Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

INTRODUCTION • xxxvii
Both modernism in Europe and the Harlem Renaissance (then called
the New Negro Movement) in the United States were focal points for
new explorations of sexuality and sexual identities. Each movement
contained a high proportion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
writers, visual artists and musicians among what are considered to be its
most significant figures. Bonnie Kime Scott, in The Gender of Modernism,
argues that the traditional view of modernist literature as concerned
with innovations in form and narration is male-centered and misleading.
An analysis that foregrounds women writers within the
movement will show that questions of gender and sexuality mark modernist
texts at least as much as narrative experimentation. Thus Radclyffe
Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which makes no such innovations,
can be set alongside Djuna Barnes Nightwood or Rosamund Lehmann’s
The Weather in the Streets, which do, because all three novels push the
boundaries of what can be expressed about women’s bodies and desires
in fiction. The black American poet Angelina Weld Grimké, though
contemporary with these figures, made very different interventions in
the expression of women’s desires and identities. At least two of her
plays center around women who refuse to marry or reproduce, as a
means of resisting racial/sexual oppression. Grimké made highly influential
antiracist feminist statements with her plays, and influenced the
New Negro Movement. Her large body of lesbian love poetry, however,
remained unpublished.
Hazel Carby and other scholars have examined expressions of dissident
gender and sexual identities in women’s blues lyrics of the Harlem
Renaissance era. It is here, rather than in fictional works, that the majority
of scholars see influential lesbian interventions into American
culture made by Harlem Renaissance women. Nevertheless, Nella
Larsen and Alice Dunbar Nelson are significant figures in the development
of the contemporary lesbian identity in literature, as the scholarship
of Gloria T. Hull has made clear.
Again, feminism is significant in this period for its assertion of
women’s active desire and right to free sexual expression. Rosamund
Lehmann’s bold descriptions of both bisexuality and an unmarried
woman’s abortion were contentious when first published in the 1920s
and 1930s. Representations of both same-sex desire and the availability
of birth control were enabled by a feminist movement that talked about
women’s sexual bodies in new and public ways. Though tainted by its