Off Centre.

11 If we transfer this to the making of the modernist canon, it becomes clear that the majority of texts by women writers could not enter the male-biased semiosphere because the filters of the boundary would not “choose” to adapt them in the first place. Thus, the function of the boundary during the making of a male-biased modernist canon was largely restricted to ensuring an organised whole based on a gendered difference between centre and periphery. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the whole modernist project is, in fact, an outcome of a “battle between the sexes” and that the rise of feminism and the New Woman led to an ever fiercer demarcation of male literary territory which constructed as its counterpart, so to say, a whole body of writing by women and/or lesbian writing that remained unacknowledged on the periphery. Shari Benstock, author of the much-acclaimed study Women of the Left Bank, also points out that literary studies of modernism have wilfully erased women writers and the intention of her study is to return them to their rightful place:

The impetus for this study of expatriate women was the desire to replace them in the Paris context from which they had been removed by the standard literary histories of Modernism. With few exceptions, the women whose lives and works are recorded here have been considered marginal to the Modernist effort. [...] In rediscovering the lives and works of these women, however, I also confronted the ways in which our working definitions of Modernism [...] and the prevailing interpretations of the Modernist experience had excluded women from its concerns. (ix/x)

12 The deconstruction of the modernist canon was triggered by a shift in the metalanguage, as Lotman would put it, within literary criticism. Lesbian feminist scholars successfully challenged the monolithic canon with its limited number of towering male geniuses. The adaptation of “forgotten” texts into a lesbian canon, however, proceeded under almost reversed conditions: rather than wilfully excluding a certain group of texts, lesbian feminist criticism shows a tendency to eagerly claim as many texts as possible for a lesbian literary heritage. Although this move was immensely important, it is well worth taking a closer look at the practice with which texts are adapted into this lesbian canon. Lotman argues that in order to create cultural memory through adapting texts, each system must have a subject and a code. The code which is embedded in the metalanguage of each culture must remain coherent and its job is the restructuring of incoming texts according to its rules. In our case, the code as well as the subject of the system is lesbian identity. Invoking this signifier is necessary for the creation of a literary heritage but it also involves, as we shall see, uniting very diverse versions of “lesbian” identity in the broadest sense into a unified whole[1] To assign the label “lesbian” to any text of this period is highly problematic since it subsumes so many different concepts such as androgyny, hermaphroditism, inversion, or mannish women. As Judith Halberstam argues: “I have argued to keep the label 'lesbian' at bay throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Neither Fred (Anne) Lister, Woods and Pirie, John (Radclyffe) Hall, Colonel Barker, Robert (Mary) Allen, the women in Havelock Ellis' case histories nor their lovers would have identified as lesbians. When we describe them as such, we tend to stabilize contemporary definitions of lesbianism.” (Halberstam 109). . As Lotman suggests, a move from the periphery into the centre of a given system always entails “an inevitable toning down” (141) of the elements. For this reason, the incoming texts are also stripped of their original characteristics to a certain extent so that “here, in the heart of the receiving culture they will find their true, ‘natural’ heartland” (146).

13 Lesbian feminism's attempt to recuperate the as yet “eccentric” texts robs some of them, as I would argue, of their very eccentricity. By uniting them under the banner of “lesbian” literature and by prefiguring the way in which these texts are thought to deviate from the assumed centre of male heterosexual modernist writing, the path of transgression is already set, as statements such as the following clearly show: “A lesbian version of modernism has always existed; constructions of masculinist modernism include it through their very act of exclusion.” (McCabe 63). That the creation of a unified female/lesbian canon inevitably leads to a much too narrow focus is obvious: “In some ways, the creation of an alternative „female“ canon (which sometimes seems to function as the binary opposite of traditional male practices) has led to a disconcertingly simplified framework.” (Elliott/Wallace 13). As this process of assimilation operates on the basis of a notion of unified (lesbian) subjects, it can only theorize a certain kind of difference which remains inextricably bound to a centre. This strand of thinking, which revolves around the “episteme of Man” (Nigianni/Storr 4), can only result in a centre-periphery dynamic anticipating a distinct kind of difference from the outset:

Within this framework, difference can only be conceived of as deviation from one, single model: a hierarchical differentiation starting and descending from the dominant signifier (the white (hu)man Face, the majoritarian, white, hetero, able bodied male) [...] that leads to a prolific production of minoritarian others always in response to the established norms. It thus fails to conceive of difference beyond the level of the signifier (Nigianni/Storr 4).

14 This tendency to acknowledge only a prescribed form of difference is prominent within most lesbian feminist criticism dealing with lesbian writing in the 1920s and 30s. Not only is the label lesbian the prescribed way of transgressing; lesbian feminist criticism has also strongly determined how such a lesbian transgression might be brought about as there is a strong bias in favour of texts that are “progressive” in that they display early versions of feminism: “Their [Barney's and Vivien's] almost uncanny anticipation of the preoccupations of feminist writers whose work began almost sixty years after Vivien's death gives them a place as foremothers of feminist literature.” (Jay xv) The link between feminism and lesbianism is prevalent and desired in the majority of (lesbian) critical work on this period. Again, Natalie Barney, or rather her body, serves as a stand-in for this particular version of feminine and feminist lesbianism:

For Barney, lesbian eroticism was defined by a sharing of sensual experiences, each of the partners taking pleasure in the other's body. [...] lesbian sexuality allowed her to direct her own desire and discover through her body her own sensual purposes. The women of Natalie Barney's Sapphic circle believed that lesbian love preserved and honored the female body, beautified it, sanctified it, and kept it safe against the ravages to which heterosexuality subjected it. [...] Thus for Barney and others of her group, lesbianism signified not only a sexual orientation but a feminist position, a radical denial of heterosexual dominance. (Benstock 289/290)

15 This, then, is a privileging of a “lesbianism” epitomized by “feminine” lesbians and a liberated and guilt-free celebration of femininity and lesbianism on the one hand and an uneasiness with authors and works that seem to display too strong an investment in masculinity on the other. It is assumed that this investment is due to the fact that the authors rely too heavily on sexologist theories, suffer from internalised homophobia and are prone to resort to drugs. The overall logic in this seems to be that they are just not liberated enough to step out of the closet and feel comfortable in a woman's body. The discomfort of lesbian feminist critics with Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness bears witness to this. Shari Benstock, for example, comes to the following verdict regarding the novels of Radclyffe Hall, Bryher, and Djuna Barnes

With few exceptions, however, these novels tended to reflect scientific thinking about homosexual behaviour that cast lesbian women as sexual deviants – men trapped in women's bodies. These works portrayed women who wanted to be men, lesbian marriages that took their models from heterosexual unions, and visions of lesbian existence as fraught with pain and suffering, disguised by makeup and clothes, eased through drugs and alcohol, carried on in the dark, in secret, and in fear. [...] the Barney-model of lesbian behaviour constituted a minority opinion among homosexual women of the Left Bank community, most of whom demonstrated that they had internalized homophobia and misogyny. (59)

Natalie Barney's person as well as her writings stand out as a feminist beacon because her “writings proclaim the delicacy and tenderness of lesbian love and demonstrate a subtle eroticism excluded by phallic notions of sexual desire redefining female sensuality.” (Benstock 283/284)