Telling It Straight: The Rhetorics of Conversion in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel and Freud’s Psychogenesis

Abstract

After a long Victorian slumber of romantic sublimation and odd spinsterhood, lesbian desire seemed to become de rigueur in the novels of the 1920s. Once relegated to nonrealist forms of representation—sentimental metaphors, sensational embraces, and gothic encounters—it now seemed to merge with a modernist esthetic as a sign of the real and a signifier of modernity: the representation of lesbian desire, in other words, continued to bypass realist modes. A number of women writers imagined their modernist epiphanies as sapphic experiences of jouissance: there is, for instance, the pear tree that blissfully if allegorically unites Bertha Young with her husband’s mistress Pearl Fulton in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss” (1922); Virginia Woolf’s famous orgasmic metaphor of the “match burning in a crocus” that captures Mrs. Dalloway’s feelings for other women; and Rosamond Lehmann’s dizzy moments in Judith Earle’s devotion to fellow student Jennifer Baird in Dusty Answer (1927).1 Here lesbian desire erodes or at least undermines the conventional heterosexual teleology of the realist novel and yet this is done with considerable ambivalence about the rules of engagement with sapphism. In all these texts lesbian desire is either framed or superseded by heterosexual romance and marriage.KeywordsSexual AmbivalenceMaster PlotWoman WriterWalk AwayOedipus ComplexThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.