Butterfly Effect - ressourcesfeministes

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17 hatted. Women have often gone scarved or hatted in public places, sometimes for
safety, sometimes in disguise. On other occasions the wearing of a hat has been
the beginning of a love affair. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier attribute their
relationship to a hat. They met one day when Sylvia Beach was leaving
Shakespeare and Co, the Paris bookstore run by Adrienne Monnier. A gust of
wind blew Sylvia’s hat into the street. Adrienne rescued the hat, and their eyes
met as she returned it to Sylvia. I wonder if this might be the source for Gertrude
Stein’s lines: “I love my love with a dress and a hat / I love my love and not
with this or with that / I love my love with a y because she is my bride / I love
her with a d because she is my love beside” “Before the Flowers of Friendship
Faded Friendship Faded”. In Gertrude Stein. 1971. Look at Me Now and Here I Am,
p. 286. For a mystery lesbian ghost story centred on hats see Merrilee Moss.
2001. Fedora Walks.
18 masked abandon. A reference to the Carnivale of Venice and other places. In opera
such masked reveries are often the site of lesbian connection.
19 bougainvillea. See Donna McSkimming. 1986. Beware the Bougainvillea, pp. 8-9. The
bougainvillea is not the threat, but rather the group of unknown men in a
restaurant in “A Fairy Tale”, pp. 21-22.
20 Sissinghurst. Vita Sackville-West's famous garden in England. It is a place of
pilgrimage for many contemporary lesbians.
21 paradise. Paradise was originally a walled garden, a place of retreat. Jeffner Allen
writes: “The delights of touch and tongue abound when paradise is lost.” Jeffner
Allen. 1991. “Passion in the Gardens of Delight”, p. 281. Monique Wittig, on the
other hand, equates paradise with new love. Paradise is contrasted with the hell
of heterosexuality and its commodification and violence in Across the Acheron.