Writing Marriage Queerly in the 1940s

What is it about?

The late novels of lesbian modernist Gale Wilhelm have received little critical attention, and have largely been dismissed as minor efforts shaped by the pressures of a homophobic literary market. Performing a kind of feminist recovery work, I demonstrate that these books incorporate queerness into the putatively heterosexual structure of the marriage plot, and frame Wilhelm as a key figure for understanding how queerness might be located at the intersection of modernist and middlebrow literature in the early to mid twentieth century.

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Drawing attention to the queerness of these late novels gives a clearer picture of Wilhelm's career, allowing us to reassess her importance to queer literary studies. More broadly, this work also suggests the importance of attending to plot--rather than character--as a site of queerness, and the necessity of a re-evaluation of the conventional association between the heteronormativity and the middlebrow.