Lillian Faderman on Edna St. Vincent Millay

It was, in fact, bohemian chic to admit to a touch of lesbianism, as is suggested by the panache with which Edna St. Vincent is said to have answered a psychoanalyst at a Greenwich Village party who was attempting to find the cause of a headache from which she suffered.

The analyst asked, with combined pride in his knowledge of the psychosomatic effects of sexual repression and trepidation at the prospect of shocking a young woman:
“I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that you might, perhaps, although you are hardly conscious of it, have an occasional impulse toward a person of your own sex?”
And Millay answered with the nonchalance requisite for a true bohemian: “Oh, you mean I’m homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what’s that got to do with my headache?”
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Edna St. Vincent Millay’s experiences in the Village may be seen as a paradigm of what some women encountered if they let it be known that they considered themselves lesbian. Millay, who had been called Vincent in college, was probably the model for Lakey in Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group. Like Lakey, she was the creative and independent leader of her fellow students at Vassar, and also, like Lakey all her love affairs during her college career, which did not end until she was twenty-five years old, were with other women. Her strongest “smash” in that all-female environment was with Charlotte (Charlie) Babcock, who was the model for Bianca in Millay’s play The Lamp and the Bell (1921). The play depicts a self-sacrificing love between two women about whom others say, “I vow I never knew a pair of lovers/More constant than these two.” Millay also had a passionate attachment to Anne Lynch during those Vassar days, and even several years later she wrote to Lynch: “Oh, if I could just get my arms around you! - And stay with you like that for hours…I love you very much, dear Anne, and I always shall.” Another Vassar classmate, Isobel Simpson, Millay called her “Dearest Little Sphinx” and “[my] one true love.” From a Greenwich Village she promised Isobel: “Someday I shall write a great poem to you, so great that I shall make you famous in history.”

But although Millay’s erotic life had been exclusively with women, once out of that all-female environment and in Greenwich Village, there was pressure on her to become at least bisexual. As a good bohemian she pretended, of course, to continue to regard homosexuality in a blase manner, as her response to the psychoanalyst who tried to cure her of a headache suggests. Yet despite her panache, Millay eventually bowed to the pressure to give up exclusive lesbianism, as many of women’s college graduates must have felt in the heterosexual 1920s, when companionate marriage was seen as the “advanced” woman’s higher goal.

The unpublished memoirs of Floyd Dell, who became Millay’s first male lover in Greenwich Village, give some insight into how women who came to the Village as lesbians were sometimes steered toward heterosexuality in this “progressive” atmosphere. For weeks Milly had agreed to go to bed with Dell, since she was taught in the Village that free bohemian women should have no scruples against such things; but she was obviously ambivalent, insisting they remain fully clothed and refusing to have intercourse. Finally, Dell pressured her sufficiently to make her overcome her reluctance. “I know your secret,” he said. “You are still a virgin. You have merely had homosexual affairs in college,” devaluing such relationships as a mature sexual experience. Dell claims that Millay was astonished at his deductive powers and she admitted, “No man has ever found me out before.” In her chagrin she gave into him. Dell’s memoirs indicate that he was one of the early lesbian-smashers. He says he made love to her, feeling it was his “duty to rescue her.” His rescue was obviously imperfect, however, since she was still having affairs with women years later when she took up with Thelma Wood, the woman who also became Djuna Barnes’ lover and her model for Robin in Nightwood. Dell finally had to admit with disappointment that Millay could not be entirely rescued. Years after their relationship, he lamented in an interview, “It was impossible to understand [Millay]….I’ve often thought she may have been fonder of women than of men.” But despite his cognizance of her feelings about women he believed he had right on his side when he proselytized for heterosexuality, and he was encouraged in this conviction by the bohemians who scoffed at the technical virginity of women whose erotic lives were exclusively with other women.

Dell even urged Millay to undergo psychoanalysis in order to “overcome” her interest in women, although she thought it analysis silly and, with a feminist awareness developed in her all-woman college environment, saw Freudian ideas as nothing but “a Teutonic attempt to lock women up in the home and restore them to cooking and baby-tending.” Yet despite her various attempts to resist, she appears to have succumbed to the pressure. She married, although it was to a man who, she claimed, left her relatively free to behave as she pleased. She said of her life with her husband that they “lived like two bachelors.” But to have chosen to live as as lesbian, even in the world of Greenwich Village, was too problematic for her, despite her history of love for other women.

The kind of pressure that was put on Millay to give up her love for women, or at least to make it take a secondary position to heterosexuality, was probably typical of what happened to young females even in this most bohemian environment during the 1920s, when love between women as had been so vital in earlier eras was devalued. While sex between women was acceptable and even chic in circles that were enamored with the radical or the exotic, serious love relationships between women could no longer be highly regarded since they would interfere with compantionate heterosexual relationships. Of course there were some bohemian men who saw lesbianism as part of the Village’s experiment with free love  an they respected the women’s choices, an there were others who were titillated by it, and still others who were homosexual also and happy enough that their female counterparts were enjoying themselves. However, many bohemian men, if they could take lesbianism seriously at all, resented not only the women’s ties to each other but their general assertiveness, which in itself may have signified danger to some men.

- Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, Lillian Faderman

But seriously folks, I think the show wants you to think that Spencer doesn’t get into Oxford (I assume????) because her purse starts leaking blood in the middle of her interview. But really it’s because her response to the Euripides/Eumenides joke was “I’m gonna have to add that to my repertoire of philosophical knock-knock jokes.“ Wasn’t a knock-knock joke and it had nothing to do with Greek philosophy, dumb-dumb. She’s a disgrace to the Hastings name.