Book Review: The Well of Loneliness
May. 6th, 2022 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI 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.
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.
