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ABSTRACT The primary focus of this article is Stephen Gordon, the infamous `mannish lesbian' of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. The article argues that conventional critical readings of Stephen Gordon have neglected the transgender aspects of the characterisation. It examines the sexological model of the female `invert', which inspired and informed Hall's character, and demonstrates how theories of inversion failed to distinguish between cross-gender identification and same-sex desire. Finally, the article offers a reading of the novel which foregrounds Stephen Gordon's masculine identification, focusing specifically on issues surrounding the character's gendered embodiment.
Ever since I can remember anything at all I could never think of myself as a girl and I was in perpetual trouble, with this as the real reason. When I was 5 or 6 years old I began to say to myself that, whatever, [sic] anyone said, if I was not a boy at any rate I was not a girl. This has been my unchanged conviction all through my life. `Miss D' of `History XXXIX' taken from Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion by Havelock Ellis)
All my life I've never felt like a woman, and you know it ... I don't know what I am; no one's ever told me that I'm different and yet I know that I'm different ... (Stephen Gordon, the protagonist of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness)
Deconstructing Stephen
If it is the sexologists who put the `mannish woman' into sexual discourse, it is the writer Radclyffe Hall who gives her what is probably her most famous, and certainly most controversial, literary representation. Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) takes this paradoxical figure out of the relative obscurity of the medico-scientific textbooks, and inscribes her in the popular imagination in a manner which far outreaches the influences of the sexological theorists. In the critical arena, most interpretations of the novel concentrate on the sexual desire of the character, which has been read as lesbian, whilst identifying her masculinity [1] as a physical expression of that sexuality. As such, Stephen Gordon has been cast as the `classic Mannish Lesbian' (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 290).
It is understandable that publicly circulated `lesbian responses' to the text tend not to foreground the confusion and disturbance...