Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

INTRODUCTION • xxvii
Thus the same era that gave rise to early debates that might be called
feminist (the 17th century) gives us the first idea of a figure we might
call lesbian in the modern sense.
The term lesbian entered the English language from the Greek and
owes its prominence to the classical bent of many European scholars.
Neoclassicism in the early modern period gave rise to the use of the
word lesbian to describe women who had romantic and sexual attachments
to other women. The term did not necessarily mean, as it does today,
that these women would live together, independently of men. Prior
to the use of lesbian, the ancient Latin and Greek word tribade described
women who had sex with each other. The Concise Oxford Dictionary
describes tribade as deriving both from the Greek for “lewd woman”
and from the verb trib, to rub. Thus tribadism, as a verb, clearly marks
a male language, which cannot imagine sex in the absence of the penis.
Lesbian came into use as an allusion to the Greek language poet Sappho,
whose few surviving fragments of work speak of her love for
women and her life in a female community. Thus, this term focuses on
romantic classical allusion and the idea of woman-centered community,
rather than on imagined sexual acts.
It is tempting to think of lesbian, as it is tempting to think of all identity
categories, as stable and clearly limited. As popularly conceived, lesbians
are women who have no feelings for men, who feel sexual desire
for women and who live independently of patriarchal control. A lesbian
is a lesbian because she is born that way, and remains so for all of her
life. Yet this definition fits very few of the women whose literature is significant
to the development of that very lesbian identity. What of a
woman like Virginia Woolf, whose only real passion may have been for
other women, but who lived with a husband she loved and may never
have enjoyed physical sex of any kind? What of Sor Juan De La Cruz, a
nun whose poetry speaks of her love for another woman, but whose primary
struggle in life was between the secular and the spiritual, rather
than between any of the sexual identity categories we might place her in
today? What of the many medieval women mystics, who often lived in
all female communities with particular attachments to female companions,
and who often bravely fought for freedom from heterosexual marriage,
but whose primary articulated sexual desire was for the dead body of
Christ? The category lesbian, as it is popularly defined today, cannot contain
any of these women or their desires. Yet all of them are instrumental