Sapphic Fathers

Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from Nineteenth-Century France

by Gretchen Schultz

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Pub Date Dec 16 2014 | Archive Date Dec 22 2014

Description

Literature that explored female homosexuality flourished in late nineteenth-century France. Poets, novelists, and pornographers, whether Symbolists, Realists, or Decadents, were all part of this literary moment. In Sapphic Fathers, Gretchen Schultz explores how these male writers and their readers took lesbianism as a cipher for apprehensions about sex and gender during a time of social and political upheaval.

Tracing this phenomenon through poetry (Baudelaire, Verlaine), erotica and the popular novel (Belot), and literary fiction (Zola, Maupassant, Péladan, Mendès), and into scientific treatises, Schultz demonstrates that the literary discourse on lesbianism became the basis for the scientific and medical understanding of female same-sex desire in France. She also shows that the cumulative impact of this discourse left tangible traces that lasted well beyond nineteenth-century France, persisting into twentieth-century America to become the basis of lesbian pulp fiction after the Second World War.

GRETCHEN SCHULTZ is an associate professor in the Department of French Studies at Brown University.

Literature that explored female homosexuality flourished in late nineteenth-century France. Poets, novelists, and pornographers, whether Symbolists, Realists, or Decadents, were all part of this...

Advance Praise

“Sapphic Fathers analyses a vast array of literature on lesbianism written by male authors in nineteenth-century France, and whose influence can be traced into American culture and especially pulp fiction. A serious and well-documented account.”

Laure Murat, Department of French and Francophone Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

“Gretchen Schultz presents a unique and novel perspective on an important topic. The final chapter is a tour de force of literary history and criticism.”

Melanie C. Hawthorne, Department of European and Classical Languages and Cultures, Texas A&M University

“A significant scholarly achievement. Readers whose primary interest is in cultural or intellectual history have a lot to gain from this research.”

Peter Cryle, Emeritus Professor, Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland

“Sapphic Fathers analyses a vast array of literature on lesbianism written by male authors in nineteenth-century France, and whose influence can be traced into American culture and especially...