When Tanith Lee writes as Esther Garber, we hear a voice that belongs to a well-defined personality. Though we are aware that Lee is still there behind the scenes, Garber does not serve purely decorative purposes. This new writer-in-residence sets Lee free from her better known writing past and opens the way to new directions. The preternatural characters and the strange worlds they inhabit in Lee’s science fiction and fantasy can be put to one side while the two women explore the world as she/they know it. A new set of fingerprints have added themselves to Lee’s new venture.
The collection of novellas and stories that constitutes Fatal Women examines the changes in values, social structures and attitudes toward gender and sexuality and love. It considers how women have adapted to these changes as they have entered into the modern era with its increasingly less segregated and differently delineated gender roles and learned to play their parts in it. Naturally, this diminished separation between categories spreads far beyond matters of gender. It causes considerable alterations in the way the world is perceived. Geography too has shrunk, history has become instantly perceivable, and change has flooded through the whole social spectrum. And of course literary conventions and boundaries have been blurring as rapidly as social or class divisions. Magic realism, for example, has become such a frequent feature of the novel that fantastic elements no longer signal that a work belongs in the category of genre. When she writes as Garber, although Lee is enveloping herself in a realism that is largely unprecedented in her work, she continues to grant herself the odd unbridled detour into the surreal and fantastic territories of imagination that her former readers will associate with her writing. However, the anomalies that appear in this book are fairly small and inconspicuous.
Lee’s companion and accomplice arrives with her own detailed history and an unshakeable determination to be nothing but herself. (Lee’s own, pleasantly conversational introduction to Garber and her siblings too, appears in Lethe Press’s recent edition of Disturbed by Her Song.) And so it is Garber-in-herself who becomes the main repository of the fantastic even as she is key to a writing which contemporary literary convention would not term fantasy. The most notable peculiarity of Garber’s “real” world is that it spans an impossibly long period, stretching from the mid-nineteenth century up to the here and now of the twenty-first. As we might expect from Lee, the representation of these more literal and immediately historical realities is scrupulous—but her attention to exact detail has always been meticulous and even the most exorbitant of her fantasy worlds has come equipped with a full range of material and cultural furnishings and references, and with characters whose observations and behavior are appropriate to their time, place and culture.
Esther Garber is explicitly homosexual. Her homoerotic disposition is of particular significance in relation to Lee’s new writing persona insofar as it allows the merged writerly identities of Lee and Garber to inhabit a feminine awareness that is unadulterated by masculine concerns. Garber is an aspect of Lee and as Lee’s alter-ego, it would be almost impossible to include a male perspective without relinquishing the special closeness and vitality that exist when new elements can be fully integrated and internalized into an identity. If Garber were to have been heterosexual, she would not have been able to occupy the intimate space in which a feminine identity can reflect upon itself in uninterrupted privacy. She would have to be more wary, more distant, and would probably become a little lost in the crowd of Lee’s more turbulent characters. Lee describes the content of these co-authored works as consisting of “varnished truth and gloves-off lies.” As always—and Lee is at all times the novelist, even when scrutinizing her own authorial identity—philosophical and psychological questions are phrased through manifestations of human nature. The medium is narrative, not analysis, which means that there are no very clearly demarcated conclusions to be drawn. Readers must supply their own explanations for the behaviors and the quirks.
The title of this book, Fatal Women, is used in two senses. It can mean either sexually or lethally fatal. In some instances the word encompasses both meanings. There are three fatal women who become intimate with death; one (in Rherlotte) is a serial murderess; another (Laure in Virgile, the Widow) is a romantic, death-obsessed adolescent, and the third (Sabia in Green Iris) acts with such empty carelessness that deaths follow in her wake more or less inadvertently. (I discussed these three novellas in greater detail in 21st Century Gothic, ed. Daniel Olson, Scarecrow Press, Inc. 2011.) The remaining three stories (The Umbrella, Femme Fatale, Le Jardin) do not involve death in an immediate sense but they continue to center on women’s negotiations with desire, loss and the urge to protect love and creativity from greed, venality and ridicule.
In this Garber-Lee collection, the strong focus on the cultural and historical aspects of the real outer world suggests that perhaps the impossible longevity of the Garber siblings is needed if the sweeping changes in the zeitgeist that occurred between the mid-nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries are to be represented as a continuous, developing, and meaningful sequence. Lee’s concern with the meaning and effects of historical progression is evident throughout. The experiences of women looking for ways to come to terms with the social order, particularly in matters of love, identity and the indissoluble connections between them, are shown in all their relentless fluctuations. Set in more than one century, the pieces in this collection illustrate the evolution of feminine perceptions and personas as they adjusted themselves to the culture vicissitudes to which they were exposed.
Rherlotte is a true woman of the nineteenth century. She exists in an era when it is possible to experience grand passion without questioning it. Phédre, although too young to have become fully self-aware, already seems to be feeling premonitions of the increasing emotional reticence that will overtake women in the twentieth century. Brought up by her grandmother, a former courtesan, Phédre is surrounded by considerable luxury but inhabits an emotional desert. She is indoctrinated with the idea that sex is a lucrative commodity which any woman of sense learns to exploit. The hypocrisy of the era regarding sex, money and class leaves her tainted and excluded from respectable society. Although she does her best to appear unsentimental and to avoid emotional indulgence, when Phédre undertakes to murder men who have abused other women, she behaves as if she is responding to a true calling and refuses to accept payment for her services. We suspect that, even if she is acting without being aware of her own motives, she is avenging her mother’s suicide following the desertion of a faithless lover. All this begins to change when Phédre is approached by Rherlotte, the bereaved mistress of a man whom Phédre has poisoned at the behest of his betrayed wife. Rherlotte embarks on an elaborate seduction and succeeds in gradually awakening Phédre to the experience of grand passion. She then leaves Phédre to experience the same devastating loss she has endured. The opposing polarities of passion and reason have been fighting a long battle for possession of Phédre. Finally, her defenses give way and the unconditional and potentially fatal value her mother gave to love overcomes the grandmother’s unwavering preference for money. This novella makes use of a series of striking and theatrical scenes to tell the story of homoerotic passion and a very feminine revenge that is effected solely through the emotional inner life. The structure is especially appropriate to a period when representations of female psychology, women’s self-perceptions, and even the simplest portrayal of women were often made in very dramatic terms.
Set in the late nineteenth century, Virgile, the Widow is presented as a drama in three acts, even though in this period the female melodrama with its motifs of death and passion had already begun to wane. We first meet the protagonist, Laure, as provincial adolescent, much given to day-dreaming and poetry. The elderly aunt in whose care she’s growing up is kindly in a vague, middle-class sort of way and Laure is left free to do much as she pleases. Her friend from the village school takes her to a soirée at the château—such events are held for the benefit of local girls who feel oppressed by husbands, convention or provincial life—and initiates her into homosexual pleasures. But Laure is inhibited by sensibilities steeped in romantic literature and soon becomes obsessed with the funereal beauty of a black-clad and sophisticated stranger in the village. She hears that Virgile is a professional widow who can be hired at a price to ease the last months of the very old or terminally ill. Her services are said to be unlimited. The villagers regard her with narrow-minded disfavor, though, when the chatelaine befriends her, their snobbery and opportunistic hopes prompt them to overlook her morals. Laure is further captivated by Virgile’s clear contempt for bourgeois prejudice. She perceives her through a romantic fantasy that fuses love and death and is soon stalking the beautiful widow. When her aunt falls seriously ill, Laure almost wishes she would die and so leave her free to experience passion and her own death in Virgile’s arms. However, when the widow strips herself naked in front of Laure, revealing that she is nothing more than a fleshly woman, Laure’s fantasy melts away. She solicitously nurses her aunt and we catch a last glimpse of the mature Laure in comfortable intimacy with the friend of her schooldays. It is evident that, so near the turn of the century, grand passion has become more difficult to entertain outside the contexts of history or literature. Or the romantic imagination.
The third novella in which death appears, Green Iris, also deals with fantasies of pleasure, though this time it ends in disaster. A pervasive sense of alienation stems partly from the period—shortly after World War I—and partly from the personality of the protagonist, Sabia, while the motif of green iris conveys dissimulation and false appearances. Sabia is skilled in two things, typing and deception. Where Laure and Phédre had been in the grip of sincere or least imagined desire, Sabia experiences nothing more than irresponsible whim and caprice. Her emotional emptiness leads to boredom. Offering to work as a typist, she insinuates herself into the household of a woman she imagines it might be interesting to seduce, but instead becomes inadvertently embroiled with the woman’s writer-husband. Sabia’s emotional involvement is faked and her lies spiral out of control. The affair leads to the death of the couple with whom she has been meddling so pointlessly and she ends up in a dreary provincial town, living out an empty unreality. Her experience has taught her nothing. She has felt nothing, learnt nothing, understood nothing and sacrificed whatever personal integrity she had to self-deception and avoidance. Out in the larger world it is the period between two world wars. Sabia’s duplicity mirrors an era of escapism when senseless celebration struggled to drown out thoughts of so much senseless death and lessons that might have been had from confronting the truth were lost in the noise of the performance.
The women of the remaining three pieces should perhaps be described more as keenly conscious of woman’s fate than fatal. In no way is any of them a femme fatale in the style of temptresses and hard-headed destroyers of men who feature feature in hard-boiled crime fiction written by and for men and who in their essence resemble men in drag. These stories treat of women in themselves, women as they perceive other women, women interested in sharing a feminine understanding of their particular situations and the predicament of women in general with other women. In all three narratives, sexual desire and, even more importantly, sexual objectives are subordinated to a desire to support and avoid any harassment of the other. They respond to each other unintrusively, restrained by consideration and sympathy. With their quiet thoughtful demeanor they contrast with other more assertive and less self-aware characters. These women take few active steps to alter the flow of outward events. However, they never for an instant cease to take note.
The young woman at the center of The Umbrella has the workings of “the writer’s mind.” But, though she indulges in the slightly frivolous habit of making up stories about passing strangers, in reality she would never intrude upon the private lives of others. This slender and gracefully constructed story balances on the fine point where emotional delicacy and sexual attraction meet. Little happens. What minimal action there is all takes place at a bus stop. On her way to work every morning over a period of several weeks, she watches a girl who comes to the stop at the same time as she does. The woman is strongly drawn to the girl, who is quite possibly oblivious to the reaction she is eliciting. The woman is diffident and hesitates to start a conversation but eventually they exchange a few words when rain provides a pretext to offer the girl shelter under an umbrella. The girl never reappears at the bus stop. The woman never discards the umbrella. Years later, she is still taking solitary walks beneath it in the rain. This is a story about love that does not demand or even need to be requited, where respect for personal integrity prevents putting even the slightest pressure upon the other. This uncluttered stillness expresses the aesthetics rather than the dynamics of love. No physical or material climax comes to bring this story to a close. We are left listening to the resonances of undispersed emotions—and the patter of rain.
Femme Fatale takes us to another extreme. Told in the first person, it recounts the experiences of a very young Esther when she finds herself in the clutches of a dictatorial sexual predator. Munne, who seems to be driving at random through Provence, has picked Esther up somewhere along the way. She is the type of homosexual woman who displays all the characteristics of a dominating male, bullying and criticizing Esther. As they enter an ancient town, they pass a woman who is weeping uncontrollably in the middle of the main road. Esther is rudely reprimanded for failing to concede that the woman must be mad. At lunch the same woman is sitting at a nearby table. The waiter informs them she has been making hysterical scenes in the hotel about a companion she claims has disappeared, whereas in fact everyone else is certain the companion never existed. Later, Munne, irritated, leaves Esther to her own devices. Esther seeks out the “mad” woman in her room and is shown a collection of personal effects the companion supposedly left behind when she disappeared without explanation during the night. As they talk together, Esther never discredits the woman’s story and keeps an open mind even in her private thoughts.
When Esther goes downstairs, Munne has ordered supper in their room. Following much ill temper and even more champagne, she tells Esther, “I see I must break you to my will.” Esther merely comments, “She did so. After all, I was spineless. What was there to break?” Waking in the night, she goes to find a drink of water. On impulse and entirely without forethought, she leaves, also without explanation, leaving behind everything but the clothes she is wearing.
The true center of this narrative is not a masculine kind of sexual bullying—the bully is anyway a woman. It pivots on the kind of support women need and can offer to one another, even where it does not stem from an established friendship. Social regulation is imposed and maintained by men and will therefore obliviously disadvantage or even threaten women. This is especially true in relation to women whose views or dispositions emerge from a feminine consciousness that fails to conform with social norms. Esther is guarded. She shrewdly keeps her opinions to herself. Only the reader hears her unspoken asides. She is aware that she too would probably be considered “mad” if she were to openly expose what she observes, and so, though Munne often calls her stupid, she has not been branded mad. Her reluctance to voice or act upon her observations sometimes give Esther a slightly contradictory appearance but though she may not like Munne anymore than Munne likes her, at least she is perfectly aware of how she feels. Even so, she offers no outward resistance to Munne’s criticisms or domination and when she finally takes action it is less through decision than impulse. Her brief expression of self-disgust and her subsequent departure seem to have been triggered by sexual coercion which is particularly disruptive because it involves involuntary participation in an unwanted physical act. The fragility of feminine self-belief is remarked here from several angles. It is seen both through a woman who is regarded as “mad” and a “nuisance” and whose experience is consequently discredited by everyone, and through a woman who is demeaned and bullied by a person who cares nothing for her, but who nevertheless finds a way to make use of her experiences. Esther’s nocturnal departure creates a parallel which mimics that of the lost companion of the so-called mad woman. Unexpectedly, it also rounds off the narrative with a sudden light burst of humor which suggests that worldly wisdom is already on the way.
In several respects, Le Jardin has resemblances to The Umbrella. Both stories center on an experience of beauty and love in which desire that remains intact in itself may come to seem more poignant and perhaps have a more lasting meaning than desire which quickly expends itself in sexual satisfaction. Lee’s depictions of deliberately unrealized desire demonstrate that to internalize love does not mean to renounce it and that prolonged pleasures of the imagination can be found in desire-in-itself. To dismiss this turning away from sexual activity as simple as sublimation continues to focus on the goal of an end product, the forms of love that Lee portrays here have no instinctual drives to reproduce. Because they can exist more or less in secret and remain as invisible and internal as female sexual organs, they do not need to adapt to personal and social norms that are frequently unreceptive, predominately masculine, and invariably action-based.
In Le Jardin, the element of sexual desire never goes beyond the suggestion that a woman artist had once expressed her love and desire in the gift of a drawing. She leaves this unfinished drawing of a garden to a woman who was only an adolescent on the single occasion when they met and walked together around a garden, but Rachel recognizes the dead artist’s love in the unexpected legacy. The drawing has magical properties. Like a real garden, it continues to grow and elaborate itself; it also produces the natural effects that belong to physical reality, such as birdsong, the scent of flowers, the sound of rain. The artist’s immersion in and identification with Nature and its magical continuation in this work underline the feminine character of an aesthetic founded in the natural world. Emphasis on the fact that, as a woman, it has been harder for the artist to achieve the reputation she deserved also conveys the lesser value often given to a feminine aesthetic.
The story is taken up when Rachel has reached middle age and the dead artist has gradually become famous. When an art collector continues to press her for an interview, she is well aware that he is avidly hoping to get possession of the drawing. She hides it away carefully before he arrives and attributes the unseasonable sounds and scents that leak from it to such mundane sources as air freshener or a neighbor’s CD player. She provides cool and minimal answers to his salacious questions about her girlhood relations with the artist. Although he suspects her honesty, when she tells him that, unfortunately, she sold the drawing to a junk shop years before the artist’s work came into fashion, he finally gives up and leaves her to return to her calm, unruffled life. The intrusions of commercial greed and the fickle insincerities of fashion have been averted and the drawing can continue in its posthumous work undisturbed. This story speaks of the particular character of feminine creativity and the difficulties of its interactions with the outside world.
Esther Garber supplies a space in which Lee’s narratives find it perfectly natural to resolve themselves by means of introspection rather than through external activity or interaction. In this collection, the tempo has grown slower. Colors and sounds seem softer and more muted than in much of her earlier work. There is a quiet luminosity in this space. Lee’s writing persona is more meditative and some ways seems more solitary in its internalized privacy. This work has a reflective intimacy which creates the slightly shimmering effect of images as they fall across very slowly moving water…
About the Authors
Tanith Lee was born in 1947, in London, England. She received a grammar school education, and thereafter worked in various jobs, including restaurants and libraries.
The publication, in 1975, of her first fantasy novel The Birthgrave, liberated her into full-time professional writing. Since then she has produced ninety-four novels and collections, and over three hundred short stories; written for TV, and BBC Radio.
She is married to the artist and writer, John Kaiine. They live with cats on the south coast.
Tanith Lee has won several Fantasy Awards.
Esther Garber is apparently a European Jewess, very orientated towards Paris, and with memories of a strange childhood in Egypt (around the 1930s, probably, but, as with all Garber’s timeframes, dates are hard to fix).
Her body of work is so far quite small, as she only came to serious writing in her fifties.
Many of her life experiences appear to have been detailed in her work…but one can never be sure what is fact.
Mavis Haut lives in London. She is the author of The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee (2001), various book reviews and a chapter on Lee writing as Esther Garber in the 2011 collection 21st Century Gothic. She is currently working on a study of ideas that have contributed to contemporary feminism, along with some less usual interpretations and applications of her materials.