Irish Lesbian Writing Across Time

For centuries, there existed a division between Irish, Anglo-Irish and Irish-born migrant authors and, given Irish history, such demarcation is unavoidable. Nonetheless, one of my arguments within this book is that, despite the geographical location, it is still possible to identify as Irish and have a strong emotional connection with the country of origin. Consequently, I will offer analyses of diasporic writers, whilst highlighting that these authors’ works are still clearly affected by their country of origin, with its culture, traditions and people. The book also investigates various genres, ranging from novels, through short stories to plays, originating from the Republic and Northern Ireland, and provides an account of major female writers in and of the whole island of Ireland, in whose works there can be found detectable traces suggesting the presence of lesbian desire. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 5, writing from diasporic locations allowed Irish women authors to write about lesbian desire in an open manner, as with the influences of globalism, transnationalism and transculturalism, the development of lesbian fiction written from diaspora is quite distinct from works emerging from Ireland alone.

Cass developed her model relying largely on the existing framework of interpersonal congruency theory of Secord and Backman, and Secord, Backman and Eachus, which, as she states, was based on the interactions of homosexual individuals with their environment (Cass, ‘A Theoretical Model’ 221). In order to be brought into a closer relation with the final stage of development, synthesis, the subject (or in my case, the text), would have to achieve congruency with an imagined perception of self and the social perception of self by others. In other words, the fiction needs to achieve an affirming view of itself in the eyes of its authors, as well as in the eyes of the readers. The examples of Irish women’s fiction that I chose to analyse as featuring lesbian desire, therefore, was to be congruent with three factors: the existing knowledge on women’s same-sex intimacy at each period of time, the state of the juridical law in terms of lesbian politics and censorship and an anticipated perception of each text by the wider public.

Cass emphasises that:

the development of private and public homosexual identities is recounted and portrayed as two separate but related processes. It is possible for [the subject] to hold a private identity of being homosexual while maintaining a public identity of being heterosexual. With increasing identity development comes a growing consistency between the two identities, giving rise in the final stage to an overall and integrated homosexual identity. (‘A Theoretical Model’ 220)

My proposed reformulation of Cass’s stages is supported by close textual and historical analyses of the texts, where I do not concentrate solely on the development of Irish lesbian narrative per se, but also verify how the presence of lesbian desire is determined by historical antecedents and the state of (lesbian) politics in a given time period. I pay particular attention to symbolism, textual techniques and experimentation, in order to observe some characteristic patterns indicative of each stage. I also propose a new framework, within which each text can be contextualised theoretically – this is often supported by a reconceptualisation of the already-existing studies according to which I develop my original terminology.

A more advanced stage of hesitation, at the turn of the twentieth century, begins to be more suggestive of implicit references to lesbian desire than in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The alternative to heterosexual submissiveness can be observed in women challenging gender hierarchy, a feature which prevails in the New Woman descriptions of cross-dressing, cross-gendering and transgendering characters. I propose that those actions of gender performativity, or of performing female masculinity, are also early representations of lesbian desire. Although the characters analysed in Chapter 1 are portrayed as heterosexual throughout the course of their respective texts, there certainly are perceptible allusions to homoerotic desire, as Sarah Grand’s Boy and Katherine Thurston’s Max are not only women who impersonate men, but, whilst in character, initiate intense same-sex friendships, making them same-sex desiring women, although not lesbians in the exact meaning of the word as we understand it today. Chapter 1 also draws attention to either absence or inadequacy of men, a feature which, in fact, prevails in lesbian fiction to this day. This facilitates two further patterns of the first stage of development, the emergence of the lesbian phallus, that results from the absence of the male phallus in George Egerton’s ‘The Spell of the White Elf’, and the transformation of lesbian desire into situational heterosexuality in Sarah Grand’s A Domestic Experiment and Rosa Mulholland’s The Tragedy of Chris, where both heroines reluctantly accept male advances after failures in initiating same-sex relations with their chosen objects of desire; failures that were partially, but not predominantly, caused by the expectations of Irish heteronormative society.