“WHEN IT COMES to lesbians, many people have trouble seeing what’s in front of them,” in the words of lesbian literary scholar Terry Castle. This statement rings especially true for historians, who infamously tend to gloss over already marginal lesbian relationships, reifying the Victorian belief in “proper” women’s asexuality. That belief had disastrous consequences for pre-Stonewall lesbian art history—a field which, in many contexts, remains in the stage of first-generation scholarship.
As a graduate student in Canada, I served as associate curator of The First Homosexuals with Jonathan D. Katz. I thus embarked on a quest to discover Canada’s “first homosexual” artists, only to find a glaring absence of research on this topic. I was troubled to learn that little to nothing had been written on queer art history in Canada before Stonewall—especially for such an ostensibly progressive country and academy. Conversations with scholars turned up a handful of leads.
It soon became evident that prevailing historical methodologies were to blame. The writers of early Canadian art histories tended to advance a genital-centric logic of lesbian identification, which is to say, they demanded explicit evidence of sexual activity between two women in order to qualify them as lovers or lesbians—a standard that is not equally applied for heterosexual couples. This logic neglects the reality of lesbian existence. As the pioneering Canadian historian Cameron Duder explains: “Lesbian relationships existed in a context of silence and fear and were balanced against the need for familial connection, financial security, maintenance of respectability, and physical safety. … Their relationships were hidden from many but were there to be seen by those who knew when and how to see and hear.”
Most art historians had failed to consider this context of silence and fear, and thus the strategies that Canadian women employed to subvert the dominant pathologizing discourse around lesbianism. Indeed, lesbianism was widely conceived of as both a congenital and a contagious illness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as famously expounded by the English sexologist Havelock Ellis in his study Sexual Inversion (firrst volume, 1897). Ellis posited that sexual deviants embodied a male soul in a female body, or vice versa, identifying gender transgression as the defining characteristic of lesbianism. Thus, according to predominant late-19th-century sexology, lesbians were but perverse men stuck in women’s bodies.
It should thus come as no surprise that most women chose not to name their sexualities. Not naming was to expressly evade the pathological baggage of a name, and hence of an identity category. As early modern scholar Harriette Andreadis has pointed out: “The effect of naming—and the more public the naming the more profound the effect—was to bring to the consciousness of individuals the connections between their behaviors and named transgressions. In this way to name may be to inhibit and constrain.” My point is that “an erotics of unnaming,” to use Andreadis’ term, was a strategy that was successfully employed by Canadian lesbian artists around the turn of the century. Artists had access to a privileged medium of expression, one that could eschew linguistic and thus punitive and disciplinary dogma. That their identities were unspoken, however, does not mean these artists did not lead complex and rich psychic lives, and they certainly expressed their identifications through their artistic practices. Put otherwise, their works of art, often accomplishing what language could not, enabled their makers to say the unsayable.
Please note that my focus on lesbian artists and their erased histories is not necessarily a feminist choice on my part. The queer artists that we know of working in Canada during this period simply happen to be lesbians. This is probably due to the paucity of research on queer art history in Canada before World War II, or to the fact that lesbian relationships were not criminalized to the degree that male homosexual relations were. Same-sex intimacy between women was less of a public concern, and female homosexuality was not added to the Canadian Criminal Code until 1953. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was still possible for women’s intimacy to be categorized as “romantic friendship,” a relatively normative model that enabled some same-sex couples to live together and share a bed over an extended period, effectively cohabitating as a married couple without legal recognition (Faderman, 1991).
The Impressionist painter Florence Carlyle (1864–1923) is the first homosexual artist on record in Canadian history. Her œuvre reveals an unrelenting interest in the erotic and emotional lives of women, especially of her lover Judith Hastings. Take, for instance, The Threshold of 1912 (Figure 1), a chef-d’œuvre of Canadian Impressionism. The canvas portrays Hastings in the traditional garb of a bride during a moment of quiet introspection, clutching her hands to her chest with her eyes solemnly shut. In a marital context, the “threshold” refers to the act of the groom carrying his bride over the threshold of a doorway to their new home, symbolizing the dawn of a new stage in life. Carlyle had met Hastings a year earlier during a trip to Wimbledon, England, to visit her brother. Hastings, a woman she described as “pink as a rose,” was her brother’s neighbor, and when they met the pair became immediately infatuated with one another. They would remain together for the rest of Carlyle’s life, and Hastings quickly became the artist’s preferred model and muse. When Hastings came to visit Carlyle in Ontario at her family’s home the following year, she painted Hastings as her bride, signifying the very threshold of their life together.
In my research, I discovered that the nature and significance of their relationship had been bowdlerized by art historian Susan Butlin in The Practice of Her Profession (2009). Butlin didn’t even mention the possibility that the two women could have been lovers. Feminist art history has at times failed to acknowledge the possibility of women’s love for other women, perpetuating an unfortunate framework of lesbian erasure. When justification for this expungement is provided, the lack of documented sexual activity is nearly always cited. On this silence in lesbian history, gender historian Martha Vicinus puts it best: “Silence is not empty, nor is absence invisible.” What Vicinus means, of course, is that lesbians often strategically employed silence for safety, and that our historiographical methods should in turn reflect this fact. As one journalist quoted in Butlin’s text commented: “[Of] Florence Carlyle herself little has been written. The reason is … she has not permitted it.”
The Toronto-based sculptors and life-long partners Frances Loring (1887–1968) and Florence Wyle (1881–1968) similarly shielded themselves from biographical investigation, and further ensured that no letters were left behind. Loring and Wyle met at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906 and remained lovers for an impressive six decades until both died just weeks apart in 1968. Following a brief sojourn in Greenwich Village, the pair settled in Toronto during the winter of 1912–13. The couple certainly stood out in the genteel Torontonian atmosphere—they were both known to wear trousers, baggy coats, men’s shoes, and moth-eaten berets as they promenaded around the city. “Passers-by would stare in obvious disapproval,” their friend reported. Nevertheless, in 1920 the pair moved into an old school church in Moore Park, which they repurposed into a home and studio. The church studio at 110 Glenrose Avenue served as an important hub for the arts in Toronto, where Loring and Wyle often hosted soirées and welcomed visits from members of the Group of Seven, the famed cohort of Canadian landscape painters. Here the pair began to refer to themselves as the Loring-Wyles, as if a newly married couple had moved into the rickety church.
The importance of art historical investigation is particularly evident in the absence of “explicit” evidence of lesbian relationships. Take Sun Worshipper of 1916, for example, Wyle’s bronze of a kneeling nude woman in a sort of sprawling, dramatic contrapposto (Figure 2). The figure arches her back to raise her chest to the sun and horizontally lifts her arm in the opposing direction, capturing a moment of ecstasy. The sculpture’s eroticism is palpable in the expression and posture of the figure, an affect heightened by the work’s lustrous surface. Wyle was devoted to a Classical ideal of the body: “The Greeks settled my ideas—gave them to me in the beginning. Greek sculpture; I think it’s the best we’ve ever had.” She produced sculptures of nude female torsos in wood, marble, and bronze throughout her career, striving to achieve a classical perfection of
Courtesy the National Gallery of Canada.
form (Figure 3). Wyle’s sapphic classicism would have been recognizable to Havelock Ellis, as he wrote in Sexual Inversion: “The inverted woman is an enthusiastic admirer of feminine beauty, especially of the statuesque beauty of the body [my emphasis].”
My point is that if an artist’s work manifests a sapphic rhetoric over the course of several decades, and especially if this artist also cohabitates with a long-term female partner, we need not engage in lengthy debate over the plausibility that she loved other women. Moreover, the persistent denial of this conclusion amounts to a sort of discursive violence. While the artists discussed here did not necessarily conceive of themselves as “lesbian,” it’s probably because this modern identity had not yet crystallized, much like Canadian national identity. Florence Carlyle was in fact born before the concepts of “homosexuality” and a united Canadian state existed. The modern, rigid identities of “lesbian” and “Canadian” were still very much in flux around the turn of the century, and arguably would not crystallize until mid-century. Carlyle, Loring, and Wyle would have seen these identities as more fungible than indissoluble. During a period in which their love was subject to compulsory silence, these artists also understood that their art could remain a site of cautious articulation.
A poet named Elsa Gidlow (1898–1986) represents the first generation of “out” lesbians in Canada. Gidlow was born in 1898 in Yorkshire, England, and moved to Montreal in 1904. With Roswell George Mills, she published a revolutionary, openly gay magazine, Les Mouches Fantastiques, from 1918 to 1920 as an outlet for amateur journalism. Gidlow, who Mills referred to as Sappho, addressed her love poems directly to women. The pair read and were inspired by Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde, and they envisioned themselves as inheritors of an ancient queer tradition spanning from the Greeks to Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Walt Whitman. In 1923, Gidlow published On a Grey Thread, a groundbreaking volume of sapphic poetry. Her poem “Love Sleep” begins: “Watch my Love in sleep/ Is she not beautiful/ As a young flower at night/ Weary and glad with dew?/ Pale curved body/ That I have kissed too much/ Warm with slumber’s flush.” Gidlow’s poetry represents a subsequent generation of North American lesbians for whom naming became a necessity, and for whom the closet no longer meant safety, but suffocation.
References
Butlin, Susan. The Practice of Her Profession: Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. Columbia University Press, 1993.
Duder, Cameron. Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900–65. UBC Press, 2010.
Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. 2: Sexual Inversion. The University Press, Limited, 1900.
Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America. Columbia University Press, 1991.
Johnny Willis, a nonbinary art historian, began working on The First Homosexuals as a curatorial assistant and is now serving as curatorial fellow at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago.
