SOURCE: Blackmer, Corinne E. “Lesbian Modernism in the Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.” In Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer, pp. 78-93. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

To the extent that lesbians have been associated with the obscure, the neglected, and the marginal, there is something quintessentially “lesbian” about bringing the shorter fictions of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein into critical focus. Although her accomplishment in this genre equals that of her contemporary James Joyce, Woolf has not been highly appreciated for her short stories. The standard format for a critical study of Woolf remains, as Avrom Fleishman notes, “a series of chapters on the nine longer fictions, one after another” (“Forms” 44). When mentioned at all, her short stories tend to be regarded not as innovative achievements in themselves, but rather as experiments in themes and techniques developed more fully in the novels. Her short stories occupy, in the hierarchy of Woolfian genres, a marginalized lesbian position analogous to that held by her treatment of desire between women in mainstream Woolf criticism.

In her lesbian-themed short stories, Woolf conducts a comprehensive analysis of the psychological experience of attraction among women. In “The Mysterious Case of Miss V.” (1908) and “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” (1928), she uses the images of the apparitional spinster, the double personality, and the mirrored self-portrait to explore the disavowed lesbian desire that simmers beneath the surface of ostensibly conventional lives. The signal importance of these stories and, in particular, “Memoirs of a Novelist” (1909) and “A Society” (1920) lies, however, in their fiercely intimate and impassioned engagement with earlier traditions of sublimated or censored literatures of lesbianism.¹ Woolf turns specifically to the short story, rather than the review essay or literary manifesto, because this form enables her to express herself with imaginative latitude and, given the need in her historical moment for discretion in handling this explosive topic, indirection. Woolf combines critical analysis and fictional narration to fashion what are among the first examples of lesbian feminist historical criticism.

Because Stein worked extensively in all the major forms, critics have been less inclined than they have with Woolf to privilege one genre over another in her vast, multifaceted, intentionally decentered oeuvre. Her concise, poetic evocations of lesbian subjectivity in her short story “Melanctha” (1909) and her verbal portraits “Ada” (1908), “As a Wife Has a Cow” (1926), and “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” (1922) achieve an aesthetic power not equaled in her more diffuse lesbian-themed writings, with the exception of her equally poetic collection of object portraits Tender Buttons and her erotic dialogue poem Lifting Belly.

Differing critical receptions of their shorter fiction cannot, however, account for the general absence of comparative commentary on Woolf and Stein, an absence all the more striking given their stature as major lesbian modernists. An analysis of their lesbian-themed short stories provides an excellent context for examining the larger implications of their distinctive approaches to creating lesbian modernist literature. For Woolf and Stein, lesbian modernism signifies a historical break with the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres, which, as represented in Victorian realist literature, reflected the belief that men and women have different but complementary biological traits, social roles, and sexual natures. In lesbian modernism, the lesbian enters the public domain as an autonomous, artistically creative, self-directed being whose conscious desire for women contradicts dominant assumptions regarding women's innate sexual passivity. More radically, her very existence implies the eventual elimination of gender as a significant force in cultural and social relations.

While Woolf and Stein share this broad understanding of lesbian modernism, their shorter fictions elaborate different significations around the homosexual closet, constructed by separating private from public knowledge of homosexual identity. According to Eve Sedgwick's influential paradigm, the defining feature of gay and lesbian modernism is the production of a homosexual code that restricts information about homosexuality to contexts in which its legibility depends on shared minority identification (Epistemology 71-73). Hence, textual occlusions, including those that ostensibly have nothing to do with sexuality, point obliquely toward individual or cultural instances of sexual identity crisis. In her lesbian-themed shorter fictions, Woolf invites her homosexual readership to identify with her lesbian subject position. Through encoded language, she reveals the repressed lesbian identities within earlier literatures of homosexuality. Concomitantly, she treats conscious acknowledgment of homosexual identity as the ethical truth of modern lesbian subjectivity by critiquing the self-ignorance and self-repressiveness informing earlier authors like Marie Corelli and Vernon Lee, Sappho scholars, and her self-portrait as the apparitional Miss V(irginia).

Because Stein occludes her gender by substituting “he” or “one” for “she,” she can also be read as a lesbian modernist who, like Woolf, uses coded language. However, since readers of Gertrude Stein remain aware of her gender, these transparent sex reversals can be interpreted as sites of disruption designed not to conceal but to call attention to the fictive status of all gender constructs. Moreover, her notorious textual opacity does not disguise lesbian identity because Stein, anticipating the queer theorizations of Judith Butler, does not believe that sexuality can remain sexuality if it submits to linguistic acts of naming that promise to transform intrinsically opaque psychic processes into transparent facts (Butler “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” 15). For Stein, sexual subjectivity signifies an inner movement of self-contained being that resists capture through definitions, categorizations, or other information about persons. Since Stein based her lesbian-themed verbal portraits on her autobiographical experiences, it makes sense that she approaches lesbianism as an embodied form of desire related immediately and casually to dramatized being. In her lesbian-themed shorter fictions, she reconfigures the ontological relationship between inessential attributes that describe habitual acts and essential definitions that name persons in order to represent lesbian subjectivity as an embodied process of experience that is neither speakable nor unspeakable.

Woolf's early story “The Mysterious Case of Miss V.” concerns an anonymous narrator who becomes obsessed with Miss V., an elderly spinster who haunts London society without anyone's taking notice of her existence. This narrative illustrates what Terry Castle calls the “lesbian ghost story,” in which the metaphor of ghosting represents the culturally mandated specter of disavowed lesbian desire that returns to haunt another woman (28-65). The connection between the narrator and Miss V. also recalls the covert male homoeroticism in late Victorian doppelganger stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). In her diary, Woolf noted that she wanted to study Stevenson, “not to copy … but to see how the trick's done” (PA [A Passionate Apprentice] 251). Published the year that the Labouchere Amendment outlawing male homosexuality in England went into effect, Stevenson's novella explores the double life of daytime social propriety and nighttime sexual liaisons forced upon male homosexuals. Henry Jekyll, an ostensibly respectable and celibate bachelor, mates with his double, Edward Hyde, a disreputable young man who arouses suspicion among his all-male circle of acquaintances, who fear being sexually blackmailed by working-class blackguards. The narrator of this study of male homosexual panic is Gabriel John Utterson, who, like Woolf's narrator, fills the void in his uneventful existence with an elaborate fantasy life based on vicarious identification with “downgoing men,” for whom “it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance” (1). Just as Woolf's narrator becomes fixated on Miss V., Utterson becomes “enslaved” (13) by the mystery of Hyde, vowing that “If he be Mr. Hyde … I shall be Mr. Seek” (15).

Woolf represents herself, as Dean R. Baldwin notes, in the character of Miss V. (Miss Virginia) and explores her fears of becoming an isolated spinster whose personal identity has shrunk to an initial and who has no more substance than a shadow (8). Through this fictionalized self-portrait, Woolf examines how the fear of losing social acceptance makes her reluctant to embrace her desire for women. Moreover, Elaine Showalter remarks that unlike Victorian gentlemen, who “had the prerogative of moving freely through the zones of the city,” Victorian ladies were not permitted “access to a nighttime world of bars, clubs, brothels, and illicit sexuality as an alternative to their public life of decorum and restraint” (118-19). In contrast to Gabriel Utterson, Woolf's narrator relates little information about her unanchored, solitary life that secretly mirrors that of the mysterious Miss V.

The sudden death of Miss V. plunges the narrator into apprehensions concerning her own anonymity: “The ease with which such a fate befalls you suggests that it is really necessary to assert yourself in order to prevent yourself from being skipped … It is a terrible fate” (“Miss V” [“The Mysterious Case of Miss V”] 30). Although she refers to the “sister” of Miss V., she also notes that “it is characteristic that in writing of them one name seems instinctively to do for both—indeed one might mention a dozen such sisters in one breath” (“Miss V” 30). She both erases Miss V. as an individual and implies that a covert sisterly bond exists between them. While the strength of this bond makes her afraid to acknowledge her desire for intimacy with Miss V. lest she share in her insignificance, her disavowal of this connection will result in the same end.

Significantly, the narrator first notices Miss V. through her absence, which causes her a “nameless dissatisfaction” (“Miss V” 31). One morning she calls aloud her name: “Mary V! Mary V!” (“Miss V” 31). But this attempt at communication fails to raise the ghost. She conceives the “fantastic plan” of visiting Miss V. and treating her “as though she were a person like the rest of us!” (“Miss V” 31). When she arrives, she discovers that Miss V. has died “at the very moment when I called her name” (“Miss V” 32). This melodramatic ending spells out the doom of urban isolation foretold in the opening: “It is a commonplace that there is no loneliness like that of one who finds himself alone in a crowd; novelists repeat it; the pathos is undeniable; and now, since the case of Miss V., I at least have come to believe it” (“Miss V” 30). The narrator arrives too late to create an actual bond with the woman revealed, at last, not as Miss Virginia but rather her apparitional double, Mary V. The story leaves the narrator with the choice of repeating the patterns that have ghosted women like Mary V. or, alternately, of becoming intimate with and acknowledging herself, Miss Virginia.

Woolf's “Memoirs of a Novelist” reveals that in the negative anxieties over ghostly spinsterhood that characterize “The Mysterious Case of Miss V.” lie the positive possibilities of recovery and rematerialization. Woolf frames this quasi-fictional, quasi-critical story as a review article that outs two late Victorian romantic friends as repressed lesbians in the process of critiquing Miss Linsett's tedious memoirs of her lifelong companion, Miss Willatt, a once popular author of insipid romances. This groundbreaking fiction should be read in conjunction with Woolf's two manifestos of literary modernism, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) and “Modern Fiction” (1925). Years before declaring that their materialist world view prevented her Edwardian literary forbears from apprehending modern character as an “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration and complexity it may display” (“Modern Fiction” 150), this story reveals how the ideology of separate spheres governing Victorian culture systemically suppressed lesbianism. Woolf accomplishes this task by exploring the difference between the official Miss Willatt, as portrayed by her Victorian biographer Miss Linsatt, and the real Miss Willatt, as revealed by the narrator.

Woolf appears to have modeled Miss Willatt on the immensely popular Edwardian novelist Marie Corelli. Her melodramas, which combined anti-sex polemics with occultism and science fiction, were often set in biblical or otherwise remote locales and rapidly fell into obscurity after her death. Corelli had a longtime romantic friendship with Bertha Vyver, a union complete with the consolations of traditional marriage except for sexual expression, which Corelli regarded as legitimate only for procreation. Viewing their female-female love as free from any “taint” of male lust, the women were openly affectionate in public. Ironically, Corelli's belief in women's natural moral superiority accompanied her staunch opposition to women's suffrage.² Woolf, who regarded Corelli as a model of bad writing and compared her unfavorably to Sappho (D [The Diary of Virginia Woolf] 2: 340), treats the Corelli-like Miss Willatt as the archetype of the censorious and morally self-righteous lesbian author who regards public adulation as a personal right but cannot identify with feminists or homosexual men lest she come to recognize her sinful lesbian desires.

The story opens with the death of Miss Willatt. After considering whether anyone can or should know the truth about someone's private life, the narrator concludes that both women have, as writers, exposed themselves to historical scrutiny. Miss Linsatt, however, uses writing to mask rather than reveal truth, and since she never explains why she wrote her memoirs of Miss Willatt or who either of them was, the narrator reinterprets the official story. Miss Linsatt, she surmises, wrote the memoirs because she “felt uneasy” after her companion's death since the people on the street looked remarkably “indifferent” (“Memoirs” [“Memoirs of a Novelist”] 69). While Miss Willatt's fate as a forgotten novelist mirrors the existential anomie of Miss Linsatt, she reinforces her predicament by excising from her memoirs the psychological conflict that would have made her and her friend fascinating and instructive to future homosexual readers. Woolf rescues Miss Willatt from oblivion but also emphasizes that authors who live by dictates of conventional opinion will die by them as well.

From the narrator's sleuth-like skill in reading between the lines of the official memoirs, we learn that Miss Willatt became alienated from society because her male relatives belittled her intellectual abilities. Expected to marry to establish her “relationship to the world,” she experiences “a terrible depression” (“Memoirs” 72). To avoid institutional heterosexuality, she takes up religion. Her moral seriousness cannot, however, eliminate her persistent desires. She confesses to her best friend, Ellen Buckle, that she oscillates between feeling superior to the sexual sinfulness that surrounds her and regarding herself as an anomalous “blot upon the face of nature” (“Memoirs” 73):

A terrible self-consciousness possessed her, and she writes to Miss Buckle as though she watched her shadow trembling over the entire world, beneath the critical eyes of the angels. … “What would I not give to help you?” writes Miss Buckle. Our difficulty as we read now is to understand what their aim was; for it is clear that they imagined a state in which the soul lay tranquil and in bliss, and that if one could reach it one was perfect. … But the only pleasure that they allowed themselves to feel was the pleasure of submission.

(“Memoirs” 73)

In this crisis, however, Miss Buckle deserts her friend by marrying an engineer “by whom her doubts were set at rest for ever” (“Memoirs” 73) and leaves Miss Willatt to suffer her suspected sinfulness alone. Not surprisingly, Miss Linsatt ruthlessly censors this portion of her memoir, shrinking “the word love and whole passages polluted by it … into asterisks” (“Memoirs” 73) and substituting dull catalogues of virtues for the complicated truth of Miss Willatt's romantic grief. Judging that Miss Linsatt has abandoned Miss Willatt by refusing to disclose why Miss Buckle ended her friendship with Miss Willatt, the narrator, in turn, dismisses Miss Linsatt and her memoirs. The narrator surmises that Miss Willatt, having suffered rejection for revealing her anomalous character to another woman, learned to mask herself and deceive the adoring Miss Linsatt. In reality, Miss Willatt was a “restless and discontented person” (“Memoirs” 75) who doubted religion and used charity to mask her ambitions. But rather than acknowledge her lesbian desires or critique Victorian gender ideology, she turns, in a gesture common to sublimated literatures of lesbianism, to the realm of fantasy, producing romantic fables of imaginary lovers in faraway locales that transport her readers into places remote from their own constricted lives. Miss Willatt becomes a failed Sappho, a woman whose cynical failure of nerve constitutes her essential tragedy as a writer and a leader of women:

She had thoughts of emigrating, and founding a society, in which she saw herself … reading wisdom from a book to a circle of industrious disciples. … Miss Willatt was far too clever to believe that anyone could answer anything; but the sight of these queer little trembling women, who looked up at her, prepared for beating or caress, like spaniels, appealed to a mass of emotions, and they were not all of them bad. What such women wanted, she saw, was to be told that they were parts of a whole.

(“Memoirs” 77)

Miss Linsatt lavishly describes Miss Willatt's death, but her homage does not succeed in immortalizing her friend. In “Memoirs of a Novelist,” Woolf doubly inverts the traditional love story. Victorian mores result in the denial of lesbian passion and an amorous fixation on death. Miss Linsatt loves her dead companion because “[i]t was an end undisturbed by the chance of a fresh beginning” (“Memoirs” 79). But Woolf destabilizes this closure, showing the intensely lonely Miss Linsatt remembering how she and her friend “had been in the habit of going to Kew Gardens together on Sundays” (“Memoirs” 79).

In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection,” Woolf portrays a disquieting, compelling woman modeled partly on her influential contemporary, the lesbian art critic Vernon Lee (Violet Paget).³ The narrative begins with the statement that “People should not leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime” (“Lady” 221) and ends with “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms” (“Lady” 225). This story reveals that the elderly spinster Isabella Tyson does not hide behind her façade a terrible crime or financial indiscretion. Rather, Isabella's reflection in the looking-glass exposes her to the narrator as an “empty” old woman who has “no thoughts,” “no friends,” and “cared for nobody” (“Lady” 225). This story never reveals the actual connection between the narrator and Isabella, or explains why the former observes Isabella so intently, as if determined to uncover “the truth about Isabella … after knowing her all these years” (“Lady” 222).

The anonymous narrator relates several facts about her friend while Isabella tends her opulent flower garden. A wealthy woman with a home furnished with Oriental antiques she has accumulated in her travels to “the most obscure corners of the world” (“Lady” 222), Isabella in her worldliness contrasts sharply with Woolf's earlier portraits of restricted, impoverished lesbian lives. Although she had “known many people, had had many friends,” her intimacies have led to “nothing” (“Lady” 222), either because she has never married or has never shared the story of her personal relationships with others. Nevertheless, the narrator speculates that to judge “from the mask-like indifference of her face, she had gone through twenty times more of passion and experience than those whose loves are trumpeted forth for all the world to hear” (“Lady” 223). The narrator implies that Isabella's hermetically sealed private life protects her lesbianism from public disclosure.

Both the voyeuristic narrator and Isabella Tyson bear a striking resemblance to Vernon Lee. Woolf composed a portrait of Lee, whom she had visited in Florence and, as the ending of “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” indicates, originally intended to make Lee's longtime female companion, C. Anstruther-Thomas, a character in Mrs. Dalloway (MD [Mrs. Dalloway] 159). Like Isabella Tyson, Lee was a widely traveled aesthete who collected art and antique furnishings. An enigmatic and strikingly beautiful woman, Lee forbade inquiries into her personal life. While Lee was reluctant to acknowledge her lesbianism even to her close friends, her writings on aesthetics, which influenced Woolf, were replete with encoded homosexual references.

Woolf treats Lee as a transitional figure who embodies the struggle between cultural tradition and innovation. Regarding art as the vehicle for sublimating homoeroticism, Lee's aesthetic theory combines an obsessive focus on women as the ideal object of art with a universalizing masculine gaze that causes her to construct an airtight homosexual closet. While Woolf shared Lee's contrary impulses to worship unattainable women and penetrate the enigma of their seductive allure, Woolf's aesthetic objectification was modified by her feminist valorization of female experience. In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection,” Woolf uses the metaphor of the mirror to explore how Vernon Lee would look to Vernon Lee if she held up the reflection of her aesthetic philosophy to herself. That the narrator discovers nothingness as the secret of Isabella's life reveals Woolf's critique of the consequences of Lee's divorce of aesthetic pleasure from empathic identification. Art, like the aesthetic contemplation of human beings, exists to forbid rather than to create intimacy. Yet the very force of the forbidden creates a desire to uncover a hidden truth that the denial of female experience has already rendered not only inaccessible but also, more alarmingly, perhaps nonexistent.

In “A Society,” Woolf turns to Sappho, the preeminent lesbian poet of Western culture. Gillian Spraggs argues that in the early twentieth century, when medical sexologists and apologists for same-sex love were adopting the names “lesbian” and “Sapphist” for a distinct psychological type, lesbian authors were identifying Sappho as an exemplary foremother. In response to these developments, “eminent scholars of ancient Greek were covering pages with passionately expressed assertions as to the ‘moral purity’ and generally conventional character of the poet” (51). Woolf shows how male scholars' pathologizing misinterpretations of her poetry contribute to the most egregious features of British patriarchy: fatalistic warmongering among men and compulsive childbearing among women. Cassandra, the central narrator, reports on the doings of six complaisant young women who have been taught to disparage women and praise male achievements. Their assumptions are challenged by Polly, who has been given a paternal legacy on the condition that she read all the books in the British Library. Polly “bursts into tears” when she can no longer suppress her knowledge that most books written by men are “unutterably bad” (“A Society” 124). Deciding that the object of life is to “produce good people and good books” (“A Society” 128), the women form themselves into a Society for judging the worth of patriarchal culture. They venture out to investigate what men do in the navy, the law courts, the arts, and the university. Until they receive satisfactory answers, they vow to remain chaste: “Before we bring another child into the world we must swear that we will find out what the world is like” (“A Society” 125).

As Jane Marcus notes, “A Society” represents Woolf's effort to penetrate cloistered male scholarly societies such as the Cambridge Apostles, whose members were ostensibly heterosexual even though they idealized male homosexuality and Greek culture, and “to offer a parallel sisterhood of intellectual inquiry and social conscience” (“Liberty” 91). Sappho connects this closeted male society of scholars, who live in sterile isolation without “children or animals” (“A Society” 127), to the feminist society of modern sapphists who infiltrate their domains. Castalia travels to Oxbridge to investigate the intellectual contributions of Professor Hobkin, whose scholarly life has been dedicated to an edition of Sappho. When Castalia returns, her contempt for his arid life mingles with her puzzlement over what useful knowledge his work means to convey.

It's a queer looking book, six or seven inches thick, not all by Sappho. Oh, no. Most of it is a defense of Sappho's chastity, which some German has denied, and I can assure you the passion with which these two gentlemen argued, the learning they displayed, the prodigious ingenuity with which they disputed the use of some implement which looked to me for all the world like a hairpin astounded me.

(“A Society” 128)

Another woman speculates that Professor Hobkin must be a “gynaecologist” since no serious literary scholar could waste so much time, in a work supposedly dedicated to a great lyric poet, over minor issues like hairpins and disputes over chastity. But Professor Hobkin typifies a tradition of male scholars who refused, with few exceptions, to accept Sappho's love for women as an unproblematic aspect of her being related to her appreciation of female beauty, celebration of nature, and criticism of warfare. Rather, they projected their compulsion to control women onto Sappho by isolating her sexuality from its social and artistic context. This fanatical obsession with Sapphic sexuality serves to deflect attention from the serious issues raised by feminist reinterpretations of chastity and to mask profound fears that women's politically motivated feminist bonding threatens male dominance and the patriarchal family. For the Society, chastity means the refusal to reproduce a culture that perpetuates waste, aggression, and mediocrity by barring women from making vitally needed contributions.

Woolf underscores the point that productive feminist community depends on common political goals. Castalia ventures again to Oxbridge to uncover more information about male notions of chastity. She decides to conceive a child out of wedlock and raise it in the female world of the Society. Although she has broken her vow of chastity, her companions do not reject her since her pregnancy registers her protest to the life-denying world of male scholarship. Both Cassandra and Castalia realize that they are not chaste according to the male definition of the term, for, as Castalia remarks, “If you'd been a chaste woman yourself you would have screamed at the sight of me—instead of which you rushed across the room and took me in your arms” (“A Society” 129).

In the end, however, Woolf undercuts this epiphanic moment of feminist solidarity in two ways. She reveals the tragic political consequences of male scholars' bowdlerizations of Sappho and suggests the challenges the women will face in coping with their new insights. The sudden arrival of World War I represents the literalization of the disputes over Sappho's chastity among European scholars. Masculine culture has failed to learn anything valuable from Sappho, who linked her love for women—as friends, students, lovers, and mothers—to her critique of the Homeric epic that glorified violence and nationalistic warfare.⁴ In a desperate effort to protect her child from this destructive culture, Castalia wants to prevent her daughter Ann “from learning to read” (“A Society” 134). But Ann cannot return to the child-like ignorance of Victorian womanhood any more than she can handle the adult responsibilities thrust upon her. Hence, just as Polly creates the Society by bursting into tears, Ann concludes this phase of feminist inquiry by crying when the women elect her the president of the Society of the Future. “A Society” allegorizes how the ideology of separate spheres imposed limits on the groundbreaking cultural achievements of lesbian-feminist modernism. The Society gains sapphic insight into the systemic failures of masculine civilization but still lacks the political and economic power to transform their world.

In her lesbian-themed shorter fictions, Woolf transforms lesbianism from a repressed cultural phantasm into a form of modern sexual subjectivity through encoded acts of critical reinterpretation. Identification with this textually generated lesbian subject position not only fosters awareness of the historical repression of lesbianism but also serves as a site of political resistance to sexual un-self-consciousness and complicity in patriarchal domination. While Stein, like Woolf, alludes to earlier literatures of homosexuality in her writing, her distinctive contribution to lesbian modernism resides in her use of autobiographical experience to resignify sexuality as an opaque psychic process and, concomitantly, to transform the relationships among literary representation, autobiographical narrative, and sexual subjectivity.

Stein makes the transition from Victorian realism to lesbian modernism in her short story “Melanctha.” This story represents her second attempt, after her posthumously published autobiographical novella Q.E.D. to understand the failure of her first lesbian relationship with May Bookstaver, a student she met during medical school and on whom she based her bisexual, biracial protagonist Melanctha Herbert in “Melanctha.” By applying the logic of the homosexual closet to Stein's mature writing, however, influential critics such as Richard Bridgman conclude that Stein merely covered her lesbian self-portrait in Q.E.D. with a heterosexual ethnic mask in “Melanctha,” thereby using race to encode lesbianism (52). This interpretation not only erases the lesbianism represented legibly in the relationship between Melanctha and Jane Harden but also elides how Stein uses race to foreground how the body and sexual life are governed by arbitrary convention. While distinctions based on race, color, gender, and sexuality dominate the text's social landscape and make Melanctha “blue” about “how all her world was made” (“Melanctha” 87), these presumptively stable and discrete properties are combined and recombined through permutating contexts with such dizzying complexity that they become self-contradictory and lose their authority to enunciate any singular truth about human nature.

Stein employs “black” language as the verbal landscape of this text not to represent actual African American dialect but rather, as Michael North observes, to dramatize the conflict between realist and modernist conceptions of linguistic meaning (74). This conflict informs the central relationship between Melanctha and Jefferson Campbell, a middle-class black doctor who wants “colored people” to avoid “excitements” and “live regular” (“Melanctha” 117). While Stein's self-portrait as Jefferson encodes her gender, she masculinizes herself to parody an earlier version of herself as a naive medical student who believed in bourgeois morality and, subscribing to medical sexology, regarded “real” lesbianism as the assumption of a socially defined masculine role. Melanctha, exposed by Jane Harden's scandalous revelations to Jefferson about their sexual “wanderings” that identify her as a biracial lesbian prostitute who has sex with black and white men alike (“Melanctha” 143-44), treats language as an inessential attribute that describes immediate, self-contained experiences without reference to past or future. She insists that her words mean no more than what she is “just saying” (“Melanctha” 172) in any given moment or context. Jefferson, in contrast, in anguished conflict over the seeming contradiction between Melanctha's “sweet nature” (“Melanctha” 160) and her experiences as a “bad one” (“Melanctha” 144), wants language that commits the speaker, that links past and present selves, and that reveals the consistent inner “truth” of being. His need to “have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling” (“Melanctha” 171) not only destroys his relationship with Melanctha but also sets the stage for Stein's subsequent representations of lesbian subjectivity as a form of dynamic experience knowable only in reference to itself.

In “Melanctha,” Stein masters her painful loss of May Bookstaver by relinquishing claims to linguistic mastery. Melanctha, who is neither black nor white nor homosexual nor heterosexual, explodes the claims to knowledge and ownership of selves that ground stable racial and sexual identities. Oscillating between her incompatible desires for an expansive “world wisdom” (“Melanctha” 103) on the one hand and a socially approved “right position” (“Melanctha” 212) on the other, Melanctha frustrates the will of the persons she encounters to dominate or contain her by naming her essence. Although Melanctha ultimately dies alone of “consumption” (“Melanctha” 236), exhausted by her inability to gain social acceptance, the responsibility for her tragic end rests not with Melanctha herself but with the limits her world imposes on the meaning of a woman's quest for “world wisdom” (“Melanctha” 212).

Melanctha begins her journey toward “world wisdom” through her relationship with her teacher and first lover, Jane Harden. An educated, “reckless,” and hard-drinking woman, Jane was forced to leave her position at a colored college because of her “bad conduct” (“Melanctha” 103)—an allusion to the drinking habits that, unlike her lesbianism and prostitution, “can never really be covered over” (“Melanctha” 105). Melanctha becomes enamored of Jane because, as an experienced preceptor, Jane makes her “understand what everybody wanted, and what one did with power when one had it” (“Melanctha” 106). Once Melanctha gains equal footing with Jane, however, she begins to quarrel with her and forgets “how much she owed to Jane's teaching” (“Melanctha” 107). Her desertion of Jane propels Melanctha on her self-destructive quest to become “regular” by discovering her “right position” (“Melanctha” 210) through her relationship with Jefferson, the gambler Jem Richards, and Rose Johnson, a shrewdly practical woman who, near the end of the story, ejects Melanctha from her house because she threatens the stability of her heterosexual marriage. On the other hand, the breakdown of Melanctha's friendship with Jane stems from her implicit recognition that, for working-class black women leading lesbian lives, the meanings of “world wisdom” extend no further than the domains of hard drinking, prostitution, and informal relations with other women located similarly on the margins of respectable society.

Conversely, “Ada” celebrates Stein's union with Alice Toklas, whom she nicknamed Ada. This encapsulated history narrates the story of Ada's life from her subordinate position as a daughter in a conventional patriarchal household to her equal status as an adult lesbian who tells and listens to stories that have a satisfying “beginning and a middle and an ending” (“Ada” 16). Stein delineates lesbian modernism as a contextual shift from the heterosexual family to “telling stories” with “one,” namely Gertrude Stein, in an open context of lesbian creativity.

As in her later relationship with “one,” Ada and her mother tell stories to each another. But in this case, the people around them do not like Ada as well as her mother, for while “the daughter was charming inside in her, it did not show outside in her to every one” (“Ada” 15). In other words, in this implicitly homophobic setting, Ada's creativity remains unappreciated and inexpressible. After her mother dies, moreover, Ada becomes a servant to the “many relations who lived with them.” When she tells her father “that she did not like it at all being one being living then” (“Ada” 15), he says nothing, since he cannot imagine an alternative to the unequal relations that make his daughter unhappy. Serendipitously, Ada receives an inheritance and moves away. Her father, who learns to value Ada because she leaves, eventually becomes “quite tender.” Once liberated from her family, Ada does not become the proverbially frustrated or outcast spinster; rather, her capacity for “living” and “loving” liberates a jouissance that results in a rewriting of literary conventions of lesbianism.

In “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story,” Stein represents lesbian sexuality explicitly to subvert conventional notions of plot structured around conflict, rising action, crisis, falling action, and denouement or climax. While “wife” encodes a private reference to Alice Toklas, having a “cow” is a slang term for orgasm. This activity of female sexual pleasure leading to orgasm is the subject, plot, and climax of this story in which form literally becomes content. The circular story begins by describing the central action and its genre: “Nearly all of it to be as a wife has a cow, a love story” (“Wife Has a Cow” 543). This story concludes, appropriately enough, with the completed action or female “climax”:

Happening and have it as happening and having it happen as happening and having to have it happen as happening, and my wife has a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now and having a cow as now and having a cow and having a cow now, my wife has a cow and now.

(“Wife Has a Cow” 545)

These verbal clusters indicate the rising action of sexual activity (“came in there … come out of there” and “feeling for it … feel”) and the voluntary withholding of premature orgasm to increase the suspense and pleasure of the climactic close (“not and now … just as soon as now,” “expect … expected,” “prepare … preparation,” and “happening … having”).

As in her other lesbian-themed verbal portraits, Stein drew the inspiration for her most famous portrait of lesbian life, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” from her actual experiences—in this case, from her and Toklas's acquaintance with a lesbian couple named Miss Mars and Miss Squires. Her repetitive use of the verbal motif “gay” performs a verbal mimesis of the self-contained forces that are related immediately, dynamically, and casually to the thing signified. Stein expands the grammatical function of the adjective “gay,” which signifies happy and carefree, and universalizes the attribute of “gayness,” a slang term for an emerging subcultural attitude toward being homosexual that countered dominant stereotypes of the “third sex” as tragically maladjusted inverts. On the threshold between an inessential attribute and an essential name, “gay” operates as both an adjective denoting a general quality of being (“happy”) and a noun designating a specific class of persons (“homosexuals”). Stein renders the contextual meanings of the “gay” relationship between Misses Furr and Skeene so transparent that only the ingrained habit of the closet, which makes readers notice lesbians only as unspeakable presences lurking behind veiled references to “the love that dare not speak its name,” could prevent anyone from perceiving this story as a coming-out narrative that assumes the existence of an articulate homosexual community.

Stein presents two distinct types of gay women: the one whose restlessness and sense of adventure impels her to travel and the other whose memories of a stable home life motivate her to discover a secure community. Although their different responses to their “gayness” finally drive them apart, both women develop themselves by “cultivating” their “voices” and “other things needing cultivating” (“Furr and Skeene” 17). Stein connects singing with lesbianism because the female voice, as a form of cultivated artistic expression, can only be generated through the female body. Hence, “cultivating voices” signifies learning how to express oneself by nurturing lesbian artistic sensibility within the context of a community where they can speak gay language and live regular (rather than abnormal) gay lives.

While Woolf's “A Society” and Stein's “Melanctha” offer trenchant critiques of the ideology of separate spheres, their lesbian-themed shorter fictions signify lesbian subjectivity differently. Woolf uses encoding to reveal and reconceal her lesbian subject position, fashioning an enclosed, protected site of self-articulation that is constitutive of modern lesbian identity as an ethical domain. In contrast, Stein's experiences impelled her to discard the epistemological distinctions between public and private and literal and encoded knowledge of (homo)sexual identities. For Stein, conscious actors cannot articulate their sexualities as stable identities because sexuality remains occluded by subconscious process. Like Melanctha, who resists Jefferson's/Stein's attempts to commit her to consistency, when it comes to disclosing the truth about sexuality, we can never mean more than what we are “just saying” in any given moment.

Notes

1. I am drawing a historical distinction between “lesbian literature” (literature about lesbianism written by women who identify as lesbians) and “the literature of lesbianism” (literature about lesbianism regardless of the sexual orientation or gender of the author).

2. See Patricia Smith, “Marie Corelli.”

3. Vernon Lee is not the sole model for the woman in this story. In her diary, Woolf noted that “One of these days, though I shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends. … How many little stories come into my head. For instance: Ethel Sands not looking at her letters. What this implies” (D 3: 156-57). While Woolf was thinking of her friend Ethel Sands as someone who, like the woman in this story, does not open her letters, this portrait represents a composite character study. I would argue that this story's prevailing artistic influence derived from Woolf's intense engagement with Vernon Lee as the closeted lesbian embodiment of fin-de-siécle homosexual aestheticism.

4. In Fragments 40, 41, and 42 of Mary Barnard's translation of Sappho's lyrics, the narrator addresses her friend Anactoria, exiled from the community of women by her marriage to an army officer. Sappho bids her to remember Lesbos, where “delicious dew pours down to freshen / roses, delicate thyme” and beautiful girls lay on “soft mats” with “all that they most wished for beside them.” In Fragment 41, she elevates the personal love lyric above the masculine ethos of Homeric epic: “So Anactoria, although you / being far away forget us, the dear sound of your footstep / and light glancing in your eyes / would move me more than glitter / of Lydian horse or armored / tread of mainland infantry.”

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. NY: Routledge, 1991. 13-31.

Fleishman, Avrom. “Forms of the Woolfian Short Story.” Freedman 44-70.

Freedman, Ralph, ed. Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1980.

Marcus, Jane. “Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny.” The Representation of Women in Fiction. Ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. 60-97.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990.

Stein, Gertrude. “Ada.” Geography and Plays. NY: Haskell, 1967. 14-16.

———. “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story.” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein 543-45.

———. “Melanctha.” Three Lives. NY: Random House, 1936. 85-236.

———. “Miss Furr and Miss Skeen.” Geography and Plays 17-22.

———. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. NY: Random House, 1990.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. NY: Bantam Books, 1981.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Oliver Bell. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

———. “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 221-25.

———. “Memoirs of a Novelist.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 69-79.

———. “Modern Fiction.” Common Reader: First Series 146-54.

———. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Essays 3: 384-89.

———. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. San Diego, NY, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

———. “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 152-59.

———. “The Mysterious Case of Miss V.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 30-32.

———. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

———. “A Society.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 124-36.