Radclyffe Hall Research Articles

Voyeurism, Desire, and Narrative Subversion in Colette’s Claudine Novels

ABSTRACT This essay positions the French author Colette’s earliest works, the Claudine novels, at an inflection point in queer feminist discourses of the early 1900s. Combining recent critical explorations of the sexological and literary roots of the lesbian figure at the fin de siècle, queer theories addressing the power and limits of the heteronormative gaze, and an examination of Colette’s development of a queered authorial persona in the course of her career, I argue that the “fluffy”, “commercialized” Claudine novels in fact make use of stylistic innovation in order to subvert contemporary expectations of the lesbian narrative. Colette’s generative denial of the male gaze in her depiction of Claudine’s affair with her woman friend, Rézi, results in the adoption of a deliberately evasive, self-obliterating narrative perspective. In this, Colette anticipates later explorations of subjective desire and authorial persona in the canonically modernist works of Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Natalie Barney. In their exploration of the alternative modes through which an authentic desire experienced between two women might be narrativized in the twentieth century, the Claudine novels’ use of generic subversion, shifting narrative personae, and strategically fragmented prose mark them as key works in a developing sapphic modernist canon.

The Use and Abuse of Queer History

The Use and Abuse of Queer History

Border Tales: Against Cosmopolitan Pessimism

Border TalesAgainst Cosmopolitan Pessimism Stefano Evangelista (bio) Two writers. Two encounters on the border. Two tales of borders as zones of transformation and renewal. The first is Oscar Wilde, who landed on American soil in January 1882. After moving from Ireland to Britain, Wilde now seized the opportunity to extend his international reach: America was to launch his career as poet—something that, in the event, did not work out as well as he had hoped—but also as a cultural mediator and exporter of aestheticism across the Atlantic. It is at the custom check in New York that Wilde said one of the most famous things he might never have said: "I have nothing to declare except my genius."1 This aperçu set the tone for his use of America as a stage of literary and mediatic self-fashioning. Another writer who fully grasped the theatrical potential of the border was Christopher Isherwood. Many years later, speaking of his arrival in Germany in 1929, he claimed that, on being questioned about the purpose of his journey by the passport official, "he could have truthfully replied, 'I'm looking for my homeland and I've come to find out if this is it.'"2 Isherwood was fleeing the repressive atmosphere of 1920s Britain, where the Well of Loneliness (1928), and its author Radclyffe Hall, had just been put on trial. Crossing the German border marked the symbolic birth of the writer out of a repudiation of national identity. That both of these border tales involve a dose of fabrication seems only appropriate: borders are places where identities are tested and individual lives are slotted into official narratives. Here, officials are on [End Page 75] the lookout for untruths and illegal traffics. Subverting the questioning ritual, Wilde and Isherwood represent crossing the border as a decisive step towards the making of a new self—crucially, in their cases, of a literary self. In this respect, it is also significant that they are both queer writers: at this time of social and legal persecution of homosexuality, the marginalization of the queer subject sharpens the critical stance towards citizenship and normative categories of belonging. Wilde and Isherwood cast borders in an ironic light. But there is another side to their tales of privileged self-fashioning: borders are also sites of trauma, best represented by the enforced displacement of migrants and refugees. In the course of the nineteenth century, New York Harbor where Wilde docked in 1882 was the entry point into America for millions of immigrants, mostly from European countries including Wilde's Ireland—a phenomenon that the website of the Ellis Island Foundation describes as "the largest mass human migration in the history of the world."3 The same foundation now runs a large oral history project of what it terms the "immigrant experience" and invites visitors to search its passenger databases in an attempt to recover some of the stories of those that were funneled through this narrow space that marked for many the beginning of a new life. It hardly needs to be stated that the German border that Isherwood crossed buoyantly in 1929 would soon become a zone of conflict and fear, as Germany's aggressive contravention of the territorial boundaries established by the First World War settlement plunged Europe and large parts of the globe into another disastrous war. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), Isherwood later tells the story of trying to bring his German lover, "Heinz," into Britain in the years leading to the Second World War: he failed, as Heinz was turned down at the border in Harwich on suspicion of trying to enter the country as an illegal worker.4 Keeping Heinz outside of Germany meant saving him from conscription and from the brutalizing influence of Nazism, but also from the very concrete threat of the regime's vicious prosecution of homosexuals. These two tales that bookend the long fin de siècle illustrate the importance of the border as a vantage point on the complex dynamics that regulate the formation of literary identities in relation to international flows of people and ideas. Historians have long seen the decades [End Page 76...

Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction; The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism

Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction; The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism

La comunità lesbica nell’Europa tra le due guerre mondiali e il caso di Radclyffe Hall

The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s most famous and most discussed novel, is considered one of the pillars of lesbian literature and historiography. In the same year of its publication, 1928, it undergoes a trial in England for obscenity because it was considered an “obscene libel” and was immediately censored as the first novel to deal openly with desire between women. The Well of Loneliness is an emblematic text and its story is exemplary for the understanding of that attempt to remove lesbianism in a patriarchal and heteronormative society. The aim is to draw a general picture of the construction of lesbian identity and its (in)visibility in the public space in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular between the twenties and thirties, trying to analyze the cultural, social and medico-legal framework in which Radclyffe Hall, Lesbian Identity and The Well of Loneliness are inserted.

The Case of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness

This article explores the notion of queering translation in relation to Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), often described as the first lesbian novel, focusing on two key terms related to sexual identity, the word queer, which was semantically unstable at this historical moment, and the quasi-scientific term invert. Hall's provocative use of queer against the minoritizing invert, which presages queer critiques of identitarian politics by several decades, complicates the field of sexuality in the novel, presenting special challenges for translators. Those challenges are analyzed in the early French translation of the novel and in later Chinese translations, from both Taiwan and mainland China.

Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America’s First Sexual Revolution by Brett Gary

Although the title does not reveal it, Gary’s book employs a biographical approach to the study of how people who embraced modernism challenged the legal gender norms established in the Victorian Age and given potent legal effect through the Comstock Act and similar state legislation. Comstockery was paternalistic in every sense of the word, utilizing the concept of obscenity to protect the moral order of society by regulating sexuality. The legal standard that was used most often to decide obscenity cases was the Hicklin rule, which required only that an object have the potential to corrupt the most susceptible people to be ruled obscene. In the hands of magistrates, customs officials, and postal officials, its use was capricious and extensive.As a cultural historian speaking to legal scholars, political scientists, and legal historians, Gary chronicles the “changes and conflicts around sex and morality in American culture in a booming, ever-expanding marketplace of information and entertainment” from the 1920s into the 1950s (2). He uses “the actions of one particular law firm and one particular lawyer” to show how an older, established fear “of public vulnerability was countered by an equal powerful claim to the public’s right of access” (3). Morris Ernst, a partner at Greenbaum Wolff and Ernst, and associate counsels Alexander Lindey and Harriet Pilpel of the same firm “won signature cases in their larger campaign against” legal suppression of sexual expression and knowledge (3). Representing feminists, birth-control activists, doctors, sex researchers, booksellers, publishers, and novelists, they did a remarkable amount of the heavy lifting required to change the law. Their individual clients included Mary Ware Dennett, the pioneering author of a sex-education manual; Marie Stopes, the author of a path-breaking work extoling women’s sexual pleasure in marriage; Covici and Friede, the American publishers of Radclyffe Hall, author of “the most important English-language lesbian novel” of the period (111); James Joyce, author of the transgressive modernist masterpiece Ulysses; Margaret Sanger, the nation’s foremost birth-control advocate and activist; and Alfred Kinsey, America’s leading sex researcher.Ernst is famous as a leading lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu), but, as Gary shows, much of his work took place outside that organization. By shifting the focus away from the organization, Gary sheds new light on how legal and cultural change occurred. His work complements and supplements Leigh Ann Wheeler’s How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (New York, 2012), which explains how the aclu incorporated sexual speech into the freedoms that deserved protection from government. Employing the traditional humanistic methodology of textual analysis, Gary illuminates in great detail how Ernst and his collaborators swayed courts (and sometimes bureaucrats or legislators) to their views. They seldom lost. More than one chapter concludes with the assertion that a judge “rendered a verdict that essentially accepted all their arguments” (286).Gary’s focus is on legal arguments, defense strategies, and trial work—often accompanied by behind-the-scenes maneuvering or publicity campaigns. He treats the briefs as not just legal arguments but also as social and cultural statements, and he views lawyers as creators constrained by the realities of litigation and context. Thus, they downplayed some aspects of their cases to gain a competitive advantage in court. For instance, in defending Dennett they glided past her treatment of masturbation to secure victory, and similarly with Sanger, they strongly pushed for a physicians’ exception to the restriction on importation of contraceptive devises. That decision reinforced the medicalization of birth control.Gary’s work details the emergence of a cultural and legal sexual revolution that set the stage for later developments. Numerous examples show how “Ernst and his colleagues” created “a core body of arguments” deployed “in virtually all of their cases” that “were steadily accepted by the courts,” shifting “the role of the state from one of paternalistic protector of childlike vulnerable citizens to an arbiter of adult marketplaces of knowledge and entertainment” (289).

In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge and their Dogs

ABSTRACTHow does attention to dogs open up understanding of the queer, and more specifically, the Sapphic, past? This article examines the forgotten enmeshments of lesbian and pedigree dog subcultures in 1920s England. It takes as its case study one of the best‐known couples of Sapphic modernity, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, and their dachshunds, Wotan and Thorgils. Bringing into dialogue scholarship on queer, trans and animal history, it traces the historical footprint of the dogs and considers how what this article calls the ‘canine archive of sex’ – a wide range of documents including show catalogues, newspaper reports, fiction and scientific writing – adds to understanding of the complexities of modern Sapphic history. Sapphic here is used to denote relationships between people assigned female at birth, some of whom may have transed gender norms and expectations. The article argues that the records of Hall's and Troubridge's involvement in the world of dog breeding expand understanding both of Sapphic modernity specifically and the intersections between histories of sexuality and gender and animal history more broadly. They reveal how gender norms, class privilege and racialised practices converged in modern pedigree culture, shaping canine–human relationships as well as the queer subcultures that formed around them.

‘Our Three Selves:’ Radclyffe Hall and Mabel Batten’s Lived Catholicism

Abstract For British Catholic women, conversion was an empowering choice for oneself, rather than a path towards gaining institutionalized power. Lay female converts at the turn of the century were generally privileged, with a worldly understanding of the role of women in British society. Many converts drew on the spirit of female independence at the end of the 19th century to contest their place in British society. For some, their social and financial capital offered an additional position of power from which to push on notions of traditional Britishness and femininity. To have the freedom to choose conversion at all exemplifies this feeling of bodily and mental autonomy rarely exhibited by many women during the late 19th century and early 20th century. This article sheds new light on the expansiveness of the lived, lay Catholic experience in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the examples of Mabel Batten (1857–1916) and Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943).

Lesbian existence

A close examination of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Olga Moraes Sarmento’s As Minhas Memórias (1948) reveals interesting intersections. Hall’s epic novel is a long, plangent plea for an understanding of ‘the Invert’, whereas Moraes Sarmento’s memoir, dedicated to her female lover, offers thinly disguised clues as to her own sexuality. Moraes Sarmento settled in Paris, for she did not care for the Portuguese mindset of her time. An intriguing aspect of her memoir is when she indulges in a lengthy meditation, similar, though not as maudlin as Hall’s, on her possible ‘missteps’ in life and, like Hall, goes over the head of ecclesiastical authority to address God’s merciful judgment. My article seeks to tease out the subtle implications of the themes ‘nature’, ‘human nature’, and ‘God’ in Sarmento’s memoir and contrast them with Hall’s more heightened arguments.

Boundaries and Desire: Censorship and the Articulation of Romantic Encounters in the Works of Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall suscitated vigorous antagonistic reactions among her contemporaries, readers and critics alike, through her rendering of same-sex romantic encounters, which often provoked heated disputes on the literary stage and in society at large, ultimately leading to obscenity charges materialised in the banning of the books under investigation. This article focuses on the articulation of love and desire between women in the works that this author wrote and/or published in the 1920s, pointing to the narrative manifestation of self-censorship, as well as to the workings of external censorship and to the effects of these personally inflicted and socially imposed boundaries.

1933: the year of lesbian modernism in Poland?

ABSTRACT This article makes the first attempt at the reconstruction of lesbian modernism within local and transnational modernist networks in Poland. It covers a brief span of 1933, the extraordinary year that witnessed the publication of three novels with lesbian and sapphic themes: Radclyffe Hall’s Źródło samotności (the translation of The Well of Loneliness) with Irena Krzywicka’s preface, Maria Modrakowska’s Anetka, and Aniela Gruszecka’s Przygoda w nieznanym kraju. On the basis of these works and archival research, the article argues that these novels contributed to the lesbian fiction which emerged in Polish literature sixty years earlier than the widely accepted 1990s.

Inverse Intimacy: Reconfiguring ‘Personal Relations’ in Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel

Ever since its publication in 1927, Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel, has prompted critical responses that have tried to gauge the ways in which the narrative represents intimacy between women. Although one of its earliest reviewers sensed that the ‘dark, forlorn spirit of inversion is all through it’, modern critics have acknowledged that The Hotel is not engaged with the sexological models of inversion that inform Radclyffe Hall's contemporaneous novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928). At the same time, commentators have recognized that The Hotel forms part of a group of 1920s fictions that address female homosexuality with increasing openness. For the most part, readers have focused close attention on the intimate friendship that develops between the young Sydney Warren and the middle-aged widow Mrs. Kerr. This bond, even if it is fraught with tension, remains a source of prurient fascination among the other English residents enjoying a wintertime dolce far niente on the Italian Riviera. Still, the sustained critical focus on the attachment that develops between these two characters has tended to ignore the significance of the partnership between the two single women, Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, that places the whole span of the novel in parentheses. Although recent studies by Elizabeth Cullingford and Maud Ellmann have drawn attention to Bowen's interest in what it means to be a ‘singleton’ or part of stadial series of personal relationships (single, couple, and triad), little has been said about the two spinsters, each of whom is ‘half of a duality’. The present essay concentrates attention on the ways in which the enumerative turn in Bowen studies broadens in scope when we look at how Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald appear as both two in one and one in two: a narrative formula that reminds us not of sexual inversion but the inverse number in mathematics. It is this type of inverse intimacy between woman and woman that triumphs at the end of The Hotel.

The Unlit Lamp (1924): translation, reception and censorship

ABSTRACT Francoist censorship hindered the publication of literature in Spain that contradicted the principles of the dictatorship. This article aims to examine the reception, censorship and translation into Spanish of Radclyffe Hall's first, The Unlit Lamp (1924), a novel that introduced progressive models of women at the time and a foregrounded lesbian relationship. The study also seeks to reflect on the link between the role of the censor and the translator, explore the reasons why the novel eluded complete censorship and analyse how it was partially censored, as well as the cultural implications of such manipulative practice.

The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives by Melanie Micir

Reviewed by: The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives by Melanie Micir Douglas Mao The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives. Melanie Micir. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 198. $29.95 (cloth). Melanie Micir's new book, which is about unfinished biography, comes to a stirring finish. In the preceding pages of The Passion Projects, Micir has noted at several junctures why it's worthwhile, indeed imperative, to retrain critical attention on biography, and specifically the biographies of writers who have never been monumentally immortalized. Yet what may be her most striking articulation of this point appears in the final paragraph of her coda. As "scholars have shown," she observes, "the midcentury consolidation of modernism into an object of academic study took place primarily in male-dominated biographies, single-author studies, anthologies, and institutional archives. … New Criticism may have focused readers' attention on the words rather than the lives, but these foundational biographical acts helped cement which words were remembered" (139). And thus The Passion Projects is in part "an argument that the act of stepping away from the biographical is the privilege of those who are already remembered, whose lives are already imprinted upon history" (140). The salience of this formulation can hardly be overstated. At least since the 1970s, there has been a tension, in and around literary scholarship, between theoretical accounts of textual production that critique the prominence of the author figure, on the one hand, and efforts to bring greater recognition to women authors, queer authors, authors of color, and other marginalized writers, on the other. Many critiques of biographical emphases have been well-intentioned—often rooted, for example, in a sense that hoary myths of the heroism of the individual subject ultimately support exploitative social arrangements by downplaying the power of superindividual forces over individual lives. As Micir eloquently captures, however, this form of critique of the subject has come, broadly speaking, at the expense of subjects whose lives—not just experiences but also conditions, not just achievements but also perspectives—have not yet been registered, sanctioned, or canonized. That the backgrounding of biography in this crucial sense still continues, half a century later, is a source of energizing frustration for Micir, who at the beginning of her coda aptly cites Madelyn Detloff's adumbration, in the inaugural number of Feminist Modernist Studies, of "the Sisyphe position," an "affective state that recognizes the 'difficult, unfortunately repetitive, seemingly unwinnable task before the queer feminist cultural worker …'" (131). With its inventiveness, acuity, elegance of prose, and (yes) passion, The Passion Projects makes this task look a little more winnable. As Micir explains in her introduction, her effort is to read "biography as an activist genre undertaken in late career by queer feminist writers determined to resist the marginalization and exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, companions, and wives from dominant narratives of literary history" (3). All unfinished in one sense or another, the projects on which Micir focuses span a range from biographical narrative to annotated collection of items from the shared past of living assembler and dead beloved. Some were initiated with the prospect of monetary reward distantly in view, but as Micir notes, their major impetus was [End Page 198] not financial: a "passion project is work that its practitioner undertakes for a reason other than professional duty or immediate gain," work "in the service of unreasonable pursuits: memory, legacy, the future world" (14, 15). Each chapter then "theorizes a specific type of unfinished biographical act and provides several case studies that range across the middle decades of the twentieth century" (15). In chapter one, Micir focuses on projects especially strongly directed to audiences in a future where queer partnerships would be valued. Una Troubridge and Evguenia Souline, each seeking to control how their lover Radclyffe Hall would be remembered, also reflected on how the publication of Hall's intimate life might, in Troubridge's words, "cheer and encourage those"—meaning those future inverts—who "come after us" (26). Sylvia Townsend Warner imagined a queerness-receptive readership to come in struggling to decide what of T. H. White's sexual life she might include in her biography of...

Female Masculinity in Radclyffe Hall's Novel The Well of Loneliness

This paper aims to analyze Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness from the perspective of female masculinity. For that purpose, it uses the concept of female masculinity developed by Judith Halberstam. Seen from the angle of female masculinity forwarded by Habersham, the present paper comes to the conclusion that masculinity falls into crisis as we compare it to how it was defined and understood traditionally. Most of the female characters in the novel show boldness, strength and ability to face and tackle different situations filled with danger and hopelessness. A young woman named Stephen Gordon pursues her passions and embarks on her own subjective world. Her activities and choices are anomalous to the established mores concerning the role and position of women. This is what goes against the conventional paradigm of gender and supports the idea of subversive female masculinity.

“Even unto this Bitter Loving”: Unhappiness and Backward Feelings in Ruth

Abstract Feminist and queer readings of the Hebrew Bible frequently treat the book of Ruth as a “happy object.” At the same time, contextual readings have suggested that Ruth is a narrative of exploitation, including possible sexual exploitation or trafficking. Building on recent scholarship about queer feelings and affect, this article negotiates a reading that takes seriously both the history of lesbian and queer readings of Ruth and Naomi and the critical attention on structures of exploitation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward (2007), I argue for the importance of feeling, especially unhappy or backward feeling, in reading Ruth. My reading also frames the biblical book in conversation with Radclyffe Hall’s classic 1928 lesbian novel (and source for lesbian and queer theory) The Well of Loneliness. By following unhappiness and backwardness in and around Ruth, we are able to snatch a glimpse of queer feeling, and the space of promise it opens.

Resisting Monosexism: Representations of Bisexuality in Literature

In a New York Times review of James Baldwin’s 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Mario Puzo writes that “A propaganda novel may be socially valuable… but it is not art.” Puzo’s claim is a function of what creative writing pedagogy scholar Janelle Adsit calls “the particular privilege that comes with a denial of marginalization.” Assumptions of rigid binaries that categorise people as either hetero- or homosexual, a phenomenon that scholar Kenji Yoshino calls “the epistemic contract of bisexual erasure,” create and reinforce harmful ideas about bisexuality. Bisexual representation in literature can operate as a creative resistance to the status quo, undermining the alleged necessity for a rigid binary system of sexuality. From James Baldwin’s 1968 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone to Jen Wilde’s 2017 Queens of Geek, this article traces representations of bisexuality in literature, with special attention to the ways in which bisexuality is demonstrated, described, and labelled in literature. However, while acknowledging the problematic representations of bisexuality in older fiction, such as Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, this paper resists a narrative of pure progress of bisexual representation, examining both problematic and nuanced representations in contemporary literature.

The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, edited by Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares

Reviewed by: The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s ed. by Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell and Rebecca Soares Christine Ferguson (bio) The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, edited by Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares; pp. xliv + 246. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2019, $140.00, £115.00. The concept of the fantastic has been crucial to feminist literary criticism since its inception, occupying a leading role in pioneering works such as Ellen Moers’s Literary Women: The Great Writers (1976) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). Yet even the most enduring of critical categories requires constant reinvention, and it is to this task that editors Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares dedicate themselves. Their work, The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, brings together fourteen essays on fantastic fiction produced by women writers from around the world and published in either the 1890s or the 1920s. Narrow in its two-decade historical focus, the book is deliberately capacious in its geographical purview, rejecting any single national focus. The collection’s essays are dedicated to a recovery and reinterpretation of the female literary fantastic. Its contents examine an impressively wide range of authorial subjects, from Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, and Edith Nesbit, to Agatha [End Page 133] Christie, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. All of the essays offer finely honed close readings of their focal texts; the best of them extrapolate their conclusions to larger debates and developments within gender and genre studies. Particularly successful are the contributions by Julia Panko, Elizabeth English, Andrew Hock Soon Ng, and Kate Schnur, which convincingly demonstrate how works by Christie, Nesbit, Katherine Burdekin, and Barnes speak to the gendered dynamics of radio broadcasting, science fiction, early-twentieth-century socialism, and the popular gothic. The impact of these often thoughtful contributions is, however, limited by their lack of organization within a coherent conceptualization of what the fantastic might actually be. Gathered within the collection’s titular aegis are texts whose narrative incidents and ontological frames seem to have little in common: the terrifying appearance of a ghost within an otherwise realist story, spontaneous acts of gender or species crossing that evoke no particular surprise within their narrative environment, slips in time, men who tell their children patriarchal bedtime stories, and murderers who escape the law only to face providence. What, if anything, links these occurrences? While procrustean definitions are always best avoided, the category of the fantastic risks losing all meaning if it is not accounted for in some critically consistent way. The editors seem reluctant to take up this task, eschewing—or in fact, barely mentioning—its best known articulation via the structuralist Tzvetan Todorov to offer instead a definition that does not quite fit the contents on offer. The fantastic, they assert, is “a genre of texts and a category of more-or-less supernatural seeming phenomena” (xix). The immediate problem with this definition is that it does not apply to a number of the volume’s own essays. While a woman’s passion for a doll—as depicted in Daphne du Maurier’s “The Doll” (1928) and analyzed by Donna Mitchell in chapter 2—might be unusual, it is hardly supernatural. Similarly, no laws of nature are violated in the telling of patriarchal nonsense stories in Barnes’s experimental novel Ryder (1928). Equally questionable is the designation of the fantastic as a genre: surely if the volume’s contents reveal anything, it is that the fantastic flourishes across a range of genres, from the mystery plot to the fairy tale, the ghost story, the imperial romance, and the erotic thriller. Perhaps the reluctance to define the fantastic lies in the editorial team’s greater interest with what it does than in what it is. And what the fantastic achieves, in their formulation, is a queer blurring of sex and gender binaries. For McCormick, Mitchell, and Soares, fantastic is better understood as a verb than a noun, one which works as an analogue to “queer”: “To...

“That rare gift: perfect hands on a horse”: Radclyffe Hall’s eros of cross-species communion

ABSTRACTScholars of Radclyffe Hall’s fiction have focused primarily on her advocacy for human gender and sexual freedom; however, closer attention to human-animal connections in her work reveals concern for equity across species lines as well. The Well of Loneliness (1928) in many ways challenges the human-animal binary just as powerfully as it does gender and sexual binaries. By narrating multi-species relationships marked by kinetic body play, the novel suggests that eroticism can be a harmonizing force that traverses deeply-ingrained social boundaries between animals of all kinds. By examining the protagonist’s interactions with her animal friends, I argue that Hall’s text privileges intimate, unspoken gestures of body and voice over the more confining structures of human language. Hall also implements grammatical constructs in animal scenes that open possibilities for co-forming, co-shaping interrelationality, a narrative move that acknowledges and appreciates, rather than ignores, radical alterity between species. Ultimately, I argue, Hall envisions a rehabilitative ecological vision for human and nonhuman animals, writing all creatures as co-constitutive actors within the intimate spaces they share.