ABSTRACT
The novel in question is Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), and as Esther Newton's essay demonstrates, it is about visibility. Hall's lesbian heroine is born a 'narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered' baby, whose infant features include an incipiently cleft chin. It is with the last that Hall's work is most associated, not least because his arguments combined biological determinism with moral exculpation, attributing to female inverts a degree of moral sensitivity in direct proportion to their homosexual predisposition. The paradoxical project of Transforming the Suit — the simultaneous assertion and deconstruction of identity — provoked these thoughts on the lesbian self-portrait. Indeed, all the images here could be exhibited under Rosy Martin's title. The author's concern in tracing such transformations across a century of photographic practice is not to document a succession of lesbian identities so much as to register that paradox, and the problems it presents to photography's promise to record identity.
