The Well of Loneliness

Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. London: Virago Press, 1982. Print.

I think that Stephen’s troubled consciousness is central to the telling of her narrative, and central to Hall’s project of explaining/begging compassion for the “invert”. Stephen’s consciousness, gendered as male (though female pronouns are used throughout) is predestined right from the start of the novel. When Anna is pregnant with Stephen, Sir Philip is convinced that his child-to-be is a boy. They are grateful that a “gallant male creature” will be born, and Sir Philip goes to church “which was seldom his custom” to show thanks for the son (9). So, from the start, the two dominant elements shaping Stephen’s consciousness are her gender/sexuality (her masculine identity, which is later identified as inversion, though she never refers directly to herself as an invert) and religiosity, the desire to reconnect with/hold accountable a god who has forsaken her and other sexual/gender deviants.

Upon initial reading, I, from my 21st century perspective, read Stephen more as a trans man than a lesbian (204), which I think only goes to show how constructed these identity categories are, and how easily notions of gender and sexuality can shift due to changes in religious, medical, political, popular culture and other discourses. Hall goes to great lengths to show how like a boy Stephen is in all ways except her genitals: everything from her disinterest in/torturing of her dolls (17) to her love of dressing up as Nelson (20) to her hunting, fencing, gymnastics and weight training (56) and her manly physical features (“the curious suggestion of strength in her movements, the long line of her limbs... and the poise of her head on her over-broad shoulders” (22). Stephen’s desire to do “manly” things, and indeed to be a man (22) of course not only essentialness gender, but also a connection between gender identity and sexual identity. As Rita Felski points out in The Gender of Modernity, however, in the late 19th and early 20th century, “this association of the mannish woman with the lesbian was a commonplace during a period which typically defined sexual preference through gender identification” (192). Hall is also, in a sense, creating a case study of the invert, which shows the invert to be a helpless victim of biology and/or god’s will (again, as Felski suggests, sexuality is a palimpsest of medical and theological discourses - 176), and an object worthy of both pity and tolerance.

Hall reinforces her attempt to make her account biologically “factual” by having Stephen find a copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and other books about inversion in a locked cupboard of her father’s (207). In these books, Stephen finds out that her desire for woman is innate. In addition to showing that biology made Stephen the way she is, however, Hall also reinforces the idea that god made her the way she is by making her into a kind of female Christ figure who hears the cries of the others like her, and sacrifices her own happiness in order to be a crusader for greater tolerance (447). (My colleague Emily Hill did a great paper on this very topic).

Another way Hall garners sympathy for Stephen (and also makes her Christ-like) is by associating her, and other inverts, with animals. After her father’s death, Stephen identifies herself with the fox she is hunting (125). She also has a relationship with Peter, Morton’s swan (255) and has a great love for and affinity with Raftery, her horse (225). Both she and Mary have a devotedly parental relationship with their dog, David (344), whose perspective Hall gives us, and Mary is also fond of birds, especially injured ones (355). Even the seemingly self-absorbed Jonathan Brockett “liked all dumb creatures” (229). Thus through this connection between animals and inverts, I think Hall is more indirectly imploring her audience to consider inverts, like animals: helpless creatures (and indeed Hall refers to the inverted characters as “creatures” throughout) still deserving of compassion, even if they may not be human in the same way.

Although Stephen, “under different conditions of environment and birth... might very well have become a reformer” (414), she does not. At least, not in the sense of starting a political movement. Instead, Stephen, encouraged by Puddle and her father, writes, hoping that in this way she will show her worthiness (and presumably in that way gain acceptance for those like her) (343). It is a completely individualized gesture. Stephen never really feels comfortable in the sexual deviant community, and is especially especially repulsed by those who cope through alcohol or drug use (393). She seems to have no recognition of her class privilege, which allows her to present herself publicly in men’s clothes and to go out with her female lover, hire servants, to work at home or not at all and to shop wherever she likes and still encounter very little insult or injury. Her privilege also allows her to avoid being criminalized or medicalized in any way she does not desire.

Though Stephen has the “terrible nerves of the invert” (154) and Mary (fragilely feminine) is in danger of becoming neurasthenic from living the isolated life of the invert (349), neither of them turns to a doctor for diagnosis, as others of their kind do (355). Stephen has the privilege coming to understand her own “nature” without external intervention, and though she wishes her father had told her earlier, Adolphe Blanc, the prophetic Jew, asks Stephen, “what doctor can know the entire truth?” (395). Thus I think that although The Well of Loneliness draws on biological/sexological discourses to call upon us for tolerance, it also endeavours to give us the full story of an invert, in order to invoke our (Christian) compassion.