Crafting Hermaphroditism: Gale Wilhelm’s Lesbian Modernism in We Too Are Drifting

This article argues for a renewed interest in forgotten modernist lesbian author Gale Wilhelm through an examination of her 1935 novel We Too Are Drifting. Aimed at a wide readership, Wilhelm’s novel differs from the work of high-modernist lesbians like Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes with its middlebrow sensibilities. Furthermore, it presents the hermaphrodite as a new metaphor for conceptualizing lesbian identity in contrast to the dominant model of the invert espoused by Radclyffe Hall’s famous The Well of Loneliness. Without engaging in explicit politics, entering into clinical considerations of sexual psychology, or including gratuitously titillating scenes that the public had come to expect with the subject of lesbianism, Wilhelm’s revolutionary gesture needs to be gauged differently: it assumes the lesbian’s right to define her own existence as the a priori condition for writing about lesbian love by focusing on how lesbian artists use visual media to express their identities and desires.