Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract

At Bow Street Magistrates Court on 16 November 1928, Sir Chartres Biron ordered destruction of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a polemical novel pleading for social tolerance for lesbianism. It is tempting to think that Hall got into trouble simply for raising issue of lesbianism, since female (as it was then known) was not legally recognized in early twentieth-century Britain. A proposal to extend to women 1885 Labouchere Amendment, which outlawed of gross indecency between men, ran aground in House of Commons in 1921 because, Samuel Hynes speculates, men found it [lesbianism] too gross to deal (375). However, at least two other novels published in autumn of 1928, Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women and, more important, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, clearly broached same subject, yet escaped official censure. Hall's case aggravating factor seems to have been not subject but treatment. Whereas Woolf's fictional biography, like Mackenzie's satire, sets out to make readers laugh, The Well of Loneliness pleads cause of sexual inversion by taking up an aggressively polemical stance. A summary of Judge Biron's ruling in The Times (17 November) suggests that Hall provoked British authorities into legal action by preaching an unacceptable sexual doctrine in an earnest tone that sought to deny possibility of either laughter or moral censure. Conceding that Well some literary merit, and that such a book might even have a moral Biron declared: But in present case there was not one word that suggested that anyone with horrible tendencies described was in least degree blameworthy. All characters were presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration. was even more serious was that certain acts were described in most alluring terms. order to advocate sympathy and tolerance for lesbians, Hall had made sure that her lesbian heroine, Stephen Gordon, appeared above reproach. Ironically, as Hall's biographer Michael Baker has noted, it was by making Stephen virtuous that Hall provoked moral censure (220). If those virtues had been nonexistent, or at least laughable, as in Extraordinary Women, The Well of Loneliness would have passed muster as having, if not a strong moral influence, at least not a bad one. The question of relation between obscenity and literature raised by Judge Biron prompted some musings in diary of Virginia Woolf, who attended Bow Street on 9 November, first day of Hall trial: What is obscenity? is literature? is difference between subject and treatment? (Diary 3:207). Like many other literati, including E. M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf went to prepared to take witness stand and speak against obscenity charges. She was not quite as committed to cause of Radclyffe Hall as some recent critics have suggested, however.(1) Like many of her Bloomsbury friends, Woolf seriously doubted Hall's qualifications as an artist, finding her work too polemical. Bloomsbury's reservations ran so deep that eight days before Woolf wrote: Most of our friends are trying to evade witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins (Letters 3: 555). Woolf was relieved to be saved task of defending Hall's novel in court by magistrate's decision that only he, and not defense's array of expert witnesses, could rule whether or not Well was obscene: In what cases is evidence allowable? This last, to my relief, was decided against us: we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art (Diary 3: 207). When, as she put it, the bloody woman's trial went to appeal on 14 December, Woolf did not attend (Letters 3: 563). Woolf's objections to Well were not limited to an ostensibly aesthetic sphere; they also highlight crucial differences among women in questions of sexual politics, questions which are ultimately inextricable from aesthetic ones. …