Of Dashes, Gashes, and Wounds: Radclyffe Hall and the Medieval Devotion of "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself"

Abstract:This article places Radclyffe Hall's "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself" in relation to a variety of discursive contexts, particularly medieval iconography and Old and New Testament biblical allusions. I show that while the story gestures toward the familiar images of a wounded Christ, Hall is less interested in a Messiah who saves and is more interested in a collective vulnerability that embraces and tarries with the grief of gendered wounding. To this end, my discussion performs a pair of linked functions: first, it delivers a new interpretive mechanism for reading "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself" in light of the medieval Christian tradition; and second, it blazes a specific path through the annals of wound iconography, parsing a quatrain of orientations—psychic wound, war wound, side wound, and cloth wound—as I unravel Hall's spiritual, psychological, and deeply philosophical account of gendered identity.