A Queer Form of Trauma: Lesbian Epistolarity in Either Is Love

The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.

—Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"

British novels, like The Well of Loneliness (1928), or highly experimental modernist works, like Nightwood (1936), have been the focus of most critical attention to early-twentieth-century narratives of female same-sex desire. Outside this canon of Sapphic modernism, however, is a cluster of American narratives yet to be recognized as an important body of literature, although the 1995 republication of Diana Frederics's Diana: A Strange Autobiography (1939) suggests renewed interest in these texts. ¹ Elisabeth Craigin's epistolary memoir Either Is Love departs from canonical lesbian texts in its use of realist techniques to present a feminized conception of lesbian identity and experience. ² Craigin's narrative remains in critical eclipse partially because it contains a heterosexual frame narrative. Jane Rule, one of the only feminist critics to mention Either Is Love even in passing, dismisses this frame as offensive. ³ I suggest, however, that the heterosexual frame narrative feminizes—that is, normalizes—the narrator in order to establish a relationship of empathy with her readers that will allow her lesbian narrative, and her rejection of the butch-femme model established by early sexologists, to be understood. Feminist readings of the epistolary genre together with theories of psychological trauma provide a method for reading Either Is Love that brings into view the complexity of both its narrative structure and its protagonist's lesbian identity. Craigin's narrative, I argue, consists of a series of traumatic repetitions, each referring back to an original trauma—the narrator's loss of her female lover. The text's heterosexual losses, then, should be read as repetitions—empathy-producing analogies—that allow the narrator to express, in a sense to translate, the primary, unspeakable (because homosexual) loss. In other words, Either Is Love is organized structurally, generically, and aesthetically around an economy of empathy. While poststructuralist and queer theorists have focused on difference as a strategy for disrupting dominant (heterosexual) ideology, Either Is Love relies on analogical constructions—the cognitive process of finding a sameness in what is different—to produce an empathic relationship between a queer narrator and a presumably straight reader. ⁴

Either Is Love concerns an unnamed female narrator who unexpectedly falls in love with another woman, Rachel. Because their love must remain a secret, the two women are forcibly separated for long periods, especially when Rachel's ostensibly single status obligates her to care for a sick friend of the family. The secrecy and separation strain their relationship, and Rachel eventually begins to have romances with other women. Later she finds religion and renounces lesbianism altogether. For years the narrator remains in grief over losing Rachel. Eventually she meets Bart when she is involved in a car accident that kills Bart's wife. Bart and the narrator, bound by their similar losses, fall in love and marry. Years later, in grief again after Bart's death, the narrator decides to publish their early love letters as a tribute to him. Ironically, the bulk of the published narrative consists of her letters to Bart confessing—and extolling—her previous lesbian relationship.

Hidden, destroyed, rewritten, and recovered lesbian narratives form layers in Either Is Love. The first lesbian narrative, told in love letters between Rachel and the narrator, is destroyed by the narrator herself when the relationship ends, in order to protect their secret. However, when she and Bart are separated by the First World War during their courtship, the narrator composes a second lesbian narrative, rewriting the story of her earlier love letters in the form of an epistolary confession to Bart. Bart accepts the narrator's past...