I Have Come to Show You Death
Carolyn Gage
Too often, our lesbian deaths have been recorded with the same obscurity as our lesbian lives, and even today the public continues to be surprised when obituaries, such as the recent New York Times obituary for astronaut Dr. Sally Ride, make note of a surviving same-sex partner. This is why I was so intrigued to discover three nineteenth-century short stories that dealt with the death or the dying of lesbian partners. Because the stories were so dramatic, I decided to adapt three of them, along with an excerpt from a novel, for an evening of theatre titled I Have Come to Show You Death--a line from one of the stories.
The stories in the collection include “Two Friends” by Mary Wilkins Freeman, “Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and “There and Here” by Alice Brown. Also included is a scene from the novel Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett.
All of the authors represented in these adaptations were born in New England around 1850. The rural villages at that time were suffering from severe economic depression. These writers came of age during that depression, and in the wake of the War Between the States which claimed so many fathers, sons, and brothers. Complications from childbirth as well as childhood diseases made death a common part of women’s lives.
In addition, the young men who did survive the war were being lured away from rural poverty and toward the promise of westward expansion and the rise of industries in the cities. The fact that these stories are focused on the lives of women, and especially older women, reflect the reality that the populations in many New England villages at this time were predominantly female and elderly.
Same-sex partners/companions and death would have been natural themes for these writers in a society where death was prevalent and where women significantly outnumbered men.
Calvinism, with its grim and rigid doctrine of predestination and unforgiving afterlife, offered little comfort to grieving women, and this generation of writers had strong motivation to help their readers imagine a more benevolent realm of the spirit. All the stories share a common mission to subvert the traditional Christian horror of death as some epic and terminal event, and to “cut it down to size” instead—arranging it on a shelf with the teacups, placing it in the basket with other things to be mended, aligning it with the rotation of the seasons. Two of the stories specifically propound a belief that the “here” and the “there” would be the same, except for the limits of human perception.
I felt that these lesbian writers, writing on lesbian intimacy, shared a common experience as outsiders, and that this perspective lent itself to radical re-envisioning of death and dying. Standing apart from heterosexual rites and patterns, living in self-created paradigms, lesbians are in a position to apply the shape-shifting skills by which we have survived to interrogate what may be just one more patriarchal lie intended to make us all toe the line.
Three of the stories address economic issues in the lives of the women. In “Two Friends,” Freeman takes pains to outline the rigors of life on the financial edge: the growing of one’s own food, the sewing of one’s own clothing, the walking—not riding—to town for groceries, the limited medical resources. And yet, the three women look out for each other, and before the life partner dies, she makes sure that there will be another woman to move in and take her place, at least in terms of survival needs.
“Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is an unusual story in that the author gives very few details about the lives of her lesbian partners. The reader understands that there has been an immediate death, and that the bereaved partner is still in the room with the body. The spirit of the dead woman rises from the bed, wrestling with her attachments to her former life—and especially to her partner—and an overwhelming calling to a larger freedom. Is the author attempting to demystify the wrenching separation, which will not be recognized in the wider community with the healing rituals that would traditionally be associated with loss of a spouse? In a fascinating lesbian reversal, the author makes the case that “the departed” is experiencing her partner as the one who has died.
In “There and Here,” Brown’s ghostly visitor comes back not only to say good-bye to her friend, but also to communicate her wish that her house be converted into a home for “middle-aged women who are tired.” The author, Alice Brown, helped found a travel organization for women who were tired of traveling at the mercy and whim of male companions, and she apparently cherished a dream that more women would consider creating institutions that were exclusively for women.
In the excerpt from Deephaven, Jewett’s young heroines are discovering their class privilege, as well as their privilege as unmarried women, throughout their sojourn in the fictional Maine fishing village of Deephaven. In the passage I have adapted, the young women are musing on what the middle-class would condescendingly view as the superstitious beliefs of “simple” country folk. Helen and Kate put forward a radical idea that these so-called “superstitions” might actually be instincts that belie a spiritually advanced state, resulting from lives lived in harmony and proximity to nature. As Kate notes, “… one cannot help the thought that the mystery of this world may be the commonplace of the next.”
Here is the dramatic adaptation of “Since I Died”:
Too often, our lesbian deaths have been recorded with the same obscurity as our lesbian lives, and even today the public continues to be surprised when obituaries, such as the recent New York Times obituary for astronaut Dr. Sally Ride, make note of a surviving same-sex partner. This is why I was so intrigued to discover three nineteenth-century short stories that dealt with the death or the dying of lesbian partners. Because the stories were so dramatic, I decided to adapt three of them, along with an excerpt from a novel, for an evening of theatre titled I Have Come to Show You Death--a line from one of the stories.
The stories in the collection include “Two Friends” by Mary Wilkins Freeman, “Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and “There and Here” by Alice Brown. Also included is a scene from the novel Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett.
All of the authors represented in these adaptations were born in New England around 1850. The rural villages at that time were suffering from severe economic depression. These writers came of age during that depression, and in the wake of the War Between the States which claimed so many fathers, sons, and brothers. Complications from childbirth as well as childhood diseases made death a common part of women’s lives.
In addition, the young men who did survive the war were being lured away from rural poverty and toward the promise of westward expansion and the rise of industries in the cities. The fact that these stories are focused on the lives of women, and especially older women, reflect the reality that the populations in many New England villages at this time were predominantly female and elderly.
Same-sex partners/companions and death would have been natural themes for these writers in a society where death was prevalent and where women significantly outnumbered men.
Calvinism, with its grim and rigid doctrine of predestination and unforgiving afterlife, offered little comfort to grieving women, and this generation of writers had strong motivation to help their readers imagine a more benevolent realm of the spirit. All the stories share a common mission to subvert the traditional Christian horror of death as some epic and terminal event, and to “cut it down to size” instead—arranging it on a shelf with the teacups, placing it in the basket with other things to be mended, aligning it with the rotation of the seasons. Two of the stories specifically propound a belief that the “here” and the “there” would be the same, except for the limits of human perception.
I felt that these lesbian writers, writing on lesbian intimacy, shared a common experience as outsiders, and that this perspective lent itself to radical re-envisioning of death and dying. Standing apart from heterosexual rites and patterns, living in self-created paradigms, lesbians are in a position to apply the shape-shifting skills by which we have survived to interrogate what may be just one more patriarchal lie intended to make us all toe the line.
Three of the stories address economic issues in the lives of the women. In “Two Friends,” Freeman takes pains to outline the rigors of life on the financial edge: the growing of one’s own food, the sewing of one’s own clothing, the walking—not riding—to town for groceries, the limited medical resources. And yet, the three women look out for each other, and before the life partner dies, she makes sure that there will be another woman to move in and take her place, at least in terms of survival needs.
“Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is an unusual story in that the author gives very few details about the lives of her lesbian partners. The reader understands that there has been an immediate death, and that the bereaved partner is still in the room with the body. The spirit of the dead woman rises from the bed, wrestling with her attachments to her former life—and especially to her partner—and an overwhelming calling to a larger freedom. Is the author attempting to demystify the wrenching separation, which will not be recognized in the wider community with the healing rituals that would traditionally be associated with loss of a spouse? In a fascinating lesbian reversal, the author makes the case that “the departed” is experiencing her partner as the one who has died.
In “There and Here,” Brown’s ghostly visitor comes back not only to say good-bye to her friend, but also to communicate her wish that her house be converted into a home for “middle-aged women who are tired.” The author, Alice Brown, helped found a travel organization for women who were tired of traveling at the mercy and whim of male companions, and she apparently cherished a dream that more women would consider creating institutions that were exclusively for women.
In the excerpt from Deephaven, Jewett’s young heroines are discovering their class privilege, as well as their privilege as unmarried women, throughout their sojourn in the fictional Maine fishing village of Deephaven. In the passage I have adapted, the young women are musing on what the middle-class would condescendingly view as the superstitious beliefs of “simple” country folk. Helen and Kate put forward a radical idea that these so-called “superstitions” might actually be instincts that belie a spiritually advanced state, resulting from lives lived in harmony and proximity to nature. As Kate notes, “… one cannot help the thought that the mystery of this world may be the commonplace of the next.”
Here is the dramatic adaptation of “Since I Died”:
SINCE I DIED
Adapted from the short story “Since I Died”
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Cast of Characters
THE DECEASED: A woman.
HER PARTNER: A woman.
NARRATOR: A woman.
Scene
A modest bedroom in a New England home.
Time
1871
Since I Died
Prologue
Adapted from the short story “Since I Died”
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Cast of Characters
THE DECEASED: A woman.
HER PARTNER: A woman.
NARRATOR: A woman.
Scene
A modest bedroom in a New England home.
Time
1871
Since I Died
Prologue
NARRATOR: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was born in Boston, in 1844. The granddaughter of two ministers and the daughter of a theological seminary professor, she was most noted in her day for novels presenting a kinder, gentler God than the Calvinism of her youth, as well as a utopian vision of heaven intended to comfort the legions of women who had lost children to diseases and husbands, fathers, and sons to the Civil War. She also wrote children’s books, creating the tomboy Gypsy Brent, who became the prototype for other tomboy heroines like Jo March in Little Women and Laura Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie. Phelps was a member of a strongly supportive group of women writers and, for several years, she shared rooms with her beloved friend, Dr. Mary Briggs Harris. She frequently wrote books critical of the effects of marriage on women, but after Harris’s death, when Phelps was forty-four, she married a journalist seventeen years her junior, with whom she would co-author two Biblical novels. They eventually separated and she died alone.
Lights come up on a bedroom, 1871. There is a figure in the bed. She wears a nightcap and her face is turned away from the audience. She has just died. Her PARTNER kneels grieving by the bed, holding the hand of the figure in the bed. THE DECEASED enters quietly and speaks to the PARTNER, who does not look up.
THE DECEASED: … I perfectly remember that I perfectly understood it to be at three o’clock on a rainy Sunday morning that I died. Your little watch stood in its case of olive-wood upon the table, and drops were on the window. I noticed both, though you did not know it.
When first you said I was "sinking fast,” the words sounded as old and familiar as a nursery tale. I heard you in the hall. The doctor had just left, and you went to mother and took her face in your two arms and laid your hand across her mouth, as if it were she who had spoken. She cried out and threw up her thin old hands; but you stood as still as Eternity.
So often and so anxiously we have talked of this thing called death, that now that it is all over between us, I cannot understand why we found in it such a source of distress. It bewilders me. I am often bewildered here…
Now, in truth, it seems a simple matter for me to tell you how it has been with me since your lips last touched me, and your arms held me to the vanishing air.
I told you I would come. Did ever a promise fail I spoke to you? “Come and show me Death,” you said. I have come to show you Death. (She crosses to the figure kneeling by the bed.) I could show you the fairest sight and sweetest that ever blessed your eyes. Why, look! Is it not fair? Am I terrible? Do you shrink or shiver? Would you turn from me, or hide your strained, expectant face?
Would she? Does she? Will she?
(She crosses back down to the audience.) Ah, how the room widened! I could tell you that. It grew great and luminous day by day…I tried to tell you how little pain I knew or feared…you said, “She suffers!” Dear, it was so very little!
I tried to tell you this, but you said: “She wanders.” I laughed in my heart at that, for it was such a blessed wandering…ruins and roses, and the brows of Jura and the singing of the Rhine; a shaft of red light on the Sphinx’s smile, and caravans in sandstorms, and an icy wind at sea, and gold adream in mines that no man knew, and mothers sitting at their doors in valleys singing babes to sleep, and women in dank cellars selling souls for bread, and the whir of wheels in giant factories—and the smoke of battle, and broken music, and a sense of lilies alone beside a stream at the rising of the sun—and, at last, your face, dear, all alone.
One thing only stood between me and immensity. It was your single, awful, haggard face. I looked my last into your eyes. Stronger than death, they held and claimed my soul. I feebly raised my hand to find your own. More cruel than the grave, your wild grasp chained me. Then I struggled, and you cried out, and your face slipped, and I stood free.
I stood upon the floor, beside the bed. That which had been I lay there at rest, but terrible, before me. You hid your face, and I saw you slide upon your knees. I laid my hand upon your head; you did not stir; I spoke to you: “Dear, look around a minute!” but you knelt quite still. I walked to and fro about the room, and meeting my mother, I touched her on the elbow; she only said, “She’s gone!” and sobbed aloud. “I have not gone!” I cried; but she sat sobbing on.
The walls of the room had settled now, and the ceiling stood in its solid place. The window was shut, but the door stood open. Suddenly I was restless and I ran.
I brushed you in hurrying by, and hit the little light-stand where the tumblers stood; I looked to see if it would fall, but it only shivered as if a breath of wind had struck it once.
But I was restless, and I ran. In the hall I met the Doctor. This amused me, and I stopped to think it over. “Ah, Doctor,” said I, “you need not trouble yourself to go up. I’m quite well tonight, you see.” But he made no answer; he gave me no glance; he hung up his hat, and laid his hand upon the banister against which I leaned, and went ponderously up. It was not until he had nearly reached the landing that it occurred to me, still leaning on the banisters, that his heavy arm must have swept against and through me, where I stood against the heavy oaken mouldings which he grasped.
Now the Doctor had left the front door unlatched. As I touched it, it blew open wide, and solemnly. I could see that it was chilly, yet I felt no chill.
The air was thick with sweetness from the dying flowers. The old arbor held out its soft arms to me—but I was restless and I ran.
The field opened before me, and meadows with broad bosoms, and a river flashed before me like a scimitar, and woods interlocked their hands to stay me—but being restless, on I ran.
The house dwindled behind me; and the light in the sick-room, and your shadow on the curtain. But yet I was restless, and I ran.
In the twinkling of an eye I fell into a solitary place. Sand and rocks were init, and a falling wind. I paused, and knelt upon the sand and mused a little in this place. I mused of you, and life, and death, and love and agony—but these had departed from me, as dim and distant as the fainting wind.
“I must be dead,” I said aloud. I had no sooner spoken than I learned that I was not alone.
The sun had risen, and on a ledge of ancient rock, weather-stained and red, there had fallen over against me the outline of a Presence lifted up against the sky, and turning suddenly, I saw--
(A long pause. She turns suddenly to her PARTNER.)
Would you not know how it has been with me since your perishable eyes beheld my perished face? What my eyes have seen or my ears have heard, or my heart conceived without you? If I have missed and mourned for you? If I have watched or longed for you? Marked your solitary days and sleepless nights, and tearless eyes, and monotonous slow echo of my unanswering name? Would you not know?
I am called and I slip from her. I am beckoned and I lose her. Her face dims, and her folded, lonely hands fade from my sight. (Lights go out on the scene at the bed.)
It is she who dies; I shall live.
Lights come up on a bedroom, 1871. There is a figure in the bed. She wears a nightcap and her face is turned away from the audience. She has just died. Her PARTNER kneels grieving by the bed, holding the hand of the figure in the bed. THE DECEASED enters quietly and speaks to the PARTNER, who does not look up.
THE DECEASED: … I perfectly remember that I perfectly understood it to be at three o’clock on a rainy Sunday morning that I died. Your little watch stood in its case of olive-wood upon the table, and drops were on the window. I noticed both, though you did not know it.
When first you said I was "sinking fast,” the words sounded as old and familiar as a nursery tale. I heard you in the hall. The doctor had just left, and you went to mother and took her face in your two arms and laid your hand across her mouth, as if it were she who had spoken. She cried out and threw up her thin old hands; but you stood as still as Eternity.
So often and so anxiously we have talked of this thing called death, that now that it is all over between us, I cannot understand why we found in it such a source of distress. It bewilders me. I am often bewildered here…
Now, in truth, it seems a simple matter for me to tell you how it has been with me since your lips last touched me, and your arms held me to the vanishing air.
I told you I would come. Did ever a promise fail I spoke to you? “Come and show me Death,” you said. I have come to show you Death. (She crosses to the figure kneeling by the bed.) I could show you the fairest sight and sweetest that ever blessed your eyes. Why, look! Is it not fair? Am I terrible? Do you shrink or shiver? Would you turn from me, or hide your strained, expectant face?
Would she? Does she? Will she?
(She crosses back down to the audience.) Ah, how the room widened! I could tell you that. It grew great and luminous day by day…I tried to tell you how little pain I knew or feared…you said, “She suffers!” Dear, it was so very little!
I tried to tell you this, but you said: “She wanders.” I laughed in my heart at that, for it was such a blessed wandering…ruins and roses, and the brows of Jura and the singing of the Rhine; a shaft of red light on the Sphinx’s smile, and caravans in sandstorms, and an icy wind at sea, and gold adream in mines that no man knew, and mothers sitting at their doors in valleys singing babes to sleep, and women in dank cellars selling souls for bread, and the whir of wheels in giant factories—and the smoke of battle, and broken music, and a sense of lilies alone beside a stream at the rising of the sun—and, at last, your face, dear, all alone.
One thing only stood between me and immensity. It was your single, awful, haggard face. I looked my last into your eyes. Stronger than death, they held and claimed my soul. I feebly raised my hand to find your own. More cruel than the grave, your wild grasp chained me. Then I struggled, and you cried out, and your face slipped, and I stood free.
I stood upon the floor, beside the bed. That which had been I lay there at rest, but terrible, before me. You hid your face, and I saw you slide upon your knees. I laid my hand upon your head; you did not stir; I spoke to you: “Dear, look around a minute!” but you knelt quite still. I walked to and fro about the room, and meeting my mother, I touched her on the elbow; she only said, “She’s gone!” and sobbed aloud. “I have not gone!” I cried; but she sat sobbing on.
The walls of the room had settled now, and the ceiling stood in its solid place. The window was shut, but the door stood open. Suddenly I was restless and I ran.
I brushed you in hurrying by, and hit the little light-stand where the tumblers stood; I looked to see if it would fall, but it only shivered as if a breath of wind had struck it once.
But I was restless, and I ran. In the hall I met the Doctor. This amused me, and I stopped to think it over. “Ah, Doctor,” said I, “you need not trouble yourself to go up. I’m quite well tonight, you see.” But he made no answer; he gave me no glance; he hung up his hat, and laid his hand upon the banister against which I leaned, and went ponderously up. It was not until he had nearly reached the landing that it occurred to me, still leaning on the banisters, that his heavy arm must have swept against and through me, where I stood against the heavy oaken mouldings which he grasped.
Now the Doctor had left the front door unlatched. As I touched it, it blew open wide, and solemnly. I could see that it was chilly, yet I felt no chill.
The air was thick with sweetness from the dying flowers. The old arbor held out its soft arms to me—but I was restless and I ran.
The field opened before me, and meadows with broad bosoms, and a river flashed before me like a scimitar, and woods interlocked their hands to stay me—but being restless, on I ran.
The house dwindled behind me; and the light in the sick-room, and your shadow on the curtain. But yet I was restless, and I ran.
In the twinkling of an eye I fell into a solitary place. Sand and rocks were init, and a falling wind. I paused, and knelt upon the sand and mused a little in this place. I mused of you, and life, and death, and love and agony—but these had departed from me, as dim and distant as the fainting wind.
“I must be dead,” I said aloud. I had no sooner spoken than I learned that I was not alone.
The sun had risen, and on a ledge of ancient rock, weather-stained and red, there had fallen over against me the outline of a Presence lifted up against the sky, and turning suddenly, I saw--
(A long pause. She turns suddenly to her PARTNER.)
Would you not know how it has been with me since your perishable eyes beheld my perished face? What my eyes have seen or my ears have heard, or my heart conceived without you? If I have missed and mourned for you? If I have watched or longed for you? Marked your solitary days and sleepless nights, and tearless eyes, and monotonous slow echo of my unanswering name? Would you not know?
I am called and I slip from her. I am beckoned and I lose her. Her face dims, and her folded, lonely hands fade from my sight. (Lights go out on the scene at the bed.)
It is she who dies; I shall live.
Blackout
End of Play
End of Play
Working notes
I have recently adapted for stage the writings of four New England women writers, some lesbian, on the subject of lesbians and death. This essay is taken from the introduction to the collection and includes one of the works, "Since I Died."
About the author
Carolyn Gage is a playwright, performer, director, and activist. The author of nine books on lesbian theatre and sixty-five plays, musicals, and one-woman shows, she specializes in non-traditional roles for women, especially those reclaiming famous lesbians whose stories have been distorted or erased from history. She won the 2011 Maine Literary Award in Drama, and in 2009, her collection of plays The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays won the Lambda Literary Award in Drama, the top LGBT book award in the US. All of her books and plays are available online at www.carolyngage.com.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.