“Woman’s Place Is the Home”: Conservative Sapphic Modernity

  • Laura Doan
Chapter

Abstract

The halo in question hovers above the famously cropped head of the writer Radclyffe Hall, whose 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness thrust, quite suddenly, the subject of lesbianism into British public discourse.1 Hall’s determination to use her novel for political ends (as seen by her demand for the social tolerance of, and the right to existence for, the intermediate sex or “inverts”) bestowed on her a special status in the familiar progress narrative of homosexual rights—when, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only a few “outrageous” sexual radicals likewise put their reputations and livelihoods at risk through their open association with what might inelegantly be termed nonnormative sexualities, or same-sex love.2 Like the playwright Oscar Wilde, arguably Hall’s male counterpart in the modern English history of homosexual emancipation, the lesbian novelist gained notoriety through a collision with the legal system; in her case, during the autumn of 1928 at London’s Bow Street magistrate’s court, when the conservative government at that time prosecuted The Well for obscene libel.

Keywords

Home Life Feminist Ideal Daily Mail Interwar Period Modern Woman 
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Notes

  1. Many thanks to Jane Garrity and Bev Skeggs for thoughtful comments on early versions of this essay.Google Scholar
  2. 1.
    This heading of the essay’s opening section appears in Jeffrey Weeks’ Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977; reprint, London: Quartet Books, 1990), p. 111. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness. 1928 (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Daily Herald, November 11, 1928. The phrase—probably tongue-in-cheek— about Sackville-West’s “proclivities” appears in a letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West. See Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann, eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1923–1928 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 520.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Daily Mail, July 26, 1928, p. 4. This interview was the second conducted by Irons with Hall—an earlier one had appeared the previous year. No further references to the article “Woman’s Place Is the Home” will be cited, unless the context is unclear.Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), p. 208.Google Scholar
  6. 8.
    Suzanne Raitt, Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 7.Google Scholar
  7. 9.
    See “Marriage: A Discussion between Victoria Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson,” Listener 1, June 26, 1929, pp. 899–900. No further references to the article “Marriage” will be cited, unless the context is unclear.Google Scholar
  8. 10.
    Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 217.Google Scholar
  9. 11.
    Michael Baker, Our Three Selves: The Life of Radclyffe Hall (New York: Morrow, 1985), p. 49.Google Scholar
  10. 15.
    Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), p. 239.Google Scholar
  11. 17.
    Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 201.Google Scholar
  12. 19.
    See Bev Skeggs’ chapter on “Becoming Respectably Heterosexual” in Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 118–38.Google Scholar
  13. 22.
    David Glover and Cora Kaplan, “Editorial,” Special issue: “Conservative Modernity,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 28 (Spring 1996), p. 2.Google Scholar
  14. 23.
    Shari Benstock, “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History,” in Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, eds., Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New York: New York University Press, 1990), p. 198.Google Scholar
  15. 24.
    Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 145.Google Scholar
  16. 26.
    See, for example, Light, Forever England and Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).Google Scholar
  17. 29.
    Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea, “Introduction,” in Nava and O’Shea, eds., Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 4.Google Scholar
  18. 31.
    Jane Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950 (Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1984), p. 116. 32. Ibid.Google Scholar
  19. 33.
    Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and Henley: Routledge, 1979), p. 2.Google Scholar
  20. 35.
    Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914–39 Google Scholar
  21. 36.
    Anthea Trodd, Women’s Writing in English: Britain, 1900–1945 (London: Longman, 1998), p. 22.Google Scholar
  22. 37.
    Mrs. Ethel Alec-Tweedie, Women and Soldiers (London: John Lane, 1918), p. 148.Google Scholar
  23. 38.
    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 3.Google Scholar
  24. 39.
    Gillian A. Dunne, “A Passion for ‘Sameness’? Sexuality and Gender Accountability,” in Elizabeth B. Silva and Carol Smart, eds., The New Family? (London: Sage, 1999), p. 66.Google Scholar
  25. 40.
    Una, Lady Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hammond, Hammond, 1961), p. 63.Google Scholar
  26. 44.
    For an interesting discussion of the linkage between “lesbian” and “vampire,” see Sue-Ellen Case, “Tracking the Vampire,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (Summer 1991).Google Scholar
  27. 45.
    James Douglas’s editorial of August 19, 1928, “A Book That Must Be Suppressed,” is reprinted in Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, eds., Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 36–38.Google Scholar
  28. 46.
    The headline “They’re here, they’re queer-they’re conservative” appeared recently on the cover of the Nation magazine, as reported in the Guardian, July 8, 2002, p. 14. O’Shea, “English Subjects of Modernity” in Modern Times, p. 11.Google Scholar
  29. 47.
    See Deborah S. Ryan, “ ‘All the World and Her Husband’: The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition 1908–39,” in Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot, eds., All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth-Century Consumer Culture (London: Cassell, 2000), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar
  30. 50.
    Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent (London: Hogarth Press, 1931), p. 164.Google Scholar
  31. 52.
    Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), p. 120.Google Scholar
  32. 56.
    Clemence Dane, “Two Million Women,” Britannia and Eve (May 1929), p. 22 and Light, Forever England, p. 10.Google Scholar
  33. 57.
    Sally Alexander, “The Mysteries and Secrets of Women’s Bodies: Sexual Knowledge in the First Half of the Twentieth Century” in Modern Times, p. 163. 58. Vera Brittain, Time and Tide, August 10, 1928; rpt. in Doan and Prosser, eds.,Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Laura Doan and Jane Garrity 2006

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  • Laura Doan

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