SOURCE: Parkes, Adam. “Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.” Twentieth Century Literature 40, no. 4 (winter 1994): 434-60.

[In the following essay, Parkes compares the treatment of lesbian themes in The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, which was declared obscene by the British courts, and Orlando by Virginia Woolf, which was not.]

At Bow Street Magistrates Court on 16 November 1928, Sir Chartres Biron ordered the destruction of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a polemical novel pleading for social tolerance for lesbianism. It is tempting to think that Hall got into trouble simply for raising the issue of lesbianism, since female “sexual inversion” (as it was then known) was not legally recognized in early twentieth-century Britain. A proposal to extend to women the 1885 Labouchère Amendment, which outlawed “acts of gross indecency” between men, ran aground in the House of Commons in 1921 because, Samuel Hynes speculates, “men found it [lesbianism] too gross to deal with” (375). However, at least two other novels published in the autumn of 1928, Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women and, more important, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, clearly broached the same subject, yet escaped official censure. In Hall's case the aggravating factor seems to have been not the subject but the treatment. Whereas Woolf's fictional biography, like Mackenzie's satire, sets out to make readers laugh, The Well of Loneliness pleads the cause of sexual inversion by taking up an aggressively polemical stance.

A summary of Judge Biron's ruling in The Times (17 November) suggests that Hall provoked the British authorities into legal action by preaching an unacceptable sexual doctrine in an earnest tone that sought to deny the possibility of either laughter or moral censure. Conceding that Well “had some literary merit,” and that such a book “might even have a strong moral influence,” Biron declared:

But in the present case there was not one word that suggested that anyone with the horrible tendencies described was in the least degree blameworthy. All the characters were presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration. What was even more serious was that certain acts were described in the most alluring terms.

In order to advocate sympathy and tolerance for lesbians, Hall had made sure that her lesbian heroine, Stephen Gordon, appeared above reproach. Ironically, as Hall's biographer Michael Baker has noted, it was by making Stephen virtuous that Hall provoked moral censure (220). If those virtues had been nonexistent, or at least laughable, as in Extraordinary Women, The Well of Loneliness would have passed muster as having, if not a “strong” moral influence, at least not a bad one.

The question of the relation between obscenity and literature raised by Judge Biron prompted some musings in the diary of Virginia Woolf, who attended Bow Street on 9 November, the first day of the Hall trial: “What is obscenity? What is literature? What is the difference between the subject and the treatment?” (Diary 3:207). Like many other literati, including E. M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf went to the trial prepared to take the witness stand and speak against the obscenity charges. She was not quite as committed to the cause of Radclyffe Hall as some recent critics have suggested, however.¹ Like many of her Bloomsbury friends, Woolf seriously doubted Hall's qualifications as an artist, finding her work too polemical. Bloomsbury's reservations ran so deep that eight days before the trial Woolf wrote: “Most of our friends are trying to evade the witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins” (Letters 3: 555). Woolf was relieved to be saved the task of defending Hall's novel in court by the magistrate's decision that only he, and not the defense's array of “expert witnesses,” could rule whether or not Well was obscene: “In what cases is evidence allowable? This last, to my relief, was decided against us: we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art” (Diary 3: 207). When, as she put it, “the bloody woman's trial” went to appeal on 14 December, Woolf did not attend (Letters 3: 563).

Woolf's objections to Well were not limited to an ostensibly aesthetic sphere; they also highlight crucial differences among women in questions of sexual politics, questions which are ultimately inextricable from aesthetic ones. Woolf seems to have been reluctant to publicly endorse the image of the “mannish lesbian” which, due in no small part to Hall, gained wide currency in Britain in the late 1920s. Further, Hall's lesbianism, eclipsing other images in the public eye, owed much to the theories of Havelock Ellis, whose model of “sexual inversion” functioned in the normative sexological and legal discourse through which Hall's trial was conducted. By publishing the novel with Ellis's prefatory assurances that it “possesses a notable psychological and sociological significance,” that it “presents difficult and still unsolved problems” (6), Hall effectively situated Well within that discourse. In contrast, Woolf's Orlando, a fictional portrait of her aristocratic friend Vita Sackville-West, mocks all normative sex and gender codes, destabilizing the very grounds on which sexological as well as legal conventions were founded. Whereas Well presents lesbianism as an issue for the debating chamber, Orlando propels its readers into the realm of the imagination, a region of seeming fantasy. But Orlando is no aesthete's evasion of unpleasant reality. On the contrary, Woolf transforms reality, and history, into a theater of seemingly infinite, protean possibility which prompts another series of questions: What is gender? What is sexuality? What is the difference between normality and deviance?

Hall considered these questions too, but her primary concern was to establish the “truth,” to persuade others to accept lesbianism as a “fact.” Intriguingly, this insistence on fidelity to fact was predicated on a discourse of “sincerity” intrinsic both to the debates of the 1928 trial and to the critical practices of some later readers trying to construct a history of the lesbian novel. Catharine Stimpson, arguing that Well has “helped to submerge, screen, and render secondary” lesbian consciousness, follows Hall in insisting on a “severely literal” definition of lesbianism as a “physical presence in the world” (363-79). In this light it seems inevitable that Well should occupy a central place even in an account such as Stimpson's, which tries to correct the “errors” perpetrated by the common acceptance of Hall's novel as the voice of lesbianism. Such models of lesbianism, which ultimately understand sexual identity as essentially stable and psychologically interior, have been challenged by Judith Butler, whose notion of gender as performance implicitly undermines their rhetoric of sincerity. In Orlando Woolf anticipates Butler's critique by interrogating and transforming the discursive practices that constructed lesbianism in Hall's novel and in the 1928 trial. Where Hall points to the “facts,” Woolf exploits the theatrical properties of sexual identity to create a whole world of performance that renders the rhetoric of sincerity ever more doubtful. Orlando thus implies that to “screen” lesbianism may not always be to render it “secondary”; rather, theatricality may offer some means of resisting the censorious effects of public discourse. In readdressing these questions, Woolf shakes the foundations on which both Hall's book and the trial were ostensibly built.

The campaign against The Well of Loneliness opened in a manner suggesting that Hall had transgressed by breaching a conspiracy of silence that excluded lesbianism from early twentieth-century public discourse. Denouncing the novel as more lethal than “a phial of prussic acid,” the editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, complained that “inverts” like Hall displayed themselves too openly: “They flaunt themselves in public places with increasing effrontery and more insolently provocative bravado. … They take a delight in their flamboyant notoriety” (qtd. in Brittain 54). Douglas was appealing to the very mentality that Hynes attributes to the Members of Parliament who, unable to bear thinking about female “acts of gross indecency,” thought it best to let the matter drop. In advocating official censorship Douglas seemed to hope that the problem would quietly disappear—as it appeared to do when Hall's publisher, Jonathan Cape, quickly withdrew the offending novel.

Yet far from closing the lid on lesbianism, Douglas's pen sparked off what the Daily Herald called “The Battle of a Book.” Protesting against Douglas's call for censorship, the editor of the Herald, Arnold Dawson, praised Well as “a restrained and serious psychological study,” and attacked Douglas as a “stunt journalist” guilty of “hysterical hypocrisy” (“Stunters” and “Jix”). While the Daily Express carried on Douglas's dirty work, the Herald recruited George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells into its camp, interviewing both writers for an article that contrasted Hall's “high-minded sincerity” with the “flippant and cynical manner” of Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women, a novel which parodied Hall in the figure of Hermina de Randan (Dawson “Shaw and Wells”).

While reviewers from both sides of this “battle” agreed in finding Well restrained, serious, and “sincere,” such qualities aroused further criticism, not only at the trial but also in the more refined air of Bloomsbury. To Forster and Woolf, Hall's “sincerity” was a function less of aesthetic achievement than of polemical intention; while interested in Hall's intention, these readers thought she failed to transform it into satisfying artistic form. Consequently, when Forster visited Hall to propose a letter of protest against the suppression of Well, he was reluctant to praise the novel as a work of art in the way that she evidently expected; in an unsigned essay he attacked the suppression as “an insidious blow at the liberties of the public” without raising the question of aesthetic worth (qtd. in Furbank 2: 154). Woolf's diary and letters also expressed doubts about Hall's “meritorious dull book”: “And no one has read her book; or can read it. … So our ardour in the cause of freedom of speech gradually cools, and instead of offering to reprint the masterpiece, we are already beginning to wish it unwritten” (Letters 3: 520). Bloomsbury's hostility is captured in Woolf's diary account of Forster's visit to Hall, which describes the latter as screaming “like a herring gull, mad with egotism & vanity” (Diary 3: 193). For Woolf, as for Forster, Well was simply too polemical, or polemical in the wrong way, and Hall's personal behavior merely emphasized that unpalatable fact.

At the trial on 9 November, the “sincerity” of Well counted against it heavily. When asked by Herbert Metcalfe, counsel for the defense, whether he agreed with The Times Literary Supplement that Well was “sincere, courageous, high-minded, and often beautiful,” Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Prothero replied: “I do not. Sincere and courageous, yes; but not high-minded and beautiful” (“Alleged”). “Sincerity” did not guarantee moral or aesthetic worth, for one might grant it while still condemning the novel. As we have seen, Judge Biron's objections to the book indicated that Hall's “sincerity” only made matters worse.

The sincerity attributed to Well by both its supporters and its detractors served an important function in terms of the mode of reading practiced in the courtroom. By trying not the author but the publisher, Jonathan Cape, and a representative of the Pegasus Press, Leonard Hill, the trial effectively treated Hall's novel as an autonomous text, as if authorial agency were no longer a factor once the published work had reached the outside world. This fact was underlined during the second day (16 November 1928) when Hall cried out, “I protest, I emphatically protest,” provoking the following exchange:

Sir Chartres—I must ask you to be quiet.

Miss Radclyffe Hall—I am the author of this book—

Sir Chartres—If you cannot behave yourself in Court I shall have to have you removed.

Miss Radclyffe Hall—Shame!

(“Novel Condemned”)

Hall had no legal right in the matter; her presence in the courtroom gave her no interpretative authority over her own work. Since her novel was “sincere,” the trial needed no more help from the author in identifying its “voice”; noise in the courtroom would only distract the proper readers from their task.

The same point was reiterated when Hall took the case to an unsuccessful appeal at the County of London Sessions on 14 December. Castigating her book as “more subtle, demoralising, corrosive, corruptive, than anything that was ever written,” the Attorney General, Sir Thomas Inskip, insisted that “Obscenity must be judged by the standards of the laws of this realm. The fact that someone who wrote a book did not intend it to be obscene does not matter.” When the court upheld Biron's original ruling, the chief magistrate, Sir Robert Wallace, made it quite clear in his concluding speech that the court had deliberately enforced certain laws of literary interpretation in reaching a verdict:

The character of the book cannot be gathered from reading of isolated passages. The book must be taken as a whole. The Court's view is that the book is a very subtle book. It is one which is insinuating and probably much more dangerous because of that fact. … Put in a word, the view of the Court is that this is a disgusting book, when properly read.

(Qtd. in Brittain 125-26, emphasis added)

This verdict implies that the only way to insure detection of the novel's “subtle” and “insinuating” poison is to read the book “properly,” “as a whole,” and (as the British Attorney General advised) by ignoring such distractions as authorial intention. Thus, the trial and appeal illustrate a particular kind of reader-response, and even New Critical, reading—a reading which, although claiming to disregard matters extraneous to a closed textual system, nonetheless vigorously pursues certain interests with manifest social and political consequences in the outside world.

Moreover, in putting the book, not the author, on trial, the authorities made it speak for the author; anything pertinent that the author might have to say is to be found within its pages. That is, Hall's word was not needed at her trial. Hall actually wanted to take the witness stand (and to that end wrote a long preparatory statement), but defense lawyers advised against it. When she protested in court against Judge Biron's interpretation of the novel, she was immediately silenced. Hall was denied a voice not only by her official antagonists but by her own side as well: her wishes were ignored at various stages by both Cape and his lawyers, Herbert Metcalfe and Norman Birkett. Such disagreements were partly the result of a conflict of interests between Hall, concerned with getting her message heard, and Cape, who simply wanted to avoid being found guilty. Cape had withdrawn Well from publication after sending an unsolicited copy to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks (“Jix”), who had promptly banned the book. The first morning in court, Birkett denied that Well dealt with “unnatural offences” (“Alleged”), while Metcalfe contended that the novel makes it “perfectly clear that throughout the relations between the two women were purely of an intellectual character” (“The Well” 2). Hall had insisted that her novel be defended according to her intentions, as a plea for “those who are utterly defenceless, who being from birth a people set apart in accordance with some hidden scheme of Nature, need all the help that society can give them” (qtd. in Brittain 85). Unexpectedly finding herself contradicted in court, Hall spent the lunch-time recess haranguing Birkett, informing him in no uncertain terms that she wanted her message proclaimed in public. The morning's back-pedaling, however, had done irreparable damage. When Birkett changed his tune in the afternoon session, the inconsistency was so obvious that the case for the defense collapsed in ruins, leaving Judge Biron little difficulty when the time came, after a week-long recess, in finding the defendants guilty, and fining Cape and Hill costs of twenty guineas each.

By silencing Hall, the judge and lawyers insured the sovereignty of their own critical judgments over and above the issue of professed authorial intention; they also excluded the extraneous voice of a lesbian, who might challenge the judicial verdict that followed from those critical judgments. The trial thus became a battle between male readers, whose critical debate would determine the question of lesbianism. Hall's text functioned as a body of symptoms; the court's task was to diagnose its particular malady and, by extension, its author's disease. Virginia Woolf observed in Judge Biron an uncanny resemblance to a Harley Street specialist—a likeness which Woolf, as Ellen Rosenman speculates, may have associated “with a Harley Street specialist of her own invention, Sir William Bradshaw of Mrs. Dalloway” (645). But the medical analogy might be extended to include all those involved in the official side of proceedings: it was everyone's task to “doctor” the text.

Hall connived at such doctoring by asking the sexologist Havelock Ellis to compose a preface for her novel. Ellis's preface subsequently received favorable attention from Hall's reviewers; his opinions, generally used to argue that Well dealt with a medically recognized “problem,” proved crucial to the defense at the 1928 trial. On Hall's instructions, Birkett took pains in court to distinguish between “perversion” and what Ellis had termed “inversion”: a natural hormonal imbalance whereby an individual experiences desire only for members of the same biological sex. In her eagerness for Ellis's endorsement, Hall perpetuated an image of the mannish lesbian that functioned intelligibly within early twentieth-century sexological discourse. As Rosenman suggests, one might say that Hall constructed her novel as a “case” study in deviance (645), doctoring the text so that ultimately Ellis's word would count for more than her own.

Granting priority to Ellis's commentary, Hall effectively asked him to authorize her novel so that it could be seen to perform his theory of female inversion. The “sincerity” exuded by the novel would simply reflect the degree to which Hall succeeded in mimicking Ellis's voice. At the same time, of course, such a strategy would deny Hall her own say: through its “sincerity,” the novel might validate Ellis ideas, but not the lesbian imagination. If her novel was “sincere,” it helped establish certain “facts” within the contested realm of sexology through a mimicry that enforced her own absence from the scene of both literary and legal representation. Indirectly, Hall perpetuated the conclusions reached in the courts.

Paradoxically, Hall's explicit intentions in her novel seem to have had a lot in common with the overt grounds on which the trial was conducted. An interview published shortly before Well indicates that personally Hall shared many assumptions about gender roles with the men who condemned her novel. Affirming her belief that “generally speaking, woman's place is the home,” she said, “One of the most deplorable of post-war conditions is, to my mind, the forcing of the wife and mother type of woman into a business or professional career.” This condition, Hall claimed, was encouraged “by the vast amount of nonsense that is written and talked about women's right to work.” “To be a good wife and mother is the finest work a woman can do,” she said; it is “the work for which Nature intended [her]” (Irons 4). Such antifeminist pronouncements may seem inimical to the spirit of the plea issued in Well, yet they are closely related. Hall founded her plea for tolerance on the premise that female inverts were hapless freaks of nature, unwittingly trapped in the wrong body, in the wrong place and time. As she told an American woman reporter after the ban:

In the heart of every woman is the desire for protection. In the heart of every man is the desire to give protection to the woman he loves. The invert knows she will never enjoy this and because of her affliction will face social ostracism.

(Qtd. in Baker 248)

The role of wife and mother was perfectly natural for most women, Hall believed; those for whom it was unnatural needed sympathy and understanding.

Hall's manifest conventionality also determined her conception of women's proper roles in lesbian relationships. Her hope for the future was to see inverts able to marry, so that they could be judged by conventional—that is, heterosexual—moral standards. Lesbian relationships, Hall thought, should conform to the normal pattern found among heterosexuals, that of the aggressive male and the passive female—the protector and the protected. Here, Hall was again following Ellis, for whom “courtship” represented an essential biological process. Michael Baker observes that by adapting this pattern to account for lesbianism, Hall created a contradiction: the female half of the lesbian relation may—and, according to Ellis, should—be attracted to a “real” man, rather than to a woman who behaved like one. According to this schema, in other words, “lesbian relationships are inherently unstable” (219). By superimposing the heterosexual model, Hall threatened to make lesbian relations disappear altogether.

As some critics have noted, Well generates similar issues by framing the tale of its lesbian heroine, Stephen Gordon, within the conventions of the heterosexual romance. Stephen adopts the aggressive male role in her subsequent sexual relationships with other women. Behaving in accordance with “the intuition of those who stand midway between the sexes … so ruthless, so poignant, so accurate, so deadly” (83), she finds herself competing with men for women's attention. For the first of those women, Angela Crossby, the encounters with Stephen represent mere dalliance; as if to bear out Ellis's theory of courtship, Angela rejects Stephen for a childhood rival, the virile, bullying Roger Antrim. The pattern is repeated when Stephen's long-term “feminine” companion, Mary Llewelyn, is enticed away at the end of the novel by Stephen's former suitor, Martin Hallam. Ostensibly, Mary is faced with a tragic choice between Stephen's long-time devotion and Martin's safe, conventional heterosexuality, but Stephen relieves her of the burden, sacrificing her own happiness to insure Mary's protection from the “social ostracism” that goes with female inversion. Far from achieving the customary happy ending, this romance ends in despair for the lesbian, the sacrificial lamb, begging God for the right to existence. But even this dénouement, Jean Radford has shown, follows a stock variation of the heterosexual romance plot. Radford observes that by using quasi-religious language Well recalls many nineteenth-century novels of love and sacrifice (108). Indeed, this “renunciation of human love in favour of the divine” enacts Ellis's suggestion that the invert might transcend her condition by cultivating a soulful spirituality. Ironically, it was in making a martyr of Stephen that Hall aggravated her critics at the trial.

Ostensibly, as far as Hall was concerned, the only difference between the heterosexuals featured in conventional romances and her own lesbian characters was one of inner nature. If Stephen had been born a boy, or a properly constituted girl, there would have been nothing untoward in her life; her condition was simply “a fact in nature—a simple, though at present tragic, fact” (qtd. in Dickson 140-41). Experience guarantees authenticity, as is implied at the end of Book Two of Well, when the schoolteacher Puddle urges Stephen toward political action by writing: “You may write with a curious double insight—write both men and women from a personal knowledge” (205). Implicitly, this concern with natural being holds at arm's length notions about the social construction of selfhood. However much Stephen is identifiable according to her role (her male clothing, her fencing, her horsemanship), those appearances simply denote the deeper reality of her sexual nature; that she looks and often behaves like a young male aristocrat only confirms her inversion. Hall would have bitterly opposed any suggestion to the contrary, as her response to the “Colonel” Barker case in England indicates:

A mad pervert of the most undesirable type, with her mock war medals, wounds, etc.; and then after having married the woman if she doesn't go and desert her! Her exposure at the moment is unfortunate indeed and will give a handle to endless people—the more so as what I ultimately long for is some sort of marriage for the invert.

(Qtd. in Baker 254)²

Using the inflated rhetoric more readily associated with scandal mongers such as the journalist James Douglas, Hall distinguished sharply between congenital inverts like herself and masqueraders like Barker.

It is interesting, then, that the progress of this romance should record so closely those outward appearances, especially as they indicate the theatricality of social roles. The narration often hints that Stephen's inversion is such a role. One of the first signs of her inversion is the housemaid's observation: “She is a queer kid, always dressing herself up and play-acting” (20). Her favorite role is that of Admiral Nelson; like any tomboy, she finds herself in conflict with those conventions that determine gender roles in children's play. While Stephen envies the masculine pursuits of the young Roger Antrim, and grows impatient with his sister Violet's submission to his dominance, Hall's narration implies that those roles are entirely arbitrary in relation not only to Stephen but to all children. Violet's childhood femininity is a series of “poses”: she exaggerates her affection for dolls, and her incompetence in rudimentary knitting exercises is matched only by Roger's in boyish pursuits (47). The introduction of Stephen to the Antrims' world of childish leisure does not merely put things out of joint; it exposes the purely constructed character of their assigned roles. How ironic, then, that in later life the Antrims should fulfill their roles in the adult world perfectly, Roger finally beating Stephen at his own game, the seduction of women, and then dying a heroic death in the Great War that redeems his boyhood inadequacies. But does Roger's success signify the true expression of natural male sexuality, or merely the effect of social conditioning? Does masculinity “prove” itself simply in the performance of heroic actions?

Similar questions are posed by Stephen, whose romantic failure and survival of the war (in which she participates as an ambulance driver) apparently undermine her “maleness.” Recalling the unhappy childhood sight of the footman kissing her beloved housemaid Collins, Stephen becomes “hysterical” at seeing Angela Crossby embrace Roger: “She laughed and she laughed like a creature demented—laughed and laughed until she must gasp for breath and spit blood from her tongue, which had somehow got bitten in her efforts to stop her hysterical laughing” (195). At one level, Stephen's hysteria may register the shock of encountering heterosexual love where she had expected to pursue her own lesbian affair. But what is this “hysteria”? What does it mean for Stephen to be hysterical? If hysteria were the female malady, Stephen would simply be the image of diseased femininity. But in postwar Britain, where thousands of ex-soldiers suffering from shell shock seemed to exhibit hysterical symptoms, hysteria signified an unstable, theatrical terrain where men might look like women, and where women might resemble men.³ Stephen's survival of the war suggests a kinship with such “hysterics,” particularly with the damaged males spawned by postwar British fiction, such as Christopher Baldry in Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (1924-1928), Septimus Smith in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and Oliver Mellors in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). For Stephen as for these characters, survival compromises masculinity: it would be more “manly” to die like Roger Antrim. That Roger redeems his childhood inadequacy in the act of dying, however, implies that to be “manly” is merely to play a role. Stephen's hysteria embodies such role-playing in a most unsettling way: for Stephen, a woman with a masculine psyche who is able to “write both men and women from a personal knowledge” from “the no-man's-land of sex” (205, 79), hysteria seems to be a “natural” condition that signifies not diseased femininity or masculinity so much as diseased sexuality. Stephen's example suggests that gender may be ascribed to such sexuality only in theatrical terms. It is a sexual crisis that produces Stephen's hysteria: a woman who has played the man's part, she finds that part filled by a “real” man, and, “flawed in the making” (204), she reacts with the laughter of “a creature demented.”

Stephen's hysterical display sharpens the tension between the natural and the contingent in Hall's novel. In one sense, her reaction seems to indicate that conflict between different sexualities naturally exists. Yet the novel also suggests that the pattern of Stephen's sexual failures depends on historical conditions unfavorable to lesbianism. Some critics have remarked that Hall's image of the mannish lesbian is a product of her historical context (Rosenman 645, Newton 573), but Well itself dramatizes that sense of contingency and limitation. Stephen's betrayal by Angela Crossby simply anticipates her self-sacrifice at the end of the novel: both incidents are the necessary outcome of a historical situation, in which the force of social convention crushes the possibility of freedom for the “freak” of nature. When hysteria breaks out in Stephen, it registers the collision between “nature” and “history,” a collision which must end in “tragedy.”

Yet in registering Hall's sense of historical entrapment, Well expresses a desire not simply to break the mold of “history” but to transcend it altogether. A pattern develops throughout the novel, whereby scenes depicting the harrowing consequences of present social conditions provoke fantasies of escape; each time, the offending encounter is sexual in some way. Stephen's reaction to seeing Collins with the footman is to hurl a flowerpot and flee wildly to the house. A horror-struck Stephen flies to the house once again when Martin Hallam proposes marriage, prompting her into a fit of self-questioning—“What was she, what manner of curious creature, to have been so repelled by a lover like Martin?”—that can only end in the answer, “I don't know—oh, God, I don't know!” (99, 100). Flight becomes a necessity for Stephen with almost monotonous regularity: the sight of Angela and Roger kissing, the home that once afforded protection, England itself, all become unbearable to Stephen, who goes to Paris with the faithful Puddle and later retreats with Mary to a Mediterranean villa. Seeing the possibilities for happiness in this world contract to nothing, Stephen eventually has no choice but to martyr herself for Mary's sake, and to appeal to God for salvation: “Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!” (437). In Hall's terms, nothing could be more depressing, for, as Radford argues, the novel's closing appeal, while ostensibly made to God, is “in effect also addressed to the reader, that is, to social not metaphysical beings” (107). Of course, the impulse to turn away from the present crisis is only intelligible in relation to historical forces; the fantasy of transcendental salvation from God is produced by the experience of actual constraint and limitation. The 1928 trial of Hall's novel seems to have reinforced this experience, sealing off the route by which lesbianism might make its way into history, just as the conventions of romance foreclosed such possibilities in fiction.

Well and Virginia Woolf's fictional biography Orlando are often linked as lesbian novels. As some readers have remarked, the lesbian content of Orlando is not explicit (Rosenman 643, Knopp 29). When the book appeared on 11 October 1928, however, the title character was quickly identified as the dedicatee, Vita Sackville-West (Mortimer 241). Seeing that Orlando was readily received as a “lesbian” work, many have been led to wonder how it escaped censure (and became a best-seller) at the very time when Hall's novel was condemned in the British courts. Citing the much-quoted passages in Woolf's diary describing Orlando as a “writer's holiday” (3: 177), Shari Benstock contends that the novel's “style and tone—a joke not to be taken too seriously” allowed Woolf to escape the disapproval which greeted the apparently more earnest Well, (185-86). Working on similar assumptions, Louise DeSalvo has criticized this jokiness as exemplifying “Woolf's continuing inability to give full acknowledgement to her own lesbianism” (207), a judgment never passed on Hall, whose “honesty” is assumed.⁴ Yet rather than simply asking us whether or not Woolf affirmed a “lesbian identity,” Orlando activates issues of expression and social visibility lurking in the question unwittingly provoked, as the satirist Beresford Egan noted, by the prosecution of Well: What is lesbianism? (Brittain 97).⁵

The difficulty of answering and even framing this question is indicated by Woolf's well-known vacillation between the comic and the serious while writing Orlando—a vacillation closely bound up with her uncertain attitude to “sapphism.” When she finished the book in March 1928, Woolf found that it “may fall between two stools, be too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book” (Diary 3: 177). Yet when first conceiving of Orlando in March 1927 she wrote: “Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note—satire & wildness. … My own lyric vein is to be satirised. Everything mocked” (131). Woolf's early expressions of interest in Sackville-West had a similar “frivolous” air, but in February 1929 she wrote to Sackville-West celebrating the impact of Orlando in America: “The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you” (Letters 4: 14). Seeking relief from the oppressively masculine atmosphere of “Bloomsbuggery” (as she called the Bloomsbury cult of male homosexuality), Woolf decided to “cultivate women's society entirely in the future” (Letters 3: 164). “Women's society” would not necessarily be exclusively sexual, but its “sapphic” overtones are suggested by a letter which, as Sherron Knopp notes (24), closely connects Woolf's and Sackville-West's relationship with the composition of Orlando:

If I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you—

I'm rather excited about Orlando tonight: have been lying by the fire and making up the last chapter.

(Letters 3: 443)

Woolf's reticence here might be encapsulated in a phrase Sackville-West once used to explain Woolf's illness after a 1929 trip to Berlin: “Suppressed Randiness” (Sackville-West 318). The hesitant, uncompleted phrase (“would you—”) enforces a kind of self-censorship which illustrates Woolf's typical restraint in dealing with sexual topics. But this gap may also indicate a space where “Sapphism is to be suggested,” though not stated. Indeed, the reluctance to state gives Woolf's letter its delicacy, its emotional and suggestive power; to state would be to risk blunting those fine edges. This quality, defining a crucial difference between Woolf and Hall, also emerges in an early draft of A Room of One's Own (1929), in a passage excised from the published version of the essay. This passage, which, as Rosenman notes, seems to refer to both lesbianism and the Hall trial, occurs in the “Chloe liked Olivia” section as Woolf's narrator imagines a novel by Mary Carmichael. When the narrator reads at the bottom of the page, “Chloe liked Olivia; they shared a———,” she is prevented from going on because the pages “had stuck”; “while fumbling to open them,” her imagination calls up images of policemen, magistrates, and an obscenity trial. At this point, the pages “came apart,” revealing to a grateful narrator the harmless information that Chloe and Olivia shared “only a laboratory” (Monk's House Papers). Rosenman acutely observes that along with the “teasing hesitation in naming what the women share,” the “imagery of attachment and space creates a double image of lesbianism and its suppression”; the “secret space that the reader and the characters share before the turn of the page” indicates “the gaps left by censorship” (636-37). In the published version of Room, the reference to male authority is pinned even more directly to the Hall trial, for now Woolf names the judge, Sir Chartres Biron, but the draft's “teasing hesitation” has disappeared too; as we all know, Chloe and Olivia shared a laboratory (85). The relatively uncontroversial published version does not exert the pressure of Woolf's “Suppressed Randiness” with quite the same force.

The space between the pages, the blank perhaps denoting something that one might like to say but cannot, may represent a limited zone within which, for Woolf, the literary imagination might give tenuous, momentary expression to lesbian desires. When Sir Chartres Biron silenced Hall at the trial, he indicated that, unlike male homosexuality, lesbianism remained unspeakable in the public discourse of Britain between the wars; attempting to overcome the danger that modern books might “become so insipid, so blameless, so full of blank spaces and evasions that we cannot read them” (Woolf “Censorship” 447), the imaginative writer had to exploit the gaps left by official and self-imposed forms of censorship. For Woolf, vacillation offered a means to such exploitation: it might be a way of expanding possibility, of redrawing the parameters (and perimeters) in which sexuality is defined and suppressed, and so of rewriting the vexed relationship between lesbianism and literary history. In this sense, vacillation in Orlando may be viewed as analogous to hysteria in Well, with the crucial difference that the vacillations of Orlando undermine the possibility of issuing the medical and literary pronouncements to which, as Hall's novel and trial showed, hysteria made one susceptible. Consequently, Woolf's fictional biography might be read as dramatizing the problems of censorship in relation to “sapphism” while at the same time maintaining the delicate balance between the jokey and the serious on which the whole book turned.

Writing of Orlando to Sackville-West, Woolf said that “it sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night” (Letters 3: 429). Woolf accomplishes that “revolution” by dramatizing and parodying the conventions of traditional biography, mocking the notion of quantifiable human “experience,” in order to create a space for imaginative speculation—a space which, once opened, plays havoc with the separation of art and life that lay at the heart of critical assumptions enforced at the Hall trial. Woolf sets about this project by creating a bizarre, protean character who, living from the Elizabethan times to the date of publication, freely crosses the boundaries usually found between different ages, nations, and sexes. Using the principle of vacillation, Woolf liberates Orlando from the historical ties that bind Radclyffe Hall's inverted heroine, Stephen Gordon, and dispels the notion that biography has for its object a single, unified identity. In the last chapter Woolf imagines a multiplicity of selves contained in one person, a multiplicity that renders futile any effort to compile an exhaustive, comprehensive biography: “For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have as many as a thousand” (309).

Orlando's sex change—the most dramatic, if strangely veiled, manifestation of this multiplicity—foregrounds the principle of uncertainty underpinning the novel's structure, displaying its transgression of historical and logical norms. “Horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong,” Orlando seems “from some ambiguity in her terms” to be “censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each” (158). This uncertainty merely expresses a vacillation that is present even in the contorted qualifications of the novel's first sentence: “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters” (13).

While seeming to leave the essential principles of sexual difference unaltered, these vacillations create the possibility of non-heterosexual desire. Since the sex change leaves Orlando's identity untouched, the object of her desire is still a woman, the Princess Sasha. Moreover, becoming a woman allows Orlando to decipher signs whose intended meanings had seemed unintelligible to her previously male mind:

If the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark … At last, she cried, she knew Sasha as she was.

(161)

In this romance, however, “love” is simply a farcical game, the parts of lover and beloved merely suits of clothes which one wears in order to strut upon the stage of life. To know what Sasha had thought and felt as a woman is now enough; hereafter, new adventures will lie in store, such as the hilarious renewal of Archduke Harry's pursuit of Orlando. Earlier in the novel the Archduke had appeared as Archduchess Harriet Griselda, but, finding that Orlando is now a woman, he sheds his female disguise; in response to this revelation, “they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes,” prompting Orlando to muse, “‘If this is love … there is something highly ridiculous about it’” (179).

In one sense, the ludicrous outcome of the Archduke's advances paves the way for Orlando's apparently more “serious” affair with Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. Yet in submitting Orlando to the marriage and childbirth to which this relationship leads, Woolf mocks heterosexual romance, suggesting that the conventions mimicked by Well may be empty. Marriage and childbirth, traditionally climaxes of feminine experience in the English novel, become relatively unremarkable features on the landscape of Orlando's journey through history, minor events offered cursorily for the reader's delectation as mere curiosities of nineteenth-century society. Though finding Orlando “an absolutely enchanting book,” Sackville-West, writing to her husband, faulted Woolf for “making Orlando 1) marry, 2) have a child”: “Marriage & motherhood would either modify or destroy Orlando, as a character: they do neither” (Moore 349). This emphasis on the importance of motherhood is not surprising, given Sackville-West's maternal role in relation to Woolf—a role which both women acknowledged in writing about each other.⁶ But in Orlando the maternal relation and the marriage from which it conventionally springs merely signify conformity to the Victorian age—an age whose features are recorded in a historical commentary that tacitly notes the emergence of the ideology of separate spheres in English society:

The sexes drew further and further apart. … And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded.

(229)

The narrator periodically links these social modifications to changes in the natural conditions of the outside world, but to Orlando “the great discovery of marriage,” by which people “were somehow stuck together, couple after couple,” “did not seem to be Nature”: “there was no indissoluble alliance among the brutes that she could see” (242). Even so, she finds that a wedding ring is the only cure for the “tingling and twangling” that afflicts her left finger in the nineteenth century. As it turns out, the union with Shelmerdine could not have been more appropriate, for his sexual identity is as unstable as Orlando's: when Orlando declares her passionate love, the same “awful suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously”:

“You're a woman, Shel!” she cried.

“You're a man, Orlando!” he cried.

(252)

This “suspicion” is quickly absorbed by the groundswell of the narrative's inexorable progress, however, and is entirely forgotten at the end when Shelmerdine makes a heroic final entrance in answer to Orlando's call. But, of course, in accommodating these unconventional elements within its hyperconventional resolution, Orlando is simply following the ground rules laid down by Shakespearian comedy, a key source for Woolf's title character: to defuse the novel's social and sexual transgressions with an ostentatious final assertion of marital love is to tell the reader that, as in Shakespeare's play, things are as you like it. Implicitly, in Orlando any readerly anxieties on this score are to be mocked, along with everything else.

Appropriating the transvestite apparatus of Shakespeare's comic plots, Woolf suggests that in order to change from the female to the male role Orlando only has to wear different clothes. After the sex change, she adopts “those Turkish coats and breeches which can be worn indifferently by either sex” (139), but she discovers that by alternating between distinctively male and female clothes she can multiply “the pleasures of life”: “From the probity of breeches she turned to the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally” (221). In this way the process of theatrical self-transformation offers potential freedom from the historically assigned social roles which often censor present and future possibilities. Orlando's personality ranges so freely that the whole of English history from the time of Elizabeth I seems to be remade in his or her rapidly changing image. The censoring force of “history” appears to be harnessed entirely to Orlando's whim—to whatever suit of clothing Woolf asks her character to put on.

In this way Orlando would seem to override the coercive historical forces which, for Hall, determine a “tragic” ending for the lesbian heroine of Well. Yet while turning history into an effect of Orlando's variety performance, Woolf still suggests that Orlando's apparently limitless freedom may be qualified. Seeing Orlando's facility in alternating between male and female roles leads the narrator to wonder at one point whether “it is clothes that wear us and not we them” (188). This idea seems to offer even greater freedom: by wearing the same clothes we might eliminate sexual difference altogether, and so liberate human character from what Woolf called “the tyranny of sex” (Essays 315). If “it is clothes that wear us,” however, then roles may be determined merely according to whatever clothes are available: that is, they may be arbitrarily imposed from without. If clothes wear us, then we are constructed, and potentially censored, by some external agency—for instance, by the sexual hierarchy that assigns particular clothes to the male and female roles. In this sense, the pleasures of Orlando's performance would seem to reside outside of Orlando herself. If the identity of Orlando merely consists of a series of external signs, the pleasures of her multiple lives may belong to the reader, who, interpreting those signs, may exert an authority over the text similar to that claimed over Hall's novel at the 1928 trial.

In the next paragraph the vacillating narrator rejects the idea that clothes wear us and, inclining to another view, reconsiders the possibility of an essential sexual identity submerged beneath the excess of theatrical artifice:

The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex. … For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

(Orlando 189)

If there is an essential identity, this passage suggests that its relation to outer appearances is completely arbitrary: one's clothes may indicate one's sex, but, there again, they may not. In other words, if identity comprises an unchanged element, a stream that flows continuously beneath the ever-changing surface of life, its relation to sex and gender must always remain ambiguous, a “dilemma,” suspending us between the poles of sex and gender that usually make biography intelligible: “Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided” (189). In Orlando one cannot, and indeed need not, decide to what sex Orlando most belongs; while there do appear to be two sexes, two poles of gender, there is no law that fixes them in one place, or that assigns one identity to either pole.

The “dilemma” of Orlando's sex highlights all kinds of ambiguities about his or her identity, but it also raises questions about Woolf's vacillating narrator, who claims to “enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from any sex whatever.” Like Orlando, the biographer is a figure of perpetual oscillation, as we see when Orlando exchanges “fine tales” and “amusing observations” with the prostitute Nell and her friends:

For it cannot be denied that when women get together—but hist—they are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print. All they desire is—but hist again—is that not a man's step on the stair? All they desire, we were about to say when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths. Women have no desires, says this gentleman, coming into Nell's parlour; only affectations. … “It is well known,” says Mr. S. W., “that when they lack the stimulus of the other sex, women can find nothing to say to each other …” And since … it is well known (Mr. T. R. has proved it) “that women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their own sex and hold each other in the greatest aversion,” what can we suppose that women do when they seek out each other's society?

As that is not a question that can engage the attention of a sensible man, let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from any sex whatever, pass it over, and merely state that Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex, and leave it to the gentlemen to prove, as they are very fond of doing, that this is impossible.

(219-20)

In this passage it is extremely difficult to pin the narrator down to a particular sex. The claim to sexual neutrality may be a male pose designed to give the air of impartial authority, perhaps like that of the judge and lawyers who settled the case of Hall. Yet at the beginning of the episode, the narrator seems to shift uncertainly from the position of a female observer, who has access to women's quarters, to another realm where the voice is implicitly detached from the women (“they” as opposed to “we”), yet not necessarily associated with the man whose unwelcome step is heard on the stair. And the voice of Mr. S. W., appealing to the supposedly “objective” authority of common knowledge and the quasi-scientific “proof” of Mr. T. R., seems to parody precisely the claim to “immunity” that the narrator makes a few lines later. It is ironic, after all, to find the narrator assuming distance from “gentlemen” who are “very fond” of proving things, for, throughout the novel, the narrator's own anxieties betray a comic concern for “facts” and “truth.”

The passage also hints at the “Suppressed Randiness” attributed to Woolf by Sackville-West. The question as to what “women do when they seek out each other's society” is left hanging as the narrator diverts attention toward him- or herself, but then, having claimed “immunity,” the narrator lets it be known that “Orlando professed great enjoyment in the society of her own sex.” We are not invited to inquire directly what “enjoyment” means here, but it seems to reactivate the hanging question of the previous paragraph. Meanwhile, as if to suppress any randiness before it reaches the wrong audience, the invisible biographer exercises a tactful censorship over the content of the women's conversations (“but hist … but hist again—”), yet is not necessarily excluded from whatever pleasures they offer.

Through the offices of the vacillating biographer, the mock-censor of Orlando, the censorship of taboo sexual subjects emerges as an important subtext of the novel. Comically fussing over the scarcity of vital “facts” and “information,” the biographer pretends to get as close to the “truth” as possible, but this means fabricating and inventing. When the time comes to relate the events surrounding Orlando's sex change, “it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to make use of the imagination” (119). The narrator drops a veil over the sex change itself, lifting it only when the change is complete, and then affecting unconcern with the topic by declaring, “let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can” (139). On the surface this ostentatious disavowal of interest in “odious” topics mimics the conventional prudery of both biographers and readers. At the same time, though, the narrator implies that we have been showing an unhealthy concern for matters which should be left, as was stressed at the Well trial, to scientists and psychologists. The narrator's disavowal parodies such gestures on the part of biographers, who sometimes arouse the reader's interest only to deflect it with pretended moral piety. Springing from no other source than the desire to display his or her own impeccable moral standards, the disapproving frown of Orlando's biographer simply imitates a well-worn and, it seems, hollow convention.

By invoking the imagination the narrator not only effects a silent (and parodic) censorship of “odious” topics, but also implies that any historical record may be riddled with gaps and evasions which in themselves may enforce a kind of censorship. The narrator comes into conflict with the fact-recording function that supposedly lies at the heart of a biographical enterprise and so lacks the conventional biographer's tone of uncompromising authority. Woolf also entertained the possibility that this vacillation may be characterized by gender. In her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Terence Hewet tells Rachel Vinrace, “You've no respect for facts, Rachel; you're essentially feminine” (295). According to this exclamation the “essentially feminine” represents that vague, elusive region lacking the hard, definite outline of “facts”; its masculine counterpart would be the confident, direct, logical “I” who provokes respect, boredom, and hostility in the narrator of A Room of One's Own. In Orlando the narrator's voice evolves as a curious mélange of these two conflicting impulses: we hear the yearning for empirical truth, but that yearning is constantly held in check, and perhaps undermined, by the realization that the record is necessarily incomplete, that the imagination must be called upon to supply what is missing. But since Orlando destabilizes the grounds on which gender is assigned, it is hard to distinguish these impulses from each other, as if one were feminine, the other masculine.

The theatrical instability of the narrator's role suggests some striking similarities with the vacillations of Orlando. Mimicking the tones now of conventional morality, now of the biographer or historian, the narrator seems to put on voices as easily as Orlando puts on clothes, adopting whatever role suits the occasion. Both Orlando and the narrator imply that sex and gender roles are fundamentally uncertain, that human personality is deeply ambiguous. As figures of vacillation, they are interchangeable, mirror images of one form.

If Orlando and the narrator are mutually generating doubles, then apparently the novel offers a cocoon-like realm sealed off from the world outside the text—a realm where one might indulge in the pleasures of art without regard for the “real” world. Woolf, of course, announced that in writing Orlando she felt “the need of an escapade” (Diary 3:131). After her sex change, Orlando gives thanks for her freedom from the man's world and, explicitly commenting on the disempowerment of women in a patriarchal society, projects herself (perhaps not without irony) onto a transcendental plane of “contemplation, solitude, love”:

“Better is it,” she thought, “to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better to be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are,” she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, “contemplation, solitude, love.”

(160)

A social, historical prohibition on women propels Orlando into a spiritual mode of existence that soars above the sordid affairs of the world of men. Counting the costs as well as the benefits, however, a manuscript draft of the same passage reveals a more acerbic sense of this strategy:

Heaven be praised she [Orlando] said; [feeling in] thanking heaven she did not prance down Pall Mall on a war horse, sentence to death or wear 72 medals on her breast: surely our choice is better than theirs: poverty, insignificance, nakedness: [those are] the [humble] garments which cover us with invisibility & allow us to escape from all the [ties of pomp] & circumstance: to pass lonely & free as clouds where we are unnoted; to hover there ‘they passed a valley’ unregarded, [peeking], watching; observing, lost in contemplation; to [escape from] the [O] odious ceremonies, disciplines … & thus enjoy the most exalted of all states of mind.

(Moore 316)

The draft is less equivocal about criticizing patriarchy. The word “nakedness” graphically exposes the impoverished, disenfranchised state of woman in stark contrast to the splendid attire worn by men when displaying their social power. Compared with the pomp and circumstance of men's public lives, women's lives are shrouded in “invisibility.” Orlando ponders the fringe benefits of this condition: one may “pass lonely & free as clouds where we are unnoted,” and observe from an unimpeded critical distance the “odious ceremonies, disciplines” on which men seem to thrive. Paradoxically, then, woman's social prohibition may grant the female artist some latitude. Yet it is significant that Woolf hints at these advantages by using the metaphor of the cloud. As an image of freedom the cloud is inherently unstable: like the words painted in the sky in Mrs. Dalloway, clouds can dissolve and become illegible. In this sense the invisible refuge offered by the clouds nicely describes the position of woman in society: an illegible sign, a censored presence (or absence) in the script of the world.

Phyllis Rose notes, justly I think, that when Orlando becomes a woman, and finds herself excluded from the male freedoms of the world, a “note of didacticism enters” (182). Yet the published version of the novel is not as didactic as it would have been had Woolf included manuscript passages such as those discussed above. What I want to ask is: Why did Woolf revise those more explicit polemical overtones out of the novel? Leonard Woolf has testified to her “almost pathological hypersensitiveness to criticism” (149), and Virginia Woolf herself admitted that she feared “being downed in public” by reviewers (Diary 2: 208). Of course, her more overtly polemical works were sometimes censured even by sympathetic readers like E. M. Forster. Woolf rightly suspected that Forster declined to review A Room of One's Own on account of its “shrill feminine tone,” and she expected to be “attacked as a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist” by other critics (Diary 3:262). Implying that feminism was some sort of disease, Forster declared: “There are spots of it all over her work.” Though describing Room as “charming and persuasive,” he opined that “feminism is also responsible for the worst of her books—the cantankerous Three Guineas—and for the less successful streaks in Orlando” (254).

Yet contributing in the wake of the Hall trial to a Nineteenth Century and After series on “The Censorship of Books”—a series which also included essays by Forster and Ellis—Woolf realized that too much pandering to the desires of the projected audience may produce effects similar to those of official censorship. Arguing, like Forster, that censorship should apply only to “books which are sold as pornography to people who seek out and enjoy pornography,” Woolf, tongue in cheek, exclaimed, “Moreover, if modern books become so insipid, so blameless, so full of blank spaces and evasions that we cannot read them, we shall be driven to read the classics, where obscenity abounds” (447). Implicitly, “blank spaces and evasions” may appear in literature when an author buckles under the pressure of social forces—the forces converging in the censorship of works that the authorities considered “obscene.” In other words, a work may internalize an anticipated prohibition, substituting self-censorship for the censorship exercised by social institutions, and in this way render itself illegible. We might read the illegibility of the self-censored work as analogous to the “invisibility” of women in society and in history.

Orlando dramatizes the problem of “blank spaces.” As the note of “Suppressed Randiness” runs through the novel's pages, Woolf often appears engaged in a struggle to suggest without stating, and yet to avoid the danger that by becoming so elusive, so obscure, the book might end up “insipid” or “blameless” to the point of illegibility. Where Orlando succeeds in carrying out Woolf's intention that “Sapphism is to be suggested,” it does so by vacillating, by casting doubt, by intimating that it may be nothing but a joke, so that any “obscenity” may pass “unnoted” like the unobserved female observer. In this way, Orlando may be read as posing the question, What is lesbianism? so as to undermine the assumptions governing the legal and sexological discourses of the Well trial, and yet appear innocent as to the verdict.

Notes

1. See Marcus Virginia Woolf 163-87 and Benstock. For these critics, Woolf's attention to Hall's case is essentially an affirmative enterprise. Marcus even suggests that Hall is the “heroine” of A Room of One's Own. As will become clear, I regard such claims with some skepticism.

2. “Colonel” Barker was really Lilian Smith, who for many years masqueraded as a military hero and even married a woman whom she abandoned three years later, before being exposed in a bankruptcy case.

3. See Leed 163, Gilbert and Gubar 318, and Showalter 167-94.

4. DeSalvo's argument counters Marcus's claim that Woolf affirms a “lesbian identity” (“Storming” 622-40).

5. Egan also designed a cartoon to accompany the anonymous parody of the Well scandal, “The Sink of Solitude” (1928).

6. Of Sackville-West, Woolf wrote that she “lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone” (Diary 3:52). Sackville-West said in turn that she felt “extraordinarily protective” toward Woolf, who had “a sweet and childlike nature” (Moore 350-51).

   While writing this essay, I have benefited from the comments and suggestions of Daniel Albright, Kris Boudreau, Bette London, James Longenbach, and Stewart Weaver.

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