Compulsory Heterosexuality and Gothic Lesbianism in “My Visitation”

Madeleine Lam

Instructor’s Introduction

In WR 151: Gender, Sex, and Gothic Lit, students read classic Gothic texts that center on questions of gender, sexuality, and power – including those that give voice to queer sexualities and identities in the years before these experiences could be depicted explicitly. With this knowledge, students then choose a piece of media from any time period or culture and pursue an independent research project analyzing how it uses Gothic motifs to comment on a specific social tension or anxiety.

For her research project, Maddie chose to revisit a story we read in class: “My Visitation,” a ghost story by a once-prominent 19th-century American writer named Rose Terry Cooke. An important detail that informs Maddie’s reading is that this text was first published in 1858 by Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, which was known for particularly family-friendly content. When we discussed this text in class, we interrogated how a story that so explicitly represents same-sex desire between two women could be considered appropriate for all audiences in an era where queerness was barely named, let alone condoned or celebrated. As a class, we determined that, at least in part, the Gothic elements allow this relationship to exist on the page in a way that leaves it open to readers’ diverse interpretations. Much like Eleanor’s ghost, readers can choose to see the text’s queerness or not. 

Maddie was fascinated by this question and ran with it in her project. In her essay, she engages confidently with scholars who debate how we are meant to read this story and offers her own thoughtful and nuanced analysis of details from the text. In addition, she deftly incorporates insights from queer theorists to make a compelling case that, regardless of Cooke’s original intent, we can read this story as a text that makes space for an authentic representation of sapphic desire – indeed, we may have to, as historically space has not been made for these sorts of stories to be told. My favorite part of the essay is actually the end, where Maddie makes a bold connection between “My Visitation” and the lyrics of Chappell Roan’s song “Good Luck, Babe!” In doing so, she shows that even contemporary creators who make intentionally and overtly queer media continue to grapple with the same questions that 19th-century Gothic writers contended with long ago. 

Heather Barrett

From the Writer

When I first read “My Visitation” by Rose Terry Cooke for my WR 151 course, I was instantly drawn to its profoundly authentic portrayal of a closeted lesbian experiencing compulsory heterosexuality. I was thrilled to discover that many professionally published scholars have had similar interpretations, but I soon also found that learning more about Cooke’s religious and political background had left them with even more questions. Is it possible to meaningfully interpret a homophobic work through a queer lens? Does the value of art lie in the intentions of the creator, or in what the audience takes away from it? My essay aims to answer these questions and more, drawing on Gothic and queer theory to construct a well-supported argument about the inherent resistance of lesbian existence and the importance of personal connection when engaging with literature.

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Gothic Lesbianism in “My Visitation”

A defining characteristic of the Gothic genre is its portrayal of ordinary people faced with extraordinary situations. These unnatural, eerie circumstances often serve as cognitive estrangement, as their absurdity represents common fears and societal taboos in a way that is unfamiliar to the reader. The 1858 short story “My Visitation” by Rose Terry Cooke, with its supernatural elements and vivid prose, easily falls within this definition of a Gothic text. But what exactly is the taboo being addressed by this story? The answer: lesbianism.

“My Visitation” follows an unnamed female narrator who has been in love with another woman, Eleanor Wyse, since the two were teenagers. The narrator’s schoolgirl crush continues through adulthood even after she befriends Herman, a man who seems to be perfect for her. Herman is a quiet, levelheaded character who initially has feelings for Eleanor and bonds with the narrator over having unrequited feelings for the same person. The two develop a profound friendship and spend much time together. When Herman confesses his love to the narrator, she rejects him because she is still in love with Eleanor. However, the narrator’s infatuation with Eleanor turns to resentment once they have an unspecified conflict. The narrator and Herman start dating, and then Eleanor suddenly dies. Soon, the narrator begins to experience “visitations” from an intangible, spiritual presence that is eventually revealed to be Eleanor’s ghost. In this paper, I argue that when viewed through a lesbian lens, the Gothic elements Cooke incorporates into “My Visitation” illuminate the profound tragedy of compulsory heterosexuality in the closeted lesbian. Through this perspective, the “death of a beautiful woman” trope distances the narrator from her attraction to Eleanor, thus enabling her to convince herself that she is in love with a man, while the supernatural aspect of Eleanor’s ghost represents the narrator’s failed attempt to suppress her queerness.

Before we begin, it is important to acknowledge that “My Visitation” was most likely meant to be viewed by its readers through anything but a queer-friendly perspective. Kristin Comment demonstrates this idea with a thorough analysis of Cooke’s background and the religious imagery she employs in the story. Her argument cites the then-popularity of conduct books, which are informational texts that teach their audience how to adhere to social norms and be a virtuous person. Many of these texts approve of intimate displays of female friendship such as kissing, but denounce actual lasting romantic relationships between women, insinuating that the presence of homosexual desire can cause the former to turn into the latter (Comment 36). Comment claims that through “My Visitation”, Cooke fictionalizes this societal fear of female friendship evolving into homoeroticism, and furthermore, threatening heterosexual relationships. Cooke’s devotion to her religious background also plays a role in Comment’s analysis; of particular note is the way the story associates Eleanor with religious doubt and sin, and Herman with faith and salvation (41-42). At the end of the story, heterosexual purity triumphs over homosexual desire, as the narrator is able to “love Eleanor tenderly but less passionately in a way that does not subvert her desire to marry Herman” (Comment 44). 

Because of its nuanced message regarding homo- and heterosexuality, scholars have interpreted the exploration of lesbian desire in “My Visitation” in various ways. These discussions tend to revolve around the question: Can “My Visitation” be considered a lesbian story, and should it be analyzed using modern concepts of lesbian identity that contradict the historical context in which it was written? According to Comment, the answer to both questions is a strong “no”. Her article evaluates various queer readings of the story, calling them “ahistorical” and “at odds with what appear to be Cooke’s more conscious intentions and the way contemporary readers would have perceived them” (43). Comment believes today’s scholars should read Cooke’s story the way it was meant to be read: as a “morality tale fictionalizing the threat that female same-sex passion poses to a woman’s desire for heterosexual marriage” (27). Despite this strong conviction, however, Comment’s article fails to address exactly why she thinks the unfaithful and “ahistorical” nature of such queer interpretations inherently discredits their validity. She implies that interpretations of a given narrative should be limited to fall within the intentions of its author, but is this rigid framework truly the best way to derive meaning from the media we consume? Must the label of a “lesbian story” be restricted to only include narratives with both lesbian authors and lesbian audiences? 

In the 1995 essay “The Lesbian Narrative: ‘The Pursuit of the Inedible by the Unspeakable’”, Marilyn Farwell argues otherwise. She posits that a “lesbian narrative” is not necessarily written by a lesbian for other lesbians; rather, the term should describe any text that creates a space for the possibility of lesbianism (157). “My Visitation” fits this description extremely well, as the narrator’s romantic feelings for Eleanor are a key aspect of the plot and can easily be a space where lesbianism can exist. Furthermore, Farwell argues that taking a text that is not explicitly queer and describing it as a lesbian narrative can be an act of resistance for lesbians and women. According to her, “To place the lesbian body in the traditional narrative is to invite conflict, for the old narrative’s structure aims, often violently, to contain the woman and the female body” (158). In other words, interpreting a story as a lesbian narrative is a way to fight back against the limits that the heteropatriarchy places on queer women in both fiction and reality. Even if Cooke did mean for “My Visitation” to condemn lesbianism and homosexuality, there is still value in alternate interpretations; lesbians who look at the story through a queer lens can find meaning in reclaiming something originally intended to criticize their existence. 

“My Visitation” is one of many Gothic stories that involve the death of a beautiful woman, which Edgar Allen Poe once described as “the most poetical topic in the world”. Through a queer perspective, Cooke’s utilization of this trope in the character of Eleanor allows the narrator to distance herself from her lesbian desire. This attraction is very apparent at the start of the story; the narrator spends a whole paragraph describing Eleanor as extremely stunning, both in appearance and demeanor. She recalls:

Eleanor’s face was very beautiful; its Greek outline, straight and clear, cut to a perfect contour; the white brow; the long, melancholy eye, with curved, inky lashes; the statuesque head, its undulant, glittering hair bound in a knot of classic severity; the proud, serene mouth, full of carved beauty, opening its scarlet lips to reveal tiny pearl-grains of teeth of that rare delicacy and brilliance that carry a fatal warning; the soft, oval cheek, colorless but not pale, opaque and smooth, betraying Southern blood; the delicate throat, shown whiter under the sweeping shadow and coil of her black-brown tresses; the erect, stately, perfect figure, slight as became her years, but full of strength and promise; all these captivated my intense adoration of beauty… the soul that pierced those deep eyes was eager, unquiet, despotic; nothing divine, indeed, yet, in my eyes, it was the unresting, hasting meteor that flashed and faded through mists of earth toward its rest – where I knew not, but its flickering seemed to me atmospheric, not intrinsic. (Cooke 233)

What stands out here is how the narrator recognizes that her feelings towards Eleanor are subjective. She says that even though she views Eleanor as a breathtaking soul, meteor-like in its intensity, the other woman is in reality “nothing divine, indeed”. By having the narrator admit this, Cooke emphasizes the arbitrary nature of romantic attraction. Although the narrator admires Eleanor’s personality and intelligence, she distinguishes this “respect” from the more irrational “fervor” that she also feels towards her friend (Cooke 233). Such fervor for a person is ultimately unquantifiable; unlike respect, it cannot be explained through a list of positive qualities or traits. The narrator’s acknowledgment of this makes clear that what she is experiencing toward Eleanor is, in fact, attraction. 

Knowing this, it is unsurprising how deeply saddened the narrator is at Eleanor’s betrayal and subsequent absence. She laments, “Death is hard to bear when its angel breathes upon the face we love, and extinguishes therein the fiery spark of life; but what is death compared to such dissolution as treachery brings?” (Cooke 236). Her statement that treachery causes even more pain than death demonstrates how hurt she is from losing Eleanor – this is the metaphorical and first death of a beautiful woman. Yet the newly created distance between the narrator and Eleanor allows her to suddenly start to view Herman in a romantic light a few years later. In the narrator’s sadness, Herman helps her reconnect with her Christian faith, and she feels immense gratitude towards him that eventually appears to turn into romance. When describing Herman, she says:

Even in his plain exterior the eye that knew him found a charm peculiar and salient; the deep-sunken, clear, earnest eyes, kindled with a spark of profound depth and meaning; the thin, sharply cut, aquiline outline; the flexible, pure, refined mouth; the bronzed coloring; the overhanging brow – all these wore beauty indefinable, fired by the sweet and vivid smile of the irradiate soul within. In his presence, calm, restful, and strengthening, no subterfuge or evasion could live. He was just, direct, and tenderly strong; it was to him, to him it is, that I owed and owe a new and higher life than I had known before… I trusted him when I disbelieved every other creature, and with this trust had crept back to me my faith in God, in good, in life, and its ends. Truly, so far as man can do it, he saved my soul alive! (Cooke 238).

These feelings can be interpreted as the result of compulsory heterosexuality, a term coined by Adrienne Rich in 1980 that describes the societal pressure women feel to be attracted to men. A natural product of heteronormative and patriarchal standards, compulsory heterosexuality impacts all women regardless of how they identify their sexual orientation, restricting and “psychologically [trapping]” them from venturing outside the norm (Rich 34-35). The concept has helped many lesbians realize that their seemingly romantic feelings for men in the past were not true romantic feelings, but rather manifestations of the expectations inflicted upon them by compulsory heterosexuality that blocked off the possibility of being attracted to women. This “absence of choice” (Rich 37) that the narrator experiences is spurred by the absence of Eleanor. Because the narrator has lost contact with the only person in her life that she was ever truly attracted to, she forgets what genuine attraction feels like, and convinces herself that her feelings of appreciation and respect towards Herman are romantic rather than platonic. 

The actual “death of a beautiful woman” only further encourages the narrator’s compulsory heterosexuality. Once news of Eleanor’s passing reaches the narrator, she sinks even deeper into the delusion that she is in love with Herman, with the two of them getting engaged. She even goes so far as to contrast her feelings for Herman with the feelings she had for Eleanor: 

Know that it is not the flower of any tropic palm that is fit to feed and sustain man, but the ripened clusters of its fruitage – the result of time, and sun, and storm. The first blush, the earliest kiss, the tender and timid glance are sweet indeed; but the true household fire, deep and abiding, is oftenest kindled in the heart matured by passion and by pain, tested in the stress of life, deepened and strengthened by manifold experience. (Cooke 239)

By comparing her love for Eleanor to a flower and her love for Herman to a fruit, the narrator emphasizes the importance of dedication and commitment in a relationship. She sees the “flower” and “fruit” as being at odds with each other, unable to coexist, and it is easy to see why: with Eleanor, she has experienced attraction without mutual devotion, and with Herman, she has experienced mutual devotion without attraction. Not only that, but the narrator also thinks that the latter is adequate enough for a meaningful relationship. This demonstrates the influence of compulsory heterosexuality on the narrator; because society expects women to be with men, she subconsciously discredits her feelings for Eleanor (a woman) once she no longer has to face them. This results in her belief that natural attraction is not a crucial component of true love, allowing her to convince herself that she is in love with Herman.

As the narrator is falling victim to compulsory heterosexuality, Eleanor’s ghost begins to appear. It visits the narrator several times, who feels “shielded” and protected from it by her developing relationship with Herman (Cooke 238). However, when the ghost’s identity is revealed to be Eleanor, the narrator’s internal conflict shifts. During this final visitation, the compulsory heterosexuality she experiences for Herman seems to diminish, and she attempts to reconcile her love for him with her love for Eleanor. The ghost materializes as a shadow to ask the narrator to “Forgive! forgive!!”, then kisses her and departs (Cooke 239). The narrator declares that she is at peace, as she is loved by both Herman and Eleanor. In the last paragraph, she confesses that she will always love Eleanor “with a truth and faith eternal” (Cooke 239). 

Through a lesbian perspective, the Gothic element of Eleanor’s ghost can be interpreted as an illustration of the narrator’s failure to suppress her own queerness, as well as Cooke’s failure to suppress the queerness of her story. In a 1993 essay titled “The Apparitional Lesbian”, Terry Castle analyzes the role of the ghost in eighteenth and nineteenth-century lesbian literature. She argues that the ghosts in these stories ultimately facilitate a “recognition through negation”; in other words, a resurrection of the lesbian desire that was meant to be ambiguously undefined (41). According to Castle, “The spectral vernacular, it turns out, contains its own powerful and perverse magic. Used imaginatively – repossessed, so to speak – the very trope that evaporates can also solidify. In the strangest turn of all, perhaps, the lesbian body itself returns: and the feeble, elegiac waving off – the gesture of would-be exorcism – becomes instead a new and passionate beckoning” (33). 

Eleanor’s ghost is a flawless example of this recognition through negation, especially considering Cooke’s likely intentions for the story to vaguely warn against homosexuality in women. Cooke’s negation of lesbianism manifests in the plot by creating a conflict and then killing off Eleanor, attempting to erase any possibility of a lesbian happy ending. However, the inclusion of Eleanor’s ghost ends up providing the very recognition of lesbianism that Cooke may have been trying to avoid. A lesbian lens paints this ghost as a manifestation of the narrator’s true, underlying desire to be with Eleanor despite being in a relationship with Herman. Eleanor’s ghost follows the narrator around for weeks, a presence “unseen, unheard, but felt in the secretest recesses of life and consciousness” that carries an aura of “something yearning, restless, pained, and sad” (Cooke 237). This omnipresent feeling of dissatisfaction and anguish represents the experience of many lesbians and queer people who try and fail to push their queerness aside. In attempting to denounce lesbianism, Cooke has instead constructed a narrative that denounces self-repression of lesbianism.

Strangely enough, this unintentional message echoes the more upfront sentiment that is often present in modern lesbian and queer media: the idea that queerness is something innate and unescapable that should inspire feelings of pride rather than shame. One recent lesbian media with such a theme is the hit song “Good Luck, Babe!” released by lesbian pop singer Chappell Roan in 2024. In the song, Roan depicts the hurt that compulsory heterosexuality inflicts upon closeted lesbians, communicating her complicated resentment towards a female lover that refuses to acknowledge her own romantic feelings and queer identity. The chorus goes:

You can kiss a hundred boys in bars

Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling

You can say it’s just the way you are

Make a new excuse, another stupid reason

Good luck, babe (Well, good luck)

Well, good luck, babe (Well, good luck)

You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling

The way that Roan’s lover is in denial of her sexuality mirrors that of Cooke’s narrator – each of them are acting on their supposed attraction to men, and each have internalized the impacts of compulsory heterosexuality. Roan bitterly bids her lover “good luck” because she knows that denying one’s queerness is a futile effort. Her chorus serves a similar purpose to Eleanor’s ghost, as both emphasize that feelings of queer desire will always be there. Even after Eleanor dies, the narrator’s feelings for her remain; attempting to suppress them would be as impossible as “[stopping] the world”. Furthermore, in the bridge, Roan sings:

When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night

With your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife

And when you think about me, all of those years ago

You’re standing face to face with “I told you so”

You know I hate to say, I told you so 

You know I hate to say, but, I told you so

Here, the parallels between Roan’s lover and Cooke’s narrator are even clearer. Roan’s lover is suddenly hit with the epiphany that she does not truly love her husband, and she realizes that her past relationship with Roan was what real attraction feels like. Although Cooke’s narrator is nowhere near that point of self-reflection even by the end of the story, the situation is familiar: she is engaged to Herman despite feeling no attraction to him, since her only real experience with attraction was how she felt with Eleanor. Similar to how Roan’s lover eventually comes to terms with the reality of her identity, not even the narrator’s engagement to Herman can stop her from succumbing to her love for Eleanor in the end. 

In the essay where she coins the term “compulsory heterosexuality”, Adrienne Rich says, “Women have married because… heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings – and our sensuality – have not been tamed or contained with in it” (31-32). I believe that “My Visitation” and “Good Luck, Babe!” are both perfect representations of this quote. On the surface, Cooke’s narrator and Roan’s lover have indeed “obeyed the institution” of heterosexual patriarchy, but a deeper look reveals that their lesbian desire comes back to them eventually. As a lesbian myself, I think there’s something beautiful in the fact that these two very different pieces of lesbian media can supplement each other so seamlessly. While “My Visitation” is more than a century old and was probably written with homophobic intentions, “Good Luck, Babe!” is extremely recent and was composed by a lesbian with compulsory heterosexuality in mind. Yet they share the same themes, and someone like me was able to find meaning in their similarities. Even if they were written with certain intentions, stories like “My Visitation” have the capacity to resonate with people of all different kinds of identities and experiences, and I believe that encouraging alternate interpretations of media will help harness that capacity.

Works Cited

Castle, Terry. “The Apparitional Lesbian.” The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 24-49.

Comment, Kristin M. “‘When it ceases to be silly it becomes actually wrong’: The Cultural Contexts of Female Homoerotic Desire in Rose Terry Cooke’s ‘My Visitation’.” Legacy, vol. 26 no. 1, University of Nebraska Press, 2009, pp. 26-47. Project MUSE, dx.doi.org/10.1353/leg.0.0071. 

Cooke, Rose Terry. “My Visitation.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 17, Harper & Brothers, 1858, pp. 232-39.

Farwell, Marilyn R. “The Lesbian Narrative: ‘The Pursuit of the Inedible by the Unspeakable.’” Professions of Desire. Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, edited by George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman, Modern Languages Association of America, 1995, pp. 156-68. Archive.org, archive.org/details/isbn_9780873525626. 

Rich, Adrienne C. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 15 no. 3, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp. 11-48. Project MUSE, dx.doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2003.0079. Originally published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1980.

Roan, Chappell. “Good Luck, Babe!” Amusement Records, 2024. Youtube, youtube.com/watch?v=1RKqOmSkGgM. 

Madeleine (Maddie) Lam is a sophomore from Los Altos, California studying Marine Science in the College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to her major, she is also minoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Outside of academics, Maddie is involved in Boston University’s satirical news publications and student-run musical theatre programs. Maddie would like to extend many thanks to her WR 151 professor, Heather Barrett (who was a great help in the development of this essay), as well as her WR 120 teacher, Meiya Sparks-Lin, for encouraging her to pursue her love of writing and the humanities alongside her STEM interests.