Solomon, Julie Helen. “The Face of the Writer: Readings in Literary Self-Portraiture.” DAI 57:6 (1996): 2511A-12A. U of Pennsylvania.
Explores the element of the face in literary self-portraits such as Colette’s La Vagabonde, Michel Leiris’s L’Age d’Homme, and Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant. Solomon brings out the central themes: the paradoxes of physiognomy, the perception and value of physical beauty. Also, Solomon discusses the meaning of make-up, the experience of aging and of the mirror and others’ eyes. As to L’Amant, Solomon focuses on the discontinuity experienced by the writer, the shift from the girl described to the aging narrator.
Weiermair, Brigitte. “Marguerite Duras: 'L'Amant.' Zu Genese und Rezeption eines literarischen Bestsellers (Marguerite Duras:
'L'Amant.' The Genesis and Reception of a Literary Bestseller. ” DAI 57:1 (1996): 133c. U Salzburg.
3.Annotated Bibliography of
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
Journal Articles
Backus, Margot Gayle. “Sexual Orientation in the (Post) Imperial Nation:
Celticism and Inversion Theory in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 15.2 (1996):
253-66.
Illustrates how Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness adapts Celtism to the depiction of Anna Molloy Gordon. In addition to Havelock Ellis’s inversion theory, Backus points out Victorian and Edwardian consrtuctions of Irish culture in the novel, which links the extralinguistic, sensual, emotional, feminine with Irishness.
Accordingly, Anna’s Irishness is contrasted to Stephen, the daughter’s masculine Englishness, and “the lesbian” is designated as
“the male,” “the English,” and “the subject” in opposition to “the heterosexual,” “the female,” “the Irish,” and “the object.” As Backus
stresses, while that the text foregrounds the sexual and national others and create the possibility of a mutual relationship between the subject and the subaltern, Hall’s racial stereotyping of “the Celt” and her phobic representation of gay men are remarkable and demand critical attentiveness.
Gilmore, Leigh. “Obscenity, Modernity, Identity: Legalizing The Well of
Loneliness and Nightwood.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4.4 (1994): 603-24.
Focuses on obscenity law in England and the United States as a major modernist discourse in relation to the development of modernist notions of authorship and sexuality. Gilmore claims that the obscene law is constitutive in the production of authorship and sexuality as an identity. Gilmore further explicates how two novels concerning lesbianism, The Well of Loneliness and Nightwood, received different legal treatment. Gilmore provides historical and cultural context of sexual inversion and obscenity law as representational violence, which produces and polices the legal body and as a social control of literacy and the literary. As to the publication of Nightwood, Gilmore finds that T. S. Eliot’s introduction plays a pivotal role, intervening in the relations among obscenity, the literary and sexuality.
Inness, Sherrie A. “Who's Afraid of Stephen Gordon? The Lesbian in the United States Popular Imagination.” NWSA Journal 4.3 (1992): 303-20.
Compares Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness to Edouard Bourdet’s play The Captive. Inness suggests that Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness represents a conventional lesbian image, conforming to the sexologists’ scientific discourse which constructs a recognizable stereotypical mannish lesbian, inscribed and defined by her voice, her clothing and her six sense. However, in The Captive the heroine Irene is a feminine lesbian who subverts the popular ideology and resists classification. As Inness points out, The Well of Loneliness depicts a lesbian who can be easily singled out and excluded from “normal” society and thus acceptable to the heterosexual reader of the 1920s; whereas, the feminine lesbian in The Captive is much more threatening and unsettling.
Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society : 9.4 (1984):
557-575.
Explores the historical relationships between lesbianism, feminism and gender in Radclyffe Hall’s novels: The Unlit Lamp and The Well of Loneliness. Newton suggests that The Unlit Lamp depicts the
romantic friendship between women which characterizes the first generation of “New Women.” While the first generation of “New Women”
used romantic friendships as an alternative to the patriarchal family, which impedes women’s autonomy, the second generation attempted to break out of the asexual model of romantic friendships.
Newton regards the masculinized heroine in The Well of Loneliness as a representative of the second-generation New Women.
Particularly, Newton points out that the cross-dressing and the masculine heroine’s sexuality in The Well challenge and reject traditional gender divisions though Hall replicates the misogynist sexology which defines lesbianism as deviant and masculine. Newton stresses that the equation of lesbianism and masculinity is problematic because feminine lesbians does not conform to it. Still, Newton claims that a new vocabulary is needed for the lesbian to define and assert an identity.
Parkes, Adam. “Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the SUPPRESSED RANDINESS of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.” Twentieth Century Literature 40.4 (1994): 434-60.
Compares Hall’s treatment of lesbianism in The Well of Loneliness with Woolf’s in Orlando. Reviewing the Hall trial, Parkes questions the censorship of literary works that was unequivocally from male perspectives and that silenced not only the author’s intention but also lesbianism. In addition, Parkes examines the text and contends that Hall still conforms to the heterosexual, conventional relationship between male and female when she depicts lesbian relations, inescapably ending with tragedies. As Parkes observes, while Hall insists on stating the truth and meanwhile gets trapped in social constraints, Woolf tends to suggest rather than directly state facts so as to offer space for imagination and to transcend social forces. Specifically, Orlando embodies vacillation of both the narrator and Orlando her/himself. According to Parkes, the mock-biographer narrator parodies the biographical honesty and insistence on truth; on the other hand, the narrator eludes the truth about Orlando’s sex change and leaves gaps and blanks in the text.
The narrator’s vacillation parallels Orlando’s, through which Orlando transgresses sexual and gender boundaries. Parkes also suggests that vacillation is what Vita Sackville-West ascribes to Woolf as “suppressed randiness” and Woolf’s self-censorship as well.
Significantly, it is by vacillating that Orlando’s lesbianism can pass institutional censorship. Nevertheless, Parkes stresses that Woolf’s vacillation does not diminish the subversive power Orlando possesses.
Scanlon, Joan. “Bad Language vs. Bad Prose/ Lady Chatterley and The Well.”
Critical Quarterly 38.3: (1996): 3-13.
Examines the prosecution and defense of The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Scanlon finds that in both cases the preoccupation with attitude towards sexual identity in the representation of lesbianism and language about sexual practice in the representation of heterosexuality prevails. Despite the fact that The Well of Loneliness makes lesbianism visible for the first time and is viewed as a subtle work by the judges, the critical response to the novel is not so positive as negative in terms of literary methods and sexual politics. However, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover receives positive comments even though it is suppressed due to ugly words in the novel. As Scanlon’s comparison shows, Lawrence’s bad language and Hall’s bad prose ensue different responses though both are attributed boring and humorless.
Stimpson, Catharine R. “Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English.” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 363-379.
Examines lesbian novels in English, which are divided into two patterns: the dying fall and the enabling escape. Stimpson suggests that lesbian writers reject both silence and excess coding, and instead, they adopt a narrative of condemnation, which reflects larger social attitudes about homosexuality and of which The Well of Loneliness is the paradigm. Stimpson suggests that while Hall projects homosexuality as a sickness, she plans a protest against that morbidity and damnation in the novel. Further, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a combination of lesbian romanticism and lesbian realism, is an example of the enabling escape from stigma and self-contempt.
Also, Stimpson finds some books approaching indifference, the Barthian writing degree zero. Among them, Stimpson points out Bertha Harris’s Lover. Stimpson concludes that an alternative process of affirmation of the lesbian body and transcendence of a culturally traced, scarring stigma has emerged.
Whitlock, Gillian. “'Everything Is out of Place': Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Literary Tradition.” Feminist Studies 13.3 (1987): 555-582.
Locates Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in the lesbian literary tradition. Whitlock suggests that The Well of Loneliness is preoccupied with issues of language, literature and sexuality on the artistic frontier to carve out a space for the lesbian writers.
Specifically, Whitlock points out Stephen, the protagonist’s relationships to gender, sexuality, and nature are ambiguous and cannot be articulated in conventional language and narrative, which
are heterosexual. Whitlock claims that though Hall used the traditional realistic narrative, it doesn’t mean Hall is unaware of the dilemma. Whitlock finds that indeed Hall attempts to deconstruct the gendered and heterosexist presumptions of language, literature and criticism. Whitlock also refers to Catherine R. Stimpson’s schema which labels The Well of Loneliness as the paradigm of “the dying fall,” while Woolf’s Orlando as that of “the enabling escape.”
Whitlock insists that although the problems of language and self-identification presented in Hall’s novel may be best resolved in the fantastic and humorous modes, feminist and lesbian critics do Hall injustice, ignoring her efforts to find a language in realist fiction.
Book Articles
Barale, Michele Aina. “Below the Belt: (Un)Covering The Well of Loneliness.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 235-57.
Examines four covers issued for the American paperback editions and reprints of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Barale suggests that the covers provides visual and dictional representation of the dominant sexual ideology within which the novel is published.
Specifically, Barale analyzes each cover in detail to claim that the cover art invites heterosexual readers to engage the narrative of a lesbian Other which is not so alien as friendly. Barale further illustrates that the homosexual Other is appropriated by making the Otherness of same-sex desire apprehensible and inscribing the heterosexual desire onto homosexual bodies. Despite self-projection of heterosexuality, the lesbian body below the belt and the lesbian text continues to elude the heterosexual representation.
De Lauretis, Teresa. “The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian: the Fantasy of Castration and the Signification of Desire.” The Practice of Love.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1994. 203-53.
Discusses Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Cherrie Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost and explores the meaning and function of castration in relation to lesbian desire. De Lauretis specifies a passage in The Well which signifies a fantasy of bodily dispossession and also points out the paradox that the masculine heroine desires a feminine body. Further, de Lauretis embarks on the theorization of a lesbian fantasy of castration which structures lesbian desire. De Lauretis draws on Freud’s notion of fetishism and Bersani and Dutoit’s revision of fetishism, which nullifies the significance of the phallus in fetishism. De Lauretis elucidates
how lesbian homosexuality, subjectivity and desire are organized in a different relation to the phallus and to the penis. De Lauretis defines the lesbian fetish as an object, a sign, which marks the difference and the desire between the lovers. Moreover, de Lauretis claims that in lesbian perverse desire, the fantasmatic object is the female body, whose loss parallels the narcissistic wound that the loss of the penis represents for the male subject. Thus, de Lauretis states that the signs of masculinity in the passage under discussion are a fetish, which signifies Stephen ’s desire for the lost female body. And as de Lauretis remarks, the fantasy of castration in the text is associated with a narcissistic wound, the lack not of the phallus but of a female body that the mother can love.
Dollimore, Jonathan. “The Dominant and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic. ” Homosexual Themes in Literary Studies. Ed. Stephen Donaldson and Wayne R. Dynes. New York: Garland, 1992. 87-100.
Discusses the dialectic between dominant and subordinate cultures, between conformity and deviance. Dollimore refers to Michel Foucault’s notion that resistances are inscribed within power as an irreducible opposite. In the case of homosexuality Foucault remarks that homosexuality begins to speak on its own behalf, to forge its own identity and culture, often in the self-same categories by which it has been produced and marginalized. Further, Dollimore points out two strategies for homosexual representation: the transformation of dominant ideologies through (mis)appropriation and subversion through inversion. Dollimore suggests that Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness is the example of the second strategy. Dollimore specifically indicates that Hall authenticating the inauthentic by merging or replacing the negative representations with more positive ones, appropriated from the dominant, despite the contradictions intrinsic to the idea of a reverse discourse. Also, Dollimore discusses the reversal of the authentic/inauthentic opposition in Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jnugle, and the subversion of authenticity in Wilde, Genet and Orton, which are different aspects of overturning in Derrida’s idea of deconstruction.
Glasglow, Joanne. “What’s a Nice Lesbian Like You Doing in the Church of Torquemada? Radclyffe Hall and Other Catholic Converts. ” Lesbian Texts and Contexts. 241-54.
Explores the reason why Radclyffe Hall and other lesbians choose to become Catholic converts. Given that these lesbian Catholic converts betray no conflict between their sexuality and religion, Glasglow examines the way lesbianism is constructed through language in Catholic teaching. Glasglow finds that in Catholicism sex is
designated completely phallocentric and thus acts performed by lesbians were not sex. As Glasglow suggests, the erasure of women as agents of sexuality and thus of lesbianism has a long history in Catholic teaching. For Hall, her naturalizing view of lesbianism as demonstrated in The Well of Loneliness is not anti-Catholicism.
And also, phallocentrism in Catholic teaching made lesbian asexual and at that time created a refuge for lesbians from the homophobia and misogyny of the secular world.
Hamer, Diane. “'I Am a Woman': Ann Bannon and the Writing of Lesbian Identity in the 1950s.” Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Lilly. Philadelphia: Temple UP,1990.
47-75.
Marcus, Jane. “Sapphistory: The Woolf and the Well” Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. Eds. Karla Jay et al. New York: New York UP, 1990. 164-179.
Focuses on the intertextuality in Woolf’s A Room of One ’s Own and its connection with Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Marcus aims to embody the historical context in which Woolf’s A Room of One ’s Own emerges. Marcus points out the significance of the literary allusion as a feminist strategy in Woolf’s A Room. Particularly, Marcus indicates that Woolf alludes to the trial of The Well of Loneliness for obscenity in 1928, that the narrator, Mary Hamilton, echoes Judith Shakespeare and both voices echo Radclyffe Hall. Marcus suggests that in this way Woolf connects the non-feminist lesbian with women’s political cause, all women with the plight of lesbians.
Also, Marcus defines “sapphistry” as new reading and writing strategies for women, including the use of ellipses for encoding female desire, the use of initials and dashes to make absent figures present, and transforming interruption, the condition of the woman writer’s oppression.
Radford, Jean. “An Inverted Romance: The Well of Loneliness and Sexual Ideology.” The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction.
Ed. Jean Radford. London: Routledge, 1986. 97-111.
Focuses on the contradictory discourses on homosexuality in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the forms of heterosexual romance fiction adapted by the author. Radford points out the juxtaposition of Ellis’s determinist theory of congenital inversion, Freudian psychoanalysis with emphasis on the familial dynamic, and the religious view of homosexuality as sin. Radford refers to The Well as a reverse discourse in Foucault’s sense as those discourses are adopted in order to demand legitimacy. Also, Radford notices
that Hall adopts the forms of popular romance writing in plot, characterization and language and combines the realist elements of the social protest fiction.
Ruehl, Sonja. “Inverts and Experts: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Identity.” Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture. Ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt.
New York: Methuen, 1985. 165-80.
Considers Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as what Michel Foucault called a “reverse discourse.” Ruehl draws on Michel Foucault’s study on sexuality in terms of historically specific discourses and methods of classification to examine Havelock Ellis’s medical-psychological discourse on “congenital inversion.” Ruehl points out that in Foucault’s perspective the process of categorization not only defines an individual’s identity but also makes resistance to the power possible. Further, Ruehl claims that Hall’s novel as a reverse discourse is a political intervention which adopts Ellis’s theory and transforms it and thus opens a space for other lesbians to challenge the definition of lesbianism and to redefine it themselves. Besides, Ruehl indicates the novel is banned because it defines the terms for lesbianism to be discussed. Despite the criticism of rigid lesbian roles and the biological inevitability, Hall’s novel contributes to challenging the moral view of lesbianism as a sin and to its translation to the realm of social problem.
Rule, Jane. “Radclyffe Hall 1886-1943.” Lesbian Images. New York: Pocket Books, 1976. 52-64.
Focuses on Radclyffe Hall’s life and her novel The Well of Loneliness . Rule points out the reactions of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster to Hall’s novel. Besides, Rule suggests that the heroine in the novel, Stephen, is Hall’s idealized mirror, which justifies Hall’s own experience. Also, Rule discusses Hall’s depiction of Stephen as a congenital invert, derived from Havelock Ellis’s sexology to escape Krafft-Ebing’s moral condemnation. Further, as Rule points out, The Well of Loneliness reflects patriarchal misconceptions without challenging them. Specifically, Stephen accepts the views that men are naturally superior and women inferior, and that loving relationships must be between superior and inferior persons.
Dissertation Abstracts
Core, Deborah Lynn. “The Atmosphere of the Unasked Question: Women’s Relationships in Modern British Fiction.” DAI 42: 5 (1981): 2127A.
Kent State University.
Focuses on the representation of the relationships among women in modern British fiction, especially D. H. Lawrence’s, Radclyffe Hall’s, Rosamond Lehmann’s and Virginia Woolf’s works. In Lawrence ’s fiction, women’s relationships are used to represent an obstruction to the world order. Core discusses the influence of Hall ’s The Well of Loneliness, which portrays sexual inversion sympathetically.
Also, in Lehmann’s novels, Core finds that women ’s relationships are presented as the foundation to build the world. In Woolf’s writing, Core women’s friendships are central to the character ’s development.
Emery, Kimberly Lynn. “Deep Subject: Lesbian In(ter)ventions in Twentieth-Century United States Thought.” DAI 55.10 (1995): 3188A.
The University of Texas at Austin.
Focuses on the intersections of Pragmatist sign theory and lesbian identity in the turn-of-the-century America. Also, Emery discusses the impact of The Well of Loneliness on American culture. Emery further compares the subversive representations of lesbianism in Mary McCarthy’s The Group with Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle.
Emery suggests that the meaning of lesbian identity changes along with the changes in cultural assumptions about meaning.
Emery suggests that the meaning of lesbian identity changes along with the changes in cultural assumptions about meaning.