Pre-Twentieth-Century Representations

In ancient Greek legends, the Amazons were fierce warrior women, living in their own country ruled by a queen (or pair of queens). Said to have descended from the war-god Ares, they worshiped Artemis. They shunned men, except for ritual mating in the spring. Only Amazons who had killed in battle were allowed to mate. They were variously alleged to kill male offspring, to return them to their fathers, or to mutilate and enslave them.

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Although some sources, like Diodorus Siculus, place them in North Africa, in Herodotus, Aeschylus, and other Greek texts, the Amazons inhabit the area around the Black Sea, and some attribute to them control over much of Asia. Amazons represent a border between (patriarchal) Greek civilization and barbarian savagery. Vase paintings c. 575 B.C. portray the battle between Amazons and Heracles, whose ninth labor was to capture the girdle of the Amazon queen. The Amazon queen has no horse and is shown with both breasts. The tradition that Amazons removed one breast in order to use the bow or javelin more easily appeared much later.

Following the Athenian defeat of Persian invaders in 490 B.C., images center on Theseus, legendary founder of Athens, who had captured and married the queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta (or sometimes Antiope). The outraged Amazons invaded Athens but were defeated by Theseus. In another Greek myth, the Amazon Penthesilea brought her army of women to the aid of Troy. She was slain by Achilles after a fierce battle. Some versions portray Achilles (or his son) removing her helmet and falling in love with her beauty.

For the Greeks, Amazons represented the chaos and disorder of women not subservient to men. In some versions, their nation originated in revolt by married women who slew their husbands. The Romans, who traced their own mythic roots to Troy, had a more positive view of Amazons and included them in many works, including some by Virgil, Seneca, and Ovid.

Numerous scholars have tackled the question of the historical existence of Amazons. Many theories have been proposed, but there is no conclusive proof. Some modern feminist scholars believe Amazon legends arose from Greek contact with more egalitarian or matriarchal societies.

Regardless of whether they actually existed, the Amazons have inspired many writers since classical times. However, until the twentieth century, Amazon characters were not associated with lesbianism. The development of the literature tended rather to make Amazons more heterosexual than they were originally.

Around the twelfth century, Amazon figures appeared in works such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie as chivalrous female knights who often fall in love with men. In Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), Amazons are examples of female power and intelligence. Amazon characters (especially Hippolyta, married to Theseus) were extremely popular in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, appearing in works by Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and numerous other authors.

The motif reached a height of popularity in the Elizabethan period, with Elizabeth herself sometimes compared to an Amazon queen. A few major writers of the seventeenth century also treated the theme. In most works, however, the Amazon characters are either chaste virgins or heterosexual lovers.

Christopher Columbus, relying on Marco Polo's travel accounts, thought he would find an Amazon island off the coast of China. He sought it as proof that he had found Asia, and in 1493, he claimed to have found an island of armored women archers, rumored to possess a nearby island filled with gold.

The Amazon river was so named because its Spanish explorers encountered women archers fighting alongside men. The legend of Queen Califia and her golden-armored warriors grew out of the Spanish quest for the fabled Amazons, and California was named for her.

Twentieth-Century Representations

The first open literary association of Amazons and lesbians came in the person of Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), a wealthy American who founded a remarkable lesbian circle in Paris. Nicknamed the Amazon, she wrote two books entitled Pensées d'une amazone (1920) and Nouvelles pensées de l'amazone (1939).

Barney and her lover, poet Renée Vivien, deliberately set out to recreate a lesbian society based on their reading of Sappho. Barney's salon included such lesbian artists as Romaine Brooks, Radcliffe Hall, Djuna Barnes, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Isadora Duncan, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Rachilde, Mina Loy, and Elizabeth de Gramont. Barnes's Ladie's Almanack (1928) is about Barney's circle, and she was the model for a character in Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928).

Despite Barney's equation of Amazons with lesbians and Helen Diner's effort to reclaim Amazons as feminist models (Mothers and Amazons, 1930), the literary image of the Amazon had become in the early decades of this century a heterosexual formula of the beautiful, man-hating woman who abandons her ways when she meets the "right" man. Katharine Hepburn starred in the first Broadway play using this theme, The Warrior's Husband (1931), later revived as a musical by Rodgers and Hart, By Jupiter (1942).

The comic book character Wonder Woman is an Amazon princess who leaves Paradise Island to help battle America's enemies. Such treatments have no lesbian content.

Amazons were definitively linked with lesbians by the advent of lesbian feminism in the late 1960s. Monique Wittig's Les guérillères (1969) is an Amazonian utopia set within a brilliant deconstruction of male cultural discourse. Wittig's entire oeuvre represents a world in which lesbians lead a revolution against the very concept of gender, and her novels and essays are among the most important explorations of lesbian theory today.

Amazons appealed to lesbians not only because of the warrior image (the two-headed axe or labyris associated with Amazons became a lesbian symbol), but also because Amazons lived without men. Titles of lesbian works like Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian/Feminist Anthology, edited by Phyllis Birkby and others (1973), Amazon Poetry, edited by Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin (1975), and Ti-Grace Atkinson's Amazon Odyssey (1974) reflect these associations. Noretta Koertge's novel Valley of the Amazons (1984) satirizes the most extreme separatist positions.

Though Amazons inspired "mainstream" fiction, most images appeared in science fiction and utopian literature. Joanna Russ's influential The Female Man (1975) contrasts our sexist world with an all-lesbian world. Numerous other novels show Amazon-like lesbians, either in all-female worlds or, more often, as women in revolt against oppressively sexist worlds. Examples of the latter include Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines (1978) and Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Society of Free Amazons" within her popular "Darkover" novels. Although most of these treatments occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, the theme continues to inspire writers.

American lesbian literature prior to Stonewall exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

The Greco-Roman myths concerning same-sex love have been of crucial importance to the Western gay and lesbian literary heritage, both as texts and as icons.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

The contributions of gay men and lesbians to twentieth-century French literature have been closely intertwined with the course of mainstream literature.

Beginning with the "new wave" in the 1960s, science fiction and fantasy writers have explored openly and seriously issues of gender and sexual orientation.

American novelist Djuna Barnes sought new forms of self-representation of lesbians in the face of society's compulsory heterosexuality.

In addition to being the muse and inspiration of other writers, American expatriate Natalie Barney, known as the Amazon, was a poet, memoirist, and epigrammatist in her own right.

A matriarch of fantasy and science fiction literature, Marion Zimmer Bradley also authored lesbian paperback pulps and articles for The Ladder and Mattachine Review.

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer uses homosexual relations and desires as a means to cast moral judgments on characters and to satirize them.

One of France's most beloved authors, Colette wrote novels with strong lesbian subtexts.

Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly and proudly, is best known for The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.

In both her science fiction and her criticism, Joanna Russ is outspokenly lesbian and feminist.

Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

Virgil wrote approvingly of male love in many works, and his second eclogue became the most famous poem on that subject in Latin literature.

Renée Vivien, who had many affairs with women, openly celebrated lesboerotic love in her poetry and dreamed of women-controlled spaces in an era when most women were still domestically confined.

The controversial lesbian author and theorist Monique Wittig has produced some of the most challenging fictional and theoretical work of second-wave feminism.