tended to use similarly hyperbolic rhetoric. When Hall and Jonathan Cape Ltd. tried to appeal the ban, Sir Robert Wallace, chairman of the court, declared the book more subtle, demoralizing, corrosive, corruptive, than anything that was ever written. In light of this reaction, it is perhaps surprising that The Well of Loneliness does not actually portray sexual relations between women, save for a single chaste kiss. The magistrate justified his decision by stating that Halls characters portrayedhorrible tendenciesfor which they were never held responsible. According to author Marc E. Vargo, the novels opponents ... were not really perturbed because the book involved love between women. They were upset because its lesbians did not apologize for being gay, or, alternatively, did not come to a bad end. ... [T]o the male-centric power structure of post-Victorian society, the prospect that some women might get along quite well without men was perceived as an affront. DuringThe Well of Lonelinessobscenity trials, many authors came forward to testify on the novels behalf, including Virginia Woolf herself. While Woolf, the elite authoress, scathingly described Halls middlebrow novel as a pale tepid vapid book which lay damp and slab all about the court, she warned of the dangers of censorship in a letter co-written with E. M. Forster: Novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention [lesbianism]. ... Although forbidden as a main theme, may it be alluded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? ... Writers produce literature, and they cannot produce great literature until they have free minds. The free mind has access to all knowledge and speculation of its age, and nothing cramps it like a taboo. Woolf and her fellow writers were ultimately prevented from testifying at the trial by the magistrate Charles Biron, who ruled that authors were not experts on obscenity, only art, and that the identification and measurement of immorality must be left to the men of the British court (in spite of their distaste for discussing such horror). While it was published one month before Halls obscenity trial had begun, Woolfs Orlandoresulted in part from the authors desire to subvert thetabooof lesbianism and, by extension, the irrationality of British censorship laws. § IN WOOLFS NOVEL, a young hero named Orlando, born as a male nobleman, mysteriously changes genders at the age of thirty and lives for the next 300 years as a woman, without aging. The character was based on aristocrat and fellow writer Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a famously passionate love affair. Throughout the story, Orlando dresses sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, and is possessed of similarly amorphous romantic inclinations. According to Leslie Kathleen Hankins, Orlando plays an elaborate game of hide and seek with the reader and the censor, rendering censorship both parodic and farcical. Woolf challenged social codes by demonstrating the constructed nature of gender, while building in a kind of plausible deniability through the device of Orlandos fantastic sex change. For example, she mocks compulsory heterosexuality in this passage: As all Orlandos loveshad been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved. Given the gendered conventions of the period, is this a depiction of lesbianism, or not? In another passage, Woolf hints at the social, historical, and literary status of homosexuality as unspeakable when her narrator, Orlandos biographer, comments that the subjects life is touched with matters on which a biographer cannot profitably enlarge, though it is plain enough to those who have done a readers part in making up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person. Perhaps ironically, Woolf was subjected to this same treatment by early critics of her work, who shied away from discussing the authors bisexuality. In this same passage, Woolf seems also to toy with the idea of literature as infectious, reflecting the British patriarchal fear that allowing women to read about lesbianism would lead to its polluting, noxious, poisonous, and corrosive spread throughout the country. Orlando, the narrator writes, was afflicted with a love of literature, though many people of his time escaped this infection ... some were early infected by a germ ... which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raised to strike.Woolfs teasing subtlety stands in stark contrast to The Well of Loneliness, through which Hall explicitly intended to encourage inverts to face up to a hostile world ... with dignity and courageand bring normal men and women of good will to a fuller and more tolerant understanding of the inverted. Notably, despite their treatment of 18 TheG&LR Radclyffe Hall in 1928. Virginia Woolf in 1928.
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