Chicago, 1935
Where desire and damage tell the same lies
A queer literary historical novel
Enter the TrapDr. Eleanor Wentworth has made herself difficult to dismiss: physician, London-trained psychoanalyst, doctor at the Chicago Institute, surgeon’s wife. In 1935 Chicago, she treats patients in a city where desire can move from diagnosis to court record. Her lavender marriage gives her a protected life that depends on keeping certain names and appetites separate.
Then Vivian Moreau, Eleanor’s oldest friend and the owner of the Velvet Trap, sends her Edith “Eddie” Langley.
Eddie is a young reporter from a working-class Catholic family, dutiful at Mass but defiant in trousers downtown. At the Velvet Trap, she is drawn to rope rituals that make fear bearable by giving it procedure. And then she goes too far.
Eleanor tells herself Eddie is one patient among many. Then treatment slips into rides home, late-night telephone calls, and meetings outside the office. When the wealthy mother of another patient accuses Eleanor of encouraging the sexual deviance she is supposed to cure, the Institute demands statements and supervision.
Eleanor should retreat into professional caution. Instead, she has already made Eddie’s treatment indefensible. Rope and compromise shape their sexual life. Each woman gives the other something real, and neither can call it harmless. In a profession that knows how to excuse male doctors’ violations of female patients, Eleanor’s real danger isn’t that she crosses a line. It’s that she crosses it with a woman.
When Vivian suffers a heart attack, the women lose the person who knew which men needed flattery and which ones required an envelope. Eddie steps into Vivian’s role too soon and suffers for her naiveté. Even her attempt to honor the Trap risks danger: a stolen notebook could identify the people she meant to protect.
As Institute supervision presses harder and the Trap’s hidden world grows more exposed, Eleanor can no longer keep desire separate from the structures built to hide it. Eddie demands more than care. Vivian’s absence leaves danger unmanaged. And Eleanor must face how much of her authority has become appetite.
In the world of the Velvet Trap, desire and damage tell the same lies.
Slip down the hidden stairs beneath the Clean Sweep Laundry, and Chicago falls away. Below street level, the Velvet Trap divides itself in two: the Red Room and the Blue Room.
Brass and wood. Red leather and red lights. Perfume and smoke. A turntable gives the room its pulse: 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, the whiskey tells another, and real names are never spoken.
Cool lights and blue leather banquettes. 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 particular 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 would rather pathologize.
Dangerous. Not cruel. A working-class reporter with a hunger to watch and a taste for restraint. In the Velvet Trap, her compulsion finds its 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 drawing rooms and the hidden world of the Velvet Trap.
These works share some aspect of the novel: queer secrecy, psychoanalysis, forbidden attachment, hidden rooms, women under pressure, and desire that straddles the border between care and harm.
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 intelligence and professional authority. She can interpret others, even as she remains opaque to her own desire, loneliness, guilt, and capacity for harm.
Where A Private Life turns toward mystery and noir, The Velvet Trap turns toward queer secrecy, institutional surveillance, and the historical danger of lesbian desire in 1935 Chicago. Eleanor Wentworth is trying to survive the consequences of a treatment that has become indefensible and impossible to contain.
Novel
Yael van der Wouden
A novel of erotic secrecy and repression. Like The Velvet Trap, The Safekeep is interested in desire as something that exposes the lies of ordinary life.
Novel
Julia May Jonas
A sharp novel about transgression, authority, appetite, and the lies told to justify crossing a line. Its interest in professional position and erotic fixation makes it good company for The Velvet Trap.
Novel
Lauren Elkin
Psychoanalysis and erotic history. Its layered structure and interest in analysis and desire resonate with the world of Eleanor, Eddie, Charlie, and the Trap.
Author
All of Waters’s novels inspired and my series The Velvet Trap with their historically rich, queer, sensual attention to class, secrecy, risk. The Velvet Trap shares the same interest in hidden arrangements and the costs of becoming visible.
Film
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is a 1930s Korean erotic thriller adapted from Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith. A pickpocket with a scheme to steal a fortune that turns into a private attachment.
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 literary, historical, and speculative fiction, and a student at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. Shen 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 literary historical novel currently seeking literary representation.
