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"Spoiled Identity": Stephen Gordon's Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History

Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed—it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men.”1 Nietzsche’s diatribe against the “born failure” in The Genealogy of Morals anticipates a common reaction to the heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. A few months after the novel’s obscenity trial, a verse lampoon titled The Sink of Solitude appeared, mocking the fate of “pathetic post-war lesbians.”2 The following year Janet Flanner, writing more coolly in the New Yorker, quipped that Hall’s “loneliness was greater than had been supposed.”3 From the moment of its publication, readers balked at the novel’s melodramatic account of what Hall called “the tragical problem of sexual inversion.”4 But the readers who have reacted most adversely to the novel’s dark portrait of inverted life are those whose experience Hall claimed to represent. The Well, still the most famous and most widely read lesbian novel, is also the novel most hated by lesbians themselves. Since gay liberation Hall’s novel has been singularly out of step with the discourse of gay pride. One reader, voicing a common reaction, said that she “consider[ed] this book very bad news for lesbians.”5 According to a model of readerly contagion not unlike the poisoning effect of ressentiment that Nietzsche traces in the Genealogy, Hall’s account of Stephen Gordon’s life is a depressing spectacle that must undermine life among lesbians. With its inverted heroine and its tragic view of same-sex relations, The Well has repeatedly come into conflict with contemporary understandings of the mean-