[In the excerpt below, Castle surveys the history of lesbianism in literature—both covert and overt—to find a connection between the presence of apparitions and the presence, or erasure, of lesbian desire.]

To try to write the literary history of lesbianism is to confront, from the start, something ghostly: an impalpability, a misting over, an evaporation, or "whiting out" of possibility. Take, for example, that first (and strangest) of lesbian love stories, Daniel Defoe's The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706). The heroine of this spectral yarn (which Defoe presents in typically hoaxing fashion as unvarnished "fact") is one Mrs. Bargrave, who lives in Canterbury with a cruel and unfeeling husband. While lamenting her sad state one morning, Mrs. Bargrave is amazed to see her oldest and dearest friend, Mrs. Veal, coming up the street to her door. The two friends have been estranged ever since Mrs. Veal, "a Maiden Gentlewoman of about 30 Years of Age," began keeping house for a brother in Dover. Overcome with joy, Mrs. Bargrave greets her long-lost companion and moves to kiss her. Just as the clock strikes noon, writes Defoe, "their Lips almost touched," but "Mrs. Veal drew her hand cross her own Eyes, and said, 'I am not very well,' and so waved it."¹

The touch of lips deferred, the two nonetheless converse lovingly. Mrs. Veal tells Mrs. Bargrave she is about to set off on a journey, and wished to see her again before doing so. She begs Mrs. Bargrave's forgiveness for the lapse in their friendship and reminds her of their former happy days, when they read "Drelin-court's Book of Death" together and comforted one another in affliction. Moved, Mrs. Bargrave fetches a devotional poem on Christian love, "Friendship in Perfection," and they read it aloud, musing on God's will and the happiness to come in the hereafter. "Dear Mrs. Bargrave," exclaims Mrs. Veal, "I shall love you forever." Then she draws her hand once again over her eyes. "Don't you think I am mightily impaired by my Fits?" she asks. (Mrs. Veal has suffered in the past from falling sickness.) "No," Mrs. Bargrave replies, "I think you look as well as I ever knew you." Not long after, Mrs. Veal departs, as if in embarrassed haste.

It is not until the next day, when Mrs. Bargrave goes to look for Mrs. Veal at a nearby relative's, that the eerie truth is revealed: her friend has in fact been dead for two days, having succumbed to "fits" at exactly the stroke of noon on the day before Mrs. Bargrave saw her. The supposed "Mrs. Veal" was nothing less than an apparition. Suddenly it all makes sense. The spirit was undoubtedly heaven-sent, an excited Mrs. Bargrave now tells her friends, for all of its actions, including the mysterious "waving" off of her attempted kiss, displayed its "Wonderful Love to her, and Care of her, that she should not be affrighted." And Defoe himself, in his role of supposed reporter, concurs: the specter's great errand, he concludes, was "to comfort Mrs. Bargrave in her Affliction, and to ask her Forgiveness for her Breach of Friendship, and with a Pious Discourse to encourage her." From this we learn "that there is a Life to come after this, and a Just God who will retribute to every one according to the Deeds done in the Body" (preface).

Why call this bizarre little fable a lesbian love story? One could, conceivably, read into its sparse and somewhat lugubrious detail a richer, more secular, and sensational narrative—cunningly secreted inside the uplifting homily on Christian doctrine. Mrs. Bargrave, the unhappy wife, and Mrs. Veal, the maiden gentlewoman—such a story might go—have in fact been clandestine lovers; they have been estranged by circumstances; Mrs. Veal dies; Mrs. Bargrave's vision is a kind of hysterical projection, in which the passion she feels for her dead friend is phantasmatically renewed. Defoe even gives a certain amount of evidence for this sort of fantasia. All the men mentioned in the story are either evil or unsympathetic: Mrs. Bargrave's husband is "barbarous"; Mrs. Veal's brother tries to stop Mrs. Bargrave from spreading the story of his sister's spectral visit. We are invited to imagine a male conspiracy against the lovers: they have been kept apart in life; they will be alienated (or so the brother hopes) in death. The fact that Defoe sometimes hints at erotic relationships between women elsewhere in his fiction—witness Roxana—might make such a "reading between the lines" seem even more enticing.²

And yet, this does not feel quite right: one is troubled by a certain crassness, anachronism, even narcissism in the reading. Is it not a peculiarly late twentieth-century moral and sexual infantilism that wishes to read into every story from the past some hidden scandal or provocation? And hasn't Defoe made it clear—more or less—that the relationship between Mrs. Bargrave and Mrs. Veal is strictly an incorporeal one? Mrs. Veal, after all, is an apparition—a mere collection of vapors—so much so that Mrs. Bargrave, as we are explicitly reminded, cannot even kiss her.

At the risk of dealing in paradoxes, I would like to argue that it is in fact the very ghostliness—the seeming ineffability—of the connection between Mrs. Bargrave and Mrs. Veal that makes The Apparition of Mrs. Veal an archetypally lesbian story. The kiss that doesn't happen, the kiss that can't happen, because one of the women involved has become a ghost (or else is direly haunted by ghosts) seems to me a crucial metaphor for the history of lesbian literary representation since the early eighteenth century. Given the threat that sexual love between women inevitably poses to the workings of patriarchal arrangement, it has often been felt necessary to deny the carnal bravada of lesbian existence. The hoary misogynist challenge, "But what do lesbians do?" insinuates as much: This cannot be. There is no place for this. It is perhaps not so surprising that at least until around 1900 lesbianism manifests itself in the Western literary imagination primarily as an absence, as chimera or amor impossibilia—a kind of love that, by definition, cannot exist. Even when "there" (like Stein's Oakland) it is "not there": inhabiting only a recessive, indeterminate, misted-over space in the collective literary psyche. Like the kiss between Mrs. Bargrave and Mrs. Veal, it is reduced to a ghost effect: to ambiguity and taboo. It cannot be perceived, except apparitionally.

But how, one might object, to recognize (enough to remark) something as elusive as a ghost effect? By way of answer let us turn to another work, also from the eighteenth century, in which a similar apparitionality envelops—and ultimately obscures—the representational field. The work is Diderot's La Religieuse (1760), long recognized as a masterpiece of the erotic, though of what sort of eros its admirers (and detractors) have often been at a loss to specify.³ We recall the story: Diderot's pathetic heroine, Suzanne Simonin, forced to become a nun by her selfish and obdurate family, is imprisoned within a series of corrupt convents, each worse than the last, where she is singled out for cruel and incessant persecution by her superiors. In letters smuggled out to various lawyers and secular officials, Suzanne recounts her sufferings and begs for release, though her cries for help go unheard. Diderot's first-person narrative itself masquerades as one of these letters, supposedly addressed to the Marquis de Croismare. Yet it also doubles as Diderot's own sensationalist assault on cloistered religious communities and the inhuman "wickedness" perpetrated within them.

As most of its modern commentators have remarked, a fear of sexual relations between women seems to suffuse—if not to rule—Diderot's story.⁴ And yet how is this fear insinuated? Ineluctably, by shadow play—through a kind of linguistic necromancy, or calling up, of ghosts. Take Diderot's sleight-of-hand, for example, in the scene early in the novel in which the vicious mother superior at Longchamp, the first convent in which Suzanne is incarcerated, forces her to undergo a sadistic mock death as a punishment for disobedience. After being made to lie in a coffin, being drenched with freezing holy water, and trodden upon (as "a corpse") by her fellow nuns, the pitiful Suzanne is confined to her cell, without blankets, crucifix, or food. That night, at the behest of the superior, other nuns break into her room, shrieking and overturning objects, so that

those who were not in the conspiracy alleged that strange things were going on in my cell, that they had heard mournful voices, shoutings and the rattlings of chains, and that I held communion with ghosts and evil spirits, that I must have made a pact with the devil and that my corridor should be vacated at once.⁵

A young nun, infected by the atmosphere of collective paranoia, sees Suzanne wandering in the corridor, becomes hysterical with terror, and flings herself into the bewildered Suzanne's arms. At this point, Suzanne tells the marquis, "the most criminal-sounding story was made out of it." Namely,

that the demon of impurity had possessed me, and I was credited with intentions I dare not mention, and unnatural desires to which they attributed the obvious disarray of the young nun. Of course I am not a man, and I don't know what can be imagined about one woman and another, still less about one woman alone, but as my bed had no curtains and people came in and out of my room at all hours, what can I say, Sir? For all their circumspect behaviour, their modest eyes and the chastity of their talk, these women must be very corrupt at heart—anyway they know that you can commit indecent acts alone, which I don't know, and so I have never quite understood what they accused me of, and they expressed themselves in such veiled terms that I never knew how to answer them.

An irrational yet potent symbolic logic is at work here: to be taken for a ghost is to be "credited" with unnatural desires. No other incriminating acts need be represented, no fleeting palpitation recorded—it is enough to become phantomlike in the sight of others, to change oneself (or be changed) from mortified flesh to baffled apparition. To "be a ghost" is to long, unspeakably, after one's own sex. At the same time—Diderot slyly suggests—the demonic opposite is also true: to love another woman is to lose one's solidity in the world, to evanesce, and fade into the spectral.

The notorious final section of La Religieuse—in which Suzanne is moved to a new convent and falls under the erotic sway of its depraved superior, "Madame ***"—shows this last uncanny transformation most powerfully. Suzanne, we recollect, after being half-seduced by Madame *** (who visits her nightly in her cell and excites her with ambiguous caresses), becomes afraid for her soul and begins to avoid her, on the advice of her confessor. Maddened by the young nun's rebuffs, Madame *** pursues her like a specter, day and night. "If I went downstairs," writes Suzanne, "I would find her at the bottom, and she would be waiting for me at the top when I went up again." Surprised by her on one occasion in the convent chapel, Suzanne actually mistakes the superior for an apparition, owing to what she calls a "strange effect" of the imagination, complicated by an optical illusion: "her position in relation to the church lamp had been such that only her face and the tips of her fingers had been lit up, the rest was in shadow, and that had given her a weird appearance."

As the superior's sexual obsession finally lapses into outright dementia—following upon a church inquiry instigated by Suzanne into abuses at the convent—her ghostly status is confirmed. As she passes "from melancholy to piety and from piety to frenzy," she becomes a nightwalker in the convent, raving, subject to terrible hallucinations, surrounded by imaginary phantasms. Sometimes, Suzanne tells the marquis, when she would come upon Madame ***—barefoot, veiled, and in white—in the convent corridors, or being bled in the convent infirmary, the madwoman would cover her eyes and turn away, as though possessed. "I dare not describe all the indecent things she did and said in her delirium," says Suzanne; "She kept on putting her hand to her forehead as though trying to drive away unwanted thoughts or visions—what visions I don't know. She buried her head in the bed and covered her face with her sheets. 'It is the tempter!' she cried, 'it is he! What a strange shape he has put on! Get some holy water and sprinkle it over me. . . . Stop, stop, he's gone now.'" Exiled to a world of diabolical spirits, surrounded by horrific shapes she tries feebly to "fend off with a crucifix, the naked and emaciated Madame *** finally expires in an exhalation of curses—a ghost indeed of her former sensual and worldly self.

How are we to read such scenes? One is struck at once by the curious repetition of gesture: like the ghostly Mrs. Veal, putting hand to eyes and "waving" off the kiss of Mrs. Bargrave, Madame *** raises her hand repeatedly to her face to obliterate those visions—the ghosts of her former love—that haunt and torment her. As if in closeup in some lost avant-garde film, the isolated hand over the eyes, caught forever in Manichaean black and white, makes the gesture of blockage, as though to cede into the void the memory (or hope) of a fleshly passion. But somewhat more insistently than in The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, the blocking motion is visible here as an authorial gesture as well—as the displaced representation, or symbolic show, of Diderovian motive. What better way to exorcize the threat of female homosexuality than by treating it as ghostly? By "waving" off, so to speak, the lesbian dimension of his own story, even as his heroine Suzanne exculpates herself from any complicity in the superior's erotic mania, Diderot establishes his credentials as law-abiding, slightly flirtatious, homophobic man of letters—the same man who could jealously complain to his lover Sophie Volland about the unnaturally "voluptuous and loving way" in which her own sister often embraced her. [See, for example, (in Diderot's Letters to Sophie Volland), in which he animadverts on her sister's "curiously" erotic way with her. In a letter written August 3, 1759, Diderot coped with his imagined rival by transforming her, through simile, into airy nothingness. "It does not make me unhappy to be her successor," he wrote, "indeed it rather pleases me. It is as if I were pressing her soul between yours and mine. She is like a snowflake which will perhaps melt away between two coals of fire." And later, after warning Sophie not to kiss her sister's portrait too often lest he find out, he says: "I put my lips to yours and kiss them, even if your sister's kisses are still there. But no, there's nothing there; hers are so light and airy."]

The literary history of lesbianism, I would like to argue, is first of all a history of derealization. Diderot's blocking gesture is symptomatic: in nearly all of the art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lesbianism, or its possibility, can only be represented to the degree that it is simultaneously "derealized," through a blanching authorial infusion of spectral metaphors. (I speak here of so-called polite or mainstream writing; the shadow discourse of pornography is of course another matter, and demands a separate analysis.)⁶ One woman or the other must be a ghost, or on the way to becoming one. Passion is excited, only to be obscured, disembodied, decarnalized. The vision is inevitably waved off. Panic seems to underwrite these obsessional spectralizing gestures: a panic over love, female pleasure, and the possibility of women breaking free—together—from their male sexual overseers. Homophobia is the order of the day, entertains itself (wryly or gothically) with phantoms, then exorcizes them.

One might easily compile an anthology of spectralizing moments from the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and even early twentieth-century literature of lesbianism. After the melodramatics of La Religieuse, one might turn, for example, to Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, a novel that, despite its different tone and sensibility (comical-fantastic rather than morbid-sublime), also presents the sexual love of woman for woman as an essentially phantasmatic enterprise. Rosette, the lover of the narrator D'Albert, has fallen in love with Théodore, a mysterious young visitor to her country estate. What she does not know (nor any of the other characters) is that Théodore is in reality a woman in disguise, the handsome adventurer Madeleine de Maupin. Clad only in the most apparitional of nightgowns ("so clinging and so diaphanous that it showed her nipples, like those statues of bathing women covered with wet drapery"), Rosette comes to Théodore/Madeleine's room one moonlit evening and pleads with her to make love to her. When "Théodore" (assuming that Rosette is deluded about her sex) is reluctant, Rosette takes matters into her own hands. Although, she explains, "you find it wearisome to see me following your steps like this, like a loving ghost which can only follow you and would like to merge with your body . . . I cannot help doing it."⁷ Then she pulls Théodore/Madeleine toward her and their lips meet in a ghostly, "almost imperceptible kiss."

Aroused by Rosette to the point that she can no longer tell whether she is "in heaven or on earth, here or elsewhere, dead or living," "Théodore" now wonders for a fleeting instant what it would be like to give some "semblance of reality to this shadow of pleasure which my lovely mistress embraced with such ardour." But how to turn shadow into substance? Her question goes unanswered, for just as Rosette slips naked into her bed, Rosette's brother, Alcibiades, bursts farcically into the room, sword in hand, to prevent the rape he imagines to be taking place. His mocking accusations underline the already free-floating spectral metaphorics of the scene: "It appears, then, my very dear and very virtuous sister, that having judged in your wisdom that my lord Théodore's bed was softer than yours, you came to sleep here? Or perhaps there are ghosts in your room, and you thought that you would be safer in this one, under his protection?" After wounding Alcibiades in an impromptu duel and fleeing on horseback into the woods around Rosette's house, Théodore/Madeleine is herself pursued by seeming phantoms:

The branches of the trees, all heavy with dew, struck against my face and made it wet; one would have said that the old trees were stretching out their arms to hold me back and keep me for the love of their chatelaine. If I had been in another frame of mind, or a little superstitious, I could easily have believed that they were so many ghosts who wanted to seize me and that they were showing me their fists.

Though carefully designed to maximize readerly titillation, Gautier's stagey scene of lesbian coitus interruptus is also a paradoxical statement on sexual ontology. Such spectral coupling as that between Rosette and Madeleine de Maupin must needs be interrupted, because otherwise it might prove itself to exist. What would happen, Gautier seems to ask, were Rosette to realize the true sex of her lover? The anxiety that pursues the novelist—or so his compulsive slippage into the language of the apparitional here suggests—is not so much that the ethereal Rosette might start back in blank dismay, but that the discovery of absence instead of presence (a haunting vacuity where the phallus should be) might bring with it its own perverse and unexpected joy. Yet Gautier can no more tolerate eros without a phallus than the dripping branches of the trees can hold back Madeleine de Maupin on behalf of their infatuated "chatelaine." Indeed, lest Rosette or her would-be lover bring into being some giddying new embodiment of love, the amor impossibilia must remain just that—a phantom or shadow in the comic narrative of desire. [The trees brushing Madeleine de Maupin's face bring to mind, of course, that waving gesture which I am suggesting often subverts the literary representation of lesbian desire. Yet here the gesture is displaced—with its meaning seemingly inverted—onto those anthropomorphic trees, which, like ghosts, want to preserve the possibility of a sexual union between Madeleine and Rosette. How to deal with the apparent contradiction? One way, it seems to me, would be to read "into" the narrative a second, unmentioned gesture: that of the rider, who finding her eyes momentarily blinded with dew, reflexively brushes back the very branches that brush her. In this second, hypothetical waving—so automatic as to preclude mention—will be found that motion of avoidance so often accompanying the literary threat of female homosexuality.]

Similar negations haunt the nineteenth-century poetry of lesbianism. In Baudelaire's "Femmes damnées," for example, one of the numerous lesbian-obsessed poems in Les Fleurs du mal (1857), Delphine and Hippolyte, the tortured lovers, are presented as damned spirits, enslaved by a sterile passion and doomed to wander ceaselessly in a hell of their own creation. Although Delphine's spectral kiss falls on Hippolyte's mouth—as Rosette's does on Madeleine de Maupin's—so "lightly" as to be barely perceptible ("Mes baisers sont légers comme ces éphémères / Qui caressent le soir les grands lacs transparents"), its psychic weight is enough to impel Hippolyte into haunting torments:

Je sens fondre sur moi de lourdes épouvantes
Et de noirs bataillons de fantômes épars,
Qui veulent me conduire en des routes mouvantes
Qu'un horizon sanglant ferme de toutes parts.

[I bear a weight of terrors, and dark hosts
Of phantoms haunt my steps and seem to lead.
I walk, compelled, behind these beckoning ghosts
Down sliding roads and under skies that bleed.]

Breathing "la fraîcheur des tombeaux" on her lover's breast, she longs for oblivion. But in a morbid excoriation in the concluding stanzas of the poem the poet himself addresses the ghost-ridden couple, condemning them forever to a world of shades:

—Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes,
Descendez le chemin de l'enfer éternel!
Plongez au plus profond du gouffre où tous les crimes,
Flagellés par un vent qui ne vient pas du ciel,

Bouillonnent pêle-mêle avec un bruit d'orage.
Ombres folles, courez au but de vos désirs;
Jamais vous ne pourrez assouvir votre rage,
Et votre châtiment naîtra de vos plaisirs.
(11.85-92)

[Hence, lamentable victims, get you hence!
Hells yawn beneath, your road is straight and steep.
Where all the crimes receive their recompense
Wind-whipped and seething in the lowest deep

With a huge roaring as of storms and fires,
Go down, mad phantoms, doomed to seek in vain
The ne'er-won goal of unassuaged desires,
And in your pleasures find eternal pain!]

In Swinburne's would-be Baudelairean "Faustine" (1862), a similar fate is reserved for the wicked Roman empress Faustine, in whom "stray breaths of Sapphic song that blew / Through Mitylene" once "shook the fierce quivering blood" by night. Worn out by that "shameless nameless love" that makes "Hell's iron gin" shut "like a trap that breaks the soul," Faustine is surrounded in death by the phantoms of women she has debauched in life:

And when your veins were void and dead,
What ghosts unclean
Swarmed round the straitened barren bed
That hid Faustine?

What sterile growths of sexless root
Or epicene?
What flower of kisses without fruit
Of love, Faustine?

And in "The Lesbian Hell" (1898), a bizarre poem by Baudelaire and Swinburne's turn-of-the-century epigone, the poet and occultist Aleister Crowley,

Pale women fleet around, whose infinite
Long sorrow and desire have torn their wombs,
Whose empty fruitlessness assails the night
With hollow repercussion, like dim tombs
Wherein some vampire glooms.

Pale women sickening for some sister breast;
Lone sisterhood of voiceless melancholy
That wanders in this Hell, desiring rest
From that desire that dwells forever free,
Monstrous, a storm, a sea.

Drawing "the unsubstantial shapes / Of other women" to them with kisses that burn cold "on the lips whose purple blood escapes," the inhabitants of "lesbian hell" roam the earth,

Like mists uprisen from the frosty moon
Like shadows fleeting in a seer's glass,
Beckoning, yearning, amorous of the noon
When earth dreams on in swoon.
(11.27-30)

When we turn to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, the apparitional lesbian is equally ubiquitous—even in works such as Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) in which the homophobic fantasy that generates (and evacuates) her is disguised within a more realistic and neutral-seeming representational context. How else, perhaps, to regard the ineffable Olive Chancellor, defeated in her love for Verena Tarrant by the ail-too palpable Basil Ransom, than as a more repressed version of those pale females, "sickening for some sister breast," who wander unappeased through late Victorian decadent fantasy? The ascetical Olive, who "glides" through rooms and greets strangers with a freezing touch of her slender white hand ("at once cold and limp") is indeed the ghost-woman of James's novel, chilling all around her with her preternatural-seeming passion for the lovely and puerile Verena. (Her connection with Olive, Basil warns Verena, is "the most unreal, accidental, illusory thing in the world.")¹¹ And like the evil exhalations of Swinburnean afflatus, Olive too will ultimately be exiled to an asexual "land of vapors." When Basil, in the tumultuous last scene of the novel, comes to drag Verena away "by muscular force" from the Music Hall in Boston where she is about to give an oration on women's rights, Olive, at her creator's behest, lapses at once into impotent, agonized insubstantiality. "Dry, desperate, rigid," writes James, "yet she wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death." To the triumphant Basil she is a "vision"—an unearthly "presentment" of "blighted hope and wounded pride." Unable in the end to compete—in this most crudely embodied of Jamesian erotic struggles—Olive simply "disappears" on the last page of the novel, retreating to the unseen stage of the auditorium, where she will search for words to explain her loss. . . .

Why, since the eighteenth century, this phantasmagorical association between ghosts and lesbians? And why the seductive permutation of the metaphor in the twentieth century? The answer, it seems to me, is not far to seek. The spectral figure is a perfect vehicle for conveying what must be called—though without a doubt paradoxically—that "recognition through negation" which has taken place with regard to female homosexuality in Western culture since the Enlightenment. Over the past three hundred years, I would like to suggest, the metaphor has functioned as the necessary psychological and rhetorical means for objectifying—and ultimately embracing—that which otherwise could not be acknowledged.

Psychoanalytic theory offers an interesting analogy. Freud, in his famous essay on negation (published three years before The Well of Loneliness) argued that the most important way in which repressed thoughts entered into individual consciousness, paradoxically, was through disavowal. To seek to negate an idea—as when one says of an unknown person in a dream, "it was not my mother"—was in fact, according to Freud, to affirm the truth of the idea on another level:

We emend this: so it was his mother. In our interpretation we take the liberty of disregarding the negation and of simply picking out the subject-matter of the association. It is just as though the patient had said: "It is true that I thought of my mother in connection with this person, but I don't feel at all inclined to allow the association to count."³⁶

Precisely "by the help of the symbol of negation," Freud concluded, "the thinking-process frees itself from the limitations of repression and enriches itself with the subject-matter without which it could not work efficiently."³⁷

One might think of lesbianism as the "repressed idea" at the heart of patriarchal culture. By its very nature (and in this respect it differs significantly from male homosexuality) lesbianism poses an ineluctable challenge to the political, economic, and sexual authority of men over women. It implies a whole new social order, characterized—at the very least—by a profound feminine indifference to masculine charisma. (In its militant or "Amazonian" transformation lesbianism may also, of course, be associated with outright hostility toward men.) One might go so far as to argue—along with Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and others—that patriarchal ideology necessarily depends on the "compulsory" suppression of love between women.³⁸ As Henry Fielding put it in The Female Husband, the vehemently antilesbian pamphlet he published anonymously in 1746, once women gave way to "unnatural lusts," there was no civil "excess and disorder" they were not liable to commit.³⁹

Beginning in Western Europe in the eighteenth century, with the gradual attenuation of moral and religious orthodoxies, the weakening of traditional family structures, urbanization, and the growing mobility and economic independence of women, male authority found itself increasingly under assault. And not surprisingly, with such far-reaching social changes in the offing, the "repressed idea" of love between women—one can speculate—began to manifest itself more threateningly in the collective psyche. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideologues were at once fascinated and repelled by the possibility of women without sexual allegiance toward men.⁴⁰ And ultimately a backlash set in—characterized as we have seen in the writings of Diderot, Gautier, James, and others, by an effort to derealize the threat of lesbianism by associating it with the apparitional.

From one angle this act of negation made a sort of morbid sense; for how better, one might ask, to exorcize the threat of lesbianism than by turning it into a phantom? The spectral metaphor had useful theological associations: witches, after all, dealt in spirits, and the witchcraft connection could be counted on to add an invidious aura of diabolism to any scene of female-female desire. ("Oh we wouldn't have stood a chance in that time," says Matt in Duffy's Microcosm, thinking of the Middle Ages; "sure sign of a witch to love your own sex." But more important by far was the way the apparitional figure seemed to obliterate, through a single vaporizing gesture, the disturbing carnality of lesbian love. It made of such love—literally—a phantasm: an ineffable anticoupling between "women" who weren't there.

—Or did it? As I have tried to intimate, the case could be made that the metaphor meant to derealize lesbian desire in fact did just the opposite. Indeed, strictly for repressive purposes, one could hardly think of a worse metaphor. For embedded in the ghostly figure, as even its first proponents seemed at times to realize, was inevitably a notion of reembodiment: of uncanny return to the flesh. "This image obsesses me, and follows me everywhere," says the narrator in Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, "and I never see it more than when it isn't there." To become an apparition was also to become endlessly capable of "appearing." And once there, the specter, like a living being, was not so easily gotten rid of. It demanded a response. It is precisely the demanding, importuning aspect of the apparitional that Radclyffe Hall depicted to such striking allegorical effect in the last pages of The Well of Loneliness.

Though in the course of this essay I have, for rhetorical purposes, implied a break between older "homophobic" invocations of the apparitional lesbian and later revisionist ones, it is perhaps more useful in the end to stress the continuity between them. If it is true that the first stage of recognition is denial, then the denial of lesbianism—through its fateful association with the spectral—was also the first stage of its cultural recognition. In the same way that the act of negation, in Freud's words, "frees the thinking process from repression," so the spectral metaphor provided the very imagery, paradoxically, through which the carnal truth of lesbianism might be rediscovered and reclaimed by lesbian writers.

This process of "recognition through negation" may have something to do, finally, with one of the most intriguing features of modern lesbian-themed literature—its tendency to hark back, by way of embedded intertextual references, to earlier works on the same subject. I mentioned in passing Stephen Gordon's "haunted" reading of Krafft-Ebing in The Well of Loneliness and Maureen Duffy's lengthy citation from Charlotte Charke's 1755 Life in The Microcosm, but other examples abound. In both Colette's Claudine à l'école and Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, the characters are reading Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin; in Brigid Brophy's The Finishing Touch, the main character not only invokes Gautier but also Renée Vivien's Une Femme m'apparut and Proust's Sodom et Gomorrhe. In Christine Crow's Miss X, the narrator quotes (with irony) from Baudelaire's "Femmes damnées" and jokes compulsively about Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness. In Sarah Schulman's After Delores, one of the narrator's friends is reading—and rewriting—Renault's The Friendly Young Ladies. For the reader attempting to proceed logically, as it were, through the canon of lesbian writing, such rampant intertextuality can bring with it an unsettling sense of déjà vu—if not a feeling of outright "possession" by the ghosts of the lesbian literary past. [The passage in Schulman's After Delores is exemplary in this respect.

Beatriz is describing a screenplay she is writing based on The Friendly Young Ladies. In Beatriz's new version, Leo and Helen are lesbians but do not acknowledge the fact to one another until an American woman seduces one of them. Then they are forced to confront the truth of their lives. As Beatriz says to the narrator, "You see, it forces them to confront the lie in their relationship and their complicity in that lie, a lie that has consumed ten years of their lives." The effect of this embedded invocation, even with Beatriz's critical reenvisioning of the plot, is to break down boundaries between Renault's novel and Schulman's own—to make the reader feel suspended, as it were, within a single lesbian Ur-text, replete with plots and counterplots, conjurings and reconjurings.]

Yet the haunted nature of modern lesbian writing attests directly, I think, to the process by which lesbianism itself has entered into the imaginative life of the West over the past two centuries. It is a curious fact that for most readers of lesbian literature, at least until very recently, it has seldom mattered very much whether a given work of literature depicted love between women in a positive or negative light: so few in number have such representations been over the years, and so intense the cultural taboo against them, that virtually any novel or story dealing with the subject has automatically been granted a place in lesbian literary tradition. (Thus even such negative-seeming works as Diderot's La Religieuse, James's The Bostonians, or Renault's The Friendly Young Ladies continue to hold an acknowledged, if not exactly esteemed, place in the underground lesbian literary canon.⁴¹) Like the analyst, who, in Freud's words, "takes the liberty of disregarding [any] negation," interested readers have tended simply to "pick out the subject-matter" of lesbianism, regardless of surrounding context, in order to retrieve it for their own subversive imaginative ends.

In the case of the apparitional lesbian, twentieth-century lesbian writers have been able for the most part to ignore the negative backdrop against which she has traditionally (de)materialized. By calling her back to passionate, imbricated life—by invoking her both as lover and beloved—they have succeeded in transforming her from a negating to an affirming presence. But they have altered our understanding of the homophobic literature of the past as well. For once apprised of the apparitional lesbian's insinuating sensualism—and her scandalous bent for return—we can no longer read, say, the novels of Diderot or James without sensing something of her surreptitious erotic power. Indeed, like Mrs. Veal, she may haunt us most when she pretends to demur. For even at her most ethereal and dissembling, as when seeming to "wave off the intrusive pleasures of the flesh, she cannot help but also signal—as if by secret benediction—that fall into flesh which is to come.

¹ Daniel Defoe, A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal (London, 1706; rpt. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1965), p. 3.

² On the hints of lesbianism in Roxana (1724), see my "'Amy, Who Knew my Disease.'"

³ To sample some of the critical controversy see, for example, Vivienne Mylne, "What Suzanne Knew: Lesbianism and La Religieuse," Jack Undank, "An Ethics of Discourse," Rita Goldberg, Sex and Enlightenment, pp. 169-204, Walter E. Rex, "Secrets from Suzanne," and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Privilege of Unknowing."

⁴ Cf. Goldberg, in Sex and Enlightenment, on Diderot's distaste for the lesbian mother superior: "Her sexual desire is so easily stimulated that we are meant to think of it as a kind of disease. . . . She is, in fact, an example of the dreaded homme-femme, with the desires of a man and the body and supposed emotional weakness of a woman."

⁵ Diderot, The Nun (Penguin, 1974), p. 85.

⁶ The pornographic representation of lesbianism may nonetheless have influenced so-called mainstream representation more often—and more profoundly—than is commonly acknowledged. In a subsequent essay in this book ("Marie Antoinette Obsession"), I argue that various pornographic works written at the time of French Revolution depicting the supposed lesbian relationships of the French queen, Marie Antoinette, contributed directly—albeit covertly—to her incarnation in the nineteenth century as an icon of romantic female-female love. The distinction I make in the present essay between polite discourse and its pornographic "shadow," is in one sense an artificial one: from Diderot and Gautier to Zola and Djuna Barnes, mainstream writers taking up the theme of lesbianism have often, in fact, drawn upon the motifs and stock situations of pornographic discourse.

⁷ Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (Penguin, 1981), p. 304. Richardson's assertion in her introduction to the novel, that "the story is the least important part of the book," is characteristic, alas, of the way in which the majority of commentators have dealt with Gautier's cryptolesbian plot line. For a somewhat less repressive view, see Sadoff, Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Androgyny.

⁸ Baudelaire, "Femmes damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte)," lines 45-48. The poem was one of those excluded, on grounds of indecency, from the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal. It is reprinted in Baudelaire's Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard, 1975), pp. 152-55. All French citations are to this edition. The English translation here is by Aldous Huxley, rpt. in Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, eds., The Flowers of Evil, pp. 115-23.

⁹ Swinburne, "Faustine," lines 125-132, in The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (William Heinemann, 1925), 1:238-43.

¹⁰ Crowley, "The Lesbian Hell," lines 6-15, in Coote, The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983), pp. 273-75.

¹¹ James, The Bostonians (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 325. . . .

³⁶ Freud, "Negation," p. 235.

³⁷ Freud, "Negation," p. 236.

³⁸ See Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," and Rubin, "The Traffic in Women." Society demands the suppression of same-sex love, argues Rubin, because such love destroys the distinction between "genders" on which patriarchal authority depends:

Gender is not only an identification with one sex; it also entails that sexual desire be directed towards the other sex. The sexual division of labor is implicated in both aspects of gender—male and female it creates them, and it creates them heterosexual. The suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppression of homosexuals, is therefore a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women.

See Rubin, "Traffic in Women," p. 180.

³⁹ Fielding, The Female Husband, p. 29.

⁴⁰ On the paradoxical male attitude toward lesbianism in the eighteenth century, see my "Matters Not Fit to be Mentioned." On nineteenth-century responses, see Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, especially pp. 277-94, and Katz, Gay American History and Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary, passim.

⁴¹ All three of these novels are featured prominently, for example, in Jeannette Foster's classic bibliographic study, Sex Variant Women in Literature.