Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris

Conclusion

T his story began in Paris with the Great War of 1914–1918. Twentieth-century warfare, with its industrial efWciency, broke faith with the Enlightenment’s promise of progress and made the creation of new systems of social engagement—or the resurrection of archaic ones—seem urgent. Representational systems, gender systems, class systems, political systems all hung in the balance. Politicians demanded change or promised restoration. In Paris, no fewer than twenty cabinets formed and crumbled between 1918 and 1939, the dates that bracket this investigation. The subjects of my case studies experienced these decades as a time of intense creativity. They participated in the post-war reconstruction of Western culture in a highly motivated ways, each according to her own imperatives. Collectively, they revolutionized the politics of (self) representation, as lesbianism—conceived as a social, sexual, and cultural identity—came to the fore in the images that they projected of themselves. By the time that war broke out in Europe for the second time in the twentieth century, this identiWcatory emphasis had lost currency. From France, Barney reported by letter on the dissolution of her milieu—on Brooks, who sat alone in Nice “surrounded by all the portraits she did of notre belle époque,” on the disappearance of cultural icons like Stein and Cocteau. With each death that “cuts us down,” Djuna Barnes responded Conclusion Ils durent, en Wn de compte, nous condamner sans croire à notre existance . . . comme à regret. —Claude Cahun, “Le Muet dans la mêlée” 05Con.qxd 6/23/2005 9:00 AM Page 136 Conclusion 137 from New York, “ . . . our legendary time is being calendared.”1 The society of visible and vocal homosexuals that had earned recognition in Paris during the interwar years grew ghostly silent during the Occupation and reconstruction period. Its members were aging, tiring, and no new blood revitalized Barney’s salon. The post–World War I drive for emancipation —on professional, sexual, cultural, economic, and political fronts—imploded , under enormous social and political pressure, into the insistence of a hearty few upon transgressive, if largely depoliticized, lesbian “lifestyles .” Lesbianism as a form of cultural and/or political activism would not resurge anew until the 1970s. By then, even in Paris, most of the women I have discussed here were, if not dead, then long forgotten.2 Yet the iconography of modern womanhood that lesbians of the interwar era had helped to codify (to conventionalize, that is, and to normalize) survived . In the interim, this iconography had devolved, however, into a very different kind of code—an encoded language, a cryptography. Although my individual case studies conclude with the advent of the Second World War, this epilogue provides an opportunity to consider revelatory events beyond the historical scope of the book’s chapters. It not only permits me to track Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and Suzy Solidor after the outbreak of the war to determine which of their self-representational practices survived beyond (or were modiWed by) this turning point; it also enables me to evoke the dissolution of what I refer to in this volume’s title as “lesbian Paris,” bringing to light the volatility and fragility of nondominant communities more generally. If, as Monnier claimed, women coming into their own during the 1914–1918 conXict were “blessed by the terrible goddess of war,” I am tempted to suggest that the same goddess cursed them two decades later. It would be simplistic, though, to blame the destruction of the fruitful sexual and artistic alliances loosely described here as lesbian Paris on the Second World War. In fact, oppositional communities of every sort—buffeted by internal divisions (political discord, cultural and aesthetic rifts, professional and sexual rivalries), pressured by economic crises, and targeted by social and political campaigns (the pro-natalist manifestations that periodically blocked the streets of downtown Paris, for instance)— began to unravel well before France and England declared war against Germany on 3 September 1939. Cahun and Moore, for example, packed up their affairs and moved from Paris to the Isle of Jersey in 1937. Since the German invasion of France may not have seemed inevitable at this early date, one can only 05Con.qxd 6/23/2005 9:00 AM Page 137 speculate as to their motives. Their disillusionment with the political climate in the capital surely inXuenced the decision to expatriate. The outbreaks of anti-Semitism, the swelling ranks of right-wing factions...