Chicago, 1935
Where desire and damage tell the same lies
A queer literary historical novel
Enter the TrapIn 1935 Chicago, Eleanor Wentworth is a woman psychoanalyst in a lavender marriage who endangers her career and the hidden queer world around the Velvet Trap when she turns the treatment of young reporter Eddie Langley into a sexual affair. The club is held together by Vivian Moreau, its underworld owner, and Violet Sinclair, Vivian’s married Gold Coast lover.
Despite threats from police, professional censure, violent men, and social ruin, the women survive by becoming one another’s shelter—sometimes as lovers, sometimes as accomplices, and often as the only ones who know what must be protected and what must be forgiven
Slip down the hidden stairs beneath the Clean Sweep Laundry, and Chicago falls away. Below street level, the Velvet Trap divides itself into the Red Room and the Blue Room.
Brass and wood. Red leather and red lights. Perfume and smoke. A turntable gives the room a pulse with Duke Ellington’s Solitude, maybe Billie Holiday's What a Little Moonlight Can Do. Behind the Red Bar is Vivian’s office, where the ledgers tell one story and the whiskey tells another.
Cool lights and blue leather banquettes, and Sam is always ready to pour. Behind him hangs a rack of keys for those Vivian trusts. Beyond the door marked “Private” are the Prometheus, the Hades, and the Arcadian, rooms arranged for unusual appetites. Across the corridor waits a library of exceptional art and unacceptable books.
Psychoanalyst, doctor, wife. In her Hyde Park office, she helps patients survive what her profession pathologizes.
Dangerous. Not cruel. A working-class reporter with a hunger to watch and a taste for restraint. In the Velvet Trap, her compulsion enters many rooms.
Proprietress of the Velvet Trap. The club is only one of her businesses. Secrets are another.
Sweet. Not innocent. With wealth and a taste for risk, she eases between Gold Coast tea rooms and the hidden world of the Velvet Trap.
These works inspired me or share some aspect of the novel: queer secrecy, psychoanalysis, forbidden attachment, and desire that blurs care and harm.
Novel
Yael van der Wouden - 2024
A novel of erotic secrecy and repression. Like The Velvet Trap, The Safekeep is interested in desire as something that exposes the lies in ordinary life.
Novel
Julia May Jonas - 2022
Transgression, authority, appetite, and the lies told to justify crossing a line. Its interest in profession and erotic fixation means it's good company for The Velvet Trap.
Novel
Lauren Elkin - 2024
Psychoanalysis and erotic history. Its interest in analysis and desire resonate with the world of Eleanor, Eddie, and the Trap.
Author
All Waters’s novels inspired me. Especially Fingersmith (2002) and The Paying Guests (2014). Waters’s fiction has queer historical desire driving class pressure and erotic danger. The Velvet Trap shares that interest in hidden relationships and the cost of becoming visible.
Novel
Graeme Macrae Burnet - 2021
A literary novel of psychoanalysis and false identity. Like The Velvet Trap, Case Study understands the consulting room as a place where authority and performance blur.
Novel
Sylvia Brownrigg - 2006
A therapist listens to patients while her own life becomes harder to keep outside the room. Like The Velvet Trap, it's what the patient can't know and what the analyst can't hide.
Novel
Judith Rossner - 1983
A psychoanalytic novel of sessions between a young patient and her analyst. Its interest in attachment and the analyst’s private life makes it a lineage for The Velvet Trap.
Novel
D. M. Thomas - 1981
A fictional Freud case history where erotic fantasy and historical catastrophe share the frame. A dark ancestor of The Velvet Trap.
Novel
F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1934
Iconic. A psychiatrist marries a patient whose recovery has become inseparable from his identity. The marriage isn't a cure that later goes wrong because there was never a treatment to begin with. The Velvet Trap also asks what happens when treatment becomes intimacy and care becomes capture.
Film
Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski
Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life follows Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst in Paris whose careful life unravels after the death of one of her patients.
For readers of The Velvet Trap, the connection is pressure. Jodie Foster does a magnificent job of projecting professional authority. She can interpret others, even as she remains opaque to her own desire and guilt.
Where A Private Life is mystery and noir, The Velvet Trap is secrecy, surveillance. Eleanor Wentworth is trying to survive the consequences of a treatment that has become indefensible and impossible to contain.
Film
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is a gorgeous erotic thriller adapted from Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith. Set in 1930s, a pickpocket with a scheme to steal a fortune that turns into a private attachment.
A tale told in glimpses and glances. Where The Handmaiden moves through deception and revenge, The Velvet Trap turns toward institutional pressure and transgressive power.
Teresa Wymore is a writer and illustrator of historical and speculative fiction, and a student at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. She is especially interested in how lesbian desire has been understood, pathologized, and lived within psychoanalytic theory and culture.
Her work has appeared in print anthologies, including the Lambda Award-winning Lesbian Cowboys: Erotic Adventures, and in online and small-press venues, most recently The Contact at BGSP. Alongside fiction, she writes autotheory from the couch in four-day-a-week analysis and scholarly work in psychoanalytic theory.
The Velvet Trap is a complete queer historical novel currently seeking literary representation.
