Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) (2 page)

Significantly, in discussions with the writers of the 1998 opera based on the novel, Alma Routsong told them that she had originally planned to conclude the story with her heroines setting off on the ship, which is where the opera ends. But one of my favourite parts of the novel is their journey through New York City, with all its socially awkward encounters, squabbles, and uncertainties; we get to see how a transcendent love weathers the everyday. I think Routsong made the right decision to end the book just as her heroines move into their house: this satisfies our curiosity but avoids the
longeurs
of utopia. She named her novel after its destination, A
Place for Us
(though the publishers who reissued it, McGraw-Hill, insisted on changing the title to
Patience & Sarah
, possibly because the original title was too reminiscent of a song from
West Side Story
). Routsong intended a sequel, to be called
A Time for Us
, which she explained in a note on the fragment of it she published, “A Dooryard Full of Flowers” (1993), would have shown their “slow, ardent, exalted life” together – but writer’s block got in the way, perhaps unsurprisingly: happiness is very hard to turn into a plot.

Many readers misremember the novel as a soppy love story. It is a romance, certainly, but a tough-minded one in which the intense connection between the lovers is riven by conflict on almost every page: varied and erotically charged tensions that arise from the clash of a younger, butcher, straightforward but more cautious woman and an older, more educated, rasher, wilier, one. “Surely a few small coddlings wouldn’t spoil her or undermine her capable ways,” Patience thinks as she feeds Sarah that first meal, and a running theme is the need for both lovers to find a balance between the powerful satisfaction of being “capable” and the blessed relief of being “coddled.”

Their lust is presented as a force of nature, an unpredictable “mighty mystery and astonishment” which often scares them. Their improvised vocabulary of “melts,” “wets,” and “waves” may have become more familiar over the decades (since so many other lesbian writers have borrowed it!), but the taut, vibrating string of sexual tension is what holds the novel together. Alma Routsong is extremely honest about the wayward nature of lust – as witness that startling moment when a tired servant is leading them up to their rented room and Sarah finds herself aroused by the girl. Sex between our heroines is often interrupted, postponed, sometimes tender, sometimes furious, never bland: there are no feebly waving fronds of seaweed here. “I wonder if it is generally true that a heightened woman can’t be marked,” speculates Patience with a guilty delight as she searches Sarah for bite marks.

Wavering of faith means beginning to believe in this life and wanting to live it, denying all duties and dashing off uncontrolled.

One aspect of
Patience & Sarah
rarely discussed is its subtle take on religion. Sarah, daughter of an anti-clerical father, learns much from her time with lapsed parson Dan Peel. Patience, an orthodox goer-to-Meeting, at one point gets down on her knees to fight her lesbian desire and ends up praying for its fulfilment instead. She struggles to hold onto the core of religion: “May God save my heart for love, despite Saint Paul.” Not only is the novel’s strong, concrete language steeped in the cadences of the King James Version, but Patience constantly refers to and rewrites (or repaints) that heritage: she thinks of herself as the punished, risk-taking wife of Lot during the destruction of Sodom, or as the cowardly Peter when she won’t admit publicly to loving Sarah. When Patience first acknowledges her desire, Sarah wears “the look of Jacob granted the Angel’s blessing” after the long wrestle. And of course the first picture Patience paints in their new home is of Ruth and Naomi. But the most interesting Biblical reference is Patience’s musing on the Prodigal Son (the subject of a series of pictures by Mary Ann Willson), an image of masculine, dissolute recklessness that she comes to embrace: “What would I do, I wondered, all uncontrolled and raging and self-seeking, my tiger-soul unchained, these dangerous passions freed?” Like later works such as Jeanette Winterson’s
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
(1985),
Patience & Sarah
manages to pay homage to Christianity even as it denounces it for its war on love.

Oh, we were begun. There would be no way out except through.

Patience & Sarah
does not correspond to the classic shape of what would come to be called the coming-out novel. The women admit their passion to each other thirty pages in, and Sarah immediately ‘outs’ them to her sister, telling her “I found my mate.” But this matter-of- fact declaration, far from being the climax of the novel, can be seen as a blunder, since it brings on a crisis that keeps the lovers apart for many months. It is through a discreet and often deceitful campaign that they gradually win over each other’s families. Patience does have to learn not to be afraid of the truth, and there is a moment that feels like a “wedding party” to her, when she holds Sarah’s hand in front of her brother as they set off – but it is a brief and wordless moment. On their journey into New York State, or among their neighbors where they settle, they present themselves merely as a couple of eccentric females, ‘kin’ in some unspecified way. The ‘place for us’ that Sarah and Patience crave is not primarily a farm to grow corn, but a bed where they can make love out of hearing range of hostile or uncomprehending people. That is why ultimately it does not matter to them that they have not made it to Genesee, only to the much nearer Greene County; their real quest is to find privacy and autonomy in the psychological wilderness of a patriarchal society.

And it is significant that the two never try to come up with any labels for what kind of women their ‘feeling’ makes them. This lack of interest in sexual identity seems very true to the early nineteenth century. (Even Anne Lister, who wrote reams in her secret diaries about her complicated love-life in early nineteenth-century Yorkshire, put her difference in the form of a verb, not a noun: “I love, & only love, the fairer sex . . . my heart revolts from any other love but theirs.”) In the twenty-first century, this focus on the love, rather than identity or the coming-out process, is something that has saved
Patience & Sarah
from dating.

Of course, many other pre-Stonewall novels share this quality of presenting a passion between two women without much labeling and without any context in a lesbian community. But if we take two that share with
Patience & Sarah
the extremely rare feature of a happy ending – Gale Wilhelm’s
Torchlight to Valhalla
(1938) and Patricia Highsmith’s
Carol
(1952) (a.k.a.
The Price of Salt
, written as Claire Morgan) – we can immediately see how groundbreaking Routsong’s novel is. The Wilhelm and Highsmith titles both have a certain tastefully literary, muted quality; communication is oblique; love between women hovers with a wary melancholy on the edge of the social world. By contrast,
Patience & Sarah
blazes out like a firework, and has an erotic confidence comparable only with later titles like Rita Mae Brown’s
Rubyfruit Jungle
(1973) or Audre Lorde’s
Zami
(1982).

It is hard to believe that Alma Routsong wrote
Patience &Sarah
in the mid-sixties, before Stonewall, the women’s movement, everything that would seem necessary to enable such brio. Before starting the novel, she had a bad case of writer’s block and a reluctance to contribute to what she saw as the ghastly genre of contemporary lesbian fiction (with all its pulp conventions, suicides and conversions to heterosexuality). It was by deciding to make her mark on the blank slate – the imaginary “green country” – of the unwritten lesbian past, that Routsong was able to summon up psychological and writerly confidence. Historical fiction is often accused of nostalgia, but in this case it seems to have offered more of the visionary, fearless quality of science fiction.

I had it from Patience that there’d been women like us before, because the Bible complained of them.

Patience & Sarah
can be considered the first lesbian historical novel. Before it came a few fictions of the past which included love between women, a couple of them even by lesbian authors – notably, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s
Summer Will Show
(1936), about the 1848 Paris revolution, and Kate O’Brien’s
As Music and Splendour
(1958), about opera singers in 1880s Italy – but both of these have a tactful, inexplicit quality; neither puts a female couple center stage and neither is written from and for an emerging lesbian community the way
Patience & Sarah
so clearly was.

Writers of historical fiction are always being asked why they set their books in the past – as if it is to be taken for granted that novels should be set in the present. (In fact, if we consider that storytelling originated with tales of a distant past, such as Homer’s
Iliad
or
Odyssey
, then a case could be made for historical fiction as the default, the original form of fiction.) Also, it is often wrongly assumed that historical novels are written to teach the facts of social history in a palatable form, rather than for riskier, literary aims. In the case of
Patience & Sarah
, Routsong was inventing a history rather than teaching a known one, which helps give the novel its vigour and zest.

It is always tricky, in writing historical fiction, to find a balance between the preoccupations of your own time and the facts of the past. Routsong pulls this off with marvellous lightness of touch. She shows a sharp appreciation for the circumstances of the 1810s – the land indentures, seasonal farming tasks, details of Patience’s father’s will – but her prose is never weighed down by research. The book is deeply feminist in its appreciation of women’s bodies, work, and attributes, but manages to be sympathetic to all its male and female characters as they struggle for happiness within the confines of their social and religious codes. They are all very credible nineteenth-century Americans: the doleful, ever-pregnant sister-in-law Martha, for instance, who wishes Patience would keep her caresses “in the family,” or the restless Parson Peel, with his wife, children and buried desire for boys.

Alma Routsong probably had no idea that she was founding a genre, but by the time she died in 1996 she knew it. In the second half of the 1970s came a trickle of varied lesbian historical fictions by Doris Grumbach, Sarah Aldridge, and Jane Chambers in the US, and Australian author Barbara Hanrahan – none of them echoing the plot of
Patience & Sarah
, but all of them enabled by that book’s bold project of imagining a lesbian past into visibility. In the 1980s came significant stories and novels of the past by Sara Maitland, Jeanette Winterson, and Ellen Galford in Britain, and Nevada Barr, Alice Walker and Jeannine Allard, in the US, as well as a dozen other authors. In the 1990s some of the outstanding names were the US’s Jewelle Gomez, Paula Martinac, Susan Stinson, Michelle Cliff, Judith Katz, and Elana Dykewoman, and Canada’s Ingrid MacDonald, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Helen Humphreys. In the early 2000s the queen of the genre is Britain’s Sarah Waters, whose novels of the Victorian underworld have won a huge mainstream audience despite their explicitly lesbian storylines.

Many of these novels resemble
Patience & Sarah
– or perhaps adopt the same approach to representing the two main ways women responded to patriarchy – in bringing together a masculine woman and a feminine one. Ellen Galford’s
Moll Cutpurse, Her True History
(1984) is a quirky romance between a crossdressing thief and an apothecary; Jeanette Winterson’s
The Passion
(1987) hinges on an affair between a girl who crossdresses to work in a casino, and a married woman; Caeia Marsh’s
The Hide and Seek Files
(1988) and Jeannine Allard’s
Légende
(1984) are about female pairs passing as married couples in 1920s Yorkshire and 1840s Brittany respectively; in Judith Katz’s
The Escape Artist
(1997) a woman disguised as a male magician is recognised, and seduced, by a prostitute. But even romances that hinge on a different dynamic, such as governess/girl or mistress/servant, tend to have at their heart the hunger for “a place for us.” And the influence of
Patience & Sarah
shows up in all sorts of surprising places: in Sarah Waters’s spooky thriller
Affinity
(1997), for instance, the spinster heroine has a prior, thwarted love for the friend who became her sister-in-law, just as Patience has. (We could perhaps call this the Emily Dickinson motif.)

Much has been written about the boom in lesbian crime novels since the 1980s, but very little about the immense growth in lesbian historical fiction. I think it shows a real maturing in lesbian readers that we are hungry to know that our subculture is not a passing phase, not just an offshoot of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Historical fiction has a crucial importance to communities whose history (in hard facts) is unlikely ever to be discovered. Because there will never be a detailed biography of the life Willson and Brundidge lived, we are all the more grateful for Routsong’s story of (as she puts it in her dedication) “something like it.”

Where is the hero who bore such batterings for love and stood up before witnesses to ask me to be a hero too? And I am a hero now. Can’t you see? We can be an army of two.… Let the world either kill us or grow accustomed to us: here we stand.

For all the historical specifics in
Patience & Sarah
, for all the precise characterisations of even minor characters – it has an elemental, timeless quality. Using the Ouija board to call up Willson and Brundidge (or maybe to shape them in her and Elisabeth Deran’s unconscious, she was never sure), Routsong told her diary “I don’t know why any book I might be able to make of this might not be called divine revelation.”