Doubt, Havelock Ellis, and Bisexuality in Jacob’s Room

Christopher James Wells

doi:10.3390/h11020039

Abstract

This essay examines Virginia Woolf’s experimental representations of bisexuality in her bildungsroman, Jacob’s Room (JR) (1922). This article suggests that we cannot appreciate Woolf’s complex modernist strategies of resistance to restrictive and reductive attitudes to sexual identities if we think only in binary terms of hetero- and homosexuality in Woolf’s work. I argue here that a contemporary gaze of queer theory, one informed by current ideologies on the spectrum of gendered and bi+ sexual identities, is required to unearth in full Woolf’s critique of sexology in her first substantive investment into experimental sexual realism. I aim to show how sexological bisexuality influenced Woolf’s developing aesthetic that was, at the time of writing Jacob’s Room, beginning to adopt a much more innovative and experimental form.

Highlights

I argue here that what was integral to this fracturing of a singular, unified illusory stable self was the ‘ghostly other’ of sexological bisexuality (Angelides 2001, p. 5)
In analysing how Jacob’s bisexuality is installed in Jacob’s Room, and the epistemological doubt that bisexuality caused in Ellis’ pursuit to discover sexual identity types, this essay departs from criticism on lesbian feminism, patriarchal masculinity and, beyond Brenda Helt’s work on queer studies and Woolf in 20121
The possibility of one thing does not preclude the possibility of its ‘Other’; the evidence of homosexual desire does not indicate the absence of opposite-sex desires. This remains true in our contemporary cultural landscape, and in Virginia Woolf’s cultural milieu of sexology and literary experimentalism of the 1920s and 1930s

Summary

Introduction

In analysing how Jacob’s bisexuality is installed in Jacob’s Room, and the epistemological doubt that bisexuality caused in Ellis’ pursuit to discover sexual identity types, this essay departs from criticism on lesbian feminism, patriarchal masculinity and, beyond Brenda Helt’s work on queer studies and Woolf in 20121. Little to no research as of yet focuses on the relationship between the uncertain sexological bisexual figure and the innovate experimental narrative method first deployed by Woolf in Jacob’s Room. To remedy this gap in scholarship it is important that we reflect on the influence of sexological studies in bisexuality on influencing Woolf’s construction of Jacob’s ambiguous desires and complicatedly composite and polyvalent sexual identity.

Modernist Sexuality

Havelock Ellis and Woolfian Sexuality

Jacob’s Room

Conclusions