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Yeah, ok, lots of spoilers in this review because I WANT TO WARN EVERYONE NOT TO SEE THIS FUCKING MOVIE!!!!! This is the platonic ideal of the Tragic Lesbian Boarding School Story.

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This is a series of reviews of lesbian-themed movies originally inspired by a request for recommendations of "good movies involving lesbian romances that don't end up with the protagonists deeply unhappy, dead, or both." To this set of criteria I’ve added the question, “Is the story primarily about coming out?” This set of index questions can involve some spoilers, but I will usually only hide them for new releases.

Many of these movies are not currently in print. I'll link each to their imdb.com entry for reference. But for those currently available, Wolfe Video [https://www.wolfevideo.com] is the go-to distributor for lgbt movies.

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Lost and Delerious (2001) is basically Dead Poet’s Society with girls. Except with the Bury Your Gays trope more explicitly gay. There's also a strong Psycho Lesbian trope, in that a thwarted lesbian relationship drives one character to increasingly bizarre and violent behavior and suicide. Hey, I told you there would be massive spoilers. Don't blame me if you're still reading.

This movie belongs to the genre of hot-house boarding school stories, in which same-sex relationships bloom and are cut off well before their prime. Mary, the new girl at an upper-crust all-girls boarding school ends up rooming with two girls, Tori and Paulie, who are involved in a hot-and-heavy relationship. All three have problematic relationships with mothers: Paulie’s birth mother gave her up for adoption and she is currently trying to track her down and contact her. (When she eventually succeeds in locating her, the woman refuses to allow contact.) Mary’s mother died three years ago and she feels she’s being sent to school to make room for her stepmother. Tori’s mother is trying to make her over into her own image as a socialite. A running subplot involves two of the school's teachers who are widely rumored to be lovers.

While Mary figures out she’s ok with pretending not to notice the sex going on in the next bed over, the balance is upset when Tori’s sister barges in one morning when the lovers are still naked in bed together. Tori freaks out about the potential for being outed and throws Paulie under the bus, claiming she was the sexual agressor and that she (Tori) is perfectly straight. To support this, Tori takes on a program of public heterosexuality, sneaking out to date and have sex with a random boy, selected due to a chance meeting. When Mary chooses to be supportive of Paulie, she takes the risk of being labelled a lesbian herself.

There’s a subplot where Paulie finds an injured Harris Hawk and secretly rehabilitates it in the woods. (I will now forego discussing the logistics of bird of prey rehabilitation as the event is clearly meant to be Deeply Symbolic and practicality need not intervene.) Paulie is the hawk, a fierce wounded creature. She makes bold symbolic gestures, including a chivalric declaration of love in the library while wearing her fencing gear and carrying an epee.

But both the girls are terrified to name their sexuality. Relevant quote, “I’m not a lesbian! I’m just Paulie in love with Tori and Tori’s in love with me.” In a late night encounter, Tori confesses she’ll never love anyone but Paulie but that they can never be together.

Paulie has always played the role of Bad Girl, which initially masks her acting out of her emotional crisis. As in Dead Poet’s Society, poetry and Shakespeare and drama are the medium through which strong emotions are expressed within this shrine of classical learning. This framing drives Paulie to challenge Tori’s boyfriend to a literal duel on the night of the big school formal (at which all the parents are present) and to cut in when Tori is dancing with her father, threatening a confrontation where she declares her love. Tori, terrified, rejects her. Mary is having her own issues, as her father fails to show up for the dance and Paulie taunts her into confessing that she hates her father, using Lady Macbeth’s “Unsex me” speech, and then recruits Mary as her second for the duel.

They meet the boys in the woods with swords, and the duel ensues, but Paulie’s using an unblunted sword and actually stabs her rival in the leg. The scene cuts to Mary running across the field where all the students and teachers are gathered in a picnic to find Tori, and we see the hawk flying up, called to Paulie where she stands on the rooftop of the school. We see Paulie begin to fall, then see the hawk flying away, and we see all the girls staring up at the roof in horror. But Mary, our viewpoint protagonist, is ok, because now we get a voiceover about the lesson she learned from the hawk and how now she’ll always remember her dead mother’s face.

This version of Lesbian Tragedy (the plot that Emma Donoghue classifies as “Rivals”) always marks out the butch character for death while allowing the femme character to recant and be redeemed. At the beginning of the movie, I don’t recall there being an obvious butch/femme distinction between the Paulie and Tori. But as the emotional crisis progresses, Paulie’s presentation becomes more and more masculinized, culminating in her wearing a suit at the school dance, envisioning herself as Tori’s knight, and more explicitly with the “Unsex me” speech. Tori drags herself by force into a normative female role by her pursuit of a heterosexual sexual experience. So rather than their gender perfomances locking them into the fates of their respective roles, once those fates were set in motion, the gendered roles claimed and assimilated them.

Given the context of the inspiration for this review series, this is definitely a Do Not Recommend. We hit all the bullet-points: Tori recanted, Paulie came out and died, everyone is unhappy. This is the sort of movie that could convince an entire generation of young lesbians that they are doomed. The fact that movies like this are still being made in the 21st century is a crime.

I've been on something of a book-buying and library spree lately for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project--not that I didn't already have plenty of material on my own shelves to last for another couple of years already! But it's always nice to have choice, and after covering a whole string of entire books, I wanted to fit in some shorter articles. By the time I finished with Castle's book last week, I'd actually expected to have the new front-end for the LHMP (and my blog as a whole) up and running, but the combination of an intensive project at work (for the last five weeks) and the push to get Mother of Souls out to the beta-readers meant that I've fallen down on my end of the necessary work. (My web masters are being very patient.) So I'll keep teasing you with the knowledge that Something New is coming Real Soon Now.

This post originally appeared on my LiveJournal in this entry, which may include a lively discussion in the comments.

Chapter 5 introduces Becky, the scullery maid. I think it’s a virtue of Burnett’s writing that she is able to portray Sara as being less essentialist about Becky’s nature and character than Burnett herself seems to be. While the narrative descriptions of Becky regularly focus on her timid and fearful personality (well, duh! when she could be dismissed from her position on a whim) and portray her as worshipping Sara as a near-goddess, not merely a princess, in Sara’s interactions with Becky, she treats her as nearly as an equal as their respective positions allow. And Sara’s kindness and charity to Becky are usually sensitive to what Becky herself wants and needs, not simply what will make Sara feel good. Still, there are a lot of wince-worthy moments around Becky.

The chapter begins by returning to Sara’s love of storytelling and how it was one of the behaviors that gave her social status among the other students. She not only makes up stories but acts them out in the telling, drawing the listeners into her imaginative fantasy worlds of fairies, mermaids, kings, and queens.

And then, in the midst of this, we switch to Sara’s observation of a new servant at the school, seen from a distance as Sara is getting out of her carriage “wrapped in velvets and furs”. Becky is working around the area steps (the lower front entrance to a townhouse, used by servants) and staring at her as if she were a vision from another world--which, in fact, Sara might as well be.

The first of the cringe-worthy moments comes in the first description of Becky as “a dingy little figure”, but more to the point, in that first descriptive paragraph, Becky (whose name we don’t know yet) is referred to as “it” three times. Now, this isn’t a matter of gender uncertainty--clothing is highly gendered in this era and even if Becky’s face were obscured it would have been instantly obvious that she was female. There seems no useful reason for this “it”-ing, especially given that the narrative switches to female pronouns in the next paragraph. If I were looking for deep meaning, I’d suggest that the change in pronouns represents the near-instant process of Sara recognizing Becky as a unique and individual human being, but if so, it still feels like a slap in the face to do that by means of literal objectifying at first.

Becky’s initial reticence is played as humorous in the narration, by virtue of noting that Sara does not laugh at the way she pops out of side like a jack-in-the-box, because she feels pity instead. And this is only the beginning of the divergence between Sara’s attitude and the narrative position. Later that day, while Sara is telling a story to a group of other girls, Becky comes in to tend to the fire and becomes so enraptured by listening to the story that she stops working to listen. Sara, noticing this, projects her voice more clearly to make sure that Becky can hear the story too and, when Lavinia (who, as usual, represents the archetypal Mean Girl) also notices and scolds Becky out of the room, Sara defends her right to listen.

Mariette, Sara’s French maid, fills her in on the details of Becky’s life, including her name, and communicates that she considers Becky to be unusually put-upon and burdened with all the hardest work of the school. (I rather suspect the nature of Becky’s position wasn’t at all unusual.) And after this, Sara makes a point of noticing and observing Becky around the school and turns her into a character in a story (presumably one she doesn’t share with the other girls) in which Becky is an “ill-used heroine”, presaging the role they both will share later in the book.

This post originally appeared on my LiveJournal in this entry, which may include a lively discussion in the comments.

Chapter 4 is entitled "Lottie", telling us which of Sara's satellites we'll be introduced to this time. But the initial part of the chapter concerns itself with setting up Sara's common sense, self-awareness, and charity in several senses.

This is initially explained by the omniscient narrator, who points out that the favoritism and flattery that Sara received at the school would be more than enough to turn an ordinary girl into a spoiled brat. Miss Minchin is once again emphasized as two-faced: secretly disliking Sara but publicly going rather over the top to indulge and pamper her, in the belief that this would cement Sara's enjoyment of her school experience.

Sara, we are shown (in a conversation with Ermengarde), is instead quite aware of both her privilege and her luck. "A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. … Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all…and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials." But she is secure enough in her position that she's friendly to everyone, generous to beggars that she meets on the street, and even willing to suggest that Mean Girl Lavinia acts horrid only due to growing pains. And as the most salient sign of her generosity and charity, Sara is willing to attempt to befriend "the baby of the school", Lottie Lay. But that we will cover in the next entry.

At the moment, I want to indulge in a critique of literary style. (Because this is a critical re-read, after all.) The thing that peeves me the most about Burnett's prose in this book is her tendency to use formulaic strings of adjectives. In particular, the word "little" is vastly over-used and could probably be eliminated 90% of the time. The strings of adjectives themselves stand out as being just over the edge of what is needed: A clever little brain, a friendly little soul, a motherly young person -- all those from the present chapter. But earlier strings that irritate me every time I encounter them include: "a queer old-fashioned thoughfulness" (in fact, one could do an entire analysis of the use of the words "queer" and "old-fashioned" in this work), "her handsome, rich, petting father", "a rash, innocent young man", "a queer, polite little voice", "a funny, old-fashioned child" (I mean, what the heck does that even mean?), "a very nice, intelligent, middle-aged Frenchman". Looking at them like that, I'm not even sure why the constructions irritate me so much.

In any event, the exploration of Sara's character is then framed by contrasting her with Lavinia, via a conversation between Lavinia and her BFF Jessie. Lavinia, it is explained to us, had been the de facto leader of the students prior to Sara's arrival, evidently due to equal parts seniority, a spiteful domineering personality, and heretofore being the best-dressed "show pupil" given special privileges. Sara undermines her position without meaning to by virtue of being richer and smarter than Lavinia, but more consciously by Being Nice. Not nicey-nice, for she isn't above speaking sharply to Lavinia in defense of other students, but genuinely kind and generous.

This is the primary theme of these early parts of the book: in those areas where Sara has agency, she uses that agency to make the world a better, happier place for those around her, as best she can. And the lengths she's willing to go to do so are detailed in her encounter with Lottie, to be covered in the next segment.