'Anders Dan De Anderen'

‘Anders dan de anderen’ Articulating female homosexual desire in queer Dutch narratives (1930-1939)

Cyd Sturgess

IN ５３ (３): １９３–２１１ DOI: １０.５１１７/IN２０１５.３.STUR

Abstract During the early twentieth century, Germany and the Netherlands witnessed an unprecedented surge in discourses on sexuality, galvanized by the pioneering research of central European sexologists. Against the backdrop of sexological developments and the hedonism of post-war society, Berlin saw the emergence of a thriving homosexual circuit during the interbellum. Across the border, however, the conservatism of Dutch society meant that a Sapphic subculture would not fully emerge in the Netherlands until the mid- 1950s. Drawing on a framework that Laura Doan has recently termed ‘queer critical history’, and through an exploration of a selection of literary, scientific and ‘emancipatory’ writings, this article will examine how societal and cultural constructions of female same-sex desire in Dutch contexts were often at odds with scientific depictions of the ‘congenital invert’. Acknowledging the existence of this incongruence, as the article will argue, can provide historians with a space to explore alternative configurations of same-sex desire in Dutch interwar society that cannot be interpreted in the sense of a self-reflexive ‘lesbian’ identity.

Keywords: queer, sexology, lesbian, Josine Reuling, Eva Raedt-de Canter, Magnus Hirschfeld, sexual inversion

１ Introduction

On Saturday, 4 December 1937 Josine Reuling’s novel Terug naar het eiland was described in the Sumatra Post as a ‘meesterwerk der nederlandse pornographie’. A story about the life of a young Swedish girl who has

VOL. 53, NO. 3, 2015 193 INTERNATIONALE NEERLANDISTIEK romantic relationships with women during her extended summers in Paris, Reuling’s work sparked outrage in the newspapers of the Dutch colonies. Yet, it was not only the conservative colonial press that took a position against Reuling’s writing. In her native country Holland, Reuling’s novel also appears to have incited increasingly incensed debates within print media about her engagement with the subject of ‘de Lesbische liefde’.In December 1937, the Dordrechtsche Courant claimed that Reuling’s protagonist was a ‘pathologisch geval’, while in the same month literary critic Top Naeff concluded in the cultural magazine Elsevier that Reuling’s focus on the ‘Lesbische liefde’ served to highlight her immaturity as an author. Although the contentiousness surrounding the subject of female homosexual desire in Dutch society appears to have brought the moral and literary integrity of Reuling’s writing into dispute, the visibility of the issue in the literary reception of Terug naar het eiland simultaneously suggests, for one of the first times in Dutch history, that lesbian desire had become a topic open to debate in the social and cultural arena in the Netherlands. Less than a decade earlier, the presence of female same-sex desire in Dutch literary and social circles is conspicuous to the modern historian only through its absence. Although, as Gert Hekma has claimed (1987; 1999), scientific and literary publications on the subject of male homosexuality had promoted quite ‘positive ideas about sexual variations’ by the early 1900s, Judith Schuyf has contended (1994) that lesbian desire remained little more than a ‘stilzwijgende samenzwering’ in Dutch society for much of the first half of the twentieth century.１ In light of the silences and omissions that characterize early lesbian experience in the Netherlands, and prompted by recent developments in queer historiography, this article will examine more closely what written narratives on the subject of female homosexuality might reveal about the ways in which women’s same-sex desires were constructed and ‘lived’ in Dutch contexts when viewed through a queer lens. By suggesting, as historian Laura Doan has done most recently (2013), that the contemporary understanding of sexuality as an ‘essential determinant’ of one’s social identity might not fully reflect the nuances of sexual experiences in the past, this article will attempt to shed light on the historical configurations of same-sex desire that sat outside of contemporary social discourses of ‘non-normative’ sexuality. After a brief survey of more recent approaches to homosexual history writing, a selection of historical ‘queer’ narratives will be presented in order to re-examine the assertion that sexual preference was a key marker of identity for women in the Netherlands after the turn of the twentieth century.

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２ Queer(ing) critical history

In her pioneering work Odd girls and twilight lovers, Lillian Faderman claims that before the mid-nineteenth century ‘there was no such thing as a “lesbian” as the twentieth century recognizes the term [...]’, and suggests that it was not until after 1880 that ‘the category of the lesbian – or the female sexual invert – was formulated’ (1991, p. 2). Faderman argues that scientific interventions into the field of human sexual behaviour during the late nineteenth century meant that ‘passionate’ relationships between women acquired ‘an entirely different meaning’ in contemporary society and fundamentally changed the ways in which women perceived their behaviours. Furthermore, Faderman argues that popular scientific theories about same-sex desire provided ‘a set of concepts and questions [...] by which to scrutinize feelings that would have been seen as natural and even admirable in earlier days’ (p. 2). Faderman’s exploration of the emergence of the category ‘lesbian’ in America draws strongly on the Foucauldian notion of a great Rubicon moment in European history after which same- sex behaviours were considered to be ‘symptomatic expressions of durable underlying sexual disposition and character’ as opposed to singular, deviant acts (Voss 2005, p. 56). Before scientists attempted to distinguish between what they perceived to be ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviours and ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ desires, Foucault argues that sodomy was considered to be ‘a category of forbidden acts’ and that their transgressor ‘was nothing more than the juridical subject of them’ (1978, p. 43).２ As a direct result of the increasing popularity of scientific literature at the turn of the twentieth century, the homosexual, Foucault contends,

became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology (p. 43).

Although Foucault’s suggestion of a ‘Great Paradigm Shift’, as Eve Sedgwick termed it (1990, p. xvi), has provided the springboard for many pioneering explorations into historic homosexual experience, recent developments in queer historiography have questioned the efficacy of taking the concept of sexuality, as it is currently understood, as a starting point for historic research into homosexual experience.３ Much like Faderman’s insistence that a ‘lesbian’ identity emerged only at the turn of the twentieth century, Sedgwick claims that the division of sexual acts and preferences under the rubrics ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ is not a ‘natural given’ but rather ‘a

STURGESS 195 INTERNATIONALE NEERLANDISTIEK historical process’ (p. xvi). However, it is Sedgwick’s application of queer theory’s assertion that sexual subjectivities are ‘fluid, unstable and perpe- tually becoming’ (Browne & Nash 2010, p. 2) that signals a fundamental ideological conflict between her approach to homosexual history writing and Faderman’s. Instead of looking to find identities constructed in the past in ways that can be identified as ‘lesbian’ in terms of the present, queer historical practices attempt instead to explore the

open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically (Sedgwick 1994, p. 8).

The queer impulse to view ‘all assertions about reality as socially constructed’, therefore, offers a method of narrativising homosexual desire that is open to the possibility that historical same-sex experiences may have been constructed in ways that are incongruent with present-day thinking about what it means to be a lesbian.４ Building on both Sedgwickian and Foucauldian approaches to histori- cising sexuality, Laura Doan’s most recent contribution to the field of queer historiography Disturbing practices (2013), provides a framework that fundamentally questions the ‘privileging of the binary relation between nor- mativity and deviance’ in order to problematize the suggestion that sexual preference was ‘a key marker of identity’ for women after the turn of the twentieth century (p. 91). Drawing on her previous research on the subject of British lesbian subcultures (2001), Doan employs an approach she terms ‘queer critical history’ in order to demonstrate that even until the late 1920s many British women had ‘little sense of sexual selfhood or subjectivity’ and ‘did not think to attach to themselves sexual labels or names’ (p. 144). Doan’s deployment of sexual categories in order to ‘pose questions rather than provide answers about sexual identities we already know’ (p. 90) presents a particularly useful starting point for the study of historic Dutch female same-sex desire. Following a brief discussion of homosexuality as a sexological construction, this article will problematize the notion that Dutch women perceived their sexual preferences as defining features of their social identities after the emergence of the term ‘homosexual’. Finally by examining a selection of historical narratives, this article will attempt to explore the interface between societal and scientific readings of female same-sex behaviour in Dutch contexts during the interwar era and exam-

196 VOL. 53, NO. 3, 2015 ‘ANDERS DAN DE ANDEREN’ ine what the intricacy of this interface might reveal about the complexity of historic constructions of female same-sex desire.

３ Sexology, sapphism, and self-reflexive labelling

The body of theoretical knowledge that promulgated an understanding of the homosexual as ‘a species’, as Foucault has suggested (1978, p. 45), stems from a practice that was defined by Iwan Bloch at the beginning of the twentieth century as Sexualwissenschaft (‘sexology’). Although the elabo- rate matrices featured in the works of prominent sexual theorists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis described an extensive range of erotic practices, one of the most enduring theories to emerge from these initial endeavours into the origins of human sexuality described a phenomenon known as ‘sexual inversion’.５ Influenced primarily by the work of literary scholar and classicist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the theory of sexual inversion cemented beliefs about the intrinsic relationship between gendered behaviours and sexual preference and suggested that homosexual desire was a congenital condition that resulted from the presence of a female ‘soul’ in a male body, or, conversely, a male ‘soul’ in a female body. Remaining a minor focus in the majority of sexological studies on homosexual desire, female sexual inversion was most often described as a set of experiences that were simply symmetrical to those of the male. In publications where more extensive research had been conducted on female ‘inverts’, however, sexologists claimed that these women could be identified by their childhood aversions to ‘traditional female activities’, the late development of their secondary sex characteristics, a virulent aversion to the male sex and, in later life, by a fondness for ‘masculine pursuits’ such as drinking, smoking, and horseback riding (Patterson 2005, p. 31). Remaining strictly within the boundaries of gendered complementarity, it was also generally agreed that the masculine female invert was only attracted to the feminine woman. One of the pioneering sexologists of the twentieth century, Magnus Hirschfeld, described the female invert as follows:

Whenever we visit a larger organisation of female homosexuals [...] we find a division of women who show something exquisitely virile in their clothing, hairdo, carriage, and movement, in their way of talking, drinking, and smoking. Many of them also have a deep, rough voice, a powerful, manly facial expression, narrow hips, and a bone structure that in general reminds you of the

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‘stronger’ sex. Among themselves, they frequently call each other by the masculine form of their name (Hirschfeld 2013, Chapter 14).

As a self-confessed ‘invert’, Hirschfeld focused his research efforts predo- minantly on the subject of same-sex desire, founding the world’sfirst organisation to campaign against the criminalisation of homosexual acts in 1898 (Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres Komitee, ‘Scientific Humanitarian Committee’) and establishing a scientific journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (‘Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries’), which was dedi- cated to the subject of ‘non-normative’ sexual behaviours.６ Hirschfeld’s activism, alongside his founding of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (In- stitute of Sex Research) in 1919 propelled the topic of non-normative sexual behaviours directly onto the German social and cultural stage. In conjunc- tion with the country’s long established history of research on the subject of human sexual behaviour, Hirschfeld’s institute meant that Berlin soon became recognized as the centre for sexual science. This unprecedented level of discussion around the topic of sexual behaviour after the turn of the twentieth century, alongside the permissive hedonism of German society after the end of the First World War, meant that sexological discourses were able to permeate the popular imagination in Germany far sooner than they were able to gain traction in neighbouring Holland. Dur- ing the interwar era, the German capital saw great changes occur across its urban landscape and, by the mid-1920s, hundreds of new bars and social clubs and around a dozen newspapers and magazines had been established to cater to the social and political needs of homosexuals (Schader 2004, p. 27). Even a cursory glance at the print press circuit of the time suggests that women in Berlin were actively engaging with the discourses of sexual science within their various lesbian communities. The following excerpt from the article ‘The Homosexual Woman’, which appeared in the magazine Die Freundin (The Girlfriend) in March 1927, for example, highlights an increasing knowledge of the subject of sexual inversion by the late 1920s, a reality, it could be argued, that encouraged women to identify their desires as key elements of their social identities:

There are two types of homosexual women. The virile − i.e. masculine − and the feminine − i.e. female − woman. The virile woman is distinguished above all by her independence and through her poise. [...] The feminine woman is quite the opposite of the aforementioned [virile woman]. Truly feminine. She lacks a certain independence. She is, through and through, a woman of delicate char-

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acter and needy nature [...] however, just as the virile woman, she is also unsuitable for marriage.７

The writer of the article not only appears to engage critically with the scientific construction of sexual inversion but, furthermore, she attempts to educate her readers about the lived realities of female homosexual experiences that were often overlooked in reductive sexological studies. While it was largely claimed by sexual scientists that the ‘feminine presenting homosexual woman’ was an example of ‘pseudo-inversion’, a temporal and situational form of homosexuality that was almost always considered a perversity８, the editors of Die Freundin insist firmly that feminine women were also ‘true’ homosexuals, a suggestion that in itself broadens the vistas of how historians could interpret the ways in which female homosexual desire may have been experienced and lived in the past. The shift between understanding homosexual desire as a singular act of deviance and the perception of homosexuality as an ‘essential part of an individual’s social identity’ that took place in Germany during the early twentieth century, however, does not appear to be reflected in Dutch media or cultural discourses. Examining the development of female homosexuality as a ‘liveable’ experience in the Netherlands suggests, much like Doan’s findings of British contexts, that Foucault’s ‘Great Paradigm Shift’ does not appear to echo the experiences of Dutch women who desired women. While German women were actively engaging with the process of self-reflexively labelling themselves, and their desires, as ‘homosexual’, Dutch women either refrained from the process of labelling altogether or classified their behaviour simply in terms of its ‘normality’ or ‘abnormality’, or as being ‘different to the others’. By approaching Dutch narratives of female same-sex desire from a vantage point that doesn’t presume that women understood their sexual preferences as a way of defining themselves it becomes possible to demonstrate that the conceptual shift in thinking about homosexual desire as an ‘identity’ did not take place in the Netherlands until much later than in Germany.

４ Anders dan anderen: Narratives of ‘non-normals’

Looking more closely at narratives of female homosexual desire that appear in the Netherlands after the fin de siècle, it soon becomes apparent that very little was written by women before the 1930s. However, although the discussion of modern sexual behaviours had been structured primarily

STURGESS 199 INTERNATIONALE NEERLANDISTIEK by the strictures of sexual science, after the introduction of Article 248bis in the Netherlands in 1911, a law which restricted homosexual acts for both men and women, a new wave of writings with emancipatory aims can be seen to emerge on the subject of same-sex love.９ This time, however, the writings come largely from self-confessed ‘non-normals’. One of the most widely disseminated documents to appear at this time was Joannes Fran- çois’ anonymously written Open brief aan hen die anders zijn dan de anderen. Door een hunner, which was published in 1915. While François’ letter provides a number of interesting insights into the interactions between literary, scientific, and social thinking on sexual behaviour, for the pur- poses of this article, the significance of his writing lies in the fact that it presents one of the first key insights into the way in which female homosexual desire was experienced, lived, and ‘received’ in Dutch society at this time. In keeping with many of the sexological studies of his era, François dedicates the core component of his writing to the experiences of the man-who-desired-men and, like many of his contemporaries, he argues that ‘de zoo-aangelegde vrouw’ has the same characteristics as her male counterpart, ‘maar dan natuurlijk tegenovergesteld’ (p. 39). Interestingly, however, François writes extensively about the life of the female ‘spinster’, a woman whose existence he believes to be far more tragic than his own:

De ongetrouwde vrouw met temperament, die lijdt onder haar ongetrouwd- zijn, heeft het veel droever dan wij. [...] Wij kunnen ten minste, en met reden, altijd nog hopen eens iemand te ontmoeten, aan wien wij kunnen geven onze liefde en toewijding’ (François 1915, p. 27).

Despite François’ reluctance to broach the subject of female homosexual desire, he finally concedes that there are just as many ‘zoo-vrouwen’,ashe terms them, as there are men. He concludes, however, that the limits of traditionally male and female behaviours in Dutch society made romantic interactions between women ‘much less difficult’ for the ‘zoo-vrouw’ than for her fellow male counterparts:

Het leven der zoo-vrouw [is] in het algemeen minder moeilijk dan dat van ons. Ik grond deze meening op het feit, dat aan een intiemen omgang tusschen twee vrouwen veel minder aandacht wordt geschonken dan aan dien tusschen twee mannen. Twee vriendinnen kunnen samen wonen, elkaar in het openbaar liefkoozen, zonder dat iemand daar aanstoot aan neemt. Het conflict met de

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maatschappij, dat ons leven zoo heel sterk beinvloedt, bestaat dus voor onze vrouwelijke gevoelsgenoote zeker niet in gelijke mate (p. 40).

Although François’ description of the societal acceptance of homosociality between women appears to be somewhat inflated, many Dutch women would have had neither the funds nor resources to live without the support of a man, his suggestion nevertheless brings to mind the extensive range of female networks that existed in many European societies between the late- eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued, before sexologists established a taxonomical framework to distinguish between levels of acceptable and unacceptable same-sex behaviours between two members of the same sex, there existed a diverse range of societal structures that actively encouraged the development of exclusively female environments. François’ assertion that public life was much easier for the ‘zoo-aangelegde vrouw’ than her male counterpart, therefore, suggests that even in the twentieth century there existed configurations of female same-sex passion and desire that were not read in society as ‘non- normative’ and not interpreted in terms of a ‘homosexual’ identity. The continued homosocial structuring of women’s lives in the Netherlands, presented those who desired the same sex, therefore, with an outlet that clearly wasn’t available to men at this time, and one that remained outside of the pathologising perimeters of sexological theories of inversion. Although François’ letter offers a brief glimpse into the life of the ‘zoo- vrouwen’,itisn’t until two decades later that accounts written by the women themselves begin to emerge in print form. One of the most comprehensive of these is lawyer and activist Benno Stokvis’ collection of autobiographies: De Homosexueelen (1939). Published as part of the series Menschenleed, Stokvis includes nine female narratives among his collection of thirty-nine autobiographies. Although the title of the publication suggests that those involved in the project self-reflexively identified their desires as ‘homosexual’, the way in which women engaged with their ‘non- normative’ preferences in the collection suggests that, even by the late 1930s, sexological labels appear to have been more often designated rather than appropriated and that sexual preferences certainly did not always result in sexual identities. Of the nine female autobiographies in the collection, only one woman uses the term ‘homosexual’ in reference to what could arguably be seen as a homosexual ‘collective’. Describing the lack of understanding for same-sex desire in society, she asserts that it is ‘geen wonder, dat er zooveel werken der duisternis onder ons, homosexueelen, gevonden worden!’ (emphasis author’s own: Stokvis 1939, p. 146). In the

STURGESS 201 INTERNATIONALE NEERLANDISTIEK remaining eight autobiographies, however, the authors refer to their desires using similar euphemisms to those visible in François’ earlier letter. In autobiography XXVII, for example, the author attempts to describe the difficulty of navigating her feelings of otherness, and makes recourse to François’ notion of ‘being different to the others’:

Hoe ver ik ook terug ga in mijn herinnering, altijd zie ik mezelf als een recalci- trant en schuw wezen, ‘anders dan de anderen’, nu eens trots op dit ‘anders- zijn’ dan weer dodelijk bevreesd ervoor (p. 146).

Although the feeling of otherness appears rarely to be articulated by the women in Stokvis’ collection in terms of a homosexual identity, their narratives are nevertheless evocative of the sexological paradigm of inversion. In each of the descriptions it is possible to see explicit references to author’smasculine‘aanleg’ or ‘aard’, and there are several attempts to trace back the origins of their desires to their youth, in order to suggest the congenital nature of their sexual and gendered preferences:

Wanneer ik tracht mij te herinneren wanneer de eerste verschijnselen van mijn anders-zijn zich openbaarden, moet ik teruggaan tot den tijd dat ik als kind de lagere school bezocht. [...] Met de jongens was ik betere vrienden; vaak mocht ik meedoen met hun wilde spelletjes omdat ik ‘zoo sterk in m’n armen was’ en evengoed vechten en worstelen kon als zij (p. 156).

In light of an increased awareness of female same-sex desire in terms of sexual inversion in Dutch society by the late 1930s, it is possible that the gender transgressions visible in the female narratives could be linked to the deep sense of loneliness and lengthy descriptions of the social difficulties that come hand-in-hand with being ‘anders dan de anderen’.１０ Unlike François’ contention twenty years earlier that social life was ‘easier’ for ‘zoo-vrouwen’ than their male counterparts, then, it appears that the growing popularity of sexual science had made certain same-sex configurations unacceptable for women within Dutch society. Although some women appear to have been influenced by sexological models and demonstrate an awareness of sexological structures by the late 1930s, the continued use of euphemism in their narratives suggests that they did not necessarily define their desires consciously in the terms of sexual science. The agenda of the author, Benno Stokvis, is also worthy of noting briefly at this junc- ture and goes some way to explaining the incongruence between the title of the publication and the ways in which the women described their sexual

202 VOL. 53, NO. 3, 2015 ‘ANDERS DAN DE ANDEREN’ feelings. Funded by the Dutch group Nederlandsch Wetenschappelijk Hu- manitair Komitee, an organisation that collaborated closely with Magnus Hirschfeld’s Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres Komitee, De Homosexueelen was strongly influenced both the theory of inversion and the political aims of the organisation to use the ‘congenital’ nature of gendered inverts as a way of lobbying for the decriminalisation of homosexual acts. The women featured in Stokvis’ collection, therefore, cannot be classed as representative of a random sample but are instead individuals who had connections with homosexual organisations and a prior awareness of sexological discourses. Examining both François’ letter and Stokvis’ autobiographies from a perspective that questions the existence of sexual preference as a marker of social identity for women suggests, therefore, that using sexological paradigms to describe the experiences of women-who-desired-women before 1940 overlooks the possible existence of alternative frameworks of same-sex desire; desire that was not experienced as an identitarian process and desires that were not tied to existing gendered structures. The poten- tial multifacetedness of historic female experience of same-sex desire in the Netherlands is also reflected in the imaginings of authors who depicted women-who-desired-women in fictional form. Not only does looking at literary narratives suggest that it is possible to interpret the scientific shift discussed in this article as a more widespread cultural phenomenon, but it also demonstrates that love between women also enjoyed many forms in Dutch literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. Forms that not only drew on sexological discourses but also, at times, presented sharp social critiques of dominant structures.

５ Fictive formations: Internaat (１９３０)

Throughout this article, there has been much discussion of the silences and omissions that characterize lesbian history. However the number of literary depictions of female same-sex love that appeared in Dutch contexts in the period 1880-1940 is surprisingly high. As Myriam Everard has discussed in her article ‘Galerij de vrouwenliefde’ (1983), there existed over 45 literary works that explored themes of lesbian desire at this time, of which 36 were written in Dutch. Much like elsewhere in central Europe, the novels generally covered themes of schoolgirl romances or congenital inversion, but novels also appeared on the subjects of ‘pseudo-homosexuality’, decadence and prostitution, and, less frequently, same-sex desire and the women’s movement (Everard, 1983). One of the most popular and well-

STURGESS 203 INTERNATIONALE NEERLANDISTIEK received of these novels was Eva Raedt-de Canter’s literary debut in the Netherlands: Internaat, which was published in 1930. As the title of the novel suggests, the narrative is set in a Dutch boarding school and is told through the eyes of a young female student. Although the text does not appear to have withstood the test of time, Internaat was an immediate success on the Dutch literary landscape. After the publication of the novel, Raedt-de Canter was compared with the author Carry van Bruggen in the newspaper Het Volk and her narrative style was praised for being as ‘frisch als de voorjaarswind’ after she incorporated an innovative use of the second person narrative, fundamentally incorporating the reader into the diegesis. The passionate feelings of the protagonist for other female char- acters in the novel remain mostly shrouded in symbolism, presented either through suggestive tropes of same-sex desire such as wild gardens and violets or through the depiction of tearful, longing departures. However, what makes Internaat interesting as a popular work of fiction is that, unlike Joannes François’ letter and Benno Stokvis’ collection of autobiographies, which were aimed at ‘Doctors, [...] Judges, [and] Police Officers’, Raedt-de Canter was able to successfully communicate the erotic elements of female homosocial environments to a mass audience. Although many of the passionate feelings of the young protagonist would have been most likely understood by the public as ‘natural and even admirable’ behavioural traits, Raedt-de Canter also explores the potentially erotic nature of homosocial environs in a more explicit episode in the novel (Stokvis 1939, p. 14; Faderman 1991, p. 2). In a scene in the protagonist’s dormitory, an unknown student appears behind the protagonist in the darkness, turns her around, and kisses her:

De kus! Hoe zondig en heerlijk tegelijk. [...] Twee armen, zachte, warm- bemouwde armen had ze om je hals geslagen en twee koele, vochtige lippen hadden even, rustig en ferm, jouw mond gekust (Raedt-de Canter 1931, p. 74).

The reader, made complicit in this erotic act through the use of the second person narrative, is told that the kiss is repeated on several occasions and that each morning when the protagonist awakes she craves the kiss and the pressure of the unknown girl’s strong body. Before moving on to examine the cultural responses to Raedt-de Can- ter’s representation of same-sex desire, an acknowledgment of some of the methodological difficulties that remain implicit in the study of historic female same-sex desires and experiences must be made. Given the scant amount of primary source material there is available on the subject, the

204 VOL. 53, NO. 3, 2015 ‘ANDERS DAN DE ANDEREN’ following survey of literary reviews can only offer a vignette of the cultural reception of historic literary representations of lesbian desire. The reviews that have been chosen for this article, therefore, highlight the difficulty in obtaining such material and do not intend to comment on the overarching divergences between the native and colonial reception of the subject of female same-sex desire, although this topic would certainly be worthy of further investigation.１１ Looking at the reviews that are available of Raedt-de Canter’s novel, then, very little appears to have been made of the underlying and more explicit erotic elements of the text during its reception. Instead, many of the reviews appear to examine the text primarily as a criticism of the Catholic school system or as a psychological narrative of childhood development. In the newspaper Het Volk, for example, Raedt-de Canter is praised by a reviewer for her depiction of ‘de bekrompen bigot- terie van de wereldvreemde nonnen’, while the Algemeen Handelsblad claimed that the novel was not only a ‘verhaal van psychisch ontwaken en bitter strijden’ but also ‘een scherp, een meedoogenloos hekelen gewor- den van de domme, grove, liefdeloosheid der benepen paedagogen’. In the Dutch colonies the Soerabaijasch handelsblad described the book as ‘het verhaal van een zielestrijd, van een harde ervaring’ and concluded that the strength of the novel’s ‘menselijker waarde’ excused the lack of Raedt-de Canter’s ‘kunst-pretentie’. The subject of same-sex desire in the novel is never mentioned explicitly in any of the reviews and, although Het Volk refers to the ‘moeilijke aanleg’ of the protagonist, the reviewer asserts that she is ‘rein-kinderlijk. Niets is in haar tot bewustheid gerijpt, het seksueel heeft zich in haar nog volstrekt niet geschieden’. Although the reviewer describes the protagonist as ‘jongensachtig wild met de jongens’ and as a girl who engages ‘onbevangen [...] met het vuistgevecht aan met de knaap, die al om haar werft en die zij volstrekt niet begrijpt’, these gendered transgressions do not appear to have raised concerns among reviewers about the possibility that the protagonist could be interpreted as a congenital invert. Despite the protagonist’s aversion to the advances of her male friends, her anger at being made to feel ‘inferior’ to the male sex, and her passionate encounters with older female students, there is no evidence of this in the reviews. In fact, any semblance of sexual desire in Raedt-de Canter’s portrayal of the difficult and lonely tomboy appear to have been dismissed entirely by reviewers simply as the result of a conflict between the authorial and narrative voice, as can be seen in a review from De Tijd on 28 May 1931:

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[...] ik noteerde slechts een bladzijde, waarvan ik vond, dat het niet zoo door een kind kon worden ervaren. Dat is waar zij spreekt van de ‘weeke, zware borsten’ van Fenna. Hier is alleen de schrijfster aan het woord.

Raedt-de Canter’s depictions of the love for which there was no name, and the virtual silence of this topic in the novel’s reception suggest, then, that certain same-sex erotic configurations still appear to have been acceptable within Dutch literature at this time. Or, if not, the positive reception of the novel indicates that these desires continued to remain unrecognized as such as François’ earlier letter suggests.

６ Fictive formations: Terug naar het eiland (１９３７)

Seven years after the publication of Raedt-de Canter’s novel, approaches to the subject of female same-sex desire in literature and the cultural reception of the matter within the print press appear to have shifted dramati- cally. Unlike Internaat’s subtle hints of Sapphic encounters, Josine Reul- ing’s fourth novel Terug naar het eiland (1937) offers a powerful social criticism of the sexological and psychoanalytical discourses of its time. A text about the life of a rich Swedish girl who spends her long summers in Paris, the models of female homosexual desire depicted in Reuling’s text indicate the author’s search for alternative ways to articulate female relationships that desist the rigid parameters of contemporary sexological discourses of inversion. In terms of its descriptions of same-sex desire, Terug naar het eiland is both more and less explicit than Raedt-de Canter’s Inter- naat. Although Reuling’s protagonist calmly claims at the beginning of the text that she is unsuitable for marriage because she cannot love men, there are almost no scenes of an erotic nature and no mention of the term ‘homosexual’. In fact, the protagonist openly refuses to identify her desires in the terms of sexual science. During her search for a love interest, the reader is told that the protagonist avoids the ‘special bars’ frequented by sexual inverts because she finds them distasteful and unfathomable. In stark contrast to these inverts, she asserts that she is proud of her feminin- ity, claiming that: ‘zij was blij dat zij een vrouw was, zij wilde niets anders zijn dan vrouw’ (Reuling 1937, p. 140). The protagonist’s relationships with women as a feminine presenting woman, therefore, resists the boundaries of inversion and breaks away from the sexological models of homosexual behaviour that confined lesbian desire to a masculine-feminine dichoto- my. In a further attempt to subvert dominant social discourses that viewed

206 VOL. 53, NO. 3, 2015 ‘ANDERS DAN DE ANDEREN’ homosexuality as ‘abnormal’, the protagonist claims that her behaviour is entirely normal, and that it is women who desire men who are not:

[zij] verklaarde, dat zij zichzelf normaal vond en alle anderen, die niet waren zoals zij: abnormaal. Voor haar was elke vrouw, die ernaar verlangde, een man te omhelzen, die in staat was haar liefde, haar hartstocht te geven aan een man, een wonder, een haar volkomen onbegrijpelijk wezen, dat zij met verbazing en heimelijke afkeer bekeek (p. 138).

From the reviews that are available of Reuling’snovel,itispossibleto suggest that Terug naar het eiland never achieved the literary success of Raedt-de Canter’s earlier publication. Although the narrative was deemed exciting by many, Reuling’s inclusion of the theme of same-sex desire was undeniably problematic. Unlike in the discussions of Raedt-de Canter’s Internaat, in which the subject of sexual desire is never explicitly mentioned, the subject of sexuality takes precedence in the reviews of Reuling’s work. The Dordrechste Courant, for example, described the protagonist as a girl ‘dat wat de erotiek in haar leven betreft, een uitzondering maakt op het normale’. On the subject of Reuling’s ‘flirten met Freud’, the Sumatra Post claimed that ‘het is allemaal inderdaad verschrikkelijk erg, zoo erg, dat het volkomen onaanvaardbaar wordt’ concluding the review with the warning: ‘wie zijn goede guldens aan dit drukwerk uitgeeft, is ronduit bekocht’. Interestingly, an earlier review appearing in the Sumatra Post directly after the novel’s release claimed that although the topic of the novel was ‘hachelijk’ it was nevertheless a book ‘dat den lezer aan het peinzen brengt en met ontroering weglegt’. This dramatic change in perspective between the first and second review might be explained partially by a growing tendency towards more conservative writing and politics during in the final years of the Sumatra Post’s print run, but could also suggest a growing intolerance within wider society for the subject of Sapphic desire. Although the reader of today would be surprised by the fervour of these reviews, it appears that references to sexological theory were enough to class the text too explicit for the common reader at this time. The perceived ‘explicitness’ of Reuling’s writing was also echoed in the reviews of her work from her homeland, as literary critic Top Naeff’s discussion of the novel’s central theme suggests:

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Onderwerpen, waaraan een groot schrijver zich niet of nauwelijks waagt, omdat hij visionnaire de consequenties van doorschouwt, worden door de kleineren [...] met graagte ter pen genomen [...] Een van deze onderwerpen is de homosexualiteit.

Naeff’s explicit naming of the term ‘homosexualiteit’ in her review, and later the expression ‘Lesbische liefde’, signals a fundamental shift in the way in which female homosexuality was being discussed in Dutch social and cultural spheres at this time. By the late 1930s, therefore, it is clear that not only the masculine invert had become recognisable as a ‘non-normal’ in literary narratives but the feminine woman could now also be recognized as a sexual ‘deviant’ in Dutch fiction. What had once been an encouraged aspect of the homosocial ordering of feminine women’s lives in the Netherlands had, in light of sexological advances, become little more a pornographic perversity.

７ Conclusion

By drawing on recent developments of in the field of queer history, it becomes possible to put a question mark above the assumption that sexuality existed as a marker of social identity in the Netherlands after the turn of the twentieth century (Doan 2013, p. 144). By problematizing the basic assumption that sexual preference has always been a marker of social identity, historic research into the nature of homosexual experience is opened up to the possibility that women were organising their desires in ways not historically recognizable as ‘lesbian’. The sexological invert appears to have been a rare figure on the Dutch cityscape at the turn of the twentieth century and, as François’ letter and Raedt-de Canter’s Internaat suggest, there may have existed multiple configurations of female desire in Dutch society that had very little to do with gender or sexuality as it is currently understood. Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland also challenges the assumption that to be visible during the interwar era female same-sex desire had to be constructed in terms of gendered inversion. Furthermore, the tensions between Reuling’s work and the sexological discourses of the era, suggest that a shift was taking place in the ways in which women were themselves engaging with the subject of sexuality and sexual desire. Love between women in the Netherlands during the early twentieth century certainly was constructed in ways that were ‘different to the others’, how-

208 VOL. 53, NO. 3, 2015 ‘ANDERS DAN DE ANDEREN’ ever, it will take a continued queering of historical approaches to homosexual experience to discover in which ways and to what degree.

Notes

1. Further to Judith Schuyf’s study Een stilzwijgende samenzwering, Anja van Kooten Niekerk and Sacha Wijmer’s Verkeerde vriendschap (1985) offers another comprehensive study of Dutch lesbian experience in the early twentieth century. Since the publication of Schuyf’s study in 1994, extended historical research into the subject of female same-sex desire has not been completed. 2. Throughout the early nineteenth century sodomy was used as an extremely broad referent to describe a diverse range of vices ‘against nature’–and against the reproduc- tive norm – and was not only reserved for the description of male same-sex intercourse. 3. This literature review has been based on a forthcoming article ‘Subtle Shifts, Sapphic Silences: Queer Approaches to Female Same-Sex Desire in the Netherlands (1914-1940)’, which will appear later this year in the Journal of Dutch Literature. 4. For further examples of historic female homosexualities that resist the parameters of sexual inversion, see, for example: Julian Carter, ‘On Mother-Love: History, Queer The- ory, and Nonlesbian Identity’ (2005). 5. As this subject has been covered more extensively elsewhere, this article will offer only a brief outline of the theories of inversion. For a more comprehensive discussion of theories of inversion see: Heike Bauer (2009; 2015); Laura Doan and Lucy Bland (1998). For further information on the implementation of sexology in Dutch contexts see Hekma (1987). 6. For further information on Hirschfeld and the Insitut für Sexualwissenschaft see: Elena Mancini (2010); Charlotte Wolff (1987). 7. Unless noted otherwise, all translations are the author’s own. Original citation: ‘Es gibt zwei Arten von homosexuellen Frauen. Die virile – d.i. männliche – und die feminine – d.i. weibliche – Frau. Die Virile zeichnet sich vor allen Dingen durch ihre Selbständig- keit, durch ihr sicheres Auftreten aus. [...] Die feminine Frau ist ganz das Gegenteil der eben geschilderten. Echt weiblich. Ihr fehlt die gewisse Selbständigkeit. Sie ist durch und durch Frau, von zartem Wesen und anschmiegendem Charakter [...] Aber ebenso wie die virile Frau, taugt sie auch nicht zur Ehe.’ 8. For a more comprehensive outline of the distinctions between ‘perversity’ and ‘perver- sion’ see: Harry Oosterhuis (2012). 9. Although the law restricting homosexuality, article 248bis, was peculiar because of its targeting of both male and female homosexuals (in Germany only male homosexual acts were prohibited) it simultaneously signaled a break in the systematic silencing of same-sex desire. What had once been an ‘unmentionable vice’ was now explicitly out- lined in the Dutch penal code, situated amidst a number a of laws introduced to help prevent immoral behaviour: ‘De meerderjarige, die met een minderjarige van hetzelfde geslacht wiens minderjarigheid hij kent of redelijkerwijs moet vermoeden, ontucht pleegt, wordt gestraft met gevangenisstraf van ten hoogste vier jaar.’ For more on the distinctions between German and Dutch laws about homosexuality, see: Anna Tijsse- ling Schuldige seks (2009).

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10. For further information on the subject of historic female gendered transgressions, see: Geertje Mak, Mannelijke vrouwen (1997). 1 1. Although little has been written about the subject of lesbian desire in the Dutch East Indies, a short overview of the subject can be found in Bonnie Zimmerman’s Lesbian histories and cultures: An encyclopedia (2000).

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Faderman, Lillian, Surpassing the love of men: Romantic friendship and love between women from the renaissance to the present. London, 1981. Foucault, Michel, The history of sexuality. Vol. 1: An introduction. Robert Hurley (Trans). New York, 1978. Hekma, Gert, Homoseksualiteit, een medische reputatie. De uitdoktering van de homoseksueel in negentiende-eeuws Nederland. Amsterdam, 1987. Hekma, Gert, ‘Amsterdam’ in Queer sites: Gay urban histories since 1600. David Higgs (Red.). London, 1999. Hirschfeld, Magnus, The homosexuality of men and women. Michael A. Lombardi Nash (Trans.). Kindle Edition: Prometheus Books, 2000. Kooten Niekerk, Anja van & Sacha Wijmer, Verkeerde vriendschap: Lesbisch leven in de jaren 1920- 1960. Amsterdam, 1985. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, Epistemology of the closet. London, 1990. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, Tendencies. London, 1994. Lieshout, M. van, ‘De homosexueelen 1939: Mijnheer is zeker óók zoo?’ Seks 11, 1981, 12-16. Mak, Geertje, Mannelijke vrouwen: Over grenzen van seks in de negentiende eeuw. Amsterdam, 1997. Mancini, Elena, Magnus Hirschfeld and the quest for sexual freedom: A history of the first interna- tional sexual freedom movement. USA, 2010. Oever, Roel van den, Mama’s boy: Momism and homophobia in postwar American culture. USA, 2012. Oosterhuis, Harry, ‘Sexual Modernity in the Works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll’. Medical History 56, (2) 2012, 133-155. Patterson, Martha H., Beyond the Gibson girl: Reimagining the American new woman, 1895-1915. Illinois, USA, 2005. Schader, Heike, Virile, Vamps und wilde Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren und Erotik in den Zeitschrif- ten homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahre. Königstein/Taunus, 2004. Schuyf, Judith, Een stilzwijgende samenzwering: lesbische vrouwen in Nederland 1920-1970. Utrecht, 1994. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America’. Signs 1, (1) 1975, 1-29. Tijsseling, A., Schuldige seks: Homoseksuele zedendelicten rondom de Duitse bezettingstijd, (unpub- lished doctoral thesis: University of Utrecht, 2009). Vicinus, Martha, Intimate friends: Women who loved women 1778-1928. Chicago, USA, 2004. Voss, Barbara L., ‘Sexual Subjects: Identity and Taxonomy in Archaeological Research’. The archaeology of plural and changing identities: Beyond identification. New York, 2005, 55-77. Wolff, Charlotte, Magnus Hirschfeld: A portrait of a pioneer in sexology. London, 1987. Zimmerman, Bonnie (Red.), Lesbian histories and cultures: An encyclopedia. New York, 2000, 397- 398.

About the author

Cyd Sturgess is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis is a comparative analysis of cultural constructions of female homosexuality in Germany and the Netherlands between 1918-1940. She is currently the Women in German Studies PG representative. [email protected]

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