Hard Times and Heartaches:

Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness

Heather Love
University of Virginia

What to do, then, with the figure referred to, in various times and circumstances, as the "mannish lesbian," the "true invert," the "bull dagger," or the "butch"? You see her in old photographs or paintings with legs solidly planted, wearing a top hat and a man's jacket, staring defiantly out of the frame, her hair slicked back or clipped over her ears; or you meet her on the street in T-shirt and boots, squiring a brassily elegant woman on one tattooed arm. She is an embarrassment indeed to a political movement that swears it is the enemy of traditional gender categories and yet validates lesbianism as the ultimate form of femaleness.

--Esther Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian"

 

In her groundbreaking 1984 article "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman," Esther Newton offered a radical new reading of The Well of Loneliness, and of its heroine, Stephen Gordon, whom Newton introduced as "[w]ithout question, the most infamous mannish lesbian of all time." (Newton, 559) For fifteen years Hall's 1928 novel had been the subject of intense criticism in the lesbian community. With its "third sex" heroine, butch-femme romance, and tragic ending, The Well found few champions among the lesbian feminists of the 1970's, whose model of lesbianism "as the ultimate form of femaleness" did not account for the likes of Stephen Gordon. Challenging the "anti-Well approach" of earlier critics, Newton pointed to the historical necessity of Stephen's mannishness. Newton credited Hall with disrupting "the asexual model of romantic friendship" (Newton, 560) of the 19th century and with giving us the first self-defining and fully sexual lesbian character in literature.

If in 1997 Stephen is no longer quite so infamous as she once was, it is in large part due to the influence of critics such as Newton, who during the 80's and early 90's worked to revalue butch/femme identity as a space of political resistance, erotic self-definition, and aesthetic free play. Their recuperation of the abjected figure of the stone butch has significantly altered critical responses to Radclyffe Hall's female invert in this decade. As a result of what Bonnie Zimmerman has called "the decline in the hegemony of feminism over lesbian theory," the most virulent attacks on Hall which labelled her as both homophobic and misogynist have come to an end. Critics have accepted and, at times, reveled in Stephen's butchness, remembering her courage and celebrating her role in the formation of modern lesbian identity. Such an upsurge in critical interest in Hall is reflected in the recent increase in Ph.D. dissertations and Master's theses devoted to her work, as well as in sympathetic treatments of Hall in the last fifteen years or so by critics such as Jonathan Dollimore, Gillian Whitlock, Theresa DeLauretis, Terry Castle, Adam Parkes, Julie Abraham, and Joanne Glasgow. In addition, the publication of Glasgow's edition of Hall's love letters to Evguenia Souline in NYU's Cutting Edge series has made an important biographical resource available to students of Hall's work.

However, despite this revaluation of butch-femme identity and increased interest in Hall's work, critics still remain resistant to several aspects of her work. In particular, readers have continued to criticize Hall's work for its extremely abject tone, its expressions of self-hatred, and its tragic ending. While some recent lesbian critics have been able to make their peace with the much-vaunted masculinity of Stephen's character--with her neckties, riding breeches, and even her "narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered" body--few have been found any value in Hall's account of the difficulty of Stephen's identification. While Stephen's butch pleasures are no longer anathema, her butch pains have remained extremely problematic for many readers. The horror of Stephen's situation has overwhelmed many lesbian readers, who have criticized Hall for reinscription of several of the culture's most homophobic beliefs about lesbian identity. While few would argue with Hall's intention to argue for the female invert's right to existence many have been troubled by the means she employed to this end, and have rejected The Well as excessively dark. Critics have argued that her portrait of Stephen as a "freak" and a "mistake of nature" offers lesbians little in the way of a role model; at the same time, they have argued that it reinforces the homophobic beliefs of the general reader.

For most critics, then, even in the 90's, The Well remains a bitter pill, one that, as Jaime Hovey points out in her 1995 dissertation, is still difficult to swallow. Hovey writes,

[Hall's] championing of masculine valor, the voluntary sacrifice of Stephen's lesbian desires made sublime through the imagery of Catholic martyrdom, the evocation of homosexual culture through the language of racism and degeneration, the denigration of male effeminacy, and the final humiliating appeal to 'normal' society for the inclusion of congenital inverts, all are strategies which have made this a hard novel for many lesbian readers to stomach. Although recent celebration of butch identity has somewhat rehabilitated The Well of Loneliness from its characterization in the lesbian canon as the representative of, in Blanche Weisen Clark's famous phrase, 'the "butch", the tears, the despair of it all;' lesbian critics still distance themselves from its embarrassingly needy, earnest plea to God and country for tolerance, preferring to retool its disquieting sentimental 'pathos' into a happier, campier 'strain of kitsch.'

Critics who have taken these recalcitrant issues head-on have continued to lament The Well's status as the lesbian novel, and to reject its centrality in the tradition. Only critics who have attempted to "retool" the pathos of Hall's novel to coat its bitterness with a campier, kitschier, and more ironic sensibility have more fully embraced The Well as an essential and valuable text in lesbian history. Hovey astutely identifies the two competing strains of Hall criticism at the present moment: the continuing dismissal of Hall's work as "too sad" and the more recent "happier, campier" strain of Hall criticism. In the following pages I would like to argue in particular against the second strain of criticism, which seeks to recuperate Hall's work by de-emphasizing its tragic aspects. While I see the value of that gesture, especially given the many homophobic readings to which Hall has been subjected, in my view it is precisely the tragedy of Hall's text that makes it so compelling. I would suggest a reading of Hall's work which neither rejects nor retools its most challenging and melancholic moments, but rather takes them as a starting point in exploring the complex difficulties of lesbian public identification and the stigma it carries. The pain of Hall's text is instructive and, I would argue, ultimately irrecuperable for any happier narrative of the formation of lesbian identity.

Love me, only love me the way I love you. Angela, for God's sake, try to love me a little don't throw me away because if you do I am utterly finished. You know how I love you, with my soul and my body; if it's wrong, grotesque, unholyhave pity. I'll be humble. Oh, my darling, I am humble now; I'm just a poor, heart-broken freak of a creature who loves you and needs you more than its life...I'm some awful mistakeGod's mistake I don't know if there are any more like me, I pray not for their sakes, because it's pure hell"

--The Well of Loneliness

Unhappy lovers write unhappy letters painful to write, painful to receive, painful to read weeks, months, even years after the fact. But Stephen Gordon's lovemaking reaches depths of self-abasement few have ventured, as she throws herself entirely on the mercy of the beloved; while her naming of herself as "heart-broken" and "humble" is fairly typical of this genre, her appeal for pity as a "freak" and as "God's mistake" takes us into another territory entirely. It is in these desperate tones that Stephen addresses herself to Angela Crossby, the married neighborhood woman who conducts an ambiguous affair with the young and inexperienced Stephen and then "throws her away." Occupied with an affair with another neighborhood man, Angela rejects Stephen's continued advances and finally betrays her by exposing this same letter to her husband, who then turns it over to Stephen's mother. Her mother continues the pitiless scourging of Stephen's frail subjectivity as she expels her from Morton, their ancestral home, saying, "I shall never be able to look at you now without thinking of the deadly insult of your face and body to the memory of the father who bred you." (Well, 200) Immediately after the confrontation with her mother, Stephen is drawn by a "strong natal instinct" to her father's study. There she is overcome by a horrible loneliness; Sir Philip, who passed away during Stephen's childhood, had been one of the only characters in the novel to treat her with understanding. It is at this point that Stephen reaches the low point in her self-hatred and self-pity, bottoming out deep in the well of loneliness. Hall writes,

All the loneliness that had gone before was as nothing to this new loneliness of spirit. An immense desolation swept down upon her, an immense need to cry out and claim understanding for herself, an immense need to find an answer to the riddle of her unwanted being. All round her were grey and crumbling ruins, and under those ruins her love lay bleeding; shamefully wounded by Angela Crossby, shamefully soiled and defiled by her mother a piteous, suffering, defenceless thing, it lay bleeding under the ruins. (Well, 203)

Many readers have been overwhelmed by the horror of Stephen's situation, and have criticized Hall for her portrait of Stephen as a tragic mannish lesbian. Such a portrait, critics have argued, simply reinforces normative culture values, and demonstrates Hall's own internalized homophobia, her inability to conceive of homosexuality on her own terms. But in my view the interest of Hall's novel is precisely that she does not attempt such an escape; rather she attempts to describe the experience of bearing an abjected identity within the dominant society. Stephen's self-hatred and self-pity are a reflection of the continual rejection that she is subjected to as a result of her "aberrant" sexuality and gender-identification. Hall exposes the extent to which such "shameful wounding" is not incidental to but rather constitutive of Stephen's innermost self. Unwonted or illicit desires determine her very being as "unwanted," permanently marked by refusal, and by the tragedy of her unassimilable existence. Hall does not offer a humanist vision of Stephen's "true self," separate from society and the traumas it inflicts. Nothing is held in reserve; no corner of the self is untouched. Hall's portrait of the tragic lesbian comes into distinct conflict with later utopian visions of lesbian identity as outside or beyond the terms of the patriarchy (Stephen's love most emphatically does not "surpass the love of men"...). In place of such arguments, Hall offers simply a plea for social acceptance, which, in her radically historicist view, is the precondition of any shift in identity or consciousness.

Following this difficult scene, we witness Stephen's pivotal acquisition of a determinate identity, as, searching for "an answer to the riddle of her unwanted being," she finds her father's copy of the sexological work of Krafft-Ebing. There Stephen discovers that she has a place in existence, as she finds in the "battered old book" the necessary clues to identify herself as a female invert. Stephen's embrace of the medical discourse of inversion offers a textbook example of Foucault's concept of "reverse discourse," which he describes as the process by which a marginalized group begins to speak on its own behalf in the same terms by which it has been rendered marginal. Hall herself made just such a move in her writing of The Well of Loneliness. In her writing of the novel, Hall embraced Havelock Ellis' portrait of the female invert, even including an introduction by the famous sexologist. Hall's embrace of this discourse allowed her to represent Stephen as the first fully sexual and self-identifying lesbian character in literature, but the costs of such a strategy are evident throughout the novel. Stephen is haunted by the associations of the abjected identity she claims; even as she attempts to resist its stigmatizing effects, she is marked by the refusal and scorn to which such a public identification exposes her. The tragedy of Stephen's "unwanted being" culminates at the end of the novel in her sacrifice of her lover Mary to a happy heterosexual union with Martin Hallam. In The Well's final scene, Stephen martyrs herself to the discourse of inversion, giving up the happiness she has known with Mary to open herself to the horrible army of inverts who physically possess her, demanding that she speak in their behalf and "tearing her to pieces." (Well, 436-7)

Several critics, also torn to pieces by the end of The Well, have taken solace in the differences they have been able to locate between Hall's novel and her life story. Arguing against homophobic confusions of fiction and life, many lesbian critics have insisted that Hall's life was not so maudlin, pointing out that she lived with Una Troubridge through the end of her life, that she "maintained a steadfast interest in her own sexual integrity and satisfaction." I would not argue that Stephen's life story is Hall's life story, however, I find little to be gained in detailing their biographical differences. What compels me in The Well of Loneliness is Hall's inscription of her experience as a woman bearing a stigmatized identity during the 1920's. The fact that Hall stayed with Una, lived comfortably for much of her life in England, or experienced sexual satisfaction with her lovers does not change the fact of Hall's deep identification and concern with "the melancholy of the invert."

Joanne Glasgow takes up several of these points in her introduction to Your John, Radclyffe Hall's late letters to Evguenia Souline. These late letters do describe many of the pleasures and passions of their affair, but what is more striking about them is the extent to which these pleasures are inverwoven with the birth-pangs of Hall's lesbian identity. Hall's words significantly echo many of the most troubling passages of The Well of Loneliness, as she confronts in a variety of more or less explicit ways the difficulty of bearing a visibly deviant sexual identity in 1920's British society. Like her invention Stephen Gordon, Hall was intimately familiar with this difficulty, which Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has called "the price paid by those who literally used their bodies and their emotions to invert received order."

Hall discusses this difficulty at length in the following passage from a 1934 letter:

Last night I had one of my fits of the glooms. When the weight of my life lay heavey [sic] upon me, when everything seemed dust and ashes in my mouth, when I felt that I had not made good at all, that I would never make good being what I am that the scales were too heavily weighted against me I get like that sometimes & have done for years it is the melancholy of the inverted. I tell you this because it is God's truth that you can lift me right out of such moods, that when I am lying in your arms & you in mine such moods cannot touch me ... I feel battle-weary, and you are my rest, my joy and my ultimate justification. (YJ, 80)

Hall's characterization of herself as "battle-weary" may sound like a hackneyed convention of the love-letter, and yet, in reading a passage such as this, it is significant to recall that Hall and others like her were fighting an almost daily battle with powerful forces of homophobia. Hall's invocation of Souline, with whom she had fallen in love earlier that year, as her "ultimate justification," may give some indication of just how tenuous were the foundations of Hall's demand for the right to existence.

Like Stephen, Hall conceives of herself as an invert, explaining herself and her desire to Souline in those terms. Often, she resists the melodrama of such a description, as in a letter where she ventures that Souline is "probably bisexual." She writes, "Nature, my darling, is not limited by the views ... of a hospital matron." (YJ, 52) Nonetheless, Hall's letters betray a serious anxiety that she not be seen as a freak or a pervert. On occasion, Hall confronts these concerns directly, as when she writes, "I am not such a freak that the thought of the love of my body need scare you," (YJ, 49) or again when she reassures Souline, writing, "you are not a morbid unnatural creature who has fallen deeply in love with a devil." (YJ, 52) Another strategy Hall employs is to give Souline a kind of mantra to repeat to herself: "Look the thing straight in the face and say: 'I have fallen very much in love with an invert, and thank God, she has fallen in love with me. There is nothing to make me feel lonely & bitter.'" (YJ, 52) Or again: "Just say to yourself 'I'm a normal woman and when my John loves me my response is normal.'" (YJ, 69)

More often Hall does not address this anxiety about her inversion directly, but betrays it in her excesses of concern about Souline's perception of her. For instance, when Hall reminisces to Souline about their time together in Paris, she writes, "You'r[e] so shy that it[']s like making love to a school girl not that I have ever done such a thing!" (YJ, 60) On another occasion, Hall sends Souline a photo enclosed along with her letter, and writes in the postscript, "This snapshot was taken in Mickie's garden. The spots on my arm are not a fell disease, they are frightful mosquito bites..." (YJ, 49) The logic of Hall's protest may not make sense until we consider it in light of another photograph of Hall, the one published on the front page of the Daily Express on Sunday, August 19th, 1928, under the banner headline "A Book That Must Be Suppressed." The article that followed--James Douglas' violent homophobic attack on Hall and her novel--began the legal process that would result in the banning in England of The Well of Loneliness in November of that year. In a section of the aritcle entitled, "The Plague," Douglas calls on British society to persecute homosexuals, and to "clean itself from the leprosy of these lepers."

What is most interesting to me in these letters is the inseparability for Hall of the public discourse of inversion from her private experience of desire and sexuality. A similar slippage between the public and the private appears in an interesting passage in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeleine D. Davis' oral history of a working-class lesbian community in the 40's and 50's. Reporting on the feedback they received from their narrators, they quote the criticism of one narrator in particular, a woman named Vic:

'It sounds like it was pretty much the good side of the whole thing. It didn't sound like there was much on hard times or heartaches, or whatever you want to call it that really happened. I don't know how you took your interviews, if you just took certain things out. It sounded like it was a really nice life, and it wasn't ...' When we asked her what she meant had we left out how bad people felt over breakups or how badly people treated one anothershe replied, 'Mostly how society treated you when you were out and things like that, not so much the people you were with.'

Perhaps one reason that Radclyffe Hall's work has remained so controversial in the lesbian community is that she rarely, if ever, "left out how bad people felt." This melancholic and even pathetic quality is the most salient feature of her novel, what remains with most readers in spite of protestations, denials, and dismissals. While many readers have suggested that we move on from this exceedingly grim portrait, I would argue that it is precisely this abject remainder the stubborn traces of Hall's suffering that most warrants our critical attention. In this regard, I find the confusion between heartbreak and homophobia--the slippage between "how bad people feel" and "how bad people treat you"--an immensely compelling aspect of Hall's life and writing. While critics have for the most dismissed such a confusion as internalized homophobia on Hall's part, I would argue that it is only in attending to this confusion that we can begin to understand the formation of modern lesbian identity in its properly historical context.

In The Well of Loneliness and in her letters, Hall described the pleasures and pains she experienced in claiming a deviant identity as the starting place for a movement for political and civil rights. It is no wonder that such an account should make lesbian readers uncomfortable, for it calls attention to the ambivalent legacy of our own still-marginal identity. But we should not for this reason reject, rebuke, or condescend to Hall. Rather, I would argue that we ought to lay claim to our own complex and difficult history. Despite the bitterness, we ought to swallow hard, and thank Hall for the butch, the tears, and the despair of it all.

Footnotes

1 Esther Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman" Signs 9.4 (Summer 1984), p. 558.

2 In particular I am thinking of the work of Joan Nestle, Amber Hollibaugh, Cherre Moraga, Sue-Ellen Case, Theresa de Lauretis, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, and Madeline D. Davis.

3 Bonnie Zimmerman, "Lesbians Like This and That: Some Notes on Lesbian Criticism for the Nineties," in New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, ed. Sally Munt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 2.

4 See in particular Lillian Faderman and Ann Williams, "Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Image" Conditions 1.1 (1977); Blanche Weisen Cook, "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination': Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition" Signs 4.4 (Summer 1979): 718-739; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1981); Vivian Gornick, "The Whole Radclyffe Hall: A Pioneer Left Behind" Village Voice June 10-16, 1981: 45+; Catherine R. Stimpson, "Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English" Critical Inquiry 8.1 (Winter 1981): 363-379. For later examples of the "anti-Well approach," see Lillian Faderman, "Love Between Women in 1928: Why Progressivism Is Not Always Progress" Journal of Homosexuality 12.3/4 (May 1986): 23-42 and Sheri Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

5 Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, ed. Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

6 Jaime Hovey, "Imagining Lesbos: Identity and National Desire in Sapphic Modernism, 1900-1930." Diss. Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, 1995, p. 113.

7 In the happier camp of Hall criticism, I would count the highly revisionist accounts of her life and writing in the recent publications by DeLauretis, Castle, and Glasgow, which, in quite different ways, argue against the mannishness and the mawkishness of Hall and her heroine. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), pp. 196-7.

8 Foucault's most famous discussion of the concept is in the following passage from The History of Sexuality: "There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and sub-species of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a reverse discourse: homosexuality began to speak it its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified." Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 101.

9 Lovat Dickson's biography Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle (1975) provides a disturbingly recent example of this kind of criticism.

10 Joanne Glasgow, "Rethinking the Mythic Mannish Radclyffe Hall," in Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 204.

11 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: NAL Books, 1989), p. 279.

12 Quoted in Vera Brittain, Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1968), pp. 54-55.

13 Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 14.