oes she love her? Does she not? As best-selling scholar-novelist Emma Donoghue argues in Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature, lesbian love has always been “somehow unofficial, lurking below the radar.” At the same time, that same phantasmal passion is central to Western cultural history. To prove her point, Donoghue examines a cross section of Western literature from late Classical Antiquity to the twentieth century that runs the gamut from high to middle to lowbrow. For her, Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, and the writers of lesbian pulp fictions have just as much to say about woman-to-woman desire as do the likes of Ovid, Shakespeare, Sade, Maupassant, Dickens, and Hardy. Her book, which is as readable as it is rigorous, highlights the idea that understanding certain plot motifs is key to understanding how writers have represented female/female courtship and love over the centuries. As she sees it, six such motifs exist: transvestite women who fall in love as a result of mistaken gender identities; women who bond with each other for life as “inseparables;” women who fight men for the attention of another woman; women who haunt other women as ghosts, vampires, or demons; women whose secret love for each other is discovered only in the aftermath of a crime; and woman-to-woman desire discovered in the process of owning up to a lesbian identity.
At the same time, Donoghue is careful not to present her study as an analysis of lesbian characters, but rather as one that focuses on female identity and its relationship to sexuality/same-sex attractions. She does this consciously, to “sidestep the . . . debates over how to classify ’sexual orientation,’ especially in the centuries before the concept was widespread.” Her approach also allows her to suggest that sexual–and by extension gender–identity is fluid and that rigid sexual/gender binaries are part of what have kept females personally and socially entrapped. What’s so refreshing about Inseparable is that, while it’s clearly the work of a bona fide scholar (Donoghue, a Ph.D. in English from Cambridge, spent 12 years researching and writing the book), it still manages to be both witty and entertaining. The writer is like that favorite college professor who, in her genial unstuffiness, breathes the kind of life into her subject that keeps students riveted from the first word. Once she makes you see that the past is really “a wild party,” and can get you to “check your preconceptions at the door,” realization that all forms of love–whether hetero and homosexual–are inextricably bound is not far behind.
by Emma Donoghue
