Lesbian Modernism?

Fashioning Sapphism: the Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. xxiii + 284 Pp. $51.50 Cloth, $20.50 Paper

Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties. Gay Wachman. New Brunswick, N.j.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Xii + 236 Pp. $59.00 Cloth, $24.00 Paper

Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity. Lisa Walker. New York: New York University Press, 2001. xvii + 279 Pp. $55.00 Cloth, $19.00 Paper

Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference. Jean Walton. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 244 pp. $54.95 Cloth, $18.95 Paper

The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson. Joanne Winning. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Ix + 230 Pp. $57.95 Cloth, $22.95 Paper

It is now a truism in sexuality studies that contemporary versions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or queer identity for women can trace their variously hyphenated being back to a moment in the early twentieth century when the modern lesbian first became visible. This visibility was, of course, simultaneously discursive (in the writings of sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Richard Krafft-Ebing) and biographical (in the publicity given to the iconographic figures of the dandy, in the shape of Oscar Wilde, and the "mannish lesbian," in the shape of Radclyffe Hall). In the context of the arrival of modernity, gay lives and texts appear to have come together in a dialectical and mutually constituting relationship that set the terms for most of the lesbian and gay history, and for almost all of the lesbian and gay literary and cultural criticism, that followed. The emergence of dissident sexualities has come to be seen as an index of modernization, as if lesbian, gay, and otherwise queer sex during these years were, in and of itself, both a radical break with the past and a harbinger of the future.

The five books under review all engage the received wisdom about how early-twentieth-century modern and postmodern lesbian identities were consolidated as well as the relationship between lesbianism and modernity itself. As Gay Wachman's book perhaps unwittingly makes clear, critical investment in finding ourselves in the past, and in establishing ourselves as politically and socially radical—"modern"—from the outset, is intense. Wachman castigates characters in novels (our precursors?) for their views, as if they reveal something uncomfortable about the birth of our selves: "I abhor Clarissa [Dalloway's] frivolity, snobbery, and cowardice, her suppression of her lesbian sexuality, and her appropriation of Septimus's death" (131). Something is being defended against here. With less discomfort, Joanne Winning also identifies an affinity between modernity and lesbian experience: "Pilgrimage is a text with dual purpose: merging the project of rendering this modern fragmentation into language with the need to find a 'new,' autonomous language for lesbian desire and identity" (11). Lisa Walker considers the possibility that the occlusion of the femme lesbian both in early sexology and in some later lesbian communities—the fact that "lesbianism came to be defined in a way that marginalized femmes" (xvi)—is a defense, born of the same anxiety that drives Wachman to "abhor" Clarissa Dalloway, against the specter of lesbian conservatism (or antimodernity). The association of lesbianism and the modern, encapsulated in phrases such as lesbian modernism and Sapphic modernism, is treated with more caution by Laura Doan and Jean Walton. Doan sets out to trace "how the conditions of English modernity contributed to the early formation, not of a self-conscious political agenda or an artistic movement as such, but of a public lesbian cultural sensibility" (xviii), and Walton considers the unacknowledged racial subtext of one of modernity's most celebrated cultural forms, psychoanalysis. In both texts, the possibility that lesbianism is not in fact an index of modernity—or, if it is, that it reveals something less than modern at the heart of modernity, or even lesbianism, itself—is confronted head-on.

All five books...