by Jane Rule
Though Stephen Gordon, the main character in The Well of Loneliness, shares few of Radclyffe Hall’s own experiences, she is Radclyffe Hall’s idealized mirror. Both recognized from childhood their essential difference from other females. Both had early emotional ties with female servants. Both were fine horsewomen and successful writers. Neither had any erotic interest in men. Both affected the same masculine style and manners. But Radclyffe Hall gave Stephen basic securities she herself lacked, a father who loved and understood her, a childhood on a fine estate, good health, and a sound education. Stephen was also very tall, a mark of masculine power and beauty Radclyffe Hall probably envied, though it is said of her that she always gave the impression of being a good deal taller than she was. Of all the good fortunes they did not share, Stephen’s opportunity to serve England in the war was in Radclyffe Hall’s eyes the greatest because she was a patriot and did not indulge in the political sophistication and skepticism of other more intelligent and subtle minds of her generation. Yet the one great blessing of Radclyffe Hall’s own life, the faithful love of both Mabel Batten and Una Troubridge, she did not allow Stephen, who is required to give up the woman she loves to a man who can provide the protection and social acceptance Stephen can never offer. Stephen’s final selfless gesture is undoubtedly calculated to strengthen reader sympathy, to allay moral doubts, and to deepen the tragedy of inversion. But for Radclyffe Hall herself, neither God nor man could interfere with her sexual life. She was not of a temperament for such a sacrifice.
A canny propagandist in plotting an unhappy ending, Radclyffe Hall also worked hard to provide a background of psychological information, intended to deepen understanding and acceptance for her main character. The books of both Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing are in Mr. Gordon’s library, and it is from them that he learns to understand and help his only and beloved child. Ulrichs not only argues that inversion is congenital and natural, but also that legal and social recognition should be given such sexual love, permission to marry granted to people of the same sex. Krafft-Ebing, taking issue with Ulrichs, grants that some inversion is congenital but insists that the cause is pathological rather than physiological, traceable in every case to inherited degeneracy. The family histories he offers are full of cases of insanity of one sort or another. Though he makes a strong plea for humane treatment of such people, since they cannot help their condition and cannot be cured of it (nor indeed do many of them even express a desire to be cured, one of the symptoms of their pathology being their view of themselves as natural), he is not so tolerant of acquired inversion, which is caused, he thinks, by excessive masturbation, isolation from the opposite sex, a conscious choice of vice. Sexual behavior of the conditioned invert is immoral. While Krafft-Ebing sees in this condition much more to blame, he also has a greater hope of cure. It is clear that, though Radclyffe Hall took a great deal of information from Krafft-Ebing, she is on Ulrichs’ side of the argument.
Stephen must be established as a congenital invert to escape Krafft-Ebing’s moral condemnation. There is no sign of insanity in Stephen’s family history. The only causes of inversion are obviously physiological. Stephen is broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, unusually tall, with a striking resemblance to her father. That she is not unique is carefully underlined in the physical descriptions of a group of inverts she meets in Paris. “One had to look twice to discern that her ankles were too strong and too heavy for those of a female.”3 Or “one might have said a quite womanly woman, unless the trained ear had been rendered suspicious by her voice … a boy’s voice on the verge of breaking.”4 Not trusting the reader to take this evidence alone, Radclyffe Hall makes general assertions about inverts, calling them “those who, through no fault of their own, have been set apart from the day of their birth.”5 Or she lets Stephen’s tutor, a repressed invert herself, say to Stephen, “You’re neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you’re unexplained as yet—you’ve not got your niche in creation.”6 Stephen is described as “like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition.”7 Stephen’s father wanted a son, then christened his female child Stephen, but these facts are offered not so much as suggestive of conditioning as some deep insight of his own into the real nature of his child.
Society’s attitude toward the invert is presented by Stephen’s mother, who is from the first offended and repelled by a child she does not understand. She objects to her husband’s desire to raise Stephen as if she were a boy, but he, in what is presented as his real wisdom, overrules her. Stephen is allowed to ride horseback astride. She is encouraged in masculine virtues. Her father says, “And now I’m going to treat you like a boy, and a boy must always be brave. I’m not going to pretend as though you were a coward.”8 Later, when he feels her education is being neglected, he says, “You’re brave and strong-limbed, but I want you to be wise.”9 In giving Stephen so unusually supportive a father, Radclyffe Hall is insisting that the accepted invert grows into a fine, moral person who can survive even the rejection of a mother. After her father’s death, her mother discovers Stephen in an affair with a married woman in the neighborhood. “And this thing that you are is a sin against nature.”10 How accurately Radclyffe Hall anticipated the attitude of many of the critics when the book appeared, who would have liked to drive her into silence as Stephen is forced to leave her home, which has meant so much to her, able to take only her loyal and understanding tutor with her.
The husband of the woman Stephen so unwisely loved is given speeches like, “How’s your freak getting on? … Good Lord, it’s enough to make any man see red; that sort of thing wants putting down at birth, I’d like to institute state lethal chambers.”11 But his viciousness is seen as part of his general incapacity as a man.
Men, in The Well of Loneliness, are capable of the highest courage and insight. Stephen’s father is “all kindness, all strength, all understanding.”12 Martin, the young man who befriends Stephen and then unfortunately falls in love with her, has “a man’s life, good with the goodness of danger, a primitive, strong, imperative thing.”13 In him Stephen feels she has found a brother. “He spoke simply, as one man will speak to another, very simply, not trying to create an impression.”14 And Stephen has “longed for the companionship of men, for their friendship, their good will, their understanding.”15 When Stephen rejects Martin, she unwittingly rejects the tentative acceptance of the community which has developed during the period of their friendship. “He it was who had raised her status among them—he, the stranger, not even connected with their country. …Suddenly Stephen longed intensely to be welcomed and she wished in her heart that she could have married Martin.”16 Years later, when he appears again in Stephen’s life and falls in love with Mary, the young woman Stephen herself loves and lives with, Stephen recognizes his superior power, as a man, to protect Mary. “I cannot protect you, Mary, the world has deprived me of my right to protect; I am utterly helpless, I can only love you.”17 Her father has taught her all the male virtues, “courage and truth and honor,”18 and she rejects their vices, “Men—they were selfish, arrogant, possessive,”19 perhaps as much because she has no social right to them as because she finds them morally repugnant. Without those vices, she has no choice but to become a martyr to her love.
Though Stephen cannot claim social equality with men, in some ways she sees herself as superior to them, not only in rejecting their vices but in having the curious virtues of ambivalent sex. “She seemed to combine the strength of a man with the gentler and more subtle strength of a woman.”20 “Those whom nature has sacrificed to her own ends—her mysterious ends which sometimes lie hidden—are sometimes endowed with a vast will to loving, with an endless capacity for suffering also.”21 “But the intuition of those who stand midway between the two sexes is so ruthless, so poignant, so accurate, so deadly as to be in the nature of an added scourge.”22 Echoing Krafft-Ebing, Radclyffe Hall claims also for the congenital i
nvert remarkable intelligence, great passion, and intense religious feeling. Stephen was born on Christmas Eve. Radclyffe Hall followed The Well of Loneliness with a novel about a contemporary Christ with whom she felt it easy to identify after her own social crucifixion. During the writing of it, stigmata appeared on the palms of her own hands.
Neither she nor Stephen ever identifies with other women. Stephen’s first love, Collins, the second maid, is a stupid, dishonest creature whom the child, Stephen, can forgive anything “since despising, she could still love her.”23 “I’d like to be hurt for you, Collins, the way that Jesus was for sinners.”24 Stephen’s mother is loved by her father because she is restful, beautiful, passive. Stephen’s own effort to make a relationship with her mother is protective and courtly. Stephen’s tutor is made a sad example of. “She was what came from higher education—a lonely, unfulfilled middle-aged spinster.”25 When Stephen first falls seriously in love with a married woman, Angela is described as “idle, discontented, and bored and certainly not overburdened with virtue.” She “listened, assuming an interest she was very far from feeling.”26 Mary, the lover for whom Stephen sacrifices her own happiness, “because she was perfect woman, would rest without thought, without exultation, without question, finding no need to question since for her there was now only one thing—Stephen.”27 “Mary, all woman, was less a match for life than if she had been as was Stephen.”28 Devoted to Stephen, subservient, with all wifely virtues, she cannot stand the social isolation of her life with Stephen, would have grown bitter at the judgments Stephen has the strength to rise above, for she has no work of her own as Stephen does, no identity of her own. She is simply a woman.
Occasionally Stephen does crave to be normal. “While despising these girls, she yet longed to be like them,”29 but these are only moments of despair when she feels rejected in the company of men who have a preference for “killing ivy.”30 Much more often, she longs to be a man, to take her natural and superior place among those of the sex she admires. Radclyffe Hall even asserts that Stephen “found her manhood,”31 though always she knows that, trapped in a female body, she is a freak, and in the final contest between Stephen and Martin, even the dog can tell that Martin is the true man. Stephen has nothing left now but her work. “She must show that being the thing that she was, she could climb to success over all opposition,”32 but she will go on being plagued by the doubt, “I shall never be a great writer because of my maimed and insufferable body.”33
If Radclyffe Hall were alive today and writing The Well of Loneliness, how much of the detail would convince anyone that Stephen is congenitally different, except perhaps in her sexual tastes? On the sexual market, it is still better to be narrower-shouldered, broader-hipped, and shorter than Stephen, but those “defects” would not convince anyone that a woman is a born invert. And though intelligent women are still a threat to some men, no one would see in intelligence a signal for diagnosing inversion. As for the freedom of behavior Stephen craved, there isn’t a woman today who doesn’t prefer trousers and pockets for many activities, and only the Queen of England still occasionally appears in public riding sidesaddle. If few women have desired a masculine name in private, a great many have used male pseudonyms in order to win honor for their work in public.
Even in 1928 Vera Brittain commented in an otherwise generous review of the book, “Miss Hall appears to take for granted that this over-emphasis of sex characteristics is part of the correct education of the normal human being. She therefore makes her ‘normal’ women clinging and ‘feminine’ to exasperation and even describes the attitudes toward love as ‘an end in itself as being a necessary attribute to true womanhood. …We feel that, in describing the supposedly sinister predilections of the child Stephen Gordon, much ado is often made about nothing; so many of them appear to be the quite usual preference of any vigorous young female who happens to possess more vitality and intelligence than her fellows. If one of the results of women’s education in the eighteen-nineties really was to attach the ugly label ‘pervert’ to a human being whose chief desire was for wider expression of her humanity than contemporary convention permitted, then that education was an evil thing indeed.”34
Obviously Radclyffe Hall so accepted that very teaching of her class and time she could not imagine a woman who wanted the privilege and power of men unless she was a freak.
Though The Well of Loneliness was viciously attacked for its sympathetic idealizing of the invert, giving it greater importance at the time than it deserved, its survival as the single authoritative novel on lesbian love depends on its misconceptions. It supports the view that men are naturally superior, that, given a choice, any woman would prefer a real man unless she herself is a congenital freak. Though inept and feminine men are criticized, though some are seen to abuse the power they have, their right to that power is never questioned. Stephen does not defy the social structure she was born into. Male domination is intolerable to her only when she can’t assert it for herself. Women are inferior. Loving relationships must be between superior and inferior persons. Stephen’s sexual rejection of Martin, though it is offered as conclusive proof of her irreversible inversion, is basically a rejection of being the inferior partner in a relationship. Her reaction is one of “repulsion—terror and repulsion … a look of outrage.”35 In her relationship with Mary, Stephen is “all things to Mary; father, mother, friend and lover, all things, and Mary is all things to her—the child, the friend, the beloved, all things.”36 The repetition of “all things” is not persuasive enough to cover the inequality of the categories. When Stephen decides not to fight for Mary, she gives her to Martin much as one would give any other thing one owns. And though her altruism is sometimes associated with her female gender, it is more often likened to the virtues of Christ. It is courageous or foolhardy for a woman to behave like a man, but, since she accepts herself as a freak, since in fiction if not in life she is made to give up the ultimate prize, she is no political threat to anyone. The natural order of things is reasserted, and she is left on the outside, calling to God and to society for recognition.
Cory, in The Lesbian in American Society, claims that “the lesbian stereotype is almost completely absent from any world of reality. Many people never meet her outside the pages of The Well of Loneliness.”37 If he means that, in the real world, there are few talented, successful, independently wealthy women who are free to lay claim to the world of masculine privilege in just the way Radclyffe Hall and her creation Stephen Gordon do, he is right, but, if he means there are no women who have taken on the style and manner of men, he is wrong. Admittedly, it isn’t easy today to know what styles and manners are associated with one sex rather than the other, but it is still possible. Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin comment in Lesbian/Woman about The Well of Loneliness saying that it became “the Lesbian bible.” “Unfortunately, to the uninitiated the book perpetuated the myth of the Lesbian as a pseudo-male, and many young women, like Del, emulated the heroine, Stephen Gordon.”38 Others have read the book without so easy an identification, but, if they carefully avoid male role-playing, they are still left with the resentment of their political inferiority and their love of other women, with the fear that to the “discerning eye” any minor characteristic could identify them as freaks.
Radclyffe Hall was a courageous woman, and The Well of Loneliness is an important book because it does so carefully reveal the honest misconceptions about women’s nature and experience which have limited and crippled so many people. Radclyffe Hall did think of herself as a freak, but emotionally and intellectually she was far more a “womanly woman” than many of her literary contemporaries. She worshiped the very institutions which oppressed her, the Church and the patriarchy, which have taught women there are only two choices, inferiority or perversion. Inside that framework, she made and tried to redefine the only proud choice she had. The “bible” she offered is really no better for women than the Bible she would not reject.
Gertrude Stein 1874–1
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“HONESTY IS A SELFISH virtue. Yes I am honest enough.”1 This is the admission of Adele, the main character in Gertrude Stein’s first novel, Q.E.D. or Things as They Are as it was titled and published first in 1950 after Gertrude Stein’s death in an edition of only five hundred copies. It was not made available to a more general public until it was finally republished in 1971. For a woman famous for obscuring and eschewing meaning through a great part of her writing life, experimenting in codes and riddles and verbal still-lifes, the flat clarity and relentless honesty of Q.E.D. come as a contradiction to all those “rose is a rose is a rose” jokes about her. Gertrude Stein literally buried the book under thousands of later pages, and, when she came upon it years later, she claimed to have forgotten it entirely. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she wrote of herself, “She was very bashful and hesitant about it, did not really want to read it.”2 At that time she showed it to Louis Bromfield, but in 1941 she refused permission to have it included in the Yale catalogue of her other work.
Q.E.D. is probably the only book about lesbian relationship which confronts its characters with the raw war between desire and morality and reveals the psychological geometry of the human heart without false romanticizing or easy judgment. Recent biographers have scrupulously identified the three characters in the novel with their counterparts in real life and documented many of the events in Gertrude Stein’s own life, suggesting that she failed in her last year in medical school not because, as she has so often been quoted as saying to her friend Marion Walker, “You don’t know what it is to be bored,”3 but because she was miserably involved in a triangular affair she later described in Q.E.D., a book written as a desperate attempt to understand and, by that means, to survive what had happened to her.
