Thinking Sex: D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall and the Socialization ofModem Texts

David Balzer Department ofEnglish McGill University, Montreal

Submitted December, 2001

A thesis submitted to the Faculty ofGraduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment ofthe requirements ofthe degree ofMaster ofArts.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstracts (English / Français) ....Page 2

Acknowledgements ....Page 4

Introduction ....Page 5

Chapter 1 ....Page 9

Chapter 2 ...Page 31

Chapter 3 and Conclusion ...Page 64

Works Cited and Consulted ...Page 98 Balzer 2

ABSTRACTS

i. English

This thesis is an examination ofsex in D. H. Lawrence's Lady ChatterIey 's Lover and Radclyffe Hall's The Weil ofLoneliness as it relates to the social, linguistic and political elements ofliterary modernism. Both novels "think sex," allowing specifie concepts ofsex to act as methods ofcommunication between artists and readers. By writing sex, Hall and Lawrence address the modem reader, providing a script for ideal readerly and writerly approaches to the novel. The first chapter examines contemporary cultural and gender theory's understanding ofthe relationship between sex and discourse and relates this to political and literary considerations ofmodernism. The second chapter looks at psychosexual rnedical texts that influenced modernism's understanding ofsex and art; the final chapter examines "thinking sex" in Lady ChatterIey 's Lover and The

Weil ofLoneliness by examining the content and reception ofboth works.

Il. Français

Ce mémoire examine le sexe présent dans les oeuvres Lady Chatterley's Lover de

D.H. Lawrence et The WeIl ofLoneliness de Radclyffe Hall dans le mesure où il est relié aux éléments linguistiques et politiques du modernisme litéraire. Il y est soutenu que les deux romans "pensent le sexe", ou proposent des démarches par lesquelles le sexe agirait comme un moyen de communication pour les artistes et les lecteurs. En écrivant des actes sexuelles, les auteurs visent à s'adresser directement aux lecteurs modernes, fournissant un scénario, pour le lecteur ainsi que pour l'écricain, pour la façon idéale d'aborder Balzer 3

l'oeuvre artistique. Le premier chapitre examine les théories contemporaires des sexes et

de la culture traitants de la relation entre le sexe et le discours et reli celles-çi au

modernisme politique et litéraire. Le deuxième chapitre se centre sur des textes médicaux

psychosexuelles qui ont infuencé les pensées du modernisme sur le sexe et l'art. Le

dernier chapitre analyse le "sexe pensé" dans Lady Chatterley's Lover et The WeIl of

Loneliness en regardent à la fois leur contenu et leur réception a leur parution.

------_._------Balzer4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1would like to thank, in particular, my advisor, Dr. Miranda Hickman, for her always­

constructive criticism, and for her assiduous oversight and shaping ofthese ideas from their vaguest initial conceptions. My thanks must also go to Lindsay Holmgren, Derek

Aubichon, Maria Simpson, MarIa Balzer, Simon Dardick and Vicki Marcok, for being a

sounding board and an invaluable support system. Last, and most importantly, 1would

like to thank my parents, Ron and Hannelore Balzer, without whom this thesis would not

be complete. Balzer 5

INTRODUCTION

This paper is about sex, but like most academic considerations ofsex, it bears very little resemblance to the act itself. This is a study ofsex as a social, linguistic and political concept; here, sex must remain discursive, sustained only as an ideal. This is also a study ofsex as it relates to literary modernism, a period marked by the emergence ofbrand new discourses on sex and sexuality, and a period that, as 1 will argue, enacts a thoroughgoing conceptualization ofsex. 1 choose two best-selling, banned novels from

1928 to illustrate the relationship between sex and modernism: D.H. Lawrence's Lady

ChatterIey 's Lover and Radclyffe Hall's The Well ofLoneliness. Well and Lady

Chatterley's indictments (1928-30 and 1959/60, respectively), as weIl as their mutual fame as books ofsexual scandaI, provide initial reasons for this coupling. Ofcourse, both are aIse about affairs: Lady ChatterIey presents a relationship between Constance

Chatterley and her Oliver Mellors with frankness and strong language, and Well of

Loneliness posits a sentimental plea for heroine Stephen Gordon's lesbian desires and subsequent relationships.

1 argue that both Hall and Lawrence consider sex in remarkably similar ways, despite superficiaI, and immediately apparent, disparities ofsexuality. Lady Chatterley may be a prototypical straight narrative, and The Weil ofLoneliness a classic oflest>ian fiction, but it is on the topic ofsex that Lawrence and Hall have the most in common.

Both posit "good" sex in their novels as a Platonic convergence, a gesture of"purity": the kind ofsex that the sexologists oftheir day most often approved of. Sometimes

Hall's and Lawrence's sex is entirely conceptual, even laced with an asexuality that transcends physical action. Here, sex confidently enters the realm ofthe discursive, often Balzer 6 becoming entirely conversationaI. But this sex act is as social as it is intimate, looking outside the bedroom and into the world. By removing sex from its physical gestures,

Lawrence and Hall seek to further connect a practice of''thinking sex" to readerly communities. They speak ofreproduction in its many modern forms - aesthetic, mechanical and sexual - and allow it to serve as the ultimate goal ofthis conceptual union. Like the politicians oftheir day, they use sex and biology as a way to articulate one's relation to astate, to a readership, to modernity. Reproduction occurs in Lady

Chatteriey and Well in order to serve this purpose, to posit the novel as something that bears new and different discursive children, giving meaning to a compulsively shifting modern society that constantly claims it is in need ofsorne stable means ofregeneration.

Sexology provides a framework for my reading ofHall's and Lawrence's conceptualizing ofsex, as does recent work on the connection between sexology and modernism by Lisa Rado and Wayne Koestenbaum. Rado and Koestenbaum explore, as

1 do, issues ofsexual identity (as it spans the personal and national) and aesthetics that recur again and again in the works ofRichard von Krafft Ebing, Havelock Ellis and

Edward Carpenter. Rado's work in particular allows me to posit a number ofconnections between modernism and sexology. To begin, sexology texts identify the artist as sexual, suggesting that artistic growth mirrors sexual development. Many moderns take these configurations ofaesthetic and sexual identity seriously; as Rado notes in The Modern

Androgyne Imagination, modernists "felt the weight" ofpsychosexual studies. The writers ofthis study certainly bear this weight demonstratively, making overt connections in their novels between artistic and sexual identity: Radclyffe Hall through Stephen

Gordon shows the relationship between a writer's ability and her sexual (or sexologicaI) Balzer 7

self-knowledge; Lawrence, though writing ofstraight sex, follows Hall in his depiction of

Connie Chatterley's concurrent sexual and ideological awakening. Furthermore, l add to both Rado's and Koestenbaum's studies by arguing that sexology sees sex as more than a

personal, biological phenomenon, and instead connects the sexual selfwith the functionally social self. Edward Carpenter, for instance, suggests that the homosexual

artist be a self-actualized part ofmodern society by generating art, which, he argues, takes the conceptual place ofstraight reproduction. Lawrence and Hall use these utilitarian proclivities to calI attention to their own novels as similarly functional, society­ driven artworks that, through a consideration ofsex, attempt to communicate with and to improve a modern readership-cum-citizenship.

Ultimately, largue that both Lawrence and Hall use sex, like their sexological contemporaries, to suggest ways in which the modern reader and the modern artist, both as members ofa modern society, should approach aesthetics. For Hall and Lawrence, sex is a way ofarticulating aesthetic goals and is thus more than a private interaction, the stuffofillicit affairs. In both works, sex takes on proportions both national and mythic;

Hall's and Lawrence's writing on sex often acts as an aesthetic manifesto, forcefully articulating a literary work's relationship to culture through sex. Both novels, moreover, are scripts for ideal writerly and readerly behaviour, and both speak ofa communion that is sexual, aesthetic and, most importantly, social: in this way, Hall and Lawrence address the modern reader and the modern nation, offering literaI and conceptual sex as a means ofregeneration for an ailing society. l thus refute critical configurations ofmodernism as antisocial, isolated and individual. Instead, l give two popular examples ofsex and art as twin preoccupations ofa very gregarious genre. Through the trope ofmodern sex, Balzer 8 through the very discursivity ofthe modem sex act, the modemism that 1 examine is, certainly in part, interested in interaction and collaboration with a considerably nationalized readership. Balzer 9

CHAPTER ONE: THINKING SEX

Writers have always been dependent on models oflove, sex and desire to describe aesthetics. From Plato onwards, the artist is not only figured as a lover, but aIso as an emissary, communing, merging with, and gleaning from a conceptual other in the act of creation. Further, the text generated by inspiration is often a sexualized (or at least biologized) child, the product ofthis inspirational copulation. Sir Philip Sidney's

Apologyfor Poetry, for instance, though certainly not the first to do so, sees the artwork as poetic offspring, either a misunderstood prodigal son or a "bastard" from a Muse "got with child." Milton's Artist-God in Paradise Lost also creates: bis is a verdant universe made possible through a series ofandrogynous copulations, containing two beings who are responsible for further biological and intellectual creation. Even the self-reflexive

Romantics do not neglect models ofcollaborative desire in their confrontations with inspiration. From Wordsworth's innocent yet passionate invocation ofhis sister Dorothy in "Tintern Abbey," to the darker, perverse encounters ofLord Byron's Manfred, Samuel

Coleridge's Christobel and Percy Shelley's Alastor, Romanticism depends on sexual communion to evoke the fruits ofcreative experiences at the limit ofindividual imagination.

Sex and desire's prevalence, evinced in these examples, is, in part, easy to account for. Ifone understands "sex" - irrespective, for the moment, ofits widely multiple connotations - as a meeting and commingling ofentities, then it is not surprising that literature is frequently its analog. After aIl, literature is by nature communicative; it is a negotiation and an exchange between participants, among them artist, artwork, medium, society, and ideology. Literature and sex both attempt a dialogism that strives Balzer 10

toward ultimate union. Like the collaborative experience ofloyers described by Roland

Barthes in A Lover's Discourse, the "single flash" and "simultaneous proffering" of

meaning between sex partners is reminiscent ofthe exchange between writers, readers

and artwork (quoted in Koestenbaum, 9). That said, there are a complex oflinks between

sex and literature that are less figurative, and indeed more problematic. As Jerome

McGann notes in his introduction to The Textual Condition, "The sexual event itself-­

which is, as the poets have always known, a model ofthe textual condition--involves far

more than the intercourse ofreproductive organs ... the sexual event organizes a vast

network ofrelated acts ofintercourse at the personal as weIl as more extended social

levels: courtship rituals, domestic economies, political exchanges, and so forth" (3).

Thus literature, like sex, does not - as much as we would like it to - simply imply

physical union.

Ifone is to see sex as a communicative gesture, then it is essential to understand just how this very physical act enters the domain ofthe discursive. Gender, cultural, and

literary critics alike now agree that part ofthe answer lies in the means by which we

choose to articulate and explain sex. As cultural theorist Thomas Laqueur observes, the

sexual body relates "our needs in speaking about it" (115). As soon as we speak about

the sexual body - indeed as soon as we speak - we reveal countIess codes and anxieties,

unintentionally declaring our language-based conceptions ofgender, politics and society

and, in doing so, betraying (among other things) our immediate cultural condition. As

Laqueur and (by association) Michel Foucault argue, "sex" is recreated and redefined in

the variable cultural moment: sex as we now understand it, even at its seemingly most

fundamental core, is not the same sex that was "made" (to use Laqueur's phrase) five Balzer Il

hundred years ago. Thus, it is not the sex acts, largely, that change, but instead our ways

oftalking about them. Take, for example, Foucault's discussion ofhomosexuality in The

History ofSexuality where, before the tum ofthe century, male sex is not a sexual

identity, not an "orientation," at aIl. Male sodomy, previously a perverse practice, only

becomes ontological "homosexuality" through language; as Foucault notes in an oft­

quoted passage from the study, "the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the

homosexual was now a species" (323).

Foucault not only asserts in History ofSexuality that sex is made by language, but

also that it is restricted, mutilated and multiplied by it. Here, discourse becomes as much

a part ofsex as genital intercourse, literaIly engendering sexualities that do not exist apart

from 1inguistic structures. Thus as Foucault talks ofsexual activities becoming species,

he cleverly endows the very language he uses with the sexual and procreative qua1ities of

the physical act ofsex and subsequent procreation. He speaks, for instance, ofnew

"perverts" given "strange baptismal names" by sexologists, as ifeach new taxonomie

qualification was itself a newbom infant. To Foucault, this linguistic infant takes the

place ofan actual human, developing as a concept faster than a person ever would. Initial

names given by sexologists to perversions become procreative in and ofthemselves;

emerging discourses ofsexology ultimately "produc[e] more species" that have no

tangible analog in nature. Here are children, a ''whole alien strain," that are the result of

our compulsion to make sex into language and oflanguage's strange ability to act as an

organic, procreating thing.

In aIl ofits different guises, important critical writing on sex over the past thirty years recognizes, like Foucault's seminal study, that to discuss sex is really to discuss Balzer 12 modes ofthinking. When Judith Butler criticizes Julia Kristeva's use ofthe figure ofthe maternaI body, for instance, she, in effect, professes the futility of"counting on" assumed ways ofarticulating sex; she negates the existence ofany utterance ofsex or gender that lies outside oflanguage. Butler understands sex as a network ofgender codes that are entirely constructed, one-hundred-percent-made, by language, refusing any essentialist, even biologie, notions ofsex. In Butler, sex and gender are impossible to conceive of without the constraint oflanguage and texts; sex depends on a language that compulsively, artificially defines and enforces it. Butler is important here because she suggests extreme ways in which language reifies sex and gender: "thinking sex" is

"making sex" in her view; sex and gender are indistinguishable from discourse.

Similarly, Eve Sedgwick's work on Henry James speaks ofsexuality as discourse, and ofdiscourse as a sex act. Here, the dominant framework ofa text sustains queer sex (like fisting in ''The Beast in the Jungle") precisely because that text makes strident efforts to elide it. When narratives attempt to soothe and silence queer sex, they flirt with the very act they wish to silence, compelling it into an elaborate language ofits own. In Sedgwick, sex acts are made possible by text acts, and the main narrative highlights, actualizes perversity - 'lhinks" it - even in its attempts to brush it away.

What would Radc1yffe Hall and D. H. Lawrence think ofSedgwick, Butler,

Laqueur and Foucault? Would these critics' notion ofsex and language's intimate alliance satisfy them? In A Propos ofLady ChatterIey 's Lover, Lawrence posits a connection between sex and thought, in a passage Foucault himselfquotes in the final pages ofHistory ofSexuality: "1 want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and c1eanly ... Now our business is to realize sex. To-day the full Balzer 13 conscious realization ofsex is even more important than the act itself' (85). Foucault uses this passage to suggest, at least in part, Lawrence's naiveté; he daims Lawrence's association ofspeaking sex with notions ofliberation ignores language's inherent tendency toward the restrictions ofdiscursive sex. In this light, Lawrence and Hall (for she, too, connects free articulation ofsex with liberty) seem antithetical to these contemporary critical theorists: while Foucault et al associate a discursive "realization" ofsex with restraint, Hall and Lawrence encourage the speaking ofsex as a release, a solution for societal ills. Yet, Lawrence's assertion that the realization ofsex is more important than "the act itself' is telling. Like Foucault, Lawrence realizes that it is possible to make sex into a language that transcends, or at least builds on, the basics of biology. He also acknowledges that a discursive sex act is highly powerful, and that it speaks compellingly on a cultural and on a nationallevel. Lawrence and Hall may be unusually hopeful about the beneficent articulation ofsex to society, but they insist, as poststruetrualist gender theorists do, that sex is a forceful way to think ofand articulate society, culture and politics.

For Lawrence, then, "thinking sex" does not mean simply writing about the act.

A Propos caUs for a merging ofmind and body that affects a "realization" ofsex acts, demanding a liberal channeling ofsex into everyday thought processes and activities.

Lawrence gives his opinion on literature's part in this process at the beginning ofLady

Chatteriey 's Lover, in a passage that describes Connie's first relationships with men:

And ifafter the roused intimacy ofthese vivid and soul-enlightened discussions

the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It marked the end ofa

chapter. It had a thrill ofits own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a Balzer 14

final spasm ofself-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of

asterisks that can be put to show the end ofa paragraph, and a break in the theme

(8).

Lawrence's self-conscious prose relates the orgasm to the structural methods ofdosure in a novel: the end ofa chapter or paragraph, "the last word," a "row ofasterisks."

Obviously, sex is figured as a mode ofarticulation here, though it is not so important that sex is the explicit topic. Rather, it is the conversation preceding the sex act that is impetus for this physical intimacy. Talk, ofthe "soul-enlightening" and not necessarily openly sexual kind, leads to sex; language, equivalent and perhaps superior to flirting and touching, allows for contact with lovers. Lawrence lets sexual gestures infiltrate literary gestures, and insists that, as a perfect pair, sex naturally follow discourse.

But Lawrence'sand Raddyffe Hall's attempts at "thinking sex" go beyond assertions ofsex and literature's similar function; again like Foucault, both daim that the pairing ofsex and literature results in a highly specifie and complex social discourse.

Foucault's species ofperverts in History ofSexuality, and his understanding ofthese species as linguistic babies, is similar to the way in which both writers attempt to "think sex." Both see the union ofsex and language as a curious semiotic procreation; both portray sexual relationships as highly communicative social acts, where the sexual union ofa couple literally speaks and thinks ideas through language and gesture to society and culture; both portray the socially directed ideas that are the result ofsex and language's union as babies. This union and creation, however, unlike Foucault's, is impossible without individual readers; as Rita Felski notes, ''What is missing from Foucault's version is any substantive account ofthe ... interaction, conflict and negotiation between Balzer 15 the discourses ofsexual science, other aspects ofnineteenth- [and twentieth-] century culture, and the experiential realities ofhuman subjects" (2). The importance of interaction with individuals in order to perform this ideological procreation is, in fact, the centre ofHall's and ofLawrence's particular method ofthinking sex. For them, a powerful pairing ofsex and language asks the reader to interact (and at times copulate) with a text; the author may have a sexually-charged experience with inspiration when she or he creates, but unless this experience can again be enacted through the resulting interaction between text and reader, a fully elaborate experience ofHallianiLawrencian thinking sex will not occur.

Thus language in Hall and Lawrence not only copulates: it procreates. New meanings are children, generated through language. "Thinking sex" is a way of acknowledging the power oflanguage to act in a specifically sexual manner as it tells of the relationship between a very social network ofreaders, writers and artwork. Of course, this means that in both Lady ChatterIey 's Lover and The WeIl ofLoneliness, sex is never just sex. Indeed, it always carries with it an ideological and a conceptual weight; it is the basis ofmeaning in both novels, and asks to be read as each author's statement on the function ofmodem aesthetics. It is not for nothing that Hall describes Stephen's novel, the proxy for her newly developing lesbian feelings, as generative - something that

"intends to get bom" - or that Oliver Mellors' final synopsis ofhis affair with Constance

Chatterley is the self-aggrandizing, "We fucked a flame into being" (316). Balzer 16

Ifsex, as a discourse, responds, as Foucault and others note, to the cultural moment in which it is uttered, it follows that Hall's and Lawrence's respective articulation ofsex in their novels reflects the political, aesthetic and cultural moment of modernism. In fact, the positing of"thinking sex" in A Propos ofLady Chatterley's

Lover is Lawrence's response to what he sees as an acutely modern problem. Thus he addresses his dictum to ''today,'' "our age": he not only discusses the Lady Chatterley of the title, but also (and more often) denounces the "counterfeit" and "sexless" behaviour ofmodern society, including the "sexual moron," the new businessman and ''the modern young jazzy." "Thinking sex" becomes a salve for a national problem, the regenerative proposition for "a sexless England" (104). Like Lady ChatterIey, Hall's Weil of

Loneliness also willingly places itselfwithin the political and social context ofmodern society. It is a "landmark text," acutely conscious that it has, to use Jane Tompkins' phrase, "cultural work" to do (xv). A 1929 New York Herald Tribune review of Weil suggests that it is not literary at aIl, but is instead "more ofa sermon than a story, a passionate plea for the world's understanding and sympathy, [and] as much a novel of problem and purpose as Uncle Tom's Cabin" (quoted by Brittain, 150-1). Una

Troubridge's biography ofHall confirms this, detailing the author's wish to proclaim their love to modemity through the novel: this newly public love will better their own relationship, other "inverted" relationships and, ultimately, society at large (84).

Eventually, as the book gained momentum in sales and press, Hall went so far as to appoint herselfmodern spokesperson for all inverts (Baker, 249).

Both authors' eager positioning oftheir work as public texts does not necessarily bring to mind preconceptions ofliterary modemism. Traditional (i.e., "high") modemism Balzer 17

is supposed to be difficult and removed: to the appreciative, it is epistemological,

conceptual, and spatial; to the unappreciative, it is (to use Virginia Woolfs words on

James Joyce's Ulysses in A Writer 's Diary) "diffuse," "brackish" and "pretentious."

Astradur Eysteinsson, in his exhaustive detailing ofthe critica1 evolution ofgeneric

conceptions of"modemism," discusses the common critical perception ofthe genre's

move away from the outside world and into the antisociality ofthe human unconscious:

... in view ofprevious literary history, modemism is felt to signal a radical

'inward tum' in literature, and often a more thorough exploration ofthe human

psyche than is deemed to have been probable or even possible in pre-Freudian

times. But this inward tum is also widely held to have ruptured the conventional

ties between the individual and society (26).

This passage recalls the dense stream ofconsciousness ofJoyce's Ulysses, or the almost

unbearable introspection ofWilliam Faulkner works like Absalom! Absalom! and As1

Lay Dying. Such revered modemist prose experiments suggest the relationship between

selfand society as fraught and remote. Poetic works like T. S. Eliot's Waste Land and

"Love Song of1. Alfred Prufrock" and Pound's Cantos similarly recoil from intimacy

and yearn for impossible modes ofregeneration in a fragmentary modem world. Further,

the New Critical work ofJohn Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks

accompanying these works sees modemism as complex and curiously hermetic, valid

only for its formaI intricacies and prolific mytho-historic negotiations. Their affective

and intentional fallacies (which refuse the subjective interpretation ofa work ofliterature

by individual readers and artists) assert the notion ofa public text only in so far as that

text eradicates subjeetivism and privileges a non-existent, idealized reader. As David H.

--~------Balzer 18

Richter notes, the New Critics' public text is not really public at ail, because it is intentionally cut offfrom the world, isolated "as a 'verbal icon' ... whose form [is] to be found entirely within itself' (729).

Ofcourse, poststructuralist modemist criticism changed ail ofthis. Recent work ofcritics like Bonnie Kime Scott, Lawrence Rainey, Shari Benstock and Wayne

Koestenbaum opens the study ofmodemism to include considerations ofgender, sexualityand economy, expanding previous notions ofthe movement as exclusively antisocial or elite. We now understand that imposed aesthetic enclosures by artists and critics could not - as much as (primarily male) modemists tried to argue - relegate the genre to a place outside ofsociety, cultural readership and contemporary history.

Benstock's landmark 1986 study, Women ofthe LeitBank, for instance, documents previously neglected women modemists (among them Radclyffe Hall), and insists on literary modemism's dependence on sociocultural circumstance. Benstock reconsiders Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Djuna Bames and Gertrude Stein not only as modemist artists in their own right, but as collaborators who provide essential creative fodder for their better known male counterparts: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and

Hemingway, respectively. Benstock's study marked a new configuration ofthe movement as a polyglot ofartists, entrepreneurs, joumalists, publishers, socia1ites, and, importantly, readers, ail ofwhom contributed to a variety ofmodemisms (now plural).

Sylvia Beach, vis-à-vis her Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore collaborated with James Joyce in the publication ofUlysses; Adrienne Monier, her partner, collaborated just as importantly with modemist readers through her lending library across the street. As both women's endeavours reveal, the shape ofmodem texts depended on material conditions. Balzer 19

For example, money and censorship were serious considerations in Beach's publication

ofUlysses (she risked both her bookstore and her reputation to see through its

publication) and Monier's library provided an essential service (as did the residences of

the wealthier Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein) for destitute modernists in search of

places to read, write and eat.

Critics now recognize such socioeconomic considerations as important to the

study ofmodernist literature. Tim Materer's "Make it Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises

Modemism" in Stephen Watt and Kevin Dettmar's 1996 anthology Marketing

Modernisms, for instance, suggests the movement's engagement in contemporary

advertising and propagandist discourses. Pound's aggressive promotion ofImagism takes

cues from similarly imagistic advertising enterprises ofthe early twentieth century,

evident in both Pound's professed poetic tenets and within the chocolate and tire ads of

the very magazine (The Little Review) that served as Imagism's forum. As bestsellers,

The Weil ofLoneliness and Lady Chatteriey 's Lover follow these marketing techniques.

Lawrence (who, ironically, called Imagism "just an advertising scheme") frets over the

appearance ofhis novel as a public commodity in A Propos. Weil, inarguably a sensation

at the end of 1928, made a caricature/star out ofHall and even spurred a theatrical

adaptation. Both authors have an intense desire for their books to sell, and both are

propagandist and opportunist marketers oftheir art. Both, moreover, feel that the wide

circulation oftheir books fulfills their roles as literary-cum-social texts; in this context, a

study ofthe socially directed sex text would be impossible without a material focus.

Finally, recent studies suggest how tbis modem materialist consciousness merges with evolving cultural conceptions ofgender and sexual identity. Writing by critics like Balzer 20

Lisa Rado and Wayne Koestenbaum expands modemism beyond the heterosexual, male canonical figures that for years were the unparalleled voices ofthe genre. Koestenbaum and Rado suggest that sex and sexuality are a tricky yet important means by which we can understand the movement's creative output. After aIl, the modems saw an unprecedented proliferation ofdiscourses about sex (the coining ofthe term

"homosexuality," for instance), and necessarily responded to these sexual discourses as serious medical, social, cultural and political statements. It is worth noting, moreover, that these discourses extended far beyond the intellectual communities in which they were bom.

Rado's The Modern Androgyne Imagination (2000) argues, with a focus on sexology very similar to my own, that a new creative/imaginative discourse ofandrogyny developed in the work ofthe modems because ofthe work ofHavelock Ellis, Edward

Carpenter, Richard von Krafft Ebing and Sigmund Freud. Modemists like Faulkner, H.

D., Woolfand Joyce "felt the weighf' ofpsychosexual studies; indeed, they used these new writings in tandem with their own, deeply concemed with new definitions ofself

(Freud's inherent human bisexuality, for instance, or Ellis' essentialist definition of homosexuality) propagated by the sexologists. Though Rado argues that the "modern androgyne imagination" inevitably fails (or remains unrealized), her study informs my own in its pairing ofmodern imaginative discourses with sexological ones. Lawrence and

Hall were certainly no strangers to sexology, and 1 argue that the theories and rhetoric of the sexologists largely, primarily, influence ''thinking sex" in both authors' novels. Like

Rado, 1 discuss the work ofEllis, Carpenter, and Kraffi Ebing as a serious preoccupation ofmodernity, using it as an important template by which to examine modern sexuality Balzer 21

and sex. Cultural writing like that ofthe sexologists attempts a veritable reconstruction ­

- not only ofwidely held conceptions ofsex, but, as 1 argue, ofepistemology ("thinking")

and aesthetic creation - and must inform a discussion ofmodem artists and writers who

daim similar goals and preoccupations. As Felski notes, in a passage Rado would no

doubt approve of, "individuals recognized themselves in the impersonal, medical

descriptions ofthe sexologists and took on these sexual identities as their own" (2).

Sexology provides a similarly important model in Wayne Koestenbaum's Double

Talk: The Erotics ofMale Literary Collaboration for sites ofmale literary co-authoring.

Here, a pairing ofJohn Symonds and Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion, for instance,

informs crucially on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot's perverse/hysterical collaboration in The

Waste Land. Koestenbaum relates to this paper primarily in his claim to "take sexual

figures ofspeech seriously" and to ''take the figurative literally" (7, 9). For

Koestenbaum, it is unsurprising that this loaded type ofmale-male collaboration occurs at

the end ofthe nineteenth century and the beginning ofthe twentieth; as mentioned above,

this is when an array ofperversions see (to use Lawrence's phrase) ''the dear light of

language." It is also the era ofFreud's unconscious, where language betrays hidden and

largely sexual preoccupations. Lawrence and other modemists, induding H. D. and

Djuna Barnes, read this unconscious powerfully, as a sort of"secret agent" that betrays the ''unconfessed, unadmitted [and] potent" aspects ofselfhood through language (PU,

10). 1understand the unconscious similarly and argue, as does Koestenbaum, that modem culture is aware ofthe unconscious and betrays this awareness through language:

that the critic examining texts from the cultural moment ofFreud is more likely to find

evidence ofslips, desire transference and sexual sublimation, permitting a rigorous and Balzer 22 nuanced examination ofthe language surrounding sex and aesthetics. 1 argue that sexual preoccupations, particularly in Lawrence, manifest themselves in the novel itself, in the author's discussions ofthe novel and, perhaps most importantly, in the reviews, criticism and controversy surrounding the novel. Reviewers' use ofsexual tones are often involuntary, yet evince an inescapable sexual vocabulary, implicitly and intricately scripted by Lawrence in his novel and in his critical writing, that intends to frame a discussion ofLady Chatterley. Ultmately, aB - author, critic and reader - have an intimate and sexuaBy charged relationship with the modem text through this scripted language.

It is in my assertion ofthis conceptual sex as inclusive and public that 1 part ways from both Rado and Koestenbaum. Koestenbaum's male collaboration takes place, largely, in a privileged, removed, and artificial male womb, often "isolating [the collaborators] from a political community" (11). In this private world ofmale intimacy, homosocial/sexual collaboration is more ofa secret strategem, as private and insidious, perhaps, as Lawrence's conception ofthe Freudian unconscious. Koestenbaum only hints (but hints importantly) at the kind ofsexual reading 1 attempt in this study at the conclusion ofhis Waste Land chapter, where he asserts that Eliot's poem "invites the reader to master it" (137). IfEliot, he argues, enacts a sexuaBy charged liaison with

Pound through the poem, then he surely invites an equally charged collaboration with readers. Here, Koestenbaum suggests that an "implied male" reader is requested to "fiB the spaces" left by Eliot: to shape the poem by examining, engaging in its gaps. This final suggestion ofreaderly collaboration is essential to my understanding of''thinking sex." Hall's and Lawrence's ways ofthinking sex not only leave room for a readership, Balzer 23 but ask for the participation ofculture and society in this site ofreaderly and writerly collaboration/communion, opening the operation ofmodernist aesthetics to society at large.

This hunger for community is similarly missing from Rado's study ofsexology and imagination; instead, she focuses on the very intimate, often "sublime," struggles of modernists to personally reconcile themselves with contemporary sexological discourses on androgyny. 1 employ Rado's study ofthe important impact ofsex on aesthetic creation and extend it to modernist authors who ostensibly invite readers into their considerations ofsex and sexuality. In fact, 1 consider sexology itself a crucial practice ofreading the selfin society. For as internaI a struggle it was for modernists to fit themselves within sexological tennets, a desire to do so evinces a longing to negotiate with the world, to self consciously place the sexologically mediated text ofselfwithin a broader context. Hall, for instance, makes conscious efforts through The Weil of

Loneliness to elaborate on and "novelize" the invert ofsexology texts, and to perhaps provide a Iiterary rubric for the reaI invert to commune with. Hall's heroine Stephen

Gordon was not the only modern woman to pour over a sexology text in search ofher essential, creative sou!. H.D., Vita Sackville West and others did this also, not only as an act ofself-definition, but also as an attempt at communion, at illumining a world of sexuality in which they might find a similar group, and realize that they were indeed not alone. Sexology itself, in fact, never pretends to mine only the inner unconscious - from

Krafft Ebing's criminology and sociology, to Carpenter's fascist leanings and Ellis's

Eugenic preoccupations, sexology is more than a mere individual, psychosexual endeavour in modern society. Balzer 24

It is with this in rnind that 1would like, finally, to refer to a study with a name similar to my own, Erin Carlston's Thinking Fascism (1998), which combines an examination ofart with discourses ofmodern politics and sexuality. Carlston's work is important here for its nuanced study of"thinking" and for its discussion ofsex (in this case, "Sapphic" modernism) as entrenched within modern politics and culture. Carlston examines the work ofthree modemist women - Djuna Barnes, Marguerite Yourcenar and

Virginia Woolf- and places their politically disparate work (apolitical, liberal and leftist, respectively) within the context ofvarious forms offascism. For Carlston, "thinking fascism" is a rhetorical practice assuming a number ofdifferent discursive postures in a variety ofpolitical affiliations. In her discussion ofthe leftist Three Guineas, for example, she suggests that Woolf, in trying to dismantle fascism, actually "thinks" it through the use ofnationalist rhetoric and a consideration ofthe utility ofpropaganda.

Fascism is a modern preoccupation, Carlston argues, extending beyond invocations of

Adolph Hitler's Germany, and it is thus likely to show up in a wide and at tirnes divergent array ofmodernist texts.

Carlston's understanding of"thinking" places a modern trope, fascism, within the liminal and subliminal discourses ofa number ofmodernist works; additionally, she relates sexuality (and in particular Sapphic, or lesbian-affiliated, modernism) to the culture and the politics offascism. For instance, the propagandist-cum-fascist state notoriously uses sexual reproduction (and the female body in particular) as a means by which to ensure the biological and sexual "fitness" ofits citizens: Carlston caUs this

"matriotism," the use ofthe female reproductive body for state purposes, where the dutiful mother contributes her offspring to increase the state army and propagandist Balzer 25

masses. This language ofreproduction, which is both mechanical and biological, is an

important concem ofliterary modemism, particularly in the writing ofwomen modemists that discusses the female body. Implicit in Carlston's work, then, is an understanding of

sex in modemism as inherently, inescapably political.

This prompts a number ofparallels between "thinking sex" and ''thinking

fascism." First, "thinking sex" in both Hall and Lawrence recognizes the sexual in the political, and places both within the realm ofaesthetics. More than this, however,

Carlston's alliance between modem sex and modem politics suggests a sexuality that is very public, and often solely defined by society and the state. Politicians thus use sex, like Hall and Lawrence, as a way to articulate projects ofnational regeneration. As

Walter Benjamin states in "Art in the Age ofMechanical Reproduction," fascist discourse makes "machine guns" inseminate the "flowering meadow" ofa conquered territory: it coats an aggressive national recovery project with the figurative language of generative sex (vulvic flowers and phallic machine guns). As 1 argue in Chapter Two and

Three, Lawrence, Hall and the sexologists repeat this action. Havelock Ellis and Edward

Carpenter, for instance, posit modes ofreproduction as a means by which to better society. Ellis suggests societal improvement via precise methods ofreproductive control

(such as Eugenics). Carpenter, like Lawrence, proposes vital regeneration through primitivism and the societal recognition ofthe principles of"love." Hall and Lawrence also use sex as a route to the political: Hall suggests, like sorne sexologists, that the social acceptance oflesbianism leads to an improved, healthy modem society; similarly, sex in Lady Chatteriey is both a conceptual protest against the indifference ofan industrialized England, and a regenerative solution to this problem. Balzer 26

Sex is thus a method by which to express nationalist ideology within modemism: it becomes thinking fascism's modus operandi. In this way, figurative sex often infiItrates both the form and the content ofpropagandist state art. F. T. Marinetti's

Futurist movement, for example, depends on the aggressive language ofsex, namely rape, to communicate the compulsive mechanical aggression ofBenito Mussolini's Italo­

Fascism. In the Futurist Manifesto, mechanized acts ofsex/rape collide with brave new forms ofsyntax, providing the ideal model for new kinds ofutterances: "Our growing love for matter, our will to penetrate it and know its vibrations, the physical sympathy that links us to motors, push us to the use ofonomatopoeia ... [.] Onomatopoeia ... recapitulates the primaI syntax ofshock, epitomizing and restaging the violent conflicts held to underlie aIl ofmatter ..." (quoted by Rainey, 133). Discursive sex, specifically a sexual sort ofonomatopoeia, permits politics and art to speak; propagandist nationalism is given a voice in The Futurist Manifesto through strongly sexualized directives.

Wyndham Lewis provides the literary equivalent to this violent collision ofsex, politics and art. His 1916 novel Tarr presents a rape ofone character by another as a detached site ofVorticist poetics, where bodies are tools to express new and radical approaches to art. Here, the victim, Bertha Lunken, leaves the scene "as a workman would have ... who had been there to mend a shutter or rectify a boit" (195). Her sexual body is an appliance for Lewis to express a modemism of, to use Ann Ardis' words,

"vigorous new formaI presentation" (380) or, to use T.S. Eliot's, "impressively deliberate frigidity" (quoted by Ardis, 381). As Ardis notes, Lewis may not be entirely successful in asking the reader to adopt this stance, though he does, nonetheless, invite a viewing of this scene as an aesthetic rather than a sexual moment. Like Lawrence and Hall, he uses Balzer 27 sex acts as a semiotic gesture, a metonym for a discussion ofmodern aesthetics. Thus

Lewis' audience, in a gesture similar to Bertha's, "mends" or "bolts" the intended aesthetic moment by participating in it. FormaI directives invite readers to see, or at least consider, rape as a site ofVoriticist conflict.

However, the literary modernism ofHall and Lawrence, like modern politics, examines sex as something more than a puzzling, radical action: like Carlston's matriotism, modernists also understand discursive sex as legible, generative, and nation­ directed. One ofthe banner works ofhigh modernism, The Waste Land, uses images of impotence as a critique ofthe degeneration ofsociety and the state. In Eliot's sterile world (and the Waste Land itself seems a degenerate modern nation) a typist and a clerk have meaningless sex (similar to Lawrence's "cocktail sex"), completely devoid of regenerative import, and finished offwith the typist's sigh, "WeIl now that's done: and l'm glad it's over." Before Eliot's geographically impotent Fire Sermon, moreover, there is the well-known pub conversation about Albert's "demobbing," in which one hears "What you get married for ifyou don't want children?" Sex as a positive (and conservative) literary device is designed for procreation; here, Eliot's fragmented modem world drains sex ofits generative import; marriage is a sterile, unhappy union oftwo fearful souls. Later in the poem, the detritus ofthe Fire Sermon is reiterated, and we find

Eliot's 'Waste" state reduced to impotent paralysis devoid ofan organic means of reproduction: ''Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road"

(331-2).

One might also consider Bames' Nightwood (1936), where those who are apart from, or cannot contribute to, traditional notions ofbiological conception (homosexuals, Balzer 28 transvestites) are relegated to a decadent, seething underworld away from dominant discourses ofthe nation state. Importantly, Bames does not shirk reproduction in favour oflesbianism; instead she dwells on the supposed ''barrenness'' ofgay orientations, allowing a doll to act as proxy for the conceptual "reproductive activity" ofa lesbian relationship. Bames's confrontation with modem psychoanalysis and sexology takes place through Matthew the cross-dressing doctor, who subscribes to the most rigid discourses ofEllis, Krafft Ebing and Freud, theorists who believe "good" sex is fundamentally procreative. Late in the novel he proc1aims, ''We give death to a child when we give it a doll - it's the effigy and the shroud; when a woman gives it to a woman, it is the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane" (344).

Though Bames' consideration ofsuch dicta are skeptical at best (as are her descriptions ofthe sinewy lesbian body ofmedical texts), Nightwood, to use Rado's term, also ''feels the weight" ofsexology, particularly in its disintegrating and increasingly dark narrative that seems to yeam for procreation in a world that can not provide it. The novel ends with severance, gloomily retreating into the darkness and abjection ofa perversion that, categorical or not, still pushes its victims, with a mixture ofanger and regret, to a place outside of"normal" modem society.

In The Weil ofLoneliness, where Hall's central crisis is Stephen Gordon's lesbianism, issues ofstraight biological reproduction prevail. "Barrenness" is the cause ofthe novel's final, tragic dénouement, where Stephen Gordon meets her rather cryptic fate, forsaking her lover in favour ofa much darker mode ofgeneration. Here, Stephen is compelled toward the c1ass ofinverts she inevitably, categorically belongs to, her womb

"clamour[ing] in vain fortheir right to salvation" (437). Though perhaps prescient of Balzer 29

Nightwood's final de-evolution, Hall's ultimate sense ofreproduction's weight in the life ofa lesbian and, in particular, a lesbian artist, has more social tones. In Hall's novel one hears the unmistakable cali ofa martyr, one who sacrifices a life ofheteronormativity in favour ofa fraught inversion. Stephen Gordon (and, as is often the case with WeIl,

Raddyffe Hall) calls out for, instead ofcrawling away from, social acceptance. Hall offers alternatives to biological conception, and asks crucially ofher heroine, and ofher readers, ifthere is something the lesbian can give to society that does not echo Robin and

Nora's doll, that is indeed aIl efngy and no shroud. Hall's answer relies on art; like the sexologists she uses as a model for Stephen, Hall implies that it is the act ofaesthetic creation that the invert need substitute for biological barrenness. This is the "child" that the modem invert gives to a modem society interested in the health and functionality of sex acts.

Similarly, Lady ChatterIey introduces extramarital sex as meaningful and procreative. 1 argue that Connie Chatterley's impregnation signaIs the most important event in the novel; it certainly separates Lawrence's work from its punitive nineteenth­ century naturalist predecessors. Indeed, Lawrence celebrates Connie's illegitimate pregnancy throughout bis work, giving it a special semiotic place in the narrative. In this way, Connie's relationship with men parallels her relationship with art: her affairs are with artists (Clifford, Michaelis, Mellors [who is, 1 argue, an artist]), and the way they express themselves sexually is in fact the way they create. For Lawrence, though, proper sex incites "reproduction," organic and aesthetic, and good sex can, he daims, act as a model, a trope, for appropriate readerly and writerly behaviour. It is for this reason that

Clifford and Michaelis's stale artworks are analogous to impoverished sex aets, and that Balzer 30

Mellors's virility is a challenge to these models, culminating in the "flame" he and

Connie "fucked into being," their child. As he tells this story, Lawrence also tries to create a new, invigorating child, Lady Chatteriey 's Lover the novel, fulfilling his calI for the rebirth ofthe stale, wrinkling novel he attacks in "Surgery for the Novel: Or a

Bomb?" Here, both Mellors' and Lawrence's "thinking sex" is a way ofcharging the artwork with the social import ofmodem reproduction and inciting an aesthetic-linguistic shift in modern literature and society.

This is, finalIy, the essence ofHall's and Lawrence's attempts to "think sex." For both, writing about sex in modemity is not casual, nor is it simply about shock, censorship, dirty words or sexual innuendo. Instead, sex is a way to negotiate the modem artwork's relationship to society and culture. Hall and Lawrence promise further contact through literary sex; they use it to communicate with readers and to relate their hopes for large-scale regeneration. Balzer 31

CHAPTER TWO: SEXOLOGY

"We must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill" - Sigmund Freud

When in Finnegans Wake James Joyce claims, "My kraft is ebbing: 1 am jung and easily freudened," he suggests the prevalence ofsexology as a method ofmodemist utterance. Like it or not (and many modemists did not), new discourses on sexuality and the unconscious burgeoned exponentially between 1880 and 1945, the years in which we tend to situate literary modemism. As Joyce's words wittily convey, new configurations ofsex infiltrated a writer's sense ofselfand slipped into language like the compulsions they often spoke of- in surreptitious, unintentional and often surprising ways. As

Joyce's pïesentation ofMolly Bloom's final internaI monologue in Ulysses filfther suggests, new voices ofsexuality and desire spoke in the modem period that, until this point, had remained silent. Havelock Ellis's lengthy discussion ofthe female orgasm in

Studies in the Psychology ofSex, for instance, seems to seep into Joyce's presentation of

Molly in this chapter, as Ellis' work focuses, like Joyce's, on "sexual periodicity" and the function ofthe clitoris in female arousaI. Indeed, like Ellis, Joyce, in this momentous last chapter, adopts the literary guise ofa modem male sexologist, searching for a "real

[female] self' that, until modemity and the modem novel, remains "in the dark [rather] than in the glare ofdaylight" (Ellis, PS, 76).

We now know that many modemists actively engaged with the work ofthe sexologists, which was prevalent in modernity and readily available. Our understanding ofthe connection between modemists and sexology presently goes far beyond Freud; as

Chris Waters suggests, it is possible that other sexologists like Ellis, Carpenter and Krafft

Ebing had just as much, ifnot more, ofan impact on modem thought than he did (162). Balzer 32

There are, additionally, many accounts ofmodern writers' interactions with sexology.

Suzanne Raitt, in a study ofVita Sackville-West (who, on pondering the homosexual content ofThe WeIl ofLoneliness, stated "the field offiction is immediately doubled"), tells us she "went to books" like Edward Carpenter's The Intermediate Sex, Ellis's Sexual

Inversion and Otto Weininger's Sex and Character to aid her in defining her sexual desire for Violet Trefusis. Lisa Rado notes that Ford Madox Ford's Women andMen

(1923) speaks ofsexology having "an immense international vogue" with the modems.

William Faulkner also recognizes the prevalence ofsexological discourses in Mosquitoes

(1927), speaking of"Dr. Ellis and your Germans" (quoted by Rado, 190n). Another modemist, H.D., later a patient ofFreud's, had an intimate friendship with Havelock Ellis that led her to question her bisexuality, and in turn, analyze her role as a bisexual artist.

A mutual friend ofD. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, socialist and suffragette Alice

Dax, often provided reading material for the young Lawrence, and kept "most of'

Edward Carpenter's works on her bookshelf (Delavenay, 21). In addition, widely read feminist journals like the Freewoman "excerpted and seriously discussed" the work of sexologists like Otto Weininger (Greenway, 27). The prevalence ofbest-selling sexologist and social theorist Carpenter need only be explained by the

"PHOTOGRAVURE PORTRAIT" ofhim for sale at the back ofUnwin's 12th edition of

Love 's Coming ofAge (w. autograph.) for 8s. 6d.

Stephen Gordon's intimate encounter with the well-worn sexology volumes ofher father's library at the end ofBook Two ofThe Weil ofLoneliness is one ofthe most frequently cited interactions between a literary modernist and a sexologist. After being disowned by her mother because ofher first lesbian affair, Stephen finds her father's Balzer 33 copy ofwhat is most likely Krafft Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, a study that saw no less than twelve editions between the years of 1886 and 1903 (see StOff, Il). Hall's near­ gothic depiction ofthe ensuing encounter between Stephen and Krafft Ebing bears full repeating:

As she slipped the key into the lock and turned it, the action seemed curiously

automatic. She began to take out the volumes slowly and with listless fingers,

scarcely glancing at their titles. It gave her something to do, that was aIl - she

thought that she was trying to distract her attention. Then she noticed that on a

shelfnear the bottom was a row ofbooks standing behind the others; the next

moment she had one ofthese in her hand, and was 100king at the name ofthe

author: Krafft Ebing - she had never heard ofthat author before. AlI the same

she opened the battered old book, then she looked more closely, for there on its

margins were notes in her father's small, scholarly hand and she saw that her own

name appeared in those notes - She began to read, sitting down rather abruptly.

For a long time she read; then went back to the book-case and got out another

those volumes, and another [.. .]. (new paragraph) Then suddenly she had got to

her feet and was talking aloud - she was talking to her father: 'You knew! AlI

the time you knew this thing, but because ofyour pity you wouldn't tell me. Oh,

Father - and there are so many ofus - thousands ofmiserable unwanted people,

who have no right to love, no right to compassion .. .'

Hall gives a very intimate portrayal ofa young lesbian (or, in Havelock Ellis' and

Hall's adopted terminology, "invert") in the act ofreading. Here, reading sexology incites discursive actions, compels readerly reactions and, most importantly, prompts Balzer 34 social interactions. First, Hall's presentation ofthe odd, intimate encounter suggests it is fated: that Stephen's meeting with Kraffi: Ebing is "curiously automatic." Stephen is mechanically drawn to this particular "battered old book" which seems to contain and define her sexuality, giving a clue to her formative sexual puzzlement in the first halfof the novel. Her encounter also enables an interaction with her dead father, adding a hereditary element to this fatalistic interaction. Stephen proceeds by speaking to her father through Psychopathia Sexualis, through the marginalia that is superficially her father's, but reminiscent ofher own equally "small, scholarly hand." This writing is about her, naming her, recognizing her and organically expanding the words already typeset on the page. Stephen understands this book more intimately than she has ever understood books before: it speaks for her; in fact, it is her. There is also a new, important interaction that occurs between Stephen and the "thousands ofmiserable unwanted people" like her. For Hall, this is the most important interaction, for before this moment, Stephen is spatially and conceptually isolated in the narrative, forbidden to exit the heterosexual repression and baIDement that is her family home, Morton. On reading

Kraffi: Ebing and receiving the brand of"invert," Hall allows Stephen an opening previously absent in the text. Tellingly, her private schoolmistress Miss Puddelton, or

"Puddle," enters the library after this epiphany, encouraging Stephen to write, and indeed suggesting that it is the only option after such an encounter.

Radclyffe Hall's well-known use ofthe words ofa sexologist as both a discursive and an ontological tool is not limited to Kraffi: Ebing. She also relies upon the work of

Havelock Ellis, who gives the book his endorsement in a prefatory "Commentary," in which he proclaims it ''the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and Balzer 35

uncompromising form, one particular aspect ofsexuallife as it exists among us today"

(6). It is clear that Hall's novel is indeed a "faithful and uncompromising" extension of

Ellis's theories on sexual inversion: her portrayal ofStephen Gordon borrows liberally

from the notions propounded in the latter's Sexual Inversion section in Studies in the

Psychology ofSex, positing the female invert as a man ''trapped'' within a woman's body,

and endowing her with the neuropathic and aesthetic leanings propounded by Ellis and

his contemporaries, Kraffi Ebing and Carpenter. Hall's fixation on the theories ofEllis

not only evinces the power ofa sexology text to assume and to create fictitious identity,

but also suggests that sexuality itselfassumes a highly elaborate textual-histrionic quality.

Photos ofRadclyffe Hall from the era ofThe Well's popularity also suggest this, where

her outfits become an itemized performance in accordance with Ellis's case studies of

"masculinized" lesbian women in Sexual Inversion, from trousers to close-cropped hair to

broad-brimmed hat. Ellis' and Hall's lesbian is read sexually by others because ofthe

signifiers she displays; physical and sartorial cues determine the essence ofthe invert.

Reading the self, particularly the aesthetic self, through a sexological model

occurs with a degree offrequency in other literary modemisms. Modemist women like

Vita Sackville-West and Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), for instance, repeated in variation and

with equal eamest Stephen Gordon's and Radclyffe Hall's act ofreading the selfand its

subsequent creation through sexological models. For H. D., the rigid ontological models

propounded by male sexologists like Havelock Ellis were so oppressive that they

momentarily stultified her as an artist; her solution was to write her own idiosyncratic version ofa sexology text, inventing a new model ofthe sexually-tuned artist, artwork

and reader in Notes on Thought and Vision. And ofcourse Hall and D.H. Lawrence's Balzer 36 novels double as sexological treatises: Hall's adheres to existing sexological models and

Lawrence's, like H. D. 's, is an original sex manifesto relying on these existing models to speak oferoticized creation. In addition, other modernists like Virginia Woolfand E. M.

Forster engaged actively in the debate sUITounding sexology and the invert, acting (albeit relunctantly) as witnesses, for instance, in the obscenity trials ofRadclyffe Hall. As Lisa

Rado and Barbara Fassler additionally note, most ofthe Bloomsbury group was either homosexual or bisexual, and was aware ofthe CUITent psychosexual studies ofEllis,

Carpenter, Krafft-Ebing, connecting androgyny with aesthetics (see Rado, 157).

Certainly Woolfs Orlando, published the same year as The Weil ofLoneliness and Lady

Chatteriey 's Lover, explores and challenges, in a similar manner as contemporaneous sexological texts, what it means to read sex and sexual identity. Though Vita Sackville­

West is well-known as the primary model for Orlando, Woolfs character could also easily have come from Krafft Ebing's most famous case study in Psychopathia Sexualis, that ofSarolta Count(ess) V (or Sarolta Vay, "the countess in male attire"), a wealthy and literary Hungarian noblewoman who freely alters her gender, eventually taking a wife.

This interest provides a framework for my exploration ofthe interactions of modems like H. D., Radclyffe Hall and D. H. Lawrence with sexological texts. For these writers, however, sexologyis more than a CUITent discourse with casual ties to modernism: instead, it often appears to invoke aesthetics. Sexology thus not only addresses the modern artist but also uses modern aesthetics to present sex. Sexologists provide highly elaborate sexual-ontological models for their readers, and at times speak directly to the artist within society, most notably in their descriptions ofthe inverted artist, masturbation and procreative sex. These elements ofmodern sexology use sex to Balzer 37

communicate the function ofart: the invert in a sexology text, for instance, must become

an artist so that s/he remains a functional aspect ofa procreative society ("art" being what

the invert gives to society instead ofa child). Sexology texts thus create specifie

conditions around which modem aesthetics form, asking modemist artists to use sexology

to explore sexual identity, or to present sexual explorations in narrative. D.H.

Lawrence's, H. D.'s and Radclyffe Hall's interactions with sexology suggest this, but

also show an important dependency on sexological discourses to express the artistic

process.

1 further suggest that in important sexological works like Edward Carpenter's The

Intermediate Sex, Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion and Krafft Ebing's Psychopathia

Sexualis one finds various acts ofcommunication and reading. As Radclyffe Hall's and

Havelock Ellis' performative lesbianism suggests, sexology texts are ways in which

modernity tries to understand sex; in addition, Stephen Gordon's experience with

Psychopathia Se).:ualis shows us that, like The Weil ofLoneliness and Lady Chatteriey 's

Lover, sexology texts are meant to be read. Sexology gives itselfto a mass audience in a

manner similar to both Lady Chatteriey and Weil: through the thinking ofsex as

allegorical, utilitarian, and inherently reproductive. In other words, the sexology text

asks to be taken seriously by modern society because it gives answers to an ailing and

sexually declining society; Hall and Lawrence take eues directly from this attempt.

Sexology's desire for a large readership also forcibly removes sex from the erotic, at least

in so far as the erotic is isolated, self-satisfied bliss. The privileged act in sexology, as in

Hall and Lawrence, is a persistently utilitarian creation and discourse: a sexuality and aesthetics that are literally and conceptually generative. What remains privileged is Balzer 38 always creation, but this creation does not always generate from straight reproductive sex. Carpenter's well-known sexology ofcontribution, for instance, suggests that the invert give to society ideas, novels, and philosophies instead ofbabies. 1 do not posit an unequivocally liberating aesthetics here; instead, 1 suggest that sexology and art that references sexology both make strident figurative connections between the procreativity ofart and sex, using this relation to draw attention to a national community ofreaders.

There are numerous direct addresses and allusions to the artist within sexology texts. Freud's sublimation, for instance, suggests that creation is often the result of sexual repression; elsewhere in Three Essays on Sexuality he suggests more generally that intellectual activity incites "a concomitant sexual excitation." Similarly, Krafft Ebing begins Psychopathia Sexualis with an alliance between a study ofsex and art, where

"sexual functions" are paired with explorations ofthe sublime and the beautiful, "sexual feeling" is termed "the root ... ofaestheticism," and "(sensual) love ... inspire[s] the creative mind," where ''the fire ofsensual feeling kindles and preserves the glow and fervor ofart"; Krafft Ebing later goes on to speak ofan invert as "highly gifted in the fine arts, especially music and poetry" (23, 24, 31). Edward Carpenter, whose Intermediate

Sex and Love 's Coming ofAge are arguably the most literary-minded ofsexology texts, cites Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Alexander the Great, Julius

Caesar, Sappho and Queen Christina ofSweden, as examples ofexceptional aesthetic and politically minded inverts. His creative, Whitmanian, and hardly clinical prose essays in

Love 's Coming ofAge suggest a discursive predisposition to a readership with an appreciation for the aesthetic. Balzer 39

Haveloek Ellis also engages in the aesthetie, in addition to interaeting with a range ofmodem and pre-modem intellectuals, artists and writers. His Sexua/ Inversion, for example, was the topie ofmodem eensorship debates that included a number of important modernist literary texts. Sexua/ Inversion had a similar obscenity trial as James

Joyce's Ulysses; Alec Craig's BannedBooks ofEng/and [1937] pairs Ellis's work with

Joyce's in an argument for free speech (he also uses Hall's Weil and D. H. Lawrence's lesbian-themed The Rainbow as examples ofcensored texts ofmerit). Morris L. Ernst supposes a similar alliance in both authors' trials in his introduction to a 1937 edition of

Ellis' Studies in the Psych%gy ofSex. Ellis also eagerly acted as a counsel to modem bisexual and homosexual artists: H. D. and her partner Bryher came to Ellis for advice in the 1910s and 20s; so did Radclyffe Hall, who also looked to Ellis for a commentary to preface Weil and pursued him (albeit unsuccessfully) for advice on its prosecution. More important, Studies in the Psych%gy ofSex uses, like Carpenter and Krafft Ebing, artists and writers like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rousseau and Goethe to illustrate instances of masturbation, fetishism and inversion.

The best route to sexology's discussion ofthe aesthetic and the social is unquestionably through the sexologist's depiction ofthe homosexual. Krafft Ebing, Ellis and Carpenter have varying notions ofthe ontology and the behaviour ofthe homosexual, though their theories are often interdependent, unified in a consideration ofnon-straight sexualities as social "problems." Given this, it is perhaps surprising to note that only

Krafft Ebing, the first ofthese three and arguably the most influential, suggests, in

Psychopathia Sexua/is, that homosexuality is an acquired trait and can be cured through rigorous psychoanalytic treatment. This, ofcourse, later resurfaces in Freud, whose 1905 Balzer 40

Three Essays on the Theory ofSexuality posits a universal originary bisexuality, where homosexuality is the result ofa premature, stunted object-choice. However, Kraffi: Ebing provides a foundation for the kind ofhomosexual psychosexual treatment seen in modern novels like Forster'sMaurice, and he eagerly documents these attempted "healings": a well-known case study ofKraffi Ebing's in Psychopathia Sexualis, for instance, the kleptomaniac and suicidaI Ilma S., is tater a triumphant success story, a thoroughly reformed homosexual, in his Experimental Study in the Domain ofHypnotism. Kraffi

Ebing achieves a cure for IIma's inverted, "stormy and decidedly sensual way" through hypnotic suggestion and a manipulation ofphysical compulsion, altering not only her orientation, but also her mannerisms.

Unsurprisingly, Kraffi Ebing's justifications ofthese disturbing treatments are given a cultural and sociological direction. A reading ofPsychopathia Sexualis suggests, similar to Stephen Gordon's shocked confrontation with this very text, that inversion is an affiicted perversion, an almost criminal activity that is expressly deviant when exercised openly within society. Sorne ofhis case studies are in fact criminals - public fornicators, pederasts - and others are compulsively associated with various forms of social and legal transgression: lIma S., notably, is both an invert and a thief; Countess

Sandor, as a biological woman, illegally marries another wom~m. Despite Kraffi Ebing's focus on the different physical body ofthe invert (measuring the pelvis, breasts, etc.) that leads Stephen to see herselfas "maimed, hideously maimed," his volume continues to suggest that, like criminals, inverts can be reformed. Merl Storr notes the earnest philanthropie intentions behind this: Kraffi Ebing wants to rid the invert ofa "hopeless existence, a life without love," daiming the "health and welfare" ofthese patients as Balzer 41

"paramount to society at large" (22-23). For Krafft Ebing, it is impossible for the invert

to function in society as an invert; to possess this perverse affliction always already cuts

one offfrom - or, worse, damages - a fervently dialogic interaction with society. In

order to attain conversance the invert must annihilate the readability, the very signs, of

her/his antisocial "perversion."

Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter differ from Kraffi Ebing in in seeing

inversion as inborn, not acquired, though they both come from similarly socialized

leanings. In Ellis, the invert is biologically predisposed to those ofthe same sex, and can

do nothing to change this; every invert has a "psychic sexual proclivity" that exists apart

from isolated sex acts such as male-male sodomy (3). Here, as Foucault notes in History

ofSexuality, the traditionally figured homosexual sex act is thus not necessarily tied to an

innate homosexual identity. Because ofthis, Ellis as weIl as Carpenter's discussion ofthe

born invert adds to Kraffi Ebing's interest in the material markings ofthe invert a

preoccupation with the "homosexual sou!." Ellis' invert is a man whose "soul" is trapped

in a woman's body, or vice versa, and, similarly, Carpenter's invert "belong[s] distinctly

to one sex as far as their bodies are concerned," but "belongs mentally and emotionally to

the other" (IS, 19). Tenaciously propounded by Radc1yffe Hall, this idea ofa ''trapped''

invert absolves the homosexual from Kraffi Ebing's overtly damning mental as weIl as

physical carnality. Ellis and Carpenter offer the invert internaI emotional tumult and a

"misplaced" body complex instead, having exalted martyrdom and chastity replace

criminology. Consequently the invert in both Ellis and (especially) Carpenter attains a

stylized, mentally superior position vis a vis heterosexual society. The invert is given the

"double insight" ofboth sexes, understanding gender binaries through knowledge ofwhat

----._~----- Balzer 42 it means to be both male and female while at the same time remaining neither. The invert is thus desexualized, meant for literary-only notions oflove and communication rather than bodily sex: essentially, s/he is more effective as an observer than a participant. This special sexual prescience makes the invert a social mediator; as Ellis suggests, in a prediction ofFreud's aforementioned sublimation, the invert can and should capitalize on this "gift" by channeling sexual desire into philanthropy.

The primary sociocultural gift ofEllis', Carpenter'sand even Krafft Ebing's invert is a ubiquitous aesthetic sensibility. Carpenter's and Ellis's pairing ofaesthetics and inversion gives the invert a privileged role as society's non-sexual creator. For

Carpenter, the invert possesses an unmistakable "instinctive artistic nature," a "sensitive spirit" and a "frank and free-nature[d]" soul (36). Carpenter's artistically attuned invert is, like Stephen Gordon, highly sensitive to the inner and outer workings ofthe world; he quotes De Joux who believes an Uming's "nerve-system" is "the finest and the most complicated musical instrument in the service ofthe interior personality that can be imagined" (IS, 32). Here, the invert's incredible sensitivity leads to unprecedented human perception; like narrators in Virginia Woolf(The Waves, for instance) or Marcel

Proust (A la recherche du temps perdu) Carpenter's Uming is highly sensitized to the minutiae ofhuman interaction and perception. Havelock Ellis speaks similarly ofthe invert's propensity for art, especially literature, citing a lengthy cast ofinverts and focusing specifically on Whitman and Wilde. Like Carpenter, Ellis claims that homosexuality is so connected to aesthetics that even a "simulated" sense ofinversion can be found in the "hyperesthetic emotions ofthe poet": hence the love sonnets of

William Shakespeare, or the homoeroticism ofAlfred Tennyson's In Memoriam (SI, 48). Balzer 43

Homoerotic leanings are thus as "inborn," as inherent in art and literature as they are in

Ellis' inverted subjects.

The invert's pronounced "sensitivity" removes her/him to a status apart from and perhaps above heterosexuality; special aesthetic talents in particular are what makes the invert unique in both Ellis and especially Carpenter. As Puddle says to Stephen after her revelatory reading ofthe sexologists, "You've got work to do - come and do it! Why, just because you are what you are, you might actually find that you've got an advantage.

You may write with a curious double insight - write both men and women from a personal knowledge" (205). The sensitized invert is thus able to incorporate the traits of both sexes in her/his creation. Lisa Rado sees this as a tendency toward a more androgynous aesthetic (seeModem Androgyne Imagination, 20), yielding the somewhat sexless, omniscient narrative points-of-view in Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf, for instance.

Additionally, however, this androgyny allows the invert a unique position as an artist, and suggests that this artist-invert, through aesthetic creation, engage in as wide a dialogue as possible with the "straight world" as the only one able to speak effectively to both men and women. There is no indication that the invert has broken gender binaries in Ellis (his

"trapped" theory ofinversion alone evinces this) or Carpenter (who, as Eve Sedgewick claims, largely elides lesbianism in favour ofa theory ofphallic male inversion that abhors "anything effeminate" [213]), but there is a sense that both sexologists privilege the inverted artist as a communicator. Carpenter and Ellis thus give inversion an aesthetic quality in their work, and bestow upon it a social, utilitarian function. The

Carpenterian/Ellisian invert is an expert artist and reader, generating specialized art for Balzer 44 the modern society and the modern nation, making the experience ofmasculinity and femininity legible to a wide readership.

There is accordingly an effort by sorne sexologists to disconnect the inverted artist from actual sexllal activity; Carpenter, for instance, uses Platonic ideology to "raise" the invert above the physical. Plato furthers the claim ofsex's relation to art, and thus makes homosexllality functional and asexllal, usually elevating it to a "friendship" beyond the genital. To Carpenter, for instance, it is unsurprising that the prolific emergence ofthe

Urning (or, homosexual) artist in the 1890s - Symonds and Pater, for instance - coincides with a renaissance in "reconstructing Greek life and ideals" (103). Carpenter's fixation on Greek culture thus enforces his attempt at executing an acceptable apologia for the male homosexual: his artistic Urning finds "that special act with which [he] is vulgarly credited [i.e., sodomy] ... in most cases repugnant," and instead seeks a philosophie, normative home in the weIl known Platonic theories ofmale friendship (54). In fact,

Carpenter sees this Platonic friendship as so incredibly pure that he suggests it be employOO in improving state standards of"Education": "The capacity that a man has, in cases, ofdevoting himself to the welfare ofboys or youths, is clearly a thing which ought not to go wasted - and which may be most precious and valuable" (IS, 104).

Important, as weIl, is Carpenter's understanding ofa Platonic love that generates, in the purest way possible, new forms ofaestheticism and beauty. He relies on Socrates' speech in the Symposium to articulate one ofThe Intermediate Sex's central ideas, the cerebral qualities ofhomosexuality: "... it seems to have been Plato's favorite [sic] doctrine that the relation [i.e., homosexuality] ifproperly conducted 100 up to the disclosure oftrue philosophy in the mind, to the divine vision or mania, and to the Balzer 45 remembrance or rekindling within the soul ofaIl the forms ofcelestial beauty" (67).

Carpenter speaks ofa homosexuallove that is "pure," one that, importantly, is as much emotional as it is sexuai. In reference to such passages, Suzanne Raitt asserts that

Carpenter and his peers' sexology, in particular the work ofWeininger and Ellis, "rarely distinguish[es] between sexual and emotional feelings" (155). Carpenter in faet forces the homosexual into a desexualized emotional and spiritual realm, where "love" dominates erotic, genital sex; in a way, this is a strategic position, sublimating socially unacceptable queer sex into a spiritual realm ofloving cornradeship. This also suggests, moreover, that Carpenter understands inverted sexuality as almost entirely conceptual: that it is not related to physical gestures at aIl and is instead entirely enabled as a stylized discourse. This understanding ofthe homosexual is thus an extreme incarnation of

"thinking sex"; Carpenter enables sexuality to be realized entirely as an ideology, through exclusively emotional and aesthetic gestures. Homosexuality is a conduit to the aesthetic in The Intermediate Sex; notably, this is WeIl ofLoneliness's raison d'être: HaIl's plea for the functionality oflesbianism lies the figuring ofinversion as philosophic and aesthetic.

Utility cornes first in sexology's pairing ofinversion and aesthetics. Carpenter's pure inversion improves communication between men: it generates "forms ofcelestial beauty" that are useful to the nation, "connect[ing]" men beyond the sexuai. Open inversion causes a "generation ofthe beautiful," initially within the Urning, or male homosexual, community, but ultimately within larger society, inciting a sort ofchain­ reaction, a "generative descent ofnoble thoughts and impulses" (67). Carpenter also daims that open inversion helps the invert self-actualize, encouraging a fulfillment of Balzer 46

social and national obligations. Carpenter, following the homosexual sexologist Albert

Moll, states that "successfullove ... exercises a helpful influence on the Uming. His

[sic] mental & bodily condition improves, and capacity for work increases" (61). An

Uming who is permitted to "love" is thus more likely to be a hard worker, for instance,

and is more physically fit to contribute to a national political economy.

Other sexologists extend this conception ofthe functionality ofsexuality beyond

inversion, positing the effectiveness ofhealthy heterosexuallove in an equally efficient

functioning ofthe state. Ellis' Studies in the Psychology ofSex daims, for example, that

effective love puts one in biological health; the popular sexologist Marie Stopes argues

similarly in lvlarriedLove (1918) that a husband's attention to his wife'S orgasmic

capabilities will better the modem marriage and, in tum, modem society. Even Freud,

later the author ofthe socially pessimistic Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), daims

in 1914 that "we must begin to love in order that we may not faH iH" (quoted by Raitt,

157).

Following this, Carpenter addresses the most pertinent issue ofHall's Weil of

Loneliness: what does the invert give to society that is equal in import to biological reproduction? His answer is similar to Hall's:

It certainly does not seem impossible to suppose that as the ordinary love has a

special function in the propagation ofthe race, so the other has its special function

in social and heroic work, and in the generation - not ofbodily children - but of

those children ofthe mind, the philosophical conceptions and ideals which

transform our lives and those ofsociety (65). Balzer 47

Carpenter's defense ofthe invert provides a basis for art's function in modern texts like

Well and Lady Chatterley. Carpenter offers "children ofthe mind" in place ofactual babies: literature, art and philosophy instead ofinfant boys and girls. Ifinverted art is a substitute for the modern baby, Carpenter argues, then it must have an important state role. Art resembles the newly bom because it, too, will eventually make the modern nation vital again through social contribution: art in Carpenter thus becomes a living, breathing, acting citizen. Koestenbaum's idea ofmodern male-male collaboration as reproductive sex is relevant here, but Koestenbaum's child ofthe mind remains enc1osed: a stylized, private and jealously guarded creation. Carpenter's child is instead a dialogic text; he suggests that a modern desire to give the novel properties ofan infant reflects a need to see it as useful. Similarly, Lawrence's and Hall's texts are functional children: they also have, to use Jane Tompkins' words again, "cultural work to do" and they do this work by engaging in a negotiation with society; following Carpenter, this is how both authors make their texts important on a political and a nationallevel. Importantly, D. H.

Lawrence's straight narrative incorporates Carpenter's idea ofthe childofthe inverted mind; Lawrence's understanding ofLady Chatteriey 's Lover's status as an artwork is similar to Carpenter's because Lawrence also wants his book to ''transform our lives and those ofsociety," just like Carpenter's inverted procreation. As Lawrence says at the beginning of"Surgery for the Novel: Or a Bomb?" one determines the importance ofthe modern text by identifying it as either a child, beginning to communicate with society, or an aging man, senile and taciturn: "You talk about the future ofthe baby, little cherub, when he's in the cradle cooing ...[or] with the parson, about the future ofthe wicked old grandfather on his death-bed"(134). Balzer 48

Havelock Ellis also speaks ofthe "future ofthe baby," seeking a redefinition of reproduction as both physical and conceptual. According to Ellis, procreation adds to both the physical population and to the national spirit: ''freedom is the breath oflife, joy is the prime tonic oflife, and no regeneration is worth striving for which fails to increase the total sum offreedom and joy" (RR, 140). Moreover, similar to Lawrence's

"Surgery...," Ellis does not just want more babies: he wants better, more effective ones.

As Ellis' notorious writing on Eugenics evinces, modern reproduction, like aesthetic creation, is not just propagation; it also includes refinement ofrace and improvement of existing modes ofcreation: "... it is necessary, in connection with racial regeneration, to deal with literature, with art, with religion, for it is only in so far as these things, and such as these, are rendered larger and freer and more joyous that a regenerated life will have its heightened value" (RR, 141). The enhancement ofrace echoes Lawrence's and modernism's attempt at aggressively redefining the artwork: both address , "improvement," and both ask society to "make it new." Modernists like Lawrence, similar to Eugenicists like Ellis, predict the birth ofnew modes ofexpression alongside population regeneration: here the "new propositions," as Lawrence states in "Surgery," the "new, really new feelings" as weIl as a ''whole line ofnew emotion" will allow radical new societal inseminations to "break a way through, like a hole in the wall" (

137).

Sexology's concern with love-making as utilitarian and society-altering results in a further denunciation - particularly in Kraffi Ebing and Ellis - ofsexual acts forgoing any type ofsocial communion. This disapproval ofthe "idle" again doubles as advice for the modern artist who, as Lawrence makes clear, should not strive to create overly self- Balzer 49

indulgent things. In Little Essays ofLove and Virtue, for example, Ellis speaks of

chastity as useless and, ultimately, thoroughly selfish.

Distaste for individualized sexuality most often takes the form in sexology of

denunciations against masturbation. Kraffi Ebing's writings on it are prolific; indeed,

masturbation seems to be the root ofaIl the deviant perversions in Psychopathia Sexualis.

According to Kraffi Ebing, masturbation causes physical aberrations like nasal disease,

olfaction, epistaxis (49), criminological behaviour like dementia and homicide (68),

sexual frigidity (74), pedophilia, spousal abuse (83), bestiality (94) and fetishism (160)

among others. His antisocial reading ofthe invert uses masturbation as a primary cause,

suggesting "nothing is so prone to contaminate ... the source ofaU noble and ideal

sentiments[.] ... If[the masturbator] reaches the age ofmaturity, there is wanting in him that aesthetic, ideal, pure and free impulse which draws the opposite sexes together"

(248). For Kraffi Ebing, the masturbator cripples the "pure" aesthetic impulses within him and instead turns wastefully inward; s/he is thus not only a pathological pervert, but a veritable anti-social, anti-artist, removed from society and unable, unwilling to contribute to it. D. H. Lawrence's equally considerable writing on the subject is similar, denouncing masturbation as an "exhaustive" act devoid of"give and take" (''PO'' 73). Interestingly,

Lawrence daims that "the real masturbation ofEnglishmen began only in the nineteenth century," relating his distaste for the practice with his aesthetic distaste for "the yellow disease ofdirt-Iust," aestheticism.

Havelock Ellis views masturbation as a naturaUy occurring aesthetic gesture but, like Lawrence, sees it as inferior to the powerful aesthetics of(in this case, heterosexual) sex. Interestingly, Ellis posits masturbation - as he does inversion - as a side effect of Balzer 50 the modern condition, of''the unnatural circumstances ofour civilized sociallife" (8188,

268). Ellisian masturbation, however, is a natural by-product of"animal creation" and, further, is "capable ofthe strangest and most various uses" (282). One ofthese uses,

Ellis argues, is aesthetic. In those with "feeble or failing mental power," for instance, he daims that it sometimes helps to stimulate aesthetic sensibility, giving the example ofthe poet, Brown-Séquard, who in old age would ''write with one hand while with the other he caressed his penis" (267). This accords with Lawrence's concession that masturbation does seem to "release a certain mental energy, in sorne people" (''PO'' 74).

Though a possible method ofcreation, both Ellis and Lawrence uitimately feel that masturbation is not a desirable habit for the artist; instead, it is a signal ofwaning aesthetic powers and/or the production ofinferior artworks. Thus, Ellis cIaims that

"young men and women ofintelligence" who masturbate are liable to produce literature that is rife with "high-strung ideals oflife" and, ultimately, "premature" and "false"

(265). Ellis acknowledges, however, like Lawrence, that sexual excitement often develops as a result ofcreation, willingly or unwillingly: ''What more usually happens is that the autoerotic excitement develops, paripassu and spontaneously, with the mental activity and at the climax ofthe latter the autoerotic excitement also culminates, almost or even quite spontaneously, in an explosion ofdetumescence which relieves the mental tension" (267). For Ellis, creation follows an identical energy path as sex. Creation is indeed so akin to the communion suggested by sex that when arousal occurs involuntarily, or through artistic creation, it is not classified solely as "masturbation."

This form oferotic arousal is Ellis's privileged mode ofautoeroticism, as close as possible to the "exaIted" state ofthe EIIisianlLawrencian sexual communion. And, just Balzer 51 as the act of(hetero) sex tends towards utilitarian production in the sexologists, so the artwork emerges as a result ofa Pygmalion-like embrace between creator and inspiration, a product ofthe subject's aesthetic sensibility.

The reaction to and appropriation ofsexological rhetoric by two modern novelists comprises the remainder ofthis paper. 1 have already discussed the relationship between modernists and sexology; it is worth noting again, though, as a preface to the following chapter, that many modernists identified with the national, aesthetic and sexual ideas of

Ellis, Carpenter and Kraffi Ebing, taking sexological studies very personally, as readers as weIl as creators. In his discussion ofSymonds and Ellis's collaboration on Sexual

Inversion, for instance, Wayne Koestenbaum notes the prime importance ofsexological texts as "catalysts for private recognition scenes" among gay and lesbian audiences (45).

This is also the case with Radclyffe Hall's Stephen Gordon who, much to her own abhorrence, discovers her own inversion in the leaves ofKraffi Ebing's Psychopathia

Sexualis. This scene ofan artist "discovering" herselfreveals the attention sexology texts pay to the role ofthe reader. In fact, sexology texts seem to require an audience, directly addressing readers, especially the readers they identify and classify. Sexology texts thus not only speak to the artist, they also, in addition, speak to the reader; in this manner, they suggest ways ofthinking about sex as well as ways ofwriting about it and, moreover, advise ways ofaddressing it to an audience.

A popular sexological tool, the case study draws attention to issues ofreadership in its gathering ofotherwise isolated, marginalized individuals under a common signifier.

Classifications like "invert" ask readers to identify themselves similarly and become part Balzer 52

ofthis community. Kraffi: Ebing's cast ofinverts, for instance, is so large and varied that

it seems more than an assemblage ofperverts; Hall's writing ofStephen's experience

(suffused with horrorthough it is) hints at the potential connections discernable in Krafft

Ebing's thorough pathologizing. As Merl Storr argues in her discussion ofIlma S.,

Kraffi: Ebing's recording ofIlma's (mis)treatment is a simultaneous recording ofher

resistance, for case- histories often speak in the first person, defying the

compartmentalized chapters ofP5ychopathia Sexualis they appear to fit into, hence

putting Kraffi: Ebing's own clinical voice into question (23). Stephen finds a collection of

abjected "others" in Psychopathia Sexualis that include and assimilate her; after her

encounter with the text she realizes there are "others like her," and she soon moves away

from Morton and settles in Paris where she can live and create in an inverted community.

Ellis's work similarly understands the case study's role as a site ofself­

recognition. His chapter on "auto-erotism," for instance, speaks ofa "married lady who

is a leader in social-purity movements" discovering ''through reading sorne pamphlet

against solitary vice, that she had herself been practicing masturbation for years without

knowing if' (164). His limited lesbian case histories, furthermore, show at least two

instances ofwomen discovering their orientations through sexology texts. And, of

course, in Sexual Inversion, there is a collision ofreader, artist, and sexologist in John

Addington Symonds, who not oruy collaborates on this volume, but also participates as a

volunteer for Ellis in Case XVIII. Here, Symonds is given a voice, albeit an anonymous,

edited one (Bristow, 95). Interestingly, one ofSymonds's many contributions to Sexual

Inversion is his willingness to include case histories like Kraffi: Ebing and Ulrichs before

him; as Joseph Bristow claims, Symonds includes this data in part to enhance bis and

.._------Balzer 53

Ellis' "scientific authority" (94). In becoming a case study himself, moreover, Symonds also recognizes his role as author as similar to bis role as reader and as subjeet. Symonds understands the importance ofincluding intimate personal experiences in sexology, experiences ofan aetual invert, to appeal to readers who are struggling with identity issues; he acknowledges that to write about sexuality (as an artist) is to draw attention to a readership as mueh as it is to examine and to "read" oneself Ellis thus adds to

Symonds's astoundingly personal testimony a number ofother "artistie" case studies, whieh, he purports, double as "a study in the evolution ofa man ofletters ... whose imagination thus early exercised and developed was predestined for a literary career"

(144).

1 eonclude this chapter with the experiences ofanother modemist, Hilda Doolittle

(H. D.) who, like Symonds, recognizes the importance ofpersonal testimony as an artist, a sexologist and a reader. H. D., also like Symonds, offered herselfas a case study for

Ellis, as well as for Freud, who ealled her the "perfect bi." H. D.'s fervent interest in sexology shows a similar recognition ofaddresses to the aesthetic and to the sexual self within sexology. However, her eventual rejeetion ofpreexisting sexologieal models suggests a dissatisfaction with the rigid conceptions ofthe sexologists; this rejection results in a work that transforms the aesthetie foeus ofsexology into a treatise ofher own,

Notes on Thought and Vision.

The discourses ofthe sexologists, particularly Havelock Ellis, had a considerable influence on H. D.'s work. As already mentioned, both H. D. and her companion Bryher went to see Ellis in the 'teens up until the thirties; H. D. read with great interest Ellis's

Studies in the Psych%gy ofSex between 1915 and 1920 (Rado, 63). Ellis, in fact, played Balzer 54 a key role in the progress ofBryher and H. D.'s relationship, for it was H. D. that encouraged Bryher to see Ellis about her "troubled" sexual state (Friedman and

DuPlessis, 217). H. D. was aware ofEllis's sexual theories that connected love, purity and creativity; she was also aware ofhis lesbian case studies ofthe "sensitive" invert­ artist. Lisa Rado's recounting ofH. D.'s involvement with Ellis's Studies in the

Psychology ofSex goes so far as to suggest that Ellis provided H. D. with a "new vocabulary" which helped her "transform her androgynous self-conception into an empowering aesthetics" (63). Certainly, H. D.'s interest in Ellis' theories on the inverted artist evinces the implicit attention works like Sexual Inversion pay in defining the role of the sexllalized artist within society.

Though her friendship with Ellis may have helped her to engage in a methodology of(as 1would deem it) thinking sex, H. D.'s Notes on 1hought and Vision is a dissatisfied response to contemporary sexology. As Rado notes, H. D., as a bisexual woman, felt frustrated with Ellis because she could not locate her sexual identity in his limited understanding offemale sexuality. However, she believed, like Ellis, that a sexological reading ofoneselfaids in personai fulfillment and function, and she believed that, as an artist, she would not reach her creative potentiai without this knowledge. Just as

Carpenter and Ellis' self-actualized invert generates socially enriching aesthetics, so H.

D. craved sexuai awareness for this sake, yeaming for the confidence in her sexuai ontology that would eventually reflect in her artwork.

Ultimately, H. D. struggles with sexual definitions ofherselfas both an artist and as a reader: she not only wants to develop as an artist through sexuality, but she aiso wants to read herself, as an artist, through a sexological profile. Notes on Thought and Balzer 55

Vision tries to provide this profile, and though it is a very personal work, it recognizes the need to extend this enlightened sexological understanding ofthe selfbeyond individual confines. The work provides both a comprehensive analysis ofconceptualized sex and creation as it relates to the artist, and additionally suggests that creation is available to anyone who desires it. Like the sexologists, H. D. ultimately speaks ofbeneficent art and sex as an engagement in useful communication with the world.

In this way, H. D.'s text is both a sexology text and a treatise on aesthetics, employing the methodology ofboth to convey the nature ofinspiration. Notes on

Thought and Vision's mission is thus twofold: to convey H. D.'s new and highly personal semiotics ofthe aesthetic imagination, and to associate this inspiration with processes ofthe mind, the sexual body and what H. D. terms the "overmind." Like the sexologists, H. D.'s treatment ofthe sexual act is stylized; she, too, combines notions of love, sex, desire and emotion into an ineffably "pure" concentration ofsexualized aesthetics. For H. D., when ''the minds of... two loyers merge, [they] interact in sympathy ofthought" (22). In Notes on Thought and Vision, this "merging" is sexual, cerebral, and simultaneously sexual-cerebral. Like Carpenter and Ellis, H. D.'s sex is often outside ofthe body, providing a framework for intellectual activity: "The love­ region is excited by the appearance or beauty ofthe loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character ofmind ... in the body" (22). As Rado states, this "visionary experience ofthe overmind" "mirrors the experience oferotic union" (65).

Here, the "overmind," a sort of"holy spirit" ofartistic inspiration, combines male and female elements in one individual creative insemination, ''tak[ing] these two forms of seed [masculine and feminine], one in the head and one in the body to make a new Balzer 56

spiritual birth" (50). The selfdivides in the act ofcreation, suggesting an encounter with

an "other"; similar to Ellis's aestheticized masturbation, the creative experience appears

as an isolated experience, but is actually an inspired communion, mirroring a sexual

encounter with another person. Ultimately, the selfforces its own temporary abdication,

so that it can seek out and fertilize an entirely separate and new creative space outside the

individual will.

Sex is the model for H. D.'s creative meeting between the body, the mind and the

overmind; the meeting of"masculine" and "feminine" elements in the above passage

suggests that, like sexology, heterosexual sex is the model for H. D.'s collaboration.

Thus, sex provides in H. D., as it does in Ellis, the template for a very "pure" Platonic

creative merging. As Carpenter's "children ofthe mind" make sex conceptual, so H. D.'s

overmind asks the mind to act as the body, letting sex provide the framework for

aesthetics. However, H. D. complicates Carpenter's asexual presentation ofthis

encounter because she insists that this "conceptual" process ofcreation take place within

the body. In H. D., the brain actually appears as a womb in the process ofcreation, and

both organs transcend their physiological roles to become the discursive tools of

imagination.

H. D.'s intricate poetics in Notes, though certainly elliptical, indicate an interest in

readership and participation that resembles the work ofEllis and Krafft Ebing. That said,

Notes is also a highly personal text (it was, after aIl, unpublished until 1982), an

individual working out ofissues raised by an inquiry into sexology. H. D. reiterates,

however, the importance ofa pair oferoticized loyers as representative ofcollective

imagination throughout the work; '1here is no great art period," she daims, "without

0-" •• ~ Balzer 57 great lovers" (21). Echoing Lawrence (with whom H. D., for a time, shared an intimate friendship), H. D. also indicates the importance ofnon-individual, converging sexual bodies asrepresentative ofaesthetics: "We begin with sympathy ofthought. The minds ofthe two lovers merge, interact in sympathy ofthoughC (22). Art as weIl as sex thus involves a surrendering and a giving ofoneselfto the not-fully-known - be it a partner or inspiration. Through the sexualized overmind, the artist incorporates him/herself in a sort ofJungian collective unconscious, realizing what s/he, as Albert Gelpi states, "shares in common with others" (13).

H. D. is careful to note that everyone can practice her/his own idiosyncratic version ofthis experience, and that her encounter with the overmind need not impinge upon others': she is merely someone who "blaze[s] [her] own trail"; her "signposts, are not your signposts" (24). H. D.'s Notes, as a sexology text, presents one case study, hers, only as a subjective template, an altemate to the rigidly didactic, purposeful case histories ofsexologists like Ellis and Krafft Ebing. Her language in Notes invites readers, and employs pronouns like ''you,'' and ''we,'' making her treatise public, and perhaps national; at the end ofNotes, she proclaims that "this world is there for everyone" (40).

In fact, her call to readers as creators has the fervent diction ofa nation-directed manifesto like Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, or Ellis' eugenic-themed "The Problem of

Race Regeneration": "There is no trouble about the art, it is the appreciators we want.

We want young men and women to communicate with the charioteer and his like. We want receiving centres for dots and dashes" (26). H. D.'s third-person plural echoes a sexological preoccupation with the ideal, the functional, the political, and the national.

Like Lady Chatterley and WeIl, Notes suggests that both sex and art are means by which Balzer 58

society can be altered and perhaps improved. H. D. suggests an aggressively evolving

community, comprised ofcitizens with a new, constantly progressing understanding of

the artistic and sexual function ofthe overmind: "Two or three people, with healthy

bodies and the right sort ofreceiving brains, could turn the whole tide ofhuman thought,

could direct lightning flashes ofelectric power to slash across and destroy the world of

dead, murky thought. Two or three people gathered together in the name oftruth, beauty,

over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force ofthis power back into the world"

(27).

Like H. D., Radc1yffe Hall and D. H. LaWTence both call attention to the reader in

their respective writings on sex and aesthetics. Radclyffe Hall also owes much to the

sexological studies ofHavelock Ellis; The Weil ofLoneliness models itself after the case

study and is as conscious as its sexological models ofan implicit reader. This is exactly

what Radclyffe Hall expects her novel to do: even more than H. D., she considers the

writing ofsexual identity through art as an important public act. Stephen Gordon thus

requires a reader's implicit understanding ofthe signs ofinversion from Ellis' Sexual

Inversion: "abnormal" muscularity, propensity for riding, large, rough hands or, notably,

a destiny as an artist. Stephen's experience at times directly correlates with Ellis' lesbian

histories; Miss M, like Stephen, cornes "across the translation ofKraffi-Ebing's book,"

having no idea "feelings like mine were 'under the ban ofsociety'" (229). Miss v., like

Stephen and Hall herself, also seems a template for the novel: "When my hair was

c1ipped, l was delighted and made everyone call me 'John.' l used to like to wear a

man's broad-brimmed hat and make corn-cob pipes. l was very fond ofmy father and

tried to imitate him as much as possible. Where animaIs were concerned, l was entirely

".-- --- "---"-"------Balzer 59 fearless" (230). The resemblance between Stephen Gordon and Ellis' six lesbian case studies is uncanny: there are even echoes ofRadclyffe Hall's own very exaggerated public persona, as she, like Miss. v., insisted on being called "John." But Hall also derives her purpose as a writer from Ellis's Sexual Inversion. Like the case study ofMiss v., the case ofStephen in The WeIl ofLoneliness claims to be in print for the "sake of other women who may be suffering" (229).

Hall's liberal use ofthe case study from sexology allows her to relate her text to as large a readership as possible. In Troubridge's biography, for instance, Hall notices that "the time [is] ripe" for her new novel, and decides to "speak on behalfofa misunderstood and misjudged minority" (82). Hall's use ofEllis's case sexology seems to grow out ofthis urge to speak to a large population; Hall wants sexually confused young women to find solace in her book, as SexualInversion's Miss V. and Miss M. do in other sexologicalliterature. Michael Baker, in bis biography ofHall, diseuses Hall's dread at Well remaining in obscurity or, perhaps worse, at her novel being seen as a

"salacious diversion ... [by] undesirable elements ofthe public" (203). Her pursuit of

Ellis for the prefatory comment to the novel, then, is an attempt, not only to ensure that

Well receives attention, but also to ensure credibility: in a letter to Ellis, Hall addresses him as "the greatest living authority on the tragical problem ofsexual inversion," and asks him to "give it in a few words the support of[his] unassailable knowledge and reputation" (203).

Hall thus presents an idealized case history ofthe invert, writing ofStephen

Gordon the artist in light ofEllis's sympathetic configurations ofhomosexuality. Here is the Tragic Invert, whose sensitivity and high spirituality is ofgreat and ofvaluable use, Balzer 60 but stillliable to be questioned, wrongly rebuked by society at large. Stephen's lesbian govemess Puddle acts as the mouthpiece for the closeted Ellisian invert who does not decide to practice her sexual desires, channeling them instead into pedagogical pursuits.

Indeed, Puddle's advice to Stephen seems directly culled from Sexual Inversion, proffering a seiÎes ofadvisory warnings: Puddle acknowledges Stephen's prototypical

Ellisian hypersensitivity, for instance, ("you're too sensitive, chiId, and the sensitive suffer") and also encourages the act ofwriting as Stephen's "only weapon" in the world

(339). As Stephen leams from Puddle, then, Hall gleans from Ellis. In her correspondence with Ellis over his commentary, she acknowledges the invert's need to use art as a means ofredemption, as a gesture ofutilitarian normativity. She suggests the homosexual must "work to make good" and Ellis responds in the affirmative: "1 heartily agree. l know only too many who don't - and perhaps could. It is far from being a

'craze' and applies equally to those who are not inverts" (quoted by Baker, 219). Puddle echoes these sentiments almost verbatim in The WeIl ofLoneliness and so, in turn, does

Stephen through her heroic work efforts. UltimateIy, Radclyffe Hall also proves that she too can "work to make good" by writing The WeIl ofLone/iness. The novel thus represents Stephen's ,attempt to "make the world respect [her] through [her] work," and also signaIs Radclyffe Hall's attempt at the same thing.

Hall's Stephen is, as Merl Storr argues, such a perfect Ellisian lesbian in taste, metier, and physicality that even Radc1yffe Hall's hyperbolic adhesion to the caricature ofthe "mythic mannish lesbian" faIls short in comparison (23). Stephen is indeed a fiction; like the image ofthe homosexual in Edward Carpenter's Intermediate Sex,

Stephen's superlative spiritual qualities, though in sorne respect setting her apart from Balzer 61 heteronormative society, seem to combine the "best" qualities ofa woman and a man into a sort ofinverted ubermensch. Stephen cornes to aid in the Great War, for instance, when there are "no men left"; when summoned to work in the war effort, Stephen consciously summons "aIl that ris] male in her make-up". Hall's Stephen replaces the "real" modem man, who is either unavailable, dwindling in numbers, or not "man enough" to rise to the occasion. Simultaneously, Stephen summons the skills ofa mother in handling the war­ wounded and, particularly, in taking care ofher soon-to-be-partner, Mary. Stephen's striving towards ideals ofboth sexes allows her, like Ellis' invert, to inhabit various sex roles: "She was aIl things to Mary; father, mother, friend and lover" (314). Stephen's often inhuman combination oftraits insists she be read as a fictive ideal; Hall provides a model based on sexology that is, in fact, more socially and spiritually perfect than any sexological model offered by Kraffi: Ebing, Ellis and Carpenter. Stephen Gordon herself thus becomes a veritable work ofart, embodying the most propitious tones ofa sexological understanding ofhomosexuality; she is a model for inverts everywhere.

D. H. Lawrence's response to sexologists like Ellis is not as pronounced as Hall's; similarly, however, he insists on the social connection between sex and art, and uses the language ofsexology to do 80. For Lawrence, sexologists do not define sex effectively or properly; his response - like H. D.'s - is the creation ofa separate sexological paradigm.

Lawrence's idiosyncratic sexology appears variously and in many different forms, but primarily resides in two works that respond to Freud: Fantasia ofthe Unconscious and

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. In these studies, Lawrence denounces Freud's

"dirty" impetus for everyday human action; Lawrence suggests that there is another unconscious, a "true, pristine" one "from which aH our genuine impulse arises" and that Balzer 62 this is the true source of"motivity" (PU, 9). Lawrence's obscure (and often tenuously defined) obsession with the "pure" and the "spiritual" in sex and art is also, ofcourse, reminiscent ofEllis and Carpenter. Emile Delavenay's study ofthe similarity between

Carpenter and Lawrence is invaluable here, principally because there is, surprisingly, no direct evidence to suggest that these two very similar thinkers ever read one another.

Delavenay infers the alliance, claiming, for instance, that Carpenter essays like "The

Drawing-room Table in Literature" (published in The New Age on March 17, 1910) about the staid and outdated Victorian sexual ethos in literature, could not have escaped

Lawrence's attention. Additionally, Lawrence's adherence to phallic vitalism and

"homogenic" comradeship also borrows from Carpenter's sexological writings (which, in turn, nod liberally to Walt Whitman, whom Lawrence adored). Indeed, though notoriously against notions ofandrogyny and apparently unsympathetic towards inversion (Lisa Rado describes Lawrence as "deeply disturbed" by Carpenter and Ellis),

Lawrence uses the language ofCarpenter and Ellis (including their language ofinversion) to define the relationship between Connie and Mellors. Here, the defense ofthe invert as aesthetically gifted transfers to a straight couple, who are accused ofbeing "half-insane,"

"perverted" and depraved (LCL 311) by the society around them, but who, like the invert, are different and "improved" in gender (in this case, more primaI), and are capable of enacting change in a sick society by creating socially valuable, procreative artworks.

As 1 discuss in the next chapter, both Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall transpose sexology into fiction, following sexology's idea ofthe invert as a sort ofsavant creator, oflove as a special, new form ofinsemination, and especially ofcreation through art as a kind of public baby. Ultimately, Lawrence and Hall relate to the sexologists both through Balzer 63 aesthetics, and through a shared desire to create an engaging public text. As Dora

Marsden, editor ofthe New Freewoman figures, echoing Lawrence's rhetoric in A Propos ofLady Chatteriey 's Lover, sexology allows society to think ofsex "scientifically, cleanly, and openly," and should do so in the most appealing voice possible. Tellingly,

Marsden claims that this appealing voice incorporate aesthetics, that the "'Sex­ psychologist' should be a poet, not a physical scientist" (quoted by Greenway, 39). It should come as no surprise, then, that sexology's attempt to reach the public incorporates aesthetics or that many readers ofsexology, including modernist artists, choose to read these texts as direct and figurative comments on their respective métiers. Balzer 64

CHAPTER THREE / CONCLUSION: LITERARY SEX

"1 feellike a mother with a virgin girl and this poor child in a compromising position" - Djuna Barnes, on the censoring ofRyder

Barnes' comment in a 1926letterto Natalie Barney on the censoring ofher first novel, Ryder, shows a modernist's attribution ofsexual - and in particular reproductive ­ traits to a work. Bonnie Kime Scott, in her introduction to The Gender ofModernism, asserts that Barnes is not alone in her tendency towards personification: that, in fact, this is a proclivity ofmany modernists, who "attached labels such as 'virile' and 'feminine' to the new writing as they reviewed if' (3). Wayne Koestenbaum's thorough examination of this need to ascribe "virile" and "feminine" qualities to modern literature in Double Talk reveals a textual and creative organicizing that subscribes persistently to both homoeroticism and to variously gendered discourses ofgeneration. Collaborative creative acts by male modernists like Conrad, Ford, Eliot and Pound suggest, as Barnes' words on Ryder do, that creation ofa modern artwork is often coloured in the language of reproductive biological sex acts. Koestenbaum's further choice to situate the erotics of male literary collaboration beside "feminine" discursive reproduction (i.e., references to the placenta, womb and so on) suggests that tbis language, though in itselfgendered, is ascribed with as much fervency by modern male artists as it is by modern female artists.

He daims, for instance, that Eliot recognizes, as evinced in "The Three Voices of

Poetry," a poem's periodof"long incubation," in which the poet is "oppressed by a burden which he must bring to birth in order to obtain relief' (quoted by Koestenbaum,

116). He also notes Pound's perception ofYeats, Joyce and Eliot each as "giving birth" to modernist babies/ "masterworks" in 1921/22 (122). Here, reproductive discourse of Balzer 65 motherhood characterizes Pound's grand hopes for modemism, making "birthing" an elevated trope, a biological-cultural-literary discourse responsible for articulating sorne of the essential textual acts ofhigh modemism. Koestenbaum argues that borrowing the feminine conceptual is in fact an attempt by male modemists to "usurp" female reproductive practices and replace them with a more masculinist poetics; men further elide women by calling the resulting text feminine and by attempting to take possession ofand share this text (6).

Koestenbaum's explanation for a tendency towards the sexual and the discursive within modemism permits exclusivity to the figurative language used to describe a literary work. But there is more to these associations than mere private interest. After aIl, Barnes' statement reacts to the censoring ofher novel, the (sexuaI) intrusion ofpublic law onto the presumably unshakable stylistic boundaries ofher work. Koestenbaum's discussion ofPound's aesthetic-erotic desires implies similar, though largely unacknowledged, intrusions. When Pound expresses his desire to "drive any new idea into the great passive vulva ofLondon," for instance, he is not merely positing himselfas inseminator. A discursivity transcending (or at least elaborating upon) the hermetic­ collaborative imagination that Koestenbaum seems so intent on establishing between the poet and his collaborator emerges here. In referencing Pound's rapacious words,

Koestenbaum suggests other collaborators than just two, including the city ofLondon and, contained within, a large British readership and a growing modem culture that, though assumed passive, obviously play a substantial role in Pound's (and [male] high modemism's) imaginative cosmology. My examination ofD. H. Lawrence and

Radclyffe Hall recognizes this extension ofsexualized language into public spheres of Balzer 66 modernity. Both Lawrence and Hall sexualize, personify and organicize their artworks, and in so doing imply a socializing ofthe modem novel. In allowing their texts to enter into the sexually and organically figurative, they draw attention to aesthetic goals of

"contact," ofan artwork whose purpose is aggressive circulation and influence in modem society at large. Like Carpenter's utilitarian offering of"chi1dren ofthe [inverted] mind" to a modem society valuing procreation, Well and Lady ChatterIey, as material novels, are actualized as new infants within modem society. It is through this figurative gesture that these texts become socialized material entities performing actions mirroring the dialogism ofmodem sex, negotiating with the world around them and forging readerly relationships with national and international ramifications.

Virginia Woolf's 1928/9 adage in Room ofOne 's Own that "masterpieces are not single, solitary births" provides a contemporary foray into Hall's and Lawrence's mutual conception oftheir novels as social actions. Like Pound, Eliot and Barnes, Woolf's language organicizes the artwork (or "masterpiece"), and suggests that its creation/reproduction can in fact be seen as a birth. She also, in doing so, posits the masterpiece as an effort ofmore than one "author." In Woolf, this work is a body capable ofinfinite generation; it is not a hermetic, Koestenbaumian "single, solitary" act.

Instead, as Woolfsuggests, it is ''the outcome ofmany years ofthinking in common, of thinking by the body ofthe people, so that the experience ofthe mass is behind the single voice" (66). The novel is thus a complexfigurative body: Woolf's discussion ofa text as culturally mediated recognizes that the novel is both the product ofacts of"thinking" by countless bodies and, in turn, is itself a body, communing and collaborating with the culture creating and surrounding it . Balzer 67

Woolfs implications relate aptly to Barnes, whose generative and sexualîzed comments to Barney on Ryder reveal authorialanxiety in acknowledging the promiscuous extension ofan artwork beyond privileged, enclosed aesthetic spaces.

Sexualizing Ryder reluctantly recognizes through figurative language the novel's position as a social text, and the role ofa censoring society as another, equally important, textual author. Accordingly, Bames amusingly describes herselfas an over-protective author­ mother ofthis "poor child" - her first novel - once conceived ofas pure but now defiled by the intrusion ofa "mass" authorship that threatens a mother's sense ofownership. The novel in society is sexually active and, in Barnes conception, stained by the hand ofthe censor, "compromised" in this act oftouching others.

But Woolfs personifying ofthe culturally mediated artwork - as an extension of the "body ofthe people" - also effectively suggests reasons why a modemist author would at all be interested in figuring the artwork as a sexual body. Both Lawrence and

Hall echo Woolfs example in Three Guineas, where she uses language ofthe generative body to evoke politics, as in A Room ofOne 's Own she uses it to discuss art. In Three

Guineas, Woolfdescribes sexism and fascism as contained "in the egg ofthe very same worm": within this festering generative combination lies the oppressive language ofthe patriarchal "Dictator ... in embryo" (quoted by Carlston, 144). Woolfs ''body ofthe people" gives birth to insidious fascism in addition to "masterpieces"; as Erin Carlston notes, Woolfs use oforganic and regenerative metaphors ofthe body refiect (and, in doing so, attempt to contradict) the language offascism. Woolfs language borrows the trope offemale reproduction in order to counter fascist ideology's preoccupation with defining female "contribution to the nation" as "maternai labour," or "matriotism" Balzer 68

(Carlston, 167). Fascist generation is thus cast in an unfavourable figurative light: it is poisoned and infected, a pemicious copulation and birth. In addition to W001E' s denunciation ofmatriotism, her tendencies toward personification reflect a larger nationalist leaning in the twenties and thirties towards a cohering language ofthe body politic. The complexities ofthis language can only be briefly noted here: relevant especially is the assertion ofcritics like Lawrence Rainey and Jeffrey Schnapp ofa nationalist (and fascist) language ofthe public body, with a dictator as the head ofthis organic-figurative entity. Rainey notes, for example, the words ofa member ofMilan's

"School ofFascist Mysticism," asserting that a "nation is always a mystical body ...and because it is a mystical body, it possesses us" (144-5). The individual disappears into this suspiciously conceptual "mystical body," assimilated within the figurative language ofa possessing state.

To use language ofthe body in 1928 thus in part implies recognition ofa politicized audience: ofa mass ofbodies subsumed within a nationally motivated discourse. When D. H. Lawrence personifies the artwork, he shrewdly capitalizes on this notion. In his literary-cum-social writing on sex (written mostly between 1927-1929), he uses a sexualized, reproductive organic body to represent the nation-state ofEngland and the British public. Moreover, Lawrence enacts a thoroughgoing conflation ofthis national-political body with an equally organicized aesthetic body that represents both the literary work (usually, the nove1) and its audience (usually - again - the British public).

Interestingly, it is this "public" that he further confuses in essays like "Pomography and

Obscenity" and "Surgery for the Novel- or a Bomb?" as both a citizenship and a readership. Like Woolf, Lawrence makes unhesitating use ofmodem nationalist language Balzer 69 in ail its persuasive figurative forms to include both the reader and artwork as organic parts ofa sort ofaesthetic-minded nation: these parts, like the body politic, must move forward, must regenerate, along with an ailing state.

Lawrence's writing on art, and in particular his writing pertaining (or looking forward) to Lady Chatteriey 's Lover, recognizes tbis public readership in its tendency toward the organic. In 1923's "Surgery for the Novel- or a Bomb?" Lawrence f1atly implicates the reader in his caU for a radical shift in the nature ofthe modern nove!. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Lawrence imagines the modern novel as simultaneously a young infant (ifthere is hope for it) and a dying man (ifthere is none). In bis denunciation of the stream ofconsciousness techniques ofJoyce, Dorothy Richardson and Marcel Proust, moreover, Lawrence speaks ofeach as poorly constructed organic entities, and describes the typical readerly reaction to such entities. Here, the "serious [modernist] novel" dedicated to presenting the minutiae ofeveryday experience is "senile-precocious," unable to communicate effectively with the reader. The ensuing encounter between a reader and the "senile-precocious" novel is self-indulgent, masturbatory: "... their audience ris] as frenziedly absorbed in the application ofthe author's discoveries to their own reactions: 'That's me! That's exactly it! l'mjust finding myselfin this book!'

Why, this is more than death-bed, it is almost post -mortem behaviour" (135). The reader meetsthe modern avant-garde text and then proceeds to turn inward, wrongly looking for discursive reflections ofthe selfin place ofcontact with another text-person.

Like the sexologists, then, Lawrence disparages art that looks inward for meaning.

His ideal aesthetic experience is a type ofpedagogical exchange, where reader-text contact incites an exchange ofmeaning and an attempted alteration ofthe reader. Balzer 70

Through the language ofthe (largely male) sexual body, Lawrence manages to foreground a modem public that is implicated in the future ofBritish society as effective communicators, as "correct" readers. In "Pomography and Obscenity," for example,

Lawrence describes the state ofpublic readership in apocalyptic tones - as a diseased, anonymous collective, incapable ofdiscerning "meanings" in their confrontations with art. Frustrated, he depicts his briefinteraction with public opinion as the indulgence ofa monstrosity, the "pull[ing] [the public's] elephantine and ignominious leg" (65).

Lawrence's cure for the body politic involves a healing ofthese limbs by an extension and regeneration ofanother limb: the phallus. In fact, A Propos ofLady Chatterley's

Lover contains a series ofprototypically Lawrencian statements on the need for the body ofthe public to become sexualized and masculinized, and for this body to employ the phallus as "the bridge to the future" (104). Simultaneously, though, Lawrence's England is a potentially generative mother, asking her public, the brood she contains, to cultivate . its degenerating virility: "Poor England, she will have to regenerate the sex in her young people, before they do any regenerating ofher. It isn't England that needs regeneration, it is her young" (92).

One of"her young," Lawrence argues, is the novel, and his Lady Chatteriey seems the most overt contribution to this intended generation in his oeuvre. Lady

Chatteriey, Lawrence's idealliterary and social salve, has, like bis figurative conception ofEngland, a number ofroles to fill. It is here that Lawrence echoes the sexual vagueness ofhis contemporary, Edward Carpenter, who calls for the regeneration of

England through sex and art while, as Eve Sedgwick notes in Between Men, simultaneously asserting "hypervirility," effeminacy, and a dual hatredlidentification with Balzer 71 women. Though Lawrence, as Sedgwick later points out, is clearer than Carpenter, his novel, as a regenerative citizen ofEngland, fills the role ofboth sexes in its confrontation with the public. In Lawrence's primitive configuration ofstraight sexuality, the novel functions as both the phallic male and the generating female. Though Lawrence - as Lisa

Rado notes - appears to be an obstinate opponent ofmodern conceptions ofandrogyny

(in Fantasia ofthe Unconscious he calls it the "hermaphrodite fallacy"), he nonetheless permits his novel to become dually sexed. The nove! acts for England, inciting cataclysm, "inventing new sensations," in order to regenerate the body politic ("Surgery,"

137). As both a man and a woman, the novel (Lady Chatteriey) is given the privilege of occupying both sides ofthe Lawrencian sex act: in its interaction with a readership, Lady

Chatteriey promises this "bringing together ofthe surcharged electric blood ofthe male with the polarized electric blood ofthe femaIe," resulting in "a tremendous flashing interchange" that creates a "new collective activity" (142).

Ifthe interchange between Lawrence's straight loyers mirrors that oftext and of reader, it must transcend anonymity to become intimate and individualized. In

"Pornography and Obscenity," Lawrence encourages a close encounter with aesthetics that improves what he deems "mob meaning." Importantly, the resulting communication draws upon individual instincts that are primaI and, paradoxically, uItimateIy shared. It is here, again, that Lawrence presents the act ofreading as synonymous with the sex act, for

Lawrence's view ofstraight intercourse promises precisely this return to a highly personaI, but nonetheless primaI, shared context. In characterizing sex, he thus speaks of a communicative act, "a unison in spirit, in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great work. A mingling ofthe individual passion into one great impassioned Balzer 72 purpose" ('~antasia," 143). Lovers create an artwork in their union, projecting discourse out into the world, into the modem state; the same occurs in an aesthetic interaction, where an artwork touches the individual intimately and sexuaUy, but aIso with national reverberations. Lawrence's critical writing on tbis encounter, tbis divining ofwhat Lady

ChatterIey caUs the universal, "passional places oflife," sometimes utterly confuses text acts and sex acts. "Fantasia..." speaks ofa desire for sex that is limited iffocused solely on copulation. In Lawrence's purview, sex must become an allegory, it must give a sense of"purposive, creative activity," and so must reading (143).

Implied in this act is a readerly gesture that itselfstands as a sort ofcreation; the reader is intrinsic to the aesthetic process, a co-writer ofthe script for this new social being, Lawrence's novel. When Lawrence describes the act ofliving, ofthinking sex, as a gesture or trope he states, "A man [sic] must come to the limits ofhimself [sic] and become aware ofsomething beyond him [sic]" (79). In approaching the artwork, the reader is told to, as Lawrence's copulating subject, make contact with another and grow: like the author's extending phaUic bridge, or a quickening foetus. In "Introduction to

Painting," he makes the association between reader and artist clear through a statement similar to Woolf's in Room ofOne 's Own: that "real works ofart are made by the whole consciousness ofman working together in unison and oneness" (111). In tbis social act ofcreation, "the same applies to the genuine appreciation ofa work ofart"; he privileges the primaI impulse ofcontact above forcing the instinctive (and the aesthetic) into

"prostituted acquiescence" (112). The reader becomes an active agent in rendering the artwork meaningful, just as the artist attempts to do so in his own gesture ofcreation.

Lawrence thus describes a national birth ofreaders in as polemical a tone as he does the Balzer 73 birth ofartworks, where audiences must "g[e]t back to the state ofthe unborn babe" so that "England may be born again" (134).

Lady Chatterley's Lover is the embodiment ofthese parallels between sex, art, the writer and the reader.Within the novel itself, Lawrence interjects unashamedly to profess the axioms he asserts in writings like ''Pornography and Obscenity,"

"Introduction to Painting" and, ofcourse, the intentionally reiterative A Propos a/Lady

Chatterley's Lover. Characters in the novellike Tommy Dukes, for instance, repeat the author's beliefthat "[modern] civilization is going to fall ... And believe me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus" (77). Lawrence forces these elements ofhis personal aesthetic-sexual manifesto to resonate discursively in the prose-thoughts of

Connie, a character haunted with reworked Biblical professions like "Ye must be born again! 1 believe in the resurrection ofthe body" (87). Lawrence even interjects himself to posit the didactical centrepiece ofthe novel, which distills his simultaneous approach to aesthetics and sex:

... here lies the vast importance ofthe novel, properly handled. It can inform and

lead into new places the flow ofour sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead

our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel,

properly handled, can reveal the most secret places oflife: for it is in the

passianal secret places oflife, above aIl, that the tide ofsensitive awareness needs

to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening (104).

Again, the novel is something more than an object; it has the capacity for life, and must be "properly handled." Lawrence presents the new novel as leading toward renewal, away from "things gone dead" and approaching a virile site ofregeneration. The Balzer 74 experience ofthe novel is both individual and national; through an analogy to genital pleasure, a touching ofthe "passional secret places oflife" by the novel or by the artist, a mass readership can find restorative properties, and be cleansed, freshened.

Radclyffe Hall's own personifying ofthe artwork is not as prolific, though she does consider her novel in a similarly organic manner. 1 suggest in Chapter 2 that Hall found encouragement in the writings ofEllis and Carpenter that allowed her to consider her writing as a form ofgenerative creation. Here, reproduction is also understood, as it is in Woolf, as something that happens "through the body ofthe people": Carpenter's invert creates social artworks that behave as veritable beings - like babies would - in modern society. Ellis' Sexual Inversion suggests an organicising - not ofthe artwork­ but ofhomosexuality in modemity. Here, Ellis describes inverted sexual instinct in its very genesis as a natural proclivity: "the soil is now ready, but the variety ofseeds likely to thrive in it is limited ... the same seed ofsuggestion is sown in various soils; in the many it dies out; in the few it flourishes" (317). Ellis' natural description of homosexuality's inception is, like Carpenter's "children ofthe mind" conception, tactical in its rhetorical positing ofinversion as a natural consequence ofhuman development.

Here, as Hall makes abundantly clear in The Well ofLoneliness, homosexuality is strategically "something primitive and age-oId as Nature herself' (313). Similar to

Lawrence, Hall imagines inversion and inverted creation as instinctual gestures, acts that recall a primaI, originary state. Like Ellis, Hall furthers an organicism in an attempt to suggest an inverted aesthetic's natural place within society as something that has not yet been recognized, a leafthat has yet remained unturned. Balzer 75

Hall's understanding ofher novel thus focuses on its qualities as a social being in an attempt to integrate the text - as an inverted being - within modern society. Hall insists in Weil that the creative invert emerge from an experience ofactive sexuality: that an invert cannot engender meaning without a partner, cannot - as D. H. Lawrence also implies in his references to "passional places" ofwriterly-readerly communion - connect with a public without an active practicing ofher/his own sexuality. Una Troubridge, as already mentioned, suggests this need in her Life ofRadcly.ffe Hall, where the (proto)text is like the "ripe" fruits ofa "natura]" inverted relationship. The work acts as a proxy for the inverted relationship in society, expressing Hall and Troubridge's ''union'' as an aesthetic whole: in other words, Weil acts as Troubridge and Hall's Carpenterian "child ofthe mind." As Troubridge notes, Hall insists that such a work could "only be written by a sexual invert" (81).

Conditions such as these are also rampant in the novel itself, which suggests that

Stephen's productivity as a writer is directly related to her sexual activity. When Stephen relates to Puddle that she "shall never be a great writer because ofmy maimed and insufferable body," she speaks before her great literary work in the novel and, tellingly, before her relationship with Mary Lewellyn. She thus complains that her second novel

"wasn't complete" because she was "not complete" (217). Even as she sits down to write her sophomore effort, she complains that "social intercourse [is] such a miserable torment"; Stephen and her creations retract from society as her practicing of"intercourse"

(both discursive and sexual) wanes. Her mind is "limp, unresponsive ... [and] dry," indicating both lack ofsexual activity and lack ofinspiration (216). Unsurprisingly, on the disintegration ofMary and Stephen's relationship, Stephen's pen, which serves as a Balzer 76

sort ofLawrencian phallus, a "sharp and purposeful" weapon throughout their union,

grows flaccid again, losing its vitalism and "slip[ing] from her nervous fingers" (379).

Hall's conception ofa text that cornes intimately from the inverted author has

increased agency through an organicism that - like Lawrence - connects the body to the

artwork; here, the novel is a product ofthe author's body, a naturally conceived creature

emerging from sexual union. Hall's description ofthe creative process ofStephen the

artist first evokes her characters as "people sprung from the soil," entities she engenders

. through the creative fruits ofher mind. Hall furthers this comparison, however, in her

description ofthe progression ofan artist's aesthetic and characters: ''Like infants they

had sucked at her breasts ofinspiration, and drawn from them blood, waxing wonderfully

strong; demanding, compelling thereby recognition. For surely thus only are fine books

written, they must somehow partake ofthe miracle ofblood ... the giver oflife, the

purifier, the great final expiation" (214). The artist's creations draw upon biosexual­

matriarchal food to attain semiotic life, dependent, child-like, on sustenance from a

mother. The author is ofcourse this "giver oflife," a creator engendering like Zeus

drawing Dionysus from his thigh. Importantly, the blood-fed artwork "compell[s]

thereby recognition," calling forth to an audience because ofthe vigor it has drawn from

the progenitor-author. Similarly, in her discussion ofStephen's friend Brockett's work,

Hall again insists that "genius" must be "fed upon live flesh and blood" (234).

Additionally, Stephen's "heart [will] not bleed anymore," because she is sexually

dormant; she is unable to give as an author because she is not giving sexually, not

dispersing her "heart-blood" to an active lover or an active aesthetic. Balzer 77

In her public statements about The Weil ofLoneliness, Hall reflects this concern with readerly ingestion, and with a writer's ability to give organically through the artwork to the reader. Here, the readers, in addition to Hall or Stephen's characters or works, nourish themselves as growing infants. Like Lawrence, Hall speaks in tones that reverberate nationally to reflect this growth. England is thus reflected as equally figurative: i.e., as a body that is sexually dormant and in need ofregeneration. In an

rd August 23 , 1928 interview in The Daily Herald, Hall calls for the unabated renourishing ofher country: "Is the reader to be treated like a kind ofmental dyspeptic, whose literary food must be predigested by a Government office before consumption? Such action can only insult the public intelligence.... On behalfofEnglish literature, 1must protest against such unwarrantable interference" (quoted by Baker, 228). Hall provides, mother­ like, organ~c food for her British readers. They are responsible for confronting her work in unmediated terms, for ingesting it individually and directly from her "authorial" body.

But The Weil ofLoneliness is not only potential nourishment for a modem audience. Indeed, like Lady Chatterley 's Lover, Hall characterizes her novel as a social being, as a human released into the public to perform social duties. Hall's statements ask the public to see her novel as an inverted intime, to accept the novel closely as they would accept, in Hallian terminology, "her people." Hall's circulation ofthis being among the modern public and, further, modernist aesthetic circles like Bloomsbury was notoriously aggressive. In fact, she wanted the novel to, as an August lSth letter to Gerard Manley

Hopkins evinces, "smash the conspiracy ofsilence" like a "pioneer," speaking for a silent minority as proxy, as a discursive mediator between the world and a community of inverts (quoted by Baker, 222). It is for this reason that Hall tries to have Weil "meet" a Balzer 78 number ofmodemists that might come to its defense. Hall describes Arnold Bennet's superficial encouragement ofher book as a "befriend[ing]" ofthe work, an acceptance of the novel as an acceptance ofher and ofthe cast ofinverts she purports to speak for

(Baker, 229). Woolf's letterto Vita Sackville-West's regarding Hall's relentless pursuit ofE. M. Forster for critical support ofWeil suggests a snide aversion to this dressed novel (and author). Woolf snickers at Hall's desire for the low-class Weil to be seen as "a work ofartistic merit - even genius," and instead says that she "scolds ... like a fishwife," pushing (in Woolf's opinion) vulgar goods indiscriminately to as many as possible.

In both Hall's and Lawrence's realization oftheir novels' respective roles in society - Hall's concem that her novel be widely circulated and Lawrence's that Lady

ChatterIey be taken as a lover - there is a fastidious need to ensure a specific public presentation. As social beings, texts are clothed by their authors, sporting necessary (or, as the case may be, unnecessary) dress for their subsequent interactions with a modem readership. In Weil, Brockett talks ofa work ofart being dressed: a "feel" for words, a

"perfect ear for balance" are a "suitable dress for a body [text]." According to Brockett, the passionless text is a dummy, and "a dummy can't stir our emotions" (231). The dress ofthe novel must always reveal the organic essence beneath; it must prepare the reader for the greater meeting that will occur "between the covers," as it were. Such is D. H.

Lawrence's conception ofthe artwork as appropriately c1othed. At the beginning ofA

Propos, he lists the various pirated editions ofhis novel, commenting ofthe dress

(binding, page quality, etc.) ofthese volumes. Versions take on a fetishized, organic identity, reminiscent ofWalter Benjamin's ''Unpacking My Library," in which the Balzer 79 collector becomes

Lawrence's ideally clothed Lady Chatteriey in

'ud begin to be women" (229). Mellors' uniform sexualizes his labourers, drawing attention to the moving bodies underneath this clothing; as a conduit to an organic interior, this postulating over dress reflects precisely what Lawrence wishes for in a readerly encounter with a text. Like Connie or Mellors' nakedness, then, the Florentine

Chatterley is not

Lawrence, deceive, but ultimately contribute somehow in revealing the thing that lies inside. The work must draw sexual attention as ifit were a male buttock orone of

Mellors' workers, covered in scarlet clotho Even the publisher ofthe Florentine edition is part ofLawrence's sexuàlized configuration ofthe textual experience, as he expresses his fondness for the very content ofChatterIey and in fact "does it" himself ("O! ma! but we do it every day!") (62).

As Hall's and Lawrence's suitably dressed novels move into a public readership with the intent ofcontact, there is a sense on behalfofboth novelists that their works are actually being touched: sometimes appropriately, often inappropriately. Similar to

Woolf's imagining in "Modern Fiction" ofthe "art offiction com[ing] alive and standing in our midst," Lawrence and Hall express concern that readers will both "break her and bully her, as weIl as honour and love her" (153). The aforementioned descriptions of

Lady ChatterIey - "smeared," handled "not very warmly" - suggest Lawrence's tendency to fetishize and then proceed to specify in detail his novel's proper public circulation.

Cheap reproductions ofthe book are misrepresentative, prompting incorrect readerly response from admirers ofpublic pornography and "stale grey Puritan[s]" who ''with a dirty mind look for dirt" in art ("A Propos," 87). Thus, Lawrence's novel must not be conceived ofas a piece ofpornography or as an ephemeral titillation; instead, it must be understood as an actual being, demanding intimacy that transcends the traditional semiotic praxis ofa pornographie text.

Part ofLawrence's wish for the circulation ofa personified Lady ChatterIey is that it not be seen as a prostitute. Lawrence's evocation ofthe pornographie text in Balzer 81

''Pornography and Obscenity" introduces this fear: "The word itself [i.e., pornographyJ, we are told, means 'pertaining to harlots' - the graph ofthe harlot" (64). ''Moralityand the Novel" takes tbis allusion further, expressing unfavourable reader-to-text relations by using the prostitute as textual proxy: "Ifa man establishes a living relation to her [i.e., the prostituteJ, ifonly for one moment, then it is life. But ifit doesn 't: it is just money

and function, then it is not life, but sordidness, and a betrayal ofliving" (141). Thus the expurgated Lady Chatterley ofA Propos is this "harlot": "filthy," handled coarsely and

concerned only in generating "a drop in the bucket" out ofits public circulation. In this case, the reader's relationship with the text is, for Lawrence, drained ofsexuality, retaining only the air ofmechanized sensationalism ofthe ''young jazzy" who ''take[sJ it like a cocktail" (87).

Lawrence's fear ofLady Chatterley's misdirected circulation also figures the expurgated text as a maimed body, as a dismembered and impotent entity in society when . forcibly shaped by an uncomprehending audience. His evocation ofhis unwillingness to remove passages from the book is typical ofthis anxiety: "So 1 begin to be tempted and

start in to expurgate. But impossible! 1 might as weIl try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds" (84). Lawrence's dismemberment is the novel's dismemberment, where the work acts as a "piece" ofthe author, as a limbic extension of the author. The novel is organic, a being that cannot be sliced and reduced, as if inanimate. Thus, as Lawrence suggests in ''Morality and the Novel," the attempt to restrict content and simplify intent is not only an act ofdismemberment, but also ultimately an act ofcrucifixion. The organic novel, potentially a living thing ifcreated aptly, is literally "nailed down" by an uncomprehending public, who refuses notions of Balzer 82 the artist-reader-text relationship as intimate, privileged: "The novel is the highest example ofsubtle inter-relatedness ... Ifyou try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail" (139).

Lawrence's preoccupation with the maiming ofLady Chatteriey inevitably assumes a sexual quality that both Lawrence and a public critical readership acknowledge. The author's attempt to "clip" his own "nose into shape with scissors" already hints at this, relating castration to literary expurgation. Like Oliver Mellors, who abhors corporate culture's need to "eut offthe world's cock," Lawrence's book is "eut" when mutilated by sales-oriented publishers (226). In fact, the tendency to ally Lady

Chatterley's trials under the censors with the threat ofemasculation persists throughout the novel's contemporary critical reception. The expurgated Lady Chatteriey thus appears egregiously eut as it is reviewed: even a contemporary anthology ofessays on Lady

Chatter/ey introduces the expurgated version ofthe novel as "emasculated" (see D. H.

Lawrence 's Lady, ix). Three modem reviews ofthe Frieda Lawrence-approved

"authorized expurgated edition" of 1932 suggest identical proclivities. An unsigned

Times Literary Supplement review from February 25, for instance, identifies the censored novel as half-human, weakened, "dead" and devoid of''warm fruitfulness." Again, the novel is "emasculated by the omissions" ofthe abridged edition (285). V. S. Pritchett in

Fortnight/y Review speaks, as Lawrence does, ofthe "cuts in the book" that make it

"difficult to see Lawrence whole," suggesting an absence ofhis self-termed "vital" member (288). Henry Hazlitt, in Nation, gives the most detailed reading ofthe novel's maiming, calling its editor-censor a surgeon who removes "every description ofthe physical act ofsex" from the work (289). Ifthe novel does not contain Lawrence's Balzer 83 descriptions ofsex acts, Hazlitt suggests, the novel itself becomes hermeneutically sterile.

The surgeon thus produces a eunuch: "Out ofLadyChatterIey 's Lover he has carved nothing but the heart. The heart? 1 find 1 am using the language ofthe editor himself

Lawrence would have been more accurate" (292).

Radclyffe Hall identifies herself, "inverts" and the personified Weil ofLoneliness text as bearers ofa pronounced martyrdom, thus similarly acknowledging the idea of

Lawrence's maimed text. Here, the scar is a mark ofthe burden ofinverted sexuality: a

"mark ofCain," as Weil ofLoneliness suggests. Just as Stephen procures a scar on her cheek from her war-sacrifice in Weil, the book and indeed Hall herselfbear this physical mark ofmistreatment. Hall's endurance for the sake ofthe book is well-documented, and though she never speaks ofher dealings with the suppressed novel as Lawrencian castration, she does evoke Lawrence's sense ofa book and an author ''being nailed," crucified, by a misguided reception. For instance, Una Troubridge and Vera Brittain both­ cIaim that Hall's difficult endurance ofher novel's critical and public trial caused her to develop fanatical physical symptoms à la John Keats: "[She] believed she had been

'chosen' for the privilege of becoming for a time the bearer ofthe stigmata. Whether imagination or hysteria ... she was obliged to seek radiological treatment for acute pain in the palms ofboth hands, accompanied by an angry-looking stain" (81). The stains on

Hall's hands, probably the most flamboyant manifestation ofher martyrdom, bracket her difficulties at the trial itself. At one ofthe most infamous moments ofWell's British indictment, for example, Norman Birkett, acting for the defence, claimed - in a desperate attempt to curry favour - that the female relationship in the novel represented nothing more than a "normal" friendship. Hall's reaction to this statement was, apparently, Balzer 84 inflammatory: unable to restrain "tears ofhearthroken anguish," she c1aimed Birkett's comments were "the unkindest eut ofaIl" (quoted by Brittain, 92). Thus Hall, like

Lawrence, represents a desexualizing and simultaneous persecution ofher novel as a maiming, and further reads this injury as a grave misunderstanding ofher novel's public purpose. Mirroring her description ofStephen's anguish over Angela Crossby's refusaI to give her love in Weil, Hall's work and her "love" are injured without adequate comprehension, "piteous, suffering, defenceless" things "lay[ing] bleeding under the ruins"(203).

As Weil' s interaction with the public continues, so does its configuration as a being completely apart from Hall: like a child that matures and grows away from its mother, Weil moves swiftly away from Hall and into the lives ofother readers. Another incident at the British trial ofWeil evinces this, where the artwork is removed from the cradling arms ofthe artist-mother. After Sir Chartres Biron's accusation ofher degradation (through implications oflesbianism) ofthe military effort ofambulance women, Hall interrupted the proceedings and protested that as '1:he author ofthis book" she had a right to "emphatically protest" its abuse. C. H. Rolph, in his introduction to

Vera Brittain's 1968 anthology ofthe Weil trial, reads this as a sign ofHall's waning controlover Weil; as "the mere author ofthe book," Rolph suggests, "she was nobody ... the only person who could speak in its defence was he who had been found to be keeping it in his 'house, shop, room, or other place for the purpose ofsale or distribution'" (12).

Like a maturing chiId, the book grows out ofHall's care, wandering into the houses and shops ofothers: Weil is indeed (as Rolph suggests) the only "defendant" at the trial, because it is given to the reader, maturing in its cultural circulation, and actualized as a Balzer 85 social being through its interaction with society. Hall's attention to the public's tendency to (as Woolfterms it) "break and bully" her novel also focuses on its independence in the world. For instance, Hall hopes, as Troubridge claims in her biography, that "the book would survive" despite "its prosecution," and that she will find "hospitality" in America and Europe for "this exiled child ofher mind" (95). At the end of Well's trial,

Troubridge depicts an exhausted Hall's concem for the very life ofthe novel, stating that

"so far as [Hall] could judge her book might weIl be dead ... [and] there was nothing more she could do for it ..." (94).

However bleakly Lawrence and Hall present their books' misdirected public interactions, contemporary reception ofboth certainly does not respond to them as

"dead." Sir James Douglas' famous August 19, 1928 indictment ofWell in Sunday

Express (which "forced" Hall's publishers to submit the book to the Home Secretary, eventually leading to The Well's prosecution under obscenity charges), for instance, sees the novel as alive and, as Brittain notes, "monstrous" (52). In many ways, Douglas treats

Well as Hall does: as an actual invert, vying for acceptance. The banner headline accompanying Douglas' attack thus reads, "A WORK THAT MUST BE

SUPPRESSED," compelling Well into the closet. Connecting the nove! to disease,

Douglas' homophopic reading rejects both the novel and the "legion ofinverts" it represents. His denouncement, based entirely on the nove!'s "undiscussable" [sic] subject, suggests that reading Well affects the body: that it and the inverts it represents

"thrusf' their "contagion" on "healthy and innocent minds"; that the book is like '1:he leprosy ofthose lepers"; and, ofcourse, that giving it to society is akin to giving "a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial ofprussic acid" (quoted by Brittain, 57). To read the Balzer 86 book, according to Douglas, is to put oneself, and British society, at risk, especially given its special "seductive" qualities ("sentiment," "delicacy," "sincer[ity]"). Thus, despite his violent reaction to the novel, Douglas undergoes something unmistakably intimate and insidious when reading Weil; the unprecedented existence ofa work offiction dealing with homosexuality makes the book stand for "homosexuality" writ large, a "plague" communicated through the pages ofthe nove!. Douglas ends his article with a personification of"fiction ofthis type" as a sexually stray daughter or wife, suggesting it

"does injury to good literature," and causes "the profession ofliterature to faU into disrepute." Ultimately, Douglas proffers a "straight" domestic life for the work, encouraging it to "keep its house in order" (58).

Despite Douglas' demonstrative revulsion, other responses to the novel reveal an eager intimacy, complying with Hall's readerly prescriptions ofthe book itselfas an organic symbol ofthe hardships ofherselfand of"her people." On the first day of

Hall's trial, for instance, the courtroom was "mainly occupied by women," including Una

Troubridge, all apparently admirers of Weil. Here is Hall's army: an actualizing ofthe

"legion" she mentions in the novel, many authors ofthousands ofletters addressed to

Hall about the book. Hall herself, sporting her Spanish riding hat like a matinee idol and described by the Daily Herald as "well-chiselled" ostensibly points both to her public persona and to the character ofStephen, with an "expression in the eyes ... ofmingled pain and sadness" (quoted by Cline, 257). At the conclusion ofthe trial, the Dai/y

Express reports two women admirers approaching her from the attendant crowd, taking her hand and kissing it. Readers, who in letters to Hall express their intimate interactions with the sensationalized text, repeat such amorous gestures through acts ofreading. One Balzer 87

"fan" Ietter, mistakenly addressed to Hall's literary agent, Audrey Heath, is an overt love letter to the book, regarding Weil as "so gorgeous it hurt[s]." It proceeds to inquire about the author, asking, "how much ofyourself is in the book?" (quoted by Baker, 255). Like

Hall's experience with sexology, then, and like the experiences ofyoung Iesbians in sexologicai case studies, Weil promises not only a means ofself-discovery, but also a chance for contact with a notable invert. Readers try to find Hall in her book, attempting to make contact with another through [her] words: as Hall evokes in her satiricai response to this letter (addressed to Heath), the reader fetishizes her "snow white hand," her "flaming words" and the "make ... of[her] fountain pen," vivifying and eroticizing an experience ofreading the book as an experience with an actuallover (quoted by

Baker, 255).

Likewise, critics eroticize the reading experience ofLady Chatteriey as much as the author himselfdoes. Again, as is the case with Hall, these responses are precisely what Lawrence appears to be after in his writing about sex and Iiterature: encouraging a way ofreading, of"thinking sex," that uses his prescribed sexuai modeis ofintimacy, purity and union as a script for the reader. As evinced above, Lady Chatteriey, and indeed Lawrence himself often appear as sexualized figures in critical writing, their effectiveness based on their respective virility as public entities. However, another critic,

J. M. Murray, in a 1929 Adelphi review, describes his contact with the novel with tones suitable to the "pure" intimacy Lawrence forges between Mellors and Connie. The novel is a new being demanding material eroticization because ofits theoreticaI, aesthetic and social position. Now, instead ofbeing eut, Lawrence and his work are pure organic essences, meeting the reader in a stylized, intimate (yet aIl the time discursive) encounter. Balzer 88

Lady Chatteriey 's Lover communicates in whispered dialogue with Murray, "[causing] the tide of... sensitive awareness to flow about the secret places oflife" (282). Later the moment ofcontact between reader, novelist and artwork occurs, suffused with hermeneutic as weIl as sexual meaning: "Do 1 not touch Mr. Lawrence at this moment through his book, even though he hides himselfwithin? Veritably touch him, and doser than laying my hand upon his arm?" (283). The book and its author simultaneously assume the role oflover, enfolding the reader in an organic discourse that equals the

"experience" ofthe novel, eliding details like characterization and plot. The novel's organicism allows it status as a conceptual whole, one that cannot and should not be "eut" for the sake ofmisdirected exegesis: here is an entity, a "tissue" as Murray caIls it, that enlivens when it is touched by a reader.

However, it is, ultimately, the action and language ofboth books that provides the manual, often a veritable manifesto, for appropriate encounters between author, reader and work. Lawrence's novel works weIl as an allegory ofthis experience: it is, after aIl, essentiaIly about Connie learning to read sex properly, and to read her own sexuality for what it really is. For this reason, Lawrence's characters stand for things: Clifford represents the misdirected modernist author, ostensibly crippled and sexually impotent, and only able to produce writing that is in essence, masturbatory, ineffectual; MeIlors represents the expression ofideal writerly tendencies, acting as the mouthpiece for a series ofassertions on sex, art and life that recur in Lawrence's nonfiction. When Connie and MeIlors meet, then, their reaction (and the world's) is necessarily explosive: this is the union that Lawrence claims will alter the world. As Mellors states in a laconic recognition ofhis and Connie's semiotic role in the text, "'1 stand for the touch ofbodily Balzer 89 awareness between human beings ... and the touch oftenderness. And she is my mate.

And it is a battle against the money. and the machine, and the insentient ideal monkeyishness ofthe world'" (292). Mellors' advice to Connie throughout is thus veiled advice to the reader, guiding her/him through an appropriate understanding ofjust what it means to think and to communicate through the trope ofa sexual relationship. Ultimately

Mellors throughlas Lawrence attempts to show that sex is a "creative act that is far more than procreative"; that is, he attempts to prove that the procreation resulting from sex acts is conceptual (aesthetic. discursive) as well as biological (292). Connie does become pregnant at the end ofthe novel, but Lawrence carefully calls this a conceptual

"insemination" as well. an insemination ofideas arising from the co-creative contact of loyers like Mellors and Connie.

Hall's conception ofa sexual relationship is, like Lawrence's. also concerned with the tropological import ofreader and ofartist interaction. where roles are shared. and varying degrees ofcontact are propitiated. Stephen and Mary's relationship is that of artist and ofreader: their relationship develops as Mary develops as a reader. Stephen

"teaching her the joy that can lie in books" (331). Further. Stephen is most active as a writer during her relationship with Mary. enlisting Mary to type her books and check the spelling in her manuscript. The text thus emerges as collaborative. the effort ofan inverted couple who collectively raise the artwork. Hall's idealized understanding between Mary and Stephen echoes Lawrence's description ofthe communicative exchange that occurs between loyers and readers/creators ofartworks. Here. "the strange sympathy which sometimes exists between two human bodies. so that a touch will stir many secret and perilous emotions. closed down on them both at that moment ofcontact . Balzer 90

.." (297). It follows that Hall uses a Biblical, "and that night they were not divided," to predict an undisclosed sex act between Mary and Stephen; here, reader and artist merge and, again like Lawrence's loyers, reach beyond themselves in a striving towards unity.

Hall's idyllic description ofthe couple's defacta honeymoon speaks ofthis union as fundamentally generative, as close to biosexual birthing as an "inverted" relationship can get: "... now they were in the grip ofCreation, ofCreation's terrific urge to create; the urge that will sometimes sweep forward blindly ... [this] intolerable life force would grip them, making them a part ofits own existence; so that they who might never create a new life, were yet one" (313).

Lady ChatterIey and Weil achieve this "oneness" by portraying sexual awakening as a learning process ofself-actualization that represents the development ofthe reader.

Stephen and Connie's realization oftheir respective sexualities incites their increased ability to see their own bodies, making themselves legible as sexual entities in the world.

Both heroines thus begin as semiotic voids: blank sheets ofpaper that are eventually written on and endowed with meaning by loyers. As 1 discuss in Chapter Two, Hall and the sexologists depict the inverted body as a specified, readable text. In the first part of

Weil, Stephen's body is an awkward puzzle because it does not recognize this text, not knowing what "if' is. As Stephen's body slowly becomes visible, it detaches from the world ofMorton, her family's estate, and is eventually rejected. As a young girl, she is puzzled at herselfand unsure ofher own meaning; when Angela Crossby inquires, "What in the Lord's name are you?" Stephen herselfwonders the same thing (144). Stephen's incomprehension ofher homosexuality is due precisely to a missing or unreadable name:

"She would think with a kind ofdespair: 'What am 1 in God's name - sorne kind of Balzer 91 abomination?' And this thought would fill her with very great anguish ... 80 now night after night she must pace up and down, beating her mind against a blank wall - the impregnable wall ofnon-comprehension: 'Why am 1 as 1 am - and what am 1?'" (152, italics mine). Hall's heroine is unsure ofwhat she is a signifier of, and because ofthis she cannot read and she cannot think; she represents confusion, compulsively repeating personal pmnouns (''why am 1 as 1 am and what am 1") and continually falling in on herself 1nevitably, then, Stephen's comfort cornes as someone comprehends her; Puddle, for instance, can read her, and suggests (echoing Ellis) that Stephen is still "a part ofwhat people calI nature," only "unexplained as yet" (154).

Lawrence's Connie is also unsure ofherselfbefore her encounter with Mellors, believing that she is destined to be remote from a complete union with men. Before she meets Mellors, Lawrence depicts her as a woman who has never had an orgasm, a

"crisis," with a man, and instead prefers to "bring herselfoff" Before her affair with the gamekeeper, Connie's sexualliaisons are flat; often, when talking ofsex, Connie is found asking, "What was the point? Ofher or anything?" (59). She is often left with a stale feeling from men, which Lawrence foregrounds in the first chapters ofthe novel by repeating words like "nothing" and "nothingness"; she is forced to praise the banal lovemaking ofMichaelis, for instance, "yet aIl the while, at the bottom ofher soul, she knew it was nothing" (54). Lawrence not only asserts the vacuity ofmodem sex acts, but he also suggests that Connie herselfis sexually and physically incomprehensible. She cannot be read, like Stephen, as she is "forlom and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing ofterrors" (117). Like Stephen, she remains puzzled, apart ±rom biology, until her body meets with another's in union. Balzer 92

As Stephen and Connie wait to be united with a lover who promises to make their bodies into meaningful texts, they both look in the mirror and scrutinize their respective unmeaningfulness. This curious moment ofsymmetry between the two texts suggests the

"untouched" body as a dead text, lacking in vital energy and losing significance. For

Hall, this is the horror ofthe silent, unembraced text, unable to thoroughly "smash the conspiracy ofsilence":

That night [Stephen] stared at herselfin the glass; and even as she did so she

hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts, and its

slender flanks ofan athlete. AlI her life she must drag this body ofhers like a

monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. This strangely ardent yet sterile body that

must worship yet never be worshipped in return by the creature ofits adoration...

. She began to grieve over it, touching her breasts with pitiful fingers, stroking her

shoulders, letting her hands slip along her straight thighs - Oh, poor and most

desolate body! [...] few words seemed to encompass her meaning - for she did

not know the meaning ofherself. But she loved, and loving groped for the God

who had fashioned her, even unto this bitter loving (186-7).

In orderto find 'lhe meaning ofher~elf," Stephen must find someone to regard her body.

This inverted body is an esoteric text when effaced and undisclosed, not knowing itself

Hall's contribution to the invert's plight is Weil itself, which, along with a proffered battalion ofsexological writing, represents the "words" that promise to "encompass her meaning"; in the noveI, Hall's momentary (and intentionally brief, tragic) answer, is also

Mary, who gives words to Stephen's body, accepting it and touching it. Stephen's ability to successfully connect with Mary is Hall's wish for inverts everywhere, and she suggests Balzer 93

her novelto further such connection to society. In reallife, Hall attempts to live this

example, associating her own relationship with Una Troubridge to the novel itself, and

then aggressively telling "aIl the nations ofthe earth" about it (Cline, 266, 272).

Lawrence's Connie's experience in front ofthe mirror also represents the author's

hope for the novel. Connie's lack ofmeaning, like Stephen's, derives from an untouched

state. In this passage, Lawrence evokes a woman going stale; at this point, like the young

modems in "Pomography and Obscenity," Connie has "mentalized sex till it is nothing at

aIl," and as a result is degenerating into nothing herself:

Connie went up to her bedroom she did what she had not done for a long time:

took offaIl her clothes, and looked at herself naked in the huge mirror. [...] Her

breasts were rather smaIl, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were unripe, a

little bitter, without meaning hanging there. And her belly had lost the fresh,

round gleam it had ad when she was young, in the days ofher German boy, who

really loved her physicaIly.... Now it was going slack, and a little flat, thinner,

but with a slack thinness. Her thighs, too, that used to look 50 quick and glimpsy

in their female roundness, somehow they too were going flat, slack, meaningless.

Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much insignificant

substance (72).

Like Hall, Lawrence associates his heroine's body with the properties ofa text lacking

meaning: Connie is "dropping," "unripe," "flat" and repeatedly "meaningless." When

Connie encounters Mellors, however, her body is literally inseminated with meaning.

Now she is touched, and Lawrence describes a physical change: "... she felt a new

stirring, a new nakedness emerging" (130). Connie, taught as a sort ofprototypical

------Balzer 94

Lawrencian reader by Mel1ors, is eventually able to create herself, though not without

help. The passage in which Connie first "opens up" to Mellors is therefore a pedagogical

model for the reader ofLady Chatterley, a moment conflating sex, pleasure and

regeneration in a "weIding" hermeneutic union: "... she felt the soft bud ofhim within

her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing

motion ... The voice out ofthe uttermost night, the life! ... Another selfwas alive in

her, buming molten and soft in her womb and bowels, and with this selfshe adored him"

(140). Connie's orgasm, concurrent with Mel1ors' and not self-generated, permits "new

life," a chiId, achieved through both her literary lover and a textual rhythm (i.e. the

repetition of"strange rhythms") that seems to coax her into a state ofpleasure. The

reader is invited to participate with Connie, to become her, and, moreover, to garner

meaning trom the text as a result ofsurrendering.

Both novels' fascination with a charged, symbolic creation inevitably leads to an

expression ofsex as an archaic evocation ofGenesis; in fact, both Hall and Lawrence

posit themselves as God, and their loyers in the novels as virile young couples in their

respective creative utopias. That both Hall and Lawrence adhere (faithfuUy, almost

garishly) to this symbol ofEden as creative suggests an aggressive tendency towards the

ideal in both novelists: the offering ofa literally perfect form ofnew love that promises

to bring postlapsarian modemity "back to the future," as it were, to a new and better

paradise ofsexual and intellectual enlightenment. Mellors' tendency towards imagining

utopias, as evinced above in his fantasy of"crimson-clad" workmen, provides an

example ofsuch authorial reverie. For Lawrence, the novel becomes a way ofcreating

an ideal within the grim modernist reality ofindustry: the sex scenes, in particular,

--~-- --~~ ------Balzer 95 provide utter escape in the book, and it is in these scenes where Lawrence proposes his

Eden. Thus the moment ofprimaI contact between Connie and Mellors, where her touch becomes the charge ofprimaI regeneration: "And now she touched him, and it was the sons ofgod with the daughters ofman ... the primeval root ofall that is lovely" (182).

Connie's time with Clifford is, unsurprisingly, rendered as an opposite experience, a snake in Lawrence's novel/garden, like the serpentine, ''tubified'' art ofDuncan (and the modernism of"nervous self-opinion"). Her nature walk with Clifford becomes the threatening sojourn ofEve alone, "the bracken ... lifting its brown curled heads, like legions ofyoung snakes with a new secret to whisper to Eve" (192). At the conclusion of the novel, Connie and Mellors' relationship becomes so stylized and sacred that it is taken to the point ofspirit - Pentecost - where Mellors claims his "soul softly flaps in the little Pentecost flame with you [i.e., Connie], like the peace offucking" (316). This is

Lawrence's conceptual Paradise, readable in the sex scenes ofhis very own book.

Stephen and Mary's hold in the "grip ofCreation" in Weil ofLoneliness also responds to this forging ofan aesthetic utopia. In this scene ofhoneymoon, Stephen and

Mary are caught up in the "fruitfuI" channel ofcreation, privy to the "life force ... making them a part ofits own existence." As mentioned above, Hall allows her lesbian couple to share in a verdant Eden for a moment in this scene, striving to portray the meeting oftwo women as utterly natural and primaI. In this idyllic Spanish garden,

Stephen and Mary become pregnant with meaning, "so that they who might never create a new life" are given the "fountain ofliving." The embrace here is communicative and creative: the lovers are able to "[speak] slow indolent words" to each other as verdant nature responds, and "flowers ... open and close in the bountiful garden" (313). Hall's Balzer 96

Eden, like her unapologetically "realist" text, makes the invert a natural entity; Hall strives to connect the meeting ofthe two loyers in the Spanish garden with this ancient tendency, naming the garden "a veritable Eden ... obsessed by a kind ofprimitive urge toward aIl manner ofcreation," expressing desire, as Lawrence does, as a "virile growth," and identifying Mary as Eve, as "perfect woman" (305). At this point, Hall responds to the meeting ofinverts, allowing them a naturalness that she questions at the end ofthe novel when Stephen forces barren loneliness upon herself; just as the Eden ofthe Spanish garden "respon[ds] to the touch oftheir healthful and eager bodies," so Hall maintains a stylized depiction ofa natural ''welding'' oftwo loyers, incorporating them into an ancient, heterosexual, literary trope. Like Hall's reallife "rallying around" the cause of inverted marriage (to use Bonnie Kime Scott's terminology), the novel unproblematically associates the meeting ofMary and Stephen with models of"straight" domesticity

(models other "Sapphic" modemists like Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks and Virginia

Woolffound repugnant), and gives this model tones ofaesthetic procreation, of''the warm feeling ... ofa union between door and latchkey" (327). Here the blankness of

Stephen is shortly impregnated, and Stephen goes on to finish her novel in a springtime

Paris that is "bursting ofbuds [in] a positive orgy ofgrowth and greenness" (324).

Despite this assured idealism, both authors end their works by acknowledging the world outside a stylized sexual-aesthetic relationship. After aIl, Hall purposefully breaks down her trope ofcontact at the end ofWeIl ofLoneliness, leaving Stephen alone and

"barren." Likewise, Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley have to confront the inevitable beast ofindustry and must justify their child's role within this world. Both novels look aggressively towards their eventual utopias: the purpose ofHaIl's tragedy in Balzer 97

Well is to enact a quickening ofthe hopeless, "yet unbom" into a tolerant world, and the purpose ofLady ChatterIey's prophecy is to manifest a change in preparation for the "bad time coming." As always, both Hall and Lawrence conclude with a movement toward union; Stephen actually appears to become Hall at the end ofthe novel, for instance, appropriating the plight ofa martyred mass ofinverts into her very womb, making it

"fruitful" and "fearful": a dark, cryptic struggle indeed, but one unquestionably predicated on contact with public readers. For aIl ofHall's and Lawrence's directives, it is only a modem readership that can actualize these ideologies; as Mellors relates to a distant Connie at the end ofthe novel, "it's a delicate thing, and takes patience and a long pause... so many words, because 1 can't touch you" (316-7). Balzer 98

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