The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

has been a great drawback to me in every way that she ever married him, & now I have to pay for the privilege of having sustained that drawback … Anyone to see & hear my mother in one of her rages would think that she was mad.

Against the background of such feuding she worked at her groundbreaking novel. She wrote into the small hours of the night at an American rolltop oak desk. She said her book was fictional over details of place and people and only autobiographical on the ‘fundamental emotions that are characteristic of the inverted’. ‘Then, I admit, I did draw upon myself, I drew very ruthlessly upon myself, hoping that by telling my readers the truth, The Well of Loneliness would carry conviction.’

She might have viewed bitterness towards her mother, anger at desertion by her father, disgust at Visetti as a stepfather, and dependency on the devotion of lovers, as emotions fundamental to herself, and explored such deep if troubled waters. She might have told of her loathing of her mother’s instability, of fears of abandonment, of her need for control and sexual conquest. Instead, she took the nature not nurture line. If she was martyred, it was by God not Mother. Any physical resemblance to Maria Visetti or admission of her power was intolerable. Better to be a freak, misfit, changeling or man, than her daughter. God, the architect of all things, alone had parented Radclyffe Hall. He, ‘in a thoughtless moment had created those pitiful thousands who must stand forever outside His blessing’.

Una read aloud about congenital sexual inverts, from Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis, A Manual of Sexual Science by Magnus Hirschfield and Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard Krafft-Ebing. Radclyffe Hall took the bits that suited her, mixed them with Catholicism, spiritualism and her own ideas on endocrinology and came up with a theory of lesbian identity about as empirically reliable as the paternity of Jesus Christ or Mabel Batten’s whereabouts on sphere three.

She drew no conceptual distinction between belief and knowledge. Her huge archive on Mabel Batten’s posthumous activities was evidence of her tenacity to maintain that what she wanted to be so, was so. Her theories stemmed from her need to control her world, her untutored mind, her attraction to the folklore theories of her time and her religious implacability. She claimed scientific objectivity but it was the world according to Radclyffe Hall.

Stephen Gordon, like her, was the congenital sexual invert, the true invert. Her attributes: small hips and breasts, broad shoulders, large feet, short hair, the look in her eye, ‘the terrible nerves of the invert’ were defining characteristics like the beak, plumage and mating habits of the crested grebe. Those who did not have these attributes belonged to a different genus.

Congenital inversion is not unnatural. These congenital inverts are born not made. They are put into the world by God’s will alone – the God of infinite understanding, compassion and wisdom. Whether you like the fact or not it is one which must be accepted by all who value truth and justice …

Congenital inversion is caused by an actual deviation from the usual in the glandular secretions of the invert’s body. Those glandular secretions influence the cells, & thus the whole human structure, physical, mental & spiritual. You can kill all the inverts but while they live you cannot make them other than inverted. They are and will always remain as God made them, and their sexual attractions will be therefore inverted as they were in the girl of whom I wrote – the unfortunate girl Stephen Gordon.

It was all rather resistant to scrutiny. At one moment God was thoughtless, the next He was infinitely wise. It was not clear what these secretions were doing or whether they were happening to less than ‘true inverts’ like Mabel Batten and Agnes Nicholls, whose bottoms and breasts were far from small. There was a curious hierarchy, a dangerous genetic model. ‘Real’ inverts were like Radclyffe Hall. Ersatz ones were like Una or Tallulah Bankhead.

Stephen Gordon is a third sex, an indeterminate sex, a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’, ‘a blemished, unworthy, marred reproduction’ of her father Sir Philip Gordon, who lives in Morton, a manor house in Malvern. His fixation on having a son, the way he calls her Stephen before she is born, teaches her to bat, hunt, drive and be a chap, is not presented as contributing to her dislocation over gender.

Stephen is born ‘a narrow hipped, wide shouldered little tadpole of a baby’. Though destined to suffer, she is superior to the rest of the world. She is a martyr, not a victim. There was a distinction in Radclyffe Hall’s view. Martyrs were on a theological par with the peerage. Victims were of a lower order and had no status or reward.

As a child, Stephen, ‘bearing some unmerited burden’, identifies with Nelson and Jesus Christ. ‘She studied the picture of the Lord on His Cross and she felt that she understood Him.’ She hates dresses, likes breeches, masochism and the housemaid. ‘I’d like to be awfully hurt for you, the way Jesus was hurt for sinners’, she says to her and wants housemaid’s knee instead of her enduring it. The footman kisses the housemaid and Stephen is ‘filled with a blind uncomprehending rage’ and throws a broken flowerpot at him. Such kissing, she feels, should come from her.

She is tall, poised, purposeful, physically and mentally splendid, the fitness ideal of a later decade. She fences, lifts weights, wins horseriding trophies. ‘There was a kind of large splendour about her … grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition.’ She speaks fluent French, appreciates ‘all literary beauty’, has impeccable artistic judgement, ‘a great feeling for balance in sentences and words’ and ‘the intuition of those who stand mid way between the sexes, so ruthless, so poignant, so accurate, so deadly’.

Sir Philip hires a governess for her, Miss Puddleton,