Dipartimento di studi linguistici e culturali
Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Lingue, Culture, Comunicazione
WOMEN’S WRITING AND THE
BILDUNGSROMAN: CONTEMPORARY REVISIONS BY RADCLYFFE HALL, JEANETTE WINTERSON,
ARUNDHATI ROY AND MONICA ALI
Prova finale di:
Valentina Martini Relatore:
Chiar.ma Prof.ssa Gioia Angeletti
Correlatore:
Chiar.ma Dott.ssa Maria Elena Capitani
Anno Accademico 2015-2016
Le caratteristiche di ogni genere letterario, dal momento della nascita, possono cambiare in relazione al contesto storico e sociale. Il Bildungsroman non è esente da queste trasformazioni. Scopo della tesi, dunque, è di evidenziarne l’estrema elasticità, esaminando autrici contemporanee che lo esplorano in modo personale e innovativo. Infatti, il romanzo di formazione, dal Novecento a oggi, ha assunto caratteristiche diverse da quelle originali, pur mantenendo inalterato il racconto dello sviluppo del protagonista.
Dopo il primo capitolo, che comprende un’introduzione sul genere e i suoi primi sviluppi, la tesi si concentra sull’analisi di quattro romanzi di formazione femminili. Nel secondo capitolo viene analizzato The Well of Loneliness (1928) di Radclyffe Hall, che racconta la vita di Stephen Gordon e la sua disperata ricerca di accettazione della sua identità omosessuale. Il forte senso di inadeguatezza della protagonista inizia fin dalla nascita: infatti, i genitori, desiderosi di un figlio maschio, battezzano la figlia con un nome maschile, che diventa il simbolo di una travagliata ricerca di identità. Il destino di Stephen non può che essere segnato da un’estrema solitudine, in cui la protagonista vede affievolirsi sempre più la speranza di affermare la propria identità.
Il terzo capitolo si concentra su Oranges Are not the Only Fruit (1985) di Jeanette Winterson, in cui la protagonista Jeanette affronta ostacoli legati non soltanto all’omosessualità, ma anche all’ambiente religioso costrittivo in cui viene educata. Vittima del disprezzo della famiglia e della comunità in cui vive, Jeanette, tuttavia, dimostra di essere un’eroina decisamente combattiva, capace di perdonare i suoi persecutori, riavvicinarsi alla madre e, soprattutto, accettare serenamente la propria identità.
Segue, nel quarto capitolo, l’analisi di The God of Small Things (1997) di Arundhati Roy. Prevalentemente ambientato nel paese fittizio di Ayemenem, in India, questo romanzo racconta l’infanzia traumatica dei gemelli Estha e Rahel, che, alla fine degli anni Sessanta, diventano le vittime innocenti delle discriminazioni di casta che tuttora vengono perpetrate nell’India postcoloniale. Estha e Rahel, impotenti testimoni della morte della cugina Sophie e dell’uccisione del pariah Velutha, sono travolti da dinamiche più grandi di quanto loro possano comprendere. Quando si incontrano di nuovo all’inizio degli anni Novanta, dimostrano di essere ancora perseguitati dai ricordi traumatici, rendendo così la prospettiva di una felicità futura ancora più incerta.
L’ultimo romanzo analizzato, nel quinto capitolo, è Brick Lane (2003) di Monica Ali.
La diciottenne bengalese Nazneen è costretta a sposare Chanu e a seguirlo a Londra, dove
infatti, grazie all’indipendenza economica e alla relazione con il giovane radicale Karim, Nazneen inizia a credere di poter scegliere il proprio destino. Rifiutandosi di seguire il marito in Bangladesh e ponendo fine alla storia con Karim, Nazneen diventa finalmente una donna emancipata, cambiando da spettatrice passiva ad artefice della propria esistenza.
Nella Conclusione, si rifletterà ancora sulla estrema duttilità del Bildungsroman, capace di riflettere gli aspetti specifici delle culture e dei paesi dai quali provengono gli autori. Nei quattro romanzi, per quanto diversi, emerge il ritratto di donne che, tenaci e determinate, non sfuggono alle difficoltà della vita, ma, al contrario, le sfruttano per una più matura autoconsapevolezza, per inseguire, senza compromessi, il loro ideale di felicità.
The features of any literary genre may change from its origins in relation to the historical and social context. These transformations also apply to the Bildungsroman. Thus, the thesis aims at highlighting the extreme variability of this genre, by examining contemporary female authors who explore it in a personal and innovative way. Indeed, the novel of formation in the twentieth century until now has assumed different characteristics from the original ones, though maintaining the story of the growing up of the protagonist.
After the first chapter, which includes an introduction to the genre and its first developments, the thesis analyses four female novels of formation. In the second chapter follows the analysis of The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall, which tells the life of Stephen Gordon, marked by the protagonist’s desperate search for acceptation of her homosexual identity. The strong feeling of inadequacy of the protagonist starts from her birth:
indeed, her parents, longing for a son, baptise their daughter with a male name, which becomes the symbol of a troubled search for identity. Stephen’s destiny is inevitably marked by loneliness, and so her hope to assert her identity is rather weak.
The third chapter will examine Oranges Are not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson, in which the protagonist Jeanette faces obstacles linked not only to her homosexuality, but also to the strict religious environment in which she is educated.
However, although she is the victim of her family and community’s disdain, Jeanette proves to be a resilient heroine, who will be finally able to forgive her persecutors, be reconciled with her mother, and, above all, accept her own identity more peacefully.
The fourth chapter follows with the analysis of The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy. Mainly set in the fictional town of Ayemenem, in India, this novel tells the story of the traumatic childhood of the twins Estha and Rahel, who, at the end of the Sixties, become the innocent victims of the caste discriminations still existing in postcolonial India.
Estha and Rahel, impotent witnesses of the death of their cousin Sophie and of the pariah Velutha’s murder, are overwhelmed by events that are too complicated for them to be comprehended. When they reunite at the beginning of the Nineties, they demonstrate to be still persecuted by their traumatic memories. Hence, the idea of future happiness for them becomes extremely uncertain.
The last novel analysed in the fifth chapter is Brick Lane (2003) by Monica Ali. The eighteen-year-old Nazneen, of Bengali origins, is obliged to marry Chanu and follow him to London, where she lives the first years of their marriage in total submissiveness to fate, an
Karim, Nazneen starts to believe that she can be the maker of her own destiny. By refusing to follow her husband back to Bangladesh and ending her story with Karim, Nazneen finally becomes an emancipated woman, turning from passive spectator into master of her own existence.
The Conclusion will highlight again the flexibility of the Bildungsroman in mirroring the specific aspects of the cultures and countries from which the authors come from.
Moreover, all four novels have, at their centre, firm and determined women, who do not escape existential difficulties, but, on the contrary, exploit them to achieve self-awareness, and pursue, without compromising, their ideal of happiness.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction p. 1
1.1 The origin of the Bildungsroman p. 1
1.2 The prototype of the Bildungsroman: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship p. 2
1.3 The English Bildungsroman p. 4
1.4 An impossible definition: the Bildungsroman as a flexible genre after
the First World War p. 5
1.5 The female Bildungsroman p. 7
2. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness: the first lesbian heroine p. 10
2.1 The author and the trial p. 10
2.2 The search for happiness: the growth of a mannish lesbian p. 12 2.2.1 Stephen’s emerging identity: from her childhood to her father’s death p. 12 2.2.2 Stephen and Angela Crossby: becoming aware of her homosexual identity p. 17 2.2.3 Stephen’s masculine redemption in the First World War p. 23 2.2.4 The relationship with Mary Llewellyn and Stephen’s final sacrifice p. 25
3. Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are not the Only Fruit: gender and religion
in the development of the protagonist p. 30
3.1 The main plot and the mises-en-abyme p. 30
3.2 Jeanette’s development: from social ostracism to self-acceptance p. 31
3.2.1 The role of religion in Jeanette’s education p. 31
3.2.2 Jeanette’s struggle for self and social acceptance p. 35
3.2.3 Jeanette’s accomplished Bildung p. 39
4. Arundhati Roy: gender and caste system in postcolonial India p. 41 4.1 The God of Small Things: a postmodern and cosmopolitan novel p. 41
4.2 The God of Small Things: an anti-Bildungsroman p. 43
4.2.1 The first trauma: Estha and the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man p. 43
4.2.2 Sophie Mol’s death p. 47
4.2.3 The transgression of the caste system: Velutha’s death p. 50
4.2.4 Estha and Rahel’s reunion p. 55
5. Monica Ali and female development in London society p. 60
5.1 Brick Lane: a realist Bildungsroman? p. 60
5.2 Nazneen’s development: from passivity to self-determination p. 63
5.2.1 Submissiveness and fate p. 63
5.2.2 Nazneen’s opposition to fate p. 70
5.2.3 “I will decide what to do”: Nazneen’s self-determination p. 79
Conclusion p. 84
Bibliography p. 89
1. Introduction
1.1 The origin of the Bildungsroman
The origins of the Bildungsroman can be dated back to the Germany of the second half of the eighteenth century. Even if the term was popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey in his The Life of Schleiermacher (1870), it was Karl Morgenstern who had actually coined the term in a public lecture called On the Nature of the Bildungsroman in 1819, as the critic Fritz Martini discovered in 1961.1 Of course, not only did Morgenstern create the term, but he also offered its very first definition:
We may call a novel a Bildungsroman first and foremost on account of its content, because it represents the development of the hero in its beginning and progress to a certain stage of completion, but also, second, because this depiction promotes the development of the reader to a greater extent than any other kind of novel. […] The novelist will wisely aim to unite the purpose of art, which is to please and to entertain by means of the beautiful, with the strictly human purpose to serve, to instruct and to better – in a word, to form [bilden].2
Thus, the first features of this new genre to be identified are two processes: that of the maturation of the hero and that of the development and instruction undergone by the reader.
Among various critics, Jerome Buckley wrote what is generally regarded as the most important study about the genre in the second half of the twentieth century. In his Season of Youth: the Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding,3 he discusses various English synonyms of Bildungsroman, such as novel of youth, of development or of apprenticeship, yet underlining how none of them can equal the German word. In fact, this refers to “an interplay of representation (Bild) and formation (Bildung)”,4 which is why the original term is often preferred to the other possibilities.
As a representation of the hero’s adolescence and development, the Bildungsroman comprises three subgenres:
1 Fritz Martini, “Bildungsroman – Term and Theory”, Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, translated by Claire Baldwin and James Hardin, ed., South Carolina UP, Columbia 1991, pp. 1-25.
2 Karl Morgenstern, “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman”, translated by Tobias Boes, PMLA, 124.2, Modern Language Association, New York 2009, pp. 647-659, http://www.tobiasboes.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01 /pmla.2009.124.2.pdf, (accessed: June 20, 2016; author’s italics).
3 Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: the Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Harvard UP, Cambridge 1974.
4 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman. Cornell UP, Ithaca 1996, p. 38.
The Entwicklungsroman, a chronicle of a young man’s general growth rather than his specific quest for self-culture; the Erziehungsroman, with an emphasis on the youth’s training and formal education; and the Künstlerroman, a tale of the orientation of the artist.5
After defining the general features of the genre, Buckley focuses on the typical features of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Bildungsroman:
A child of some sensibility grows up in the country or in the provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon the free imagination. His family […] proves doggedly hostile to his creative instincts […], antagonistic to his ambitions, and quite impervious to the new ideas he has gained from unprescribed readings. […] He therefore […] leaves the repressive atmosphere of home (and also the relative innocence), to make his way independently in the city […]. There his real ‘education’ begins. […] His initiation complete, he may then visit his old home.6
As Buckley explains, it is rather difficult, if not impossible, to find a novel that follows this pattern entirely. However, in order to define this genre, he concludes stating that no novel that
Ignores more than two or three of its principal elements – childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation and a working philosophy – answers the requirements of the Bildungsroman.7
1.2 The prototype of the Bildungsroman: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
Even if the first example of Bildungsroman is generally considered to be Agathon (1766- 1767) by Christoph Martin Wieland, it was Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795- 1796) that actually established the genre. In this novel, the protagonist, Wilhelm, is the son of a successful businessman who, instead of following his father’s desire of him embarking on the same career, pursues his dream joining a theatre company. Thomas Jeffers explains that
“This act of rebellion brings on the usual paternal disapproval and the usual filial guilt. His father […] dies when his son is yet very young, and so occasions another absence the youth
5 Buckley, op. cit., p. 13.
6 Ibid., pp. 17-18.
7 Ibid., p. 18.
has to deal with”.8 For example, a very dramatic scene is that in which Wilhelm performs Hamlet and the actor who plays the Ghost is so similar to his father that the performance, thanks to his real fright, turns out to be a great success. As Jeffers continues, “Such absconded or absconding parents […] are characteristic of many canonical Bildungsroman”;9 moreover,
“In Goethe’s epoch, it was genuinely revolutionary […] to insist that a son might freely choose to do something different from what his father had done”.10
After examining Wilhelm Meister in detail, Jeffers finally highlights the reason why this novel presents the prototypical plot of a Bildungsroman:
Goethe would have [Wilhelm] free, first, to choose his sexual partners, his aesthetic interests, his career and companions, all with a view to giving his life the shape that pleases not other people […] but himself. His apprenticeship ends when for a sufficient while he has ‘pleased himself’ alone, and is ready […] to please himself by pleasing others.11
After Wilhelm abandons the theatre company, because he realizes both that he is not a born actor and that the company, after the success of Hamlet, only offers cheap amusement, he joins the mysterious Society of the Tower, a secret organization that has been watching over his development. The final part of the novel deals with his initiation, which consists of a promotion from apprentice to master (Meister), together with a discussion of different theories of education and the achievement of the initiate’s purpose in his life. Thus, after many vicissitudes and different sexual encounters, “L’anello si è chiuso, la vita ha trovato il suo senso: è il momento del cerchio, figura di un tempo che – raggiunto il suo scopo – continuerà sì a scorrere, ma senza più né scosse né mutamenti”.12 At the end, Wilhelm happily accepts the education that the Society had already prepared for him: this is what Franco Moretti defines as “il paradigma ideale della socializzazione moderna: desidero fare ciò che comunque avrei dovuto fare”,13 which is the idea that also characterises the English Bildungsroman in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (e.g., Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice).
In conclusion, Wilhelm Meister presents the typical plot of the Bildungsroman: a sensitive hero who, facing stages of conflict and growth through different crisis and love
8 Thomas L. Jeffers, Apprenticeship. The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana, Palgrave Macmillan, New York and Basingstoke 2005, p.16.
9 Ibid., p. 17.
10 Ivi..
11 Ibid., p. 28.
12 Franco Moretti, Il romanzo di formazione, Einaudi, Torino 1999, p. 21.
13 Ibid., p. 23 (author’s italics).
affairs, proceeds along a gradual path of maturity. Eventually, the protagonist both accepts the values of society and finds his/her own place within it. This novel thus follows, in Lotman’s words,14 the principle of classification, whereby a compromise is definitively reached at the end. From the twentieth century onwards, instead, the Bildungsroman will generally follow the principle of transformation, that is, the process of growth is open-ended and accomplishes no aim.
1.3 The English Bildungsroman
The English novel of formation is very similar to the German one, in particular as regards the plot, which basically maintains the same key aspects. Nevertheless, there are some subtle differences. The first one concerns the relationship between the protagonist and his/her social context:
The Germans tended to focus attention on the individual’s cultivation, while neglecting responsibility for the national culture. The English tried […] to be attentive toward both: one’s development as an I depended not only on the richness of one’s inner life, but on the affiliations one had with the people […]
who constituted and shared one’s social environment.15
Thus, the protagonist of the English Bildungsroman is much more influenced, in his/her process of maturation and search for identity, by the surrounding social context than the German counterpart.
According to Franco Moretti, the second difference between the two kinds of novels of formation is the importance that the protagonist’s childhood assumes in the English version:
Contrariamente al Meister, infatti, nel romanzo inglese le esperienze più significative non sono quelle che alterano, ma quelle che confermano le scelte compiute dell’ ‘innocenza’ infantile. Più che romanzo di formazione, vien voglia di chiamarlo romanzo di conservazione – conservazione di una scelta di vita.16
Contrary to the German version, moreover, the English novel of formation often presents typical traits normally associated with fairy tales. Moretti ironically asks: “Ve lo immaginate un bambino che legge Wilhelm Meister, Il rosso e il nero, Le illusioni perdute?
14 Juri M. Lotman, La struttura del testo poetico, Mursia, Milano 1990.
15 Jeffers, op. cit., p. 35 (author’s italics).
16 Moretti, op. cit., p. 202 (author’s italics).
Impossibile. Ma Waverley e Jane Eyre, David Copperfield e Grandi speranze – ecco la
«grande tradizione» della letteratura per la tarda infanzia”.17 In particular, he refers to the clear-cut separation between good and bad characters: “Infantile, e fiabesco, è credere che un giudizio del genere si possa dare sempre e dovunque: che sia, in fondo, l’unica forma rilevante di giudizio”.18 Another typical fairy-tale element is the figure of the villain, who obstructs the hero’s happiness, creating such unfavourable circumstances for the hero’s self- fulfilment, that he has often no choice but to escape.
The last important feature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century English Bildungsroman is that the heroes are “Very Common Persons”,19 ordinary people with whom readers can easily identify.
1.4 An impossible definition: the Bildungsroman as a flexible genre after the First World War
With the beginning of the twentieth century, it became evident that it was almost impossible to categorise literary genres, included the Bildungsroman, which shows a great flexibility in terms of minor characteristics, context and themes. A particularly profound transformation occurred after the First World War, during the period of Modernism, when the focus is no longer on social integration, but on the representation of emotions and thoughts from the inside. Indeed, the alienation and the economic crisis caused by the war make the relationship between man and society more complex: literature focuses on the figure of an anti-hero who cannot overcome traumas. Thus, “le occasioni si trasformano in incidenti: nuclei non più prodotti dall’eroe come altrettante svolte del suo libero maturare – ma contro di lui da un mondo del tutto indifferente al suo sviluppo soggettivo”.20
In this period, the protagonist is no longer characterised by the conscious maturity that he/she had in the classical Bildungsroman: instead, the focus is now on the hero’s thoughts and emotions told from the inside, on what constitutes the so-called stream of consciousness.
The subconscious is seen as the source of a continuous flow of thoughts, which, even if they may appear inconsistent or illogical, reveal the process of development of the protagonist
17 Ibid., p. 206.
18 Ibid., p. 207 (author’s italics).
19 Ibid., p. 210.
20 Franco Moretti, “‘Un’inutile nostalgia di me stesso’. La crisi del romanzo di formazione europeo, 1898-1914”, op. cit., p. 262 (author’s italics).
through the expression of feelings rather than with tangible actions and practical decisions. In other words,
The broadly diachronic and evolutionary Bildungsroman gives way to a more fragmentary and synchronic […] form of narrative. Moretti identifies the First World War as a pivotal event because the trauma of the trenches precludes a peaceful development into maturity and social acceptance. Youth is cut short, meaning remains enigmatic.21
According to Moretti, Modernism and its interest in the subconscious will cause the end of the Bildungsroman: “dedito da sempre alla rappresentazione dell’autoconsapevolezza, il romanzo di formazione non può che ritirarsi sconcertato di fronte a una realtà inconscia”.22
On the other hand, other critics argue that Modernism produced an important transformation of the genre, made possible by a distinctive feature of the Bildungsroman, that is, its adaptability according to when and where it is produced. As Fritz Martini explains,
The Bildungsroman is given full freedom to include philosophical reflection, the diary, and the memoir, be it biography or autobiography. It also became evident later that the Bildungsroman can hardly be isolated as a specific
‘literary’ genre with formal structural laws applying solely to it; it is rather determined by prerequisites that have to do with content, theme, and ideology.
[…] It appears not as a categorical aesthetic form, but as a historical form deriving from specific and limited historical conditions in the understanding of the world and the self.23
In particular, this feature emerges from the 1950s onwards, when minority groups, such as female and postcolonial authors, started to adopt this genre for the representation of their own stories:
During the past few years, attention within the twentieth-century Bildungsroman studies has increasingly shifted towards post-colonial and minority writing. As a result, it has become obvious that the critical commonplace of a decline of the genre during the modernist period is a myopic illusion. In reality, the novel of formation continues to thrive in post-colonial, minority, multi-cultural, and immigrant literatures worldwide.24
21 Tobias Boes, “Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends”, Literature Compass, 3.2, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken 2006, p. 238, http://www.tobiasboes.net/wp-content/uploads /2011/01/Boes_Modernist.pdf (accessed: June 20, 2016).
22 Moretti, “‘Un’inutile nostalgia di me stesso’. La crisi del romanzo di formazione europeo, 1898-1914”, op.
cit., p. 265.
23 Martini, op. cit., p. 24 (my italics).
24 Boes, op. cit., p. 239.
1.5 The female Bildungsroman
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, novelists such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë adopted the Bildungsroman to present the development of a heroine. Even if, on the one hand, these novels maintain the typical characteristics of the genre, on the other hand, they evidence some crucial differences.
As regards the similarities, the male and female development share the idea that
“‘growing down’ paradoxically enables ‘growing up’”.25 In particular, as social expectations, such as marriage, are stronger for women, the heroine “must give up those aspects of her independence that separate her from patriarchal society, and she must find ways to reconcile her view of herself with others’ expectations of her”.26 These social limitations imposed on the heroine, including the lack of economic independence, led many scholars to consider the female Bildungsroman a “conservative” novel,27 so that the female protagonist, unlike her male counterpart, begins her formation “as an assured young woman with a strong sense of self, but as the novel progresses, the heroine comes to realize that her view of herself differs from others’ view of her. Her maturation involves learning to see herself as others see her”.28
However, this must not be considered a passive attitude: after she becomes aware of the social limitations imposed on her and of how other people see her, she will be able to manipulate these expectations for her own gain. More specifically,
The heroines do not create a false self so much as they begin to consider the importance of controlling the image of themselves that others perceive. They become willing consciously to control their own image in order to gain a balance between their own view of themselves and societal expectations.29
In other words, the female Bildungsroman displays subversive meanings in representing the societal oppression of women, and, in this context, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is paradigmatic as well as revolutionary.30 Despite the importance of social integration, the heroine never gives up her own search for independence. In fact, “when Jane Eyre increases
25Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750–1850, Associated Universities Presses, Cranbury, 1999, p. 18, https://www.questia.com/read/117508726/appearing-to- diminish-female-development-and-the, (accessed: June 20, 2016).
26 Ivi..
27 For example, Franco Moretti, in Il romanzo di formazione, talks about Jane Eyre as a conservative novel, in which the psychological and social status of the protagonist do not change.
28 Ellis, op. cit., p. 30.
29 Ibid., p. 31.
30 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Garzanti, Milano 2007.
the scope of her self-reflection, she uses her knowledge in order to stand firm, to force other people to adapt to her perspective”.31 This can be seen in two main moments: firstly, when Jane refuses to marry St. John, because she does not love him and realises that he only wants a companion and not a wife; and secondly, when she breaks off the marriage with Mr Rochester and refuses to be his mistress, as he is already married to Bertha Mason. Thus, in order to follow her principles and “be completely self-identified, organically whole (measured by wealth, the power to make choices, and independent actions), Jane must separate from Rochester, only subsequently to reunite on a basis of human equality”.32 Hence,
The conventional aspects of the ‘happy ending’, in which Jane acquires a fortune and settles down into quiet domestic bliss serving the man she loves, is uneasily balanced by Jane’s continuing autonomy and control: her ability to gain marriage on her own terms, to maintain power over her husband by acting as his ‘eyes’, and to write her own story in the form of an autobiography.33
Consequently, Charlotte Brontë’s novel, through the inclusion of both conservative and revolutionary elements, paves the way for a new modern heroine, who will eventually find her most mature expression from the 1950s onwards. In fact, in those years, female authors started to exploit the Bildungsroman for the representation of their own stories, adapting this genre to challenge patriarchal society and represent the search for a new female identity.
Indeed,
Certain notions which were previously unthinkable – women’s right to a social identity not determined by their sexual and maternal roles, for example – have become embedded within the discursive frameworks of contemporary culture, functioning as an important and influential source of new narratives which attempt to confront and work through in story form some of the contradictions of gender identity uncovered by feminist ideology.34
This new female identity no longer depends on the compromise between the heroine and society, as is typical of the female Bildungsroman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the contrary, in contemporary novels of formation, this theme is replaced by that of the internal growth of the protagonist, regardless of social expectations:
31Ellis, op. cit., p. 145.
32 Karen E. Rowe, “‘Fairy-born and human-bred’: Jane Eyre’s Education in Romance”, The Voyage In. Fictions of Female Development, Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland, ed., New England UP, Dartmouth College 1983, p. 71.
33 Ellis, op. cit., p. 139.
34 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Feminist Literature and Social Change, Harvard UP, Cambridge 1989, p. 126.
The defining feature of the feminist text is a recognition and rejection of the ideological basis of the traditional script of heterosexual romance characterized by female passivity, dependence, and subordination, and an attempt to develop an alternative narrative and symbolic framework within which female identity can be located.35
In conclusion, the contemporary female novel of formation represents women struggling against a still patriarchal society in order to achieve autonomy and self-awareness.
Consequently, these struggles “generate distinctive narrative tensions – between autonomy and relationship, separation and community, loyalty to women and attraction to men”.36
35 Ibid., p. 129.
36 Abel, Hirsch and Langland, ed., op. cit., p. 12.
2. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness: the first lesbian heroine 2.1 The author and the trial
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born in 1880 and died in 1943. She soon discovered to be an
“invert”, the term used at that time to refer to homosexuals, and which often appears in her novel. During her life, she had several love affairs, but the most important relationship, which lasted until her death, was with Una Troubridge, a sculptor and translator. She is best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), where she tells the life, from birth to adulthood, of Stephen Gordon, a masculine lesbian. However, apart from the main theme of homosexuality and its consequences on social relationships, the novel is also regarded as an example of Künstlerroman, a story of the development of an artist. Unfortunately, the end of the novel is marked by both personal and artistic failure: The Well of Loneliness “is also the story of an artist who, because of her vulnerability and humanity […] and because of her view of herself in relation to the people and values in her environment, can never find permanent fulfilment in either her art or her life”.1
Indeed, even if Hall was not the first writer to discuss about homosexuality (in the very same year of publication of The Well of Loneliness, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was put on sale, too), her novel caused a great scandal in the UK and became the subject of a trial, after which all the copies were destroyed and its publication restarted only after the author’s death.
In fact, the scandal was caused not so much by the theme per se, but by the fact that “In order to advocate sympathy and tolerance for lesbians, Hall had made sure that her lesbian heroine […] appeared above reproach. […] It was by making Stephen virtuous that Hall provoked moral censure”.2 In Sir Chartres Biron’s words, the presiding magistrate of the trial,
The tragedy as represented here is that people who indulge in these vices are not tolerated by decent people; they are not received in society and they are ostracized by decent people; and the whole note of the book is a passionate and almost hysterical plea for toleration and recognition of these people.3
1 Claudia Stillman Franks, “Stephen Gordon, Novelist: a Re-Evaluation of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 1.2, Tulsa University 1982, p. 136, https://www.jstor.org /stable/464075?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, (accessed: June 20, 2016).
2 Adam Parkes, “Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando”, Twentieth Century Literature, 40.4, Hofstra University 1994, p. 435, https://www.jstor.org/stable/441599?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, (accessed: June 20, 2016).
3 The judgement of Sir Chartres Biron, chief magistrate, Palatable Poison. Critical Perspectives on ‘The Well of Loneliness’, Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, ed., Columbia UP, New York 2001, p. 42.
It is this desperate request for tolerance and acceptance, together with an implicit attack against common ethical principles, which shocked the society of the Twenties. The consequent censorship was seen as a protection against a possible moral corruption:
The detractors of The Well made it quite clear that they were defending themselves, and the vulnerable British populace, from the possible nefarious consequences which would result when the susceptible reader was lured by the seductions of the novel into the sexually unnatural practice or state of inversion.4
Curiously enough, The Well of Loneliness, in spite of being considered the first lesbian novel, was also strongly criticised by some lesbian readers. Indeed, the failure of a homosexual narrative, in which the protagonist should find happiness and social acceptance, is due to the fact that Stephen’s development occurs within a patriarchal and heterosexual frame, which offers no tolerance to the invert. Moreover, the protagonist and other lesbian characters are always portrayed as mannish in their physical appearance, clothes and moods:
according to lesbian and feminist’s readings, in this representation the protagonist has no possibility to find a new female identity but within a comparison with stereotyped male characteristics. However, Hall’s novel remains the first literary work that denounced the condition of social exclusion in which homosexuals were obliged to live. In Doan and Prosser’s words,
The Well of Loneliness proved a paradoxically productive disestablishment foundation for lesbian feminism, precisely a palatable poison. It was the most famous representation of lesbianism that was its infamous misrepresentation, yet its misrepresentation helped give proof of the homophobic and misogynist stigmatization of lesbianism from which the lesbian feminist sought to emerge.5
4 Janice Stewart, “Shadows in a Cracked Mirror: the Spectre in The Well of Loneliness”, EnterText, 6.3, Brunel University London 2006-2007, p. 369, https://www.brunel.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/186086/ET63 StewartED.pdf, (accessed: June 20, 2016).
5 Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, “Introduction: Critical Perspectives Past and Present”, Doan and Prosser, ed., op.
cit., p. 16.
2.2 The search for happiness: the growth of a mannish lesbian
2.2.1 Stephen’s emerging identity: from her childhood to her father’s death
The story of Stephen’s life, narrated chronologically, starts from her childhood and the description of Morton, the Gordon family’s home, which, situated very near Upton-on- Severn, is depicted as “an old-fashioned dwelling that provides uneasy shelter for Stephen, its unquestionably modern heir. Morton is an extraordinary nostalgic space, harking back to the classic traditions of English country houses, homes that were built to preserve strict gender divisions”.6 Indeed, in its garden, there is “a stream that forks in exactly the right position to feed two large lakes in the grounds”.7 As Victoria Rosner sustains, “The forked stream and two lakes imply that gender is formally presented by Morton as a choice between two opposite positions, with Stephen somehow caught between these two spaces”:8 Stephen will never be able to choose between being a man or a woman, her feelings will always be of envy towards the former and of hate towards the latter and her condition will always be that of in- betweenness. Following Rosner’s analysis,
Stephen’s troubles are caused by her feeling that she is neither one sex nor the other but some combination of the two – the classic dilemma of the invert. […]
The world that Stephen lives in is literally built around a clear-cut division between the genders, without accommodation for any in-between position.9
After the description of Morton, the reader comes to know that Stephen’s parents, Sir Philip and Lady Anna, longed for a son, and that when they discovered they were pregnant, the father “christened the unborn infant Stephen”.10 Eventually, he will maintain this name when his wife actually gives birth to a daughter. The use of the verb “to christen”, the choice of the name Stephen and the child’s birth on Christmas Eve hint at the protagonist’s tragic end of loneliness and despair.
Stephen’s body is already masculine in her early days, highlighting her similarity to her father: a “wide-shouldered”11 baby, “she throve, seeming strong and when her hair grew it
6 Victoria Rosner, “Once more unto the Breach”, Doan and Prosser, ed., op. cit., p. 319.
7 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, Penguin, London 2015, p. 3 (to be cited hereafter as The Well).
8 Rosner, op. cit., p. 319.
9 Ibid., p. 320.
10 The Well, p. 4.
11 Ibid., p 5.
was seen to be auburn like Sir Philip’s. There was also a tiny cleft on her chin”,12 just like her father, and after a while “Anna saw that her eyes were going to be hazel – and thought that their expression was her father’s”.13 This similarity is the first reason for a strange and complicated mother-daughter relationship, marked by incomprehension and even shyness:
Lady Anna can only see the little Stephen as a “caricature of Sir Philip; a blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction”,14 and complains of “a certain crude lack of grace in her movements”.15
Stephen is seven years old when she has an innocent infatuation for Collins, the housemaid. She loves playing with her and dressing up like Nelson, until one day Collins, watching Stephen dressed like a man, says to the cook: “‘Doesn’t Miss Stephen look exactly like a boy? I believe she must be a boy with them shoulders, and them funny gawky legs she’s got on her’”,16 at which Stephen replies: “‘Yes, of course I’m a boy. […] I must be a boy,
‘cause I feel exactly like one”’.17 It is in this scene that, as Jay Prosser affirms, Stephen
“shows her realizing for the first time through crossdressing the discrepancy between her gender identification and her sex”:18 she is starting to feel some sort of gap between what she should look like, how she should behave and dress and how she actually feels simply to be.
She starts to be aware of how much “she hated soft dresses and sashes, and ribbons, and small coral beads, and openwork stockings! Her legs felt so free and comfortable in breeches; she adored pockets, too, and these were forbidden”.19 Still as a child,
She was conscious of feeling all wrong, because she so longed to be someone quite real, instead of just Stephen pretending to be Nelson. In a quick fit of anger she would go to the cupboard, and getting out her dolls would begin to torment them. She had always despised the idiotic creatures which, however, arrived with each Christmas and birthday. ‘I hate you! I hate you! I hate you’, she would mutter, thumping their innocuous faces.20
During this period, Stephen gets closer and closer to her father, who seems to be more gentle and sensitive towards his daughter than Lady Anna. Stephen feels that she can trust
12 Ibid., p. 6.
13 Ivi..
14 Ibid., p. 8 (my italics).
15 Ivi..
16 Ibid., p. 12.
17 Ivi..
18 Jay Prosser, “‘Some Primitive Thing in a Turbulent Age of Transition’: the Transsexual emerging from The Well”, Doan and Prosser, ed., op. cit., p. 136.
19 The Well, p. 13.
20 Ivi..
him, so she asks him: “‘Do you think that I could be a man, supposing I thought very hard – or prayed, Father?’”.21 At moments such as this one, he studies the daughter, her way of moving and playing, and then he spends the rest of the day in his study, reading a book that he keeps locked in a bookcase.
Unfortunately, with Stephen’s infatuation for Collins comes also her first disillusion:
one day, she sees Henry, the footman, kissing Collins, at which Stephen throws a pot at the young man, cutting his cheek. After this episode, Stephen confesses her love for Collins to Sir Philip, and this will become their secret: Lady Anna must not know about her daughter’s
“strangeness”, because she would never be able to understand and love her again.
Subsequently, Collins is sent away and Stephen feels terribly lonely, until the day when her father buys her a pony, which she secretly calls after the housemaid. With this new companion, Stephen’s “strangeness” becomes even more evident: she proves to be really good at hunting and, most importantly, she insists on riding astride, something that was commonly forbidden to women. It is precisely in one of those hunting days that Stephen meets the two children of Colonel Antrim, Violet and Roger, and she soon realises how much she feels uncomfortable with other children. As regards Violet, she hates her perfect female way of being: “Why, Violet could never come to tea without crying, could never play a game without getting herself hurt!”;22 she is “full of feminine poses”,23 she knits and she rides side- saddle. On the other hand, Roger is “already full to the neck of male arrogance. […] She loathed him, and her loathing was increased by a most humiliating consciousness of envy.
[…] [She] envied his right to climb trees and play cricket and football – his right to be perfectly natural”.24 Stephen hates and envies Roger so deeply that one day they have a fight, caused by his teasing about her way of riding:
‘You thought they’d suppose that you looked like a boy, just because you were trying to be one. […] And my mother said […] that your mother must be funny to allow you to [ride astride]’. […] All that was heavy in [Stephen’s] face sprang into view, […] and yet there was a kind of large splendour […] like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition.25
After some years, when Stephen is fourteen and has become a good fencer, her father decides to plan her education: “‘I want you to have the same education, the same advantages
21 Ibid., p. 19 (author’s italics).
22 Ibid., p. 37.
23 Ibid., p. 44.
24 Ibid., pp. 43-44.
25 Ibid., pp. 49-50.
as I’d give to my son’”,26 he tells her. Sir Philip wants her to study, to become wise and to have books as her friends in order to protect herself when life would present difficulties. This is why he admits her in his study and lets her read his books, a permission that was generally denied to girls, who were used to different activities. So, Sir Philip hires Miss Puddleton, called Puddle, as a teacher: thanks to her, Stephen discovers her writing ability, which she will cultivate for the rest of her life. Writing allows her to reflect upon her thoughts and feelings, to give them a voice – a voice that sometimes lets her anguish emerge: “‘I’m lost, where am I? Where am I? I’m nothing – yes I am, I’m Stephen – but that’s being nothing”’.27 Her horrible sense of indefiniteness, of non-belonging makes her feel lonely and misunderstood.
When Stephen is seventeen, her masculine body and her similarity with her father are exploited again to represent her invert identity, until the point that she, observing her image in the mirror, “would feel just a little uneasy: ‘Am I queer looking or not?’”.28 Also her clothes are used to express her invert identity: Stephen constantly quarrels with her mother, who would like her to wear something more feminine. However, wearing the dresses bought by her mother, Stephen feels extremely awkward: “‘It’s my face […] something’s wrong with my face’”.29 Moreover, as during her childhood, Stephen continues to feel uncomfortable in society:
With other young girls she had nothing in common, while they, in their turn, found her irritating. […] While despising these girls, she yet longed to be like them – yes, indeed, at such moments she longed to be like them. It would suddenly strike her that they seemed very happy, very sure of themselves as they gossiped together. […] Could Stephen have met men on equal terms, she would always have chosen them as her companions; she preferred them because of their blunt, open outlook, and with men she had much in common – sport, for instance. But men found her too clever if she ventured to expand, and to dull if she suddenly subsided into shyness.30
Stephen is continuously depicted as an in-between creature that belongs neither to the female sex nor to the male one: “she had not yet learnt that the loneliest place in this world is the no- man’s land of sex”.31
26 Ibid., pp. 59-60.
27 Ibid., p. 70.
28 Ibid., p. 73 (author’s italics).
29 Ivi..
30 Ibid., pp. 76-77.
31 Ibid., p. 79.
However, when Stephen is eighteen, there is a moment in which her social life seems to improve, namely, when she befriends Martin Hallam. Their sudden and deep friendship arouses expectations, particularly in Sir Philip and Lady Anna, who seem relieved at the idea that their daughter is finally falling in love with a man. Nevertheless, when Martin declares himself to Stephen, the girl’s reaction proves that her nature has not changed: “terror and repulsion [Martin] saw on her face, and something else too, a look as of outrage”,32 at which the young man has no choice but to leave Morton. As a consequence, gossip about Stephen’s behaviour immediately starts circulating among her neighbours: “They had been so eager to welcome the girl as one of themselves, and now this strange happening”.33 But most importantly, this incident gives Stephen the chance to seriously reflect upon her childhood, her manners and her sense of loneliness for the first time. So, she decides to ask her father his point of view: “She would try to make him understand her suspicion that this feeling of hers was a thing fundamental, much more than merely not being in love; much, much more than not wanting to marry Martin”.34 Hence, that evening, she enters her father’s study, but after confessing him all her doubts and asking him if there is anything strange about her, he does not manage to tell her the truth about who she really is:
‘My dear, don’t be foolish, there’s nothing strange about you, some day you may meet a man you can love. And supposing you don’t, well, what of it, Stephen? Marriage isn’t the only career for a woman. I’ve been thinking about your writing just lately, and I’m going to let you go up to Oxford’. […] After she had gone he sat on alone, and the lie was still bitter to his spirit as he sat there.35
Sir Philip lies, and insists on Stephen’s education because he believes that it will be the only means through which his daughter will be able to survive in her complicated life.
Unfortunately, one day a tree falls on Sir Philip in his garden and causes his death.
From that moment, Stephen finds herself completely alone, and she feels that she has lost her only true friend. Jus before he dies, he whispers his last words to his wife: “‘Anna – it’s Stephen – listen- […] It’s – Stephen our child – she’s, she’s – it’s Stephen – not like -’.36 Even in her father’s last words, Stephen’s identity remains undetermined, with no label. Still very young, she loses the only point of reference she has ever had:
32 Ibid., p. 101.
33 Ibid., p. 112.
34 Ibid., p. 105.
35 Ibid., pp. 110-111.
36 Ibid., p. 124.
Sir Philip’s death deprived his child of three things; of companionship of mind born of real understanding, of a stalwart barrier between her and the world, and above all of love – that faithful love that would gladly have suffered all things for her sake, in order to spare her suffering.37
2.2.2 Stephen and Angela Crossby: becoming aware of her homosexual identity
A few years after Sir Philip’s death, Stephen, now a twenty-one-year-old young woman, meets Angela Crossby, with whom she will have her first love affair, becoming aware of her homosexuality. Their meeting is casual: one day, Stephen goes to Upton to run some errands, and, outside the butcher’s, a dog fight starts; giving some help to stop the fight, she meets Angela, one of the two dog’s owner. After a brief introduction, Stephen offers to drive her home, The Grange, where Angela lives with her husband Ralph. Once back to Morton, the two women settle on the next Sunday for tea. In the few days that precede this meeting, Stephen “did not stop to analyse her feelings, she only knew that she felt exultant, very much alive and full of purpose”.38 She feels anxious about her physical appearance: “for five mornings she studied her face in the glass as she dressed – after all she was not so bad looking”.39 She also becomes more obsessed with her outfit, which always includes a tie and a matched suit. In these days, the thought of Angela starts to replace little by little the sad mourning for her father, in whose study Stephen passes a lot of time.
A few weeks go by, and, even if Stephen feels sometimes afraid of her own feelings towards Angela, she finally decides to declare them openly:
‘We’re both filled with the old peace of Morton, because we love each other so deeply – and because we’re perfect, a perfect thing, you and I – not two separate people but one. And our love has lit a great, comforting beacon, so that we need never be afraid of the dark any more – we can warm ourselves at our love, we can lie down together, and my arms will be round you. […] I know that I love you, and that nothing else matters in the world’.40
At these words, Angela, who feels very lonely and not loved by her husband, lets Stephen kiss her. Nevertheless, their relationship will not be easy at all, because Angela does not want to deceive and leave her husband, which is the reason why the two lovers often
37 Ibid., p. 127.
38 Ibid., p. 144.
39 Ibid., p 145.
40 Ibid., p. 154.
quarrel, as it happens one day, when Stephen threatens to tell Ralph the truth, and Angela becomes furious: “‘You know perfectly that there’s nothing to tell him, beyond a few rather schoolgirlish kisses. Can I help it if you’re – what you obviously are?”’.41 Stephen’s sense of inadequacy culminates when Angela provocatively asks her: “‘Could you marry me?”’,42 at which Stephen can only reply negatively, realising all her impossibility to protect her lover.
During her relationship with Angela, Stephen becomes obsessed with her lack of self- knowledge: “She would think with a kind of despair: ‘What am I, in God’s name – some kind of abomination? [...] Why am I as I am – and what am I?’ […] A great darkness would seem to descend on her spirit – there would be no light wherewith to lighten that darkness”.43 The opposition between darkness and light is symbolic to express her yet unknown identity: she does not know what she is; she only feels, comparing herself to animals and to what most people do, that she is somehow different:
Away in the distance there would be a harsh crying, the wild, harsh crying of swans by the lakes – the swan called Peter protecting, defending his mate against some unwelcome intruder. From the chimneys of Williams’
comfortable cottage smoke would rise […]. Home, that meant home and two people together, respected because of their honourable living. Two people who had had the right to love in their youth, and whom old age had not divided.
Two poor and yet infinitely enviable people, without stain, without shame in the eyes of their fellows. Proud people who could face the world unafraid, having no need to fear the world’s execration.44
At Morton, since Sir Philip’s death, only Puddle, the teacher, can understand why Stephen sometimes looks so sad and almost neurotic. She imagined herself consoling her:
“she would go to the girl and say: ‘I know. […] You’re neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you’re as much as part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you’re unexplained as yet. You’ve not got your niche in creation’”.45 In this passage, Puddle refers not only to the fact that inverts were not accepted in the society of the first half of the nineteenth century, but also to the fact that homosexuals and transsexuals had not been properly studied yet: a lack of knowledge that has its visible effect in the use of the general and inappropriate word “invert”. Moreover, that of the invert is a field that even the psychologist and sexologist Havelock Ellis did not show to know properly in the commentary
41 Ibid., p. 159.
42 Ibid., p. 160.
43 Ibid., p. 163.
44 Ibid., p. 164.
45 Ibid., p. 165 (author’s italics).
to the first edition of The Well of Loneliness: “So far as I know, [The Well] is the first English novel which presents […] one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us today”.46
After some time, the relationship between the two women becomes almost impossible:
Stephen grows more and more jealous, because she suspects that Angela has an affair with Roger Antrim, whom she has recently met. When Stephen asks her if there is anything between them, Angela kisses her, but she “suddenly pushed her away: ‘Don’t, don’t – I can’t bear it – it’s too much. […] It’s all wrong, I’m not worth it, anyhow it’s all wrong. […] If you were a man-’ She stopped abruptly”.47
With her increasing sense of physical inadequacy, Stephen grows to hate her body, which, one night, she observes in front of a mirror:
She stared at herself in the glass; and even as she did so she hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts, and its slender flanks of an athlete. All her life she must drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. This strangely ardent yet sterile body that must worship yet never be worshipped in return by the creature of its adoration. She longed to maim it, for it made her feel cruel; it was so white, so strong and so self- sufficient; yet withal so poor and unhappy a thing that her eyes filled with tears and her hate turned to pity. She began to grieve over it, touching her breasts with pitiful fingers, stroking her shoulders, letting her hands slip along her straight thighs – Oh, poor and most desolate body!48
As Teresa de Lauretis sustains,
The scene represents a fantasy of bodily dispossession, the fantasy of an unlovely/unlovable body – a body not feminine or maternal, not narcissistically cherished, fruitful or productive, nor, on the other hand, barren […] or abject, but simply imperfect, faulty and faulted, dispossessed, inadequate to bear and signify desire. Because it is not feminine, this body is inadequate to signify the female subject’s desire in its feminine mode; however, because it is masculine but not male, it is also inadequate to signify or bear the subject’s desire in the masculine mode.49
Hence, Stephen’s extreme suffering is caused by her condition of in-betweenness to which she cannot find a solution. The mirror scene represents “the tragic meaning of the invert: lost
46 See the commentary to the first edition of The Well by Havelock Ellis, Doan and Prosser, ed., op. cit., p. 35.
47 The Well, p. 190.
48 Ibid., p. 202. Jay Prosser, reflecting upon this passage, sustains that Stephen, more than a lesbian, is a transsexual, as she has a male personality trapped in a female body: “Stephen is a perfect copy of a man in her gender, but because of her female sex this manliness becomes pastiche” (Prosser, op. cit., p. 135).
49 Teresa de Lauretis, “Perverse Desire: the Lure of the Mannish Lesbian”, Doan and Prosser, ed., op. cit., p. 114.
