GLR May-June 2025

of the statuesque beauty of the body [my emphasis].” My point is that if an artist’s work manifests a sapphic rhetoric over the course of several decades, and especially if this artist also cohabitates with a long term female partner, we need not engage in lengthy debate over the plausibility that she loved other women. Moreover, the persistent denial of this conclusion amounts to a sort of discursive violence. While the artists discussed here did not necessarily conceive of themselves as “lesbian,” it’s probably because this mod ern identity had not yet crystallized, much like Canadian national identity. Florence Carlyle was in fact born before the con cepts of “homosexuality” and a united Canadian state existed. The modern, rigid identities of “lesbian” and “Canadian” were still very much in flux around the turn of the century, and arguably would not crystallize until mid-century. Carlyle, Loring, and Wyle would have seen these identities as more fungible than indissol

Fig. 2 (left): Florence Wyle. Sun Worshipper , 1916. Fig. 3 (above): Florence Wyle. Torso . Both courtesy the National Gallery of Canada.

met at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906 and remained lovers for an impressive six decades until both died just weeks apart in 1968. Following a brief sojourn in Greenwich Village, the pair settled in Toronto during the winter of 1912–13. The couple cer tainly stood out in the genteel Torontonian atmosphere—they were both known to wear trousers, baggy coats, men’s shoes, and moth-eaten berets as they promenaded around the city. “Passers-by would stare in obvious disapproval,” their friend reported. Nevertheless, in 1920 the pair moved into an old school church in Moore Park, which they repurposed into a home and studio. The church studio at 110 Glenrose Avenue served as an important hub for the arts in Toronto, where Lor ing and Wyle often hosted soirées and welcomed visits from members of the Group of Seven, the famed cohort of Canadian landscape painters. Here the pair began to refer to themselves as the Loring-Wyles, as if a newly married couple had moved into the rickety church. The importance of art historical investigation is particularly evident in the absence of “explicit” evidence of lesbian rela tionships. Take Sun Worshipper of 1916, for example, Wyle’s bronze of a kneeling nude woman in a sort of sprawling, dra matic contrapposto (Figure 2). The figure arches her back to raise her chest to the sun and horizontally lifts her arm in the op posing direction, capturing a moment of ecstasy. The sculpture’s eroticism is palpable in the expression and posture of the figure, an affect heightened by the work’s lustrous surface. Wyle was devoted to a Classical ideal of the body: “The Greeks settled my ideas—gave them to me in the beginning. Greek sculpture; I think it’s the best we’ve ever had.” She produced sculptures of nude female torsos in wood, marble, and bronze throughout her career, striving to achieve a classical perfection of form (Figure 3). Wyle’s sapphic classicism would have been recognizable to Havelock Ellis, as he wrote in Sexual Inversion : “The inverted woman is an enthusiastic admirer of feminine beauty, especially

uble. During a period in which their love was subject to com pulsory silence, these artists also understood that their art could remain a site of cautious articulation. A poet named Elsa Gidlow (1898–1986) represents the first generation of “out” lesbians in Canada. Gidlow was born in 1898 in Yorkshire, England, and moved to Montreal in 1904. With Roswell George Mills, she published a revolutionary, openly gay magazine, Les Mouches Fantastiques , from 1918 to 1920 as an outlet for amateur journalism. Gidlow, who Mills referred to as Sappho, addressed her love poems directly to women. The pair read and were inspired by Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde, and they envisioned themselves as inheritors of an ancient queer tradition spanning from the Greeks to Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Walt Whitman. In 1923, Gid low published On a Grey Thread , a groundbreaking volume of sapphic poetry. Her poem “Love Sleep” begins: “Watch my Love in sleep/ Is she not beautiful/ As a young flower at night/ Weary and glad with dew?/ Pale curved body/ That I have kissed too much/ Warm with slumber’s flush.” Gidlow’s poetry represents a subsequent generation of North American lesbians for whom naming became a necessity, and for whom the closet no longer meant safety, but suffocation. R EFERENCES Butlin, Susan. The Practice of Her Profession: Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism. McGill-Queen’s Uni versity Press, 2009. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture . Columbia University Press, 1993. Duder, Cameron. Awfully Devoted Women : Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900–65 . UBC Press, 2010. Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. 2: Sexual Inver sion . The University Press, Limited, 1900. Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America . Columbia University Press, 1991.

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