Sponsored by

from The Gay & Lesbian Literary Heritage, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), which is the best references work on GLBT Literature. CAPITALIZED NAMES refer to related articles in the book.

NOTE: During the past few years, our Reading Group has read some of the landmark novels mentioned in this essay. Here is a list of all the books we have read since June 1997.

From the great modern writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community. Not only do lesbian novels define and redefine what it means to be a lesbian in our society, they provide an important record of changing cultural attitudes toward lesbianism. By depicting different versions of the lesbian experience, the lesbian novel enriches and enhances lesbian culture. More broadly, lesbian novels, by questioning gender norms, debating what it means to be a woman in our society, and questioning dominant values, have not only depicted the lesbian community but also helped to constitute it.

Exactly what features make a novel "lesbian" are difficult to specify. Critics have different ideas about how to define the lesbian novel, but most agree on two points: The author must be a lesbian, and the central character or characters must be lesbians. Using this definition, novels that contain central lesbian characters but were written by men, such as HENRY JAMES's The Bostonians (l886) or Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women (1928), fail to qualify as lesbian novels. Moreover, novels with a significant lesbian content but written by heterosexual women, such as Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), do not qualify as lesbian novels. As important as authorship in defining the lesbian novel is audience reception; although the audience does not have to be exclusively lesbian, the book should have particular appeal for lesbians. Numerous lesbian novels, such as VIRGINIA WOOLF's Orlando (1928), RITA MAE BROWN's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), and JEANETTE WINTERSON's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1987), attract many heterosexual as well as homosexual readers. The lesbian novel may contain lesbianism in either an overt or covert fashion. A number of important lesbian writers, such as WILLA CATHER, GERTRUDE STEIN, and Virginia Woolf, do not explicitly refer to lesbianism in their novels; still, these writers do create lesbian subtexts in their work. Ultimately, all that can be said with certainty about the lesbian novel is that it is a genre that resists firm categorization since there is no single definition.

A thorough discussion of all important lesbian novels is beyond the scope of this brief essay, but I shall at least mention many of the most significant lesbian novels of the twentieth century. No study of the lesbian novel can be complete without citing RADCLYFFE HALL's The Well of Loneliness (1928), a novel that, as Bonnie Zimmerman has noted, has helped define lesbianism in this century. It was the first novel written by a lesbian that talked openly about homosexuality. Stephen Gordon, the novel's handsome, aristocratic lesbian heroine, was a role model that lesbians strove to emulate for over fifty years. Countless women identified with Stephen's struggle to be a lesbian during a period when homosexuals were considered abnormal and mentally disturbed. When it was published, Hall's book, which was banned as obscene in England, caused a scandal because it endorsed the view that lesbians should have a place in society and not be shunned as social pariahs. Despite Hall's positive portrayal of lesbianism, her work has had ambivalent responses from lesbian readers. Although some of them praise Hall's novel for its unconcealed depiction of lesbian relationships, others condemn it for Hall's adherence to an essentialist belief - first made popular by the late nineteenth-century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing - that lesbians and lesbian mannerisms are the products of congenital "inversion." Some lesbian readers are critical of Hall's angst-filled narrative and of her masculinist bias; they argue that The Well of Loneliness does not present lesbianism positively. Whether or not we accept Hall's ideology, however, we can still respect Hall's courage in depicting lesbianism openly. We can also appreciate that Hall's novel helped innumerable lesbians discover that they were not alone. Even today, we can admire the characterization of Stephen Gordon, who remains one of the most fully developed heroines in lesbian fiction.

Not all lesbian novelists in the interwar period felt comfortable talking openly about lesbianism in their writing, particularly since blatant lesbianism could result in getting a novel banned or discouraging its publication. These writers frequently disguised the lesbian content of their work. Instead of the straightforward realistic depiction of lesbianism in Radclyffe Hall's novel, DJUNA BARNES's Nightwood (1936), for example, presents a very different image of lesbianism. Throughout this surreal modernist novel, lesbianism is a topic just below the surface. One of the characters, Frau Mann, is called "the property of no man." Two other characters, Nora Flood and Robin Vote, fall in love, and their tumultuous relationship is the focus of much of the convoluted narrative. Like Nightwood, Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography (1928) also explores gender and sexual identification, but in a text that revolves around the adventures of Orlando, a thinly disguised version of Woolf's lover VITA SACKVILLE WEST. Orlando transforms from male to female throughout a number of centuries. Although less phantasmagorical than Orlando, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is also a fantastic tale, wherein Stein, under the alias of Toklas, writes the supposed autobiography of her lover, describing her life with Stein. These three novels show how modern writers resorted to nonrealistic, often fantastic, story lines in order to make lesbianism a more acceptable subject to discuss.

By the 1950s, PATRICIA HIGHSMITH had returned to the realism of Radclyffe Hall. In The Price of Salt, published under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan" in 1952, Highsmith shows lesbians not as mannish women or helpless neurotics--as they were commonly portrayed--but as women who can easily blend into a heterosexual crowd. Therese Belivet, a young artist living in New York City, falls in love with Carol Aird, a wealthy woman separated from her husband and living with her daughter. Throughout the novel, the two women gradually become closer and ultimately begin a sexual relationship, which is fulfilling for both of them. Their blossoming relationship, however, seems destined to end when the women learn that Carol's former husband has had them followed and threatens to use his information about his ex-wife's new affair to gain custody of their daughter. Faced with the need to choose between her daughter and her new lover, Carol decides to go to her lover - a truly radical decision for the 1950s. What is even more unusual about The Price of Salt is that insanity and suicide, which were the necessary complements of lesbianism in most 1950s popular fiction, never appear. Indeed, the lesbian relationship in this novel actually appears to be superior to the heterosexual relationships in the text; as Carol comments, "the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman." Because of Highsmith's sensitivity to lesbianism and her creation of a lesbian novel in which lesbianism is not doomed to failure, her work continues to be read in the 1990s.

In sharp contrast to the portrayal of lesbianism in Highsmith's novel, the hundreds of lesbian pulp novels published in the 1950s and early 1960s, the "Golden Age" of the pulps, typically are chock-full of madness, suicide, adultery, and even incest. Despite their sensationalistic contents, these novels, sold at bus stops and drugstores and directed largely at a heterosexual audience, also gained wide popularity with lesbians. Bonnie Zimmerman writes, "These pulp paperbacks were crucial to the lesbian culture of the 1950s because they offered proof of lesbian existence." For many lesbians, the pulps were one of the few sources of affirmation. Although some of the novels read more like a male fantasy of what it means to be a lesbian, the better ones, particularly those written by ANN BANNON, provide a sensitive and tolerant image of the difficulties confronting lesbian women in the 1950s and early 1960s. Lesbian pulp writers, such as Ann Aldrich, Ann Bannon, Randy Salem, and Valerie Taylor, showed in their fiction that social prejudice against lesbians was morally wrong. They also suggested that lesbians were driven to insanity or death because of the society around them that condemned them as abnormal, not because they were inherently psychologically disturbed. For the period, this was an unusual and refreshing message.

Along with the prevalent pulps, there were also some notable lesbian novels written in the 1960s. JANE RULE published Desert of the Heart in 1964. Critic Gillian Spraggs calls Rule's novel "a book that challenged a wilderness of silence and malice." Set in Reno, Nevada, the story focuses on the relationship between Evelyn, a professor of English literature, and Ann, a change girl at a Reno casino, who is also a successful cartoonist. Evelyn is just getting a divorce from her husband of many years because of their incompatibility; in this fashion, Rule points out that heterosexual relationships are not always superior to homosexual ones. Surprisingly enough, at the end of the novel, Evelyn and Ann are still together and planning to establish a life with each other. Rule refuses to accept the commonly held assumption that homosexual relationships are doomed to be fleeting. Other writers in the 1960s, like ISABEL MlLLER in A Place for Us (1969; later renamed Patience and Sarah) and MAY SARTON in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), also explored lesbian relationships and the social forces that made them difficult to maintain for long periods. In her historical novel set in Calvinist New England, Miller attempts to imagine a lesbian relationship in the absence of a lesbian subculture.

Like Rule, Miller, and Sarton, MAUREEN DUFFY, a British author whose writing reflects a working-class sensibility, was one of the novelists of the 1960s who tried to portray lesbian experience in her work, which includes novels, plays, nonfiction, and poetry. She is the first contemporary British lesbian novelist publicly to announce her sexual identification. The Microcosm ( 1966), which is one of Duffy's most important works, centers on lesbianism. Like other lesbian novels that focus on the community found at a lesbian bar (for instance, Nisa Donnelly's The Bar Stories [1989] and Katherine Forrest's Murder at the Nightwood Bar [1987]), Duffy's work describes the bar microcosm that has played such a significant role in the lives of many lesbians. Like writers such as Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, Duffy experiments with language and tries out different points of view. Like Barnes, Duffy also plays with gender; we are not sure, for instance, whether "he" refers to an anatomical male or to a butch lesbian. Criticized by some lesbian critics for her Freudian views of lesbianism, Duffy nevertheless deserves serious attention since her depictions of lesbian life go far beyond what is contained in Freud's theories.

In the early 1970s, a novel was published that had a profound and lasting effect on future lesbian literature. Without a doubt, Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) is one of the most influential and best known of all lesbian novels. Brown's popular Bildungsroman, which was first published by the feminist press Daughters Inc. and then by Bantam Books, has remained in print for over twenty years. Rubyfruit Jungle caused a sensation because of its positively portrayed lesbian heroine, Molly Bolt. Despite her illegitimate birth and her impoverished background, Molly, thanks to her superior intelligence and strength of character, wins a full scholarship to the University of Florida. Even when she is a child, Molly knows that she never wants to get married and assumes that she is a lesbian. In college, she begins to experience lesbian life and has an affair with another woman student. When she is expelled from school because she is a lesbian, Molly heads to New York City where she studies to be a film director. This novel is a coming out story that traces Molly's maturation as an individual and, particularly, as a lesbian. Brown's ebullient, often farcical, picaresque account of a lesbian coming of age showed that lesbianism did not mean that a woman would necessarily be confined to an insane asylum or commit suicide. Instead, Molly is a survivor who manages to overcome tremendous obstacles.

The remarkable success of Rubyfruit Jungle spawned an explosion of lesbian novels. A number of feminist publishers, including Naiad Press, Daughters Press, Diana Press, and the Women's Press Collective, jumped onto the bandwagon, as did publishers such as Crossing Press and Seal Press that were not solely lesbian publishers but did publish lesbian literature. These feminist presses were particularly important because they published nontraditional or experimental narratives, such as June Amold's Sister Gin (1975), BERTHA HARRIS's Lover (1976), and ELANA DYKEWOMON's Riverfinger Women (1974), that were not acceptable to the major publishing companies. Even more presses publishing lesbian novels sprang up in the 1980s, and it became more common for the mainstream publishing houses to produce lesbian novels. For example, Dutton published SARAH SCHULMAN's After Delores, Knopf published LISA ALTHER's Other Women (1984), and St. Martin's Press published Nisa Donnelly's The Bar Stories: A Novel After All (1989). Today, in the 1990s, the increasing number of publishers willing to produce lesbian novels has resulted in far greater diversity, the new offerings ranging from murder mysteries to romances to more experimental genres. (See also JOURNALISM AND PUBLISHING.) Unfortunately, even these more recent novels have only rarely addressed the complex concerns of lesbians of color. Finding lesbian novels that address the concerns of nonwhite lesbians is difficult, and always has been so, particularly before the 1980s. ANN ALLEN SHOCKLEY is the only novelist who focused on black lesbian lives and reached a broad audience before the 1980s. In Loving Her (1974), an account of an interracial love affair, and her other novels, Shockley explores with sensitivity the difficulties facing

African-American lesbians. A few other writers, the most notable being AUDRE LORDE, also explored the situation of African-American lesbians. In her "biomythography" Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Lorde wrote one of the most memorable accounts of what it means to be black and lesbian in the United States. Lesbian writers with a Native American background are even less common than African-American writers. An important exception is PAULA GUNN ALLEN. In her novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), Gunn describes the experience of a Native-American lesbian. Her mythladen, symbolic writing places Gunn among the many contemporary lesbian novelists who are trying to stretch language's meaning.

While some authors have explored the present or past in order to discuss lesbians' experiences, other novelists have looked into the mythical future in order to understand lesbian lives. Since some writers would argue that lesbian experience can never be portrayed in the context of a patriarchal society, they have tried in their fiction to redesign the world. Certainly the best-known novels to reenvision a different lesbian future are MONIQUE WITTIG's. In The Lesbian Body (1975), the author explores how a phallocentric society has limited the ways in which we view lesbianism. Using experimental prose that works to redefine the way we perceive the lesbian subject, Wittig creates a lesbian world in which the conventions of a patriarchal society no longer apply. Other novels depicting alternative lesbian realities followed Wittig's work, most notably JOANNA RUSS's The Female Man (1975) and Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground (1978). These texts help reenvision how lesbian (and heterosexual) society should be constructed. By showing communities where lesbianism is central rather than marginal, these novels suggest that society need not be based on heterosexuality.

Contemporary lesbian writers frequently explore more conventional genres than the utopian novel, revitalizing formula fiction like the romance, mystery, and detective novel to make it reflect the realities of lesbian life. In the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most popular genres of the lesbian novel has been the detective story. Authors as diverse as Katherine Forrest, Camarin Grae, Vicki McConnell, Claire McNab, Diana McRae, Jaye Maiman, Mary Morell, Sarah Schulman, Pat Welch, Barbara Wilson, and Mary Wings, as well as many others, have written detective stories that focus on lesbians and lesbian culture. The detective genre has obtained wide popularity in the lesbian community because it explores notions, such as passing for heterosexual, that are essential features of the lesbian world. The lesbian detectives in these novels, whether they are as official as Kate Delafield, a member of the LAPD homicide squad or as unofficial as Emma Victor, who works for a women's hotline, explore what it means to negotiate the division between heterosexual and homosexual. The novels themselves often explore the meaning of lesbian experience as much as they dwell on the mystery that needs to be solved. Delafield, for instance, in Murder at the Nightwood Bar, must deal with how she is perceived as heterosexual at her job, but as homosexual when she enters a lesbian bar: "She felt stripped of her gray gabardine pants and jacket, her conservative cloak of invisibility in the conventional world. In here she was fully exposed against her natural background." As well as being an arena to explore lesbian identity, the detective novel has also been a space to explore variations in style. Mary Wings, for instance, in She Came Too Late (1987) uses the hard-boiled style made famous by Raymond Chandler. Sarah Schulman, influenced by post-modern theories, is only one of many contemporary lesbian writers who attempted to create a more experimental lesbian prose in the 1980s. On the surface, many of Schulman's novels, such as The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984) and After Delores (1988), are detective stories, but they are also texts that are just as concerned about exploring the meaning of identity as they are in solving a crime. Schulman's Girls, Visions and Everything (1986), although not a crime novel, still has the gritty, urban background of Shulman's other stories. In this book, Schulman explores the streets and alleys of New York City through the character of Lila Futuransky, a poor Jewish lesbian. Although the story focuses on Lila's romance with Emily, it also explores what it means to view culture from a lesbian perspective, as does Schulman's most recent novel, Empathy (1992). (See also MYSTERY FICTION, LESBIAN.) Like Schulman, Jeanette Winterson tries to expand the limits of the traditional lesbian novel. Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), is definitely a lesbian success story; the book even became a BBC television production in 1990.

Winterson's hilarious but poignant work focuses on the coming of age of a young lesbian, Jeanette, in an evangelical household in the industrial midlands of England. Artistically, the novel is a brilliant success. Critic Hilary Hinds especially notes its "fluidity, its ability to cut across so many critical and cultural categories and positions, its refusal to be pigeonholed as one sort of text or another . . . ." In her later novels, The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989), and Written on the Body (1992), Winterson continues to show that she is what critic Terry Castle calls "the reigning mistress of postmodern lesbian drollery." There are many other important lesbian novelists in the 1990s, including Paula Martinac and DOROTHY ALLISON. In Home Movies (1993), Martinac explores how a lesbian understands the death of her uncle from AIDS. Allison, too, is concerned with addressing social issues in her novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), which discusses poverty and child abuse in the South. Martinac and Allison are only two of the many contemporary lesbian novelists who use the novel as a forum for social critique. Schulman, Winterson, Martinac, Allison, and other lesbian writers seek to redefine the lesbian novel in the 1990s and beyond. We can await the results with great anticipation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. * Hinds, Hilary. "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Lesbian Texts Cannot Reach." New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings. Sally Munt, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 153-172. * Jay, Karla and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York: New York University Press, 1990. * Spraggs, Gillian. "Hell and the Mirror: A Reading of Desert of the Heart." New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings. Sally Munt, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 115-131. * Stimpson, Catharine. "Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English." Critical Inquiry 8.2 (Winter 1981): 363-379. * Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989. Boston: Beacon, 1990.

copyright (c) 1995 New England Publishing Associates, Inc. NOTE: This article is for your personal use; please do not distribute it. Thanks!