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Chapter One: Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes: Radclyffe Hall and the Modern Lesbian
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• O N E • Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes Radclyffe Hall and the Modern Lesbian But then of course all intelligent people realized she was a creature apart. —Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness Since its publication in 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness has provoked praise and condemnation, identification and denial for generations of lesbian readers. Twenty years of feminist criticism have brought no resolution to questions about the novel’s status within the lesbian literary tradition. Though it may no longer hold its place as “the Lesbian bible”— the lesbian novel that was most notorious and perhaps most widely read between the 1930s and 1960s—it still retains its rank as a landmark publication.1 Nevertheless, the novel remains a source of controversy, and for some, of embarrassment, on several counts: its negative characterization of the lesbian life, its questionable literary merit, its definition of the “invert” as a man trapped in a woman’s body, and more broadly, its portrayal of the gendered identities, which would now be termed “butch” and “femme,” that Hall helped to define.2 On the first count, The Well’s status as the lesbian novel is inseparable from its reputation as the most depressing lesbian novel ever written. Many readers would understandably prefer 21 that a novel occupying such a central place in lesbian literary history depicted lesbianism more positively than Hall’s dismal account of Stephen Gordon’s social ostracism and failed loves. And the novel has been maligned as much for its literary flaws as for its content. Since the 1970s, lesbian-feminist critics have compared Hall unfavorably to modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes, whose stylistic innovations , poeticism, and narrative complexity have inspired more admiration than Hall’s traditional realist plots and formal prose. Not without cause, Hall’s writing has been called dull, overwrought , melodramatic, maudlin, old-fashioned, and stilted, and The Well is often regarded as pioneering for its open representation of lesbianism rather than for its literary achievements. But aesthetic objections to The Well cannot be easily separated from political and social ones, for it was Hall’s choice to write within the conventions of narrative realism and within the discourses of sexology that made the book’s depiction of lesbianism blatant enough to come under broad public scrutiny.3 Though Hall was careful to depict Stephen Gordon as intelligent, sensitive , and above reproach in her chivalrous behavior toward other women, many readers have taken offense at her depiction of lesbianism —most famously, perhaps, Sir Charles Biron, the magistrate who presided over the trial at which the novel was declared obscene and banned in England. Unlike feminist critics who would later link the novel’s failure to provide positive images of lesbians to its formulaic realist “narrative of damnation,”4 Chief Magistrate Biron found the novel’s literary merit to be undercut by its failure to castigate the protagonist’s sexual conduct. Contemporaneous lesbian readers were also concerned with the novel’s representation of female sexuality. Many worried that the book would heighten the surveillance of women showing a preference for tailored clothes or female company, and therefore that it would make lesbians more vulnerable to public scrutiny.5 Because Hall’s novel increased the visibility of the masculine lesbian in particular, it provoked the more specific concern that 22 • Martyred Butches and Impossible Femmes [3.218.247.159] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:39 GMT) Stephen Gordon, the archetypal invert, would come to represent lesbianism as a whole. This concern was not entirely unfounded . The scandal surrounding The Well’s publication put Hall and her protagonist in the public eye, and the image of the lesbian as the mannish woman did come to dominate the popular imagination. A portrait of Hall published in the Sunday Express captured that image. The photo, which appears to have been cropped from a picture of Hall with her long-time partner , Lady Una Troubridge, literalizes the feminine lesbian’s elision from the representation of the female invert. It depicts Hall from the waist up, wearing a smoking jacket with her hair slicked back and a cigarette in hand, apparently alone as she stares into vacant space. The photo was accompanied by the editor’s denunciation of the author as a “decadent apostle of the most hideous and loathsome of vices” who took “delight in [her] flamboyant notoriety” (Figure 5).6 Hostile and sympathetic readers alike shared this...