Abstract
Reflecting upon Radclyffe Hall’s decision to write a novel about the suffering of the female homosexual, Hall’s lover of almost three decades, Una Troubridge, wrote that: ‘it was her absolute conviction that such a book could only be written by a sexual invert, who alone could be qualified by personal knowledge and experience to speak on behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority’.1 There is little doubt that Hall’s own life, and the lives of friends and acquaintances provided material and inspiration for The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928. However, The Well, as a whole, is not a roman à clef, and this chapter provides invaluable insight into the cultural and social backdrop against which authors of Sapphic modernist romans à clef were working. Like many writers, Hall inserted aspects of her experience into her novels. What differentiates a novel like The Well from those novels that I will identify as Sapphic romans à clef is its address, which aimed to determine the reaction of an uncomplicated, mainstream audience, rather than anticipating and negotiating multiple simultaneous audience reactions. Hall aimed to change minds, and to elicit a single sympathetic response, and this motivation is written into the pages of her novel. The importance of this chapter, then, lies in what it reveals about the limits of the speakable in the interwar period; its establishment of an understanding of the configuration of public and private that governed such speech; its illumination of the strategies that enabled writers to write about samesex desire (as well as those that failed); and the work it does in differentiating the roman à clef from novels that simply borrow from life.
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Notes
Lady Una Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hammond and Hammond, 1961), 81–2. Hall was prepared for the attention the publication of The Well of Loneliness was likely to draw to her own sexual orientation. According to Una Troubridge, Hall consulted her on whether she was willing to be subject to the public scrutiny such a novel would bring to their private lives. Troubridge responded that she was ‘sick to death of ambiguities and only wished to be known for what [she] was’. See Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall, 82.
Lovat Dickson, Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle (London and Toronto: Collins, 1975), 132, my emphasis.
Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (London: John Murray, 1997), 196.
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago, 1928), 246.
Diana Souhami, Wild Girls: The Love Life of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, (London: Phoenix, 2004), 69.
Rebecca O’Rourke, Reflecting on The Well of Loneliness (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 85.
See Lillian Faderman and Ann Williams, ‘Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Image’, Conditions 1.1 (1977): 31–49; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), 317–23.
Blanche Wiesen Cook, ‘“Women Alone Stir my Imagination”: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition’, Signs 4.4 (1979): 718–39; Catherine R. Stimpson, ‘Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English’, Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 363–79; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 218–21. Gilbert and Gubar position ‘the lesbian’ and the lesbian couple as outsiders, although they also discuss the novel in terms of its subversive approach to ‘gender categories’ (Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, 354).
Heather Love, ‘Spoiled Identity: Stephen Gordon’s Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4 (2001): 499.
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.
Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (1990; repr., Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008), 153.
Clare Hemmings, ‘“All My Life I’ve Been Waiting for Something …”: Theorizing Femme Narrative in The Well of Loneliness’, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 194.
Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 2.
Esther Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman’, in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr (London: Penguin, 1991), 283.
Havelock Ellis, Commentary on The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall (New York: Doubleday, 1928), 6.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Volume II, Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company Publishers, 1928), 1.
See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; repr., New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 83–4, my emphasis.
Hall’s personal conception of her own sexuality was undoubtedly informed by sexology, but it is important to note that it was less fixed than that manifested in the character of Stephen Gordon. A number of critics have commented upon the distinctions that need to be drawn between Hall’s life and that of her most famous protagonist. Particular attention has been paid to the stylishness of Hall’s female masculinity, which did not equate to ‘inversion’ at the time (see Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, 111–12); her sense of humour (see Terry Castle, Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996]); and the fact that she had many great friends, both heterosexual and homosexual, and lived a life of ‘privilege, seduction, freedom and fun’, rather than of isolated anguish (see Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, 160).
Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1908), 11.
Radclyffe Hall, The Unlit Lamp (London: Virago, 1924), 55, 116.
Gillian Whitlock, ‘“Everything Is Out of Place”: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Literary Tradition’, Feminist Studies 13.3 (1987): 561; Laura Green, ‘Hall of Mirrors: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Modernist Fictions of Identity’, Twentieth Century Literature 49.1 (2003): 292.
For one of few relatively recent critical works on The Unlit Lamp, see Trevor Hope, ‘Mother, Don’t You See I’m Burning? Between Female Homosexuality and Homosociality in Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp’, in Coming out of Feminism, eds Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal and Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 123–53. Hope performs a psychoanalytic reading of the novel, and is particularly preoccupied with its mother-daughter relationship. This relationship is undoubtedly the most significant in the book, yet I would argue, in opposition to Hope, that in spite of Joan’s mother’s success in transforming her daughter from a feminist lesbian to a copy of herself, the novel sets out possibilities for same-sex affect that are not present in The Well.
Rebecca West, ‘Concerning the Censorship’, in Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log (New York: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1931), 10.
Ethel Mannin, Confessions and Impressions (London: Jarrolds, 1930), 226.
Arnold Bennett, review of The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall, Evening Standard, 9 August 1928, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 56.
Leonard Woolf, review of The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall, Nation and Athenaeum, 4 August 1928, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 53–4. Hall strongly objected to the tenor of these reviews, for she insisted — to the point of paranoia — that she be taken seriously as an artist.
James Douglas, ‘A Book that Must Be Suppressed’, in Palatable Poison, eds Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 38.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Middlebrow’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 155.
Woolf to Quentin Bell, 1 November, 1928, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 3:555.
Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday: 1925–1939 (London: Angus and Robertson, 1972), 48.
Katrina Rolley, ‘The Treatment of Homosexuality and The Well of Loneliness’, in Writing and Censorship in Britain, eds Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 224.
Elizabeth Ladensen, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 120.
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© 2012 Sashi Nair
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Nair, S. (2012). ‘Moral poison’: Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness. In: Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230356184_2
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