abstract
This article is concerned with the ways in which literary spaces can become sexualized by the transfer of objects between women, as well as by the ways in which bodies themselves touch. It discusses how lesbian desire changes both spatial and temporal structures, via a consideration of the use of pearl imagery. In particular, it analyses the link between sexual, class and bodily construction in two texts: Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) and Carol Ann Duffy's poem ‘Warming Her Pearls’ (1987). These texts encode contrasting ideas about the lesbian body, ideas that are discursively textured by the periods in which they were written and by the relative ideological resistance of their writers. While du Maurier's novel establishes a concept of spatial and temporal enclosure, Duffy's poem creates an unconfined and unstable lesbian body-text. Within this, the pearl can be seen as a subversive device, destructuring and stretching the parameters of lesbian desire.
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Notes
‘Warming Her Pearls’ is from Selling Manhattan by Carol Ann Duffy, published by Anvil Press Poetry in 1987. I am grateful for permission to reprint the poem in its entirety here.
There is an association between lesbianism and French-ness within English sexological discourse. Virginia Woolf (1925) makes use of such analogy in Mrs Dalloway: Sally Seton, the lesbianly figure, ‘always said she had French blood in her veins, an ancestor had been with Marie Antoinette … she had still, a ruby ring which Marie Antoinette had given her great-grandfather’ (pp. 166–167). The reference to Marie Antoinette is meaningful. There had been persistent rumours, designed to undermine her reputation, that she was a lesbian, ideas that found publicity again in 1923 when two English women, Charlotte Moberley and Eleanor Jourdain, wrote about their own ‘visions’ of the Queen at Versailles. This became another cause celebre of the early 20th century. Terry Castle (1993: 140) describes Marie Antoinette as ‘a code-figure for female homoeroticism’. Daphne du Maurier appears responsive to these allusions when she claims to have felt beguiled by her French teacher who ‘absolutely kind of lured me on and now I am coiled in the net…’ (Forster, 1993: 28), and the narrator of Rebecca also reflects this. At the ill-fated masked ball she organizes at Manderley, in which she unwittingly, and revealingly, dresses like the dead Rebecca, she notes another women ‘disguised as I know not what romantic figure of the past, it might have been Marie Antoinette or Nell Gwynne… or a strange erotic combination of the two’ (du Maurier, 1938: 233).
I am grateful to the editors of this Journal for drawing my attention to Alison Light's persuasive discussion of Rebecca, which first appeared in Feminist Review in 1984. Fundamentally, I agree with her that Rebecca ‘is a projection of (the narrator's) own desires’; and that ‘the regulation of female sexuality finds its weapon in the expression of class difference. In doing so, (the novel) threatens to expose the social construction of all sexuality and the inherent instability of all those class and gender definitions' (1984: 11). However, I propose that this ‘threat’ is deliberately contained by du Maurier; and I suggest that we may need to focus, too, beyond ‘the class dynamics of the text’, as Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (2000: 219) indicate, when they consider that ‘the writing process itself provides du Maurier with a way of … harnessing the potentially destructive aspect of the ‘Other’ … Rebecca's death within the plot suggests the containment of transgressive desire but her ‘disembodied spirit’ with all its divergent energies continues to inform the writing process' (see Horner and Zlosnik, 1998). Here I am interested, though, in the re-embodied body that, through extension, and even its absence, has the capacity to unsettle expansive and unbounded times and spaces, within and beyond the text itself.
Descriptions of the relationship of the two women are permeated with the appeals of their class difference. Vita Sackville-West (1955) wrote of Virginia Woolf that ‘Such things as old families and great houses held a sort of Proustian fascination for her. Not only did she romanticise them … but they satisfied her acute sense of the continuity of history, English history in particular’ (p. 157). Woolf wrote in her diary about her feelings for Sackville-West: ‘Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine’ (Leaska, 1984: 22). In a letter to Vita (19 July 1926), the pearl is once more imbued with a fantasy of cross-class and same-sex associations: it opens with reference to a coronet that had belonged to Woolf's aunt's French grandfather, and proceeds in a long, flirtatious and circumlocutory manner, to a fantasy of dining together in a restaurant where ‘there are looking glasses which reflect the most astonishingly commonplace scenes … in such a way that one feels one is dangling among octopuses at the bottom of the sea, peering into caves, and plucking pearls in bunches off the rocks …’ (Woolf, 19th July 1926 in Nicholson, 1997: 280–282).
Lesbians are frequently represented, in fiction and in ‘lives’, as seeking to invade or control key spatial areas of (particularly marital) homes (see Hallett, 1999: 36, 112–113). Mrs Danvers, for example, as housekeeper, holds the keys to Manderley, and guards thresholds over which the hapless narrator wishes to cross. It is in the doorway to Manderley that the narrator has her first confused meeting with Mrs Danvers (du Maurier, 1938: 72); and there are numerous subsequent encounters in doorways or on stairs (e.g. ibid. 76, 96, 224, 251, 373). Later she thinks ‘With Mrs Danvers gone I should learn bit by bit to control the house’ (ibid. 392). She is mistaken, of course, and the housekeeper appears, in dreams at least, on the stairs, ‘through a hollow door’ (ibid. 394) ever afterwards.
Mrs Danvers is, from the outset, clearly assigned to the realm of the deathly. She is walking, talking proof of sexological theory, ‘someone tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull's face, parchment white, set on a skeleton's frame’ (du Maurier, 1938: 72). The narrator herself, at her most vulnerable moments, moves towards such a realm: ‘How white and thin my face looked in the glass … Did I always look like this? Surely I had more colour as a rule’ (ibid. 174). The battle between the narrator and Mrs Danvers takes place indeed in a cosmic setting, a struggle literally and metaphorically between life and death. The housekeeper accuses her of trying to take the place of the dead Rebecca (ibid. 252–253), and at key moments the two wives appear to metamorphose into each other before the narrator's own eyes (ibid. 396), as the masked ball debacle (ibid. 222-224) pre-stages. The lesbian figures of the dead Rebecca and the deathly housekeeper threaten to possess the second, nameless, wife. The final image is one of morbidity: ‘And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea’ (ibid. 397).
Early 20th century European sexology constructed lesbianism as disease. The use of ‘contagion’ in this article is designed to challenge that and to invest it with a sense of ‘catchy’, like a tune that runs through the head; and, also, to adumbrate here the response suggested in my final paragraph, of a writerly lesbian contagious ‘circuit’.
Eavan Boland compares Duffy's and Keats’ poems to suggest that the former's ‘is a bold subversion of the sexualized erotic’. She writes of the ‘radically disassembled’ erotic object/subject, and traces ways in which women's writing can reconfigure ‘old fixities’ (Boland, 1995: 226, 229). My ideas here have been shaped by Boland's convincing analysis, and I seek to develop a sense of the potential of texts, and of objects within them, to continually, or permanently, unsettle structures of space and time beyond the reading moment.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lyn Innes for her comments on these ideas at an early stage; to the editors of Feminist Review for their helpful suggestions; and to the insights and enthusiasms over several years of students studying the module ‘Women's Auto/biography’ at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
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Hallett, N. Did Mrs Danvers warm Rebecca's pearls? significant exchanges and the extension of lesbian space and time in literature. Fem Rev 74, 35–49 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400109
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400109