By 1928 – the year The Well of Loneliness[1] and Orlando[2] were published – there was an increasing social awareness of female same-sex desire in Britain.[3] Whilst The Well engages in religious and contemporaneous sexological discourse in order to legitimise and justify ‘sexual inversion’; Orlando adopts metaphorical language and narrative strategies to deconstruct and expose conventional heterosexuality, exploiting the possibility for same-sex desire.[4]
The masculinised protagonist of The Well – Stephen Gordon – can be identified, with the help of Newton, as ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian’.[5] This view of female homosexuality echoes throughout the novel, and is primarily drawn from the work of contemporary sexologist’s such as; Havelock Ellis[6], Edward Carpenter[7], Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Karl Ulrich, whose theories of ‘congenital sexual inversion’ Hall embraced.[8] To these theorists ‘sexual inversion’ is seen as misaligned gender identity[9]; in other words, female homosexuality is characterised by a masculine soul trapped in a female body.[10] Stephen is directly associated with masculinity: her masculine tastes and accomplishments, her cropped hair and her men’s ties, combined with an aversion to female domesticity and passivity, identifies her as the quintessential ‘invert’.[11] For Stephen – and Hall – ‘lesbianism is a congenital form of lust caused by and manifested in gender reversal’[12] but this use of sexological distinctions between ‘true inverts’[13] and the women who love them, sets up a hierarchy of inversion weighed down by contradictions about same-sex desire.
Continue reading “Representation, Expression and Censorship: Same-sex Desire in ‘Orlando’ and ‘The Well of Loneliness’”
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