Lily Briscoe. Mary Meigs
of humility and resentment; and the total inability, because they were so far beyond me, to learn from them—the inability to see what they saw, how they saw, to take even a first step; the infantile frustration spent on rage at the hapless pears on a chair, which seemed like a crystallization of my impotent self.
Sometimes we can come to terms with the infant in ourselves, but we cannot kill it. Aroused, this infant behaves in fascinating ways, awful and uncontrollable. He or she shouts, weeps and raves like a lunatic. There is a lunatic in every one of us, ready to be triggered off by “something,” the threat of threats. Lovers breaking up are in a state of derangement, on the edge of madness. I have been that way, possessed by unreason. We are threatened by superior beings, threatened by the fear of being abandoned. The latter can drive human beings and animals mad. Communism. Homosexuality. I know a remarkable woman, accomplished and intelligent, who writes reports, heads commissions, practices psychotherapy, and her madness resides in that part of her that is homosexual, that unadmitted part. To admit it would send her over the edge. Contemptuously, she speaks of women as lesbians and men as faggots; unmarried, she talks of the joys of married life and of heterosexual love. And coward that I am, I never allude to the incident in her life when she was in love with another woman, for this is the trigger and I am afraid to pull it. I begin to tremble at the very thought, just as I tremble at the thought of discussing myself with anybody, afraid to kill or be killed. Isn’t the threat, finally, death to an essential image of ourselves, to the way we hold our egos together?
I have always had difficulty holding my ego together, for it was battered both by my infinitely slow progress as a painter and by society’s generalized threat to homosexuals, which could turn me to craven jelly even while I remained in hiding. Homosexuals live more than others in the shadow of threat. We have committed a crime that has been condemned for thousands of years. Our answer has been to deny it. We lead double lives; we are hated (if recognized) and then judged for hating ourselves. We are judged for reacting bitterly to the unbearable weight of guilt that has been put on us. The most beautiful and loving experiences of our lives have to be kept secret; and the lies we live make us wary and cold. “Cold heart, what do you know about love?” my mother once said to me. At the time she spoke, I was twenty-five and having my first sexual experience with a woman. But it was not my first love.
Three years before, I was in love with a woman and it made me quake with fear and happiness, such flooding happiness that that time of first being in love with a woman still seems like the happiest time of my life. I was twenty-two years old and knew only enough about homosexuality to be afraid of the subject. Long before that, at a debutante party (for we dutifully went through the conventional paces), a young man questioned me, “Have you ever been in love? Do you want to get married?” I said that I hadn’t thought about it, but no, I didn’t particularly want to get married. He kissed me suddenly. I saw his lips coming closer and pulled away. “Don’t you feel anything?” he asked. I said I didn’t, not wanting to say that I hated the feeling of this strange mouth pressed against my own. He looked curiously at me and said, “Maybe you’re . . .” and stopped. “Maybe I’m what?” “Nothing,” he said. I remember this exchange about thirty years later when what he meant came to me with a blinding flash. A “sort of” or a real Lesbian? Had I deliberately hidden myself from myself? How did it happen that I remained so long in a state of total innocence about sex, that I didn’t try any of the experiments with my body that other children try? My sister and I were caught one day by our governess lying on the bed with our feet in the air, trying to study ourselves. After her scolding, I never looked at myself again and never wanted to. How well it worked, repression by shame and disgust! The exchange of sexual information that normally goes on between brothers and sisters in a family was taboo in ours and harmless experiments became crimes. With the following exception, our brothers and we never saw each other nude. It was summer; my sister and I were eleven and our brother was sixteen. Our rooms adjoined one another and one night he stole into our room to give us a lesson in comparative anatomy. This ended disastrously, for in the purity of our mean little hearts, we informed. “Why couldn’t you have told me that you minded?” said our brother, who had been annihilated by our mother’s wrath. Now, almost fifty years later, I know that this brother has been devoured by guilt ever since, martyred like Prometheus, though he did nothing shameful, and that my sister and I are partly responsible. As for me and the fact that I “minded” so much—did it mean that the “sort of” was already latent in me? Or was it our upbringing that made me continue to be squeamish about men’s bodies to this very day, to skirt gracefully around the word “penis,” and yet to harbour in me a certain interest in this unruly organ that all men carry about with them?
When my short-term Argentine lover, in the stormy days of our breaking-up, accused me of suffering from “penis envy,” I flew into a rage, longing to think of an equivalent accusation for him. “You have penis envy yourself,” I said, wishing to attack his manhood, for he was sensitive in a general way on this point (he did not know how to drive and it humiliated him to be so capably driven by me). But he smiled sardonically. For Freud, penis envy was inherent in every woman, like original sin; for most people now, it is a useful term to throw at women who aspire to self-determination. Or perhaps it is because they are Lesbians? For, if your attitude toward the penis is at all irreverent, if you refuse to think of it as the rising sun, the risen Lord, the creation, or whatever, you are immediately suspect. Hasn’t Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover a sixth sense for spotting the “Lesbian woman” (i.e., one who pits her sexual will against his)? “When I get with a Lesbian woman, whether she knows she’s one or not I see red,” he says to Connie. Well, Mellors has suffered from women’s wills and refusals and frigidity, which (in Lawrence’s eyes) adds up to Lesbianism, and since I have a sneaking affection for Mellors, I forgive him. But I don’t forgive Lawrence, who might have made an effort to understand Lesbians as profoundly as he understood everybody else. But being an almost “sort of” himself, he was uptight about threats to his manhood. So was my Argentine friend. I understand now why he said during a furious argument we had about Lawrence, in which each tried to claim him as a friend, “Lawrence would have hated you.” Yes, I think now, having just read Lady Chatterley’s Lover after all these years, Lawrence would have perceived the Lesbian in me, the resistance to his maleness—and would have “seen red.” At the time of our argument, the sentence, “Lawrence would have hated you,” seemed to be groundless, calculated to arouse my fury. Now I think—would he have? Couldn’t we perhaps have been friends if there had been no question of our being lovers?
But to return to my sexless childhood, to my grown-up relations, and to the two houses where we spent our vacations. I see now that my choice of Mater’s house, The Peak, rather than of Belfield, my maternal grandmother’s house, was less an early exercise of taste than an instinct for what made me happy. Belfield had thick stone walls, narrow, almost perpendicular staircases, small rooms full of beautiful old furniture, a basement that smelled of mould, turned butter and souring cream. Everything about Belfield should have made us happy, yet we were less happy than at The Peak. The garden at Belfield was fragrant with lilac and peonies, and you could descend stone steps past a rock garden and take a path that led to the spring, a pool covered with a lacy green plant which heaved and trembled with the perpetual bubbling below. It terrified me to think that if you fell into the spring you could never get out. There were other things to fear at Belfield: a bad tempered cow that chased us and giant Muscovy ducks with their faces entirely covered by red wattles, standing in the mud of the chicken yard, their eyes like brass buttons. But worse than that, there was something almost abstract there, a sense of menace: the huge grey building, a Catholic seminary, that was built on the land beyond the back gate.
My mother’s prejudice against Roman Catholics was shared by her sister, Sarah, who fought tooth and nail to keep the land from being acquired and the seminary from being built. Aunt Sarah was acknowledged by everybody to be a great woman. By sheer force of character and intelligence, she became president of a medical school for women, though she had had no medical training, and was given several honourary degrees. She was a feminist at a time when it was hard work to be one. When we were young, she wished even to liberate my sister and me from our subject state. “Do you remember when Aunt Sarah said to mother, ‘Suppress, suppress,’ meaning that mother suppressed us?” my sister asked me