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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. In his 1980 edition, Olney identified and cataloged various critical resources on autobiography, as did Leigh Gilmore fourteen years later (“Mark”). These accounts of the critical work on the genre have been formative in establishing and shaping “autobiographical studies.” 2. Foucault’s historicizing of sexuality and its discourses, in History of Sexuality, is a crucial underpinning of my work because of his emphasis on the construction of sexual paradigms as opposed to the naturalness of sexuality. 3. The collection Autobiography & Postmodernism would rectify a similar case for autobiography in studies of postmodernism; see Gilmore. 4. De Man studies the shifting nature of these “figure”s. Starobinski notes the “deviation.” 5. I agree with Gay Wachman, when she writes in her book about lesbian fiction of the 1920s that “writing, however oppositional” is “enmeshed in the dominant culture” (3); no matter how “oppositional” these writers were, they, to some extent, must rely upon the symbolic semiotics of their time. My trajectory shows the growing range in their abilities to write in another symbolic. That other symbolic has been identified as “sapphic modernism” by a number of scholars. See Laura Doan and Jane Garrity for an excellent overview of criticism (12, fn 16). 6. Andrea Harris also goes to Woolf’s exploration for the idea of “other sexes” in her excellent book on “women writers attempt[ing] to revise the prevailing system of binary gender” (xiii). Her book has provided a foundation for my own, with her argument that “gender and style form the central connection between feminism and modernity” (xv). 7. Terry Castle’s extraordinarily useful study explores how lesbian characters inhabit literary texts, unseen. She identifies culture as the active blinder: the “lesbian has been ‘ghosted’—or made to seem invisible—by culture itself” (4). 8. Working with the “feminine” and genre, Shari Benstock conceptualizes this area of study well when she asks, “how do textual forms that escape or confound the privileged visual order of cognition figure in accounts of psychosexual subjectivity?” (Textualizing xv). 156 Notes 9. I think immediately of the theoretical work in l’ecriture feminine, with its connections of textuality to the body. The “white ink” of Helene Cixous (“Laugh”) and the “two lips” of Luce Irigaray (This Sex) come to mind. The critical work in this area is growing. See, for example, Kathy Mezei’s Ambiguous Discourses and Joseph Allan Boone, as well as Judith Roof’s important study (Come). 10. See Jeffrey Weeks, Ruthann Robson, and Lynda Hart for a sampling of the growing critical work on lesbians in the British and American twentieth-century legal system. Adam Parke’s study of legality and obscenity helpfully situates effects on texts. 11. See Bristow, who suggests the work analyzing gay and lesbian literature “does not comprise a coherent field.” As important, then, as recognizing the differ- ence between straight and queer is a realization that “lesbian and gay designate entirely different desires, physical pleasures, oppressions, and visibilities” (2, 3). 12. I am particularly indebted to the generative work of the last thirty years on women’s autobiographies. The work began with Jelinek, extended through Heilbrun, Stanton, and Gilmore (Autobiographics), and continued in antholo- gies edited by Benstock, Smith and Watson, Brodzki and Schenck, Neuman, Brownley and Kimmich, and Culley. This important work continues to emerge. 13. The anthologies Lesbian Texts and Contexts; New Lesbian Criticism; and Sexual Practice, Textual Theory draw together, formulate, and extend critical work on lesbian aesthetics. 14. For an invigorating debate of the issues in the context of scholarship on Virginia Woolf’s work, see the four presentations under the rubric “New Applications of Queer Theory,” with Judith Roof, Troy Gordon, Eileen Barrett, and Patricia Cramer participating. I particularly like Cramer’s presen- tation of Woolf in terms of “activism” (119). One of Cramer’s points of clarification about the debate is that “lesbian-feminism is defined by lesbians who generally seek closer ties with non-lesbian identified women than with gay or otherwise-defined men” (118). So, for instance, lesbian-feminist critics of Woolf might look to the relationship between La Trobe and Isa in Between the Acts (120). The political nature of these debates is emphasized in all four presentations. Roof, in particular, emphasizes the (necessary?) essentialism of lesbian-feminist criticism that assumes a “pre-existent lesbian content,” that a lesbian exists (94). 15. James Olney, rightly, positions autobiography as a genre that represents many discourses, among them history and literary self-expression, philosophy and spiritual “confession,” psychology and art. 16. “Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Pychopathia Sexualis (1889) and the work of Karl Ulrichs form the background to the writing of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. A common assumption of these writers is that the preference of sex object is fixed by nature” (Ayers 137). 17. I follow Cynthia Secor’s example when I refer to Doolittle as Hilda Doolittle, rather than Pound’s name for her, H.D. Doolittle had a number of names for herself, among them Delia Alton, the name under which she wrote an autobio- graphical sketch. Why not use one of these instead of the name inscribed for Notes 157 her by Pound across an early poem of hers? (Secor, “Gertrude Stein” 31). I follow convention by listing Hilda Doolittle as H.D. in the bibliography. 18. Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank gives an excellent understanding of expatriate lesbians of this time period. See also Mary Lynn Broe’s and Angela Ingram’s edition Women’s Writing in Exile. 19. As Domna Stanton and others have pointed out, autobiography was only available to women if written in forms like the diary or letter. James Olney writes about the difficulty of putting boundaries around autobiography, reminding us that he himself made the argument that “T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is his spiritual autobiography” (5). 20. Virginia Woolf closely observed the trial, even standing as possible witness for the defense. 21. For excellent historical contextualizations of the Radclyffe Hall trial, in terms of British legal censorship, and Woolf’s part in it, see Scott, Refiguring 242–257 and Parkes, chapter 4. 22. Hermione Lee establishes Woolf’s extensive interest during the 1920s in the issues of censorship. See chapter 29, particularly 513–521. Lauren Rusk points out two audiences set up by Woolf from within Room: that of women and that of the patriarchy. Rusk focuses on “life writing of otherness,” life writing by “members of groups that are not dominant in their society” (1, 3). Leslie Hankins interprets lesbianism in terms of censorship, and shows how Woolf changes censorship from a patriarchal control to a playful feminist strategy. 23. Celia Marshik explores Woolf’s self-censorship, and her mocking of the institutions of censorships. For example, Marshik agues that “Orlando mocks the very kinds of self-censoring tactics that Woolf employed throughout her career” (“Publication” 878). See also her British Modernism and Censorship. 24. It took the work of scholars such as Joanne Trautmann, Suzanne Raitt, and Sherron E. Knopp even to establish Woolf’s 1920s lesbian sexual relationship with Sackville-West. 25. Louise DeSalvo shows how Woolf used revisions to cover lesbian sexuality in her first novel The Voyage Out (Melymbrosia). Hermione Lee notes that the revision process of Room concealed lesbian references (518–519). 26. Patricia Moran has uncovered the controversy written into Room between Woolf and Desmond MacCarthy over his sexism with regard to women writers. 27. Jane Marcus writes of Woolf’s narratives as “rhetorical seduction,” using “sapphistry as a suitable term” (169). She suggests that Woolf uses “ ‘a little language unknown to men’ which we might call ‘sapphistry’ in Night and Day, A Room of One’s Own, ‘Professions for Women,’ The Years, and Three Guineas” (92). 28. Examples are Leigh Gilmore’s important work on “the mark of the ‘I’ ” and Paul de Man’s “defacement” in autobiography, Jean Starobinski’s “double devi- ation,” and Susan Stanford Friedman’s theories of “dual consciousness” (39). 29. Catharine Stimpson’s brilliant reading of the “lesbian lie” has been instru- mental to my readings of lying and truth in lesbian autobiography. See Timothy Dow Adams excellent book on autobiographical lying in general. 158 Notes 30. See, for example, Stimpson on coding and parody (“Zero” 99–100, and 109); in contrast to the early twentieth century with its representative Well of Loneliness, the later-twentieth-century lesbian novel, Stimpson argues, gives “an alternative process of affirmation of the lesbian body” (110). Julie Abraham bases her arguments on her understanding that a lesbian tradition depends on identifying the lesbian literature, and “Given the particular social pressures surrounding the writing and reading of lesbianism over the past century, can we assume anything about what a text ‘about’ desire between women might look like?” (xiii). She finds a tradition in “social and cultural forms” (xvii). 31. In 1920, Freud published “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.” As with Dora, sessions ended without termination of the analysis. In both case studies, Freud lays the failure at the feet of the patient. In this case the parents wished for a change; the girl did not. Freud notes that “normal sexuality depends upon a restoration in the choice of object; in general to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than to do the reverse, only that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted” (16). Freud records that he “broke off the treatment and gave advice that, if it was thought worth while to continue the therapeutic efforts, it should be done by a woman” (26).
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