Literary Labor: Radclyffe Hall’s Reproductive Futures

Abstract: Calling for the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in August 1928, James Douglas of the Sunday Express famously declared that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” For Douglas, The Well of Loneliness would promote unnatural behaviors and desires, threaten the innocence of children and the institution of the family, and work against procreation and the survival of the species. But while Douglas attempted to breathe new life into the tired Victorian figure of the innocent child in need of protection, The Well of Loneliness and its kin were proposing alternative forms of procreation and motherhood. Taking its lead from the liberal, sometimes playful, often powerful deployment of the symbolic child in texts and paratexts both by and about Hall, this article explores the various functions of metaphors of reproduction, parturition, childhood, and parenthood in The Well and beyond. Navigating a series of surprising associations and mixed metaphors around children and childbirth, and arguing for literary censorship as a generative or reproductive force, the article identifies a thematic cord that twists and turns through the fraught yet enduring category of lesbian modernism: textual progeny and queer means of creating them.