The Well of Loneliness
by Radclyffe Hall
Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com
Dear Book Group,
I want everyone to know that the reason I am not at today's meeting is that I am out of town, and not that I am at home hiding under the kitchen table in a cowardly attempt to escape everyone's wrath. I would feel better, actually, if I were going to be able to just walk on in and take full responsibility, even if it meant being hooted out of the room, or pelted with cream pies. Since I can't be there in person, let me simply tender my full, free, and sincere apology for having suggested that we put ourselves through the experience of reading this book.
It's not that people didn't warn me that it would be 'depressing.' But I thought it would be depressing the way, say, Emma Donoghue's Hood was depressing, because everything ends in (or in Hood's case, begins with) tragedy. You know, like that it would be basically a good book with strong characters telling the story of struggle and oppression that ends up, as all such stories appear to have done back in the days of yore, with a dead butch on the landing and a faithless fem taking the next train back to Heteroville. What is depressing about The Well of Loneliness is not so much what happens to the characters, as the fact that it so vividly displays in such great detail and at such an excruciatingly slow place exactly how misogynistic, homophobic, classist, and self-indulgent our first literary foremother truly was.
Although in general I enjoyed the first section of the book a lot more than any of the later ones, I still maintain that that first crush on Collins represents perfectly in microcosm all the hell that is Radclyffe Hall. It shows us, for instance, that for some reason, Stephen has defined love as a sadomasochistic enterprise in which the only appropriate means of expressing your devotion is to force yourself to suffer for your beloved. In fact, it works better if the suffering you put yourself through is completely useless in terms of actually making your beloved feel any better. Someone needs to take Stephen aside and explain that the only thing that will cure Collins's housemaid's knee is to force the Gordon clan to get down on their hands and knees and scrub their own goddamn floors. But then it would be mighty difficult to explain to Stephen about the importance of scrubbing your own damn floors, because here and throughout the book she seems to completely accept the class system that gave Collins her housemaid's knee and made Stephen independently wealthy at the age of twenty-one. For instance, it does not bother her at all that the hissy fit she pitched about not having her way with Collins got two people fired, one of whom is SUPPOSED to be the woman she loves. Nor does it occur to her to see any parallels between Collins and the footman being fired for expressing their sexuality and the way she's punished for expressing her own sexuality.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, Stephen's whole problem is that she feels that she really ought to have been a rich white man, and is pissed off that she is denied the privileges that come with that position. I really think that if she were born in America today she would grow up to be the first lesbian president of the Log Cabin Republicans. I just cannot think of a single piece of patriarchal bullshit that this woman has not swallowed hook, line and sinker. And then there's the plot. As I said to Liza at some point, "It's really easy to predict this book. Just think of the worst thing that could possibly happen, and that'll be it." And then there's her unbelievably homophobic treatment of Stephen's gay male friend, who gets bashed unmercifully, presumably for the crime of being too much like a woman. Yo, Stephen, if you think being a woman is such a terrible thing, WHY DO YOU DATE THEM?
Although it is true that Liza and I kept saying, "Oh my God, I'm glad things have gotten better" as we read it, I really honestly don't think that the time period fully explains this book's depressingness. I would bet any amount of money that any day during Radclyffe Hall's life you could walk into London and find yourself 10 dykes who were happier than she was. Because the main reason Stephen's life is so friggin' horrible is that she's accepted class, gender, and natural hierarchies so enthusiastically and completely that she can't help hating herself for not fitting into the great chain of being. Not everyone responds to patriarhcal oppression by internalizing the values that produce it. Then again, not *everyone* gets published--and that's another thing. Why was this book, for such a long time, the only classic of lesbian fiction available to most dykes? Why were the gatekeepers willing to let this book through? COULD IT BE that it's because The Well of Loneliness so thoroughly affirms capitalist and patriarchal values, in addition to making being a lesbian seem like less fun than being run over by a steamroller that has been specially fitted with acid-filled spikes and is traveling at 0.5 miles per hour? I mean really. If I were of a paranoid turn of mind, I would suspect that publishing this book was a deliberate attempt to wipe out lesbians forever by driving them all to suicide.
I'm sorry to be so ranty and long-winded, but I just can't contain my loathing. I feel like I've been had. I want to read the books from this period that didn't get published--the ones that were too threatening to the powers that were to be considered 'good enough' to print. But since most of that stuff is probably lost to us forever, all I can say is, I'm real sorry that we had to go through this, and it's all my fault. As penance, I think I will go and get down on my hands and knees and rub the carpet repeatedly until I too develop painful bursitis. It's the only way I can mitigate the suffering that I have caused you all.
Contritely yours,
The Plaid Adder
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