Old Girls' Club

On the Smart Set, Jessa Crispin takes a look at lesbianism in literature.

From the piece...

For a history of lesbian literature, where you expect misery you find a lot of merriment; where you expect secrets and codes from deep within the closet, you get openness. Much of the work Donoghue outlines is out of print or obscure, certainly more obscure than the "tragic" segment of gay and lesbian literature we know so well: Henry James's The Bostonians, various works by Balzac. Like Emma Bovery, Anna Karenina, or The Awakening's Edna Pontellier, the characters of these works want the wrong thing and so their stories must end with a walk into the waves. Compare that to the 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier, whose protagonist dresses as a man, seduces both members of a heterosexual couple, and declares:

My dream, a chimera, would be to have both sexes in turn, to satisfy this dual nature. Man today, woman tomorrow, I should reserve for my lovers my loving tenderness, my submissive and devoted attentions, my softest caresses, my sad little sighs, everything which belongs to my feline, feminine nature. Then with my mistresses I should be enterprising, bold, passionate, dominant, with my hat pulled down over my ear, with the demeanor of a captain and an adventurer.

Mlle. Maupin sounds perfectly modern, even today.

It's not all fun, though. Less courageous writers killed off lovers to please the morality of the times, and others wrote blindly nasty things about weak-minded women who just needed to be conquered by a real man. For much of the late 19th and early 20th century, writers were too afraid of prosecution or ostracism to be bold, so novelists like W. Somerset Maugham and memoirists like Margaret Anderson disguised lovers as friends and gay relationships as straight.