The Modern Lesbian Classic Published Over a Century Ago
Anna Elisabet Weirauch's 'The Scorpion' would be surprisingly modern if published today.
Under the Weimar Republic, there were 170 queer spaces around Berlin, and while sex between men was illegal, sex between women regulated, neither was as heavily restricted or censored as they were in most countries. Clubs, cabarets, books and magazines about queerness flourished in this somewhat tolerant atmosphere. Some of the earliest were the works of Anna Elisabet Weirauch.
Weirauch’s The Scorpion (1919, trans 1932) was one of the first books to portray lesbianism in a positive light, and to portray queerness as something natural and innate. It fascinated and surprised me because although Weirauch wrote it over a century ago, it’s surprisingly modern, espousing values and psychological insights that are remarkably ahead of their time. There’s a lot of the wildness of Eva Baltasar’s queer women, or of Constance Debrè, of an unwillingness to live by the rules or society, all three asking if it is truly so awful to be queer in the face of so much class injustice, of so many bourgeois hypocrisies and repressions. Weirauch writes about toxic sexual relationships and characters who do drugs in queer clubs, shocking even when Guillaume Dustan wrote about similar activities in the seventy years later, but she also makes lesbian relationships beautiful and sacred. “Everything that is God, is eternal! Do you not feel that this night belongs to God? Time is an invention of the Devil. Satan invented the passage of time in order make man apostate to God. But God remains enteral. Satan invented much else, besides, sickness, pain, vermin and money. Above all - money!...New happiness always effaces old pain as if it had never been. And happiness endures. No pain can efface it. I would die of shame if I thought that only the nerve-ending in our skin vibrate.”
The story follows Metta (or Myra in some translations), a motherless girl in a well-off bourgeois family. She’s being raised by her gentle father, and he cannot stand up to her aunt. Metta, however, can, and even as a child, cannot wait to get out of the clutches of her morally rigid, domineering “old maid” aunt, a stock character type that readers of Victorian and Edwardian literature will recognize. As a very young girl, she grows overly attached to her beautiful “young lady” governess, so attached that she’s willing to steal and pawn family silver when the governess manipulates her into doing so. This foreshadows, down to the pawn shop, the decade-older woman she meet when she’s nineteen or so. Metta is still in a “child”, a minor as the age of majority in Germany at that time was twenty-one, Olga Rado. The prose is very descriptive, at times flowery and decadent, as is true for other writers of Weirauch’s era, but it works as a reflection of the teenager’s mind and romantic notions. Of that moment, Weirauch writes -
“The moment when her life really began - with hundreds of roaring voices, with a full, singing, swinging motif that was never again to be mute, but would sound now in the major, now in the minor, now from all the violins and celli, now from a single complaining oboe, in a thousand intricacies, a thousand nuances, until the closing chord - that moment was when Olga Rado opened the door …. And walked into the room”
Olga is the scorpion of the novel. In Germany of that era, a “scorpion” was what would consider a masc (short for masculine) or butch lesbian. She has the image of a scorpion etched upon her cigarette case, the only creature other than humans, Weirauch tells the reader, that commits suicide, that voluntarily chooses death. Olga is a romantic, impractical, and her morbid nature and spontaneous behavior often creates a sense of unease and foreboding. She reminiscent of Mara Daniels in Han Suyin’s Winter Love in that she’s in so much of the novel, but the reader knows so little about her, she’s only glimpsed through Metta’s loving view, and so she remains a mystery, different from everyone else. As with Winter Love, the motherless girl in the clutches of the predatory lesbian, older-younger, butch-femme dynamics are turned on their heads. Metta pursues Olga, following her everywhere for several months before Metta’s family catches on. A desperate situation turns their friendship romantic through Metta’s planning, and a very sweet scene in which Metta tries to warm Olga’s cold foot turns it into something more… “though I certainly never run away, I might go mad with happiness!”…which slows lead to a kiss, which leads to the removal of clothing, which…
“I was bitten by a scorpion, and now the poison is all through my blood. And you know, the only thing that will cure a scorpion’s bite is scorpion’s poison. But there aren’t any scorpions here, It’s all superstition that it’s contagious. It’s only phalanges that are so poisonous you die from washing in a basin that’s been used somebody who has been bitten by one.” (88 - 89) It’s an interesting metaphor for queerness, a bit similar to Qiu Miaojin’s more sophisticated comparison to becoming a crocodile. Weirauch’s take is also an echo of Natalie Barney’s quote “My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one”. Metta makes the same argument, also in a letter to her family: that she knows what’s best for her, she wasn’t harming anyone.
Anna Elisabet Weirauch was queer also: she met the love of her life, Helena Geisenhainer, ten years her junior, in the 1920s, and they remained lifelong partners until Weirauch’s death in 1970 (she died exactly two weeks after Romaine Brooks). Because this book is more obscure and the plot points generally unknown…I’ll leave out spoilers and let you read the book for yourself. It’s a remarkable book; much more than the pulp lesbian novel it was sold as in the US. The English translated book becomes much less interesting in the later 30% or 40% of the book - The Scorpion is actually two books of a three part series, I suspect it’s the second book that’s less interesting than the first. It gets drawn out with too many uncomfortable party scenes. They move the story in showing the common queer experience of becoming an outcast, and wondering where, if anywhere, you fit in, but this part could have used a good edit. As with Qiu Miaojin, I wouldn’t recommend this book to someone deeply depressed as it dives deeply into suicide and suicide ideation, but unlike Miaojin, it’s at times very happy, light, and romantic. It’s a shame it’s out of print, but you can do what I did: buy an inexpensive e-book version from g—gle books, or hunt down a physical copy (but they’re not cheap).
Would it be on Gutenberg.org?