Heroines of a New Modernity

Analyses of the disturbing figure of the lesbian associated with the psychotic woman at the turn of the twentieth century have filled many pages since the rise of queer studies, but Christine E. Coffman is the first to write a meticulous and theoretically serious study of these "heroines of a new modernity," to quote Elisabeth Roudinesco paraphrasing Walter Benjamin.¹ The patient method that Coffman uses to deconstruct a network of literary and psychoanalytic texts that are concerned with lesbianism, albeit mostly their phantasm of it, makes Insane Passions an essential book on the subject.

The first chapter deals with the infamous Papin case, the story of two sisters thought to have had incestuous relations in 1930s France. Employed as maids, they killed their employer and her daughter in a particularly brutal manner, gouging the mother's eyes and mutilating their bodies with a kitchen knife. The chapter is essentially a rereading of Jacques Lacan's famous article on the Papin case, "Motives of Paranoid Crime: The Crime of the Papin Sisters," published in the surrealist journal Minotaure in December 1933. Coffman shows how Lacan used Freud's case of President Schreber and the presumption of the sisters' homosexuality to construct his theory of the délire à deux, but ultimately reached a dead end: "If the Papin sisters had not been paranoid, they would not have been 'larval' homosexuals—but if they had not remained homosexuals, they would never have been paranoid. In the contradiction, 'Motives' displays a tension between two divergent approaches to temporality: the diachronic temporality of Freud's developmental model and the synchronic temporality (here rendered as 'contemporaneity') of Lacan's later distinction between the Real, imaginary and symbolic orders" (49–50).

The second chapter focuses on the surrealists, who were fascinated from early on not only by insanity but by women murderers, from the Papin sisters to the patricide Violette Nozière. Coffman turns her attention to the writings of André Breton, from L'Amour fou to Nadja, and specifically to the famous passages in Nadja dedicated to The Deranged, a controversial play that put onstage a lesbian teacher addicted to morphine. Exploring the surrealists' ambiguous position toward psychiatry, Coffman shows how, unlike Lacan, who is quick to highlight the Papin sisters' latent homosexuality, Breton himself obscures lesbianism and how this erasure also participates in a denial of marginal sexualities.

In rereading Lacan and the surrealists, Coffman attacks male-centered readings that cancel female desire. The first two chapters arrive at this conclusion without mention of another source that would have been of interest here: Jean Genet's play The Maids, which was directly inspired by the Papin case. Coffman instead chooses—understandably—to give voice to two women writers: Djuna Barnes and H. D. This is the turning point in her demonstration: while Lacan and Breton posited the lesbian as a "primitive," at the limits of civilization and human society, Barnes opens a space for her within language itself; that is, in a subversive move, language absorbs and assimilates schizophrenia within literature, thanks to its temporality and reversible characters. At the same time, her use of a disjointed temporality distinguishes Barnes from H. D., who successfully articulates such a temporality in Paint It Today: "What is most important in Paint It Today, however, is that it does rearticulate the terms of the symbolic: it stakes out a place for queer women's desires and bodies not in the future anterior of Djuna Barnes's queer 'kingdom without precedent' but in that dialectical synthesis of past and future that composes the 'living present' " (190).

Insane Passions is imbued with optimism, as it eludes the psychoanalytic trap with psychoanalytic tools and shows the conquest of the literary space by the queer woman. This optimism is nevertheless tempered in the last chapter, "Filming the Psychotic Queer Woman." Coffman returns one last time to her starting point, the Papin case, the inspiration for two recent films, Sister My Sister (dir. Nancy Meckler; 1994) and...