Page "Lesbian" Paragraph 82

Lesbianism became almost exclusive to French literature in the 19th century, based on male fantasy and the desire to shock bourgeois moral values.

Honoré de Balzac, in The Girl with the Golden Eyes ( 1835 ), employed lesbianism in his story about three people living amongst the moral degeneration of Paris, and again in Cousin Bette and Séraphîta.

His work influenced novelist Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, which provided the first description of a physical type that became associated with lesbians: tall, wide-shouldered, slim-hipped, and athletically inclined.

Charles Baudelaire repeatedly used lesbianism as a theme in his poems " Lesbos ", " Femmes damnées 1 " (" Damned Women "), and " Femmes damnées 2 ".

Reflecting French society, as well as employing stock character associations, many of the lesbian characters in 19th-century French literature were prostitutes or courtesans: personifications of vice who died early, violent deaths in moral endings.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1816 poem " Christabel " and the novella Carmilla ( 1872 ) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu both present lesbianism associated with vampirism.

Portrayals of female homosexuality not only formed European consciousness about lesbianism, but Krafft-Ebbing cited the characters in Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo ( 1862 ) and Ernest Feydeau's Le Comte de Chalis ( 1867 ) as examples of lesbians because both novels feature female protagonists who do not adhere to social norms and express " contrary sexual feeling ", although neither participated in same-sex desire or sexual behavior.

Havelock Ellis used literary examples from Balzac and several French poets and writers to develop his framework to identify sexual inversion in women.