Friday December 15, 2006 SGN.org |
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Volume 34 Issue 50 |
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Friday, Sep 05, 2008
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Past Out by Liz Highleyman |
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| What was Patience and Sarah? | |
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by Liz Highleyman -
SGN Contributing Writer The novel Patience and Sarah, first published in 1969, was a rarity in its day as a Lesbian love story in which the protagonists did not come to grief on account of their relationship. Patience and Sarah, originally published as A Place for Us, was written by Alma Routsong, under the pen name Isabel Miller. Born in 1924, Routsong served in the Navy, was married to a man for 15 years, had children, and wrote novels featuring heterosexual relationships, before coming out as a Lesbian. "I became convinced that being gay meant constant rejection, pain, and frustration," she told historian Jonathan Ned Katz in a 1975 interview. "When I finally woke up sexually, I could no longer be contented in a heterosexual relationship...It wasn't emotionally fulfilling." Routsong's best-known novel, set in the early 1800s, tells of the relationship between Patience White, a middle-class painter, and the cross-dressing, working-class Sarah Dowling. The families of both women oppose the budding romance; when Sarah tells her sister of her feelings for Patience, the sister replies, "I used to worry about you. That no man would have you. I never thought to worry you'd think you was a man." Eventually, Patience and Sarah leave their puritanical Connecticut village to establish a farm in upstate New York. Facing opprobrium from their conservative neighbors - but also earning their grudging respect - the women struggle to build a life together without the support of a Lesbian community. Patience and Sarah was inspired by a real-life couple, American folk artist Mary Ann Willson and her companion, known today only as Miss Brundage, who ran a farm together in Greene County, New York. Routsong first learned about Willson while visiting a folk-art museum; a card near Willson's painting of a mermaid noted that the artist lived with her "farmerette" companion, and a book accompanying the exhibit revealed that the two women had a "romantic attachment." But beyond Willson's primitive-style watercolors - done with berry pigments and brick dust - little is known about the women and their relationship. Routsong began writing the novel after moving to New York City in the early 1960s. Upon its completion in 1967, she sent the manuscript to several publishers, but it garnered only rejections. "I think the novel's very threatening to straight women, and closet gay women," she told Katz. "If they say they like it, people will think they're gay." After receiving payment from her brother on a long overdue loan, Routsong decided to self-publish, spending $850 to print 1,000 copies, which she sold on street corners and at meetings of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). "The fact that my people were reading my book and loving it, meant more to me than anything else that ever happened in my life," she recalled. Kay Tobin, the partner of New York DOB chapter president Barbara Gittings, once asked Routsong, "When does the man come in?" noting that "there's always a man in Lesbian books who takes the lover away." The author replied, simply, "Not in this one." Even as the field of Lesbian literature burgeoned with the Lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s, the popularity of Routsong's novel endured. In 1971, it won the American Library Association's first-ever Gay Book Award (now the Stonewall Book Award). The following year - after a friend of a literary scout picked up a copy at a feminist conference - McGraw-Hill reissued the novel under the title Patience and Sarah, and Routsong achieved a measure of commercial success. Before long, women's studies programs began assigning the novel as required reading. Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of the Lesbian theater troupe Split Britches collaborated with Routsong to adapt Patience and Sarah for the stage in 1987, and the work was later the basis for the first explicitly Lesbian-themed opera, opening in 1998. Librettist Wende Persons said she created the opera (along with her former lover, composer Paula Kimper) after a Lesbian soprano friend complained that she never got an opportunity to sing about love for women. Over the years, Patience and Sarah has had its share of critics. Readers have both condemned and praised the work for its portrayal of butch-femme sexuality, although Routsong said that, while Sarah dresses as a man, "She's not butch, she's not male-identified...Men's clothes are not male identification; they're freedom." One reviewer for the gay press complained that the level of feminist consciousness portrayed in the novel was unrealistically high for that period of history. But "backward places" in middle America gave the novel enthusiastic praise, Routsong told Katz. "I think men gave it the best reviews. They didn't have to worry - nobody was going to think they were Lesbians!" Today, Patience and Sarah remains a Lesbian literary classic. Though Routsong maintained that she was not "conscious of the missionary motive" and did not intend her novel as a political statement, it nevertheless had that effect. According to author Ann Wadsworth, its "brave-new-world, just-the-two-of-us attitude" challenged the conventional characterization of fictional Lesbians as "sordid, suicidal creatures of the night, a view predominant in Lesbian literature of the pre-Stonewall years." Liz Highleyman is a freelance writer and editor who has written widely on health, sexuality, and politics. She can be reached care of this publication or at PastOut@qsyndicate.com. |
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