Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

Christian Theology – Alister McGrath

I have been meaning to read this for as long as I've had The List (not just this, but this stands out), and it has taken me the best part of three years to get through it. Not for any particular reason - there was a continent move involved in the middle, of course, but it's just not... quite ever been the sort of thing I've had the discipline to sit down and read all the way through. I had a good spell on the mini-hol last week to make it through the final chapters, after initial stints on retreat in NY and then sporadically throughout the intervening years. Meaning I suspect that I have a rather thin retention of the content... that said, as a book it is well organised and clear, setting out the main debates of doctrine and important transitional points of church history for those interested in a bit more background on this sort of thing.

Chrome Yellow - Aldous Huxley

Absolutely dire. I wouldn't have read it had it not been for the fact that it's a thinly veiled roman a clef about life at Ottoline Morrell's Garsington and the cultural life there. A young writer turns up at the Garsington stand-in, flails a lot about being in love with a girl and doesn't do anything about it, and leaves. Not much happens. Characters make endless speeches about topics of Symbolic Importance. There are some good passages, not to mention some foreshadowing on themes that will turn up in Brave New World about population control, but otherwise ghastly. I struggled to make it to the end.

The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall

Now, I have read an awful lot about this book over the last few years, what with the HM project and a general interest in the literature and social history of the early 1920s, but I don't think anything had really prepared me for the fact that it's actually rather good. Mind you, I think having read some of the stuff I've read from this period and about it helped, not least the fact that I know a bit about Kraft-Ebbing and the theory of inversion which was going about as an explanation for lesbianism in this period. If you don't know about that, then you sort of end up looking at Stephen, the novel's protagonist, and not understanding either her actions or the actions of her father (who realises the truth about his daughter's condition when she is young, but cannot bring himself to discuss the subject with her mother or with the young Stephen herself - thus eventually leading to a chronic division between mother and daughter later in the novel).

The novel closes with Stephen in Paris having made a reputation as a writer, and (inter alia) being exhorted to tell the story of the inverts, in particular male inverts, who are presented as a particularly sad and sorry group, unable to break beyond what their nature requires of them. (Female inverts are rather more sympathetically presented throughout the novel, which is an interesting difference of perspective.) The Well of Loneliness contains in this way an explanation of its own goals - it seeks, through fiction, to make society at large sympathetic to the plight of the invert, unable to resist his or her own nature, horribly misunderstood and punished by society, and generally forced into low morality not because of his or her nature, but because of the reaction from 'good' society to that nature. It's quite a complicated social critique, in its own way, but it is understanding the idea that accepting that identity leads to sacrificing a normal life which has to be seen at the heart of the novel and its action.

I did really enjoy reading this - it's reminiscent in places of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (although Woolf deliberately ignores the psychological or indeed the causal in her account), both in content and theme. People have been disparaging about the style and the language, but I enjoyed it - it is a bit plummy and OTT, but it's also - well, I don't quite want to say rollicking because rollicking isn't the right sort of term for this kind of novel, but it is engaging even if it's not the most highly polished of prose. So I would recommend this - but I'd also recommend keeping it well out of the hands of any teenager trying to work out matters of sexual orientation. It will do more harm than good to people who approach it in the hope of finding an identity, but will give a great deal of pleasure to those able to appreciate it in its historical context.

Comments

[atreic.livejournal.com]

When I read the Well of Loneliness (which is a while ago now) it really resonated more with me as a trans narrative rather than a lesbian narrative - Stephen's choice of name and dress, etc etc. But I don't know much about the period. I'd be really interested if you think that's wrong, and why.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

I think my main reason for saying that Hall envisaged this as a lesbian narrative is because the primary way of thinking about inversion/lesbianism was by talking about it in terms which now sound far more like trans to us - about women who displayed men's characteristics and so on. If you read Kraft-Ebbing or any of the other psychological writers of the period on the subject, that's how they describe the Proper Lesbian, and they get rather confused and fussed about why women who don't display these characteristics (i.e. 'femmes' to use a modern term) go along with it. In fact, I think most writers on the subject conclude that 'normal' women will eventually leave 'mannish' women for a real man if the opportunity arises (and this is part of what drives the plot of The Well). As far as I am aware, the writers of this period don't have a conception of trans. If a woman says she feels like a man in a woman's body and fancies women, then it's straightforward inversion and that's that - there's no sense of the distinction between the gendered object of desire or one's own sense of self-identity, if that makes sense. According to Wikipedia, the word transsexual didn't make it into the medical dictionary until 1949, which is well after Hall's frame of reference; while there may have been earlier cases, it's not part of the standard psychopathia sexualis which Stephen and her father are meant to have read. Also, Hall uses the word inversion frequently, which was the language used for lesbianism and homosexuality in the period.

I should hasten to add that I'm not an expert on trans history in any shape or form, and that I can see why a trans reading would be the more natural reading for a modern reader. But without understanding the underpinnings of how contemporary psychology viewed inversion (namely, you were damned to be miserable and outcast from society), I don't think that Stephen's actions or Mary's reactions to Parisian life make any sense.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think Hall didn't envisage it as a lesbian narrative - they wrote a narrative about being an invert. I think that readers of The Well came to it later and decided it was a lesbian narrative through their own perceptions of gender and sexuality, at a time when lesbianism was better understood than trans issues. I don't think we can say 'inversion is the language used for lesbianism and homosexuality' without acknowledging that if a modern straight trans man was analysed within that framework and language they would also be diagnosed as an invert.

I would love to know what would happen if Radclyffe Hall was alive nowadays and trying to write about Stephen in our terminology. Is Stephen a butch lesbian? Is Stephen a trans man? My money is much more on the latter than on the former... but maybe the point is that gender and orientation is about people discovering and labelling their own identity. And from that point Stephen is an invert - and to label them as either a trans man or a lesbian is to try and squash their life into our boxes.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on all of this (and/but I get annoyed when modern-day lesbians co-opt The Well in a way I wouldn't if modern-day trans people did so.)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, thank you so much! I love the book strangely and fiercely, and I too bristle when it is sold as a lesbian novel.