Dear Editors

Bless us, another Sadistic Lesbian novel! Ildiko de Papp Carrington doesn't seem to recognize the genre to which Joyce Carol Oates' Solstice belongs. This may be fortunate as far as she's concerned (not having read all the other ones has kept her from a very bad taste in the mouth after reading this one) but it's also unfortunate, since her lack of familiarity with the tradition keeps her from spotting a newly malignant member of this very nasty and ultimately anti-feminist tribe and so warning the rest of us.

Lousy Lesbian Novels are the one kind that commercial publishers will readily buy and handle, the other being the Ridiculously Awful sort (like the unreal silliness of Kinflicks, that strange combination of falsely comic sex and real mother/daughter suffering).

The Loathsome Lez began in the United States in the 1920s (Lillian Faderman traces the genre's development in her Surpassing the Love of Men), usually converging with the Older Woman Has Mysterious Power Over Younger plot. What de Papp Carrington describes in her review is yet another cautionary tale about how awful the whole repulsive business is. Women who love women really hate women. Trust another woman, especially if your feelings towards her are sexual, and she will do ghastly things to you. Desire as betrayal. Love is abjection. And so on.

Oates has been long obsessed with this kind of unreal violence. I would protest against it as a novelist, and as a feminist I detest it. Oates often seems to have accepted the patriarchal view of the world as one in love with victimization and violence. As a lesbian woman, I'm afraid I see Solstice as just another piece of anti-woman and anti-lesbian propaganda. If I had not read all those other books and plays (and recognized them in Faderman's description in Carrington's review) I might even have accepted its view of relations between women as, if not realistic, at least imaginatively original. But when something is the fiftieth or eightieth or hundredth of its kind, one becomes skeptical.

Women are not angels. Even lesbians aren't, believe it or not! There are some women who are sadistic toward other women, some lesbian women who are also.