Abstract
When Ann Bannon’s five lesbian ‘pulp’ novels,1 written and first published in the late 1950s, were reprinted in the early 1980s by Naiad lesbian press in the United States, they reappeared at an opportune moment. One of the most compelling concerns of lesbian feminism this decade has been with the writing of a history of our own. The few historical documents that are available to lesbians, as part of this production of a history, are frequently the subject of wide debate as to their meanings and political implications. Think, for example, of the ongoing contest to establish a definitive reading of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.2 Bannon’s novels, for the most part situated in the lesbian bar culture of New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, are becoming the site of a similar historical debate.
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Notes
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago, 1985). Hall’s The Well of Loneliness has been regarded as both narrowly reactionary; see Blanche W. Cook, ‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination: Lesbianism in the Cultural Tradition’, Signs, vol. 4, no. 4 (Summer 1979) pp. 718–39; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Women’s Press, 1985); Lillian Faderman and Ann Williams, ‘Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Image’, Conditions, no. 1 (April 1977); Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985); and as progressive and interventionist: see Esther Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman’, Signs, vol. 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984); Jean Radford, ‘An Inverted Romance: The Well of Loneliness and Sexual Ideology’, in Jean Radford (ed.), The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) pp. 96–111; Sonja Ruehl, ‘Inverts and Experts: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Identity’, in Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan (eds), Feminism, Culture and Politics (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982) pp. 15–37; Gillian Whitlock, ‘“Everything is out of place”: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Literary Tradition’, in Feminist Studies, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall 1987) pp. 554–82. Also see Catherine Stimpson, ‘Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English’, in Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 2 (Winter 1981) pp. 363–79.
The terms of which have been outlined elsewhere, see Joan Nestle, ‘Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s’, in Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (New York: Firebrand Books, 1987); Anna Livia, ‘“I would rather have been dead than gone forever”: Butch and Femme as Responses to Patriarchy’, in Gossip, vol. 5 (London: Onlywomen Press, 1987) for a positive account of butch and femme relationships. For a more critical account see Sheila Jeffreys, ‘Butch and Femme: Now and Then’, Gossip, vol. 5 (London: Onlywomen Press, 1987).
Henry Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897).
Susanna Benns, ‘Sappho in Soft Cover: Notes on Lesbian Pulp’, in Makeda Silvera (ed.), Fireworks: The Best of Fireweed (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1986) pp. 60–8; also, see the many interviews Bannon gave when her novels were reprinted by Naiad; Maida Tilchen, ‘Ann Bannon: the Mystery Solved!’, in Gay Community News (8 January 1983) pp. 8–12; Jeff Weinstein, ‘in Praise of Pulp: Bannon’s Lusty Lesbians’, Voice Literary Supplement, no. 20 (October 1983) pp. 8–9; Charlotte Rubens, ‘50s Lesbian “Pulp” Author: an Interview with Ann Bannon’, Coming Up! (November 1983) p. 16; Tricia Lootens, ‘Ann Bannon: a Lesbian Audience Discovers its Lost Literature’, Off Our Backs, vol. xiii, no. 11 (December 1983) pp. 12–20.
Nor was Bannon the only author to begin writing lesbian pulp fiction at this time, see J. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1983) p. 135, on the growth in the lesbian pulp market.
S. Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ (1920), Case Histories II, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 9 (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1979) pp. 371–400.
Blanche Weisen Cook, ‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition’, Signs, vol. 4, no. 4 (1979) p. 722.
Valerie Walkerdine has argued this in another context: see ‘On the Regulation of Speaking and Silence: Subjectivity, Class and Gender in Contemporary Schooling’, in Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin and Valerie Walkerdine (eds), Language, Gender and Childhood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985) pp. 203–41.
Mandy Merck, ‘The Train of Thought in Freud’s “Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”’, in m/f, vol. 11/12 (1986) pp. 35–46. See Jacqueline Rose, ‘Femininity and Its Discontents’, Feminist Review (ed.), Sexuality: A Reader (London: Virago, 1987) pp. 177–98, for feminist rereading of Freud’s account of women’s feminine identity.
Jackie Stacey argues for a reassessment of psychoanalytic ‘sexual difference’ theory in order to address lesbianism; see ‘The Invisible Difference: Lesbianism and Sexual Difference Theory’, paper delivered at ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ conference, Amsterdam, December 1987, published in conference papers ‘Literature and Arts’ vol. 1. French psychoanalytic feminism has been less reticent on the issue of lesbianism: see Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) pp. 98–112.
Janet Sayers, Sexual Contradictions: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism (London: Tavistock, 1986) p. x.
At times Journey to a Woman reads like a case-study for Betty Friedan’s ‘problem with no name’. See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1965). I am grateful to Sue O’Sullivan for first drawing my attention to this point.
Lucy Bland, ‘Purity, Motherhood, Pleasure or Threat? Definitions of Female Sexuality, 1900–1970s’, in Sue Cartledge and Joanna Ryan (eds), Sex and Love: New Thoughts on Old Contradictions (London: The Women’s Press, 1983) pp. 8–29.
J. Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985) p. 81.
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Hamer, D. (1990). ‘I Am a Woman’. In: Lilly, M. (eds) Lesbian and Gay Writing. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20837-1_4
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