The author’s note preceding “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” in Radclyffe Hall’s 1934 eponymous short story collection places the story under the direct notoriety of her scandalous novel The Well of Loneliness, thus orientating the readers’ way of dealing with the humble in terms of genre and also of content, especially at the time of the First World War. Still, the writer’s gallery of characters and contexts widens the scope of the humble beyond gender dysphoria before shifting the perspective from being humble to being humbled. If the characters seem deprived of agency in their relationship to the other, their invisibilisation is used as leverage to resist dispossession. Although, or precisely because it might fail, such a process results in what could be called an ethics of the flawed, here examined through Hall’s editorial choices which inform her treatment of the genre.
La note d’auteur qui précède la nouvelle “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself”, titre éponyme du recueil publié par Radclyffe Hall en 1934, inscrit la nouvelle dans la lignée de son roman à scandale The Well of Loneliness, invitant ainsi à associer l’humble à un genre littéraire et à un attribut (gender), notamment pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. La variété des personnages et des situations élargit cependant la définition de l’humble au-delà de la dysphorie sexuelle avant de renverser la perspective : plutôt que d’être humble, on en vient à être rendu humble. Si les personnages semblent en effet privés d’agentivité dans leur relation à l’autre, leur invisibilisation sert de ressort pour résister à la dépossession. Alors même qu’il échoue parfois, ou peut-être précisément pour cette raison, ce procédé mène à une éthique de la faillite étudiée à travers les choix éditoriaux de Radclyffe Hall et leurs conséquences sur le genre littéraire.
Ce document sera publié en ligne en texte intégral en décembre 2023.
Plan
Delineating a Humble Genre through Humble Motifs
From the Humble to the Humbled: Processes of Marginalisation
Towards an Ethics of the Flawed
Aperçu du texte
Radclyffe Hall’s 1934 single published volume of short stories opens on the eponymous story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” preceded by the following author’s note:
This story, in which I have permitted myself a brief excursion into the realms of the fantastic, was written in July 1926, shortly before I definitely decided to write my serious study of congenital inversion, The Well of Loneliness. Although Miss Ogilvy is a very different person from Stephen Gordon, yet those who have read The Well of Loneliness will find in the earlier part of this story the nucleus of those sections of my novel which deal with Stephen Gordon’s childhood and girlhood, and with the noble and selfless work done by hundreds of sexually inverted women during the Great War: 1914-1918. (Miss Ogilvy 6)
Given the definition of humble as “of lowly condition or rank” (online OED), such a note may be read as an invitation to consider Hall’s story as humble since it places it under the direct notoriety of her so-ca...
Tina Terradillos, « Radclyffe Hall’s Short Fiction: A Humble Ethics of the Flawed », Journal of the Short Story in English, 77 | 2021, 167-182.
Référence électronique
Tina Terradillos, « Radclyffe Hall’s Short Fiction: A Humble Ethics of the Flawed », Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 77 | Autumn 2021, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2023, consulté le 02 juin 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3656
Tina Terradillos is a member of EMMA at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. Her research centres around British literature of the early twentieth century, anthropology, psychoanalysis, social sciences and philosophy. In December 2018, she defended her PhD (“Le Sale comme ressort d’une éthique de l’altérité dans les romans de Radclyffe Hall,” supervised by Professor Christine Reynier), which examines how filth serves as leverage in Radclyffe Hall’s novels to delineate an ethics of alterity. She published two articles on Radclyffe in Études britanniques contemporaines and teaches in a secondary school in Montpellier.