Gypsies and lesbian desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2004 by Kirstie Blair

Deborah Epstein Nord has examined how, in the Victorian period, women's writing "associated the gypsy figure with an unconventional femininity located in blood and bone, and with a bodily and temperamental difference figured as the result of accident or heredity" (190). "To imagine oneself a gypsy," she writes, "is to escape, in some sense, from conventional femininity; it is also to claim kinship with those who mirror and explain one's anomalousness" (192). As the discourse of the "invert" took shape in the early twentieth century--in precisely the same decades when scholars were attempting to define the "core identity" of the gypsy--the gypsy's difference and anomalousness meant that she could be appropriated by women seeking a way to engage with this discourse without necessarily subscribing to the "Stephen Gordon" myth of the mannish woman. (2) Claiming kinship with gypsies, I will suggest, provided one means for women engaged in same-sex relationships to play with gender roles, particularly by emphasizing their femininity while also consciously representing femininity as a masquerade. When Violet Trefusis imagined herself and was imagined as a gypsy, for example, the perceived passionate heterosexuality of the gypsy woman might act as protective coloring, but as we shall see, it also highlights her deliberate performance of an ultrafeminine role.

Popular culture and literature in the first decades of the twentieth century tended to highlight this performative aspect of gypsiness by associating gypsies with exotic "oriental" fashions: indeed, costumes based on gypsy style were widely worn in the 1920s, and it was popular, for the upper classes at least, to be painted or photographed in Spanish gypsy dress. (3) Laura Doan warns us, with regard to masculine dress, of the dangers inherent in reading particular women's fashions as signs of lesbian sexuality in the early twentieth century, given that lesbians were not fully recognized as a distinct and identifiable social group (95-123); her argument also holds true for gypsy dress and fantasies of gypsy life, which were fairly widespread in the period. Yet the extravagance, orientalism, and exoticism associated with gypsy clothing and customs does feed into an emerging homoerotic discourse. The ostentatiously gay Eddy Sackville-West, for instance, wrote to E. M. Forster that the Berlin cabarets of the 1920s and 30s (the period when Harold Nicolson worked there and Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf visited) featured men dressed as female Spanish dancers, a key gypsy persona (qtd. in Lee 521). (4) While on the one hand the adoption of gypsy costume by women stages a cliched, romanticized contempt for modern civilization--as opposed to the more subversive, visibly disturbing implications of men cross-dressing as female Spanish gypsies, or "female masculinity"--on the other hand, gypsy dress already implies the potential for unregulated sexual behavior. With regard to lesbian identity, masculine costume has been much discussed, but the adoption of fashions that accentuate femininity, including gypsy dress, has not. Yet there are many instances, in popular culture as well as in the writings of Sackville-West, Trefusis, and Woolf, where these styles meld. In Eyes of a Gypsy (1926), for instance, a novel by the well-known Canadian author John Murray Gibbon, the half-gypsy heroine, whose passionate, flirtatious friendships with both a young female artist and her male suitor strongly hint at an ambiguous sexuality, occasionally wears men's clothing and runs a statistical bureau by day, while by night she adopts New York's latest gypsy bohemian fashions and tells fortunes to a wealthy clientele. (5)