Passionate Communities

Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule's Fiction

Marilyn R. Schuster

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781479807239
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of "writing and reading lesbian" that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture and of political and sexual subcultures.

From her earliest novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), Rule's fiction has provided a challenge to the concept of a fixed identity and to the identity politics founded on such a concept. Incorporating all of Jane Rule's early work-including unpublished manuscripts, letters, magazine and newspaper columns, as well as fan mail she received-Schuster also draws on interviews, conversations, and personal encounters with the author to elicit the ways in which Rule interrogates the meanings and politics of sexuality, the relationship between sexuality and language, and the stakes of communities in individual claims on identity.

Passionate Communities is a thorough, engaging, and long-overdue study of an important voice in lesbian literature and gay and lesbian politics.

ONE

Sailing to Galiano
Jane Rule at Home

Poetry and fiction can sometimes do what theory has not yet learned: to speak a language of desire where there had been only silence or denial. Adrienne Rich has taught this to us, as have Audre Lorde and Monique Wittig and many other lesbian writers who refused to be silenced long before the current wave of queer writing. Jane Rule’s fiction—and the ways it has been received and ignored—provides a rich ground for exploring the creation of a language of desire in a context of denial.

Born in New Jersey in 1931, Jane Rule matured as a woman and a writer in the decade following World War II. The postwar effort to restore order on the home front included a campaign to define healthy femininity as heterosexual, monogamous, reproductive, and domestic. At the same time, as Jennifer Terry and other queer theorists have amply demonstrated, homosexuality was intensely pathologized. Medical and psychological discourses categorized “homosexual” as sick and were joined by the politics of McCarthyism that marked “homosexual” as traitor. Kinsey was denounced in the early fifties for proposing a continuum of sexual practices and desire rather than an opposition between the healthy, reproductive heterosexual and the sick, sterile, degenerate homosexual.

Literary texts were bound up in the same models of deviance. The lesbian fiction available to Rule as a young writer, such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, seemed to marginalize lesbians as congenital inverts; or, like pulp fiction, it was formulaic, requiring “heterosexual recuperation” at the end (the lesbian loses “the girl” or is killed off, marriage and nature triumph over deviant desire); or it was highly coded, like Gertrude Stein’s work.

Jane Rule’s work provides a way for understanding the cultural work of fiction. We can see in her early work (published and unpublished) a writer at odds with a culture she nonetheless values and wants to engage. To borrow Marilyn Farwell’s phrase, Rule is caught up in heterosexual plots as she tries to create lesbian narratives. Her early struggles, often unsuccessful as finished texts, nonetheless enable her to devise strategies of resistance and subversion.

The reception of Rule’s work—especially as articulated in letters from readers—illustrates the cultural work of fiction in another way. Rule’s texts often create a special bond of reading between reader and writer. Who are these readers? How is that bond understood? Why have Rule’s fictions been so vital to some women (and some men as well)? Why do these narratives continue to be important to many readers? Read in the context of 1990s queer provocations in theory, literature, and film, Rule’s stories may seem understated. But along with increased queer visibility in recent years, there has been a return of pathologizing discourses that echo the medical and political languages of the fifties. Discourse about AIDS and religious and political campaigns to explain, contain, or excise queer sexualities in the body politic bear an uncanny resemblance to the languages about deviance in the 1950s. Rule’s strategies of resistance and subversion continue to be useful to a population at risk.

The Journey: Crossing Over

The journey to Jane Rule’s home cannot be rushed. To get to the ferry at Tsawwassen—a spit of land that separates Boundary Bay from the Strait of Georgia—requires three city buses from my temporary home on the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver. I tuck Inland Passage back into my bag as the bus pulls up to the ferry dock. On this sunny June day, foot passengers with backpacks and cars with camping equipment wait for the boat that will take them to the Gulf Islands for a holiday weekend. First stop, Galiano Island, where Jane Rule and Helen Sonthoff will meet me at the Sturdies Bay dock.

I’ve been traveling for much longer than the two hours on buses. Along with many other readers, I first met Jane in Lesbian Images, herself a reader of lesbian writers, holding her own story up to the stories available. In that book, as in her own fiction, Rule was charting new territory: reading as a writer, but also as a lesbian looking for stories that would help her map what it means for a woman to love women and to articulate that desire in language. Her readings of other lesbians in that book led me to her own writing, which had been unknown to me before. I turned to Desert of the Heart and then was given a worn photocopy of This Is Not for You, out of print but passed around from woman to woman—a silent community of readers finding, at last, stories to give shape and meaning to our lives. For nearly twenty years I’ve been meeting Jane in her books, then in letters, and once, two years ago, in person. This, my second sailing to Galiano, is a return to territory now more familiar. I’ve been living with her letters, college papers, unpublished stories, manuscripts, photographs, rejection notices, and, finally, reviews in dozens of boxes at the University of British Columbia archives.¹ She is the only company I’ve kept for two weeks. Moving back and forth in time, I try to piece together her childhood, her first loves, her persistence as publisher after publisher turn down Desert of the Heart.

As I returned to the late fifties in her papers, I asked myself the question I’d asked when I first read Desert of the Heart: How did this middle child of an American middle-class family become Canada’s most public literary lesbian? How did she find a way to write stories of lesbian lives that weren’t punishing or tortured—stories that echo Yeats (as in the title of her novel The Young in One Another’s Arms, taken from “Sailing to Byzantium”) and Pilgrim’s Progress (in the quest allusions of Desert of the Heart) more than Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness or pulp fiction? And how could it be that a writer so vitally important to readers throughout North America has been ignored by the professional arbiters of literary reputation—academics, literary critics, and now queer theorists?

Taking a seat by a window in the ferry, I wait for the horn to sound the beginning of the hour-long voyage through the Strait of Georgia. Strange waters, these: the border between Canada and the United States follows a quirky, jagged line between the Gulf Islands in British Columbia and the San Juan Islands in Washington state, with Canada as often to the south of the United States as to the north.

As the ferry pulls out of the dock I think about my first trip to Galiano two years ago, a vacation with Susan, partner in life and work, to celebrate the completion of book manuscripts about other women writers. The closer we got to the island, the more apprehensive we became. How much of Jane’s life entered her fiction directly? Would Helen, our mothers’ contemporary who graduated from Smith College years before either of us was born (and where we both now teach), turn out to be the model for Constance in Memory Board, lovable but without any short-term memory? I kept looking at a picture of Jane on the back of Contract with the World, taken when she was the age I was that summer; what would she look like now, twelve years my senior and suffering from arthritis of the lower spine that sometimes nearly cripples her? What a risk she and Helen had taken, we thought, to invite us in as houseguests for several days rather than take the ferry ride themselves to the city. Or, simply, they could have declined an invitation from strangers. Later, when we confessed these apprehensions over one of many glasses of Scotch, Helen said (in full command of her short-term memory), “It’s difficult for Jane to travel because of her arthritis, and we’ve found through experience that you can put up with almost anyone for two days.” A welcome and a warning that made us all laugh.

On that trip, we had driven off the ferry to follow the directions to their house. There is only one main road the length of Galiano. We drove through an Emily Carr landscape of fir trees and red-barked arbutus, with occasional glimpses of the water. Later we’d explore traces of Indian middens on the beaches of this tiny island where the past and present mingle, but no landfill, no Savings & Loan, no gas stations have brought the most visible signs of the late twentieth century. Without their careful directions we would have missed the house—a cedar cabin tucked into a hillside, modest and unassuming from the road, protecting the privacy of Helen’s flower garden and Jane’s pool.

They greeted us like old friends and, after settling into our room, we joined them for sherry before lunch. Gradually we discovered the signs of other presences—little drawings and paintings by Elizabeth “Hoppy” Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s niece, who had been their neighbor and whose grave they visit on walks to the sea. The Poseurs, a portrait of cats preening, hangs next to a painting of foot passengers in bright summer gear descending from the ferry at Sturdies Bay. Dozens of Indian baskets hang in the living room, traded for trout caught by Jane’s namesake great-grandmother, Jane Vance, in the Eel River in the Northern California redwoods early in this century.

We wondered when we made that journey—Susan a reader of American women poets—if Galiano were like Emily Dickinson’s room. Did the island shut out the world but open up the freedom to create? When Jane and Helen moved there permanently in 1976, Jane had imagined long stretches of uninterrupted time to write. She was forty-five and had published dozens of stories, three novels, and written most of a fourth, but she dismissed these as “apprenticeship novels” and looked forward to writing the works of her creative maturity. But even so, she didn’t ever close the door of that house to the outside world. Every afternoon in summer she invited all children, permanent residents and visitors alike, to swim in her pool while she kept watch. Every winter she and Helen would travel to family and warmer weather in California to ease her arthritis and keep the elaborate networks of their friendships and kinships alive. Island living, yes, but isolation, no. Once in Galiano, they took an active role in island life, acting as the “Bank of Galiano,” making loans so that neighbors could start businesses or buy houses. It was after moving to Galiano that Jane assumed her most public political voice, writing a column, “So’s Your Grandmother,” for The Body Politic, the gay liberationist newspaper in Toronto.

The freedom to write that moving to the island promised didn’t last, however. A short time after Jane and Helen moved to Galiano, Jane’s arthritis was diagnosed and started to worsen. Although she would write three more novels and publish three collections of stories and essays, Jane had constantly to choose between pain and writing: the pain killers prescribed for her illness blocked the concentration needed for writing. On that earlier visit, I was only vaguely aware of these circumstances. Jane’s hospitality and kindness require her to shield her guests from her own discomfort. As we sipped after-dinner Scotch one night, I asked what she was working on now. It had been three years since After the Fire and I was eager for her next book. “I’ve retired,” was the unequivocal answer; further discussion was not invited. Her decision, while clear, had not been easy.

The foreclosure of future texts made me want all the more to return to Rule’s early work. Crossing over to Galiano Island, I think about the twenty years that I’ve been reading Rule and about the ways I have learned to “read queerly.” What did it mean then, what does it mean now, to be a lesbian writer—or reader?

Reading Then, Reading Now

What it means to me now to be a lesbian reader is informed above all by feminist ways of reading. Reading “queerly” is inseparable in my practice from reading “as a woman.” Two maps for reading queerly have emerged for me in the last twenty years, each predicated on affinity and difference, identification and separation between the writer and the reader. The first is the model for feminist reading developed by Adrienne Rich in her foundational 1976 essay about Emily Dickinson, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” Traveling to Dickinson’s home at a century’s remove even as I am traveling to Rule’s home at a generation’s remove, Rich clearly stakes out the importance of recovering the cultural and geographic context of the woman writer and the equal importance of clarifying her own cultural location as reader. The affinities she senses with Dickinson as a poet writing against the expectations of her time and place are neither more nor less important than the differences that separate the two women, the two historical moments in which they think and write. Patricinio Schweickart returns to Rich’s essay in 1986 to propose a paradigm for feminist readings of women writers that Rich illustrates in her reading of Dickinson. Schweickart pays as much attention to the rhetorical strategies of Rich’s text as she does to its content, especially the use of a personal voice and Rich’s choice of images to articulate her relation to her subject.

Schweickart focuses on Rich’s organizing metaphors—of witness, travel, and “trying to connect”—arguing that the images delineate a process for feminist reading. “The first,” explains Schweickart, “is a judicial metaphor: the feminist reader speaks as a witness in defense of the woman writer” (“Reading Ourselves” 46). The second, a travel metaphor, points to the importance of uncovering the writer’s historical and cultural context. The third image—”an insect against the screens of an existence which inhabited Amherst, Massachusetts”—acknowledges that reader and writer are both separated and united by the text between them (47).

As I think about reading and rereading Rule, first as a stranger and then as someone I’ve gotten to know through texts and conversation, I think about our affinities and am reminded of our differences. As lesbians looking to literature to make sense of our lives, we came of age in different cultural contexts. Rule began her teaching career in the McCarthy years; pressure was exerted on schools to require faculty members to sign a loyalty oath that implicitly, if not explicitly, exacted allegiance to heterosexuality as well as to the American flag. In that climate, Rule left behind her United States citizenship and moved to Canada in 1956. Rule came of age as a writer at a time when Radclyffe Hall and Beebo Brinker were the most visible literary lesbians; in that literary context, Rule sought to map out new ways of writing lesbian desire.

Having come to adulthood and professional maturity in the post-Stonewall, queer-friendly decades of the seventies and eighties, I’ve been nourished not only by a political climate distinctly less hostile than the climate Jane left when she went to Vancouver, but I also have something she didn’t have—her fiction. And yet the assertions of queer pride in the nineties have not replaced the verbal and physical bashing of the fifties; they barely cover over the continuing fear and loathing of sexuality not contained by heterosexual reproduction. The rantings of McCarthy have been taken over by talk radio, and the repercussions, less public but no less real, are felt in the daily lives of gays and lesbians who may or may not see themselves represented in the already defunct politics of Queer Nation. The space between the rhetoric of talk radio and the rhetoric of queer power may be, precisely, the space occupied by much of Rule’s fiction and many of her readers. It is this space that I hope to explore in reading Rule: in part because she has been passed over by many other professional readers, but also because she has been important in an intensely private way to me and to many other readers.

As Schweickart says of Rich’s essay, a feminist reading of a woman writer weaves—but does not blend—”the context of writing and the context of reading” (54). I understand that to mean that the feminist reader does not appropriate a woman’s text or use it to authorize or validate her way of reading, but looks at the interaction of these different but mutually illuminating contexts, making clear her own stakes as she proposes an interpretation that accounts for the text she’s reading and, ideally, can be extended (tactfully) to other readings.

The model for feminist reading provided by Rich and analyzed by Schweickart is complemented in my mind by the bond of reading between women writers and readers that Shoshana Felman proposes in What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. Felman’s book brings together readings she had done over many years, primarily of texts by Balzac and Freud, but newly framed in her book by readings of texts by women—Woolf, Rich, de Beauvoir. Felman discovers her own presence in her earlier reading, her personal stakes in interpretation visible only in hindsight and illuminated by later reading of women writers. She explains that in her experience as a critic, “[f]eminism … is indeed for women, among other things, reading literature and theory with their own life—a life, however, that is not entirely in their conscious possession” (13). Her goal is to unsettle apparent certainties about autobiography and personal writing that have become commonplace in recent years. She asserts that “none of us, as women, has as yet, precisely, an autobiography” (14, emphasis hers). Positioned as “other” in language, women don’t have a story, but must become a story, through the bond of reading.

Felman is primarily concerned with sexual difference, what it means to be(come) a woman and to read as a woman, which for Felman means to read as a feminist. Her insights, however, translate very usefully to thinking about different sexualities. Felman, like Rich, is interested in reading practices, specific engagements with texts. She focuses on the negotiation that constitutes the subjectivity of both the writer and the reader, an act of newly gendered reading that extends deconstructionist methods. She argues that the unconscious, unavailable at the time of writing, can be discovered later, through the act of reading. She looks at what it means to assume one’s sexual difference in the act of reading: “assuming, that is, not the false security of an ‘identity’ … but the very insecurity of a differential movement, which no ideology can fix and of which no institutional affiliation can redeem the radical anxiety, in the performance of an act that constantly—deliberately or unwittingly enacts our difference yet finally escapes our own control” (10).

The potential implications of Felman’s effort to read sexual difference for specifically lesbian writers and readers become clearer as she turns to Simone de Beauvoir’s reading of herself as a feminist writer. Felman cites an interview conducted by de Beauvoir with Jean-Paul Sartre three decades after de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex. Sartre misreads de Beauvoir by telling her: “You became a feminist in writing this book.” De Beauvoir counters by saying, “But I became a feminist especially after the book was read, and started to exist for other women” (11). The book, Felman argues, is the site for a negotiation through which both the writer and the readers constitute themselves. Felman says that “feminism comes to be defined here almost inadvertently as a bond of reading” (12). “The bond of reading,” argues Felman, “constitutes a renewed relation to one’s gender” through a relay of “becomings.” “Becoming a feminist is undertaking to investigate what it means to be a woman and discovering that one is not a woman but rather becomes (somewhat interminably) a woman; discovering, through others’ reading and through the way in which other women are addressed by one’s own writing, that one is not born a woman, one has become … a woman” (12, emphasis hers).

If one were to substitute “lesbian” for “woman” in the above passage, the allied projects of writing and reading queerly can be seen to participate in a similar bond of writer and reader, made possible, but not wholly contained by, the text. When resituated in the cultural context of North America from the late fifties through the eighties, the bond of reading enabled by a writer who becomes a lesbian in her fiction and, more importantly, through the ways her fictions are read, can be understood as doubly confirming—confirming the legibility of sexual difference and of different sexuality. Multiple bonds of reading in which difference is confirmed and conferred can be seen in readings of African American women writers and by other groups read as other or as different by the (falsely) unified white, masculine, heterosexual mainstream.

I know from letters I’ve seen in the archives, written to Rule over ...