Jesse Monteagudo: Jesse Monteagudo is a free-lance writer and book lover who lives in South Florida. You can reach him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online. This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VIII Issue 39). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online.
Literature by or about lesbians has played a major part in the creation of a lesbian community; and even of a lesbian movement. As historian Jonathan Ned Katz once wrote, “fiction by Lesbians has played a special role in the resistance to that oppression denying Lesbians existence altogether, or presenting only the most negative image of women-loving women.”
Significantly, the first major work of lesbian studies is “Sex Variant Women in Literature” (1956), a literary survey by the late Jeannette Howard Foster. Foster's pioneering study was followed by Jane Rule's “Lesbian Images” (1975), Lillian Faderman's “Surpassing the Love of Men” (1981) and Bonnie Zimmerman's “The Safe Sex of Women” (1990); not to mention the three editions (1967, 1975, 1981) of Barbara Grier's bibliography, “The Lesbian In Literature.” There have also been a number of anthologies of lesbian literature, of which Faderman's “Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present” (1994) is a prime example.
“The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall,” is the latest, largest (1100 pages) and most comprehensive anthology of writings about women-loving women, easily superceding Faderman's award-winning collection. There is a major difference between this book and its predecessors.
As Terry Castle, the editor of this anthology, tells us: “this volume is not a collection of ‘writings by lesbians.” Rather, Castle's “approach is different: less ideologically fraught, perhaps, and I hope less compromising. Instead of presenting at the outset what lesbianism is - then trying to find writers who somehow fit the bill - I start with the assumption that it is precisely the category itself that is in need of historical examination.
“How (and when) did it first become possible in modern Western culture to think about erotic desire between women? From whence derive our sometimes wildly contradictory notions of what lesbianism is and how it can be recognized? And how to comprehend, more broadly, the curious and enduring intellectual fascination that fantasies of love between women have exerted over the Western popular imagination since the Renaissance?”
Because “The Literature of Lesbianism” deals with lesbianism as subject matter rather than lesbians as authors, many of the writers represented here are men. As Castle writes, “The lesbian ‘idea' has never been the exclusive intellectual property of the female sex.
Indeed,” Castle tells us, “in the modern West the collective mental discovery - that women might love and desire one another as men loved and desired them - is first visible registered in the writings of men: those humanist poets and scholars of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe who confronted (to their mixed pleasure and unease) a burgeoning imagery of female-female eros in the recently recovered texts of Sappho, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, and other Greek and Roman authors of antiquity.”
Contrary to the common belief that lesbianism was till recently a taboo topic, “virtually every author of note since the Renaissance has written something, somewhere, touching on the subject of love between women…” In short, “the lesbian theme” is “commonplace - if not indispensable…in modern Western writing.”
The literary selections featured in The Literature of Lesbianism bears out Castle's theory. It begins in the 16th Century with a segment of Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem, Orlando Furioso. Ariosto is followed by a virtual “who's who” of Western literature: Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Aphra Behn, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Alexander Pope, Denis Diderot, the Marquis de Sade, Anne Lister, Théophile Gautier, Honoré de Balzac, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Compton Mackenzie and Graham Greene, just to name a few.
There are several major omissions in this collection - as Castle notes, sadly, “According to the terms of Radclyffe Hall's will…it is not possible to excerpt from The Well of Loneliness.” Also missing from The Literature of Lesbianism are any living writers, or any literature written or published after Stonewall, which Castle views as “a convenient emblem…for the historic resolution of that larger cultural transformation I have sought to outline here: the absorption into collective awareness of the lesbian idea.”
The Literature of Lesbianism's scholarly scope - and its physical size - will keep many people from buying it or even reading it. I presume that most copies sold will end up in libraries, where they will be used as reference. This is a shame, because there is a lot of good reading in The Literature of Lesbianism, not the least of which is the editor's excellent preface.
Whatever else it is, The Literature of Lesbianism is a major work of lesbian studies, one that continues the proud tradition begun by Jeannette Foster in 1956.
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