By May Thomson
There is a short fragment of Sappho that simply reads: ‘you burn me.’ With these three words (just two in ancient Greek), she exquisitely conveys the intense, consuming nature of love. They can also be read as one of the earliest uses of burns as markers of queer love – a metaphor Chloe Michelle Howarth reanimates and makes titular in her debut lesbian novel, Sunburn.
Sunburn, true to its name, is a stinging, red-raw account of first love. The novel follows Lucy as she falls in love with the startlingly unapologetic Susannah. But, of course, there is always Martin – Lucy’s doting, handsome-enough friend, who everyone in the claustrophobic Crossmore expects her to marry. Martin is safety, while Susannah is, in the fullest sense of the word, divine happiness.
It is Susannah – loud, passionate, and fiercely loving – who wins the reader’s heart (as well as Lucy’s). The other characters lack the same depth; Martin is a flat character who exists to perform a narrative function and Lucy is a dull mirror, at once uncompromising and reflective, prioritising her reception over her internal reality – pleasing no one in the process. Susannah, conversely, is depressingly patient, clawing at the idea that Lucy will choose her loudly and leave the ‘sweet wastleland’ of Crossmore behind. Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of the novel is that, even after choosing Martin, Lucy loses everything she has so desperately clung onto. And none of the pain was worth it.
Like love itself, Howarth’s imagery is starkly contrasting – blending the thematic threads of sunlight and faith with visceral, bodily imagery: ‘I am all wounds, Susannah, and you are the loveliest pus. Flooding in to heal me. Yellow as the sun.’ These lines reflect the unlikely blend of the corporeal and sunny. The text feels, as a result, as grounded as it is lofty – as solar as sickening. A study in cognitive dissonance, Lucy’s wild emotions set the rhythm for the text, sending us volleying back and forth between mad, unapologetic love, and guilty, repentant cowardice. Despite being a girl, Susannah is more than Lucy could ever have imagined and later, when she leaves to travel and take other lovers, she remains unresolvedly present.
There is threefold value in the sunburn metaphor for queer love. First, it represents queer joy; lesbian love is sun-like – dazzling and bright. The sun becomes a figure of vitality and affirmation, casting queerness as something vivid – even life-giving. Second, the sun motif represents truth, picking up common associations with light and honesty. To step into the sun is to step into visibility – but this comes with risk. Exposure can be painful, and the resulting ‘burn’ reflects the often painful and strikingly visible cost of living openly. The metaphor thus captures the ambivalence of truth: it is illuminating but not without harm.
Sunburn also speaks to the themes of pain and visibility. Unlike a hidden wound, a burn is raw, blistering, and marked on the skin for others to see. It is a public record of one’s exposure, suggesting that queerness (or, at least, the reception of it) leaves traces that are not easily concealed. Thus, sunburn becomes a kind of memory, imprinting on the body beyond the moment of exposure and contact. Likewise, the temporality of sunburn elevates this representation; it’s a delayed reaction, surfacing hours after a day in the sun.
Queerness, likewise, is latent – often belatedly realised. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us, shame is not only wounding but generative – a mark of exposure that both hurts and makes queer identity legible. Sunburn, in Howarth’s novel, works in exactly this way: a searing trace on the skin, painful yet luminous, a record of love lived under the risk of visibility. This exposure carries a double valence, then, as it is framed as at once vital and wounding.
This metaphor, standing in opposition to metaphors like the closet and the shadow in its focus on visibility, judgement, and joy, clarifies the dynamics between Lucy and Susannah. When Lucy lies in the sun, Susannah lies beside her. Susannah is no Juliet, however, and is not equated with the sun consistently. The sun represents something beyond a lover – an external force that shapes queer life – and it shines on both girls. The metaphor also has implications for heterosexuality. While heterosexuality, for Lucy (or the queer subject more broadly), might be imagined as a life lived in shadow, queerness is figured in searing light. The sun figures as a metaphor for queer love that does not simply encompass judgment and shame, but also the conditions of unapologetic and honest existence.
For all its sadness, Sunburn cannot be reduced to a lesbian tragedy. By treating sunburn as both wound and illumination, Howarth adds to a wider tradition in queer literature that understands desire as inextricably bound up with exposure. This metaphor does not simply describe the romance between Lucy and Susannah, but reconfigures how we read the visibility of queer love – as something at once joyous, wounding, and indelible.
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