Hemingway, Wilhelm, and a Style for Lesbian Representation

Abstract

This essay explores Hemingway's possible influence on We Too Are Drifting (1935), a now forgotten lesbian novel by Gale Wilhelm, and then examines how both authors engaged with contemporary scientific arguments about the origin of homosexuality, specifically the early 20 th century psychological concept of "sexual inversion." Wilhelm's style and tropes evoke Hemingway's, while both authors use "twinness" as a vehicle to explore sexuality and sexual identity in different ways. Using an apparently "factual" writing style, each sought to represent same-sex desire as a "fact" of normal and mainstream life.

The Well of Inspiration: Radclyffe Hall and the Growth of Popular Lesbian Fiction in America

“…The “scientific” explanation in Wilhelm's We Too Are Drifting is most closely akin to the sexologists’ explanation in The Well but with one major difference: while Jan's lesbianism seems to have been predetermined in utero , it was the result of being a fraternal twin. Jennifer Haytock suggests that the novel proposes Jan's lesbianism and her twin Michael's unspecified sexual perversion as the result of “hav[ing] gotten their ‘male and female germs’ mixed up in the womb” (112). Haytock traces the effects of this Huxleyan mix‐up, arguing that the novel reveals “a gender paradigm in which the twins swapped traditional gender traits” (112).…”

Modernism and Sexology

“…(Pettipiece; Doan, Fashioning Sapphism ), T.S. Eliot (Miller), William Faulkner (Duvall), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Froehlich), E.M. Forster (Bredbreck, Martin), Radclyffe Hall (Bauer; Doan, Fashioning Sapphism and “Outcast,” Halberstam, Prosser), Ernest Hemingway (Haytock, Pettipiece, Moddelmog), Langston Hughes (Vogel), Christopher Isherwood (Isherwood, Page), James Joyce (Brown, Cotter), D.H. Lawrence (Scherr), Claude McKay (Maiwald), Wallace Thurman (Stokes 175), and Virginia Woolf (Barrett, Fassler).…”