English

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

Document Type

Article

Abstract

On the face of it, Gale Wilhelm’s obscure 1938 novel Torchlight 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.

Publication Title

Modernism - Modernity

Publication Date

9-2024

Volume

31

Issue

3

First Page

491

Last Page

512

ISSN

1071-6068

DOI

10.1353/mod.2024.a956651

Keywords

Gale Wilhelm, lesbian literature, marriage plot, middlebrow, queer literature, Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, Torchlight to Valhalla

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