Lesbian panic: The homoerotics of narrative in modern British women's fiction

In her groundbreaking studies Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick posits that much of nineteenth-century British literature--and much of subsequent popular and high culture--is underscored by what she terms "homosociality." Through this system of covert and socially sublimated male homoerotic desire, order is maintained through the exchange of women as sexual objects that mediate and surrogate forbidden male homosexuality. Transgression from this established norm (i.e., the overt expression of homosexual desire) results in a form of disruption and violence that Sedgwick, following legal paradigms, terms "homosexual panic."; This dissertation examines a related if not completely analogous situation in twentieth-century British women's fiction. Women, given their historic economic marginalization and corresponding dependence on men, have been unable to express their own covert homoerotic desires through an exchange of men. Rather, the open expression of lesbianism or any evidence thereof devalues a woman as an object of male exchange. Accordingly, in the context of the courtship plot, that most commonplace of female-authored fictional modes, lesbian desire can exist only as a threat to the predetermined closure in marriage. In this study, I trace lesbian panic from its early stages as a form of disruption in the courtship plot in works by Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte. Subsequently, as the courtship plot becomes a less viable form for women novelists, the paradigm shifts; the narrative of romance and marriage becomes increasingly secondary, while that of other events, including lesbian desire and panic, come to the forefront. Through the novels of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, Anita Brookner, Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy, Beryl Bainbridge, Emma Tennant, Fay Weldon, and Jeanette Winterson, I trace this phenomenon and its influence on the shape of lesbian representation in women's fiction. I argue that while the plot of lesbianism in these novels has generally been invisible or unspeakable to critics, female homoerotic desire is nonetheless a central, rather than marginal issue in the delineation of twentieth-century British women's fiction and must be reckoned with as such.