the world. (71-72)
In this quote, we are given Raftery’s motivation, a desire to communicate, a desire he’s unable to
realize, not only because horses can’t speak, but because the concept is “too big” for linguistic
communication. One should not take this to mean that Raftery has no access to linguistic
thought, as the narrator often provides his thoughts to the reader in dialogic language. Instead,
Raftery must communicate with Stephen in a kind of sign language, in hopes of expressing his
depth of feeling. Raftery’s desire to communicate the “age-old wisdom of all dumb creatures” is
a feature that repeats in the novel, a longing often expressed to the reader at moments when

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Raftery wants to use that knowledge to alleviate Stephen’s suffering or, at times, to commiserate:
“So now [Raftery] too felt infinitely sad, and he sighed until his strong girths started creaking,
after which he stood still and shook himself largely, in an effort to shake off depression. Stephen
bent forward and patted his neck. ‘I’m sorry, sorry, Raftery,’ she said gravely. (127-28) This is
one of the moments in which Stephen is able to comprehend her horse, but the ease of
communication is at times inconsistent. Stephen’s irregular ability to understand Raftery (as well
as the other animals in the text whose mental and emotional processes are explicated) indicates
that, while she is more closely aligned with animal than with humanity because of the ease of
affinity she find with animals, she is nonetheless not “one of them,” either. And so Hall
illustrates not necessarily Stephen’s animality, but her inhumanity. Thus, her loneliness is
singular.
The extensive access we have to the thoughts and language of animals in The Well of
Loneliness signals a level of narrative experimentation that the rest of the novel’s realism may
overshadow; it suggest this novel is, itself, grotesque. Catharine R. Stimpson calls the type of
realism in The Well of Loneliness “lesbian realism,” a style that demonstrates how “bonds
between women and demonstrate that such relationships are potentially of psychic and moral
value” (105). Certainly we see this in The Well of Loneliness, as the few times Stephen is happy
as an adult are when she is in a relationship with another woman. It nonetheless demonstrates
how Hall uses the flexibility of the novel’s form to push the boundaries of what’s representable.
Stephen’s retreat to animals, and at times, their rejection of her, only serves to heighten readers’
sympathy for Stephen and, by extension, their sympathy for actual lesbians. While this appeal to
sympathy, so heavy-handed in the novel, is well documented—the novel ends with Stephen, in
despair, surrounded and then inhabited by a legion of the spirits of the inverts that preceded her,

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appealing to God: “Give us also the right to our existence” (437). This ending, an appeal meant
to reach out of the diegesis to elicit sympathy from readers, also marks the novel’s most obvious
departure from realism, suggesting that the emotional impact of the lesbian’s isolation, however
real, exceeds the novel’s dominant approach. Here too, we see how Hall subtly experiments with
form to represent the lesbian-as-invert experience of the time.
Beginning with Stephen’s name—the rather heavy-handed gender mismatch used to mark
her inversion—we see how the grotesque as individually recognizable components mixed into a
new form for a dissonant effect are at play in The Well of Loneliness. While “grotesque” is used
to characterize Stephen in several explicit ways in the novel—in the narrator’s reportage of
Rodger and Angela’s perception of Stephen, the palpable, emotional distance separating Stephen
from her mother, Anna, Anna’s perceptions of Stephen’s similarities to her father, and Stephen’s
description of herself—we see it operating on the formal level via the access we and Stephen
have to the thoughts of animals in the novel.
In something as small as a name, one can trace the implications of a detail’s import to the
overall structure of the novel. As the use of a masculine name to mark a given character as
lesbian, often commensurate with a more masculine gender presentation, is a feature one finds in
lesbian novels spanning the twentieth century—for example, Mario in L’ange et les pervers
(1930), Leo in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies (1944), Mickey in Tereska Torres’
Women’s Baracks (1950), Mitch in Vin Packer’s Spring Fire (1952), Terrence in Ann Allen
Shockley’s Loving Her (1974), Al in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, and Chris in Judith
Frank’s Crybaby Butch (2003)—we see how congenital inversion becomes a thread connecting
lesbian novels across the twentieth century, though, of course, not all of them. It also suggests
that the grotesque is a way to think through the beginnings of the lesbian novel as genre. While

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the formal experimentation in Ladies Almanack is more obvious—pulling from a variety of
forms such as handbooks, renaissance diction, and the roman à clef—Hall, too, capitalizes on the
novel’s lack of rigid definitions to create a representation of lesbianism. The use of a male name
may seem like a small trope around which to begin to look at the generic conventions of the
lesbian novel, but as I hope I have illustrated thus far, the devil is in the details.

The Angel
Lucie Delarus-Mardrus’ largely overlooked L’ange et les pervers (The Angel and the
Perverts) offers a very different iteration of the lesbian novel’s grotesque beginnings. While
some may see it as an outlier in the genre, its narrative’s investment in inversion is palpable.
L’ange et les pervers tells the story of Marion de Valdeclare, a so-called “hermaphrodite” who,
because they cannot live a singular life within the sexual binary, lives a double life.90 Since it
tells the story of their life from birth, childhood, and eventual acceptance of a way to live the
world, one could consider it a kind of bildungsroman, not unlike The Well of Loneliness.91
Published and set in interwar Paris, the spirit of modernism’s influence is evident in the novel’s
experimentation with narrative mode, form, and content. Through its main character, it offers a
unique perspective on gender and sexuality by illustrating the limitations of a fixed gender
identity, portraying homosexuality as inevitable for the protagonist. However, because the main
character doesn’t fit within the sexual binary of man/woman, categorizing L’ange et les pervers
as a lesbian novel is a bit tricky. Because Marion’s lack of a fixed identity resonates with the
novel’s varying modes and styles of narration as the novel progresses, L’ange et les pervers
illustrates another example of an author using the novel’s flexibility and imaginative dimension
to think though congenital inversion, same-sex desire, and the invert’s place in a binary world.

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Though, in the case of Marion, happiness is only attainable if they choose a singular existence
within that binary.
The progression of chapters illustrates how Delarus-Mardrus utilizes formal
experimentation to characterize Marion’s peculiarity and play with its readers’ expectations of
how and what novels represent. Chapter one opens using the third person omniscient mode,
narrating the tale of an isolated and queer little boy born to aristocratic parents who don’t show
him any love. Similar to the life of Stephen Gordon whose sexual difference is attributed to the
failed incarnation of her parent’s will, Marion de Valdeclare locates his peculiarity in the
expectations of his mother: “He often dreamed that his mother, or rather that blind beast which
works within us independently of our minds, had been expecting twins while she was carrying
him, for, ever since the age when human beings enter into agony of the soul, he had felt
instinctively at his side a mysterious second self” (63).92 Though it’s not a conscious inquiry—
occurring in dreams or a part of brain not responsible for conscious, intellectual thought such that
Marion likens it to the animal rather than the human—the use of this reflective moment
demonstrates how Marion understands himself as somehow different, even when there’s nothing
for him to compare his life to; while Stephen Gordon’s childhood loneliness is rooted others’
rejection of her and the contrast of her gender presentation as compared with those around her,
Marion leads a life isolated completely from the outside world. The use of “often” illustrates the
degree of this awareness; it occurs frequently and on the level of instinct, signaling the animal
rather than human part of his existence. His sense of dual existence, of having a “mysterious
second self,” is oddly measured in terms of sameness, or, perhaps more accurately, in terms of a
complement, in the form of a twin. Even as a young child, Marion understands on a visceral level

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that his difference is rooted in duality, which, combined with the animal part of him, invokes the
idea of the grotesque and inversion.
From the outset, this duality is relentlessly reaffirmed, underscored in several aspects of
his characterization. For example, like Stephen Gordon, Marion is of bi-ethnic heritage: his
father is French aristocracy and his mother is a “fine lady with the reticent eyes who carried the
distinction and stiffness of her race in her vary marrow… She never left the child in the hands of
an underling . . . A rare quality for an Anglo-Saxon woman, especially one of high class (63). As
a result, Marion is also bilingual and “first learned . . . to read, write, and count in English and
French” (64).93 Even his name underscores his difference in duality: “She pronounced it Marion,
an English name which can be used for either sex,” a feature that will serve him later on in the
novel when he lives a double life (66).94 His name also demonstrates the intersection of French
an English at play in this novel, as its ambiguity is operationalized through pronunciation; the
English pronunciation signals a different gender than its French pronunciation for a
Francophone. This mystery of his dual nature will haunt Marion for most of his adolescence,
always aware but never knowing. And, if the reader hasn’t read the back of the book, they too are
haunted, at least initially. Duality becomes an inescapable trope throughout the novel, defining
Marion’s existence as the suffering, perpetual outsider whose only companion is an imagined
phantasm, denied even the friendship of an animal: “He had no dog. No cat. His only friend was
the unborn double who obsessed and defined him all at once, demonic familiar of this troubled,
troubling being . . . He had always been alone in the world. He set off bitterly upon the road of
life, accompanied by his double, his strange, ill-starred double,—the taint of his birth (65,71).” 95
The second chapter disorients the reader by jumping forward in time and beginning midconversation among three women, introducing the primary supporting character of the novel and

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closest thing Marion will have to a friend as an adult, Laurette Wells.96 97 Laurette opens the
chapter with:
“It’s no use bothering her. She cares for nothing and no one.” . . . The contralto
voice of the woman motionless . . . gave Laurette and Janine a start. . . .
“Did you hear that, Janine? I care for nothing and no one. Perfectly put.”. . .
“What a pity! A beautiful young lady like you!”
“Who said I was a young lady?”. . . Then Marion laughed.
“Guess what I am?”
“An archangel!” Janine cried earnestly. “A beautiful archangel that’s come down
to earth to visit us!” (73-75)
This scene is disorienting in that the reader is unaware of who these characters are, where they
are, when the narration is taking place, or what their relation is to anyone in the previous chapter.
In “‘One Man in Two is a Woman’: Linguistic Approaches to Gender in Literary Texts,”Anna
Livia writes, “There is no obvious connection between the il of the first chapter and the elle of
the second. . . . By withholding [sic] any explicit link, Delarue-Mardrus forces readers to make
the connection themselves between Mario(n)’s male and female personae. In this way, they are
also implicated in his/her change of gender” (156). This is an interesting, if unexamined,
assertion, suggesting a level of experimentation with reader engagement on the level of
Francophone cultural and grammatical gender; like the proverbial tree in the forest, it asks us to
wonder if Marion’s gender would change if a reader were not there to read it.
Regardless, while this change in time, location, and gender doubtless creates a level of
suspense for the reader (who is still as yet in the dark about the specifics of Marion’s alterity), in
terms of characterization, this moment (like so many others) continues the strategy of

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highlighting Marion’s physical differences—in this case her contralto voice, which exists in the
lowest range of the female register—and noting features of the sex “opposite” to the one Marion
is presenting in a given scene; things such as “his hairless upper lip” (68) or “her prominent
brow” (74) or “[t]he tall girl with the hoarse voice” (82) are a common occurrence throughout
the novel. These descriptions are often near moments when someone has remarked on Marion’s
beauty, implying, perhaps, the source of her beauty lies in her very difference. But, for the
reader, it also underlines how Marion is always set apart. This is further emphasized by the
frequent comparisons of Marion to angels, as above when Janine “guesses” Marion is an
archangel, the most common iteration of angelic comparison found in the novel. In this we find
resonances with the angelic parentage of the first “Woman born with a Difference” (and, as we’ll
see later, with A.D. in The One Who is Legion). But if angels can be construed as a generally
positive spin on Marion’s difference—things like “Seraphic head” (68), “the gaze of an
archangel” (92), and “despairing archangel who doesn't believe in heaven”—just as often she is
referred to in negative, otherworldly terms: “a monstrous terror” (64) “fairy tale monster” (94)
and the oddly specific “Asmodeus” (101). This constellation of positively- and negativelycharged non-human words highlights how Marion’s body is grotesque, a mixture of elements not
normally seen together, thus putting her ever outside the accepted social order, and how that
uncanny existence both delights and terrifies those who encounter her, though never know her
secret.
The most interesting, if saddest, incarnation of Marion’s duality is her double life. After
leaving Laurette and Janine in Laurette’s salon, the third chapter opens with Marion taking a cab
to her “garçonnerie,” foreshadowing her automotive gender swap:

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Just before she arrived, she took out the little tube of Vaseline, which she used to
remove her make-up. Once this task was accomplished, she closed the bag and
stuffed it in the pocket of her overcoat. After she paid the driver, she had three
stories to climb. The house went no higher. She glanced in the concierge’s lodge
as she passed the mezzanine. At last she fit the key into her lock and she was
home.
He was home. (83-84)98
For now this scene only actually confirms that the female Marion appearing in the second
chapter is the boy introduced in the first; it does not reveal that Marion is an “hermaphrodite”
(though how a modern reader could not have already figured that out would require an
astonishing level of willful ignorance). This moment also suggests how easily Marion passes as
either gender, as if becoming a man for her is as easy as removing her makeup and making sure
the concierge doesn’t see her in women’s clothing. Though why does she live a double life?
When passing as one gender is easy for her, why not simply choose? The short answer is
practical. Though of aristocratic heritage, Marion’s family had no money; she needs to make
money (by writing) to survive, and it’s far easier to get published as male author. Implicitly,
however, it’s because she shares some kind of affinity for the members of Paris’ so-called
demimonde and this double life allows her to travel into what a contemporary reader would call
the gay and the lesbian communities, respectively.
Though we never learn how Marion entered this sphere, he is nonetheless a part and, as
we’ll see , apart from it. The relentless attention of the gay men of the theatre world are,
however, off-putting for Marion who lashes out when they continue to talk about him as if he
weren’t there:

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Then, suddenly, Marion rounded on them, “I come to see you because . . . You
think I’m the strange beast. Well, it’s entirely the other way round. . . . You
interest me because you are eggs with clear yolks, you know, infertile eggs. I have
a penchant for them, that’s all. It amuses me to watch women in Paris who behave
like men and men who behave like women. To me there is no more ridiculous
sight than a false hermaphrodite. (89)99
This is a fascinating moment in terms of how Marion views himself. “Eggs without yolks”—a
term indicating an inability to reproduce—is a term Marion uses to describe himself on more
than one occasion. This terminology then groups him in with the men he’s addressing in this
scene, as well as with the “women in Paris who behave like men.” However, calling them “false
hermaphrodites” immediately separates him, as he is a “true” hermaphrodite. His “lack of yolk”
is, ostensibly, a biological reality, whereas these men are “infertile” as a result of sexual practice.
In this we see a dissonance—in the sense of it being a near alignment—with Stephen Gordon,
who too is described as having a barren womb; the condition is the same, its cause, ostensibly,
different.100 And yet, there is something deeply sad in the anger—even the contempt—of this
moment. Though drawn to these people (either out of simple necessity or a more complex
affinity), Marion verbally distances himself from them by relegating them to the realm of a
ridiculous amusement, rejecting them cruelly, as he imagines he would be if they knew the
reality of his body. And as someone who is unable to align their sex with one gender and must
therefore hide this misalignment to survive, it suggests he finds unimaginable people who would
actively choose to visibly transgress gender norms, and perhaps even envies their freedom to do
so, since, even with their transgressions, their bodies are still in alignment with the accepted
binary: “So it’s precisely because I am two that I must always be a woman alone, or a man alone.

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Why, why didn’t my mother follow the instinct of her womb to its rightful conclusion and make
me the boy and girl I should have been? How we would have loved each other! Telescoped one
into the other, we are too many for a single being, or rather, we are nothing at all . . .” (120)101
Marion’s lack of a fixed identity is mirrored in the narrative style of the novel itself.
While the first three chapters of the novel are written in third person omniscient, chapter four
suddenly shifts to first person. Of the first three chapters, Marion narrates:
So the nameless horror of my childhood was an even darker story than the eternal
poison its memory has left in my soul. But could my parents have behaved any
differently? . . . My birth, which of course no one ever told me about, must have
been a scene of unprecedented drama, the registration of that birth a masterpiece
of deception, my baptism a lake of tears choked back.
Too late did I recognize my mother’s genius. Too late unraveled the clues of
her love, or at least the pity she has for me. It was she who found my dual purpose
name, just as she found the means to help me cross the formidable plains of child
without myself or anyone else discovering what it was that made her lower her
eyes, what it was that put me beyond the pale of normal humanity, destined
inexorably and as though deservedly to shame and disgrace. (94)102
Chelsea D. Ray characterizes the move between first-person and third-person as “destabilizing
the idea of narrative authority and a cohesive, unified self” (98).103 While certainly I agree with
the second part of that statement—and explore the phenomenon later in this section—I would
argue that this shift in narrative mode gives the feeling that initial chapters were (being) written
by Marion as part of the diegesis itself; it gives a sense of Marion as having authority over how
their story is told, and one narrative mode is not enough. Marion is, after all, a writer in both

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male and female personae, Mario/n de Valdeclare and Marion Hervin, respectively. This shift in
narrative perspective also reflects how Marion’s perspective on her parents’ behavior toward her
during their childhood has shifted. Whereas the initial chapter makes the Valdeclare parents
seem cruel, here Marion tempers that emotion explicitly, with the rhetorical question “could my
parents have behaved any differently,” and implicitly with “nameless horror.” The former
suggests that there was no other way for them to behave because his condition was something
completely unknown to them (nameless horror). Like Stephen Gordon or even the first Woman
Born with a Difference, the lack of knowledge about Marion’s type of existence, suggests it is
new and links it to modernity. This opening paragraph also illustrates how the problem is rooted
in how sex is connected to the regulatory systems of religion and state administration, systems
that Marion’s parents had to subvert. And Marion’s realization (too late!) that Madame de
Valdeclare didn’t isolate Marion to be cruel so much as to protect is bittersweet.
Interestingly, if the young Marion of chapter one attributes the cause his bodily deviation
from the norm to the imagination of Madame de Valdeclare, adult Marion of chapter four asserts
that the Valdeclares, themselves, believed it to be a result of their inter-faith marriage, another
example of Marion’s problem being connected to duality and a clash between human and divine
will: “I am certain that when I put in my confounding appearance in the world, each of my
parents saw me as the just retribution of their respective Gods. Their fanaticism must have been
provoked beyond measure, added to their remorse and regrets. I was the very embodiment of the
curse of heaven, not to mention my unseemly frailty. (96)”104 Though of course how Marion is
so “sure” is unclear. Whereas the narrator of The Well of Loneliness locates her inversion in the
will of his parents or Ladies Alamanack in the actions of celestial beings, L’ange et les pervers
imagines it could have been either. Regardless, what we see here is another example of how

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human sexuality is shifting away from a phenomenological (sexuality as practice) to an
ontological (sexuality as identity) question, one in which authors, through the lens of sexual
inversion, are imagining causes and expressions of these new way of being in the world. In this
we see reverberations with sexologists of the same period and the kind of literary evidence later
scholars—Foucault and Rich, for example—turn to, grappling with this twentieth century
understanding of human sexuality.
Medicalization and its relation to the state are key to understanding the particulars of
Marion’s suffering, a suffering which only increases when his parents die and he is taken into
custody of his father’s brother and his wife. If his early childhood is characterized by loneliness
and his adolescence at boarding school by bullying, the years waiting to come of legal age in the
“care” of his aunt and uncle can be characterized as state-authorized psychological torture.
Writing of his aunt and uncle:
My slim girlish figure, my fragility, my voice which has not managed to become a
man’s but which was no longer that of a girl; they had all the proof they needed.
Nevertheless, when I left college they found it necessary to have me examined by
a doctor.
He declared, despite what was written on my birth certificate, that all things
considered it was better to classify me among the female sex. I will never forget
the words that doctor, pronounced in a scientific tone, worse than all the jeers of
my classmates.
“Unfortunate individuals like yourself are sometimes lucky enough to grow a
beard, you understand. But yours will never grow and that will, in the end, excite
suspicion. So it is best to make up your mind while there is still time. You are

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only nineteen years old, you are not yet known in the world. Cases like yours are
not unheard of in the legal domain. It will be easy to have your status rectified at
the next meeting of the medical board.” (99-100)105
The degree of pain caused by this doctor’s pronouncement, burned forever into Marion’s mind,
is made evident through the comparison to the superlative “all the jeers”; years of bullying do not
compare to three sentences uttered in a “scientific tone.” In Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of
Linguistic Gender, Anna Livia attributes this to, not the fact of a change, but the direction: “For
Marion . . . who moves from male to female status, the alteration of her birth certificate is ‘la
suprême offense’ (the supreme insult) (60). He had been his father’s only son and heir, the only
hope of continuing the aristocratic family name de Valdeclare, and he now sees himself demoted
to the level of a dependent and unmarriagable girl” (178). Though this reading mischaracterizes
the text a bit—Marion never saw themself as heir to the already defunct Valdeclare line, wanting
instead to be a Benedictine scholar—it does resonate with the novel’s gender politics; becoming,
or rather being made, female drastically alters the material reality of Marion’s life. This moment
illustrates how the language of science is mobilized at this time to categorize people based on
their secondary sexual characteristics. This scene resonates, implicitly, with the work of the
sexologists that Hall explicitly invokes. This performative language, the decree of the doctor, can
change Marion from a male to a female in the eyes of his family and the state. Since Marion’s
genitalia are ambiguous, the lack of the visibly male, secondary sexual characteristic of a beard
bars Marion from male status in the eyes of medicine, the law, and society. His entire sense of
self, cultivated for eighteen years, is disqualified because he will forever be unable to meet
societal expectations of what it means to look like and therefore be male; he will excite

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suspicion, and that possible, imagined, future suspicion is enough for Marion to be forcibly made
to live as a woman, while simultaneously ridiculed by his uncle for failing to do it flawlessly.
If the passage of time into the modern era is implicit in such things as the medical
community’s ability to change Marion’s gender or the end of the aristocracy signaled by the
Valdeclare’s lack of wealth and a chateau lost during the first world war, Marion notes that this
time of change is also vital to their survival. Meditating on the treatment endured at the hands of
Aunt and Uncle de Valdeclare after the doctor’s declaration, Marion writes, “I had the luck of
being born in a time of sexual confusion. How would I manage now if custom and fashion didn’t
constantly help me pass from one personality to another without anyone noticing, not even the
concierges in my two dwellings? (101)”106 “Luck” feels like an ambivalent adjective if we
consider that Marion never appears to be happy; these changing times at least allow Marion to
survive. However, the rhetorical question implies the degree of that luck, suggesting that Marion
would not have been able to “manage” at all if born in another time, or at least that Marion
cannot imagine it. The degree of luck is accented by the mention of the concierges, who would
be people who see Marion on a regular basis and therefore have more chances to observe
Marion, yet never catch on. This question also calls to mind the moment in second chapter when
all Marion need do to change from woman to man is remove her lipstick. Though, it’s not just
the “mores and modes” of this time; the ambiguity of not only her genitalia (which is only ever
made explicit once) but, more importantly, of her secondary sexual characteristics and general
body proportions (which are noted throughout) allow Marion to survive, a survival made
possible by her ability to write and publish as a man. Still, there’s something about this moment
that feels like more than a comment on Marion’s mere survival, but perhaps most importantly on
the ability to live as one chooses.

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Returning to the third person in the fifth chapter, Marion’s survival via writing in the
modern era is further stressed when a young playwright asks for advice on how to get his plays
published and performed. Marion describes that one’s success in this time is all about the
“scheme”:
“To get performed in Paris, at least on the Planches modernes, if you don't
already have a name. You need two things. Do you have them?
“What things?”. . .
“Money and a whore. . . .
One cannot attach the same meaning to the word ‘play’ as did our worthy
predecessors. Theatre today, you understand—except of course for the exception
which proves the rule—is a branch of the Stock Exchange. If you want your
percentage back, you have to invest a little beforehand, don’t you?
“Are you telling me that, as an author, more is required of me than my play?”
“Unless you collaborate with a well-known name, who’ll take all the glory for
himself, without having written a single word naturally . . . if you’re lucky enough
that your name doesn't get dropped en route! Take it or leave it. Scheme,
monsieur, scheme. That’s the motto of our era in every field. (112-13)107
These shifts in narrative mode, following no particular pattern and, in later chapters, even
happening within the chapters themselves, create a subtle effect on how the reader apprehends
Marion and his relationship to other characters. The third person, here, reflects distance Marion
maintains from the gay men of the Parisian demimonde. If we understand the fourth chapter’s
shift to first person as indicating that Marion is the writer of the third person accounts of the
novel, than it’s particularly apt that we now think of him writing a scene where he’s speaking as

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a writer to another writer. The sincerity of Marion’s cynical, humorous tone is uncertain if one
keeps in mind this conversation isn’t a private one; he’s surrounded by a bunch of French theatre
gays who adore him and are seeking a recitation (and laugh at his opening joke). However, we
cannot dismiss his comments here as mere performance; Marion does, after all, make his
living—enough to support two Parisian apartments—as a writer. Like a pin to a balloon,
Marion’s characterization of the theatre as a branch of the stock exchange is meant to disabuse
this young auteur of any romantic illusions about writing as art, because it’s about making a
living. This approach, this “motto of our era in every field,” is made inescapable with the simple
use of the first person plural possessive adjective and superlative. Theatre as art, the exception
that proves the rule, has been marginalized by modern capitalism such that, regardless of one’s
profession, you gotta hustle if you want to eat.
While the condition of modernity is signaled with more familiar touchstones within the
diegesis (for example the car and its speed), we see modernism reflected in Delarus-Mardrus’
formal experimentation. The most striking instance occurs in the ninth chapter, where we not
only switch from third to first person; the chapter suddenly takes the form of journal entries from
December seventeenth through the twenty-second. The writing style of this chapter conforms to
general expectations of a journal: it contains reports of the day’s actions, musings about her
annoyance with her closest friend, Laurette Wells, work deadlines, and passages about her
abnormality. As with the initial change from third to first person in the forth chapter, the change
in style, form, and narrative perspective enforces the idea of Marion as both writer, and writer of
this novel. This is aspect of the novel is further underscored by the other, most noticeable formal
deviation from novelistic conventions, the inclusion of an intermezzo between the tenth and
eleventh chapters. This dramatic, formal element further suggests that Marion is the writer-

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narrator of the third person sections of the novel since, in both his male and female personae,
Marion writes plays. There is also a palpable shift in style in the intermezzo, which describes
“[t]he ambiguous silhouette of a figure with two face [that] can be seen prowling, but never
participating, at various carnivals in modern dress” (163).108 Marion is adrift in their solitude and
misery again, wallowing in feeling that they don’t fit in the world. In that sense, an intermezzo is
a perfect form to explore this feeling of outsiderness as it exists outside the neat progression of
chronological chapters. While the formal experimentation and shifting narrative mode doesn’t
interfere with reader comprehension of L’ange et les pervers’ minimal plot (often the most
obvious litmus test for whether a novel is a capital “M” Modernist novel), its consistency
resonates with Marion’s journey to figure out how to first figure out what they are and then how
to exist in a world that has not, as yet, conceived of a place for them to fit within the social fabric
of interwar Paris. The spirit of modernism in L’ange et les pervers is undeniable.
It would be easy to conceive of L’ange et les pervers as a lesbian novel by focusing on
the figure of Laurette Wells, since the plot is rooted in her love affairs with women and her salon
as seen through Marion’s eyes; certainly it fits the definition I propose. But Marion,
unsurprisingly, throws a wrench in the works. How do we conceive of this as a lesbian novel
when the protagonist is a “hermaphrodite,” owns to no explicit sexual attraction whatever, let
alone practice (though this reservation is rooted in Marion’s fear of rejection), and leads a double
life as both man and woman? When Mario/n moves in both halves of the demimonde, could we
not just as easily call it a gay novel? Or queer? Or an intersex novel? What, beyond yet another
literary incarnation of Natalie Clifford Barney (in the form of Laurette Wells) made the
publishers of The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature series publish Anna Livia’s English
translation as part of their series? One could argue that, even though Marion was raised as a boy

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until the age of fifteen, when he was forced to live as a women at the behest of a doctor and the
cruel humor of her uncle, when the story moves to the present—the time of narration—Marion’s
experience as a man is a means to an end, only; it is how he makes a living as an author and
holds onto the (defunct) de Valdeclare estate. He shares no amity with the gay men and their
actress friends. And his view of this kind of (contemporary rather than classical French) theatre
is one of a mercenary, not an artist.
Marion’s life as woman, by contrast, moves the plot forward, is the persona in which she
finds a degree of companionship, and, in the end, the gender in which she finds fulfillment.
Marion’s life as Miss Hervin is one of choice and artistic expression—she shares her work as a
woman only with Laurette. Her apartment is better and she interacts with her concierge. Her
friendship is with Laurette, though contentious, is explored at length. And while at the end of the
novel she and Laurette don’t fall in love, Marion’s love of Pierre—the bastard child of Laurette’s
lover, Aimée de Larges, whom Marion helps to secret away from de Larges’ husband—alters
Marion to the point where we see the first real moment of affection between Marion and
Laurette. Playing with French-grammatical gender, Laurette mistakes Marion’s request to
become Pierre’s guardian for some other male-gendered object in the room:109
Laurette clasped her in her arms, holding her tight against her breast, a powder
puff still in her hand. Downstairs the music stopped. “Marion! Marion! I beg you,
don’t sob like that! I don’t know who you are! I know nothing of your life . . .
Why did you say that just now? . . . That little boy . . . Did you have a child . . .
whom you’ve lost? No? . . . Forgive me . . . I’m talking nothing but foolishness,
naturally . . . This is the first time you’ve been human with me . . . I love you so
much!” (213)110

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This moment is striking for several reasons. First, the physical contact between the two is
especially poignant if we consider that Marion lives a largely isolated, unloved existence, first by
will of her family and now as a matter of (perhaps only perceived) necessity. Laurette, who
otherwise is completely self-absorbed in their interaction, shows Marion genuine affection and
care, comforting Marion, illustrating that their relationship is somehow deeper than even they
may have realized. Yet, the several instances of ellipses (appearing in the original) signal just
how unusual this behavior is on both their parts; the eloquent, sly Laurette stumbles, not
knowing exactly how to react. Laurette’s affirmation of Marion’s humanity (though qualified
with “devant moi”) and previous exclamation that she knows nothing of Marion, adds an
additional layer of poignancy; perhaps the only person to love Marion, a person who’s known
Marion for years, is just now, at the end of the novel, seeing her somewhat unguarded and
vulnerable. And Laurette’s final exclamation of “I love you so much!” is the closest this story
comes to romance. Still, while a declaration of love is not synonymous with romantic desire and
its origin is not Marion, this moment is decidedly woman-identified and, in that sense, lesbian.
Marion’s choice to be a woman, by way of being Pierre’s mother, gives Marion, for the
first time, a place in the world:
Joy! I can sacrifice my manly pride to joy. My motherly love will always be a
little masculine, but when one holds a child by the hand, there is pride too in
being a woman. He will think I’m his mother and that will give me a sex at last.
… I shall be his father and his mother in one person . . . so there is a reason for
my double nature … Mademoiselle de Valdeclare bent over her quarry.
Trembling, and forcing herself to soften that voice which was stuck eternally at

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breaking point, she instructed, “Now, my love, you mustn’t say Dadame any
more. You must say Mamma.” (215-17)111
In a novel that’s largely hopeless for Marion and, by extension, for the intersex condition, the
ending is decidedly happy, though Ray argues that the choice, itself, forecloses a sense that there
is any room for an existence outside the gender binary.112 The text would seem to contradict that
reading, at least to an extent: though Marion will now live as woman—and therefore, we assume,
as a part of Laurette’s world—she nonetheless locates a reason for her “double” nature as both
Pierre’s father and mother, presenting as female but maintaining a male dimension. Still, the
choice to live as a woman, to sacrifice manly pride for joy (in motherhood) has several
implications left unaddressed in the novel: how will Marion make a living when that livelihood
is dependent on her male persona? If Marion is to be Pierre’s mother and Laurette is his legal
guardian, what role will Laurette have in Pierre’s life—will Pierre have not one, but two
mommies? Ultimately, it would seem that Pierre’s existence making Marion into a mother and
Marion’s decision to live as a woman ties Marion, finally, with the novel’s lesbian community.
While the resolution to live as a woman thus aligns Marion with the likes of Laurette and,
therefore, the lesbian sphere, for me a more compelling argument for understanding L’ange et les
pervers as a lesbian novel is its use of other generic conventions of the lesbian novel, namely the
profusion of angelic references and, more importantly, the idea of congenital inversion
incarnated in Marion’s body, expressed in similar ways through people’s reactions to her
inexplicable yet visible oddity. Though we never see Marion’s sexual desire, we nonetheless
know it exists, implicitly in moments when Marion negates having desire for “vice” (read
prostitutes or homosexuality, depending on the moment). However, the one moment that
explicitly references Marion as having desire is also the one explicit mention of inversion:

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“Love, how I hate you, instinct of normality, I who am outside the norm! Ecce homo! Ecce
mulier! In whichever direction my love goes, I cannot avoid being an invert. . . . Each time I hear
the word Love, I will hear the answer Vice. But why was I born with a heart so precise when my
sex is so ambiguous? (98-99)”113 This moment, so striking in its admission of possessing
desire/love with a precise direction, is also striking in that the English translation—largely
accurate except for one or two egregious typos—leaves out a sentence between the last two
sentences above (outside my own use of ellipses).114 The French reads:
Mais combien je te hais, amour, instinct normal de tous, moi qui suis anormal !
Ecce Homo ! Ecce Mulier ! Je n’ai pas le droit, de quel côté que j’aime, de n’être
pas une créature invertie. . . . Chaque fois que je penserai Amour, il me sera
répondu : Vice. Et parce qu’à quinze ans j’ai malgré moi fait toutes les
expériences que comportait l’affreux jumelage de mon corps, l’illusion m’a
été ôtée avant le temps, et jamais vice ne voudra pour moi dire amour.
Alors pourquoi, sans sexe défini, suis-je né avec un cœur si précis? (59-60)115
In the eliminated sentence we find the completion of Marion’s thought in the first sentence;
Marion’s use of the negative superlative “jamais” with the conditional “voudra dire” suggest that
all of their experiences had taught them by the age of fifteen that the expression of desire will
always be impossible. This moment resonates with Ray’s take on the novel, which characterizes
the gender binary as something inescapable. Here, Marion can only ever see their love as taboo
because their genitalia lacks definition within the sexual binary. If, for example, Stephen
Gordon’s manly body and gender expression (clothes) misaligning with her (assumed) female
genitalia combined with her attraction to women signal her inversion, Marion’s ambiguous
genitalia make any alignment impossible. Inversion, here, is perhaps, a misnomer since, unlike

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Stephen Gordon, it’s not so much the expression of a male spirit in a female body (the reason for
the invert nomenclature) that marks Marion’s difference; it’s a mixture of several characteristics
attributed to “either” sex. This mixture is where the grotesque inflects our understanding of how
inversion is at play in the novel, especially the “l’affreux jumelage de mon corps,” omitted from
the English translaiton. Yet, this conception Marion has of herself makes any thought of
romantic love (standing in for, among other things, sexual interaction) have a negative
connotation. Marion puts it in terms of a kind of thought experiment, whereby love will always
equate to vice in their mind but (and this is the part the excised sentences emphasizes) never the
opposite, a reality made concrete in the first fifteen years of his life. The final sentence, which
reads like a kind of pitiful call to some unidentified interlocutor, indicates that it’s not that
Marion has no sexual desire. Indeed, the contrast of their precise heart emphasized against the
ambiguity of their genitalia suggest Marion does have desire, a desire with direction, even,
though we’re never to know in which direction that heart is oriented. Perhaps it’s simply a desire
to belong, somewhere, somehow.
It is inversion as expressed in genital hermaphrodism, however negatively conceived, that
links this novel with a larger network of lesbian novels of the time. Rather than having a fixed
understanding of what “lesbian” means and therefore looks like in representation, L’ange et les
pervers demonstrates how a novel can think through a concept, using fiction imagine how one
might represent inversion and its implications. For Marion, the most important implication is that
love, for inverts, is forever unattainable and survival is about passing. While it might be easy(ier)
from our historical vantage, after much of the work has been done to solidify what
homosexuality “looks” like, to say that Marion is a person with an intesex condition in the same
way people may argue that Stephen Gordon is really a butch or really trans, this ignores how

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novels like this were a part of doing that work such that seemingly easy categorizations are,
today, possible. The benefit of examining how issues of sex, gender, and sexuality are expressed
in novels like L’ange et les pervers—and how Delarus-Mardrus uses the novel form to push the
boundaries of the idea of sexual inversion—is to remind us that such fixed notions are a rather
recent phenomenon, that they are made fixed, and that, if people could use novels to imagine
new ways of understanding human sexuality into being, then people can, still.

The Revenant
If L’ange et les pervers offers an unconventional representation of congenital inversion,
Natalie Clifford Barney’s only published novel, The One Who is Legion, pushes the boundary
even further. When considering the formation of the lesbian novel as a genre, credit is given to
Natalie Clifford Barney in two primary ways. The first is, of course, the culture she helped to
cultivate with her personal life: her salons, friendships, and love affairs brought together a group
of women writers who fed off of each other’s artistic energies. The second, and related, way she
is credited as engendering the genre is as inspiration for characters in at least six, separate lesbian
novels: Liane de Pougy’s Idylle Sapphic (1901) parts of which Barney is rumored to have coauthored, Colette’s Claudine s’en va (1903), the final installment in her series of four novels,
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’ L’ange et les pervers (1930), her lover Rene Vivien’s obscure Une
Femme M’apparue (1904), Djuna Barnes’ cheeky Ladies Almanack (1928), really a novella, and
of course in Radclyffe Hall’s seminal The Well Of Loneliness (1928), without which the genre as
we know it would not exist at all.116117118119 It is therefore striking to me that little has been made
of her own and only “lesbian” novel, The One Who is Legion, and its place within the tradition120
—and here I used lesbian in quotation marks for reasons I hope will become obvious.121

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In Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940, Shari Benstock accounts for the relative
lack of attention Barney has gotten as a writer:
One of the reasons, of course, that it has been so easy to dismiss Barney’s writing
and to concentrate on the indiscretions of her life is the very inaccessibility of her
writings. Most of her early work was printed in limited editions through small
Paris publishing houses. Her later writings, although reaching a wider reading
audience at the time of publication, have not remained in print. A large portion of
Barney’s literary oeuvre remains in manuscript, and—with the exception of The
One Who Is Legion and “memoirs of a European American”—all of her writing,
including the autobiography, is in French. Although Barney wrote consistently
throughout her life, she published her work infrequently, gathering together
selections from her journals and diaries to be included in memoirs and pensées.
The generic range of these writings—poetry, drama, gothic fiction, epigrams,
biography, and autobiography—attests to her varied literary interests, but these
words divide themselves between writings in fixed literary forms (poems, plays,
and fiction) and those that exist almost by definition outside the strict generic
limits: pensées, memoirs, and various autobiographical accounts. (294-95)
Like much of her work, the larger (especially Angolophone) public lacked access to her only
work in English. The first edition of The One Who is Legion was very limited, with only 560
copies printed in 1930, and it was only reprinted once, in a hard-cover facsimile in 1987, by the
University of Maine’s Printing office National Poetry Foundation, which makes sense, as she’s
best known for her poetry. If few people had access to the book, it’s hard to fault them for not
writing about it. There’s also the dominant methodological approach of lesbian studies—the

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focus on—one might even argue obsession with—the relationship between authorial biography
and their written works. Though technically American, the majority of Barney’s work was poetry
and essays written in French (largely untranslated), material less accessible to the Angloacademy. Combined with a compellingly unusual lifestyle in any epoch, it’s unsurprising that
more attention is paid to her life than her work, itself. Then there’s the fact that the book itself is
a difficult read. It eschews realism (casts it off really), playing with the generic conventions and
our expectations of the novel as a form. Though obviously influenced by the gothic novel, the
style of The One Who is Legion is thoroughly experimental, making it difficult for readers to, at
times, figure out exactly “what’s going on.”
While these are each plausible speculations, the fact remains that little attention has been
paid to the novel.122 My interest in The One Who is Legion is in how its experimental style—a
collage of literary genres—is related to the protagonist, A.D.’s, characterization as an
ambiguously gendered composite entity. Its relationship to congenital inversion is debatable; I
argue that, like Marion de Valdeclare, A.D. is a different iteration of sexual inversion signaling
lesbian desire whereas Darcie D. Rives asserts that, “Barney sought to fight the ways in which
sexology studies worked to affix lesbian identity—and the identity of all women—to the body.
She would instead insist on the impossibility of categorizing anyone, and she resisted attempts to
erase individuality and variation through classification” (170-71). Whether emulating or
representing against congenital inversion, it thus reasserts inversion’s import as a founding
criterion around which the lesbian novel genre coalesces. Regardless, Barney juxtaposes the
seemingly irreconcilable ontological question of the simultaneous multiplicity and unity of the
self in order to both imagine and, by extension, create an understanding of what it means to be
lesbian.

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Though the plot of this novel is decidedly subordinate to its formal experimentation and
philosophical musings, I feel compelled to say a little bit about it in order to give us a bit of
grounding. The publishers agree, adding a note to the dust jacket of the first edition that reads,
“The publishers suggest reading the Author’s Note first,” which suggests it’s a useful place to
begin (see fig. 11).

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Figure 11. Note from the publishers found on the left, inside dust jacket of Natalie Clifford
Barney; The One Who Is Legion ; Paris, 1928, p. 24-25. Courtesy of University of Chicago
Special Collections. Text reads, “The publishers suggest that the Author’s Note be read first.”

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Appearing after the novel, proper, Barney’s note reads:
For those who would have our obscurities brought into opera-glass focus shall we,
as in theatre, condense our argument?
A.D., a being having committed suicide, is replaced by a sponsor, who
carries on the broken life, with all the human feelings assumed with the
flesh, until, having endured to the end in A.D.’s stead, the composite or
legion is disbanded by the One, who remains supreme. (160)
The irony of the phrase “opera-glass focus” will not be lost on anyone who’s actually used opera
glasses; while they do indeed bring the action closer, they are severely limited in terms of control
and scope, suggesting Barney wasn’t very concerned with clarity in terms of the novel’s plot.
The use of the “royal we” calls into question the ostensible separation of the author from the
diegesis since first person plural is used throughout the text to refer to the body of A.D.,
resurrected by various entities (the One, the Legion, and a shadow). But to take it at its word as a
note separate from the story, it’s further interesting to observe that the driving force of the novel,
according to this note, is an argument, not a plot. And so I cannot help but wonder if knowing
that 1. A.D. commits suicide, 2. is reanimated by an angel, a host of lower spirits and the shadow
of a now-dead couple, in order to 3. reconnect the lost love that lead to A.D.’s suicide is, in fact,
important at all. Regardless, in terms of plot, that’s the short of it. However, the foundation of the
plot—A.D.’s resurrection, ambiguous gender, lack of singular identity, desire for women, and
spiritual reunion with Stella—is integral to understanding how this is a lesbian novel. At play in
in The One Who is Legion is how formal and narrative experimentation is put to use, bending the
norms of genre and gender, to imagine what female same-sex desire looks like: new life and selfinterrogation leading spiritual union between women.

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Genre Bender
The One who is Legion opens in a Parisian graveyard:
In the Bois de Boulogne, opposite the Longchamps race-course, lies the graveyard
where the nuns of Longchamps were buried after the destruction of their abbey. In
the nineteenth century it gave burial to “La Guimard,” and extended the
hospitality of its enriched earth to many more recent guests. The dead of the
romantic period had a predilection for this cemetery.
A grey breed of Andalusian hens and two ash-colored cocks with flaming
crests strut about this enclosure by day, cared for by the guardian and his wife
who live there, less in fear of seeing what remains of these remains desecrated by
the rapacious Conseil Municipal, than of having their little house given over to
some rustic policeman. Although there survive few concessionaires who can
protect these graves, no one is sure of resting in peace, not even the dead, for even
in this really dead graveyard the earth mounds and tossed headstones suggest that
they are most restless and have turned in their sleep. (9)
Two main anxieties come to the fore in the first page of this novel, security of place and change
over time. The communal space of the nuns—symbolic perhaps of pre-revolution France—has
given way to celebrities and artists of the romantic period, now themselves dead and gone. The
current inhabitants, both living and dead, human and fowl, have no sense of security at the mercy
of State bureaucrats who could kick them out at any moment. But also the earth itself seems to
suggest that, even in death, one has no guarantees of a home for their bones. The graveyard
becomes a tenement with two merciless landlords.

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In this opening, the setting of a graveyard signals the obvious influence of the gothic,
carried throughout the novel. This theme is then bolstered by things such as the opening being
narrated by a shadow, perched atop the shared grave of two lovers, who were, in life, the
shadow’s “master-mistress, a couple so united that I never could cut out one from the other in
separate silhouettes” (13). Further descriptions characterize the graves themselves as “an
underground catacomb, intersected bones that have long since broken through rotten coffins and
cemented cells to intermix freely. In this dormitory white coral phalanxes meet: a corpse-tocorpse intermingling of ribs within ribs, more complete than the interpenetration of human corps
à corps” (10). Here we also see how Barney marks her audience as one that has a rather deep
understanding of French for, while the book is written in English, these moments of French that
appear in the novel play on the subtlety of meaning that only the French can capture, in this case,
how the French corps-à-corps inflects the gruesome, literal intermingling of corpses with
eroticism. This moment illustrates an underlying tone that permeates the novel: grotesque and
erotic.
But graves and buildings are not the only options available to those seeking a room for
rent or others within which to gruesomely commune; the human body is also up for grabs.
Focalized through the shadow, we hear:
A shot. A suicide amongst the dead? Someone tired of death? A form has risen, or
rather a shaped light. Two other lights cross swords or wings. A struggle of some
kind ensues. A grating of moon-blades, a high cry of pain. A sinking of shaped
light. I approach . . . I feel in the air a heaviness of lost wings.
My darkness tries to understand, to complete its sense of the situation.

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Many of Death’s cast-offs approach the radiation to be incorporated, like
separated atoms in a ray of light. Each pleads to be taken into service even as I.
(11-12)
The body—who we will later learn belonged to the main character, simply named A.D.,
reanimated by a fallen celestial being and a host of others, including the narrating shadow—
begins a investigation into who the former owner of the body used to be and what its purpose is
as this new amalgamation. This moment becomes the diegetic incarnation of the title, a being
that is both a multiplicity and singularity, simultaneously one and legion, calling to mind the
invasion of Stephen Gordon’s “barren womb” by unnumbered spirits whose “name is legion”
(Hall 437). Through this character, alive for a mere three days until its reconciliation with the
ghost of A.D.’s lover, Stella, we are given a different narrative of who lesbians are—or at least
who they could be—an alternative to the singular, unified “I” that we conceive ourselves to be.
However, this new creature struggles to find cohesion among its many parts, so much so that the
One will later lament the relative ease with which other forms of multiple being organize
themselves, for example the terrestrial “hermaphrodite,” or the celestial angel whose halves
compliment and complete each other in their respective domains, or the balance in the holy
trinity, who are arguably the most harmonious of multiple creatures. So while it’s possible, it is
not apparently easy to be legion in one body.
But this multiplicity isn’t limited to the protagonist of the story; it’s a trope reflected in
the form of the novel itself. One of the novel’s basic conventions is its lack of strict formal
requirements. While there are many definitions of the novel, at times similar and at odds, I have
a personal affinity towards E.M. Forster’s cheeky definition from his lectures published as
Aspects of the Novel: “Perhaps we ought to define what a novel is before starting. This will not

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take a second. M. Abel Chevalley has, in his brilliant little manual, provided a definition, and if a
French critic cannot define the English novel who can? It is, he says, ‘a fiction in prose of a
certain extent’ (une fiction en prose d’une certaine étendue)” (3). Forster goes on to qualify that
the extent, for his purposes, will be “50,000 words” and challenges any who find his definition to
be “unphilosophic” to “think of an alternative definition, which will include The Pilgrim’s
Progress, Marius the Epicurean, The Adventures of a Younger Son, The Magic Flute, A Journal
of the Plague Year, Zuleika Dobson, Rasselas, Ulysses, and Green Mansions . . . .” (3).
While Elizabeth English notes various, established novel genres at work in The One Who is
Legion—gothic novel, roman à clef, detective fiction—Forster’s vague definition is useful if we
are to understand this The One Who is Legion as a novel, because its incorporates non-novelistic
forms and styles: it includes varying font sizes and indentations which indicate different modes
of inner thought and traditional narration; it incorporates many instances of verse, rather than
prose; it contains a section of two columns which details the breakfast the One is consuming
while simultaneously reading the day’s correspondence addressed to A.D.; it includes two
images by Romaine Brooks of an androgynous humanoid figure; 123 and, my personal favorite, a
Dramatis Personae occurs at the very end of the novel, breaking not only the conventions of the
novel by including a dramatic component, but violating the conventions of drama by putting it at
the end of the text. This experimentation, this pushing the limits of what we think a novel can do
and look like, makes palpable The One Who is Legion’s modernist spirit.124 Citing Karla Jay’s
The Amazon and the Page, English asserts that Barney’s
work is infused by a fascination with bygone French literary traditions and styles
of decadence and symbolism, as well as an interest in the life and work of the
Lesbian poet Sappho, thus making for an uncomfortable assimilation under the

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heading of ‘Modernism.’ To an extent she embodies the privilege and elitism
under which man lesbian modernists were able to produce experimental art, and
certainly, her work was intended for a select and discerning, rather than
mainstream, audience. (66)
Because, leading into this quote, English is talking about Barney’s work in French, it’s unclear
how The One Who is Legion fits into her assessment of Barney’s work within Modernism,
proper. Using the period of publication to label it modernist would normally feel like a cop out,
were it not for that opening scene that places the romanticists in the grave; the novel is conscious
of this change in style marked by a change in time. There are also images, common in modernist
works, expressing anxiety with the impact of modernity—digressions and nervous descriptions
of biplanes and car rides so fast the eye can’t take in the scenery, for example, or how the
choices of a destination are dictated by the timetables of a train station. And my personal
favorite: the mentions of the Grande Roue de Paris and the Eiffel tower, two of the most
enduring symbols of modernity. For me, the collaging of novel types and non-novelistic forms in
The One of Legion signal a Modernist soul at work in this novel, one that links a new form of life
(the resurrected A.D.) and the desire for modernity. But situating The One Who is Legion within
a modernist context of formal experimentation is an arguably easier task than characterizing it as
a lesbian novel, which is, of course, my task. So, then, how can we understand this novel as a
lesbian novel?

Gender Bender
One could, following Bonnie Zimmerman, name The One Who is Legion a lesbian novel
because a self-proclaimed lesbian wrote it. Taking it a step further, we could call this a lesbian

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novel simply because it was produced as the direct result of Natalie Clifford Barney and (her
long-time lover) Romaine Brooks’ intellectual relationship and artistic production; after all
Brooks did provide two illustrations for the book (see fig. 12 and fig. 13).

Figure 12. Painting by Romaine Brooks of androgynous figure looking down, four beams of light
come down from their fingertips coming to a central burst. Included Natalie Clifford Barney’s
The One Who Is Legion,1930, pp. 8. Courtesy of University of Chicago Special Collections.

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Figure 13. Painting by Romaine Brooks of an androgynous seeming to be falling through a
crevice. Included in Natalie Clifford Barney’s The One Who Is Legion,1930, pp. 72. Courtesy of
University of Chicago Special Collections.	

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This would certainly fulfill Adrienne Rich’s definition of lesbian as any woman-identified
experience, regardless of sexual orientation. Rives reads lesbianism into the novel by comparing
it to how Natalie Clifford Barney conceived of and embodied her own lesbian sexuality in A.D..
English considers it a lesbian novel as part of a larger context of lesbians of the time’s interest in
and representations of the occult. But if I’m to follow my own definition where a lesbian novel is
“any a novel in which female same-sex desire is integral to the novel’s narrative or structure,”
the task becomes complicated. Disregarding Barney’s explicit or even perceived identity gives
one very little to work with, in terms of the content of The One Who is Legion.
We do have two, passing representations of lesbians in the novel, a mannishly dressed
woman with a fortune—an invert’s cameo, as it were—and an instance of two women kissing,
hardly anything one could deem “integral to narrative or form,” at least not on their own. And so
we are left with the ambiguously gendered A.D.. Barney is very careful throughout the novel to
use no gendered name or pronouns to refer to A.D., always, instead using the initials to mark the
life of the former mere human. Even the correspondence from some unnamed female lover
addresses A.D. as “Mon Seigneur, Ma Dame” as if the writer of said letter was unsure, herself, of
A.D.’s gender, or perhaps that her gender isn’t singular. While we know A.D.’s erotic orientation
is toward female objects—initially, the Glow-Woman and finally Stella, with whom she is united
in spirit at the end of the novel—only one moment in the whole novel points to the possible sex
of A.D.’s body. While riding a horse through early morning Paris, the One muses to themselves:
“Angels are hermaphrodites, self-sufficient, no marrying in heaven. On earth they often appear
with a woman’s body and a man’s desire, or vice versa” (38). Suzanne Hobson reads this
moment as an ambivalent moment for A.D.; “To the confused mind of A.D., hermaphrodite
angels stand to prove both that heterosexuality is the natural condition for human beings and that

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inversion finds its own supernatural justification” (128). But outside of what this moment shows
us about A.D.’s mind, because we are told that an angel has taken over A.D.’s body and desires
women, this is the only evidence we have of A.D. being an incarnation of female sexual
inversion, or what we would call the lesbian. The distinction between the location of the angel is
key: in heaven, a hermaphrodite, on earth, is a woman with a man’s desire. As an angel is the
organizing force through which the legion of spirits animates A.D.’s body, following the logic of
the book—expressed through A.D.’s own musings—A.D. is female, as well, at least bodily.
But I’d like to end by having us thinking about two things. The first is that the impulse,
indeed the need, to prove that A.D. is not, in fact, a man points to the heterosexism inherent in
our reading practice, not only in terms of how sexual attraction operates in novels (Stella is the
object choice, so work must be done to demonstrate A.D. is female), but also, by extension, the
figure of the lesbian must fall within the fiction of the gender binary. Judith Roof asserts that
fictional narratives are inherently heterosexist, and reproduce heterosexual paradigms. While in
general, this may hold true, The One Who is Legion, like L’ange et les pervers, and to a lesser
extent The Well of Loneliness, undermines this by creating a character that consistently resists
the sexual binary;125 rather, the impulse to characterize A.D. suggests that it’s our reading
practice more than narrative itself that reproduces heteronormativity. But perhaps most
importantly to this project is keeping in mind how genres work. On its own, The One Who is
Legion may be difficult to call a lesbian novel (under my definition), but if we place it in a
broader context of novels with similar images, tropes, and approaches to the novel, it becomes
guilty by association.

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Conclusion
That much has been done, in response to The Well of Loneliness, to resist its depiction of
lesbian-as-invert, is linked to the connotative and affective valences attached to it—the invert is
abnormal and will always end up lonely—as well as criticisms of the authenticity of its
representation, the “not all lesbians” response. My focus on these texts as the nexus illustrating
the formation of the lesbian novel as a genre is not about validating inversion as authentic.
Rather, its place within these texts demonstrates how it, among other images and approaches, is
one of the founding generic conventions of the lesbian novel. I’m not concerned with
authenticity—the lesbian experience itself is unrepresentable, as it’s not a singular or uniform
thing; all representations are inauthentic. Instead, ignoring any analysis of these novels’ mimetic
accuracy allows us to see how they engage with, expand upon, and deviate from an idea of
female homosexuality, limning its limits, imagining how it might look differently. We might
understand genre by means of pattern recognition, considering how these novels operate as
textual foremothers to later novels, for example, or things such as male names used as a tool for
lesbian characterization, or, say, the genderless narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the
Body (who, herself, has a first edition copy of The One Who is Legion).126 Looking at patterns
within representation, we find out what in these texts become things with or against which real
lesbians can identify and create themselves in the world. Even defining oneself against inversion,
grotesque collage, angelic progeny, or the mythic mannish lesbian demonstrates the impact the
lesbian novel has on how female same-sex desire is understood and lived.

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CODA: MUSINGS, SPECULATIONS, POLEMIC CONCLUSIONS
Because she knows my book, she thinks she knows me. And she is partially right.
-Carole Maso, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat

In her now infamous “Open Letter to Mary Daly”— published first in This Bridge Called
My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and then republished in Sister Outsider: Essays
and Speeches—Audre Lorde rather cordially calls out Mary Daly for the limited scope of her
seminal feminist work, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, in terms of her
analysis of goddesses. Lorde writes:
When I started reading Gyn/Ecology, I was truly excited by the vision behind
your words and nodded my head as you spoke in your First Passage of myth and
mystification. Your words on the nature and function of the Goddess, as well as
the ways in which her face has been obscured, agreed with what I myself have
discovered in my searches through African myth/leg- end/religion for the true
nature of old female power.
So I wondered, why doesn't Mary deal with Afrekete as an example? Why are
her goddess images only white, western european, Judea-christian? Where was
Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa? Where were the warrior goddesses of
the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan? (Sister 66)
I call this letter “infamous” because Daly did, in fact, reply to Lorde’s letter, and the reply was
discovered among Lorde’s belongings after her death. This fact calls into question the veracity of
the epigraph that opens the published version of this letter in Sister/Outsider: “The following
letter was written to Mary Daly, author of Gyn/Ecology,* on May 6, 1979. Four months later,

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having received no reply, I open it to the community of women” (66). Apparently, Lorde was
engaged in a little exercise in mythmaking, herself. Which is interesting if we consider the
double invocation of Afrekete, the linguistically dexterous, gender-bending, Afro-Caribbean
trickster goddess in Lorde’s list of questions above.127 Lorde even calls the goddess a third time
in her closing; “In the hands of Afrekete, Audre Lorde,” almost as if the letter is out of her hands
and instead is the work of divine inspiration (71). One can imagine Lorde quietly slipping Daly’s
letter into her desk, chuckling to herself as she typed out that epigraph, a plausible cover for
putting Daly on blast.
As Afrekete is a recurring figure in Lorde’s work, it is perhaps unsurprising that she has a
cameo in Lorde’s memoir, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name: A Biomythography. Appearing at
the end of the narrative-proper, Lorde’s encounter with Afrekete—Kitty for short—becomes a
kind of erotic idyll in the final chapter of the book (lovers of plantains and avocados are in for a
particular treat). The chapter ends, “We had come together like elements erupting into an electric
storm, exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted, passed,
reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange. I never saw Afrekete again, but her
print remains upon my life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo” (253). The
appearance of Afrekete at the end of the memoir calls into question the status of Zami as a piece
of non-fiction, unless, of course you believe that Lorde had a fling with the incarnation of a
goddess. But if it’s not a memoir, or work of autobiography, what genre might we (be able to)
call it? The astute reader will, of course, return to the title wherein Lorde names the genre: the
biomythography, the mythology or perhaps mythologizing, of one’s life in writing. And yet
we’re faced with the question: can there be a genre of one? Using “lesbian” as I do, as a
metaphor for genre, the answer is no; it takes several constituents with enough common elements

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in order to constitute a genre, a type, a set of many that set themselves apart from a larger set of
many.
There are other lesbian narratives one might consider to be biomythographies. Gertrude
Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice. B Toklas comes to mind. Like Afrekete appearing at the end
of Zami and making one wonder just how faithful its narrative is to the reality of Lorde’s life, the
final lines of The Autobiography of Alice. B Toklas does similar work: “About six weeks ago
Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography.
You know what I’m going to do. I’m going to write it for you. I’m going to write it as simply as
Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it” (252). Unlike Zami,
the generic play in The Autobiography of Alice. B Toklas is much more obvious; if this humorous
ending didn’t give it away (since Defoe wrote a novel), the “by Gertrude Stein” on the cover
would. After all, by definition the life story within is meant to be of and by the author. Which is
true, in a sense, since it’s just as much about Gertrude Stein as is it about Alice B. Toklas. It’s
true, in another sense, since Toklas typed up all of Stein’s manuscripts, so it’s likely she had a
hand in its writing in a very literal, if not creative, sense. While we may call it a memoir-novel,
or, as Chris Baldick does, an example of autobiografiction, using Lorde’s “biomythography”
marks The Autobiography of Alice. B Toklas as part of a particularly lesbian tradition.128
If this retroactive categorization is troubling—after all, the word “biomythography”
didn’t exist when Lorde wrote Zami, let alone when Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice. B
Toklas—we might turn, then, to a more contemporary example: Jeanette Winterson’s memoir,
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? In a moment when ostensibly musing to herself,
Winterson writes, simply, “I have a memory – true or not true?” (11). If Zami’s fidelity is called
into question by Lorde’s propensity to mythmaking for effect and The Autobiography of Alice. B

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Toklas’ through Stein actively playing with generic conventions, Winterson self-consciously
blurs the distinction between reality and fiction by way of the unreliability of (her) memory. This
technique isn’t new to Winterson; we find a similar sentiment expressed in her novel Written on
the Body, wherein the unnamed, genderless narrator’s unreliability is linked to an uncertainty as
to whether or not what they say is true: “‘You’re making it up.’ Am I?” (14). Even they seem to
be unsure, either in terms of their ability to tell the truth or tell the difference between truth and
fiction. The key difference in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is that, unlike
mythmaking or generic play, which are conscious actions, the unreliability of memory feels like
a function of the unconscious or, perhaps, a physical failure of the brain. In that sense,
mythmaking is something out of the author’s control. The potential mimetic infidelity of each of
these three memoirs begs the question: might a methodology oriented to their fictional dimension
provide a fruitful line of inquiry? What might we discover about their authors if we examine not
what’s true, but what’s not? If we do so, what might we learn about female same-sex desire?
Implicit in my critique of the biographical methodology for analyzing and characterizing
lesbian novels of the twentieth century are these questions: what’s with this implicit value bias
toward the real? Why don’t we value the creative power of fiction to the same degree? Why does
the question of a story’s “truth”—by which I mean referentiality—matter so much,
disproportionately, especially in terms of representations of lesbians? For certainly it does. Of
the response to her novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson writes:
I am often asked, in a tick-box kind of way, what is ‘true’ and what is not ‘true’ in
Oranges. Did I work in a funeral parlour? Did I drive an ice-cream van? Did we
have a Gospel Tent? Did Mrs Winterson build her own CB radio? Did she really
stun tomcats with a catapult?

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I can’t answer these questions. I can say that there is a character in Oranges
called Testifying Elsie who looks after little Jeanette and acts as a soft wall
against the hurt(ling) force of Mother.
I wrote her in because I couldn't bear to leave her out. I wrote her in because I
really wished it had been that way. When you are a solitary child you find an
imaginary friend.
There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier
than that. (Why Be Happy 6-7)
The impulse to tease apart what is “true” from what is “not true” is not a neutral endeavor; in
asking what is true, the questioner wishes to know which details to value, to care about, to
underscore in their own minds as “important.” What’s immediately striking here is how
Winterson does not give answers to the questions posed to her, instead turning (us) back to the
text for answers. It suggests that, in this particular case at least, in asking whether certain aspects
of the novel reflect her lived history, readers are missing the point. Winterson’s reply of “I
can’t”—not “I won’t”—is telling. It suggests not unwillingness, but inability; it’s as if, in writing
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the facts of her personal history have, themselves, become
unclear. What is clear, what she stresses, and the fact with which she leaves her inquisitive truthseekers is the degree of her childhood loneliness and the trauma caused by her relationship with
her mother made unbearable not imagining a better version, a friend, Elsie.
The place of autobiography in novels tells us not so much about the authors’ actual lived
experiences, but illustrates experiences of what might have been and, by extension, what could
be. And by imagining these possibilities we make possible, in reality, new ways of surviving
and, if one might be so bold, thriving. When Winterson writes, “I believe in fiction and the

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power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in
deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is
stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. … Somebody has been there
before us and deep-dived the words,” she is speaking to a particularly twentieth-century
phenomenon of queer existence (Why Be Happy 9). For example, I recall vividly the moment
when, while discussing John Knowles’ A Separate Peace my sophomore year in high school, my
teacher informed us that “some people” have suggested that Gene and Finny were more than just
friends. You could have heard a pin drop. The possibility had occurred to no one. No one, that is,
except me. Which is shockingly ignorant of my classmates, willfully, one might say; Phinny was,
after all, always borrowing Gene’s clothes and wore a pink necktie as a belt (I mean, come on!).
But the dearth of queer visibility at that time, either in the form of representation or actual
interlocutors, made queer existence impossible for them to imagine. They had no point of
reference. When we don’t see ourselves represented, represented enough, or represented as we’d
like to be, fiction becomes, not just an escape, but also an alternative existence in “the language
of others.”
My interest in the idea of biomythography, is, as is the rest of this dissertation, related to
my investment in discovering the import of fiction to lesbian existence. Northrup Frye tells us
that autobiography is often integral to the novel form.129 Certainly, when considering the lesbian
novel genre, the scholarship has born out this assertion. With Lesbians; How Novel, I want to
reorient us to just how much more there is to lesbian novels, beyond their mimetic dimension.
My brief gloss of the above lesbian memoirs is meant to highlight how, even in a genre whose
definitional limits are supposedly rooted in representing the real, biography or referntiality are
unreliable as the sole vectors for assigning worth or creating knowledge. If each of these lesbian

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memoirs have demonstrated just how integral imagination is a “non-fiction” form, how can we
not focus on the creative dimension of the lesbian novel? I have called the politics of Lesbians;
How Novel a feminist, recuperative politics, bringing to light works whose value has been
ignored or underserved. But it’s also a politics of preservation. As the lesbian moniker goes out
of style, as a younger generation blazes a trail towards new ways of being queer in the world, the
ironic tone of my title, “Lesbians; How Novel” becomes a bit darker.130 These lesbian novels
serve as testament to the historicity of sexuality, its fluidity and potential for solidification and,
most importantly, the role that lesbian novels had in producing a particular formation of sexual
identity. So when we think of lesbian novels as historical documents, let’s not limit ourselves to
treating them as mere records of the lives of lesbian authors or to documents that reflect the
dominant (or marginal) attitudes towards female same-sex desire of the time and culture in which
they were written. Let us also look to them as models for effecting change, finding in fiction
strategies for imagining new ways of being queerly in twenty-first century.

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END NOTES

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END NOTES

1. This entry also once appeared in the now-defunct glbtq.com online encyclopedia. The
loss of this online resource is palpable, and speaks, if only anecdotally, to the precarity of queer
culture.
2. Judith Roof argues that narrative is, inherently, a system for the reproduction of
heteronormativity, which suggests that gay and lesbian narratives do not exist. See for example
her Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative and A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and
Theory.
3. Zimmerman does it herself, if briefly, in The Safe Sea of Women. Annamarie Jagose
gives a particularly thorough and nuanced overview of the field’s diverse take on what a lesbian
is in her introduction to Lesbian Utopics.
4. Following Castle, Jodie Medd takes it a step further in Lesbian Scandal and the
Culture of Modernism by making her vector of analysis not just lesbianism, but the suggestion of
lesbianism: “Aware of the perils of doing so, I have chosen to use “lesbianism” as a broad
reference for the range of possible female same-sex practices, behaviors, affiliations, and identity
categories that suggested in the cases I examine. This assumes neither a clear category of lesbian
identity over time, nor one within the period under discussion. Indeed, my qualification (or
equivocation) – the suggestion of lesbianism – is intended to keep the term unstable while
emphasizing questions of representation and interpretation, rather than specific identities.” (9)
5. See Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between
Women from the Renaissance to the Present and Kent’s Making Girls into Women: American
Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity.

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6. Pratt and Loewenstein write, “Although women heroes in novels of heterosexual,
lesbian, and solitary passion act, by definition, in an antisocial way, much of their revolutionary
spirit is tempered by conflict with patriarchal values. Battles about dominance and submission,
self-punishments, and despair before gender norms characterize many novels of love and
friendship between women—often resulting in excessively punitive denouements. The lesbian
novel, as a result, does not always create new worlds for its protagonists since they face the same
battle with gender norms as those of other novels we have examined. The genre reflects a radical
polarity of experience: the intensity of the hero’s anxieties and punishments, on the one hand,
and, on the other, a great sense of regeneration, of freshness, when lovers successfully break
through into their unique “new spaces.” (95) And then, “The necessity of disguise, encoded
messages, and secret agents in novels of friendship recurs in the lesbian novel, where heroes
must find their way through the labyrinths of sexual politics in both the external world of male
society and the internal world of women’s embattled psyche” (100).
7. Emphasis mine.
8. In her introduction she writes, “Disagreement abounds (even among the contributors to
this volume) over what constitutes a “lesbian” and what is understood by postmodern.
Consequently, our point of embarkation in imagining something called the lesbian postmodern
promises to unsettle, rather than settle, a complex array of questions” (ix).
9. This, of course, is inspired by the Radicalesbians who represent the inextricability of
their radicalism from their lesbianism.
10. See Doan and Garrity’s “Introduction” to Sapphic Modernitites: Sexualities, Women
and National Culture.
11. See English’s Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction.

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12. See also Andrzej Pawalec’s “The Death of Metaphor,” page 118 in particular.
13. This approach is heavily influenced by Marilyn Frye’s article “The Possibility of
Feminist Theory” wherein she critiques the totalizing impulse of many feminist theorists,
arguing that feminist inquiry’s task is pattern recognition as a means of describing women’s
experience.
14. See for example the afterword by Steven Moore in Ladies Alamanack, which
provides the detailed clef du roman or Gayle Rubin’s introduction to A Woman Appeared to Me,
which does the same, Lillian Faderman’s afterword to The Friendly Young Ladies, which
compares the novel’s main characters with Mary Renault’s life, Carlos Jansiti’s postface to the
texte integral of Thérèse et Isabelle, which uses the novel’s publication history to signpost
Leduc’s life and relationships with French literati of the period, and so much of the work on
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando that cannot seem to escape her relationship with Vita Sackville-West.
15. For an impressive historiography of representations of lesbians in the French roman,
see Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novels by Jennifer Waelti-Walters.
16. This is a perhaps unconscious nod to Heather Love’s approach in Feeling Backward.
17. The text of Thérèse et Isabelle was originally supposed to be the beginning of
Leduc’s novel Ravages. For an overview of the censorship of Thérèse et Isabelle, see Carlo
Jansiti’s postface in the texte integral.
18. See for example, “Amid brazen, deadly attacks, gay Syrians tell of fear of Isis
persecution” by Arwa Damon and Zeynep Bilgensoy.
19. See for example, “Mother ‘stabbed her son to death’ because he was gay” by Nick
Duffy.

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20. See for example, “Brooklyn man beats woman unconscious during anti-gay subway
attack” by John Riley.
21. See for example, “Torture and Killing of Transgender Woman Stun Brazil” by Dom
Phillips.
22. See for example, “‘They Starve You. They Shock You’: Inside the Anti-Gay Pogram
in Chechnya” by Andrew E. Kramer or “40 Gay Men Have Been Rescued From Chechnya’s
Concentration Camps” by Dmitry Lovetsky.		
23. Though today, the singular “they” is en vogue as the gender-neutral pronoun, as these
were the pronouns I was asked to use, they are the ones I’ll continue to use when referencing
Feinberg.		
24. Italics original from the Editor’s Note to Minnie Bruce Pratt’s obituary, “Transgender
Pioneer and Stone Butch Blues Author Leslie Feinberg Has Died.”
25. This entry also once appeared in the now-defunct glbtq.com online encyclopedia.
26. See for example Jay Prosser’s “No Place Like Home: The Transgendered Narrative of
Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues,” Cat Moses’ “Queer Class: Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch
Blues,” Anika Stafford’s “Departing shame: Feinberg and queer/transgender counter-cultural
remembering,” or Harlan Weaver’s “Friction in the interstices: Emotion and landscape in Stone
Butch Blues.” Sara L. Crawley’s “Prioritizing Audiences: Exploring Differences Between Stone
Butch and Transgender Selves” (2002) acknowledges that it can be read as either lesbian or
transgender.
27. This formation resonates with Gayle Rubin’s article “Of Catamites and Kings:
Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries,” which appears in Joan Nestle’s The Persistent
Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader alongside two short stories by Leslie Feinberg: “Butch to Butch:

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A Love Song” and “Letter to a Fifties Femme from a Stone Butch,” which would become the
opening chapter.
28. In a blog post from September 3, 2012 entitled “On Pronouns,” Halberstam describes
a non-policing approach to the pronouns people use to refer to hir since “floating gender
pronouns capture well the refusal to resolve my gender ambiguity that has become a kind of
identify for me.” Rather than pick a side, I choose to use gender-neutral pronouns when
referencing Halberstam as a way of gramphematically honoring that ambiguity.
29. The Lesbian Herstory Archives are located at 484 14th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215.
30. See for example Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings.
31. For a broader explanation of this method, see for example “Experiencing the Method:
An Exploration of Being Present.” On one particular exercise that I find inescapable when
thinking of the Abramović Method, see Lenny Ann Low’s “What counting 3987 grains of rice
with Marina Abramovic [sic] taught me” or see “Counting the Rice and Sesame” on the Marina
Abramović Institute website to experience the exercise for yourself.
32. See for example Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism
from 1719-1900, wherein she argues that novels produced the modern understanding of the
individual/individualism by representing a new way of thinking about the self.
33. Crybaby Butch first appeared as a short story in The Massachusettes Review in the
autumn of 1999. 484 14th Street in Brooklyn per their website, lesbianherstoryarchives.org.
34. Bastard Out of Carolina was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992 (Jetter),
and was favorably reviewed in Entertainment Weekly, Publisher’s Weekly, The Independent,
and The New York Times.

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35. This phrase appears in Crybaby Butch a few times, always when butch authority is
being asserted over another person: Star over Anna, Anna over Chris, Chris over Kathleen.
36. Women and Children first is an independent, woman-owned bookstore in Chicago
that’s been open since 1979 and is currently located at 5233 N. Clark St.
37. See Stone Butch Blues - Jess buys a Norton, technically, on page 51-2 after getting a
factory job. Later, Jess gets a Triumph.
38. See Stone Butch Blues - Jess describes the first butches she sees as having “perfect
DA’s” on 27, and confirms she too had that hairstyle on 171.
39. See Stone Butch Blues page 25 for age, 27 for first entrance into a gay bar “a year
later,” making her sixteen.
40. Hir is the gender-neutral form of the third person singular object pronoun, used in the
same way as either him or her. Because Jess Goldberg transitions, lives as male, but occupies a
less stable gender identity that either male or female toward the end of the Stone Butch Blues, I
have chosen to use this gender-neutral pronoun when referring to Jess Goldberg.
41. Also see page 73 of An Archive of Feelings for an interesting take on the
intermingling of public and private in this address as well as her endnote referencing Michal
Warner’s work.
42. See for example For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology edited by Sarah LuciaHoagland & Julia Penelope, 1998.
43. Per the Stone Butch Blues page from Feinberg’s website, transgenderwarrior.org.
44. See for example E.J. Graff’s review “Delusions of Gender” from The Women’s
Review of Books and Anthony Consiglio’s “Gender Identity and Narrative Truth: An
Autobiographical Approach to Bias” from English Journal.

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45. See for example, Stuart Jeffries’ article “Lesbian story ban is lifted” from The
Observer.
46. Translation mine. The original reads, “Une lectuer des textes comme autobiographie
est non seulement possible, mais, à en croire les critiques consacrées à cet auteur, inevitable.”
47. See his Biography Violette Leduc. Jansiti must be commended for his tireless work in
keeping Leduc’s oeuvre alive. He taught himself French just to study her books and life, created
the fonds Violette Leduc at the l’Institut Mémoire de l’édition contemporaine which houses her
manuscripts, personal correspondence, and much of the European, published scholarship and
press on Leduc. He even consulted on the popular biopic Violette. A comprehensive list of these
materials can be found in the Appendix of Elizabeth Locey’s The Pleasures of the Text: Violette
Leduc and Reader Seduction.
48. For more on the effect of Leduc’s biography, see the second note on the Introduction
of Elizabeth Locey’s The Pleasures of the Text: Violette Leduc and Reader Seduction found on
page 155.
49. Written and directed by Martin Provost, Violette has been well-reviewed by John
Powers of NPR.com, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian,
and Scott Foundas of Variety and had an 84% Freshness rating on RotenTomatos.com. Frank
Nouchi of Le Monde has a more measured reaction, lauding the acting though stating the film
feels somehow “unfinished.” At the time of writing, Violette is currently available to stream on
Netflix in the U.S., available to purchase as a digital download on iTunes, and can be either
downloaded or rented from Amazon.com, bringing the life of Violette Leduc to anyone with a
screen and internet connection.
50. Sophie Blanch writes, “An exuberant and unorthodox biography of Vita and her

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heritage, Orlando finally enabled Woolf to capture an enduring impression of the women who
had been both her muse and her lover” (73); Kristie Blair asserts offhandedly that Orlando is “a
text which, of course, draws on Sackville-West’s life” (157); Jay Dickenson writes, “Although
Vita Sackville-West claimed that she and Woolf had sexual relations only twice, and that they
were traumatic experiences for Virginia, the relationship they enjoyed together became one of
the most meaningful of Vita's life, especially when Woolf chose in 1928 to immortalize Vita (by
then the best-selling author of her long Georgian poem The Land) in thinly disguised form in
Orlando” (202); Victoria Smith contends, “Woolf’s identification with Sackville-West and who
Woolf imagines her to be are of paramount importance if we consider that Woolf writes
Sackville-West’s story in Orlando: A Biography” (57); Louise DeSalvo maintains, “Virginia
Woolf's friendship with Vita Sackville-West was most eloquently celebrated in her writing of
Orlando” (204); Christine Fouirnaies begins her article, “When Virginia Woolf introduced the
idea of Orlando (1928) to Vita Sackville-West, whose life was the basis for Orlando, she
explained that Sackville-West's "excellence as a subject" arose largely from her ‘noble birth,’”
(21).
51. Tama Lea Engelking writes, “Vivien’s Une femme m’apparut ..., an autobiographical
novel she wrote about her love affair with Natalie Barney” (373); Juliette Dade notes, “Nathalie
Barney’s relationship with her lover, the British/French poet Renée Vivien (née Paulina Tarn),
was described in detail in Vivien’s novel Une femme m’apparut...”; Mary Eichbauer cites,
“Barney claims (and many critics have followed her lead) that A Woman Appeared to Me is
mainly valuable as a record of Vivien’s feelings for her, feelings more intense and pathetic than
those she wished to evoke” (17); All of these derive their reading from Gayle Rubin’s
introduction to the 1976 Naiad Press edition in which she argues, “If A WOMAN APPEARED

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TO ME were merely a lost work by an obscure lesbian author, its publication would be welcome.
But the novel is also a historical document, part of the archival remains of one of the most
critical periods in lesbian history. A WOMAN APPEARED TO ME is Renee [sic] Vivien’s
feverish, dream-like account of her tormented relationship with her muse and mistress, Natalie
Clifford Barney” (iv).
52. Margaetta Jolly characterizes it as a work of “autofiction” (492); Julie Ellam
characterizes it as “semiautobiographical” (79); David J. Maxwell notes, “Jeanette Winterson’s
work of faction, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, (London, 1985), is based on her childhood
experiences in an Elim Church in Lancashire in the 1960s” (228); Mara Reisman concludes,
“Just as Jeneatte’s story is integrated into the Sir Perceval and Winnet stories, Winterson
integrates some of her personal history into Oranges” (33); on Winterson’s use of autobiography,
Anne DeLong writes, “Winterson’s revisionist quests knot up the thread of the autobiography by
continually shifting the correspondences of parent/child or master/apprentice embodied by the
narrator Jeanette’s relationship with her mother” (268); Winterson, herself, writes, “I am often
asked, in a tick-box kind of way, what is ‘true’ and what is not ‘true’ in Oranges. … I can’t
answer these questions” (Why Be Happy 6).
53. Locey makes a similar argument about the value of fiction, while focusing on
autobiography in her analysis of Thérèse et Isabelle. She also calls La Bâtarde, a novel, when
it’s an autobiography.
54. Translation mine. The original reads, «Tel que Violette Leduc l'avait conçu, retraçant
l'ensemble de l'itinéraire amoureux de Thérèse de l'adolescence à la maturité, Ravages aurait sans
doute eu l'ampleur d'un véritable roman de formation » (197).

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55. I get the word Dactylogramme from Violett – IMEC refers to them as
dactylographies, a synonym.
56. Aujourd’hui, enfin, parâit Thérèse et Isabelle comme une œuvre en soi, dans sa
cohérence initiale et sa continuité. (Texte Intégral 135)
57. See page 10-11 of Catherine Violett’s “Thérèse et Isabelle: Le Dactylogramme” who
cites Leduc’s La Chasse à l’amour as the source from which she identified the process of making
and copying this “faux” manuscript.
58. I discovered this in my examination of the dactylogrammes at IMEC – as of June
2015, no one at the archive seemed to know where those pages went/are.
59. In their stories on the firing of Elizabeth Koke from The Feminist Press at SUNY and
her subsequent lawsuit against the press, The New York Post, The Advocate, and The New York
Daily News each report that Therese and Isabelle was used as the example of how the new
executive director, Jennifer Baumgardner, felt the press had become too lesbian. Quoting from
the point 24 in the Statement of Facts section of the Summons and Complaint of Elizabeth Koke
v. Jennifer Baumgardner et al.:
24. PLAINTIFF alleges that beginning in 2014 editorial acquisition meetings
became hostile when someone expressed a different opinion that MS.
BAUMGARDNER and when MS. BAUMGARDNER asserted that the
FEMINIST PRESS should be publishing books with more “mainstream appeal,”
instead of books like “Therese and Isabelle,” which is a lesbian school girl love
story” (24)
60. Sophie Lewis’ translation from the Salammbo edition: “Isabelle pulled me
backwards, she laid me down across the eiderdown, lifted me, held me in her arms: she was

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releasing me from a world I have never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit.
With her lips she parted mine, moistened my clenched teeth. The fleshiness of her tongue
frightened me: the foreign sex did not enter” (17).
61. This is one of the main arguments in Locey’s The Pleasures of the Text: Violette
Leduc and Reader Seduction;
One of the most intriguing aspects of Violette Leduc’s works is her uncanny
ability to suture the reader into the text in a bond of identification with the
narrator-protagonist. The verb “to suture” might seem too strong, as readers
frequently develop feelings of identification with the narrator over the course of a
novel or autobiography. However, when one considers that Leduc’s narrator
consistently presents herself in the worst light…it becomes clear that few readers
would set out to become (one with) la bâtarde. And yet, this is what happens time
after time. (84)
62. Sophie Lewis’ translation from the 2012, Salammbo edition: “It reached up to my
oesophagus. I was listening to Isabelle who was pressing lightly, who was following the growing
tide, enjoying the outward ripples” (116).
63. Which is, incidentally, how it’s written in the 1955 édition de luxe.
64. I have chosen to include Coltman’s translation of the 1966 version in order to
demonstrate how two different translators followed the same basic rule: regardless of whether a
verb is in passé composé or passé simple, it is translated into the simple past in English. It’s also
a way of honoring the work of person who made possible the Anglophone encounter with the
text in the first place.

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65. See for example Olivia by Dorothy Strachy, Mrs. Peabody’s Inheritance by Elizabeth
Jolley, Spring Fire by Vin Packer (though the setting it technically a sorority), Claudine à l’école
by Colette, Cracks: A Novel by Sheila Kohler, Chocolates for Breakfast: A Novel by Pamela
Moore, and Lillian Hellman’s play, The Children’s Hour.
66. Alex Hughes’ approach to the homoerotic in Thérèse et Isabelle, is highly
psychoanalytic and comparative. He writes:
In this chapter, I intend to explore the nature of the sexual relation Leduc
envisions in Thérèse et Isabelle, and to argue that while it proves to be transitory,
it is characterized by a harmony which distinguishes it from the feminine
familial/sexual bonds of Ravages. My aim is also to demonstrate that in creating
an account of what might be termed ‘love of the same in the feminine’, Leduc
looks forward, instinctively, to Irigaray’s vision of a female homosexual
economy, based upon the subject relations of pleasure and desire between women.
(81)
Hughes locates value of Leduc’s representation of female same-sex desire in the characters’
feminine gender presentation a representational precursor to Irigaray’s theory of a “female
homosexual economy” and much of the chapter is dedicated to how Leduc’s representation
aligns and diverges from other theories of homosexuality, most notably Freud and Kristeva.
For Elizabeth Locey, understanding how female same-sex desire is represented in the
novel hinges on an examination on how the look functions in the text. “In this chapter, we will
examine the role of the erotic look in Thérèse et Isabelle, the figure of the eye in the text, and the
manner in which Leduc manipulates her reader’s participation in erotic looking. By
incorporating a potentially aggressive, detached, dominating reader’s gaze into the lover’s inner

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circle, Leduc renders that gaze safe, and more important, loving” (83). Unlike other Leduc
scholars who seek out the real in terms of the biographical, Locey is interested in how Leduc
created a hermeneutic that guides the readers’ response to Thérèse and Isabelle’s relationship.
It’s striking that she uses words like “looking” and “gaze” to describe the reader’s interaction
with Thérèse et Isabelle as they’re metaphors for imagining; the reader, unlike a viewer, can not
see Thérèse or Isabelle in anything except a figurative sense.
67. Un train de nuit quitta la gare et la quitta derrière le sifflement monstre qui perçait des
ténèbres étrangères au collège. Je rejetai le drap, j’eus peur de dortoir comateux. On appelait
derrière le rideau de percale Je faisais la morte. He remmenai le drap au-dessus de ma tête.
J’allumai ma lampe de poche. . . . Isabelle en visite ne quittait pas mon rideau de percale. Je
doutais de sa timidité, je doutais de ses longues cheveux défaits dans ma cellule. (Texte Intégral
18-19)
68. The most famous example is Diederot’s eighteenth-century novel, La religiuse.
69. Nous commençons la semaine le dimanche soir dans la cordonnerie. Nous cirions nos
chaussures qui avaient été brossées le matin dans la cuisine ou bien dans la jardin de notre
famille. Nous venions de la ville : nous n’avions pas faim. Nous évitons le réfectoire jusqu’au
lundi matin, nous faisons quelque tours de cour, nous allions dans la cordonnerie, deux par deux,
avec l’adjudant qui s’ennuyait. . . . Nous cirions dans une chapelle de monotonie, sans fenêtres,
mal éclairés, nous rêvions avec nos chaussons sur nos genoux les soirs de rentrée. L’odeur
vertueuse de cirage qui nous fortifie dans les drogueries nous désolait. Nous languissions sur le
chiffon, nous étions gauche, nous avions perdu nos aises. . . . Nous nous levions à six heures et
demie. Les surveillantes faisaient glisser les anneaux sur les triangles, elles entraient dans les
cellules pour voir si nous étions debout. Nous défaisons notre lit, nous nous lavions à l’eau froide

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pendant que le matelas refroidissait, nous refaisions le lit quand nous étions habillées. À sept
heures moins le quart, l’élève de corvée ouvrait le placard, sortait le balai, et le ramassepoussière, faisait le ménage dans sa cellule, déposait le balai devant le box inspectait les
démêloirs, à sept heures vingt-cinq nous fignolions nos mains, nos ongles, à sept heures vingtcinq la cloche sonnait : nous nous rangions dans l’allée, nous descendions deux par deux. (Texte
Intégral 11, 33).
70. The use of “elles” requires all subjects to be female, therefore indicating “les”; a mix
of male and female would defer to male pronouns “ils.”
71. J’ai des ordres stricts murmura la nouvelle surveillante. Pas de visites dans les box.
Chacune chez soi. Nous étions toujours à la merci d’une inspection nocturne de la directrice.
(Texte Intégral 16).
72. Mon avenir ne ressemble pas au leur. Je n’ai pas d’avenir dans le collège. Ma mère la
dit. Si tu me manques trop je te reprendrai. . . . Elle peut me reprendre d’un instant à l’autre.
(Texte Intégral 12)
73. Quoting from his article, “On the Sapphic Motif in Modern French Literature”:
Several of the novels which attempted a portrayal of Lesbian loves take place in
girls’ schools and deal with the clandestine discovery of tender affection and
adolescent caresses between teenagers or with their crush on one of the women
teachers. The most exaggerated and feeblest is no doubt Thérèse et Isabelle, by
self-confessed Lesbian whom Simone de Beauvoir praised warmly for her
autobiography, La Bâtarde (1964). She admired the author for courageously
accepting her own ugliness and refusing to please or charm. Violette Leduc’s own
half-fictional autobiography reads like a curious document on the war years and

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as a demonstration of Narcisssim driven to its utmost. It is written with vigor and
humor. However her other “récit” of two girls hysterically palpating and tickling
each other’s “lower parts” in the school bathroom and dormitory never rises
above childishness. (25)
This is an ungenerous reading of the text to say the least, one that borders on the unprofessional,
if not outright misogynistic. But one doubts if he’d read the texte intégral if his characterization
of the novel would be much different.
74. Je l’ai serrée dans mes bras, de toutes mes forces de repentie, je l’ai respire, je l’ai
appuyée sur mon ventre et j’ai eu d’elle un pagne, j’ai titubé avec mon incrustée. Isabelle grisait
mes chevilles, mes genoux pourris de délices. J’étais fondue de chaleur comme un fruit, j’avais
le même écoulement de liqueur. Des tenailles me torturaient mollement. Son épingle à cheveu
tomba dans la cuvette, nous perdîmes l’équilibre. Je plongeai ma main dans l’eau, je remis
l’épingle dans ses cheveux. (Texte Intégral 41-42)
75. See the impressive historiography, Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novels.
76. On secouait notre porte, on entrait dans le cabinet à côté du nôtre : on ne nous
dérangeait pas. Le piétinement sur le ciment nous révélait que la petite fille avait attendu le
dernier moment. Elle soulevait son tablier, sa jupe, ses dessous. Je fermai les yeux, j’effacqai le
sexe chauve de l’enfant que je ne connais pas. Mes chairs en lambeaux tombaient sur des
dentelles. . . . L’enfant se soulageait mais nous nous avions honte de l’écoulement monotone
dans la cuvette. Je devinais que ce serait un souvenir. (Texte Intégral 43)
77. — Midi moins le quarts ! dit Isabelle. Viens, viens… Nous sommes tombées sur les
marches de l’estrade.
— Midi moins le quart Thérèse ! . . . Je craignais de la dégrader en soulevant sa jupe.

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— Presque midi moins dix, Isabelle !
— Si tu ne parles pas plus bas nous serons prises, dit Isabelle. Je me suis aventurée sous la jupe
plissée: ses dessous m’ont fiat peur. Elle était trop indécente sous sa robe. Ma main avançait
entre la peau et le jersey.
— Laisse-moi faire. Ne regarde pas sic a te choque, dit Isabelle.
J’ai regardé.
Elle s’est soulevée, elle m’a rendu ma main.
— Quel slip impossible, dit-elle. C’est une main de somnambule qui l’a enlevé, qui l’a fourré
dans la poche du tablier. Isabelle s’est offerte sur les marches. . . . J’étais sadique. Attendre et
faire attendre est une délicieuse perdition. Je suis tombée. . . . Je me suis risquée en
contrebandier, mon visage le premier. Isabelle a donné un coup de ciseaux avec ses jambes. . . .
Ma langue cherchait dans de la nuit salée, dans de la nuit gluante, sur de la viande fragile. Plus je
m’appliquais, plus mes efforts étaient mystérieux. J’ai hésité autour de la perle. . . . Je la perdais,
je la retrouvais. . . . Je lui demandais entre les lèvres du sexe. . . . J’ai mouillé de larmes de sueur
sa toison.
— Apprends-moi… Apprends-moi… . . . Isabelle couchée sure les marches de l’estrade s’est
cherché, s’est trouvée. (Texte Intégral 84-86).
78. Elle s’allongea contre la cloison, dans son lit, chez elle. J’enlevai mon peignoir, je me
sentis trop neuve sur la carpette d’un vieux monde. Il fallait venir tout de suite près d’elle
puisque le sol me fuyait. Je me allongeai sur le bord du matelas : prête à m’enfuir en voleur.
— Vous avez froid. Venez plus près, dit Isabelle.
Une dormeuse toussa, essaya de nous séparer. (Téxte Intégral 22)

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79. Renée contemplait la photographie, devinait, c’est probable, un couple à côté d’elle
puisqu’elle n’osait pas lever les yeux. J’étais prise entre la fausse innocence de l’une et l’audeace
de l’autre. La main d’Isabelle, dans les plis de son tablier, me caressa. C’était fou. Je pourrissais,
mes chairs étaient blettes. . . .Je m’écroulai avec le paysage dans ma main. (Texte Intégral 78).
80. . . . j’ai entendu les gémissements du sommier dans la chambre voisine. . . .
— Le bruit de notre lit la nuit…
— Ce n’est pas le bruit de notre lit le nuit, dit Isabelle. J’ai prêté l’oreille. Le rythme régulair ne
ressemblait pas au rythme saccadé dans le box d’Isabelle. . . . Je ne pouvais pas m’arracher à
cette cadence régulière. . . . J’étais captive du rythme, j’étais condamnée à le suivre, à le
souhaiter, à le redouter, à me rapprocher de lui. . . . J’épiais. (Texte Intégral 101-102)
81. Isabelle se dressa, elle me prit dans ses bras :
— Tu viendras tous les soirs ?
— Tous les soirs.
— Nous ne nous quitterons pas ?
— Nous ne nous quitterons pas.
Ma mère me reprit.
Je ne revis jamais Isabelle. (Texte Intégral 129)
82. De Laurentis is referring to the film adaptation of Rebecca but the sentiment holds
true for the novel, as well.
83. Though the impulse of my dissertation is to bracket the author, for those wishing to
know how seriously Barnes took this book, see the October 27th entry of “Life is Painful, Nasty
& Short…in My Case It Has Only Been Painful & Nasty.” Djuna Barnes 1978-1981: An
Informal Memoir, pages 34-35, 101.

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84. Writing of the “Zodiac” section, Bertha Harris—author of books such as Lover
(1993) and The Joy of Lesbian Sex (1977)—characterizes Ladies Almanack “revolutionary.
”Contrasting her own response to Harris’, Suzanne Hobson has a more practical response; “Yet
to read this passage as a celebration of lesbian identity is necessarily to miss the ironic distance
created by Barnes’ archaic and pompous language, language that is itself undercut by the bathos
of Musset’s ‘first words’: ‘Pardon me, I must be going’ (124).
85. Karla Jay’s “The Outsider among the Expatriates: Djuna Barnes’ Satire of the Ladies
of the Almanack” is emblematic of the “key” approach to Ladies Almanack. Susan Sniader
Lanser frames her “Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Discourse of Desire on
Ladies Alamanack’s real-life referents, then moves into an analysis its various narrative modes,
demonstrating the difficulty of escaping the gravity of the biographical approach to this book in
particular. Louis F. Kannenstine is a wonderful exception, reading without a key, as it were,
focusing on the style of Ladies Almanack in relation to Ryder, Barnes’ other illustrated novel,
though he cannot help but mention the group of literary lesbians who inspired the publication.
Still, his conclusion further connects it to the novel genre; “Ryder and Ladies Almanack . . . find
Miss Barnes still in an experimental phase, only beginning to struggle out the process of the
novelistic genre” (56). Carolyn Allen, is more typical, foregrounding how “Ladies Almanack is a
kind of comic roman à clef in almanac form about the "ladies" of Natalie Clifford Barney's
coterie” (4). Daniella Caselli’s approach is misleading, opening “The Unreadable Pleasures of
Ladies Almanack” with the details of its publication and the relationship between the real and
representation, but then moves into a brilliant, meticulously detailed close reading of the text,
arguing, “Rather than decoding Ladies Almanack as if it were a riddle hiding a solution (which
critics have often located in biography or context) I argue that the texts difficulties are

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instrumental to opening up the relation between pleasure and meaning. That is to say to
exploring the politics of representation” (39). Frann Michel’s “All Women Are Not Women All:
Ladies Alamanack and Feminine Writing” escapes the roman à clef approach, reading Ladies
Alamanack in relation to Kristeva and Cixous’ concept of écriture feminine as a way of
understanding Barnes corpus. In this sampling of texts we see how difficult it is to read Ladies
Alamanack on it’s own terms rather than how it relates to the people who inspired its characters.
86. Though Havelock Ellis’ commentary remains in contemporary times, it’s still the
heavily edited version; his full thoughts on Hall’s representation of inversion remain unavailable
to the reading public See Doan and Prosser’s “introduction: Critical Perspectives Past and
Present” in Palatable Poison.
87. The masculinity of Stephen’s shoulders are mentioned eight times in the novel; the
masculinity of her hips or “flanks” are mentioned six times, in conjunction with her shoulders
five of those six times.
88. See Doan and Garrity’s introduction to Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and
National Culture.
89. See the OED’s definitions of “grotesque.”
90. While in contemporary times, I would use the term “person with an intersex
condition,” hermaphrodite would be the term of the time in both French an English.
91. Pronoun usage can be difficult, as they shift depending on which persona Marion is
inhabiting within in the narrative. Whenever talking about them in general terms, I use the
gender neutral “they” as it’s the term du jour. Whenever referencing a particular moment or
quote, I use the pronoun that corresponds to the persona Marion is living at that moment in the
text.

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92. Though my analysis works between both French and English, I use the English
version because my audience is primarily Anglophone. Unless my analysis requires attention to
the French, all further original text will be cited in notes: Il a rêvé souvent que sa mère, ou plutôt
la bête aveugle qui agit en nous indépendamment de notre esprit, à dû, lorsqu’elle le portrait,
préméditer des jumeaux, car, depuis l’âge où l’humain entre dans l’angoisse de l’âme, son
instinct lui a fait sentir à ses côtés un mystérieux second lui-même. (7)
93. La fine dame aux yeux réticents, macérée dans la distinction et la raideur de sa race,
voulut elle-même, des berceau, soigner la créature souffreteuse qu’elle avait mise au monde. Elle
ne laissa jamais son enfant, même pour une minute, à des mains subalternes. On ne voit guère
cela chez les Anglo-Saxonnes, surtout de haute classe. (7)
94. Elle prononçait Mârionn ce nom anglais qui sert pour les deux sexes. (11)
95. Pas de chien. Pas de chat. Il n’avait pour ami que le Sozie non créé que l’obsédait et
lui manquait à la fois, démon familier d’un être inquiet et inquiétant (10). And later: Il avait
toujours été seul au monde. Amèrement il se mit en route pour la vie avec son double, son
étrange et néfaste double, —sa tare native. (19)
96. For a fascinating take on this moment from the perspective of a linguist, see the
“Hermaphroditic Discourse” section of the seventh chapter in Anna Livia’s Pronoun Envy:
Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender.
97. Laurette Wells is supposedly based on Natalie Clifford Barney.
98. Un peu avant d’arriver, elle prend dans son petit sac le tube de Vaseline qui lui sert à
retirer son fard. Ce travail fait, elle referme le sac l’enfouit dans la poche de son pardessus. A sa
porte, le taxi payé, trois étage sont à grimper. La maison ne monte pas plus haut. En passant, un

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coup d’œil à la loge de la concierge, située à l’entresol. Enfin la clé fouille la serrure. La voilà
chez elle.
La voilà chez lui. (37-38)
99. Alors, brusquement, Marion fonça.
—Je viens vous voir parce que… Vous croyez que c’est moi la bête curieuse. Eh bien! c’est la
contraire! . . . Vous m’intéressez parce que vous êtes des œufs clairs, vous savez, des œufs
stérile? J’ai du gout pour ça, c’est tout. Ça m’amuse de voir dans Paris des femmes qui font les
homes et des homes qui font les femme, parce que, les faux hermaphrodites, il n’y a rien pour
moi de plus rigolo sur la terre! (46)
100. See the second to last paragraph of The Well of Loneliness in which Stephen is
described as being possessed by spirits; “They possessed her. Her barren womb became
fruitful—it ached with its fearful and sterile burden” (437).
101. C’est donc parce que je suis deux qu’il me faut toujours être seul, ou seule.
Pourquoi, pourquoi ma mère n’a-t-elle pas suivi jusqu’au bout l’instinct de ses entrailles et n’a-telle pas fait de moi le garçon et la fille que j’aurais dû être? Comme nous nous serions aimés!
Télescopés l’un dans l’autre, nous somme trop pour un seul, ou plutôt nous ne somme rien... (88)
102. L’horreur sans nom de mon enfance était donc une histoire plus noire encore que
son souvenir dans mon âme, poison éternel. Mais pouvaient-ils, mes parents, agir autrement
qu’ils ne l’ont fait? . . . Ma naissance, qu’on ne m’a jamais racontée, naturellement, a dû être une
sorte de drame comme on n’en a jamais vu, ma déclaration à l’état civil un chef-d’œuvre de ruse,
mon baptême un lac de larmes ravalées.
Le génie de ma mère, je le reconnais trop tard. Je démêle quand il n’est plus temps l’amour, en
tout cas la pitié qu’elle eut pour moi. C’est elle qui trouva mon prénom à deux fins, comme elle

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trouva le moyen de me faire traverser les régions redoutable de l’enfance sans que rien fut révélé,
ni aux autres ni à moi-même, de ce qui lui faisait baisser les yeux de ce qui me mettait en marge
de l’humanité normale, me vouait implacablement et comme légitimement à l’infamie. (52)
103. Ray is only indirectly characterizing L’ange et les pervers by way of comparison to
Barney’s posthumously published Amants féminins ou la troisième.
104. Je suis maintenant certain que, lors de ma consternant venue au monde, mes deux
parents, chacun de leur côté, virent en moi le juste châtiment de leur Dieu respectif. Leurs deux
fanatismes durent s’exaspérer côte a côte avec leurs remords et leurs regrets. Outre mon
inconvenante infirmité, j’étais pour eux la forme même de la malédiction du ciel. (55-56)
105. Ma figure lisse de demoiselle, ma fragilité, cette voix qui ne parvenait pas à devenir
mâle et qui n’était plus femelle, ils avaient toutes les preuves; cependant, ils éprouvèrent le
besoin, à ma sortie de collège, de me faire examiner par un médecin. Celui-ci déclara, malgré
mon état-civil, qu’à tout prendre il était préférable de me cataloguer dans le sexe féminin. Je
n’oublierai jamais les paroles de ce médecin, prononcées sur un ton scientifique pire que tous les
quolibets de ma classe. « Vous comprenez, les pauvres sujets comme vous ont quelquefois la
chance d’avoir de la barbe. Mais il ne vous en poussera jamais, et ça finira pas donner l’éveil.
Alors il vaut mieux vous connaît encore dans le monde. Au point de vue de la loi, des cas comme
le vôtre se sont déjà présentés. Il sera facile de faire rectifier au moment du Conseil de révision.
(61)
106. J’ai eu la chance, dans mon malheur de naître à l’époque de la confusion des sexes.
Comment-ferais-je actuellement si les mœurs et les modes ne m’aidaient constamment à passer
d’une personnalité dans l’autre sans que nul le remarque, même les conciergeries de mes deux
logis ? (64)

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107.— Pour se faire jouer à Paris, du moins aux Planches modernes, quand on n’a pas
encore de nom, il faut deux choses. Les avez-vous?
— Quelles choses ? . . .
— De l’argent et une putain. . . .
— Il ne faut plus attacher au mot jouer le sens qu’y attachement nos honnêtes prédécesseurs. Le
théâtre d’aujourd’hui, comprenez-vous, — sauf, bien entendu, l’exception qui confirme la règle,
— C’est une succursale de la Bourse. Quand on veut du tant pour cent, il faut d’abord avoir fait
un placement, n’est pas ?
— Vous voulez me faire croire que moi, auteur, je dois apporter autre chose que ma pièce ?
— A moins que vous ne collaboriez avec un nom connu, qui prendra toute la gloire pour lui sans
avoir écrit un mot, bien entendu,... si vous avez la veine que votre nom ne tombe pas en route !
C’est a prendre ou à laisser. Combine, monsieur, combine ! C’est la devise de notre époque dans
tous les domaines. (77, 79)
108. Dans divers carnavals en costumes modernes, on voit roder, qui ne participe jamais
à rien, la silhouette équivoque d’un personage à deux face : . . . (147).
109. The first end note from the fifteenth and final chapter reads: in French, Marion asks
“Voulez-vous me le donner?” “Le” is the direct object prounon which is marked for gender (the
object is grammatically masculine) but provides no information with to regard to animacy, i.e.
the hearer cannon tell whether a human being or a thin g is being referred to. Laurette therefore
assumes that Marion is looking for some grammatically masculine object, the comb (le peigne
perhaps” (222).
110. Laurette était contre elle, la tenant serrée sur sa pointrine, un houppe à poudre
encore dans la main. La musique, en bas, se tut. —Marion ! Marion ! Je vous en prie, ne

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sanglotez pas comme ça ! Je ne sais pas qui vous êtes, moi ! Je ne connais pas votre ve...
Pourquoi ce que vous venez de dire ?... Ce petit garçon... Avez-vous eu un enfant... que vous
avez perdu ? Non ?... Pardonnez-moi... Je ne dis forcement que des bêtises... C’est la première
fois que vous êtes humain devant moi... Je vous aime tant ! (215)
111. La joie, je puis lui sacrifier mon orgueil de garçon. Mon amour maternel sera
toujours un peu male, forcement, mais quand on tient un enfant par le main, c’est un orgueil
aussi d’être une femme. Il me croira sa mère, et cela va me donner un sexe. … Je serai son père
et sa mère en une seule personne... J’ai donc raison d’être deux. … Courbée sur sa proie, Mlle de
Valdeclare enseigna, frémissante, en s’efforçant d’adoucir son organe sombré dans la mue
éternelle : — Maintenant, mon amour, il ne faut plus dire dadame. Il faut dire maman. (218-199,
221)
112. Though not an extensive examination of the novel, Chelsea Ray draws a similar
conclusion, writing, “By portraying gender as a performance, Delarue-Mardrus exposes it as a
social construction: Marion can switch genders in the course of a taxi ride. But the tension
Marion feels, and her eventual desire to make a definitive choice, suggests that a position inbetween genders cannot remain stable and viable for the long term, especially owing to Marion's
isolation and his/her desire for recognition as a writer. . . . So Delarue-Mardrus's novel, far from
portraying any kind of facile liberation from gender, illustrates how the strict binarism of
masculine and feminine limits human development, in this instance, in the extreme
circumstances of life as a hermaphrodite.” (96)
113. Je n’ai pas le droit, de quel côté que j’aime, de n’être pas une créature invertie. . . .
Chaque fois que je penserai Amour, il me sera répondu : Vice. Et parce qu’à quinze ans j’ai

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malgré moi fait toutes les expériences que comportait l’affreux jumelage de mon corps, l’illusion
m’a été ôtée avant le temps, et jamais vice ne voudra pour moi dire amour.
Alors pourquoi, sans sexe défini, suis-je né avec un cœur si précis? (59-60)
114. In the English version, “basilique” is translated as “basilisk” three times (173, 174,
190).
115. Emphasis mine. This sentence is tricky, but translates roughly to, “And because, at
fifteen years of age, I have, despite myself, made all the experiments involved in the frightful
twinning of my body, illusion has been taken away from before I was born, and never would vice
for me say love.”
116. This list of novels, in different formations and number, appears in several places. A
complete list can be found in the “Natalie Clifford Barney” entry of Terry Castle’s epic
anthology, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, page
605.
117. In the “Lucie Delarus-Mardrus” chapter of George Wickes’ The Amazon of Letters:
The life and Loves of Natalie Barney, Wickes writes at length about Delarus-Mardrus’ fictional
portrayal of Barney as Laurette Wells in L’ange et les pervers.
118. Louis F. Kannenstine calls Ladies Almanack a novel in the “Ryder and Ladies
Almanack” chapter of The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation, though of it he asserts
that it puts the genre “to the test” (34). Similarly, James B. Scott calls it a “‘novel’”; his use of
quotation marks indicates, like Kannentine, that its form makes it difficult to call Ladies
Almanack a novel.
119. See the “Natalie Clifford Barney” entry in Women Writers of Great Britain and
Europe: An Encyclopedia.

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120. Elizabeth English’s recently published Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality,
and Genre Fiction is a notable exception, offering a wonderful reading of The One Who is
Legion’s play with generic conventions of the novel in her second chapter, “‘Ghost Desire’: The
Lesbian Occult and Natalie Clifford Barney’s The One Who is Legion; her chapter focuses on the
relationship The One Who is Legion has with the literature of the occult. Prior to that, Darcie D.
Rives investigates the novel in terms of its relationship to “sexual-medical discourses of the early
century” in the fourth chapter of her 2006 dissertation, Fantastic Writing, Real Lives: Gender,
Race, and Sexuality in Early Twentieth-Century American Women’s Speculative Fiction. (174)
121. For example, Terry Castle’s anthology The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical
Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall doesn’t even mention it, either as one of her works, or in
further reading about Barney.
122. English characterizes it as “rarely discussed” (61).
123. It’s interesting to note that, in the 1987 reprint, Brooks’ two images occur in places
different than the first edition: the first is next to the publication page, the second before the table
of contents. In the original, the first appears on page 8 and the second on page 72. They do not
appear to coincide with the story, in terms of their placement, so perhaps this is why they were
moved. However, the first image may anticipate the fall of the celestial being to the graveyard.
Regardless on the impact on the narrative, the change in location does change the experience of
the novel for contemporary audiences in ways no one can predict.
124. English remarks that in general, Barney’s “work is infused by a fascination with
bygone French literary traditions and styles of decadence and symbolism, as well as an interest in
the life and work of the Lesbian poet Sappho, thus making for

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125. Sashi Nair’s Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism: Reading Romans à Clef Between the
Wars offers a great (if implicit) counter argument to Roof by talking about lesbian novels’
multiple levels of address to different audiences, suggesting again, that readers more than
narratives are responsible for the reinscription of heteronormativity. We may also turn to such
works as “Seeing Black Women Anew Through Lesbian Desire in Nella Larsen’s Passing” or
Barbara Smith’s “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” that “read against the grain” to see
lesbian subtext in otherwise heteronormative novels.
126. Under the Journalism section of her personal website, Winterson writes, “I have a
novel written by Natalie Barney – The One Who is Legion, and inscribed in her hand, July 1936,
‘To my angel Romaine, illustrated by the two pictures of hers, which more clearly than my
words, define this (and our) double-being!”
127. For an excellent description of the history of Afrekete and her place in Lorde’s
work, see Kara Provost’s “Becoming Afrekete: The Trickster in the work of Audre Lorde.”
128. See his “memoir-fiction” and “autobiograficiton” entries in The Oxford Dictionary
of Literary Terms.
129. See his “Fourth Essay” from Anatomy of Criticism.
130. See, for example, Zing Tsjeng’s “Teens These Days Are Queer AF, New Study
Says”; Christina Cauterucci’s “For Many Women, Lesbian offers a Fraught Inheritance”; and
Sarah Karlan’s “Young People More Likely To Be Openly LBGT, But They’re Leaving
Traditional Labels Behind” which cites GLAAD’s third annual “Accelerating Acceptance”
report.

192

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