"Spoiled Identity": Stephen gordon's loneliness and the difficulties of queer history

GLQ

Volumn 7, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 487-519

  Love, Heather K ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 32244437984     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-7-4-487     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 122.
2. Quoted in Diane Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 238.
3. Janet Flanner, "Paris Letter," New Yorker, 4 October 1930, 84.
4. Quoted in Souhami, Trials of Radclyffe Hall, 158.
5. Quoted in Rebecca O'Rourke, Reflecting on "The Well of Loneliness" (London: Rout- ledge, 1989), 127.
6. The reconsidering of Stephen's masculinity in The Well began with Esther Newton's groundbreaking article "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman," Signs 9 (1984): 557-75.
7. In recent years Judith Halberstam's work (Female Masculinity [Durham: Duke University Press, 1998]) and Jay Prosser's transsexual reading of The Well (Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality [New York: Columbia University Press, 1998]) have been crucial to this reassessment. Several critics in the 1980s began to rethink The Well in terms of Foucauldian reverse discourse: see esp. Newton, "Mythic Mannish Lesbian"; Sonja Ruehl, "Inverts and Experts: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Identity," in Feminism, Culture, and Politics, ed. Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), 15-36
8. Jonathan Dollimore, "The Dominant and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic," Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 179-92.
9. Blanche Wiesen Cook, "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination': Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition," Signs 4 (1979): 721.
10. Catharine Stimpson, "Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 364, 369.
11. Cook, "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination,'" 719.
12. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 107-8.
13. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Anchor, 1990), 378, 387. All references to the novel are to this edition.
14. Stephen herself is a formidable hunter, but she gives up hunting after the death of her father. One day, while riding ahead of the pack of her country neighbors, she imagines that she has turned from hunter to hunted. She dismounts and kneels by the fox, that bedraggled creature with the "desperate eyes of the relentlessly pursued" (126). Though her identification with this doomed creature may strike some readers as sheer melodrama, Stephen's intuition turns out to be prescient rather than paranoid. Within two years her neighbor Ralph Crossby announces his plan to expose Stephen's aberrant desires. "I'll hound her out of the county before I've done," he swears, "and with luck out of England" (198).
15. The history of female romantic friendships, for instance, was crucial to the construction of lesbian feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. In her writing on this topic, Lillian Faderman describes romantic friendship consistently in terms of "innocence" (Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present [New York: Morrow, 1981]). Innocence in this context seems to refer both to sexual naivete and to a lack of exposure to the pernicious effects of homophobia.
16. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Rout- ledge, 1993), 223, 228.
17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel" GLQ 1 (1993): 4.
18. D. A. Miller, Place for Us (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 26.
19. Angus Gordon considers the tendency of recent queer critics to stabilize adolescence as the site of an abject experience of the closet, of homophobic assault, and of self- hatred in "Turning Back: Adolescence, Narrative, and Queer Theory," GLQ 5 (1999): 1 -24. Gordon speculates that such reconstructions of the past insulate the present as a space of pride, freedom, and well-being. While I agree with Gordon's account of queer theory's attempt to establish the qualitative difference of the present, I argue that critics have done this by disavowing the losses of the past. Miller's account of his pre-Stonewall, preadult experience in Place for Us offers an important counterexample to both of our characterizations of contemporary queer theory.
20. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Aesthetics, Method, and Episte-mology, vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: New, 1998), 386-87.
21. Christopher Nealon, "Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction," New Literary History 31 (2000): 747.
22. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 223.
23. Raymond Williams, "Structure of Feeling," in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.
24. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 98 -99.
25. Whether Stephen "faces the guns of Bond Street" (165) or sits in a fashionable restaurant in Paris, her appearances in public are narrated as hostile stares and taunts ("Look at that! What is it?" [165]). Her neighbor, Ralph Crossby, annoyed at Stephen for hanging around his wife, comments casually, "That sort of thing wants putting down at birth" (151). Stephen's most intimate relations and friends reinforce her experiences of refusal. Her mother keeps her at a distance from earliest infancy and, having found out about her affair with Angela Crossby, seconds the world's opinion, telling Stephen that she would rather see her "dead at my feet than standing before me with this thing upon you" (200).
26. On Hall's conservatism see Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
27. "If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house," Gaston Bachelard writes, "I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace" (The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas [Boston: Beacon, 1964], 6). Hall is likewise concerned with the protecting function of the house, but for her, the inwardness of dreaming is not the first priority. Rather, the house provides a vital link between the inward and the outward: it offers a publicness lined with and enabled by acceptable forms of domestic privacy. For Stephen, Morton signifies public acceptance and recognizability guaranteed by the institutions of property, inheritance, and social hierarchy. It also offers an intimate space in which the orderly domestic relations that such publicness presumes can flourish.
28. The distinction that Judith Butler elaborates between melancholia and narcissism aptly describes the gap between expectation and outcome that structures Stephen's birth. Butler considers Freud's formulation that in melancholia the shadow of the object falls on the ego; she then contrasts it with Lacan's understanding of narcissism, in which the shadow of the ego falls on the object. While in narcissism one encounters one's own plenitude in the object, Butler writes, "in melancholia this formulation is reversed: in the place of the loss that the other comes to represent, I find myself to be that loss, impoverished, wanting. In narcissistic love, the other contracts my abundance. In melancholia, I contract the other's absence" (The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], 187). While the Gor-dons understand their desire for a son as narcissistic, as a desire for a copy that will reflect their image, Stephen's birth recasts this desire as melancholic. The Gordons hope to transfer their plenitude to a son who is Sir Philip's mirror image; instead, they find themselves inscribed at the site of Stephen's loss: they contract her absence.
29. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 212-13.
30. According to de Lauretis, Stephen can gain the mother's love only by satisfying her narcissistic desire for a daughter who is feminine. But there is no reason that the mother's desire for Stephen should work exclusively along such lines. Several factors in The Well broaden the spectrum of the mother's desire for Stephen: her prenatal expectations of a boy, Stephen's chivalrous attitude toward her mother, and her close resemblance to her father. Part of what makes Lady Anna's attitude toward Stephen so difficult is that she fluctuates between disappointed desire for Stephen as a daughter and outraged and ambivalent desire for her to be a son.
31. Prosser, Second Skins, 168, 161 -62.
32. Second Skins, Ibid., 161.
33. Stephen's very longing for masculinity has disturbed feminist critics since the novel's publication. Vera Brittain, who valued Hall's representation of the experience of the inverted, nevertheless criticized her "overemphasis of sex characteristics" in the novel, arguing that she had confused the distinction between "what is 'male' or 'female' or what is merely human in our complex make-up." Brittain's 1928 review in Time and Tide is reprinted in Brittain, Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? (London: Femina, 1968), 50.
34. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 104.
35. Prosser, Second Skins, 161;
36. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 99.
37. Prosser, Second Skins, 166, 168, 116.
38. Thanks to Rita Felski for thinking through this question with me in connection with her work on tragic women.
39. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 24.
40. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 235; emphasis added.
41. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 112.
42. Butler, Gender Trouble, 235.
43. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 181.
44. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 153.
45. Christopher Castiglia, "Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories," boundary 2 27, no. 2 (2000): 175.