similar subject matter, Hall and Woolf spurned each others work. According to Diana Souhami, Hall distrusted innovation in literature and arts, and shunned what she saw as ... modernist heresies. While Woolf was a member of the famed Bloomsbury group, a group of modernist authors and artists holding liberal views toward gender and sexuality, Souhami writes that Hall was right wing, a patriot, and a stalwart of the Catholic church who perceived authority and power as masculine. Thus, the author reacted with horror and indignation when her book was condemned under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 on November 16, 1928. Souhami further notes that Hall was bewildered ... to be branded obscene, corrupt, and depraved by the social class to which she felt allegiance. And yet, class consciousness was undoubtedly a major factor in the widespread indignation and eventual condemnation of the book by male judges and legislators. As illustrated by the British Parliaments attempt to legislate lesbianism in 1921, representatives sought to dismiss the discomfiting reality of sex between womenasavicethat was practiced byunfortunate specimens of humanity who were vile, unbalanced, and neurotic. Such descriptors evoke the upper-class anxieties that were especially prevalent in Britain after World War I. This association is reinforced by the Lord Chancellors assertion that anysophisticated society would not harbor this kind of vice. Like the tuberculosis epidemic that was viewed as a diseasemaintained by ignorance and folly in Londons slums, lesbianism was similarly positioned as a lower-class infection that might pollute the minds of otherwise virtuous women. Halls work thus represented an explicit challenge to the forms of collective identification enacted by upper-class society, which conflated disease andvice as conditions of the uneducated and the unrefined. § TOWARD THE END of The Well of Loneliness, the protagonists friend Jonathan Brockett discovers her relationship with Mary Llewellyn, and Stephen experiences a queer sense of relief at the thought that he knew ... because there was no longer any need to behave as if those relations were shameful.Perhaps reflecting Halls relationship to her own sexuality, her novel has been criticized for representing homosexual life as shameful, tragic, and self-loathing, contrasting starkly with Woolfs Orlando, which enacts a playfully queer romp through several historical ages. Nevertheless, when the publisher of TheWell of Loneliness, Jonathan Cape, shifted printing to Paris, he found that the fact that in Britain it could only be procured illicitly made it all the more enticing. WhileHalls work certainly did not pollute womenwith lesbianism as suggested by the ignorant House of Lords debate in 1921, a book that was explicitly about love between women led to a widespread discussion of homosexuality among the public, thus paving the way for social reform. The sensationalist obscenity trial did more to publicize the text than Hall herself could have hoped, though unfortunately she was deeply hurt by the outcome and subsequently lost confidence as a writer. Alternatively, Woolf demonstrated that silence and censorship imposed upon homosexual themes need not be internalized purely as a source of shame but might also be mobilized as an enabling space for revolutionary experimentation, provocation, and the subversion of compulsory heterosexuality. SeptemberOctober 2023 19 HIST LIV ender identiti er andg Que TORIES VING ies in art are celebrated in this d.com d.com w, m Distributed in the USA & Canada b frick.org Jason Reynolds, Legacy R Jonathan Anderson, Jessic Foreword by H y anag an aY in response to iconic Old Doron Langberg, Toyin O new book highlighting wo cbsd yCBSD gilesltd ssel ove . Russell, and Ru l T y ca Bell Brown, Christopher Lew gihara, with contributions from Master paintings at the Frick. alm oor Ojih Odutola, and S an T orks created by Jenna Gribbon, , =(002 ED80 GG.D2" 46 480 13. C / 3D63E(G4D6) C461E$ GDK&02 012E40G. M1"G .D 4.G 20E1.4D6G/4I C2DK CDEEDFG ./0 123 DC #$%&'($!! .G G0EC 0G /0 6M FG$ 1G D G$ G K4.G 1 C(EE" .D 16D./02) F4./ <4846< "D(2G M0GI142 ./1. 3DK0 0(I/D241 16M ./0 ./0 .(2&(E0630$ ./ ./0 .216=(4E4." 16 /4</G 16M ./0 EDF ./0" 6184<1.0 ./0 9D46 ./0 GI01;02 1 "D( 120 4684.0M .D +6 ./0G0 -7 ID0KG F46602DC . 1<146 F4./ ./0 ED80 ID0K >?.D&402G;4@G G.(6646< 4K 1++:!"+#$%3&/ ,-' 8?8 >?,.4,648 ,; >=, /0 %' *DD; ,F12M K)> H J0<4 L04.! ?/01$ .FD#.4K0 K1<02" F4EE /180 "D( 06./21EE0M 83(*"838 8458 6++:5 ,38 5 ,)+-/ 1,3-85 7 9+648/ 0 M +4'
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