Radclyffe Hall

This book examines how sexological ideas about desire and the body made their way from German science into British literary culture at the turn of the last century. It shows that fiction not only influenced the vocabulary of European sexology, but that it allowed lay women and men to shape modern ideas about sex, gender and the body.

Main authors discussed include Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand, Edith Ellis, and Radclyffe Hall.

This essay placed second in the Corpus Christi Christopher Marlowe Essay Competition. It examines the representation of gender in Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando' and Radclyffe Hall's 'The Well of Loneliness' through clothing, 'gender as performance' (drawing on Judith Butler's theoretical work) and the treatment of gendered binaries. I argue that the language of both texts echoes ideas of gender performativity and constructivism that were to emerge in the later in the 20th Century.

Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys and Radclyffe Hall have long been considered minor figures within the larger context of Modernism. Also, very often their colourful biographies have received more attention than their literary works. This book offers a close reading of these authors’ major fictional works. The focus lies on the female heroines of the texts and their sense of identity. Drawing on the theoretical works of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Michel de Certeau, Kerstin Fest shows how identity can be perceived as performance. Although society’s norms and expectations influence these performances of identity, there is room for creative engagement from the subject’s side. The women in Richardson’s, Rhys’s and Hall’s oeuvres are very much aware of the discourses shaping society’s expectations of what it means to be a woman. Although in relatively powerless positions, they show a surprising degree of agency in carving out their roles to play. The results are highly individual and flexible versions of femininity that refuse to conform to a single mould.

This piece, which is Chapter 4 of my monograph, English Literary Sexology 1860-1930, argues that The Well of Loneliness provides a distinct contribution to the emergence of modern ideas about female same-sex sexuality. Examining both the sexological debts of Hall's novel and the contribution it made to sexual debate, the chapter shows how The Well of Loneliness came to challenge sexology's authority as the producer of scientific truths about the the body and desire.

'Same Old' offers a rethinking of positions that have defined queer theory since its inception in the early 1990s. Steeped in philosophical and political commitments to 'difference', queer theoretical frameworks have tended to assume that ideas related to 'sameness' only thwart and stymie queer forms of life. But this book takes a number of these ideas as its focus - uselessness, reproduction, normativity and reductionism - and reveals their unexpected formal and thematic importance to a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century: fin-de-siècle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the 'stud file' or record of serial sex. Demonstrating how queer cultural objects often stand at odds with the frameworks that have been meant to help interpret and comprehend them, Same old interrogates the genealogy of the aversion to sameness that has kept those frameworks in place.

Author of the paper examines the figure of lesbian war-nurse in Radclyffe Hall's prose in relation to the emancipatory potential of the Great War. By the end of 1917 nearly 200 000 women joined the British military medical services, working as doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers – both in civil hospitals and in field units built along the front line. It was also an experience of many women-writers of the period, such as Gertrude Stein, May Sinclair, and Vera Brittai​n. The Great War's sense of freedom and emancipation became one of the themes of women modernist writing (Gilbert, Gubar 1989). This paper shows that in Radclyffe Hall's short story "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself" (1926) and in the novel "The Well of Loneliness" (1928) the role of a nurse have primarily two functions. First of all, for Hall's heroines, the military sanitary service becomes a chance to constitute their non-heteronormative identity. Secondly, a lesbian heroine does not fit in the gender patterns transferred to the realities of war, which becomes a critical tool to expose the patriarchal paradigm (of, e.g., home front/battlefront opposition).

The thesis argues that modern lesbian narratives appeared from the beginning of the twentieth century as a reverse discourse in response to late nineteenth-century sexology that defined the lesbian as unnatural and immoral. The MA thesis analysis explores the texts of three pioneering lesbian narratives, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Vin Packer’s Spring Fire, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. I shall contend that these texts reinterpreted the terminology used by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and created a subversive sequence of intertextuality as they spoke for lesbian visibility. The analysis is focused on the linguistic expressions used in these narratives to identify recurring themes. These themes register lesbian desire both in the sense of being attracted to another woman and that of a need to be distanced from heterosexuality’s noramlizing expectations. In the analysis, following the ideas of Tamsin Wilton, Adrienne Rich, and Julie Abraham, lesbian-ness is understood as a particular social position that critically questions the authority of the heteronormative canon represented by Krafft-Ebing and Ellis. The thesis also looks at the publishing conditions of the lesbian narratives to prove that cenzorship was also a heteronormative device used by the relevant institutions of the literary canon, preventing these works from reaching the public. While previous debates in academia tend to highlight that  the chosen  narratives address lesbian unhappiness, the thesis concludes that all three lesbian novels brought a positive change by their mere emergence at the literary market. Lesbian narratives could serve as an important survival strategy for lesbian readers to  find identities like themselves in the first half of the twentieth century. I hope to contribute to lesbian (literary) historiography by reclaiming a lost and invisible lesbian past in the field of literature.

Here is the power point presentation of a lecture given at the SAES annual congress last June in Toulon. The theme of the congress dealt with commitment and I delivered my speech at the SEAC which is the French Society of Contemporary English Studies.

The novel is considered a seminal text in the history of LGBT literature. First published in 1928 by Covici Friede, it remains the most important novel of the period. There have been better books more accurately delineated and written with the hindsight of the psychoanalysis and medical research but these novels fell short of the realism and pathos of the well of loneliness. The paper explores the issues and struggles of a homosexual woman who tries to fit in with society but is ultimately rejected as an abnormality or anomaly, it explores the genetic predilection to homosexuality and its exploration by some medieval scientists and by Freud. I will see if Freud's theories can be applied to Stephen's case. Although it is a fact that women don't have to be have to be virile or masculine to be gay. A number of homosexuals are found among harem inmates and prostitutes and even amongst actresses. But well of loneliness sticks to the tried and tested format of a masculine woman with short hair and flat chested. As biologists tell us that originally there is no difference between the sexes , an identical soma is acted upon the sex hormones. And it is these hormones which may determine the sex of the foetus. And an excess of testosterone in the androgens (sex determining hormones) may make someone excessively masculine and vice versa where an excess of feminine hormones shall make a male foetus more girlish even though they may be born boys. Radclyffe Hall worked hard to provide this background information so that each reader may understand and accept her protagonist Stephen who is born a woman but considers herself a man. Radclyffe Hall read both Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Krafft Ebing .Mr Gordon Stephen's father keeps their books in his library. Ulrich calls homosexuality inversion and believes that it is both natural and congenital or determined from birth. Ulrichs was a believer in according equal status to homosexuals and even in same sex marriage and believed in giving them legal redress if they were being ill-treated. He was a man ahead of his time as can be gauged by his ideas. In fact he accorded them higher status believing that they are more artistic and creative than the rest. He believed them highly sensitive to all aspects of life. The perpetuation of the race is for the normal but the arts are maintained and propagated by the highly sensitized or the abnormal. (Ulrichs, 1988) In contrast Kraftt Ebing accepts homosexuality is determined at birth but further classifies that it is a pathological rather than physiological, here the attempt is to classify homosexuality akin to a disease. (Ebing, 2011). For Ebing it is a disease , an inherited degeneracy. Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis gives an example of virile lesbian whose name is Count Sandor. Stephen is the protagonist of The Well of Loneliness. Count Sandor is reared as a boy by her father , she is good in horse riding and even of hunting. At the age of thirteen she is placed in an institution to reform her. A little later she falls in love and flees the institution all the while pretending to be boy. When she reaches home she calls herself a gender neutral name like Sandor. Sandor hates all feminine clothes, her father made sure she had a good education and she accompanied her father on long riding trips, always attired in male attire, she was addicted to sports. She was fascinated by actresses and other single women. Not the teenage or younger ones but the women who were very feminine in their mannerisms. Immodesty and forwardness in the weaker sex put her off, it even disgusted her. Just like a man she spent liberally on women , she even got married with the father in law being cozened into believing that she was a man. The servants had even observed her shave but it was an age of spying through keyholes, they soon discovered the truth and had her imprisoned. The jail authorities did a physical exam of her and saw that she was not fully female, she sex organs were not fully formed, she got her periods late in life and hated the thought of sexual relations with men, it filled her with dread and horror. She regarded men as bum chum buddies and felt shy of women rather than of men. Of course she was attracted to women as if there was a magnetic force in them. Especially to women between the ages of twenty four and thirty,

https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1419/94273

The essay provides new insights into Carlo Emilio Gadda’s various experiments with short story writing through an examination of his manuscripts held at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan. A number of handwritten notes reveal the author’s continuous attempts at producing short fiction from the late 20s onwards and include a series of still largely unknown projects and lists of themes for future development, such as that of a satirical dialogue on misogyny. The main focus of the essay then shifts to an unpublished incomplete short story dating to the late 40s. Its protagonist Amedeo meets his demise in the Battle of Cape Matapan during the Second World War (1941) after falling in love with a mysterious girl seen in a park accompanied by another woman. The relationships between these tentative and unfinished drafts, 'Prima divisione nella notte', and other published texts are highlighted as well as the theme of lesbian love underpinned by Gadda’s reading of Radclyffe Hall’s novel 'The Well of Loneliness' (1928).

Keywords: Carlo Emilio Gadda; Unpublished Texts; Short Stories; Manuscripts; Radclyffe Hall; Jonathan Swift; Narrative.

https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1419/94273