Between 1880 and 1920, sexologists, psychoanalysts, and other members of the medical community developed the modern Western conception of the "lesbian."¹ 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 "perverted"⁶ 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,⁷ 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."¹¹ Nevertheless, in The Waves, Woolf uses innovative narrative techniques to depict Rhoda as another ambiguously sexualized char acter¹² 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 favor of a dynamic, non-stable ontological status. Ogilvy and Rhoda both die near the close of their respective tales, but these women also prefigure a fantastic image of a multi-sexualized individual, capable of ambiguously resisting society’s demand that "people" inhabit separate and distinct social/sexual subject positions.

Western society began to make definitive demands upon the sexually "perverse" female near the turn of the century through scientific and medical discourses. There is no definitive indication that Hall consulted Freud’s writings on female deviancy as background information for her fiction, but her biographers and critics make clear her knowledge of his theories;¹³ Woolf’s knowledge of Freud, on the other hand, has been well documented.¹⁴ Freud’s basic psychoanalytic thought, which conceives of all humans as simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual, views lesbians as underdeveloped "normal" women. In "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman," he demonstrates his hypothesis that lesbians’ sexuality remains simply retarded and advocates psychotherapy as the proper means of reversing this "perversion" (135-38). Barbara Fassler notes that "Freudians tended to link homosexuality with other neuroses caused by early childhood sexual traumas." She concludes that "although one escaped the label of a genetic mistake, one was [under Freud] termed a neurotic" (247).¹⁵ Freud’s theory ultimately regards lesbians as heterosexual women who need proper clinical attention; in other words, he presents them as broken subjects in need of psychoanalytic repair. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, many read and critiqued Freud, but his thought still strongly influenced the notions of sexuality and sexual deviancy adopted throughout Western Europe.

Although we may not have decisive proof that Hall read Freud’s work, critics have documented thoroughly both her and Woolf’s familiarity with the work of Ellis.¹⁶ Indeed, Hall invited Ellis to provide a "Commentary" for her scandalous semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, The Well of Loneliness (1928), and Woolf had access to Ellis’ work through her family library (Fassler 240).¹⁷ Ellis provided two categories of "lesbians." Like Freud, he believed that some women simply mentally misperceived themselves as homosexual. For these treatable individuals, Ellis advocated a strong dose of social integration and activity. However, he also discussed a distinct group of women whom he termed "congenitally inverted;" these women occupied a female body but possessed male chromosomes and behaved like men ("Sexual Inversion" 145). Carol Smith-Rosenberg indicates that Ellis understood female sexual inversion as "biological, hereditary, and irreversible. The ‘invert’ was powerless to change her inclination" (270-71). Ellis distinguished this type of lesbian from either the woman or the man, creating what Esther Newton terms "a third sex or trapped soul" which is devoid of socially sanctioned sexuality (568). While Freud viewed the female homosexual as a belated heterosexual woman, Ellis described her as a mannish woman. These discourses influence the construction of Hall’s and Woolf’s fictional women, as well as the critical reception of the authors in the late twentieth century, by shaping the social perception of deviant women.

With the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics began to reprimand Hall and Woolf.¹⁸ Many lesbian feminists derided Hall for her association with Ellis, claiming that her work only reproduces the oppressive sexual discourses of the early twentieth century. Catharine R. Stimpson, in her canonical essay, "Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English," outlines two basic plots for the female homosexual tale: social condemnation and individualistic escape. She argues that Hall’s fiction consistently engages the "narrative of damnation, of the lesbian’s suffering as a lonely outcast," leaving the hero(ine) with neither happiness nor hope (364). Stimpson concludes that "Hall represents the lesbian as scandal and the lesbian as woman-who-is-man" (367). Frustrated by Hall’s apparent acceptance of Ellis’ theories, Stimpson and others dismiss her as a preliminary and "premature" lesbian writer. However, we should not interpret Hall’s decision to ask Ellis to provide a commentary for The Well of Loneliness as a clear endorsement of his thought. Rather, Hall’s authorial strategy demonstrates her knowledge of various discourses of sexual deviancy. By aligning herself with Ellis, she counters Freud’s notion of the lesbian as a broken heterosexual feminine being. Hall’s characters are non-perverted under Ellis’ umbrage; they are coded masculine entities in a woman’s physical body. Hall ultimately negotiates both discourses of female homosexuality, creating what Michel Foucault denotes "a ‘reverse’ discourse."¹⁹ Foucault explains that "discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy" (101-02). Foucault’s analysis allows us to view Hall’s adoption of Ellis as strategic; she remains influenced by the discourses of sexuality, but she also maintains her role as a participant in the discourses. She revises both theories of female deviancy, acquires authorial authority for her work, and establishes momentarily a space for a new sexual/social subject.

Elaine Showalter, during the same period of feminist thought in which Stimpson critiqued Hall, levied a harsh attack on Woolf, charging that the novelist’s depiction of sexually ambiguous characters was an escape from true feminine experience and a "flight into androgyny." In her attempt to establish a uniquely female tradition of novel writing, she felt obliged to dismiss, with some qualification, the importance of Woolf -- a writer whose vision of "true androgyny ... is attractive, although ... like all utopian ideals ... lacks zest and energy" (263). She criticizes Woolf for not providing a clearly feminized version of her personal experience within an explicit politicized realm. Toril Moi points out that "Showalter thus implicitly defines effective feminist writing as [a] work that offers a powerful expression of personal experience in a social framework" (4). This limited conception of a ìfeministî project allows for neither Woolfís nor Hallís "reverse discourse" -- i.e., their navigation of, and participation in, powerful social discourses. Showalter’s comments reveal her desire to delineate clear sexualized identities. In her later work, Sexual Anarchy (1990), which maintains that the early twentieth century witnessed many crossings and blurrings of gendered boundaries, she assumes that these frames of sexed and gendered subjectivity are identifiable, and were at least once stable (9). Both Hall and Woolf challenge Showalter’s presuppositions by negotiating the dominant discourses of female deviancy and envisioning ambiguously sexualized women who resist static sexual subject positions.

Although second-wave feminists critiqued both Hall and Woolf for not providing effective and codified statements for the lesbian and feminist community, both of these writers offer politically powerful visions of a non-Cartesian subjectivity -- embodying a multiplicity of sexes, genders, and sexualities. The theories of subject formation promoted by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer helpful insight into the dynamic characters of Hall and Woolf. Deleuze images all of human life as a three-dimensional continuum (see Figures 1 and 3), and suggests that as individuals, we fold over a part of the perpetuity, creating an illusion of roundedness (see Figures 2 and 4).

Working from Leibniz’s theories, Deleuze terms this sense of self a fold.²⁰ He explains that "the world is enfolded in each soul, but differently because each illuminates only one little aspect of the overall folding" ("On Leibniz" 157). In Figure 2, we can see an image of the fold; note how the folded corner does not create a completely enclosed sphere. This is, perhaps, more noticeable in Figure 4, in which we see an enlarged graphic of the fold; the subject creates a feign of a rounded Cartesian ego, but it is only an illusion of completeness. Likewise, Ogilvy and Rhoda recognize the forces of society which attempt to coerce individuals into establishing an artificially distinct sexual and social identity, but they also resist this pressure.

The process of enclosure, imaged by Figure 4, is artificial, but it allows us to function in a capitalistic society that demands individual entities (The Fold 189). Deleuze indicates that "we have to manage to fold the line²¹ and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breath -- in short, think" ("A Portrait of Foucault" 111). While neither Hall nor Woolf portray Ogilvy and Rhoda as complete or whole, these fictional characters must initially maintain an illusion of independent internal cohesiveness in order to operate in the social realm -- i.e., the outside. Constantin V. Boundas points out that "it is the individual who causes the outside to fold, thereby endowing itself with subjectivity, as it bends and folds the outside" (114). As folded subjects, Ogilvy and Rhoda ultimately recognize their "selves" as multiple; their persons are more than the bodies, faces, sexes, genders, and sexualities they can enclose within their folds. Nevertheless, these sexually ambiguous women are often forced to fold a part of the outside world and its social discourses in order to affect an inside of subjectivity necessary to function in society. Both Ogilvy and Rhoda resist social pressure to fold over a "distinct" identity that is stable, permanent, and individualized, and both characters die failing to complete their resistances, but not before they offer marvelous visions of multiplicitous sexual and social subject positions.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that as subjects we strive to satisfy desires produced by social discourses and pressures which act as machines.²² They reconfigure desire as a mode of social construction and note how "society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production" (Anti-Oedipus 10). Maintaining that discourses produce desires for society and its participants, ²³ Deleuze and Guattari posit that the individual subject negotiates attractions and repulsions to various produced-desires. They explain that the "subject is produced" through "the opposition between attraction and repulsion" (Anti-Oedipus 17), and they indicate that "the opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of intensive elements ... that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which a subject passes" (Anti-Oedipus 15). Ogilvy and Rhoda reveal the influence of social discourses as well as various attractions and repulsions to the desires they produce. Ogilvy negotiates the sexual duality of Ellisí theory, and Rhoda often appears as a broken agent in need of Freudís psychoanalytic therapy. These characters, however, continually resist permanently static sites of identity, and they ultimately envision a subjectivity rooted in dynamic multiplicity. As Deleuze and Guattari note, "the subject itself is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes" (Anti-Oedipus 20). Neither Ogilvy nor Rhoda is ever centered or whole as a Cartesian subject. Their subjectivity remains a function of the produced desires of society -- a society which defines deviant women as masculine, feminine, and ambiguous. Reminding us of Judith Butler’s call to trouble stable g ender identities (Gender Trouble vii), Ogilvy and Rhoda move amidst masculinity, femininity, and sexual equivocality, touring the "thousand tiny sexes" that Deleuze and Guattari find within the social machine (A Thousand Plateaus 213).²⁴ Deleuze and Guattari suggest that "we do not have units of measure, only multiplicities or varieties" (A Thousand Plateaus 8). They examine these multiplicities within the category of sexual identity and declare that "the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc., a thousand tiny sexes" (A Thousand Plateaus 213). The ambiguous and multiple sex, gender, and sexuality of Rhoda and Ogilvy prefigure Deleuzian notions of human continuity and multiplicity -- a vision which demonstrates both figures’ attempts to resist society’s desire for distinctly folded subjects, and which abruptly ends with the death of both characters.

Hall prefaces "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself" by indicating that she has allowed herself "a brief excursion into the realms of the fantastic" in this tale -- a narrative strategy which greatly facilitates her depiction of Deleuzian notions of subjectivity (ii). The author opens her tale by noting the "disbanding of [Ogilvy’s] Unit" (3). Anticipatory of Deleuze’s notions of multiplicity, this assemblage had encompassed many worlds folded within many individuals. Hall relates: "They had all been members of that glorious Unit" (4). However, with the dispersal of the group, each person must assume a separate identity to function in the socioeconomic world of post-war Britain. As the story shifts, so that Hall can provide important biographical information about Ogilvy, we learn of the protagonist’s troubled sexual identity. The narrator describes Ogilvy’s "tall awkward body with its queer look of strength" (3), and the protagonist later recounts her memories of herself as "a queer little girl, aggressive and awkward because of her shyness; a queer little girl who loathed sisters and dolls, preferring the stable-boys as companions, preferring to play with footballs and tops, and occasional catapults" (6). In this brief remembrance, Ogilvy demonstrates qualities of Butler’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s thought: she remembers herself as a girl -- as someone ìknown as feminineî -- but also associates herself with contradictory masculine attributes and activities. Even her recollection displays her conflicted and ambiguous sexual subjectivity, although she remains imaged as a dual-sexed individual.²⁵ Furthermore, Hall presents an early example of her character’s foldedness. The author indicates that "Miss Ogilvy had found as her life went on that in this world it is better to be one with the herd, that the world has no wish to understand those who cannot conform to its stereotyped pattern" (6-7). Ogilvy has experienced va rious binary struggles which urge her to fold her "self" over to create a socially functional persona and person.

Ultimately, Ogilvy’s subject formation involves much more than a simple exercise in acquiring masculine traits for a feminine body; she negotiates a binary sexualized identity, but she also resists dualistic understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender. Indeed, Hall states that Ogilvy had previously blurred the gender borderlines. She lifted weights and "gloried in her strength ... but presently this had grown irksome to her; it had seemed to lead nowhere, she being a woman" (7). We do not see Hall confront completely the inversion theories of Ellis until the latter parts of the story, but she does offer a brief early strike at his biologically based thought. Ogilvy remains perfectly aware of her status as "one-known-as-woman," and dismisses efforts to become more masculine. She does more than cross gender borders, which would only reinscribe Ellis’ thought; she is not simply a female body with male chromosomes and tendencies. When her father dies, she becomes a domestic manager for her mother and sisters. Hall notes that Ogilvy’s sisters "looked upon her as a brother" (8). She performs the duties of husbandry, occupying a vacant male space with a female body. Following the death of her mother, she receives an inheritance from an unnamed aunt, enabling her to "move her protesting sisters to a little estate she had purchased in Surrey" (10). As a "deviantly" sexualized person, Ogilvy attempts to satisfy society’s desires for women and men. She serves as a masculine guardian, but also receives the bitter criticism of her friends and family for not being feminine (8-10). In her attempt to negotiate these demands, she initially constructs an artificial and folded subject position by rehearsing, responding to, and enfolding society’s desire for an efficient sexualized dichotomy.

With the news of the war, Ogilvy again confronts her sexual status. She declares: "My God! If only I were a man ... if only I had been born a man" (10). Hall reminds us that her hero(ine) was "not at all like other ladies;" she "wished to go up to the front-line trenches" (11). Dismissing her society’s desire that she fuel the war effort by knitting socks, Ogilvy forms her own "admirable unit" and serves under the French in a front-line medical corps (11-12). After the war, she feels dissatisfied with the mundane activities of husbandry. She realizes: "This won’t do at all ... life’s not worth so much fuss, I must pull myself together" (15). The social machine of post-war capitalistic society has forced Ogilvy to affect a degree of individuality, but this feigned distinctness ultimately leaves her feeling fragmented. She misses the diversity within interdependence that she enjoyed in her recently disbanded unit, and the news that one of its members plans to marry leads Ogilvy to experience "a sense of complete desolation" (16). Claudia Franks Stillman speaks of this moment in psychoanalytic terms as a "crisis" that drives the hero(ine) to seek restorative treatment (126). However, Ogilvy does not seek corrective therapy. She takes a brief vacation and ultimately enters a fabulous world in which she images a form of Deleuzian sexual/subject formation rooted in multiplicity.

Hall emphasizes the mythic quality of the island to which Ogilvy retreats by indicating that it "is still very little known to the world" (17). After she encounters the mysterious cave and notes how the water undulates onto the land, she observes seagulls "grown fearless of man by reason of his absurd limitations" who "reared countless young who multiplied, in their turn, every season" (20). Her comments regarding the seagulls reveal Hall’s critique of restrictive social constructions of individualized subjectivity. Ogilvy admires the continuous variety of the birds, who consistently re-create and re-fold life and its various manifestations. Moreover, she maintains a strange memory of the fabulous island and cave -- a sensation which becomes stronger and sharper when the hotel proprietor, Nanceskivel, shows various ancient relics of the area to the hero(ine). Ogilvy becomes quite disturbed that her host has uncovered these bones; she "knew how such men had been buried, which made the outrage seem all the more shameful" (22). Her anger suggests a sense of affiliation with these earlier forms of life. Like Deleuze’s belief that all human life is a continuum, Ogilvy is conscious of her relation to other people and time periods. Ogilvy has been forced to distinguish and fold her "self" in a post-War capitalistic world, but Hall offers a brief and incredible vision of trans-temporal relatedness. It is not a vision of Cartesian wholeness; rather it demonstrates the radically interconnected human subjectivity theorized by Deleuze and imagined by Hall.

The author opens the penultimate section of her story with an interesting image of affected or folded subjectivity that Ogilvy uses to establish a feign of individualized enclosure along this human perpetuity. Hall describes Ogilvy digging into her pockets and notes how "she could feel small, familiar things in those pockets and she gripped them, glad of their presence" (23). This portrait of Ogilvy reaching inwards into her pockets for materiality reminds us of the de-centered status of a folded subject -- society desires her to rely on the "things" in her pocket for a centered and rounded sense of self. The desire-producing machine dominates, forcing Ogilvy and others to affect a rounded, albeit false, individualized subject position which society needs to perform the distinct roles and functions a capitalistic community. Near the point of collapse, she closes her eyes and enters a pre-historic dream world. Hall immediately declares that "Miss Ogilvy knew that she was herself, that is to say she was conscious of her being, and yet she was not Miss Ogilvy at all, nor had she a memory of her" (24). Hall challenges the Cartesian understanding of stable identity by narrating her hero(ine)’s simultaneous association and disassociation with her "self."

Hall now performs a permutation of sorts, as she blends Ogilvy’s character with two pre-historic figures -- one coded masculine and the other coded feminine -- negotiating a sexualized dichotomy to create a third equivocal gender identity. [The author’s language requires careful attention, meriting a lengthy quotation that I have marked for easy reference.] Hall narrates:

Hall represents Ogilvy’s thoughts and words through line 4 of this excerpt. At this point, the author introduces a new voice, whom we come to know as the female figure who identifies Ogilvy as a man in line 6. Hall returns to Ogilvy’s character in lines 7-10, referring to her not as a man but as "Miss Ogilvy;" and, it is at "her" side that the "little" companion stands. However, at this point, the appropriate antecedents for various female pronouns become ambiguous. It is not clear between lines 10-15 who is wearing pelts or who examines whose black hair. While we may like to maintain that Ogilvy as a distinct entity admires the beauty of an other, the language collapses into indeterminacy. In line 15, when Hall uses the same female pronoun to announce "Pretty," we are again unclear about who speaks these words, Ogilvy or her little companion. Finally, Hall ushers in a male voice in line 16, which troubles further the association of characters with voices. Although critics neglect close readings of this tale, many have offered blanket statements about its confusing gendered persons. Stillman Franks argues that Hall posits an inverted image of Ogilvy as man (127), and Michael Baker maintains that we see a previous incarnation of the hero(ine) as a masculine cave dweller (187). While these critics acknowledge some of the story’s complexity, they fail to view the tale as anything but a manifestation of Ellis’ notions of lesbians as congenitally inverted women. Hall’s brief narrative accomplishes far more than a mere reversal of Ogilvy’s physical sex. Through the means of human language, the author auditions binary sexual and gender identities and provides an image of merged sexual subjects, similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions of the perpetuity of human life and the multiplicity of sexes. This mingling of masculine and feminine pronouns, combined with Ogilvy’s sexual equivocality, glimpses a multi-sexualized subject position.

As the narrative continues, Ogilvy as a subject becomes subsumed into a dialogue of masculine and feminine identities. The ensuing conversation between stereotypical male and female figures offers important clues to Hall’s understanding of the multifaceted, multi-sexed subject. When the man stutters, "You ... woman," the narrator indicates that "the word ... he spoke had a number of meanings." Hall as author seems to admire the ambiguity of language, but she quickly narrates that because of the loversí amorous reciprocity ìshe understood him" (27). Similar to Ogilvy’s participation in the medical unit, these lovers feel connected. With the coming of evening, "the lovers ... felt very much alone, yet withal more closely united to the other" (28). Hall stresses both the separateness and relatedness of the male and female figures. Like Deleuze’s theory of disrupted human continuity, they share a sense of unity but are also forced to establish distinct identities. In their precarious status as particular yet mutual, the lovers struggle to negotiate sexual binaries and arrive at a synthesis. Hall reports that "they were conscious of a longing for something more vast than this earthly passion could compass." The narrator provides a glimpse of this connectedness in the image of the water’s encounter of the land: "the sea and the marshes were become as one substance, merging, blending, folding together; and since they were lovers they also would be one, even as the sea and the marshes" (32). As the waves of the sea mix with the earth, the male and female lovers commingle, creating a brief vision of a new diversity by working through an old duality. Hall’s rhetoric maintains the binary dialectic of male and female, but her vision provides momentary hints of a third ambiguously sexualized subject, which anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s postulation of "a thousand tiny sexes." Hall’s image is brief and fabulous, but she does pref igure multiplicity as a model of subjectivity by collapsing a duality. Although Ogilvy seems to glimpse this vision, she cannot experience it in the social world. The narrator observes that a fisherman found the hero(ine) "at the mouth of the cave. She was dead, with her hands thrust deep into her pockets" (34). Like Hall herself, Ogilvy searches for a way to express her sexual variety and complexity, but her society desires her to create a subject position in response to the discourses of Freud, Ellis, and other social machines -- machines which force her to maintain a stable and individualized sexual subjectivity that is more useful to and efficient for a capitalistic community. Her death marks the incomplete status of Hall’s Deleuzian vision, but it does not erase this amazing image.

Rhoda also dies near the end of The Waves, the "novel" that Woolf termed "my first work in my own style!" (Writer’s Diary 176).²⁶ Critical treatments of the narrative emphasize Woolf’s formal experimentation and the non-Cartesian models of human identity developed through her characterization.²⁷ Although Woolf does image the human subject as multiple and communal by using six voiced speakers and one non-voiced entity, it is Rhoda who struggles to encompass this diversity despite social pressures that demand she remain an individualized agent.²⁸ Rhoda relates early in the story how this multiplicitous identity can deteriorate into particularized subjects. She observes how "the birds sang in chorus," but she immediately notes that they flew away; now "one sings by the bedroom window alone" (10-11). Her recognition of the loss of community in the natural world mirrors her experience of isolation from the other five speakers in the beginning of the tale. She is notably excluded from the butterfly hunting expedition and the discussion of who saw Jinny kissing Louis (12-15). Frank D. McConnell speaks of Rhoda as the most ethereal character in Woolf’s corpus (125). She is present in the story, but often absent as an integral agent from its plot.²⁹ Society forces her to maintain an affected sense of individualized self so that she can perform specific duties in her community, but she resists this by remaining part of others, and dependent on them. Mark Hussey argues that "Rhoda is trapped by her need for others, the need to replenish her dreams with figures from that world populated by those who are at home in their bodies" (17). McConnell and Hussey rightly point out Rhoda’s lack of a distinct and complete ego; however, we need not view her as a disturbed individual in need of psychoanalytic therapy. Rather, Woolf displays Rhoda as a character who ambiguously resists society’s demand that she as sume a stable and particularized subject position, and hence, often seems absent from the activity of the narrative.

Woolf’s depiction of Rhoda emphasizes the character’s reliance on her community of friends as well as her isolation from this group. Rhoda is in many ways a loner because she resists society’s desire that she fold over a unique and enclosed sexual identity sanctioned by society.³⁰ Louis reports that "Rhoda has no father," (20) and it is not coincidental that she can follow neither Freud’s law of the Father nor Lacan’s law of the Phallus.³¹ The absence of a paternal persona disrupts her supposed Oedipal crisis, and the early classroom scene demonstrates her alienation from patriarchal symbolic figures such as numbers and letters. She declares: "But I cannot write. I see only figures" (21). Rhoda must strive to join the world of figures and loops, but even her forced entry into the social realm of language leaves her crying and alienated from the world (21-22). Howard Harper claims that Rhoda is "unsure of every aspect of her being" and concludes that "she is afraid in ways which would never occur to most of us" (240).³² She "put[s] off [her] hopeless desire to be Susan, to be Jinny," but this rejection of the two socially accepted roles for the female -- the fecund mother and the sensual seductress -- leaves her without a recognized sexualized role. She now needs to "[assure] herself" by touching "something hard" (27), reminding us of Ogilvy’s need to dig her hands into her pockets to affect an illusion of roundedness. Both Rhoda and Ogilvy revert at times to the safety and security of "hard," individualized subjectivity; their visions of unique multi-sexualized subject positions are dangerous and threatening. Indeed Rhoda engages a constant struggle against society’s pressure that she become a Cartesian self, but she also realizes the world’s demand that she participate in society as a distinct individual.

Rhoda’s resistance to society’s desire for her to develop her own permanent subject position facilitates her various existential crises. She explains: "I am nobody. I have no face" (33). Indeed, Rhoda’s sexual ambiguity precludes a recognizable body or face; she cannot be captured in one physical being or one countenance. Nevertheless, she initially decides that she must "seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and ... endow it with omniscience, and wear it under my dress like a talisman" (33). Again, she is seemingly compelled to follow the machine’s demand that she possess an identifiable face. She acquires one, which she can carry as a boarding pass that allows her to function in social life, but this "face" is really a function of her imitations of others. Susan observes how Rhoda follows herself and Jinny (40). Later, while she attempts to hide from the reflection of her "face," Rhoda repeats "I am not here. I have no face" (43), and she observes that "other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world (43). Rhoda feels that she must model and mimic Susan and Jinny to affect a countenance, a fold, and an identity that will prevent her obliteration in the social realm. She explains how she must "do what other people do when they have done it" (43). She attaches herself "only to names and faces; and [hoards] them like amulets against disaster" (43). Rhoda assimilates names and faces which help her create a feign of unique subjectivity, but she is ultimately more than the sum of names and faces, masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality.

The uncertainty of Rhoda’s sexualized subjectivity forces her to "bang [her] hand against some hard door to call [herself] back to the body." This process of distinct subject formation will prevent her from "[falling] down into nothingness" (44). Her brief encounter with Miss Lambert displays a more positive aspect of Rhoda’s non-individualized subject position -- i.e., the multiplicity it can encompass and envision. Rhoda seems to admire her teacher, and this respect leads her to conclude that "Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through" (45). Rhoda’s comments suggest the loss of specified borders for the human bodily frame, reminding us of Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of human continuity and sexual prolificacy; but this moment of communal connectedness does not persist. She later dreams that she is an Empress who conquers with an attitude of defiance; yet she quickly realizes that this vision of strongly individualized subjectivity "is not solid; it gives me no satisfaction" (56). Rhoda’s will to a Cartesian ego is unsuccessful. Her body fails, and as it "thaws," she feels "unsealed" and "incandescent." She again returns to a communal model of subjectivity that allows the waves and stream to "[pour] in a deep tide fertilising, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free" (57). Her continuous struggle between a forced or folded sense of self and an inclusive model of human connectedness comes to an early climax when she remembers the puddle that she felt she could not cross.³³ She recalls that "Identity failed me," but she then recollects how she proceeded to "[return] very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle." She concludes that "this is the life then to which I am committed" (64). Rhoda is conscious of the artifice of her constructed subject position and she k nows how "we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures" in order to affect an apparently complete ego. Keith M. Booker notes that "Rhoda is unable to find any role at all to occupy comfortably" (39). Rather than seeing Rhoda as incapable of locating a culturally endorsed part to play, we can see her as a powerful resister of the social machine’s desire for individualized agents. Her "inability" to occupy a specific and distinct role demonstrates her ability to resist society’s desire for separate beings who can perform isolated capitalistic tasks.

Rhoda (re)experiences her existential crisis/struggle following the third interlude. She observes the artificial behavior of other people with their "faint smiles" that "mask their cruelty, their indifference," and knows that she too must "thrust [herself] back to stand burning in this clumsy, this ill-fitting body." She professes to "hate all details of the individual life," but also acknowledges that "An immense pressure is on me" -- a pressure to act in a society that demands separate actors (105). She knows that Susan and Jinny, who have acquired the socially sanctioned female roles of mother and sensualist respectively, perform more effectively in the social world; "they say Yes; they say, No; they bring their fists down with a bang on the table" (106). Moreover, she understands how this behavior is ultimately artificial. She sees how others are also faceless and undefinable by either their physical sex or gender performance. Rhoda resists this ersatz constructed self and remains "perpetually contradicted" (107). She reflects: "I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women ... like a cork on a rough sea" (107). In Rhoda’s first overt mention of sexed identity, she expresses her own sexual ambiguity by noting her relatedness to both men and women. And yet Louise Poresky argues that "Rhoda eludes all sexuality completely" (The Elusive Self 189). While Poresky delineates some of the confusion regarding Rhoda’s subject position, we should not view the sexually ambiguous character as an un-sexed being. Rhoda avoids a static male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual categorization and reminds us of Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of a multiplicity of sexes, genders, and sexualities -- "a thousand tiny sexes."

Rhoda’s sexual status becomes both more prominent and more confusing as the narrative unfolds. Bernard initiates a repeated description of her as "the nymph of the fountain,"³⁴ which introduces a classical myth that suggests Rhoda’s sexual deviancy. This myth of Arethusa’s escape from Alpheus into the ground as fluid water helps us understand Rhoda’s ambiguous resistance to society’s desire for codified sexed and sexualized beings.³⁵ Her disassociation from a static sexual/social subject position is extremely frightening. Part of this fear derives from her observation that "nothing persists." The constantly changing and developing fold of social human life prevents a "real" and "true" conglomeration; because Rhoda consistently resists society’s pressure to create artificially an illusion of rounded and complete subjectivity, she is quite fearful and insecure. She knows that there is "no single scent, no single body for me to follow" (130). Again she must physically exert herself -- must "press [her] hand against the wall to draw [herself] back" -- and imitate the actions and words of others "to have lodgment" (131).³⁶ Rhoda makes several attempts to resist society’s desire that she isolate a specific sexual/social identity, but she still must engage and respond to this social demand. Her resistance becomes complicated with the death of Percival -- another reminder that nothing persists. She now feels "alone in a hostile world" (159). Moreover, she despises this isolation. She declares that "the human face is hideous," and announces that she is "sick of privacy" (159-60). The exclusion Rhoda experiences recalls her notable absence from the early scenes of the novel; she feels solitary because she is no longer connected to the artificial unity that Percival created. The nationalistic connectedness constructed around and through Percival collapses and fails.³⁷ Rhoda is left with the demands of desire-producing society which pressure her to affect a distinct subject position.³⁸ Tamar Katz identifies Rhoda as "the speaker who feels her identity most fragile" (237). This fragility is even more prominent following the loss of Percival as a cultural centering device. Her lack of individualized ontological stability, however, ultimately facilitates her vision of malleable and interconnected sexualized identities and social subjects because she does not conceive of herself as distinctly different from others.

As readers, we learn late of Rhoda’s love connection with Louis (170),³⁹ perhaps her last desperate attempt to assume a socially sanctioned female role. Moreover, we may hear as much about Rhoda leaving Louis as we do about their relationship. Louis initially briefly states that "Rhoda left me," but he soon elaborates: "Rhoda, with whom I shared silence when the others spoke, she who hung back and turned aside when the herd assembled and galloped with orderly, sleek backs over the rich pastures, has gone now like the desert heat" (202-03). Although Louis and Rhoda have shared the conspirator status as outsiders in the novel,⁴⁰ Rhoda appears to resist even this codifying identity. Removing herself from this heterosexual romance, she also dismisses her association with compartmentalized humanity.⁴¹ She critiques the social machine for chaining her "to one spot, one hour, one chair." She explains that she initially "yielded" to the force of the social desires: "What you did, I did. If Susan and Jinny pulled up their stockings like that, I pulled mine up like that also" (204). She acknowledges that she has tried to satisfy the produced desires of her society; she has endeavored to act like a mother and like a sensual seductress. She will, however, no longer strive to create an artificial subject position from which to act and speak. Again, this is a risky and frightening move for Rhoda. She feels rolled over the waves and notes how "Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me." She seems formless and permeable, but this does not prevent her from acting. She says: "Putting my foot to the ground I step gingerly and press my hand against the hard door of a Spanish inn" (206). Rhoda opts against a static social/sexual identity, and her multiplicity involves action. This small action may initially return her to a body, but her vision and observations anticipate the social and polit ical potential of a multi-sexualized subject position.

Rhoda’s struggle to resist social pressures continues in the final group-scene of the novel. During the reunion dinner at Hampton Court, Rhoda no longer hides her body from the group, but she explains that "it is only that I have taught my body to do a certain trick" (222). Rhoda seems to have accepted her disembodied status as a resister of social pressures. She also understands the socially produced desires of her friends -- "children, authority, fame, love, society" -- and continues to insist that she "has no face" (223). Moreover, Rhoda is now concerned with the world, extending her vision of multiplicity beyond her childhood community. She feels that she "must undergo the penance of Hampton Court," but she has a larger sense of interconnectedness in mind. She longs to "embrace the entire world," but knows that she still "must go through the antics of the individual" (223-24). She sees the artifice of the individual subject and wants to incorporate the global community. She ultimately claims that "The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us ... and we enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent." She concludes that "This is our dwelling-place. The structure is now visible. Very little is left outside" (228). The absence of "self-serving" bodily borders facilitates relief and the absence of tension. There are no more borderlines to cross or blur; the dichotomies between sexual identities and social subjects have dissolved and all is enclosed within Rhoda’s vision of a fantastic communal subjectivity. Rhoda hears the suffering of the world (230), wants very much to embrace the multitude, but observes how "light falls on them again. They have faces. They become Susan and Bernard, Jinny and Neville." She terms this artificial process of individualization "shriveling ... an humiliation" (232). Rhoda’s dr eams of communion are not realized completely; yet we ought not forget her mystical image of integration, which resists the pressures of society that demand individually folded sexual subject positions.

In Bernard’s final speech, we can note much of Rhoda’s vision. He now realizes that he is "not one person." He reports: "I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am -- Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis: or how to distinguish my life from theirs" (276). He recounts Rhoda’s death in a way that captures its mystery. He describes her as "always so furtive, always with fear in her eyes, always seeking some pillar in the desert," and indicates that "she had killed herself" (281). While the exact method of her suicide remains unclear, she does ultimately resist society’s desire for her to establish a static social and sexual identity through death. This is an ambiguous and incomplete resistance. Her death leaves her vision of global integration unfulfilled; and yet it does lead Bernard to relate immediately that "this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda -- so strange is the contact of one with another" (281). He recognizes that he has "been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know." He "cannot find any obstacle separating us." He now believes that "There is no division between me and them," and he concludes that "This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome" (288-89). Rhoda’s suicide may curtail her earthly pursuit of this vision of communal subjectivity, but Bernard quickly resumes her struggle and reminds us of her image of multiplicitous sexual/social subjectivity.

The difficult struggles of Rhoda and Ogilvy against socially produced desires for static individual sexual identities certainly do not come to "happy" ends. They die near the conclusion of their respective narratives, but as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has argued, we need not privilege the endings of modern fiction by women (Writing Beyond the Ending 142).⁴² Additionally, we need not maintain stable and specified conceptions of sexual and social roles to be politically engaged as critics. As ambiguously sexualized figures, Rhoda and Ogilvy demonstrate a negotiation of dominant discourses of female deviancy as well as a resistance to society’s produced desire for distinct subject positions. Second-wave feminists criticized Hall for not positing a more victorious portrait of the lesbian and chastised Woolf for avoiding the polemical depiction of a "true" female identity. Hall and Woolf, however, reveal how this emphasis on difference and uniqueness is insufficient. Hall rehearses the binary advocated by Showalter, and ultimately envisions Ogilvy as male, female, and equivocal. Woolf constructs "masculine" and "feminine" characters as well as homosexual and heterosexual heroes and heroines, but she eventually finds these dualistic understandings to be reductionist. Rhoda and Ogilvy cannot be encircled by static and artificial denotations of sex, gender, and sexuality; and their resistances constitute a politically powerful statement for the concept and appreciation of a multi-sexualized identity. Socially produced desires attempt to codify normalized and permanent spheres for people -- the same spheres that second-wave feminism attempted to advocate and uphold. Rhoda and Ogilvy resist these categories and anticipate a Deleuzian image of multiplicitous sexual subjectivity. As we move from the polarized and rigid theories of second-wave feminism to the malleable domain of gender theory, critics must begin to move beyond the application of "masc ulinity" and "femininity" as useful terms, without extensive qualification, contextualization, and explanation. Contemporary with and similar to trickle-down economics, second-wave feminism sought to accentuate difference as a means to usher in a new order; however, as Reaganomics only led to a greater discrepancy between rich and poor, second-wave feminism has ultimately made the disparities between sexes, genders, sexualities, cultures, nationalities, etc. more severe and seemingly permanent. Inspired by the powerful call of Judith Butler to trouble gender, and Deleuze and Guattari’s mystical theories of sexual and social subject formation, we as critics can also prefigure the dynamism of the fold and anticipate the prolificacy of sexualized subject positions exemplified by Rhoda and Ogilvy.

Notes