Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives

Marilyn Farwell

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780814728031
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria su temi LGBT

What is lesbian literature? Must it contain overtly lesbian characters, and portray them in a positive light? Must the author be overtly (or covertly) lesbian? Does there have to be a lesbian theme and must it be politically acceptable?

Marilyn Farwell here examines the work of such writers as Adrienne Rich, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Jeanette Winterson, Gloria Naylor, and Marilyn Hacker to address these questions. Dividing their writings into two genres--the romantic story and the heroic, or quest, story, Farwell addresses some of the most problematic issues at the intersection of literature, sex, gender, and postmodernism.

Illustrating how the generational conflict between the lesbian- feminists of twenty years ago and the queer theorists of today stokes the critical fires of contemporary lesbian and literary theory, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives concludes by arguing for a broad and generous definition of lesbian writing.

• ONE •

When Is a Lesbian Narrative a Lesbian Narrative?

Precisely because it is motivated by a yearning for that
which is, in a cultural sense, implausible—the subver-
sion of male homosocial desire—lesbian fiction charac-
teristically exhibits, even as it masquerades as “realis-
tic” in surface detail, a strongly fantastical, allegorical,
or utopian tendency.

—Terry Castle,
The Apparitional Lesbian

The Well, published in the same year as Orlando... is,
like Orlando, a “lesbian novel.“

—Marjorie Garber,
Vested Interests

As a not-so-closeted lover of opera, I sometimes imagine what a lesbian opera might look like. The prospects are dim. Nineteenth-century romantic opera celebrates excessively and ecstatically heterosexual romance in a way that tests one’s feminist let alone one’s lesbian politics. Woman is both the object of adulation and of erasure in this strange art form that idealizes Maria Callas’s ability to sing triumphantly about the victimization of Lucia di Lammermoor. As a feminist critic, I know that opera is about a plot and that the Western plot is male and heterosexual. In a book about opera libretti, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, the French feminist Catherine Clément warns of the danger of such stories when coupled with beguiling music: “The music makes one forget the plot, but the plot sets traps for the imaginary” (10). Like Hélène Cixous, her partner in other theoretical writings, Clément sees safety in the space of alterities, in sorceresses, “madmen, Negroes, jesters” (119); only in those spaces can “women win” (130). While this French feminist reading rescues some opera plots, the maternal subtext that writers like Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva identify is not synonymous with a lesbian plot or subplot. Nor can I find solace in the music if I believe feminist musicologist Susan McClary, for music itself partakes of narrative and is subject to traditional plot structure. McClary warns that Western music operates according to “narrative demands of tonality” (14) in which the main theme or key is pitted against a subtheme, usually in a minor key. Using Teresa de Lauretis’s feminist theories of narrative, McClary identifies this struggle as a battle between male and female elements (14—15). It is no wonder, then, that Carmen is given those slithering chromatics and that the whole opera ends on an improbable chord of resolution (54—67). Nor is it strange that the love story of Tristan und Isolde is told in five hours of unrelenting chromaticism and one moment of mystical, sexual, and tonal resolution. For one seeking a lesbian opera, then, there is no escape from the narrative institution which posits subjectivity for the male and marginality for the female in a heterosexual relationship that assures his triumph, usually over her dead body. I would have to conclude, then, that opera doubly inscribes the Western narrative as unleashed heterosexuality and anti-feminism. It would seem to leave the lesbian opera fanatic in alien territory.

At the same time, opera is often considered the province of gay male culture. Wayne Koestenbaum’s recent book, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, breaks open the operatic closet with a postmodern, impressionistic reverie on gay culture’s love of the opera’s camp and of the feminine, especially of opera divas. Koestenbaum ostensibly includes lesbians in his construction of gay culture, but his primary concern is to articulate the affinity gay males have for opera through the congruence of the “flamboyant, narcissistic, self-divided, grandiose, excessive” (85) elements of gay male culture and of an elaborate nineteenth-century art form kept anachronistically alive in the late twentieth century. If we add to Koestenbaum’s perceptions Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory (using René Girard) that male bonding is at the core of many heterosexual stories, even when the male-male connection is antagonistic (Between Men 21), then those rivalries between the tenor and the baritone are not about a Lucia or a Leonora, but about themselves. I must, then, conclude that opera plots are either a heterosexual institution which represents the ecstatic and transcendental union of opposites or a gay male province which plays to male bonding and sometimes, as in the case of Benjamin Britten’s operas, to male homosexuality. My search for a lesbian opera seems doomed.

In an effort to find a lesbian opera, I often resort to redefinition, and because I have been a feminist and lesbian critic for twenty years, I am practiced at rereading and rewriting texts. I search for whatever or, more likely, whoever can be identified as lesbian. The one lesbian character of which I am aware, the Countess Geschwitz in Alban Berg’s Lulu, is intriguing because she is the only loving figure in an otherwise selfish, self-centered world of men trying to win sexual favors from the aloof and self-absorbed “femme fatale,” Lulu. But most often operas offer no literal lesbian characters. Then I resort to the ambiguity, intended or otherwise, inherent in one of opera’s quaint traditions: the trouser role. These are male parts—usually young boys on the verge of manhood— sung by mezzo-sopranos. For instance, in the first scene in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, the young nobleman, Octavian, and the female lead, the Marschallin, are found in most contemporary productions embracing in bed as the curtain rises to explicitly sexual music in the orchestra. Octavian is a trouser role. In a wonderful twist of fate, the eighteenth-century male roles created for the castrati—originally men with surgically induced treble voices, often alto, employed by a church that excluded women from participating in its ritual—are now played by women. Other operas intentionally assign the part of a young man to a lower-voiced woman. Famous male lovers such as Orfeo in Gliick’s Orfeo ed Eurydice and Romeo in Bellini’s |Capuletti ed i Montecchi have been played by mezzos like Janet Baker, Marilyn Home, or, my favorite, the late Tatiana Troyanos, making the lovers, under their costumes, two women. Terry Castle coins the term “gynophilia: exaltation in the presence of the feminine” (230) to describe the lesbian potential in this situation. At other times, I rely on Adrienne Rich’s well-known metaphor of lesbian as the “primary intensity” between two women ("Compulsory” 648) in order to secure my chances of finding a lesbian opera. Bellini’s Norma contains such potential. The two Druid priestesses, Norma and Adalgisa, sing a duet of reconciliation in the second act that appears to position them as lovers rather than rivals. Marilyn Home’s and Joan Sutherland’s memorable characters embraced in a way that confirms this reading. Although this situation lasts for only a moment, it is a satisfying one. 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 problems. Identifiable lesbian characters, themes, and authors inhabit much of the twentieth-century literary landscape. In fact, a comparison of operas of the nineteenth century and lesbian literary narratives of the twentieth century might be called a comparison of apples and oranges. But several points of intersection are significant. Both areas—opera and literature—rely on a system of narrative meaning informed by the same gender and sexual ideology, an ideology that discourages, subverts, and buries lesbian concerns. 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.

Understandably, then, literary critics offer a variety of possibilities, some contradictory, for the definition of lesbian narrative. Marjorie Garber’s distrust of any definition is apparent not when she connects two different novels as lesbian, The Well of Loneliness and Orlando, a common juxtaposition, but when she encloses the genre in the ubiquitous, ironic postmodern quotation marks (135). For literary criticism, a lesbian narrative is a problematic category because it involves two contested terms: lesbian and narrative. What would, on the surface, appear to be a simple issue—a lesbian narrative is a story about women who are sexually attracted to other women—has become over the last twenty-five years a complex theoretical problem dividing current literary critics and theorists, pitting anti-essentialists against essentialists, pronarrative against anti-narrative factions, and political lesbian-feminists from the 1970s and their descendants against queer theorists of the 1990s. In this atmosphere, the word “lesbian” remains an elusive term that, as noted over ten years ago, is “plagued with the problem of definition” (Zimmerman, “What” 456) and more recently has been called the “hub of conflicting intellectual and ideological interpretations” (Palmer, “Contemporary” 60). After the explosion of narrative theory in the last half of this century, theorists also debate the relative worth of popular, realistic narrative structures versus the more avantgarde, postmodern narratives. Traditional lesbian theory treats the lesbian narrative as a text determined by the shared experience among identifiably lesbian authors, readers, and characters and treats narrative itself as a relatively neutral tool into which lesbians can be written; postmodernism treats lesbian as a fluid and unstable term and the narrative as a powerful if not closed ideological system into which lesbians enter only to be entangled in a heterosexual, male story. Traditional lesbian theory validates traditional narrative structures like quest stories and detective fiction as potentially lesbian; postmodernist theory valorizes only the nonlinear disruption of the “master plot.” The definition of a lesbian narrative is caught in the crossfire of these contending theories, leaving, for example, a film like Desert Hearts, based on Jane Rule’s novel Desert of the Heart, an exciting lesbian story under one set of rules and inadequate, and therefore not really lesbian, under another. Perhaps for this reason or in spite of it, Terry Castle calls lesbian fiction “somewhat undertheorized” (67).

One reason for this claim is that contemporary criticism and theory have treated the lesbian narrative as a marginal form. Earlier critical interests steered away from lesbian fiction because, in the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian fiction was equated with popular novels, a form that seemed to lack literary depth. Instead, lesbian theory doted on the fine lesbian poets of the time, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Olga Broumas, and Judy Grahn, among many others. In the mid-1980s, studies of women’s fiction became central to feminist criticism, but in recent reviews of critical studies of women’s fiction, both Ellen Cronan Rose (373) and Carolyn Allen ("Review” 233) note that these studies offer less than substantial attention to lesbian narratives. Recently, studies of gay male literary themes dominate much of the theorizing about homosexuality and literature, notably in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s and Jonathan Dollimore’s work. In fact, the new emphasis on gay and lesbian studies downplays the specificity of lesbian theory and literature in favor of an inclusive queer theory. This inclusivity is often illusory. In a recent article in PMLA, Gregory W. Bredbeck identifies homosexual theory as a complement to feminism: “Feminism, one might say, has launched a first-strike frontal assault on the privileging of the phallus. Homosexual semiotic theory can bolster the battle through a subsequent attack from the rear (every pun intended)” (269). But because this “homosexual semiotic theory” relies exclusively on male imagery, lesbian theory is absent. At the same time, queer theory privileges drama as a genre because poststructuralism puts a premium on performance as a means of highlighting the artificiality of essentialist categories like gender. In this current climate, lesbian literary narratives are again marginalized. As the generational and theoretical gaps grow wider, the need for critical and theoretical attention to the lesbian narrative grows stronger.

The definition of a lesbian narrative, however, has always been in crisis, for unlike other minority literatures, lesbian texts reflect the ability and need of some writers and readers to disguise their sexual identity in order to pass as heterosexual. Furthermore, lesbian writers have not written exclusively on lesbian topics nor straight authors on straight themes. While the parameters of the current debate are unique, they are related to a simple but problematic question that has plagued lesbian literary criticism: where is the “lesbian” in the lesbian narrative? The practical questions are endless once that first question is asked. For instance, must the characters be overtly lesbian? Must the author be overtly or covertly lesbian? Must both be true at the same time? Must there be a lesbian theme and must it be politically acceptable? Must the characters or theme be positive instead of negative? Is, for instance, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando a lesbian novel when the main character is never identified as lesbian, unlike Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness? Sherron Knopp uncovers the lesbian relationship between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West that motivates Orlando (” ‘If I Saw You’ “), but does that context constitute the text as lesbian? Does the mere existence or even the centrality of lesbian characters determine that the novel is lesbian when, perhaps, the author is not? How explicit must a text be to be considered lesbian? Alice Walker created one of the most powerful lesbian situations in contemporary fiction in The Color Purple without using the word “lesbian. “

Because some African-American critics object to calling this book lesbian, the recent PMLA essay on the lesbian elements in Walker’s novel emerges as revolutionary (Abbandonato 1108). Is it possible to produce a definition of a lesbian narrative that cuts across racial, class, or cultural differences? On the other hand, what if the writer is lesbian, has written a significant lesbian novel, and chooses to write a book with indirect rather than direct references to lesbian issues? Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body are such books. What if neither the author nor the story is identifiably or literally lesbian? The recent Penguin collection of lesbian short stories includes Isak Dinesen’s “The Blank Page,” a story not overtly lesbian. The editor, Margaret Reynolds, claims that the story’s “real unwritten history is that belonging to lesbians” (xx) because, as she declares of the lesbian implications of A Room of One’s Own, “It’s not explicit. But it’s there” (xxii). Although she does not include Dinesen’s story in her recent anthology of lesbian literature since the seventeenth century, Lillian Faderman is confronted with a similar issue. Faderman must label as “lesbian,” literature that predates notions of sexual identity and that, like Emily Dickinson’s and Christina Rossetti’s poems, vaguely but provocatively hints of lesbian content and authorship. In order to include the variety of lesbian literature she finds in these four centuries, Faderman admits in her preface to an enlarged definition of the term “lesbian": “By dubbing such writers and characters ‘lesbian,’ I am employing the word most familiar to our era to signal content about female same-sex emotional and physical relationships” (ix). From these anthologies, then, we might ask if it is possible for a text to contain a lesbian theme without clearly identifiable lesbian characters or a lesbian author.

Because many lesbian writers have been closeted and silenced by a patriarchal system that coordinates its oppression of women and lesbians, the lesbian nature of their works is problematic. Because silence is not simply the space in language which women are accorded but also the lived experience of writers like Willa Cather and Elizabeth Bishop, is a critic justified in reading their works as coded lesbian texts? Is the use of codes acceptable or unacceptable? Is Bishop’s poetic distance a function of being a sexual outsider as Adrienne Rich argues (Blood 129)? Is there, as Sharon O’Brien suggests, a “lesbian subtext” in some of Gather’s fiction (593)? Other critics go further. In reading Ivy Compton-Burnett, Susan Crecy suggests that while her works cannot be read as “coded references or suggestive metaphors to evoke the sexuality which literary decorum decreed could not be openly expressed” (13), her writing is relevant for lesbian studies because of her nightmarish treatment of the heterosexual family (22). With these difficulties in mind, the reader might become the locus of the lesbian in the lesbian text. In fact, for some critics, the reader is the only locus of the lesbian text. From that perspective, Diana Collecott calls for a “revision of reading practices” (104), and Sally Munt, using Roland Barthes’ distinction between readerly and writerly, highlights the “lesbian culture’s ability to be so writerly” (xxi) because lesbian readers must rewrite texts, heterosexual or lesbian, as they read.

Employing codes enables critics to discount the need for either a lesbian writer or a literal lesbian character in determining whether a text is lesbian or not. The definition of lesbian in the works of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, and Olga Broumas became, in the 1970s, the theoretical center of a rich metaphor for the space every woman could occupy. These theories and some versions of French psychoanalytic feminism expand the definition of the lesbian subject; no longer only literal, it can be a metaphor for women’s primary relationships with one another and for a political stance a woman takes toward other women rather than, as the culture demands, toward men. Adrienne Rich’s notion of a “lesbian continuum” as the “primary intensity between and among women” ("Compulsory” 648) and Monique Wittig’s description of her intent in The Lesbian Body to “lesbianize the men and the women” (Straight 87) allow critics to suggest that the disruption of categories of gender, with or without lesbian authors or characters, constitutes a lesbian text. Barbara Smith’s well-known analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula claims that the novel is lesbian not because Nel and Sula are literally lesbians, which they are not, but because the novel challenges the primacy of heterosexual relationships (189). Can, then, a text like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon be interpreted from the perspective of the ambiguous lesbian relationship between the main character, Morgaine, and the priestess, Raven? While current queer theorists dismiss this version of lesbian as static and essentialist, the metaphoric lesbian enlarges the potential as well as the problems of reading certain narratives as lesbian.

But current theory entertains the most abstract and the most specific definitions of all. Marked by the relationship of the lesbian body/sexuality and textuality, this theoretical position privileges “a rebellious, subtle, raucous textuality” (Stimpson, “Afterword” 380). Is, then, a textual strategy identifiably lesbian? At times, this approach requires no literal lesbian anywhere in sight. Paulina Palmer, for example, concludes that a collection of short stories by Jennifer Gubb, which has no identifiable lesbian character and contains no lesbian eroticism, can “arguably be called a lesbian text” whereas a Fay Weldon novel with a lesbian narrator cannot be called lesbian because Gubb “gives the impression of writing from the margins” and Weldon does not ("Contemporary” 45-46). Before feminist thinking became enamored of continental theory, Bertha Harris, one of the earliest and least recognized lesbian writers of the current era, prefigured the modern emphasis on subversion when she claimed that “if in a woman writer’s work a sentence refuses to do what it is supposed to do” then we have “innately lesbian literature” (cited in Smith, “Toward” 175). These approaches eliminate the need for a lesbian subject, even broadly defined, as central to a lesbian text. On another level, Judith Roof and Elizabeth Meese ask whether it is possible to narrate lesbian in a plot system which is already overdetermined as male and heterosexual. Meese, in her stunning analysis of the possibility and impossibility of lesbian writing, calls lesbian, paradoxically, a category to end categorization ((Sem)Erotics 8). Judith Butler takes this thinking to its logical conclusion: “I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign [of lesbian] signifies” ("Imitation” 14).

Postmodernism, then, simultaneously enlarges and limits the possibilities for a lesbian narrative. Do these larger definitions of lesbian as metaphor or textuality disparage the “realistic” lesbian narratives that depict “real” lesbians, sometimes negatively, sometimes romantically? Does that redefinition of lesbian exclude the literature which lesbian women most often read and which common sense dictates is lesbian? Is Patience and Sarah absent from a list of lesbian literature because its romantic idealism does not exhibit a view “from the margins?” Does this position negatively affect a reading of Adrienne Rich’s poetic narrative, “Twenty-One Love Poems” (Dream)? Terry Castle’s provocative discussion of lesbian fiction as a counterplot to Sedgwick’s erotic triangle, however, turns these wider definitions around, claiming that lesbian fiction is best described, even when realistic, as “strongly fantastical, allegorical, or Utopian” (88). In her terms, lesbian fiction is identifiable and always noncanonical.

It is no wonder, then, that some readers despair over a definition of lesbian or a lesbian narrative and that others suggest the outrageous. The debates over the definition of lesbian led Sarah Lucia Hoagland, in Lesbian Ethics, to refuse to define lesbian because any circumscription, she argues, will be absorbed by the “context of heterosexualism” (8). Frann Michel proposes that Faulkner is a lesbian author because the relationship between “two feminines,” the feminized position of the writer and the work of art, which is coded as feminine, makes his writing “a lesbian act” (13) and, therefore, it would seem, his novels lesbian. Finally, Judith Roof declares that the problem resides in the question critics ask because as “part of the lure of identity, definition becomes a critical preoccupation” (167). This position firmly dismisses the earlier concerns with definition and red...