Beauty and the Beast: Lesbians in Literature and Sexual Science from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

At the turn of the century and into the 1920s, we find the rather questionable beginnings of a scientific discourse on lesbianism in Italy in the work of sexologists and in studies on masculinity and femininity (considered natural categories). What influence did this discourse have on the portrayal of lesbians in novels of the period? To be sure, the presence of lesbian characters is rather scant, but what is there holds some surprises and offers a fascinating contrast to the deprecating attitudes of positivism, and not just in literature written by women.1 The fact is that positivist theories of sexual inversion represented a reactionary strain of thought: Internationally, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the first gay rights movements inspired by the writings of Ulrichs and Kertbeny in German-speaking countries as well as the organizational activities of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which worked for the abolition of antisodomy laws and included lesbian women.2 Hirschfeld, a doctor, theorized the distribution of human sexuality across a natural scale that went from masculinity on one end to femininity on the other and embraced any number of possibilities in between. These intermediate forms took on the popular collective designation of “the third sex.” The research journal he founded, Yearbook for the Sexual Intermediates, published, among other things, autobiographical accounts by women who loved women.3