2003/01/01 by Laura Green · 6 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Irish and British Studies #Contemporary Literature and Criticism #Gender, Feminism, and Media #Loneliness #Identity (music) #Hall effect #Sociology #Art #Psychology #Physics #Aesthetics #Social psychology #Quantum mechanics
paper · open access · doi:10.2307/3175982
published in Twentieth Century Literature 49(3), 277 (Duke University Press)
openalex publication_date 2003/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Virginia Woolf’s well known distaste for the generic and aesthetic instability of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) finds echoes in more recent responses, even as the novel remains an anchor of a lesbian literary canon. I demonstrate that Hall’s novel does indeed exhibit generic and psychological instability, as a Victorian novel written in the Modernist period and as a text that draws its model of identity from sexology within a cultural context of Freudian ideas. I argue, however, that this instability is not an aesthetic weakness or a sign of retrogression. Rather, I emphasize the novel’s intertextual construction and show that Hall addresses both the difficulty and the necessity of producing narratives of identity. In rooting identity in narrative, she is part of novelistic and psychological traditions stretching from Victorian through Modernist literature and beyond.