GLR September-October 2023

the age of thirty and lives for the next 300 years as a woman, without aging. The character was based on aristocrat and fellow writer Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a famously pas sionate love affair. Throughout the story, Orlando dresses sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, and is possessed of similarly amorphous romantic incli nations. According to Leslie Kathleen Hankins, Orlando “ plays an elaborate game of hide and seek with the reader and the censor, ” rendering censorship both parodic and farcical. Woolf chal lenged social codes by demonstrating the constructed nature of gender, while building in a kind of plausible deniabil ity through the device of Orlando ’ s fan tastic sex change. For example, she mocks compulsory heterosexuality in this passage: “ As all Orlando ’ s loveshad been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt early critics of her work, who shied away from discussing the author ’ s bi sexuality. In this same passage, Woolf seems also to toy with the idea of liter ature as infectious, reflecting the British patriarchal fear that allowing women to read about lesbianism would lead to its “ polluting, ” “ noxious, ” “ poisonous, ” and “ corrosive ” spread throughout the country. Orlando, the narrator writes, was “ afflicted with a love of literature, ” though “ many people of his time es caped this infection ... some were early infected by a germ ... which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raised to strike. ” Woolf ’ s teasing subtlety stands in stark contrast to The Well of Loneliness , through which Hall explicitly intended to “ en courage inverts to face up to a hostile world ... with dignity and courage ” and “ bring normal men and women of good will to a fuller and more tolerant un derstanding of the inverted. ” Notably, despite their treatment of

tended to use similarly hyperbolic rhet oric. When Hall and Jonathan Cape Ltd. tried to appeal the ban, Sir Robert Wallace, chairman of the court, de clared the book “ more subtle, demor alizing, corrosive, corruptive, than anything that was ever written. ” In light of this reaction, it is perhaps surprising that The Well of Loneliness does not actually portray sexual rela tions between women, save for a single chaste kiss. The magistrate justified his decision by stating that Hall ’ s charac ters portrayed “ horrible tendencies ” for which they were never held responsible. According to author Marc E. Vargo, “ the novel ’ s opponents ... were not re ally perturbed because the book in volved love between women. They were upset because its lesbians did not apologize for being gay, or, alterna tively, did not come to a bad end. ... [T]o the male-centric power structure of literature, and they cannot produce great literature until they have free minds. The free mind has access to all knowl edge and speculation of its age, and nothing cramps it like a taboo. ” Woolf and her fellow writers were ultimately prevented from testifying at the trial by the magistrate Charles Biron, who ruled that authors were not experts on ob scenity, only art, and that the identifica tion and measurement of immorality must be left to the men of the British court (in spite of their distaste for dis cussing such “ horror ” ). While it was published one month before Hall ’ s ob scenity trial had begun, Woolf ’ s Or lando resulted in part from the author ’ s desire to subvert the “ taboo ” of lesbian ism and, by extension, the irrationality of British censorship laws. § I N W OOLF ’ S NOVEL , a young hero named Orlando, born as a male noble man, mysteriously changes genders at

Radclyffe Hall in 1928.

post-Victorian society, the prospect that some women might get along quite well without men was perceived as an affront. ” During The Well of Loneliness ’ obscenity trials, many authors came forward to testify on the novel ’ s behalf, including Virginia Woolf herself. While Woolf, the elite authoress, scathingly de scribed Hall ’ s middlebrow novel as a “ pale tepid vapid book which lay damp and slab all about the court, ” she warned of the dangers of censorship in a letter co-written with E. M. Forster: “ Novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention [les bianism]. ... Although forbidden as a main theme, may it be al luded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? ... Writers produce

itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved. ” Given the gendered conventions of the pe riod, is this a depiction of lesbianism, or not? In another passage, Woolf hints at the social, historical, and literary status of homosexuality as unspeakable when her narra tor, Orlando ’ s “ biographer, ” comments that the subject ’ s life is touched with matters on which a biographer cannot “ profitably enlarge, ” though “ it is plain enough to those who have done a reader ’ s part in making up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person. ” Per haps ironically, Woolf was subjected to this same treatment by

Virginia Woolf in 1928.

TheG & LR

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