Proust's Lesbianism

For the past twenty years or so a movement has been afoot in the United States to reclaim, rediscover, and reinvent lesbian history. Overtly heterosexual works have been re-read for their lesbian subplots; numerous authors and other public ftgures of the distant and more recent past have been "outed" and their novels, poems, ftlms, music, and letters reexamined in this light; and more or less openly lesbian or bisexual authors such as Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf have received renewed attention, no longer despite but specifically because of their sexuality. This general outbreak of lesbian visibility has nevertheless left one aspect of the history of relations between women for the most part unexplored: the representation of female homoeroticism in male-authored texts.Proust's Lesbianism addresses the question of how the already thorny issue of male representation of female homosexuality becomes further complicated in the context of a work written by a gay man.
Proust's conception of female homosexuality-"Gomorrah," as he calls it, as opposed to "Sodom," or male homosexuality-both inherited the tradition of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, Balzac's Pille aux yeux d'or, and Chansons de Bilitis, and played an instrumental role in forming the canon of lesbian images in literature as it developed over the course of the twentieth century.