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On Her Mouth You Kiss Your Own: Lesbian Conversations in Exile, 1924-1936

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On Her Mouth You Kiss Your Own: Lesbian Conversations in Exile, 1924-1936 University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Spring 1992 On her mouth you kiss your own: Lesbian conversations in exile, 1924-1936 Luita Deane Spangler University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation Spangler, Luita Deane, "On her mouth you kiss your own: Lesbian conversations in exile, 1924-1936" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations. 1691. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/1691 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International . A Beil & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9225266 On her mouth you kiss your own: Lesbian conversations in exile, 1924-1936 Spangler, Luita Deane, Ph.D. University of New Hampshire, 1992 UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 ON HER MOUTH YOU KISS YOUR OWN: LESBIAN CONVERSATIONS IN EXILE, 1924 - 1936 BY LUITA D. SPANGLER A. University of California at Santa Cruz, 1976 M. A. University of New Hampshire, 1984 DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English May, 1992 This dissertation has been examined and approved. f ? ' 'i *s/~ v( Dissertation director, Jean Kennard Professor of English Patrocinio Schweickart, Associate Professor of English —I" Sarah Sherman, Associate Professor of English \ 6 w . ip t,— ^ . L d k w f c . __________ Barbara White, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Women's Studies }ofessor of French and Womdri's(/Studies A p A x , '?9 Date DEDICATION To Jean Kennard and Susan Schibanoff for who they are and who they've been to me iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION................................................. iii ABSTRACT...................................................... V CHAPTER PAGE I. GLEANINGS FROM THE SHORES OF MYTILENE: LESBIAN TEXTS, LESBIAN READERS................... 1 II. AN OUTGROUP OF OUTSIDERS: SOLITA SOLANO, JANET FLANNER, NATALIE BARNEY DJUNA BARNES......................................22 III. SOLITA SOLANO'S THREE UNCERTAIN FEASTS..........44 IV. AN ADVENTURE IN ILLUMINATION: JANET FLANNER'S THE CUBICAL CITY................ 75 V. A DISCOURSE OF SELF-DELIGHT: NATALIE BARNEY'S THE ONE WHO IS LEGION.........119 VI. NORA REINVENTS THE WORD: DJUNA BARNE'S NIGHTWOOD.........................153 SOURCES CONSULTED......................................... 196 ABSTRACT ON HER MOUTH YOU KISS YOUR OWN: LESBIAN CONVERSATIONS IN EXILE, 1924 - 1936 by Luita D. Spangler University of New Hampshire, May, 1992 This dissertation examines the work of four American lesbian expatriate novelists living and writing in Paris in the years between the two World Wars. Altogether six novels are discussed: The Uncertain Feast (1924), The Happy Failure (1925), and This Wav Up (1927) by Solita Solano; The Cubical City (1925) by Janet Flanner; The One Who Is Legion (1930) by Natalie Clifford Barney; and Nicrhtwood (1936) by Djuna Barnes. Guided by recent conjectures on the significance of sexuality and gender development proposed by such feminist theorists as Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, this dissertation explores these six novels for evidence of shared imagery and communally evolving concepts regarding such issues as female autonomy, female friendship, lesbian identity, lesbian passion, and androgyny. All three of Solita Solano's novels sustain an overt critique of heterosexuality; The Uncertain Feast offers a v background example of primary affection between women that may be recognized as a highly encoded model for lesbian relationship. In The Cubical City. Janet Flanner foregrounds women-identified love against a portrait of marriage as a formula for female surrender and submission. Natalie Barney's The One Who Is Legion experiments with narrative form while proposing gynandry as the ideal human state. In Nicrhtwood. Djuna Barnes advances the concept of lesbianism as an entirely alternative ontological stance in a narrative analysis that seems to anticipate the recent theories of Irigaray and Wittig. This study acknowledges Nicrhtwood as a conscious disruption of patriarchal authority and challenges conventional interpretations of the novel as "tragic." Images that recur in the work of Flanner, Solano and Barney are collected and developed to their greatest potential within the densely metaphoric language and structure of Nicrhtwood. Barnes' s novel is recognized as the culmination of lesbian literary modernism that evolved during the first half of the twentieth century and is regardeed as a work that ultimately calls for the necessity of devising a language capable of expressing female, and in particular, lesbian, reality. CHAPTER I GLEANINGS FROM THE SHORES OF MYTILENE: LESBIAN TEXTS, LESBIAN READERS In A Room of One1s Own, an essay based on a series of two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and at the Odtaa at Girton in October, 1928, Virginia Woolf suddenly interrupts the line of her argument: . I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? (141-142) As Jane Marcus has pointed out in "Sapphistory: The Woolf and the Well," through this aside Woolf has involved her audience in an intricate "conspiracy," an "us against them" situation in which the implied "them," represented by Chartres Biron, the presiding magistrate in the British obscenity trial against Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, are the forces in society that seek to deny public recognition of lesbian representation in the arts. Here she equates all men with the reactionary forces of Chartres Biron, and "all women" as an audience who can hear the significance in her following disclosure, that, in the novel by her fictional author Mary Carmichael, "'Chloe liked Olivia' . Do not start. Do not blush." Her understated revelation posed against such an 1 anticipated violence of reaction is not only humorous, but also works on a number of levels to suggest first, by irony, the innocence of such a situation, second, paired with the association with Chartres Biron and masculine antipathy against lesbianism, that Chloe liking Olivia may indeed have a lesbian resonance, and thirdly, through her advice to her audience not to start or blush, that the situation of Chloe liking Olivia is normal, particularly among a separatist audience who can "admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen." As Marcus points out, by setting up an environment in which women-centered affection is a healthy norm, Woolf has created for herself, "at least symbolically," a lesbian audience. What is the necessity of a lesbian audience? Apparently Virginia Woolf thought a lesbian environment, even one constructed by the text itself, was necessary to explore the ramifications of patriarchal authority and the need for women to absent themselves from their proscribed roles within that same patriarchy, to obtain a room of their own, in order to achieve full creative and intellectual integrity. More recently, certain feminist critics such as Barbara Smith, Bonnie Zimmerman and Gillian Whitlock have written on the need to create a body of lesbian literary criticism, to acknowledge a reading audience whose assumptions, points of departure, interpretations and final achieved meanings from texts are very different from those of heterosexuals. Indeed, as in A Room of One's Own, the very accessibility of a lesbian audience may allow a writer certain freedoms that would not be otherwise obtainable. The absence of an openly lesbian interpretive voice has worked to diminish or distort the reception of lesbian texts: Susan Sniader Lanser has noted, for example,
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