ABSTRACT
The "Cult of the Clitoris" paragraph then launched the sort of enticing narrative that a scandal requires and also made its publisher, Noel Pemberton-Billing, a public sensation. In a few weeks, Allan, the play's star, and J. T. Grein, its producer, began legal proceedings against Billing on a charge of obscene and criminal libel. This chapter considers how a wartime crisis of reading and representation configured national and social anxieties through the operation of lesbian fantasy. The suggestion of lesbianism aroused a cultural frisson but lesbianism itself lacked a legal definition, it provided a salient figure of sexual fantasy through which the nation could simultaneously condense and disperse its unrepresentable anxieties about national health and security. The very phrase "The Cult of the Clitoris" combines the shock of anatomical reference with the suggestive danger of female sexual and political independence. The phrase dismembers and thus diminishes the female body, but it also invokes the danger of female sexual difference.
