Women and the Blood Tax

The Irish-Canadian-Lesbian novelist Emma Donoghue is probably best known for Room (2010), about a young woman kidnapped and imprisoned in a one-room outbuilding until she's old enough to bear her abductor's child.  The story is told from the son's perspective.  It became a best seller and was made into a movie, which I skipped.  The book was well-done, but abuse porn is not my genre of choice.  I'm relieved that I'm not the only person who feels this way; I do wonder about people who eat it up.)

Since 2010 Donoghue has published seven more books in a variety of genres -- young adult, historical fiction, contemporary fiction, and a collection of stories.  Her newest one, The Pull of the Stars (Little, Brown), was published only a year after its predecessor, Akin, and by a remarkable coincidence she completed it just as the coronavirus pandemic was beginning.

The narrator and protagonist of The Pull of the Stars is Julia Power, a midwife and maternity nurse in Dublin in 1918.  The novel begins at the end of October, a few weeks before the armistice that ended World War I, and a few months into the great American influenza pandemic that would eventually kill millions of people around the world.  The marks of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 are still on the city, with bombed-out buildings and the memories of hundreds killed still a sore presence.  Hospitals were already overtaxed by wounded soldiers, and the the onslaught of people sick and dying of flu strains the hospitals and the city to the breaking point.  Nurses, doctors, and staff are falling sick, so those who can still work are exhausted and fearful.  Julia has already had the flu, so she's immune, but that mainly means that she must go on working until she almost literally drops.  She's usually assigned to a small ward for women on the verge of giving birth who also have influenza, which is where most of the novel takes place.  

On the first day of the novel she's the only nurse on the ward, but then a new volunteer comes in, a much younger woman named Bridget (Bridie) Sweeney, who turns out to be a very effective assistant, quick and eager to learn.  Even so, a large amount of action is packed into three days, as patients try to survive long enough to give birth and Julia and Bridie try to keep them and their newborns alive; not always successfully.  Most of the action is obstetrical, as none of the cases are uncomplicated, with a lot of detail that may make some readers queasy; be warned.  

Donoghue began writing the book in 2018 for the centennial of the epidemic, with no idea of what was to come.  I was impressed by the amount of research Donoghue put into it; it's intense but not gratuitous.  The aim is to depict the lives and deaths of ordinary people in a poor country in wartime crossed with an epidemic, and The Pull of the Stars succeeds vividly.  It's not pleasant, but it's important, and it's not abuse porn either.  The many parallels to the present pandemic enhance the story's power: people who go from healthy to dead in a day or two, or who linger on, with "recovery" that amounts to lifelong damage; people who refuse to protect themselves or others (masks were as political an issue in 1918 as they are today); the aggravation of the disease by poverty and dirt, the contempt for the poor by the better-off.

There's more to The Pull of the Stars that I haven't gone into here because it's new, so anyone who might be moved to read it will still find some surprises.  But one theme worth pointing out is sounded about halfway through.  One of the male hospital orderlies mocks the idea of women voting.  Julia snaps:

Haven't we proved our worth to your satisfaction yet?

The orderly grimaced.  Well, you don't serve, do you?

I was taken aback.  In the war?  Many of us most certainly are serving, as nurses and drivers and --

The orderly waved that away.  Don't pay the blood tax, though, do you?  Not like we fellows do.  Ought you really get a say in the affairs of the United Kingdom unless you're prepared to lay down your lives for the king?

I saw red.  Look around you, Mr. Groyne.  This is where every nation draws its first breath.  Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.

He snickered on his way out [179-80].

At first this felt a bit too neat, almost cliched.  But, for what it's worth, around 1500 women nurses from various countries died in the Great War.  I can't find how many ambulance drivers died, but it looks like a similar number.  Many more men died, but remember that women were barred from combat, and even their driving ambulances met with opposition; on the other side of the coin, most soldiers who died were killed by disease and famine, not by 'enemy' weapons.  What drove men to enlist, when they weren't conscripted, was not necessarily a desire to serve the King or President Wilson but a longing for adventure, machismo, and other less edifying motives.  Nor is military service a prerequisite for men who want to vote.

Then it occurred to me that The Pull of the Stars is a war novel - not merely a wartime novel, but formally similar to stories about combat: the courage needed to care for the sick when death might strike down the caregiver, working in gushes of blood and other body fluids, camaraderie among the grunts and conflict with higher-class superior officers.  I've been reading some World War I era fiction recently, and The Pull of the Stars has a lot in common with those stories.  It has been speculated that men perpetuate war partly out of a desire to face the same mortal dangers women have historically faced whenever they went into childbirth, hence the sexual division between war as men's work and childbearing as women's work.  Whether Donoghue intended the parallel or not, I detected it, and it lends added force to her story.  If other readers don't see it, fine.  In any case, The Pull of the Stars is worth reading.  I started reading Donoghue with her second novel, Hood, and she keeps getting better.

Franker and More Celebratory

In my earlier post on Kate O'Brien's 1958 novel As Music and Splendour, I noticed that Emma Donoghue wrote in 2010 that it had "a tactful and inexplicit quality" and doesn't put "a female couple center stage and neither is written from and for an emerging lesbian community the way Patience and Sarah so clearly was."  As I wrote in that post, when I read As Music and Splendour (thanks to Donoghue's reference to it) I found it surprisingly blunt and forthright, and its female couple shared center stage with the other main character's heterosexual relationships.

Then I stumbled on a reference to an earlier essay by Donoghue on O'Brien's work, which appeared in 1993 in Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O'Brien, edited by Eibhear Walshe and published by Cork University Press.  Donoghue's take on As Music and Splendour was quite different in that piece, much closer to mine.

What I find so satisfying about working on Kate O’Brien rather than on other lesbian novelists, quite apart from the quality of her writing, is her honesty.  She is explicit – not about sex (concerning which she has little to say) but about moral issues, decisions, hard words.  Reading the works of her contemporaries, even those as apparently “out” as Gertrude Stein, we have to struggle through euphemisms and code-words, layers of innuendo and ambiguity, all designed to protect the writers from embarrassing accusations.  Romantic friendships, especially in the girls’-school literary subgenre (a powerful example is Dorothy Strachey Bussy’s Olivia (1949), are often given a degree of intense eroticism that can only be called lesbian – yet nothing can be proved.  Whereas Kate O’Brien, on the two occasions when she writes about passion between adult women, calls it exactly that; no coyness veils her analysis of lesbian relationships.  She knows, and she makes her heroines acknowledge, that this is not romantic friendship but a quite different thing: something equivalent to marital love, though outside its social ‘order’; something punishable and costly, but often worth the price [48].

And:

As Music and Splendour (1958) is like Mary Lavelle in that the story unfolds far away from Ireland, but is much franker and more celebratory in its account of a relationship between two women.  Instead of playing a supporting role, the lesbian is one of the two heroines, whose stories are presented equally and in parallel.  Set at a safe distance in place (Paris and Rome) and time (the 1880s), As Music and Splendour nonetheless manages to create a modern Irish lesbian and give her a startling voice [50].

Much better.  I just realized that this essay was published in the same year as Donoghue's excellent historical study Passion Between Women.  Since then she has published a study of the poet(s) Michael Field, which I haven't yet read, and Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature, which I have.  I just looked again at Inseparable, which covers a lot of 20th century lesbian fiction as well as much older works, and I see that though Donoghue mentioned O'Brien and As Music and Splendour in it, she again got it wrong, lumping it in with The Well of Loneliness and The Friendly Young Ladies as a novel where the "generous" lesbian gives up her girlfriend to a man. Maybe it had been too long since she'd read either the novel or her earlier discussion of it.  With this 1993 essay, "'Out of Order': Kate O'Brien's Lesbian Fictions," to guide me, I'll be working through the rest of Kate O'Brien's novels.

Tactful and Inexplicit?

I hadn't heard of Kate O'Brien's As Music and Splendour until a couple of months ago, though it is a story of love between two women published in 1958.  I thought I knew most of the significant twentieth-century lesbian novels at least by reputation, so I was surprised when Emma Donoghue mentioned this one in her introduction to a 2005 reprint* of Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah.

As Music and Splendour was originally published in the UK in 1958.  It's the story of two poor Irish teenagers who are sent to Paris, and from there to Rome, to study singing in the 1880s.  Having distinguished themselves by their talent in Eire, they are granted extended loans by an institution called The Committee, effectively mortgaging their futures for years.  Away from their hometowns for the first time, they turn to one another for company and become fast friends.  Both achieve success at high levels in the opera and are able to repay the patrons who paid for their training, though Rose becomes more of a star.  Clare, though more reserved, does quite well too, on her own terms.  The novel recounts their training in some detail.  The girls' teachers are depicted compassionately but without illusion; this is a very adult book in the best sense of the word.  I've never been an opera queen, so I have no idea how accurately O'Brien describes their milieu and its politics, but the details are interesting anyway.  Both draw numerous male admirers, but manage to avoid ruin, and not just because they're heavily chaperoned.  Rose eventually selects a young French tenor as her first lover, but Clare falls in love with the Spanish Luisa.  Yet As Music and Splendour isn't a romance, it's a Bildungsroman about two young women growing up to be artists.  Love is part of their lives, along with everything else that they encounter along the way, but music is the most important part.

Donoghue wrote that, in contrast to Patience and Sarah, such earlier historical novels like As Music and Splendour and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show "have a tactful and inexplicit quality; neither puts a female couple center stage and neither is written from and for an emerging lesbian community the way Patience and Sarah so clearly was" (page 16).  It's true that Patience and Sarah, one of my all-time favorite books, puts its female couple center stage.  As Music and Splendour doesn't, but as I recall, Summer Will Show does, though against the backdrop of mid-nineteenth century political revolution in Europe.  It's true that Summer Will Show is "inexplicit" about the nature of the relationship between the two women, but it was originally published in 1936, just a few years after the scandal and court battles surrounding Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness: it must have taken a fair amount of courage to publish even an inexplicit novel about lesbians that didn't demonize them.  (Indeed, O'Brien's 1941 novel The Land of Spices was banned in Ireland for a passing reference to homosexuality.) As Terry Castle wrote, if the relationship in Summer Will Show had been between a man and a woman, no one would have objected that you couldn't be sure it was an erotic one: heterosexuality is assumed, homosexuality must shout itself from the rooftops or it will be ignored -- and then heterosexuals will complain about the Love That Won't Shut Up.

As Music and Splendour, however, is explicit, depending on what is meant by "explicit."  There are no sex scenes, but O'Brien makes it clear that Clare and Luisa are not just good friends but lovers.  (I'm actually glad that Donoghue got that wrong, so I could be pleasantly surprised when I read the book.)  Most of a chapter of the novel is devoted to Clare's defense of her love for Luisa against the accusations of Thomas, a young Welsh singer, conductor, and composer who's in love with Clare.  It's a fascinating exchange, because Clare gets the best of the debate -- which is hardly a debate, since Thomas hardly bothers to make an argument, just indulges in name-calling.

‘I can’t understand that split in you.’

‘Split?  How do you mean, Thomas?’

‘I mean, pet – sit down, don’t look so furious – I mean, this unlucky schwärm you have for Luisa -- ’

‘Schwärm?’

‘Don’t get cross.  Wait.  Schwärm is a good German word – Schwärmerei – for the manias girls get for each other or for their teachers – in school age. Your development has been delayed, and you are having a schwärm now for Luisa -- ’

‘Oh Thomas, stop!  Please stop.  How dare you?  Because I told you truly that I love Luisa you must not bring your clever talk against something you know nothing about.’

‘No clever talk.  Sit down.’

‘Here I sit down.  What now?’

‘I know plenty about love, Clare.’

‘In some ways you may, Thomas.  And I have observed you, and I know your actions – but I appreciate your good manners.  Still – I think you are amoral.’

‘Amoral?  But you, Clare?  I take you to be serious and grown-up, in your own conception, when you say you are in love with Luisa?’

‘Yes – Thomas.’

‘Then – you are totally amoral.’

‘No.  I am, I suppose, a sinner – certainly I am a sinner in the eyes of my Church.  But so I would be if I were your lover.  So is Rose a sinner – and she knows it – in reference to our education and faith.  You, who come out of Baptist chapels, don’t know how clear our instruction is.  Rose and I know perfectly well what we’re doing.  We are so well instructed that we can decide for ourselves.  There’s no vagueness in Catholic instruction.’

‘But there’s lots of disturbance.’

‘That sounds witty.  What disturbance have you encountered?’

‘Well, love – the disturbance you create.’

Clare stood up.  Standing, she looked down on the weary, dusty young man whom she liked greatly, and to whose vivid intelligence and friendship she owed so much.

‘Thomas, I’ve learned fast – so has Rose – in two years of Italian life.  You can argue as you like against my loving Luisa.  But I can argue back all your unbridled sins.  We all know the Christian rule – and every indulgence of the flesh which does not conform to it is wrong.  All right.  We are all sinners.  You and I and Rose and Tonio and René and Mariana – and all our friends’ [207-8] 

Now, Clare is hardly taking a militant, pro-gay position here; she concedes that in the eyes of her Church (Roman Catholic, Irish division) her love for Luisa is a sin.  But not more sinful, she insists, than the heterosexual fornication that her friends and colleagues indulge in without a second thought.  And I ask the reader to remember again that the relationship between Clare and Luisa isn't depicted as an ambiguous romantic friendship which might or might not involve copulation.  Clare is explicit that she and Luisa are lovers in the same sense as Rose is with René, or Thomas with his numerous paramours.  Thomas, the all-too-typical male heterosexual supremacist, tries to dismiss her love for Luisa as a mere schoolgirl crush, but Clare rightly will have none of it.  She doesn't allow him to condescend to her, though that doesn't keep him from trying.  She demands that he give reasons, and he has to concede that he has none.

And again, a few pages later:

‘What is love, then?  Two silly girls kissing each other?  Is that love?’

‘Maybe.  I find it to be love.’

‘Oh Clare – how all this torture heaps up love!  What are we to do?  Where am I to bury you, you unnatural, appalling one?’

‘You can’t bury me until I’m dead.  But why am I unnatural or appalling?  Consider your own career.’

‘Darling, I’m a man.’

‘I didn’t think you’d be so stupid as to say that.’

‘Nor did I.  See how you degrade me!  Stop striding!’

Clare leant against the window.

‘Easily I might have loved you,’ she said.  ‘But – she caught my heart before I knew what was happening, Thomas.  And I think she’s lovely, and I love her.  I can’t help it.  It’s true.’

‘She isn’t even faithful to you.’

‘I know.’

‘If you were a man you couldn’t endure that.’

‘No.  Men, as you call them, don’t seem to be able to endure things.  I don’t know what sex you suppose me to belong to, but I can endure Luisa’s life.  I love her,  you see.’

‘She’s promiscuous.  She’s a whore.’

‘Maybe.  It may be for that alarming honesty that I love her.’

‘Then you know more than I do about love.’

‘You’ve never been in love, Thomas -- ’

‘I’m in love with you -- ’

‘Only since you discovered you can’t get me -- ’ [212]

Amusingly, Thomas at one point invokes love's "texts – Plato, Ovid, Stendhal" as authorities for Clare, which he retracts right away as "no good" (209), though not, as far as I can tell, because he remembers that in Plato's philosophy "love" meant primarily erotic (if sublimated) love between males.

I've had some exchanges like this with heterosexuals who objected to the supposed immorality of erotic love between people of the same sex, while ignoring or brushing aside their own heterosexual immorality, which was often extensive.  Thomas, of course, is mainly miffed because Clare won't let him have sex with her.  But I've also met homosexuals who accepted that view.

It's also a common move to dismiss homosexuality as adolescent dabbling, as though heterosexual adolescents didn't dabble with one another too.  When I remember that As Music and Splendor was published in 1958, I'm impressed by the position O'Brien let Clare take.  Reading it also took me back to the mindset that was common among queers as well as among straights before and often after Stonewall, in which same-sex love was not to be taken seriously, just a kind of dirty play.  For all that, there were plenty of committed, long-term same-sex relationships between males or between females, but I've met many gay men and lesbians of my parents' generation who, though they were in such relationships themselves, saw them as a kind of second-best making-do.

I had a curious conversation in the mid-1970s with one such man, who was indignant when a drunken wife at a faculty party said that it was no secret that he and his partner were a couple.  Everyone at the party was shocked too, because while it was no secret, you weren't supposed to talk about it.  My friend asked rhetorically if they'd talk about each other's adulteries (which they probably would).  I asked, very seriously, if he considered his fifteen-year relationship with his partner to be morally equivalent to adultery.  He thought a moment, then allowed that he didn't.  But I think that on some level he did.

Kate O'Brien, who was old enough to be that man's mother, managed not to bring his attitude to As Music and Splendour.  Given the informal censorship of the 1950s, which required apologetic shame for homosexual characters if not a violent death at story's end, it's a remarkable novel, and I hope to find time to read it again someday.  And though I disagree with her account of it, I thank Emma Donoghue for bringing it to my attention.

*By Little Sister's Classics, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, British Columbia.

Stage Frights

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I'm rereading Emma Donoghue's excellent book Passions Between Women (Harper, 1993), and finding lots of good things in it.  For one thing, I located this delicious tidbit I keep thinking of but wasn't able to quote accurately before:

One librarian, Mrs Lord, was accused by certain Dublin men of lending obscene novels to their daughters; she responded by assuring them that she underlined all the dirty bits so the girls would know what to skip [15].

We should all have such librarians.

But what I like about Passions Between Women is Donoghue's ability to remember that people differ from each other, have different reasons for what they do, and probably have more than one reason for what they do.  In the chapter on Female Husbands, for example, she acknowledges that women who adopted male dress and identities, and pursued romances with other women may have had numerous reasons for doing it that way.  (It wasn't necessary to pass for male to find a girlfriend.)  She also shows that the "deceived" wives of the female husbands may not have been deceived after all, or may not have minded the deception.  When their husbands were caught, the wives often came to their defense.  The memory of Donoghue's discussion had a lot to do with why Stewart Van Cleve's account of a passing woman in 19th-century America annoyed me so much: like several scholars Donoghue criticizes, Van Cleve made unwarranted assumptions about women's motives for taking on male identities.

After the female husbands, Donoghue moves on to "breeches parts":

Female crossdressing was central to British culture in this period [1668-1801], but it was a site of contradiction and double standards.  While female husbands such as Mary Hamilton were being whipped and jailed for male impersonation, women were playing "breeches parts" in roughly a quarter of all plays.  Individual attitudes too were inconsistent and unpredictable; as Terry Castle has pointed out, Henry Fielding could denounce female transvestites in his translation of Juvenal's Sixth Satire, yet as a theatre manager hire the crossdressing actress Charlotte Charke to play male roles.  Hostility to female crossdressing does not seem to have borne any relation to the completeness of the disguise: some female soldiers who successfully passed as men were lauded for it, while other women were attacked for riding unfeminine riding habits.  The figure of the crossdresser was read in many different ways, depending on the circumstances, what her motives were thought to be, and how much she seemed to threaten the powers of men over women [87].

Donoghue says that historians, including queer ones, tend assume that the spectacle of women playing men on stage was intended to titillate male audiences, but this wasn't always the case:

Richard Steele's The Tender Husband [1705], which includes a scene of a female transvestite wooing another woman, was so popular with women that it played on Ladies' Nights (dates on which women could request the performance of a particular play) on average every two years during the first half of the eighteenth century.

And:

The most uncomfortable moment in one such play is when Sylvia, the crossdressed heroine of George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer (1706) flirts and eventually spends a night with her nurse's daughter, Rose, who emerges next day in bewilderment, complaining "I don't know whether I had a Bedfellow or not."  Neither do we.  The obvious joke is that, though Rose doesn't know it, she has not had a "Bedfellow" in the sense of a male heterosexual partner.  But the audience cannot be sure what is being implied; what has happened to Rose in the night to make her so unsure about the nature of sex, about what being "Bedfellows" means?  [89]

This isn't a particularly subtle reading, but it seems to me that many scholars, whether historians or literary critics, have trouble recognizing or analyzing such ambiguities.  Donoghue stands out for her sensitivity to these realities and ambiguities.

Space Bar

I'm feeling flustrated, distracted, and out of sorts today, so I'm just going to post this quotation from an interview (via) with Emma Donoghue:

"I got into all this doing a PhD in 18th-century literature, when I became interested in revisionism," Donoghue explains. "Who was left out of history? Well, primarily, women. But look at the history of everyday life and you find that most people are left out: the women lead you to their equivalently obscure male family members, then you come to the freaks and cripples and slaves – not just downtrodden, but treated as not fully real people. If you're writing a novel about Henry VIII, you don't have to say what you've fictionalised, because it's easy to check; Henry VIII doesn't need you to speak up about your sources. But Mollie Sanger, my doughty cowgirl – if I don't put her on the record she's not on it at all. And I'm so grateful to her and all of them for the good stories."

That improves my mood all by itself.  So, should I wait for her new collection of stories to come in at the library, or should I just go ahead and buy a copy?

Don't Mess with Mr. In-between

I'm about 60 pages into Emma Donoghue's new book Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (Knopf, 2010), and enjoying it a great deal. Donoghue is best known as a novelist, but she's a scholar too, and a good one. Her earlier Passions Between Women (HarperCollins, 1995) not only taught me a lot but encouraged my own take on the history of sexuality.

In her chapter on inseparable romantic friends, Donoghue says that "opposites attract ... is one of our culture's most beloved truisms" (60).

The fact is, in Renaissance literature, love was very often thought to be based not on contrast but on similarity; the classical model was the romantic bond between two men. Like calls to like; birds of a feather flock together. There is an intriguing exchange in Honore D'Urfe's (1607-1627), when a jealous man called Hylas asks sneeringly if "Alexis" (a man disguised as a priestess) finds shepherdesses more appealing than shepherds, and "she" answers proudly, "Have no doubt about it, and blame no one but nature, who wants everyone to love his own kind." When Leonard Willan dramatizes D'Urfe's saga as Astraea (1651), he included a debate between a woman and a man, to be judged by their mutual object of desire, Diana. Phillis argues that same-sex passion is strongest because love grows from "Equality and Sympathy"; Sylvander counters that mating requires difference.

You plead th'advantage of your Sexe, as bent
To love sembable were natures Intent;
In Beasts see where her motives simple be,
Their prevservations shall t'each contrarie [60-61].

What this shows, of course, is that both conceptions of love co-existed then, as they do now. (With good reason: both conceptions play a role in human loving.) It brought to mind some arguments I've seen about the value of same-sex erotic relationships, apart from the question of marriage. Some religious bigots have been arguing -- without any real basis for their arguments, of course -- that two men or two women can't form a couple as rich and rewarding as a mixed-sex couple, partly because men and women are opposites. Or because they're an animalistic fact of nature. Orson Scott Card also argued for the superiority of heterosexual marriage because it was unnatural, because it's “very, very hard -- to combine the lives of a male and female, with all their physical and personality differences, into a stable relationship that persists across time.”

But even within the Christian tradition these are shaky positions. Neither Jesus nor Paul thought much of heterosexuality, not even marriage. True, Paul used marriage as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ the Bridegroom and the Church the Bride -- but not between Christ and the individual believer, who he thought would do better to remain single if possible. The individual believer was the slave of Christ, not his bride. And I don't see oppositeness as the guiding conception of the sexes in the Genesis creation myths. Whether you go with Genesis 1, which has us created, male and female in Yahweh's image; or Genesis 2, where Eve was created from Adam's rib to be his helper, you won't find a meeting of opposites where men and women are concerned. The conception of sex/gender in the Hebrew Bible, at least, is more like the "one sex" model described by Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard, 1990).

Donoghue offers the story of Ruth and Naomi as an example of inseparable female friends. (The story of David and Jonathan is similar: "the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as himself" [1 Samuel 18:1-4].) Whether either relationship had erotic elements, it's significant that Ruth's famous words to Naomi have often been used in heterosexual weddings. If same-sex couples are so different from mixed-sex couples, and indeed inferior to them, why do heterosexuals keep using same-sex couples as their models?