Betz - The lesbian fantastic : a critical study of science fiction, fantasy, paranormal and gothic writings

ALSO BY PHYLLIS M. BETZ AND FROM MCFARLAND

Lesbian Romance Novels:

A History and CriticalAnalysis (2009)

Lesbian Detective Fiction:

Woman as Author, Subject and Reader (2006)

A Critical Study

of Science Fiction, Fantasy,

Paranormal and Gothic Writings

PHYLLIS M. BETZ

For Joan

Third time's the charm

and for my nieces, Kathleen, Caitlin, and Madeline

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I wish to thank my department chair, Dr. Kevin Harty, for pushing me to apply for a research grant and to the Leaves and Grants Committee of La Salle University, including Nancy Jones, for accepting my application for the fall of 2010 to work on this manuscript. I must also thank my colleagues for allowing me to use them as sounding boards for my work.

I am extremely grateful to Roz Miller, proofreader extraordinaire. As always, to my family for their continued support.

Lesbians are scary. Scary because they contradict standard concepts of what women look like, how they should behave, and who they ought to love. The lesbian becomes the quintessential representation of the Other, that entity who resides beyond the limits of normal expectations of engagement and response. If she looks like a girl, but acts like a boy, how do you know what to do? No wonder, then, the lesbian has been painted as a man trapped in a woman's body, a deviant incapable of expressing basic, natural desires, a sexual predator bent on seducing innocents into a perverted life. These images, not surprisingly, have been used to justify the physical, psychological, and spiritual assaults on lesbians throughout history. This fear has been projected into the very language used to designate the lesbian as separate from the rest of society: she is demon, vampire, monster, unnatural, horror, alien. Nor should it surprise one to find that such terms and images appear in the widest range of written and spoken discourse, from the scientific to the literary, and that these representations become mechanisms not only for determining the meaning of the lesbian, but also for shaping social responses to the lesbian.

The appropriation of derogatory words and images and the reassignment of their meaning has been a hallmark of any marginalized group's effort to determine its own identity. One such strategy involves the utilization of popular cultural forms by the ostracized group; this allows the redefinition of the terms used to designate its relation to the larger society. Lesbians have mastered the art or re-appropriating negative images of popular culture and changing them to allow the reimagining of how the lesbian can present herself within wider social relationships. By using the familiar formulas and practices of popular forms, the lesbian practitioner has the ability to reframe the engagement between her private self and the public's assumptions about that self. Not surprisingly, then, genre literature offers lesbian writers the opportunity, by using recognizable and accepted conventions, to challenge images meant to frighten mainstream society.

The most paradoxical utilization of a popular form to encourage changes in the conception of lesbian identity and behavior can be found in lesbian authored fantasy, science fiction, and gothic literatures. Genre fantasy literature depends on the monstrous, the horrible, the alien, to establish its connection to its readers, so the essential question to be posed is why would an individual, one who is already seen as something too terrible to exist within the parameters of normal society, deliberately construct narratives that magnify such otherworldly characteristics. My aim in this study is to offer some possible answers to this question by examining the mechanisms of this literature and tracing the processes by which they are stretched to allow the inclusion of the lesbian within its pages. A key component of this analysis requires a defining of the various types of genre texts that make up fantasy literature. Indeed, calling the entire range of these works "fantasy" creates a distinct set of critical issues and challenges. Each of the major subgenres to be considered in this study-science fiction, fantasy, the paranormal, and gothic-has its own theoreticians with well-established critical viewpoints as well as clearly delineated literary and publishing histories. Further complicating the necessity of labeling is the ability of this literature to cross into other literary genres; the large numbers of recent mysteries that have a vampire (or vampire hunter) as the detective illustrates the problem of stabilizing fantasy literature too rigidly.

Once the issue of distinguishing the categories for this literature has been discussed, I intend to position representative texts within each category, looking particularly at how lesbian authors utilize and adapt the narrative conventions, character types, and thematic stresses. Before looking at the major fantasy formats, I wish to position the lesbian practitioner within a history of female-authored and -focused fantasy/gothic literature; this will be limited to 19th-century American and English writers who, while not explicitly identified as lesbian, incorporate plot situations and characters that reference behavior and relationships that contemporary lesbian writers integrate into their own work. Writers from this period as diverse as Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Rose Terry Cooke produced ghost stories, utopic fiction and other eerie tales. Also to be discussed will be major imaging of the female as demon and other in male authors, such as Sheridan Le Fanu. Among the topics that will be treated once this background has been described are the transformation of the standard character types-vampire, magician/seer, space explorer, extraterrestrial, ghost, warrior-not only in their gender, but also in their representation of lesbian experience. A second area to be examined will be a constant narrative emphasis on the establishment of a specifically lesbian community and/or romantic relationship between the alien character and another female character. Of course, not all genre fantasy presents plots and characters in such sympathetic ways, and I will also discuss texts that rely on the familiar expectations of danger and terror in the confrontations between the everyday world and the arcane and how these are impacted by the imposition of a lesbian sensibility.