osprey_archer | Book Review: The Well of Loneliness

I can’t say The Well of Loneliness was exactly an enjoyable read, but then, it’s not meant to be. It’s a novel with a reformist mission, and like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it goes about that mission by pricking you with needles until you scream, “This injustice must be stopped!”

In The Well of Loneliness, the injustice is the social persecution of inverts - and I use the word inverts advisedly; it’s the word Radclyffe Hall always uses, and the idea of gender inversion is absolutely central to the novel and to Hall’s understanding of gender and sexuality. Stephen is always described in masculine terms, as a double of her beloved father (strong feeling that if Hall wrote this book today, Stephen would be written as a transgender man), whereas Stephen’s lover Mary is normal because she’s conventionally feminine. In fact, Stephen frets about the misery of Mary’s lot as “a girl who, herself being normal, gave her love to an invert.”

At the end, Stephen self-sacrificingly pretends to take a lover in order to push Mary into the arms of Martin Hallam, who fell in love with Stephen years ago and has now fallen for Mary, who is sort of in love with him and also sort of not. During a quarrel, Mary shouts at Stephen, “But for you, I could have loved Martin Hallam!”, at which point Stephen comes up with her fake-lover plan.

Hall comments of Stephen, “Surely never was an outlaw more law-abiding at heart, than this, the last of the Gordons,” and this is never more evident than in Stephen’s rock-solid certainty that Mary would be happier in a socially acceptable marriage to a man who could give her children and an honorable position in society - and her belief that it’s her duty and her right as Mary’s protector to make that choice for Mary if Mary won’t make it herself.

Her pretend lover Valerie Seymour certainly disdains Stephen’s self-sacrifice. “For God’s sake keep the girl, and get what happiness you can out of life,” she says. Stephen insists Mary must be set free to find happiness in normal channels! At length Valerie capitulates, scoffing, “You were made for a martyr.”

Stephen’s plan works, Mary flies from the supposedly perfidious Stephen into Martin Hallam’s arms, and the novel ends with Stephen alone, wailing to the heavens, “Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!”

As I said, it’s not always enjoyable - it is, after all, meant to rend your heart - but it is fascinating, and I’m glad that I finally read it.

However, I can also see why Mary Renault really disliked this book, to the point of savaging it decades later in her afterword to The Friendly Young Ladies, which I now strongly suspect was written in part as a repudiation of The Well of Loneliness. This was THE book about lesbians in the 1920s and 30s, and as a Representative Text I can see why it would be grating. Yes, there are some lovely idyllic bits about Stephen and Mary’s love affair, but overall the picture it offers of the life of the invert is bleak. And it’s so abject! (I suspect this is what really got Renault.) It’s a book-length plea for pity. It begs, hat in hand. Just allow us to exist!

As an antidote to The Well of Loneliness, Mary Renault recommends Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women. I have not gotten very far in Extraordinary Women (will report back more fully when I do), but a plea for pity it is not.

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From:

sovay

Stephen’s rock-solid certainty that Mary would be happier in a socially acceptable marriage to a man who could give her children and an honorable position in society - and her belief that it’s her duty and her right as Mary’s protector to make that choice for Mary if Mary won’t make it herself.

I find that less heartrending that inspiring me to punch Stephen in the face.

However, I can also see why Mary Renault really disliked this book, to the point of savaging it decades later in her afterword to The Friendly Young Ladies, which I now strongly suspect was written in part as a repudiation of The Well of Loneliness.

I wish she'd been able to give it a better ending, if so.

I am also reminded of The Heart in Exile (1953), in terms of books explicitly written not be pleas for pity.

Edited Date: 2022-05-07 02:19 am (UTC)

From:

osprey_archer

Hall's imaginary reader is clearly a solidly bourgeois person from 1928 who will see Stephen's actions vis-a-vis Mary as a noble sacrifice and not a refusal to let the girl make her own decisions.

Particularly boggling: when Martin realizes he's getting feelings for Mary, he comes to Stephen and says he's going to leave, and then Stephen is all, "No! Stay and we'll fight it out like men!" And then a few months later Martin declares she's won, and THEN Stephen comes up with this fake infidelity plan. This is truly next level shooting oneself in the foot.

I was hoping that this book would give me some insight into why Renault chose to end The Friendly Young Ladies that way, but alas, I remain in the dark. The part in The Friendly Young Ladies that really felt like a response is the part where Leo is musing about the societal attitude toward queerness and thinks (in terms of attitude, not her actual words) "Normal people might object but whatever." Poor Stephen never gets in spitting distance of "whatever."

From:

sovay

Hall's imaginary reader is clearly a solidly bourgeois person from 1928 who will see Stephen's actions vis-a-vis Mary as a noble sacrifice and not a refusal to let the girl make her own decisions.

Look, I want to punch Cyrano de Bergerac, too!

I hope Valerie lived to become a grand dame of the British queer scene so that a generation later she could commiserate with Alec on being the sole people in their respective books with their heads screwed on straight.

I was hoping that this book would give me some insight into why Renault chose to end The Friendly Young Ladies that way, but alas, I remain in the dark.

I just feel that if she so violently renounced Radclyffe Hall and all her works, it would have been nice if her own novels were not so legendary for swatting their romances with a cement truck.

The part in The Friendly Young Ladies that really felt like a response is the part where Leo is musing about the societal attitude toward queerness and thinks (in terms of attitude, not her actual words) "Normal people might object but whatever."

That makes sense. I assume Hall had difficulty with spitting distance herself.

From:

regshoe

It seems to me that some of the tragedy of that plot comes from Hall's (/Stephen's?) view of what lesbians/inverts are being basically self-contradictory, rather than societal attitudes as such (though mostly that, obviously!). I have a lot of sympathy for older ideas about queerness like this vs more modern models, but if you start by drawing a line between inverts and normal women, then decide that inverts are only attracted to normal women but normal women can only be happy with men because they're normal... you're going to get stuck somewhere. (Speculating, I wonder if Renault having her more obviously 'inverted' character fall in love with a man was part of refuting that model).

And I look forward to hearing about Extraordinary Women!

From:

osprey_archer

The novel is based closely on Hall's life, so I think we can safely say that Stephen's views (at least at the end of the book) are more or less Hall's own.

Anyway, yes, Hall does tend to assume that inverts fall for normal women, and normal women tend to fall for men. The one couple we see where both sides stay true to the end, ends with the normal girl dying of pneumonia and her invert lover killing herself out of grief/guilt (she had proudly refused all the offers of financial assistance that might have prevented this tragedy), so a rather tragic example.

I think you may be onto something re: Renault: maybe she meant to buck the trend by having boyish Leo fall for a man rather than girlish Helen. It's still such an odd ending that my first thought when I read it was that she HAD to end it that way to appease her publisher, but she doesn't mention any such thing in the afterword she wrote decades later when presumably she could have said so...

It is an interesting contrast that in The Well of Loneliness, Stephen is pushing Mary toward Martin because he can give her safety/security, whereas in The Friendly Young Ladies the feeling of the ending (at least for me) is that in going with Joe, Leo is giving up the safety and security of the houseboat and Helen. Maybe Renault's ending is intended as a riff on The Well of Loneliness after all?

From:

sovay

I think you may be onto something re: Renault: maybe she meant to buck the trend by having boyish Leo fall for a man rather than girlish Helen.

The sexual fluidity of The Friendly Young Ladies, too, would be a direct riposte to what sounds like the born-this-way-and-can't-help-it pleading of The Well of Loneliness. The ending remains a crashing horror of heteronormativity, but it does confirm Leo as well as Helen as bisexual, both of their sexual orientations and their gender presentations and their choices of partner carefully disambiguated from the conflatingly binary model of Hall—I still love Helen's casual repudiation of the assumption that she must be in a relationship with a woman because she's afraid of men, as opposed to the reality that she likes men just fine, she just likes Leo better. Helen then looks like a conscious rebuttal of the figure of the "normal" woman in the invert model, just as much as tomboyish Leo going off with a man. If it had been more queerly done, it would have been a much less horrific ending.

Edited Date: 2022-05-07 07:20 pm (UTC)

From:

osprey_archer

One of the things that can make Renault's books so maddening is that in many ways they are SO queer, and then sometimes they get hit by a great big heteronormative truck. Not only does Leo going off with a man, but hooking up with him changes both of their personalities entirely. They were buddies before BUT THEY WILL NOT BE BUDDIES NOW, we are assured. The letter he writes her, about how he befriended her boyish, independent side, which will be destroyed by their relationship! and he already mourns that destruction! but they should get together anyway! is truly something else.

From:

sovay

One of the things that can make Renault's books so maddening is that in many ways they are SO queer, and then sometimes they get hit by a great big heteronormative truck.

In case I have not yet complained to you about Purposes of Love (1939), that one is like an entire heteronormative truck convoy. (Further complaint as well as actual discussion in comments.) I love the premise of a queer m/f couple trying to negotiate a relationship on equal terms with as little interference from gender norms as possible. Unfortunately, they are the protagonists of Mary Renault's first novel. The fix-it would take the whole second half of the book. [edit] I actually resent it very much; the first half is still unusual in fiction.

The letter he writes her, about how he befriended her boyish, independent side, which will be destroyed by their relationship! and he already mourns that destruction! but they should get together anyway! is truly something else.

Ten out of ten red flags, would flush down the loo and not write back again!

I may never get over the ending of The Friendly Young Ladies. I don't understand how it can exist in the same book as Helen's conversation with Peter, which is funny and realistic and so well deserved. He's so shocked and keeps trying to come up with a heteronormative explanation. There is no heteronormative explanation. She tells him he must have read too many novels.

Edited Date: 2022-05-08 04:05 am (UTC)

From:

regshoe

Barbara and Jamie! I remember they were one of my favourite parts of the book, OTT tragedy as it was.

That's an interesting point about safety and security, also. Yes, I can kind of see how it might be a riff on this book, just done in a way that's very... er, Like That.

From:

osprey_archer

Barbara and Jamie are SO sweet and SO sad. Way to twist the knife, Hall!

I guess ultimately any attempt to understand the ending of The Friendly Young Ladies has to fall back to the question "Okay, so she was trying to do X, but why did she do it Like That?" The answerable question.

I do sometimes have the suspicion that Mary Renault just liked to make her readers scream, and the ending of The Friendly Young Ladies certainly accomplishes that.

From:

regshoe

I do sometimes have the suspicion that Mary Renault just liked to make her readers scream

*nods seriously* I think you may be onto something there...

From:

lauradi7dw

In a collection of letters between Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson, Vita (having just read the novel when it was released) basically said she thought it was badly written, but that if a mainstream company could publish such a book, it doubled the story options for novelists.