LHMP #137v Faderman 1981 Surpassing the Love of Men III.A.4 Fiction as a Weapon

The 20th century saw the rise of new genres of fiction that demonized lesbian relationships and inextricably linked them to social structures that had historically nourished women’s friendships, such as single-sex schools. Curiously, it has been revealed in retrospect that many lesbian novels of the 20th century were written by women who were, themselves, lesbian.

The “vampiric” lesbian became established as a trope, joining with the predatory schoolmistress motif in Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women (1915). Although Faderman identifies the central character as a “vampire” it isn’t clear to me from the discussion that this is meant in the sense of literally drinking blook, rather than simply causing a physical decline in her “victim”. Faderman explains “it is not the victim’s blood that the villain lives on but her youth and energy” although in another novel mentioned in this category (White Ladies by Francis Brett Young, 1935) the word vampire is used by a character for describing this psychic effect.

In addition to the lesbian schoolmistress, scholarly and academic women come in for identification as predatory lesbians. Depictions of close, emotional, dependent friendships between women are given a sinister sexual spin in works such as Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death (1927) [Sayers also invokes the “lesbian academic” trope in Gaudy Night but there it is challenged and countered by the character Harriet Vane], G. Sheila Donisthorpe’s Loveliest of Friends 1931), of Edouard Bourdet’s play La Prisonnière (1926). These stories typically involve an older, dominant, often ugly lesbian who seduces a younger, pretty, “normal” woman who may or may not be “rescued” by a male character by the end of the story.

Some anti-lesbian literature of this era purports to present “true case history” type stories, such as D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox (1922) in which the male protagonist considers the breaking up of a female couple to be something of a masculine biological imperative, likened to hunting down prey, with marriage to the more feminine of the two little more than an excuse. Perhaps more pointedly, Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women (1928) satirizes and ficionalizes a real-life circle of upper-class lesbians living on the island of Capri, whose models included Natalie Barney, Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge, Romaine Brooks and, others.

The “mannish lesbian” became a stock figure of genre novels by popular authors such as Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart. And with the rise of the paperback novel, the “lesbian pulp” genre emerged, no longer veiling their characters’ sexuality with allusions, and following a contractually-required plot formula that punished lesbianism with tragedy, loneliness, or death. But out of the pulps, eventually a different type of lesbian literature emerged.