Hall, who had converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1912, was devoutly religious.[55] She was also a believer in communication with the dead who had once hoped to become a medium[56] — a fact that brought her into conflict with the church, which condemned spiritualism.[57] Both these beliefs made their way into The Well of Loneliness.
Stephen, born on Christmas Eve and named for the first martyr of Christianity, dreams as a child that "in some queer way she [is] Jesus".[58] When she discovers that Collins, object of her childhood crush, has housemaid's knee, she prays that the affliction be transferred to her: "I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus — I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins — I love her, and I want to be hurt like You were".[59] This childish desire for martyrdom prefigures Stephen's ultimate self-sacrifice for Mary's sake.[60] After she tricks Mary into leaving her — carrying out a plan that leads Valérie to exclaim "you were made for a martyr!"[61] — Stephen, left alone in her home, sees the room thronged with inverts, living, dead, and unborn. They call on her to intercede with God for them, and finally possess her. It is with their collective voice that she demands of God, "Give us also the right to our existence".[62]
After Stephen reads Krafft-Ebing in her father's library, she opens the Bible at random, seeking a sign, and reads Genesis 4:15, "And the Lord set a mark upon Cain...."[63] Hall uses the mark of Cain, a sign of shame and exile, throughout the novel as a metaphor for the situation of inverts.[64] Her defense of inversion took the form of a religious argument: God had created inverts, so humanity should accept them.[65] The Well's use of religious imagery outraged the book's opponents,[66] but Hall's vision of inversion as a God-given state was an influential contribution to the language of LGBT rights.[67]
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