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Monday, March 12, 2018 - 08:00

Any time I'm obsessed with a particular text, I'm likely to spend a fair amount of effort to hunt down as much of the scholarly literature on it as I can. (I don't think I can ever exhaust my interest in commentary on Yde and Olive!) For one thing, lesbian historical studies have something of a history of jumping to lesbian-friendly interpretations of texts or persons, and it can be essential to examine contrary opinions. Clearly I need to track down Susan Lamb's analysis to see what I think of her arguments on Mademoiselle de Richelieu. (It will, of course, have no effect on my irrational fondness for this highly peculiar text.) Every time I read another study of this work, I get excited about the fiction project that it inspired in my imagination. Not the straightforward novelization that I first conceived, but something of a time-slip story, overlaying the original fiction with a pair of modern characters that include a woman studying the text. So many writing projects, so little time!

Major category: 
LHMP
Full citation: 

Gonda, Caroline. 2006. “Lesbian Narrative in the Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu” in British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 2: 191-200.

Gonda examines the rather peculiar mid-18th century text The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu within the context of cross-dressing narratives and as a lesbian-like narrative (she doesn’t use that specific term), as well as comparing it with its highly abridged knock-off The Entertaining Travels and Surprizing Advenrures of Mademoiselle de Leurich.

Mlle. de Richelieu is an eclectic and peculiar text, including numerous digressions on hereditary monarchy, religion, philosophy, various types of literature, and travel narratives, as well as the core picaresque adventure retained in Mlle. de Leurich that Gonda concisely sums up thus: “The narrator/heroine Alithea de Richelieu dresses as a man, calls herself the Chevalier de Radpont, and goes around Europe flirting with women, mostly avoiding duels with men, hearing love-stories and scandals from the people she meets. ... [N]o one sees through her disguise, but she reveals her true sex to the charming widow Arabella, who is delighted by the revelation and becomes her inseparable companion: Alithea and Arabella, both dressed as men (and accompanied by their maids, Lucy and Diana, cross-dressed as their valets de chambre), wreak havoc in women’s hearts in Italy, Spain, and Portugal before returning to France (by way of England and the Low Countries), resuming their female dress and identities and settling down together, six months a year in Paris and six months in the country.”

Gonda summarizes some of the past literature on this text. Carolyn Woodward concludes that the heterogenous text is what allows and conceals the transgressive nature of the content. Susan Lamb views it as an anti-feminist satire, especially with its repeated emphasis on how two women cannot consummate their relationship, and suggests that it may instead be a gender-flipped account of a male homoerotic couple. Susan Lanser identifies it as “sapphic picaresque” and considers the homoerotic content bound up in the adventure setting.

The anonymous authorship contributes to the ability to postulate such different readings. The text presents itself as a translation (which might hypothetically explain some of the internal dissonances) but there is no corroborating evidence that it actually was originally in French as claimed. Lanser views the incongruities as part and parcel of the inherent queerness of the text.

Within the general context of “transvestite narratives” Mlle de Richelieu breaks convention. Joseph Harris’s study of 17th c French cross-dressing stories notes that they only temporarily challenge gender roles, returning to the status quo at the end, often by means of marriage. The conclusion of such narratives typically coincides with the revelation of the cross-dresser’s “true sex”. In contrast, it is Alithea’s revelation of her true sex to Arabella that initiates their travels together.

Another contrast with the texts that Harris studied is Alithea and Arabella’s continual flirtation with homoerotic desire, in contrast to the more usual situation where homoeroticism (though expected in the text) arises from an unwitting female admirer agressively pursuing the more restrained and avoidant cross-dresser. (The exception being texts where the cross-dresser is using her disguise to distract a female rival through feigned seduction.)

Alithea and Arabella, in contrast, regularly seek out women to court and flirt with, though they always draw back at the end. Gonda notes that the use of “whim” or “whimsical” in this context can be seen as an 18th century code word for lesbian desire. As when Arabella says of Alithea, “that unaccountable Whim of yours, of dabbling in Amours and Gallantry” as well as many other similar references in the text. “Unaccountable” is another keyword in contexts of female homoeroticism.

Arabella and Alithea also break the pattern of the “female husband” narrative, which is based on a sort of butch-femme model. Rather than embodying a gender contrast, they are both simultaneously butch (when traveling together in male disguise) or simultaneously femme (when they eventually settle down to live together as women).

It is not Alithea’s masculinity that secures Arabella’s desire, but her revelation of her female identity, uncovering her breasts, at which Arabella embraces her “with transports rather of a lover than of a friend.” Their erotic response to each other is intensified by the contrast between their public (male) appearance and their knowledge of their private (female) identity. Alithea, having initiated the cross-dressing adventure and encouraged Arabella in the game of flirtation with women, becomes obsessed and jealous of Arabella’s success at the game and women’s resposne to her.

Although one might see (as Susan Lamb suggests) a shadow of a male homosocial bond--two men as comrades using their flirtations with women as a way of intensifying their friendship--the text itself addresses this, showing male comradeship as false and dangerous.

The two women joke regularly about their attractiveness to women and egg each other on, ghost-writing letters for each other to the women they toy with and describing the imagined desire those women have for their comrade. When speaking directly of each other’s charms, it is typically in a projected male voice, imagining how a man would react (or how each of them would react as a man). They do not reject the possibility of desire for a woman, but rather make it possible to experss their desire for each other by voicing it as an imagined man.

The language in which they imagine the desire of men for women (it makes the men happy) stands in contrast to how they imagine women’s desire for men (it is a threat, a curse, foolish). Thus, they conclude that the idea of love is for a woman to be in love with a cross-dressed woman for she can enjoy the joys of love without being betrayed and disappointed by the “dull brutal conclusion” of heterosexual sex.

This theme is elaborated in one of the many digressions, this one involving yet another cross-dressing woman that Alithea is attracted to, not knowing the woman’s true sex, but only appreciating her “effeminate delicacy.” This woman, Miss Courbon, is in disguise to escape a forced marriage. She and Alithea encounter each other, each beliving the other a man, resulting in an unsettled reaction in Alithea who considers it out of character for her to be attracted to a man. It isn’t until Alithea is made aware of Miss Courbon’s true sex that Alithea enters enthusiastically into a flirtation. (Susan Lamb notes that the location in Paris where the two first encounter each other was a notorious cruising ground for male homosexuals, which contributes to her theory about authorship. The nature of the location is not touched on the text itself.) This episode occurs early in the text (pre-Arabella) and is the first of Alithea’s flirtations to be described, establishing the pattern that her affairs with women occur in the context of dual cross-dressing.

Thoughout the text, women who allow themselves to be seduced by men habitually suffer as a result. Miss Courbon eventually is one such, with the negative consequences described in more detail than others. Miss Courbon follows a more typical cross-dressing narrative: disguise for the purpose of avoiding forced marriage, inadvertent attraction between women, shift attraction to a man and resume a female presentation, get married. In the conventional cross-dressing narrative, this is the desired conclusion. Here, the rejection of that narrative is seen as making her fate tragic.

While Mlle. de Richelieu breaks with the French transvestite-story conventions, it also fails to follow British conventions for this genre. The pattern in 18th century British fiction is for the cross-dressing woman either to be re-confined in heterosexual domesticity, or punished harshly for her transgression of gender norms.

In the conclusion, Mlle. de Richelieu creates a “double vision” where Alithea and Arabella can be seen either as a “happily ever after” lesbian romantic conclusion, or as a displacement and denial of lesbian desire, always projecting it onto other women.

Time period: 
Sunday, March 11, 2018 - 17:57

I know I've mentioned it before, but I do love having a local book-centered convention that is literally a ten minute drive away. Bonus points for the Walnut Creek Marriott having a lobby-cum-bar that is absolutely ideal for socializing in. Except for one brief, minor bout of social anxiety when I didn't have a dinner group lined up for Saturday evening. ot was all good. (Note: I will leave some meals deliberately not pre-arranged to give myself the opportunity to meet up with people spontaneously who I might not feel comfortable approaching for specific arrangements. And that's exactly what happened in this case, once I'd determined to bluff it out and settled myself into an empty table in the lobby traffic zone.)

Great high-energy presentations from Honored Guests Andrea Hairston and Ada Palmer. This year I got to the late night comedy "liars' panel" (improv tall tales in response to moderator questions) which was a hoot.

I was on three program items. The early Saturday morning panel on Faust and his literary offspring had great attendance (given the time) and (if I may say so) great synergy among the panelists. We talked about the various versions of the Faust story itself, its uses in other works, what the parameters of a "Faust-type story" might be, and what the various versions of the story say about attitudes towards knowledge and/or pleasure. Was Faust the hero of his own story? And in the end was he damned or redeemed?

My first panel, on Friday afternoon, was on meta-fiction: the use of narrative within the narrative, or of cross-boundary interactions between audience, author, and content. Lots of examples of different types of meta-fictions (including a discussion of whether 1st and 2nd person narrativion is itself inherently a meta-narrative). I got to talk a little bit about meta-narrative in Mother of Souls and how the creation of the Tanfrit opera enabled the characters to critique and analyze their attitudes towards their own invisible character arcs.

My third panel was a fairly open-ended discussion on the romance genre as an antidote to the despair of living in a dystopic society. (It was one of two romance panels, the other being the somewhat misleadingly named "Bonkers Romance" talking about plots and tropes that would be hard to get away with anywhere other than that genre. I was in the audience for that one and got to hear my own books being recommended--in all sincerity since the recommender hadn't connected them with me!) I did feel a bit out of place on occasion in the "Romance for the End of the World" panel because the discussion routinely slipped into the assumption that every romance plot has a man in it somewhere (either as m/f or m/m), as well as a regular conflation of romance with erotica. Still a fun discussion, just occasionally a bit alienating.

I've kept meaning to volunteer to be more involved in the running of FOGCon, and since they put out a plea for more people to get involved at the closing roundup, I put my metaphorical hand up once more. (I triedt to volunteer a few years ago and nothing came of it, but they may have had plenty of people back then.)

And then here I am back home, with no jet lag and another hour of daylight.

Major category: 
Conventions
Saturday, March 10, 2018 - 08:43

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 44 (previously 20b) - Interview with Elizabeth Bear - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/03/10 - listen here)

Heather Rose Jones: Today, the Lesbian Historic Motif Project is delighted to host Elizabeth Bear. Elizabeth is a prolific writer of both fantasy and science fiction and particularly known for historically inspired fantasies such as the Silk Road Eternal Sky series, the New Amsterdam series which is alternate history with sorcery, too many more to discuss in detail, but also the two books that particularly inspired me to invite her on the show: Karen Memory and its sequel that has just been released Stone Mad, which take place in the steampunk Pacific Northwest late 19th century.

Back in 2005, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Fantasy and Science Fiction Author, and she's won a couple of Hugo Awards for Short Fiction plus other honors that would take a while to list through. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Bear: Hi, I'm glad to be here.

H:  So, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about Karen Memory and Stone Mad and how you came to write them?

E: [Laughter] Well, it's actually one of those funny and convoluted stories because it turns out that adult but YA-friendly American steampunk novel with a 16-year-old lesbian protagonist was apparently hard to get through to the marketing people. [Laughter] Initially, I was solicited to write a – well, not write but submit a proposal for a Young Adult novel with a lesbian protagonist. I thought about it for a while, and I was talking with a friend of mine about it. Her name happens to be Karen, and, you know, she sort of tossed me the softball that made Karen's voice and the first line of the novel pop into my head.

H: Which is a very iconic line.

E: It's, “You ain't gonna like what I've got to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway,” so that's why Karen is named Karen. She's named after my friend. I wrote the first 15,000 words of the novel, and I wrote a proposal up and sent it in, and it was soundly rejected, rejected left and right. [Laughter]

H: Do you suppose maybe a 16-year-old lesbian prostitute was maybe hard to swallow for the YA market?

E: You know when I initially pitched it, when I had the discussion with the editor who solicited it, they thought it was a great idea. I think sometimes – I think people were a little doubtful about Karen's voice among other things and because that she's a first-person narrator, and her voice is so intrinsic to my ability to write her. I don't write Karen's stories and then like run them through the Encheferizer [Laughter] to get her voice. They come out her voice, or they don't come out at all. Often, what I have to do is go back and edit out pages and pages and pages of digressions, usually about food. [Laughter] She likes her groceries.

So, this was back in 2009, and I took – I think it was the first 7,000 words or so of what I had written and turned it into a short story for a steampunk western anthology, a Weird West Anthology that John Joseph Adams put together. I wrote the Eternal Sky novels for my Tor editor Beth Meacham. When I had handed the last one in, she was like, “What do you want to do next?” and I'm like, “I don't really know. What do you want to see from me?” and she said, “Well, there was that YA pitch. Is there any reason why it has to be a YA?” and I'm like, “No, I mean it's going to be a 16-year-old protagonist with a fairly straightforward voice,” so she convinced me to try writing it as an adult novel. It's still quite YA friendly, I think. It certainly, at least, a lot of young readers seem to enjoy it.

It all kind of just came out of me in a rush. I think possibly because it had been, at that point, sitting there in the back of my head stewing for five years. The story had been there growing without being disturbed, so when I actually sat down to write it, I wrote it, I think four or five months.

I just had a wonderful time writing it. I had a wonderful time with the – one of the things that I like about the Karen Memory world is that it's more on the scientific end of steampunk. Many steampunk novels have things like vampires or sorcerers or…

H:  Yeah.

E:  In fact, my other steampunk or gaslit fantasy series has magic and sorcery in it. The New Amsterdam books that you mentioned, and this one doesn't have any magic. It doesn't. It has super engineering, and it has cryptozoological creatures. So, this is a world where like jackalopes are real and, you know, like all the creatures that show up in in tall tales of the Wild West are real. There are chupacabras out there somewhere sucking on goats. [Laughter]

Setting those constraints for myself meant that I had to think up, at least, like comic book technological explanations for everything, which was a lot of fun. You know, I grew up on Jules Verne and H. G. Wells the same as everybody else did.

H:  Yeah, the influences from Verne were really obvious in it.

E: Yeah. Well, one of the things I love about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is that if you actually read – which is actually kind of hard to get your hands on – if you read a complete version of the novel, it's got really strong anti-colonial aspects to it because Nemo is a British subject from the Indian subcontinent who is fighting against the British overlords. He has a motivation! [Laughter]

H: Yeah.

E: Which doesn't show up in a lot of the movies and the edited versions of the book somehow.

H: Funny thing.

E: Funny thing! Funny thing how that gets taken out. Anyway, so, yeah, I mean that aspect is obviously very strong in there. The second novel, Stone Mad, it's a very, very short novel. It is just over the legal limit at like 40,000 words. So, it's being published through Tor.com's novella program because they have the infrastructure to do it, basically, but it is technically a novel, kind of. [Laughter] I've decided that what I want to do with this series because I do have above three more stories I want to tell in it right now.

H: Oh, I'm sure.

E: I’m sure I will think of more is – I think it would be neat to do longer works that are sort of more complicated murder mystery type objects and shorter works that are almost a little, I don't want to say, you know, that they're almost sort of self-fanfic like –

H: Well, no, I know exactly what you mean.

E: Like, almost, just a fun little side story.

H: I have a bunch of those to write for my series where it really does feel like I'm writing fanfic of my own work.

E: Yeah, and you know but there's nothing wrong with that. Why do the fans get to write all the fun bits? [Laughter] I want to write my protagonist and her girlfriend going out to dinner and getting into trouble. That's maybe not a novel plot, but it's certainly a very fun side story plot.

H: Yup.

E: I guess that's it, you know? I mean I'm delighted to be writing these. My intention with them is that each one is going to be a story that can be read all by itself, and I want them to be – my friend Sarah Monette who also writes as Katherine Addison, who wrote The Goblin Emperor is her most well-known work, makes a distinction between clair and noir as modes of storytelling. Noir is, you know, what we might term grimdark these days but just where the underlying presentment of how the world works is cynical and brutal and nothing will ever turn out right and you'll never be happy. That's not the world I want to write when I'm writing about Karen. I want to put her in – she's an optimistic person, and I want to put her in an optimistic world, not where bad things never happen and people never get hurt because, obviously, they do but –

H: But where there's a hope that things will come out well.

E: There's a hope that things will come out well and people can recover from trauma within reasonable limits. Obviously, if somebody drops a house on you…

H: Yeah.

E: [Laughter] So finding that balance of gee-whiz action adventure, and a little bit of romance and a little bit of fun, and also making it a serious story about a serious character who experiences character growth, but it doesn't have to be that kind of, “And then I had a huge epiphany and realized why I had been goofing up my life,” [Laughter] because she hasn't, really.

H: Yeah.

E: She's had a rough life, but she's a very capable person. That's fun to write.

H: So the setting in the sort of – it's a Pacific Northwest clearly but not a specific place although I got kind of a mixed Portland-Seattle vibe out of it.

E: I was going for sort of mixed San Francisco-Seattle. I've never actually been to Portland. I’m sorry. I keep trying to go, and it doesn't work out. [Cross-talk] Portland, I'm coming!

H: Am I remembering correctly that you were living in Seattle at one point?

E: No, I visited it several times in quick succession and I've taught Clarion West a couple of times.

H: Okay, that must be what I'm remembering.

E: Yes, Cherie Priest was living in Seattle. I went out and bothered her once but – [Laughter]

H: So what was the attraction of that particular setting?

E: I mean it's physically beautiful for one thing. The history of the Northwestern U.S. is fascinating, and complicated, and gets extensively sort of – I mean like most of the history of the American West it does have a real tendency to get whitewashed and normed and, really, that part of the world during that time was where all the dregs washed up.

As I proudly identify myself as a dreg [Laughter] by middle American standards anyway or by, I should say by 19th century middle American standards, it allowed me to talk about a lot of people that history generally overlooks, and ignores, and erases. Seattle literally was—actually Seattle and San Francisco both in a lot of ways—literally were built on the backs of prostitution, that the working girls, the parlor girls, were taxed $50.00 a week. That's a lot of money in 1860 [Laughter] which tells you how well they were doing, at least, the ones on the upper end of the trade. That was the tax base so—and one of the things I love about Seattle is that they just admit this.

There was a woman of whom there is a fictionalized—I did not use the real Mother Damnable in Karen Memory; however, there is a character called Madame Damnable who is heavily inspired by the real Mother Damnable who was one of Seattle's founding mothers as it were and was, in fact, at one point running a whorehouse out of the upstairs of her two-floor house and town hall out of the first floor, [Laughter] literally.

Having been given that sort of coincidence of history and of frequently—I'm trying to think of the word I want here – of frequently marginalized people who nevertheless had a huge impact on society, that was what I wanted to talk about.

H: Yeah, and that actually leads into one of the questions I had prepared which you've already answered part of, but what I had come up with is that one of the things I loved in Karen Memory was how you wove in people and situations that are solidly part of history but weaving them in in ways that people might mistake for fictional elements. I'm thinking of things like the character of Bass Reeves, and the significant ethnic diversity without glossing over any of the racism, the diversity of gender and sexuality in a context where readers might find that surprising, and the utterly bonkers politics. So were those things that were part of the inspiration for the story in the first place, or were there things that you turned up while researching?

E: Well, Bass Reeves is the only real historical character in the book who is there as himself and not as a “This person inspired me to create a fictional character who is in some way their ‘structural descendant’ I guess,” but Bass Reeves was a real dude. He was a U.S. marshal who was an escaped slave who worked in the Indian territory, which is now Oklahoma. I have him somewhat off his patch for the purposes of this story.

He was obviously a black man, and he is, I believe, he still holds the record for the most warrants served and fugitives returned, and that's more than 100 years later. This guy was a badass not to put too fine a point on it. He also had like 23 kids—yeah, I know, when did he find the time, right?

He is probably the inspiration for the lone ranger. I had wanted to make more people aware of this guy's existence, and so I had the opportunity in this story since I have a serial killer running around Seattle, why not bring the lone ranger in to solve the mystery?

H: Sure.

E: Make it the real lone ranger. Then, of course, he had to have Comanche possemen, and I wanted to try to do a more honorable version, more honorable job of presenting a real human being and not…

H: Just a sidekick?

E: A stereotypical Indian sidekick, yes, exactly. So, I wound up doing a lot of research on that and on the state of Indian affairs in the 1870s in the U.S. which is just depressing and horrible and not a story in which—it's a genocide. I mean there's no way to put any finer point on it than that. It's the story of a genocide, so there becomes a real challenge in talking about that stuff and being honest about it but also being honest about the fact that people in terrible conditions still have to live their lives. People in terrible conditions are not defined by their victimhood or don't have to be. You don't have to perform—society has a certain number of set roles for people who have been traumatized, and you are expected to perform one of those roles.

As somebody who has PTSD, I find that very irritating because I would like to see more representation of a wider range of characters like me. This makes me assume that other people who are not widely represented in fiction would like to see more representation of a wider range of characters who are like them, who are not the same two stereotypes.

H: Uh-huh, a lot of your fiction is rooted in history but takes off in new directions so not only in terms of adding fantastic elements sometimes but tweaking the direction of history to different pathways. What's the particular appeal to you of that type of story generally? Are historic settings something you've always loved or did just sort of arise out of the writing?

E: Well, I'm a terrible historian. I tried to write one actual historical novel which is The Stratford Man which was published in two volumes as Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth. I know it’s exhausting. It was so much work. I did the whole Tim Powers thing. I had timelines, and I had calendars with historical events written on them and fictional events written on them. I had to move something by one day for reasons of pacing, and I felt terrible about it. I’m like, “I'm just never doing this to myself again.” [Laughter]

H: So that definitely explains the diverging from history part of it.

E: Yeah, I'm done with being faithful to history. It's too much work. I'm going to leave that to people who like that sort of thing. I mean I love reading it. I love reading a good secret history but, wow, so much… And the thing is that no matter—nobody agrees about anything. I spent five days trying to research whether Shakespearean actors used stage paint and I finally—I could not find any research on this. I finally decided based on stage directions that they must. There's a line in Shakespeare, “Enter Rumor, painted in tongues,” if that's all he needs to say about it, “painted in tongues,” then obviously stage makeup is a thing that everybody's familiar with, and this is not a radical new idea.

Anyway, but I digress, I also feel like there are some of my books that are really very ahistorical that may be inspired by a time period, or a historical pattern, or a cultural pattern. I was trained as an anthropologist and often what I get my inspiration from is cultural patterns and cultural development rather than actual history. People will try to force it into a historical mold. My Eternal Sky books are about as ahistorical as any Western fantasy. They have no more basis in historical reality of the Mongolian steppes and the Middle and Far East than Game of Thrones does in 13th century Ireland and England.

H: But I guess that answers my question is that you are attracted to cultures and playing with cultures as opposed to being attracted to historical events and playing with those.

E: Well, trying very hard not to appropriate other people's cultures but sort of look at the logical structures of how a culture develops and why it happens that way and come up with a thing that follows a similar logical structure, does that make sense?

H: Yeah, yeah.

E: I think that there are a lot of fantasists who do the same thing, but then they'll say, “Oh, I'm writing Celtic fantasy,” and I'm like your Celtic fantasy has absolutely nothing to do with real Celtic society.

H: Yeah. [Laughter] Well, and a lot of the people—

E: [Cross-talk] just cop to the fact that, “No, I made this up.”

H: Yeah, a lot of medieval fantasy is the same. It's like, “Oh, this is a medieval fantasy,” but nothing like anything I've ever studied.

E: Yeah or Norse fantasy which is—I've written a fair amount of Norse-inspired fantasy and Norse-inspired techno-fantasy because I am a child of the 80s. This is not a saga. I am not telling you a true story about something that happened to people a thousand years ago. I am making a lot of stuff up, and, yes, it does have trolls in it. I did borrow your trolls.

H: So I'm interested also, specifically, in how writers develop the presentation of marginalized sexualities in their historic settings. I mean the name of the podcast kind of leads to that point. Is this something where you base the characters on known historical situations, or individuals, or on general research, or just what felt fit right to you?

E: Often, I do… I mean I grew up in a queer family, and I'm queer myself. Because of that, I have never lived in a world that didn't have queer people in it, and so when I was—I actually just wrote a Patreon post about this. When I was a young person reading science fiction, discovering books that actually had queer people in them unremarkably, Diane Duane in particular The Door Into… series, I think that was the first book I ever encountered as a young reader in which I opened it and here's a young prince riding off to rescue his beloved, another young prince, who is trapped in a tower. It's just treated totally naturally and I'm like, “This is amazing. This is like people I know.”

I still remember that visceral sense of not feeling ostracized from the fiction I loved, and I want to give other people that sense of, “Here is a place where you are welcome,” obviously, but I also feel like we do have a real tendency to write historical characters as if they were living in the modern world and writing—I mean the concept of heterosexuality and homosexuality is only about 150 years old, if that.

When I'm writing characters in Elizabethan England who are same gender attracted or attracted to a panoply of genders or whatever it is that's their particular thing, they're not thinking about it in terms of, “Well, I'm gay,” or “I'm straight,” or “I'm bisexual.” They're thinking about it in terms of “This is a homosexual act,” not, “I am a homosexual person,” so the construction of identity is very different. That was a thorny thing to wrestle with while trying to acknowledge that while not saying anything that could be interpreted as, “Well, homosexuality is not a valid identity,” because, of course, it is. Because sexuality is a social construct and so is identity, that doesn't make them not real. Money is a social construct.

H: Exactly.

E: Corporations are a social construct.

H: But there's a tricky aspect there where heterosexuality was not a valid historic concept either and yet—

E: Exactly.

H: —nobody ever questions or challenges that if you're writing heterosexual characters so…

E: Bingo, exactly. Obviously, I believe that there is a spectrum of desire and people are attracted to whom they are attracted to for various reasons including gender but that the—so the construct of that is a real thing versus the identity of, “Well, I'm a heterosexual.”

H: Yeah, and what to expect to do with that desire is, of course, very socially constructed.

E: Exactly, absolutely. Yeah, that's a real challenge. It's also a real challenge to write characters in the same time frame or same setting who come from different cultures and have different ideas of what gender and sexuality are. Of course, many of these are so different from our own constructions and yet I want to feel welcoming to modern readers who read my books.

H: Yes, exactly.

E: It's so challenging.

H: It's a really tricky balance point.

E: Yeah, exactly. Man, people are complicated. [Laughter]

H: So, as we've said, your new book Stone Mad will be out by the time this podcast airs, and people should go pick it up and read it. If they haven't read Karen Memory before, they should read that, too, although you say they both stand alone. What other current projects or upcoming projects do you have that our listeners might be interested in?

E: Today I am finishing the final structural and narrative edit on a book called Ancestral Night that I am super, super, super excited about. It will be out next year, 2019, from Gallant in the U.K. and Saga in the U.S. It is a big idea sprawling old school exploration of space opera whose protagonist is a lesbian salvage tug engineer with terrible taste in women. [Laughter]

H: That sounds like our listeners will probably like that one.

E: Terrible, I like that so bad. [Laughter] So, that's relevant to this podcast.

H: Yes.

E: After that, I need to start serious drafting work on a book called The Red-Stained Wings which is the next book in the second Eternal Sky trilogy. The first book is The Stone in the Skull which was out last October and just made the Locus Recommended Reading List.

H: Yay!

E: That one's pretty thoroughly queer, too, I have to say. I was playing around with the ideas of what sort of societies might have developed in an analog to the Indus River Valley which is one of the places where agriculture first arose, agriculture and aqueducts, and counting, and written language, possibly, and a bunch of other stuff first arose. We know almost nothing about the people who lived there because time.

Because I have this big tapestry in the Eternal Sky world, I wanted to move there and tell a set of stories about those people, and they're having a basically a little internecine cousin versus cousin, the empire has collapsed, war over resources because some of them have fertile farmland and some don't. Then catastrophic geologic events start happening which is, of course, always makes your border skirmishes better.

H: Yeah, shakes up your characters very nicely.

E: Yeah, yeah.

H: Makes things happen.

E: So that's my next big project that I actually have to write as opposed to editing.

H: Uh-huh, so if one of our listeners wanted to follow you on social media and keep up with what you're doing what would you suggest? I know you have a Patreon where you sometimes post stories.

E: I do. I am @matociquala everywhere, m-a-t-o-c-i-q-u-a-l-a. I actually don't currently have a dedicated website because it needed to be revamped completely, and I took it down, and then life happened so elizabethbear.com will currently just take you to my Patreon. That's the easiest way to get there. I’m @matociquala on Twitter, and I'm @matociquala on Instagram. I have a very neglected Facebook page, Facebook fan page, so if you want really, really intermittent updates, there's that. I also have a tiny newsletter on an erratic basis which is also @matociquala.

H: Once upon a time, you had a LiveJournal, but I don't know if that got dropped somewhere in the great LiveJournal migration.

E: It is all still mirrored on Dreamwidth, and there's a lot of, “How I learned how to write,” back there which might be a useful resource, but I have not—I started that blog because—actually it was Neil Gaiman's fault although he doesn't know this. He wrote a post on his blog about why his blog wasn't about writing, and it was a very funny post. Then I realized that I wanted to read that blog. I wanted to read as somebody who was at that point trying to, had just sold my first professional short story, and was trying to write a novel that would sell. I wanted that blog, so I decided to write it. I wrote it. I kept it going for 10 years, 2003 through 2013 plus intermittent updates afterwards. I think the last one was probably about a year ago, but then I realized that I'm still learning stuff about writing. I don't think you ever stop, but all of the stuff I'm learning about writing now is no longer generally applicable. It's how I fix this one particular sentence, and I have no idea how to blog about that or if it would be useful to anybody. Also, I sort of ran out of time.

H: Yeah, yeah, I know that well.

E: That's the other thing.

H: So I'll include links to all of these places to find you in the show notes, and thank you so much for sharing your time with the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.

E: Good, thank you for giving me this opportunity. This has been so much fun.

Show Notes

A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.

In this episode we talk about:

  • Elizabeth’s upcoming steampunk novel Stone Mad, an independent sequel to Karen Memory. Set in an alternate late 19th century Pacific Northwest, Karen navigates her way past murderers, corrupt politicians, and arcane conspiracies the help of a steam-powered armored sewing machine, the other denizens of the disreputable Hôtel Mon Cherie, and her girlfriend Priya.
  • How Karen Memory started out as a YA novel and what happened next
  • The importance of voice in how the stories developed
  • The roots of the world in Verne, Wells, and actual history
  • Future stories involving Karen Memory
  • The difference between writing grim versus hopeful worlds, even when bad things happen to your characters
  • The social, historical, and political context of the Pacific Northwest that made it a perfect story setting
  • Basing stories on cultural patterns as opposed to events, and why Elizabeth doesn’t write actual historical fiction
  • Elizabeth’s early experiences discovering SFF with queer characters and the importance of representation in fiction
  • Books mentioned

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Links to Heather Online

Links to Elizabeth Bear Online

Major category: 
LHMP
Friday, March 9, 2018 - 11:00

I guess it doesn't help to have an "upcoming events" feature on my website if I don't fill in my schedule until I'm actually at the event! (Only remembered to make my hotel reservation two days ago, for that matter.) Fortunately, when you're dealing with a convention that's literally 10 miles down the road, being a bit discombobulated has fewer consequences.

In any event, here I am at FOGCon. I'll be on several programming items today and tomorrow, talking about things like meta-fiction, the inherent feminist nature of romance novels, and Faustian bargains.

Major category: 
Conventions
Thursday, March 8, 2018 - 07:42

Lately I've been thinking about a topic in the general field of literary gatekeeping. To some extent, these thoughts were inspired by my new venture as a contributing book reviewer at The Lesbian Review. One of the reasons Sheena has been urging me to join the reviewers there is that they didn't have anyone who specialized in historical fiction, so for the most part, historical fiction simply wasn't getting reviewed. And since historicals are a favorite genre of mine...

But when you think about it, that's a big responsibility: to be the primary reviewer for a specific genre at a review venue. Historicals are only one of the genres I read (I'll be reviewing other things for TLR as well--probably mostly mainstream books with lesbian protagonists). And I'm not a prolific reader, not in comparison to most professional reviewers. (Though I have to remember that when the reviewers you hang out with include people like James Nicoll and Liz Bourke, you can get a skewed notion of reviewer reading prowess!) So that means that even with the relatively small size of the lesbian historical fiction output (and it hadn't really hit me how small it is until I started putting together the forthcoming books segement for my podcast), I'm going to be filtering what I read (and therefore what I review) based on my own idiosyncratic tastes.

That means that there are topics and subgenres within lesbian historical fiction that probably won't get reviewed for TLR at all simply because I'm not reviewing them. For example, I'm less interested in reading 20th century historicals, not very interested in the most popular formula for American western/frontier stories, and not really interested in books with significant erotic content. As an individual reader, that's just my taste. But as a reviewer, that filters out some significant market segments. It's neither fair nor right, but it's a thing.

The Lesbian Review isn't the only review site that has this sort of de facto gatekeeping. For example, I love reading the reviews and columns at Smart Bitches Trashy Books (a general romance review site). Although historical romance is a major interest of the site, and although there are occasional reader requests for recommendations for f/f historical romance there, the sole SBTB reviewer who specializes in lesbian romance isn't interested in historicals. So they don't get reviewed. And one of the unintended consequences of that is that the reader threads asking about lesbian historical romance have the mistaken impression that there's essentially none being published. It's not only an inadvertent gatekeeping of publicity, but an inadvertent gatekeeping of knowledge itself. Similarly, review venues that cover the whole LGBTQ spectrum but have a single reviewer to represent the entirety of L fiction are going to reflect that one person's specific reading tastes. (And I can pretty much guarantee you that those tastes will be contemporary romance.)

Any time that access to a field goes through a single person, we can get the illusion of representation without the reality. This is a constant issue in discussions of diversity in the book world, whether it's the one POC agent at a literary agency or the one "diverse book" on a publisher's line-up. By definition, a single access point cannot be "diverse" and a full sense of the field requires triangulation from multiple viewpoints. But the effect can't be laid on the shoulders of that single access point. Each agent, each reviewer, each acquisitions editor (each writer for that matter) can and should reflect the things they absolutely love. What the world needs is more loves--more different loves from different angles.

This isn't a critique of the venues that host those single-point inadvertent gatekeepers. Especially in the field of book reviews, the work is mostly done as a labor of love. It's a field where "shoulds" can kill any interest in continuing at all. Rather, it's a caution to consumers. Never assume that what you see is all there is to get. Never narrow your information sources down to a single venue. Because you're going to miss some great books that way. I know I do.

Major category: 
Thinking
Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - 08:06

Other than my fairly rigid schedule of LHMP posts and the Bingo series, my blog spreadsheet tells me I haven't posted much in the last couple of weeks. Sometimes all the overlapping deadlines and commitments conspire to knock out the time I'd normally spend brainstorming blogs. In the present case, it's been a combination of scrambling to get some LHMP material together, all of my investigations at work going from "waiting on someone else to do something" to "you need to get this turned around right now," and spending half of last week serving my jury duty--the first time in my life I've actually been selected for a trial that went to completion. The jury duty was a fascinating experience. I was satisfied with our verdict, though left angry by some of the events we needed to rule on. And I was unprepared for how exhausting it was to alternate between waiting around for things to happen with paying very intense concentration to the testimony. Most exhausting was the hour or so spent in deliberations (especially since I sort of volunteered/was volunteered to be foreman). I've blogged in detail about the experience on my Dreamwidth account, but I'm afraid it's only accessible if we're mutuals there. (I don't lock Dreamwidth posts very often, but I wanted a layer of privacy for some of what I was talking about.)

So since I don't have new and interesting thoughts to post here today, I figured I'd cheerlead about some recent and upcoming stuff, just as a reminder:

  • Lace and Blade 4 is out! With a new Alpennia story about Jeanne de Cherdillac! Anthologies often get overlooked in the flood of great new books coming out, so if you enjoy the stories (and especially if you enjoy mine), it would mean a lot if you dropped a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon.
  • The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast's brand new original fiction series will debut this month! I'm so excited about this new venture and I've lined up a really great story to kick it off. The fiction series is a massive experiment, not only for the podcast, but for lesbian historical fiction in general. There's been a lot of buzz recently on twitter contrasting all the people who say they're looking for good lesbian historicals with the experiences of those of us who write them. The biggest hurdle is simply getting the word out about where to find the stories. So I hope that, if people enjoy the story--or even simply enjoy the idea of lesbian historical podcast fiction--you'll spread the word and encourage others to listen. Can we get a wave going here that can help lift up the field in general?
  • My 2018 Lesbian Book Bingo Challenge story series is up to five episodes so far! Although I'm doing the series in part to have a more interesting way of promoting the Book Bingo event, there's a certain satisfaction loosing an actual new piece of fiction into the world every two weeks. Follow the intertwined adventures of what will be a fairly extensive cast of characters navigating their lives and loves in the chaotic world of late 17th century Europe.
  • Getting back to The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast: One of the great things about a podcast is that it's "sticky" -- people can pop in and listen to past episodes whenever they want to. In my automated social media postings, I have a rotating schedule of pointers to past episodes, though as always it's hard to know whether people are clicking through to listen to them. If one of the postings reminds you of a favorite episode, it would be wonderful if you shared it to your followers with a comment on why you liked it. The LHMP blog and podcast are a labor of love, but they're also meant to be a resource in a field where information can be hard to find. In 2018, the blog will come up on its 4th anniversary, and the podcast on its 2nd and it finally feels like knowledge of their existence is starting to trickle out past the "first circle" of people who found out about them directly from knowing me. I queried an author who specializes in lesbian historicals about doing an interview and was a bit dismayed to find out that she'd never heard of the podcast. So don't assume that the people you know you might enjoy the blog and podcast already know about them.
Major category: 
Promotion
Publications: 
Gifts Tell Truth
Monday, March 5, 2018 - 07:00

This biography falls outside the Project’s pre-20th century scope, but I already owned the book and since I featured an interview about a show based on Carstairs’ life on the podcast, it felt like a good excuse to cover it in the blog. The shifting experiences and receptions of Carstairs’s same-sex relationships over her lifetime provide something of a tour through 20th century lesbian history, though of course Carstairs herself was insulated to an astounding degree by her wealth and connections. Carstairs was definintely gender non-conforming and adopted a number of masculine-coded attributes, including a preference for the name Joe. However there seems sufficient evidence in her own writings to conclude that she did not consider herself transgender, and so I have followed the book's lead in using female pronouns.

And not to put too fine a point on it, Carstairs was not exactly a socially and politically progressive icon. While many aspects of her transgressive life appear glamorous, and while she did embrace some improvements with regard to social and economic conditions for “her people” in the Bahamas, she was solidly imperialist, colonialist, racist, and classist and when she was able to, she ordered the lives of those around her in a manner that was autocratic and sometimes cruel. But she is a part of lesbian history as much as more palatable icons are.

Major category: 
LHMP
Full citation: 

Summerscale, Kate. 1997. The Queen of Whale Cay. Viking, New York. ISBN 0-670-88018-3

Marion “Joe” Carstairs was born in 1900, heir to a fortune, courtesy of her grandfather’s involvement in Standard Oil, and became famous in the 1920s as a motorboat racer and celebrity. She dropped out of general notice in 1934 when she bought an island in the Bahamas and moved there to found something of a private kingdom where she entertained her fellow celebrities, such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as well as a long string of female lovers such as Marlene Dietrich. She was know for eccentricities such as favoring masculine clothing and for her mascot, a doll named “Lord Todd Wadley” that she treated as something of an alter ego.

[Note: Like many eccentrics of her class and era, she was conservative in politics and unrepentantly imperialist, as well as embodying the racist and colonialist attitudes of white British culture of the time. While the author of this book tends to report these attitudes without comment, I have omitted some of the more offensive elements in my summary and so feel the need to point it out more explicitly.]

[Second note: I feel the need to embrace the possibility that, if born in a later age, Carstairs might have had a trans identity. Certainly she falls on the trans-masculine spectrum. But the information in the biography seems to me to fall solidly on the female and lesbian side, so I have followed the author in doing so.]

By the time of Carstairs’ death at age 93, she was essentially forgotten, both in her exploits and her scandals. The author of this biography was assigned to write her obituary for The Daily Telegraph and uncovered a story that she thought warranted more research and a full history. That story came from old newspaper clippings, friends and lovers still around to be interviewed, and a series of tape recordings that Carstairs made in the 1970s for an abortive project of having her autobiography ghost-written. The tapes are especially revealing, showing a woman who did very little self-reflection or analysis of her own life and motivations. She was; she did; but the whys and wherefores she dismissed as unimportant.

Although her inherited wealth made Carstairs’ transgressive life possible, she worked hard to dissociate herself from her parents, choosing her own gender-neutral nickname at an early age (before eventually choosing “Joe”), and later claiming she didn’t even know her father’s given name--though he left the marriage shortly after Carstairs’ birth, so this might be forgiven. That father was British and was the connection that brought her from the company of American oil barons to London society. Her mother remarried a series of Englishmen, but Carstairs had little affection for her half-siblings. She describes her youth: “I was never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer,” and told stories of a rough and tumble adventurousness. Her mother in turn seems to have had little interest in her, except for a possessive jealousy that led to interfering with any emotional attachments Carstairs tried to make with other adults in her childhood.

Carstairs developed an early fascination with boats. Even by her own account she was a violent and unmanageable child, leading to her being put into an American boarding school in order to separate her from her half-siblings at age 11. It was during this period that she gravitated toward masculine clothing and the company of other girls who did so. She had crushes on her school-fellows, though she claimed they never progressed to sexual encounters at the time.

During World War I, she developed an ambition to become a doctor and her grandmother arranged--over her mother’s objections--for Carstairs to go to France as an ambulance driver. During this period in Paris she discovered the joys of sex with a fellow ambulance driver, among other women. Dolly Wilde, the niece of Oscar Wilde, was one of her lovers and part of Natalie Barney’s circle in Paris, but Carstairs was only on the periphery of that glittering crowd. It was Dolly who taught Carstairs how to invent her own public persona.

In 1918, Carstairs had a break with her mother over her lesbianism, and though Carstairs tells it that she told her mother what do do with her threats of disinheritance, shortly afterward she married a childhood friend Count Jacques de Pret, most likely to avoid losing her inheritance. The two parted immediately after the marriage and both took pains to note that it was never consummated.

After WWI, Carstairs took her love of motor vehicles to supporting the British anti-Republican activities in Ireland, where she again fell in love with a number of like-minded unconventional women. Then in 1919 it was back to France to help with post-war cleanup. All this was hard physical work with a certain amount of danger. The nature of the work required maasculine-style dress and it often attracted women who transgressed traditional gender roles. (This chapter of the book includes extensive repetition of a slur used for the Chinese laborers they were working beside, as well as quoting some very racist commentary. I note this for the sake of full representation but decline to repeat any of it.)

Shortly after being demobilized in 1920, Carstairs’ grandmother--and champion--died in New York. Carstairs played at being poor while waiting several years for the will to be settled, though in fact trust funds gave her an extremely comfortable income. She and her army friends set up an all-female chauffeur business in London, perhaps to prolong the sense of transgressive freedom they had during the war. Their clientele was extremely varied and included tours and international travel as well as local service. [Reading the details, I kept imaging a tv historical sit-com revolving around the company and its activities!] Despite devoting herself to the driving service as a business, Carstairs had an estate in Hampshire. And in 1924 when both her mother’s and grandmother’s wills were finally settled, Carstairs became extremely wealthy. She commissioned “the best motorboat money could buy” and set out on the next stage of her life.

The state of the art in motorboats at the time were hydroplanes--very fast, but unstable and fragile. Boats were as likely to be destroyed in the race as to win. Carstairs took on a full time boat mechanic named Joe (they had fun with the name coincidence) who would be one of the many associates she “looked after” financially life-long. Then she began winning races, not consistently, but regularly, expressing an addiction to the thrill and hazard of the speed.

Carstairs attracted a regular flock of girlfriends, from high society women to showgirls. This was typical of the racing celebrities, though Carstairs’ relationships were less openly discussed by the press than her male compatriots’ were. In 1925, while on holiday with her “secretary” Ruth Baldwin (who seems from the evidence to have been the deepest love of her life), Carstairs received from her as a present the doll that would become her mascot and icon. She had an aversion to the idea of children in her life, but the doll, “Lord Todd Wadley” becomes something of a child substitute.

The 1920s (sometimes called “the lost generation” in Britain) was an era of theatricality and abandon. The fashion for androgyny that also produced the “flapper” style, manifested in Carstairs and others in gender-bending and cross-gender clothing styles. The war had produced a gender imbalance due to massive male casualties which lessened the pressure on women to stick to a traditionally feminine role in society. Carstairs acknowledged that she “looked like a boy” during that era, but disclaimed a butch or transgender identity, saying, “I was not a stomper.” Carstairs had many friends and lovers among the theatrical set, including Gwen Farrar for whom her first racing boat was named. Among the well-known actresses within her circle was Tallulah Bankhead.

Having taken all the major speedboat competitions in the light 1.5L engine class, Carstairs turned her sights on the unlimited-power Harmsworth trophy, a competition where the wealth to build large fast boats was key. After several failed boats and spectacular mid-race catastrophies, she eventually gave up on that ambition, saying that the sport was just too expensive.

By then--the late 1920s--public attitudes toward lesbians had turned from amused tolerance to condemnation. Lesbianism was attributed to athleticism (as opposed to the reverse!) among other causes, leading to disapproval of women in active pursuits like racing. The press coverage of Carstairs’ life and exploits became more biting, and in 1931 she set off on a round-the-world voyage to escape the gossip and would thereafter spend only visits in Britain. Initially bouncing between London and New York, her relationship with Ruth--always quite open in terms of fidelity--soured and they parted ways. Carstairs built and lived on a sequence of luxury yachts and then, in 1934, bought Whale Cay, a small island in the Bahamas, where she would reign like a queen.

The population of the Bahamas in 1930 was over 80% black, with most of the white population concentrated in the capital of Nassau. Carstairs’ Whale Cay was inhabited when she bought it by a black couple who tended the lighthouse--and that was all. Several previous owners had tried business ventures there that failed. Carstairs set to work building roads and a home. She complained that the local population (“the natives,” she wrote) didn’t like work and had to be taught the construction and road building skills she needed. But her building project attracted local labor and also brought in a company store where they could spend their wages. Carstairs’ Spanish style mansion was complete in 1936. In addition to the mansion and store, Carstairs rebuilt the lighthouse and built a power plant, radio staion, schoolhouse, and museum, as well as supporting agriculture on the island and experiments with a fish cannery. She bought several more small islands nearby for more agriculture, and dredged out a harbor on Whale Cay.

On Whale Cay she had the power and control over her life and socializing that had become difficult in England. She could entertain guests or eject the unwanted. She dispensed an idiosyncratic form of local justice to her employees and their families and was fond of crude and sometimes terrifying practical jokes inflicted on her guests or chance visitors.

In 1934, Carstairs’ longtime partner Ruth Baldwin died of a drug overdose in England. Carstairs built a church in her memory on Whale Cay, with memorial services held for her annually. A startling number of Carstairs’ close friends from the ‘20s and ‘30s died relatively young in the years around 1940, with drugs and alcohol playing a significant part.

The descriptions of Carstairs’ dictatorial rule over “her people”are a bit stomach-turning. She wanted to help the local people “better themselves” but her rhetoric was steeped in racism and paternalistic colonialism. Except for the rather circular cash economy of the island, she might as well have owned the inhabitants outright. Conversely, her racism toward Bahamians didn’t preclude having the occasional black girlfriend among her theatrical friends, including Blanche Dunne and Mabel Mercer. And in some of her Bahamian political activism as well as visits to the American South, she could take overtly anti-racist stands. A complex woman. Her combative and dictatorial approach undermined her own efforts for local social reform and by 1941 when World War II caused large shifts in the Bahamian economy, she had both made enemies of the white elite and lost the momentum, of her social improvement projects among the black population. Although Carstairs tried to support the war effort, both personally and by the offer of some of her ships, no good fit for her efforts could be found.

The author of the biography goes off on two chapters of extended metaphor, viewing Carstairs as a Peter Pan figure, and then as being in the tradion of Carribbean pirates.

Carstairs had a rather tempestuous affair with Marlene Dietrich in the late 1930s. After it broke up, Carstairs began emerging more into society again. She did some sea rescue work and brought her ships into use for local commercial transport in place of vessels that had been conscripted for the war. In the mid 1940s, Carstairs decided to take up flying and proposed building a small-plane airport near Miami that was never approved. [Note: In her wealth, eccentricities, and love for fast vehicles, Carstairs keeps reminding me a bit of Howard Hughes, although unlike Hughes the wealth was entirely inherited rather than a product of eccentric genius.]

Through the 1950s she had a series of long-term girlfriends, but in the late 1950s, age began catching up with her, with arthritis in her legs and other ailments. By the 1960s, her rule on Whale Cay was being challenged by the black residents who were increasingly disinclined to behave like subjects. When she sold Whale Cay in 1975, she claimed it was due to increased drug trafficking, but it seems likely that the way of life she as accustomed to had become untenable.

Carstairs lived in Florida until 1990, with summers in the northeast, always near the sea. She still maintained many personal connections, though often through the medium of financial support of people who had once been close to her or helpful to her. She had a distrust of people she couldn’t bind with money. In 1978, saying she “had it with these fucking women” she invited a man she’d met on Long Island to move in as her hired companion and friend, and he stayed with her until her death.

The emotional center of Carstairs’ life had increasingly become her mascot Todd Wadley and other dolls. Like many eccentric rich people, she made a habit of regularly changing her will toward the end of life, shifting her bequests according to her shifting relationships with friends and relatives. After a long decline, Carstairs fell into a coma in December 1993, a few weeks short of her 94th birthday, and died later that same night. The doll, Todd Wadley, was cremated with her and their ashes, combined with those of Ruth Baldwin, were entombed over the sea on Long Island.

Time period: 
Place: 
Event / person: 
Saturday, March 3, 2018 - 07:00

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 43 (previously 20a) - On the Shelf for March 2018 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/03/03 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for March 2018.

It’s been a busy month here at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project and I’m really excited about the things we have coming up to share with you, not just this month but in the year to come.

The Fiction Project

If you’ve been following along on the blog, you’ll already know the lineup for the podcast fiction project. When I finished the first read-though of submissions, I knew immediately that I had a problem: there were just too many good stories that I wanted to buy. Fortunately, I could solve this with an executive decision. Rather than buying two stories for a half-year trial run of the fiction project, I just went ahead and bought four to cover all the "fifth Saturday" episodes for the entire year. That will also give me more data to see whether and how I want to extend the fiction project in the future.

I haven't decided on the order of appearance for the whole season yet, but here are the selections in chronological order of setting:

  • "Peaceweaver" by Jennifer Nestojko - In 6th century Denmark, one of the secondary characters from the heroic poem Beowulf comes home again, looking for a different type of peace than she once wove for her kingdom.
  • "At the Mouth" by Gurmika Mann - In 10th century India, a temple dancer and a seamstress sort out how best to further each other's happiness. It’s a heart-wrenching tale of the choices that love demands.
  • "Inscribed" by V.M. Agab - In 15th century Venice, Luca apprentices to her father in disguise as a young man, and then falls hopelessly in love with Coletta. But Coletta's problem is more difficult to solve unless Luca is willing to take a daring chance.
  • "One Night in Saint Martin" by Catherine Lundoff - The 17th century Carribbean is full of spies, pirates, and tangled international politics--this story has them all, as well as romance!

I'm especially happy that after I'd identified the best stories I'd received, I found I also had a broad variety of time-periods, cultures, and types of story. We have young love and love returned to late in life. We have adventure and quiet friendship. We have women who transgress gender norms and those who find love within conventional structures. We have happy endings, bittersweet ones, and stories where the eventual end is yet unknown. I'm so excited to be able to bring these stories to my podcast listeners!

At the time I’m recording this, I’m still sorting out which story will debut the series at the end of the month. But I’m sure you’ll enjoy all of them, no matter which one comes first.

Publications on the Blog

I have a number of different approaches to choosing which publications to cover in the blog. Sometimes I try to pick ones that relate to the theme of that month’s podcast, like when I did my month-long special on Sappho and her poetry last year. I’ve done a little of that this past month with two biographies of actress Charlotte Cushman. One by Lisa Merrill, published in 2000, looks very specifically at how Cushman felt about her relationships with women and how she carefully managed the way they affected her public reputation. The second biography, by Joseph Leach and published in 1970, makes a strong contrast as well as an interesting case study in how historians and biographers have actively worked to erase queerness from the subjects of their study. When I chose these books to blog, it wasn’t so much to have a coordinated theme this time, but because I needed to read them to put the podcast together. I’m starting the March blogs off with another coordinated publication: a biography of speedboat racer and lesbian celebrity “Joe” Carstairs, which ties in with the interview at the end of this show.

Sometimes I’ll choose publications for the blog simply because something came to my attention and I wanted to read the material anyway. That was the case with the three linguistics-related articles that started off last month’s blogs. I was a little disappointed by the one by Mary-Jo Bonnet on the chronology of words for lesbians in French because gaps in her data undermine some of her key conclusions. The other vocabulary-related article by Randy P. Connor was interesting in part for having an extensive vocabulary list of terms used for both male and female homosexuals in pre-modern France. And I was really delighted with Diane Watt’s close examination of the phrase “clipping and kissing” as used in 16th century English, and how it was used in an English translation of the story of Yde and Olive to indiacate sexual activity between the two women. I’m going to digress for a moment of academic fangirl squee, because a couple weeks ago Professor Watt tweeted a link to my blog in connection with a different publication of hers that I’d included. And--oh man!--nothing quite like the panic of realizing that someone’s actually paying attention to what you’re saying about their work.

Getting back to how I choose articles. Sometimes I’ll line up a small group of publications from my to-do list that have a related theme, like when I had a group of three books on sexuality in the middle ages that I covered last fall. Sometimes I’ll just wander into the library in my house and grab something at random that I haven’t covered yet. But sometimes timing and logistics pushes me in a particular direction. Covering a substantial book in a single blog, like I did for the Cushman biographies, takes up a big chunk of time. So for the next couple months I’m going to focus on journal articles instead, and try to line up a few months’ worth to give me a bit of a breathing space.

So just to let you in on a bit of my process in how I do this: I spent Last Saturday in the Cal Berkeley library with a spreadsheet of call numbers and a cell phone app that turns photos directly to pdfs. I started out with a list of 70 articles to try to track down and made my way through about 50 of them before I ran out of time. From those 50, I ended up with 28 photocopied articles, plus 8 books that I identified as being useful enough that I went online and bought them. (Although I really wish there was a non-Amazon site that aggregated second-hand book listings conveniently.) The rest of the items that I worked through on my list either weren’t on the shelf or were available only in electronic form.

Such a variety of options gives me the chance to pick a few to start with that coordinate with this month’s essay, which is an adaptation of a blog I wrote on the theme of falling in love with cross-dressing women in historic literature. So I’ll fill out the rest of the March blog spots with Caroline Gonda’s “Lesbian Narrative in the Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu”, Kristina Straub’s “The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing and the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke”, and Ad Putter’s “Transvestite Knights in Medieval Life and History” which is particularly intersting as it discusses positive portrayals of men cross-dressing as women in medieval literature.

As I mentioned, this month’s essay will be an adaptation of a blog I wrote a couple years ago on the use of gender disguise in historic literature as a way of creating a context for same-sex attraction and how various different texts handled the consequences of that attraction. I’ll be adding some further analysis of how the gender disguise trope in historic literature creates a site of intersection for both lesbian motifs and transgender motifs and how it can point out some of the inherent problems with modern identity groups trying to lay exclusive claim to people or works in the past that existed within an entirely different set of models for gender and sexuality.

Author Guest

This month’s author guest will be fantasy and science fiction writer Elizabeth Bear, in celebration of the release of her second Karen Memory book, an alternate history steam-punk adventure featuring lesbian protagonists. Elizabeth is a wonderfully entertaining guest and you should go out and read Karen Memory now so that you’ll be ready for Stone Mad when it comes out later in the month. More details on that are coming up in the next segment where I talk about forthcoming books.

I’d also like to congratulate last month’s guest, Ellen Klages. The novella we talked about, “Passing Strange” has been nominated as a finalist for the Nebula award. The Nebulas are a set of awards voted on by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America organization. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the members of that organization find it the most brilliant novella of the year, like I did. (I know that as a SFWA member, I’ll certainly be voting for it.)

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

Let’s talk about some new historical and historically-inspired books coming out this month. Because there are so few lesbian historical books overall, I cast a fairly wide net in this ongoing segment and indicate whether a book is purely historical, is set in real-world history with fantastical elements, or is historically inspired but set in an alternate history or alternate world.

Of course, the first book to mention is the one our featured author will be talking about, the steampunk alt-historical Stone Mad by Elizabeth Bear, coming out from Tor.com. Here’s the blurb:

“Readers met the irrepressible Karen Memory in Elizabeth Bear’s 2015 novel Karen Memory, and fell in love with her steampunk Victorian Pacific Northwest city, and her down-to-earth story-telling voice. Now Karen is back with Stone Mad, a new story about spiritualists, magicians, con-men, and an angry lost tommy-knocker―a magical creature who generally lives in the deep gold mines of Alaska, but has been kidnapped and brought to Rapid City. Karen and Priya are out for a night on the town, celebrating the purchase of their own little ranch and Karen’s retirement from the Hotel Ma Cherie, when they meet the Arcadia Sisters, spiritualists who unexpectedly stir up the tommy-knocker in the basement. The ensuing show could bring down the house, if Karen didn’t rush in to rescue everyone she can.”

In the purely historical category we have The Northwoods by Jane Hoppen coming out from Bold Strokes Books.  It’s a historical romance with the fairly popular setting of the American frontier in the mid 19th century, involving a cross-dressing woman passing as a man. The blurb says:

“In 1853 Wisconsin, Evelyn Bauer’s husband dies and, to support her children and their farm, she must disguise herself as him and work the logging camp for the winter. Sarah Bell has lost her partner Abigail to pneumonia. When she’s offered a job as a cook's helper at the logging camp, she has little choice but to go. The two women secretly forge a friendship as they struggle to survive the harsh environment. As Evelyn’s and Sarah’s feelings grow, tension silently builds and their unspoken passion will either force them apart or bind them together forever.”

A book that looks like it may stray over the line a teensy bit from history into alternate history is Free to Love by Ali Spooner and Annette Mori from Affinity Rainbow Publications. This is a pair of intertwined stories set in the Carribbean. The date isn’t clear from the blurb, but it looks like either the later 18th century or early 19th century

Ali Spooner’s contribution is The Chandler’s Daughter. “Captain Hillary Blythe loves sailing the Atlantic Coast on her journeys to deliver goods. Appalled by the growth of slave trade, vowing to find a way to help her thoughts turn to piracy frequently. Will helping those enslaved jeopardize her life, and the life she hopes to have with the Chandler’s Daughter?”

The other story by Annette Mori is Forbidden Love. “When Captain Blythe brings a small group of rescued slaves to a mission on Antigua, life for Elizabeth Allen changes forever. Elizabeth feels an instant connection to Kia, one of the young women. A devout Christian, Elizabeth struggles to align her feeling for Kia and her devotion to the church. Will Elizabeth allow the forbidden love she feels for Kia, or will faith over-rule her heart?”

The fourth book I found this month is more of a fictionalized biography: Undiscovered Country: A Novel Inspired by the Lives of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. It’s written by Kelly O’Connor McNees and published by Pegasus Books. Here’s the blurb: “In 1932, New York City, top reporter Lorena “Hick” Hickok starts each day with a front page byline―and finishes it swigging bourbon and planning her next big scoop. But an assignment to cover FDR’s campaign—and write a feature on his wife, Eleanor—turns Hick’s hard-won independent life on its ear. Soon her work, and the secret entanglement with the new first lady, will take her from New York and Washington to Scotts Run, West Virginia, where impoverished coal miners’ families wait in fear that the New Deal’s promised hope will pass them by. Together, Eleanor and Hick imagine how the new town of Arthurdale could change the fate of hundreds of lives. But doing what is right does not come cheap, and Hick will pay in ways she never could have imagined. Undiscovered Country artfully mixes fact and fiction to portray the intense relationship between this unlikely pair. Inspired by the historical record, including the more than three thousand letters Hick and Eleanor exchanged over a span of thirty years, McNees tells this story through Hick’s tough, tender, and unforgettable voice. A remarkable portrait of Depression-era America, this novel tells the poignant story of how a love that was forced to remain hidden nevertheless changed history.”

Remember that I can only include forthcoming books in this regular segment if I know they exist. So if you have or know of an upcoming book that might fall in the category of lesbian historical fiction, let me know so I can check it out.

Ask Sappho

Instead of the usual Ask Sappho segment in this podcast, I have a short interview with composer and artist Phoebe Legere about her off-Broadway musical about the life of Marion “Joe” Carstairs, an heiress, celebrity, and speedboat racer, whose life spans most of the 20th century and traces the changing experience of lesbian identity throughout that period. Phoebe Legere seems quite a colorful character herself and is very excited about the topic of her one-woman show. At the end of the interview there will be information about when and where the show will be performed and a special deal for our listeners.

Interview with Phoebe Legere

[Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find time to transcribe the interview before posting this. If I’m able to do so in the future, I’ll add it to this transcript.]

* * *

And that wraps up this month’s look at what’s on the shelf. I hope you’re looking forward to this month’s podcast features as much as I am!

Show Notes

Your monthly update on what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been doing.

In this episode we talk about:

  • The stories chosen for the new audio fiction episodes
    • "Peaceweaver" by Jennifer Nestojko
    • "At the Mouth" by Gurmika Mann
    • "Inscribed" by V.M. Agab
    • "One Night in Saint Martin" by Catherine Lundoff
  • Publications on the Blog
    • Conner, Randy P. 1997. “Les Molles et les chausses: Mapping the Isle of Hermaphrodites in Premodern France” in Queerly Phrased: Language Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia & Kira Hall. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510471-4
    • Bonnet, Marie-Jo. 1997. “Sappho, or the Importance of Culture in the Language of Love” in Queerly Phrased: Language Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia & Kira Hall. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510471-4
    • Watt, Diane. 1997. “Read My Lips: Clipping and Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century” in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall. New York, Oxford University Press.  ISBN 0-19-510471-4
    • Merrill, Lisa. 2000. When Romeo was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and her Circle of Female Spectators. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. ISBN 978-0-472-08749-5
    • Leach, Joseph. 1970. Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman. Yale University Press, New Haven.
    • Summerscale, Kate.  1997.  The Queen of Whale Cay.  Viking, New York.  ISBN  0-670-88018-3
    • Gonda, Caroline. 2006. “Lesbian Narrative in the Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu” in British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 2: 191-200.
    • Straub, Kristina. 1991. “The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing and the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke.” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub. New York: Routledge. pp. 142-66
    • Putter, Ad. 1997. “Transvestite Knights in Medieval Life and History” in Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome & Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Garland, New York. pp. 279-302
  • New and Forthcoming Books
  • A special interview with composer and artist Phoebe Legere about her new one-woman musical about lesbian celebrity and speedboat racer Marion “Joe” Carstairs

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Links to Heather Online

Major category: 
LHMP
Thursday, March 1, 2018 - 08:00

This time the theme for the current Lesbian Book Bingo square is "Women of Color". See my first post in this series for information about the Bingo challenge and to find the start of my series of mini-stories on the themes of the bingo squares. I'm doing a mini-story for each square, with the added challenge of placing them all in a historic setting and linking all the stories together loosely as a single narrative.

I'm going to be a little blunt here: the lesbian fiction community is many wonderful things, but one thing it is not is racially diverse, both in terms of characters and authors. In the last couple of years, there has been more acknowledgement of this state of affairs, and organizations like the Golden Crown Literary Society have taken steps to seek out speakers to address the issue so that at least the conversation can begin. It isn't enough for established authors to include non-white characters in their work. Good representation has to begin with supporting authors who are working with a deep inside knowledge of the lives and cultures they're writing about. And I'm delighted to see that the list of suggested books for this square are overwhelmingly Own Voices with respect to culture/ethnicity (to the best of my knowledge and research).

That's particularly important in contemporary novels, but in my own field of historical fiction, lesbian fiction has produced some cringe-worthy cases of fetishization of non-white characters. It's something I struggle with calling out, because the historical field is so small to begin with. But if you're playing the Lesbian Book Bingo challenge, I'd like to urge you to choose a book for this square written by a non-white author. (In my list of "what squares are the Alpennia books good for" I've already requested that people not use Mother of Souls to fill this square for just this reason.)

Here are some books I've enjoyed in the last few years with female same-sex attraction (whether they use the word "lesbian" or not) involving non-white characters that are own-voices in some cultural/ethnic aspect:

  • Serpentine by Cindy Pon (Chinese-based YA fantasy, not a romance but significant themes of same-sex desire)
  • Everfair by Nisi Shawl (alternate steampunky history of the Congo where some of the colonial horror was successfully challenged, realistic depiction later 19th c attitudes towards romantic and sexual relations between women, both positive and negative)
  • "That Could Be Enough" by Alyssa Cole (novella in the linked collection Hamilton's Battallion) (lovely wounded-bird romance between two black women in post Revolutionary New York)
  • The House of Binding Thorns by Aliette de Bodard (post-magical-apocalyptic Paris with fallen angels and dragon kingdoms; there are queer charcters in most of de Bodard's work but I've chosen this one for the significant same-sex relationship involving an Annamite (Vietnamese) woman; note that this book is best read after the previous volume The House of Shattered Wings which also features queer relationships)

In my mini-story series, I've fallen into a pattern of overlapping the introduction of new characters with references to the established ones. So you may have guessed which character in "Three White Doves" is going to rise the the fore in this one. Originally I was going to make her girlfriend be simply a dresser at the Paris Opera (which is setting things up for the next story), but when I was looking for inspirational images, I came across one of a set of engravings of opera dancers from the late 17th century, and one of them struck me as looking black. And I found a hand-colored version of the same engraving that gave the impression even more strongly. It may have been a chance trick of how the art was photographed, and I couldn't find any further information on the individual that would support or contradict the impression. But I took it as a sign from my muse.

For the first couple stories in this series, I just went with inspiration, but now I'm putting together a spreadsheet to track the upcoming bingo square themes and figure out how I'll keep weaving my characters in and out of each others' lives. I never can keep anything simple!

A Girl Can Dream (Lesbian Book Bingo 2018 - Women of Color)

“Marie, where’s your brother? Madame will be wanting you upstairs. La Maupin is coming to visit.”

I gave the footman a saucy look but crammed the last bite of cake into my mouth and rose hurriedly from the table. Charles had sneaked off for a quick nap in the room we shared and I poked him in the ribs before lifting my striped silk turban off the stand that protected its feathers. I leaned toward the mirror to check as I tucked my hair in all around then reached for the coat.

Charles groaned.

“Up, up! Madame wants us. That opera singer is here.”

Charles wasn’t really my brother—that is, maybe he was, who could say? But everyone called us twins since as far back as I could remember, toddling around Tante Jeanne’s market stall. I don’t think Tante Jeanne was really our aunt either, but I think family is something you do, not something you are. And until Charles started getting his growth a year back, we’d always looked like two peas in a pod: the same height, the same wide cheekbones, the same coloring.

That was how Tante Jeanne convinced Madame to hire us both when she was looking for a little black page boy. All the fashionable ladies had one. Well, Madame would have two: a boy and a girl. They’d wanted to dress me up like a boy too at first, but I’d have none of that, so they’d put me in a scarlet riding habit with gold braid to go with Charles’ scarlet coat and breeches, and matching gold-striped turbans with peacock feathers to top it off. Together we waited on Madame when she was entertaining guests and followed after her carrying her things at balls and the opera.

“Charles!”

He rolled off the bed, yawning and scrubbing his hand across his face. At least he’d had the sense to shave earlier—there’d be no time now. He was getting too old to play the page boy and we both knew the day was coming when we’d have to find other work, either in Madame’s house or somewhere else.

We barely managed to be dressed and tidy and standing in place at either side of the door to Madame’s boudoir when one of the footmen arrived escorting La Maupin. The scandalous opera singer was dressed in skirts today, looking quite like any other fine lady, except that she always moved like she was on stage with broad gestures and the energy of a cat.

Charles and I bowed and opened the doors with precise timing to let her through. There was no change in her expression but I knew she appreciated a good performance, whether she was on stage or not. Charles followed to announce her and I took the tray from a maid who’d slipped in from a side door to the antechamber and brought it in to set it on the table beside Madame’s bed.

“Thank you Marie, Charles, you may go. See that we aren’t disturbed.”

We bowed again, closed the doors with exact precision, and then looked at each other with broad grins and tried not to laugh out loud.

“They’ll be singing duets before long!” Charles whispered.

But my mind had gone elsewhere already, because if La Maupin was here, then Lisette would be waiting downstairs.

“Charles, sweetest of brothers, most darling of—”

“What do you want, Marie?”

“You know she won’t want anything for hours. We don’t both have to stay…”

He sighed. “Yes, Marie. I’ll keep watch.”

I kissed him hurriedly on the cheek. “You’re an angel.” Then rushed back to our room to change.

Swapping the red satin and feathered turban for a plain gown and kerchief was the work of a few minutes. The livery was designed to go on quickly and easily, for one never knew when we might be wanted. I’d almost slipped out the door to the yard when Madame’s housekeeper saw me.

“Where do you think you’re going, Marie?”

I ducked my head because sauciness wouldn’t work with her. “Madame said she doesn’t want to be disturbed for hours and hours, and Charles is kicking his heels in the antechamber in case she needs anything. And I need to take this off to Tante Jeanne.”

I held up the little purse I’d slipped into my pocket. We always sent part of our wages to her and I kept it for an excuse when I wanted to be out and about.

“Very well,” she said. “But no dawdling.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Lisette was leaning against the wall by the stables waiting. I ran to her and took her face in my hands in for a long, slow kiss, then set back just to look at her. Lisette had the most beautiful eyelashes I’d ever seen—and I loved having the chance to see them up close like that, the way they curled up and tickled when I kissed her. I loved the sweep of the darker freckles across the top of her nose, even though she hated them and tried everything she could to take them off. And most of all I loved her red, sweet lips like the plumpest of cherries stolen straight from the tree. I tasted them again.

Lisette laced her fingers through mine and nodded toward the stable door. “It’s more private in there.”

I wrinkled my nose. Some day I wanted to kiss Lisette all over without having to think of horses. “I told the housekeeper I was taking my pay to Tante Jeanne. But we can walk as slow as you please and still be back before La Maupin finishes with Madame.”

We both giggled imagining that. La Maupin was notorious for her lovers, both women and men, and each one was the greatest love of her life to hear them tell. Lisette knew better, being La Maupin’s dresser at the opera house. When the opera singer went swaggering about town in men’s clothing, she went alone. But when she was playing the role of fashionable lady, she needed someone to fill out the part of lady’s maid and Lisette was glad to play it.

We twined our arms around each other’s waists and set off down the street toward the river where Tante Jeanne had her market stall. Lisette had to slow her pace to mine. She was all a dancer’s step and spring. Her every movement made me think of the feel of those muscular legs wrapping around me.

As if she’d heard my thoughts, Lisette said, “I’m going to dance tomorrow! Toinette twisted her foot and La Maupin told them I knew all the dances and they should give me a chance.”

“Oh, Lisette!” I knew she always learned all the chorus steps and practiced alongside the opera dancers every time she could, but she’d only once danced on the stage before and that was just for rehearsals. I teased, “You’ll be famous soon and forget all about me. You’ll have rich lovers sending you bonbons and flowers.”

“When I have rich lovers I’ll buy bonbons and flowers for you,” she said and squeezed my waist even more tightly. “Just you see.”

We came out into the market and threaded our way through the crowds to where Tante Jeanne sold eggs and chickens. When I thought back, I knew that Tante Jeanne was growing older. Every year her face was more weathered and had more lines, but it was like the way your favorite leather gloves got softer and darker and more closely fitting the longer you wore them. Her eyes got all bright when she saw us and we both kissed her cheek as if Lisette was a daughter too.

“You make the day brighter, mes petites.” But then her voice turned mock-scolding. “And where is my boy Charles! Why doesn’t he come to see me like you do?”

“You know Charles came last month. He’s waiting on Madame and we couldn’t both get away.” I carefully took the little purse out of my pocket and slipped it into her hand so no one else would see. You had to be careful letting people know if you had money. Jeanne slipped it into her own pocked under her apron and I knew it would go into her hidden box later. Something to keep her some day when her joints grew too stiff to sit in the market all day.

But it seemed like no more than a few minutes of telling her stories of Madame and her guests, or Lisette telling tales on the other opera dancers, before I knew it was time to be getting back.

We wound back through the cobbled streets again, arms still wrapped around each other’s waist to hoard up the feel of our bodies moving so closely together. And then we were in the yard and I gave Lisette one last chaste kiss because one of the grooms was in the yard and I didn’t want him to think  we were doing it for him.

“I wish I could come see you dance,” I said. “Not just waiting on Madame, but to see you.”

Lisette sighed and laid her head on my shoulder briefly. “Maybe some day I will have a really rich lover and I can take you away from all this. Oh Marie, I want you with me always.”

We both knew that wouldn’t happen. But a girl can dream.

(copyright 2018 Heather Rose Jones, all rights reserved)

[Continue to the next installment]

Major category: 
Promotion
Monday, February 26, 2018 - 07:00

When I decided to blog a few books on Charlotte Cushman in support of doing a podcast on her, my online searches suggested two titles that fell in the “definitive” category: Merrill’s 2000 book that I blogged last week, and Leach’s 1970 one that I’m blogging today. I hadn’t quite realized that they’d be such an object lesson in ways to approach the sexuality of 19th century queer women. Merrill unabashedly tackles the evidence for Cushman’s romantic and erotic relationships with other women and the ways she self-conciously managed her public reputation around them, as well as how shifts in public reception for same-sex relationships contributed to a significant erasure of Cushman’s rightful place in stage history. Leach, writing 30 years earlier, takes a far more “traditional” approach to the lives of 19th century women in “romantic friendships”. At almost every turn, Cushman’s lovers are turned into “friends”, the emotional chaos of her personal life is converted to concerns about finances and professional jealousies, and when evidence of Cushman’s intense emotional relationships with women is impossible to ignore, Leach hurries past with no analysis or discussion. In contrast, Leach fastens onto every scrap of evidence for Cushman’s interactions with men, converting an unnamed man that she spurned early in her career to a life-long romantic wound who was solely responsible for her remaining unmarried and regularly referring to Cushman’s life as “loveless” and “lonely”. And yet both biographers had exactly the same set of documentation available to work from.

One explanation, of course, is the times they were writing in (keeping in mind that Leach’s 1970 publication reflects research and composition done well before that date). He wrote at an era before “gay liberation” when a laudatory biographer would consider it a duty to “protect the reputation” of his subject. But also when myths about the nature of 19th century women’s sexuality largely stood unchallenged. (Keep in mind that Lillian Faderman’s 1981 work also failed to challenge them substantially.) Merrill was writing in the midst of a renaissance of historic research into queer women’s history: when Helena Whitbread’s work with Anne Lister’s diaries had exploded the myth that pre-20th century women were incapable of a self-conscious lesbian identity and when there was no longer a pall of stigma attached to identifying your research topic as other than heterosexual.

When digging for historic evidence for queer sexuality, it can be important to keep this sort of contrast in mind. Historians are never objective. They have their own biases and filters and their own agenda regarding how they want to present their topic. And while that doesn’t mean that you can’t trust anyone, it certainly means that no books should ever be taken as the final word on a subject.

Major category: 
LHMP
Full citation: 

Leach, Joseph. 1970. Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Publication summary: 

A biography of 19th century American actress Charlotte Cushman that does its best to avoid recognizing her romantic relationships with women.

Leach’s biography of Charlotte Cushman takes a detailed “gossip column” type of approach, working in detail through all her travels, performances, and social interactions. He attributes motivations, emotions, and reactions both to Cushman and to those around her, dramatizing and fictionalizing the bare facts drawn from letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts. This can leave a seriously mistaken impression of what the evidence is behind his assertions.

I selected this book to blog as part of the context for a podcast on Cushman, seeing it as a complement to Merrill’s When Romeo was a Woman, but having read both, I find that Leach’s work is of very little value to the purpose of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. He does his best to suppress or dismiss the evidence for Cushman’s romantic and erotic relationships with women, going through startling contortions in some cases. As my blog of Merrill’s work has covered the basics of Cushman’s career, my summary of Leach’s book is going to be largely confined to commentary on that process of suppression and dismissal. So the following discussion will focus specifically on the ways in which Leach “spins” the evidence with regard to Cushman’s interpersonal relationships. This will not in any way give a balanced picture of what his book covers, but it best serves the overall purpose of the Project. This entry on Leach’s book is best understood after having read Merrill’s to provide the framework that I’m commenting on.

The description of Cushman’s girlhood emphasizes her rough-and-tumble play. He notes Cushman’s reaction to her sister Susan’s “more feminine beauty” as being to move further from the feminine ideal and become a comic performer. He traces her interest in theater directly to seeing the English actor Macready in New York (rather than to her early success in amateur theatricals). Leach spotlights personal attentions from two men (Charley Wiggin and Charles Spalding) but asserts that a supposed engagement to Spaulding was nixed by his family’s reaction to Cushman’s wild behavior. When Spaulding died in an accident, Leach asserts that Cushman was too young to “mourn the loss of a lover”, taking it as given that they had had a romantic attachment. He asserts that Cushman avoided marriage in order to focus on her career rather than from general disinterest.

Cushman’s assertive and ambitious actions with regard to her early stage career (demanding particular roles, seeking good billing) is attributed to her inexperience in the thater world rather than to self-confidence. Leach puts a strong emphasis on a supposed close brush with “romance” with an unnamed man in Albany. (A man that Cushman’s memoirs refer to as having made improper advances.) In the context of Cushman’s sister Susan marrying, becoming a mother, and being abandoned by her much older husband, Leach notes of Cushman that “her career left little time or inclination to ponder the good of any romance.” He presents Cushman as being unhappy at her lack of conventional beauty and jealous of Susan on that point.

With regard to Cushman’s early emotional attachments to women, Leach glosses over her courtship of Fanny Kemble as simple friendship. Also labeled “friendship” were her visits with Annie Brewster, which he describes as “to relieve the mounting tedium” by reading to each other and taking joy in literature. This “interest” in Brewster is quickly supplanted (with no mention of Brewster’s family’s qualms about the nature of the relationship) by her introduction to Rosalie Sully. He says they shared “an intuitional understanding” and “profound attachment”, but notes that Cushman referred to Rosalie as “beloved” without discussion of what that might mean. Leach notes that Cushman’s diary and Rosalie’s letters “suggest an affectionate regard between them that was not universally approved” but dismisses this concern noting that similar sentiments were expressed in other contemporary female correspondence that “sound no less oddly romantic to a later age.” [Note: that is, Leach is saying that we modern people would find the language “oddly romantic” but that we aren’t to take it as such.]

Before leaving for England, Cushman gives Rosalie a ring and a bracelet “pledging...eternal fidelity.” This is not directly commented on. Leach notes Cushman’s diary entries on the voyage about hoping to become successful enough to have Rosalie “with me always”, also without comment.

The following extended quote from the book, describing Cushman’s reception by English women, specifically including Eliza Cook (who would become Cushman’s partner for a time) is a prime example of how Leach de-sexualizes the context of Cushman’s relationships:

“Like Annie Brewster and Rosalie Sully, young women in England found in Charlotte a strong attraction. The magnetism that audiences applauded carried over into her social relationships with women her age who came to ‘kneel’ at her feet. If none could define the quality, few doubted her force and self-possession, her manner that clearly announced, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ For Victorian girls such a young woman held unique interest, a kind of wish fulfillment.”

Leach notes that rumors around Cushman’s “friendship” with Eliza Cook reached Rosalie and caused her unhappiness without touching on the type of “friendship” that such an expectation of exclusiveness implied. He provides extensive quotations from Geraldine Jewsbury’s letters to Cushman that concern rumors about her “friendships” where Jewsbury advises her to cling to “worthy” friends and ignore gossip. The book dances around naming what those rumors would have been and why they would be concerning. He discusses Cushman’s friendship with Jewsbury’s romantic friend Jane Carlyle but places much more emphasis on Cushman’s interactions with Jane's husband, historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle. (In comparison with Merrill’s book, there is much more emphasis in Leach’s on Cushman’s friendships with prominent men, as opposed to the women that formed Cushman’s close social circle.)

Leach introduces Matilda Hays as “an intimate, a spirit as freely capable of friendship as Roslie Sully.” He notes the development into a “deep attachment” and comments by Cushman’s associates calling her relationship with Hays a “female marriage”. This is about as close as Leach comes to acknowledging Cushman’s orientation, but there is no direct recognition or discussion of it.

Leach opines that, in comparison to Cushman’s supposed male suitors, that her same-sex bonds “could scarcely offer the intimate rewards of marriage” but “supplied a release at last from loneliness.” [Note: this is the point where I almost threw the book across the room.] He focuses more strongly on Cushman’s family’s skepticism about her relationships with women. There is a through-line in the narrative where he regularly mentions how Cushman’s mother (whom she was supporting by this point) disapproved of her female friends.

The relationship with Hays is framed as being Cushman mentoring her as an apprentice actress. He refers to Hays as “the girl”, in order to undermine the impression that they interacted as equals, then notes Hays’ shift from performer to “confidante and companion” supplying “a sense of home” for Cushman.

Leach depicts a supposed romantic attraction to actor Conrad Clarke, suggesting that Cushman had grown bored with Hays. He describes the motivation as “deep inside her [Cushman], a woman’s heart lay sleeping” and that Clarke crated “a softening” in her demeanor. He then dramatizes a confrontation in which Clarke’s wife confronts Cushman and accuses her of coming between them, and suggests that Cushman was emotionally devastated by this deceit resulting in her dismissing Clarke from her presence.

When describing the household that developed in Rome, the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, like Hays before her, is referred to in the narrative as a “girl”. I interpret this as Leach trying to downplay the perception of a romantic context by framing the interactions as more mentorship or maternalism. Perhaps Leach had a sincere aversion to acknowledging Cushman’s potentially problematic attraction to significantly younger women. He depicts Cushman’s relationship to Hosmer as entirely one of professional mentorship and patronage with no suggestion of any other emotion besides Hosmer’s hero-worship of the actress and Cushman’s “mothering instinct” in return.

The stormy consequences of the attraction between Hays and Hosmer is presented as simply “an attachment” and Leach seems genuinely confused why their friendship should disturb Cushman, suggesting that she simply resented not being the center of attention and became bored by their distraction. Cushman drags Hays off to England with her and when Hays returns alone to Rome, Leach says that Cushman felt “more loneliness than sadness” leaving aside the question of romantic jealousy. The tentative reunion with Hays, when she returned to England from Rome, doesn’t overtly discuss the emotional context. Leach suggests that Cushman felt sorry for Hays for not having the same level of career expectations as the other women in her circle and that was why she’d kept her around as a companion. (This ignores the straightforward evidence for Hays’ own career.) When Hays makes her final departure, the author says, “the friendship...had come at last to mean little” and makes no reference at all to her demand for “palimony” for having put Cushman’s career over her own. Leach consistently portrays Hays as having little talent of any type and not having been worthy of Cushman’s support. Perhaps this is how he excuses Cushman’s rather shabby treatment of her.

When Emma Stebbins arrives in Rome, Cushman’s interest is once again framed as artistic patronage. Her accompanying Cushman on a return trip to the States goes unremarked, and he quickly moves on to her initial meeting with Emma Crow. [Note: for the remainder of the biography, Leach does his best to entirely ignore the presence of Stebbins in Cushman’s life and accompanying her on her travels. She is mentioned only rarely as if of no importance.]

At the very beginning of their relationship, Leach highlights the age difference between Cushman and Crow and projects that Crow will later “wonder that she ever declared so fervent a love for an old woman.” He describes Cushman as feeling complete with the two Emmas having “cast loneliness and grief behind her.” He believes that Cushman never intended or expected Crow and Cushman’s nephew (and adopted son) Ned to fall in love (in contrast with Merrill’s position that Cushman engineered the marriage as a blind) and that she was bewildered by Stebbins’ flashes of hostility toward Crow (ignoring Cushman's direct discussion of it in her letters to Crow). He suggests that when Crow returned to the States after visiting in Rome, Cushman had more regret that Ned was leaving than that Crow was. Only when the marriage between Emma Crow and Ned Cushman is in progress does Leach finally suggest that its purpose, in Cushman’s eyes, was to create a permanent legal place for Crow in her own life and family.

When Crow has experienced her miscarriage and Cushman is writing to her to comfort her, Leach quotes Cushman recalling that she once had been “called upon to bear the very hardest thing that can come to a woman.” For unspecified reasons Leach assumes that this passage is referring to “the abortive romance in Albany” early in Cushman’s life, to a man man never even named in her writings, to whom Leach attributes Cushman’s aversion to marriage.

When Emma and Ned are arranging to move to Rome, Leach notes Cushman’s careful explanation to Emma about her loyal devotion to Stebbins while giving no context as to why such an assurance should be necessary. When the couple arrived in Rome to augment Cushman’s household, Leach treats Hosmer’s decision to move out as an expression of ingratitude for Cushman’s patronage, as if that had been their only interaction.

During Cushman’s various trans-Atlantic voyages that followed, although Stebbins was a regular traveling companion, Leach barely notes her presence, focusing instead on the people that Cushman visited and her performances. This continues even though, when Cushman’s cancer becomes a major reason for her to return to the U.S., Stebbins accompanies her to the detriment of her own career. The entire focus of the book at this point is on Cushman’s continued correspondence with Emma Crow. As death approaches, this emphasis continues while Stebbins’ constant attention and presence warrant only passing mentions.

At the end, the focus is on Emma and Ned’s efforts to be at Cushman’s bedside and not on the continued support that Stebbins continued to provide.

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