The Well of Hopefulness: Gale Wilhelm, Radclyffe Hall, and the Rewriting of the Marriage Plot

Abstract: On the face of it, Gale Wilhelm’s obscure 1938 novel Torch-light to Valhalla and Radclyffe Hall’s infamous 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness could not be more different. Torchlight is short, unmistakably modernist in its prose, and ends happily for its queer characters. The Well is long, was deplored by modernists for its old-fashioned aesthetics, and has a gut-punch of an ending. But for all their differences, these books are united in the way they use the clash between modernism and the middlebrow to explore the implications of the marriage plot for queer women, framing marriage as a question of genre. Rather than simply discarding the marriage plot, Wilhelm and Hall incorporate it into new literary forms, exposing the loneliness at its heart. The pedagogical mode of the middlebrow is reimagined in modernist terms, as queerness reveals disjunction, fissure, and changeability to be already present within the marriage plot. These novels offer hope to their queer readers and instruction to their straight ones, rewriting the marriage plot in a way that substitutes hopeful endings for happy ones.