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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2004 by Kirstie Blair

Such fantasies of being a gypsy can underscore the playful, performative nature of sexuality, as highlighted for us by Judith Butler's and Sue-Ellen Case's work on gender construction and lesbianism, or Marjorie Garber's writings on cross-dressing and bisexuality. Besides its playfulness, however, the deployment of the gypsy, whether literally--in the form of style and costume--or figuratively, hints at the dangerous consequences of desire between women. For a woman writer to ally herself with the gypsy as a means of imagining a relationship between women courts the danger of identifying with a clearly defined outgroup in Western society, an outgroup against whom legislation was stepped up in the early decades of the twentieth century. In an unpublished novel by Trefusis, for instance, written after the bitter ending of her affair with Sackville-West, the heroine is trapped between civilization and her love for Kalo, a Spanish gypsy (implicitly Sackville-West), and she ends up "Disowned by her own class, disowned by the gypsies, forsaken by all" (Souhami 223).

Before turning to the writings of Trefusis, Sackville-West, and Woolf, it is important to place them in context in order to show how their depiction of gypsies was influenced by (and itself influenced) the contemporary British engagement, even obsession, with the gypsy. In 1912 the editor of one folklore journal wrote that he possessed "hundreds" of press cuttings on gypsies from the last few years (Editorial). This intense reportage, plus a heightened interest in control and legislation, may have responded to a rise in immigration from various European tribes whose Eastern dress marked them as foreign (Fraser 231-32). Since the foundation of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1888, moreover, the culture, customs, folklore, and language of the gypsy had gradually become an acceptable subject of academic study. One writer claimed that by 1912 gypsy lore was "no longer the private study of a few, but, we can well say, a national topic of interest" (Inglish 47). The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society initially foundered in 1892 but was revived in 1907, and despite a relatively small list of subscribers, managed to run throughout the century. For anyone wishing to investigate gypsy culture, this would have been a readily available source in libraries and institutions. A related journal, The Romanitshels,' Didakais,' and Folk-Lore Gazette, aimed for a wider circulation but does not seem to have succeeded, despite the support of such eminent literary figures as Arthur Symons, Theodore Watts-Dunton, and H. G. Wells. A third journal, The Gypsy (1915-16), designed to highlight European, "Bohemian" art and literature, was published from Dublin, but managed only two volumes before the Easter Rising caused its collapse.

The success of various folklore and gypsy societies stemmed in part from the perception that the gypsy way of life was threatened and needed to be preserved if it were not to vanish completely. As anthropologists sought to record the beliefs and behavior of "primitive" societies for posterity, so the members of the Gypsy Lore Society aimed to point out that gypsies constituted one of these threatened groups and that their "pagan" customs and rites and unusual language provided a vital link between "savagery" and "civilization," showing how ancient beliefs could coexist with modern culture. Konrad Bercovici, author of several romantic accounts of gypsy life in the 1920s, commented, "They are our only link with the East, with mystery, with magic" (Story 217), and Irving Brown, an American travel writer who adopted gypsy dress, learnt Romany, and "passed" as a Spanish gypsy for several years, wrote in 1922 that gypsies "bring us all the mystery of the Orient" (14). Walter Starkie, an academic who similarly traveled around Spain with the gypsies as an itinerant musician, observed in Don Gypsy (1936) that the tribe he encountered "was like a rare fauna that naturalists roam the world to discover" (89). The gypsy is further romanticized by this sense that real gypsies were an endangered species, vanishing from their traditional haunts and pastimes or becoming reduced to a tourist attraction. In Sheila Kaye-Smith's short story "The Fear of Streets" (1926), for instance, this clash between gypsy life and modern civilization is emphasized in the story of an old farmer who traditionally let gypsies camp on his land but cannot save his fields from going to the council for a housing estate after his death. "Some day there won't be any tents by the wayside, same as there won't be any farms in the fields," he laments (202).