A Hemingway short story in an anthology of writing about female homosexuality? Um, where’s the punch line?
Nowhere to be found in Terry Castle’s massive new work, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (Columbia University Press, 2003). “Hemingway has the reputation of being this ultra-macho, sort of absurd parody male,” the professor of English says. “But I included The Sea Change because it’s a brilliant vignette, set in a Hemingwayesque bar in France, where a man and a woman are having a break-up conversation, and she is leaving him for a woman. The point of view is exquisitely vulnerable.”
Ten years in the making, Castle’s chronologically arranged anthology highlights hundreds of works about love and erotic desire between women across an expanse of five centuries, from Renaissance love poems to 20th-century novels. “It really emphasizes the evolution of lesbianism as a cultural ‘idea,’ ” she says. “How did sexual desire between women become thinkable? That’s the big question I pose here.”
The scope of the undertaking is apparent in the cross-section of authors Castle has chosen, including both male and female writers, some straight, some gay. Some of the most ardent love poems (“Inés, Dear, with your Love I am Enraptured”) were written by the sequestered 17th-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and dedicated to her convent patroness. Excerpts from Shakespeare, whom Castle praises as “magnificently paranoia-free,” hail love between girls masquerading as boys. There are “flamboyantly ‘Sapphic’ verses” by Baudelaire (“Lesbos”), Verlaine (“Scenes of Sapphic Love”) and Swinburne (“Anactoria”), along with lyric poems by Katherine Philips (“To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship”) and Anne de Rohan (“On a Lady Named Beloved”).
Twentieth-century works, which make up the bulk of the anthology, look at Virginia Woolf’s “intimate reveries” in Mrs. Dalloway and at Vita Sackville-West’s 1920 memoir about her love affair with Violet Trefusis. Castle concludes with Janet Flanner’s 1975 memorial to Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s lifelong companion.
“One point I’m trying to make is that the theme of same-sex love has been one that countless people, male and female, have been writing about since the Renaissance,” Castle says. “A lot of the most homophobic writing about lesbianism in the 19th and early 20th centuries is by women, and some of the most sympathetic and sensitive treatments are written by men. It’s a very complex issue, and I don’t think we’ve begun to get anywhere near the heart of how people project themselves into literary works.”
A specialist in 18th-century British literature, Castle has taught at Stanford since 1983 and recently completed a term as chair of the English department. She contributes frequently to the London Review of Books and has written seven other books, including Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’ (Cornell University Press, 1982) and Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford University Press, 1986). Castle attracted a wide popular readership with the 1993 publication of The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (Columbia University Press), which was nominated for the 1994 Lambda Literary Award.
Castle has a consistently engaging style that will draw general readers as well as scholars of feminist criticism and gay and lesbian literary theory. “Regarding any moral queasiness my title may evoke in the traditionally minded, I have little to say: those who find lesbianism distasteful or indelicate or question the value of a tome on the subject—even from such an esteemed press as Columbia—are advised to stop reading now,” she writes in the introduction to the new book.
Publication of Castle’s anthology coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, which many consider the founding moment of gay and lesbian liberation, and also marks Castle’s 20th year at Stanford. “The chair of the English department when I was hired was George Dekker, and he very kindly said to me, on a little trip around Lake Lagunita, as he was trying to recruit me, that he was happy to say that there were many gay faculty in the department,” Castle recalls. “I was, I’m sure, blushing at the time—completely pink—but it was very, very nice, and I’ve found Stanford a wonderful place to be, in its openness and acceptance. I’ve had wonderful gay and lesbian colleagues over the years, and I feel very grateful that there’s always been a little cohort of us running around.”
