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An investigation of the lesbian identity through visual and cultural representation |
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It was only when women were accepted as authors that the stories became more authentic in dealing with women’s emotions, although they still had to conform to the ‘tenor of the times … [and] … its rigid moral framework’ (ibid, p. xiv). Among the best-known of these female pulp fiction writers is Ann Bannon; although her work was subject to the same suggestive covers and negative blurbs as others, she realized that ‘[t]he same critical scorn that judged the work of us paperback writers as unworthy of attention, had seemed to guarantee us privacy, the chance to explore and experiment, to say the unsayable’ (Bannon, annbannon.com, [no date]), a viewpoint shared by Abate Paperback novels had an adult rather than a child audience and were largely a populist form that existed outside of bourgeois literary conventions. Thus, they were able to depict more radical modes of female behaviour than their mainstream counterparts …(op cit, p. 173) With this in mind, Bannon structured her stories to subtly introduce more positive endings. In spite of the fact that her characters largely conformed to the established stereotypes and her stories contained the obligatory overtly sexual scene, they always ended with the women staying together or at least one of them going off to an open, hopeful future. When she began writing at the age of 22, Bannon had read only two novels with lesbian content, one of which was Well of Loneliness. There are echoes of Stephen Gordon in her best-known character, a woman called Beebo Brinker, which not only show the influences of Ellis but illustrate how Hall’s upper-class heroine has now become reincarnated as a working-class woman. Gordon was brought up by her wealthy land-owning father and aristocratic mother, privately educated and surrounded by privileges whilst Brinker was raised by her veterinarian father and brother after the death of her mother. Both women had a link to the land and the ‘natural’ shown through Gordon’s love of horses and Brinkers’s devotion to healing sick animals. The ambulance-driving exploits of Gordon in the first World War are mirrored by Brinker’s ‘delivery boy’ job in New York in the 1960s. Even the masculine physical attributes are faithfully rendered – Brinker’s ‘face … was in many ways the face of a boy. Her stance was boyish and her low voice too was like a boy’s balanced on the brink of maturity. And there it would stay all her life, never to plumb the true depth of a man’s’ (Bannon, 1962, p.18). Brinker’s first love is ‘wholly feminine, soft and submissive’ and ‘Beebo wanted to protect her, accomplish things for her’ (ibid, p. 88) while Gordon falls in love at first sight as it ‘dawned on [her] that this woman was lovely – she was … like some rare, pale flower without blemish or stain’ (Hall, 1956, p. 130). Surprisingly, although Bannon conformed to the model of lesbianism as it had been established at the turn of the century, the illustration on the original book cover (fig. 7, above left) of Beebo Brinker was not overly lurid, although it did have touches of heavy handed imagery. The illustration of Brinker, showing her as she arrived in New York, is faithful to Bannon’s description of the clothes she wore – ‘a sporty jacket … a man’s white shirt, open at the throat … a straight tan cotton skirt … white socks and tennis shoes’ (op cit, p. 10) although the artist, for some reason, has given her pink socks. A sign above her head points out that it is ‘One Way’ to ‘Gay St.’. |
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The blurb is a bit kinder than usual, referring to her as ‘lost, lo, above rightnely and boyishly appealing’. It is the re-release by the lesbian publishers Cleis in 2001 (fig. 8) that has the classic brunette lesbian leering at the blonde innocent, who has her eyes closed to symbolize rejection of the lesbian world. While this cover can be seen as an ironic deconstruction of the old-style covers, it can also be read as a cynical marketing ploy and raises questions of just how much political correctness means to a gay press when weighed against financial considerations and the conventions of our patriarchal society. Goffman (1990, p. 11) speaks of how ‘[s]ociety establishes the means of categorizing persons and the … attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of these categories’. A lesbian woman, because of her perceived rejection of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘natural’ attributes of the patriarchal society, is placed outside that society and, instead of possessing a ‘social identity’ which is acceptable to her peers, is deemed to have a ‘spoiled identity’ and ‘reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’ (ibid, p. 12) therefore risking both being ostracized and stigmatized. The lesbian pulp fiction novel consolidated the image of the lesbian woman as a spoiled identity – a predatory, psychologically damaged person preying on her weaker sisters. On the soft pornographic covers of the books, she was simultaneously objectified as a purely sexual being, providing titillation for male readers, and presented as a warning to ‘normal’ women. The plots underline the point that no good could come of being a lesbian and mete out punishments in the form of madness, suicide or imprisonment. The most invidious aspect of these novels was that they presented lesbian women with an established negative identity which was completely at odds with ‘normal’ heterosexual society. |
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