The Well of Loneliness Radclyffe Hall

Paris lesbian and gay subculture

In Hall's time, Paris was known for having a relatively large and visible gay and lesbian community – in part because France, unlike England, had no laws against male homosexuality.[18] Marcel Proust's novels continued in their influence upon 1920s Parisian society depicting lesbian and gay subculture. When Stephen first travels to Paris, at the urging of her friend Jonathan Brockett – who may be based on Noël Coward[19] – she has not yet spoken about her inversion to anyone. Brockett, acting as tour guide, hints at a secret history of inversion in the city by referring to Marie Antoinette's rumoured relationship with the Princesse de Lamballe.[20]

Brockett next introduces Stephen to Valérie Seymour, who – like her prototype, Natalie Clifford Barney[19] – is the hostess of a literary salon, many of whose guests are lesbians and gay men. Immediately after this meeting Stephen announces she has decided to settle in Paris at 35 Rue Jacob (purchased at Seymour's recommendation), with its temple in a corner of an overgrown garden. Barney lived and held her salon at 20 Rue Jacob.[21] Stephen is wary of Valérie, and does not visit her salon until after the war, when Brockett persuades her that Mary is becoming too isolated. She finds Valérie to be an "indestructible creature" capable of bestowing a sense of self-respect on others, at least temporarily: "everyone felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour's".[22] With Stephen's misgivings "drugged", she and Mary are drawn further into the "desolate country" of Paris gay life. At Alec's Bar – the worst in a series of depressing nightspots – they encounter "the battered remnants of men who...despised of the world, must despise themselves beyond all hope, it seemed, of salvation".[23]

Many of those familiar with the subculture she described, including her own friends, disagreed with her portrayal of it; Romaine Brooks called her "a digger-up of worms with the pretension of a distinguished archaeologist".[24] Hall's correspondence shows that the negative view of bars like Alec's that she expressed in The Well was sincerely meant,[25] but she also knew that such bars did not represent the only homosexual communities in Paris.[26] It is a commonplace of criticism that her own experience of lesbian life was not as miserable as Stephen's.[27] By focusing on misery and describing its cause as "ceaseless persecution" by "the so-called just and righteous", she intensified the urgency of her plea for change.[28]

World War I

Although Hall's author's note disclaims any real-world basis for the ambulance unit that Stephen joins, she drew heavily on the wartime experiences of her friend Toupie Lowther, co-commander of the only women's unit to serve on the front in France. Lowther, like Stephen, came from an aristocratic family, adopted a masculine style of dress, and was an accomplished fencer, tennis player, motorist and jujitsu enthusiast.[29] In later years she said the character of Stephen was based on her, which may have been partly true.[30]

In The Well of Loneliness, war work provides a publicly acceptable role for inverted women. The narrative voice asks that their contributions not be forgotten and predicts that they will not go back into hiding: "a battalion was formed in those terrible years that would never again be completely disbanded".[31] This military metaphor continues later in the novel when inverts in postwar Paris are repeatedly referred to as a "miserable army".[32] Hall invokes the image of the shell-shocked soldier to depict inverts as psychologically damaged by their outcast status: "for bombs do not trouble the nerves of the invert, but rather that terrible silent bombardment from the batteries of God's good people".[33]

Christianity and spiritualism

Hall, who had converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1912, was devoutly religious.[34] She was also a believer in communication with the dead and had once hoped to become a medium[35] – a fact that brought her into conflict with the church, which condemned spiritualism.[36] Both these beliefs made their way into The Well of Loneliness.

Stephen, born on Christmas Eve and named after the first martyr of Christianity, dreams as a child that "in some queer way she [is] Jesus".[37] When she discovers that Collins, object of her childhood crush, has housemaid's knee, she prays that the affliction be transferred to her: "I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus – I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins – I love her, and I want to be hurt like You were".[38] This childish desire for martyrdom prefigures Stephen's ultimate self-sacrifice for Mary's sake.[39] After she tricks Mary into leaving her – carrying out a plan that leads Valérie to exclaim "you were made for a martyr!"[40] – Stephen, left alone in her home, sees the room thronged with inverts, living, dead and unborn. They call on her to intercede with God for them and finally possess her. It is with their collective voice that she demands of God, "Give us also the right to our existence".[41]

After Stephen reads Krafft-Ebing in her father's library, she opens the Bible at random, seeking a sign, and reads Genesis 4:15, "And the Lord set a mark upon Cain ..."[42] Hall uses the mark of Cain, a sign of shame and exile, throughout the novel as a metaphor for the situation of inverts.[43] Her defence of inversion took the form of a religious argument: God had created inverts, so humanity should accept them.[44] The Well's use of religious imagery outraged the book's opponents,[45] but Hall's vision of inversion as a God-given state was an influential contribution to the language of LGBT rights.[46]