March 29, 2024

Obscenity, book bans, and The Well of Loneliness

I’m in the middle of a few books right now that I’m enjoying reading slowly. Rather than rush to finish any of them, here’s something a little different.

---

A few weeks ago I walked into a used bookstore¹ in Williamsburg and overheard a conversation between the two booksellers working behind the counter. After a bit of eavesdropping, I picked up that one was telling the other about a book that had been the subject of an obscenity trial. She said, “I think it was just based on one sentence, something like ‘and that night they were not parted.’” At this I couldn’t help but cut in, “are you talking about The Well of Loneliness?”

Yes, as it turned out, they were, because the classic lesbian novel² was in the middle of its own obscenity trial in the store. One of the booksellers had shelved it in the general fiction section, whereas her manager was determined to shelve it with the erotica, presumably given its notoriety as an “obscene” work. They had been moving the book back and forth between sections for days until the bookseller in question finally gave up and resigned themselves to bitching about it to their coworker.

I laughed and joked with them about the total lack of eroticism of The Well of Loneliness. For those who haven’t read it, it really is just that one line that gestures toward anything sexual. The bulk of the book is spent recounting the deeply depressed Stephen Gordon’s genderful childhood in the English countryside, and I told the booksellers as much. They threw me what I assume was a customer service pity laugh and I went back to browsing.

But then I saw The Well in the erotica section of yet another used bookstore. At first I thought it was funny, but the more I thought about it, the more genuinely annoyed I became. I understand erotica to refer to art—in this case literature—that not only explicitly depicts sexual acts, but is intended to arouse sexual interest or excitement. Neither of those things are negative or wrong, it’s just that The Well of Loneliness doesn’t do either of them, so to put it in the erotica section is to completely mischaracterize it. Had it been shelved where it didn’t belong because of a profound misunderstanding of its contents? As an ironic nod to those aware of the obscenity trial? I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t like it either way.

As a librarian who primarily works with young adults, I am more sensitive than most to debates around what makes a work explicit or obscene. Per reports from PEN America, the American Library Association, and EveryLibrary, efforts to ban or restrict access to books in school and public libraries are intensifying to a degree never seen in my lifetime by a number of metrics. 2023 saw more individual challenges, more books challenged, and more books removed from libraries in the United States than any other year on record.

This is partly due to an unprecedented number of new laws that aim to restrict student access to books, particularly in the state of Florida, but also in 13 other states. Additionally, groups like Moms for Liberty have sought to rid libraries across all 50 states of any books they deem “inappropriate” for children or teenagers, turning school and public libraries into the battleground of a new culture war in the process. While these efforts disproportionately impact students and library users in Republican-controlled states, they are happening everywhere, probably closer to home than you realize.

Of the 13 most frequently challenged books of 2022, seven were challenged for “LGBTQIA+ content,” three for profanity, three for sexual abuse or rape, two for drug use, one for “DEI content,” and one for providing sexual education. The only common complaint between every single one: that they were “sexually explicit.” So what are we actually talking about when we label a book—especially a queer book—explicit or obscene, and what about these books specifically is so threatening?

In Book Banning in 21st Century America, scholar and librarian Emily Knox concludes that attempts to ban books are part of a conservative, reactionary project. Responding to perceived losses in the form of progressive social changes, individuals or groups attempt to restrict access to books as the part of a larger effort to slow or even reverse those changes. When it comes to queer books, those changes include the legalization of gay marriage, the increased visibility and acceptance of queer and especially transgender people, and the movement to diversify school reading lists, just to name a few examples. So while would-be book banners may say they’re interested in protecting the innocence of American children, what they’re really doing is the same thing conservatives have been doing since the 50s: standing athwart history, yelling Stop.³

Put differently, it’s not the actual sex that may or may not be happening in these books that presents a problem to potential book banners. Instead, it’s the idea that queer books create queer readers, or else broader societal acceptance for queer people. I don’t think they’re entirely wrong about that, I just happen to think that’s a positive.

Which takes us back to The Well of Loneliness. As established, it is not a sexy or explicit book, nor does it make being a lesbian seem particularly appealing. To be honest, it’s not even a very good novel. The dialogue is stilted, the pace is slow, and it could benefit from some serious editorial pruning. The only level on which it succeeds is as an almost painfully earnest cri de coeur on behalf of “congenital inverts,” the term Victorian sexologists used to refer to people who experience same-sex attraction.⁴ This gets very literal when at the end of the novel, having driven her lover away because she believes she’ll be happier in a heterosexual relationship, Stephen pleads to God on behalf of “inverts,”

We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!

Given what we know about book banning it’s clear to me that Hall’s obvious desire for her book to enact social change, however minor, is what made The Well unacceptable to moralists and censors in the 1920s. Hall was far from a radical, but in writing a novel that begged for acceptance in a society determined to shun queer people, her work became obscene, an impression that remains today in spite of our radically different literary and political climate.

To bring it back around to where I started, I don't think that the managers of your average used bookstore are on the same level as, say, Ron DeSantis or the newspaper columnist who said he'd “rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid” than let them read The Well of Loneliness. After all, they're still selling the book, but in shelving it with the erotica, they're aligning themselves with a conservative, reactionary project by implying obscenity where there is none.

The idea that queerness is so obscene that to present it on the page will poison the culture, that queer art and queer people must be cordoned off from the rest of the world, is so deeply entrenched that even hip New York City bookstores subscribe to it, even if unthinkingly or unintentionally. But we know where this idea leads, and if we're not careful, we'll be following it there whether we like it or not.