340 julie abraham The Well of Loneliness, even though she herself stayed in London But as I have suggested, throughout her novel “this very city,” whether London or Paris, is also “every city” (299): the invert is isolated in Paris “as in all the great cities of the world” (406); the homosexual society of Paris is represented as “the stream that flows through all great cities” (356) In fact Hall presents Paris as a representative city whenever she invokes it as a setting for gay life For Radclyffe Hall as for Floyd Dell, the city the queer inhabits is a generalized metropolis, a great city For the purposes of this essay I have juxtaposed The Well with Robert Park’s landmark essay, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment” (1915–1925) My reading of Radclyffe Hall at the Chicago School has two parts I begin by describing the ways in which Park’s and Hall’s shared investment in the “difference” of cities and homosexuals frames their accounts of the city and the invert so that Hall’s invert can emerge as a model citizen of Park’s great city I go on to discuss the ways in which their emphases on difference play out in their accounts of “communal life”—when negotiating “communal life” is presented as the definitive dilemma of urban citizens and homosexuals alike.14 What I hope to produce here is a reading of a sequence of interlocking arguments that turn on the two subjects that Hall and Park share—cities and deviance—by mapping the shifting relations between Park’s and Hall’s texts Homosexuals are obviously not the only deviant individuals who find their way to great cities Nevertheless my argument here presupposes that some deviants exemplify the urban better than others As I will demonstrate, homosexuals exemplify the urban best of all The Criminal, the Defective, and the Genius Both Park and Hall believed that literature was true but it was science that they believed would give their analyses credibility Park wanted to claim for urban study the “patient methods of observation” and the credit granted “anthropologists like Boas and Lowie” (92); he wanted to “make of the city a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be conveniently and profitably studied” (130) Hall likewise believed in the “laboratory or clinic” as the ultimate source of validation for her work, asking Havelock Ellis to comment on her novel and then publishing The Well