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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2004 by Kirstie Blair

Recalling her first visit to Spain in her journal, Sackville-West exclaims, "I would give my soul to go there with Violet" (qtd. in Nicolson 48). Trefusis had already written to her, years earlier, that they should travel to Spain together, "you as my pupil, I as your cicerone ... I will show you eyes of black velvet ... the sevillana, the fandango, undulating bodies, throbbing castanets" (70). It is interesting that she portrays herself as already a knowing guide to Spanish sexuality (and perhaps particularly female sexuality), with Sackville-West as the innocent. Knowing that Sackville-West could be flattered by references to her Spanish blood and dark good looks, Trefusis told her in 1918 that she should be painted by William Strang, a popular artist who "does Spanish women so well" (qtd. in Souhami 131). Later, in exile on the continent, Trefusis writes of her longing to live in Spain forever with Sackville-West, in a world of "sun and love, and singing and dancing" (148). Spain represents liberation from conventional society, as it may have done for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who were in Andalucia in 1913 and 1915; for Gerald Brenan, who lived in Andalucia from 1920 and was visited by the Woolfs in 1923; and for Valentine Ackland, who journeyed to Spain with her first woman lover in 1925.

In the letters exchanged between Sackville-West and Trefusis it is clear that their private elaboration of the gypsy myth provided both lovers with an intense fantasy of escape and a way of referring to an illicit but natural sexuality. The first specific mention of a gypsy woman in an early letter from Trefusis (25 Jan. 1918) also suggests her additional potential to figure as the writer herself. She presents a fable to Sackville-West in which a woman artist's choice of a bourgeois life with husband and children splits her into two selves, woman and artist:

         Presently, they met; they confronted each other, the woman
         serene, loving, imperturbable, the artist defiant, jealous,
         irritated beyond endurance. And the artist stood and jeered at
         the woman. Poor artist: Dishevelled, irresponsible gypsy, it
         was more than she could bear--Now the woman belonged heart and
         soul to her husband and her children, but the artist belonged
         to no one, or rather to humanity. Fancy one, she roams the
         earth, here today, gone tomorrow. (75)

One of the striking things about this vision is that Trefusis uses it to imagine a woman artist desiring another woman, her Platonic other half. The jealousy and irritation, it is implied, might stem from sexual jealousy as well as envy, as the gypsy artist seeks to separate the woman from her comfortable heterosexual existence. The artist here is plainly superior, but Trefusis's description does introduce doubt as to whether the artist willingly abandons home and stability, like Bercovici's gypsy, who has "locked himself out of gates of modern civilization, and roams freely on the highways and byways of the world" (Story 3), or whether she is exiled, shut out by others.