‘Hair Cut Short like a Mediæval Page’: Queer medievalisms in Gwen Lally’s historical pageants and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928)

Nuding, Emma (2025) ‘Hair Cut Short like a Mediæval Page’: Queer medievalisms in Gwen Lally’s historical pageants and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). In: Studies in Medievalism XXXIV : Tribal Medievalisms. Studies in Medievalism, 34 . Boydell and Brewer, pp. 1-25. ISBN 9781843847380

Abstract

'Scholarly discussion of medievalism is no longer limited to hetero- and androcentric approaches. However, at the intersection of these two concerns, there remains a neglected area of inquiry: how do women, whose cultural productions can be profitably understood within a “lesbian” and/or “queer” framework, respond to medieval texts and tropes? In reply, this chapter presents two case studies from 1928: Gwen Lally’s medievalist pageant held at Wroxton Abbey and (John) Radclyffe Hall’s novel “The Well of Loneliness”, sometimes referred to as the “bible of lesbianism”. Hall’s identification with the medieval period can be illuminated by examining the “pageant fever” in her cultural context. The pageant world provided writers like Hall with a plethora of cross-gender performances, many of which evinced a lesbian erotics, such as the figure of the female page with her hair “cut short” accompanying her female knight. Despite such influences, the queer medievalisms of Hall's novel sit in tension with its conservative medievalisms, those uses of the medieval past that conserve established power structures rather than question, subvert, or reimagine them.'