Obscenity Trials and American Literature

While obscenity is notoriously difficult to define and the test for determining obscenity has shifted over time, typically the term has referred to the crime of publishing prohibited, sexually explicit material. Obscenity has always been a criminal offense in the United States. Citing English common law, judges in the early republic and antebellum periods maintained that obscenity threatened to degrade the nation’s character. Nevertheless, obscenity law was not strongly or consistently enforced throughout the United States until the Comstock Act in 1873. Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, targeted Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass along with publications by advocates for feminism, free love, and birth control. American courts adopted the test put forth by Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn in Regina v. Hicklin (1868), which held that obscenity was defined by “the tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Obscenity became a battleground not only for debates about gender and sexual politics but also about the nature of the public sphere. During the 20th century, American literary presses and magazines became increasingly willing to challenge bans on sexually explicit speech, publishing controversial works including The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Ulysses by James Joyce. Modernist authors transgressed the legal bounds of propriety to explore the unconscious, fight for erotic pleasure free from heteronormative restraints, or claim aesthetic autonomy from moral and legal restrictions. United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” (1933) struck a blow against the Hicklin test. Affirming Judge John M. Woolsey’s not guilty verdict, Judge Augustus Hand proposed a new test for obscenity that anticipated many of the themes that would emerge when the Supreme Court took up this question with Roth v. United States (1957), which defined obscenity as “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient [i.e., sexual] interest.” The Court liberalized obscenity law even as it maintained restrictions on pornographic literature, setting off a wave of censorship cases including trials on Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. After Roth, lawyers defending borderline obscene publishers pushed for courts to hold that a work could not be obscene if it possessed any redeeming literary or social value. Free speech libertarians succeeded with Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966) and Redrup v. New York (1967). Although Miller v. California (1973) clawed back this ruling by stipulating that a work must possess “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” to be cleared of obscenity, in the 21st century obscenity convictions for publishing textual media have been limited to a handful of cases concerning pornographic depictions of child sexual abuse. Obscenity remains on the books but largely unenforced for literature.

Fiction for the Woman of To-day: The Modern Short Story in Eve

This chapter explores short fiction published in Eve, later Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a magazine directed to ‘the woman of to-day and tomorrow’ in print between 1921-29. This elite English women’s paper was avowedly modern in outlook - debating new social roles for women, new ideas about psychology and sexuality, changing relations between the sexes and modernist aesthetics - at the same time as upholding traditional values such as respect for class hierarchy and marriage within its routine content of society gossip columns, fashion pages, travel writing and reviews of new books, art exhibitions and theatre. This chapter shows how the tension between modernity and convention was also reflected in the magazine’s short stories, which ranged from formulaic and conservative plots to experimental and subversive narratives. It reads stories by familiar and forgotten authors, including Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Anstruther, Marthe Troly-Curtin and Radclyffe Hall, that, in more or less radical ways, probed new models of femininity and new models for heterosexual relationships.

«Preferiría verte (muerta) a mis pies». Eróticas maternas e infancias butch en Radclyffe Hall

We will analyze the counterpoint versions of motherhood and butch childhoods in those novels by Radclyffe Hall addressing “sexual inversion,” the lesbian bestseller The Well of Loneliness (1928) and The Unlit Lamp (1924), which present significant differences regarding the conditions of possibility and the misfortunes of a queer life. We will concern ourselves with the representations of maternal abjection, in the light of the importance that Radclyffe assigns to this deeply disturbing erotic bond (whether aversion or attraction) for the development of butch childhoods. We will argue that a careful reading of the perversions of this bond makes clear that Radclyffe’s perspective –for all of its morality, sexual shame and desire to be admitted within the privileges of heterosexuality– allows for a critique of exclusivist, monogamous, and unconditional emotional pacts, as well as of the conception of happiness they give rise to.

Intimate Archives

This chapter demonstrates that some intimate biographical acts are designed as archival projects to be mined later. It suggests that compilers of intimate archives, such as Radclyffe Hall, his long-time partner Una Troubridge, alongside her lover Evguenia Souline prioritize future researchers over midcentury readers. This chapter focuses on Ann Cvetkovich's notion of the “archive of feelings” and further proposes that some queer feminist life stories were intentionally left incomplete—even unwritten. The chapter concludes with a substantial engagement with Sylvia Townsend Warner's late-career life writing. Claiming that the archive of her partnership with Valentine Ackland could not be published without a safe margin for everyone to be dead in. Warner spent years after Ackland's death assembling an intimate archive of their literary life together. Like Troubridge and Souline's letters, Warner's archive was intentionally assembled, collated, annotated, and saved for a more generous future audience.

Modernism’s Unfinished Lives

This chapter reassesses the importance of biography, broadly conceived, for modernist, midcentury, and contemporary women writers and scholars. It draws together a diverse archive of biographical acts, such as published and unpublished books, drafts, outlines, fragments, letters, annotations, collections, objects, and ephemera. In the experimental life writing of canonical mainstays like Virginia Woolf, the intimate archives of Radclyffe Hall and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the abandoned projects of Djuna Barnes and Hope Mirrlees, the midcentury memoirs and literary collections of Margaret Anderson, Sylvia Beach, and Alice B. Toklas, and the more contemporary recovery projects of Lisa Cohen, Jenny Diski, Monique Truong, and Kate Zambreno, the biographical impulse signals a shared ethical drive to develop a counternarrative of literary history grounded in women's lives. The chapter then tracks the interest in preservation across biographical novels, histories, and archives. It uncovers the modernist prehistory of the contemporary queer feminist recovery project.

The Passion Projects

It's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. This book examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others. The book explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner's carefullly annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes's fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson's collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf's joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field. Arguing for the importance of biography, the book shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.