Lily Weeks
Lily Weeks is a Ph.D. student in American Studies at New York University. Their work centers on 20th and 21st-century American literature, media, and popular culture, with an emphasis on ephemeral, deteriorated, and/or forgotten works. Their primary fields of interest include queer studies, affect studies, critical race theory, and physical & digital archives. Lily has recently been writing on 1990s lesbian films and plans to incorporate this work into a larger project on sincerity and seriousness in queer archives. They hold a B.A. in English and Visual and Dramatic Arts from Rice University.
Serious Ambivalences: Sensationalism and Sincerity in Lesbian Pulp Fiction
Introduction: Ambivalence in the Lesbian Pulp Fiction Canon
Most scholars credit Tereska Torrès’ 1951 novel Women’s Barracks as the first entry into the lesbian pulp fiction genre. The novel is a largely autobiographical account of the women of the French Freedom movement in World War II, and it is far less salacious than one might expect under the category of pulp. Portrayals of lesbian sexuality in the wave of lesbian-centric pulp novels that followed Women’s Barracks actually varied widely, ranging from lesbian-authored romances to male-authored pseudo-studies of sexual deviancy. Even now, the scope of the genre is extremely broad. As scholar Yvonne Keller outlines, the novels published between 1951 and 1965 must meet only two criteria for entry into the lesbian pulp fiction genre: they must be printed on mass-produced paperbacks, and they must prominently feature a woman in a love plot with another woman.[1] To address the homophobia often embedded in the genre, scholars such as Keller have divided the works into two sub-categories: “pro-lesbian pulp fiction,”[2] books written by women centering a woman in a romantic plot with another woman, “without obviously extraneous sex scenes, and with well-developed characters” and “male reader-oriented pulp…typically with more sex and a male protagonist.”[3] Despite these delineations, the intermixing of male-oriented pulp with lesbian narratives has led to concerns about the genre as a whole as a purveyor of voyeurism, or a catalyst for the association of lesbianism with heterosexual pornography.[4] The novels’ covers, too, tend to exacerbate this issue; they are infamously salacious regardless of content.
Dismissing the novels as inherently voyeuristic, however, neglects the prominence of lesbian authors within the genre. The work of queer authors within a sensationalistic (and at times homophobic) genre nonetheless presents an archive of queer ephemera ripe for analysis. By pointing to the liminal queerness visible in lesbian pulp works, I position lesbian pulp novels as archives of queer ephemera. In “Ephemera as Evidence,” José Esteban Muñoz describes how, in these spaces, “Queerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack.”[5] In 1950s and 1960s lesbian pulp fiction, the possibility of attack is twofold. Lesbian authors contended with the (almost assured) risk that publishing companies would mandate tragic endings for queer protagonists, whose deaths operated as a failsafe for avoiding accusations of moral indecency.[6] Additionally, there was the possibility that the authors themselves would be outed through their work, hence the trend of authorial anonymity and the disguising of explicit lesbian identities within the texts.[7]
The “trace” of open, unashamed queerness in lesbian pulp fiction is thus mitigated by the authors, editors, and publishers. The trace also emerges as a recurring pattern of queer affects related to the protagonist’s taboo desires. For all their variation in content and tone, pulp novels frequently follow the same narrative structure: the (young, white, feminine) protagonist engages in a whirlwind romance with another (often older) woman that ends in heartbreak or tragedy. The more experienced love interest often inducts the protagonist into their queer circle of friends, even as the protagonist struggles to accept her queer identity in their presence. Because of the plot’s straightforward nature, the novels’ conflicts tend to be incredibly interior. Readers follow the protagonists as they become enamored with the love interest, fraught with frustration over their queer desires, and overwhelmed with despair at the impossibility of their situations. While these feelings vary greatly in tone, they are almost exclusively tied to the melodramatic because of their excessive and sentimental nature. In a contemporary review of Women’s Barracks, for example, Publisher’s Weekly describes the novel as “a delicious blend of sex and melodrama that manages to be sentimental without ever becoming mawkish or campy.”[8] Sentimental protagonists frequently enable the blend of melodramatic sexuality by remaining in close proximity to the reader, often narrating or engaging in free indirect discourse. As a result, their vulnerability enables increased emotional insight when they “invariably veer from the promise of pornography to the achingly real, and often painful, emotional excavations.”[9] The painfulness of the protagonists’ emotions often invokes the structure of moral melodramas. In lesbian pulp fiction, these melodramas manifest as an intense self-hatred at the idea of inhabiting an unaccepted (or supposedly immoral) identity. As a result, the novel’s pull towards wallowing in feeling, towards the extreme or the excessive, is inextricably linked to the protagonist’s queer identity. So, while the texts’ melodrama can be read as campy or sensational, the turbulent emotions that melodrama enables are also crucial to understanding the affective underpinnings of the lesbian pulp genre.
As a consequence of the genre’s palpable melodrama and heteronormative marketing, lesbian pulp fiction has often inspired ambivalence among readers and critics alike. For example, the term “ambivalence” is the focus of Christopher Nealon’s essay “Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction.” In an overview of the genre, Nealon describes reading pulp in the present day as “both funny and sad;”[10] funny “because of their outrageous melodrama” and sad “because the women who wrote the most popular lesbian pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties were always under pressure to remember that, officially, they were writing for a male readership.”[11] The novels feel additionally sad because of their tragic endings and the homophobic messages that often couple them. The sense of homosexuality as punishment is most palpable in the protagonists’ expressions of pain. In one of the most famous lesbian pulp novels, Ann Bannon’s I am a Woman (1959), the protagonist spends pages explaining queerness as discomfort. She describes how, being a lesbian, “all you want on God’s green earth is to get the hell out of your own skin and to be normal.”[12] Even the protagonists whose same-sex relationship survives the novel are often plagued by uncertainty; they face constant reminders that their happiness could be fleeting.[13] The novels’ emotional intensity, especially surrounding first romances and sexual awakenings, exacerbates the sense that queer happiness is unsustainable.
But despite the restrictiveness of the narratives’ ambivalences, the protagonists’ emotional oscillation defines the novels’ emotional registers. The emotional highs of queer liberation and the lows of moral entrapment come together and contradict one another, giving way to unique affective illegibilities. These illegibilities are perhaps most pronounced in pulp novels that reside in an in-between space, between the categories of pro-lesbian pulp and virile adventures. And so, to continue investigating difficult ambivalences, I turn to two lesser-known pulps, Kay Addams’ Queer Patterns (1959) and Della Martin’s Twilight Girls (1961). Although moments in both Queer Patterns and Twilight Girl could be read as erotic rape fantasies, I momentarily disregard questions of authorial intent to consider sincere articulations of queer pain. Reading Queer Patterns and Twilight Girl in conjunction with one another, I look for moments of sincerity in the novels’ discomforting dissonances as a way of reading for silences in the lesbian pulp archive. Additionally, I aim to highlight the varying emotional strategies that emerge from the genre’s ambivalences by focusing on an emotionally vulnerable protagonist and an invulnerable minor character. I argue that although lesbian pulps often traffic in homophobic tropes, their ambivalences do not make them “bad” queer art. Instead, their irresoluteness documents tangible queer pain and the complex and contradictory desires of lesbian subjects.
Reading Nora: Sincere Pain and Failed Alternatives in Queer Patterns
Queer Patterns is a particularly difficult pulp novel to read. The novel has elements of a pro-lesbian pulp piece. The narrative follows Nora’s attempts to come to terms with her lesbianism following her breakup with her boyfriend, Roger. Although Nora’s realization of her homosexuality is painful at first, she begins questioning her feelings of shame after beginning a romantic relationship with her coworker, Clara. Addams explores the romance between Nora and Clara in depth from a sympathetic perspective, aligning with Keller’s description of pro-lesbian pulps that have “surprisingly nonhomophobic images of lesbians given the time period, and emphasize the story of a lesbian romance in some depth.”[14] For example, moving in with Clara relieves Nora of the shame that often follows her. Nora describes, “Living with her was glorious, more wonderful than anything I had ever known.”[15] Addams not only takes seriously Nora’s queer desires but also delves into Nora’s pain following sexual trauma. Nora is raped twice throughout the course of the novel, once by Roger and again by an unnamed man at a bar. Although rape narratives are not uncommon in pulp novels, particularly in the erotic virile adventures, the author viscerally portrays the psychological repercussions of the violence Nora has experienced. By centering Nora’s numbness with a reserved seriousness, the narrative deviates from erotic rape narratives to highlight Nora’s long-lasting pain.
But despite these moments of perceived sincerity, the text also frequently veers into the territory of virile adventures. Halfway through the narrative, Nora takes a job nude modeling, and her internal monologue fades to the background as scenes of sexuality take center stage. Three-quarters of the way through the text, Nora’s former boyfriend suddenly returns. His re-entry into the narrative catalyzes the novel’s turn towards explicit heterosexual eroticism, erasing and re-framing Nora’s earlier queer desires. Lines like “The fact that he hadn’t pleased me had probably been just as much my fault as his” become the norm.[16] However, even in moments where the text centers male pleasure, its earlier portrayals of Nora’s psyche haunt Roger’s return. The text’s oscillation between sincerity and eroticism makes it so that unpacking contradictory forces in the novel allows a unique insight into an unintelligible emotional landscape. The novel’s contradictions create failure at many levels, introducing possibilities for sustainable queer happiness before foreclosing them with palpable force.
Queer Patterns portrays visceral representations of the protagonists’ pain following instances of sexual violence, investigating her psyche with a seriousness that feels disjointed from the rest of the text. The scene deviates from both the tropes of erotic rape fantasies in virile adventures and the “melodramatic exaggerations” that accompany even most pro-lesbian pulp novels.[17] In investigating the prevalence of erotic rape narratives in mid-twentieth-century pulp novels, scholar Alex O’Connell points to a pattern in which these novels’ protagonists continually grapple with their masochistic desires. In the erotic pulps that O’Connell references, inevitably, the protagonist “soon finds herself enjoying rape and sexual violence at the hands of the main male character.”[18] The protagonist’s “masochistic enjoyment” is portrayed alongside the “sadistic pleasure” of the assailants throughout the text.[19] In Queer Patterns, Addams portrays neither the sadistic pleasure nor masochistic enjoyment that marks most eroticized rape narratives in postwar pulp novels. When a stranger rapes Nora, the act of rape itself is relegated to two sentences. Nora narrates: “Then I was on the bed, unable to cope with his weight and strength. I closed my eyes, shuddering, trying to cut myself off from reality.”[20] The lack of detail stands apart from later scenes of homosexual and heterosexual sex, which are described explicitly. The detail that she was “trying to cut herself from reality” urges the reader to take this moment seriously, neglecting visual descriptions in favor of prioritizing Nora’s defensive psyche. The narrative also does not portray pleasure from the perspective of the perpetrator–the scene cuts to him claiming, “I didn’t mean to do it,” to which Nora responds that he did.[21] The scene’s matter-of-fact nature contributes to a sense of realism, encouraging the reader to identify with Nora and her painful experience.
The narrator’s withholding of details surrounding sexual violence creates a careful representation of withdrawal resulting from trauma. In An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich focuses on trauma in contemporary queer and female texts. She describes a traumatic response as difficult to portray, a “complex and even paradoxical process because it includes not only ‘hyperarousal,’ or states of heightened sensitivity, but ‘numbness,’ or states of imperviousness to sensitivity, such as ‘dissociation.’”[22] Addams conveys Nora’s paradoxical response to trauma in the novel’s first rape scene. The scene painstakingly builds as Nora protests Roger’s assault during their date until Nora describes how “He was moaning, and then he clutched at me in the shock of ecstasy I felt nothing, nothing at all. I felt only the violation of my body, not once but many times, and each time I begged him to stop.”[23] Nora’s description of feeling “nothing” alludes to her withdrawal from the scene. In contrast, her insistence that she still felt the “violation” of her body conveys the paradoxical hyperarousal that exists in tandem with her numbness. The lack of punctuation between “ecstasy” and “I” creates additional discomfort in the reader. The run-on reflects the immediacy of Nora’s assault even as she mentally withdraws. Compared to moments of sexual violence common in virile adventures, Addam’s exploration of Nora’s pain feels pressing and real.
Additionally, despite the prevalence of sexual violence, Nora’s lesbianism is not framed as a result of rape but as a separate (painful) issue. This, again, stands apart from other pro-lesbian pulp novels; several books of (relatively) well-known status in the lesbian pulp fiction canon portray lesbianism as a result of trauma. In “Voyage to Camp Lesbos,” Barbara Brickman describes how books like Vin Packer’s Spring Fire echo “the sickness theories of writers such as [Frank] Caprio and [Wilhem] Stekel where some trauma, such as violence, abuse, or early sexual assault, results in frigidity and/or homosexuality in women.”[24] While Spring Fire aligns with popular 1950s psychosexual theories, Queer Patterns resists these explanations for Nora’s homosexuality. Nora is careful to note that her attraction to women has endured for some time, presumably as long as she has lived. She describes seeing women in changing rooms as a teen, remembering how “Sometimes at night I would dream of this and wake up in a cold sweat. I would have the pillow clutched tightly to my body but it wouldn’t be a pillow at all. It would be the body of a girl.”[25] Her feelings of despair may be overwhelming and all-consuming; however, Nora is careful to differentiate her desire from the consequences of her traumatic experiences. This separation allows Addams breathing room to explore Nora’s sexuality in tandem with her sexual trauma without necessarily linking her lesbianism to the sexual assaults she has experienced.
The book’s insistent portrayal of Roger as a hero, however, rewrites this more serious investigation into Nora’s trauma and sexuality. As Roger becomes a viable love interest again, Nora also retroactively doubles back on her earlier feelings. She reframes his “violation” of her as unsatisfactory sex that was probably “just as much my fault as his.”[26] She continues to shift responsibility to herself, describing, “Sex was merely an expression of love, not the whole of love. You took a man to your body and sometimes you expected too much.”[27] She also separates herself from her desire for Clara; suddenly, “Quick memory of the nights I had known her, the nights we had known each other, swept before me in a blinding flash of distaste and disgust.”[28] Through the degradation of Clara and praise of Roger’s sexual prowess, Addams portrays Roger as “saving” Nora from her lesbianism, mirroring the virile adventures that “often have a male hero.”[29] Notably, this ending is not a tacked-on disclaimer on the dangers of homosexuality but an extended culmination of the narrative’s more sensational aspects. Early on in the text, for example, Nora’s friend Hilda gives an extended monologue praising the sexual prowess of the “older men” who “show her a good time.”[30] But although the novel’s ending is foreshadowed by these moments, the decision to have Nora end the novel with Roger rather than fall in love with a new male love interest feels particularly painful. The move necessitates not only negating Nora’s earlier desire for Clara but retroactively rewriting Roger’s rape of Nora, replacing her view of the incident with his.
But despite the novel’s many shortcomings, Nora’s failed attempts at exploring alternative futures allow readers to chart unexplored possibilities. Throughout much of the text, Nora seems to be working towards a path of self-discovery that later doubles back on itself. Although her pain at her lesbian identity feels familiarly melodramatic, there are other moments in which Nora begins to question whether or not she should be feeling wounded by her desire for Clara. When she debates returning to Clara after they first sleep together, Nora starts to doubt her feelings of guilt. She starts to describe returning to Clara, saying, “To do that was to destroy myself totally, to take further and further into a forbidden world.”[31] However, then she pivots, asking herself, “But was it really wrong?”[32] Nora resolves to “figure out” how she feels about her lesbianism not by seeking out moral guidance but by looking to her own feelings.[33] She tells the reader, “I had to solve this by myself. I had to reach into my mind and body and learn the truth.”[34] This move marks a distinct change in Nora’s psyche; she pivots from wallowing at the pain of immorality to investigating “the truth” about her desire.
Nora’s victimization leads to an increased fervor in discovering her sense of self. She describes feeling like a “tramp” following her rape; however, she remains insistent on not returning to her previous life. She maintains, “The old life was behind me and I had to build another one. I couldn’t go back, couldn’t retrace my steps. I had to plunge ahead, right or wrong, and find myself.”[35] At this moment, Nora sidelines her quest to find what is right and wrong, instead prioritizing self-discovery. She progresses in her quest to find herself at unexpected moments following her experiences with sexual violence. After the second rape, Nora describes her feelings of intense loneliness; however, she also comes to a revelation about her desire for Clara. She explains to the reader, “The night before a man had taken me on this bed but now I was alone, so terribly alone that I felt lost to the entire world. I put my hands to my breasts, cupping them, admitted to myself that they wanted the love of only one person. Clara.”[36] Although the visuality of Nora cupping her own breasts is possibly aimed at male readers, Nora’s touching of herself and admittance of her feelings for Clara can also be read as an act of reclaiming sexuality. Her sense of feeling “lost” is connected to her rape, the man that had “taken” her in her room, as well as to her desires for women, which she repeatedly describes as isolating. As a result, Nora admits her attraction to Clara as a remedy to her loneliness, even as it cannot resolve her pain at being assaulted. In other words, Nora’s acceptance of her desire provides a building block for a new understanding of identity after it has been shattered in a multitude of painful ways.
However, Nora understands this admittance of her lesbianism as a failure, even as it provides her with a sense of identity. Alluding to her return to Clara, Nora tells the reader, “I knew what I was going to do, and what I had to do…I had been a fool to try to forget; failure was the only thing possible. And I had failed.”[37] By failing at trying to “forget” her feelings for Clara, Nora fails at fulfilling expectations of heterosexuality. As a result, Nora’s failure to meet her own expectations provides certain possibilities. As Jack Halberstam explains in The Queer Art of Failure, failure to meet patriarchal standards can also be freeing, as “gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals.”[38] Once Nora lets go of her attempt to succeed at heterosexuality, she asserts that she has finally found herself. She asks herself a question that she has repeated time and time again: “Who was I? What was I?”[39] For the first time, she has an answer: “I was in love with another girl.”[40] Nora’s failure to forget her queerness catalyzes her newfound assurance of “who she is” as she ties her identity to her love for Clara. Even though her love for Clara cannot encapsulate her entire identity, Nora’s move to define herself by her queerness mirrors the manner by which “queer lives exploit some potential for a difference in form…not as an essential attribute of sexual otherness but as a possibility embedded in the break from heterosexual life narratives.”[41] Consequently, Nora’s failure marks the culmination of her self-discovery journey, as her assertion of queerness offers many alternative paths away from heterosexual narratives.
However, in the larger context of the novel, Nora’s attempt to better understand herself fails, as well. Nora’s newfound assurance in her lesbian identity falls apart when she discovers Clara cheating on her. She describes the pain this betrayal resulted in, saying, “She had torn me apart and I needed to be alone.”[42] Clara’s betrayal feels particularly palpable because it comes directly after Nora shares details about her sexual assault with her. Clara is the only person sympathetic to her experiences, comforting her and reminding her that she is not alone.[43] As a result of her betrayal, Nora is left in a state of confusion. Because Nora’s new sense of identity had been rooted in her desire for Clara, Clara’s betrayal shatters her new understanding of self. Returning to a space of profound and multifaceted pain, Nora fails at charting new narratives. Although Nora’s rejection of heterosexuality introduced new ways of being, Nora’s inability to situate her queer identity showcases the way that “failure is also unbeing, and that these modes of unbeing and unbecoming propose a different relation to knowledge.”[44] After being undone by Clara, Nora immediately returns to Roger, seemingly seeking a return to normalcy. But although the text ends with Nora “succeeding” at heterosexuality, her moment of unbecoming lingers in the margins. What happens if we stay with Nora’s desire to be alone? In a position where her knowledge is completely in question? Although Nora chose a path back to heterosexual narratives, her moment of undoing provides a starting point for a new understanding of identity. From this point, we can imagine alternative paths to queer narratives, paths that start not from knowing oneself but from unknowing. However, ending Nora’s narrative here still leaves us in a moment of stasis, with Nora once again hurt and alone. The moments where the novel deviates from virile adventure tropes, especially when Nora’s pain is taken seriously, render the novel’s final indecisiveness especially crushing. While readers can imagine alternatives for Nora, they can also feel how her pain seeps through the narrative, even in its most sensationalistic moments.
Reading Mavis: Invulnerability and Racial Melodrama in Twilight Girl
While Nora’s emotional vulnerability in Queer Patterns clashes with the texts’ sensational tendencies, Twilight Girl uses a minor character’s invulnerability to pre-emptively defend itself against sensational readings. Della Martin’s 1961 novel exemplifies the unique benefits of butch invulnerability as a mode of protection and expression for nonwhite lesbians through the character Mavis, a Black butch lesbian.[45] The text follows Lon, a white sixteen-year-old who befriends Violet, a waitress at the local drive-through. Violet invites Lon to the 28%, a lesbian bar, where Lon meets Sassy Gregg and Mavis, an interracial couple who are friends with the bar’s owners, Rags and Betty. Lon becomes enraptured with Mavis’ knowledge of lesbian history, and the two begin a mentor/mentee relationship. Eventually, Lon convinces Mavis to leave Sassy and begin a new life with her in Plymouth. The novel is configured in three parts: “Kid Stuff,” which introduces Lon to the 28%; “Sassy,” which pivots to follow Sassy and Mavis living together in Sassy’s home; and “Lon,” which follows Lon as she attempts (and fails) to run away with Mavis. While Queer Patterns’ intended audience remains unclear throughout the text’s duration, Twilight Girl’s ending closely reflects the endings of other pro-lesbian pulps who are forced to punish lesbian characters by the end of the work. And so, rather than attending to the ending’s expected negativity, I instead choose to read the text through the character of Mavis and her moments of illegibility.
Considering the ambivalence associated with the lesbian protagonist and the melodramatic genre, I argue that viewing the text through the minor character, Mavis, exposes layers of nuance absent from protagonist-centered readings. As a Black lesbian in a predominantly white space, Mavis draws attention to performances of both masculinity and race. In doing so, Mavis invokes a level of invulnerability that points to the limits of the novel’s melodramatic structure. Specifically, Mavis’ emotional withdrawal subverts the pulp genre’s sensationalism as well as the structure of racial melodramas.[46] Sometimes Mavis uses a stone affect as a means of protection against broader racist and homophobic ideology; other times she does so simply to antagonize her girlfriend, Sassy. Regardless of her motivation, Mavis creates spaces outside sensationalism and beyond ambivalence; as a result, centering her introduces a meta-conversation on lesbian pain and its resulting affects.
Mavis and Sassy have an abusive relationship, with each character openly antagonizing the other. Lon imagines Mavis as in need of rescue from this relationship because Sassy has a reputation as volatile and rageful. In fact, Sassy once beats Lon without provocation “like an animate, crazed hammer.”[47] But Mavis dismisses Lon’s concern. She maintains that Sassy is the object of her “tormented, vindictive pity” and admits to Lon that her impulse to stay with Sassy is akin to “some kind of hate in me making me wait around like a vulture.”[48] Although Mavis is generally less expressive than Lon, she shares her same “violent hatred” for Sassy,[49] a hatred which she demonstrates by verbally abusing Sassy in the following scene. The scene is the first in the section titled “Sassy,” the only section of the novel where Lon does not appear. In Lon’s absence, Mavis at first seems no less ambivalent toward her lover than the rest of the novel’s characters. However, Mavis’ dedication to invulnerability halts her sudden outburst. She stops her provocations and becomes completely silent, thereby infuriating Sassy further. The two then enter into a violent sex scene–the only sex scene in the novel–in which Mavis remains silent and unresponsive. The scene uses vague language, not explicitly depicting rape but implying it as a possibility through Mavis’ withdrawal. In this scene, the narrator mirrors Mavis’ reserve; they back away from both characters’ violent desires to instead define the relationship by what is absent. Consequently, by suddenly self-silencing, Mavis adds an ambiguous depth to a scene that at first appears sensationalistic. The effect is to hinder the readability of the scene, placing the reader in an uncomfortable stasis that reflects Mavis’ silence. This stasis allows for serious reflection on scenes of violence between women while evading direct depiction.
Mavis’ interaction with Sassy draws attention to a cycle of reading and rereading that ironically obfuscates the “good” and “evil” moral designations associated with the noir and melodramatic genres. Before Mavis takes on this silent role, her relationship with Sassy is legible through the back-and-forth nature of their interactions: Mavis makes an aggressive comment, and Sassy responds in a way that seems overtly sentimental. However, Mavis’ silence, in tandem with the narrator’s new, withdrawn position, makes it very difficult to read who is reacting to whom. Mavis seems to be following what Jackie Stacey calls butch noir sensibility, which lies in anticipating what has already been read and then rereading it constantly in a dizzying cycle, which in itself is incredibly hard to follow. In a relationship, butch noir exists in a system by which, in Stacey’s ventriloquization: “My [butch] vulnerability arises in your capacity to wound me, but my queerness defies this wounding power, since it has already embraced and incorporated your derision; thus, you read me, I show you that I have read your reading by reclaiming it, and, in reading myself—by refusing your reading of me—I try to get ahead of the game; but, just when I think I have done so, I find this rereading has already been reread, if and when I arrive in your future.”[50] Because of Sassy’s whiteness, Mavis’ vulnerability manifests in her anticipated reading of the scene as a caricature of an interracial relationship. Her knowledge of these readings and subsequent repurposing of racialized melodramatic tropes then denies Sassy the ability to wound her. However, when Mavis is silent, she cuts this loop of endless anticipatory reinterpretation, taking away Sassy’s ability to reread her. Furthermore, she hinders the novel reader’s ability to reread the scene, instead wrapping them into the exhausting and opaque dynamics of this violent relationship.
Within her cycle of rereading, Mavis employs explicitly racialized and gendered performances to reimagine melodramatic tropes to her personal benefit. In doing so, she momentarily leans into the sensationalistic reading that she is the “true villain” of the text. When Mavis returns home after meeting with Lon, she immediately prods Sassy for information on her male fiancé, whom she is marrying to placate her family. Mavis speculates that Sassy “Must get tired, running. Meeting that big, strong he-man nights. Coming home sick enough to vomit. But planning to marry him, come across steady.”[51] Mavis’ brutal comments come as a shock following her vulnerability with Lon. Mavis does more than “wait around like a vulture;” she externalizes her hatred through verbal abuse. The sudden switch in Mavis’ character mimics the mechanics of a racialized “sensation scene.” Only briefly diverting from Lon’s perspective, “Sassy” as a chapter anticipates the narrative’s revelation of the true nature of Sassy and Mavis’ relationship. In Playing the Race Card, Linda Williams describes the purpose of sensationalism as relating to the texts’ morality, explaining how, in early melodramas, “Typically the ‘unspeakable’ truth revealed in the sensation scene is the revelation of who is the true villain, and who the innocent victim, of some plot.”[52] In racial moral melodramas, this revelation positions the “true villain” as the Black masculine figure and the “innocent victim” as the white feminine. Mavis references this reading directly by returning to the style of dialogue that perplexed Lon. Alluding to Sassy’s ambiguous scars, Mavis asks, “Yo’-all wear them long-sleeve pee-jamas when dat big boy enjoyin’ yo,’ Miz Gregg?”[53] Referring to Sassy as “Miz Gregg,” Mavis distances herself from the intimacy of their romantic relationship by invoking explicitly racialized hierarchies that demonstrate Sassy’s position of social power. Moreover, Mavis rereads Sassy’s derision by representing her as the white mistress and, by implication, rereads herself as the Black servant. She does so as a means of feigning ignorance about the impact of her comments, rereading these hierarchies to give her the power to hurt Sassy.
However, Mavis’ sudden silence gives readers access to Sassy’s unequivocal violence to subvert the structure of a sensation scene. While casting Mavis as the Black masculine villain and Sassy as the white feminine victim would align with the melodramatization of race that often occurs in pulp, both characters actually resist these categories. When Mavis makes a comment that Sassy marks as the final straw, Sassy slaps Mavis across the face. It is this violence that prompts Mavis to enter her state of silence, which she maintains for the next two pages. From this point forward, the pair’s actions no longer signal anticipatory readings; readers are left with purely Sassy’s physical violence. It is also only once Mavis is silent that readers learn Sassy’s motives, and the narrator states, “She could not love Mavis enough, hurt her enough in her rage to possess what could not be possessed.”[54] Sassy’s aim to “hurt” and “possess” Mavis opposes the sort of moral legitimacy mapped onto white feminine victims in racial melodramas, the “racially beset victims who acquire moral legitimacy through the public spectacle of their suffering.”[55] Mavis’ unresponsiveness casts doubt on her version of the relationship as mutually toxic and leads the reader to question Mavis’ agency within the relationship. The narrator describes Mavis as in a dissociative state, with a “coldly permissive attitude,” “robot face,” and a “body that was like dry ice.”[56] This representation suggests vulnerability and victimhood. Nonetheless, the narrator maintains that Mavis’ silence is an act of agency in other moments. For example, they describe how “Mavis ridiculed [Sassy’s] attempt to bring tears with a retribution of silence.”[57] Moments such as these make it difficult to know whether to trust the narrator or if the narrator is reflecting Mavis’ intentions. They have retreated from Sassy’s internal monologue, certainly, but they do not expand on Mavis’ thoughts any further. As a result, Mavis’ withdrawal catalyzes a move from the realm of sensationalized toxicity into a space that is uniquely discomforting and difficult to define within the pulp genre.
Mavis’ silence is also imbued with questions of the scene’s purpose that destabilize straightforward readings of the two characters. The subversion of the sensation scene begs the question: what does the scene reveal? Purely the extent of their “violent hatreds?” Or that beneath the explanation of mutual hatred lies something deeper, undefined but far more sinister? Generally, the narrator’s careful description aligns with Mavis’ reserve and, thereby, seems to contrast the voyeurism that structures rape scenes in erotic pulp novels. The narrator moves from specific, incendiary lines of dialogue to vague descriptions that distance the reader from the scene. They stop referring to Mavis by name; she becomes diminished to “the girl” in the line: “The girl offered no more objection to Sassy’s brutal handling of her body than to the intermittent love words, the occasional caresses that were adoring and gentle.”[58] Although we learn that Sassy’s handling of Mavis is “brutal,” most of Sassy’s violence is only ever alluded to in contrast to what is “adoring and gentle.” The structure of the description changes as well; longer, meticulously constructed reflections replace the previous paragraph’s short, exclamatory sentences. Neglecting to state the details of the encounter and instead reflecting on the relationship, the narrator presents the scene as a sort of plot twist, taking what we thought was over-the-top and melodramatic and suddenly rendering it serious. However, the sudden return to sensational language creates a moment of tonal whiplash that leaves the reader in a disorienting space. As soon as their encounter ends, the narrator quickly goes back into Sassy’s mind, where she describes her intense “penetrating” jealousy for Mavis and Lon’s relationship.[59] Within the span of a paragraph, the narrator weaves inside and outside character perspectives, inside and outside sensationalism, and inside and outside Mavis’ silence. At this moment, the narrator themself seems to be “rereading” the scene; they render the violence serious only to re-mark it as erotic in the aftermath. This move also pushes the reader into the uncomfortable space of reading and rereading by pressuring them to anticipate the dramatization of violence in pulp novels, subverting that dramatization, but then returning to it once again.
Despite the confusion that surrounds it, Mavis’s silence makes space for unspoken nuances of victimization and abuse, even as they are not explored elsewhere in the novel. Although I am inclined to say that Sassy’s physical violence, coupled with her desire to “possess” Mavis, signals a pattern of domestic abuse, the characters’ preemptive actions make it difficult to say this with certainty. Because readers are abruptly dropped into the middle of the relationship, this uncertainty seems purposeful; both characters employ symbols that the reader lacks the context to read. Mavis’ remarks about Sassy’s relationship with her fiancé, for example, seem to be building off a relational history that is inaccessible to the readers. The narrator creates this inaccessibility by handling Sassy’s trauma with a similar type of reserve. They neglect descriptions of heterosexual sex to allow Sassy to describe it as “neither painful nor pleasurable, only gross…gross and degrading and stupid.”[60] Depicting every major character as having a violent–but sympathetic– “hatred” hinders readers from ascertaining the “sufferings of innocent victims” or “the exploits of brave heroes or monstrous criminals,” particularly as they are often mapped on to Black and white characters.[61] Moreover, resisting straightforward moral and racialized categorizations, the dynamic between Mavis and Sassy provides a level of nuance to the subject of violence between women. As a minor butch lesbian character, Mavis introduces this nuance by constantly rereading herself and resisting the categorizations imposed on her by Sassy, Lon, and sensational pulp narratives.
Conclusion: Archival Silences in Lesbian Pulp Narratives
One can consider the way in which both the Noras and Mavises of the genre serve as microcosms of larger silences, particularly in archives. Although I have focused on silence as constructed in archival texts, the effects of this silence on modern queer narratives are similarly palpable. Carmen Maria Machado, for example, begins her 2019 memoir In the Dream House with a discussion of “archival silence.” Framing her experience with domestic violence in a queer relationship, Machado asserts that, through her retelling, “I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice, measure the emptiness by its small sound.”[62] The stories unreferenced in this essay, both of silence and of voyeurism, in part create the emptiness that Machado feels. However, I posit that Mavis, and characters like her, speak into the silence that Machado references, morphing and resisting melodramatic tropes as a form of measuring the voices that are missing. As readers move through Nora’s emotional failures and Mavis’ discomforting silence, they move towards a realm of ambiguous emotion that exists even in ambivalent spaces. Taking these emotionalities seriously invites queer histories to recognize in them the spaces of unmitigated queer feelings.
[1] In a historical review of lesbian pulp novels from 1950-1965, Yvonne Keller similarly defines the lesbian pulp genre as “mass-market paperbacks with explicitly lesbian themes and sensationalized covers that enjoyed widespread distribution and millions in sales” (385)
[2] Keller, Yvonne. “‘Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife so Passionately?’: Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965.” American Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2005): 392
[3] Keller, “Was It Right,” 392.
[4] Keller describes how “the genre’s undeniably homophobic and voyeuristic appeal to a heterosexual male audience intent on enjoying the ‘queer loves’ of the ‘twilight woman’” which “ties this image of lesbianism to heterosexual pornography” (385).
[5] Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (January 1996): 6. https://doi.org/10.1080/07407709608571228.
[6] As Melissa Sky details in “Cover Charge: Selling Sex and Survival in Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” the trend of tragic endings began after Women’s Barracks was lambasted by the House of Representatives 1952 Committee on Current Public Pornographic materials, inciting fear that publishers and distributors would be jailed if they did not tone down the sexual content and end the novel emphasizing the immorality of queer identities (Sky 130).
[7] Michelle Ann Abate describes these risks in reference to Marijane Meaker in the essay: “From Cold War Lesbian Pulp to Contemporary Young Adult Novels: Vin Packer’s Spring Fire, M. E. Kerr’s Deliver Us from Evie, and Marijane Meaker’s Fight against Fifties Homophobia.”
[8] Publisher’s Weekly. “Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torres,” https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781558614949.
[9] Publisher’s Weekly, “Women’s.”
[10] Nealon, Christopher. “Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction.” New Literary History 31, no. 4 (2000): 745.
[11] Nealon, “Invert-History,” 745.
[12] Bannon, Ann. I Am a Woman. Naiad Press, 1959/1995, 147.
[13] Artemis Smith’s The Third Sex, for example, ends with a toast to the central couple, in which a minor character reminds them that they barely know each other.
[14] Keller, “Was It Right,” 400.
[15] Addams, Queer, 123.
[16] Addams, Queer, 144.
[17] Nealon, “Invert-History,” 752.
[18] O’Connell, Alex. “Pulp Sadomasochism and Sensational Narratives of Sexual Violence in the Postwar United States.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 32, no. 2 (May 2023): 202–23. https://doi.org/10.7560/JHS32204.
[19] O’Connell, “Pulp.”
[20] Addams, Queer, 82.
[21] Addams, Queer, 82.
[22] Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Series Q. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 98
[23] Addams, Queer, 16.
[24] Brickman, Barbara.“Voyage to Camp Lesbos: Pulp Fiction and the Shameful Lesbian ‘Sicko’.” Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives, edited by Bruce Drushel and Brian Peters, Lexington Books, 2017. 13
[25] Addams, Queer, 22.
[26] Addams, Queer, 144.
[27] Addams. Queer, 144.
[28] Addams, Queer, 152
[29] Keller, “Was It Right,” 400.
[30] Addams, Queer, 62-63.
[31] Addams, Queer, 56.
[32] Addams, Queer, 56.
[33] Addams, Queer, 56.
[34] Addams, Queer, 56.
[35] Addams, Queer, 93.
[36] Addams, Queer, 95.
[37] Addams, Queer, 107.
[38] Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 4.
[39] Addams, Queer, 142.
[40] Addams, Queer, 142
[41] Halberstam, Queer Art, 70.
[42] Addams, Queer, 136
[43] Addams, Queer, 111.
[44] Halberstam, Queer Art, 23.
[45] While the pen-name “Della Martin” is likely recognizing queer activist and founder of the Daughters of Bilitis Del Martin (b.1921), the text is not attributed to her (“Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Papers”).
[46] I am using the term “racial melodrama” as it is invoked by Linda Williams in Playing the Race Card. Williams describes racial melodramas as melodramas in which “we discover the generation of ‘moral legibility’ (Brooks 1995) through the spectacle of racialized bodily suffering” (xiv).
[47] Martin, Della. Twilight Girl. Beacon, 1961. Box 3, Folder 10. MSS 116 Gay and Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection 1955-1988, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, New York, NY. 74
[48] Martin, Twilight, 68.
[49] Martin, Twilight, 66.
[50] Stacey, Jackie. “Butch Noir.” Differences 30, no. 2 (September 1, 2019): 34. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-7736035.
[51] Martin, Twilight, 84.
[52] Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton University Press, 2001. 18.
[53] Martin, Twilight, 85.
[54] Martin, Twilight, 89.
[55] Williams, Playing, 44.
[56] Martin, Twilight, 87.
[57] Martin, Twilight, 90.
[58] Martin, Twilight, 90.
[59] Martin, Twilight, 91.
[60] Martin, Twilight, 104.
[61] Williams, Playing, 19.
[62] Machado, Carmen Maria. In the Dream House: A Memoir. First Edition. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2019. 2.