Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction

Towards a Queer Liminality

Amy Jeffrey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000594485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction offers an original and much-needed study of Irish Lesbian fiction. Evaluating a wide body of Irish lesbian fiction ranging from the Victorian era to the contemporary age, this book advocates for women writers who have been largely ignored in Irish literary history and criticism. This volume examines the use and applications of space in Irish lesbian fiction. In recent years, it can be argued that Irish society has created a new 'space' for LGBT or queer people. The concept of space is, thus, important both symbolically and physically for lesbian literature. In asking, if Irish women writers have moved 'out of the shadows' so to speak, what space is open to the Irish lesbian author? How is spatiality reflected in lesbian representation throughout Irish literary history? Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction examines a diverse range of writers from the nineteenth century to the contemporary age, evaluating the contributions of largely unknown authors who have been overlooked alongside more established voices within Irish literature. The concept of liminality that this volume takes as its theme and focus engage with notions of intersectionality, thresholds, crossings and transitions. In suggesting the overlap between the indeterminate threshold of the liminal space and its ambiguously queer potentiality to examine the dynamics of space and its relationship to lesbianism, this ground-breaking project both locates and charts spaces of queer liminality in Irish lesbian fiction.

1 Inversion and Queer Liminality in the Nineteenth Century

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176503-2

The homoerotic themes that run throughout Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story ‘Carmilla’ (1872) have commonly established the author as the creator of the first lesbian vampire in gothic literature, a trope that is now synonymous with the gothic genre. Often grouped alongside the heavyweight of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which succeeded ‘Carmilla’ by 25 years, Le Fanu’s reputation as an author of the supernatural throughout Britain and Ireland is well documented. Akin to many Victorian ghost stories, ‘Carmilla’ was first serialised in London-based literary journal The Dark Blue before its subsequent publication in the short story collection In a Glass Darkly. Le Fanu is referred to as ‘the father of the modern ghost story’ given the success of his gothic novels in Britain and Ireland; between 1845 and 1873, Le Fanu published 14 novels, of which Uncle Silas (1864) and The House by the Churchyard (1863) were well received in Ireland and England. That Le Fanu’s work is concerned with Irish nationality and the increasing sense of displacement experienced by the Anglo-Irish from the 1860s onwards is well documented, Jarlath Killeen notes the ‘now orthodox reading of Le Fanu as (the?) central figure in an “Irish gothic tradition” made up primarily of Irish Protestants’ (“Irish” 101) has long dominated Le Fanu criticism. As is common in criticism of gothic literature whereby the fear, or monster, is representative of a larger social/political issue, many of these scholars hold that the homoerotic themes in Carmilla ultimately represent something other than homosexuality. Robert Tracy, for example, states that in ‘Carmilla’ ‘these anxieties are neither supernatural nor primarily sexual … they are primarily social and political, aroused as the Catholic Irish began to assert themselves, especially in terms of the central issue of nineteenth century Ireland, the ownership of land’ (xix–xx). Since the late 1980s, however, homoerotic readings of Le Fanu have been proposed, in line with growing liberalism towards homosexuality both in society and in the academy. Earlier critics of Le Fanu have been wary to apply the term lesbian to ‘Carmilla’; for example, in 1965, critic Peter Penzoldt wrote that ‘it is doubtful if Le Fanu knew the true nature of what he was describing’ (75). In contemporary scholarship lesbian readings of ‘Carmilla’ are not unusual; there is a vast body of scholarship that reads Le Fanu’s text in light of female sexuality and its opposition to Victorian moral codes. Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995) goes as far as to cite Carmilla as ‘one of the few self-accepting homosexuals in Victorian or any literature’ (41). ‘Carmilla’ is also included in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014).

George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886) is commonly read in association with ‘Carmilla’ as both works emphasise the otherness of the lesbian; they are presented as demonic, monstrous and, to quote Moore, ‘scarcely sane’ (Muslin 3). No stranger to controversy in his lifetime, Moore’s works were repeatedly banned due to the sexual licentiousness of his female characters. A Modern Lover (1883) and A Mummer’s Wife (1884) were both removed from circulating libraries, prompting Moore to write a pamphlet titled Literature at Nurse (1885), his attack on moralism and imposed censorship of Victorian circulating libraries. Biographies of Moore long stress the influence of French naturalist authors such as Émile Zola on Moore’s work, yet it is still somewhat surprising that more recent critical work on Moore focusing on LGBTQ aspects has not been produced considering that his corpus does include a vast array of homosexual and gender-fluid characters. In 1895, he published his first short story collection, Celibates, which dealt with themes such as repressed homosexuality and transvestism. Novella The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1918) also explored the life of a cross-dressing woman in Victorian Dublin. As such, this chapter adds to existing scholarship on Moore, examining his third published novel A Drama in Muslin (1886), offering a reading of the text which contends that Terry Castle’s descriptions of the spectrality of the ‘apparitional lesbian’ is applicable to his descriptions of the nineteenth-century lesbian. This chapter further explores how lesbian character exists in spaces that are associated with liminality, such as convents and attics, spaces which illustrate how the lesbian is an obscure figure in nineteenth-century Irish literature. This chapter begins with an examination of Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ from the short story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) in light of how lesbianism was medicalised in the nineteenth century. Le Fanu’s construction of female desire and transgression occur in the same spatial constructs that leading sexologists such as Havelock Ellis argued would engender what would today be termed lesbianism. I offer a new reading, which contends that ‘Carmilla’ is an interesting case study on the pathologisation of the lesbian body. Through an examination of liminal spaces in ‘Carmilla’, Le Fanu illustrates the spaces where the lesbian body can go, the spaces in which lesbian bodies were said to ‘infect’ other bodies and socially deemed appropriate spaces for the ‘normal’ heterosexual woman. I also briefly examine George Moore’s third novel, A Drama in Muslin (1886), offering a reading of the text that analyses Cecilia Cullen in the context of nineteenth-century pathology.

Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Nineteenth-Century Sexology

Sexology is the scientific interest in human sexuality and it grew in prominence during the nineteenth century. During this period, sexologists codified certain sexual behaviours as perversions and devised criteria to demarcate the normal from the pathological. According to Chris Waters, ‘it was the era in which the terminology of sexual life we have inherited was formulated’ (45). ‘Sexual Perversion’ in its first usage referred to sexual practices that were non-reproductive and not necessarily homosexual. However, over time ‘perversion’ became a cachet phrase for homosexuality and other taboo sexual acts such as masturbation and sadomasochism, amongst others. These acts were listed as perversions in German psychiatrist Richard von Kraft-Ebing’s seminal Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Véronique Mottier explains that:

Charles Gilbert Chaddock, translator of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, is thus credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with having introduced the word ‘homosexuality’ into the English language in 1892, a year after a medical publication had introduced the term into French.

(38)

Although sexologists’ opinions varied, sexology, in general, pathologised non-heterosexual and non-reproductive sexual acts as perversions that were caused by an abnormal biological instinct. This helped to create a system where heterosexuality was the normative biological expression of ‘normal’ healthy people. Psychopathia Sexualis was a collaborative casebook which brought together leading sexologists from across Europe, including the Germans Karl Westphal and Iwan Bloch, the Swiss Auguste-Henri Forel and the English Havelock Ellis.

The Oxford English Dictionary reports an early use of the term ‘lesbian’ in a 1732 epic, William King’s The Toast, An Epic Poem (OED) with its intention being ‘to satirise Lady Frances Brudenell, duchess of Newburgh, who is said to have presided over a circle of lesbians in Dublin in the early eighteenth century’ (Lacey 184), but the term is more commonly associated with the late nineteenth century. In Britain, lesbians were omitted from the Labouchère Amendment of 1885, which outlawed homosexuality, which was defined as committing acts of ‘gross indecency with male persons’. Such an omission reflected a general widespread belief that women were uninterested in sexual behaviour, or lesbianism was not as detrimental to society as male homosexuality. Many of the leading sexologists believed that a woman’s sexual drive was established insofar as it was associated with a maternal drive for reproduction. Women who exhibited excessive sexual urges were often classified as hysteric, which was a ‘nervous disorder thought to be caused by insufficient sexual satisfaction of excessively passionate women’ (Mottier 35). Several clinics opened throughout the UK which sought to cure hysteria amongst women. Homosexual men and women were considered to be biologically separate types of individuals from heterosexuals, with specific personality traits, clothes and bodies (Mottier 39). At its time, sexual inversion was a pioneering theory which basically stated that homosexuals were inverted men or women born into the incorrect gender. Sexual Inversion (1897) by English psychiatrist Havelock Ellis was banned as an obscene publication in Britain in 1898. The original text of Sexual Inversion (1897) started as a collaboration between the classicist, poet, travel writer and literary critic John Addington Symonds and the medical writer and sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis. Following Symonds’ death, his family requested copies to be destroyed. The original text was republished and adapted in the multi-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which attributed Havelock Ellis as the sole author.

The term ‘invert’ was interchangeable with sapphist or lesbian throughout medical literature, although the term was also widely associated with gay men. Inversion theory has played a major role in how lesbians were classified during the nineteenth century. Ellis argued that sexual inversion in women falls into two categories: the inborn and the pseudohomosexual. The inborn or ‘true’ invert was a woman who was congenitally predisposed to homosexuality, whereas, the pseudohomosexual was a woman who, under the correct conditions, could be lured into homosexuality. The term ‘invert’ was widely adopted in the following decades since its initial usage by sexologists. Steven Gordon, the central protagonist in Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, is termed an invert throughout the text and the first edition of the novel included a foreword written by Havelock Ellis. A pseudohomosexual could resist progression to becoming a homosexual by engaging in heterosexual pursuits such as marriage and motherhood. As stated in Sexual Inversion, ‘in the girl who is congenitally predisposed to homosexuality it will continue and develop; in the majority it will be forgotten, not without shame, in the presence of the normal object of sexual love’ (216).

A legacy of the work of the sexologists was that they often linked female inversion to non-adherence to traditional gender roles in women. Havelock Ellis’s work repeatedly emphasised that inverted women were more interested in traditional male pursuits than female ones. For example, he argued that inverted women held a ‘dislike and sometimes incapacity for needle-work and other domestic occupations’ (250). In both physical appearance and mannerism, inverted women were actually men on the inside:

The brusque energetic movements, the attitude of the arms, the direct speech, the inflexions of the voice, the masculine straightforwardness and sense of honour, and especially the attitude towards men, free from any suggestion either of shyness or audacity, will often suggest the underlying psychic abnormality to the keen observer.

(250)

Whilst believing that true female homosexuality was congenital, pseudohomosexuality could be caught, by those that were already genetically disposed, by engaging in certain pursuits that were linked to the growing women’s movement, such as higher education. For those not genetically disposed, a ‘spurious imitation’ was possible. Ellis stated that ‘the unquestionable influences of modern movements cannot directly cause sexual inversion but they develop the germs of it, and they probably cause a spurious imitation’ (262). By linking inversion to female independence, or a non-adherence to traditional gender roles, many scholars think that the sexologists sought to discredit the growing women’s movement. Faderman argues that ‘a top item on their hidden agenda, whether they were conscious of it or not, finally came to be to discourage feminism and maintain traditional sex roles by connecting the women’s movement to sexual abnormality’ (Odd Girls 48).

‘Carmilla’ (1872)

Whilst Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ predates many of the seminal scientific works on homosexuality, the text speaks to the contemporary climate of intellectual ideas surrounding female inversion. Le Fanu’s descriptions of vampirism in ‘Carmilla’ are strikingly similar to those detailed in medical accounts by leading sexologists who were increasingly concerned that inversion was an infectious disease that could be transmitted between women. The storyline of Le Fanu’s short story follows this very trajectory. Shortly after Carmilla’s arrival, Laura takes ill from the same illness that Carmilla claimed to have suffered from (270) and latterly exhibits Carmilla’s same ‘pale’ and ‘languid’ appearance (282), symptoms that, according to Victorian pathology, were attributed to deviant acts such as homosexuality or masturbation (Mottier 30). It was commonly accepted that female inversion could be transferred between women in certain areas where male contact was sparse. Female-only spaces such as convents and boarding schools were key areas were women could ‘catch’ inversion. In Sexual Inversion, Ellis wrote that ‘[inversion] has been found, under certain conditions, to abound among women in colleges and convents and prisons’ (195). It is interesting then that Carmilla generally keeps the all-female company and arrives at the Schloss with her mother and a ‘hideous black woman’ (257) who forms part of her entourage. Carmilla’s father is not mentioned in the text and much reference is made in her maternal history to the Karnstein family as a ‘bad family’ prone to ‘atrocious lusts’ (305). Jarlath Killeen’s reading of the text emphasises how in Victorian scientific thought, infections and disorders, especially mental disorders, were believed to be passed on from the maternal line, ‘for this reason, many [doctors] warned mothers with a background of family illness (whether physical or mental) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Inversion and Queer Liminality in the Nineteenth Century
• 2 Liminal Spaces and Minority Communities in the Twentieth Century
• 3 Embracing Queer Liminal Space in the Late Twentieth Century
• 4 (Liminal?) Lesbians in the Mainstream: ‘Popular’ Lesbian Fiction
• Conclusion: The Lesbian Death (Bed): Contemporary ‘Queer’ Irish and Northern Irish Writing
• Index