Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris

Notes

INTRODUCTION The epigraph comes from Charlotte Wolff, Love Between Women (New York: St. Martin’s, 1971), 82. 1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet, historicizes the closet, observing that “even the phrase ‘the closet’ as a publicly intelligible signiWer for gay-related epistemological issues is made available . . . only by the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay politics oriented around coming out of the closet.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 14. 2. Albert Flament, cited in Blandine Chavanne and Bruno Gaudichon, eds., Romaine Brooks (Poitiers: Musée de la Ville de Poitiers et de la Société d’Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1987), 157. “Le chapeau noir assez haut, le regard dans l’ombre du bord qui avance un peu, le visage pâle, les lèvres à peine colorées, un petit veston noir, où le mince ruban rouge de la boutonnière est la seule note qui tranche dans ce camaïeu. . . . Et je regarde de nouveau ce . . . visage sévère et blême, cet être invisible à nos yeux, qu’elle livre là, sur la toile . . . , ce promeneur solitaire, au large des habitations dévastées.” 3. Albert Flament, cited ibid. 4. I am grateful to Whitney Chadwick for sharing her insights about the term amazon, a signiWer that, she has found, crops up similarly wherever women exercise power in the early twentieth century, as those who had the privilege of attending her Clark Art Institute lecture, “Amazons and Warriors: New Images of Femininity in Early Twentieth-Century France,” in the fall of 2003 will vividly recall. 5. Because progressives like Ellis viewed homosexuality as biologically determined , congenital—and not a “condition” of a cultural, social, or moral order— they invested the discourse of sexology with universal pretensions. Therefore, they borrowed case studies and drew conclusions with impunity across cultural and national borders. 6. Pierre Vachet, L’Inquiétude sexuelle (Paris: Grasset, 1927), and Henri Drouin, Femmes damnées (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1929), participate in the explosive N o t e s 06Notes.qxd 6/23/2005 9:00 AM Page 145 development of a popular genre of “expert-opinion” books on sexuality arising in response, Vachet explained (156), to the inXux of “ménages de femmes” evident in post-war Paris. At the same time, journalists such as Maryse Choisy (“Dames seules,” Le Rire, 21 May 1932) went “undercover” to report on these emerging sexual subcultures, while others, such as Marise Querlin, commented on homosexual practices that transpired, with increasing frequency, in plain sight: “Il est de toute évidence que ces pratiques sont devenues courantes depuis la dernière guerre et que ceux qui s’y livrent le font ouvertement.” Marise Querlin, Femmes sans hommes: Choses vues (Paris: Editions de France, 1931), 48. 7. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28. 8. Maryse Choisy, Un Mois chez les hommes (Paris: Editions de France, 1929), 222. “À Ahtènes, comme à Paris, comme à New York, ce ‘lesbisme’ [sic] (qu’on ne connaît plus à Lesbos) naît chez la femme qui travaille, la femme qui n’est plus une madone, et pas encore la camarade dont l’homme bien élevé respecte l’indépendance.” 9. Choisy, “Dames seules,” 3. 10. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, 7. 11. Choisy, “Dames seules,” 3. 12. Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1908), 34. Carpenter , like Ellis, speculates at length on the apparent relationship between homosexuality and genius, a precept embraced by many members of Brooks’s circle and on which she embroiders in her writings and portraiture. The all but forgotten writings of Dr. Camille Spiess on the superiority of the intermediate sex and the “psycho-synthetic” (androgynous) energies animating genius gained similar currency in France during the 1920s. 13. Natalie Barney (Nice, Hotel d’Angleterre) to Djuna Barnes, 13 January 1963, Djuna Barnes Papers, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park. 14. Mireille Havet, Journal, 1918–1919 (Paris: Editions Claire Paulhan, 2003), 62. “Je voudrais que grandir et devenir une femme ne soit pas synonyme de perdre sa liberté.” 15. Vu, no. 48, 13 February 1929: “Les Etats généraux de la femme: ce que la femme ne peut pas faire en France, ce que la femme peut faire dans le monde.” 16. Odette Simon, “Ce que la femme ne peut pas...