The Tree and the Vine.

The Tree and the Vine. Dola de Jong. New York: The Feminist Press, 1996. 123 pages + 125-41. $9.95.

In 1980, in the "Foreword" to Part of Nature, Part of Us, Helen Vendler notes that "reviews are written out of the freshness of first impressions, and they carry more of the gratitude or surprise of a first encounter, preserving the literary moment and the personal one at once." For this reader, the first impression made by Dola de Jong's The Tree and the Vine cannot be separated from the personal, and it is not a very positive one. The book shocked me and hurt me because it brought back the culture of self-hatred so prevalent in pre-gay liberation days. As a lesbian, a reader, and a teacher of gay and lesbian literature, I was torn between the historical value inherent in the story and the possible benefits of reading such a novel. I didn't like the characters, and I found their lives, their stories, annoying, sometimes even embarrassing. I cringed in pain through most of my reading, but I was more angry than relieved when I finished the book.

The basic story in The Tree and the Vine is the superficial connection between Bea and Erica, two young women who decide to share an apartment out of convenience. The gist of the narrative lies in the fact that these women do not seem to know how to connect with each other, even though Bea admits to feeling "immediately attracted to" Erica upon first meeting her. Bea, however, does not seem to know what the attraction means, even though she admits that she "changed the course of [her] life because of" Erica. Thus, from the very beginning, the story steers the reader towards an implied romantic or at least emotional connection between Bea and Erica. The problem is that the connection develops in strange and peculiar ways. For one thing, Bea warns us that she was spared "the torture of insight and understanding" about what was happening in her life during the year that she spent with Erica because she "tried to stay aloof." Staying aloof from the relationship leaves her with only partial knowledge of what takes place in Erica's life, which means that the reader, who sees the story through Bea's eyes, is also left with a rather fragmented version of what happens in Erica's life outside the apartment that she shares with Bea.

My first problem with Bea's claim that she was "immediately attracted to" Erica is that there is no apparent reason why anyone should be attracted to Erica. The writer simply does not provide enough information about Erica to make her interesting, much less appealing. Bea's reaction to Erica, then, must have been sexual, but de Jong does not do a very good job of writing sensually or sexually about these characters. Other than the almost stereotypical construct of the lesbian whose "brown eyes had a penetrating, somewhat melancholy expression" and the "blond hair [that] was cut short with an untidy fringe at the neck, like a boy who badly needs a haircut," the reader is provided with very little information about Erica. What we do see of Erica throughout the novel, however, is not a very appealing picture. We see her as she recovers from a night of drinking and as she suffers from the bruises given to her by Dolly, a lover whom she explains as "sadistic by nature." We see her as a woman who falls madly in love very quickly but cannot seem to stay in love. We even see her ignore the obvious signs of the imminent Nazi invasion and disregard her one chance to escape. When she admits to Bea that her American friend or ex-lover had answered Bea's plea to send the money for Erica's safe passage to America, it is already too late because Erica, as a true, obsessive, self-destructive Freudian lesbian, "spent the money" during her affair with Inge, a German musician. Her "love" for Inge, someone whom she had just met, is so obsessive that she cannot think about escaping the Nazi invasion even though she is classified as a Bastard-Jew I, a classification that will surely get her killed.

If Erica is presented as a stereotypical lesbian with serious identity issues, Bea, the narrator, fares no better. She is hyper-critical and detached. In fact, from the first few pages of the story, the relationship between these two women is dramatically staged as Bea closes "the sliding doors" to her own side of the apartment and states that "this gesture was meant to put a seal on our agreement to leave each other free." The two women agree to live together, but the emotional uncertainty that must have been created by the physical attraction felt by Bea at first sight of Erica is not addressed until the very end. Instead, Bea becomes Erica's caretaker as she takes "on the role of housekeeper," irons Erica's clothes, and cooks for her, becoming in fact Erica's "femme" in the male/female gendered relationship that she could understand.

Even when she cannot ignore her own sexual attraction to Erica, Bea claims that she "belonged in another world than hers." This statement comes after Erica has "made advances" which Bea realizes she "had not indeed stopped ... immediately." That is the traumatic moment when Erica screams the stereotypical "`That's the way I am!'" as Bea rushes out of the room in pretend heterosexual panic after hearing Erica scream "`And you are that way too! You, too, Bea! You might as well admit it!'" Bea's problem, of course, is that she cannot admit it. Her attraction is strong, but she is not capable of recognizing what the attraction means until years later when she is writing from the safety of hindsight. From that safe distance, she can say

   It was clear that she suffered more that night from what I then called
   (with a superiority feeling born of self-preservation and compassion)
   `Abnormality,' than during the weeks when she first discovered she was
   `wrong.' Wrong, she called it that night. It was the catharsis by which she
   then hoped to reconcile herself with `being wrong.' She never used that
   expression again afterwards. Indeed she resigned herself to a nature that
   could not be changed, accepted the consequences, and enjoyed life. I have
   always admired that.

The sense that the lesbian's feelings about women are wrong lies at the core of Dola de Jong's The Tree and the Vine.

Fortunately for the contemporary reader, The Feminist Press asked Lillian Faderman to write the "Afterword" for The Tree and the Vine. In it, Faderman addresses the contemporary reader's sense of displacement with the novel by attempting to explain the characters and the (now mercifully) outdated, illogical reactions that the women have toward each other. Faderman argues that "while for Bea it is Erica who is the only focus of attention, for the reader, as we' watch the watcher watch, it is Bea in her lack of self-knowledge, her tragic self-denials, her movement from timidity to noble expansiveness, who is the most interesting character." Faderman rightly points out that "the Bea who appears early in the novel in not very likable or alluring" because "she reveals herself to be hypocritical, narrow, and judgmental," but she claims that Bea develops and that "the novel is largely about who she will become." Faderman also addressed the Freudian subtext of the novel as well as the historical imperatives of the time during which the novel was written.

Although Lillian Faderman's "Afterword" helped me to understand Bea and even Erica, it did not save the novel for me. As a contemporary lesbian, I cringed at the Freudian subtext in The Tree and the Vine. The narrator, Bea, prides herself in her attachment to her father, and Erica's mother is, of course, distant, uncaring, even a bit of a loose woman who was never a "good" example for her daughter. The easy Freudian subtext is supposed to explain Erica's lesbianism, and Lillian Faderman justifies it as "a function of the times in which de Jong was writing." She explains that

   Lesbian novels of the 1950s almost inevitably betray the influence of their
   era: Censorship laws, the tyranny of conventional morality, and the
   heterocentric convictions of the Freudians (who were the high priests of
   the 1950s) all colluded to make the notion of a "well-adjusted lesbian"
   oxymoronic.

The "influence of the era" is degrading. Having lived long enough to witness Freud's theories about women and particularly lesbians proven wrong, the contemporary reader should find it hard to step back in time and suffer through the culture of self-hatred that is so prevalent in this novel.

The novel disturbed me as it pulled me in; it also filled me with pity and rage all at once. Had I been convinced that the narrative provided by de Jong was entirely fictional, I may have reacted differently, with intellectual detachment, but these women are all too real and familiar. They are the women who lived before queers became "uppity," before the revolutionary period of the 1960s when gays and lesbians all over the world allowed Freud's nonsense to define them and, because of it, internalized self-hatred into identifiable "abnormal" behavior. In spite of my feelings toward the novel, I will probably use The Tree and the Vine the next time I teach Gay and Lesbian literature, but only as a history lesson. I want my students to know what it was like to be queer before queers mustered enough self-love to demand respect and equal rights. I want them to realize that we have a horrendous history and that the journey to self-acceptance and "gay pride" is littered with broken lives lost to self-hatred.

Ibis Gomez-Vega is the author of Send My Roots Rain, a lesbian novel. She is Assistant Professor of English at Northern Illinois University where she teaches Ethnic American Literature and Gay and Lesbian Literature.