The writings of Hall called for changes within society, while the writings of Woolf challenged the accepted norms of society. Both women created a type of literary politics that questioned sexual morality--which could be censored by British officials.

Because of her refusal to criminalize Stephen Gordan’s lesbianism in The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall was brought to trial, and her books were banned in England. Woolf was prepared to testify at Hall’s trial against the censorship of Hall’s book, even though Woolf disliked The Well. No testimony, however, was allowed at the trial. Hall appealed this first decision but was met with a second trial that echoed the first: obscene libel.

Hall felt that she had a duty to her fellow homosexuals to attempt to gain acceptance for them from society. In The Well, she notes that many inverts have fallen into despair due to the effects of prejudice and fear. Similarly, Plato notes in his "Allegory of the Cave" that many people remain (or have fallen) within the cave, looking only at shadows of reality instead of freeing themselves and opening their eyes. Plato believed that those who have seen the light must return to the cave and tell those who remain about it. Similarly, Hall writes that those "who have courage have also a duty" (The Well of Loneliness 389).

Woolf’s Orlando was not as explicit about sexuality as The Well. Because of the inconspicuous, even subversive tactics used by Woolf, no suit was brought against it and no censorship was imposed. I believe that Orlando, read in conjunction with A Room of One’s Own (published a year later), outlines Woolf’s convictions concerning healthy sexuality and lack of gender expression—that being androgyny. Woolf uses Orlando, who changes from man to woman, subsequently blurring gender roles, to outline her idea that within each person is both sexes--or both genders. As Orlando changes her clothes from the attire of a man to the dress of a woman, we see that she is treated differently and begins to view herself differently.

Hall also used clothes to signify difference (as when Stephen insists on dressing as a man), but used a unified image of only masculinity--as opposed to Woolf’s argument that clothes did not always denote biological sex or one’s assumed gender role. Hall was arguing for the acceptance of the congenital (inborn homosexual) invert, using terminology that identified the female invert with heterosexual males. Woolf, on the other hand, was writing about the social construction of gender and how its dichotomy of opposites could actually be found in one person, in everyone in fact, and she was fighting for the empowerment of women. In A Room of One’s Own, she writes of her disdain for gender competition and roles:

Woolf similarly writes in a letter, "Where people mistake is in perpetually narrowing and naming these immensely composite and wide flung passions—driving stakes through them, herding them between screens" (Letters 6:200). Woolf was fighting for the freedom of expressing oneself as one was, not as one should be. This could and did relate not only to gender but also to the expression of one’s sexuality. Eve Sedgwick understands Woolf’s struggle, writing in her book Tendencies that

Thanks to sexologists (and to some extent, thanks to Hall, since much of the sexological discourse was still only viewed by medical professionals), two binarized categories arose to define one’s sexuality; one was either heterosexual or an inverted homosexual. Despite this categorization, Woolf continued to scorn either as a personal definition. She did, however, have several friends that identified themselves as inverts. Woolf’s experience with "inverts" primarily began with her introduction to the Bloomsbury Group.

Soon after her father died, Woolf and her family moved to Bloomsbury, where Woolf became a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite assemblage of writers (primarily men). Bloomsbury afforded Woolf not only a feeling of social acceptance, but also an outlet for political debate, activism, and open expression of sexuality. She writes, "The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement that we had discussed the nature of good." Many of the members of Bloomsbury were indeed homosexuals. Nevertheless, Woolf’s interaction with Bloomsbury might not all have been positive, as Eileen Barrett notes in her book Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings:

Woolf did not haphazardly choose a move to androgyny; she understood that any system that gave a majority power over a minority was not the answer—whether or not that majority enjoyed its power from race or sex--as with Bloomsbury. Intellectual androgyny would support a free self-expression without conservative social mores and encourage a merit-based society rather than preferential treatment for men and prejudice based on one’s ability to (or failure to) fit into strict norms.

As literature was her primary focus and cause, Woolf believed that the person with an androgynous mind would be the sagacious artist. She writes in A Room, "the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; …it transmits emotion without impediment; …it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided" (98). Such a mind has the freedom from birth to "stretch itself in whatever way it liked"—this means anything from gender or religious expression to sexual partner/s or exploration of literary themes (99).

While Hall refrained from openly challenging patriarchal power or religious values, The Well does contain some anomalous characters who either show the destructiveness of the gender invert model outlined by Krafft-Ebing or who present positive images of un-inverted homosexuals as presented by Ellis. Hall presents these as minor characters who interact with the main, inverted, character so that her propaganda of acceptance and pity (since the invert cannot help the destructive life that they must lead due to their congenital inversion) remains in the forefront to the reader.

Yet, Hall’s The Well was banned because lesbianism would not be condoned by the "upright" patriarchy, while Woolf ‘s Orlando remained untouched because it obscured any same-sex relations. To elaborate, Woolf was capable of bending gender by presenting Orlando as a man (by dressing and being more masculine at times like a man) while still a woman, because she was not openly sleeping with women (she didn’t cross that last line). Woolf hints at the enjoyment women find in each other’s company but does not elaborate, merely asserting that she will "leave it to the gentlemen to prove, as they are fond of doing, that this is impossible" (Orlando 220).

Through passages such as this, Woolf criticized misogynistic patriarchy with its gender constraints, oppressive morality, and censoring authority. These subtle and playful evasions are what make Woolf so politically effective—they make it possible for Woolf to write that which others would not be able to hint at without naming. This idea is best elucidated by Eileen Barrett when she writes,

Woolf used blank spaces (ellipses) to openly denote the things that censors said she couldn’t write. Her silences are explained when she writes, "if modern books become so insipid, so blameless, so full of blank spaces and evasions (of the full un-publishable truth) that we cannot read them, we shall be driven to read the classics, where obscenity abounds…" (Parkes 457). Woolf uses pauses within A Room to symbolize what could have been written following "Chloe liked Olivia"—that a same-sex relationship could have openly ensued within the book—but did not, because of censoring, because of prejudice, because of gender restrictions.

The first group of specialists to challenge such assumed norms (which were protected by censorship) were sexologists. I will continue now by analyzing the works of three sexologists specifically used in Hall’s The Well.

  Sexology began during the Victorian Era and has since died away as a profession to be placed piecemeal within psychology, sociology, and various other social, physical, and psychical studies. The dynamic impact sexologists had on the latter part of the 1800’s and early 1900’s emerged from their clinical (whether medical and/or psychological) examination of sexuality and creation of sexual discourse. Sexologists not only instigated a sexual reform within their profession/s; they also produced social reform.

An important fact to keep in mind while considering sexologists is that many of them were fighting for the better treatment and understanding of homosexuals. When I first considered writing about inversion, which was the major theory held by sexologists at the time concerning homosexuality; I felt it shortsighted and close-minded. I have since come to understand that many scientific and legislative constituents during the Victorian Era were trying to find factors that would help identify homosexuals. Since many of the physical deformation arguments had been disproved through time, the search was directed inward, but only in as much as the inward desires/preferences were reflected outwardly. Thus, gender inversion became the easiest to identify, since one could reason that if a man/woman desired his/her own sex, there must be something within him/her similar to the opposite sex.

Many sexologists that argued for an inverted model of homosexuality were offering a biological or psychologically innate argument, as opposed to the stigma that homosexuality was morally objectionable or evil. In her book The Safe Sea of Women, Bonnie Zimmerman writes that such an argument was "used as a defense against the increasing conservatism and hostility of the dominant culture, because if we are born that way, we are not responsible for our sexuality and hence less vulnerable to attack" (59). The sexologists discussed below offered an umbrella from some of society’s fears concerning homosexuals and began calling for more lenient legislation concerning same-sex offenses.

Although he wrote in Germany during the 1860’s, it is important to note Karl Heinrich Ulrich as significant to the building of sexology during the late 19^th century. Ulrich was one of the first significant writers on what we today call inversion. During this period, same-sex acts were still considered unspeakable. Ulrich stated that based on his research, he believed there to be a third sex, peoples that are "born with the ‘soul’ (character) of the opposite gender; therefore their desire for someone of the same sex is natural" (Summers 318). He called this gender inversion "Urnanism" (Urnings) and resigned from his position as an attorney to fight for their rights, since he himself was one. Concentrating on male-male love, he categorized Urnings into four categories: Mannline (male lover of effeminate men); Weibling (male lover of muscular men); Zwischen-Urning (male lover of young men); and Virilized Urning (male lover of men who represses his inborn sexual instinct by cohabitating with women) (Bristow 135).

Taking his term "urning" from the Greek word Uranos, meaning heaven, Ulrich believed that love between urnings was a higher love than heterosexual love (Collins 64). In Plato’s Symposium, a character outlines two forms of love. One is from heaven, Uranos, and the other is common. The common love finds its expression with a partner choice from either sex, while "those who are inspired by [heavenly love] turn [only] to the male" (Plato 328).

Ulrich was the first sexologist to pose inversion (males with female gender/souls and vice versa), a biologically/psychologically inborn sexuality, as an argument for homosexual rights and acceptance. It is important to note that he was one of the first thinkers/writers of the time who moved away from the idea that same-sex sexual interactions were only unrelated acts, to a concrete preference and sexuality.

The next significant sexologist after Ulrich was Richard von Krafft-Ebing who published Psychopathia SexualisI in 1886. Kraff-Ebing criticized Ulrich because Ulrich "makes no distinction between the congenital and the acquired anomaly" of inversion (Psychopathia Sexualis 353). Krafft-Ebing viewed inversion as a pathology, whether acquired or congenital (inborn), but, like Ulrich, was very sympathetic toward his inverted patient, as he was with any patient that had pathological afflictions.

In defense of congenital inversion, Krafft-Ebing states, "Some authors claim that congenital homosexuality does not exist, but that this anomaly is acquired from others. But I cannot accept their arguments, for they do not explain the presence of the distinguishing symptoms often found in the earliest years of the individuals afflicted…" (448). He thus defends the congenital invert, stating that his counseling and studies have shown him that they often cannot be "cured" through treatment. He explains that

According to Krafft-Ebbing, acquired inversion, however, can be cured in some patients. One patient he counseled was suffering from being attracted to men. This was obviously a case of acquired inversion since the man was married with children and had only recently been feeling such urges. Krafft-Ebing states that his advice to the patient was that he should "strenuously combat these homosexual impulses, perform his marital duties whenever possible, eschew alcohol and masturbation, which increases homosexual feelings and kills the love for woman, and undergo treatment for neurasthenia. If he could not find relief and the situation became unbearable he must confine himself to kisses and embraces with the male" (368). (Krafft-Ebing notes—from a trend in his patients—that most inverts are satisfied with simple embraces or touch by the same sex.) This advice given, he sent the patient on his way and recorded healthy results.

Krafft-Ebing administered sessions of hypnosis to another patient who found himself to be attracted to men and wished to remain unmarried. In each of these, he had the patient repeat key phrases to change the patient’s object of desire. He lists them as: "1) I abhor onanism, because it makes me weak and miserable. 2) I no longer have inclination toward men; for love for men is against religion, nature and law. 3) I feel an inclination toward woman; for woman is lovely and desirable, and created for man" (457). After treatment, the man seemed healthier and cured. A year after treatment, he still maintained that he was attracted to women and wished to marry.

Krafft-Ebing goes on in Psychopathia Sexualis to note that hypnosis didn’t fully work on many of his patients. He doesn’t offer any remedies to this, but says that he has found that physical treatment such as castration, or commitment to an asylum, are not permissible or helpful treatments.

Sexual inversion in females is just as frequent as in males, according to Krafft-Ebing. He states, "It would not be fair to draw from this the conclusion that sexual inversion in woman is rare, for if this anomaly is really a manifestation of functional degeneration, then degenerative influences will prevail alike in the female as well as in the male" (395). The reason society might think inversion is less frequent in women is that 1) women’s confidence is hard to gain; 2) many laws do not outline the possibility of lesbianism; 3) sexual inversion does not bring about impotency in women, so physical affects are less apparent; and lastly, 4) because women are not as sensual or sexually aggressive as men. Also,

Inverts are, of course, easily spotted or suspected. If a woman wears her hair short, wear men’s clothing, or enjoy sports, she is without fail, an invert. Krafft-Ebing also explains that for the female invert, the concept of being excluded from intellectual debate or the military is infuriating and debilitating. Male inverts, on the other hand, enjoy women’s clothing, act, walk, or talk like women, and enjoy toiletries, sweetmeats, or perfume.

Krafft-Ebing concludes that much of the homosexual legislation existing could be extinguished since inverts are harmless and in many cases incurable. He continues that these laws incite blackmail by making inescapable acts illegal, which he finds deplorable. He urges jurists and legislators to revamp such legislation. His views were sympathetic, though he argued that homosexuality was pathological.

Krafft-Ebing knew of the difficulty of gaining sympathetic support from legislators while presenting a positive view of homosexuality. In Psychopathia Sexualis he included a response from one of his patients. The patient writes,

The patient continues to describe a generic situation that most homosexuals must face: that even if they are lucky enough to have a healthy same-sex relationship, they still must worry every moment about the secrets and lies they must create. He suggests that Krafft-Ebing is being shortsighted in his accounts of homosexuality, arguing that the pathology Krafft-Ebing is finding in homosexuals is due to the daily fears homosexuals must face of being found out, of societal punishment, and the guilt they feel due to societal messages of homosexuality as wrong.

Krafft-Ebing does not respond to this letter, only includes it in his book. This leads one to surmise that he was open to alternative ideas, but perhaps thought it unwise to state his own opinions when he was trying to remain medically accurate based on his experience.

Havelock Ellis, a contemporary to Krafft-Ebing, believed that Krafft-Ebing should be considered "a clinician, rather than a psychologist" (Encyclopedia of Sexual Behaviour 70). Ellis argued that homosexuality was strictly congenital and that even Krafft-Ebing himself had a difficult time, after several years of study, of standing by his idea of acquired inversion. He points out that

The increase in legislation reflects the increase in conservative morals and will be discussed below.

Perhaps the best-known piece of British Legislation against homosexuals is the Labouchere Amendment, which was written into the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. It stated that "gross indecency" between males in public or private was a misdemeanor punishable by two years of hard labor. The Labouchere Amendment quickly became known as the "Blackmailer’s Charter" since many homosexual, as well as heterosexual men, were threatened to be reported as homosexuals (Bristow 1). Homosexual men paid blackmailers to keep their secret, while heterosexual men paid to keep from being defamed. Oscar Wilde was the first homosexual to be publicly prosecuted, becoming a casualty of the Labouchere Amendment. This amendment was important to women such as Hall or Woolf because it paved the way for British legislators to propose a similar amendment prohibiting same-sex acts between women. Vera Brittain notes this 1920 legislative struggle in her book covering Radclyffe Hall’s trial, A Case of Obscenity:

The discrimination and homophobia of the Labouchere Amendment remained in effect until forty years ago. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967, however, only partly decriminalized male homosexuality. The male age of consent for same-sex relations was 21, while the heterosexual age of consent was 16. Not until 1994 did the House of Commons vote to lower the age of consent for homosexual men to 18.

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The Labouchere Amendment, however, does not account for the ways in which England responded to the topic of homosexuality as it was discussed in the writings of scientific professionals (such as Ellis or Krafft-Ebing) or authors of fiction (such as Hall or Woolf) during the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century. Oftentimes trials would ensue in which judges would claim that these writings were "obscene libels" and ban them.

The phrase "obscene libel" was not used until 1725, in a case against Edmund Curll for publishing A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs and Venus in the Cloister. The former depicted fornication and flagellation, while the latter described a nun’s sexuality. Up until this point, Curll had published volumes on venereal disease, hermaphrodites, impotence, and sodomy (Thomas 78). Within the case, the word "libel" was defined by a judge as not meaning the defamation of a person or persons by the publication of a book, but as a return to the Latin libellus, meaning ‘a little book’ (82). Thus, an Obscene Libel should be understood as an obscene little book. Curll was found guilty of publishing an obscene little book and sentenced to the pillory (where insults and objects could be hurled at him by the people).

A formal Obscenity Law was written into legislation in 1727 against anything "tending to corrupt the morals of the King’s subjects" and "destructive of morality in general" (Brittain 159). This law was rewritten in the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and called Lord Campbell’s Act, but the rewrite did not alter the (albeit vague) definition of the offence. The Act stated that if a work "depraved and corrupted" the morals of young people, shocked "the common feelings of decency in any well regulated mind," and could fall into the hands of someone whose mind was open to uch "immoral influences," then the publication was found to be obscene (162). The revision changed the language and made the suppression of morally undesirable materials easier by giving Justices of the Peace the power to write search warrants and to order the destruction of any material without a trial.

In conjunction with the Obscene Publications Act, the Vagrancy Act of 1824 ordained it illegal to create a public performance of an obscene book (Thomas 38). The Town Police Clauses Act of 1847 made it an offence to display ‘profane or indecent or obscene books’ or sing a ‘profane or obscene song or ballad’ or to use any ‘profane or obscene language’ (Thomas 174). The Customs and Consolidation Act of 1876 authorized customs to seize any indecent or obscene articles imported into the country (70). The Advertisements Act of 1889 prosecuted persons that advertised obscene books or used any profane language (118). And finally, the Indictments Act of 1915 provided that in a case against a book, the book must be provided as well as the indictment and particulars showing the portions of the book that were being complained about (46). These legislative acts show the lengths to which the British Government had gone to suppress controversial materials. Many of these Acts were used to condemn Havelock Ellis and Radclyffe Hall’s works.

Ellis’ Trials

Havelock Ellis became an important figure in light of this legislative prudery since he had an important role in Radclyffe Hall’s understanding of inversion and writing of The Well of Loneliness and also came under legislative fire himself. Ellis’ difficulty arose in 1895 when he attempted to publish Studies in the Psychology of Sex right after Oscar Wilde’s trial. Many publishers were not willing to take the risk after such a publicly homophobic event. Shortly after the book was ready for publication, Ellis’ co-author, John Addington Symonds, who contributed a few sections to the Studies, died, leaving his family requesting that his name be removed from any connection to the book. Ellis had to print a second edition without Symonds’ name or contributions, and he republished the first volume of Studies in 1897. Ellis found Dr. Roland de Villiers to publish his book at last but was soon to find that this choice of publisher would be problematic (Craig 60).

De Villiers handled other publications such as The Adult, which was produced from a society called the Legitimation League. The Legitimation League deemed their purposes as obtaining legal status for illegitimate children, upholding the principle of mutually-consented divorce, and protecting the rights of sexual deviants (61). The secretary of the League was a Mr. George Bedborough, who, like the rest of the League and de Villiers, was being watched by authorities for any wrong moves so that the League could be prosecuted for their subversive publications (Thomas 268). Unfortunately, Ellis’ first volume of the Studies, Sexual Inversion, became the evidence used against the League. In fact, the volume was considered a piece of homosexual pornography (270).

Ellis, thinking that he personally would be prosecuted for publishing an obscene libel, secured as legal representation Messr C.O. Humphreys and Sons, who had represented Wilde in his trial (Grosskurth 193). As was written in the Obscene Publications Act, however, Ellis didn’t need worry since he was not the owner of the book or of the premises on which it was found. Moreover, before the trial could begin on October 30, 1898, Bedborough pleaded guilty to most of the charges because he was promised immunity. He explained that his part was a subordinate one and that he had little knowledge of the themes in the publication of either The Adult or Sexual Inversion. As for de Villiers, he committed suicide while in custody (270). Ellis’ volume subsequently was restricted from publication. When he attempted to publish a second volume, the books were found obscene libels once again and burnt by the government.

It has been an important query of mine, when analyzing radicals’ controversial work, to understand the effect that the legislative and social difficulties they faced had upon them. Ellis considered The Studies his life’s work. Though he underwent trial after trial in England, his volumes were well received in both Germany and America. He was not broken by his battles against British censorship; in fact he notes in the postscript of the sixth and final volume of The Studies that a prosecution instigated by the government put an end to the sale of

Unfortunately, Hall was more embittered than Ellis after her trials.

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In the Beginning: The Reviews

Thanks to preliminaries arranged by Jonathan Cape, the publisher of The Well, Hall had sought a preface from Havelock Ellis supporting her book. Ellis’ commentary held Hall’s books to have "fine qualities as a novel" and "notable psychological and sociological significance." Ellis noted Hall’s book to be the first of its kind that addressed sexual inversion, which was Hall’s main objective, and supported the invert as capable of having the "highest character and finest aptitude." He assured the reader that Hall wrote so vividly of this sexual deviation, "and yet with such complete absence of offence," that Hall’s book should hold a "high level of distinction." After Ellis’ preface was finished, Cape had printed 1250 copies to see how well they sold. In the beginning, Hall’s publication of The Well was a success. Sales were ascending, a connection Hall had made socially to a Mrs. Blanche Knopf allowed her to begin considering publication in the United States, and reviewers were, for the most part, spectacularly positive.

Reviewers were understanding Hall’s theme as a "a plea, passionate, yet admirably restrained and never offensive, for the extension of social toleration, compassion and recognition to the biologically abnormal woman, who, because she possesses the tastes and instincts of a man, is too often undeservedly treated as a moral pariah" (Brittain 48). The public understood that

Another reviewer noted that

Not everyone had positive comments, however. One reviewer did not believe Hall’s argument that homosexuality is congenital, writing that

Unfortunately, it was sentiments similar to that cited above which led James Douglas, editor for a newspaper called the Sunday Express, to send a note to Jonathan Cape warning him that he would be printing an article that Sunday, August 19^th, 1928, calling for a banishment of Hall’s book from public viewing (Souhami 189). Apparently, aside from the moral arguments, Douglas was primarily concerned with making his newspaper sell.

In fear and haste, Cape sent a letter shortly after the printing of Douglas’ article to the secretary of the Home Office (which judged books obscene or not), Sir William Joynson-Hicks. Cape reflexively wrote that

Hicks did indeed believe the book obscene and wrote to Cape saying,

Keeping to his word, Cape canceled the reprint of the books but allowed the already-published copies to sell since no formal order for destruction was given. In addition to Hicks’ reply, Cape had to satisfy his obligation to Hall’s wishes. He decided to send the molds for the book to Paris and lease the rights to The Well to Pegasus Press, providing a list of unfulfilled British orders and an overseas mailing address. The Pegasus Press had new copies of The Well ready within three weeks (Souhami 204).

The trouble began anew when a journalist from the Daily Sketch phoned the Home Office, informing them that he had seen circulars from Pegasus concerning The Well. That same day, Hicks issued a warrant to the Postmaster-General to look for materials from the Pegasus Press, detain those materials, and produce them for Hick’s inspection. Hicks also requested that the Chairman of the Board of Customs detain all Pegasus material imported into England under the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876 (mentioned above). Hicks encountered one problem, however. Members of the Customs board had read The Well and didn’t believe it to be obscene. To get round this inconvenience, Hicks gained the aid of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin. Hicks and Bodkin had informally discussed the book when Cape’s letter first reached Hicks. Both men agreed that the book was obscene. Thus, Bodkin didn’t blink an eye when he applied an Order under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (otherwise known as Lord Campbell’s Act) against The Well (Brittain 86).

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The Fight Begins: Hall’s Trial

To call the ensuing trial against The Well just would be naïve and farcical. Sir Chartres Biron, the presiding judge, occasionally rubbed elbows and was of like mind with both Bodkin and Hicks. From E.M. Forster, V. Sackville-West, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, to priests and literary critics, exceptional witnesses had gathered to defend Hall’s book (Brittain 190). Biron, however, refused Birkett’s (the defense attorney representing Pegasus and Cape) request to call any witnesses. Only one witness was allowed during the trial, a police officer who testified for the prosecution, and he was not required to answer whether he thought the book obscene or not (Souhami 222).

During the trial, Biron stated that

He went on to say at the trial’s conclusion that it was not the mere fact that the book described sexual acts between women, but that the acts were described in alluring terms, which could corrupt the morals of its reader. This made the book an obscene libel. The book was ordered banned and burnt.

Nevertheless, up until this point, The Well continued to sell at increasing rates. The scandal led more readers to seek its mysterious knowledge. Articles continued to pour forth during and following the trial journals and newspapers. One reviewer sarcastically wrote, "I was surprised when, during The Well of Loneliness case, Sir Chartres Biron seemed unable to appreciate the difference between inversion and perversion…"(Brittain 110).

After losing the trial, Leonard Woolf offered to launch an appeals fund for Hall and Cape (Souhami 227). Cape sailed to America to preserve the book’s life there, while Hall dealt with the emotional strain of the trial. Hall was outraged that she was not allowed a voice in the trial. She was shocked and hurt that all of the qualified witnesses who had traveled long distances to testify were denied their voices as well. Hall and her partner of nineteen years, Una Troubridge, traveled to the coast so that Hall might rest and relieve her increasing depression.

On December 14, 1928, the appeal was heard before Sir Robert Wallace, chairman, and the 12 magistrates that would oversee the trial. Prior to this event, Sir Archibald Bodkin had refused the magistrates’ request to see copies of The Well because "it would not be appropriate nor practicable" (Souhami 233). Thus, the second trial quickly mirrored the first in its mockery of justice. The defense "again pleaded for the freedom of literature, again urged the court to differentiate between the theme of a book and treatment of a theme," all to no avail (235). The magistrates adjourned for less than ten minutes, ruling that the Appeal would be dismissed with costs (Brittain 125). Hall was devastated. She wrote to Aubrey Heath (who had suggested Cape as a publisher), "I renounce my country for ever…Nor will I ever lift a hand to help England in the future" (Souhami 239).

If this were not enough, the result of the trial left Hall without copyrights. Anyone who wanted to, could defame or plagiarize Hall’s book as he or she wished. Consequently, a battle ensued when a young actress decided that she wanted to play the part of Stephen Gordan (the main character of The Well) in a portrayal of the book. Hall refused her proposal because she felt the actress incapable of portraying Stephen’s character adequately. The actress fought for and won the right to produce the play, but lost in that the play was poorly received and gained terrible reviews.

Consequently, the day after the appeals trial began Pascal Covici and Dondal Friede published The Well in the United States. In less than a month, 20,000 copies had been sold, and the sales were reaching the top of the best-sellers list (Brittain 140). Detectives, however, raided the offices of Covici in New York and took all the copies of The Well. They were operating under Article 106 section 1140-1148 of the States Criminal Codes, which were against indecency, and lewd and filthy books (Souhami 239).

Covici and Friede hired Morris Ernst to be their defense lawyer. During the trial, Ernst argued that if the court "brand this book as obscene [they would] open the door henceforth to the wanton and undiscerning prosecution of legitimate literature" (247). He stayed away from the mention of lesbianism and sexual inversion, instead using terms like "tragic problem," asking who would want to emulate such a "tragic case." Ernst then discussed other books that were far worse than Hall’s The Well that could be considered obscene but were available at libraries and bookstores (245).

The judges adjourned for eleven days to read the book, reconvening on April 19, 1929. Their verdict ran as follows:

The judges acquitted Covici and Friede, awarding them damages for malicious prosecution. This was a far different judgment from those in England. Unfortunately, it was not enough to lift Hall’s spirits. She began writing her next book, Carpenter’s Son, to take refuge from the British indictment. Carpenter’s Son is a tragic story about a man crucified by his people, thus closely paralleling the life of Christ. This was Hall’s bitter testimony that she felt that she had been crucified for her people (homosexuals) by her country.

Before she wrote The Well of Loneliness, Hall was a respected author of four books and had lived with her partner, Una Troubridge, for several years. Now that she was seen as a noteworthy writer, Hall decided to begin The Well and embark on her own fight for herself and her kind—female inverts. The difficulties Hall incurred with using sexological discourse from men such as Ulrich, Krafft-Ebing, and Ellis was that their gender assumptions were somewhat confining compared to Hall’s life-experiences (including her relationship with Una and her homosexual friends—all of which will be discussed later).

I believe that Hall felt that not all homosexuals fit the invert model, giving examples of anomalous homosexual characters through Stephen’s interactions with them, primarily when she moves to Paris. Joanne Glasgow discusses Hall’s ideas about inversion in her article "Rethinking the Mythic Mannish Radclyffe Hall." Glasgow quotes a letter Hall writes to a friend: "Have you ever heard of bi-sexuality? Don’t you know that an enormous number of people are bi-sexual, capable of falling in love equally with a man or a woman?…Bi-sexual people outnumber the inverts" (203). We can also see the destructive confines of traditional gender construction within the difficulties of Stephen (the main character) and (Stephen’s partner) Mary’s relationship, which I believe did more harm to their relationship in the end than anything else, causing Stephen to push Mary into leaving her. Glasgow also believes that Hall was denouncing tightly structured gender roles. She writes,

Hall, however, understood the importance of including accepted sexological discourse--that it could be used to further her propaganda, which aimed at gaining societal acceptance for the homosexual. In order to do this, she needed to create a character that was clearly portrayed as a congenital invert because the congenital invert was born a woman with a man’s prerogatives (for masculinity and feminine partners), which explained why she preferred women, and she was born a homosexual, which could not be her fault. This is best summarized as the Krafft-Ebing’s pathological model.

Hall stuck closely to her propaganda by using the invert model in the beginning of the book--creating Stephen as predestined within the womb to be masculine (to the point that Stephen’s parents are convinced that she will be a boy) and portraying her as devoutly religious (which was a supposition held by Ellis that will be outlined later). During the second third of the book, however, Hall began to stray from such a clear-cut propagandized message, using more of her life-experience of homosexuality and creating homosexual men and women that are not inverted, that dress according to their sex and are accepted by society. This expression of normality in her characters can also be seen as Hall’s conscious step away from Krafft-Ebing’s pathological invert model, which she follows closely in the beginning of the book, to Ellis’ healthy homosexual model, which is more prominent towards the last part of the book.

As was mentioned before, the idea of the New Woman was becoming prominent during the early 1900’s. Since gender during the Victorian era (by moralists and leaders) was ever more strictly being defined, relying on the distinction between aggressive qualities and passive qualities, the New Woman was considered aggressive and thus masculine. Edward Carpenter, a contemporary sexologist to Krafft-Ebing and Ellis, writes in his book, The Intermediate Sex,

Since these women were seen as trying to be like men, their sexuality came into question, which allowed many (primarily men) to deem New Women abominations against God’s order.

Most of the writing on women’s sexuality came from male sexologists who wrote in and to a purely scientific frame of mind. Hall used these sexologists’ discourse to her advantage, writing a book that illustrated that New Women were in fact sexual, capable of autonomy, and suffering from oppressive social attitudes that deemed same-sex love, which should be seen, according to Hall, as noble and pure, was regarded instead as abominable. (In this way, Hall was affirming that many of the New Women were congenital homosexuals, but also arguing that they could not control how God had made them. Hall never uses the term "New Woman" but the personalities of many of the women in her book are characteristic of the New Woman, which would have been a well-known term in society as Hall was writing.)

With this in mind, I will first consider how Hall used her own childhood as a model for Stephen’s (the main character) temperament. After this, I will examine how she used Krafft-Ebing’s model within her book, followed by an assessment of how Hall justified the invert through religious metaphors. Furthermore, I will observe the ways in which Hall established four characters in the book (two of which were based on friends of Hall’s) that clearly dispute the inverted model and reaffirm Ellis’ model. Finally, I will discuss the way in which Hall showed the negative effects of a strict gender model, while still maintaining her propaganda (plea for acceptance) by returning to Krafft-Ebing’s invert model and emphasizing the tragedy that inverts experience.

In many ways, The Well serves as an autobiography for Hall. (There are a few dissimilarities that exist between Hall and her portrayal of Stephen, but these will be discussed later.) Hall never saw much of her father but nurtured a fondness for him, while maintaining difficult and bitter relations with her mother. At the age of twenty-one, Hall inherited $10,000,000 from her grandfather, who had opened a sanatorium for chest diseases, and lived easily for most of her life, enjoying horseback riding, breeding dogs, and any other sportive activity. At the age of twenty-seven, Hall began her relationship with Mabel ‘Ladye’ Batten, who encouraged her to develop her mind and began for the first time to write (Cline 3). Around the year 1912, Hall asked that her close friends call her John instead of her given name, Marguerite. At the age of thirty-six, Hall began a relationship with Una Troubridge. Around 1920, when Hall was forty years old, she finally cut her waist-length hair and started wearing suits and ties more frequently (22). Una would remain Hall’s partner until Hall’s death.

Stephen Gordan, the main character in The Well, similarly is a well-to-do girl born to parents expecting a boy, enjoys fencing, horseback riding, and dogs, and experiences a close relationship with her father and estrangement from her mother. Stephen’s father insists on naming her after the boy her parents were expecting and continues to treat Stephen as a boy, allowing her the freedoms that boys have and arranging for her equal education.

He allows her to develop her body as she wishes, being the natural-born athlete that she is, but, as she gets older, insists that she develop her mind as well. After her father dies, Stephen takes to wearing men’s suits and ties and cuts her hair short.

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As has been discussed before, Ulrich and Krafft-Ebing ascribed masculine attributes to female inverts such as wearing men’s clothes and exhibiting more aggression. Hall takes this idea a step further, describing the female invert’s body itself in masculine terms. Stephen is born "a narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a baby" (The Well 13). Hall’s word choice throughout the book invokes a sense of difference from normal heterosexual females through the portrayal of a masculine physique and each character’s discomfort with Stephen (as well as Stephen’s discomfort with herself). Anna, Stephen’s mother, feels a "queer antagonism" toward her daughter, seeing her as a "caricature of [Stephen’s father] Sir Phillip; a blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction—yet she knew that the child was handsome" (15). Sir Phillip also instinctively feels that there is something different about his daughter. He feels that Stephen will have to bear some "unmerited burden" and begins watching his daughter closely. He is the first to discern what his daughter is, but fails, for all of his loving her, to tell her or her mother.

As a child, Stephen dresses as a boy (confirming Krafft-Ebing’s model of congenital inversion and cross-dressing) but is conscious of being caught between worlds, since she most feels like a boy yet cannot be as real boys are and instead is made to pretend (as when she dresses as the fictional Nelson, an adventurer). It is during this period that her father begins reading Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.

As Stephen reaches puberty, she develops a "certain largeness about her, a certain crude lack of grace in her movements" that makes her feel uncomfortable within her own body and think that everyone is staring and laughing at her peculiarity (16). When Stephen progresses to her later teenage years, her body becomes more comfortable to her and less peculiar to look at by others: "Stephen’s figure was handsome in a flat, broad-shouldered and slim flanked fashion; and her movements were purposeful, having fine poise, she moved with the easy assurance of the athlete" (72). Stephen still feels she is "queer looking," however, glimpsing in her mother a model of how one should look womanly. Attempting to mimic her mother’s example fails Stephen, which continues her feeling of physical awkwardness and difference. Hall attributes Stephen’s difference to God and nature, almost as if she were a biological evolution. Hall writes "had nature been less daring with her, she might well have become very much what [her neighbors] were—a breeder of children, upholder of home, a careful and diligent steward of pastures" (108).

This vision is accomplished within Stephen’s neighbor and foil, Violet Antrim. Violet is the perfect socialized girl with bright bows in her hair and frilly frocks. She likes to play with dolls, cries easily, and abhors riding horses. Hall notes later in the book that Stephen does envy girls like Violet; "While despising these girls, she yet longed to be like them…It would suddenly strike her that they seemed very happy, very sure of themselves," which is something Stephen is never afforded (76).

Violet’s brother, Roger, on the other hand, becomes the personification of the freedom Stephen wishes she could have. Stephen envies his "right to climb trees…his right to be perfectly natural; above all she envied his splendid conviction that being a boy constituted a privilege in life; she could well understand that conviction, but this only increased her envy" (47). In this way Hall criticizes gender restraints, explaining that the female invert cannot be the socialized girl with dolls, but neither is she given the freedom by society to be the liberated boy.

Hall adapts the sexological congenital theory farther by creating Stephen’s first crush on the young housemaid, Collins. Stephen all but worships Collins. After Stephen catches Collins in the arms of a man and throws a flowerpot, hitting him in the face, her father sends both servants away, causing Stephen’s sexual awakening to be put on hold. During this time, Hall’s language suggests that Stephen begins to find personally unobtainable, yet awe-inspiring beauty, within her mother, Anna. Stephen argues with her mother, saying, "I’ve tried your way, Mother, and I look like a scarecrow; you’re beautiful…but your young daughter isn’t" (73).

As Stephen becomes a young woman, Sir Phillip encourages her to become a great writer (so that this may be her protection from some of the world’s cruelness) and enrolls her at Oxford. Stephen’s peculiarity begins to weigh on her parents’ relationship, for while Sir Phillip understands what Stephen is, Anna does not. Instead of telling Anna, Sir Phillip argues for the life of the New Woman for his daughter.

Anna becomes a little more comfortable with her daughter after this talk, until she becomes shocked and outraged at Stephen refusal to marry Martin Hallam. It is here that Stephen first experiences revulsion toward sexual love with men, though she is still unable to understand its meaning. Here we see that Hall is reaffirming Krafft-Ebing’s argument that "In cases of completely developed inverted sexuality, heterosexual love is looked upon as a thing absolutely incomprehensible…Such an attempt brings on the inhibitory concept of disgust or even horror" (Krafft-Ebing 383).

Sir Phillip attempts to placate Anna concerning Stephen’s social faux pas, reasoning that marriage is not the only career for women, since he understood that Stephen would never be marrying. As an example of this new and independent woman he lists Puddle, Stephen’s governess, who, we learn later, is also an invert.

Shortly after the arguments, a falling tree hits Stephen’s father, causing his death. While wandering through her father’s study, Stephen finds a book by Krafft-Ebing with her father’s writing in the margins:

Finally, she is given a name for what she is and understands that there are thousands like her. Puddle attempts to explain to Stephen, "You’re neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you’re unexplained as yet" (154).

Stigmata

Being a devout Christian, Hall considered the noblest person to be Jesus Christ, who sacrificed himself for others. Throughout The Well, Hall describes Stephen’s love as noble and self-sacrificing, to the point of being Christ-like. It is as a homosexual, however, that Hall sets Stephen to be crucified for her people by showing her as unaccepted by her mother or by society, making Stephen a spokesperson for homosexuals, and by making her inversion/homosexuality a misery that she suffers for, eventually losing the love of her life.

As a child, Stephen is taught to pray every night. After dressing as a boy, Stephen begins to ask her father, "Do you think that I could be a man, supposing I thought very hard—or prayed, Father?" (26). During the beginning of her crush on Collins, Stephen turns to the "Child’s Book of Scripture Stories and she studie[s] the picture of the Lord on His Cross, and she [feels] that she understood Him" (21). That night Stephen prays to take all of Collin’s ailments away and bear them herself because she loves Collins so much. This is a reference to Ellis’ research, which showed that most inverts felt themselves to be upstanding moral citizens and felt their relationships to be very sacred (Ellis 346).

When Stephen finds her father’s Krafft-Ebing book, she turns to God for some sort of sign of support. Flipping open the Bible, she reads about the mark God set on Cain: "And the Lord set a mark upon Cain" (Hall 205). This mark remains metaphorical to Stephen, existing as any anomaly in homosexuals that sets them apart (such as the soft hands of a man or thick ankles of a woman). She continues to notice this mark on homosexuals in Paris: "such people frequented Valerie Seymour’s, men and women who must carry God’s mark on their forehead" (352). Puddle attempts to soften the blow Stephen has received, using much of the same language found in the book of Ruth in the Bible when Ruth tells her lover Naomi, "Entreat me not to leave you or to cease following you. Whither thou goest I will go…" (1:16). Puddle says, "Where you go, I go, Stephen. All that you’re suffering at this moment I have suffered" (205).

The next strong intonation of religious fervor and sacrifice comes when Stephen falls in love with her married neighbor, Angela Crossby. Hall introduces Angela with some of the same language of difference she attributes to Stephen. Stephen sees Angela as "some queer flower that had grown up in darkness, like some rare, pale flower…" (132). Stephen realizes this to be the summer "when she fell quite simply and naturally in love, in accordance with the dictates of her nature" (146).

Stephen suffers for her love and would sacrifice anything to keep it. She tells Angela,

Unfortunately, it is here that Stephen begins to realize her limitations as a woman-loving woman. She cannot offer the protection of marriage or social acceptance. Stephen eventually loses Angela for this reason, to men (Roger Antrim, Angela’s lover and Ralph, her husband).

Angela betrays her love affair with Stephen to her husband, who writes a letter to Anna, Stephen’s mother. Anna accuses Stephen of unnatural love and immoral acts. Stephen defends her love saying,

Anna decides that the best way to protect her husband’s name is to send Stephen away to London under the guise that she is to become a writer. Thus, in the end Stephen does suffer and sacrifice her home, Morton, for loving Angela.

The last major religious fervor from Stephen comes at the very end of the book where every homosexual that has ever existed, or will ever exist, demands that Stephen speak for them:

Through this encounter, Hall returns to the expression of her goal to speak for homosexuals, their ongoing agony and religious morality, and Hall’s plea that homosexuals be accepted. Her plea to God nearly becomes a plea to the patriarchy since the book was not to God, but to society and the men who ran it.

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After a successful first book, Stephen finds herself exhausted and unmotivated. Stephen’s gay friend, Brockett, suggests that she vacation in Paris and rest. Brockett was modeled from a close friend of Hall’s, Noel Coward. Coward was an actor and playwright that exemplified effeminacy offstage and a masculine façade onstage (Castle 10). Brockett becomes Stephen’s consoler during her inverted depressions and introduces her to Valerie Seymour and other un-inverted homosexuals. Brockett, however, is first to challenge Stephen to "out" herself. When they travel to Paris, Brockett drops hints of an affair between Marie Antoinette and her lady in waiting, ending with "They must have felt…sick to death of the subterfuge and pretences. Don’t you ever get tired of that sort of thing?" (239). He lets her know that he understands that she is homosexual.

It is interesting to note, however, that Stephen finds Brockett "repelling," thinking that she felt a "sense of outrage creeping over her when she looked at his hands" (226). I believe, since Hall was so close to Coward, that she was writing Stephen as different from herself here, making Stephen dislike this effeminate homosexual because society would not approve of him and thus by denouncing him to some extent, Hall could gain their support and sympathy. Brockett also acts as the first anomaly within The Well since he is obviously inverted, but is always good humored, even funny--a far cry from Stephen’s moody and depressive inversion or Krafft-Ebing’s pathological inversion.

Shortly after Stephen decides to make a home in Paris, war breaks lose. She decides to join as an ambulance driver as her way of contributing to her nation for her kind. In the ambulance unit are several similar inverted women who risk their lives for their country. "Many a one who was even as Stephen, had crept out of her hole and come into the daylight, come into the daylight and faced her country: ‘Well, here I am, will you take me or leave me?’" (271). Stephen meets Mary, who clings to her like a child, and begins to fall in love with her. Mary, "as though drawn by some hidden attraction…turned in all faith and all innocence to Stephen" while Stephen would stretch "out a hand" and "stroke the girl’s shoulder where she lay [sleeping]" (384, 386). After the war, Mary asks to live with Stephen. In anguish, Stephen fears that if Mary lives with her as her partner, one day Mary will be forced to ask Stephen,

Mary finally convinces Stephen that she can be strong and truly loves her. This is the longest relationship yet for Stephen, and in the beginning, it is fairly healthy and happy. Stephen and Mary’s relationship, however, continues the portrayal of traditional heterosexual couple roles that began in Stephen and Angela’s relationship. Stephen maintains the dominant personality of the couple, while Angela and Mary fulfill the passive role.

Puddle warns Stephen that the inverted life will be difficult for Mary since she is so fragile. She suggests that Stephen begin writing again to become a well-known author as a protection from society for Mary and herself. Stephen begins her next book, but in doing so begins to neglect Mary. Mary begins to become very unhappy, at which point Brockett suggests that Stephen and Mary should be more social with homosexuals.

Valerie Seymour is the major hostess to society inverts and becomes friends with both Mary and Stephen. Just as Ellis suggests that homosexuals have been some of the best artists, actors and writers, so Hall writes about homosexual men and women gifted as musicians, painters and socialites. Ellis also notes, "The homosexual who has developed strong characteristics and manifestations of the other sex is probably in a minority among homosexuals" (488). This is where Hall begins to switch to Ellis’ model. Hall does not assume that all homosexuals are as physically or emotionally inverted as Stephen, writing that the homosexuals in Paris were of "grades…so numerous and so fine that they often defied the most careful observation" (352).

Modeled from Hall’s close friend, Natalie Barney, Valerie Seymour becomes the second spokesperson against inversion (Castle 39). Valerie is not described as physically masculine, nor does she have the same competitive and uncomfortable interaction with heterosexual men that Stephen encounters. "Great men had loved her…but she was not attracted to men" (Hall 243). Whereas Stephen was often victimized because of her same-sex attraction and suffers greatly, Valerie seems to have never been attacked for what she is or who she’s loved; she, in fact, "lived her life in great calmness of spirit" (243).

Unlike Stephen, Valerie believes that homosexuals should pride themselves on their "fine brains" rather than on a higher moral sense (406). Valerie seems to lead her life with the motto "I am that I am." She no more fits within the patriarchal system than she does in its religious or monogamous expectations. Hall writes, "here was no libertine in love’s garden, but rather a creature born out of her epoch, a pagan chained to an age that was Christian," and says that her love affairs "would fill quite three volumes" (246, 243). I believe this to be Hall’s exploration of how a lesbian’s life could be if conservative society no longer disapproved—healthy, happy, non-pathological. One thing is for certain—Valerie Seymour fulfilled many of the androgynous characteristics that Woolf believed distinguished a consummate person.

Hall then moves to show the effects that Krafft-Ebing’s model can have on the relationship of two women, Barbara and Jamie, and compares it to Ellis’ model. Jamie is a gifted pianist who was exiled from her hometown with Barbara because they were homosexuals. Now Jamie is working to complete a piece that will enable her to make some money for both her and Barbara. Jamie has taken the masculine role of breadwinner (just as Stephen has done for Mary making Barbara and Jamie’s relationship telling of where Stephen and Mary’s can end up), while Barbara has taken up the domestic feminine role. Barbara’s health is failing, and their fights increase due to the pressure they’re both under from their lack of money and food. Stephen and Mary offer to help financially, but the couple turns them down because of pride. Barbara eventually dies, leaving Jamie to commit suicide from guilt and loneliness. Hall gives these two characters as a prime example of victims of prejudice and lost hope, following Ellis’s contention that societal pressures can produce melancholy and suicide in homosexuals (Ellis 346).

Shortly after this, we see the introduction of a third character that challenges the pathological and depressive discourse of Krafft-Ebing. Adolphe Blanc, a designer with the "eyes of a Hebrew," tells Stephen "For us there is no sin so great as despair, and perhaps no virtue so vital as courage" (352). Hall describes Blanc as a greatly learned Jew to whom everyone went to for advice. Later at a bar in the ghetto, Blanc again tells Stephen "those who have courage have also a duty" (390). I believe that Hall’s repeated reference to Blanc’s Hebrew eyes was an attempt for her to further her homosexual cause by comparing it with the Jews, a religiously and historically oppressed people. Blanc also served as a voice of explanation for what Hall felt was her "duty" to her kind, through her ability as a writer (instead of medical sexologist) to spread a message of acceptance. Blanc asks Stephen what use homosexuals have for medical books. He continues by asking,

Soon after Barbara and Jamie’s deaths, Mary and Stephen’s relationship suffers once more. A mutual friend writes to both women asking them not to visit anymore since she has recently found out that they were inverts. Mary is deeply hurt and angered by this. Eventually it begins to break her spirit as she worries about their other close friends who do not know that they are partnered inverts. As was noted in The Sexologists section, Krafft-Ebing includes a letter from one of his patients which explains why homosexuals are so anxious and depressed—they must daily fear being discovered as homosexuals and must create fictional facades and lies (591). Stephen clearly echoes this idea when she remarks,

Shortly after these difficulties, Martin Hallam returns to visit with Stephen and begins to fall in love with Mary. Noting how bitter and broken she looks, Martin tells Stephen that the invert’s life will destroy Mary. He feels guilty for loving Mary as he does and decides to be honorable and leave. Stephen will not hear of this, arguing,

A contest ensues, leaving Mary torn between her love and loyalty to Stephen and her growing love for Martin. Mary decides to remain with Stephen, which, in essence, means that Stephen and inverts alike are in fact a threat to heterosexual patriarchy. However, whereas Hall maintained this idea in her own life of being a threat to the heterosexual patriarchy because her partner left her husband to be with Hall, she must render Stephen helpless against the patriarchy to make her propaganda effective. Stephen suddenly sees Martin "as a creature endowed with incalculable bounty, having in his hands all those priceless gifts which she, love’s mendicant, could never hold. Only one gift could she offer to love, to Mary, and that was the gift of Martin" (430).

Stephen leads Mary to believe that she has had an affair so that Mary will leave her for Martin and obtain protection through the social contract of marriage. Hall returns to the sexological discourse of Krafft-Ebing that stressed the importance of marriage for the acquired invert, which is personified within Mary. Mary had never sexually "[been] led primarily into heterosexual channels," which could result in her acquiring of inversion since her first experience of masculine protection came from Stephen (Krafft-Ebing 397). Acquired inverts, according to Krafft-Ebing, could be saved from the life of inversion through marriage. If Mary were to wed, her inversion would all but disappear according to Krafft-Ebing.

I believe that it was Stephen’s masculinity and Mary’s enforced femininity (enforced more by Stephen and other characters than Mary’s personality itself) that first began to threaten their relationship, and continued to threaten their relationship when Martin entered the scene. Because of Stephen’s upper-class status, her house and clothes are in impeccable shape, which leaves Mary incapable of fulfilling a domestic and feminine role for Stephen, which is the only way that Mary could give back in such a relationship since she does not have the money that Stephen does to buy gifts or maintain living expenses.

Stephen (and Hall) always describes Mary as small, frail, and feminine, yet it is Mary that can be seen as the fourth person to challenge the invert model. It is Mary who insists upon a relationship with Stephen, not the other way around, and it is Mary who is the physical initiator within the relationship, though Stephen never takes notice. "Mary…[sat] down beside her, and she laid a hand upon Stephen’s knee; but Stephen appeared not to notice that hand, for she just let it lie there and went on talking" (297). Mary also asks for physical affection, saying "Stephen…won’t you kiss me goodnight? It’s our first night together here in your home. Stephen, do you know that you’ve never kissed me?" (299 Author’s ellipses).

Because Hall needed to maintain her inverted character as the focus within her book, we are not allowed to see how Mary views her own sexuality or her relationship with Stephen. Either Stephen or the narrator tells us how Mary feels, never Mary herself. Loralee MacPike analyzes Mary’s character within her article "Is Mary Llewellyn an invert?" She believes, as I do, that Hall did not limit her views of herself or her kind to pathological inverted theory. MacPike also believes that Mary should not be seen as an acquired invert, who can be swayed in her sexual choice, but as a woman with a "homosexual disposition" which we never hear since Mary is but an undefined shadow, sacrificed to Hall’s need for her propaganda to be effective and accepted (77).

MacPike views Mary as the "new lesbian" (78). She is not further explored because if she were given true sexual autonomy by Stephen or Hall, if her story were heard and she in fact did have a choice and were able to choose Stephen, she would be feared even more than the invert. Her femininity made her indistinguishable from heterosexual women, which was a fear held by the patriarchy. The patriarchal norms did not accept any normalization of the homosexual (whether physically, mentally, emotionally), because to do so would mean that there were few differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals. A lack of difference would mean that anyone could become, or was, a homosexual. This fear was something sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing attempted to overcome by defining acquired inversion. This fear is also something Hall toys with by constructing the ending as if Mary were an acquired invert, but not saying whether Mary does go to Martin and marries him.

In the end we see Stephen, following Krafft-Ebing’s model, sacrifice her love for Mary for what she feels will bring Mary happiness and peace of mind. This clearly shows Hall’s belief about the invert model’s limitations and the tragedies it can create. It is because of Stephen’s strong inversion (gender construction) that Mary is never able to obtain equality within the relationship, and it is Stephen’s belief that she must procure the best life for Mary, without allowing Mary to make her own choice, that ends the relationship.

Stephen’s choice clearly differs from Hall’s in that Hall did win her partner from a man and never sacrificed that love for her partner’s social acceptance. Una remained Hall’s partner until Hall’s death at sixty from inoperable cancer. Hall also was not the faithful and monogamous partner that Stephen is portrayed to be. Hall had several affairs while maintaining her partnership with Una. We must conclude, then, that Hall would write of her heroine sacrificing to a man to continue her propagandized plea to society at large, through the terms and conditions of the patriarchy itself. Hall half-heartedly portrayed the invert as always at the mercy of societal acceptance, which was determined primarily by heterosexual men. These men, for Hall’s invert, would not be led to fear her, but pity her. This is the major effect Hall was looking for to create more freedom for homosexuals in general, by defining them as congenital inverts.

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In this section, I will be discussing Woolf’s attitude towards gender. I will show how Woolf began incorporating her beliefs concerning gender and sexuality into her book Orlando, which explores androgyny. After discussing Woolf’s gender deconstruction, I will examine how she then constructed androgyny within Orlando. Finally, I will consider Woolf’s position on societal norms such as marriage and the effect her lover, Vita Sackville-West, had upon her views concerning literature.

The importance of an androgynous main character is that he/she would have the liberation that the patriarchal society feared—Orlando either demonstrates a lack of gender or varies in his/her expression of masculinity and femininity. This leaves the reader incapable of matching Orlando with a defined sexual preference, which also frees Orlando to choose either a male or female partner (or, alternately, both). An androgynous main character unnerved readers of 1920’s England, who were used to the narrowing gender roles—Orlando questioned such a conservative drive. Thus, Woolf’s literary politics in Orlando challenged her reader to be as indefinable as the main character, Orlando, and to be a complete person unconfined by gender or sexual restrictions.

Woolf believed that gender, to a large extent, was a construct of patriarchal society, dividing a person’s self-conception and intellectual whole into confined halves. Woolf railed against patriarchal power, which used religion and legislation as its moral and lawful right to control society and those that deviated against the patriarchy’s rule. In her novel The Years, we find Woolf’s character Nicolas echoing these sentiments when he says,

Woolf goes on to ask through Nicolas’ character, how, if we do not allow ourselves to know ourselves, we can make laws and religions that fit.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf explains that the patriarchy was established by men who, in seeking self-confidence, found the need to label women inferior. Their superiority always in question, men must continue to find new ways to delineate the sexes. Thus, gender was born, attributing every aspect of weakness and passivity to women and every facet of strength and dominance to men. Woolf realizes that it is as painful to be locked out of societal knowledge as it is to be locked in. For, while women are shooed into the household and freed to their emotions, they are denied books or the creativity of the pen; and while men are free to dip their minds and pens into the wellspring of knowledge, they are expected to be strong and emotionless.

Much of what is found in A Room first began as speeches to college women about "Women and Fiction." Woolf argued that women had written very little because they were denied their autonomy (both physically and financially and thus emotionally). Book upon book had been written about women by men—about their evilness, their goodness, their intellectual inferiority to men, their intellectual equality to men, their sexuality, and their lack of sexuality—none of which was conclusive. To Woolf, such varying opinions concerning what women were and were not reaffirmed that gender distinctions were faulty because women as a whole (just as men) were categorically intangible.

A Room was also written in response to Hall’s obscenity trial. In A Room, Woolf picks up Mary Carmichael’s book, Life’s Adventure, to read the sentence, "Chloe liked Olivia." She pauses after reading this to let her audience understand that she is specifically referring to the possibility that lesbianism could have been written about but was not because of censors. She then asks, "Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Biron Chartres [the judge at Hall’s trial] is not concealed?" (82). Woolf continued to impress upon her audience a feeling of unity, chiding, "Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women" (82).

Woolf’s mention of the judge at Hall’s trial was her show of support for Hall’s cause and thus relayed her frustration toward the censorship which Hall’s book underwent. Though she may not have supported Hall’s literary style, she did support her theme; "for if Chloe liked Olivia and [the author] knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been" (84). Hall did write that Stephen liked Mary, thus lighting Woolf’s thematic torch.

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Woolf’s book Orlando was published the same year as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well, yet it did not undergo the same legislative or moralistic bombardment. The difference, perhaps, is that while Hall challenged openly, Woolf defied subversively. We find Woolf’s parody of gender take flight within Orlando. I will now describe the major events that lead Orlando through the life of a man into the life of a woman, and how these events change Orlando into an androgyne.

Orlando begins as a boy in the high court of England during the sixteenth century. He is a dreamer, a "nobleman afflicted with a love of literature" (73). He has shapely calves and "eyes like drenched violets" (15). Despite these seemingly feminine descriptions, we see Orlando being socialized by his father to become a real man, by practicing swordplay and slicing at a skull (13-14). In her book Virginia Woolf Against Empire, Kathy Phillips discusses the ways in which Orlando as a man is made to be militaristic. This expression of aggression not only shows the violence boys are taught to convey but also the factions of opposing forces they choose to fight. Orlando’s father had "struck heads of many colours off many shoulders" (13). This is indicative not only of the growing British Empire of the time that invaded foreign lands, but also of the British patriarchy.

Phillips notes in her book "Besides militarism, another stifling aspect…is [male patriarchal] attitudes toward women" (186). Woolf, as narrator, criticizes the beauty standards that define women as only beautiful when they are young, noting in Orlando, "what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. Girls were roses and their seasons were short as flowers" (Orlando 27). Orlando takes notice of such a Russian rose named Sasha. She is described as mysterious and autonomous, provoking an unrequited love in Orlando. Sasha leaves when the rivers thaw, freeing her father’s boat to sail back to Russia. "Standing knee deep in water [Orlando] hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver…" (64). It is here the reader gets to see Orlando as a "true man," attempting to rule a woman. When he fails, he blames it on the faults of the woman and insults her character. We later see Orlando rethink these biases when he becomes a woman.

Afterward Orlando undergoes his first deep-sleep of seven days. He wakes, seeming "graver and more sedate" but with an "imperfect recollection of his past life" (66). Seeking literary counsel, Orlando invites Nick Greene, a famous poet, to his house. Greene sarcastically states that "the art of poetry was dead in England…the great age of literature was past; the great age of literature was Greek" (88). Greene wrote for "glawr" (or glory), which Orlando attempts to do, but is publicly humiliated by Greene for his writing. Orlando decides, "bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write from this day forward to please myself" (103). Orlando’s poetry becomes significant later when we discuss Woolf’s motives for writing Orlando based on her lover, Vita Sackville-West.

Sue Roe points out in her book Writing and Gender, that Orlando as a socialized man, and later as a gender-conscious woman, is unable to write his/her precious poem "The Oak Tree"—it is only as an androgyne that Orlando finishes the poem to any satisfaction (94-101).

It is soon after this that Archduchess Harriet begins to visit Orlando. She is described as very tall and slender. Harriet begins to evoke a lust in Orlando. Fearing that he will be hurt again, Orlando asks the King if he may become ambassador to Constantinople, is granted permission, and flees his estate.

Orlando fares well at his new station and soon receives a dukedom. The day after, however, the British stationed in Constantinople are killed by invaders--all but Orlando, who has slipped into another deep sleep for seven days and is assumed dead by the invaders. British officers find him in his bed later, with a marriage certificate to a gypsy on his table. During this time, the metaphorical three sisters of Modesty, Purity, and Chastity dance around Orlando and leave as he wakes to find himself a woman. The three sisters dance to, it seems, no avail, since Orlando never finds a long-lasting need for any of their qualities (though for a while on her return to England she begins to exhibit them, she quickly afterward relinquishes them). I believe that Woolf was showing that such constructions (purity, chastity, modesty) are not innate, since they have no effect on Orlando when she finds herself to be a woman. Within the book in fact, they are told, "Horrid Sisters, go!" by the narrator (136). It takes the strict gender expectations of the English to make Orlando think twice about her expression of herself: thus, Woolf was showing that gender was in fact socialized.

Since Orlando was socialized to be a man but not to be a woman, she is free to express herself as she wishes. "Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been" (138). It is interesting to realize here that Woolf was evidently applying the belief widely held by the British that foreign countries were savage and erotic (which was a major excuse for Britain’s invasion of so many countries—to save them from their wild selves). Orlando undergoes only one sex change within the book and it is within a foreign land, which leads back into the beliefs of mystical foreign countries (Kaivola 249).

When she awakes, she dresses and goes outside, where an old gypsy is waiting to lead her to shelter in the hills of Turkey. Orlando’s marriage certificate is never explained to the reader. Neither are we told why Orlando entered into a sleep nor if he knew that he was to become a woman. We must assume that to some extent Orlando knew the changes that were about to befall him the night he entered into his long sleep, for he easily accepts his new body and has an escape (the old gypsy) waiting for him when he awakes.

Orlando becomes part of the gypsy clan by overseeing the sheep. There is little gender consciousness within this community because all work is shared equally. The gypsies, however, begin to distrust Orlando because they sense that she holds different ideas than they, and they begin plotting her death. Orlando decides to return to England, where she becomes painfully aware of the gender expectation for women (Modesty, Purity, Chastity).

On the boat to England Orlando realizes that she must be conscious of her body when she shows a little leg and a crewmate trips and falls over himself. Orlando thinks with sadness that these are extremely ridiculous expectations that require that all of women’s beauty must be covered. "She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely appareled. ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,’ she reflected" (156). Orlando revisits herself here, when, as a man, she had stood knee deep in water and chided a woman for her autonomy. Woolf’s criticisms of each gender are expressed when Orlando ventures,

Soon afterward, Orlando begins to thank God that she is a woman, instead of a man full of pride, power-hungry, or at war. She rejoices in herself, believing that it is better "to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex…so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are…contemplation, solitude, love" (160).

With this frame of mind, Orlando returns to England, unsure of whether she is man or woman, of whether she is going to be permitted to keep her estate as a woman or be exiled by the law. While the courts are deciding if the recently returned woman is Orlando, she is granted permission to live within her estate. Pamela Transue writes in her book Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style, that she believes Woolf to be inserting her feminist beliefs here concerning British law by the litigation surrounding Orlando’s estate:

Upon her return, Orlando’s servants accept her as their master, however, and she dons better clothing. The narrator remarks that

Woolf notes that the clothes themselves change our interaction with the world. While Orlando’s hands were free to hold a sword as a man, her hands were now kept busy with her clothing as a woman, which tended to slip from her shoulders. Hall also spoke of Stephen’s difficulty with clothes in The Well, stating that "Perhaps it was the clothes, for she lost all conceit the moment she was dressed as Anna would have her; at this period clothes greatly influenced Stephen, giving her confidence or the reverse" (79). Hall goes on to describe the character Wanda, a Polish painter, could not dress without looking like the opposite sex: "if she dressed like a woman she looked like a man, if she dressed like a man she looked like a woman" (353).

The Archduchess Harriet reenters the scene soon after Orlando is settled back upon her estate, revealing that she is, in fact, a man—the Archduke Harry. Harry explains that he had seen a picture of Orlando (as a man) and fallen in love. He lodged nearby and dressed as a woman so that he could meet with Orlando. Woolf is obviously playing with sexual preference and gender roles here by having Harry proclaim that he fell in love with Orlando the man and decided to become Harriet the woman in order to pursue his love. Now that Orlando is a woman, Harry can return to fulfilling the normalized gender roles of a man and openly ask her hand in marriage, which he promptly does, calling her the "pink, the pearl, the perfection of her sex." Orlando is repelled by his return to masculinity and finds such sentiments (of pink, pearl, and perfection) about herself to be untrue and ridiculous, and she rejects his proposal (179). Transue discusses this difficulty of communication between Orlando and Harry. Transue points out that in Orlando’s rejection scene, Harry does not at first accept her refusal. Orlando begins first with subtle hints, eventually attempting to outrage Harry by cheating at the game "Fly Loo." When Harry forgives her for cheating, in order to make her decision final, Orlando puts a toad down his shirt (Orlando 180-84). Transue points out that Woolf was stressing the difficulty the sexes have in communicating openly with each other because of their confining gender roles. Transue writes,

It is shortly after this refusal of gender role by Orlando that we see that she still finds her attraction toward women, even more so than ever, for now she feels she understands them.

We begin to see Orlando dropping the femininity she had temporarily picked up and begin expressing herself as she is—an adrogyne. Woolf reasons that

Because Orlando begins to show such "inconsistencies" within her gender expression, she confuses the men and women of society around her as she becomes more social. At night, she also dresses as a man so that she may travel freely without a chaperon or fear of confrontment by men, coming in contact often, and having conversations with prostitutes (creating an undercurrent of sexuality). Transue, mentioned previously, writes "By using the metaphor of ‘changing clothes’, Woolf is able to support the idea of bisexuality without naming it as such" (122).

"The sexes drew further and further apart" as the nineteenth century begins for England, but its people revel in fertility and have many more children (229). Orlando feels the change of the age, and her wedding-ring finger begins to throb. The clothing styles change, leaving women to wear dresses that Orlando feels are "heavier and more drab than any dress she had yet worn" (244). Woolf is noting here that by the nineteenth century, English society was becoming more traditionalistic. Karen Kaivola discusses these same phenomena in her article "Revisiting Woolf’s Representations of Androgyny." She explains that

This new change begins to break Orlando’s spirit; she resolves to marry. Noting a lack of suitable mates, we begin to see Woolf’s inclusion of pagan beliefs as Orlando goes for a walk and decides "I have found my mate…I am nature’s bride" (248). Orlando is kept from completely giving herself to nature by the arrival of a suitable partner, Shelmerdine, who rides up on a horse and notes that Orlando’s foot is broken. Shelmerdine is a sea captain on leave. They quickly fall in love, astounded by each other’s androgyny. "It was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman…" (258).

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Shortly after they marry, Shelmerdine returns to the sea, leaving Orlando to her solitude. Orlando begins to question her marriage because

While these thoughts may trouble her, she has succeeded where other women have been defeated, by meeting the nineteenth-century expectation of marriage while maintaining her independence. "Prophetically, when Orlando pronounces the word "Obey" in the marriage service [to Shelmerdine], her voice is drowned out by a resounding clap of thunder (Brown 196). This can be seen as Woolf’s refusal to let Orlando be forced to fulfill a social contract that requires a woman to promise to be subservient even while she has forged a relationship of equality with her partner, or, as nature’s recognition of Orlando’s lie (or lack of conviction) in promising to obey her husband.

Woolf often worried about maintaining her independence, especially when Leonard Woolf asked her to marry him. In Quentin Bell’s biography of Woolf, he notes her writing in a letter about marriage:

Within A Room, Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister named Judith, who was a gifted poet denied the freedom to express her faculties because of her sex. At the proper age, her father proposes that she marry. We begin to glimpse how Woolf may have felt towards marriage when Judith "cried out that marriage was hateful to her…The force of her own gift alone drove her to it" (47). Liang-ya Liou discusses why this may have been so "hateful," suggesting that

Later in A Room Woolf writes, "there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind" (76). Leonard was neither controlling nor misogynistic, and his creativity as a writer ensured Woolf her freedom of literary expression. Before she accepted his marriage proposal she writes: "I sometimes think if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction to you…" (Paper Darts 50). Woolf’s ensuing marriage with Leonard was more of a friendship. Woolf, like Orlando, did not let the social construct of marriage restrict her autonomy or keep her from liking "other people." She writes "The truth is one has room for a good many relationships" (Diary 3:117).

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Sapphistry and Androgyny

Orlando has been called a miraculous love letter because Woolf wrote the book to and about her lover Vita Sackville-West. Quentin Bell continues in his biography of Virginia to note that Woolf’s diary during her writing of Orlando relates scenes with Vita that would later be captured in the book. Bell notes that Woolf describes in her diary

 Vita was established as a writer but had always written for, as Woolf writes in Orlando, "Fame…A Prize" (312), or as Nick Greene mentioned before and as Orlando tried herself, "glawr." Woolf disdained such uses of literature, believing more in art for art’s sake. As their relationship flourished, their gender roles varied between Vita’s dominating personality and her submissive acceptance of Woolf as a literary mentor (DeSalvo 23). "Sackville-West appealed to Woolf as a masculine and feminine presence" (Rosenman 642). Thus, Woolf’s typecasting of Vita for Orlando (even going so far as including pictures taken of Vita to illustrate the androgyny of Orlando within the book itself) fit perfectly. Vita, however, was not strictly adhered to as a model since she sexually identified herself similarly to Radclyffe Hall—strictly as a "sapphist" or lesbian (even though she married Harold Nicholson). Perhaps Woolf used some of herself in Orlando’s character, since both women refused to be categorized.

In her article entitled "Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body," Suzanne Raitt quotes Vita as writing in her autobiography, "I see now that my whole curse has been a duality with which I was too weak and too self-indulgent to struggle" (152). Vita writes this not so much about her androgyny but her sexual conquests, which led her to have several affairs with married women (including Virginia Woolf) (Lee 503). Woolf’s diary entry shortly after she meets Vita suggests her enthrallment with Sackville-West, but also her feelings of dissimilarity. She writes "These Sapphists love women: friendship is never untinged with amorosity" (Lee 484). Woolf is also pointed out in the foreword to A Room of One’s Own to have written in her diary in 1929 that she feared that critics of A Room would hint at her being a sapphist.

Woolf’s enjoyment of her affair with Vita did not certify her personal association with lesbianism. In a letter to a friend in 1925, Woolf writes, "Have you any views on loving one’s own sex? All the young men are so inclined, and I can’t help finding it mildly foolish…For one thing, all the young men tend to the pretty and ladlylike…they paint and powder. My [Vita]…is violently Sapphic" (Lee 486). We can see in this letter that Woolf disagreed with the rising homosexual predilection for inverting gender and categorizing one’s sexual orientation. Vita writes in her diary, "Virginia is curiously feminist…She dislikes possessiveness and love of domination in men" (510). Woolf continued to refuse to be categorized or limited in her gender or sexual expressions, just as she wrote Orlando to be.

I believe Woolf’s refusal to be categorized also relates to her position on psychology—specifically sexology, in that she did not allow it to interfere with her politics and her literature. Woolf certainly had exposure to sexological discourse, if not from Hall’s of it inclusion in her book, then from Woolf’s family’s interaction with John Addington Symonds, who co-authored Studies in the Psychology of Sex with Ellis (Bell v1. 60). Whether because of her interactions with doctors and psychologists due to her manic depression or because of the growing popularity of psychoanalysis and Freud (which Woolf’s Hogarth Press published a volume or two of—primarily for financial reasons), Woolf’s dislike and distrust of psychology is very apparent (Nalbantian 140, Bell v2 103). In her 1929 essay ‘Phases of Fiction,’ Woolf confronts sexologists and even Hall, writing

We see these sentiments against psychologists in Orlando when Woolf writes

As was noted in my Introduction, only eighty pages after this quotation, Woolf challenges men and the patriarchy to prove that women cannot actually interact without a man present, just as in this quotation we see Woolf challenging biologists and psychologists to prove, once and for all, a person’s gender and sexuality—the things hidden beneath one’s clothes which can only be guessed at.

It is with the mysteries that are hidden underneath Orlando’s clothes that Woolf concludes her book. In her book Aesthetic Autobiography, Suzanne Nulbantian outlines her belief that it is with a woman’s status question that Woolf ends her book. We see Orlando driving in her car through London experiencing all of the inner selves that she has experienced through life. Orlando is desperately trying to find an inner voice that can relate to all that she has been, as both a man and woman, male and female, single and married, struggling artist and satisfied poet. Nalbantian argues that Woolf is finishing her book with a challenge to women to take stock of where and who they are. Nalbantian writes "What began as a mock biography of a living loved one became a serious questioning of the status of the twentieth-century intelligent, liberated woman" (167). And so, Woolf leaves us, both men and women, with a challenge of imagination, and a call for a unified inner voice that can speak to and from all of our inner inconsistencies and multiplicities.

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I became interested in politics in literature because I was intrigued by which factors (social, legislative etc) contributed to authors’ viewpoints and work and how their work contributed to society at large. I have shown how legislation and sexological discourse affected Hall’s work and how Hall’s trial affected Woolf’s A Room. Furthermore, I have discussed the various methods each writer used to express their political and social goals. I have shown that while Hall worked within the confines of society—using the accepted gender assumptions and forming a plea of acceptance--Woolf worked without--by denouncing gender and sexuality definitions.

While Hall used Christian imagery and metaphors to establish the high morals of inverts, Woolf focused on the freedom from gender, sexual, and spiritual confines. Woolf writes that nothing could be "more arrogant…than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s. Orlando, it seemed, had a faith of her own" (Orlando, 173). This contrast has formed the basis of homosexual debate for decades—for while Hall spoke from a congenital, orientation perspective, Woolf discussed an androgynous, free flowing experience of selves. Woolf felt Hall was building onto societal norms (set by sexologists) by attempting to classify a person as either masculine or feminine (having either gender) and sexual interaction as either heterosexual or homosexual.

Woolf called for a women’s literary movement in A Room. While creating an appeal to the creative androgyny of the mind for literary reasons, Woolf also fought for the freedom of the sexual androgyne—a woman that divested herself of the sexual definitions and expectations of sexologists and patriarchal society. As was mentioned in the introduction, British legislators did not feel that women were sexual enough to be capable of same-sex relations. Woolf mocks this idea in Orlando, writing