Abstract
Partly as a legacy of the new possibilities opened to women during the First World War, Britain in the 1920s experienced what appeared to be a moment of increased sex and gender tolerance.1 Esther Newton, in her ground-breaking essay on the emergence of a modern lesbian identity, has examined this shift, explaining that for the new generation of twentieth century women, female ‘autonomy from family was, if not a given, a right’.2 This had implications for ways in which women theorised sexual inversion, for unlike those nineteenth-century New Women who explored female desire primarily in relation to questions such as economic emancipation and alternatives to conventional heterosexual marriage, a new type of independent women writer in the early twentieth century focused explicitly on issues of sexual identity and female same-sex desire. The extensive range of works about women and modernism including recent studies of lesbianism by Laura Doan, Terry Castle, Erin Carlston and Joanne Winning, has shown the importance of explorations of sexuality, especially, female same-sex desire, for writers such as Katherine Mansfield, May Sinclair, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf.3 Critics tend to agree that the legacies of sexology play little role in their works, which may have been indebted to ‘the explosion of discourses of sex from the late nineteenth century onwards’, as Hugh Stevens has pointed out in Modernist Sexualities,4 but which also deliberately sought to break with the sexual as well as the literary conventions of the Victorian age.5
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Notes
Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 99–115;
Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (eds), Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997);
Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994).
Esther Newton, ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian; Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman’, in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr. (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (London: Penguin, 1991), 283–284.
Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of Modern Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and her Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1998);
Joanne Winning, ‘Writing by the Light of The Well’;, in Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (eds), Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 372–93.
Hugh Stevens, ‘Introduction: Modernism and Its Margins’, in Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett (eds), Modernist Sexualities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 8.
See for instance Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolfand the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (eds), Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
Lisa Duggan, ‘The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America’, in Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi (eds), Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 83.
Judith Butler, ‘Withholding the Name: Translating Gender in Cather’s “On the Gull’s Road”’, in Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett (eds), Modernist Sexualities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 57 and 69.
Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Named John (London: John Murray, 1997);
Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Virago, 1999);
Radclyffe Hall, Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, ed. Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
The earliest account of Hall’s life was written by Una Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hammond and Hammond, 1961).
Troubridge’s executor, Lovat Dickson, published Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: a Sapphic Chronicle (London: Collins, 1975), which is characterised by an insipient homophobia and is full of a number of factual errors, which might be in part due to bad editing (Stephen’s lover Mary Llewellyn, for example, is alternately given the surnames ‘Henderson’, p.71, and ‘Hamilton’, p.133).
Michael Baker, Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985).
Doan, Fashioning Sapphism; Shari Benstock, ‘Paris Lesbianism and the Politics of Reaction, 1900–1940’, in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr, (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (London: Penguin, 1991), 344.
Sonja Ruehl, ‘Inverts and Experts: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Identity’, in Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan (eds), Feminism, Culture and Politics (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), 20;
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges (London: Yale University Press, 1989), 354.
Joanne Glasgow, ‘Introduction’, in Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, ed. Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 9.
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 83–95.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: a Medico-Legal Study, trans. from the 12th German edition by F.J. Rebman (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1934), 398.
Claudia Stillman Franks, Beyond The Well of Loneliness: The Fiction of Radclyffe Hall (London: Avesbury, 1982).
Radclyffe Hall, Adams Geschlecht, trans. Elisabeth Wacker (Berlin: Knaur, 1928).
For an overview of publications with a female same-sex theme see Jeannette H. Foster’s survey, Sex Variant Women in Literature (Tennessee, Fl.: Naiad Press, 1985), 240–328.
Teresa De Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Castle, Apparitional Lesbian; Halberstam, Female Masculinity; Prosser, Second Skin.
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Junction, 1981), 15–20.
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 130–131.
Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic’, in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 294–306.
Catharine Stimpson, ‘Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English’, Critical Inquiry, 8.2 (1981), 367.
Suzanne Raitt, ‘Queer Moods: the Life and Death of Charlotte Mew’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis and Murray Pratt (eds), In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002), 30.
See for instance Günter Grau (ed.), Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933–45 (London: Cassell, 1993);
Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Sexuality and German Fascism (New York: Berghahn, 2005). An interesting comparison can be found in Derek Duncan, Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 64–82.
Edward Carpenter, ‘The Intermediate Sex’, in his Love’s Coming-of-Age (London: Methuen, 1914), 130.
Rosa von Braunschweig, ‘Felicita von Vestvali’, originally published in Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen 1 (1903), reprinted in translation in Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson (eds), Lesbians in Germany: 1890s-1920s (Tallahassee, Fl.: Naiad Press, 1980), 74.
See Iain Pears, ‘The Gentleman and the Hero: Wellington and Napoleon in the Nineteenth Century’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 217–36.
Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 172.
See Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, ‘Introduction: Critical Perspectives Past and Present’, in their Palatable Poison, 2–13. Leslie A. Taylor provides an interesting account of the American trial of The Well of Loneliness, which took place in New York between December 1928 and April 1929. Here the charge of obscenity was squashed and the novel was a publishing success. See Leslie A. Taylor, ‘“I made up my mind to get it”: The American Trial of The Well of Loneliness, New York City, 1928–1929’, Journal for the History of Sexuality 10.2 (2001), 250–86.
Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: The Well of Loneliness’, The Nation & Athenœum, 4 August 1928, 593.
Vera Brittain, ‘Facing Facts’, Time and Tide, 10 August 1928, 765.
Jonathan Dollimore, Sex, Literature and Censorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 99–104.
James Douglas, ‘A Book That Must be Suppressed’, Sunday Express, 19 August 1928, 10.
Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 193–212; Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side (New York: Routledge, 1993), 153–72; Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy,feminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Joseph Bristow surveys recent criticism in his ‘“A complex multiform creature” — Wilde’s Sexual Identities’, in Peter Raby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195–218.
Alec Craig, The Banned Books of England (London: George Allen, 1937) 40–1.
See also Paul Allen, Beresford Egan: An Introduction to His Work (London: Scorpion Press, 1966), 14.
Beresford Egan, Policeman of the Lord: A Political Satire. The Drawings by Beresford Egan, the Preface and Lampoon by P.R. Stephensen (London: The Sophistocles Press, 1929).
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges (London: Yale University Press, 1989), 354.
Havelock Ellis, Commentary, in Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), inside cover.
H.F. Rubinstein, ‘Sex, Censorship and Common Sense in England’, in World League for Sexual Reform (Proceedings of the Third Congress): Sexual Reform Congress London 8–14: ix: 1929 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner, 1930), 305.
Erin G. Carlston, ‘“A Finer Differentiation”: Female Homosexuality and the American Medical Community, 1926–1940’, in Vernon A. Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities (New York: Routledge, 1997), 177–196.
Clarence P. Oberndorf, ‘Diverse Forms of Homosexuality’, Urologic and Cutaneous Review 33 (1929), 518–23.
Carlston argues that the discussion was divided into two main strands: Freudians, who believed homosexuality to be acquired, and who hence opposed the The Well’s depiction of inversion (the Freudian Béran W. Wolfe memorably called the novel ‘pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus’, Béran W. Wolfe, A Woman’s Best Years (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1935), 157), and anti-Freudians like Oberndorf, who believed sexual inversion to be congenital.
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© 2009 Heike Bauer
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Bauer, H. (2009). Stephen Gordon Super-Invert: The Sexology of Radclyffe Hall. In: English Literary Sexology. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234086_5
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