Emergence of Feminist Criticism
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The emergence of feminist criticism and women's studies since the 1960s has been affected in more recent decades by the related but nonetheless distinctive disciplines of gender studies and queer theory. How feminist theory links with gender studies can be seen in Sedgwick's point that, whatever else feminist efforts to enlarge the Western canon to include women's texts have done, in significant part they have been due to "the scarifying coarseness and visibility with which women and men are, in most if not all societies, distinguished . . . from one another" (Sedgwick 1483). Sedgwick cites the problems in applying the feminist canonic "model" "to that very differently structured though closely related form of oppression, modern homophobia" (1483). She identifies in much critical discourse "a possible though intensively proscribed homosexual identity in Euro-American culture" (1483) but calls for analysis of the presumption of heterosexual identity, however vexed, as the psychoemotional standard.In 1928, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness took as the substance of its narrative conflict the subject of the consequences of enacting a homosexual identity in an Anglo-European culture. The novel itself, and not simply the characters of the narrative, was the focus of both legal and literary conflict, which is important to sort out in part because of the autobiographical aspects of the narrative and in part because the conflict resonates with aspects of gender/queer studies.
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(socially conventional) view that woman's place is in the home as wife and mother. The evidence of the Stephen-Mary relationship in Well is that Hall envisioned same-sex marriage structured on traditional heterosexual lines, i.e., one partner the strong provider and the other the weaker helpmate. From the gender/queer studies standpoint, the Well narrative fails to think outside the patriarchal as it were box.
Hall's tolerance polemic was an attribute of the view that "female inverts were hapless freaks of nature, unwittingly trapped in the wrong body, in the wrong place and time" (Parkes 440). It is in that context that Hall obtained a one-paragraph preface by the psychologist and acknowledged sexuality expert Havelock Ellis that deplored social hostility against "a particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us today" (Ellis in Hall iv). The clinical endorsement links to the serious and sincere tone of the novel; however, as per gender/queer analysis, the double effect is that to the degree female inverts are freaks they are also marginalized, to be pitied but not necessarily sanctioned, still less to find a discrete public voice. Well, in that view, cooperates in silencing homosexuals.
And so to the narrative itself.
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Approximate Word count = 1494
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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