Chapter IX · FICTION IN ENGLISH (continued 2)

Although for a decade or so the novel has been freely available in inexpensive editions, a brief summary may be offered. Stephen Gordon, only child of solid county parents whose dearest desire is a son, receives the name and upbringing that would have been his. From infancy she is the image of her father, masculine in build, mannerisms, abilities and tastes. At eight she experiences unmistakable passion for a housemaid; throughout adolescence she despises feminine garments and amusements; in her late teens she rejects a first suitor, long her good friend, whose sudden amorousness seems to her unnatural. The death of her father leaves her without an ally and bitterly solitary. At twenty she becomes infatuated with a new neighbor’s wife, a former American chorus girl, who plays the coquette and accepts lavish gifts but evades caresses by pleading her husband’s jealousy. Stephen’s discovery that a male rival has been successful drives her to frenzy, and the American, fearful that the girl may inform her husband of her infidelity, forestalls the possibility by showing him Stephen’s last letter. This outpouring of naked passion, at once passed on to her mother, leads to Stephen’s being turned out of her home and virtually driven from England. Soon she achieves a literary reputation of sorts, but her lack of passionate experience proves an artistic handicap. In London and Paris she meets both male and female homosexuals but shuns them, hating their immediate interest in her because she hates her own “difference” and wants only to be accepted as a normal human being.

Then World War I gives her, along with others of her sort, the chance to do a man’s job in an ambulance unit. She falls deeply in love with a younger co-worker, innocent and feminine, whom she struggles to protect from danger. After their release by the armistice, a holiday together forces both to admit the nature of their love—an interlude less specifically detailed than Lawrence’s lesbian passage in The Rainbow, but, of course, presented with complete sympathy. Now united, the two girls attempt to make a life for themselves in Paris, but neither finds tolerable the bohemian existence which is open to them, and both suffer under the slights which exclude them from conventional society. Eventually, Stephen’s early suitor seeks them out and falls in love with Mary, who responds but will not consider disloyalty to Stephen. The latter, realizing that Mary can never be happy with her outside the social pale, makes the dramatic gesture of pretending intimacy with a distinguished lesbian she has known superficially for years. She achieves her purpose—Mary accepts the man, and Stephen is left once more to loneliness.

The story is more engrossing than The Unlit Lamp because of swifter pace and greater intensity, but inferior in literary art, since it is often over-emotional and occasionally lapses into bald special pleading. Moreover, there is a blur in the explanation of Stephen’s variance. Emphasis on her physical masculinity indicates hereditary causes, as does her father’s early recognition of her anomaly. But his consequent indulgence of her proclivities, and the stress laid on both parents’ desire for a male child, hint at belief in prenatal as well as childhood conditioning. Miss Hall’s evident purpose was to absolve Stephen of the slightest responsibility for her temperament, and inevitably one is reminded of Lacretelle’s Marie Bonifas, translated in the preceding year but probably known to Miss Hall in French upon its appearance in 1925. The two differ in that Lacretelle lays Freudian stress on negative childhood conditioning, while Miss Hall’s comparative hereditary emphasis marks her a disciple of the older school of Ellis and Hirschfeld. Despite its shortcomings, The Well of Loneliness made a heroic gesture for tolerance of lesbian relations among persons of integrity, and the author had the satisfaction before her death of seeing it widely accepted.

Compton Mackenzie entered the variant lists armed with gentle satire. Extraordinary Women, like Norman Douglas’s South Wind to which its foreword pays respect, is laid on the island of Capri, here called Sirene. It includes almost as many lesbian individuals as Peladan’s La Gynandre of forty years earlier, and considering its author’s Catholic affiliation, it may have been written with some similar, though milder, intent. Every nationality is represented and every age, from Lulu de Randan, sent vacationing with her governess to break off a flirtation with a tradesman’s son, to a fading Roman wife given to tearful sentimentality over the boyish young beauty she adores. Roughly there are two generations of lesbian women, among the older a poet who poses as a modern Sappho, a tailored Englishwoman who has bred bulldogs and supported boxeuses in Paris for a few decades, and Lulu’s Anglo-French mother. The younger group includes a stormy and self-defeating Greek concert pianist, an American hypochondriac, millionaire’s daughter, and the picturesque and irresistible poseuse, Rosalba Donsante, child of the third of her Swiss mother’s five international marriages. What plot there is centers about Rosalba and Aurora Freemantle, the Englishwoman, who finds the girl an incarnation of the boyish ideal she has celebrated in her lesbian verse for years. “Rory,” dreaming of permanence at last, remodels a villa halfway up to Anasirene at reckless expense, but her beloved is of no mind to be caged there, and leads practically every woman in the cast a hectic chase before the curtain falls upon her unheralded departure in pursuit of a last inamorata, leaving poor Rory in tears in her empty paradise.

The tale offers a potpourri of sophisticated intrigue fertilized by idleness and wealth. Its various types are superficially convincing enough, but they are largely unaccounted for beyond the influence of their frivolous environment. Many of the older women have been married at least once, and even young Lulu has narrowly missed a heterosexual entanglement before succumbing to Rosalba’s glamorous seduction. Few men enter upon the scene save hotel servants and one or two twittering homosexuals and eccentrics. Rory alone (physically as masculine as Stephen Gordon) is treated with some gentleness as a victim of hereditary forces, although even she is more ridiculous than appealing, and the total effect of the novel is one of cool detachment, the report of a witty and superior observer.

Among these outspoken narratives Miss Bowen’s quiet social comedy, The Hotel, is conspicuous for a sexual reticence as absolute as any before 1915. The hotel of her title, a conservative Riviera establishment frequented by professors, clergymen, retired officers and their families, provides a lively background for her understated central drama. In this, the actors are two: a British girl of twenty and a cosmopolitan widow twice her age with a son at school in Germany. (The action antedates World War I.) Sydney is ostensibly recuperating from overstudy for a recent university degree, and acting as companion to a married cousin. Actually, as she is wretchedly aware, her relatives have financed her holiday in the expectation of her capturing a husband. But Sydney is wholly absorbed in Mrs. Kerr. This exquisite worldling, of whom the other guests stand a bit in awe, accepts the girl’s small services and gifts with just enough warmth to keep her enslaved and the onlookers socially envious. Malicious gossip naturally flourishes over the bridge tables, and though it stops just short of slander, Sydney finds the association all in all more wearing than rewarding.

When the son arrives on holiday it is clear that he is held captive on a similar emotional leash, and Sydney’s intelligence recognizes that their charmer is playing one against the other and battening on their mutual jealousy. But not until, piqued at a black mood of Sydney’s, Mrs. Kerr accuses her of playing for a passionate response, and voices disdain for “emotions so unbalanced,” is she moved to rebellion. The injustice of the charge, when she has all but broken under the strain of emotional control, finally dissolves the spell. On the rebound Sydney tries being engaged to an estimable but rather colorless clergyman, but Mrs. Kerr’s brilliant subtlety has spoiled her for finding happiness in a commonplace association. Her final saddened conclusion is that the whole Hotel interlude has been a kind of lotus-eater’s dream bred of idleness in an artificial environment, and her only hope is that all its cloying preoccupations will fade with return to “reality” in England.

This study of heartless egotism may owe something to Regiment of Women, but it achieves the unity and detachment which Miss Dane’s study lacked. The problem here is simpler, of course; Mrs. Kerr’s beauty and assurance lead to conquest without effort, and aside from her vanity her own emotions are little involved. Of the pair, then, Sydney alone is variant, a telling example of that protracted adolescence which is common among the intellectually precocious. Her attaining adult perspective without benefit of a happy heterosexual romance marks Miss Bowen’s independence of current Freudian theory, a point of artistry in her favor. Another is her humorous vignette of a pair of elderly spinsters whose one-time variant devotion has withered into querulous possessiveness. All in all, pale aquarelle though The Hotel is among the year’s more positive canvases, its quiet statement carries authority.

Any cursory treatment of Mrs. Woolf’s Orlando must do it grave injustice, but here the emotional thread must be drawn from the rich fabric and examined as nearly as may be alone. No one yet has analyzed Orlando fully, and such critics as have not slighted it in discussing Mrs. Woolf’s work have tended to find it uneven and confusing. Complex it is indeed, but a part of the critical confusion has come from failure or refusal to recognize as perhaps its main theme the relation of intersexual traits to creative ability. It attempts in fact to sustain four parallel motifs. The most obvious is the biography of a timeless individual who enters as a boy of sixteen acquainted with Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, and is still living in October 1928 as an English woman of thirty-six. A second is the changing social roles of the two sexes from century to century and their consequently shifting relations to one another. A third is the corresponding fluctuation—perhaps resultant, perhaps only concomitant—in the emotional “Spirit of the Age” in English literature. This is least coherently traced and may be ignored here. The fourth and most cryptic is a parallel between the history of Orlando and the literary and perhaps personal biography of Mrs. Woolf’s colleague and friend, Victoria Sackville-West, more than one of whose photographs illustrate Orlando’s later career, and whose family estate of Knole is clearly pictured in the descriptions of Orlando’s ancestral house. (For judicious comment on this last motif and on Mrs. Woolf’s other variant references, the reader is referred to David Daiches’s laudatory study of her work published in 1942.[59])

In the sixteenth century Orlando is a budding poetic dramatist (as was Thomas Sackville, of the family living even then at Knole). As a debonair boy he lives the sexual life of a lusty age, and is far from innocent when in his late teens profound passion overtakes him. With a Russian girl-princess, niece of the ambassador from St. Petersburg, he lives out a burning romance worthy of the period, which ends tragically when Sasha sails for home without adieu. The Russian girl is no innocent either; she is secretive, older than he emotionally, though younger in years; he suspects her of dalliance with a muscovite sailor and even, after her desertion, of being the ambassador’s mistress rather than his niece. Though anything but masculine, she is robust and by spells cruel in temperament; she wears Russian trousers against the cold, and skates, rides and loves with the zest and endurance of another boy. But her desertion has a woman’s cruelty, and it throws Orlando presently into a state of delayed shock which produces a seven-day trance.

He emerges a melancholy seventeenth-century philosophic poet, ridden by a passion for fame. Soon he is stalked by a ridiculous and masculine Roumanian bluestocking who—perhaps because she is six-feet-two—plays the man’s role in the game of hearts. For a moment “Orlando heard ... far off the beating of love’s wings.” But at the point of becoming ensnared, suddenly “it was Lust the vulture, not Love the bird of paradise, that flopped foully and disgustingly upon his shoulders. Hence he ran....”[60]

He escapes by accepting a diplomatic post in Constantinople, where he achieves brilliant success until a local uprising terminates his mission. He lives in the ornate luxury befitting an emissary of Charles II to the Sultan, and becomes “the adored of many women and some men,” but only from a distance. In private he is still melancholy, and escapes to write poetry in the hills by day, by night to roam the city streets, where he meets a gypsy dancer, Pepita. With her he contracts a marriage of sorts and, rumor hints, has a trio of offspring. This episode is sketched so briefly that one can only guess at its significance. It cannot well have repeated the early romance with Sasha, since she was a court lady of brilliant culture and Pepita is a daughter of the streets. But neither can it have echoed the passage with the Archduchess Harriet. Honest passion for an illiterate woman does not inspire the self-loathing bred of an itch for an otherwise hateful social and intellectual peer. Whatever it meant to Orlando, after the uprising ends his official services, he bestows a farewell embrace upon the gypsy and falls into his second seven-day trance. It may be that this one registered inability to endure an emotional impasse any longer.

From it he awakes a woman, but Mrs. Woolf lays stress on the fact that the change is merely one of physical sex and not at all of temperament.

The sound of trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being since the world began has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.[61]

With the gypsies (not apparently Pepita’s clan) to whom Orlando escapes, she still lives a man’s life, for among nomads, temperament and daily duties are much the same in both sexes. After some seasons of successful adaptation to this barbaric simplicity, nostalgia for England and for literary pursuits turns Orlando toward home. And now she faces the difficult business of learning to act the lady. High comedy attends her efforts, particularly in connection with a renewed pursuit by her former bête noire, the bluestocking, who now through a transformation corresponding to her own is an absurd and lachrymose Roumanian nobleman. Amid the relaxed proprieties of the eighteenth century, Orlando often roams London in man’s dress, more at home in the honest company of daughters of joy than in the artificial salons of her peers.

There were many stories told at the time, as, that she fought a duel, served on one of the King’s ships as a captain, was seen to dance naked on a balcony, and fled with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady’s husband followed them.... She enjoyed the love of both sexes ... for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive.[62]

The neatness with which fantasy here dodges any scandalous implications may well account for the difficult tour de force which the whole volume is.

With the advent of Queen Victoria, a depressing social change occurs: humankind is rigorously divided into Men, whose role is to lead, protect, support; and Women, who must submit, be timorous, and cling. The results, both personal and literary, Mrs. Woolf plainly considers lamentable. Orlando’s history turns emotionally barren and housewifely, and neither reading nor writing afford her any relief. Though she suffers from personal loneliness and social disapprobation, she refuses to consider marriage under such a regime. She waits instead for the twentieth century:

There was something definite and distinct about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a distinction, a desperation....[63]

In this century she meets a man with the spirit of a poet—he knows Shelley by heart—but who has also been “a soldier and a sailor and ... explored the east.” Mutual love is instantaneous, and complete union follows swiftly upon the intuitive moment when both cry out together: “You’re a woman, Shel!” “You’re a man, Orlando!”

For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.[64]

The natural and happy results are marriage and a son, but not a Victorian ménage. “Shel” is gone the greater part of the time on his adventurous voyages, and Orlando is free to “write and write and write” and win literary prizes.

Clearly Mrs. Woolf felt that to be an integrated, and above all, a creative personality, one needs freedom from the Procrustes’ bed of sex. She was not preaching license in the name of some bohemian deity of Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village. She was begging psychological Lebensraum for the creative artist. Nevertheless, the total sum of Orlando’s experience is, beyond question, bisexual.

Among these four novels of 1928, Mackenzie’s satire was mild rather than sharp; Miss Bowen pictured variance as an unhappy state but treated her variant girl with entire sympathy; and Mrs. Woolf pled as it were in the abstract, Miss Hall in passionate particular, for the variant, even the lesbian woman of personal integrity. The annual balance was, therefore, on the whole positive, and it is clear that the verdict early in the year against Well of Loneliness restrained British publishers only from issuing lesbian propaganda.