Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

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INTRODUCTION • xliii The sex variant has always been with us and probably always will be. He [sic] has been thus classified, partly because of the arbitrary designations male and female. As I have shown in All the Sexes, there are any number of possible gradations of human behavior—from that of a theoretical masculine to that of a theoretical feminine being. 8 (Foster, 5) Sexology and the literature of lesbianism, which draws upon sexological inquiry, see masculinity and femininity as biological states. Whether, like Havelock Ellis, they uphold ideas of an ideal masculinity and femininity or, like George Henry, they seek to promote a new, less dualistic understanding of human sexual biology, sexological thinkers continue to see gender and sexuality as a matter of the body. Psychoanalysis, in its early development, was more dependent on sexology than is commonly acknowledged. Sigmund Freud cites sexological research in essays like “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” and in one letter refers the mother of a young homosexual man to the work of Havelock Ellis. From 1910, when the first of Freud’s essays were translated into English, his work had a tremendous influence on the writing of lesbian, bisexual and transgendered women in English. James Strachey, Freud’s patient and chosen English translator was associated with the sexually dissident writers of the Bloomsbury Group. The Strachey translations were published by the press (Hogarth) founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge record in their journals and letters that they read Freud aloud to each other. Djuna Barnes created long stream-of-consciousness ramblings for her homosexual characters that resemble Freud’s famous talking cure, and incorporate ideas of the Oedipal conflict. Freud built upon and complicated sexological ideas of gender variance and same-sex desire by developing the concepts of aim and object choice. Through his particular and universalizing myth of the child’s development within the family, he articulated a number of ways in which the development of the human sense of self involves desires for and identifications with both the male and female parent. In a clearly preferred scenario the child will ultimately identify with the parent of the same sex and desire the gendred other. However these are separate actions and might “go wrong” in any number of ways. Therefore one’s aim might be either masculine or feminine, that is one might desire to
xliv • INTRODUCTION be either masculine or feminine. At the same time one’s object choice— preferred object of desire—might be of either the same, the opposite or both sexes. Sexological ideas of masculine and feminine bodies become psychoanalytic ideas of masculine and feminine psyches. Still, samesex desire is married in many cases to masculine and feminine identifications, aim to object choice. It is famously asserted that Freud claimed that all humans are born bisexual. This is strictly true, but not in the sense in which that term is commonly used. For Freud a newborn girl has the capacity to desire union with either her mother or her father, but a clearly preferred “normal” development scenario has her relinquish desire for the mother in favor of desire for the father. The work of Sigmund Freud affected lesbian literature in two important ways. First, the idea of the so-called “talking cure” popularized the notion that subconscious truths and desires lay beneath the surface of all dialogue and that an unrestricted flow of language might reveal them. Freud’s idea of conscious and subconscious selves, or layers of the psyche, and the notion of free and unfettered narrative flow informed modernist experiments in narrative style. Virginia Woolf, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Gertrude Stein, Rosamund Lehmann and Djuna Barnes all transformed the talking-cure into their literary investigations of the sexual self. Secondly, ideas of aim and object-choice and of the fluid nature of the psychic sexual self have been incorporated into literary characterization of lesbians since the day they first appeared. Woolf’s theoretical ideas about masculine, feminine and androgynous minds, Barnes’ damaged inverts scarred by loss, and pulp characterizations of lesbian survivors of rape, abuse and domineering mothers and fathers all are enabled by the ideas of psychoanalysis. Even where writers like Woolf consciously distance themselves from Freud’s narrative of sexual development, evidence of the influence of his method appears in their work. Medical theories, including psychoanalysis, share an idea of masculinity and femininity as somehow essential. Whether gender falls into two categories, or exists as a continuum along which an infinite number of human variables fall, it is psychically or biologically an attribute of the individual. On the other hand, an important branch of lesbian feminist theory sees gender as socially constructed. Gender is a hierarchal social system, rather than a quality attributable to individuals. Gender, according to materialist feminists, is a system created to differentiate one class of humans from another, in order to oppress them. Thus ideas
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