Windows of Loneliness: domestic and public spheres in The Well of Loneliness

Windows act as the threshold between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere. Patriarchal society encodes gender into these spaces: the domestic sphere as supposedly the realm of women and the public sphere as that of men. Thus arbitrarily coding spaces however relies upon the acceptance of a gender binary. A character such as Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness, whose gender identity disrupts the gender binary, then disrupts the gendered coding of these spaces. Furthermore, the window gains yet greater significance in its liminality because of this disruption.

During Stephen's childhood and adolescence at Morton, Radclyffe Hall often situates Stephen in the public sphere. While her father is alive, Stephen's freedom in activity and behaviour is not so strictly curtailed as it might be - that is to say that her father dilutes attempts of social conditioning on the basis of the sex assigned her at birth - and so Stephen has greater access to spaces that are dominated by men. Hall uses Stephen's relative freedom to subvert the positioning of women at the window, gazing outwards into a sphere in which their movements would be severely restricted - as Virginia Woolf exemplifies in A Room of One's Own. Instead, Stephen in her youth sees the windows of Morton as beckoning her home, as if the house itself is a character of ‘most compassionate kindness’ (p.109) and acceptance: ‘she fancied that Morton was thinking about her, for its windows seemed to be beckoning, inviting: “Come home, come home, come inside quickly, Stephen!”’ (ibid.). While Stephen sees Morton as part of her identity throughout the novel, looking upon the windows from the outside, beckoning her in, suggests that the home is Other to Stephen, more analogous to the way in which one might identify with a relative: sharing a common background, sharing a sense of connection and belonging somewhat but still distinctly separate. Moreover, Stephen’s understanding of Morton as home is not confined to the physical building but encompasses its grounds, as well as the surrounding environment as far as Stephen may see. In this way, Stephen's place in the domestic sphere and the public sphere is blurred: she both identifies strongly with her home, but her sense of home permeates beyond what we may conventionally consider as the domestic sphere, by absorbing in from the public sphere.

When Stephen's mother is made explicitly aware of Stephen's sexual orientation, Stephen's forced exile complicates her positioning within domestic and public spheres. Stephen cannot remain at home in Morton and, upon visiting, she feels disconnected: ‘she would feel like a stranger within the gates, an unwanted stranger there only on sufferance. […] its windows no longer beckoned, invited: “Come home, come home, come inside quickly Stephen!”’ (p.230). Her public appearances with her mother however must suggest of no scandal - no change - so Stephen's public persona must become a lie. This isolates Stephen and only by Jonathan Brockett's recognition of Stephen's queer identity can she again have a public life, albeit subcultural and exiled.

Within the circles of the Parisian subculture, Stephen and her partner Mary meet Jamie and Barbara. Frequently Hall aligns the two couples - Mary in particular often notes their similarity - so as to insinuate the parallels that the reader may draw between the couples in terms of character, dynamics and plotline. Hall describes Jamie and Barbara's dwelling in distinctly gloomy terms – ‘the distempered grey walls were a mass of stains, for whenever it hailed or rained or snowed the windows and skylight would always start dripping’ (p.394) -- but with ‘an eye-shaped window that would not open’ (p.395) in one of the rooms. In and of itself this window may have little significance - it is not the site of any significant plot development in the narrative, but as Jamie and Barbara's tragic ending foreshadows Stephen and Mary's own tragedy, we would do well to bear it in mind in the final scenes of The Well of Loneliness.

As the narrative draws to a close, the window at the threshold of the domestic sphere once again becomes of great significance. From the window of Stephen's bedroom that faces on the courtyard, she watches on as her final sacrifice – giving ‘light to those who live in darkness’ (p.482) -- pushes Mary into the relative protection of a relationship that will be read in society as heterosexual and therefore acceptable by the standards of the wider population – no longer an exiled relationship. As Mary and Martin disappear out of sight, the room fills with the spirits of inverts in a great culmination of queer purgatory. The imagery denoting purgatory finally situates Hall's undeniably queer characters in this liminal space from which they may only ever look upon a society which rejects them and infringes upon them – as the rain and snow leak into Jamie and Barbara’s studio -- without the freedom to truly integrate themselves in the public sphere – the eye-shaped window will not open -- while they remain isolated in the relative safety of exile within a queer domestic sphere. Here, Stephen indubitably learns that ‘the loneliest place in this world is the no-man’s land of sex’ (p.79).

- Ruth Tolerton

‘Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence’: Orlando as an intertextual space for women, writing and literature.

Orlando acts a text that is a literary space where women and writing as a profession can be discussed. For Woolf, this text and the temporal space it occupies, has closest compositional genesis with her work A Room of One’s Own. Although much of her other work, including her short stories permeate around both texts. Orlando is a text which is also referential in its historical and contemporary literatures. Woolf utilises this to discuss ideas of gender, expectation and profession. This post considers these concerns, exploring Orlando as prism rather than a one dimensional shape.

Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, establishes the fictional concept of Shakespeare’s sister Judith. Judith’s own creative and critical output is ignored in Elizabethan culture and Woolf determines this predisposition down to her sex and gender. At the beginning of Orlando, the figure of the Elizabethan Orlando is able to achieve literary success in sonnets and plays, because he can, simply by his sex and gender being identified as male. By historicising this dichotomy as a space where this creative and critical output can achieve success simply by the nature of one’s gender, Woolf is using this as a demonstration of the problems women face in terms of their own professional identity. As the figure of Orlando transcends historical periods and gender, the unfinished nature of the work The Oak Tree is constantly interrupted by the difficulties he/she faces by this gender shift. It is only when the novel reaches its conclusion in contemporary 1928, that Orlando feels able to write uninterrupted.

However, this freedom of purpose is not as simple as this. Orlando is still a woman who has the financial and social means to establish her aim of finishing her work. And, the assumption that this attempt is a fleeting and non-serious concern for women still has potent political and social currency in 1928. Towards the end of the novel it is reflected ‘Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and woman in the prime of her life, she will soon give over the pretence of writing and begin to think of a gamekeeper (as long as she thinks of a man, no one objects to a woman thinking’ (p.133). Whilst this is an indirect reference to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it is a further permeation of what the text means in terms of women and writing. Placed at the end of the novel, it is a stoppage where Orlando and her profession can be examined and linked back to the beginning of the novel – and these same problems about gender, and professional purpose can be considered.

‘For masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common.’

A Room of One’s Own, p.68.

The literary inheritance that Orlando as text uses and what it seeks to provide to literature is an interesting space too. Woolf, who further establishes this later in AROO, as provided in the quote above makes use of this ‘thinking in common’ to achiever her own subtle aims. The use of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as previously mentioned, also acts as a contextual reference. The novel had recently been banned for its moral and sexual divergence from accepted norms, and Woolf is making sutble use of this and the societal contradictions it offers in the roles of women. Earlier in the novel, the parodic reversal the roles Jane and Rochester in Jane Eyre is used when Orlando meets her husband for the first time, when Orlando is found laying upon the moorland. Whilst this is seen as parodic, it acts as another illustration of what the text is seeking to achieve in terms of role reversal and gendered contradiction.  

Whilst the full potential and establishment of women and writing is never fully realised in Orlando, the text makes bold and innovative statements about the problems that surround that debate, one which Woolf would further strengthen and articulate throughout her literary and critical career. The text is an open space, and this has allowed it to interact and influence other texts in terms of gender construction and identity. Woolf ends the novel with ‘And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty-Eight.’ (p.162).  This lasting statement, finishes the novel with an optimistic look towards a future, whilst acknowledging the difficulties of the past and present. Its persistence is all the more prevalent, 1928, being the year of Universal suffrage for women. 

Ieuan Rees is an MA student at Cardiff University. He specialises in Twentieth-Century studies.