29 - ‘It was really rather fine to be suffering’: Radclyffe Hall at the Queer Intersection of Masochism and Martyrdom

Summary

IN 1928, BERESFORD EGAN’S illustration St Stephen was published in The Sink of Solitude, a parody of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness of the same year. The caricature of Hall sharply dressed in her ‘signature sombrero’ and nailed to a cross portrays her as a dramatically crucified Christ, which, as Richard Dellamora explains, ‘exposed the conflated identification within [The Well] of Christ, Stephen Gordon, and the author as redemptive martyr and victim’. This portrayal of Hall – which her long-term partner described as ‘vile, obscene, and blasphemous’ – magnified the already overt connections between queer identity and (religious) suffering that underscore much of the novel. A traditional Bildungsroman, The Well follows Stephen’s life from before her birth, when she was still just a masculine ideal in the minds of her parents, through a somewhat idyllic childhood and then through the trials and tribulations of a complicated queer adolescence and adulthood. Born into a financially secure family, Stephen’s subsequent struggles are primarily tied to her gender and sexual identity, manifest first in her mother’s discomfort with her and later reappearing in various amorous contexts. Stephen’s understanding of romantic (and eventually sexual) love and desire are tinged with sacrifice and suffering as a kind of personal ideal, one that cannot escape its religious implications. Accordingly, while there is no shortage of criticism that puts the novel in conversation with the biblical allusions scattered across it, this chapter is a more focused examination of Stephen’s reliance on Christian mythologies in light of the queer masochistic potential inherent in this idealised martyrdom, especially considering Hall’s own complicated relationship with and approach to Christianity.

Religious references and imagery surface throughout the novel, with Stephen comparing herself or being compared to various biblical figures during particularly significant or traumatic moments in her life. Her earliest crush on the housemaid is framed as Christlike in its reverence for physical suffering and emotional torment, while her discovery of her father’s collection of sexological texts after his sudden death culls a heavy-handed comparison to Cain.