Tag: Virginia Woolf

Gender Trouble in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’

Ana Francisca Silva1 Comment

“. . . but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” [1]

‘Bliss’ opens with the heroine – Bertha – being moved by an overwhelming, and misunderstood, feeling of anticipation, which is particularly characterised by her inability to give expression to it. Throughout much of the story she is unable to give full expression to her inner passions, whether out of fear or inability, ‘her discourse is tempered by social conditioning.’[2] When she is overcome by this intense feeling of bliss she asks whether there is ‘no way to express it without being ‘drunk and disorderly’’ and perceives civilisation as ‘idiotic’ because of its control over her own individual expression. When she desires to ‘get in touch’ with her husband, she becomes paralysed on the phone, ‘What had she to say? She’d nothing to say… She couldn’t absurdly cry: ‘Hasn’t it been a divine day!’ Again, in the nursery, the contrast between her internalised feelings and her verbalised response is striking, ‘You’re nice – you’re very nice! … I’m fond of you. I like you,’ she says to her baby daughter.

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Representation, Expression and Censorship: Same-sex Desire in ‘Orlando’ and ‘The Well of Loneliness’

Ana Francisca Silva2 Comments

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.

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