The Resistant Social/Sexual Subjectivity of Hall's Ogilvy and Woolf's Rhoda

Abstract

the medical community developed the modern Western conception of the lesbian.' While multiple writers provided various theories, two dominant explanations emerged, which formed the basic debate regarding the female sexual deviant2 in the twentieth century.3 Sigmund Freud and his followers saw all humans as fundamentally bi-sexual beings, and claimed that homosexuals were simply prematurely arrested in their sexual development.4 Countering the Freudians, Havelock Ellis allowed that many women thought they were lesbians who really were not, but he concluded that there actually existed congenitally inverted females - women who were physically organized as females but biologically determined to be male through a chromosomal error.5 As Freud and Ellis sketched the parameters of the sexually perverted6 woman in opposition to what they felt were normal female subjects, Radclyffe Hall composed her literary manifestations of the ambiguously sexualized woman. In Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1926, 1934), a short story that critics consistently neglect,' Hall carefully navigates both discourses of female homosexuality. This authorial strategy allows her to engage the discussions of deviancy and posit a vision of Ogilvy as a non-Cartesian human subject, glimpsing momentarily a multi-sexed self.8 Virginia Woolf's affinity with Hall and other members of the lesbian community has been the subject of much critical commentary.9 Woolf, of course, did not achieve or want the public exposure that Hall experienced as a prominent queer woman;10 likewise, Woolf's fictional female characters do not appear as overt lesbians.' Nevertheless, in The Waves, Woolf uses innovative narrative techniques to depict Rhoda as another ambiguously sexualized character12 who maintains qualities of a non-Cartesian agent. Both Hall and Woolf negotiate and respond to the dominant discourses of female homosexuality to create fictional feminine figures who anticipate modes of sexual subjectivity rooted in multiplicity. Hall accomplishes this by rehearsing and (re)visioning the binary relationships between men and women, while Woolf develops a non-codified character who dismisses clear sexualized identification in

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