Lisa L. Moore

Lesbian Migrations: Mary Renault's South Africa

How can a postnational lesbian and gay literary history understand its imperialists and sexual conservatives as well as (or sometimes simply as) its resistance fighters and brave pioneers? This question, perhaps unanswerable in the abstract, has become increasingly pressing as the globalization of queer culture—through international gay media, human rights organizations, and even queer film festivals—brings the sexual practices and social histories of worlds once deemed separate into intimate contact. In this essay I examine a moment in which Mary Renault, probably the twentieth century’s best-selling lesbian writer, made two crucial and related decisions: to abandon the contemporary setting of her first six books for that of homosexual ancient Greece in the historical novels that were to secure her legacy, and to move from England to South Africa in the wake of World War II’s devastation of Europe. These two forms of distance—one literary, one geographic—help us understand some of the difficult features of Renault’s position in the history of gay and lesbian literature; they also show us, in practical terms, the shortcomings of the ethos of celebration that often marks our studies of queer writers of the past. This essay also seeks to explore the still little-examined connections between lesbianism and colonialism, the latter a term most often discussed in relation to male homoeroticism in the annals of gay and lesbian studies. The case of Renault challenges us to assess a lesbian literary pioneer who disavowed gay rights, considered women lesser artists than men, and benefited from the racial exploitation and segregation codified in apartheid. There are telling resonances between two contemporaneous forms of distantiation in which Renault engages in the late 1940s: her decision to write historical fiction and her emigration to South Africa.1 The motives for each decision were complex and overdetermined; Renault’s style in the British fiction of the 1940s does not constitute a simple prediction of her geographic relocation at the

A Lesbian History of the Sonnet

The singer Sappho, daughter of wealthy Scamandronymus of Mitylene, fell in love with Anactoria, or Atthis, or Abanthis, who looked like golden flowers. Sappho offered the glancing girl gifts of the finest Lesbian wine, perfumed purple clothes, painted toys, and silver cups innumerable and ivory. But the lovely one looked away, laughing. Suffering the hard pains of love, Sappho begged gold-crowned Aphrodite to come to her aid. The goddess came from heaven, wrapped in a purple cloak, and asked, “Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?” “She with beautiful feet and violets in her lap,” replied the singer. “She puts the heart in my chest on wings. Greener than grass I am, and almost dead for love.” The deathless one granted the poet this boon: a poem that turns toward two states of mind, in which she who flees will soon pursue, she who refuses gifts will offer them fruitlessly, and she who laughs at love will, all unwilling, feel its hard care. Aphrodite gave Sappho the sonnet. Apollo and Daphne, Diana and Actaeon, Orpheus and Eurydice: these couplings have all been exhaustively explored as metaphors for poetry’s founding moments. Despite the long-acknowledged primacy of the ancient Greek poet Sappho in the Western lyric tradition, her potent evocations of one woman’s desire for another are missing from this catalog of origin stories. In this essay, I propose to read the sonnet, sutured as it is