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Renée Vivien and the Trials of Lesbian Poetry
On the 11th of June 1877, English poet Renée Vivien (née Pauline Mary Tarn) was born in London to a wealthy British father and an American mother. She adopted her French name at the age of twenty-one after moving to Paris, where she lived a notorious bohemian lifestyle defined by her quirky style of dressing, turbulent relationships and original poetry. Her first relationship in Paris was with American heiress and writer Natalie Clifford Barney. However, Barney’s frequent infidelities led to an inevitable and abrupt breakup. In 1902, Vivien became romantically involved with the wealthy Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, one of the Paris Rothschilds. Zuylen was already married and with two kids when it happened; therefore, the relationship was never out in the open. But from Vivien’s letters to her French friend, journalist and classical scholar Jean Charles-Brun, we learn that the couple often travelled together and continued a discreet affair for many years. At some point, Vivien even considered herself married to Zuylen. In the meantime, the poet had a secret affair with the wife of a Turkish diplomat in Istanbul. The ladies corresponded secretly over the years and met incognito several times. In 1907, Zuylen cheated on Vivien with another woman, leaving her in a state of despair. Unable to deal with the situation, she left Paris first for Japan and then for Hawaii. The loss of her long-term partner led to a mental breakdown. The course of events pushed her towards drugs, alcohol, and sadomasochistic fantasies. Her dangerous sexual escapades became an obsession. Her never ending drive to find physical pleasure, whether at parties or other public gatherings, eventually left her in a state of suicidal depression. She refused to eat and drink, became ill and died at the premature age of thirty two.
Vivien left behind twelve books of poetry as well as her own translations of Sappho’s verses from Greek (the language she learnt specifically for the purpose). Contemporary feminists consider her as one of the first women to write openly lesbian poetry. “[Y]et her reputation as the Sappho of 1900 makes it more difficult to understand why she wrote in a language much more gender-marked than her native English, and why she sometimes framed her woman-centered verses within the restrictive framework of the sonnet, a form exemplifying what Gertrude Stein referred to as “Patriarchal Poetry””. (Tama Lea Engelking, Genre and the Mark of Gender: Renée Vivien’s “Sonnet féminin”, Modern Language Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, 1993). It seems that, “her discursive universe is founded on an all-pervasive division between two antagonistic positions: the masculine and the feminine. These two extremely hostile territories are defined in such a mutually exclusive way that infiltration of one by the other seems absolutely impossible (let alone desirable).” (Mireille Rosello, Infiltrating Culture: Power and Identity in Contemporary Women’s Writing).
Her choice of the sonnet as poetic format was not dictated purely by her personal preferences. Yes, she read Dante and the great sonneteer Petrarch, and was particularly fond of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which she emulated in the last six of her published sonnets, but most of all, she was aware of the disadvantages of her sex and prejudices towards female writers. “Perfecting the sonnet form may have been one step more toward earning the “gloire” she sought as a serious poet, who relied on her skills as a writer to compensate for the perceived weakness of her sex. She even went so far as to hide her gender by having her first two books published under the genderless pseudonym “R. Vivien”. Also, she signed the cards included in the copies destined for critics with the masculine form of her name, “Rene Vivien”. … Vivien’s readers were confused by her unconventional combination of gender and genre, and some of them wrongly assumed that the love poems inspired by Natalie Barney were written by a man to his mistress. The two women actually attended a public “misreading” of Vivien’s poetry incognito, and according to Barney’s account, were forced to stifle their giggles at the lecturer’s mistake. Conditioned by conventional gender roles, her readers’ reactions may have seemed funny and even complimentary to Vivien at first, but it eventually became a real concern for the increasingly paranoid and depressed poet”. (Engelking)
It seems that what initially appeared to be her personal weapon against biased male criticism, eventually became the cause of even deeper suppression. By choosing a typically ‘masculine’ form of poetry, Vivien made it impossible for herself to be heard as a woman.
Your Strange Hair
Your strange hair, cold light,
Has pale glows and blond dullness;
Your gaze has the blue of ether and waves;
Your gown has the chill of the breeze and the woods.I burn the whiteness of your fingers with kisses.
The night air spreads the dust from many worlds.
Still I don’t know anymore, in the heart of those deep nights,
How to see you with the passion of yesterday.The moon grazed you with a slanted glow …
It was terrible, like prophetic lightning
Revealing the hideous below your beauty.I saw-as one sees a flower fade-
On your mouth, like summer auroras,
The withered smile of an old whore.
You come up with some fascinating information – good stuff.
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Thank you for reading 🙂
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I am researching the life of an American woman Mary Livingston King (1842-1931.) She was briefly married to an English peer, the Marquess of Anglesey. Separated in 1882, she spent most of the last fifty years of her life in Paris. She shows up frequently in biographies of Elsie Wolfe, Natalie Barney, Renee Vivien etc. One author of has described Lady Anglesey as “the queen of all lesbians” in Paris and one of Natalie Barney’s lovers. Any comments or information would be greatly appreciated.
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Thank you. We will look into it, Tom.
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Gosh this is fascinating and especially interesting on a personal level because I am a lesbian poet and I had no idea about this lady and her story. I find it very sad she appeared to be seeking sexual satisfaction, could this mean she was not so much as lesbian as a woman wishing to be a man? I say this because I have long held a theory that some women who are especially sexually ardent to the extent it becomes dysfunctional, those who are of the masculine bent, may well be suffering from gender dysmorphia and a wish to be the reverse gender, more so than homosexuality. I think sometimes a lesbian or queer man is only so because to consider gender reassignment is too extreme for many. Perhaps as much as they feel like they would like to be a man/woman they wouldn’t want to do what it would take to make that happen (and I can’t blame them that’s a lot) of course in her day, there was no such thing, I always thought Radcliffe Hall was an invert in the true sense of the word, wishing to be the other gender. They couldn’t talk about it then, they didn’t really even know about it then. But to my mind a lesbian is a woman who wishes to be with other women for her attraction of other women and her own femininity, a lesbian who to all intense purposes identifies as masculine, I feel that is something else. Anyway I suppose each to their own. Very sad that she died at 32 but quite something that she wrote ten books. I will now read a few. Thank you for this informative post, most never write about lesbians so it was really a lucky find when it came up on my browser. Thank you, great post
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Thank you so much – we are happiest when our articles open new doors of cultural interest for our readers. We look forward to having you back in the future – plenty more LGBT-centered articles here too!
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Glad for it and thank you so much for being a voice in the darkness for many
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Vivien did not want to be a man. If you read her any of her work it becomes very apparent that she had a potent animosity towards men as a class. She identified distinctly as a lesbian, a woman who exclusively loves women, even if she didn’t use that specific word for herself. I’d be more than happy to give excerpts that demonstrate both of these points.
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Thank you for this!
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Thank you for correcting this! The transgender ideologists are now ‘transing’ past artists and writers who definitely weren’t. Another hijack among the many, not in the least the definition of woman and lesbian.
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Bonjour, venez visiter mon blog
http://www.renee-vivien.com
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