The Lesbian Rule: Lillian Hellman and the Measures of Realism

The Lesbian Rule: Lillian Hellman and the Measures of Realism ANNE FLECHE Lesbian rule: a mason's rule made of lead, which could be bent to fit the curves of a moulding; hence fig., A principle of judgement that is pliant and accommodating. (Very common in qthc., but app. DOl always correctly understood.) OED Politics is deployed as the final measuring slick for assessing the present utility, and thus the final relevance, 9f theories of gay identity.I The invisible lesbian has posed difficulties for writers of queer history and criticism, in part just because she's a woman. We have seen, for example, how historian John Boswell accounted for the relative absence of women in his classic study Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Women, he explained, mostly didn't write the history he was talking about, so they were necessarily underrepresented in his book as well.2 Meanwhile, in literary criticism , texts in which the lesbian is ignored or ambiguously or negatively represented have called for drastic measures, requiring either a political approach, as Diana Fuss has suggested - a measuring stick of "utility" - or a kind of aesthetics of lesbianism which has seemed specious to the utility-minded. Recently, this apparent opposition between essentialism and constructionism in queer politics seems to be breaking down3, and this is a good thing for the lesbian, whose existence often has to be posited, becaUSe she's not always available in referential terms. The challenge in lesbian representation is also the challenge of feminist theory, namely, to discuss the woman as an effect of the very discourse that names her. to affirm a woman who is in some sense not there. Lesbian theory adds to feminism 's challenge the question: what difference does sexuality make in the structure of a gendered discourse? To examine this question, which supposes the lesbian as a kind of double negative that somehow. at the same time, is not a positive, a referential tenn, I will revisit Modern Drama, 39 (19<)6) t6 The Lesbian Rule 17 one of the more notoriously negative texts in the history of lesbian theater in the U.S., Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934). In this play about a girls' school, one of the children has only to whisper something hastily to her grandma, and - voila! - two female teachers are stripped of their social and professional lives, and one of them, after a tearful "confession" of her illicit "love," runs offstage and shoots herself. Hellman's play thus poses the historical problem of lesbian negativity. In its time the play was banned in some cities for its supposed lesbian content, while in more recent years it has been criticized for the lack of any - or at least for the lack of a language that doesn't concern "sickness," "dirtiness," "unnaturalness," or disease.4 In the first case. the play's negative value is a rejection of its supposed content; in the second, its negative charge comes from a supposed absence of content. Indeed, The Children's Hour seems to suffer from a chronic crisis of negative value, which no amount of moral or political outrage has quite explored. To do this would require giving the play's negativity some thought, and I would say also giving the play back some of its charge of unnaturalness, its historically relative potential to provoke. In order to write The Children's Hour, Hellman had after all to confront the rules of gender representation in a radical way. Hellman's construction of the play around the charge of lesbianism required her to investigate the very structuring principles of gender identity and, not coincidentally, of the "realistic" or referential theater of the Thirties. For, as some lesbian critics have pointed out, there are, in a way, no lesbians in this play, no lesbians for sure -but then, one can never be sure. The relation of sign to referent is tantalizing. a temptation, Artaud might say, but never, especially here, decisive. Contemporary lesbian critics of the play might well decry the fact that Hellman doesn't question whether one can be "guilty" oflesbianism, with all the negative valuation that implies. But on the other hand, Hellman does posit a much more complicated and contemporary problem, namely, how that guilty identity could be produced, presented, represented on the stage.' Indeed, one could say that what The Children's Hour dramatizes is in fact the problem of lesbianism in search of a referent: if there is a lesbian in this play, which one is she and how would we know? For, in a language marked by gender difference, the lesbian is already assumed by and into the rules of gender, in which the lesbian figures (only) as the negative of the hetero, the exclusion that marks inclusion, the unmarked side of the binary heterolhom06 In fact, one of the functions of the term "lesbian," as the "lesbian rule," quoted above, reminds us, has been to designate both a measurement and a judgement, in a correlation of structural and moral language that predates not only our present debates about gender and subjectivity, but also Hellman, her play, and the historical court case on which it was based. Hellman's technical problem, then, is roughly this: how to produce, in the more or less "realistic" style of drama favored in the Thirties, alesbianism whose value is measured in and through absence and 18 ANNEFLECHE negation, in and through the exclusionary discourse of a heterosexist world, such as the world of The Children's Hour. The play's historical moment seems to have been surprisingly propitious. In an interview, Hellman remarked that she came to playwriting at a time of transition , when realism was beginning to lose its grip on U.S. theater: ] was caught. By caught I mean in a time of life, not caught in any disagreeable sense, caught between a so-called realistic theater and a so-called new theater coming after the Second World War, the theater of the absurd, the theater of the imagination, whatever words one has for it.7 The theatrical moment of the Thirties was distinctly, looking back, one in which Hellman thought she was looking forward, learning to bend the rule, to show the strain of writing straight, the problems with what she wanted to write. This strain in her plays has been interpreted variously, by Hellman and others, as a throwback to the nineteenth-century "well-made play," or just the opposite, a lapse in technique: The charge of too well-made] suppose means 100 neat, too well put together. It's basically Jthink a rather foolish charge against anybody. because what is too well-made? Why should something be badly made? I think. what people do mean by it is that perhaps sometimes the sewing shows, and there I think sometimes it does in my plays. I don't think: too often. I hope not, but I think sometimes it does.s But a close look at The Children's Hour suggests that here the strain on repres ~ntation is posed by the idea of lesbian sexuality in its relations to language and knowledge. As Hellman's remarks suggest, the play demonstrates her early interest in the post-war theater of language, and the way this "theater of lhe imagination," as she calls it, developed out of her efforts to mine the tradition of theatrical realism. When the question of realistic disclosure becomes conflated with the question of lesbian identity, Hellman's play begins unraveling the discourse of gender and exposing more and more of its stitches, its seaming straightness. The Children's Hour opens, as it happens, in the middle of a sewing class. The girls at the Wright-Dobie School are supposed to be sewing, at any rate, but only some of them actually are, "with no great amount of industry on pieces ofwhite material.'''} Of the other students, one is trying to cut another's hair, two are studying for a Latin exam, and Peggy is "sitting in a higher chair than the others. She is reading aloud from a book. She is bored and she reads in a singsong, tired voice." Peggy's text is Portia's "quality of mercy" speech, which is interrupted and misquoted during the opening minutes of the play and then abandoned altogether. The words clearly mean nothing to Peggy, but after all, the reading, it turns out, is a lesson in elocution, not literature. Their The Lesbian Rule 19 teacher is an actress, Mrs. Mortar (her name suggests a vessel in which something is pulverized, or the glue of a structure that hardens with time). When Mortar tries to show Peggy how to read with more feeling ("You are pleading for the life of a man"), Peggy points out that Mortar has skipped three lines. the part of the speech we hear in Hellman's play is about kings, scepters, God, and earthly power, lines that seem especially irrelevant to these girls, who are being "educated" to quite a different purpose and station. (Their sewing is like a feminine equivalent of writing.) The part of Portia's speech Mortar skips, and which consequently is not in the play, reads as follows: Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That in the course ofjustice, none of us Should see salvation.10 Omitted in Hellman's text are both Portia's tone to Shylock ("Therefore, Jew") and the startling idea that "justice" is not causally related to "salvation." The Golden Rule - "do unto others" - the Christian rule - Portia divides from the rule of (Jewish, Old Testament) law, of"justice" - "an eye for an eye" - in the act of creating a new moral hierarchy of "mercy" over "justice." So goes one possible reading of this speech. The implications of this, for the plot of Hellman's play, may seem simple enough: the community is hardly merciful, and when "justice" is done, and the women are believed, in Act Three, it is too late to save Martha. Yet the omitted section of Portia's speech, by making the relation of justice to salvation arbitrary, throws the question of resolution into doubt: what is justice - or salvation - if there is no tight or justice that necessarily saves? What is it that the Golden Rule can measure? When Karen Wright appears in Act One, she sympathizes with the bored student: KAREN (smiling) Peggy doesn't like Portia? MRS. MORTAR] don't think she quite appreciates it, but KAREN (patting PEGGY on the.head) Well, I didn't either. [don't think I do yet. (10) Karen's lines are not necessarily an endorsement of the Golden Rule, as some critics have supposed. Nor does it seem, as Mary Titus has argued, that Hellman is invoking Shakespeare to show her literary credentials in the male canon.I I Mortar's reverence for Shakespeare is mock reverence, as Titus points out, but Karen's response underscores her own lack of "feeling" for Portia, or rather her understanding of Peggy's lack of feeling. This lack has been cited by more than one critic as evidence of Karen's culpability: she teaches her students not to value Shakespeare; Hellman is showing she is intellectually superior to her characters, these half-educated women, etc. " But giving this lack a meaning doesn't account for the lack so much as fill it in, at 20 ANNEFLECHB the same time as Karen is explained as "a character," a kind of flawed consciousness that can also be filled in by a judgement about her lack of"character ." But looking at the gap in Portia's speech suggests something ·more - and less: the arbitrariness of measurement, the vagueness of virtue, when all laws are subject to an unknowable ideal. And this theme is repeated often in the play. In Act One especially, the language of value and measurement is striking . One of the girls tries to help another with her sewing, but the girl "can't get the hem thtraight" [sic]. "So much has been cut off," Hellman's direction says, "that it is now hardly large enough for a child offive." Mrs. Mortar's response suggests what little girls are taught to do when the cloth is not cut to fit: MRS. MORTAR (vaguely) Well, try to do something with it. Make some handkerchiefs or something. Be clever about it. Women must learn these tricks. (To PEGGY) Continue . "Mightiest in the mightiest." (6) The assumption of an ideal law that supersedes all others really proposes an arbitrary rule, that through a "trick" can be recut to fit any measure, no matter how inadequate. The irony of Mortar's lines, "Women must learn these tricks. ... 'Mightiest in the mightiest''' gets its humor from the contrast, the incommensurability , like the tiny dress held up by the twelve- or fourteen-year-old girl. Neither measures up. Indeed, this opening scene is patterned by images of the incommensurate and the foreshortened. The interruption of Portia's speech is another example. The first interruption comes from Mrs. Mortar herself , who has just noticed that Evelyn is trying to cut Rosalie's hair: "[Evelyn] has Rosalie's head bent back at an awkward angle and is enjoying herself," while Rosalie "sits, nervously, infront ofher." The implication in this opening tableau is that Evelyn (of the unstraight and abbreviated hemline) looks as if she could cut things a little too close for Rosalie's comfort. Later, Peggy is interrupted a second time by Lois, whom Catherine is helping to memorize Latin conjugations. It isn't going well: LOIS (from the back a/the room challts softly and monotonously through the previous speech) Ferebam, ferebas, ferebat, ferebamus, ferebatis, fere, fere CA1HERINE (two seats away, the book propped in/ront a/her) Ferebant (6) Here the process of interruption is linked specifically to the girl's alienation from language. Lois tries twice to conjugate "ferebam," both times getting it wrong, and Mortar gradually becomes aware of the hum: "How many people in this room are talking?" The Latin lesson plays continuo to the elocution lesson , a babel of classical language and classic literature, in which the meaning of the words is lost in the structure of the scene, in its performance, and in the The Lesbian Rule 21 emphasis on each student's role as a performer. Peggy is learning elocution, or perhaps "feeling," while Lois is trying to memorize conjugations (for the verb "to bear" or "to carry," in the continuing past - i.e., a "past" that is ongoing), in a language that has no practical use at all. Hellman's stage directions show how the language is to be performed: "in a singsong, tired voice," "almost singing it." The musical, even operatic quality of the language as sound, as theatrical gesture, creates through theatrical means a connection between the irrelevance of these educational values (dead writer, dead language) and the absence of a structural hierarchy. No single exchange seems significant in itself, despite Peggy's high chair. All the education here seems to be rote, recitation , and performance. When Mortar shows Peggy how to "feel" Portia's "pity," "She recites hammily," while the girls look on "with blank, bored faces." What is Portia to them? The Children's Hour repeatedly suggests the absence of an adequate or commensurate language, language that measures up, that defines reality, and the need of, perhaps, new language. In a way it's an Eden story, like all stories about little girls, about the realization that language is already stacked against you, tainted, used. Mary, the little girl who tells the "lie" about her teachers, is introduced in Act One as an hysteric, an actress, and a pathological liar. In Act two, she is repeatedly called a liar and ordered to tell the truth, as though this were a simple thing to do. But Mary has been taught the same language her grandmother learned as a girl, the old language, and she knows that language can be bent to a purpose, that its values are arbitrary: MARY But - (She hesitates, then goes up to Mrs. Tilford and puts her arms around the older woman's neck. Softly) How much do you love me? MRS.1U.FORD (Smiling) As much as all the words in all the books in all the world. MARY Remember when Iwas little and you used to tell me that right before I went to sleep? And it was a rule nobody could say another single word after you finished? You used to say: "Wor-rr-Id," and then I had to shut my eyes tight. MRS. m.PORD And sometimes you were naughty and didn't shut them. MARY I miss you an awful lot, Grandma. MRS. TILFORD And Imiss you, bur I'm afraid my Latin is too rusty - you'n learn it better in school. (35) In Mrs. Tilford's bedtime visits, when she exchanged words of "love" with Mary, the value of "love" was measured quantitatively, and measured in words. The rule of the game was that Mary be silenced, that she shut her eyes, and go to sleep. It seems surprisingly apt that this same exchange should refer to the school and to Mrs. Tilford's rusty Latin: Mary has been learning all her life to value the language that is never spoken, and to see words as arbitrary signs of power. When she tells Mrs. Tilford her story about the two teachers, she realizes she is "on the right track" when her grandmother tries to control 22 ANNEFLECHE her use of words ("Stop using that silly word"; "You have picked up some very fine words"), and she gets another girl, Rosalie, to substantiate her story by making her swear an oath. What Mary knows, as an hysteric and a liar, is that language is performative, it catches her in its net, unless, of course, she rejects language's effects, refusing and, indeed, perverting its meanings. Mary thus manages to pre-empt the adults' efforts to control her speech, in part by perverting speech, and in part by obscuring the origins of her story about the teachers, the source of her knowledge of sexuality. And this brings on a crisis of knowledge and of language that Hellman can't, and I would say doesn't, resolve. Of course, the most damaging accusations Mary makes are never spoken aloud. The turning-point in her efforts to convince her grandmother that something "unnatural" is going on between Martha and Karen is her excited "whispering ." What we hear at this point is not the words, but their sound effects. ."At first the whisper is slow and hesitant but it gradually works itself up to fast, excited talking. In the middle of it Mrs. Tilford stops her" (39). Again, Mary is silenced by her grandmother, who is "trembling," visibly excited. The homoeroticism in Mary's relationship with her grandmother has been touched on elsewhere,'3 but this scene also, like the discussion of the bedtime ritual, suggests the power-struggle between the two in which sexuality plays its part, and has strong verbal associations. Moreover, like the simultaneous dialogue in Act One, this scene represents language as sound, rhythm and intensity, rather than as a strictly referential system. Part of the play's tension, in fact, is that it contains so few references, that it relies so heavily on the effects of words rather than the words themselves. Mary's accusations refer very little to the language the teachers use with one another. She speaks mainly of "noises" and "sounds." The actual sightings of lesbian behavior Mary attributes to Rosalie: "She said she had read about it in a book and she knew" (55). But Mary is the owner of the book in question, not Rosalie, and presumably what she whispers to her grandmother is more or less plagiarized. Hellman represents Mary's sexual knowledge as somehow obscured, inauthentic. It has to be there but it's also, in a way, not there, as if Mary simply intuits the power of her words. Yet, as we've seen, Mary's perversion of language shows that she is, in fact, a very apt pupil. Mary may not play by the rules at school, but she has learned her languages well, as Martha says: she can revalue others' words, "making them have meanings that - [...] Where did you learn so much in so little time?" (53).'4 But Martha's question sounds disingenuous, given her own role in Mary's ongoing education. Her discovery that Mary's misbehavior actually constitutes a sustained performance with very sophisticated implications is a reminder that realism relies on such belated discoveries, and that these surprises are made possible by realistic characters' inability to see themselves. But it also shows the strain in the play's "realistic" structure. The teachers' The Lesbian Rule 23 roles in producing Mary's rebellion against their codes is never investigated, despite Mary's constant accusations. It is only the implicit content of her latest charge that gives her a hearing. Interestingly, once Mary's antisocial behavior is "heard," she disappears from the play, and in the final act Hellman leaves it to the two teachers to confront the power of a language no longer understood as referential but as constitutive, performative, constraining. This fact underscores the peculiar structure of The Children's Hour, for Hellman: it's one of the few plays in which she does not use a unit set, and in which all characters are not neatly accounted for in the final scene. In various revisions and productions , she wrestled with the objections of the play's earliest critics, who found Act Three anti-climactic and puzzling: why did Hellman drop Mary, . who was central to the plot until this point; and why leave Mary's retraction offstage, letting the grandmother report it at the last minute? By the time she was through making changes, Hellman was saying that Act Three was the play.'5 And indeed this is the act that seems most topical at the moment, since it is the only act in which the possibility of the sexual love of one woman for another is seriously discussed. If in Act Three the strain in Hellman's structure shows through most clearly, this is certainly not because the play is carelessly written. The Children's Hour shares the careful plotting and preparation of Hellman's other early worle And as in other "realistic" or "well-made" plays, the structure is created by the sense that something real is being suppressed, some truth waiting to be told. Yet because the truth at the center of the plot is ostensibly the negation of a lie, and because this lie has to do with sexual identity , Hellman has to work out the conclusion through the discussion of language itself, questioning the way identities are produced and sustained in and by language. Realism's pressure to tell, to expose, to fill in the blanks, is subject to another pressure not to tell, a pressure to leave gaps, to be less than explicit, not only to avoid moral censure. but also because sexuality isn't objectively knowable and provable; it can even elude self-knowledge. When Martha says "f have loved you the way they said [ita!. sic]," her language already appeals to the community's charge as the original of her knowledge about herself: It's funny; it's all mixed up. There's something in you, and you don't know it and you don'1 do anything about it. Suddenly a child gets bored and lies - and there you are, seeing it for the fIrst time. (Closes her eyes) Idon'( know. It all seems to come back to me. (72) Martha's language mirrors Mary's accusation - what we get to hear of it about "funny noises," "funny things." And the ambivalence-in the speech is striking - '" don't 'know," "it's all mixed up." By closing her eyes, as Mary was told to do, Martha seems to be internalizing the sight produced by the public charge against her. She says she didn't "know" and didn't "do anything 24 ANNEFLECHE about it," which seems an unnecessary point: if she didn't know, how could she have, consciously, done anything about it; and, moreover, if she didn't know, and she had done something about it unconsciously, presumably now there would be some external corroboration for the images on her mind. Martha 's confession brings out the conflict between realism and lesbian sexuality in the play: it has no way to become realized Cin either sense), and so it can never be resolved. It can't support a structure of closure and coherence. Hellman 's early notes call Martha an "unconscious lesbian,,,,6 suggesting that the character would be arriving at self-knowledge in the last act, but it seems clear that by the time she finally wrote the scene she knew there was nothing conclusive about it. It would be far truer to say that Martha produces an imaginary lesbian at the end of the play, to give her a way out Cso to speak), and that Hellman shows how it is constructed out of the very need to produce the abject lesbian so clearly demanded by the homophobic community. What of the unspeakable word in the play, "lesbian," then? What would it mean to bring the lesbian into the terms of representation, were that possible? This very desire is a desire for origins, for knowledge Cofthe origin), as Martha 's rationale shows: all her character traits tum into clues of her difference, in the end, which she equates with her "guilt." Her sexuality is necessarily an afterthought, a product of the story, not a subversion of it at all. Act Three specifically foregrounds, for the first time in the play, the question of selfknowledge , that is, the radical uncertainty of confession, disclosure, representation , and truth-telling. In Act Three the play's concern with gender and language has thus become even more explicit. The problem of lesbian representation, forced out into the open like this, forces Hellman to consider the way the negativity of the lesbian Cas what's not there) is both constituted and constitutive. Once there is no question of a referent, the language of the play turns to -language: the reference as its own object. And it's here, I think, that the impossibility of the lesbian is squarely faced, and not dodged, in Hellman 's play, despite Martha's suicide. Representation of the lesbian requires that the negative be revealed in its constitutive function. It is not that the lesbian equals the negative in this play - nearly the opposite: she equals something like negation. Yet it does not follow that this negation is therefore unspeakable. How can this be? Perhaps part of the difficulty of discussing the lesbianism in Hellman's play is that, as the "lesbian rule" suggests, the literal and the figural are linked in a way that is imperfectly understood, perhaps just because this link is so common. Language often seems to confirm rather than to constitute , as in this analysis of the lesbianism in Hellman's play: Hellman's text [suggests] that to know about lesbian desire is to recognize it as a part of oneself. This is confinned by Martha Dobie, who feels that Mary's accusation articulates and thereby actualizes her desire.I7 The Lesbian Rule 25 But to know about lesbianism and to be accused of it are not the same thing; and the relation between the articulated and the actual is, as I have tried to argue here, very much the question of the play, and not its assumption. Attempts to trace the historic origins of homosexuality run into just this problem , of whether a homosexual is verified by social discourse or by self-definition or by some practice now identified as "homosexual." As Diana Fuss has pointed out, there is not much room in theories of origin for the unconscious, or, presumably, for repression or negation.I' In Freud's theory of negation, reality is tested by the ability of the reality-ego to re-find an external image of an internal one which was lost. 19 And the function of "judgement" is to separate the subjective from the objective, the merely internal from what is present externally as well. The relationship between the conscious and the unconscious is indicated by negation, which signals a lack of acceptance of the repressed content, in the very act of intellectually accepting it. That is, negation is a way of bringing the repressed content into consciousness, without removing the repression itself. For example, Martha's confession of her sexual feelings for Karen can still be interpreted as a guilty mis-reading, a need to find something in herself to punish. Thus the lesbian can be repressed in the act of being intellectually accepted. In the act of denial and repression, the lesbian enters the drama as something objective, external, after all. Hellman includes an awkward scene in this last act in which a delivery boy comes in to stare at the two women - that is, as if they were lesbians. Presumably, what the delivery boy sees isn't there; yet we still see him seeing it. Consequently the question of whether one can affirm or accept lesbianism is as much a problem in Hellman's playas the problem of negating it, the two notions collapsing into one another at crucial moments of truth. In another example, earlier in the play, Martha and Karen discuss the possibility of a lesbianism that is defined by a choice of action, rather than an external judgement:'o KAREN (Shivers, listlessly gets up, starts making afire in the/ireplace) But this isn't a new sin they tell us we've done. Other people aren't destroyed by it. MARTIiA They are the people who believe in it, who want it, who've chosen it .... (70) Just as Karen instinctively begins to light a fire when she shivers, so the possibility of lesbianism's objective existence is immediately counteracted in the play by the reminder that Karen and Martha haven't consciously chosen it, and so are not, in some way. real lesbians. The instinctual behavior here produces a reassuring chill. In this case, as we see, if the lesbian can be repressed in the act ofbeing intellectually accepted, she may also be accepted in the act of being repressed." In effect, the charge of lesbianism in The Children's Hour produces a "lie" which endlessly produces and reproduces the lesbian, bringing her into the consciousness of the playas something that is affirmed so that it can be 26 ANNEFLECHE denied. At this point the productive'power of the discourse of sexuality drives the play far wide of any question of "a" lie, which is what Hellman said it was about; lesbianism becomes the lie, sexuality the question, and the possibility of finding lesbianism's referent, and so ofjudging reality, impossibly remote. It's been suggested that The Children's Hour is canonical because it plays into homophobic rules: the lesbian is nowhere to be found; as soon as Hellman raises the possibility of same-sex desire onstage, the lesbian cancels herselfout, disqualifies her desire." Another way to respond to the play's negativity, however , would be to say that it abstracts the lesbian - cuts her out, abbreviates her, conceives her as a problem of representation. The Children's Hour implicates the lesbian in questions of truth, ofultimate terms ofknowing - thereby raising the stakes of Hellman's "realism," putting lesbianism in the domain of large questions ofmeaning and identity. But what kind of "realism" is this? And how is it possible to speak of a lesbian where there is no referent? "The lesbian rule" provides both a metaphor and a strategy with which to pursue the question of lesbian representation. What is the significance of a rule that is made to bend, a rule that measures only when bent? The lesbian rule places the emphasis on the problem of measurement when the object to be measured is not straight like a ruler. Pliant enough to measure what is not straight, the lesbian rule suggests the possibility of rethinking representations of lesbian subjectivity without fixing its meaning or value in advance. Once the tenn lesbian has ceased to be referential, external to the text, it can be seen in its activity of fixing a rule of measurement, and of assigning a value. It's no longer a matter of the lesbian, but of the lesbian rule. At the same time, then, the lesbian rule does not nullify or cancel the rigid rule by which the lesbian is subsumed into heterosexist language. On the contrary, although it significantly suspends any assumption about the shape of the thing measured - in fact, it assumes that what is measured will have an unpredictable shape - the lesbian rule will nevertheless rigidify eventually, so that the object can be described in terms of inches or centimeters, thereby entering a straight language , a language that presumes straightness. The difference is that not only can the object be measured more carefully, more attentively, but also, and crueiany , straightness will arrive with the measurement, as an assumption of its discourse, rather than the rule. In writing her play, Hellman had to apply the lesbian rule herself, examining the constitutive effects of the lesbian in order (not) to represent her. That such measures then become rigid representations in and of the lesbian's absence is in fact the pathos of the play. For in The Children's Hour there is such a thing as a lesbian, people can be accused of being lesbian, everybody knows what it means. And yet the accusation can be made - is made - independent of any referential "evidence." Perhaps there is no need to bring Mary back in Act Three, the point about (female) children, language, and learning having been made so well. If Hellman is revealing the "sewing" in the play by leaving her out, she is by the same The Lesbian Rule 27 device pointing to her silence in this act, the structural absence of the liar, the manipulator of language. The play turns, then, to the question of language itself. Certainly the lines focus more consciously on language here than in the earlier acts, as Martha and Karen try to imagine a "world" that would be made possible by new "words." "[E]very word will have a new meaning," Karen tells Joe, "no words that we can use in safety any more." "[W]e would have had to invent a new language," Martha tells Karen, "as children do ... " (72). And Karen realizes, as she says to Mrs. Tilford, that the older woman's terms of reparation are inadequate: "a public apology and money paid" are not, as Mrs. Tilford seems to suppose, the equivalent of"justice" done, or "goodness" reasserted . ("You want to be 'just,' don't you, ... You want to be a 'good' woman again. don't you?") The play ends, surely, on a very odd exchange, in which Mrs. Tilford asks Karen to "write me some time." Karen's reply, "If I ever have anything to say," suggests that Karen Wright-Right-Write is left with a crisis of language and meaning that mayor may not be resolvable. Karen has been associating this crisis with "tragedy" in Act Three ("no solid world"; "love and pity"; "sick, high-tragic people"), and Hellman's play is full of "tragic" structural implications, both Greek and Shakespearean. Martha's suicide is part of her and Hellman's desperate need for closure. But we've seen too the classical references in Act One, the Shakespeare and Latin lessons, all imperfectly learned, a babel of languages without referents. The new beginnings promised by tragic endings - including, in Shakespeare especially, the need to begin language again - are implied at the end of The Children's Hour, where language's incommensurability is so pointedly recognized. Hellman's play, then, demonstrates language's performativeness, its power to produce what it names, which is nowhere more striking than in Martha's confession of lesbianism, a confession of a truth that can never be proven by reference to anything outside itself. The instability of language, and of identity , renders the "real" - that external which is found to correspond to the internal image - as the performative effect, the "realistic." The play certainly does seem, as Hellman puts it, "caught" by language, exposed, searching for some "new theater," "whatever words one has for it." The Children's Hour begins with a lesson in dead language and ends with a suspension of writing. As Hellman realized later, her play was part of an historical movement toward a theater less trusting of the bond between language and referent, a "bond" which Shylock attempts to redeem with that pound of flesh. Indeed Hellman's citation of Shakespeare cites an historical parallel to the problem of representing the absent lesbian, since there were, famously, no Jews in Shakespeare's England. (No "out" Jews, at least.) Shylock's presence is, in a way, the representation of an absence: he's a copy whose model is denied in advance. By the end of Heilman'S play the search for the impossible referent has taken on its own poignancy; Mrs. Tilford's discovery of Mary's lie is almost too easy, and as Karen says, it's hardly the point any more. The problem seems to be where 28 ANNEFLECHE Karen goes from here, the "lesbian" who never existed. And how can the playwright - or the contemporary critic - write about her, how can they both take sufficient measures not to arrive at a rule? I think Hellman saw, in writing The Children's Hour, that the lesbian rule might measure how far the authority of language could be bent. NOTES Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature. and Difference (New York, (989), 106: 2 John Boswell. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europefrom the Beginningo/the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, (980), 17. 3 In a recent issue ofglq, for example, an issue devoted to the subject of "Premodern Sexualities in Europe," the editors, Louise O. Fradenburg and Carla Frcccero. write that one of the strengths of queer theory has been its persistent investigations of desire and identification, and that this investigation has benefited queer historiography : "What has been crucial to a queering of historiography is not the rejection of truth for pleasure - which would only repeat the myth of their opposition - but rather the recognition of their intimacy. Thus, transhistoricist perspectives cannot be found wanting simply because they seek, in the past, the allure of the mirror image. Moreover, it has to be asked whether the observation of similarities or even continuities between past and present inevitably produces a transhistoricist or universalizing effect." (glq, 1:4, [1995]. 377). The fact that one of the Editors ofglq is David'Halperin, a constructionist who considers "sexuality" a modern phenomenon , is perhaps another indication that the divisions between "essentialism" and "constructionism" are becoming less pronounced - or at least less divisive. 4 The title of a recent analysiS of the play, an analysis which I have found very useful . may give some indication of the distaste the play provokes. See Mary Titus, "Murdering the Lesbian: Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour," Tu/sa Studies in Women's Literature, 10:2 (Fall 1991), 215-32. Titus sees the playas "a crucial document" which reveals the social pressures on Hellman "to murder the lesbian in her text. and perhaps in herself" (229). I want to suggest that these social pressures were being met, at the time, by changes in dramatic fonn and function. S Lynda Hart has summarized the discussion surrounding lesbian representation in perfonnance in "Identity and Seduction: Lesbians in the Mainstream, in Acting Out: Feminist Performances (Ann Arbor, 1993. 119-137). As Hart points out, the instability of "sexual identities" as objects of representation requires, in effect, the wedding of something like "essentialist" and "constructionist" notions, a wedding she demonstrates in her analysis of Split Britches' Anniversary Waltz. In Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw's butch-femme perfonnance, the "real" lesbian is produced as an(other) fantasy, just as "real," in other words. as the heterosexual and the economy of visibility that heterosexuality purports to support, The Lesbian Rule 29 6 For a deconstruction of this binary, see Diana Fuss, "Inside/Out," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories. Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York, (991), ]-10. ft's also remarkable that the heterosexualization of the plot of The Children's Hour for the 1936 mm We Three required, as far as I can see, only relatively minor changes. 7 Jackson R. Bryer, ed. Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson, 1986), I 15. 8 Bryer, 115· 9 Lillian Hellman, The Children's Hour, in Six Plays by Lillian Hellman (New York, 1979), 5. (Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text.) It is important to note that my analysis in this article refers to the first (1934) edition of the play, and not to the "acting edition" of 1953. The acting edition contains a number of changes significant for my argument, particularly in Act One, Titus, whose careful analysis of the play I will be citing, also follows the 1934 version . 10 William Shakespeare, The Merchant o/Venice, IV, i: 197-200 II TituS,2 IS. 12 See Philip M. Armato, "'Good and Evil' in Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour," Education Theatre Journal, 25 {December 1973,443-47; and Titus, 218. 13 See Titus, 220-2 t. 14 Martha's question is a reminder of Freud's problems with "Dora," in another case which conflates the question of woman's representation with the negation of lesbian sexuality, Jacqueline Rose sees "Dora" as posing, precisely, "this question of woman as representation," "of woman as query, posed by Dora herself, of her relationship to a knowledge designated as present and not present - the sexual knowledge that is the secret behind her relation with Frau K: 'Her knowing all about such things and, at the same time, her pretending not to know where her knowledge came from was really too remarkable. I ought to have attacked this riddle and looked for the motive of such a remarkable piece of repression' (SE 7: 120, n. I, p. [62; c 142, n. 2; italics mine). Thus nothing in Dora's position can be assimilated to an unproblematic concept of the feminine or to any simple notion of the body," ("Dora: Fragment of an Analysis," in Charles Bemheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora's Case: Freud -Hysteria - Feminism [New York, 1985], 138). The problem of where a child could have gotten such knowledge was in fact not at issue in the case on which Hellman based her play, since there the child was presumed to have picked up her information on lesbian sex during her childhood in India. The specifically racial content of this question ofsexual knowledge is erased in The Children's Hour, then, though not the subsequent fear and loathing of the child rather then the women she accuses, See Lillian Fadennan, Scotch Verdict: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods v. Dame Cumming Gordon (New York, 1983),239 and passim. And see also Titus, 219. Perhaps the racial content of its source is suggested by the language of eugenics in the pia). There are a number of otherwise - to me - inexplicable references in Act One to inbreeding, including the suggestion that Mary could be the product of incest. 15 Carl Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York, 1988), 336. 30 ANNBFLECHE 16 The Lillian Hellman Collection a.t the University ojTexas, compo Manfred Triesch (Austin, 1968), 102-104. Cited in Titus. 220. 17 Titus, 221. 18 Fuss, 105. The "essentialist-vs-constructionisl" dialogue between the historians John Boswell and David Halperin provides an example of Fuss's point The Boswell-Halperin dispute seems, as I have suggested, to rely upon the supposed referentiality of language. For Boswell, descriptions of certain sexual acts and object-choices in the medieval or ancient world indicate that homosexuality existed, whereas for Halperin homosexuality names a specific social construction of types of individuals apparently unknown before the late nineteenth century. So, it seems, whether terminology describes acts, object choices, or types of individu· als, the relation of the sign to its referent remains pretty stable. And this despite the philological analyses of Boswell, or Halperin'5 corrections to the OED. Without a theory of language that links it to the fonnation of subjectivity itself, a theory that then makes room for negation, lack, r!!pression and differance, historians will con· tinue to make assumptions about the existence of homosexuality based solely on a positive theory of language's power to name. See Boswell, "Categories, Revolutions and Universals," and Halperin, "Sex Before Sexuality," in Hidden From History : Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Dubennan, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York, 1989); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years 0/ Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York, 1990). 19 Freud, "Negation," in The Standard Edition a/the Complete Works a/Sigmund Freud, 19, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London, 196r), 233-39. Freud's "Negation" thus paves the way for the notion Lacan develops as desire: the.constitution of the subject in the externalization of an image of loss. 20 It's interesting that this is where Boswell finally marks his difference from the constructionist position, revising his definition of "gay" in Christianity, Social Toler· ance, and Homosexuality, where "gay persons" were defined as "those 'conscious of erotic inclinations toward their own gender as a distinguishing characteristic.' ... I would now define 'gay persons' more simply as those whose erotic interest is predominantly directed toward their own gender (ie., regardless of how conscious they are of this as a distinguishing characteristic). This is' the sense in which, I believe, it is used by most American speakers" (Boswell, "Categories, Revolutions and Uni· versals," "Postscript," 35. 21 And it's worth noting as a further inconsistency that Freud's negation doesn't work in reverse: Martha's confession doesn't necessarily mean she's not a lesbian. 22 "The canonization of The Children's Hour reveals an unquestionable complicity between heterosexism and the concept ofcanonization." (Lynda Hart, "Canonizing Lesbians?" in Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, ed. June Schlueter [London, 1990], 278). ...