ABSTRACT
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, occupies a seemingly anachronistic place in the history of European fiction: Flaubert’s novel was published in the mid-nineteenth century but has a distinctly ‘modernist’ style marked by shifting points of view and a focus on interiority, and Hall’s novel was published in the time of high modernism but is based on a distinctly ‘realist’ mode of narration. Indeed, Hall’s was critical of the modernist narrative method of her contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce: in a talk given at Sion College entitled ‘True Realism in Fiction’, she castigated them as writers ‘suffering from a leaking subconscious’.1 She further established her own artistic philosophy as a contrast: whilst modernist
writers dealt with ‘subjects that with normal people sank naturally to the subconscious mind’, Hall’s own novels encapsulated her belief that ‘all realism must mean something, must not be idly employed, and must lead somewhere’, a belief which was rooted in the understanding of the nature of fiction from an earlier part of the Victorian period. The case of The Well of Loneliness concludes my study of literary trials and masculinity, allowing me to test the argument about the constructions of gender and the intertwining of literary and legal discourses beyond the Victorian period, whilst also serving as a reminder that periodisation in literary history and the use of labels such as ‘realist’ and ‘modernist’ in criticism, although useful, are themselves practices with a degree of arbitrariness which should be kept in view. The events leading up to the legal case began with the publication of a damning
review of The Well of Loneliness in the Sunday Express by the paper’s editor, James Douglas. Its title, stating that the novel was ‘a book that must be suppressed’, was enlarged, capitalised and in bold, a format which was presumably meant to convey outrage at the novel’s publication, as well as the urgency of banning it. As with the cases of obscenity we have seen, the premise for his condemnation was the likely mimetic effects of Hall’s novel on its readers, who were imagined to be youthful and therefore vulnerable: Douglas points out that it could fall into the hands of ‘young women and young men’ and hence posed the risk of ‘devastating the
Bradshaw has pointed out, ‘for all his ludicrous hyperbole and self-important posturing, the well-connected Douglas was a prude to be reckoned with’, and Hall’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, was wary that the Sunday Express review would lead to prosecution.3 When it became clear that the Home Office would take action, Cape wrote
to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, offering to withdraw the book. However, he was unwilling to concede defeat to the censors so readily. He secretly sent the moulds for printing to Paris, and in September 1928 the novel was reprinted by the Pegasus Press in France in its original English version. The published copies were then exported back to England. One shipment to a bookseller, Leopold Hill, was impounded at customs, but was subsequently released. The police then obtained search warrants under Lord Campbell’s Act and seized copies at Hill’s shop and also at the premises of another major bookseller on Charing Cross Road in London. Cape and Hall soon found themselves before the Chief Magistrate, Sir Henry Chartres Biron, at the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. Biron convicted the publisher and ordered all copies of the novel to be destroyed. Cape and Hall appealed against Biron’s decision, but to no avail.4 In this chapter, I will situate the trials of The Well of Loneliness in the context of
how female same-sex relations were understood in the early twentieth century, and will examine them as the terrain on which law and literature clashed over the construction of lesbian identity.5 In the first section, I will argue that the text constructs lesbian relations in a hetero-normative mode in order to ensure acceptability to a largely heterosexual readership. I will further contend that its representation of lesbianism is premised on an insufficiently acknowledged denigration of male homosexuality, and that Hall’s narrative displaces the offensiveness of gender deviancy from the figure of the lesbian onto the figure of the male homosexual as part of a strategy to establish lesbianism’s cultural acceptability. I will deepen this line of analysis in the second section through an investigation of lesbianhomosexual relations in the novel in a psychoanalytic frame. In the final section, I will analyse the way in which The Well of Loneliness was interpreted through the eyes of the law in the obscenity trial, and will posit that the magistrate’s reading of Hall’s novel unexpectedly constituted the route through which the
figure of to haunt it.
