Divergent narrative theories have been made about the history of lesbianism. There aren't many examples of what a modern audience would recognise as blatant representations of female homosexual love because of historical traditions, language, and the perilous stigma associated with expressing homoerotic desire.
In order to construct a picture of a person's sexual life, the current observer is frequently compelled to piece together fragmentary and categorised "proof" while being careful to avoid applying outdated interpretations and labels to the past.
As an illustration, female artists who chose to remain single, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, are still sometimes referred to as "spinsters" shared a home with a dear female pals for several decades (evidently).
Painting, lithography, and aquarelle artist Charles-Louis Baugniet was born in Belgium. His alias continues to be associated with the lithographing of portraits of well-known and obscure individuals from Belgium, France, and England. They include politicians, high-ranking government officials, prominent members of the Catholic and Anglican churches, businesspeople, academics, performers in the theatre, and vaudeville performers.
Elegant women are well portrayed in oil paintings by Charles Baugniet. The characters in the painting is able to communicate emotional resonance thanks to the delicate lines and gentle tones. The soft elegance with which the two girls' love is expressed in THE LOVE LETTER alludes to the 18th-century girls' reserve, restraint, and stillness. Two women are depicted in silence, without any discernible contrast or an identifiable individuality. Like an understatement of love letters that have been written throughout history, yet full of love that is concealed; possibly unheard of or unknown.
Katherine Harris Bradley & Edith Emma Cooper (Left Photo)
Along with "countless unfinished works," the majority of which have vanished into obscurity, Michael Field published eleven poetry books, thirty plays, and "countless unfinished works." But! In reality, there was no such thing as "Michael Field," there were only two women who wrote under the pen name "Michael Field": Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. The fact that Katherine was Edith's aunt and there was a 16-year age difference between them did not stop the lady-loverbirds from getting together. According to historian Phillip Clark, "both tended to be formidably formal in speech and dress," and "their intellectual fortitude and love of classical literature, lyric poetry, and verse drama made them a brilliant match for one another." Along with 28 volumes of co-written diaries, they also left behind a ton of enlightening love poetry.
The intelligent Edith Cooper began composing poems while she was just a teenager. As their relationship with her aunt became closer, they fell in love. The New Minnesinger and Other Poems was a collection written by Katharine Bradley in 1875 under the pseudonym Arran Leigh. Before the table of contents, there is a frontispiece poem that is covertly dedicated to her 13-year-old niece after the poems are devoted to her mother's memory:
TO E. C.
MY deep need of thy love, its mast’ring power,
I scarce can fathom, thou wilt never know;
My lighter passions into rhythm may glow;
This is for ever voiceless. Could the flower
Open its petall’d thought, and praise the dower
Of sunlight, or the fresh gift of the dew,
The bounteous air that daily round it blew,
Blessing unweariedly in sun and shower,
Methinks would miss its praises: so I drink
My life of thee; and put to poet’s use
Whatever crosses it of strange or fair.
Thou hast fore-fashioned all I do and think;
And to my seeming it were words’ abuse
To boast a wealth of which I am the heir.
For the rest of their lives, they would be in love. They exchanged numerous love letters, which Sharon Bickle compiled and printed in 2008. Here is the first one, which Edith wrote as she approached her fifteenth birthday:
Letter from Katharine Bradley to Edith Cooper
25 Dec. 1876
From Fowl to Fowlet; From Owl to Owlet; From Loving to Lover; From Bard to his Brother; From Arran Leigh To the Voice to be; From the hand of “Own” To the dearest Known; From the Bird-All-Wise To the Light of his eyes; From Friend unto Friend After Life shall end. Christmas 1876
Edith - "The Voice to Be" - had two unreleased works at the time. For their lives, the two women would be together as aunt and niece, lovers, and co-authors of poems and plays. Bellerophôn, a play by Arran and Isla Leigh, was their debut collaboration. After then, they published most of their writing using the pen name Michael Field, with a few articles appearing under an anonymous name. Due to the combined bias against women authors and collaborative poetry, they chose one man's name for two women. They might investigate topics like the flames of passion that were deemed inappropriate for women under that moniker. Additionally, it gave them a chance to hide their lesbian feelings behind the façade of the socially acceptable love of men for women.
Claude Cahun was a radical and multidisciplinary artist most known for her elaborately staged self-portraits that defied traditional concepts of gender. She was the daughter of a prominent intellectual Jewish family named Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, but later adopted the names Claude Courlis, Daniel Douglas, and finally Claude Cahun. Her longtime girlfriend and step-sister Suzanne Malherbe, nicknamed Marcel Moore, worked with her on a extensive projects, including collages, novels, periodicals, sculptures, and photomontages. They utilised their work as activism during World War II – dangerous for a Jewish couple — and ended themselves in jail for their resistance, but were liberated before a death sentence came to pass. Marcel died in 1972, and is buried close to Claude on the island of Jersey.
Lucy wrote of the day she and Suzanne discovered a picture of a regiment of troops marching in a German magazine in a postwar letter. They were given a novel kind of opportunity as a result. They removed the scarves from their heads when they came home, unbuttoned their coats, and set the picture on the table. According to Lucy, the troops in the picture are marching briskly. Although their legs are boring and their boots are caked in mud, they are moving while swinging their arms. They appear to be buried in the mud.
They made the decision to split the image in half, maintaining the bottom half and changing the Nazi strength graphic into a sloppy mess. The soldiers were then depicted as continually plodding through the mud as Lucy painted what she called "our jingle"—ohne Ende [without end]—across it in red paint. Unhappy, she took an ancient picture of Oscar Wilde and his lover, Alfred Douglas, out of its priceless frame. She swapped out this photo for one of the soldiers that had been cropped and saw the humorous juxtaposition between the exquisite frame and the filthy image it now contained.
In the twenty-first century, many activists have worked to increase the awareness of lesbian history and the activists who made it known. They contend that the history of LGBTQ people is far less well-represented than the histories of other civil rights campaigns, such as those for African Americans' or women's equal rights. To help preserve this history for future generations to celebrate and treasure, activists and other volunteers from across the nation have made an effort to gather historical relics, records, and other stories. Additionally in the 21 century, there has been a growing movement to make LGBTQ+ content more visible in school curricula. One of the causes of homophobia and the marginalisation of members of the LGBTQ community in schools is the absence of the LGBTQ+ community and its history.
Dorien Donne
Thursday, May 4, 2023
Brussels, Belgium
Artpendix Press
Comments