Lively essays (some previously published in the Kenyon Review,
etc.) on the representation of lesbians in literature and history.
Readers acquainted with gay history will be on familiar ground
here, since Castle (English/Stanford; the scholarly Masquerade and
Civilization, 1986, etc.) includes the likes of Greta Garbo, The
Bostonians, and The Well of Loneliness among her subjects. Her
thesis is that lesbians have been "ghosted" - made into
apparitions, visible but not quite present - throughout history,
and she finds numerous examples of homosexual women being described
as "spectral" or, like The Well of Loneliness's Stephen Gordon, as
"earthbound spirits." Castle's "ghosting" looks suspiciously like a
fancier wording for the well-explored phenomenon of "lesbian
invisibility," but the author (who's openly gay) infuses new life
into the concept by underlining various characters' feistiness and
"gaiety" rather than their victimization. But Castle often reads
too much between the lines: One would never guess that The New
Yorker's Janet Banner was a lesbian simply by studying her
articles. Moreover, she sometimes misreads other historians or
literary critics: Lillian Faderman's claim, for instance, that the
19th-century English Ladies of Llangollen lacked a "lesbian
consciousness" somehow becomes a straw man that the author dubs the
"no-sex-before-1900 school." But Castle's forte - the use of
examples from her own life - underlines her points and makes her
concluding chapter, "In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender (A Musical
Emanation)," her best, as she deftly mixes autobiographical
revelation and literary theory while analyzing female fans of
operatic divas, in a kind of lesbian equivalent of Wayne
Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat. Not groundbreaking, but Castle's
blend of solid research and clear, accessible prose may win her an
enthusiastic readership. (Kirkus Reviews)
In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and
Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual
reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne
Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry
James's "The Bostonians, " Castle shows how a lesbian presence can
be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past
three centuries.
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