Displaced Deviancy in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
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Many critics have commented that Radclyffe Hall’s protagonist in The Well of Loneliness, the lesbian Stephen Gordon, can be seen as a man trapped in a woman’s body, a sexual invert, because of the genetic idea Havelock Ellis made popular, that one was “born” that way. Hall, however, interrogates the idea of a reality ordered by scientific discourse by suggesting that experience determines reality, even more than science. Over the course of the novel, reality undergoes important changes when it is understood not in relation to the world science describes, but in relation to the life Stephen experiences. Hall points out that many “natural kinds” of lesbians exist, and that diversity in experience accounts for the dialectic or movement between objective and constructed reality that constructs lesbian desire; women “become” lesbians depending on an array of natural, social, and personal circumstances. For Hall, sexuality becomes equated with consciousness, with understanding how existence works in relation to the self. Hall therefore claims in her novel that human sexuality depends upon the experience of both objective and constructed realities thereby making use of the notion of the “many” to shift the landscape of lesbian deviancy onto the social domain.
Abstract
Many critics have commented that Radclyffe Hall’s protagonist in The Well of Loneliness, the lesbian Stephen Gordon, can be seen as a man trapped in a woman’s body, a sexual invert, because of the genetic idea Havelock Ellis made popular, that one was “born” that way. Hall, however, interrogates the idea of a reality ordered by scientific discourse by suggesting that experience determines reality, even more than science. Over the course of the novel, reality undergoes important changes when it is understood not in relation to the world science describes, but in relation to the life Stephen experiences. Hall points out that many “natural kinds” of lesbians exist, and that diversity in experience accounts for the dialectic or movement between objective and constructed reality that constructs lesbian desire; women “become” lesbians depending on an array of natural, social, and personal circumstances. For Hall, sexuality becomes equated with consciousness, with understanding how existence works in relation to the self. Hall therefore claims in her novel that human sexuality depends upon the experience of both objective and constructed realities thereby making use of the notion of the “many” to shift the landscape of lesbian deviancy onto the social domain.
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