Portrait of a Lady in Quarantine by Margaret Speer
When Portrait of a Lady on Fire hit Hulu about month into the quarantine, lesbians across the country rejoiced. Due to its limited availability prior to this particular streaming service, many of us hadn’t seen it yet. Those of us lucky enough to have a lesbian pandemic partner (hopefully you’ve read the Bustle article “Quarantine Pro Tip: Get Yourself A Lesbian” by now), and those of us who doubled down on our people’s speedy willingness to commit, UHauling into new girlfriend isolation pods, all prepped for a date-night in that was… a little bit gayer than all our other nights in. Those of us quarantining alone set up virtual watch parties with friends and/or the people we keep sexting, “When this is all over I’m going to…”
Watching Portrait for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic was surreal. On the one hand, the desolation of the beautiful setting and the sparseness of the characters felt right for the socially distant new normal. But if you’re the kind of viewer I have become since quarantine, there was also an extra frisson of danger to the approaches between the characters. And as we know, the slow burn of the approach is always already half the fun of lesbian period pieces. Most of all—you know where I’m going with this—the scarves that Marianne and Héloïse tie around their faces (because the wind is whipping? to symbolize their mystery to one another?) uncannily resembled the makeshift facemasks that we all were just starting to wear.
Part of the eeriness of these highly resonant scenes was the temporal scrambling of it all. The timeliness seemed unbelievable, but of course, the movie had been made and released long before any of this started. So even more disturbing was the unknowing prescience of those scarf scenes.
For those of you who maybe aren’t gay, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the highly restrained and aesthetically gorgeous story of a young woman who has been promised in marriage to a Milanese nobleman, provided he approves of her portrait. Marital relations are presented as a grim prospect from the start, since Héloïse has inherited this fiancé from her sister, who we are told jumped off a cliff rather than marry him. Héloïse is (almost) as reluctant as was her sister to marry a complete stranger and has refused to allow her portrait to be painted. So, her mother employs Marianne to pose as a companion and paint Héloïse from memory despite her refusal to pose. She will never suspect, because only men have professions like painting. The mother will likewise never suspect that eventually Marianne stops posing as a companion who is really a painter, and starts posing as a painter who is really a lover, because women’s bonds are presumably as innocent of the sexuality they eventually share as are women of professionalism generally. Paradoxically, this is why they can be alone together in the first place.
It matters that Marianne is a painter, and that she can get away without suspicion of being a painter, because women’s financial independence in 18th-century France was rare. While this was hardly the main barrier to women’s ability to make lives together, if we could suspend our knowledge of the traffic in women and the stigma of homosexuality, women’s ability to win bread would still pose a massive obstacle to their living together until less than a century ago.
Obviously, the women are not able to stay together. It’s never even an option. They have a brief and heartbreakingly relatable affair, the kind where you stay mostly in bed for multiple days and fingerfuck each others’ armpits. Then, one woman leaves and the other marries the man. (Luckily, her time with Marianne has taught Héloïse how to find pleasures of her own in the wider world, and we have the sense that her life doesn’t totally suck, though we also know that the women will always be in love.)
It may have been just the ye olde facemasks, but watching this film in pandemic mode, I wasn’t struck so much as smashed upside the head by another similarity between the world of late-18th-century provincial France, and the situation of being a dyke in the ongoing state of emergency in which we find ourselves. Reader, I am one such excessively premature quarantine U-Hauler, and, I know we all say this, but it made sense at the time. Combining forces for forcible childcare, combating loneliness, securing someone to fuck instead of baking endless bread… But about a week into shacking up and hunkering down, something happened that has come to frame this quarantine partnership very unpleasantly.
One of my lover’s other lovers, a (surprisingly great!) guy who has guns and some light prepper tendencies, reached out to my girlfriend in panic mode. He was worried that because we live “in town,” we will be in danger when shit gets real. He was imagining that when people really start to get desperate for toilet paper, neighbors will turn on each other and we would be defenseless. He knows that while we are not literally vegans who love cats (actually, we don’t really like cats and we both eat meat), we definitely belong to the genre of indoor, book-reading lesbian over any gun-toting or even particularly self-defense-inclined variety of lesbian. So, he extended the admittedly generous offer that we two, and the kids, could come and stay with him and his girlfriend, and their own blended brood.
Now, on the one hand, the idea that our neighbors will be moved to violence by a dearth of toilet paper seems laughably implausible. I don’t only watch lesbian movies; I also watch gay movies, and I remember that part in Fight Club about how hard it is to get a stranger to actually attack you. Especially now that we are weeks, even months, into quarantining, the depressing reality is, unsurprisingly, that the people in the most danger are still black and brown folks, and the low-wage workers with inadequate protections and compensation for work for which they literally risk their lives.
On the other hand, the current reality of what used to seem like dystopia makes it feel easier to imagine a situation in which violence were extant, and my pacifist, feminist dad’s decision to buy a gun could seem more practicably reasonable than merely an effort to feel in control of a shitty situation. One of my (male) cousins also asked me if I had a gun when “all this” started. In short, at the start of quarantine, I felt suddenly surrounded by men with guns—even queer, peaceable men of whom I would have expected better. My dad’s decision to buy a gun made me nauseous. The turn to firearms in desperate times is anathema, given that the prevalence and easy accessibility of firearms in this country is why schools get shot up, why black and brown people are so regularly murdered where they live by people who aren’t the police, who should also not have guns. Also, every bone in my body wanted to reject this invitation, which to me sounded exactly like “Step aside, Little Lesbian; I’ll protect her.”
And yet, what actually shook me to my core was that he had a point. If we were really, really in danger… wouldn’t I be grateful that my partner and her children have somewhere to go where they’ll be safe? I’d want them to have a benevolent, turtleneck-sweater-wearing Matt Damon from Contagion wielding the gun he got from his abandoned neighbor’s house while he pulls his daughter’s quarantine-breaking boyfriend off her. (Am I making the point about patriarchal control of women’s sexuality too subtly?) Wouldn’t I myself rather turn my back on my politics and—maybe worse—depend on a man than die? Ok, maybe not the latter. But still. The pandemic in general, and the invitation to shelter with a man specifically, has sobered and humbled me. If people wanted to hurt us, I could not fight them off with my compendium of Shakespeare’s plays, though it’s one of the heavier pieces of movable property I own.
This man’s invitation raised a specter I haven’t been able to banish: is lesbianism a decadent arrangement only sustainable when things are good? When, say, the thing people worry about most is running out of is toilet paper, as opposed to food? When violence is afoot, when women truly start to feel afraid, must we disperse from each other and shelter with the nearest man? At what point do otherwise independent women start to cast about for a brother or husband or father, as defenseless heroines in 19th-century novels often put it? The way in which Héloïse has to go off with a man in order to have any kind of a life suddenly felt way too close to home.
I’m writing a dissertation about the material conditions of lesbianism in the 19th century, where I make much of the idea that women need “a room of their own”—and money enough to secure such—to be able to fuck each other as much as to write serious novels. (I think Virginia Woolf was also saying that all along.) I’ve been thinking about women’s material dependence on men and women’s poverty as compulsory heterosexuality for a long time now. I hadn’t until now, however, thought about women’s need for protection from violence as compulsory heterosexuality.
With this man’s promise of protection to my femme girlfriend, my dissertation suddenly felt hollow. Like many butches, I went to graduate school looking for expressions for and recognition of my queer feelings. Cerebralization is often the best way to process a lifetime of being told that one is secondary, less than, a copy of an original. Moreover, I’m good at the grad school. My dissertation has at times felt compensatory for masculinity’s vanishing horizon, with the irony that it’s mostly gradgays who realize that masculinity—as is femininity—is a vanishing horizon for everyone, no matter what gender one was assigned at birth.
The point is, I felt castrated in my (capital “D”) dissertation. Not only am I neither armed nor capable, big nor strong, I’m not even a fucking breadwinner in this household (because, again, grad student). I can close-read the hell out of a 19th-century novel for you, but I don’t have a ton of practical skills for the end times.
It often feels as though my gender and The Work are tied together. This makes my dissertation strong, I think, but it can also mean that when one or the other fails me, I am eviscerated. As we talk in these times of what differently situated folks are contending with as they try to keep it together, let alone keep working through the quarantine—suddenly augmented childcare obligations, mental health issues—I’ve realized that this is my main hurdle. My ability to survive the psychic burdens of my sexuality and my choice to get a PhD in literature have always been inextricable, and this has given me the definite advantage that my work matters to me. But now that I can’t really imagine being less essential than I am, and I seriously wonder at what point I would tell my girlfriend to go and be with the armed man she sometimes sleeps with, the linkage has stopped me in my tracks, personally and professionally. No matter; as grad students in the humanities, we feel that there is absolutely no room to stop working, for, say, a breakdown, because our job prospects are so bleak already.
There is irony in the fact that at another historical moment, Portrait of a Lady on Fire could have been legible in a totally different mode. Without the lens of Covid-19, I would not have reached across time to connect with a depiction of women who can’t successfully pair off because circumstances are too hard. Instead, I might have understood the film as an instance of women pairing off because things are hard. What joy has Héloïse had in her life? And then suddenly here’s a girl with great armpit fucking technique?
A friend of mine calls films where women in situations of deprivation hook up, “prison lesbian movies.” Not to be confused with the literal “women in prison film” which, according to Wikipedia, “is a subgenre of exploitation film that began in the early 1900s…. Their stories feature imprisoned women who are subjected to sexual and physical abuse, typically by sadistic male or female prison wardens, guards, and other inmates. The genre also features many films in which imprisoned women engage in lesbian sex.” Pace, Orange is the New Black, this the prison lesbian genre just means the kind of lesbian content—of which we are implicitly sick—where women turn to one another in desperate situations.
The term “situation” has deep roots in the history of homosexuality, or, in 19th-century terms, “inversion.” For about the length of a century (and much, much longer into the 20th than we might have thought), the question of how to understand and categorize same-sex bonds took two main avenues. Until around the 1930s, “acquired sexuality” was a serious “competitor of congenital sexuality.” You had your “ ‘true invert,’” and your “situational” invert (Kahan 186, 178). In sexological discourse, the kind of homosexuality that takes place among men on ships (when there are no women), or women at boarding schools (when there are no men)—or in prisons—was called “acquired,” and was a major part of how homosexuality was defined, though it has largely disappeared from our vocabulary. Benjamin Kahan argues that we have “ignored half of the history of homosexuality” (177)—the situational, contingent kind—in our understandable eagerness to imagine, say, that Marianne and Héloïse would have fallen in love, or least in lust, even had there been some suitable men around.
The reason situational or acquired homosexuality has largely disappeared from our definition, is, ironically, part and parcel of historic efforts to make queer lives better. It is on the basis of homosexuality as an innate quality that queers have secured rights (Kahan 177). Queers who wish to affirm the fluidity or constructedness of sexuality and gender have faced a double bind. If we want the protections that minorities are afforded, we can’t throw down for a homosexuality like “I only do anal at sea.” As Kahan notes, “the sexological terms ‘false,’ ‘spurious,’ and ‘pseduo homosexuality’ were used interchangeably with situational homosexuality. Situational homosexuality was often referred to as ‘artificial’ or ‘imaginary’” (186). “Acquired” queerness is neither inborn nor immutable; as opposed to the “true invert,” situational or contingent homosexuality is “untrue” (Kahan 186). And so we can trace the roots of our dissatisfaction with the prison lesbian genre to a historically contextual sense that such is not “real” lesbian content.
The phrase to which I keep returning when I talk about my fear that lesbianism is an arrangement that must dissolve when shit gets real is… “when shit gets real,” i.e., when we have to be serious instead of decadent. But what is “real?” In sexological terms, the congenital is the “real,” an inborn, immutable inclination. Shying like good humanities scholars from biological explanations (see, a prickle of shame for scorning biology when we need a vaccine!) we could attenuate “real” sexuality to mean the thing we’d choose, all things being equal. But when in history have all things been equal for women? The reason so much historical lesbian content falls into the prison lesbian genre is that even when there are suitable men around, no man is truly decent, given that all your rights disappear under him. Literally, under him—Google “coverture.”
All relationships are situational, contextual, contingent. Sometimes, the conditions under which we partner-up are wonderful, and sometimes they are the Coronavirus. When we are in love, though, we always feel lucky.
Margaret Speer is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, where she is writing about switching and self-sufficiency between women. She lives in Long Beach, but hails originally from Rochester, New York, where she still serves on the literary journal reading committee for ImageOutWrite.
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