History | Marie-Antoinette
Poor Souls Marie-Antoinette and Early LGBT Literature
Gareth Russell looks into the early life of the ill-fated French Queen
“Brockett pointed to the simple garniture on the mantelpiece of the little salon, then he looked at Stephen: ‘Madame de Lamballe gave those to the queen,’ he murmured softly. … Presently they followed him out into the gardens and stood looking across the Tapis Vert that stretches its quarter mile of greenness towards a straight, lovely line of water. Brockett said, very low, so that Puddle should not hear him: ‘Those two 36 EILE Magazine
would often come here at sunset. Sometimes they were rowed along the canal in the sunset – can’t you imagine it, Stephen? They must often have felt pretty miserable, poor souls; sick to death of the subterfuge and pretences. Don’t you ever get tired of that sort of thing? My God, I do!’” - From The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)
There was a time, in the early twentieth century, when we can first begin to see a literary genre developing which attempted to deal with homosexual identities, and when the figure of the longdead Marie-Antoinette was seldom missing from gay-identity literature. In Despised and Rejected, a novel written under a pseudonym by Rose-Laure Allatini in 1918, two young girls struggle with their romantic feelings for each other. They project their feelings outwards, into an obsession with a play about Marie-Antoinette. In 1933’s The Frost of May by Antonia White, the story’s central heroine falls in love with the most popular girl in boarding school