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Novel Approaches to Lesbian History
Linda Garber
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING
Novel Approaches to
Lesbian History
Linda Garber
Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
Series Editors
Gina Wisker
International Ctr for Higher Ed Mgmt
University of Bath
Cambridge, UK
Denise deCaires Narain

University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
This monograph series aims to showcase late twentieth and twenty-first
century work of contemporary women, trans and non-binary writers in
literary criticism. The ‘women’ in our title advocates for work specifically
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missions that engage directly with different definitions of ‘feminism’. Our
series does make the claim for a continuing imperative to promote work
by women authors; it remains essential for our field to make space for this
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Linda Garber
Novel Approaches
to Lesbian History
Linda Garber
Women’s & Gender Studies Department
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, CA, USA
ISSN 2523-8140 ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
ISBN 978-3-030-85416-4 ISBN 978-3-030-85417-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85417-1
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For Barbara, my love
With affection and gratitude for my fairy godmothers, Peg and Lillian
And dedicated to the memory of Muriel, Helen, and Mildred
Acknowledgments
As a younger woman I was fortunate to be taught, mentored, and

befriended by four giants of lesbian studies: Peg Cruikshank, Lillian
Faderman, Estelle Freedman, and Bonnie Zimmerman. To them I owe my
career. Without them, this book would not exist.
Many thanks to friends who read parts of Novel Approaches to Lesbian
History over the years: Michelle Burnham, Pamela Cheek, Bridget Cooks,
Lisa Hogeland, Sharon Page Ritchie, Mairead Sullivan, Peg, and Lillian.
Thanks, also, to friends who supported this project in so many ways,
among them: Shay Brawn, Erin Carlston, Laura Ellingson, Eileen Elrod,
Noreen Giffney, Jonathan Hunt, Liz Hutchison, Carisa Showden, Marilyn
Wann, and the Fingersmiths—Sharon, Judie, Ruth, and Duffy. And to my
sisters, Neila, Beth, and Susan, who make everything bearable with grace
and humor. Too many friends to mention here encouraged me over the
years, and I’m grateful to all of them.
It helped enormously to discuss my ideas with receptive critical audi-
ences at meetings of the Modern Language Association, Popular Culture/
American Culture Association, and Western Literature Association.
Likewise, the D.C. Area Queer Studies Symposium, the University of
Leeds Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, the University of
Auckland English Department, and especially the Lesbian Lives
Conferences in Dublin and Brighton provided important venues to share
and discuss my work in progress. I’m grateful for Esther Rothblum’s stew-
ardship of the Journal of Lesbian Studies, which in 2015 published my
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
essay “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and

Fiction.”
The Interlibrary Loan staff of the Santa Clara University Library made
my research possible, especially during the pandemic lockdown of
2020–2021. Two sabbaticals from my position in the Women’s and
Gender Studies Department at SCU facilitated reading all of the novels,
most of which came from the national treasure that is Powell’s City of
Books in Portland, Oregon.
Last, and most, I thank Barbara Blinick, who has lived with Novel
Approaches for so many years.
Contents
1 Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother 1
2 H(a)unting the Archives 19
3 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lesbian Sex*

*But Only in Historical Fiction 41
4 Tomboys and Indians 77
5 Unsafe Seas for Women111
6 The Usual Suspects145
Epilogue: Failing That, Invent165
Lesbian Historical Novels by Category167
Key to Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels171
ix
x Contents
Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels173
Name Index179
Subject Index185
CHAPTER 1
Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother
When I was twenty-one years old and had been living as a lesbian for just
over a year, I came out to my mother. She looked at me and said, “I’m
glad you finally felt like you could talk to me about it.” I was both delighted
and dumbfounded. Years later she told me she “knew” that I was “differ-
ent” from an early age. The day I came out my mother gave me a priceless
gift, a story about a lesbian in the past. “You remember my friend Mildred,
from Liberty?” she asked. It turns out that Mildred, my mother’s best
friend at least since junior high school, had left the Catskills in 1950 and
moved to New York City, where she lived with her female lover—or
“friend,” as my mother probably put it. She didn’t seem sure why I was so
delighted to hear the story, nor why I was so upset about two things: that
I hadn’t known the story when I was younger, and that Mildred’s lover
left her after ten years to marry a man. But my mother intuitively knew
one thing, that I needed to hear the story.
By that summer when I came out to my family, I had begun collecting
lesbians in history through research, chance encounter, and gossip. My
experience was common, at least in the 1970s and 1980s. It seemed that
any time the name of a famous woman came up—Virginia Woolf, Bessie
Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt—someone in my feminist and increasingly les-
bian world would say, “You know, she was ‘family’…” Leaving aside for
the moment our propensity to collect bisexuals under our enthusiastic
lesbian banner, the practice was still noteworthy for what it says about our
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
L. Garber, Novel Approaches to Lesbian History, Palgrave Studies in
Contemporary Women’s Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85417-1_1
2 L. GARBER
need for history. We certainly speculated about living women—from Tracy

Chapman to a couple of high-profile professors on campus—but the past
had an irresistible draw. We desperately needed to know that we had been
there in the past. We wanted to know “What Lesbians Have Done for
America,” later the subtitle of Lillian Faderman’s book To Believe in
Women (2011).
To the lesbian scrapbook that began with my mom’s friend Mildred, I
soon added a couple of dyke standbys, a high school PE coach who came
out to me when I was in college, and a former camp counselor whose
name turned up in a gay newspaper as the head of a national LGBT rights
group. In time, I would gather a queer family album: two cousins, a dis-
tant relative in South America, and my uncle’s brother. My friend Ruth
has a literal photo album of the great aunt who raised her mother, and her
great aunt’s “friend.” Another lesbian friend, raised by her mother and
aunt, sees them as an emotional lesbian couple—though not sexual, still a
story of her lesbian family origins.
Why did I so badly want these stories when I was young? Why do I trea-
sure them so today? And what do I have in common with all those other
lesbians who seem to feel the same way? The gossip mill that I remember
from my college days—which we perpetuated at the women’s bookstore
where I worked in graduate school, and which in some ways is my stock in
trade as a lesbian studies professor—is a widely shared, almost compulsive
activity. We want our lesbian celebrities (Tracy, Melissa), our dyke forbear-
ers (Gertrude and Alice, the Ladies of Llangollen), our lavender histories.
Certainly, uncovering lesbian history was a major project of lesbian
feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, both its academic and activist sides. It
was in that era that the monumental Lesbian Herstory Archives was begun
in the Manhattan apartment of Joan Nestle and Deb Edel, and the collec-
tion of historical lesbians continues apace today, in books, archives, and on
line. Deciding whom to name a lesbian in the past is a question with which
lesbian historians have struggled from the outset of the lesbian-feminist
academic project.
In her book A Desired Past, Leila Rupp (1999) tells the story of her
aunt and her aunt’s friend, who “were just like a married couple” (1).
Rupp explains that she never knew for sure if they were lovers, and that
they certainly didn’t call themselves “lesbian.” For her, their ambiguous
story raises vital questions about the knowability of lesbian history. Lesbian
history has always been a self-aware field of historiographical creation as
much as historical discovery. Unanswered questions dominate the
1 WHO KNOWS, WHO CARES, AND WHY BOTHER 3
landscape: What is a lesbian in the first place? What constitutes evidence of

lesbianism in the past? How much does it help to recast “lesbian” as a
continuum, or an adjective, or a question instead of an answer?1 The his-
torical records, if they exist at all, frustrate as often as they inform. Spotty,
written by men, open to multiple interpretations—traces of a recognizably
lesbian past run aground on the rocky shoals of the history of sexuality
itself.2 Some people argue that the search for “lesbians” in a pre-homosex-
ual era is not only futile but wrong-headed. As a great deal of historical
scholarship points out, it’s unlikely that many cross-dressing and/or
women-loving women in history would recognize themselves as the “les-
bians” they are claimed to be.
But who cares, really? I pose this question both flippantly and in all
seriousness, not least because I myself care. Scholars strive for understand-
ings of the past that are nuanced and intellectually rigorous, relying on
theoretical principles that make the recovery of recognizably “lesbian”
history difficult. The majority of people, however, want the validation that
comes with identification. So, like most histories, lesbian history has
spawned a genre of imaginative fiction. As early as the 1930s, novelists
began to project clearly identifiable lesbian imagery into the past.3 The
number of lesbian historical novels increased dramatically in the 1980s,
roughly simultaneous with the rise of the Foucauldian insistence that
homosexual identity didn’t exist before the late nineteenth century.4 Laura
Doan and Sarah Waters (2000) sum up the dilemma of lesbian historical
research in the light of postmodern insight: “[T]he lesbian past grows
increasingly insubstantial the nearer one draws to it; ultimately, perhaps,
there is no ‘it’ to be recovered” (24). We could date the rise of lesbian
historical fiction to the era when lesbian-feminist history ran into a theo-
retical brick wall. Without much concrete evidence of sexual activity
between women in the past (in most cases, Anne Lister notwithstanding),
and with a widespread understanding of “lesbian” as a recent historical
category, what more could be said that wasn’t speculative?
Enter the lesbian protagonist in period costume and setting, manifesting
our desire for a history without which it is difficult to envision a future.
Based on traces of evidence, provocative images, cherished gossip—or noth-
ing at all but fantastical desire—lesbians writing in English in more than 200
novels and a handful of films depict a wide-ranging cast of marauding
pirates, Civil War scouts, Western bandits, homesteading pioneers, suffrag-
ists, schoolteachers, wealthy ladies, working class servants, prostitutes, and
shopkeepers—all of whom enjoy fabulous, orgasmic sex with other women.5
4 L. GARBER
And lest anyone mistake them for merely eccentric, many of the characters
understand their identity to be different from most other women.
As much as the term and identity “lesbian” are under pressure today,
these novels make clear that it remains an idea with some force. I’m not
unaware of the debates, and I find various arguments about the limits and
misuses of the term persuasive, from Judith Butler in the early 1990s to
many of my contemporaries thirty years later. Even the Journal of Lesbian
Studies issued a call for papers in 2020 on the topic “Is Lesbian Identity
Obsolete?” But I still find myself agreeing with Terry Castle’s unfashion-
able statement from 1993: “If in ordinary speech I say, ‘I am a lesbian,’
the meaning is instantly (even dangerously) clear: I am a woman whose
primary emotional and erotic allegiance is to my own sex” (15). While the
term is debated among us—scholars, activists, queers of many stripes—in
the workaday world it carries a vitality that it never enjoyed before, having
become more widely speakable in the context of marriage and other rights,
even in the dubious, omnipresent invocation of June’s annual LGBTQ
pride as a marketing strategy. The death of “lesbian,” as the saying goes, is
greatly exaggerated. I would go so far as to argue that challenges to the
term “lesbian” highlight its longevity and, if we play our cards right, its
productive elasticity.6
Whether or not the term survives in the long run, the role of what I’m
calling lesbian historical fiction remains the same for women, broadly
defined, who love women. Lesbian historical novels weave lesbians into
the fabric of recognizable historical eras and events; if they were a political
slogan, it would be “We were everywhere.” Novels that depict ordinary,
daily life in a historical setting seem to say, “We’ve always been just like
everyone else,” though we’ve had to hide and/or fight for our right to
exist. Many writers take advantage of popular mythologies—of the Old
West, say, or swashbuckling pirates—to insinuate lesbians into the stories
a culture likes to tell about itself. If pioneers in Conestoga wagons are
American as apple pie, lesbian pioneer tales can interpolate lesbians into a
nationalist identity. Of course, assimilation cuts both ways; among other
things, American pioneers were colonizers.
For good or ill, iconic historical settings are marketable, the literary
equivalent of the hugely successful American Girls doll franchise.7
Frequently, a historical novel’s setting allows its lesbian protagonist to
engage in a valiant struggle for justice: fighting slavery, protesting for
workers’ rights, organizing for suffrage. If historical fiction provides an
avenue to assimilation, seen from another angle it carves out territory to
be different—even heroic—in a comfortably recognizable and marketable

past. It says, we could have been there, and if we were, we certainly would
have contributed to a righteous cause.
For most lesbian historical novelists and filmmakers, the nuances of
scholarly historiography take a back seat to some mixture of archival
research, reasonable speculation, and wish fulfillment. Emma Donoghue
(2006) distinguishes between writers “who make it all up” and those like
herself who conduct research “desirous of having some historical reality.”
She notes that it’s “often best to only find a few” facts, since they can
“spur” but also “fetter” the writer (“Picking Up Broken Glass”). All con-
temporary novels, irrespective of genre, include a statement designed to
protect their authors and publishers from liability, declaring the books
works of fiction, “any resemblance to actual events or people” being
“coincidental.” About a third of lesbian historical novels also include
author’s notes explaining their stories’ grounding in historical fact, which
raises the question along with Donoghue of the role of the intervention
performed by lesbian historical fiction “at still a relatively early phase of
digging up—or shall we say creating” the lesbian past (“Picking Up
Broken Glass”).
Like Donoghue, a small number of lesbian historical novelists devote
considerable space to the available historical evidence about their charac-
ters. Most of the others who provide notes state the bits of historical fact
on which they base an elaborate yarn, or the truth of the general subject
matter, such as the existence of women-loving women on the North-
American western frontier or women, often cross-dressing, forming rela-
tionships with women during the U.S. Civil War.8
Some notes address the deliberate liberties authors take with the his-
torical record and their reasons for doing so. Anne Cameron’s preface to
the Canadian frontier novel The Journey (1982) says, in part, “When one
is re-inventing the world one cannot be concerned with minor details, and
when one has become convinced, over a number of years, that the privi-
leged patriarchal perspective is sick, one looks for alternatives.” Cameron’s
statement in 1982 responds to Adrienne Rich’s lesbian-feminist call a
decade earlier for “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh
eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction,” which Rich
called “an act of survival” (“When We Dead Awaken,” 35). Cameron
makes clear that the text she set out to rewrite is the popular Hollywood
Western, in which “The boys could identify with the heroes. We had Dale
Evans. She was the one with no guns, the one on the slower horse, who
6 L. GARBER
rode behind Roy just in time to catch the mud flying from his gallant
steed’s hooves.”
Cameron’s further reminiscence hints at the racist, colonialist mess of
appropriation into which the lesbian historical novel almost invariably
steps when it Goes West: “[B]ecause I had long hair, worn in pigtails, and
the stereotype did not allow me a six-gun, a rifle, or a knife, I spent many
hours tied to trees, the captive Indian.” Cameron had become convinced
“over a number of years” that history must have been different than the
skewed story told and retold through biased popular culture, so she
penned her own version starring heroic lesbians battling violent white
men—sadly replete with the same Chinese and Native American support-
ing cast found more widely in Westerns, running the gamut of stereotypes
from sneaky laborers to benevolent healers.
Most lesbian historical novels are written by white women, and far too
many bear some version of the Western’s racist stereotypes. A handful of
significant exceptions are written by and feature lesbians of color and oth-
erwise ethnically nondominant women-loving women. Among them are
Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo (2009), Judith Katz’s The Escape
Artist (1997), Samar Habib’s Rughum & Najda (2012), Jewelle Gomez’s
The Gilda Stories (1991), Elana Dykewomon’s Beyond the Pale (1997),
and Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1996)—all works that
illuminate both the intersections and dissimilarities between sexual and
racial or ethnic identities.
The corpus of lesbian historical fiction, warts and all, illustrates the
novelist’s freedom to invent where the historian must research. The bal-
ance between evidence and imagination has been as much under consider-
ation in mainstream academia as it was in the heyday of lesbian-feminist
community activism. John Demos (2005) envisions historical fiction exist-
ing in a “borderland of surprising width and variegated topography” that
joins history and fiction” (329). And this borderland is rife with political
possibilities; as Jerome DeGroot (2013) puts it, “Historical novels critique
the hegemonic structure of a totalizing, explaining past” (57). Richard
Slotkin (2005) argues in “Fiction for the Purposes of History” that his-
torical fiction goes beyond “stimulating interest in the study of history…
If properly understood, the writing of historical fiction can be a valuable
adjunct to the work of historians in their discipline” (222). He contends
that fiction allows historians to explain what they “understand,” which is
often “more…than can be proved according to the rules of the discipline,”
leading to a choice “between knowledge and understanding: between
telling the whole story as [the researcher] has come to understand it; or
only what can be proved, with evidence and argument” (223).
This may be what Patricia Duncker means when she writes in the after-
word to The Doctor (1999), a novel about the life of a cross-dressing
nineteenth-century physician, “As to the inner reality of James Miranda
Barry’s life, here we can only guess at the truth, for there is very little evi-
dence. And it is here that the novelist will always have the edge over the
historian” (375). Detailing the sources she used to write Life Mask (2004),
Donoghue acknowledges that “For the private relations between” the
characters, “of course, I’ve had to rely on educated guesswork” (606).
Isabel Miller’s 1969 classic Patience and Sarah is based on scant evidence
about an early nineteenth-century painter and her female companion. In
an afterward, Miller writes, “We are provoked to tender dreams by a
hint” (203).
Like Cameron in her prefatory note, a number of lesbian and queer
historians embrace “telling the whole story,” entertaining the alternative
history that “reasoning, if not documentation, persuades us must have
been” (Laskaya 45). Lesbian historical researchers have long debated
whether same-sex affection and erotic behavior in the past can be consid-
ered “lesbian” in the sense that we currently use the term. At least since
the 1990s, transgender scholars and activists have cautioned against claim-
ing cross-dressing or passing women as lesbians, which can ignore trans as
an identity and historical phenomenon.9 Still, many lesbians outside of
academe follow Cameron, who notes that “Dedicated critics and commit-
ted historians will quickly find that this novel does not pay particular atten-
tion nor give much respect to the recorded version of history. Pickypicky!”
Instead of ignoring evidence, scholars tend to advocate viewing it dif-
ferently than it has been, and they frequently disagree about the appropri-
ate uses of terminology. Ruth Vanita (2002) makes a compelling argument
that all vocabulary is culturally bound and presentist, not just the word
“lesbian” (4-5). Anne Laskaya (2011) concurs, “Some terms elicit ener-
getic interrogation … while others remain less scrutinized … the extensive
defining, confining, and qualifying that pervasively occurs with the term
‘lesbian’ also points to the power of our own culture’s homophobic resis-
tance” (36). Valerie Traub (2007) argues for “a new methodological para-
digm for lesbian history” that takes seriously the similarities researchers
and others perceive among women-loving women, particularly as they
“recur, intermittently and with a difference, across time” (125-26).
8 L. GARBER
Queer theorists exploring temporality make similar claims; “queer time”

in Carla Freccero’s (2011) formulation, can productively “confound the
temporalities we call past, present, and future” (68). Following Walter
Benjamin, Freccero posits history as “a political project for the present …
For those seeking, in the present, a history that does not tell the story of
the naturalness of one kind of erotic affectivity, it is important to rescue the
dead from the enemy, because, if not, the dead risk never having been,” a
dire prospect with consequences for the future. Freccero thus advocates
“anachronistic desire … queer in its reading of history for the pleasures of
identification” (62-3). This is a simultaneously postmodern and identitar-
ian goal, both academically queer and clearly, politically, lesbian. Laura
Doan (2013) states plainly that “history is always in the service of the pres-
ent (this is not a problem of history, it is a condition of history)” (89).
Doan’s insight notwithstanding, historians have rarely gone as far as
literary scholars and cultural theorists. Even as the protagonist of Stevie
Davies’ Impassioned Clay (2000) informs her students in an Oxford his-
tory class that “Without imagination…you will never be historians,” she
admits that “this heresy was not approved by the department” (42). In
1990 the historian Judith M. Bennett first provided lesbian studies with
the extremely useful, and careful, term “lesbian-like,” to describe “women
whose lives might have particularly offered opportunities for same-sex
love; women who resisted norms of feminine behavior based on hetero-
sexual marriage; women who lived in circumstances that allowed them to
nurture and support other women” (9-10). Bennett makes clear that she
wants “to participate in the creation of histories that can have meaning for
those women who today identify as lesbians, bisexuals, queers, or other-
wise” (4).
Doan distinguishes between two genealogical “modes of history writ-
ing,” which she calls ancestral and queer:
What energizes ancestral genealogy is its confidence in—and political com-

mitment to—the possibility of finding family resemblances to (or dissimilari-
ties from) a largely stable modern homosexual. This is an object that queer
genealogy, while acknowledging ancestral efforts as a necessary early stage in
the historiography of homosexuality, ultimately dismisses as theoretically
naive, untenable, and even mired in transhistorical ‘nostalgia.’ (58-9).
Doan herself favors a third mode, “queer critical history,” whose “value is
not to provide a usable past but to explain aspects of the sexual past that
resist explanation in the context of identity history” (61). To most garden-

variety lesbians, Doan’s distinctions may appear arcane and Bennett’s
“lesbian-like” simply doesn’t go far enough. Monique Wittig’s novel Les
Guérillères (1969) exhorts women to “Make an effort to remember” in
the face of history’s silences, “Or, failing that, invent” (89). The unspeci-
fied mythic time of Les Guérillères is embodied in the queer-time, lesbian-
historical Sappho—both Lesbian (geographic/ historical) and lesbian
(sexual/political)—who promises in Fragment 60, “Someone in / some
future time / will think of us.” The only way for modern lesbians to
assemble a complete picture of our past has been to search out the frag-
ments and inventively fill in the blanks.
Sarah Waters talks about employing historical settings not only to cor-
rect inaccurate and partial histories, but to think “about how we write
about history… still very much aware that the past is absolutely teeming
with untold gay stories, or stories that aren’t popularly known” (Armitt
120-21). On the strength of her six novels, Waters has garnered numerous
accolades, including being short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three
times and the Orange Prize twice, being named Stonewall Writer of the
year twice, and winning an unprecedented three Lambda Literary Awards
for fiction. Four of her novels have been adapted into films, and her work
has been translated into thirty languages. In 2009 she was elected to the
Royal Society of Literature, and in 2019 she was presented with an Order
of the British Empire for services to literature.
Unlike many famous writers who scorn identity labels as mainstream
attempts to marginalize their work, Waters claims the title “lesbian author”
repeatedly in interviews. She speaks of “living as a lesbian” (afterellen.
com), names herself “a modern lesbian feminist writer” (Dennis 44), and
says it “makes sense to call me a lesbian writer in the sense that I’m a writer
who is a lesbian—and also a writer for whom lesbian issues are at the fore-
front of what I’m doing” (qtd. in Palmer 72). Speaking on an author tour
for The Little Stranger (2009), a slightly abashed Waters apologized to
lesbians in San Francisco that the book has a male protagonist and no
lesbian characters (afterellen.com).10
Waters’ talent, prominence, and contributions are unquestionable, but
she’s not alone. Along with Emma Donoghue and Jeanette Winterson,
she is one of a triumvirate of prominent, best-selling lesbian historical
novelists with both lesbian and mainstream audiences, each of them taking
a different approach to the genre. On the strength of her first three novels,
all set in the nineteenth century, Waters is best known as a neo-Victorian
10 L. GARBER
writer. Neo-Victorian scholars discuss Donoghue as well, but her contri-

bution to the genre is predominantly archival. Jeanette Winterson repre-
sents a postmodern approach, invested in the concept of time as much as
history.
All of Waters’ novels are historical, set in either the nineteenth century
(Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith), the 1920s (The Paying
Guests) or the 1940s (The Night Watch, The Little Stranger). She explains
in interviews that she began writing novels to explore historiographical
questions arising from her doctoral thesis, “Wolfskins and Togas: Lesbian
and Gay Historical Fictions, 1870 to the Present,” which “examines the
role of historical reference in the representation of homosexuality in British
literature since the late nineteenth century” (2). As an extension of her
graduate work, Waters’ novels engage literary questions at least as cen-
trally as historical ones: “the sorts of issues…literary departments are
interested in talking about,” “playing around with literary tradition”
(Armitt 125), and “nineteenth-century form” (Broughton 5).
Not surprisingly, a fair amount of scholarly ink has been spilled in the
field of Neo-Victorian Studies analyzing Waters’ work. Like other neo-
Victorian novels, Waters’ first three books are set in the nineteenth cen-
tury both historically and stylistically. In other words, they carefully set
lesbian stories in the recognizable world of nineteenth-century novels.
Jerome de Groot argues, for example, that “Waters makes a clear historio-
graphic intervention in her work … largely expressed through her engage-
ment with the possibilities of the historical novel genre” (58). Put another
way by Mariaconcetta Costantini, Waters knows that “both history and
fiction consist of plural representations, none of which is objectively, unde-
niably true. It is only by merging them together that we get a better sense
of the ‘reality’ of past ages and, in so doing, detect affinities with the pres-
ent, which help us rethink our role and identity” (19).
Waters herself explains that “a novel like Fingersmith was very deliber-
ately written in the tradition of the Victorian novel of sensation” (Armitt
117), that her nineteenth-century novels are “like a celebration of the
Victorian novel itself” (Dennis 46). Kate Mitchell goes so far as to term
Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002) “‘faux’ Victorian fiction” in which
Waters “speaks with the language of Victorian fiction in order to invent a
tradition of nineteenth-century female homosexuality, writing it into our
cultural memory of the Victorian literary tradition by a fictional sleight of
hand” (10). In doing so, Waters creates for lesbians something like the
literary legacy uncovered for gay men by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her
groundbreaking study Between Men: English Literature and Male

Homosocial Desire. Waters’ Neo-Victorian novels explore the lesbian
potential implicit in the nineteenth-century British novel, deftly raising
questions about sexual identity, class, and other contemporary political
issues without calling attention to the revisionary and historiographical
work she performs under the cloak of period-perfect literary reenactment.
Like Waters, Emma Donoghue is a scholar of lesbian literature and his-
tory. She has published novels both contemporary and historical, clearly
lesbian and not. Among her sixteen books are a survey of “British Lesbian
Culture 1668-1801” (Passions Between Women, 1993), a biography of the
Victorian lesbian writing couple Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (We
Are Michael Field, 1998), and a study of “Desire Between Women in
Literature” (Inseparable, 2010). Donoghue’s research skills show up to
great effect in her four lesbian historical novels: Life Mask, about the eigh-
teenth-century British sculptor Anne Damer; The Sealed Letter (2009),
about a scandalous divorce trial in 1860s London; Frog Music (2014),
about the murder of cross-dressing Jenny Bonnet in 1870s San Francisco;
and The Pull of the Stars (2020), set in the Dublin influenza epidemic
of 1918.
All four of these novels include extensive author’s notes explaining the
research sources and known facts behind the literary plots. At the end of
both Life Mask and The Sealed Letter, Donoghue devotes several pages to
describing the extant historical records about the novels’ respective main
characters, the eighteenth-century sculptor Anne Damer and the
nineteenth-century feminist Emily “Fido” Faithfull. Donoghue explains at
the end of Life Mask, “This novel is fiction, but the kind that walks arm in
arm with fact” (605). While The Sealed Letter has been discussed by Neo-
Victorian studies scholars, by and large Donoghue’s historical fiction aims
more straightforwardly for placing lesbians in and through archival history
rather than literary tradition.11
Waters revels in historiographical questions; for example, “On what
terms does history appeal to the lesbian writer and how is the past negoti-
ated in lesbian literary production?” (Doan and Waters 13). Meanwhile
Donoghue is keen to publish stories demonstrating that love between
women existed in the past, that we were there. She explained as much to a
newspaper reporter in 2008:
Imagine living in a city where there are no monuments, no buildings from

before 1970, no proof that you had grandparents or parents, no history at
12 L. GARBER
all. Wouldn’t that make you feel like you were just a passing fad, that you
could be blown away like leaves? … for any community to feel substantial
and able to change without losing themselves, a history is absolutely crucial.
(qtd. in Lawlor)
Grounded in archival research, Donoghue’s lesbian historical novels pro-

vide that history. Even her collections of short stories—for example, The
Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), Three and a Half Deaths (2011),
and Astray (2012)—feature actual people or incidents found in the archives,
marked as such in author’s notes. Like Waters, Donoghue is a literary
celebrity, having won the Commonwealth Prize for Fiction, the Stonewall
Book Award (twice), and the Lambda Literary Award. Her screenplay for
her novel Room (2010) was nominated for an Academy Award, and she has
been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize.
Many of Jeanette Winterson’s books, whether lesbian or not, are con-
cerned in some way with history—her own (Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?), or her characters’
(The Daylight Gate, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry), or western civiliza-
tion’s, in that particular form of cultural history alternately called mythol-
ogy and religion (Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, Boating for
Beginners). Winterson’s vast learning is everywhere evident, but the
archives are nowhere to be seen, and she masterfully plays fast and loose
with details and chronologies. Her queer novel Sexing the Cherry (1989)
is announced on its back cover as taking place in “a fantastic world that is
and is not seventeenth-century England.” Her lesbian masterpiece The
Passion (1987) relies on thoroughgoing knowledge of Napoleon’s Russian
Campaign and the history and lore of Venice, but like nearly all of her
novels the book is, finally, about love and time, not the particulars of the
historical setting. “The past is magnetic. It draws us in,” says the narrator
of Winterson’s novel The Powerbook (2000), but “History is a madman’s
museum” (157, 287). Time, throughout Winterson’s work, is figured as
“eternally present” (The Passion, 62), a concept about which there are
many lies (enumerated in Sexing the Cherry, 90). For Doan and Waters,
Winterson’s style is exemplary of “a sophisticated treatment of lesbian his-
toriographical issues and contradictions, one that problematises the very
categories with which sex and gender are constructed” (25).
Winterson both has an avid lesbian following and, like Donoghue and
Waters, is much lauded in the literary mainstream. Among other honors,
she has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn
Rhys Memorial Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the E.M. Forster
Award, and her books have been published in eighteen countries.12 In 2006
she was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to
literature. But lesbian community and politics have always been collabora-
tive affairs, more socialism than oligarchy. Amid the recent mainstream
popularity of historical fiction, the success of only three lesbian writers
points out the limited space in commercial publishing for lesbian historical
stories, and perhaps lesbian stories full stop.13 To build the historical back-
ground required by a diverse lesbian culture necessitates the dedication of
an independent feminist, lesbian, and/or queer publishing industry.
It has been, and remains, my perverse scholarly passion to pore over
lesbian books known to relatively few people—my people—lesbian read-
ers, for whom the corpus of lesbian historical fiction serves at least two
purposes. To entertain, certainly, but also to undergird contemporary les-
bian identity by providing it a historical, if speculative, grounding. The
majority of lesbian historical novels do exactly what Doan and Waters
accuse them of doing: purveying “nostalgia” masquerading as “histori-
cism” in the service of “an appealing, romantic rhetoric” (19, 15). But
Kate Mitchell is also right, that “nostalgia might be productive, giving
voice to the desire for cultural memory to which these novels bear wit-
ness,” including Waters’ own (5). Novel Approaches to Lesbian History
critically examines historical literature written by and for—and read pri-
marily by—lesbians, in the spirit of a movement that has evolved and
changed over the last half century while retaining a focus on a central tru-
ism: We are indeed everywhere, including the past. However speculative
or spurious or unreliable our sources, knowing so enables us to survive in
the present.
***
(Ring. Ring.)
Barbara: Hello?
Muriel: Honey, I lied to you.
Barbara: Auntie Mur? What you are you talking about?
Muriel: I always loved Helen.
Barbara’s aunt Muriel was phoning from her hospital bed. She thought
she was dying of congestive heart failure, and she needed to set the record,
well, lesbian. We had asked her years before, flat out, if she and Helen were
lovers, life-long partners like we are, and she had said no. Despite her
14 L. GARBER
many stories and photographs of their fifty-two years together, and despite
her acknowledging me as a member of the family, a lifetime of cautious
habit had led her to lie to us. Faced with her own mortality, she needed to
tell us the truth. Auntie Mur didn’t die that day, or that week, and over
time she told us her story. Like my mother, and not unlike lesbian histori-
cal novelists, Auntie Mur knew that we need our histories.
Notes
1. For “continuum” see Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian
Existence”; for “adjective” see Faderman, “A Usable Past?”; for question
instead of answer, see Ng.
2. Problems of interpretation are as thorny in gay male, bisexual, and trans
history. Women’s historical lack of access to literacy and power in most
cultures makes finding depictions of women (and hence, lesbians) particu-
larly difficult. Worldwide, the historical archive of images and descriptions
of men loving men is much larger than the archive of women loving women.
3. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show and Maude Meagher, The
Green Scamander were both published in the 1930s. Sarah Waters wrote
her doctoral thesis on Meagher’s novel; an essay version titled “Wolfskins
and Togas” was published in Women: A Cultural Review.
4. Elsewhere I have termed this insight “the Foucauldian Orthodoxy” and
pointed out its limitations, particularly in transnational context. See
Garber, “Where in the World Are the Lesbians?”
5. Compiling an exhaustive list of lesbian historical novels published in
English is a nearly impossible task, since library catalog headings are not
helpful, and because so many titles are out of print. Over the course of
some twenty years I have identified more than 200 titles whose stories take
place before 1930. Of these, only six were published before 1980; twenty-
two were published in the 1980s, thirty-five in the 1990s, and the rest
between 2000 and 2021.
6. My thinking on this subject has been most recently and productively influ-
enced by reading Mairead Sullivan’s insightful, provocative book Lesbian
Death: Disruption and Attachment between Feminist and Queer, forthcom-
ing from University of Minnesota Press, and by conversations with
the author.
7. My thanks to Pamela Cheek for suggesting the comparison. For some
examples of academic writing on American Girl dolls and books, see Osei-
Kofe, Chatelain, and Davion.
8. For a discussion of novels set on the western frontier, see Chap. 4: Tomboys
and Indians. Lesbian Civil War novels include, among others, Dunne,
Ennis, Radclyffe, and Thompson.
9. See, for example, Halberstam and Feinberg.
10. For representative interviews, see Mitchell, 129; Armitt, 125;
Broughton, 4-5.
11. For analysis of Donoghue’s work in Neo-Victorian studies, see O’Callaghan
and Pettersson.
12. www.jeanettewinterson.com. Web. 8 August 2016.
13. On the popularity of historical fiction, see for example Bourke, Crosby,
Dee, and Dukes.
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Garland, 2000.
CHAPTER 2
H(a)unting the Archives
The protagonist of Daphne Marlatt’s 1988 novel Ana Historic asks, “What
if … we live in history and imagination?” (139). Certainly, she does, an
exemplary heroine of a subgenre of lesbian historical fiction that features
characters who search the historical record aware of its limitations, whose
stories highlight the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of lesbian his-
tory. Suzanne Keen (2001) calls these “romances of the archive” (139).
They have in common protagonists looking for material or documentary
evidence of times past, and the passion of their quests stands as a metaphor
for the desired past that gives rise to the entire genre of lesbian historical
fiction. Seeming to rebut postmodern skepticism of the knowability of his-
tory, romance-of-the-archive plots purport to “answer questions about
what really happened, though … without surrendering [the] license to
invent” (Keen 3). Such books are less frequently studied than the post-
modern novels that Linda Hutcheon (1988) notably termed “historio-
graphic metafiction,” which “openly assert that there are only truths in the
plural, and never one Truth; and there is rarely falseness per se, just others’
truths” (109). Marked by “provisionality and indeterminacy,” historio-
graphic metafiction is less interested in finding the truth than in question-
ing “whose truth gets told” (111, 123). Similar concerns are frequently
explored, or at least implied, by lesbian historical fiction, but the desire for
a lesbian past—and the conviction that it must have existed—lends itself as
well to the convention of the realistic novel that provides a generally usable
past. Employing a sexual metaphor well suited to lesbian studies, Stevie
Davies puts it this way, “The historical record arouses without satisfying.
What answers it provides are seldom those our questions solicit. Fiction,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2021
L. Garber, Novel Approaches to Lesbian History, Palgrave Studies in
Contemporary Women’s Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85417-1_2
20 L. GARBER
through its dissemblings and guesswork, can satisfy not only by faking
evidence but also through mirroring those dissatisfactions” (Davies
2003, 29).
Marlatt’s novel satisfies both concerns, providing an avenue to a usable
lesbian past while simultaneously dissecting the biases and limitations of
traditional historical research. Marlatt illustrates the lesbian historical fic-
tion project through her protagonist Annie, a married white Canadian
writer who tells a different story from the official record, one that makes
her own present and future possible, and her past legible. Throughout
Marlatt’s novel, Annie researches the life of a “Mrs. Richards” in the local
archive, dubbing her “Ana,” imagining herself in the past as she creates
Ana as a character for a novel. Marlatt’s acknowledgements at the end of
the book explain, “this is a work of fiction; historical personages have been
fictionalized to possible and/or purely imaginary lengths” (n. pag.) Annie
can find very little documentation of Mrs. Richards’ life because, as she
knows, “history” is “the story … of dominance. mastery” (25). Annie
learns that Mrs. Richards arrived in a small logging town in British
Columbia in 1873 to take her first teaching post, that she claimed to be a
widow, that she bought a piano and taught in the one-room schoolhouse,
and that she soon married, becoming Mrs. Ben Springer—“the sweep of
that part of her life summed up” in a text from the period written by a
Major Matthews. Annie understands that “history is the historic voice
(voice-over), elegiac, epithetic. a diminishing glance as the lid is closed
firmly and finally shut. that was her. summed up. Ana historic” (48).
At first Annie is uncertain how far to go in filling the gaps of Mrs.
Richards’ story, which she had begun researching for her husband’s aca-
demic project. Throughout the novel, Annie carries on an internal conver-
sation with her deceased mother Ina, a woman stifled by her role as
mid-century wife and mother, robbed by electroshock treatments of her
“imagination,” her “will to create things differently” (149). Seeking to
understand and escape her mother’s fate, Annie explores plausible alterna-
tives for Mrs. Richards’ story, because she realizes that “something is
wanting” (48). Her pursuit is guided by a question she poses to her
mother: “whose truth, Ina?” Annie provides a veritable map for future
lesbian historical fiction when she responds to her own query: “when
you’re so framed, caught in the act, the (f) stop of act, fact—what recourse?
step inside the picture and open it up” (56).
Annie has dutifully internalized a traditional version of what history is
supposed to be, as personified by her husband Richard (Dick!), her former
2 H(A)UNTING THE ARCHIVES 21
professor and “a good historian” (134). She argues with her mother/
herself that she isn’t merely “telling stories” when she imagines a flirta-
tion, perhaps an affair, between Ana Richards and Birdie Stewart, “that
other enterprising woman who, flying in the face of family and church,
establishes her house that same year” (108). Rather, Annie is “untelling”
the horrific story of her mother’s life, the frightening tale of her own con-
ventional life, and the official history of Ana Richards’ life, in favor of
“true stories and real” whose telling depends upon “a monstrous leap of
imagination” (28, 141, 67, 135). Annie’s work is “a testimonial to wom-
en’s struggle to make room in history for their stories,” according to liter-
ary critic Marie Vautier (1999), “because to make room for their history is
to make room for themselves” (27). Marlatt herself explains that she “as
Annie … invented a historical leak, a hole in the sieve of fact that let the
shadow of a possibility leak through into full-blown life … Mrs. Richards
is a historical leak for the possibility of lesbian life in Victorian British
Columbia” (Marlatt, “Self Representation,” 15).
Annie takes a leap of lesbian imagination in her own life, urged on by
Zoe, into whose lesbian arms Annie literally leaps in the last pages of the
book—not an ending but a beginning, “the reach of your desire, reading
us into the page ahead” (n. pag.) Annie will survive and thrive by telling a
story about Mrs. Richards that defies “good” history by giving her research
subject/protagonist a first name, investing her with skills and opinions,
and exploring the possibility that she was unmarried and secretly took a
woman lover. She can only do so by writing a novel, ignoring the call of
scholarly history: “come back, history calls, to the solid ground of fact.
you don’t want to fall off the edge of the world—” (111). In an interview,
Marlatt makes clear the necessity of invention, exploiting the “historical
leak,” when she explains,
that scene that Annie writes between Birdie and Anna … is entirely con-
cocted. It’s entirely an invention and the book is quite clear about that, but
it’s an invention that allows the narrator to take that step that she’s having
trouble doing all through the book. It allows her suddenly to translate her-
self … She begins seeing the lesbian potential through the scripts of hetero-
sexual romance she’s grown up with, and through all the constraints of
Victorian sexuality, because that’s what she’s dealing with: the residue of
that as it’s passed down through the generations. (Curran 115)
22 L. GARBER
Marlatt and her protagonist perceive both the limits of the historical
record and the potential of historical discourse.
By understanding the limitations of Ina’s life and perceiving the lesbian
possibility of Mrs. Richards/Ana Historic, Annie Richardson can recreate
herself, Annie Present, and reach her full potential as the lesbian Annie
Future. Or, to quote Jeanette Winterson in The Passion (1987), “I’m telling
you stories. Trust me.” In Winterson’s fantastical historical novel, the char-
acter Henri explains that in a literal struggle for survival, “Stories were all we
had” (5, 107). Doan and Waters (2000) describe the brilliant historiograph-
ical turn of Winterson’s postmodern novels, which “mark a break with the
unwillingness of [most lesbian historical fiction] to abandon limiting para-
digms, and the beginning perhaps of a more inventive use of history” (20).
That is, novels of queer rather than ancestral genealogy.
Nevertheless, the sheer and increasing number of historical novels pro-
vide material testimony to Henri’s/Winterson’s statement, even when
they take more prosaic routes to the telling of lesbian historical stories.
Writing lesbians into recognizable—even cliché—versions of the past
seems to intone, “We exist, we exist, we exist.” I would go so far as to
argue that the dichotomy of postmodern versus realist lesbian historical
fiction is an unproductive one. Readers and writers know that the lesbian
historical novel is a flight of fancy, whether or not its historiographical
mechanisms are laid bare. Meanwhile, Marlatt and Winterson provide a
sophisticated depiction of the machinery at work—at the same time as
they satisfy readers’ cravings for historical representations of lesbians.
Mockumentary
Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1996) provides an example
of archive-romance that illustrates my point. Like Marlatt’s novel it simul-
taneously provides the sought-for historical lesbian and pulls back the cur-
tain to reveal her invention. Dunye’s film is particularly important for its
exploration of the intersections and divergences between historical recla-
mation projects focused on race and sexual identity. The film’s protagonist
is “Cheryl,” a young, Black, lesbian filmmaker played by Cheryl Dunye (a
young, Black, lesbian filmmaker). Cheryl has three on-screen relation-
ships: one with her best friend Tamara, an African-American lesbian;
another with Diana, a white lesbian who becomes her lover; and a third
with the focus of her documentary project, Fae Richards, an African-
American actress from the 1930s who was credited in films only as “The
Watermelon Woman.” As Cheryl researches her film within the film, paral-
lels between her life and Fae’s come into focus. Both face racism and
homophobia, and both encounter disapproval from African-American
friends for taking white lovers. Cheryl develops a clear sense that she needs
to understand her relationship to history, through Fae, in order to con-
tinue with her work in the present.
But everywhere Cheryl turns for information about “The Watermelon
Woman” she finds partial answers and particular forms of resistance. No
one she interviews on the street has ever heard of the actress. A gay Black
film memorabilia collector specializes in “race films” and Black Jazz Age
nightclubs in Philadelphia, but he admits that “women are not my spe-
cialty.” At the library, Cheryl tells her friend Tamara, “It’s not like I can go
and ask for information about the Watermelon Woman.” When she does,
the white male librarian tells her to “check the Black section in the refer-
ence library.” Cheryl responds, “Well, how about Martha Page. She was a
white woman director in the 1930s.” The librarian directs Cheryl to the
“film section,” as if she hadn’t already thought of it, then tells her, “The
only thing that’s coming up is Martha Page. She is coming up in several
non-reference titles on women and film. No, no Watermelon Woman.”
While Martha Page, who directed films starring the Watermelon Woman,
can be found in books and articles about “women in film,” the Watermelon
Woman repeatedly turns up lost between volumes on women, presumed
to be white, and Black people, presumed to be men.
The history of African-American film alone, or lesbian film alone, can’t
satisfy Cheryl’s needs, since they have been constituted primarily as two
separate histories.1 Lesbian/queer history privileges whiteness, African-
American history privileges heterosexuality, and the parallels are compli-
cated by structural and historical differences between the studies and
experiences of sexuality and race. Saidiya Hartman (2019) is right, “Every
historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved
is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the
limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who
is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor” (xiii). It’s
also the case that histories of different dispossessed groups face distinct
challenges. Reclamation projects of historically recognized groups—by
race, ethnicity, gender, class, and the like—demonstrate that a community
survived and contributed, and that people’s lives have been as misrepre-
sented as their ancestors were mistreated.2 Lesbian/queer history strug-
gles first to establish group identity, the valid historicity of its subject.
24 L. GARBER
Facing objections and dead ends while researching a historical project with
overt racial and sexual dimensions, Dunye ingeniously presents a docu-
mentary within a documentary that is actually a feature film. With her
genre choices, Dunye seems to say along with Winterson, “I’m telling you
stories. Trust me.”
Matt Richardson (2005, 2011) discusses The Watermelon Woman as an
instance of “Black Queer Signifying Practice” (“Critical,” 8): “documen-
tary film is another historiographical tool and a method of signifying on
the gaps in written history, not a replacement for history” (“Our,” 8) but
rather a repetition of “cultural norms with a distinct, and analytical differ-
ence” (“Critical,” 8) Film scholar Alexandra Juhasz, who produced The
Watermelon Woman, classifies it as a “fake documentary,” a type of film
that “make[s] use of (copy, mock, mimic, gimmick) documentary style
and therefore acquire[s] its associated content (the moral and social) and
associated feelings (belief, trust, authenticity) to create a documentary
experience defined by [its] antithesis, self-conscious distance.” As a “pro-
ductive” fake, The Watermelon Woman “mirrors and reveals the sustaining
lies of all documentary, both real and fake, producing the possibility for
the contesting of history, identity, and truth” (7). Certainly the film func-
tions on this level—but only for the viewer who reads the credits at the
end, where Dunye reveals the fiction of the otherwise straightforward-
appearing documentary. It is entirely possible to view The Watermelon
Woman as a successful “hoax,” as Thelma Wills Foote (2007) explains,
because to “spectators who presuppose the veracity of documentary form,
The Watermelon Woman becomes a prank at their expense.”
At the end of the film, Cheryl presents the documentary within the
feature, introducing it as, “What you all have been waiting for, the biog-
raphy of the Watermelon Woman, Fae Richards, Faith Richardson,” con-
sisting of black-and-white film clips, stills, and Cheryl’s voice over.
Curiously, screen credits appear only a minute into the documentary.
Attentive viewers raise an eyebrow by the second such credit, which lists
the actors, including Cheryl Dunye as “Cheryl,” and Lisa Marie Bronson
as “Fae ‘The Watermelon Woman’ Richards.” The credits flash by fairly
quickly, several of them noting production, direction, cinematography,
and the like in typical fashion. The eleventh credit screen is the big tipoff,
for someone paying close attention, because it acknowledges the creator
of “Photos and Home Movies of the Watermelon Woman,” the contem-
porary photographer Zoe Leonard. Foote explains that “many film specta-
tors” at a pre-release screening believed in the veracity of Cheryl’s
documentary even with the hints in the credits, failing to see the film as
Dunye’s fiction—or “fake,” or the director’s favored term, “Dunyementary”
(Foote). So Dunye added a final credit screen that reads, “Sometimes you
have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction. Cheryl
Dunye, 1996.” Because the announcement is made quietly at the very end
of the film, The Watermelon Woman can function as both a hoax and a
productive fake. As Juhasz (2006) states clearly, “a fake documentary
unmarked,” or one that’s so subtly marked, “is a documentary” (10).
Like Keen’s “romance of the archive,” the hoax/fake documentary sat-
isfies by doing two things at once, providing a historical lesbian character
and her story in a recognizable narrative format (the documentary), and
drawing attention to the historiographical complexities of lesbian research.
In other words, even though Juhasz and Foote are right about the com-
plexities of the fake documentary as it points to historiography and prob-
lems of history, the faked documentary of the Watermelon Woman and of
Cheryl’s search for her still satisfies the desire (or nostalgia) for “what you
all have been waiting for”—Black lesbian history—just like straightfor-
ward romances do. Foote explains,
With the campiness of a sophisticated drag performance, Dunye’s faux doc-

umentary film mocks the sobriety of classic documentary films about the
past and their nostalgia for the lost ancestor. Yet, Dunye’s mock-documentary
does not deny the meaningfulness of the past, nor does it overlook the epis-
temic violence perpetrated by the erasure of the black homosexual from the
historical record. Rather, the film affirms self-determining acts of making a
living and open history from a past whose meaning is forged by the mediat-
ing capacity of the creative imagination to traverse historical knowledge
and desire.
Maybe The Watermelon Woman is such a successful hoax not only

because of formal considerations, nor even audience desire that it be true,
but also because its African-American archival story is inseparable from the
lesbian one. Foote points out that The Watermelon Woman is a particularly
devastating hoax because the character Cheryl is conflated with Cheryl
Dunye, and audiences trust a Black lesbian to tell the truth about Black
lesbians. It’s less possible to deny outright the existence of people of color
in various historical situations because there is incontrovertible evidence
that they were there. Dunye skillfully combines faked movie clips and stills
of her character Fae Richards with pictures of African-American celebrities
26 L. GARBER
such as Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, and Louise Beavers; she

knows that most viewers can’t see the difference between the fictional
Black lesbian actress Cheryl has discovered and the historical actresses they
may or may not recognize.
Using a similar technique in her novel The Escape Artist (1997) Judith
Katz interweaves her magical-realist lesbian plot with the known history
of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Pale of Eastern Europe and their connec-
tion to an underground economy of Jewish prostitution in Buenos Aires.
Many white lesbian authors include cross-dressing women in their his-
torical fictions; we know they existed, too, and we have documentation
that some of them married women—even though “lesbians” are not sup-
posed to have existed until the medical establishment invented the idea in
the late nineteenth century. In Lesbian Romance Novels, Phyllis M. Betz
(2009) points out “the importance of incorporating accurate architec-
tural, decorative, and fashion description” into the historical fiction nar-
rative to “create the requisite fantasy element essential to the romance”
(86). The Watermelon Woman achieves its verisimilitude through depic-
tion rather than description, relying on Zoe Leonard’s still photographs
and “home movies” of Fae Richards as portrayed by actor Lisa Marie
Bronson.
Near the end of the film Dunye reveals her motivation for making The
Watermelon Woman, when Cheryl looks into the camera and states that
she needs to tell her version of the Watermelon Woman’s story to enable
her own life and creative work as “the one who says, ‘I am a Black, lesbian
filmmaker’”—an identity she had claimed only tentatively at the beginning
of the film. But Cheryl isn’t the only person who needs Fae’s story, and
not all interested parties need it for the same reasons. June Walker, Fae’s
lover for more than twenty years after she left the movies, leaves Cheryl a
letter and a packet of photographs and memorabilia she hopes will correct
the record on Fae, including Cheryl’s misinterpretation of her life. Cheryl
had been thrilled to find out that Fae and the white lesbian director Martha
Page were lovers, and she soaked up any and all images she could find of
Fae on film, however racist the scenario or depiction of Black female char-
acters. Having learned that, June writes, “I was so mad that you men-
tioned the name of Martha Page. Why did you even want to include a
white woman in a movie on Fae’s life? Don’t you know she had nothing
to do with how people should remember Fae?” Finding no alternative
views, save the silence and scant evidence of the official record, Cheryl had
been all too happy to claim the parts of Fae’s life with which she could
identify. She is thoroughly schooled by June, in a voiceover narration that

plays behind still shots and home movies of June and Fae. “She did so
much, Cheryl. That’s what you have to speak about. She paved the way for
kids like you to run around making movies about the past, and how we
lived then. Please, Cheryl, make our history before we are all dead and
gone. But, if you are really in the family, you better understand that our
family will always only have each other.”
While June knows more about Fae than others do, ultimately Cheryl
makes clear that June’s version, like all others, tells an invested story. The
truth is that Cheryl needs Fae for her own reasons. Like all documentari-
ans, Cheryl created the subject of her film. And in case viewers don’t
understand the importance of her story, Cheryl/Dunye states it clearly. In
order to live her Black, lesbian life in the present, she needs to believe in a
Black lesbian past. Dunye seems to say, with Winterson, “I’m telling you
stories. Trust me.”
We Are Family
In Stevie Davies’ Impassioned Clay (2000), lesbian “family” is biological
family, and the hunt is archaeological and spiritual as well as archival. The
novel opens with the discovery of a historical artifact under the parched,
root-laced soil of the protagonist’s backyard. Fifteen-year-old Olivia is
helping to dig the grave for her mother in the garden of the “straggling
homestead” that her “mother’s people have agelessly inhabited” when her
uncle’s spade strikes bone (4, 7). The digging becomes a project for a
team of university archaeologists when it becomes clear that the bone
belongs to a seventeenth-century skeleton, a woman hanged to death and
buried with the “scold’s bridle” that had mutilated her mouth and jaw.
Fifteenth or so in an odd line of Quaker women to inherit the land, Olivia
becomes obsessed with the skeleton and with the secrets of her undemon-
strative mother, whose intentional Quaker reserve faded to silence with
her death. Grief-stricken and bookish throughout her adolescence, as an
adult Olivia becomes a scholar of—what else?—history.
Olivia realizes her desire “to know” the skeleton woman is more than
academic curiosity. The body is discovered in “the web of roots” beneath
Olivia’s ancestral land, which is “rock-hard” from drought, watered now
by the grief of her father’s “forbidden tears” (6). Olivia’s university
research into the skeleton of her maternal line is personal in more ways
than one. She acknowledges that it draws her “with the kind of thrill most
28 L. GARBER
people of twenty keep for sexual discovery” (34), hinting at both the erot-
ics of lesbian historical research and the importance of the research to
Olivia’s growing knowledge of her own erotic leanings. At the same time,
Olivia meets Faith, the only other woman in the history department, who
becomes her first real friend. As Olivia pieces together clues about the
skeleton woman, she draws closer to Faith; her jealousy over Faith’s rela-
tionship with a male colleague leads her to her “latterday discovery of the
obvious,” her own attraction to women (57). Meanwhile, she learns that
the skeleton belonged to one Hannah Emmanuel, a persecuted, perhaps
mentally ill, renegade Quaker preacher who had a woman lover
named Isabel.
Olivia feels unable to speak her love to Faith, despite her growing iden-
tification with Hannah, who was violently silenced by her community
because she wouldn’t shut up about her belief in herself and other women
she considered holy. When a forensic archaeologist “scientifically” recon-
structs Hannah’s face, and she turns out to be a dead ringer for Olivia,
Olivia dives deeper into her research to discover all she can about Hannah
Emmanuel, and thus herself. Denied intimacy with a mother who believed
in the sanctity of silence, who died when her daughter was only fifteen,
Olivia digs into the suppressed truth of her maternal line. Following a pat-
tern established in her youth, she shrinks into a private world of books,
peopled by “the dead [who] spoke to me, with such vehement voices that
when I looked up, my contemporaries seemed blurred and dull” (32).
While her classmates “all wanted a good shag,” Olivia wants only knowl-
edge: “Carnal knowledge: I understood that biblical use of the verb to
know” (33).
Olivia’s archival sources include the ravings of a main-line minister who
persecuted Hannah, the self-serving testament of a contemporary and
rival of Hannah’s, a secret memoir written by Isabel, and finally Hannah’s
own manuscript, “Wilderness of Women,” which Olivia’s mother had
transcribed, redacted, and then hidden from Olivia. Olivia realizes that
each source reflects its author’s own agenda with respect to Hannah’s life.
Over the course of the novel, Olivia develops and learns to articulate her
own goals: to “shatter” the scold’s bridle and its “jagged mouthpiece,
with its rusted prongs to spike her tender tongue” (159, 131) and thus
deliver Hannah “from her long silence” (68). Olivia fulfills them by telling
Hannah’s story, ultimately collecting her bones from the museum and
reinterring them with dignity so that “She is free” (222).
Over the near decade since Olivia first discovered the skeleton, she has
learned lessons about the shortcomings and promises of history itself,
which turn out to be extremely relevant to her personal and professional
development—and thus to lesbian identity and the creation of lesbian his-
tory. “History, gagged and branked” like Hannah herself, is a salvage
operation, and “Everything salvaged lies upon a boundless hinterland of
lost information” (141, 106). What is not lost, it turns out, has been hid-
den. Isabel’s testament had been hidden because Hannah’s descendant
four generations later was “forbidden” by her father to preserve anything
related to Hannah (96). Olivia’s mother presumably hid Hannah’s testa-
ment to protect Olivia from her inheritance, a foremother she considered
“a fairly unbalanced character … a dangerous … stray cannon.” Olivia
realizes, “My mother had seen and regretted in me the same inability to
toe the line” (156). In addition to hiding the manuscript, Olivia’s mother
had edited its transcription, leaving Olivia determined to “heal the wounds
in Hannah’s text” (159). Olivia knows, because she has “lived and
breathed” it herself, that her mother censored Hannah and Isabel’s love-
making from the text. Olivia, who forsook God and religion at an early
age, vows to “read the forbidding silences as my holy places” (174). She
understands that “all portraits are self-portraits” (119), that in order to
draw a picture of Hannah’s (and thus her own) history, she must follow
the advice she gives her students: “Imagine what you think you know;
show it like a film, checking back to the documents as you run the
spool” (120).
Olivia’s uncanny resemblance to Hannah provides the skeleton for
Davies’ tale of “lesbian-like”-ness. Olivia is and is not like Hannah, just as
Hannah’s partnership with her “loving yoke-fellow” Isabel is and is not
like Olivia’s lesbianism. For starters, the forensic reconstruction of
Hannah’s face shows an irrefutable physical likeness, their two faces
“twinned” (75). And then, of course, they are kin, genealogically and as
Quaker Friends. But Olivia has forsaken belief in God, while Hannah’s
heretical belief in Her defined her life and led to her persecution and
death. Hannah made a public spectacle of herself in the service of beliefs,
whereas Olivia seeks mostly “to vanish into the woodwork” (189)—
unaware that her “butch” appearance and mania for Hannah have made
her into “a standing joke” according to her rival, Faith’s husband (187).
Both, however, live(d) out of step with the world around them, in a strong
sense making Olivia “one with [Hannah] across time” (73). While the
mainstream of Olivia’s department may have had her “down as a freak”
30 L. GARBER
(188), Hannah’s historical context meant she was condemned, brutally

persecuted, and finally violently executed for her eccentricity, which was
lesbian-like as well as doctrinally heretical.
When Isabel met Hannah—her “only beloved,” “dear one,” and “yoke-
fellow”—Hannah was dressed in men’s clothing, “what we call in our
country a will-jill” (99–101). Despite their abiding spiritual and physical
love, (the fictional) Hannah also fell in love with the charismatic, ulti-
mately condemned (historically real) Quaker leader James Naylor, with
whom she had a child. Nevertheless, Hannah consistently lived, traveled,
and suffered persecution with Isabel, not James, and they considered
Hannah’s daughter Grace to be the miraculous child of their love (102–3).
For Olivia, living in an era in which lesbian identity exists, the sexual like-
ness to her woman-loving ancestor stops short of violent silencing. Across
the gap of centuries and the development of the concept of sexual identity,
Hannah and Olivia share Faith in Love—Hannah’s theology “love is the
only law” (104, 171) made flesh in Olivia’s love for her friend Faith, the
only person she trusts enough to share Hannah with, in both spirit
(Hannah’s manuscript) and flesh (when they re-inter Hannah’s bones at
the end of the novel). Love and faith—and Faith’s loving if chaste friend-
ship—are what Olivia needs most, to heal from the death of her mother
and to enter the physical world of human interaction.
Hannah, who lived primarily in her own spiritual world, releases Olivia
from the abstract world of books to live in the present and the flesh.
Hannah, who was violently denied her voice, gives Olivia her own. Olivia
uses her newfound agency to bring Hannah home—literally by re-interring
her bones, and figuratively by bringing her story to light. She gives Hannah
back her voice with empathy, filling in the details so judiciously censored
by her mother. For Olivia, “History, gagged and branked” turns out to be
the key to living a fulfilled lesbian life in the present.
Supernatural Interventions
By their very genre, some lesbian historical fictions are much more obvi-
ously “stories” than Dunye’s convincing mock documentary or Davies’
grisly romance of the archive. If the “apparitional lesbian” is the ghost in
the machine of modern culture, as Terry Castle (1993) argues, it should
come as no surprise that actual ghost stories are not uncommon plot
devices for lesbian historical novels. The least academically inclined reader
knows these are fantasies and can grasp the ways in which they reveal the
constructedness of history as well as its usefulness to the present. I would

argue that the obvious contrivances of ghost stories and their kin, time-
travel plots, at least tacitly point to both queer and ancestral genealogies in
Laura Doan’s (2013) sense. Supernatural gothic and science-fiction
devices figure prominently in lesbian historical fiction, allowing protago-
nists the actual interaction with historical lesbians that Dunye’s character
Cheryl craves. Paula Martinac’s ghost story Out of Time (1990) and
Brenda Adcock’s pirate novel The Sea Hawk (2008) are romances of the
archive that mobilize genre fiction devices in the service of lesbian history.
Both feature lesbian characters who desperately need guidance from role
models in the lesbian past, and their authors are not afraid to employ
supernatural devices to give it to them. As Toni Morrison (1987) demon-
strates with devastating brilliance in Beloved, fantastical plot devices can
reveal historical truths beyond the reach of the realistic novel.
The protagonist of Martinac’s Out of Time is a lesbian graduate student
in New York City whose life is at loose ends. At age thirty, Susan Van Dine
is in debt, unsure whether to move in with her lover, and bored with her
doctoral program in English—her third graduate degree. One day while
Susan is walking down the street, she takes refuge from a sudden rain-
storm in an antique shop she has never noticed before. Inside, she is mys-
teriously drawn to a photo album chronicling the friendship of four
women in the 1920s who called themselves “The Gang.” Susan feels con-
nected to the women, who seem to look directly at her from their photos,
“peer[ing] out at me seductively,” she thinks, “beckoning” (6). Unsure
whether the album is for sale, Susan takes it while the shopkeeper’s back is
turned and leaves a check for what she considers a fair price (7). Exhilarated
and surprised by what she has done, Susan becomes obsessed with The
Gang. She falls in love with the women, fantasizing that she is the photog-
rapher interacting with them as they pose (15). Soon the women in the
pictures start speaking to Susan. When she wonders silently, “How did I
find you?” Harriet, the most flirtatious of The Gang answers, “‘Silly girl …
we found you’” (16). By the fourth chapter Harriet’s ghost caresses Susan
as she falls asleep; in Chapter Seven, Susan finds out firsthand “what a kiss
was like in 1926,” and in Chapter Eight Harriet seduces Susan, convincing
her, “It’s for your education … Tell yourself it’s for history” (55).
Susan takes a leave of absence from graduate school and then quits
altogether to work at an antique shop aptly called “Out of Time” and to
focus her attention on The Gang. Confused, fearing she may be losing her
mind, Susan shares only a little of what is happening with her level-headed
32 L. GARBER
lover, Catherine, a school teacher and self-taught community historian.

Catherine’s archival research about The Gang’s four members turns up
dates, news articles, even political writings by one of the women, but it
leaves Susan cold. She far prefers first-person research to more traditional
methods: “It all seemed like a lot of work to me, because I was convinced
they would tell me their stories eventually and far more accurately than
written records could” (19). Susan feels that Catherine’s factual research
is “cluttering things up” (45), because her “fascination with precise facts
and dates left no room for intuition or imagination. Or romance” (48).
In historian Richard Slotkin’s (2005) terms, Susan seeks to understand,
unsatisfied with what Catherine can prove “according to the rules of the
discipline” (223). When Susan finally tells Catherine about what’s hap-
pening, she explains, “I’m having this historical experience” (72). The
couple continues to pursue the history of the Gang in tandem, with
Catherine grounding Susan and Susan urging Catherine to push boundar-
ies. Martinac presents the haunting as real, leading the reader to accept
Susan’s version of events, tempered and contextualized by Catherine’s his-
torical facts. In other words, the reader participates in the historiographi-
cal debate that in an important sense is the subject of the novel.
While Catherine’s interest in history is both academic and political,
Susan’s is personal. She needs lesbian history in the form of elders and
foremothers to teach her how to navigate her own life. Harriet’s ghost
seduces Susan into examining the past, but it is the ghost of Harriet’s lover
Lucy who teaches Susan what to do with what she learns. Lucy’s ghost
literally places in Susan’s hands one of the novels she wrote, an artifact that
leads Susan to explore a box of Lucy’s papers that she had acquired from
Lucy’s niece, based on information Catherine had uncovered at the les-
bian archives (40, 66). The box contains letters, packages, and notebooks,
“All precisely packed away. For history” (85). It also holds a fountain pen
that Susan eventually realizes was Lucy’s first gift to Harriet (136, 143).
When Susan picks up the pen, she hears Lucy’s ghost repeat the words
Lucy had said decades ago to Harriet, “Write me something beautiful with
it” (89). When Susan agrees to, she gets the first clue in answer to a ques-
tion she will soon pose to herself, “Why me? What did they want of me?”
The answer, as it reveals itself over the rest of the novel, gives Susan a clear
direction for her life at long last.
At first Susan thinks Lucy wants her to write a novel about the The
Gang (164). When her attempt fails, Lucy’s ghost leads Susan to her out-
line for a novel from 1929; Susan “only had to read a few lines to know it
was the novel [she herself] had been trying to write” (166). Catherine is
skeptical about Susan’s plans to finish Lucy’s novel without further
research, reigniting the tension between Susan’s yearning for lesbian fore-
mothers and Catherine’s reverence for historical accuracy. Catherine’s
accusation that Susan “just want[s] to make up the story, your story, the
way you see it” rings true, even to Susan’s ears (167). Although Susan
promises Catherine that she will “get the whole story” before she writes
the novel, Susan knows she’s not alone in her need to interact with the
past on an emotional level. In case Martinac’s readers don’t consciously
register the same pull in themselves, at a particularly enlightening juncture
in her research Susan thinks, “This would be a novel about love and loss
and remembrance … Lesbians would eat it up. I’m not the only one, after
all, with fantasies about true and perfect love” (205).
It turns out that Lucy’s ghost seeks Susan’s help in publishing a finished
manuscript titled Our Time, Our Place, which will bring lesbian history to
life for others in the same way that haunting has brought it to life for
Susan. The manuscript turns up in a box of Lucy’s papers at the apartment
of her former nurse—another lesbian who becomes part of Susan’s friend-
ship circle (216). Lucy’s ghost, who had empathized with Susan’s difficul-
ties as a kindred writer (162–63) plays midwife to Susan’s professional
writing career. Susan writes the introduction to and publishes Lucy’s
novel, which stops both the haunting and Susan’s writer’s block. In the
closing pages of Martinac’s novel, Susan begins writing a historical novel
of her own and takes on the longer-term project of editing Lucy’s journals
and short fiction for publication (218–19).
The literary ambitions and mentorship of Lucy’s ghost help Susan in
more ways than one. Susan gains focus as a writer, but her haunting by
The Gang, especially Lucy, also leads Susan back to Catherine after a
period of estrangement (144–45). If Susan and Catherine don’t have
“true and perfect love,” in the end they have a strong relationship and a
future together, warts and all, just like Harriet and Lucy had. Susan learns
from Lucy’s journal that Lucy, too, questioned her relationship, wonder-
ing about its long-term viability (186). Lucy’s ghost makes the connection
clear when she explains that she stayed with Harriet despite her infidelities
for the same reason that Catherine and Susan recommit to each other:
“Because you have something together other people can’t see, don’t want
to see” (181). This parallel, once voiced by Lucy’s ghost, makes Susan
realize she has been on the right track: “That,” she responds, “is what I’ve
felt all along! Why the facts didn’t matter so much to me! It’s something
34 L. GARBER
else, something … deeper” (181). In other words, Susan’s needs in the

present, which compelled her pursuit of The Gang and gave rise to her
relationships with ghosts, turn out to provide a useful impetus for under-
standing the past. She couldn’t have done it without Catherine’s level-
headed research, but Catherine could not have understood history fully
until she came around to believing in Susan’s personal knowledge.
By the end of Martinac’s novel, Susan and Catherine are living together
in a house recently vacated by the death of Elinor, another member of The
Gang. Elinor’s nurse Fleck lives on the bottom floor; they are frequently
visited by Tuttie, Susan’s trusted employee at the antique shop; Susan has
weekly lunches with Lucy’s lesbian niece Bea, who owns the shop where
Susan initially found The Gang’s scrapbook; and Susan has become friends
with Lucy’s nurse Sophia and her lover. In short, over the course of her
“historical experience” Susan has put her relationship on a solid footing
and assembled “[her] own gang” (193), bringing the novel full circle as
lesbian community is reinvented for the present generation of lesbians
through the intervention of their foremothers.
In several lesbian historical novels, spectral visitation provides the nec-
essary ingredient for the fictional researcher to accomplish what Lisa
Hogeland (2009) calls “speculative knowledge production,” an endeavor
vital to lesbian history. Terry Castle demonstrated some years ago that the
“apparitional lesbian” is a staple of western literature from the eighteenth
century onward. First used to stigmatize actual lesbianism, later to invoke
it, the lesbian specter wafts through mainstream culture until it is embraced
by contemporary lesbian writers who “have succeeded in transforming her
from a negating to an affirming presence” (65). As Paulina Palmer (1999)
explains in Lesbian Gothic,
The protagonist’s encounter with the spectral figure, while involving her on
a psychological plane in a confrontation with a ghostly double who reflects
aspects of her own personality, also furnishes her, in terms of woman’s quest
for origins, with an entry into the lesbian past. The encounter, though emo-
tionally disturbing, is nonetheless represented as instructive. (64)
In Palmer’s terms, the lesbian ghost is a perfect vehicle for “personal and
psychological” explorations of history (19).
If dead lesbians won’t or can’t visit contemporary protagonists, in some
novels protagonists travel to the past to visit them. At the start of Brenda
Adcock’s The Sea Hawk, marine archaeologist Julia Blanchard has reached
the limits of academic research into the shipwreck of the Georgia Peach.
Like Susan in Out of Time, Julia’s personal life is in shambles, “the perfect
life she thought she was living … unexpectedly gone” (1). Julia’s fault isn’t
too little research, but too much; her lover is straying with other women
because Julia is “always working.” Confronted by Julia about her infidel-
ity, Amy retorts, “Did you expect me to be waiting for you to come home
from your little sea adventure, wearing an apron and stirring a pot of soup
to warm you like a good little mariner’s wife?” (8).
Workaholic Julia literally drowns her sorrows in her work. She heads
out to sea alone and is stranded in open water when modern-day pirates
steal her research boat (2–4). Dehydrated and nearly dead, after several
days Julia finally “sobbed and gave herself to the sea” (17), then wakes to
find herself somehow miraculously rescued by a British frigate in the early
nineteenth century (21). At first certain that she is dreaming, or has been
rescued by a ship and crew performing an elaborate historical reenact-
ment, Julia slowly concludes that she is “stuck somewhere in the past”
(28). When the frigate is attacked by French privateers, Julia is captured—
and captivated—by the striking female captain of the Faucon de Mer,
Simone Moreau (30). Fierce in battle, ruthless in ship’s discipline, and
accepted as a woman-loving woman by her crew, Simone is immediately
attracted to Julia as well. The plot twists through travels (Martinique),
wars (the Battle of New Orleans), jealousy (of Simone’s lover), flirtation,
and avoidance until Julia and Simone finally declare and consummate their
love—only to lose one another at the brink of a happy ending. When Julia
is pitched overboard in a storm, she cries out, “I love you, Simone! Never
forget that!” She has just revealed to Simone that she is from the future
(156), and as she loses her grip on Simone’s hand, she says, “I can’t [hang
on], I don’t belong here” (158–59).
Be that as it may, Julia has discovered a great deal about the past, and
herself, during her time with Simone in the nineteenth century. For one
thing, she learns that the ship she had been calling the Georgia Peach is
actually the Faucon de Mer, and she knows about the ship’s exploits and
daily life on board in great detail. The fact that Simone’s ship sunk off the
coast of Georgia, scuttled by a cannon shot from inside the hull, leads Julia
to understand that Simone lived the end of her life where she knew Julia
would live in the future (176–77, 191). More important than archaeo-
logical facts, Julia learns a life lesson in love, as she tells her parents after
she is rescued, “The sea … revealed the meaning of love to me … timeless
love does exist. I never thought I would know that kind of love” (167).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Soitto kaikuu ulkoravintoloista ja torvet kimaltelevat auringossa.
Pikkulapset juoksentelevat punaisina, valkoisina taikka sinisinä ja
leikkivät hiekkaläjissä tynnyrinvanteilla, palloilla taikka
ilmarakkuloilla. Ne nauravat ja lörpöttelevät, taikka itkevät
hillittömästi, kun ilmarakkula on karannut ja josta pian näkyy
ainoastaan pieni pilkku kaukana, kaukana — lähellä aurinkoa.
Naiset pukeutuvat vaaleihin pukuihin, kalossit sysätään syrjään, ja

herrat etsivät kävelykeppejään ja kiiltäviä silinterihattujaan. Valkoisia
lakkeja, kultalyyryjä ja nuorisoa vilisee odottaen saada näyttää
maailmalle ylioppilaiden kaunista voitonmerkkiä.
Ruohokentät rupeavat kimaltelemaan hennossa vihreydessään,

esplanaadien penkereillä aukeavat kukat auringonpaisteessa,
pensaihin ilmestyy pieniä lehtiä ja vesikioskien portit aukaistaan.
Mutta kun illalla lapset ovat viedyt huoneisiin, soitto tauvonnut ja

yö tullut, vallitsee kaduilla hiljainen ja omituinen tunnelma. On yö,
mutta ilma on kuitenkin valoisa, läpikuultava, luonto uinuu, mutta
valvoo maatessaankin, kaikki lepää, mutta elää kuitenkin; kaikkialla
on hiljaista ja kuitenkin on kaikkialla sointua ja säveltä. Ei ole
ainoatakaan ikkunaa, jonka uutimien takana ei uneksittaisi uusia
unelmia, ei ole muuria, jonka sisäpuolella olisi ihminen, jota ei
kevään kaikkivalta olisi koskettanut. Haaveillaan töistä ja
laakeriseppeleistä, rakkaudesta ja valoisista kesäpäivistä,
säihkyvistä silmistä, joihin on katsottu, puolittain tehdyistä
lemmentunnustuksista ja lupauksista, kaikesta, joka ei vielä ole
tapahtunut, mutta joka voi tapahtua, kaikellaisesta, josta ei oikein
itsekään olla selvillä mitä se on… Seisoissamme ajatuksiimme
vaipuneina näemme kulkijan jossain kaukana, kuulemme hänen
askeleittensa heikon kaiun haihtuvan pois, hän katoo itsekin kuin
usvahaamu, kaukaa kuuluu serenaadi, ja milloin tahansa voi toinen
kuulua aivan läheltä. Ei valoa, ei varjoa, ainoastaan yksi ainoa, suuri
unelma.
Kuka meistä ei joskus elämässään olisi seisonut uudenaikaisessa

kaupungissa, ilman sukuperää ja muistoja, hurmautuneena ja
tuntenut puolivaloisan toukokuun yön tuhatäänistä, melkein
kuulumatonta elegiiaa!
3.
Taistelu talven jälkijoukon ja eteenpäin kiirehtivän kevään välillä on

vetäytynyt pohjoiseenpäin, jonnepäin talvi on peräytynyt
luoksepääsemättömään napalinnoitukseensa. Lumiräntä, joka
toisinaan vielä on näyttäytynyt, on muuttunut lämpimäksi sateeksi,
tuulten voima on laimentunut, pilvet hajautuvat ja aurinko levittää
voittavan loisteensa, elähyttävän paisteensa, lemmekkään lämpönsä
luonnon yli, joka hurmaantuneena nauttien, muistuttaa nuoren
morsiamen kaihoa, autuuden ilme kuvastin kirkkaiden sisäjärvien ja
lahtien sinisessä katseessa.
Koivulehdot, jotka ovat olleet punertavia ja pronssinkarvaisia,

rupeavat nyt muuttumaan viheriäisiksi, leppien tahmeat umput
paisuvat ja pihlajien pitkät lehtien suojukset puhkeavat ja antavat
tilaa monihaaraisille untuvaisille lehdille kehittymiseen. Lehmus,
vaahtera ja haapa, kaikki saavat elon, mahla pulppuaa niissä, kaikki
kiirehtivät elämään, kukkimaan ja kantamaan hedelmää lyhyessä
kesässä.
Oi, kuinka tuolla metsän poluilla lemuaa, siellä tuntuu kuivuneiden
lehtien, sammalen ja itse maankin lemu, jota tallaamme, ja loistavien
valkovuokkojen, jotka ovat tulleet esiin leppämullasta! Oi, mikä
elämä ja liverrys puiden oksissa, mikä kiire pehmeitä pesiä
valmistuissa, ja mitä lemmenkiistaa sitten vähä väliä! Käellä yksin ei
ole aikaa pesimiseen ja rakentamiseen, hän ei voi ajatella
tulevaisuutta ja vastuksia pienien poikasten kanssa. Käkipariskunta
lentää vaan läpi lehtojen koko kevään, yhdessä ainoassa
lemmenhuumauksessa ja ehtii tuskin hakea ruokaansa.
Eläimet viedään taas laitumelle ja pelloilla kynnetään ja kylvetään

ja ahdistetaan tunkeilevia variksia, jotka tulevat syömään siementä.
Päivät kestävät melkein kauvemmin, kuin voimat riittävät, ja työ
sujuu hyvin. Miesten huudot kuuluvat vainioilta, naisten laulu kaikuu
tuvista, joiden ovet ovat auki, ja illalla tulevat lehmät hitaasti käyden
kotiinpäin polkuja pitkin kilisevin kelloin ja kärsimättömästi ja iloisesti
mylvähdellen.
Saaristoissa on vielä jäätiköltä jälellä jossain varjoisalla rannalla ja

puut ja vihreys ovat myöhästyneet. Mutta siellä on sentään
sykkäilevää eloa. Kun jäälohkareet vielä uiskentelivat ympäri, tulivat
haahkat suurissa parvissa, näyttäen pilvenhattaroilta ja telkät,
koskelot, mustasorsat ja allit — kaikki ovat saapuneet. Haahkat ovat
hajautuneet ja lepäävät parittain kallioilla ja leikkivät
lemmenleikkiään tyyninä aamuina kimaltelevien vesipatsaiden
keskellä, haahkatelkkä viheriänä ja mustana ja komeana
koreudessaan ja haahka ruskeana, niin että sitä tuskin näkyy luodon
ollessa takalistona.
Usva lepää hienona ja valkoisena aamulla, mutta kun

ensimmäinen heikko itätuulahdus on herännyt poistuu sumu suurien,
kevyiden pumpulipilvien kaltaisina, joiden lomista loistaa sininen
taivas. Silloin parveilevat muuttavat allit ympäri pienissä joukkioissa
hajautuneina koko rannikolle tuhansittain ja tuhansittain, silloin
laulavat ne avaruuden täyttävää lauluaan, niin että se kuuluu kuin
kaukainen torventoitotus. Ilma suhisee lintujen lennosta, vesiryöpyt
kimaltelevat niiden heittäytyessä mereen, kaikkialla kuuluu laulua ja
vihellystä ja laukauksia pamahtaa näkymättömistä pyssyistä, jotka
ovat piilossa kallioiden vedenpuoleisilla reunoilla, höyrylaivojen ja
purjealusten risteillessä kulkuväylien tuhansissa mutkissa.
Niin, kevät on voittanut, kaikkialla on eloa, elämää ja väriä,

höyryävässä maassa siitiniloa, kaikkein katseissa herännyttä riemua
ja nautintoa koko luonnossa.
Niin, nauttikaamme siis me kaupunkilaisihmisetkin valosta ja

lämmöstä, sulkekaamme koulut ja tukahuttavat vuokrakasarmit ja
etsikäämme kaikkein meidän äitiämme, luontoa, joka odottaa meitä
valkovuokko-, kieloja tuomenkukkakinoksineen ja koivunlemuineen
ja antaa terveyttä ruumiillemme ja virkistystä kaupungin
ahdasmielisyydessä ja melussa väsyneille aivoillemme.
Helsingissä 1900.
Äiti
Siis olet sinä tullut, rakas poikani — kiitos, kiitos, että tahdoit
vaivata itseäsi pitkällä matkalla. Varmaankaan ei ollut niin hauska
jättää elämää siellä, opinnoita, suuria kaupunkia, rikasta luontoa ja
mahtavia vuoria, tullaksesi tänne vähävaraiseen kotiisi näkemään
vanhan äitisi kuolevan pois luotasi ja isäsi luota — kiitos tulemastasi
— nyt olette te minulla molemmat vieressäni — elä itke, katsos, ei
koko maailman tiede voi pelastaa minua, sillä ääni sydämmessäni
puhuu tyynesti ja varmasti, että kuolema lähenee — —
Mutta kerro minulle enemmän alpeille nousuistasi, enemmän niistä

jyrkistä huipuista, jotka ikuisen lumen peittäminä, kylpien
auringonvalossa, kuten rohkeat aatteet ja ajatukset kokoutuvat ylös
avaruuteen. Se ei väsytä minua ja minä kuuntelen niin mielelläni.
Tiedätkö, minä tunnen itseni niin ihmeelliseksi, ei tunnu ollenkaan
siltä, kuin olisin lähellä pimeää hautaa, missä maallinen majani
muuttuu jälleen maaksi, vaan minä tunnen päinvastoin täydellistä
sopusointua, tunnen itseni terveeksi sairaudessanikin.
*****
Sinä kysyt minulta katseellasi — et tahdo tehdä sitä suullisesti —

pelkäät, että puhun itseni väsyksiin. Minä vastaan sinulle, poikani,
minä ymmärrän sanattomat kysymyksesi. Isä ei koskaan osaa
selittää sinulle sitä — sinä olet liian vaitelias isä, sinä — —
Niin, katsos, minä kasvoin kaukana maalla, kodissa, jota suuri

puisto ympäröi, jossa kävelin ympäri haaveillen nuoruuden unelmia.
Lukemiseni, jonka vanha isäni minulle valitsi, johti unelmieni tiet
turhamaisuuden kujilta suurten vainajien seuraan, henkieni, jotka
olivat olleet ihmiskunnan hyväntekijöitä ja luonnonkuvaukset
herättivät mielikuvitukseni rikkaaseen elämään. Ajattelepas, minä,
lapsi, minä istuin puutarhassa ja luin ja minä näin ihania maisemia
avautuvan eteeni, kukkivat omenapuut veivät minut seutuihin, jotka
keväisin ovat kukkien lumesta valkeita, suuret puut muuttuivat
mahtaviksi seeteripuiksi, ja iltasin menin minä usein näköalavuorelle,
nähdäkseni yhä laajemmalle. Silloin muodostui kaikki mitä näin,
sisäisten toivomusteni mukaan. Näin välkkyviä meriä, joilla suuret
höyrylaivat liikkuivat, tehden kultaisia vakoja, kylät tulivat suuriksi
kaupungeiksi loistavan valkoisine rakennuksineen, ja pilvijoukkiot
jotka ukkosilmoilla kokoutuivat yhteen, olivat alppia, joiden huiput
kimaltelivat punaisina ilta-auringon valossa.
Katsokaas, vanha äiti on vielä hieman runollinen. Nyt lepään

hetkisen.
*****
Niin, ja sitten kasvoi minussa vähitellen suuri halu nähdä kaiken

tämän todellisuudessa, mitä olin haaveillut, saada ottaa tehokasta
osaa vilkkaaseen elämään, nähdä meriä ja avaruuksia, ja mahtavia
alppia — päästä pois tasaiselta maalta, niin, minun mielestäni rupesi
melkein elämä kotona tuntumaan yksitoikkoiselta ja jokapäiväiseltä
ja että kaunis puutarha oli huonosti hoidettu ja ruma.
Sitten tuli kevät, maa rupesi viheriöitsemään ja koivujen ja

haapojen latvat saivat pitkiä ripsuja, jotka loistivat, kuin pronssi.
Vuokot puhkesivat, muuttolinnut palasivat ja illat tulivat lämpöisiksi.
Silloin tuli isä — niin, hän oli nuori ja keikarimainen silloin — ja sitten
rupesi hän katselemaan minua ja minä häntä, vaikka en
tahtonutkaan. Ei, minä en tahtonut, usein istuin minä ylhäällä
näköalavuorella vain herättääkseni eloon vanhoja unelmia alpeista ja
avaruuksista ja niiden avulla syrjäyttääkseni kaiken uuden. Mutta se
ei auttanut. Tuo uusi tunkeutui ylitseni vastustamattomalla
hurmauksella, samalla kun surukseni näin vanhan, vanhat tunteeni
— ei kuolevan — vaan syrjäytyvän. Ja niin laskin minä käteni isän
käteen eräänä iltana kukkivan tuomen alla. Missä on kätesi nyt isä,
ojenna se minulle taas — näin.
*****
Nyt loppuivat pian unelmat korkeuksista ja avaruuksista — ne

muodostuivat toisenlaisiksi nyt. Laaksoon jäisin minä ja asuisin
siellä, ja sinne minä jäin ja siellä asuin — mutta se oli kukoistava ja
tuoksuava laakso, siellä kasvoi ruusuja ja kieloja ja linneat
puhkesivat metsän hämäryydessä. Punaposkinen pienokainen
kasvoi vieressämme laaksossa, samalla kun isä ja äiti näkivät
vuosien hiljaa vierivän yksitellen, ja riemuiten huomasivat tunteitten
ja ajatuksien heräävän pienokaisessa ja kuinka ne yhä enemmän ja
enemmän kehittyivät. Pienokainen olit sinä, rakas poikani. Niin,
laaksossa asui ihmeellinen onni kukkien joukossa, onni, jota ei nuori
tyttö milloinkaan täydellisesti voinut aavistaa maatessaan vanhan
kotinsa puutarhasohvalla ja katsellessaan pilvenhuippujen loistoa.
Niin, kiitos isä, että veit haaveilevan tytön elämän elävään
todellisuuteen — kiitos!
*****
Ei, antakaa minun vaan puhua nyt, kun kerran olen alkanut. Niin,
minä kiitän molempia sydämellisesti kaikesta siitä onnesta, mikä on
tullut osakseni, kaikesta mitä olette antaneet minulle. Olen
tyytyväinen ja onnellinen vielä kuollessanikin — joka ei ollenkaan
tunnu minusta vaikealta. Kuoleman kauhun asemasta, josta olen
lukenut ja kuullut puhuttavan, on, kuten jo sanoin ihmeellinen
sopusointu sydämessäni — ei mitään tuskia enää, ainoastaan
väsymystä — ja sitten nuo ihmeen ihanat soinnut — joiden syytä ja
alkua en täydellisesti voi selvittää. — Mutta ehkä sentään voinkin —
se johtui juuri mieleeni, kun kohtasin katseesi, rakas poikani. Mutta
minä kokoan vähän voimia.
*****
Niin, se oli sinun kotiintulosi, joka saatti sopusointuisuuden
sydämessäni ylimmilleen — se herätti täyteläisempään eloon
tunteen, joka aikaisemmin piili siellä pohjalla — nyt on se paisunut
ilahuttamaan viimeisiä hetkiäni. Se on päässyt valtaan aina, kun olen
lukenut rakkaita kirjeitäsi, poikani katsos, se on nuoruuden runous,
joka on herännyt täyteen kukoistukseen, se on kaikkein
näköalavuorella haaveilemieni unelmain täyttymys, joka vaikuttaa
tämän onnellisen tunteen kuoleman läheisyydessä. Katsos, lapseni,
— niin, sinähän olet kaikessa tapauksessa minun lapseni, niin vanha
kuin oletkin — katsos, sinä olet saavuttanut sen, josta minä
haaveilin, sinä olet nähnyt välkkyvät meret, suuret kaupungit ja
pulppuavan elämän, sinä olet tutkinut tieteitten pesäpaikoissa, sinä
olet katsellut äärettömiä avaruuksia ja kiivennyt korkeille alpeille,
jotka lumikoristuksessaan loistavat punaisina ilta-auringossa ja
ikäänkuin mahtavat aatteet ja ajatukset pyrkivät avaruutta kohti —
sinä olet nähnyt kaiken tämän ja saavuttanut. Ja sittenhän on, kuin
jos minä itse olisin tehnyt sen — nähkääs, tämä mahtoi sentään olla
kaikkein nuoruuden unelmaini sisältö. — Niin poikani, vanha äitisi on
elänyt useamman elämän, isän ja sinun ja hän on ollut onnellinen
teidän menestyksistänne, hänellä on mielestään ollut osansa
kaikesta, mitä te olette toimittaneet — ja tämä tietoisuus, joka nyt on
selvinnyt varmuudeksi, mahtaa olla se, joka hymnin lailla kaikuu
minulle ja täyttää sydämeni elämän täyteläisyydellä ja taittaa
kuolemalta kärjen.
*****
Päiväkirjasta.
Toukokuun 3 päivä.
Siitä on kulunut vuosi, ei kauvempaa. Kuinka tämä vuosi on

tuntunut pitkältä, ja kuinka paljon se on opettanut minulle!
Kuinka vanha hän nyt olisikaan? kun lasken. Niin, hän olisi nyt
kolmenkymmenen vuotias, koska Signe on kuuden.
Me olemme olleet tänään haudalla, Signe ja minä ja koristaneet

sen kukilla. Kuinka onnellista, että lapsen suru sentään niin helposti
haihtuu! Signen mielestä ei elämä enää ole niin surullista ja
erinomaista senvuoksi että hänen äitinsä on kuollut. Onnellinen ikä!
Joskus vaan enää tapahtuu, että äidin muisto jälleen herää, ja

silloin voi Signen pienessä sydämessä syttyä kiihkeä kaiho sen
perään, joka oli hänen paras apunsa ja hellä ystävänsä.
Kuluneena vuotena olen minä koettanut johonkin määrin korvata

vainajaa. Kuinka naurettavasti ja tuhmasti käyttäydyinkään ensi
alussa! Oli tuhansia asioita, joita en osannut, joita minun täytyi
vähitellen oppia ja joita Signen täytyi minulle opettaa. Minä tunsin
itseni ensin melkein yhtä avuttomaksi, kun Robinson saarellaan,
kaikkien noiden pienien vaatteiden, kaikkien noiden ajatusten ja
kaikkien lapsellisien kysymysten kanssa, joihin on niin vaikea
vastata.
Minä muistan esim. vielä aivan hyvin, kuinka minä muutama päivä
jälkeen kuolemantapauksen osottauduin taitamattomaksi ja
tuhmaksi. Minun oli onnistunut pukea Signen päälle noin jotensakin
ilman muistutuksia hänen puoleltaan, ja kun hän oli valmis, oli hän
mielestäni erinomaisen hyvin puettu. Sitten menimme me
kahvipöytään.
"Saanko kaataa kahvin, isä, kyllä minä osaan?"
Toden totta ei minulla ollut sydäntä kieltää, pidin kuitenkin käteni

läheisyydessä sillä varalta, että apua olisi tarvittu. Pienet sormet
tarttuivat toimekkaasti kahvikannun kädensijaan ja kuppi täyttyi
vähitellen. Lopuksi rupesi pikku käsi vapisemaan ja kannu asetettiin
alas pienellä läjähdyksellä.
"Se painoi, mutta kuppi täyttyi kuitenkin," sanoi Signe, kasvot

punaisina ja riemuiten.
"Nyt kaadan minä sen sijaan sinulle."
"Mutta eihän Signellä ole tapana saada kahvia!"
Salatakseni nolouttani sanoin minä silloin, että hän sentään

tänään saisi puoli kuppia.
"Senkö vuoksi, että äiti on kuollut?"
"Niin, sen vuoksi."
"Saanko minä aina tästedes kahvia?"
"Et, ainoastaan joskus."
"Niin, eihän äiti sentään olekkaan kuollut hänhän on taivaassa.

Voiko hän sieltä nähdä, kuinka me juomme kahvia?"
"Ehkä" — enhän tietänyt mitä minun piti vastata.
"Mutta kattohan on edessä."
"No sitten ei hän ehkä näekkään meitä."
"Jos hän näkisi, niin kyllä kai Signe hänen mielestään olisi oikein
taitava, kun voi kaataa kahvia isälle."
"Kyllä varmaan."
"Isä, ei Signe oikein ymmärrä tuota, että äiti on haudattu maahan

ja sentään on taivaassa?"
"Niin, tänään saa Signe myöskin leivoksen, ja sitten menemme me

ulos kävelemään."
"Mihin, torilleko?"
"Niin, torille."
Kaikeksi onneksi sain nuo pikku aivot työskentelemään toiseen

suuntaan.
Sellaisia keskusteluja on meillä ollut usein, ja tavallisesti olen minä

joutunut ymmälle. En käsitä, kuinka äidit selviytyvät sellaisesta.
Vuoden kuluessa olen minä kuitenkin tullut vähän enemmän

huomaamaan, kuinka on meneteltävä, kun on kuusivuotias tytär
hoidettavana ja kasvatettavana, taikka kenties on parempi sanoa,
että Signe on tullut huomaamaan, kuinka kuuden vuotiaan tytön
tulee kasvattaa isäänsä.
Kaikessa tapauksessa on hän avuttomuudessaan kiintynyt minuun
pienen sydämensä koko lämmöllä ja hellyydellä ja me kasvatamme
yhä edelleen toinen toistamme.
Minkälaisia muutoksia yhdessä vuodessa!
Kuinka kauniita nämä kevätaamut ovat! Kevät onkin tullut aikaisin

tänä vuonna lämpimineen ja saattanut maan viheriöitsemään. Kun
aukaisen verannan oven, virtaa koko maailman auringonpaiste
minua vastaan ja höyryävä maanhaju tuntuu. Koivujen kaikkein
pienimmät hiirenkorvat kimaltelevat kuin kulta ja hamppuvarpunen
laulaa. Vanhassa lepässä viheltelee rastas laulua
lemmenonnestaan. Minä otan työni ulos verannalle ja kirjoitan
hetkisen pöytäkirjoihini, Signe makaa vielä. Mutta työstä ei tahdo
tulla mitään. Suloiset kevät-aamut ja pöytäkirjat eivät varmaankaan
kuulu yhteen.
Minä menen Signen huoneeseen ja vedän uutimet syrjään ja

annan auringon paistaa sisään ja istun hänen vuoteensa viereen.
Kuinka lämpimänä ja pehmeänä hän lepää pikku vuoteessaan

valkoisena ja hienona kuin joutsenenuntuvat! Kuinka kauniina
ruusuinen pää lepää tyynyllä, keltaisten hiusten ympäröimänä. En
tiedä, tekeekö sen kevät, taikka mistä se tulee, mutta minä tunnen
itseni melkein onnelliseksi, istuissani tuon makaavan pienokaisen
käsi omassani, onnelliseksi, muistojen kaihon sekaantuessa
onneeni.
Signe ei herää enkä minä herätä häntä. Minä nautin istuissani
täten hänen vuoteensa vieressä, vasta heräävä kevät ulkopuolella,
linnunlauluineen, joka kaikuu sisään ikkunasta ja loistavine
auringonpaisteineen yli maailman.
Enhän koskaan ole ollut runoilija, mutta minun mielestäni pitäisi

sitä, mitä tunnen, voida pukea runomuotoon. Jos voisin runoilla,
kirjoittaisin nyt runon, joka sisältäisi melkein seuraavaa:
"Herää pienokaiseni, herää, nouse vuoteen pehmeästä suojasta,

lämpöisenä kuin linnunpoika ja valkoisena ja hienona kuin joutsenen
untuva."
"Herää pienokaiseni, herää, huuhtele valkeaa ruumistasi ja

punaista poskeasi lähteen kirkkaalla vedellä."
"Pue itsesi valkeihin vaatteihin, niin kävelemme pitkin

auringonpaisteista polkua tuoksuavan tuomen ja koivun alla,
leivosten liverrellessä."
"Tahdon viedä sinut viheriälle niitylle, missä kielot kukkivat."
"Herää pienokaiseni, herää, sano hyvää huomenta visertelevän

iloisesti, niin iloisesti, kuin hamppuvarpunen laulaa ikkunan
ulkopuolella."
"Herää pienokaiseni, lämpöisenä ja hienona, niin menemme ulos

kielojen keskelle!"
Ja sitten herää Signe, aukaisee silmänsä ja luo silmäripsiensä

välistä minuun loistavan katseen.
Vuosi sitten luulin minä, että olisi aivan mahdotonta meille

kahdelle, Signelle ja minulle, päästä läpi elämän yhdessä. Näytti,
kuin olisi päälleni sälytetty vastuunalaisuus, jota en koskaan voisi
täyttää.
Nyt se on joka tapauksessa muodostunut toisellaiseksi, ei siten,

kuin olisi vastuunalaisuudentunne heikontunut, ei, päinvastoin, mutta
minä olen rohkaissut luontoni ja uskon itse, että se onnistuu meille.
Asia on vaan se, että minä ennen ajattelin aivan liian paljon
päiväkirjojani ja liian vähän sitä, että elämä itse asiassa vaatii
muutakin minulta. Ennen olivat nuo kirjoituspuuhat mielestäni
elämäni varsinaisena tarkoituksena, s.o. tuo tunne oli juurtunut
minuun, vaikka en tietänyt siitä, minä en ollut koskaan ajatellutkaan
asiaa. Signe on opettanut minulle toista, Signe on opettanut minulle,
että pöytäkirjat ovat vaan elämisen välikappaleita, sivuasioita, jota
vastoin elämä itse, eläminen, on pääasia.
Kun olen nyt tullut huomaamaan tämän ja ajattelen, minkälainen

minä ennen olen ollut, huomaan minä, että useat elinvuosistani ovat
hutiloimalla kuluneet. Täällä olen minä istunut ja lukenut
paperikimppuja ja kirjoittanut paperikimppuja ja koonnut rahoja,
viettääkseni komeaa elämää, voidakseni elää mukana, kuten
sanotaan, vaikkei vaimovainajani ollenkaan pitänyt sellaisesta
suuresta seuraelämästä, eikä ottanut mielellään siihen osaa.
Pyörre oli tarttunut minuun ja minä olin alkanut pyöriä sen

mukaan.
Nyt näen minä selvään kuinka vähän todellista riemua sellainen
elämä sisältää, kuinka tyhjää tämä kaupungin remuava ilo on.
Kaiken täytyy tulla sisältäpäin, onnen, ilon, elämisen taidon.
Sen olet sinä opettanut minulle, Signe! Kuinka iloinen olenkaan,

siitä surusta huolimatta, joka ei koskaan haihdu, kuinka onnellisia
olemmekaan toistemme kanssa, ja kuinka vähän me todellisuudessa
tarvitsemme tämän maailman hyvyydestä! Me iloitsemme
voikukkasista tien vieressä, tuomenkukkien tuoksusta, lintujen
laulusta ja auringon loisteesta järvellä, me iloitsemme ystävällisten
ihmisten katseista ja naurusta ja pienistä lavertelevista lapsista, joita
tapaamme kävelyillämme puistoissa.
Niin vähästä olemme me onnellisia, Signe sen vuoksi, että se

kuuluu hänen ikäänsä ja minä sen vuoksi, että olen oppinut, kuinka
paljo tässä vähässä on.
Minä olen onnellinen ja iloinen Signen itsensä tähden. Kuinka

paljon hän minulle onkaan, lapsellisuudessaan ja pienuudessaan.
Mitä kaikkea onkaan hänessä ja mitä voi tulla tuosta pienestä
siemenestä, kunhan se saa kehittyä oikein sinisen taivaan ja
auringon alla.
Niin, minä luotan itseeni, minä uskon, että minä voin johtaa hänen
mahdollisuutensa kehitykseen, minä ainakin teen mitä voin, se on
oleva elämäni tarkoitus ja päämäärä — pöytäkirjain tästedes vaan
ollessa sivuseikkana, välikappaleena.
Tänne tulee tätejä sekä isän että äidin puolelta puhumaan Signen
tulevaisuudesta, hänen koulunkäynnistään — vaikka se onkin liian
aikaista vielä, voi ja tuleekin joka tapauksessa sitä ajatella, eihän
keskusteleminen vahingoita asiaa.
No niin, minä annan tätien keskustella. Itse olen enimmäkseen

vaiti, kunnes suvaitsen ilmoittaa heille, että aion itse pitää koulua
Signelle.
"Sinä koulua! Onpa nekin tuumia!"
"Minä rupean pitämään ulkoilmakoulua."
"Mitä se on? Tuleeko hänen oppia lukemaan ulkona, tai mitä sinä
tarkoitat?"
"Lukemaan? Sitä ehtii myöhemminkin."
"Mutta siitä kai on alotettava! Niinhän on ollut kaikkina aikoina, niin

kauvan kun muistamme."
"Ulkoilmakoulussa me enimmäkseen kävelemme, katselemme

kasvia, kiviä ja eläimiä, soutelemme järvellä, kaivamme maassa,
tutkimme tähtitaivasta, katselemme talonpoikain työtä ja niin
edespäin."
"Siitä mahtaa tulla ihmeellinen koulu."
"Niin, ainakin huvittava. On aika kaivaa esiin unohtuneet tietoni,

opiskella ja istuttaa Signeen rakkautta luontoon, vielä hänen
ollessaan pieni. Sitten kun aika tulee, annan minä jonkun teistä
opettaa hänet lukemaan."
"Sinä näyt aikovan kasvattaa häntä jonkinlaiseksi ihmeeksi!"
"Minä tahdon vaan välttää tavallisen koulun tasoittavaista

vaikutusta, tahdon välttää sen kasvatusta."
"Sinä näyt olevan kehittymäisilläsi runoilijaksi."
"Ehkä."
Itse asiassa olen minä kyllä paljonkin ajatellut tuota kouluasiaa, ja

päättänyt tehdä niinkuin ylläoleva keskustelu osoittaa. Minkätähden
en tekisi niin? Voin niin hyvin ajatella, että lapsiin voi istuttaa — ei, se
ei ole oikea sana — että lapsissa voi herättää rakkauden luontoon ja
elämään antamalla heidän vähitellen nähdä yhtä toisen perään,
puhua siitä, mitä on nähty, esittää erilaisia ominaisuuksia, puhutella
maalaisia heidän töissään, katsella kyntämistä, kylvämistä ja
elonkorjuuta, työkaluja ja kotiteollisuutta, kalastusta y.m. Täytyyhän
täten yksinkertaisesti ja helposti voida opettaa lapsille kasvioppia,
eläintiedettä, uskontoa, matematiikkaa, vieläpä kieliäkin —
edellyttäen, että itse osataan kaikkia noita aineita ja omataan
opettamiskyky ja kyky johtaa keskustelua siten, että lapsen aivot sen
käsittävät ja valita oikea ikä yhdelle niinkuin toisellekin.
Kuusi, seitsemän vuotta! Siinä ijässähän se yleensä on liian

varhaista. Enkä minäkään ehkä olisi puhunut aikomuksistani, elleivät
tädit olisi kiusanneet minua.
Kuuden seitsemän vuoden ijässä voi sentään joka tapauksessa

sirottaa ruokaa pikkulinnuille, katsella kuinka kukat kehittyvät ja
opetella katselemaan, kuinka kaunista luonto on.
Mutta mitä hyödyttää puhua koulusta. Opetushan seuraa kaikkea
muuta, sehän on vaan osa kasvatuksesta, eikä se riipu niin paljon
siitä, tiedämmekö sen tai sen, pääasia on saada tunne kehittymään
ja sydän lämpenemään.
Kuitenkin matkustamme me vielä tänään maalle ja katsomme,

mitä voimme tehdä puutarhalle. Signe saa oman maapalasensa,
jonka hän saa muokata ja kylvää. Kun puhun tästä hänelle, tulee
hänen katseensa kuin auringonpaisteeksi, pieniä pyyleviä käsiä
taputetaan riemusta, ja me menemme ulos käsi kädessä.
Ulkona laulaa linnut ja maa on täynnä elävää elämää. Miksi emme

me kaksikin voisi elää, tarvitsematta silti olla runolijoita taikka
ihmeitä.
"Mitä sinä arvelet, Signe?"
Tänään on palvelustyttö ollut kaupungissa asialla ja Signe on

mennyt mukana.
Kun he palaavat, tulee Signe minun luokseni, sinne missä istun

papereineni.
"Isä, Fiina sanoo, että jos Signellä ei olisi sinua, niin ei Signellä
olisi ketään, jonka luona olla, sitten kun äiti on mennyt taivaaseen."
"No niin, mutta onhan Signellä tätejä."

"Signellä ei olisi kotia, missä asuisi, ei vuodetta missä makaisi, ei
ruokaa, eikä mitään."
"Onhan sinulla tätejä, jotka antaisivat sinulle kaiken tuon."
"Mistä sinä sitten saat kaikki sellaiset, isä?"
"Minä ansaitsen työlläni."
"Eikö Signekin voi ansaita?"
"Eikö sinulla ole kaikki hyvin nyt sitte?"
"On, mutta jos isä menisi taivaaseen."
"Ei isä kuole, ennenkun Signe tulee suureksi."
"Menihän äitikin pois Signen luota."
"Äidin täytyi mennä, mutta isän ei täydy, isän täytyy olla täällä —
miten on sinun uuden nukenvaunusi laita, sopiiko se hyvin nukelle?"
Mielessäni olen raivoissani koko palvelusväelle. He eivät näy

olevan kasvattajia. Puhua sellaista lapsille!
Signe menee hakemaan nukenvaunuaan ja tulee vetäen sitä

perässään. Äkkiä jättää hän sen ja juoksee minun luokseni, kiipee
syliini ja painaa koko pikku olentonsa minua vasten.
"Kuinka hyvä sinä olet, isä, annat Signelle uusia vaatteita, uudet
kengät ja leikit kanssani kaikenmoista."
"No, nyt katselemme nukenvaunua."

Jos minä kuolisin — mitä tulisi silloin Signestä? Luontoni vastustaa
tuota ajatusta. Minä en voi enää ajatella, että hän voisi elää ilman
minua, yhtä vähän kuin minä ilman häntä.
Köyhä ja surullinen olen minä, lohduttomana seisoin minä

hautakummulla ja itkin, mutta sinä, sinä pikkuruinen asetit pehmeän
kätesi käteeni.
Sinä katsoit silmiini kuin lapsi katsoo, viattomuudella ja

luottamuksella, ja sinä annoit minulle uuden onnen.
Minä tahdon tehdä elämäsi iloiseksi ja valoisaksi kuin

auringonpaisteinen sunnuntaiaamu, kun laineet loiskivat.
Köyhä ja surullinen olin minä, mutta sinä asetit lapsenkätesi minun

käteeni ja annoit minulle uuden onnen.
Pikku Signe ei voi hyvin tänään. Näen, että hän on kalpea ja

toisinaan häntä viluttaa. Hän ei mene ulos, vaan istuu sisällä
värilaatikoineen ja nukkineen. Iltapäivällä saa hän pään kipua ja
tahtoo itse mennä vuoteesen. Parin tunnin kuluttua herää hän taas ja
on kuumeessa. Hän sanoo voivansa paremmin, mutta lääkäriä on jo
haettu. Hän tulee, antaa jotain pieniä määräyksiä yöksi, sanoo,
rauhoittaakseen minua, että se on vaan vähäpätöinen vilustuminen,
joka pian menee ohi.
Me juomme teetä illalliseksi ja minä istun Signen vuoteen vieressä

pidellen kuppia ja tukien hänen lämmintä päätään. Huomaan, että

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Novel Approaches to Lesbian History

Denise deCaires Narain

More information about this series at

ISSN 2523-8140 ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic)

Cover image © Micha Klootwijk / Alamy Stock Photo

As a younger woman I was fortunate to be taught, mentored, and

essay “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and

1 Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother 1

2 H(a)unting the Archives 19

3 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lesbian Sex*

4 Tomboys and Indians 77

5 Unsafe Seas for Women111

6 The Usual Suspects145

Epilogue: Failing That, Invent165

Lesbian Historical Novels by Category167

­Key to Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels171

Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels173

Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

need for history. We certainly speculated about living women—from Tracy

landscape: What is a lesbian in the first place? What constitutes evidence of

be different—even heroic—in a comfortably recognizable and marketable

Queer theorists exploring temporality make similar claims; “queer time”

What energizes ancestral genealogy is its confidence in—and political com-

resist explanation in the context of identity history” (61). To most garden-­

writer. Neo-Victorian scholars discuss Donoghue as well, but her contri-

groundbreaking study Between Men: English Literature and Male

Imagine living in a city where there are no monuments, no buildings from

Grounded in archival research, Donoghue’s lesbian historical novels pro-

Doan, Laura. Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of

———. The Little Stranger. Virago, 2009.

H(a)unting the Archives

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

With the campiness of a sophisticated drag performance, Dunye’s faux doc-

Maybe The Watermelon Woman is such a successful hoax not only

such as Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, and Louise Beavers; she

identify. She is thoroughly schooled by June, in a voiceover narration that

(188), Hannah’s historical context meant she was condemned, brutally

constructedness of history as well as its usefulness to the present. I would

lover, Catherine, a school teacher and self-taught community historian.

else, something … deeper” (181). In other words, Susan’s needs in the

Naiset pukeutuvat vaaleihin pukuihin, kalossit sysätään syrjään, ja

Ruohokentät rupeavat kimaltelemaan hennossa vihreydessään,

Mutta kun illalla lapset ovat viedyt huoneisiin, soitto tauvonnut ja

Kuka meistä ei joskus elämässään olisi seisonut uudenaikaisessa

Taistelu talven jälkijoukon ja eteenpäin kiirehtivän kevään välillä on

Koivulehdot, jotka ovat olleet punertavia ja pronssinkarvaisia,

Eläimet viedään taas laitumelle ja pelloilla kynnetään ja kylvetään

Saaristoissa on vielä jäätiköltä jälellä jossain varjoisalla rannalla ja

Usva lepää hienona ja valkoisena aamulla, mutta kun

Niin, kevät on voittanut, kaikkialla on eloa, elämää ja väriä,

Niin, nauttikaamme siis me kaupunkilaisihmisetkin valosta ja

Mutta kerro minulle enemmän alpeille nousuistasi, enemmän niistä

Sinä kysyt minulta katseellasi — et tahdo tehdä sitä suullisesti —

Niin, katsos, minä kasvoin kaukana maalla, kodissa, jota suuri

Katsokaas, vanha äiti on vielä hieman runollinen. Nyt lepään

Niin, ja sitten kasvoi minussa vähitellen suuri halu nähdä kaiken

Sitten tuli kevät, maa rupesi viheriöitsemään ja koivujen ja

Nyt loppuivat pian unelmat korkeuksista ja avaruuksista — ne

Siitä on kulunut vuosi, ei kauvempaa. Kuinka tämä vuosi on

Me olemme olleet tänään haudalla, Signe ja minä ja koristaneet

Joskus vaan enää tapahtuu, että äidin muisto jälleen herää, ja

Kuluneena vuotena olen minä koettanut johonkin määrin korvata

1 Who Knows, Who Cares, and Why Bother 1

2 H(a)unting the Archives 19

3 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lesbian Sex*

4 Tomboys and Indians 77

5 Unsafe Seas for Women111

6 The Usual Suspects145

Epilogue: Failing That, Invent165

Lesbian Historical Novels by Category167

Key to Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels171

Bibliography of Lesbian Historical Novels173

resist explanation in the context of identity history” (61). To most garden-