Forbidden lives

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE A FORBIDDEN LIFE? SOPHIE WARD HEARS FROM THE PANELISTS SET TO DISCUSS THE TOPIC AT THIS YEAR’S HOMOTOPIA FESTIVAL IN LIVERPOOL

“Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?”

“Always,” Carol said, smiling, too. Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (Carol)

So it must have seemed to Patricia Highsmith and the women she encountered in the New York of the 1950s. Impossible attractions, to be pursued in secret if at all, with the understanding that such love might be more enhanced than diminished by the nature of the forbidden.

Highsmith, educated and independent, lived and wrote in a time when lesbianism was certainly unacceptable but was also, unlike male homosexuality, inconceivable. As Todd Haynes, director of the recent film adaptation of Carol, discussed in an interview with Film Comment last year, “the just unimagined notions of what love between women might look like and how it might be explored” are at the centre of Highsmith’s novel, and how this opacity allowed for a certain amount of freedom in society.

While neither Carol or her lover Therese escape from their affair unpunished, such a concept of the “forbidden” with its frisson of naughtiness and taboo hardly bears the weight of biblical consequence; a fruit which must not be tasted lest the wrath of the Creator banishes you from paradise. Or your religion, country, society and home. Or perhaps, that is too superficial an understanding of the women’s torment. Perhaps, they truly do lose paradise.

When the television adaptation of Joanna Trollope’s novel A Village Affair was first shown in 1995, many women asked me why the two female protagonists, played by myself and Kerry Fox, did not end up together. They were in love, they had weathered the disapproval of their families and a marital break-up, why could they not have had a fairy-tale ending? I, too, was concerned at the unhappy resolution and believed that life could have been very different for the lovers if they had been braver. Within two years I understood better the very particular challenges my character had faced when, living in a small English village, married to a man and with two young children, I fell in love with my now wife. For a long time it seemed it would have been very much easier to not be in love, to not pursue a life together, possibly not to exist at all, rather than face the verbal slings and newsprint arrows of my outrageous fortune.