“Was it marriage?”: Queer Relationships and Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Realism

Abstract

“Was it marriage?”: Queer Relationships and Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Realism Todd G. Nordgren (bio) On February 17, 1909, Virginia Stephen (not yet Woolf) accepted a marriage proposal from a panicked Lytton Strachey; it was called off before the end of their conversation.1 Other prominent queer authors in the early twentieth century lived in marriages, as Virginia would with Leonard, that afforded the appearance of propriety even if they did not practice it. Although he preferred short-lived relationships over monogamy, Guillaume Apollinaire married Jacqueline Kolb only a few months before his death from Spanish Flu in 1918. After marrying his first wife, Ray, David Garnett maintained his habit of conducting affairs with men and women alike. In each of these cases, otherwise sexually deviant people felt an imperative to marry or live as if married, despite their sharp critiques of the equation of marriage with a happy, successful life. When E. M. Forster protested, in the face of matrimony’s intractable grasp on life and literature alike, that novels were expected to end with “the old, old answer, marriage,” he voiced a widely-held frustration with the possibilities for representations of queer life in fiction and fact.2 This article explores how a vein of queer modernist writing, exemplified by David Garnett’s 1922 novella of animal transformation, Lady into Fox, dislodges conventional marriage as the central organizer of social and literary form by undermining the foundation of the marriage plot—narrative realism. Garnett’s novella subverts the hegemonic norms of the marriage plot, critiquing structures of heteronormative monogamy while offering an affirmative version of queer resistance in which moments of subversion surpass critique and instead imagine a new vision of [End Page 357] the social order. Moreover, Lady into Fox reveals that this history of progressive political expression is entangled with the legacies of modernist innovations and the often-elided role of fantasy in modernist writing. In Lady into Fox, what begins as a realist plot is undone through the introduction of a fantastic mode that overrides the otherwise normative events of the narrative when, early in the story, the protagonist’s wife is suddenly and irreversibly transformed into a fox. The novella registers the social, cultural, and ideological dominance of heterosexual couplings but undoes several features of the marriage plot’s closure in heterosexual monogamous compacts, creating an alternative way to organize a life beyond, as Forster puts it, “the old, old answer, marriage” through a transformation of one of characters into another species and the couple’s subsequent navigation of and adaptation to their new, queer way of living together. Exploring the fantastic, speculative vein of queer modernism that Garnett’s no-vella represents allows us to answer José Esteban Muñoz’s call to resist the “recent . . . erosion of the gay and lesbian political imagination” that makes queer politics into nothing more than “mere inclusion in a corrupt and bankrupt social order” signified by the master symbol of marriage.3 Fantasy’s potential as an anti-realist genre is precisely what transforms critique into new possibilities for queer people, rather than rerouting their desires into normative social structures or failure. For Rosemary Jackson, fantasy “characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss.”4 As such, this article will turn to consider how the subversive imagining of a world of queer potential at the center of Lady into Fox resonates with desires expressed in two of the period’s most formative literary works: the origins of surrealism in Apollinaire’s play Les mamelles de Tirésias (1903/1917) and Woolf’s celebrated mock biography of fantastic sex change, Orlando (1928). Garnett’s novella acts as a fulcrum around which turns this history of the entanglements of queer fantastical imagining and modernist innovations, illuminating a dynamic history of queer modernism beyond the simple “compensation” for loss that Jackson describes, or what Heather Love has called “selectively affirmative” histories drawn from “isolated moments of resistance in the larger story of homophobic oppression and violence.”5 Attending to the queer potential that fantasy offers Garnett in Lady into Fox...