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For Bertha Harris, a central figure of the Stonewall-era feminist and lesbian movements, images of medieval female saints embody a particularly aesthetic erotics. This aesthetic shades her memory of the 'girl-saint holy cards' of her Catholic youth:
The saints were colored - or, better, colorized ... . [Their] curly hair was either Jean Harlow peroxide blond or Joan Crawford 'raven,' though without Hollywood's klieg-lit glossiness ... . They were all dressed in ankle-length lipstick pinks, malarial yellows, and, most of all, in BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) baby blues. Some displayed the stigmata - bloody holes supposed to have spontaneously erupted in their palms, proof that they'd earned Jesus' favor. (Harris, 1994, Par. 3)
Harris here draws together pictorial representation with cinematic iconography in an ekphrastic description that forcefully elucidates the erotically aesthetic possibilities of saints' lives. The medieval cult of saints, with its trade in relics and brilliantly embellished reliquaries, enacts this same impulse for aesthetic enshrinement, though privileging a denial of particular types of bodily experience. A bewilderingly complex family tree prefaces Harris' 1976 novel and graphically reproduces the convoluted kinship grid of the story's main characters (Figure 1 - See PDF,).
This tree includes not only genetic affiliation, but also cross-species and cross-temporal connections: Harris envisions her narrative's lesbian enclave as being radically related to 'Sport, the dog' and a number of cats, as well as individuals with whom the clan has presumably had only passing connections ('The Good Boy' and 'The Red Haired Woman'). Also prominently featured in this tree are three medieval virgin martyrs: Lucy, who was condemned to suffer the shame of prostitution, and who is often represented with her eyes on a platter or in a cup; Agnes, perhaps the most revered of early Christianity's virgin martyrs, who was also sentenced to a brothel as punishment for her sanctity, eventually beheaded and usually depicted holding a lamb; and Catherine, associated with the torturous wheel, who is said to have bled milk instead of blood when she was decapitated. Snippets of female saints' lives are similarly fused into Harris' novel. The intricate erotohistoriography she creates in Lover often places the reader in the position of Lewis Carroll's Alice - an Alice got up in drag - falling down a...