The Outside Thing

Modernist Lesbian Romance

Hannah Roche

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231547697
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In a lecture delivered before Oxford University's Anglo-French Society in 1936, Gertrude Stein described romance as "the outside thing, that... is always a thing to be felt inside." Hannah Roche takes Stein's definition as a principle for the reinterpretation of three major modern lesbian writers, showing how literary and affective romance played a crucial yet overlooked role in the works of Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. The Outside Thing offers original readings of both canonical and peripheral texts, including Stein's first novel Q.E.D. or Things As They Are, Hall's Adam's Breed and The Well of Loneliness, and Barnes's early writing alongside Nightwood.

Is there an inside space for lesbian writing, or must it always seek refuge elsewhere? Crossing established lines of demarcation between the in and the out, the real and the romantic, and the Victorian and the modernist, The Outside Thing presents romance as a heterosexual plot upon which lesbian writers willfully set up camp. Writers boldly adopted and adapted the romance genre, Roche argues, as a means of staking a queer claim on a heteronormative institution. Refusing to submit or surrender to the "straight" traditions of the romance plot, they turned the rules to their advantage. Drawing upon extensive archival research, The Outside Thing is a significant rethinking of the interconnections between queer writing, lesbian living, and literary modernism.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE LESBIAN WRITER, OR “WE INSIDE US DO NOT CHANGE”

1. Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures in America [1935] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 167–68.

2. Jodie Medd, “Lesbian Literature: An Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, ed. Jodie Medd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1.

3. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 11; Jodie Medd, Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9; Susan Lanser, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 15.

4. Lanser, Sexuality of History, 15.

5. Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 274, 267.

6. Medd, “Lesbian Literature,” 2.

7. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” [1980], in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (London: Virago Press, 1987), 23–75; Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman” [1984], in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1991), 281–93.

8. Queer Modernism(s) II: Intersectional Identities, University of Oxford, April 12 and 13, 2018; 90 Years Since “The Well of Loneliness”: A Radclyffe Hall Symposium, Birkbeck, University of London, July 27, 2018.

9. Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013), 21.

10. Sharon Marcus, “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay,” Signs 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2005), 196.

11. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, “Introduction,” in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women, and National Culture, ed. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3.

12. “ ‘Sapphic’ as I use it is also meant to encompass ‘lesbian-like’ discourses and representations like those sometimes signaled by ‘romantic friendship’ that are plausibly if not provably sexual.” Lanser, Sexuality of History, 16.

13. Castle quotes from “Identity Crisis: Queer Politics in the Age of Possibilities,” Village Voice, June 30, 1992, 27.

14. Gloria Anzaldúa, “To[o] Queer the Writer—Loca, Escritora y Chicana” [1990], in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 163–64.

15. Madhavi Menon, Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 4, 127.

16. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21.

17. Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), xi. Doan is referring to her first book, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

18. Judith M. Bennett, “ ‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 1/2 (January–April 2000), 1–24; Traub, Thinking Sex, 85.

19. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 195.

20. Leonard Woolf, “The World of Books: The Well of Loneliness,” Nation and Athenaeum, August 4, 1928.

21. See chapter 6. Quoted in Cheryl J. Plumb, “Introduction,” in Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, ed. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), xviii.

22. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 95.

23. Carla Freccero, “The Queer Time of Lesbian Literature: History and Temporality,” in Medd, The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, 20.

24. Bennett, “Lesbian-Like,” 2.

25. See Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Tom Villis, British Catholics and Fascism: Religious Identity and Political Extremism Between the Wars (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 104; Erin G. Carlson, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).

26. Love, Feeling Backward, 21; Bennett, “Lesbian-Like,” 2.

27. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 12; Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009), 2.

28. Radclyffe Hall to Evguenia Souline, August 19, 1934, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (collection henceforth cited as HRC).

29. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct, A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. F. J. Rebman, 12th ed. (New York: Physicians and Surgeons Book Company, 1924), 398–99. The first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis was published in 1886; the twelfth edition was first translated into English in 1924.

30. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 399.

31. The Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph described Adam’s Breed as “her clever novel” on April 13, 1927. Quotations are taken from clippings from Minirva, September 4, 1927, and Houston Chronicle, May 8, 1927, in Hall and Troubridge’s scrapbook “Re: Adam’s Breed and awards, 1927–28” (HRC). Further quotations from newspapers in this introduction are taken...