Gender, Sexuality and the Poetics of Identification

Abstract

If the volume of writing about lesbians is any indication, nineteenth-century France was profoundly interested in female homosexuality, Both non-fiction and creative writers alike diagnosed symptoms, detailed traits, described milieus, devised plots, and imagined couples and couplings of women. The authors who lent their time, their analyses and their imaginations to the contemplation of lesbians came from a broad array of disciplines, including medicine, criminology, journalism, and fiction writing. They were also nearly exclusively men. l During the first half of the century, notable literary works included Diderot (La Religieuse, published 1796), Balzac (La Fille aux yeux d 'or, 1835) and Gautier (Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835). Following the mid-century and the medicalization of sexual pathology, this literary vogue flourished and attracted authors whose works on female homosexuality ranged across the genres and registers: the popular, pornographic, naturalist, and decadent novel; and poetry high and low. The phenomenon of male interest in female homosexuality, which Naomi Schor, among others, has referred to as male lesbianism,2 was (and, to judge from contemporary pornography, still is) an overwhelmingly voyeuristic obsession motivated by a libidinous curiosity about sexual activity between women. Male fantasies about lesbian sexuality clearly inspired some explicitly erotic texts (Mus set's Gamiani, 1833; Henry Monnier's 'Deux Gougnottes', 1864; among others) and undoubtedly motivated more mainstream portraits as well, from Adolphe Belot's popular novel, Mile Giraud, ma femme (1870) to Catulle Mendes's Mephistophela (1890). Voyeuristic representations oflesbians, however, frequently did doubfe duty: they served to warn readers as well as to excite them. Lesbian sexuality represented excess and menace, dangerous not only to other women (seduction, corruption), but also to men (unrequited fatal attraction, unbridled jealousy). Consequently, literary texts from the period often punished the lesbian characters-whether sympathetic victims or predatory seductresses-