The Resistant Social/Sexual Subjectivity of Hall's Ogilvy and Woolf's Rhoda

Throughout the early twentieth century, psychologists, medical doctors, and sexologists debated and determined our modern understanding of the female homosexual. Rooted in a dialectic between the theories of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, the discourses of the lesbian emphasized the perversity and deviancy of the homosexual woman. Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf engage this discussion and offer two powerful fictional portraits of women who challenge the developed notion of the lesbian as either a broken heterosexual or a mannish woman. The characters of Hall and Woolf, moreover, resist the heterosexualization of culture which mandates that individuals must be stable agents as either male or female, heterosexual or homosexual.