illicit love and its limits: evil lesbians in Hollywood

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illicit love and its limits evil lesbians in
Hollywood
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Aleister Crowley, The Lesbian Hell 1898

• Pale women fleet around, whose infinite
• Long sorrow and desire have torn their wombs
• Whose empty fruitlessness assails the night
• With hollow repercussion, like dim tombs
• Wherein some vampire glooms.

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Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian

• The lesbian remains a kind of ghost effect in
  the cinema world of modern life elusive,
  vaporous, difficult to spot...to try to write the
  literary history of lesbianism is to confront,
  from the start, something ghostly an
  impalpability, a misting-over, an evaporation.

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Mary of The Uninvited (1944)
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spinsters
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Another spinster, and tortured school teachers
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Draculas Daughter, 1936
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Prison films, 1950s
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Paranormal abnormality in The Haunting, 1963

• Theodora Is this another one of your crazy
  ideas?
• Eleanor Lance I'm not crazy!
• Theodora Crazy as a loon! You really expect me
  to believe that you're sane and the rest of the
  world is mad?
• Eleanor Lance Well why not? The world is full of
  inconsistencies. Full of unnatural beings,
  nature's mistakes they call you for instance!

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Eleanor Whose hand was I holding?--The
Haunting
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the 1930s alternatives
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Discussion Questions

• How is the queerness of Rebecca managed (or not)
  in Rebecca the novel?
• How does queerness work in R the film?
• Recall all the films doubles. Who is doubling
  for whom, and how does this complicate how
  sexuality is presented?
• What are the connections between Jane Eyre and
  Rebecca (either work)?