On February 17, 1909, Virginia Stephen (not yet Woolf) accepted a marriage proposal from a panicked Lytton Strachey; it was called off before the end of their conversation. Other prominent queer authors in the early twentieth century lived in marriages, as Virginia would with Leonard, that afforded the appearance of propriety even if they did not practice it. Although he preferred short-lived relationships over monogamy, Guillaume Apollinaire married Jacqueline Kolb only a few months before his death from Spanish Flu in 1918. After marrying his first wife, Ray, David Garnett maintained his habit of conducting affairs with men and women alike. In each of these cases, otherwise sexually deviant people felt an imperative to marry or live as if married, despite their sharp critiques of the equation of marriage with a happy, successful life. When E. M. Forster protested, in the face of matrimony’s intractable grasp on life and literature alike, that novels were expected to end with “the old, old answer, marriage,” he voiced a widely-held frustration with the possibilities for representations of queer life in fiction and fact.

This article explores how a vein of queer modernist writing, exemplified by David Garnett’s 1922 novella of animal transformation, Lady into Fox, dislodges conventional marriage as the central organizer of social and literary form by undermining the foundation of the marriage plot—narrative realism. Garnett’s novella subverts the hegemonic norms of the marriage plot, critiquing structures of heteronormative monogamy while offering an affirmative version of queer resistance in which moments of subversion surpass critique and instead imagine a new vision of the social order. Moreover, Lady into Fox reveals that this history of progressive political expression is entangled with the legacies of modernist innovations and the often-elided role of fantasy in modernist writing. In Lady into Fox, what begins as a realist plot is undone through the introduction of a fantastic mode that overrides the otherwise normative events of the narrative when, early in the story, the protagonist’s wife is suddenly and irreversibly transformed into a fox. The novella registers the social, cultural, and ideological dominance of heterosexual couplings but undoes several features of the marriage plot’s closure in heterosexual monogamous compacts, creating an alternative way to organize a life beyond, as Forster puts it, “the old, old answer, marriage” through a transformation of one of characters into another species and the couple’s subsequent navigation of and adaptation to their new, queer way of living together.

Nordgren, Todd G. '“Was it Marriage?”: Queer Relationships and Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Realism." Modernism/modernity 29, no. 2 (2022): 357–376. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/863188

Todd Nordgren is Director of LGBTQ Services and professor of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Project Muse's Website. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/863188

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