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GENDERS
Second edition
The concept of gender continues to be a central issue in literary and cultural
studies, with a significance that crosses disciplinary boundaries and
provokes lively debate. In this fully revised and updated second edition,
David Glover and Cora Kaplan offer a lucid and illuminating introduction
to ‘gender’ and its implications, including:
● an overview of the critical language and concepts surrounding gender
from their historical inception to contemporary debates
● discussions of the major theorists in the field
● updated and extended coverage of lesbian and queer theory
● a new glossary of terms essential to an understanding of the debate
on gender in contemporary theory.
With its impressive breadth and depth of coverage, this volume offers not
only a comprehensive history of this complex term, but also indicates its
ongoing presence in literary and cultural theory and the new directions it
is taking.
David Glover is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton.
He is the author of Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the
Politics of Popular Fiction (1996) and is Editor of the journal New Formations.
Cora Kaplan is Professor Emerita of English at the University of
Southampton and Visiting Professor in the School of English and Drama,
Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of Sea Changes: Essays
on Culture and Feminism (1986) and Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism
(2007).
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THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING
The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to today’s
critical terminology. Each book:
● provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the term
● offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and cultural critic
● relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible breadth
of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to key topics in
literary studies.
Also available in this series:
The Author by Andrew Bennett
Autobiography by Linda Anderson
Adaptation and Appropriation
by Julie Sanders
Class by Gary Day
Colonialism/Postcolonialism –
Second edition by Ania Loomba
Comedy by Andrew Stott
Crime Fiction by John Scaggs
Culture/Metaculture by Francis Mulhern
Difference by Mark Currie
Discourse by Sara Mills
Drama/Theatre/Performance by Simon
Shepherd and Mick Wallis
Dramatic Monologue by Glennis Byron
Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard
Elegy by David Kennedy
Genre by John Frow
Gothic by Fred Botting
Historicism by Paul Hamilton
Humanism by Tony Davies
Ideology by David Hawkes
Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran
Intertextuality by Graham Allen
Irony by Claire Colebrook
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Magic(al) Realism by Maggie Ann
Bowers
Memory by Anne Whitehead
Metaphor by David Punter
Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form
by Philip Hobsbaum
Mimesis by Matthew Potolsky
Modernism by Peter Childs
Myth by Laurence Coupe
Narrative by Paul Cobley
Parody by Simon Dentith
Pastoral by Terry Gifford
Performativity by James Loxley
The Postmodern by Simon Malpas
Realism by Pam Morris
Rhetoric by Jennifer Richards
Romance by Barbara Fuchs
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Science Fiction by Adam Roberts
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
Subjectivity by Donald E. Hall
The Sublime by Philip Shaw
The Unconscious by Antony Easthope
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GENDERS
Second edition
David Glover and Cora Kaplan
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First edition published 2000
Second edition published 2009
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2000, 2009 David Glover and Cora Kaplan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glover, David, 1946–.
Genders/David Glover and Cora Kaplan. – 2nd ed.
p. cm. – (The new critical idiom)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sex role. I. Kaplan, Cora. II. Title.
HQ1075.G59 2008
305.3 – dc22
2008030933
ISBN 0-203-88347-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 10: 0–415–44243–5 (hbk)
ISBN 10: 0–415–44244–3 (pbk)
ISBN 10: 0–203–88347–0 (ebk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–44243–5 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–44244–2 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–203–88347–1 (ebk)
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CONTENTS
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71
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
vii
8
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
viii
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Introduction: gendered histories, gendered contexts
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Of doctors and dictionaries
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Gender and sexual science
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4
Rethinking gender(s)
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Gender and language: Wittig’s pronouns
19
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7
1 Femininity and feminism
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‘Women feel just as men feel’: femininity and
feeling 1790–1850
38
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Femininity between world wars
50
2
Race and femininity in African American writing
59
3
Masculine identification: femininity’s disappearing act 65
4
Lesbian fiction after modernism: queering the genre
73
5
Post-human(ist) femininity?
81
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2 Masculinities
86
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‘The manly ideal’
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Dissipation and ‘natural character’
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‘The hero as man of letters’
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Of beetles and dandies
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3 Queering the pitch
114
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Homosexuals, inverts and fairies
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6
In and out of the closet
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7
Queer sensibilities, queer theory
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‘Anticommunitarian impulses’
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vi CONTENTS
4 Readers and spectators
147
Gender and the public sphere
150
‘Interpretive communities’
161
Spectateur, spectatrice
170
Conclusion
181
GLOSSARY
186
BIBLIOGRAPHY
188
INDEX
198
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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which
seeks to extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address
the radical changes which have taken place in the study of literature
during the last decades of the twentieth century. The aim is
to provide clear, well-illustrated accounts of the full range of
terminology currently in use, and to evolve histories of its changing
usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one
where there is considerable debate concerning basic questions of
terminology. This involves, among other things, the boundaries
which distinguish the literary from the non-literary; the position
of literature within the larger sphere of culture; the relationship
between literatures of different cultures; and questions concerning
the relation of literary to other cultural forms within the context
of interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a
dynamic and heterogeneous one. The present need is for individual
volumes on terms which combine clarity of exposition with an
adventurousness of perspective and a breadth of application.
Each volume will contain as part of its apparatus some indication
of the direction in which the definition of particular terms is
likely to move, as well as expanding the disciplinary boundaries
within which some of these terms have been traditionally
contained. This will involve some re-situation of terms within
the larger field of cultural representation, and will introduce
examples from the area of film and the modern media in addition
to examples from a variety of literary texts.
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PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Gender is a vast and expanding subject; in this book we have
tried to guide our readers through what seem to us to be some
of the most important debates and issues, especially as they impact
on culture and representation. Although it is impossible to give
a comprehensive treatment of all the cultural and historical aspects
of gender in a book of this size, we hope that our discussion will
help readers in pursuing further research on those topics which
interest them. Genders is very much a joint production, conceived
together, but the responsibility for the Introduction and chapters
2 through 5 belongs to David Glover, while Cora Kaplan is the
primary author of Chapter 1.
We are grateful to the staffs of the British Library and the
London Library for their help with our research for the book. A
study leave from Southampton University has allowed David
Glover the space to complete his part of the project. Our thanks
to John Drakakis for inviting us to write for the series and for
his constructive criticism and support, and to Talia Rodgers, Liz
Thompson and Polly Dodson who have been enthusiastic and
patient editors throughout.
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INTRODUCTION
GENDERED HISTORIES, GENDERED
CONTEXTS
‘Gender’ is now one of the busiest, most restless terms in the
English language, a word that crops up everywhere, yet whose
uses seem to be forever changing, always on the move, producing
new and often surprising inflections of meaning. We talk about
gender roles, worry about the gender gap, question whether our
ideas are not gender-biased or gender-specific, and we might look
for additional information on these and related topics in the
rapidly expanding gender studies section of our local bookstore.
This rich linguistic profusion is confusing enough, but all too
frequently it is made worse by the discovery that many of these
neologisms appear to be pointing in sharply opposed directions.
Gender role, for instance, suggests something that constrains
or confines, a part we have to play, whereas gender-bending, by
contrast, implies a way out, the subversion of a role through
parody or the deliberate cultivation of ambiguity: what was once
dutifully thought to be fixed becomes chameleon-like, a part to
be played with style, a chance to mock and shock.
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2 INTRODUCTION
As these brief examples show, gender is a much contested
concept, as slippery as it is indispensable, but a site of unease
rather than of agreement. If gender is used to mark the differences
between men and women, portmanteau words like gender-bending
or gender-blending call those differences into question, drawing
attention to the artificiality of what we think of as ‘natural’
behaviour. This sense of discord ought to warn us against seizing
too quickly upon a summary definition of the term, seeking
order and clarity where none is to be had. Instead, this intro-
ductory chapter will try to explore some of the reasons why gender
has become such a vital, but nonetheless intensely problematic
word in the contemporary critical lexicon.
OF DOCTORS AND DICTIONARIES
Despite sometimes sounding as if they were mere clichés, little
more than the superannuated jargon of interpersonal relations,
phrases like gender role or gender identity are in fact relatively
new. Before the Second World War they didn’t exist and other
closely connected expressions – such as gender-bender – did not
appear until the early 1980s. The Oxford English Dictionary did
not begin recording these linguistic innovations until as late as
1989, though its entry for gender includes examples that date
back at least to the days of Chaucer. To illustrate the early use
of the term, consider the following item of gossip from the
Morning Herald, 29 November 1784:
The rumour concerning a Grammatical mistake of Mr. B—— and
the Hon. Mr. C——, in regard to the genders, we hope forthe honour
of Nature originates in Calumny! – For, however depraved the being
must be, who can propagate such reports without foundation, we
must wish such a being exists, in preference to characters, who,
regardless of Divine, Natural and Human Law, sink themselves below
the lowest class of brutes in the most preposterous rites.
(quoted in Chapman 1937: 185)
As it was designed to do, the publication of this story precipitated
a scandal in English upper-class circles. The not-so-mysterious
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‘Mr. B——’ was easily recognized as the wealthy young author
and Member of Parliament, William Beckford, whom the press
accused of entering into what might today be called a homosexual
liaison – ‘homosexuality’ being late-nineteenth-century coinage
– with the sixteen-year-old son of Lord Courtenay. What really
happened remains a matter of dispute, but once the rumour was
in print the newspaper attacks rapidly grew bolder and bolder.
A little over a week later the veiled language had been dropped
and the Herald was openly deriding Beckford and Courtenay as
‘a pair of fashionable male lovers’ (Chapman 1937: 186). By the
following summer Beckford had yielded to his family’s advice
and discreetly moved to Switzerland.
Feigning injured piety and outrage at the mischievous
rumourmonger, the insinuations in the Herald’s original report
left no doubt as to who was doing what to whom. What made
this brief paragraph such a devastating piece of innuendo? In the
report’s very first sentence the rhetorical reference to ‘genders’
would have been read as utterly damning, because it plays upon
the different connotations of the word current in this period.
According to the sixth edition of Dr Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary
of the English Language (1785), gender could refer either to the
grammatical practice of classifying nouns as masculine, feminine
or neuter; or it could mean ‘a sex’. Similarly, the verb ‘to gender’
meant to produce, to beget, to breed, or to copulate, as in
Shakespeare’s Othello : ‘A cistern for foul toads/To gender in.’
Thus the ‘Grammatical mistake’ to which the Morning Herald
so archly alludes also carries the implication of same-sex desire
and points towards the ‘crime’ of sodomy. This inference is further
underscored by the columnist’s deft insertion of the verb ‘to
propagate’ and the adjective ‘depraved’, placing ‘Mr.B——’ and
the ‘Hon. Mr.C——’ ‘below the lowest class of brutes’.
The modern meanings of gender still bear the traces of these
older historical usages. Gender continues to function as a
grammatical term, for example, as well as being a euphemism
for a person’s sex, though it is no longer used as a synonym for
the sexual act. So we might be forgiven for thinking that nothing
much has changed since William Beckford’s time. Yet, compared
to today’s complex linguistic flux, these eighteenth-century idioms
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4 INTRODUCTION
seem remarkably restricted, as if cut off from the perpetual
expansion of meaning that characterizes the present.
Part of the reason for this sense of semantic discontinuity
stems from the fact that, beginning in the nineteenth century,
sexuality gradually assumed a new status as an object of scientific
and popular knowledge. The last two hundred years or so have
seen what the critic and historian Michel Foucault once described
as a ‘discursive explosion’ around the question of sex, by which
he did not simply mean that it came to be talked about more
widely or more often or more explicitly, relaxing the grip of
repressive conventions or taboos (Foucault 1979: 38). Rather,
what really revolutionized sex was the way in which ideas about
sexuality began to spread out and touch every aspect of modern
social life. According to Foucault:
The most discrete event in one’s sexual behaviour – whether an
accident or a deviation, a deficit or an excess – was deemed capable
of entailing the most varied consequences throughout one’s existence;
there was scarcely a malady or physical disturbance to which the
nineteenth century did not impute at least some degree of sexual
etiology. From the bad habits of children to the phthises of adults,
the apoplexies of old people, nervous maladies, and the degeneration
of the race, the medicine of that era wove an entire network of sexual
causality to explain them.
(Foucault 1979: 65)
Sexuality is here much more than a facet of human nature, the
seat of pleasure and desire. It has become a principle of explanation
whose effects can be discerned, in different ways, in virtually any
stage and predicament of human life, shaping our capacity to act
and setting the limits to what we can think and do. The sexual
discourses listed by Foucault are astonishingly diverse, ranging
from pedagogical discussions on how to teach and discipline
children and minors, to medical and psychiatric case studies of
disturbed individuals, to treatises on population and demography,
and even to ideas about the proper design of buildings, including
family houses, dormitories and classrooms.
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To see how dramatically thinking about sexuality has changed,
let us consider a particularly challenging example, that of a
nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite named Herculine
Barbin whose memoirs Foucault republished in 1978. Today we
would define an hermaphrodite as someone who combines features
drawn from both sexes: in classical mythology Hermaphroditus,
the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, merged with his lover Salmacis
to become a being with female breasts and male genitals, after
she had prayed to the gods that the two of them might be united
for ever. But Foucault’s point is that in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance the hermaphrodite’s sexual identity was not simply
a question of biology: legal, religious and medical codes all had
a bearing on how any individual might be treated, and in some
circumstances some hermaphrodites could actually choose for
themselves whether they wanted to be recognized as a man or as
a woman. Not only were the biological facts of the matter subject
to interpretation in such cases; more than this, the whole view
of human reproductive biology within which these facts were to
be understood diverged radically from the dimorphic or two-sex
model that seems so obvious to us.
Until at least the middle of the eighteenth century the human
body was conceived as being of one flesh: in other words, as
consisting of a single, yet capacious sex, an ‘open body in which
sexual differences were matters of degree rather than kind’
(Laqueur 1990: 125). Thus the famous sixteenth-century surgeon
Ambroise Paré could write that ‘Sexe is no other thing than the
distinction of Male and Female, in which this is most observable,
that for the parts of the body, and the site of these parts, their
is litle difference betweene them, but the Female is colder than
the Male’ (Paré 1634: 27). Consequently he thought it entirely
possible for a woman spontaneously to change her ‘sexe’ (or, as
he put it, ‘degenerate’ into a man), since ‘women have so many
and like parts lying in their wombe, as men have hanging forth’
and these could certainly be externalized. Paré took such stories
very seriously, believing that the only real obstacle lay in the fact
that ‘a strong and lively heat seemes to bee wanting, which may
drive forth that which lyes hid within’ (Paré 1634: 975). However,
he felt it to be far less likely that men could turn into women,
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6 INTRODUCTION
for ‘Nature tends always toward what is most perfect and not,
on the contrary, to perform in such a way that what is perfect
should become imperfect’ (Paré 1634: 33).
From the standpoint of twentieth-century clinical medicine
this view of sexual difference seems to be incredibly wrong-headed
and unenlightened. Yet the story of Herculine Barbin shows that
the advances associated with modern anatomy were not without
their personal costs. Herculine was raised as a girl in a Catholic
orphanage and later worked as a schoolteacher, but, following a
medical examination during an illness, she began to have doubts
about her sexual identity. A second examination in 1860 led a
local court to reverse her civil status and to declare that her ‘true
sex’ was that of a ‘young man’. In his medical report Dr Chesnet
insisted that, despite all of Herculine’s ‘completely feminine
attributes’ including a very small vagina, ‘the whole outer part
of her body is that of a man’. The conclusive signs of ‘the
predominance of masculine sexual characteristics’ in Herculine
were the ‘ovoid bodies and spermatic cords . . . found by touch
in a divided scrotum’, features that Chesnet believed to be ‘the
real proofs of sex’ (Foucault 1980: 123–8). Devastated by this
verdict and forced to leave town, Herculine committed suicide
in Paris in 1868. In her memoirs she described herself as ‘a sad
disinherited creature’, whose ‘very life is a scandal’ (Foucault
1980: 93, 99).
In a sense, Herculine Barbin was partly the victim of a new
drive to investigate the nature of sexual identity and to catalogue
its various anomalies and deviations, a drive which, according to
Foucault, reached a peak in France in the decade between 1860
and 1870. Today, the strict anatomical division between the
sexes sounds inevitable, mere common sense. According to current
medico-legal orthodoxy, whatever a person’s sexual tastes may
be, it should in principle be possible to classify everyone unam-
biguously as either male or female. Yet, if one looks at ‘sex’ from
the long-term, historical perspective recommended by Foucault,
the fate of Herculine Barbin suggests that to define identity
like this is also to close down some of the options that once had
been available to those who felt themselves to be ‘different’. ‘Do
we truly need a true sex?’ asks Foucault: after all, isn’t what truly
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matters ‘the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures’
(Foucault 1980: vii)?
While the case of Herculine Barbin provides an unforgettably
bleak illustration of the extent to which the foundations of sexual
knowledge were being thoroughly overhauled in the nineteeth
century, this is by no means the full story. Paradoxically, the new
modes of medical power and expertise that ultimately made
Herculine’s life seem no longer bearable also provided the occasion
for new voices to make themselves heard, insisting, like the
unhappy Herculine, upon the validity and legitimacy of their
own experiences. Thus the growing willingness to put ‘sex’ into
question, even to search for the scientific truth about sexual
behaviour, gradually opened up new ways in which the entire
field of sexual possibilities and sexual identities could be imagined,
permanently transforming people’s most intimate sense of their
sexual selves. ‘The nineteenth century and our own’ represent an
‘age of multiplication’, wrote Foucault, an age in which there is
‘a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate
forms’, resulting in nothing less than an ‘epoch’ of ‘sexual
heterogeneities’ (Foucault 1979: 37).
Nevertheless, Foucault failed to give enough weight to one of
the most momentous changes to occur within the modern sexual
sciences: the recognition that a person’s sexual desires cannot be
deduced solely from a simple inventory of anatomical facts. This
realization was slow in coming, for medical researchers clung to
the notion that the human sexual instinct was essentially a
physiological phenomenon, initially thought to be localized in
the reproductive organs or, on a slightly later view, in the brain’s
cerebral cortex. Yet in the diagnosis and treatment of sexual
abnormalities, the so-called ‘perversions’ such as sado-masochism,
it proved impossible to discover a malfunction in a specific part
of the human body that would explain the vicissitudes of the
sexual instinct.
We find a profound ambivalence running through the work
of writers such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austrian
psychiatrist who first coined the term ‘sado-masochism’ in 1890.
For example, in his massively influential textbook Psychopathia
Sexualis (originally published in 1886), Krafft-Ebing wavers
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8 INTRODUCTION
between asserting that the sexual instinct is rooted in the brain
and admitting that there is as yet no clear evidence as to where
exactly in the brain it might be. Ultimately, this was a productive
contradiction, for it pushed Krafft-Ebing towards the view that
sexual behaviour was always bound up with a certain type of
‘sexual personality’ or ‘sexual sensibility’. But he was not alone
in reaching this conclusion. Arnold Davidson has shown in great
detail how, in the English language, the nineteenth-century word
‘sexuality’ eventually moved away from its association with the
purely biological aspects of ‘sex’, and came instead to refer to
someone’s sexual feelings or sexual preferences, reflecting the fact
that by the 1890s:
Sexual identity is no longer exclusively linked to the anatomical struc-
ture of the internal and external genital organs. It is now a matter of
impulses, tastes, aptitudes, satisfactions, and psychic traits.
(Davidson 1987: 21–2)
These novel meanings crystallizing around the concept of
‘sexuality’ are a strong indication that sexual life was beginning
to be seen as something more than a mere set of sensations: to
possess a sexuality was to lay claim to a distinctive form of subjec-
tivity, or what Krafft-Ebing once termed ‘mental individuality’.
Describing what he called the ‘anomalies of the sexual instinct’
(such as same-sex desire), Krafft-Ebing claimed that:
These anomalies are very important elementary disturbances, since
upon the nature of sexual sensibility the mental individuality in greater
part depends; especially does it affect ethic, esthetic, and social feeling
and action.
(Krafft-Ebing 1904: 81)
In other words, ‘tell me what your desire is and I will tell you
who you are’ (Foucault, quoted in Macey 1993: 365).
Of course, this cultural shift did not happen overnight, nor
did it occur once and for all. Sexual biology and sexual psychology
continued to be conflated. Much of the force of Freud’s Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), one of the founding texts
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of psychoanalysis, lies in his criticism of the widespread belief
that achieving sexual satisfaction is ‘analogous to the sating of
hunger’, a straightforward function of the human body (Freud
1977: 7.61). By considering the evidence of ‘sexual aberrations’
– including studies of homosexuality, fetishism and scopophilia
(compulsive sexual pleasure in looking) – Freud was able to
reveal the workings of the sexual instinct to be far more
complicated than was generally understood. The sheer variety of
the sexual behaviour recorded by Krafft-Ebing and the other
early sexologists seemed to undermine the assumption that there
was any intrinsic, or even natural, connection between the sexual
instinct and the object of desire. On the contrary, argued Freud:
Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us
that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely
soldered together – a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking
in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the
object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus
warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct
and object.
(Freud 1977: 7.59)
To pursue Freud’s argument to its logical conclusion necessarily
means dislodging ‘the normal picture’, undermining its customary
dominance by seeing it as just one contingent form of sexual
desire among many. For Freud, one could almost say, the perver-
sions disclose the truth of heterosexuality.
Although Freud and the majority of the psychoanalytic
movement never abandoned the concept of sexual perversion,
the line between ‘these deviations and what is assumed to be
normal’ becomes less and less clear as a result of Freud’s inter-
vention – especially since he insisted that there were many
situations in which ordinarily acceptable sexual activities such as
touching or looking could come to be defined as perverted (Freud
1977: 7.46). It is therefore perfectly plausible to argue on psycho-
analytic grounds that ‘human sexuality . . . cannot in any sense
be enclosed within a specific pattern which may be considered
normal’; or, to turn the proposition around, that ‘all human
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10 INTRODUCTION
sexuality is essentially perverse’ (Torres 1991: 73). Similarly, while
Freud always stressed that psychoanalysis shared ‘a common basis
with biology’, one effect of his work has been to problematize
the relationship between desire and the body (Freud 1979: 9.399).
This remains a controversial issue, but for some of Freud’s
successors the most striking aspect of the Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality is ‘the radical loss of the biological’ that his
argument seems to imply (Laplanche 1976: 125).
Freud’s debt to his contemporaries in the field of sexology was
considerable. Yet in building upon their work to produce a truer,
more scientific theory of sexuality in the Three Essays, Freud was
also attempting to distance himself from them in order to establish
the superior credentials of psychoanalysis, his own distinctive
brand of science. For Freud the real interest in studying sexual
behaviour lay in its contribution to our understanding of the
most inaccessible and troubled regions of mental life; and this
meant that he tended to regard sexology as a useful, though
ultimately inferior, fact-gathering activity. This spirit of rivalry
between the two specialisms has continued down to the present
day, but one of the reasons for this tension is that sexology and
psychoanalysis obviously overlap. Indeed, Foucault even saw them
as being part of the same system of thought, since each is based
upon the assumption that the truth about ourselves can be found
in our sexual natures. And it is in this area of overlap between
sexology and psychoanalysis that we first see the late modern
concept of gender beginning to emerge.
In the United States especially, the years following the Second
World War produced something of a boom for sexology and
psychoanalysis. In sexology this phenomenon is best represented
by the massive interest aroused when Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual
Behaviour in the Human Male was published in 1948. Although
it was an expensive scientific text filled with statistical tables rather
than graphic illustrations, Kinsey’s book sold 200,000 copies in
six months. As with earlier work in sexology, the effect of Kinsey’s
research was to show how incomplete or misleading popular
knowledge about sexuality really was. His findings – like the
most widely quoted Kinsey statistic that ‘nearly 2 males out of
every 5 that one may meet . . . has at least some overt homosexual
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experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old
age’ – not only suggested a sharp divergence between conventional
morality and social reality, but they also revealed the inadequacy
of existing concepts for describing sexual behaviour (Kinsey
et al. 1948: 650). It is notable that throughout his work Kinsey
tried to avoid using the condemnatory clinical typology of the
perversions.
GENDER AND SEXUAL SCIENCE
No one knows precisely when and where gender was initially
used to refer to the social and cultural aspects of sexual difference,
but it is clear that the term was already current in sexology by
the early 1960s. For example, gender does not figure in Alex
Comfort’s post-war overview of Sexual Behaviour in Society (1950)
until the book was revised for publication some thirteen years
later (under the new title Sex in Society), when the author added
a brief discussion of ‘gender roles’. Significantly, this was placed
in a chapter on ‘The Biological Background’ to human sexuality,
in which Comfort stressed the difficulty in knowing the extent
to which our sexual behaviour was instinctive, given ‘the far greater
importance of higher mental functions in man’ than in the other
animal species (Comfort 1963: 34). This explains why:
The ‘gender role’ which an individual adopts – ‘manly’ or ‘womanly’
– according to the standards of his culture, is oddly enough almost
wholly learned, and little if at all built in; in fact, the gender role learned
by the age of two years is for most individuals almost irreversible,
even if it runs counter to the physical sex of the subject.
(Comfort 1963: 42)
‘Gender’ is used here to index the wide variation in styles of
behaviour between societies, but it also suggests that within them
the degree of choice is fairly limited. By making his readers
aware of these cultural differences, Comfort hoped to demystify
human sexuality and so help to release them from what he believed
were unnecessary and irrational sexual taboos. At the same time,
however, his more guarded emphasis upon the irreversibility of
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12 INTRODUCTION
gender roles seems to tell against the promise of any easily
accessible path to sexual liberation. For liberal humanists like
Comfort it was often hard to understand why sexual enlighten-
ment should appear to lag so far behind the other modes of social
and technological progress.
Probably the most thorough attempt to theorize the distinction
between sex and gender in this period is to be found in the
writings of the psychoanalyst and anthropologist Robert J. Stoller,
whose book Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity
and Femininity appeared in 1968. Stoller located the starting-
point for his work in Freud’s paper on ‘The Psychogenesis of a
Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ (1920) which argued that
a person’s physical sexual attributes, mental attitudes and objects
of desire could ‘vary independently of one another’; so that ‘a
man with predominantly male characteristics and also masculine
in his erotic life may still be inverted in respect to his object,
loving only men instead of women’ (Freud 1979: 9.398–9).
In a similar vein, Stoller used the term ‘gender’ to signal the
complexities of those ‘tremendous areas of behaviour, feelings,
thoughts, and fantasies that are related to the sexes and yet do
not have primarily biological connotations’ (Stoller 1968: ix).
Not only do we tend to confuse sex and gender, however. We
also assume too readily that the various components of gender
are mutually reinforcing, whereas in fact they may well pull in
different directions.
In addition to separating sex from gender analytically, therefore,
Stoller distinguished between ‘gender role’ and ‘gender identity’
in order to indicate that one’s inner and outer life may be deeply
conflicted or fail to coincide. The gender role that one plays out
before others may offer little clue as to who one feels oneself to
be, and consequently in Stoller’s theory the very definition of
gender identity is founded upon the possibility of an inner discord,
a kind of non-identity with one’s sexual being:
Gender identity starts with the knowledge and awareness, whether
conscious or unconscious, that one belongs to one sex and not the
other, though as one develops, gender identity becomes much more
complicated, so that, for example, one may sense himself as not only
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INTRODUCTION 13
a male but a masculine man or an effeminate man or even as a man
who fantasies being a woman.
(Stoller 1968: 10)
By the end of this sentence gender identity has begun to sound
like a form of alienation and, perhaps not surprisingly, much of
Stoller’s clinical work was devoted to examining cases in which
people felt uncertain as to whether they were ‘really’ masculine
or feminine. According to Stoller the first few years of childhood
usually gave rise to a stubborn core of gender identity and this
could sometimes clash with subsequent experiences, values or
wishes. But such conflicts were rarely simple. In a discussion of
those patients whose genital abnormalities meant that they were
brought up ‘in an atmosphere of parental doubt’, Stoller suggested
that it was possible for them to develop ‘a hermaphroditic gender
consciousness’, a unique core identity that recognized the division
of the world into two sexes, while feeling that he or she was a
social and a sexual misfit who ‘belongs to neither’ (Stoller 1968:
33–4). On the other hand, not all psychic conflicts were necessarily
destructive. Commenting on the case of a patient who was a
transvestite, Stoller observed that part of the man’s pleasure in
heightening his sense of femininity through cross-dressing came
from a simultaneous awareness of also being male. Here ‘the two
aspects of gender identity’ – ‘the later one, I am feminine, and
the earlier core identity, I am (nonetheless) a male’ – were equally
‘essential to his perversion’ (Stoller 1968: 40). To manipulate the
limits of gender, to play with and upon a sense of the contra-
dictions of identity, was, for this subject, to secure the conditions
of the most intense sexual enjoyment.
The continuing legacy of Stoller’s work (and that of the Gender
Identity Research Clinic which he set up in Los Angeles in the
1960s) can still be seen in the American Psychiatric Association’s
official diagnostic manual. There one can find entries on ‘gender
dysphoria’ or ‘gender identity disorder’, defined as a ‘persistent
discomfort about one’s assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness
in the gender role of that sex’, a syndrome that often temporarily
affects children – though no clue is offered as to why this should
be so (American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV 1994: 533).
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14 INTRODUCTION
While inevitably lacking the psychological subtleties of Stoller’s
detailed case histories, these brief, abstracted symptomatologies
do point up the weaknesses of his own narrowly clinical approach.
Stoller had little time for broader social analyses of gender,
dismissing Foucault’s ‘cultural history’ of sexuality as nothing
more than ‘a story’, based on ‘shards’ and ‘fragments’, that ‘leaves
out the information that the intimate study of individuals can
add’ (Stoller 1996: 16–18).
RETHINKING GENDER(S)
As much as any single figure could, Stoller put the distinction
between sex and gender on the map for writers and researchers
in the humanities and the social sciences. But if his basic ideas
quickly became commonplace, they were also soon being used
in ways that he could not have anticipated. With the tremendous
revival of feminist politics in North America and western Europe
in the late 1960s came renewed attempts to understand and
contest the social disadvantages experienced by women and
Stoller’s separation of sex from gender was pressed into service
as the cutting edge of a critique of male domination. So, when
Kate Millett began to outline her theory of patriarchy in Sexual
Politics (1977 [1970]), which was one of the founding texts of
second-wave feminism, she drew upon Stoller’s work to under-
score her argument that ‘male and female are really two cultures’
since his evidence seemed to cast doubt upon ‘the validity
and permanence of psycho-sexual identity’ as a fact of life.
Yet, in staking this claim, Millett was actually moving in quite
the opposite direction to Stoller’s own highly individualistic
psychoanalytic theorizing; for, when she rephrased his distinction
to read ‘sex is biological, gender psychological, and therefore
cultural ’ (my emphasis), she was but one step away from mapping
the opposition between sex and gender on to that between nature
and culture (Millett 1977: 29–31).
As we shall see in a moment, there is good reason to question
the apparent obviousness of this equation, but it still tends to
govern the meanings ascribed to the sex/gender distinction even
today. Locating gender within the many-sided realm of culture
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became the primary means of challenging the supposed inevitabil-
ity of women’s subordination, part of what the historian Joan
Scott, looking back over more than a decade of feminist research,
has called ‘a genuine historicization and deconstruction’ of
masculinity and femininity that sought to minimize or reduce
human biology’s capacity to underpin the spuriously ‘fixed and
permanent quality’ of these terms (Scott 1988). ‘Gender’, accord-
ing to Scott’s pithy definition, is simply ‘a social category imposed
on a sexed body’. Perhaps the most influential attempt to define
the relationship between sex and gender through the contrast
between nature and culture occurred within feminist anthro-
pology, notably in Gayle Rubin’s 1975 essay ‘The Traffic in
Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’. In a wide-
ranging theoretical and cross-cultural analysis, Rubin argued that
every known society has what she dubs ‘a sex/gender system’,
that is:
a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human
sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and
satisfied in a conventional manner, no matter how bizarre some of
the conventions may be.
(Rubin 1975: 165)
Just as hunger may be satisfied by any number of different kinds
of food, each of them ‘culturally defined and obtained’, so, in
any given society, sex too is filtered through the culturally
dominant codes that regulate the behaviour acceptable in men
and women. But these codes police not only ‘the social relations
of sexuality’; they also determine the social division between the
sexes, the basis upon which men and women are placed into
‘mutually exclusive categories’. Pointing to what she saw as the
arbitrariness inherent in such classificatory logics, Rubin insisted
that:
Men and women are, of course, different. But they are not as different
as day and night, earth and sky, yin and yang, life and death. In fact,
from the standpoint of nature, men and women are closer to each
other than either is to anything else – for instance, mountains,
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16 INTRODUCTION
kangaroos, or coconut palms. The idea that men and women are
more different from one another than either is from anything else
must come from somewhere other than nature . . . Far from being
an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the
suppression of natural similarities. It requires repression: in men, of
whatever is the local version of ‘feminine’ traits; in women, of the
local definition of ‘masculine’ traits. The division of the sexes has the
effect of repressing some of the personality characteristics of virtually
everyone, men and women.
(Rubin 1975: 179–80)
On this view the goal of cultural critique is not only the unmasking
of a restrictive and fundamentally flawed conception of nature,
but also the liberation of a true, because more genuinely natural,
human diversity from the chains of social convention. By clearing
away these arbitrary and artificial cultural obstacles, it might even
be possible to imagine ‘the overthrow of gender itself’ – or at
least, this prospect seems to be implicit in Rubin’s argument
(Butler 1990: 75).
Rubin’s essay remains one of the most remarkable attempts to
think through the causes of gender inequalities, constructing a
systematic theoretical framework that links work, kinship and
politics. Drawing upon insights from Marxist economics, psycho-
analytic accounts of identity and anthropological studies of
marriage and the family, Rubin shows how men typically ‘have
certain rights in their female kin’, whereas ‘women do not have
the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin’ and
may be used as bridewealth, trophies, gifts and even ‘traded,
bought, and sold’. Yet the notion that such oppressive kinship
systems represent ‘an imposition of social ends upon a part of
the natural world’, including the translation of sex into gender,
assumes that sex and nature are somehow unproblematically given
and exist outside the particular stock of cultural knowledge which
makes one society so different from another (Rubin 1975: 175–6).
‘Sex is sex,’ writes Rubin, ‘but what counts as sex is . . . culturally
determined and obtained’ (Rubin 1975: 165). One of the primary
lessons of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, however, has been that
there is no simple sense in which ‘sex is sex’, and that our ideas
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and beliefs about sexuality have been revolutionized over the last
hundred years – indeed, they are still changing. This disquieting
observation need not commit us to a naive relativism, a conviction
that there can be no such thing as objective knowledge. But it
does entail recognizing that what has counted as truth or error
has varied enormously over time and that the history of this
distinction will always also be a history of those cultural practices
such as science, medicine and law within which evidence and
proof have been deployed and contested.
Sex and gender are therefore intimately related, but not because
one is ‘natural’ while the other represents its transformation into
‘culture’. Rather, both are inescapably cultural categories that
refer to ways of describing and understanding human bodies and
human relationships, our relationship to our selves and to others.
Sex and gender necessarily overlap, sometimes confusingly so.
What once was baldly called a ‘sex change operation’ is now, not
entirely euphemistically, known as ‘gender reassignment’, a term
that reflects the growing instability of the body’s contours in
many contemporary societies, its increasing malleability or
openness to reinvention, whether through drugs, dress, discipline
or surgery. Of course, there are limits to who or what we might
become, though these are not always the limits we might expect.
In English law, for example, regardless of how much one’s body
may have changed its shape or form since birth, it was not possible
to alter one’s legal status from male to female, or vice versa until
2003. In this respect, legality – and not, as Freud once wrote,
‘anatomy’ – is destiny.
As a rough approximation we might say that ‘sex’ is the name
we give to the language through which we speak and come to
know our desires, while ‘gender’ denotes the cultural practices or
cultural media that enable these desires to be played out. In her
important book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has argued that
gender is a symbolic form of ‘public action’ whose recurrence
allows for our recognition as desiring and desirable subjects. For
Butler:
gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an
exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender
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18 INTRODUCTION
is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be
understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements,
and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding
gendered self.
(Butler 1990: 140)
According to Butler’s theatrical metaphor, gender is fragile,
provisional, unstable, the sum total of its appearances rather
than the expression of a unifying core. Masculinity or femininity
come in many transient guises, all of them in some measure
unfinished or incomplete. And this is as true historically, when
one considers the range of competing definitions of what it has
meant to be a man or a woman, as it is true individually, when
one remembers the difficulties in growing into and sustaining an
identity. ‘Thus,’ as Freud noted, ‘we speak of a person, whether
male or female, as behaving in a masculine way in one connection
and in a feminine way in another’ (Freud 1973: 2.147). Yet he
failed to add that we also disagree among ourselves as to what is
appropriately masculine behaviour in one case or acceptably
feminine in another.
Butler’s claim that gender is primarily an act of signification
or representation can sound as if gender is a matter of choice,
of picking up and discarding identities at will. Butler has herself
cautioned against this popular, but deeply misguided reading of
Gender Trouble:
The bad reading goes something like this: I can get up in the morning,
look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can
take out a piece of clothing and change my gender, stylize it, and
then that evening I can change it again and be something radically
other, so that what you get is something like the commodification of
gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of
consumerism.
(Kotz 1992: 83)
The flaw in this picture, says Butler, lies in its failure to take
into account the contradictory mode in which we inhabit our
sense of gender, not as an identity that we freely embrace, but
one that we also struggle against, that sustains us at the same
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time as it constrains us. Like the everyday use of language from
which it partly derives, gender underpins our capacity to make
decisions and act upon them, while constantly slipping out of
our control and ensnaring us in complex webs of meaning that
no single individual can ever hope to master.
But the false image of the subject who selects her gender for
herself is at least correct in suggesting that there are many genders.
So various are the different conceptions of masculinity and
femininity that emerge from the miscellany of sites and settings
in modern societies, that we can justifiably refer to them in the
plural as masculinities and femininities (see Connell 1987; 1995).
How wide is the range of variation within and between these
genders? The answer to this question will largely depend upon
contingencies of time and place, but nevertheless critics have
continued to disagree about how the problem should be theorized.
Thus Teresa de Lauretis has claimed that today’s representations
of gender are produced by a number of distinct ‘technologies of
gender’ such as cinema or advertising and that we, as gendered
subjects, can be seen to be ‘constructed across a multiplicity of
discourses, positions, and meanings, which are often in conflict
with one another’ (de Lauretis 1987: x). For de Lauretis these
discursive contradictions may actually provide a breathing space,
a moment in which new gender identities might begin to be
fashioned. By contrast, though writing in roughly the same period
and starting from similar analytic assumptions, Chantal Mouffe
has argued that ‘despite their heterogeneity, discourses and
practices do not take place in isolation’ but interact with one
another to create ‘a common effect’. As a result ‘the feminine’ is
invariably set up ‘as a subordinated pole to the masculine’, a
process in which ‘the symbolism linked in a given society to the
feminine condition plays a fundamental role’ (Mouffe 1983: 141).
There can be no alleviation of gendered inequalities unless this
symbolism is successfully confronted.
GENDER AND LANGUAGE: WITTIG’S
PRONOUNS
As an even more fundamental example of how gender has become
a contested term, consider the work of the French writer Monique
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20 INTRODUCTION
Wittig. Wittig combines the roles of radical feminist theorist and
novelist and her work has been principally concerned with prob-
lems of gender and language. At first sight her ideas seem to be
sharply at odds with the central argument being developed in
this book since, not only does Wittig fail to pluralize gender, she
also insists that it is an inherently singular term. This is because
linguistically ‘the masculine is not the masculine but the general’
– that is to say, the use of words like ‘mankind’ or ‘he’ to refer
to men and women alike perpetuates an abstract, universalizing
idiom that is denied to women, making men its sole beneficiaries
(Wittig 1992: 60). From Wittig’s perspective the consequences
of this much-overlooked fact are devastating.
Wittig’s position is rooted in a materialist theory of language,
according to which concepts and symbols are not mere free-
floating ideas or signs, but have real effects upon individual
subjects. Despite her indebtedness to Marxism – she refers to it
at one point as ‘the science which has politically formed us’ –
Wittig explicitly turns the Marxist theory of revolution on its
head. Instead of adopting Marx’s argument that the conflicts
produced by economic forces will bring about a political revolution
which will necessarily destroy the dominant ‘categories of lan-
guage’, Wittig calls for a revolution in language as the first
condition of social change:
Can we redeem slave? Can we redeem nigger, negress? How is woman
different? Will we continue to write white, master, man? The trans-
formation of economic relationships will not suffice. We must produce
a political transformation of the key concepts, that is of the concepts
which are strategic for us. For there is another order of materiality,
that of language, and language is worked upon from within by these
strategic concepts.
(Wittig 1992: 30)
For all its high-flown rhetoric, passages like this are in deadly
earnest, since they point to language’s overwhelming impact ‘upon
the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it’ (Wittig
1992: 78). While some people have been forced to conform to
established ideas about what is and is not natural, others have
been written out of history.
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Wittig’s prime target is what she calls ‘the straight mind’, a
mode of thinking about the world that ‘cannot conceive of a
culture, a society where heterosexuality would not order not only
all human relationships but also its very production of concepts
and all the processes which escape consciousness, as well’ (Wittig
1992: 28). On this view, gender relations can never be equalized,
for the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are defined as asymmet-
rical or hierarchical from the outset. Language plays a crucial role
in sustaining this imbalance, for by learning to call oneself a
woman one is also implicitly deferring to the privileges enjoyed
by men. By installing a basic division at the core of our being,
the heterosexual imagination denies women the capacity to act
as subjects, something that can only be achieved by taking control
over the ways in which language is used. To become what Wittig
calls a ‘total’ or whole subject one must first break with the
assumptions embedded in the grammar of heterosexuality, that
system of linguistic positions which conventionally assigns women
an identity only in relation to men. Of course, there have always
been those who have slipped through the nets of language, those
whose ‘refusal to become (or remain) heterosexual always meant
to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not’
(Wittig 1992: 13). It logically follows, in the words of one of
Wittig’s most famous slogans, that ‘Lesbians are not women’, a
conclusion which she is delighted to accept (Wittig 1992: 32).
But how is it possible to transcend the prison-house of language
in order to bring about the abolition of gender? And isn’t Wittig
herself inescapably complicit with those same linguistic resources
that enable her to diagnose her condition and make her arguments
intelligible to others? It is here that we turn to Wittig’s practice
as a novelist, and also return to the grammatical meanings of
gender with which we began this chapter.
Gender has often been used primarily as a sociological category,
as if language were only of secondary importance. Reversing this
assumption, Wittig looks to the place within language where
gender begins: the personal or subject pronouns I, you, he, she,
we, you, they. These markers are ‘the pathways and the means
of entrance into language’, the words that position us within
discourse as male or female, ‘working in the same way as the
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22 INTRODUCTION
declaration of sex in civil status’ by calling upon specific gendered
identities (Wittig 1992: 78–9). Wittig’s extraordinary fiction takes
the personal pronoun as its point of departure, foregrounding
the principles by which they operate and attempting to disrupt
their normal functioning. In her first novel L’Opoponax (1964),
for example, Wittig explores the interior world of a young
schoolgirl, creating a curiously distanced stance through the use
of the indefinite or ungendered French pronoun on (the English
‘one’) in her narration, interspersed with the protagonist’s name,
Catherine Legrand:
On ne met pas de pantalon quand on est une petite fille. On n’aime
pas ça parce qu’on devient deux. Catherine Legrand mais aussi ce
qui est dans le pantalon et qui n’est pas exactement Catherine Legrand.
Peut-être Catherine Legrand est la seule petite fille à porter un pantalon
et à n’être pas exactement une petite fille.
(Wittig 1964: 17–18)
You don’t wear knickers when you’re little. You don’t like them because
they divide you in two, Catherine Legrand but also what is in the
knickers which is not exactly Catherine Legrand. Perhaps Catherine
Legrand is the only little girl who wears knickers and who is not
exactly a little girl.
(Wittig 1979: 13)
Especially in the original French, the effect is radically to unsettle
the formation of identity, to interrupt the implied reference linking
pronoun and proper name, suggesting that Catherine Legrand
cannot quite occupy the elle (or ‘she’) that is traditionally awaiting
her, just as her underclothes and her selfhood don’t sit comfortably
together, somehow failing to add up. Moreover, as Wittig has
herself noted in a commentary on this text, on is a marvellously
elastic word that can be made to stand for any number of persons:
I, you, they, everyone. And, insofar as it is able to invoke all of
these at once, identification is always on the move, impossible
to pin down. When, towards the end of the novel, a new and
seemingly more decisive note is struck, signalled by an abrupt
shift of pronoun – ‘Je suis l’opoponax’ (I am the opoponax) –
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there is no corresponding gain in clarity, for Catherine has earlier
written that the mysterious opoponax, from which the book
takes its title, cannot be described, being ‘neither animal nor
vegetable nor mineral, in other words indeterminate’/‘ni animal,
ni végétal, ni minéral, autrement dit indéterminé’ (Wittig 1964:
161, 207; 1979: 119, 154).
Wittig’s fierce desire to push identity to its outermost limits,
to transcend the categories through which identity has traditionally
been thought, to disengage identity from gender, and to enact a
new form of subjectivity within literary language places
considerable demands upon her readers, preventing them from
holding on to the binary logic that oppressively couples men and
women together. This linguistic disruption is intensified still
further in her later books. In Les Guérillères (1969), for instance,
Wittig makes extensive use of the rather specialized French
collective pronoun elles, which has always taken second place to
the masculine ils. Elles can only be used to refer to a group of
women, whereas a mixed group is invariably referred to as ils,
even when the women outnumber the men. Moreover, ils has
an important generalizing function that is denied its feminine
counterpart, for it can also mean they in the sense of people or
mankind, whereas elles cannot. Wittig’s strategy is to elevate the
feminine plural to the same status as the masculine ils, to make
it resound with a sense of communal destiny and purpose. ‘Word
by word,’ comments Wittig, ‘elles establishes itself as a sovereign
subject’, forging a new collectivity in an epic struggle, a nous, a
‘we’ who have proved themselves to be true ‘camarades’ and who
together finally sound the funeral march for those who died for
freedom, ‘un air lent, mélancolique et pourtant triomphant’
(Wittig 1992: 85; 1969: 208).
At one point in Les Guérillères, elles specifically reject the
vocabulary of their adversaries, their enemies in language, the
masculine ‘ils’, who have dismissed their fight as a ‘revolte contre
nature’ (Wittig 1969: 153). So, in line with this repudiation, the
text scrupulously avoids making reference to ‘men’ or ‘women’,
since in Wittig’s lexicon these words are tokens of capitulation.
As we have seen, Wittig’s textual manoeuvres are not easily
reproduced in translation: the ‘you’ of the English version of
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24 INTRODUCTION
L’Opoponax is gender-free, but suggests a closer, far more familiar
idiom than the original on. And in the case of Les Guérillères
the unavailability of a gendered alternative to ‘they’ led Wittig’s
translator to replace elles by ‘the women’, a substitution that
wholly subverts the author’s own avowed intentions.
Nevertheless, Wittig’s fiction is a good example of the way in
which fiction can serve as a laboratory for the exploration of
gendered modes of consciousness, including those we might
imagine to be among its terminal forms. Novels such as L’Opoponax
and Les Guérillères stand in a long line of modernist texts whose
stylistic innovations foregrounded the whole question of gender,
power and subjectivity, and whose authors have included Gertrude
Stein, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, among many
others. Though very different from Wittig’s guérillères, the protag-
onist of Dorothy Richardson’s multi-volume novel Pilgrimage
(1915–38), Miriam Henderson, has been described as ‘one of the
first women in fiction to be shown other than in relation to a man’
(Beauman 1995: 153). And, as Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the
Body (1992), with its sexually indeterminate protagonist, shows,
we have by no means seen the last of those wily, ambiguous
narratives that persistently avoid framing themselves in exclusively
masculine or feminine terms.
Wittig’s prose-poetry, her uncompromising experimentalism
informed by an intransigent belief that ‘everything is socially
constructed’, represents an invitation to rethink the meaning and
boundaries of our genders (Fuss 1989: 41). In the following
chapters we take up this challenge, focusing initially upon the
making of femininity and masculinity, before moving on to those
more obliquely gendered margins that are often treated as ‘threats
to heterosexuality’ or even ‘threats to gender itself’, but which
have typically been lived out in the lengthening shadow of legal
or extra-legal prohibitions and sanctions (Butler 1997: 135).
Indeed it is the unresolved questions, theoretical, medical, legal
and cultural that form the constellation of issues at stake in
‘the New Gender Politics’ of recent years, ‘a combination of
movements concerned with trangender, transsexuality, intersex,
and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.’
Reflecting on these recent turns, Judith Butler reminds us that
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the ongoing and historically overlapping nature of these debates
ought not to be read as linear revisions of earlier theories and
practices but rather as a complex set of stories existing and being
retold simultaneously (Butler 2004: 4).
If our identities are partly fictions, cover stories set in place
by the narratives within which our lives are intertwined, then the
restless play of identifications that our reading or viewing releases
can become one of the key ways in which these fictions can be
re-scripted. ‘When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music,
to pictures,’ writes Jeanette Winterson, ‘we are clearing a space
where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for
new stories about ourselves’ (Winterson 1996: 60).
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1
FEMININITY AND FEMINISM
In the opening pages of ‘Femininity’, the fifth of his New
Introductory Lectures (1933), Sigmund Freud poses the ‘riddle of
the nature of femininity’ as an unresolved question that ‘people
have knocked their heads against’ throughout human history.
Commiserating with one sex and winding up the other, Freud
goes on, tongue-in-cheek, to separate and gender the subjects
and objects of the interrogation: ‘men’ it seems have not ‘escaped
worrying over this problem’ but ‘to those of you who are women
this will not apply – you yourselves are the problem’ (Freud
1973: 146). Yet as Freud knew very well, women had been
‘worrying’ over the problem of ‘femininity’ at least as long as
men. For although femininity may be defined as a set of attributes
ascribed to biologically sexed females, what exactly those attributes
are, and the extent to which any given version of femininity is
natural or cultural, have been debated long and hard by women
themselves. When, for example, Charlotte Brontë’s heroine,
Jane Eyre, speaks passionately to the reader of the gendered
division of emotions: ‘Women are supposed to be very calm
generally: but women feel just as men feel’, she is challenging
the commonsense understanding of femininity in the 1840s,
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and, by implication, its scientific as well as its social basis (Brontë
1987: 96). In life as well as in fiction, one can both ‘live’ a
gendered identity in all its complexity, and hold its received
definition at arm’s length. In fact, the analysis of femininity by
women has a long pedigree in its own right. Later in the chapter
we will turn to some key moments when femininity was under
particular pressure and scrutiny, exploring them through both
women’s fiction and feminist theory and criticism.
Before we come to that history we may need to remind ourselves
of how easily femininity in its everyday use naturalizes and genders
so many other terms. In ‘Femininity’ Freud asked his readers to
reconsider their automatic association of passivity with women,
and activity with men. He points out that it is ‘inadequate . . .
to make masculine behaviour coincide with activity and feminine
with passivity . . . Women can display great activity in various
directions, men are not able to live in company with their own
kind unless they develop a large amount of passive adaptability.’
‘Even if,’ he argues, one were to say that psychologically femininity
gave preference to ‘passive aims’, ‘a passive aim may call for a
large amount of activity.’ He warns his readers that to give activity
and passivity crude gender alignments serves ‘no useful purpose
and adds nothing to our knowledge’ (Freud 1973:148–9). The
opening theoretical move in ‘Femininity’ is to suggest not only
that the conventional binaries that designate gender are convenient
but mistaken social fictions, but that all humans are potentially
bisexual – that their choice of sexual object is the result of an
often impeded and difficult psychic trajectory. Whether the
emphasis is on gender or on sexuality, Freudian theory makes
femininity an outcome not an origin. We might add that to
be a ‘woman’, biologically, psychologically and socially, is not
necessarily to be thought ‘feminine’ in whatever local and
customary sense that may be understood. A promiscuous qualifier,
‘feminine’ can and does attach itself to almost anything: cats,
cars, colours, handwriting, home furnishings – and men. Yet as
an aspiration or an accolade, a despised or wished for descriptor,
‘feminine’ always evokes ‘woman’.
It is not uncommon, of course, to hear women described as
‘unfeminine’; supposed coldness, aggression, ambition, neglect of
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28 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
children or high intelligence can quickly bring this accusation
upon them. But even so-called unfeminine women are inscribed,
we might argue, with a femininity, if not always the one most
valued by a particular culture. Femininity, the noun, is never
quite the sum of its adjectival parts, which are in any case likely
to be in conflict. The saucy flirtatiousness of a pleasure-loving
young woman and the selflessness of the devoted mother – to
take two common stereotypes – may both be considered ‘feminine’
qualities, but they have historically been seen to belong to very
distinct stages of a woman’s life trajectory. Mothers and pros-
titutes, little girls and old crones, women of different classes and
ethnic identities and sexual orientations – all these supposedly
discrete ‘types’ of the female – may be thought to ‘have’ femininity,
but both within one lifetime and between social and cultural
differences the cluster of attributes thought to make up their
gendered identity may vary widely. And while we may first
of all see masculinity and femininity as defined through their
complementarity and opposition, it is equally important to see
them as internally divided and moralized: versions of ‘good’ and
‘bad’ femininity – blondes and brunettes; mothers and prostitutes;
white women and black women; straight and lesbian; middle-
class and poor – have also been set up as binary terms. While
femininity is always associated with femaleness it has been a
common racialist strategy to ascribe feminine traits or femininity
to non-white or other supposedly inferior ethnic groups as a
whole. The men in those groups in particular – the Irish, Jews,
Asians, Native Americans and Africans have all been so depicted
– although what marks these men as feminine varies from
supposed excesses of feeling to passivity to a degree of nurturance
thought inappropriate in Anglo-Saxon masculinity. Homosexual
cultures have their own rhetorics of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ traits
and behaviours, and value them differently than the homophobic
and heterosexist societies that observe them. In the twenty-first
century femininity persists as a contradictory constellation of
meaning that can refer at once to normative, flawed and even
‘perverse’ categories of the human. That is why it is perhaps
more useful to think of femininity in the plural – femininities –
and to see femininity both as an umbrella term for all the different
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ways in which women are defined by others and by themselves,
and as a semi-detached property of the self, not identical with
the biologically sexed body. Indeed in its most removed but
perhaps most ubiquitous sense femininity is a trope – ‘luck be a
lady tonight’ – the figurative bearer of meanings that may only
have a contingent and metaphorical relationship to ‘woman’.
All these uses of femininity are interconnected, and their
interface is most often their contradictory evocation of femininity
as at once sexual, transgressive, even threatening, and as inferior,
weak and dependent. Does ‘lady luck’, we might ask, reward the
gambler by her propriety or her compliance? When, for example,
Virginia Woolf opens a 1927 essay on ‘The Art of Fiction’ with
the conceit ‘that fiction is a lady and a lady who has somehow
got herself into trouble’ she makes just such an oblique
metaphorical use of femininity, playing knowingly with the kinds
of ‘trouble’ that women, and even ‘ladies’, might get into or up
to, and so conjuring up the cultural misogyny that such a situation
might invoke, while mocking, at the same time, the archaic
chivalry of male critics: ‘gentlemen’ who ‘have ridden to her
rescue’ (Woolf 1992: 121). Woolf’s essay was written in the
decade that British women were given the vote, a decade in
which their new access to civic freedom was constantly attacked
in the media for encouraging women’s independent, and therefore
promiscuous, exercise of their sexuality. Questions of gender and
sexuality are especially difficult to prise apart when femininity is
under discussion. Elaborating her metaphor, Woolf explores the
plight of fiction through other, less risqué, stereotypes of the
feminine. Fiction, she argues, has been unfairly and condescend-
ingly seen as the ‘humble’ domestic drudge or dependent wife
of the arts, unaesthetic, ‘feeble’ and a ‘parasite’ (Woolf 1992:
124). The trope of femininity gives Woolf a flexible weapon with
which to attack the lapses and prick the pretensions of literary
criticism, but it is a weapon that can easily turn on its wielder.
The figurative strategy of ‘The Art of Fiction’ depends on the
prevalence of the cultural misogyny which it both invokes and
derides, deflecting in passing the chauvinism that might greet the
woman critic and writer herself.
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Woolf was, on the whole, an optimist when it came to the
future of gender politics, but reading her literary and feminist
essays now reminds us how tenacious have been the attitudes
that she described. The more that formal legal and civic discrimi-
nation against women in the public sphere have been eroded in
the West, the more clearly we can see the shadow that persistent
cultural misogyny still casts over women, a shadow that often
seems longer and darker precisely in relation to the advances and
rising expectations that legislative equality has achieved. These
negative associations of inferiority and worse, which so stubbornly
cling to the subjective and objective representations of woman,
have been one of feminism’s strongest raisons d’être, but they
have also provoked its most strenuous theoretical disagreements.
Feminism continues to argue about what is natural or biologically
given and what is culturally constructed; it remains divided,
although perhaps less absolutely so than in the past, about how
to analyse the psychic and the social components of female
subjectivity. (Indeed, as with sex and gender, the divide between
the social and the psychic is never hard and fast.) One recurring
strand of feminist analysis of femininity has highlighted the
supposed female virtues of social sympathy and nurturance, seeing
in femininity an enlarged capacity for supportive human relations
with caring motherhood at its centre. Lynne Segal, writing in
1987, worried that the increasing fragmentation of the women’s
movement and its social and political agendas had given the
conservative idea that female difference should be understood as
both natural and desirable a heightened attraction that ironically
threatened to become the new ‘“common sense” of popular fem-
inism’ (Segal 1987: 2). Nevertheless a strong majority among
feminist theorists have been sceptical about linking femininity to
those feelings and practices that have long been associated with
innate gender difference and which have historically determined
women’s subordination, preferring to see most aspects of gender
as potentially mutable and ripe for reinvention. And even the
bleaker interpretations of femininity past and present, those which
emphasize oppression rather than resistance, have also provoked
feminism’s innovative, utopian imagining of the future of gender.
When women have considered the ‘problem’ of their gender,
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they have drawn on both analytic pessimism and creative optim-
ism. Over the past two centuries women have, in their writing,
visual art and music, developed a rich cultural account of
femininity and affect, an archive from which one might derive
a critical history of gendered feeling. It is unlikely, however, that
all feminists would be in agreement about either its theoretical
underpinning, or its highs and lows.
A poignant vignette that shows the contrasting moods in which
such a history might be written opens Ann Snitow’s now classic
1989 essay ‘A Gender Diary’ which reflects on one of modern
feminism’s central paradoxes: the ‘need to build the identity
“woman” and give it solid political meaning and the need to tear
down the very category “woman” and dismantle its all-too-solid
history’ (Snitow 1990: 9):
In the early days of this wave of the women’s movement, I sat in a
weekly consciousness raising group with my friend A. We compared
notes recently: What did you think was happening? How did you
think our lives were going to change? A. said she had felt, ‘Now I
can be a woman; it’s no longer so humiliating. I can stop fantasizing
that secretly I am a man, as I used to, before I had children. Now I
can value what was once my shame.’ Her answer amazed me. Sitting
in the same meetings during those years, my thoughts were roughly
the reverse: ‘Now I don’t have to be a woman anymore. I need never
become a mother. Being a woman has always been humiliating, but
I used to assume there was no exit. Now the very idea “woman” is
up for grabs. “Woman” is my slave name; feminism will give me
freedom to seek some other identity altogether.’
(Snitow 1990: 9)
What the postwar women’s movement had done, Snitow suggests,
was to take what had seemed natural, imposed and inevitable,
freeing up gender identity, redefining it as unstable and mutable,
making it open to forms of choice, which she describes as
‘subtle psychological and social negotiations about just how
gendered we choose to be’ (Snitow 1990: 9). ‘Negotiation’ is, she
implies, the diplomatic and liberating sequel to a more violent
and less voluntary experience of femininity. Snitow’s exemplary
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32 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
conversation with her friend hints at a future for gender where
choice not prescription would rule. But it also highlights something
more recondite and more particular to women: the ‘shame’ and
‘humiliation’ through which many western middle-class women
in the latter half of the twentieth century had come to experience
their lived and imagined gender. Shame and humiliation are
powerfully negative emotions to describe the subjectivity of women
who were, after all, enfranchised, educated and ever increasingly
entering the professions, even if they still remained in a very
disadvantaged position in comparison with white middle-class
men. Some feminist writers have appropriated the term abjection
to theorize these negative feelings, pinpointing the interaction
between the ways in which societies and women themselves too
often conceive of femininity. Abjection’s ordinary meaning denotes
being thought inferior, either by oneself or by others, something
unworthy and vile, or less than human, something to be cast out;
for feminist psychoanalysts, like Julia Kristeva, abjection marks
out a landscape of feeling by and about women that places them
before, below and beyond culture – almost outside what can be
represented within it. The evocation of abject feelings by women
themselves hints at something stubbornly intractable in the
negative inflection of femininity, something not easily shifted
by the removal of legal, political and economic impediments to
equality. Yet even this residual negativity serves as a galvanizing
force, a motive for further exploration and analysis of just what
makes female gender such a difficult identity. If the desires of
Snitow and her friend to embrace or disavow their gender mirror
opposite choices, once choice became an option, what drew them
together, what perhaps drew them into feminism, was their
common acknowledgement of the degraded value of femin-
inity both ‘out there’ in the dominant culture and in their own
psychic life.
The mix of abjection and euphoria that is the psychic condition
of modern femininity, and which fuels contemporary feminism,
can be thought of as a creative paradox rather than as pure
contradiction or simple complement, for the tension between
these opposed psychic states has been productive rather than
otherwise. Feminist historian and theorist Joan Scott has argued
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that paradox is constitutive of feminism itself from the eighteenth
century onwards. She borrows the self-definition of Olympe de
Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and
Citizen (1791), as ‘a woman who has only paradoxes to offer and
not problems easy to resolve’ to describe feminism itself, both
then and now (Scott 1996: 4). As Scott reminds us, ‘paradox’
implies not only a term that may be both true and false at the
same time, or a statement that is resistant to dominant ideas, but
also a linguistic balancing act that is generative of poetic meaning
(Scott 1996: 4). Paradox is therefore an immensely suggestive
way of posing the ‘riddle’ or the ‘problem’ of femininity, perhaps
especially as it confronts the lopsided relationship between female
subjectivity and the universal concept of the human. Denise
Riley has suggested that we think of femininity as a part, not the
whole of female subjectivity, whether collective or individual.
‘There are differing temporalities of “women”, and these substitute
the possibility of being “at times a woman” for eternal differ-
ence on the one hand, or undifferentiation on the other’ (Riley
1988: 6). For:
any attention to the life of a woman, if traced out carefully, must
admit the degree to which the effects of lived gender are at least
sometimes unpredictable, and fleeting . . . Can anyone fully inhabit a
gender without a degree of horror? How could someone ‘Be a woman’
through and through, make a final home in that classification without
suffering claustrophobia? To lead a life soaked in the passionate
consciousness of one’s gender at every single moment, to will to be
a sex with a vengeance – these are impossibilities, and far from the
aims of feminism.
(Riley 1988: 6)
The recognition that one need not be a woman all of the time
in all aspects of one’s life at best throws open a world of
transformative possibility and creative potential and at the very
least poses femininity as a part-time occupation for full-time
humans. Yet this very realization can be a catalyst and prelude
for women – like Snitow’s friend – to confess to powerfully
negative emotions about being female, characterized by that
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34 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
combination of despair and degradation that comprises abjection,
or the horror and claustrophobia that Riley says accompany the
feeling that one is trapped into always being a woman. Such
feelings erupt as women simultaneously try to live up to perceived
social models of femininity and attempt to deny, resist or cast
them off. Writing from a more psychoanalytic perspective than
Snitow, Scott or Riley, but in other ways not at odds with their
emphasis on the mutability and instability of gender, Jacqueline
Rose asks us to think about ‘femininity’ as part of the necessary
‘division and precariousness of human subjectivity itself’ (Rose
1986: 52). Rose presents this as a question about identity rather
than an answer to it, one that expresses a desire that cannot, and
perhaps should not, be met. She interprets Freud’s exploration
of femininity’s riddle as a double question, the second more
searching than the first: ‘how does the little girl become a woman,
or does she?’ (ibid.: 45).
How to analyse – and perhaps to smooth – the imperilled
psychic path from infancy to female adulthood has been a vexed
issue for feminism ever since Mary Wollstonecraft, in A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) turned her readers’
attention to the way in which ‘females . . . are made women of
when they are mere children’ (Wollstonecraft 1988: 117).
Wollstonecraft argues that women are made, not born:
Every thing that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth
emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the
mind.
(Wollstonecraft 1988: 117)
In her writing we find a detailed and extended account of the
social construction of gender, as she resists Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
claim that femininity is an instinctive set of sexed traits. But
Wollstonecraft also, as Barbara Taylor has argued, saw the psyche
as creative precisely in its capacity to fantasize, to wish for and
invent different scenarios for gender, while believing, at the same
time that women were especially vulnerable to the seductive erotics
of romantic narrative, and prey to dangerous and self-destructive
imaginings (Taylor 2003).
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From the late-eighteenth century forwards fantasy, conscious
and unconscious, occupies a contested and contradictory position
in feminist thought – the sign, on the one hand, of the sway of
the irrational, and on the other, in the more respectable guise of
‘imagination’, of the vitality of creativity and radical thinking.
Femininity has historically been seen in terms of the difference
between men and women’s affective, emotional life, and this
supposed division of affect becomes surrounded by new medical
evidence as the scientific model of anatomical sexual difference
moved from what historian Thomas Laqueur has called the
‘onesex/flesh model’ of the period prior to the Enlightenment to
the ‘two sex/flesh model’ which comes to dominate nineteenth-
century science and medicine (Laqueur 1990: 8). The historical
interdependency of theories of mind and body makes it especially
hard to distinguish where sexuality might end and gender begin.
As some aspects of the biological bases of gender inequality came
under increasing critique in the twentieth century, feminists have
given renewed attention to the way in which women’s mental
and emotional life has been theorized. In the past twenty-five years
a debate among feminist theorists both about the origins of
femininity and, more generally, about the meaning of mental life,
has focused on whether that distinctively modern ‘science’ of
psychoanalysis has helped or hindered an understanding of sex
and gender. From the late 1960s, the first years of the ‘second
wave’ of the women’s movement, American feminists such as
Kate Millett led the assault on Freud’s view of femininity. Millett’s
witty attack in Sexual Politics (1970) makes Freudian psycho-
analysis the whipping boy for the general misogyny of the domin-
ant culture. Other feminist writers, following Millett, held Freud
responsible for the normalizing and conservative use to which his
theories had been put by both therapists and cultural analysts. The
analyst’s abuse of power in the patient–analyst relation, when men
were the analysts and women the analysands, has been seen to
exemplify patriarchal relations. Worst of all, psychoanalysis was
portrayed as a theory that drew universal assumptions from the
evidence of very local and historically specific cultures, ‘fixing’
gender by suggesting that psychic structures were somehow outside
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36 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
of or immune to cultural influence and thus denying the possibility
of historical change.
Countering this wide-ranging critique, which nevertheless
tended to exaggerate both the role and influence of psychoanalysis,
and to misinterpret its object of study, mental life, as a totalizing
theory of subjectivity, other feminist theorists have defended
both the historical intervention of psychoanalysis and the
usefulness of its paradigms in understanding femininity. An early
and groundbreaking study, Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and
Feminism (1974) argued that Freud’s view of women was more
suggestive and less reductive than that of other psychoanalysts
of his time. Mitchell contends that those analysts, Karen Horney
and Ernest Jones among them, who set out nobly to amend
Freud’s ‘unfriendly’ view of women, found themselves positing
female difference ever more distinctly as a separate and unequal
identity, grounding it in gendered concepts of instincts and desire.
Jacqueline Rose, in an important essay, ‘Femininity and its
Discontents’ (1986 [1983]) points out that Freudian theory
consistently queried those dominant interpretations of women’s
mental life that had become increasingly medicalized and
pathologized by the late nineteenth century. While feminists
in the 1970s focused their debate on psychoanalysis around its
concepts of sexual difference, Rose argues that they neglected
the most important contribution of psychoanalysis to feminism –
its theories of the unconscious. Through the unconscious and its
symptoms – dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes – psychoanalysis
has emphasized the incoherence, difficulty and discontinuity in
all human identity. In his work on femininity between 1924 and
1931 argues Rose, Freud moved from focusing on the little girl’s
meditation on her difference from little boys and its possible
violent sources, ‘(“injury”, as the fact of being feminine), to an
account which quite explicitly describes the process of becoming
“feminine” as an “injury” or “catastrophe” for the complexity of
her earlier psychic and sexual life (“injury” as its price)’ (Rose 1986:
91). The work of Jacques Lacan, Rose continues, extended and
deepened Freud’s emphasis on a human psyche ‘always and
persistently divided against itself’ (92).
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Psychoanalysis, like feminism, has, from its origins, put the
issue of normative ideas about gender high on the list of its
internal disagreements. We would highlight here its productive
insights for feminism, not least its recognition that femininity
and masculinity are identities which must always, in some sense,
fail. Feminists, such as Rose, who hold this position do not
imagine that there should or can be a psychically smooth and
unproblematic path to ‘stable’ gendered identity, for it is precisely
the belief in such a path that naturalizes gender and sexuality,
and offers it up to regulation. They are suggesting instead that
the radical potential of feminism is in its emphasis on the unstable,
contradictory and paradoxical nature of all social and psychic
identities. Even within this general position, writers remain divided
about which psychoanalytic thinker – Freud and Lacan are the
two most often cited – offers the most persuasive critique of fixed
or stable identity.
The feminist debate on psychoanalysis has been important,
not least because the disagreements within feminism about the
character and future of femininity are part of those epistemological
and political questions about truth and agency that have become
the subject of a much larger set of social and political debates
which ask whether there can be an objective, universal ground
for knowledge when so many categories of people are excluded
from its making. Is a fixed and positive sense of self always the
precondition for being a successful actor in the world, or is agency,
the ability to take actions on behalf of oneself or one’s group, a
more complex concept? As Rose pointed out in her essay on
femininity, psychoanalysis paradoxically stands accused of being
both a normative, regulatory discourse and one that disables
feminist agency through its insistence on the instability of identity.
Theories of gender and sexuality are valued or attacked for their
ability to encourage or undermine forms of social and political
action, as if such action flowed in a simple and unidirectional
way from how we understand the grounds of difference. To
caution against such vulgar causal arguments is not to suggest
that theories are free from politics, but only that the politics of
their construction and their deployment are never singular, but
always part of a complex constellation of ideas and practices that
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are specific to different times, places and societies. Within western
feminism in the past quarter century quite opposed theoretical
positions on femininity have come together in alliances around
particular campaigns of action about reproductive rights, nuclear
power and pornography. Conversely, in a particular conjuncture
a theory of difference may offer liberation and inspire rebellion
for one group, while implying that others should by the same
token remain subordinate. In the following three sections we will
show how this occurs by exploring two historically specific
moments in the history of femininity.
‘WOMEN FEEL JUST AS MEN FEEL’:
FEMININITY AND FEELING 1790–1850
When historians explore the evolution of ‘modern’ ideas of gender,
the eighteenth century is usually seen as the time when changes
start to accelerate. Certainly from its last decades onwards femi-
ninity is a busy category, performing, in Mary Poovey’s useful
formulation, a great deal of ‘ideological work’ in western culture,
involved in the making and unmaking of theories of gender
(Poovey 1988:2). Frequently employed as both an indication
and a cause of the uneven development and alarming dynamism
of whole societies, femininity is always Janus-faced, read by the
dominant culture and by the feminism that seeks to defend and
change it as at once a residual symptom of the inequalities or
virtues of past cultures and as a sign, good and bad, of things
to come. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) the
republican and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft uses these past and
future tenses to strategic effect. She invokes the Gothic and
feudal to describe imperilled femininity, picturing the bourgeois
women for whom she is writing as prisoners of a threatening and
abusive power, literally and metaphorically ‘immured in their
families, groping in the dark’ (Wollstonecraft 1988: 5), or even
worse, in the case of her heroine Maria in The Wrongs of Woman,
consigned by her husband to a madhouse. Husbands and families
may be timeless adversaries for women, but in A Vindication
Wollstonecraft associates what she sees as women’s internal
enemies, their narcissism, dependency and deference, with the
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worst aspects of an immoral and oppressive aristocratic culture
whose residual feudalism was under attack at the moment of
democratic revolution in which she was writing. But, as Harriet
Guest has argued, Wollstonecraft in A Vindication, as well as
elsewhere in her writing, also figures feminine sensibility, or
feeling, in terms of the modern market economy, which in
turn is characterized by a gendered division of labour (Guest
1996: 3–4).
Emotion is a key element in every definition of femininity in
this period: what woman is or can be is interpreted in terms of
the perceived difference between women’s and men’s feelings.
The lines of race and class that divide women themselves are
marked by distinctions of feeling also: humanist and democratic
arguments at this time need to assert what is not deemed to be
apparent, that all women have maternal emotions. In the late-
eighteenth century, sensibility and sentiment are the operative
categories of feeling that women must negotiate. While some
critics see little distinction between sensibility and sentiment, it
is useful to distinguish them. Sensibility refers to those emotions
that seem instinctive or physical, rather than the discourse of
moralized sentiment. Sensibility in women can be a dangerous
force, easily corrupted; it can fire the utopian imagination or
derail or deform its purposes. Guest argues that in the 1790s the
‘dreams of sensibility’ that surface in the work of writers like
Wollstonecraft and her radical contemporary, the novelist Mary
Hays, were ‘peculiarly appropriate for the articulation of the
. . . need to reform the social and political condition of women,
and particularly middle-class women’. The ‘language of sensibility’,
says Guest, ‘links the feminine pursuit of financial and moral
independence with the masculine pursuit of professional ambition’
for it is a language which ‘takes advantage of the blurred public
and private character of professional or commercial ambitions,
which for men, as well as perhaps for women, are the phantoms
of libidinised pursuit, of an idea of self-fulfilment which is as
much about the desires of the private and sexual subject as it is
about the more thoroughly moralised aim of independence’
(Guest 1996: 19). As a result Guest explains, women’s self-
positioning at this moment is profoundly paradoxical, for even
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40 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
when highly politicized ‘feminine subjects’ in the 1790s, like Hays
and Wollstonecraft, conceived ‘of themselves in terms of discourses
of politics, of the division of labour, of civil and commercial
culture’ they must both reject those divisions insofar as they
excluded women and accept them as a regime which would allow
them to be agents in modern culture. New, reformed and liberated
femininity had simultaneously to accept the terms of the market –
including the volatile feelings that were its psychological drivers
– and abjure them. Women from this period onwards, seeking
more rights and more freedom, had little choice but to move
within the emotional and libidinal economies of market societies,
which demanded self realization and the up-front desires that went
with it. These were the conditions and contradictions under which
femininity and feminism were to develop (Guest 1996: 20).
These problems were taking self-conscious shape for feminist
writers in the 1790s. They surface again in a somewhat different
form in early Victorian Britain, when gender along with other
forms of difference and hierarchy is once more being challenged
at a time of social and political unrest. The 1840s, like the 1790s,
was a particularly turbulent time in British and European societies
with economic recession exacerbating class conflict in Britain.
The threat of revolutionary uprising at home as well as its reality
on the continent undoubtedly contributed to the anxious edge
that one finds in women and men’s writing about gender and
sexuality. Most of the novels of the 1840s and 1850s that put
the working-class Chartist movement for political rights overtly
or covertly at the centre of their plots – Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil
(1844), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and
South (1855), and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, were all engaged
in one way or another with the pleasures and dangers of women
in public roles, as Chartist supporters (Sybil), as poor working
women and prostitutes (Mary Barton), or cross-dressing landlords
(Shirley). Each of these fictions ends conventionally with women
happily ensconced in marriage and under male protection, but
their concern with women outside the home in defiance of gender
norms is woven into their mixed sympathy and unease with
working-class subjectivity and the threat of violence implicit in
the political orchestration of collective discontents among the
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poor. This ambivalence is highlighted in Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s ‘novel-poem’, Aurora Leigh (1996 [1856]), the story
of a woman poet, in which feminism, femininity and working-
class resentment and rage are also brought together in a narrative
where poetry, not social revolution, becomes the preferred solution
to class divisions. Mary Poovey has suggested that in this period
anxiety about ‘women’s aggressiveness’, social and sexual, is
‘managed . . . through a series of substitutions’ (Poovey 1988:
12). In the proto-feminist texts of the mid-nineteenth century,
humiliation and degradation as well as aggressiveness – those
disturbing feelings that all humans are subject to, must be shifted
away from the aspiring heroine. In Aurora Leigh working-class
women are either an underclass of foul-mouthed slatterns who
have neither filial nor maternal feelings, or idealized, deferential
victims such as the seamstress Marian Earle; they represent in
both cases the extreme ends of the spectrum of possible feminin-
ities, incarnations of anger and abjection, those excesses of feeling
which the bourgeois woman poet is at pains to dissociate from
her own identity.
Perceived racial difference which relied on similar economies
of emotion to make its distinctions provided another figurative
strategy through which femininity could be fractured and
hierarchically ordered. The 1840s was also the first full decade
after the abolition of slavery in Britain, a decade which shows a
steady decline in humanitarian sympathy with ex-slaves who
were now no longer the objects of pity but potential equals and
competitors in the world labour market and in other spheres
also. This too is reflected in novels by women that are centrally
concerned with the limits and possibilities of femininity. In
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1987 [1847]) and Dinah Mulock
Craik’s Olive (2000 [1850]), the post-slavery revision of social
hierarchy is represented by threatening, violent racialized women
from the West Indies: the mad wife of Rochester, Bertha Mason
in Brontë’s novel, and the mixed race mother–daughter pair, Celia
and Crystal Manners, in Olive. The fury these women express at
men and women from the privileged, white British culture is at
one level a narrative symptom of the complicated response that
British writers in the 1840s made to the legacy of colonial slavery.
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More immediately, perhaps, the unacceptable anger of British
women against the gendered division of emotion and labour that
condemned them both to calmness and inaction was, in these
novels, displaced into the rage expressed by racialized ‘foreign’
women against both imperial masculinity and femininity.
Gender, but especially femininity and its proto-feminist
revisions, in this early Victorian period has, interestingly, been
the site of impassioned critical debate in the second half of the
twentieth century, as if the trope of emotion that structured the
theory and representation of femininity in the nineteenth century
itself has acquired a second life in its critical reconstruction in
our own time. In her writing about gender in the 1840s and
1850s Mary Poovey has designated certain resonant issues in the
period which ‘had the potential to expose the artificiality of the
binary logic that governed the Victorian symbolic economy’ as
‘border cases’. Border cases ‘mark the limits of ideological certainty’
and were the site of ‘intensive debates’, Poovey believes, because
they ‘threatened to challenge the opposition upon which all the
other oppositions claimed to be based – the opposition between
men and women’ (Poovey 1988: 12). In turn we might see the
intensity of recent debates about gender in Victorian Britain as
just such a modern ‘border case’, but one whose ideological
stakes are somewhat different. Modern feminist critics use the
Victorian period to revisit the unresolved issues of what kind of
opposition gender is, and what kind of ethics and politics can
be assigned to ‘traditional’ femininity, but they are posing these
questions in the context of another one that has long divided
feminists: is gender, in fact, the only or primary ‘founding’
opposition?
While there is an unprecedented mass of social, political and
medical discourse in this period which focuses on what femininity
should or should not be, recent criticism has given the novel a
particular prominence and influence as the space where both
gender and genre are under revision: femininity’s story as imagined
in early Victorian novels by women is identified as the avatar of
a new kind of fiction. Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, cultural
critic Raymond Williams saw the 1840s as a kind of watershed
decade for masculinity and femininity, arguing in particular that
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these years saw a deepening division between the emotions thought
proper for men and women to display. Men’s tears, Williams
suggests, became a sign of unmasculine weakness rather than of
proper masculine sensibility. Such a cultural shift away from
expressive masculinity, Williams believed, meant that imperilled
femininity (the female orphan in contemporary fiction is his
example) came increasingly to represent the generic plight of
‘man alone’ (Williams 1965: 84–5). For Williams the appearance
of such an icon is a tragic effect of modernity: the female orphan
stands for the anomie and misery of the alienated psychic life
of men and women in industrial societies where communal feeling
has been destroyed. When the female orphan represents only
herself and her gender, she is no longer a tragic hero. Williams
argued that women’s writing, especially the work of Charlotte
Brontë, and her orphaned heroines, Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe
of Villette, introduces into the novel and the culture as a whole,
a distinctively new subjective voice, whose self-representation
is both feminine and sinister. This voice, at once ‘private’ and
‘individual’, is the confessional and desiring voice of the
quintessentially modern subject, the voice of an unrestrained and
asocial individualism which elevates private feeling above public
good (Williams 1984: 70). But if for Williams the predicament
of the proto-feminist heroine of the 1840s represents a wider
crisis of modernity, its remedy or compensation, the development
and celebration of mental and emotional life – what some theorists
call the invention of human ‘interiority’ – as they are expressed
within the narratives created by women writers is seen as false
and dangerous.
Williams’s view of women’s writing is, by implication, chal-
lenging a perspective that praises the individual and the private,
at the expense of the social and communal. Indeed, his reading
of gender in the 1840s is soon overtaken by an influential strand
of feminist criticism from the 1970s which unambiguously aligns
itself with the proto-feminist protagonists of this period and
their authors, seeing both as pioneering forerunners of late-
twentieth-century bourgeois women heroically struggling against
the limitations of marriage, exclusion from public life and the
still active double standard of sexual morality. The female orphan
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in this staging of a feminist analysis does not stand in for a
universal subject, but is emphatically the emblematic victim and
potential agent of her sex. These early and important feminist
studies, especially Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own
(1978) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman
in the Attic (1979), delight in women’s personal ambitions and
transgressive desires where these fictions actually endorsed them;
it is more often the conventional resolutions of marriage and
motherhood that they must justify to late-twentieth-century
women readers. For them the women writers were not the
vanguard of self-referential and selfish materialism, but resistant
minority voices, exemplary rebels for their time in what they saw
as an unfinished democratic revolution.
By the 1980s, when the euphoria of the early years of feminism
was on the wane, this initial body of work on nineteenth-century
women’s writing was being subjected to revision within feminism
(mirroring wider disagreements in both activism and scholarship)
for its failure to take account of the class biases and the racist
and imperial assumptions embedded in the novels and authors
it championed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in a groundbreaking
1985 essay ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’
asks feminism to think again about the politics of Jane Eyre,
which, she argued, had become the ‘cult text’ of a feminist individ-
ualism that was neither reflective nor critical about the less
progressive implications of its political investments (Spivak 1985:
263). A later essay by Susan Meyer, ‘“India Ink”: Colonialism and
the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, traces the complex racial
representations and identifications which subtend the creation of
Jane as moral protagonist and survivor, showing how Brontë
manipulates racial tropes to support both Jane’s resistant identity
and final emergence as white wife and mother (Meyer 1996).
In a fascinating and influential study, Desire and Domestic Fiction:
A Political History of the Novel (1987), Nancy Armstrong uses
the work of Michel Foucault to elaborate and extend the gist of
Williams’s argument as part of a debate within feminism. She
sees the novel itself, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
as ‘containing the history of sexuality within it’, by which she
means the history of gender as well (Armstrong 1987: 204).
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Its most innovative development was the invention of an interior
psychic world which Armstrong figures as feminine. Both the
desiring femininity she describes, and the novel itself, are person-
ified as appetitive and acquisitive; indeed the novel’s ‘omnivorous’
form means that ‘there is very little cultural material that cannot
be included within the feminine domain’ (204). The writing of
the Brontë sisters is key to Armstrong’s analysis. The ideological
work that she ascribes to ‘domestic fiction’ generally – fiction by
women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that centres
on the private, subjective sphere of life – was to transform ‘political
information’, implicitly gendered masculine, into ‘psychological
information’ which then becomes the province of a new kind of
femininity. Even where the targets of Charlotte Brontë’s criticism
are demonstrably social, such as the hypocrisies and abuse that
are practised by the Governors of Lowood school for female
orphans which Jane Eyre attends, Armstrong argues that Brontë
substitutes the wrongs of woman for the wider injustices of class:
‘she displaces class conflict onto sexual relations’ (200).
Although strongly critical of the immediate and long-term
effects of Victorian women’s fiction, Williams and Armstrong,
by arguing that the new femininities articulated in the domestic
novel altered the form and content of Anglophone fiction for
ever after, gave these novels and their authors what could be
interpreted as a flatteringly central role in the making of modern
literature and culture. However, this supposed power comes
with an ethical price tag that is too high in any accounting, for
it portrays the femininity constructed by early Victorian women
writers as endowed with an exaggerated and malign agency in
the making of the modern self, an argument it would be difficult
to sustain if we looked at a wider range of discourses on gender
and identity. Such an argument also depends on a paradoxical
logic in which the critic makes an ethical and political judgement
about what kind of questions properly belong to the public
arenas of debate. By insisting that issues of gender, sexuality and
psychic identity belong to the private sphere, and therefore cannot
be ‘political’, this analysis reproduces in theory the very divisions
between private and public, personal and political, that are the
object of its critique. As a result the psychic life of humans, or
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46 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
their ‘interiority’ as it is sometimes called, is represented as the
invention and inherent property of a powerful but pathologized
femininity. In this analysis, psychic selfhood becomes not the
place where we all dream, but modernity’s bad dream about
itself, a dream with material effects that can do infinite social
and cultural harm.
Armstrong’s depiction of the feminist femininity of the 1840s
has the advantage of rejecting two over-simple characterizations:
the received image of passive, repressed and victimized Victorian
womanhood and its replacement, the celebratory portrait of
vanguard egalitarian feminism, painted by liberal feminists of the
1970s. But her monstrous alternative to abject or heroic
womanhood is as unidimensional as these earlier formulations.
Should feminism accept the mantle of the begetter of modern
fiction, if the price is that it is held responsible for the death of
progressive politics? Neither accolade nor accusation seems quite
deserved. Nor does the division of public and private inscribed
in this analysis bear much relationship to the way in which early
and mid Victorians themselves saw those issues, for while
conservative social commentators of both sexes advanced the
view that ideal femininity conformed to ‘natural and instinctive
habits’ of women, ‘love, tenderness and affectionate solicitude’
for children, spouses and parents, such moral qualities were at
the service not just of men as individuals, but of men as ‘citizens’
(Gaskell 1972: 165). The state was, as it still is, invested in
particular articulations of femininity which supported it. The
‘private’ in which middle-class femininity was supposed to reside
might have been the daily business of maternity, marriage and
domestic life, but in ideological terms such femininity, conceived
as a set of emotional attributes, did highly public work. We
might think of femininity in this sense as a kind of fiction of
political calculation, a double entry, as it were, in the ledgers of
social accountancy. Certainly the women and men who defended
or criticized the separation of spheres knew this very well: it was
femininity’s function as the mainstay of nation and state through
the affective relations of the family that they were debating.
In fact, femininity in the 1840s might best be seen through
the lens of Guest’s complex discussion of the 1790s. In the 1840s
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as in the 1790s the political aims of women for more cultural
power and for economic and social parity in the public sphere,
as well as their other aspirations and wishes – for passion, marriage
and motherhood – draw on an affective vocabulary in which the
desiring languages of the market and those of the gendered self
are hard to disentangle. While both women and men vigorously
critiqued the ways in which the coldly instrumental mores of
capitalism were shaping both masculinity and femininity and
affective life – Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1982 [1847]) is just
such a polemic against the corruption of love and family feeling
under the pervasive influence of the market and the desires it
unleashes – men’s texts tend to resolve these issues unambiguously
in favour of the exclusion of women from all but the domestic
and the maternal. Excluded or participant, women’s agency or
subordination was emphatically a public matter, and a social one.
For women writers, in any case, supporting the relegation of
women to domestic life was rarely if ever without contradiction.
Their own practice as authors undermined the solutions that the
many last chapters which release their heroines from paid
employment or cultural production into blissful domesticity
provided. Women’s novels in the 1840s imagined women who
made a broad claim for the right to desires of different kinds –
‘all the incident of life, fire, feeling’, as Jane Eyre puts it – although
their narrative closure often settled for much less (Brontë 1987:
95). In Jane Eyre’s famous soliloquy from the rooftop of
Thornfield just cited, we can see how Brontë’s refusal of a gendered
division of feeling is the basis of her rationale for a femininity
that went beyond the matrimonial or domestic. When Jane
declares that ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally:
but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their
faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers
do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,
precisely as men would suffer’, she makes her case through the
language of public, masculine sensibility, the driving language of
approved masculine ambition (Brontë 1987: 96). But most
women writers were criticizing the excesses of that sensibility as
well as asserting a right to it. The desires and priorities of industrial
and commercial masculinity were, they thought, in need of reform,
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48 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
and Gaskell and Brontë both allow the reader and the female
protagonists to see the world created by it through the eyes of
its economic and social victims. Thus, like Wollstonecraft and
Hays, but more opportunistically, since she draws on without
ascribing to their republican politics, in Jane Eyre Brontë aligns
the suppression of women’s feeling at one point with the situation
of the ‘rebel slave’ and the disempowered generally, provocatively
implying that the imposition of ‘stillness’ and ‘tranquillity’ on
women could spark a rebellion comparable to the ‘political
rebellions’ that ‘ferment in the masses which people earth’ (ibid.).
We have been arguing, throughout this section, that a key
element in understanding femininity and its discontents from
the late-eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century is the
gendered rhetoric of feeling and its deployment. As we suggested
earlier, the discourse of feeling is intimately bound up with the
way in which the expanding sciences of the human increasingly
differentiated men and women’s physiology. Historian of science
Nancy Stepan goes further in arguing that the developing models
of sexual difference were interactive and interdependent with the
theories of racial difference then being elaborated (Stepan 1990).
Skin colour, body type and hair as well as reproductive organs
were the physical markers of such differences, but their social
meaning was expressed in terms of emotional attributes, capacities
and dangers. The language of feeling however was not, as certain
critics suggest, the sole property of a newly invented private
individual exclusively gendered female, but shared its terms
with the discourses of the market that it sometimes resisted and
critiqued, as well as with those of the state and nation that it
wished to reform and support. When women in the mid-
nineteenth century tried to break down the arbitrary divisions of
the emotions that culture set in place and theorized as natural,
they defended their transgression by splitting femininity itself
across class and racial lines and displacing transgressive emotions
into women of lower status. Yet this self-protective move never
quite works. Jane Eyre’s defiant soliloquy is preceded by a defen-
sive challenge directed less at the reader than at the gathered
opinion of the whole world: ‘Anybody may blame me who likes,
. . . Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called
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discontented’ (Brontë 1987: 95). This pre-emptive anticipation
of blame cannot quite deflect the warning to be meted out for
demanding emotional and social equity. For Jane’s meditation is
soon interrupted by the sinister and threatening sound of female
laughter and the ‘eccentric murmurs’ and ‘oral oddities’ (96) at
first wrongly ascribed to the drunken working-class servant Grace
Poole, but later correctly identified as the ravings of Rochester’s
wife, Bertha Mason, the ‘white’ Creole, whose unchaste appetites
prefigure her descent into madness and her transformation
into a racialized creature with ‘fearful blackened inflation of the
lineaments’ (Brontë 1987: 249), without gender or human
attributes. The feared punishment for Jane’s desire for equality
of feeling and opportunity is averted, narratively speaking, by
subdividing the female self and projecting its excesses on to
degraded and racialized femininities.
The core statement of Brontë’s polemic – ‘women feel just as
men feel’ – strikes at the heart of all arbitrary divisions of affect
among types of humans; yet its very radical implications seem
to provoke in the challenger herself the immediate need to re-
establish the threatened binary by asserting the differences of
class or of race. If one is asking, as feminist criticism and theory
of the 1980s and 1990s has done, whether the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century origins of modern Anglophone feminism, or
the femininities Brontë’s statement advanced, were politically
and ethically progressive by late-twentieth-century standards, the
answer is sure to be no. Yet the understanding of those ethics
and politics through a deeper exploration of the history in which
they were embedded is of the utmost interest and importance to
us today, not least because that fearful reflex which reinstates the
differences it seems to challenge is by no means behind us. But
the questions themselves are best posed and answered theoretically
in a form that does not replace the historical distinction between
good and bad femininity with an equivalent distinction between
feminism’s misguided past and its progressive present. Such a
distinction implicitly assumes that feminism today can stand
completely outside and remain untainted by the political forces
of market, state and nation. History suggests otherwise.
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FEMININITY BETWEEN WORLD WARS
‘Always to be a governess, always to be in love’ is how Virginia
Woolf, writing of Charlotte Brontë in 1916, characterized (and
caricatured) both Brontë’s best known protagonist and the
subordinate, monotonous and emotionally static femininity of
the Victorians. For Woolf, Brontë is emphatically not the
precursor of twentieth century modernity or modernist literary
forms, but the exemplary prisoner and victim of a femininity and
a fictional aesthetic that must be superseded. Between Brontë
who died in 1855 and Woolf, whose writing career began in the
early 1900s, lies almost a half century of struggle to advance
women’s rights, and challenge restrictive and misogynistic
representations of women. English-speaking feminism was a fully-
fledged movement by 1916, with a leading cause, the vote, and
an embattled but highly visible profile on the political scene.
From the 1880s onwards men and women writers and social
thinkers fashioned a new, liberated femininity – a vanguard
identity dubbed the ‘new woman’ – that demanded parity with
men in every sphere, and a new masculinity to go with it. But
while the First World War hastened the granting of the franchise
in Britain, the underlying beliefs in gender difference and women’s
inequality proved much harder to shift. The ‘femininity’ that
early twentieth-century feminists were determined to uproot and
replace was more than a century old and harder to supplant than
had been supposed. Woolf’s frequent evocations in her feminist
writings of the thwarted lives of early Victorian women writers,
rather than of those born a little later who, like George Eliot,
were more unconventional, suggests, rightly we think, that many
women between the wars still lived with and under the restrictions
that were associated with a much earlier period. Yet in spite of
the uneven development of women’s emancipation, there is no
doubt that the war proved a catalytic moment for gender as for
other social hierarchies, and in its wake women’s fiction, and
feminism too, shifted its ground and altered its narratives, with
some surprising results in how they imagined femininity.
We will be looking at a range of these fictions, and will be
focusing especially on the way in which class and race construct
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femininity between the wars, a period when writers of all kinds
experimented with formal and philosophical innovation. We
began this chapter with Freud’s provocative essay, ‘Femininity’
because, as we have argued, psychoanalysis was the site of some
of the most novel theorization as well as the most intense and
interesting disagreements about the meaning of identity and
gender difference. As a discourse which claimed to have a new
truth about psychic life and sexuality, it can be seen as in a kind
of covert competition with fiction, with which it shared some of
the same ambitions. Psychoanalysis becomes a common referent
in the fiction of the interwar years, a signifier of new and ‘modern’
ideas about the self in everything from Agatha Christie’s detective
fiction to Dorothy Richardson’s experimental ‘stream of conscious-
ness’ novels. Fiction’s view of psychoanalysis is rarely friendly,
but the novel’s theorization of gender, and perhaps especially
femininity, betrays some of the same contradictions and uncertain-
ties that we find in Freud, his followers, and his psychoanalytic
adversaries. One way of approaching Freud’s ‘Femininity’ and
other writings on the same subject in this period is to place them
in the context of the imaginative writing by women in the interwar
years, approaching psychoanalysis not as an orthodoxy in the
making but rather as a discourse that was part of a spectrum of
analytic and speculative texts on gender – and women in particular
– in this particularly volatile period in the history of gender.
In Britain women were granted the vote in two stages – at age
thirty in 1919 and at twenty-one only ten years later. In that
crucial decade the media discussion of the ‘flapper’ franchise,
about the dangers of letting unmarried twenty-something women
vote, and therefore play an official role in civil society, acts as a
touchstone for new and daring discussions of what ‘woman’ could
mean or be, as well as provoking a strong backlash against the
supposed freedoms they might take. Femininity’s supposed
excesses included the rampant expression of women’s sexuality
and the rejection of what was recognizably feminine: politicians
remarked that even women didn’t seem to want to be women
any more. Virginia Woolf ’s feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s
Own (1929) argues that the resentment and anger, as well as the
abjection, that were, she believed, the psychic companions of the
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52 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
restrictive femininity of the Victorians, would soon fade away.
Her playful, genderbending fiction, Orlando (1928) is, as Rachel
Bowlby puts it in her introduction to the novel, ‘a “what if”, a
serious fantasy which imagines what femininity (or, for that
matter, another masculinity) might be in quite different conditions
– if anything were possible’ (Woolf 1992: xlvi). As Orlando enters
the twentieth century, Woolf allows her to be a woman, to have
children and a husband and a career, for Woolf believed optimistic-
ally in the transformation of femininity, as to a great extent did
most of her generation of women writers, although only a few
of them would have identified with her outspoken feminism.
We can see this re-imagining of femininity attempted in fictions
that were less obviously experimental than Orlando, such as
Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929), a novel set in
1920 among the aristocracy in an Anglo-Irish country house
during the guerilla war between the British Army and the IRA.
Marda Norton, a cosmopolitan 29-year-old visitor, teases the
restless, orphaned Lois Farquar who is just emerging from her
adolescent dependency on her aunt and uncle. Urging Lois
impatiently to some form of independent action, Marda asks her
why she continues to live with her relatives. Lois answers: ‘I like
to be in a pattern . . . I like to be related; to have to be what I
am. Just to be is so intransitive and so lonely.’ ‘Then you will
like to be a wife and mother’, Marda responds ironically, adding,
‘It’s a good thing we can always be women.’ ‘I hate women’,
Lois replies fiercely, ‘But I can’t think how to begin to be anything
else . . . I would hate to be a man. So much fuss about doing
things’ (Bowen 1998: 98–9).
Lois’s problem – her creative paradox – is how not to be a
woman in the mould of her aunt or her dead mother, or alterna-
tively, how not to envy or identify with the too busy or prematurely
vitiated masculinity of her uncle, family friends, cousin or suitor.
Bowen describes with peculiar poignancy Lois’s desire to steer
instead a path of independence that has not yet been charted.
To be ‘a woman’, from Marda’s perspective, is an identity of last
resort, a safety net that she herself is probably choosing, as, after
breaking off a series of engagements, she heads resignedly towards
a pragmatic marriage. Lois’s half-formed fears and desires are
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represented in a more philosophical vein. Bowen gives the adoles-
cent a rather lofty set of anxieties in making her afraid of the
‘intransitive’ isolation of just being; more positively but conserva-
tively she values and needs that relatedness so often associated with
femininity, but she also longs for an identity outside the forms
of the domestic heterosexuality linked to the social pieties of
her upper-class upbringing. Resisting but also embracing the
clichés of masculine freedom, ‘She did not want adventures,
but she would like just once to be nearly killed’, she reaches
clumsily for a heightened experience of life that has analogies to
the sublime – an aesthetic confrontation with what is terrible and
frightening – one that is neither marked by femininity nor by the
familiar tropes of bourgeois culture and leisure (Bowen 1998: 99).
In deliberately ambiguous but telling phrases, Bowen describes Lois
as wanting to see ‘backgrounds without bits taken out of them by
Holy Families’ and hungering to visit ‘unmarried sorts of places’
(99). Not unlike Woolf’s Orlando, she ‘thought it would be pity
to miss love’ (99). Indeed, Lois’s sense of the constraints of her
gender does not amount to the full rejection that her fierce ‘I hate
women’ implies, but is more to do with the way class determines
the visibility and status of women, for while she ‘did not mind
being noticed because she was a female, she was tired of being not
noticed because she was a lady’ (99).
At the same time as Lois strains against the inhibitions and
prejudices of her class as it shapes and controls her femininity,
she is unconsciously its bearer. When she thinks of travel abroad
she thinks of Cook’s, the travel agent of the well-to-do, arranging
her itinerary and booking her seats – a gentle, joking reminder
from the well-born Irish Bowen that there were social limits to
Lois’s imagination and her rebellion. These limits inhere in the
writers themselves; for all the boldness with which interwar women
writers in the United Kingdom offered their heroines and their
readers a chance to fantasize femininity otherwise, in their narra-
tives new femininities are, in very overt ways, mediated by and
through class relations, and in less obvious ways by the exclusions
of both empire and race. ‘Everything mocked’, was Woolf’s
intended motto for her proposed fiction, Orlando, yet this jeu
d’esprit on gender mocks least of all the author’s own love affair
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54 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
with the idea of aristocracy; for its renegade androgynous
protagonist, affectionately modelled on her friend and lover Vita
Sackville-West, permission and privilege are intertwined. Jaime
Hovey has argued that the Sapphism of Orlando – its subtextual
celebration of lesbianism – is represented through racialized tropes
of transgression. In Orlando Woolf locates her most negative
versions of femininity – its sentimentality, its conventional
heterosexuality, and its implied social and political conservatism
– in caricatures of nineteenth-century domestic servants, who
themselves are made to stand in for the Victorian middle class,
including Britain’s bourgeois monarch, while a more buoyant,
perverse and adventurous version of female subjectivity is reserved
for the upper classes.
Woolf’s double move in Orlando is to celebrate a certain kind
of transhistorical aristocratic identity in which the tie to the landed
estate permits the destabilizing of gender, so that Orlando can,
albeit not at his/her own volition, be alternately a man and a
woman. Such a move challenges, if only obliquely, that long tradi-
tion reaching back to the eighteenth century in which middle-class
women writers – and Woolf, born into the London intelligentsia,
is emphatically one of these – targeted aristocratic femininity
as both over-privileged and corrupt, placing the advancement of
women’s rights and the progressive future of both women and
the nation confidently in the hands of the expanding middle class.
The interwar years witnessed a kind of imaginative rebellion
by women writers against what is seen to be complacent and
provincial in both bourgeois femininity and bourgeois feminism,
a rebellion which, in fiction at least, transfers to Britain’s titled
and historic class, together with the group just below it, the landed
gentry or ‘squirearchy’, an oddly vanguardist role in the trans-
formation of gender, considering that this class was generally
seen as declining in social, economic and political power.
We have suggested how this revision of class femininity
functions in Orlando, and in The Last September. It is also thema-
tized in Daphne du Maurier’s hugely popular Rebecca (1938).
Alison Light suggests that the ‘desire to be differently female is
central to du Maurier’s best-known novels’ (Light 1991: 166).
At first glance, Rebecca might seem to be a novel in the anti-
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aristocratic tradition of earlier proto-feminist women writers,
focusing like Brontë’s Jane Eyre on the literal and figurative demise
of masculine aristocratic privilege, in this case Maximilian de
Winter’s inherited estate, Manderley. Yet as Light has argued,
while Rebecca pushes the demonization of upper-class femininity
as far is it could go, stigmatizing the beautiful, accomplished
Rebecca, de Winter’s dead first wife, as sadistic, sexually perverse
and diseased, the ‘overkill’ in the narrative attack on Rebecca
‘testifies to the extraordinary power and fascination’ of the novel’s
images of ‘sexual anarchy’ (178). It is true that the humble,
nameless middle-class heroine who becomes de Winter’s second
wife, is gradually disabused of her desire to envy or emulate the
aristocratic woman she has replaced; indeed, the novel approvingly
charts her progress from a repressed and easily intimidated child-
wife into a woman who is at least her husband’s equal. Even so
Rebecca is by far the most interesting character in the novel;
her amorality and contempt for men and their desires seductively
invites identification from the reader. Rebecca, as an idealized
and feared construct of the second wife’s imagination, represents
in Light’s analysis ‘the insecurity at the heart of all femininity,’
but Manderley, that Tory, English stronghold is also ‘a place in
the imagination where a freer and more independent sexuality
might have been possible’ (178). Du Maurier explicitly exposes
Rebecca’s heterosexual infidelity, and hints darkly if euphemisti-
cally at her possible bisexuality. Yet the novel’s open homophobia
is directed less at Rebecca than at Manderley’s housekeeper
‘Danny’ Danvers, whose passion for her dead mistress is repre-
sented as both creepy and murderous. Nevertheless, the seductive
wickedness of its dead protagonist, her entirely transgressive
but wonderfully active femininity, overrides the conventional
ethics that the novel espouses and seriously erodes the reader’s
sympathetic alliance with the tiresomely insecure second wife. As
if to emphasize the pleasures of excess Max de Winter’s estate is
itself endowed with an exotic, out of order femininity. In Rebecca,
Light suggests, du Maurier allows her readers a temporarily
dangerous alliance with outrageous femininity, and, if they
so wish, a safe rejection of it. While Manderley burns, in a
conflagration lit by Danny, the vengeful custodian of Rebecca’s
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56 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
memory, consuming in its flames the comfortable future of its
proprietor and his young wife, it returns, at once longed-for and
terrifying like the perverse femininity it comes to stand for, in
the dreams of the second Mrs de Winter, now living with Max
in virtual exile abroad. More conventional both in its writing
and its outlook than Orlando, Rebecca shares Woolf’s love affair
with the landed classes, a conservative romance with place and
class that is also explicitly aligned with experiment and trans-
gression in relation to femininity.
Radclyffe Hall’s watershed lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness
appeared in 1928, the same year as Orlando. While most critics
have highlighted Hall’s representation of homosexuality, almost
as fascinating is the author’s depiction of normative femininity,
at once harsher and more sentimental than any of the other
writers we have been discussing. Like Orlando, The Well of
Loneliness imagines the transformation of gender in terms of the
landed English gentry, as Jaime Hovey has argued. Hall fantasises
a privileged childhood in her creation of Morton Hall, the country
seat in the Malvern Hills of Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon,
and their daughter and only child, the novel’s ‘invert’ protagonist,
Stephen Gordon. The Well of Loneliness focuses on the way in
which biological females don’t necessarily become women, tracing
instead the path to maturity of a girl who identifies as a boy.
Stephen becomes an adult who adopts a masculine style and is
attracted to other women. In The Well of Loneliness femininity
becomes a lost object of desire: something that Stephen can neither
be nor have. Unachievable and elusive, the feminine becomes
both overvalued and degraded, invested in things as well as people.
Morton Hall is described in the opening sentences of the novel
through a nostalgic evocation of the femininity of the past, ‘like
certain lovely women who, now old, belong to a bygone generation
– women who in youth were passionate but seemly; difficult to
win but when won, all-fulfilling’ (Hall 1990 [1928]: 3). At first
Anna Molloy, Stephen’s mother, seems a present incarnation of
such idealized femininity: ‘lovely as only an Irish woman can be,
having that in her bearing that betokened quiet pride, having
that in her eyes that betokened great longing, having that in her
body that betokened happy promise – the archetype of the very
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perfect woman, whom creating God had found good’ (3) Sir
Philip’s overwhelming desire for a son and heir is frustrated
when Anna bears a daughter; in his disappointment he persuades
his wife to keep the male name they have agreed upon. But as
the ‘narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered’ baby (5), turns into a
tomboyish ‘queer’ child an ‘almost grotesque’ shyness develops
between mother and daughter (7) , and Anna’s attitude towards
Stephen who so closely resembled her loved husband degenerates
into ‘antagonism’, ‘anger’ and distaste (8).
Sir Philip is represented as both noble and tolerant, but as
Anna imagines her child as ‘a blemished, unworthy, maimed
reproduction’ of its father, the mother’s narrow sympathies are
exposed (8). Nobility in The Well of Loneliness is associated
with the ‘true’ masculinity that Philip possesses; Stephen’s yearning
for nobility is an early sign of her masculine identification as
she innocently tells the servants that ‘I must be a boy, ’cause I
feel exactly like one, I feel like young Nelson in the picture
upstairs’ (13). Fantasies of male heroism are later merged with
more romantic and intellectual ones as Stephen becomes the
Byronic figure, suggested by her surname, class and choice of
writing as a profession. Rejected by her beautiful mother, who
tries to impose a superficial femininity of dress and decorum on
her awkward child, Stephen desperately pursues the elusive
feminine in a series of inappropriate love objects: a young female
servant, a bored local housewife, Angela Crosby, and finally the
love of her life, the Welsh orphan, Mary Llewellyn. From Anna
through Mary, each of these conventionally feminine women ends
in betraying her: her mother’s bigotry, Angela’s fear of her husband
and her own social position, Mary’s growing love for Stephen’s
old friend Martin – each of these proximate causes springs from
the constellation of characteristics that make up a small-minded,
shallow and inconstant femininity. The Well of Loneliness histori-
cizes femininity as it tracks the changed opportunities for women
in the incremental understanding of gender and its more perverse
manifestations from Stephen’s Edwardian childhood to the First
World War and its aftermath. Yet there is another more static
and ahistorical register in the novel by which so called ‘normal’
femininity is seen, through the longing and misogyny of unmet
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58 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
desire, as both hopelessly idealized and ethically wanting – express-
ing in the end a deformity of spirit as immovable as the biology
that Hall believes is responsible for the existence of ‘inverts’.
The scientific theories that underpin Hall’s concept of a ‘third
sex’ – her novel is dedicated to ‘Our three selves’ – were drawn
from the sexology of her time formulated by Havelock Ellis and
Krafft-Ebing. However, her contradictory representation of tradi-
tional femininity draws on both popular prejudice and on a
feminist-inspired revulsion at the narrative closure of female rebel-
lion and independence in conventional marriage and motherhood.
At the end of Well of Loneliness Stephen tricks Mary into abandon-
ing her for Martin and a protected heterosexual life in Canada.
Once Mary is narratively disposed of, Stephen’s future can be
invested in the noble defence of her ‘kind’. And in this crusade
her nobility and wide sympathies fully emerge as she champions
not only female ‘inverts’ but male homosexuals as well, whom
the novel represents as the bearers of the most degraded femininity
of all, the simulated, grotesque femininity of gay men, with their
‘shaking, white-skinned effeminate fingers’ (505).
Of the English and Irish women writers we have been discuss-
ing, only Woolf was a self-described feminist. Indeed, only Woolf
had radical or progressive views on issues other than gender: Hall
had fascist leanings, du Maurier was a conservative, and Bowen,
as her biographer Victoria Glendinning notes, ‘moved further to
the right as she got older’ (Glendinning 1993: 231). Although
the interwar period in Britain witnessed plenty of activism around
women’s rights from men and women who saw these as part of
larger social and political agendas, in this generation of women
writers the wish to challenge the norms of gender and to invent
new forms of femininity were not necessarily aligned with liberal
views on other issues. Nevertheless Bowen, Woolf, Hall and du
Maurier have become part of a new literary canon of twentieth-
century women writers whose fiction explored the century’s new
sense of gender, experimenting as much with the narrative forms
through which it could be represented as with the limits of what
one could say about it. Impatient with the constraints and pieties
of both middle-class femininity and middle-class feminism, their
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fantasies of gender freedom or gender transgression as an identity
that might be ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ become
entangled in different ways with an image of aristocracy and its
privileges rather than with that of a revolution from below.
RACE AND FEMININITY IN AFRICAN
AMERICAN WRITING
Class and ethnicity were by no means the exclusive or local
concerns of women from Britain or Ireland, but qualified and
complicated in different ways all the new femininities invented
and narrated by women in the Anglophone societies of the 1920s
and 1930s, where women were newly enfranchised. Moreover, to
see how some of the same issues about the role of sexual freedom
in the rights and freedoms that women might now claim surface,
albeit with a different history, when femininity is parsed through
the grammars of race and class we can turn to African American
women writers in the United States in the same decades. The
growth of a black middle class after the abolition of slavery, a class
regarded by spokespersons like W.E.B. DuBois to be the agent of
progress for all African Americans, placed a heavy responsibility
on the morals and demeanour of its women. The myths created
through slavery and racism about the promiscuous sexuality of
African American women were to be refuted by the virtuous,
educated and civic-minded mothers, wives and daughters of the
black bourgeoisie, whose women leaders saw themselves as at once
the shock troops and domestic stronghold of ‘race’ politics. Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1987 [1892]) offered readers
a heroine of just this sort.
In the interwar years, however, an altogether different kind of
heroine begins somewhat hesitatingly to emerge, in fictions which
rebel against the novel whose main ideological thrust was the
advancement of the race or the femininity it championed. Janie
Crawford, the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1936), comes from the rural poor, is thrice
married, and is forced to kill her last and most loved husband,
Tea Cake Woods. The sort of agency Janie wants and the
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femininity she inhabits have little to do with either upward
mobility or the advance of the race, but are rather the pursuit
of both passion and ‘to find out about livin’’ first hand (Hurston
1937: 183). Her second marriage to the store-owner, Joe Starks,
leaves Janie excluded from both these possibilities. The novel’s
narrative voice-over and the vernacular exchanges of its characters
allow anthropologist Hurston to raise Janie’s quest for love and
knowledge to the level of a ‘folk’ philosophy. Through the voices
of the Southern poor in her short stories and non-fiction Hurston
obliquely resists the middle-class terms through which both racial
and gender aspirations might be channelled. Yet critic Cheryl
Wall suggests that in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston is
arguing that the social values identified with white materialist
society cannot be evaded, but were at work even in the most
marginal communities of the South, personified not only in
propertied men like Starks, but by the light-skinned restaurant
proprietor, Mrs Turner, ‘whose attempt to replicate the social
hierarchy of the larger [white] society causes Janie and Tea Cake
to revert to the stereotyped gender roles that society endorses’
(Wall 1995: 191).
Wall’s comment prompts the questions of where those
stereotypes originated, and of which class within a minority culture
adopted and endorsed them. Were the repressive social and sexual
standards of the black middle class that Deborah McDowell argues
continued to inhibit the work of most African American women
writers in the interwar years, especially in their representation
of black female sexuality, simply a replication of nineteenth-
century white standards of ‘pure womanhood’? Even more than
in the British texts of the 1920s and 1930s female sexuality is
the key to the revision of femininity in African American women’s
writing. Because of the long history and durability of ‘social and
literary myths . . . about black women’s libidinousness’ reaching
back to slavery, but more virulent perhaps after its abolition,
McDowell explains that ‘even into the Freudian 1920’s, the Jazz
Age of sexual abandon and “free love” – when female sexuality,
in general, was acknowledged and commercialized in the
advertising, beauty, and fashion industries – black women’s novels
preserve their reticence about sexuality’, leaving its open expression
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to ‘black female blues singers’ who sang about its pleasures and
dangers in the vernacular speech of the poor (McDowell 1986:
xiii). Class difference fractures the kind of femininity that could
be dreamed of and written about in this period. The sexual politics
of black expression surfaced as a contested issue in the aesthetic
debates among black artists and intellectuals in the ‘Harlem
Renaissance’. It dictated the reserve, McDowell argues, that
pervades the work of one of the most experimental and compelling
writers of the period, Nella Larsen, whose two memorable novels,
Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) directly and tragically
confront the contradictions and constraints of black bourgeois
femininity. The restless young heroine of Quicksand, Helga Crane,
leaves her teaching job at a black southern school, Naxos (saxon
as anagram) which ‘was now a show place . . . exemplification
of the white man’s magnanimity’ (Larsen 1986: 4). The school
‘tolerated no innovations, no individualisms’ and ‘Enthusiasm,
spontaneity, if not actually suppressed, were at least openly
regretted as unladylike or ungentlemanly qualities’ (4), so that
Helga had come to hate ‘the trivial hypocrisies and careless
cruelties’ which were ‘a part of the Naxos policy of uplift’ (5).
In addition Helga’s lack of connections to the leading families
of Negro society, which was, Larsen tells us, ‘as complicated and
as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society’,
meant that her individuality had to be suppressed (8). In gendered
terms the Naxos ethos rewards ‘ladyness’ (12), and when Helga
resigns, the head tries to flatter her by saying that she is a ‘lady’
who brings ‘dignity and breeding’ to the school; it gives Helga
some satisfaction to tell him that ‘My father was a gambler who
deserted my mother, a white immigrant’ (21).
Helga’s search for less constricted gender identity and a wider
field for her inchoate ambitions, which Larsen characterizes as a
finely tuned aesthetic sense, takes her first to New York where
she becomes part of a sophisticated and monied black society
light years removed from the provincial Naxos, and later to Europe
where she moves with her white Aunt and Uncle in white society.
None of these contexts gives her enduring satisfactions, but are
instead a series of dead ends in which she feels trapped by the
enclosing walls of societies built, in different ways, on racial
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62 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
exclusion; in Europe she escapes the pretensions of the black
bourgeoisie for one that is freer but in which she is regarded as
an exotic commodity. And Helga herself is constantly censoring
what she believes is illicit and regressive in her own sensuous
desires, associating them with African primitivism – ‘the jungle’.
Larsen cannot resolve the dilemma she has set for Helga or her
narrative; the novel’s hardly bearable or credible conclusion finds
Helga back in a Southern small town, married to a black preacher,
Reverend Pleasant Green, whom she loathes, condemned to a
life of endless childbearing. McDowell argues that the unsettling
and downbeat ending of Larsen’s novel, in which the turn to
conventional marriage is a form of living death, is Larsen’s response
to the ‘contradictory impulses’ that inspired Quicksand. ‘Larsen
wanted to tell the story of the black woman with sexual desires,
but was constrained by a competing desire to establish black
women as respectable in black middle-class terms’, a conflict that
has ‘strangling effects . . . both on her characters and on her
narratives’ (McDowell 1986: xvi).
Larsen’s fiction suggests how closely meshed the determinants
of race and class are in the making of gendered subjectivity, as
well as just how misleading it can be to make too strong a
distinction between the categories of gender and sexuality when
thinking through the representation of femininity. In Orlando,
Rebecca and The Well of Loneliness, racial difference acts as a
subtheme or motif in more overtly class-bound discussions of
gender. Whiteness, as a privileged form of gendered identity, is
subliminally present as a kind of consolation prize for the trials
of being a woman. But Larsen, drawing on and revising the literary
figure of the ‘tragic mulatto’, the woman of mixed race who had
been long a favoured figure of racialized femininity deployed
by both white and black writers, makes the raced element of
femininity and its discontents central to her texts and to her
light-skinned protagonists, Helga Crane and Clare Kendry of
Passing, each of whom is the product of a cross-racial liaison. As
Cheryl Wall points out, Larsen’s use of the mulatto subverts ‘the
convention consistently . . . They are neither noble nor long-
suffering; their plights are not used to symbolize the oppression
of blacks, the irrationality of prejudice, or the absurdity of concepts
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of race generally’ (Wall 1995: 89). Instead, Wall argues, they
focus on the psychological effects of ‘racism and sexism’ which
make ‘self-definition’ impossible for black women (89).
Passing takes on, as well, the impossible attraction between
women, highlighting another common element of women’s
writing about women in this period: femininity, especially highly
sexed, hyper-femininity, less as a lure and danger to men than
as the site of desire between women. In this novel Larsen has
taken the conflict between respectability and desire that destroyed
Helga Crane and split it into two characters, girlhood friends
drawn to each other in mid-life. Irene Redfield is a repressed,
respectable Harlem doctor’s wife, whose ‘passing’ for white is
limited to an occasional day out at a posh department store; here,
one day, she re-encounters the beautiful Clare Kendry who has
married a bullying white businessman, and concealed her racial
origin, but risks everything by renewing her friendship with Irene
and the black middle-class cultural milieu to which she belongs.
As Deborah McDowell points out, the novel, by eroticizing Clare’s
exotic beauty – her ‘tempting mouth’, and her seductive ways,
the ‘caress’ of her gaze – as seen through the fascinated and
fearful eyes of Irene, more than hints at their mutual attraction
(McDowell 1986: xxvii). The surreal denouement of the novel,
when Clare, her racial identity suddenly revealed to her racist
husband, falls or is pushed to her death from a Harlem balcony,
suggests the impossibility not only of black female identity but
of same sex desire.
Feminist theorist Judith Butler’s analysis of Larsen’s novel,
‘Passing, Queering’, argues that the social and psychological
readings of Passing ought not to be seen as in conflict; she suggests
that race (whiteness as much as blackness) is constituent of the
psychic terms of sexual difference. Butler pushes this argument
one crucial theoretical step further, insisting that there is no
‘relationship called “sexual difference” that is itself unmarked by
race’ (Butler 1993: 181). ‘What becomes psychically repressed
in Passing is linked to the specificity of the social constraints on
black women’s sexuality that inform Larsen’s text’ (179). These
recent analyses of Larsen’s work have quite properly seen her
bold if ambivalent attempt to make the repression of black female
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64 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
sexuality, rather than its exploitation, the key problem and the
potential tragedy of the women in her texts. Hazel Carby argues
that Larsen’s exposure of the contradictions involved in the
representation of Helga Crane ‘as a sexual being’, even if they
are ones she cannot resolve, makes Helga ‘the first truly sexual
black female protagonist’ in African American fiction (Carby
1987: 174). If we read women writers from the interwar years
right across the racial and cultural divide, we can see that sexual
freedom, with its pleasures and dangers, is for all of them in a
variety of ways, the linchpin of their criticism of middle-class
femininity, and by implication the middle-class campaign for
women’s rights of which they were now the supposed beneficiaries.
Virginia Woolf herself embodies those tensions and contradictions
when, in 1929, she predicted happily that these new civic freedoms
would liberate women into writing fiction that would involve
‘a turn towards the impersonal’ which would make ‘her novels
. . . more critical of society, and less analytical of individual lives’.
She would write novels which would ‘deal with social evils and
remedies. Their men and women will not be observed wholly in
relation to each other emotionally, but as they cohere and clash
in groups and classes and races’ (Woolf 1979: 50–1). She is not
the only writer to be dissatisfied with the imaginative ghetto
of the ‘personal’ – in The Last September, Lois rejects the idea of
being a writer as ‘so embarrassing . . . Even things like – like
elephants get so personal’ (Bowen 1998: 98). Woolf, who had
argued elsewhere that women in the twentieth century should
be able to write ‘the truth of the body’, is perhaps defending
women writers against the old accusation that all their work would
be narrowly personal and subjective and that femininity rendered
women constitutionally and culturally incapable of a wider vision.
The understanding that sexuality as well as gender were a part
of the politics of ‘groups, classes’, races and nations was an idea
taking shape but not fully articulated in the interwar years. Woolf’s
conservative defence reflects how hard it was to resist the binary
definitions of gender which made the ‘personal’ and the ‘emo-
tional’, which we might translate as sexuality and the psychic,
part of a degraded femininity, rather than crucial issues for the
societies in which, as she rightly remarks, women would now be
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able to act for themselves and ‘not merely influence the acts of
others’ (Woolf 1979: 50).
In view of the way in which these fictions by women highlight
sexuality, depicted in terms of race and class rather than as outside
their categorical jurisdictions, as a centrally unresolved issue within
the reorientation brought about by the new freedoms of postwar
society, one might see Freud’s conclusion in ‘Femininity’ in a
slightly different light. When he suggests that understanding
sexuality and its psychic effects ‘goes very far’, if not far enough,
towards resolving the ‘riddle’ of femininity’, he may be no more,
although no less, than at one with the Zeitgeist he helped to create.
MASCULINE IDENTIFICATION:
FEMININITY’S DISAPPEARING ACT
In thinking beyond femininity in its past and present incarnations,
both theorists and imaginative writers have invented narratives
in which feminine abjection can be transformed, displaced or
otherwise evaded. One strategy, as we have seen, is to look to the
past: when Brontë chooses to have the child Jane Eyre align her
resistant and angry self with ‘any other rebel slave’, she does so
in the years after the abolition of colonial slavery in British colonies
(Brontë 1987: 9). Similarly, the aristocratic identifications in
Woolf, Bowen and Hall are nostalgic ones – a displacement into
the past of privilege. Another strategy exploits the fantasies
of upward mobility so endemic to capitalist societies. In mass-
market fiction – in Harlequin or Mills & Boon romance and the
blockbusters and bodice-rippers which target women readers – a
favoured move has been to alleviate the restrictions of gender by
conferring on women status and money rather than demo-
cratically extended rights and opportunities. The avant-garde as
well as the popular has been keen to displace the narrative of
female degradation and melancholia. French feminist theory and
fiction of the 1960s and 1970s that called itself ‘écriture feminine’
was committed to transforming gender, and what was written
about it, by celebrating as well as changing femininity. We have
looked at Wittig’s linguistic and narrative experiments in the
previous chapter. She is one of many feminists from the late
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66 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
1960s onwards who chose to take up modernist strategies or who
turned to utopian and science fiction to find a style or genre
which would allow them to bypass the seeming inevitability not
just of gender binaries but of femininity itself as a trajectory for
little girls, with an identity called ‘woman’ as its necessary outcome.
Yet in literature as in life, as Snitow’s interlocutor suggests,
resistance to a particular social narrative of gender may take the
form of the fantasy of being a man, although it is always a fantasy
with problems and limits, a fantasy that, whether simply imagined
or acted out tends simultaneously to undermine and to confirm
gendered identity. The history of female cross-dressing is well
documented, and its place in western social practice and imagi-
nation has been much analysed of late. Orlando, of course, is a
playful incarnation of this fantasy but Woolf cleverly keeps the
mechanism which alters Orlando’s gender safely in the control
of the author rather than her protagonist; similarly Radclyffe
Hall makes the fantasy itself a narrative dead end for Stephen
Gordon who must turn to theories of a ‘third sex’ to advance
the human rights of homosexuals. Hall’s fictional crusade has
become reality; as transgendered and transexual humans acquire
more rights in western democracies, so it becomes more possible
for imagined gender to be lived out.
In the first half century of psychoanalysis the persistence
of women’s identification with masculinity into adult life – her
‘masculinity complex’ – was a favoured topic for analysis; to
understand the psychic process whereby adult women fail to relin-
quish such ‘infantile identification’ – the masculine stage – was
thought a route to understanding female homosexuality. In 1929,
the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere published a fascinating essay on
the meaning of so-called masculine identification in otherwise
‘feminine’ women. ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ highlighted
the performative status of femininity. Riviere foregrounds just
those groups of professional women who were emerging in the
period, women who, in her view:
seem to fulfil every criterion of complete feminine development. They
are excellent wives and mothers, capable housewives; they maintain
social life and assist culture; they have no lack of feminine interests,
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FEMINITY AND FEMINISM 67
e.g. in their personal appearance, and when called upon they can still
find time to play the part of devoted and disinterested mother-
substitutes among a wide circle of relatives and friends.
(Riviere 1986: 36)
For Riviere, who saw the social categories of gender in relatively
conservative terms, the fact that these women ‘fulfil the duties
of their profession at least as well as the average man’ makes
them a ‘puzzle’ to classify psychologically (36). Her leading ‘case
study’ involves ‘a woman of this kind . . . engaged in work of a
propagandist nature, which consisted principally in speaking and
writing’ who suffered extreme anxiety after every successful
performance, worried whether she had done ‘anything inappro-
priate’ and in desperate need of reassurance, both about the
competence of her performance and her sexual attraction, from
men who were ‘unmistakable father figures’ (36). Yet in unrav-
elling this and other similar cases, Riviere comes to a surprising
and radical conclusion. She does not argue, as she might, that
the supposed masculine activities of such women are cross-gender
‘performances’ (although the logic of her analysis implies that
they are), but rather that femininity – womanliness – is itself a
‘masquerade’, and one, moreover, that many woman adopt as
a defence against the extreme anxiety produced by masculine
identification. While Riviere roots her analysis in contemporary
psychoanalytic debates about the psychic stages of infancy and
early childhood, her exploration leads her to ask a much broader
question in her conclusion: ‘what is the essential nature of fully
developed femininity?’ (43). As if she herself must propitiate the
gods of gender whose special task it is to keep masculinity and
femininity in place as binary terms, she seems through this
question to draw back from her own startling answer that no
such ‘essential nature’ exists.
Cross-gendered fantasy in general must be viewed as a crucial
part of imaginative life. Certainly it is the sine qua non of the
creative process, and especially of fiction and drama, for what
novelist or dramatist could survive without it? However, there is
a more disturbing logic within certain feminist narratives that
moves inexorably from a critique of the feminine as it is expressed
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68 FEMINITY AND FEMINISM
in particular cultures and social groups, to an identification with
and/or an idealization of the masculine, as if femininity were a
kind of disappointing daughter to be discarded for a more favoured
son. In these narratives the problems and burdens of femininity
are magically resolved through a kind of sleight of hand in which
a ‘woman’ becomes ‘more like a man’, psychologically and socially,
and is thereby positioned in a brave new world where the privileges
and priorities of gender inequality have disappeared. This turn
towards masculinity as a refuge from an embattled and under-
valued femininity seems, at one level, perfectly rational, but at
another it only intensifies the ‘puzzle’ about the nature of
femininity and feminism. It points to feminism’s simultaneous
censure and envy of the masculine as well as its own latent
misogyny – or at the very least its suspicion that there is something
irremediably wrong, not only with the universal preference that
human cultures give to men, but with female subjectivity itself.
In a striking number of feminist texts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to the feminist science
fictions that have been invented from the 1970s onwards, there
are points where the lady seems to vanish and her place is taken
by virtual masculinity. In order to see what is at stake when
femininity performs this kind of disappearing act we need to
look more closely at how gender and its effects are represented
in such texts.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1969 novel
about a planet of androgynes, a female anthropologist from a
future federation of ordinary, two-sexed human worlds reflects
on the liberating but frightening possibilities of a society without
fixed gender. On Gethen, she muses, there is ‘no myth of Oedipus’,
‘no unconsenting sex’, ‘no division of humanity into strong and
weak halves’. Unique among the varieties of mankind that people
the known universe, Gethen is a place where ‘the whole tendency
to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be
lessened or changed’ (LeGuin 1977: 69). Yet even for LeGuin’s
sympathetic social scientist, trained as she is to encounter and
accept new ways of being, the ontological shift that signals the
collapse of dualism’s old certainties about sexual difference registers
as shocking and terrifying. Its abandonment threatens the cate-
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gories of thinking itself, as well as those of selfhood. It challenges
the very ground on which ethics are based. Convention is all,
even if it is a convention of radical inequality, so that for a species
whose sense of self has been fashioned from and through the
deformations of gender to be suddenly ‘respected and judged only
as a human being . . . is an appalling experience’ (70).
Daughter of the anthropologists Alfred Louis and Theodora
Kroeber, LeGuin often conceives her science fictions as didactic
ethnographies. Her alien worlds and peoples combine elements
of actual and imaginary human cultures, while her plots are
parables of humanity’s worst excesses and best impulses. Written
in the first years of the second wave of the women’s movement
in North America and Western Europe, The Left Hand of Darkness
echoes a utopian desire at least as old as the feminism that inspired
it, evoking (if never citing) Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘wild wish
. . . to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless
where love animates the behaviour’ (Wollstonecraft 1988: 57).
On Gethen, Wollstonecraft’s wish is achieved in part by effacing
one of the significant differences between the sexual lives of
animals and humans: LeGuin’s androgynes, like earth’s animal
species, are restricted to brief and exclusive periods of desire and
sexual activity. In this recurring active phase sexual difference
asserts itself as an arbitrary effect of each discrete periodic
encounter. Whether one will become a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ in
any given pairing is outside the willed control of the individual
or the couple, but the result is always a heterosexual union. So
while LeGuin keeps a two sexed model in play, she also relegates
it to a restricted space in Gethenian life; her androgynes are only
properly men or women when ‘animated by love’. In their fertile
years these perfectly hermaphrodite beings both bear children
and father them so that everyone is equally liable to be ‘tied
down to childbearing’. The psychic and social divisions of labour,
which LeGuin sees as more or less inevitable in a world where
only one sex reproduces, are evaded, and the happy result is that
‘Anyone can turn his hand to anything’ (LeGuin 1977: 69).
No more or less innocent than Freud’s division of labour into
those who can think gender and those who only display it,
LeGuin’s provocative use of the generic masculine for her
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androgyne species points to a familiar paradox at the heart of
her egalitarian vision of an undivided human subject – the
hate–love relationship that women have for most types of femi-
ninity as they are embodied and lived in any given historical
moment. Androgyny, what Francette Pacteau has called ‘the
impossible referent’, is less a solution to the revulsion than a
clarification of its problem. Indeed her essay takes its title from
The Left Hand of Darkness, citing the human male, Genly Ai,
when he says of his Gethenian friend that ‘it was impossible to
think of him as a woman . . . and yet whenever I thought of him
as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture’ (LeGuin 1977:16).
An incomplete or simulated masculinity has often been
preferred to the impossible feminine. Late-eighteenth-century
feminism framed its distaste for femininity as an excess of desire
for femininity; Wollstonecraft puts it baldly, even brutally, in A
Vindication: ‘This desire of being always women, is the very
consciousness that degrades the sex’ (Wollstonecraft 1988: 99).
‘Women’ or ‘the sex’ was the negative site of gender in the
eighteenth century; femininity often measured the distance or
decline from the human ideal. Early feminists, launching their
critique both at the everyday androcentrism of bourgeois society
and at the theorized misogyny of progressive social philosophers
such as Rousseau, shared an uncomfortable common ground with
their opponents in their dislike of actually existing femininity.
But while Rousseau believed that the feminine was innate, and
recommended restraint as the only cure for its inevitable excesses,
Wollstonecraft argued that it was cultural, and therefore open to
reform. Rejecting biological determinism, and its accompanying
fatalism about the future of sexual difference, she believed that
women could and should transform their ‘degraded’ consciousness
through exercising their latent rationality or ‘understanding’. It
‘should be the first object of laudable ambition . . . to obtain a
character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex’,
wrote Wollstonecraft, but her ‘human being’ is remarkably close
to an eighteenth-century ideal of masculinity (Wollstonecraft
1988: 9–10). It sometimes seems that the scenario of women’s
slow but steady emergence from their subaltern status rests not
only on the assumption that women are made not born, but on
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a model of regendered humanity that owes more to imagined
masculinity than to any other. Now and then The Left Hand of
Darkness reminds the reader, almost as an afterthought, that
Gethenians are women as well as men, but for most of the time
masculinity is imaginatively as well as grammatically the default
mode of subjectivity on Gethen.
When Genly Ai, the male dimorphic emissary to Gethen, is
asked by his androgyne friend Therem Harth what women are
like, he comments first on what they are less likely to be –
mathematicians, great musicians – before his capacity to describe
them falters and then fails: ‘I can’t tell you what women are like
. . . In a sense women are more alien to me than you are’ (LeGuin
1977: 160). In this way LeGuin reads back to us the problem
of gender difference at its most extreme, for in Genly’s failure
to describe femininity we can also perceive a failure or fault line
in LeGuin’s profoundly humanist project, for its success rests on
the perception of similarity – on human commonality and the
sense of community and affiliation that should, but often does
not, flow from this basic connection. Underneath Ai’s rueful
afterthought that ‘You and I share one sex, at least’ (160) lies
the sense of something unspeakable and negative in the feminine,
and something noble and expressible in the masculine, a difference
as ‘impossible’ as the androgyny that pretends to change it.
Women’s imaginative evocation of masculinity as a scene for
idealized human relationships, both social and erotic, in the late-
twentieth century has taken some strange and wonderful forms.
Cultural critic Constance Penley writes about a subgroup of
fanzine culture around the US TV series Star Trek which imagines
in stories, drawing and videos drawn from the actual programmes,
an explicit sexual romance between Captain James T. Kirk of
the USS Enterprise and his Vulcan first officer, Mr Spock. The
K/S zine is one of a number of ‘slash’ fanzines which publish
stories that eroticize male duos from television series. Penley
suggests that the K/S narratives ‘retool’ existing masculinity,
making it more ‘sensitive and nurturing’ than that which exists
around them, but she also argues that the ‘slash characters have
to be male’ because:
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the fans do indeed reject the female body as a terrain of fantasy or
utopian thinking, but the female body they are rejecting is the
body of the woman as it has been constituted in this culture: a body
that is a legal, moral and religious battleground; a body seen as
murderously dangerous to the foetus it may house; a body held to
painfully higher standards of beauty than the male body.
(Penley 1992: 498)
The K/Sers, most of whom are self-described straight women,
do not and will not call themselves feminists, but their transgressive
reworking of the emotional and sexual possibilities of what is
already an avowedly humanist series, if it stops short of a worked
out political critique of either femininity or feminism, does seek
to ask the same question that LeGuin’s novel poses. What is the
future of femininity and of humans, if men are the new women?
The utopian element of such writing cannot be easily pinned
down as a naive escape from or denial of femininity and its
discontents, or conversely, flagged as a simple radical revision of
it. Like LeGuin’s androgyne planet, its very existence troubles a
more settled common sense humanism that holds out hope for
a better deal for gender in all its manifestations.
How well and how much can men or women understand or
imagine their own or the other sex? Are the limits of such
understanding, if limits there are, a reason for humanist despair?
In making her male protagonist unable to define what ‘women
are like’ LeGuin both reproduces and criticizes Sigmund Freud’s
conclusion to ‘Femininity’, where he concedes with deceptive
candour that his ‘incomplete and fragmentary’ discussion ‘does
not always sound friendly’. Freud adds that of course he has only
‘been describing women in so far as their nature is determined
by their sexual function’ and although ‘that influence extends
very far; we do not overlook the fact that an individual woman
may be a human being in other respects as well.’ (Freud 1973:
169). Both the vagueness of ‘other respects’ and the conditional
tense of ‘may be a human being’ underline how provisional and
problematic a woman’s identity as a ‘human being’ might be.
The Left Hand of Darkness imagines a cross-species love between
Gethenian and human that cannot be consummated, a love that
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is composed, like that between men and women, and like that
of women for their femininity, of attraction and repulsion. While
Gethenians are a kind of material realization of Freud’s universal
notion of bisexuality, their embodiment of that acknowledgement,
of the fact that difference is in great part a fiction, makes them,
for humans, figures of taboo, both noble and untouchable.
LESBIAN FICTION AFTER MODERNISM:
QUEERING THE GENRE
For all her bold exploration of gender in her science fiction LeGuin
in Left Hand of Darkness is surprisingly phobic about the possi-
bilities of same sex attraction, or even something more biologically
complicated that her fictional Gethenians represent. Yet as we
have seen the interwar period provided a fertile ground for women
writers like Hall, Woolf, Barnes and Larsen to play with gender
and with female sexuality, worrying the ideological and aesthetic
lines of a heteronormative culture. With the exception of The
Well of Loneliness however, these fictions highlighted women to
women desire to a greater or lesser degree without making it the
raison d’etre of their narratives. A gradual lifting of censorship
permitted the flowering of mass market erotica which included
soft core lesbian ‘pulp’ fiction – cheap paperbacks with suggestive
covers and enticing titles such as The Third Sex, Women’s Barracks
and Spring Fire whose ‘golden age’ was the mid-fifties to mid-
sixties. This subgenre, sometimes written by men as well as
women, was aimed primarily at men, and was hardly designed
to encourage a positive view of lesbianism as a gendered or civic
identity, yet it had, as many readers have testified, a wide lesbian
audience. How might we see such soft-porn genre fiction, often
implicitly as well as explicitly homophobic, as either sexually
progressive or, in any sense, queer? If these novels were, at one
level, part of a long tradition of using lesbian sexual encounters
as titillation for the heterosexual imagination, the fact that many
pulps were written by women, and women readers formed a
significant market share of the audience suggested a way forward
for lesbian feminist writers in the seventies and eighties to develop
their own successful strands within genre fiction – romance,
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historical fiction, gothic, sci-fi, detective fiction explicitly directed
at women readers. Writing in popular genre forms didn’t immed-
iately secure mainstream publishers however. The groundbreaking
Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller (a pseudonym for Alma
Routsong) was first published in 1969 as A Place for Us, before
it found a commercial outlet. Miller tries out the lesbian novel
as historical fiction, drawing on the life of the painter Mary Ann
Willson and her companion Miss Brundage in early nineteenth-
century America for her tale of star-crossed women lovers. The
cross-dressing working class Sarah and the more feminine middle-
class Patience end up together at last farming in rural upstate
New York, out of the way of angry families and more general
social censure.
But the city as a setting, and the gritty present with its sexual
danger and its utopian possibilities, was even more of a lure for
lesbian novelists in the seventies and eighties. Detective fiction
with lesbian detectives and, often, a lesbian milieu, proved
particularly popular, perhaps because it offered an opportunity
to rewrite not the genteel fictional female tecs of the Queens of
Crime, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Dorothy Sayers’s Harriet
Vane but rather the hardboiled tradition of Raymond Chandler
and Dashiel Hammett, authors whose careers also depended, at
least initially, on the pulp paperback market. Hardboiled American
detective fiction presented both a temptation and a challenge
because it was a genre so freighted with misogyny and rife with
homophobic images that to allow the positive figure of the lesbian
detective to replace the lone male private eye in its imaginative
world was, in effect, to ‘queer’ it, putting in question hardboiled
fiction’s assumptions about gender, sexuality, agency and justice.
Most lesbian and feminist crime fiction borrows largely from the
conventions of realism established in the interwar period – taking
sexual politics to the cosmopolitan, sexually louche worlds of
mean streets, and giving them a progressive, libertarian twist.
Structurally, lesbian crime fiction – as with feminist crime fiction
more generally – tries to follows the hardboiled tradition of making
the detective a loner but never a celibate. Barbara Wilson’s Pam
Nilson novels, Murder in the Collective (1984) and Sisters of the
Road (1986) follow this convention, but although Pam styles
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herself stereotypically – short hair and overalls – and in pursuing
the murderer of a young prostitute becomes acquainted with the
underside of American cities, her middle-class tastes and liberal
reformist impulses are also crucial to her image. It is a sign of
Pam’s, and the genre’s, own aspirations when she gives Trish, a
vulnerable street kid whose indiscriminate literary tastes run to
Shogun and trashy family sagas, as well as the more acceptable
but macho Steinbeck, the iconic feminist novel, Jane Eyre, as a
start to her literary-political education: ‘She might as well begin
at the beginning’ (Wilson, 1986, 29). In Wilson’s detective fiction
murderers and rapists are handed over to the law, however
alternative and left wing Pam’s lifestyle and politics appears.
Wilson is careful to challenge the sexual politics but not, ultim-
ately, the justice system of a rule governed state. As with Patience
and Sarah, Wilson’s Sisters of the Road was initially published by
her own independent and feminist Seal Press, in Seattle and in
Britain by the Women’s Press. Success in the mainstream for
lesbian fiction is ruthlessly market driven: the much raunchier,
less high-minded After Dolores (1988) Sarah Shulman’s now classic
contribution to the genre, was taken up by Penguin’s US imprint,
Plume. Its unnamed, unwashed, alcoholic and occasionally violent
heroine works in a seedy Lower East Side diner and is in angry
mourning for her ex-lover Dolores. Her only and favourite book
is a volume of Patti Smith’s lyrics. As a kind of distraction from
the pain of abandonment Schulman’s heroine pursues the
mysterious death of a young ‘Punkette’ from New Jersey who
she fancies. Masquerade is a leading trope in After Dolores;
one of the heroine’s lovers dresses up as Priscilla Presley, another
central character, Charlotte, is an actress who has a magical if
sinister ability to change roles. The true identities, sexual prefer-
ences and romantic object choices of After Dolores’s characters
are as elusive as the justice the protagonist, with her borrowed
and unregistered pearl-handled gun, metes out to Marianne/
Punkette’s male killer. Sexuality and gender are presented as
performative in Schulman, in both the common sense and
Butlerian use of the term, where it is the repeated iteration of
the self that forms identity. In After Dolores, these reiterated
selves seem both fragile and mutable, so that they – like the
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heroine’s romances – as often as not fail. In much lesbian fiction
after The Well of Loneliness what is at stake is not the deviation
from normative femininity and object choice but the drama of
love and betrayal. For Shulman’s sad, hungover, scruffy heroine
what persists as the ‘core’ of herself, is her loss of Delores, for
which the intense if casual encounters with other women in the
novel, cannot compensate. In contrast, Pam Nilson, if also love-
lorn, has a more recognizably humanist self to lose. ‘Whatever I
knew or had known about myself was being crushed’ she says,
when she is raped by the villain, Wayne, at the climax of the
novel, yet Pam recovers her lost agency through further physical
risk: she takes up sky-diving (Wilson 1986: 194). Women in the
urban lesbian subculture of the novel can be, and often are,
downright nasty – and if their sadism falls short of physical
murder, it can induce the death of the heart. Of these two
examples After Delores is the more radical text, its emphasis on
surface, its shape-shifting cast, its appropriation of the hardboiled
– not quite pastiche but veering towards it – classically post-
modern. At the end of the book the heroine has rid the world
of a killer and herself gone unpunished, but she has given up
none of her bad habits, nor has she stopped missing Delores.
The niche market that second wave feminism and the gay and
lesbian movement created for lesbian fiction offered many other
opportunities for literary experimentation. Rita Mae Brown’s
scandalous Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) is one of the first coming of
age, coming out novels of this period, and its comic exuberance
sets the tone of the postwar lesbian bildungsroman which works
hard to avoid the melodrama and histrionics of Radclyffe Hall’s
classic without playing down the risks that young lesbians take
in a homophobic world. Lesbian bildungsroman quickly became
a favourite sub-genre, developing its own inventive way with the
form; for example blurring the boundary between fiction, memoir
and autobiography, as in the black lesbian feminist poet Audre
Lorde’s self-styled ‘biomythography’, Zami: A New Spelling of
My Name (1982) which explores the highs and lows of growing
up and coming out in New York City, and includes both lyrical
evocations of love affairs, and a sharp critique of the racism within
lesbian subcultures of the period. Eighteenth-century picaresque,
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from Moll Flanders to Tom Jones proved another appropriative
model for movement inspired fiction and autobiography. An early,
and bold example is Kate Millet’s picaresque stream-of-
consciousness Flying (1974): autobiography that reads like a novel
and might well fit Lorde’s later neologism, in which sexual, literary
and political experimentation are brought together.
These novels of the 1970s and early 1980s largely celebrate
women’s newfound cosmopolitan and sexually ambidextrous
agency. In many movement novels, such as Lisa Alther’s comic
Kinflicks (1976) or Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1976)
lesbianism is thematized as one viable option for women; the
possibility of trying out same sex relationships in these years was
a choice that feminism in the first instance enhanced, and that
the gay and lesbian movement widened further. A few years
later Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) charts some of the
same territory, borrowing this time from the eighteenth-century
epistolary novel. Walker’s magically extended time frame maps
black life in the American south in the twentieth century, but
that journey is informed by the sequential and intersecting social
movements of the postwar period. Nevertheless it caused a critical
sensation because Walker allows Celie, her abused heroine, to
fall in love with and find sexual and emotional happiness, if not
monogamy, with the bisexual singer Shug.
Femininity and sexual transgression are of course issues in these
novels, but although many of the protagonists follow the dress
codes associated with butch lesbians – short hair, trousers–as often
as not the effect of such fictions is to refuse rather than reinforce
the fixed alterities of masculinity and femininity, and to reject
directly or by implication Hall’s adaptation of contemporary
sexology in her evocation of a ‘third sex.’ In or out of pants,
most of these female protagonists exhibit traditionally ‘feminine’
emotions – they are classically nurturant as well as brave and
adventurous, for example. If the butch/femme cliché of lesbian
attraction is still in play in many of these stories, lesbian fiction
and its related forms in this period also highlights the fluidity of
female sexual desire, and makes the norms of masculinity – if
not its threat or its power – a kind of irrelevance, and in so doing
offers femininity a much wider spectrum of human attributes.
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Beginning in the 1970s and extending through the 1990s
the proliferation of small feminist, sometimes exclusively lesbian
feminist presses, and feminist, gay and lesbian bookstores
supported a niche market for lesbian genre fiction – with its ever
expanding categories from historical romance through science
fiction – as well as autobiography and novels with more avant-
garde or simply mainstream aspirations. Transgressive femininity
as a narrative of same-sex love and desire did well in the market-
place, we might say, as long as it knew its place, or, as in the
case of a novel like The Color Purple, it was subordinate to other
contemporary social movement issues such as race. Yet these
notable successes highlight the fact that it has been noticeably
harder for novels with strongly marked lesbian themes – and
their authors – to receive more general critical acclaim. Jane Rule’s
early bittersweet romance between two women, Desert of the Heart
(1964) was made into a very successful film Desert Hearts in the
mid 1980s, its notoriety making her stand out for a time, as if
she ‘were the only lesbian in Canada’. This attitude did change:
Rule, a prolific and successful novelist, received state accolades
from both British Columbia and the Canadian state in the years
before her death in 2007. Later generations of writers have done
better: two notable exceptions to a still general if now rarely
voiced prejudice, have been the writers Jeannette Winterson and
Sarah Waters, both British.
Winterson made her name with Oranges are Not the Only
Fruit (1985) which won the Whitbread First Novel prize and
was translated to television with great success a few years later.
Its heroine is a quasi-fictional character, Jeanette and the novel
is hung on key facts of Winterson’s own history: her adoption
by working Pentecostal parents, her childhood and youth in
Accrington in the north of England, and the teenage romance
with another girl which forced her to leave home. The prohibition
and superstitions of the Pentecostal household and the Church,
which dominates Jeanette’s childhood and which interprets her
emerging sexuality as a form of possession structure the novel,
are divided up into biblical segments from ‘Genesis’ through ‘Ruth’.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is, as Winterson says in a 1991
preface to the Vintage edition, an ‘experimental novel: its interests
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are not linear’ but ‘spiral’. Winterson suggests that the novel is
both ‘threatening’ and ‘comforting’, threatening in its exposure
of the ‘sham’ of family life and its revelation that ‘what the
church calls love is actually psychosis’ and that ‘what makes life
difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people’s.’
It is threatening also, Winterson adds, because its ‘humour and
lightness’ draws even the unwilling reader to it. Its ‘comfort’ lies
in its willingness to tackle ‘difficult questions.’ (Winterson 1991:
xiii–xiv) Interspersed with Jeanette’s story are blocks of fairytale,
a fragment of Arthurian myth, meditations on history as well as
Jeanette’s adult reflections on her childhood and youth. And while
the quest element of the novel takes Jeanette to the city and the
pleasures and uncertainties of new women lovers, the last chapter,
true to Winterson’s description of the novel’s ‘spiral’ form, is an
account of a visit home, where she discovers that in spite of
scandals affecting the Pentecostal church, modern technology is
helping the sect: her mother has traded her piano for an electronic
keyboard, and is putting out the evangelical message worldwide
on Citizens’ Band radio. In the town only a few people seem to
remember her scandalous adolescence and her demonization; even
her mother doesn’t mention it. Indeed Jeanette tells us that even
earlier, two scant years after her departure, her ex-lover Melanie,
now ‘pushing a pram’, ‘seemed to have forgotten everything.’
(166 ) Challenging the linear narrative of the bildungsroman as
coming out story, Jeanette muses that ‘history is a string full of
knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a
bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for
playing. A cat’s cradle.’ (166) The same mix of scepticism and
creative appropriation applies to Winterson’s attitude towards
gender, sexuality and genre – she dislikes the fixed categories and
hierarchies of all three – as she is quoted in a profile by Maya
Jaggi, ‘I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks’ (Jaggi
2004). Like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, acknowledged
influences, she wants to do something else with both the language
and narrative structure of genre fiction. The Passion, set in the
Napoleonic era, with its web-footed, cross-dressing bisexual
Venetian heroine owes a good deal to Orlando without feeling
either dutiful or derivative. Winterson’s compelling literary voice
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develops a set of stories about love and its discontents which
acknowledges without reifying the difference gender makes. In
her fiction feminism and femininity are always immanent, but
caught, like her characters in the convoluted web – the cat’s cradle
as she says – of history.
If Winterson’s ambitious postmodern inventions are one
high-end trajectory for the lesbian novel, a nomenclature that
she herself refuses, then Sarah Waters’s trilogy of historical novels
set in Victorian and Edwardian Britain are another. Waters has
a rather different relationship to genre writing, embracing it
without the reservations and qualifications that mark Winterson’s
approach. Although she regretted it later, she was happy to call
her first novel Tipping the Velvet (1998), a ‘lesbian romp’, its
picaresque adventures taking her heroine from a Whitstable oyster
bar through music-hall, mean streets, lesbian salons and, in a final
scene, to a podium at a Hyde Park demonstration. Tipping the
Velvet has its dark moments but of the two novels that followed,
the bleak Affinity (1999), whose mis-en-scene is the prison and
the medium’s parlour and Fingersmith (2002), in part a remake
of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, set in a Dickensian thieves’
den, a pornographer’s country house and an asylum, use sensation
fiction and Victorian melodrama as their historical referents. The
period and settings allow Waters to explore the differences and
inequalities of class between women as well as their heterodox
sexuality. Waters has a light touch with historical pastiche, with
her feminist subtext and with her lesbian themes. She is able to
evoke both the atmosphere and language of the period without
making her reader long for the originals – to reimagine the
nineteenth century novel as including narratives of same-sex love
and betrayal. As with Winterson, feminism is the ground of
Waters’s rethinking of the novel, but it is a feminism with a
strong streak of the libertarian in its assumptions, a feminism
that has taken in and literalized the harsh though thoroughly
libertarian vision found in texts like Angela Carter’s provocative
1979 study The Sadeian Woman. In making one of Fingersmith’s
two female protagonists, the educated girl of low origins, Maud
Lily, voluntarily become a commercial pornographer at the end,
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Waters deliberately breaks with a more puritanical vision of
women’s sexual imaginary as well as with a simply utopian vision
of their ability to transcend or remake the social. A theme that
runs through lesbian fiction – women’s troubling capacity for
violence and cruelty as well as nurturance to other women, how-
ever its causes are ascribed – surfaces in Waters’s work also. This
propensity as regards the wild card of the sexual imagination in
particular is the subject of angry and agonistic debate among
lesbian theorists in the 1980s, and is a topic too for feminist
psychoanalytic accounts of the female imagination. Yet in the
world of Waters fiction, women’s cruelty to each other is not
raised primarily as questions of sameness or difference, or of
femininity or masculinity, or of natural versus social, but are
rather a proof of their fully human if ethically vulnerable being.
For all its leitmotifs of imprisonment, Waters’s fiction is essentially
optimistic, for the future of the lesbian themed novel as much,
if not more, than for her characters and their imagined fates, and
ours. In their very different ways both Winterson and Waters are
part of a new celebration of the power of ‘story’, perhaps in their
case of the literary in its widest sense, to reinvent gender and
sexuality.
POST-HUMAN(IST) FEMININITY?
The optimism of imaginative writers is countered to some extent
by a more millennarial and troubling vision of gender and its
future. A 1999 cover of the New Yorker magazine, in an issue
devoted to ‘Style’ at the millennium captures this well. It depicts
a robot undergoing what seems to be a complete servicing (Roberts
1999). A mechanical claw tightens a loose screw in its head while
others apply lipstick to its mouth and matching polish to its
incongruous long nails. Yet another attachment brushes the robot’s
hair. ‘It’ is a ‘she’, and ‘she’ is made to look apprehensive rather
than cosseted by all this attention, as well she may. An equation
is being made between style, which has increasingly become
an ambivalent shorthand for many aspects of modern societies,
from politics to computers, and femininity. The cartoon depicts
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femininity as style only: the body and its differences are
dispensable. A minimal visual code, and a bit of affect – bewildered
and a bit frightened will do – can, the artist implies, make a
woman of anything. The image suggests that these superficial
adornments are all that is left of and for femininity at the end
of the twentieth century. Does it also imply that the work of
feminism and of modernity in denaturalizing the body has gone
a tad too far – or not far enough? The robot’s femininity, like
the Cheshire Cat’s smile in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland,
lingers on uncannily, as both accessory and affect, commerce and
sensibility, while the living ‘body’ of femininity has disappeared.
African-American legal theorist and essayist Patricia Williams
puts such questions in the context of the ‘grotesque’ represen-
tations of gender in the United States, which are tied, she argues,
to the fetishization of racial embodiment. Through the language
of disembodied little sounds she describes listening to her mother
as she ‘does her face and hair’:
I can hear the anxiety of her preparations: the creaking of the floor-
boards as she stands closer then farther from the mirror;
the lifting and replacing of infinite bottles and jars on the shelves; the
click of her closing a compact of blush; the running of water over her
hairbrush; an anonymous fidgety frequency of sounds. She is a
constancy of small motions, clatters, soft rattles and bumps.
(Williams 1991: 196)
Performing the same ritual herself, Williams (rather like the New
Yorker cartoon) realizes that when ‘I am fully-dressed, my face
is hung with contradictions; I try not to wear all my contradictions
at the same time. I pick and choose among them’ (ibid.: 196).
Her ironic reflection on the meaning of ‘choice’ echoes the mixed
message of the New Yorker cover.
Can the machine become a labour-saving fantasy for the
feminist imagination, taking over the jobs that marked femininity
as too embodied but not quite human enough? In the utopian
feminist writings of the 1970s technology was positively appro-
priated as a way of releasing women from reproduction: Marge
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Piercy’s novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) pursued the
analysis of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1979
[1970]) by making gestation and childbirth an out-of-body
experience, and ‘mothering’ a task shared between men and
women. The dystopian future, in which women are valued only
for their capacity to reproduce, is sketched out in Margaret
Atwood’s bleak fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986). In a counter-
move, certain feminist thinkers have tried to build a new version
of ethics on the psychic and social relations that they believe flow
from women’s role in child rearing, if not childbirth. The media
debate about the uses of increasingly sophisticated reproductive
technologies erupts into the public domain with each new
‘discovery’, and is mirrored by profound disagreements within
feminism about the benefits of such technology. At the same
time, the pro-natalist, anti-abortionist and often fundamentalist
opinion in the United States, by no means a male-only stronghold,
has helped to carry laws which protect the foetus to the extent
of criminalizing the pregnant mother-to-be who drinks or smokes,
thus disaggregating the rights and identities of mother and unborn
child in novel and frightening ways, and giving a new twist to
a long tradition of contradictory representations of motherhood
as both idealized and pathologizied. Technology has altered not
just the fact of motherhood, but also profoundly affected its
representation as an aspect of gender. The spread of birth control
and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s seemed to offer
more autonomy to women in every aspect of their lives, not
simply in respect of sexuality and reproduction, and thus to shift
the relations of power between men and women. But the enhanced
possibility of ‘choice’, through the availability of contraception,
and to a lesser extent abortion, has provided, as an ironic corollary,
a further instrument of state control of poor mothers, who may
have their benefits withdrawn if they have additional children
while receiving state support. It is possible that, paradoxically,
maternal femininity has become both more liberated and more
regulated.
In a ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ feminist theorist Donna Haraway
pursues the metaphor of the ‘cyborg’, that ‘hybrid of machine
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and organism’, as a way of ‘imagining a world without gender’,
one which both short-circuits and supersedes unresolved and
perhaps unresolvable debates about origins and differences, nature
and culture (Haraway 1991: 149–50). ‘Cyborg imagery’, Haraway
suggested hopefully in the mid-1980s, was ‘a way out of the
maze of dualisms’ in which gender, and feminism too, had become
enmeshed and imprisoned (ibid.: 181). Haraway’s essay turns
on its use of irony and contradiction; it was conceived in a ‘post-
modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition’
(150) and set its face determinedly against the recreation within
feminism of a new ‘organicism’, for gender or for femininity,
against any theory which essentializes gender by turning to myths
of goddesses or of fecundity. If feminism must have a myth,
Haraway suggested, it has to be one which incorporates its own
critique of identity, it must embody the components of modernity
it might make use of, including technology, and it should
emphasize women’s – and feminism’s – radical heterogeneity.
Haraway’s model is one which tries to make incommensurable
elements connect: she envisages a working alliance that can live
with the discomfort and difficulty that we have suggested is the
condition of femininity, indeed of gender.
Haraway herself has been criticized for suggesting that ‘women
of colour’ – a politically crafted category that comprises different
ethnic and diasporic groups in political alliance – can be imagined
as one type of ‘cyborg’. For those subjects still struggling to be
regarded as ‘human’ by states and societies, the anti-human,
post-gendered metaphor may not be as liberating as it looks.
Nevertheless, blurring the boundaries between the human and
its others has remained a tempting strategy for what Haraway
evocatively calls ‘the imaginative apprehension, of oppression,
and so of possibility’ (149). When Patricia Williams imagines a
world without racism or gender hierarchy, she crosses over into
an animal world as fabulous as Haraway’s cyborgs, a world,
rather like the femininity she inhabits, ‘ambiguously natural and
crafted’ (Haraway 1991: 149). Williams’s fantasy landscape is
arctic; it is significantly without sound or affect: a world of polar
bears, of ‘white wind’, ‘shadowed amnesia; the absence of being
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. . . cool fragments of white-fur invisibility. Solid, black-gummed,
intent, observant’ (Williams 1991: 236). Her polar bears are
the poetic expression of creative paradox, not so much a dream
beyond the reach of the brutal ideologies of gender or colour, as
its necessary correlative: a country at once familiar and alien, on
whose strangely silent shores one can pause to regroup and
reconsider the ‘complexity of messages implied in our being’
(236).
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We begin this chapter in what has long been thought of as a
quintessentially male arena: the battlefield. Towards the close of
The Storm of Steel (1929), the extraordinary memoir of his
experiences as an officer in the First World War, the German
writer Ernst Jünger recounts the story of how he escaped being
captured, shooting enemy soldiers as he ran, even though his
own body was riddled with bullets. Narrated with the surgical
precision that was to become his trademark as a novelist –
‘continuous loss of blood gave me the lightness and airiness of
intoxication’ he notes as he describes dodging and then returning
enemy fire – Jünger’s recollections come to a halt in a military
hospital where the tone of his writing abruptly and rather
unpredictably changes (Jünger 1929 [1920]: 312). Declaring
himself to be ‘no misogynist’, the author cannot help but confess
that:
I was always irritated by the presence of women every time that the
fate of battle threw me into the bed of a hospital ward. One sank,
after the manly and purposeful activities of the war, into a vague
atmosphere of warmth.
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Only the ‘clear objectivity of the Catholic nursing sisterhoods’
offers an ambience that is at all ‘congenial to soldiering’, a blessed
relief from the usual oppressively maternal regime (314).
To be sure, women do have their charms. Earlier in the narra-
tive, when a ‘friendly’ seventeen-year-old, alone in her cottage,
serves him a peasant supper Jünger is immediately struck by the
‘ease of manner that one finds so often in France among quite
simple girls’ (66). For a moment he almost seems to forget that
he is a member of an army of occupation and that he is enjoying
his enemy’s hospitality. But in the rather less idyllic setting of
the military hospital a line must be drawn in the sand that will
keep femininity at bay, despite the fact that these nurses are
enlisted Germans sent to provide him with the care he so
desperately needs. It is as if the tenderness of women might
somehow further corrode the soldier’s armoured psyche, already
put at risk by his physical injuries. From the indignities of the
hospital bed it seems impossible to recover the sense of gallant
condescension that had once allowed him to find the young
French woman so enchanting, so unthreatening.
The ferocious splitting of the nurses into the compassionate
and the dispassionate, and the demand for a carefully distanced,
rigorously unemotional system of care, speaks volumes about the
precarious nature of Jünger’s male ideal. His memoirs show
masculinity at a historic turning point, a moment when ideas
about what it meant to be a man were under maximum pressure
from mass military mobilization and new, more deadly technol-
ogies of warfare. Underpinning the descriptions of manoeuvres
and scenes of combat in The Storm of Steel is an account of
Jünger’s constant struggle to secure his sense of value as a man
in the midst of the most appalling conditions, an account that
lays bare the fragility of masculinity, its hopes and its weaknesses.
Jünger learns to measure his tour of duty by a pitiless military
code that is both intensely patriotic – the book closes with the
words ‘Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!’ – and
thoroughly preoccupied with upholding one’s honour in front
of the men from the lower ranks whose composure quickly slips
away as soon as privation and danger strike (319).
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Masculinity for Jünger requires careful definition, a discrimi-
nating eye. It may be rooted in social class, but class is a matter
of birth and breeding, of what one is, not of what one achieves:
its highest good is the nation, yet some nations, including his
own as well as France, are prone to ‘excessive national feeling’,
falling into vulgar and demeaning posturing, and failing to give
the enemy his due (52). Women are no less of a problem, causing
soldiers to forget themselves and thereby undermining true
military decorum. When the men fraternize too closely with the
civilian population they are liable to soften, to neglect their duties.
Recalling one such episode in the village of Fresnoy-le-Grand,
Jünger remembers ‘the sounds of carnival in every billet’ and
coyly observes that ‘Venus deprived Mars of many servants’ before
the ‘old Prussian discipline’ was restored (119).
Of course, Jünger’s larger purpose is to commemorate the
dead and to remind his readers why his comrades died. For once
we cease to understand what it means for a man willingly to
die for his country the whole idea of the Fatherland becomes
meaningless: it too will have died. But, on another level, Jünger
is defending what he regards as a model form of masculinity,
one that is deserving of authority and respect, despite the terrible
loss of life in which it is implicated. In a sense, The Storm of
Steel seeks to make that loss intelligible through a direct appeal
to a virtuous and selfless code, the ethic of the true warrior. In
cultivating a militaristic sensibility, Jünger draws upon the full
resources of German literary culture, quoting Nietzsche, Goethe
and Schiller in the grand manner and pitting the ‘manlier’ Schiller
against the decadent French sentiments of Stendhal. Jünger thus
seeks to occupy the moral and cultural high ground, to ennoble
his fellow officers even in – perhaps especially in – defeat.
Jünger’s writing helps us to see some of the intensive cultural
work that goes into securing masculinity and why so much seems
to ride upon what men take themselves to be. But if Jünger’s
project of masculine regeneration is simply one attempt among
many to shore up contemporary manhood, to restore it to its
rightful place within the modern nation state (and restore the
nation to its proper standing in the world), how does it relate
to those gentler or less abrasive versions of masculinity with which
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it has been, at best, in competition, at worst, locked in a life and
death struggle? To put this question in perspective we need to
turn to a cultural history of masculinities.
‘THE MANLY IDEAL’
Histories of this kind are still too new to be wholly uncontroversial,
but a useful starting point is George Mosse’s synoptic study of
masculinity and modernity The Image of Man (1996), one of the
last works written by a pioneer in the field. Mosse presents a
broad brush survey that charts the rise and gradual erosion of
what he variously calls ‘the dominant masculine stereotype’,
‘normative masculinity’, or, more simply, ‘the manly ideal’, a
highly charged bundle of ideas that he traces back to the late-
eighteenth century. At the centre of this ideal lay a renewed
emphasis upon the perfectibility of the male body, which became
an outward sign of a man’s moral superiority and inner strength
of character. The body was to be a locus of self-discipline and
restraint, able so to concentrate its energies that any obstacle could
be surmounted, any hint of emotional weakness could be held
in check.
This masculine ideal was intimately connected to the growth
of a commercial and industrial bourgeoisie throughout western
Europe but, far from being a wishful self-portrait of one particular
social class, it was a complex amalgam of beliefs and practices
drawn from many sources, some old, some new. One key element
was the eighteenth-century revival of interest in the ancient Greek
ideal of male beauty associated with the writings of the archaeolo-
gist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68)
who promoted the model of the young Greek athlete as the
embodiment of what he called ‘noble simplicity and quiet
grandeur’ (quoted in Mosse 1996: 29). Winckelmann’s striking
phrase brings out not only the fusion of the moral and the
visual that was so important to the manly ideal, but the carefully
qualified sense of dignity and pomp conveyed here also suggests
its political potential as an inspirational image that might be taken
to symbolize the nation, alongside the national anthem and the
national flag. Among those deeply indebted to Winckelmann’s
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work was the republican artist Jacques Louis David (1748–1825)
whose neo-classical canvasses depicted the French revolutionaries
as ‘Greeks and Romans re-born’, men whose stirring deeds were
‘just as worthy of the painter’s attention as the episodes of Greek
and Roman history’ (Gombrich 1978: 382).
Winckelmann’s concept of beauty, which involved his praising
the qualities of ‘balance, proportion, and moderation’, was
sometimes criticized as forbiddingly abstract, too removed from
real life (Mosse 1996: 33). But it did offer a kind of standard
that ordinary bourgeois citizens might try to emulate, implying
that the male body could be purified or purged of its imperfections.
There was of course a long tradition of thought which claimed
that an individual’s moral well-being depended upon his physical
fitness – we find this idea in Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
influential treatise on education, for example – and the early years
of the nineteenth century saw the spread of popular gymnastics,
particularly in Prussia where regimes of vigorous exercise were
seen as a means of achieving German unity. According to Friedrich
Ludwig Jahn’s 1816 handbook Deutsche Turnkunst (‘German
Gymnastics’) the aim of these disciplined exertions was to produce
men that were ‘chaste, pure, capable, fearless, truthful and ready
to bear arms’ (quoted in Mosse 1996: 43).
This ideal of masculinity therefore requires intense effort: a man
must struggle against himself, even conceiving of his own body as
a sort of enemy, and also against others. The differences between
men and women had to be sharply emphasized and feminine traits
had to be kept firmly in their proper place: in men they were a
sign of weakness. Mosse argues that the manly ideal was partly
defined by what it excluded, those unsightly features and patho-
logical behaviours that indicated everything an authentic mascu-
linity was not supposed to be. More than mere bad examples to
be shunned and avoided at all costs, these negative images took
the form of dangerous ‘countertypes’ that were thought to pose a
real threat to the healthy body and ought therefore to be vigorously
resisted. These ranged from cultural outsiders like the Jews or
gypsies to those in the grip of practices that seemed much closer
to home such as masturbation or sodomy. The eighteenth-century
synonym for onanism or masturbation was ‘self-pollution’, a term
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which captures the inherently auto-destructive quality associated
with this ‘solitary vice’, one widely believed to lead to enfeeble-
ment, insanity, and even death if it was not ruthlessly stamped
out.
Mosse argues that the manly ideal shows remarkable resilience
throughout the modern era and suggests that it does not begin
to break down until the 1950s. In its idealized form, masculinity
undergoes many local revisions and permutations but nevertheless
many of the same features seem to occur again and again, as if
the image were a necessary fiction in constant need of refurbish-
ment or updating. This comes through in Jünger’s reflections on
the terrible aftermath of the battle of the Somme in The Storm
of Steel where, side by side with a picture of the devastation of
the landscape – a ‘fantastic desert’ of shell-holes ‘strewn with
bully-tins, broken weapons, fragments of uniform, and dud shells,
with one or two dead bodies on its edge’ – we witness the
emergence of a new man, ‘more mysterious and hardy and callous
than in any previous battle’. For Jünger this figure signalled the
death of chivalry and the old Europe:
After this battle the German soldier wore the steel helmet, and in his
features there were chiselled the lines of an energy stretched to the
utmost pitch, lines that future generations will perhaps find as
fascinating and imposing as those of many heads of classical or
Renaissance times.
(Jünger 1929: 109)
The reference to the classical body is unmistakable. Jünger is
describing a watershed in European experience and yet he still
regards ‘honour and gallantry’ as crucial if an officer is to be ‘the
master of the hour’. In Jünger the manly ideal takes its most
heroic form, an indication perhaps of how difficult it was for
modern masculinity completely to break with the socially redun-
dant codes of chivalry, as though warriors or knights had not
been transformed into courtiers long ago. ‘What is more sublime,’
he asks ‘than to face death at the head of a hundred men?’ Jünger
can imagine nothing nobler and insists that only weaklings
would settle for less. The brave leader ‘will never find obedience
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fail him, for courage runs through the ranks like wine’ (Jünger
1929: 27).
We will return to the question of heroism in a moment. But
what of those men who did not think like Jünger? How does
one live without the classical body – indeed, couldn’t it be said
that the history of modern warfare is precisely what makes that
ideal redundant? For a partial answer we can contrast The Storm
of Steel with another book published in the same year, Erich
Maria Remarque’s pacificist novel All Quiet on the Western Front
(1993 [1929]) which provides a view of the German Army from
the rank and file. Although Remarque’s book owes more to stories
told to him by other soldiers than to any of his own experiences
of the war, many of the scenes and situations described in All
Quiet on the Western Front show an unmistakable resemblance
to those recalled by Jünger: the ‘torn, blasted earth’ of the battle-
ground littered with ‘convulsed and dead soldiers’ under a ‘greasy
sun’ (Remarque 1993: 79), for example, or the soldier’s sense of
the Western Front as ‘a mysterious whirlpool’ pulling him ‘slowly,
irresistibly, inescapably into itself’ (41). For both writers the battle
zone seems to have a life of its own, like some vast lumbering
machine or an enormous alien forcefield against which the indi-
vidual can easily dwindle into nothing. In each case the narrator
recounts his struggle to survive and to find meaning in a world
poised at the zero degree of existence.
But in Remarque’s novel honour is no longer available to the
modern soldier; no glory attaches to his military exploits and,
contra Mosse, there are few traces of ‘the manly qualities of endur-
ance and calmness in battle’ (see Mosse 1996: 108). For a brief
moment very early on in the book we are given a poignant glimpse
of an ancient past in a near magical description of a supply platoon
at night in which ‘the guns and the wagons’ seem to ‘float past
the dim background of the moonlit landscape’ and ‘the riders in
their steel helmets resemble knights of a forgotten time’. It is a
sight that is ‘strangely beautiful and arresting’, yet the next instant
the men are cursing as they stumble around unanticipated shell-
holes, falling face-first into the rolls of barbed wire carried by
the men in front (43).
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Where Jünger sought to cultivate an almost spiritual sense
of dedication, steeling the body with the unyielding discipline of
the mind, Paul, the narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front,
learns to live inside his body more intensely, shedding the false
sentiments inculcated at home and in school. There is a kind
of double disillusionment. The harshness of military training
quickly quashes any last vestige of idealism – ‘we learned that a
bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer’
– and then ‘the classical conception of the Fatherland held by
our teachers’ begins to wither away as the new recruits realize
that they are merely being drilled into obedient cannon-fodder.
Bursting with enthusiasm, they had enlisted to fight for their
country only to discover that they were being prepared ‘for hero-
ism as though we were circus-ponies’ (20–1).
In fact, the soldiers’ experiences turn them into animals of a
very different stamp. They become ‘wild beasts’, ‘because that is
the only thing which brings us through safely’: in battle, if one
wants ‘to live at any price’, this ‘is a sheer necessity’ (78, 94).
The need to survive teaches these men ‘the indifference of wild
creatures’, transforming them ‘into unthinking animals in order
to give [them] the weapon of instinct’, for had they relied upon
‘clear, conscious thought’ the shock of fully understanding the
grim reality of war would have driven them to the point of
mental breakdown (178). This state of bestiality moves through
several distinct registers. In one characterization, it involves
stripping away the folly and irrelevance of modern culture in
order to recognize the animal nature that is the true essence of
humankind. On other occasions, such as close proximity to battle,
man’s animality is conceived as a wilful slide into ‘degeneration’,
voluntarily embracing the condition of so-called primitive peoples
like the ‘Bushmen’, abandoning the entire process of social
development that is supposed to separate tribal societies from
twentieth-century Europeans (179). Or again, soldiering on may
be depicted as a brutalized deepening of the unconscious, a retreat
from the rational mind by forcing the ‘terror of the front’ to
‘sink down in us like a stone’ through an elaborate effort of
repression (94–5). The same stark bestial reality afflicts the enemy
too and one of the most striking features of Remarque’s book is
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how little national differences really matter. Even in defeat, animal
imagery comes to the fore: Russian prisoners-of-war, ‘big fellows
with beards’ seem to resemble ‘meek, scolded, St. Bernard dogs’
(125)
Underlying each of these ideas of the ‘human animal’ is a view
of the male body as ‘grotesque’: uncontrolled, appetitive, vulgar,
dirty and inconvenient, a body that smells and bleeds and laughs
and screams, especially when it is not supposed to. It stands,
of course, in stark contrast to the virtues of the classical body,
beautifully proportioned, nobly disposed, and perfectly ordered,
whether represented by Winckelmann’s Greek revivalism or
Jünger’s military discipline. In All Quiet on the Western Front,
however, bodily functions are ever-present: soldiers wet their beds,
curse and grind their teeth, and their bodies gurgle horribly as
the life oozes slowly from them. We learn of the pleasures of
sitting on the portable latrines in the middle of a field of poppies,
reading, smoking and playing cards. And that a ‘sharpened spade’
makes a better weapon than a bayonet, because it can easily be
removed from the opponent’s body without having ‘to kick hard
on the other fellow’s belly to pull it out again’ (72).
The grotesque body foregrounds ‘the gaping mouth, the protu-
berant belly and buttocks, the feet and the genitals’ (Stallybrass
and White 1986: 22). ‘The soldier is on friendlier terms than
other men with his stomach and intestines’, observes Paul, and
he also notices that ‘three-quarters of [a soldier’s] vocabulary is
derived from these regions’, giving ‘an intimate flavour to expres-
sions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation’
(Remarque 1993: 11). Everything in war has a visceral, earthy
quality about it and the messiness of daily life can be a source
of pleasure as well as anxiety. From Remarque’s depiction of the
Western Front it is clear that Napoleon was only half-right when
he said that an army marches on its stomach: here it thinks with
its belly too.
The opposition between the classical and the grotesque body
was initially theorized by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin
(1895–1975) in his magisterial study Rabelais and His World
(1965) which reads the Renaissance writer’s huge sprawling text
Gargantua and Pantagruel as an attempt to dismantle the stifling
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orthodoxies inherited from the Middle Ages. According to Bakhtin,
Rabelais’ assault on the high seriousness of medieval scholasticism
uses a bawdy and exaggerated treatment of the human body as
an occasion for humour and parody. ‘Laughter degrades and
materializes’, says Bakhtin; it deflates the empty pretensions of the
spiritual and the transcendental and brings them down to earth
(Bakhtin 1968: 20). Rabelais’ style can be termed ‘grotesque
realism’ or ‘grotesque fantasy’ since it describes excessive and
outrageous events with an extraordinary visual exactness. This is
as true of the tumultuous battle scenes in the book as it is of the
story of Gargantua’s birth following his mother’s attack of
diarrhoea after eating too much tripe.
While Remarque’s novel is a far cry from this kind of overripe
comedy, it does take the indignities and satisfactions experienced
by the male body as the butt of much bitter humour and even
aggression. The grotesque masculinity of Paul and his comrades
is partly defined by their irreverance, which often erupts into
insubordination. Officers who are perceived as vindictive or unjust
are likely to be subjected to humiliating reprisals, as in the case
of Corporal Himmelstoss, ‘the strictest disciplinarian in the camp’
(Remarque 1993: 21). Ambushed on his way back from the pub,
Himmelstoss is tied up and horsewhipped until his ‘striped . . .
backside gleamed in the moonlight’ as he scampers off ‘on all
fours’ (38). What makes All Quiet on the Western Front a pacifist
text is not any outright condemnation of violence per se, for the
stories of revenge or retaliation that it tells positively revel in
cruelty and pain. Instead, it is as if the men’s aggression must
first be redirected against the enemy within their own ranks in
order that the book’s critique of the institution of war can be
underwritten by an appeal to a common humanity. The realization
that ‘you [the enemy] are a man like me’ depends upon a prior
displacement of hostility, upon someone, somewhere bearing the
burden of difference and hatred, upon guilt and blame being
re-assigned in order to secure the creation of innocence (147).
There are two obvious problems with linking masculinity and
the grotesque body in this way, however well it might seem to
fit the account of army life in Remarque’s novel. First, why should
we assume that the grotesque body is some special preserve of
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men? Indeed, doesn’t the example of Gargantua’s unfortunate
mother with her prolapsed bowel suggest that women are equally
likely to be depicted in similar terms, just as the statue of Venus
de Milo represents the classical womanly body? This is a perfectly
fair point – and for an exploration of this important topic, see
Mary Russo’s excellent study The Female Grotesque (1995) – but
it is one that neither Bakhtin nor his disciples would wish to
deny. Instead, they could plausibly argue that the classical and
the grotesque body each has its own distinctively masculine and
feminine variants. For every Corporal Himmelstoss in a book
like All Quiet on the Western Front, there is a Bertha Mason in
Jane Eyre.
However, this response leads on to the second query. Because,
put like this, it sounds as if the classical and the grotesque are
timeless categories – as though, for example, the image of the
coarse, farting, scratching, yawning, boozing male persists
unchanged from Rabelais’ Gargantua to more recent incarnations
like Gary and Tony in the TV series Men Behaving Badly. Doesn’t
this merely show that Paul and his fellow-soldiers in All Quiet
on the Western Front were correct in claiming that ultimately
human beings (and men especially) are merely animals? To this
objection the answer has to be: yes and no. It is undoubtedly
true that there are continuities in low or rough humour over
the ages and that the infirmities of the body will always be a
subject of laughter and derision. But on the other hand, what is
thought of as vulgar or in bad taste will very much depend
upon the standards of polite society in different times and places.
And, to return to the two examples that we have been discussing,
there is a world of difference between Rabelais and Remarque.
As we noted in passing, Rabelais’ writing involves more than
making lewd jokes at the expense of the other-worldly monk or
the medieval philosopher, for hand in hand with the farcical
distortions of human bodily functions we find an exceptionally
precise anatomical knowledge of its workings.
The point about ‘Rabelaisian laughter’, argues Bakhtin, is not
only that it ‘destroys traditional connections and abolishes ideal-
ized strata; it also brings out the crude, unmediated connections
between things that people otherwise seek to keep separate, in
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pharasaical error’ (Bakhtin 1981 [1975]: 170). The idea of the
infant Gargantua finding his own way out of his mother’s womb
by climbing up a hollow vein and easing himself out through
her left ear is a patently ridiculous conceit, but it is rendered in
scrupulous physiological detail. Set beside this meticulous order
of description, Remarque’s style seems loose and impressionistic.
Rabelais’ fascination with the life of the body is part of a humanist
outlook that conferred the highest value upon ordinary human
existence. Paradoxically, this often results in comic representations
of death, of the ‘cheerfully dying man’, ‘presented in close
relationship with the birth of new life and – simultaneously –
with laughter’, not to mention food, drink and ‘sexual indecencies’.
Despite its many bloody and chaotic episodes, Gargantua and
Pantagruel is largely motivated by the desire to valorize ‘the eternal
triumph’ of life over death, to insist on the human ‘responsibility
to fight to the end for this life’ (Bakhtin 1981: 197–8).
One would be hard pressed to find an instance of ‘cheerful
death’ in All Quiet on the Western Front. Although the role
of vulgarity in Remarque’s novel is to undermine the pieties of
Germany’s official culture, it provides little basis for optimism.
The war has so disrupted the experience of the book’s protagonists
that they are torn between the struggle to stay alive and their
sense that death will bring a welcome relief from their suffering.
Some of the bleakest moments in the novel record their feeling
of being isolated from the sympathetic understanding of other
men, cut adrift from past and future generations, from those
who never knew and those who will all too quickly forget: these
‘weary, broken, burnt out, rootless’ soldiers will finally be ‘super-
fluous even to ourselves’ (Remarque 1993: 190). In Remarque
the grotesque male body is part of a language of refusal, of
resistance to the sanitized ideologies of the state; but, as the
novel wears on, the body increasingly takes on another kind of
grotesqueness due to its having been disfigured or dismembered.
Even in hospital ‘the wounded have their shattered limbs hanging
free in the air from a gallows’ or their ‘intestine wounds . . . are
constantly full of excreta’ (172). To find a visual equivalent of
these scenes, one would need to turn to the shattered bodies and
twisted faces displayed in Otto Dix’s paintings of the Great War
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and its aftermath, particularly his gruesomely stylized portraits
of crippled war veterans (see Armstrong 1998: 96–7).
DISSIPATION AND ‘NATURAL CHARACTER’
So far we have been tracing the history of ‘the manly ideal’ and
its countertypes in the modern era, looking especially closely at
changing conceptions of the male body as it was re-imagined
following the First World War. One disadvantage of Mosse’s
account of the dominant form of masculinity – and this is also
true of the opposition between the classical and the grotesque –
is that, however closely these contrasting figures are intertwined,
they can easily start to become polarized, as if they were mutually
exclusive. In fact, masculinities are often much more inherently
contradictory than such an analysis would tend to suggest, and
never more so than in periods of intense social upheaval. ‘I’ll
nearly always be mistaken if I think that a man has only a single
character’, wrote the young Stendhal in his diary in 1801 (Beyle
1955: 14). Mosse may well be right about the manly ideal, but
wrong to think of it in such a relatively rigid manner. By regarding
it as ‘a stereotype, presenting a standardized mental picture’,
Mosse sometimes comes close to reifying his own argument
unnecessarily (Mosse 1996: 5).
As we saw earlier, Mosse dates the origins of the new manly
ideal from the second half of the eighteenth century and this
period therefore provides an interesting test case as to how robust
this male sense of self was in practice. London in the eighteenth
century was a highly contested social space in which a number
of social groupings and factions vied for power and in the city’s
theatres, taverns, and coffee-houses several different styles of
masculinity were to be seen, among them the fop, the rake and
the gentleman, to name just a handful. None of these labels was
entirely clear-cut and few kept the same meaning for very long;
as chronicled in early issues of periodicals like The Tatler, for
example, they were ‘less an orderly taxonomy than a fluid
continuum of male gender types’ usually distinguished through
‘details in the extravagance of their dress’ and by the ways in
which they sought the favours of women (McKeon 1995: 313).
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To make one’s way in such a volatile milieu was not always
easy. One of the best case studies we have of the uncertainties
surrounding masculinity in the middle of the century comes from
the diaries kept by James Boswell, whose Life of Johnson (1791)
was one of the first modern biographies. Throughout his diaries
Boswell worried over his ambitions and his failings, and about
what kind of man he really wanted to be. His London Journal
1762–1763 is particularly fascinating because of his descriptions
of the wealth of opportunities and temptations that the capital
made available to him: it was, as he disarmingly observes,
simultaneously ‘the seat of Parliament and the seat of pleasure’
(Boswell 1950: 140). Boswell, who sometimes dreamed of a career
in government, found himself attracted to both, yet he also believed
that they were quite incompatible. Unfortunately, he found it hard
to decide which mattered most.
Boswell’s dilemma can be read as at once social and philo-
sophical. Socially, Boswell came from a wealthy, landed family
of considerable professional standing: his father was one of five
judges in Scotland’s supreme criminal court and as a young man
Boswell was pressed into studying law, which he did with little
enthusiasm. By the late 1750s he had already begun to publish
his own verse and, much to his father’s dismay, he formed the
plan of becoming an officer in the Guards – not because he had
any desire to fight for his country, but simply to enable him to
live permanently in London. In fact, following the successful
conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the army already had far
more officers than it needed and Boswell’s aspirations were
hopelessly unrealistic. But his experiences in the city, where he
met the writer Samuel Johnson for the first time, played a key
role in his formation as a man of letters.
On an ethical or philosophical level, Boswell was tormented
by questions of identity that ultimately derived from strains in
the way the self could be imagined in the late eighteenth century.
Boswell aspired to be a man who ‘was rational and composed,
yet lively and entertaining’. But in spite of a firm belief that his
‘natural character is that of dignity’, he found it difficult to ‘fix
myself in such a character and preserve it uniformly’ and when
his ‘resolution’ or will-power faltered he became a ‘dissipated,
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inconstant fellow’ at the mercy of every passing whim or fancy
(Boswell 1950: 258). Boswell alternates between seeing himself
as a sober, upright individual, a condition he describes as retenu
– that is to say, reserved or restrained – and feeling that his best
self is always being thwarted by his own uncontrollable enthu-
siasms or impulses, rendering him scatter-brained or étourdi, a
man whose identity lacked a secure centre, a slave to his emotions.
Could the self ever be anything more than a loose bundle of
appetites or sensations, without a stable core? Some of Boswell’s
contemporaries, like his friend the philosopher David Hume,
were sceptical that it could. But, while Boswell resisted this idea
intellectually – hence his conviction that each man possessed a
‘natural character’, a kind of essential inner self – he found himself
pulled between the competing models of masculinity he
encountered in London. In this period, Boswell:
represents an amalgam of increasingly mobile status positions: he
vacillates between Scots, English, aristocratic, and bourgeois male
identities as he maintains his dignity, attempts to adhere to a strict
sexual morality, and pursues the pleasure that may constitute the
privilege of his station.
(Weed 1997/8: 216)
He is, by turns, pious and amorous, a man of gravitas and a man
of sensual pleasures, a highminded scholar who will sometimes
masquerade as a lower-class tradesman. Paradoxically, the sexual
desires that are partly aroused by the urge to transgress class
boundaries are then immediately punished by his own self-disgust
at having done so. On one occasion he ‘picked up a strong, jolly
young damsel’ and, after walking her down to Westminster Bridge,
found that ‘[t]he whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling
below us amused me much. Yet after the brutish appetite was
sated, I could not but despise myself for being so closely united
with such a low wretch’ (Boswell 1950: 255–6).
As Felicity Nussbaum’s detailed study has shown, the contrast
between Boswell’s retenu and étourdi selves was deeply gendered.
His rationality and his reserve are not just confirmed by the
approval of his male peers; they also crucially depend upon his
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‘power to maintain dominance over women’ (Nussbaum 1989:
115). In the account of his affair with the actress he calls Louisa
in his journal, Boswell writes of his ‘sweet delirium’ and ‘supreme
rapture’. Yet, although he is thoroughly delighted by his own
‘godlike vigour’, his self-possession prevents him from losing
control, from frittering away his precious masculinity. His phrasing
here is particularly revealing. ‘Sobriety’, he insists, ‘preserved me
from effeminacy and weakness’ (Boswell 1950: 139). A week later,
however, on discovering the painful signs of an unwanted foreign
visitor, ‘Signor Gonorrhea’, he has second thoughts and is beside
himself at the idea of having been ‘the dupe of a strumpet’, at
having wasted his time and his money (155–6).
Believing that Louisa must have known of the infection, Boswell
confronts her. Once again he is in command of the situation: ‘I
really behaved with a manly composure and polite dignity that
could not fail to inspire an awe’, while Louisa stands miserably
before him as ‘pale as ashes and trembled and faltered’. He receives
her denials and anxious queries about his health in silence,
dismissing her from his mind as ‘a most consummate dissembling
whore’. Boswell refuses to accept any blame for this incident,
regarding his misfortune as ‘merely the chance of war’. And so
the affair is over. But what happens next sheds fresh light on the
relationship between Boswell’s rival selves.
On leaving Louisa, he calls on someone much older than
himself, the actor David Garrick. Boswell was to seek the approval
of fatherly men all his life and is terribly flattered when this rich
and famous figure confidently predicts that one day his visitor
will be ‘very great’. Yet Boswell is too anxious and disconsolate
to allow himself to imagine such a future. Instead, he becomes
‘what the French call un étourdi’ and gives ‘free vent’ to his feelings
of admiration for Garrick, seizing him by the hand and heaping
affection and gratitude upon the actor. This emotional outburst
raises ‘a charming flutter of spirits’ and relieves his depression.
Nevertheless, on returning to his lodgings at the end of the day,
he again feels ‘very bad’ (160–2).
In the eyes of the modern reader Boswell might appear as
a muddled, rather vain individual, prone to overpowering
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moodswings. However, what distinguishes Boswell’s psychological
universe from our own is the way in which he has to tack between
contrasting styles of masculinity in order to neutralize his feelings
of guilt and shame and continue to believe in his own self-
worth. Boswell’s emotional economy is a tangle of nuances and
discriminations, a delicate balancing act that can easily fall apart.
To be ‘un étourdi’ can be compromising, but it is not necessarily
to be despised, so long as a sense of proportion is maintained.
There is a world of difference between the warm eloquent (not
to say, homosocial) candour that passes between men, whether
among one’s peers or one’s betters, and finding oneself unmanned
in the presence of a woman. In one desperate episode, Boswell
deliberately kits himself out in the scruffy attire of ‘a blackguard’,
pretending to be ‘a disbanded officer of the Royal Volunteers’,
though he also describes himself to the prostitutes he is seeking
as ‘a barber’ and ‘a highwayman’. After a dispiriting tale of
rejection turning to rape, Boswell is pleased to report that his
clothes and his lies never prevented him from being recognized
as ‘a gentleman in disguise’ by those on whom he bestows his
favours (272–3). If self-loathing is never very far away, some of
his most dissolute nocturnal adventures can still occasionally
confirm him in his preferred identity.
In Boswell’s journals, despite the desire for an essential or
‘natural character’, we see the author repeatedly returning to the
idea that the self is not fixed, but ‘may be continually revised
and remade’ (Nussbaum 1989: 107). In his Life of Johnson
Boswell produced an account of an exemplary life, ‘a man whose
talents, acquirements, and virtues, were so extraordinary, that the
more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded
by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and
reverence’ (Boswell 1953: 1402). Above all others, Dr Johnson
was the companion whose advice most consistently helped to
raise Boswell’s spirits and to give him a sense of purpose, for
Johnson’s pre-eminence as a writer and scholar had only been
achieved after many setbacks. In return, Boswell’s biography aimed
to establish Johnson as a literary icon, an inspiration for future
generations.
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‘THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS’
This was not to be. By the mid-nineteenth century, Johnson’s
character had already been turned into caricature and he was
remembered as a man whose fabulous eccentricities seemed to
mark him out as a figure of fun, one whose ‘opinions’ were ‘fast
becoming obsolete’ (Carlyle 1966 [1841]: 182). It was left to
another Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle, to attempt to rescue
Johnson’s reputation and he did so by presenting an image that
stood in sharp contrast to Boswell’s and that was part of a new
take on the ‘manly ideal’ tailored to the altered circumstances of
the Victorian age. Less than eighty years after Boswell and Johnson
had first met in the capital, Carlyle chose to deliver his annual
course of lectures in London on the topic of ‘heroes’, those
‘Great Men’ who had shaped the course of ‘Universal History’.
And among the curiously assorted names in his pantheon –
Mohammed, Luther, Cromwell, Rousseau – Carlyle numbered
the undervalued Johnson as a hero of a new type, ‘the hero as
man of letters’.
Carlyle’s survey identified six categories of hero, some of whom,
like mythical or divine beings, prophets and priests, were largely
bound to the past, while others, such as the poets Dante and
Shakespeare, lived on in the present by continuing to give a
national voice to their peoples. But with the coming of print
culture a new kind of hero becomes possible, raising some of the
functions of the idols of yesteryear to a higher level. The printing
press enables the man of letters to reach out across time and
space and ‘accomplish miracles’: ‘teaching, preaching, governing,
and all else’ (160–1). For in Carlyle’s view it is the writer whose
books and essays now instruct the nation and who is therefore
best able to make things happen, displacing the pulpit, the
university and parliament from power. In an intoxicating flight
of rhetoric, Carlyle imagines the man of letters as representating
a new ruling class, one that would place ‘intellect at the top of
affairs’ and ensure government by ‘the true, just, humane and
valiant man’ (169).
Carlyle paints the lives of his heroes in intensely dramatic
colours. They are typically men of humble origins, earnestly
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wrestling with immense obstacles in an endeavour to find and
realize the truth. They are sincere, honest, determined, fearless,
and free of all humbug or cant. Often these qualities are instinc-
tive: Shakespeare, remembered here as a writer of tragedies and
‘a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light’, was ‘everyway an
unconscious man’, ‘a Force of Nature’. For, intones Carlyle in
his best biblical manner, ‘whatsoever is truly great’ in a man
‘springs-up from the inarticulate deeps’ (111–12). As this lofty
standpoint implies, Carlyle’s sketch of Johnson is a far cry from
the ‘highly instructive and highly entertaining’ conversationalist
described by Boswell (Boswell 1950: 292). Instead it depicts him
as a tragic individual struggling heroically against every kind of
adversity, his noble inner nature beset by poverty, ill-health and
neglect:
Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy
heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a
stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could
come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there
were nothing better! The largest soul that was in all England; and
provision made for it of ‘fourpence-halfpenny a day.’ Yet a giant
invincible soul; a true man’s.
(Carlyle 1966: 179)
Johnson is hardly Cromwell or Mohammed; but Carlyle gives
his work an epic grandeur that blurs the differences between
them, transforming him into a crusader against scepticism and
unbelief. And, as the lectures draw to a close, one is finally unsure
in whose hands Carlyle expects the future to lie: the man of
letters or the man of action.
With hindsight it is hard not to read Carlyle’s attempt to depict
the writer’s vocation in heroic vein as a vindication of his own
personal myth of authorship, a reworking of the narrative of his
struggle to carve out a literary career for himself. ‘To carve out’
is no idle figure of speech here, for one crucial move in Carlyle’s
creation of a distinctive literary persona was his alignment of the
writer’s work with the simple dignity of his father’s daily labour
as a stonemason. Carlyle’s memoir of his father’s life, written
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immediately after news of his death in 1832, uses the same
language of heroic struggle as the 1840 lectures: ‘Nothing that
he undertook to do but he did it faithfully and like a true man’
(Carlyle 1881: 5). Revealingly, Carlyle even compares him to the
man of letters, surmising that his father was ‘among Scottish
peasants what Samuel Johnson was among English authors’ (15).
As Norma Clarke has argued, one effect of this Oedipal
identification was to reclaim the world of literature for men, to
produce a ‘social fiction’ to offset the social fact of increased
opportunities and recognition for women writers in the early
decades of the nineteenth century (Clarke 1991: 41). In Carlyle’s
imagination such brave, reverent, natural men formed a kind of
brotherhood, united in devotion to their calling. This trope of
brotherhood appears in a variety of guises in Victorian art and
literature, from the pre-Raphaelites to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
At times this kinship between men is compared to a monastic
order, as in Carlyle’s meditation in Past and Present (1843) on
the contrast between the ‘wretchedness’ of the modern workhouse
and the life that was once found in the now ruined abbey at
Bury St Edmunds (Carlyle 1971: 262). In this text, as elsewhere
in Carlyle’s writings, women are pushed to the margins of the
ideal society, at which point they can be conveniently forgotten.
In Past and Present the symbolic moment for this exclusion
occurs when the young Samson, the man who will become the
monastery’s abbot and heroic leader, leaves his mother for the
Church.
Carlyle’s fantasy of male bonding is not without its problems,
however. The powerful communal feelings passing between men
can become charged with desire and, at St Edmundsbury, it is
the task of the fatherly abbot to set an example, to hold their
psychic energies in check, and to sublimate any last trace of
homoeroticism into productive work. The nobility of the
Carlylean male ideal is compromised by a deep interior division
between the need for mastery or control that will create order
out of chaos and a fear of the potentially untameable flows of
energy within. One can see this as a splitting of gendered identity,
in which the instability of what for the early Victorians constituted
‘maleness’, the potent physical powers that were thought to be
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of the basic essence of man, begins to sabotage the ‘manliness’
or self-discipline with which an individual conducts himself. For
Carlyle,
maleness, potentially progressive, is also innately diseased. The very
spring of male identity is also potentially the source of its destruction
as dissolution. Repelled by the male body, by male sexuality, by what
he sees as the miasmic swamp of the male psyche, Carlyle imagines
the interior of the male as polluted, unclean. Masculine energy may
power the energy of industrial society but it may also disrupt it in a
power surge, an overflow of the diseased fluid interior in a flood that
would dissolve the ego boundaries of the male self and the patriarchal
bounds of the social system.
(Sussman 1995: 24)
Herbert Sussman’s analysis of the phantasmatic construction of
masculinity in texts like Past and Present brings out not only
Carlyle’s immensely fertile strategy of yoking together materials
drawn from different historical times, so that the warrior may be
reborn (or re-branded) as the ‘Captain of Industry’; but it also
reveals the extreme precariousness of his restless imaginings, a
masculine ideal that is in constant danger of collapsing under
the weight of its own contradictions. Unlike the rival images of
the male self held out for inspection in Boswell’s journals, this
is not so much a conflict between competing masculinities as a
strong bid to establish a dominant form of masculinity for the
industrial era that pays the price of its own exclusions. Carlyle’s
dreams contain the seeds of his own worst nightmares, haunted
by thoughts of indolence or disruption that assume the shapes
of feminized men (the lazy freed slave conjured up in the notorious
pamphlet ‘The Nigger Question’) or castrating women (the female
marauders depicted in his study The French Revolution).
We would seem to have moved a long way from the battlefields
and the trenches. But in fact we have come full circle. For one
of the major influences upon Sussman’s account of Carlyle in
his book Victorian Masculinities is Klaus Theweleit’s disturbing
two-volume study Male Fantasies (1987, 1989), an investigation
into the gendered imaginary of the right wing Freikorps, private
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armies of mercenaries that were employed to contain the ‘threat’
of communism in the aftermath of the First World War. From
an intensive reading of letters, autobiographies and novels,
Theweleit reconstructs the fantasy world of these forerunners of
German fascism showing how it thrived upon a series of patho-
logical representations of hostile and aggressive women who
symbolized all that was felt to be most terrifying in their political
adversaries. Here sexual predators and militant revolutionaries
became indistinguishable: the mocking, brazen prostitute was
sister to the sadistic communist riflewoman, phallic creatures
who brought slow, sexually humiliating death, finally leaving their
male victims ‘drenched in black blood between hips and thighs’
(Theweleit 1987: 74).
Blood flows throughout these texts. But so too do desire, energy,
tears, and bile, passions and bodily fluids. Bodies themselves
seem to merge into a liquid mass, the ‘Red flood’ that threatens
to drown the gallant men who are defending their nation’s honour.
Theweleit traces a complicated psychic economy of dams and
torrents in which the battle to stem the swelling enemy tide has
as its counterpart the soldier’s strict control over his own bodily
functions so that he does not turn to water, jelly or shit. Unlike
the sublimated, productive energy that courses through Carlyle’s
imagery, the literature of the Freikorps typically erupts into
climactic violence when the moment is right. In one scene depicted
by the popular novelist Edwin Erich Dwinger, the men cannot
shoot:
into the crowd of women until the advance wave of that slimy stream
is already upon them. Not until the spit of one of the working-class
women is already dripping down his medal of honour does Donat
[the soldier] fire into the woman’s open mouth. And not until then
does Donat perceive that what was once a face is now only a bloody
pulp.
(quoted in Theweleit 1987: 428–9)
In this hideous contra-flow, aggression is always already sexualized
and the metonymic slippage between different kinds of fluids –
slime, spit, blood, pulp – is endless. In Theweleit’s analysis, the
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appeal of fascism goes right to the heart of this desperately embat-
tled masculine imagination, for the Nazis, in effect, promised to
turn the tide, channel men’s energies and desires, ‘and let them
flow inside their rituals’ (429). Fascism thus ‘translates internal
states into massive external monuments or ornaments’ (431); it
offers a controlled release of intolerable frustrations through mass
political spectacles like the Nuremberg Rally.
As a theory of fascism, Theweleit’s argument is tendentious in
the extreme. It would reduce too many complex political and
economic events, from hyperinflation to the anti-Jewish pogroms
of the Reichskristallnacht, to an immense psychodrama. But as
a study of what we might call a combatant masculinity, one that
acquired a deadly social presence at a key point in German history,
Theweleit’s work is extremely insightful, not least for the way in
which it seeks to identify the ideological currents that passed
back and forth between personal memories, popular literature,
and political propaganda. It allows us to glimpse the inner dynamic
through which the classic military body patriotically extolled by
Ernst Jünger came to be transformed into the fascist ‘new man’.
Jünger, Remarque, Boswell and Carlyle were all engaged in an
attempt to imagine a form of manhood that was worthy of the
name, to construct a version of the male self that could command
moral and cultural respect, sometimes in the face of the most
appalling conditions. Yet despite the fact that their work can be
placed within a general history of the dominant modes of
masculinity in Western Europe, these writers differ considerably
in their accounts of men’s strengths and blindspots. Taken
together, their writings show more signs of discontinuity than
convergence. They cast doubt on the notion of a single modern
manly ideal.
Even where there are points of overlap, as in the profound
ambivalence towards bourgeois society that they each exhibit, the
differences between them outweigh the similarities. One of the
most unsettling episodes in All Quiet on the Western Front comes
when the soldiers are sent on leave and are unable to adjust to
civilian life. Not only do they find themselves estranged from
the people who remained in their home towns, but ordinary
everyday sounds like the noise of the tramcars remind them of
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the screech of shells whistling across the battlefield. The mood
of despair evoked by Remarque is diametrically opposed to the
scathing tone adopted by Jünger in his indictment of ‘the
bourgeois epoch’ a mere two years later. In a highly polemical
essay ‘On Danger’ (1931) Jünger attacked the bourgeois as the
person who overvalues security, who desires a reasonable world
from which risk, misfortune and chance have been completely
banished. The comfortable middle classes are not only unaware
that life is becoming increasingly hazardous, but they are ill-
equipped to understand why this is to be welcomed. In their eyes
the man who jubilantly volunteered to fight for his country in
the Great War was guilty of ‘patriotic error or a suspect love of
adventure’; whereas, in reality, ‘this jubilation was a revolutionary
protest against the values of the bourgeois world’, a Nietzschean
demand for ‘a revaluation of all values’. Jünger places the warrior
alongside the other great outsiders of modernity, the artist and
the criminal, men who, whether ‘lofty or base’, are closer to ‘the
elemental’ nature of things than their bourgeois cousins (Jünger
1993 [1931]).
OF BEETLES AND DANDIES
Jünger believed ‘the values of the bourgeois world’ to be incom-
patible with what he called ‘the select embodiments of a powerful
masculinity’ and on one occasion he even went so far as to depict
combat as ‘the male form of procreation’ (quoted in Huyssen
1993: 10). But by no means every writer who has found himself
at odds with modern bourgeois society has regarded it as lacking
in masculinity. To the contrary, for some modernist writers it is
the crushingly oppressive nature of bourgeois masculinity that
led to its symbolic renunciation in the pages of their fiction.
As an extreme example, consider one of the most famous of
all twentieth-century texts: Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamor-
phosis (1915) with its abrupt and unforgettable opening: ‘When
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he
found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect’
(Kafka 1992: 76). At first sight Kafka’s fable would seem to have
little to do with gender, and Gregor Samsa’s downward spiral
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from rejection by his family to an ignominious death has often
been read as a parable of spiritual alienation and martyrdom, a
vivid allegory of the human condition. However, recent Kafka
scholarship has begun to think much harder about the author’s
relationship to the time and place within which he worked,
producing a very different picture of these strange, disquieting
writings.
In his fascinating book Kafka’s Clothes (1992), Mark M.
Anderson portrays the young Kafka as a contradictory figure, a
dandyish man about town who was nevertheless deeply critical
of the decadence of urban life. Although early photographs show
him ‘sporting broad, upturned collars, fancy silk neckties, even
a top hat, tuxedo, and gloves’, he was also attending popular
lectures on clothing reform and the need for a wholesale return
to nature (51). Both of these preoccupations had an impact upon
Kafka’s aestheticism for, while he soon ceased to cultivate the
stylish air of the snappy dresser, his single-minded pursuit of a
life in art led him ruthlessly to strip away each and every diversion
or encumbrance, including the possibility of a happy marriage,
until he had reached the point where he could describe himself
as ‘made of literature’ and ‘nothing else’ (quoted 95). And, of
course, Kafka’s purism, like the dandyism which it replaced, was
a far cry from the bustling commercial ethos of his father’s affluent
fancy-goods store. It provided a way of distinguishing himself
from the Jewish milieu into which he was born, distancing him
from the world of his parents.
With this cultural context in mind, Anderson reads The
Metamorphosis as the difficult incarnation of what he calls ‘a will
toward art’ (131), the desire to move into a ‘self-enclosed world
of aesthetic play and freedom’ represented by the symmetries of
Gregor’s insect form (142). (Notwithstanding his differences from
Kafka, it is perhaps worth recalling here that, besides literature
and war, one of Ernst Jünger’s other great passions was to
scour the world in search of rare beetles, discovering species
whose teeming variety seemed to offer endless scope for aesthetic
contemplation.) Previous interpretations of Kafka’s novella have
tended to focus upon the anxieties accompanying Gregor’s
transformation and have often failed to take into account the
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pleasures that his new body evidently brings him. As soon as he
is able to place his legs firmly on the ground, for example, Gregor
at once begins to experience ‘a sense of physical well-being’, an
instinctive ‘joy’ in the discovery of an unexpected capacity for
movement; and later he learns to enjoy ‘hanging from the ceiling’,
gently swaying to and fro, a delightful manoeuvre that allows
him to ‘breathe more freely’ (Kafka 1992: 89, 101). In such
brief, bitter-sweet moments he seems finally to have transcended
the care-worn routines of the ordinary commercial traveller he
once was.
As the story makes clear, in his human phase Gregor had been
chained to his family and his job, forced to become the household’s
breadwinner after the failure of his father’s business. Both
institutions are intensely exploitative. No sooner has the company
discovered that Gregor has missed the early morning train than
the chief clerk is knocking on the door of the family’s apartment
to find out where their employee has got to. But, most sinister
of all, Gregor’s father starts to undergo his own monstrous trans-
formation, changing from a semi-invalid apparently defeated by
life into a large, vigorous, uniformed patriarch who drives him
away with his stick, bombarding Gregor with apples and hastening
his death. Indeed, for Anderson, the father’s new uniform, together
with other textual details such as the three anonymous bearded
men who later become the Samsa family’s lodgers, are signs of
a highly regimented form of social existence from which Gregor
is permitted to escape. One could argue that Gregor must
ultimately die because there is literally no place for him in this
soulless, grasping world.
Several commentators have drawn attention to the ways in
which the metamorphosed Gregor has also been effectively
feminized. He has lost his social position as the real head of the
household and consequently is banished from public view. His
voice immediately begins to change – Eric Santner describes
Gregor’s ‘distressed chirping’ as ‘the mutation of the male voice
in the direction of the feminine’ – and as the story develops he
becomes increasingly vulnerable and passive (Santner 1996: 206).
There even seems to be a curious parallel between Gregor’s newly
‘curved brown belly’ and the image of the ‘harem women’ with
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which he identifies the other commercial travellers who are far
lazier in their habits than he is (Kafka 1992: 76–7). However,
it might be more accurate to say, not that Gregor is in the process
of taking on female attributes, but rather that he has become
unable to continue to live up to the demands of masculinity that
have been his lot in life until now. In The Metamorphosis there
is a kind of withdrawal from, or divestment of, a conventionally
dutiful bourgeois masculinity – a disengagement that is later given
a surprising justification when we learn that the Samsa family is
not really bankrupt at all. If one implication of The Metamorphosis
is that the true artist cannot flourish in such a brazenly commercial
world, another no less sobering reflection is surely that the modern
codes of masculinity are based upon an illusion. In the Oedipal
dramas played out in Kafka’s fictional universe, relations between
fathers and sons are always unstable and liable to take unexpected
turns for the worse. Once Gregor is gone family morale among
the Samsas revives and the story closes with happy thoughts
of Gregor’s sister finding ‘a good husband’ (126), a new ‘son’
who will erase all memory of Gregor’s unmanly failings.
Ranging from the aggressiveness of writers like Jünger and
Carlyle to the retreat from gendered identity in The Metamorphosis,
the snapshots assembled in this chapter suggest something of the
historical variability in the forms that masculinity has assumed
when it has been imagined and explored through different kinds
of literary texts. Fashioning masculinities in writing appears as
a complex and precarious enterprise, in which any claim to fix
upon a core of manly attributes has always had to be placed and
justified within a wider field of cultural differences. Indeed, the
uncertainties and self-doubts attending Boswell’s struggle to
discover exactly what sort of man he most wanted to be indicate
just how fluid the regulative ideals of masculinity, not to mention
the fantasies underpinning them, could sometimes be. To do full
justice to this order of complexity we need, as Christopher Lane
has eloquently put it, ‘a less defined and infinitely messier sense
of process, of ideas being worked out in texts trying to make
clear their own understanding of desire, intimacy, and gender’
(Lane 1999: xxi). Terms like ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ carry
an immense amount of cultural baggage, but they can also cover
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up far more than they reveal. Though conventionally regarded
as a set of mutually exclusive binary opposites that constitute the
bedrock of experience, it is possible that these categories are too
restricted, too simplistic, too crude even to serve as an adequate
shorthand for the pleasures of the body, let alone to be taken
for granted as cultural or human universals. The next chapter
considers some of the recent debates that take this possibility
seriously.
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QUEERING THE PITCH
Kafka’s Gregor Samsa represents one version of masculinity’s
vanishing point. Here is another: after the British Football Associa-
tion had charged two rival players with misconduct following a
fight during a match between Chelsea and Liverpool in February
1999, the man who threw the first punch alleged that he had
been provoked by his opponent’s cries of: ‘Come on, come on,
give it to me up the arse.’ Of course, many would argue that
verbal abuse is simply an inevitable part of a highly competitive
game which thrives on insults and banter. But there are limits:
racist taunts are now officially tolerated much less than they
once were, whereas, according to a recent newspaper discussion
of this episode, ‘homosexuality is still largely seen as a symptom
of weakness and thus mercilessly pilloried’ (White 1999: 2).
The article appeared under the headline ‘Queering the pitch’,
punning on two senses of the word ‘queer’: as a pejorative term
for ‘homosexual’ and as a verb meaning ‘to spoil’ or ‘to put out
of order’.
It is not difficult to see why homosexuality should be the
object of what is probably soccer’s ultimate taboo. In the name
of the game some of the most intense emotional feelings among
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and between men are openly displayed on the pitch and on
the terraces, making football a contact sport in more ways than
one. ‘I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with
women’, records Nick Hornby at the beginning of Fever Pitch,
his phenomenally popular evocation of a twenty-year infatuation
with the sport; but his earliest memory highlights ‘the over-
whelming maleness of it all’ (Hornby 1992: 15–19). To fall in
love with ‘maleness’ as a man falls in love with a woman: Hornby’s
treatment of football’s boredom and its breathtaking highs is far
more nuanced than this. Yet it takes only a pinch of exaggeration
for an unsympathetic gay critic to discover in the game’s mesmeric
power ‘an essential, deep and graceful masculine mystery of flesh,
sweat, skill and leather which non-believers cannot possibly
comprehend’, a parodic re-description that slyly insinuates a rather
different sort of male performance (see Simpson 1996: 34).
Football couldn’t really be about that, could it?
This chapter is about the place of same-sex desire in modern
culture, its history and its effects. And foremost among these
effects has been the gradual unravelling of any simplistic divide
between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, part of a wider recognition that the
relation between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ is much more fluid than the
division between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ with which these terms
are sometimes confused. One of the lessons to be drawn from
football’s fear that its pitch might be permanently ‘queered’ by
the presence of gay players is an awareness of just how precarious
and self-defeating the balancing act required by the game’s demand
for ‘real’ men actually is. The dilemma it poses seems inescapable:
those who are somehow not masculine enough are obviously
suspect and therefore unsuitable. But, on the other hand, men
who appear to be too masculine are also a problem since there is
always the worry that they might have something to hide. We
can see traces of this predicament in some of the responses to
the public prosecution of Oscar Wilde for what the court called
‘acts of gross indecency with another male person’, an event which
played a decisive role in redefining the acceptable boundaries
of gendered identity. Shortly after Wilde’s sentence to two
years hard labour, the novelist George Gissing – scarcely a gay
sympathiser – told a fellow writer:
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I have a theory that he has got into this, not through natural tendency,
but simply in deliberate imitation of the old Greek vice. He probably
said: go to, let us try the pederastic pleasures, and come to understand
them. No doubt whatever he justified himself, both to himself and
to others, by classic precedent.
(Gissing 1994 [1895]: 339)
In other words, Gissing thought that Wilde was guilty as charged,
but that he had shown lack of judgement rather than evidence
of what might have been considered a truly perverted disposition.
Oscar Wilde may have been overly influenced by the revival of
interest in Hellenic culture – this provided, after all, a language
within which such diverse figures as Matthew Arnold and Walter
Pater could imagine a renewal of Victorian society – but he was
not a ‘real’ homosexual.
This neo-classical project formed part of Wilde’s own self-
exculpating rhetoric at the trial when he spoke of ‘the love that
dare not speak its name . . . that deep spiritual affection that is
as pure as it is perfect, and that pervades great works of art, like
those of Michelangelo and Shakespeare’ (quoted in Cohen 1993:
200).
HOMOSEXUALS, INVERTS AND FAIRIES
Gissing does not use the word ‘homosexual’ in his letter, perhaps
because it was still a relatively new term in 1895; its first
appearance in English was probably in an early translation of
Krafft-Ebing’s sexological compendium Psychopathia Sexualis in
1892. By classifying people according to their sexual histories,
Krafft-Ebing helped to provide a medical warrant for thinking
about sexual acts in terms of pathological types of individuals;
or, in Foucault’s famous epigram: ‘[t]he sodomite had been a
temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’
(Foucault 1979: 43). In effect, Gissing’s shocked and exasperated
defence of Wilde rests on the claim that his behaviour was ‘a
temporary aberration’, that Wilde’s un-natural acts were indeed
unnatural since they formed no part of his nature.
For much of the twentieth century ‘homosexuality’ was more
than a ‘name’ that dared not be spoken: within clinical medicine
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it has been a diagnostic category, a suitable case for treatment,
a condition to be cured wherever possible by psychotherapeutic
and other, less savoury methods like electro-convulsive therapy.
Because of the institutional prestige enjoyed by the medical
profession, this way of thinking leached into and strengthened
popular beliefs and prejudices about which sexual preferences
were acceptable and which were not. It therefore took some time
before this terminology could be turned against itself, and ‘homo-
sexuality’ started ‘to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality”
be acknowledged’, a development aided by liberal sexologists
like Havelock Ellis who insisted on viewing ‘sexual inversion’ as
‘a congenital anomaly’ rather than as a pathology or sickness
(Foucault 1979: 101). As Ellis’s analysis suggests, the question
of whether homosexuality should be considered as a naturally
occurring phenomenon has long been a troubling issue for critics
and advocates alike.
How accurate is Foucault’s broad contrast between sodomy as
a deviant act and the homosexual as a deviant type of individual?
It is not hard to find historical examples where same-sex desire
seems relatively unproblematic compared to its dominant
perception in Western Europe throughout the twentieth century.
In the late-seventeenth-century ‘Song’ (‘Love a woman? You’re
an ass’) by John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, the
triumphant riposte voiced in the final stanza appears to be free
of shame or stigma, despite the poem’s evident sense of irony
and misogyny:
Then give me health, wealth, mirth, and wine, And if busy Love
intrenches, There’s a sweet, soft page of mine Does the trick worth
forty wenches.
(Wilmot 1994: 37)
Yet the fact remains that these sentiments derive their impact
from their scandalous assault on what would today be (erro-
neously) understood as heterosexual values (‘I’ll change a mistress
till I’m dead’), values which are more or less taken as given in
the bulk of Rochester’s poetry. These lines hardly equate with
the ‘free choice’ between men and women as sexual partners that
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Foucault identifies in the ancient Greek world, the belief ‘that
the same desire attached to anything that was desirable – boy or
girl – subject to the condition that the appetite was nobler that
inclined toward what was more beautiful or more honorable’
(Foucault 1987: 188–92). Nevertheless, in Rochester’s ‘Song’ it
is the act that matters; no inference is being made about a
particular sort of person who engages in the act. That would
come later.
It is, of course, true that in Rochester’s time sodomy was a
capital crime. But its meaning was not restricted to sexual relations
between men. In the early sixteenth century the word covered a
variety of practices: it proscribed anal intercourse (with anyone),
but also the use of a dildo or sex with animals. (Even today in
those parts of the United States where sodomy laws remain on
the statute books they typically include cunnilingus and fellatio
and make no distinction between their practice by heterosexual
and non-heterosexual persons.) Moreover, sodomy played a
complicated role in the religious politics of the period. In
Protestant England the Papacy was often identified with the
corrupt biblical city of Sodom and hence was seen as a hotbed
of vice, with buggery being defined as a peculiarly Italian habit
(Cohen 1993: 103–6). In similar vein, Rochester’s ribald poem
‘Signior Dildo’ (c. 1673) seems to have been occasioned by the
controversial marriage of the heir presumptive to a Catholic
princess from Italy, an event which the poet facetiously linked
to the import of Italian dildoes into the country. The point, once
again, is that the legal category of ‘sodomy’ did not correspond
to the modern notion of ‘homosexuality’.
If it is impossible to imagine a history of ‘homosexuality’ that
is not primarily a history of our medical and legal categories and
their impact upon us, what of same-sex passion? What kind of
history might it have? This has been a productive, but at the
same time an immensely difficult, question. Historians like
Randolph Trumbach and Alan Bray have found evidence of
what they see as ‘sodomitical subcultures’ coming into existence
in major urban centres like London by the early eighteenth
century. Trumbach, for example, has argued that ‘a profound
shift occurred in the conceptualization and practice of male
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homosexual behaviour’ during this period, but sees this as part
of a wider ‘reorganization of gender identity’ in which the
differences between men and women started to become more
sharply defined. In an argument that echoes Thomas Laqueur’s
account of the two-sex model, Trumbach claims that the majority
of men now came to regard themselves as male ‘because they felt
attraction to women, and to women alone’ (Trumbach 1987:
118). Not only did this ‘gender revolution’ undermine the older
idea of the sodomite as someone who would engage in sex with
boys and women, it also made sexual interest among men more
dangerous than ever before. In London’s post-Restoration theatre,
for example, references to sodomy began to be suppressed and
to portray unmanly fops on stage was to court legal and financial
disaster (Senelick 1990). Notice that the word ‘fop’ has acquired
a new meaning here: when Rochester writes of a ‘rival fop’ he is
merely referring to someone whom he thinks is an insipid fool,
but by the early eighteenth century the term has come to be
associated with effeminacy and a male desire for the love of men
(Wilmot 1994: 191). And it is worth adding that ‘effeminacy’ –
a word that could variously mean ‘tender’, ‘soft’, ‘gentle’ or
‘womanly’ – only began to take on specifically sexual overtones
around 1700. In Thomas Nashe’s description of the defeat of
the Anabaptist uprising in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), for
example, the mood of ‘stern revenge’ among the Imperial troops
‘made them so eager [i.e. to slaughter their enemies] that their
hands had no leisure to ask counsel of their effeminate eyes’ –
in other words, these men killed without mercy or compassion
(Nashe 1972: 285).
Was the sodomite beginning to turn into the modern
homosexual by 1700? In their discussion of ‘sodomitical sub-
cultures’, both Trumbach and Bray emphasize the historical
importance of the ‘mollies’ as an early example of what a collective
same-sex lifestyle might look like. As one eighteenth-century
observer put it, these were men who ‘mimick all manner of
Effeminacy . . . that they may tempt one another, by such
immodest Freedoms, to commit those odious Beastialities, that
ought for ever to be without a Name’ (Ward 1756 [1709] : 265).
Stories survive of their nightly meetings in a room in a tavern
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where they rapidly became renowned for their cross-dressing and
elaborate rituals such as the simulation of childbirth and long
sessions spent gossiping about their husbands and children.
Reading these descriptions today it is hard not to see the
sexual underground of the mollies as the distant forerunners of
the Harlem drag balls captured in Jennie Livingston’s 1991
documentary film Paris Is Burning, a portrait of a self-subsistent
enclave whose members compulsively mime and parody the
conventions of the straight world around them. The molly sounds
like a new kind of identity, a step into the future; it was, writes
Alan Bray, ‘a broader word’ than the older term ‘sodomite’ and
was not necessarily ‘intrinsically sexual at all’ (Bray 1995 [1982]:
103). But unfortunately our information about these men is
extremely sketchy, drawing heavily on court records and other
unsympathetic sources. Edward Ward’s A Compleat and Humorous
Account Of All the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the City of
London and Westminster cited above was clearly written to divert
and entertain its readers, and alongside the account of the ‘Men
who chuse this backward Way’ are tales of the ‘Club of Ugly
Faces’ and the ‘Farting Club’. And what is one to make of the
doggerel which ends this section?
But Sodomites their Wives forsake
Unmanly Liberties to take;
And fall in Love with one another
As if no Woman was their Mother.
(Ward 1756: 268–9)
Is this evidence that the ‘molly’ was not so very different from
the sodomite after all; or is it merely a piece of invective or
perhaps a cheap jibe? Conspicuously absent here are any first-
hand accounts of how the mollies viewed themselves, or how
they regarded their own activities.
Nevertheless, the idea that in ‘the Mollies Club’ we see the
crucible of modern gay culture remains a tantalizing, if uncertain,
possibility. Historians continue to disagree as to whether it makes
sense to talk about well-established sodomitical subcultures in
eighteenth-century London. The picture only starts to become
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clearer as we move towards the present. Once again, the coining
of new words or new usages offers important clues: according to
the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, ‘drag’ (in the sense
of men dressing up in female attire) and ‘lesbian’ can both be
traced back to the 1870s and obviously pre-date the Wilde trials,
while another cluster of explicit and/or derogatory terms like
‘queen’, ‘queer’, ‘pansy’ and ‘homo’ seems to enter the language
in the 1920s. These popular linguistic shifts imply that modern
gay or lesbian identities did not emerge solely in a space created
for them by medical and legal judgments, as the first volume of
Foucault’s History of Sexuality tends to suggest; rather, they were
the product of a complex interaction between familiar, subcultural
values and practices on the one hand and attempts at control by
the state and the professions on the other.
By far the fullest and most detailed cultural history of gay
urban life is George Chauncey’s pathbreaking book Gay New
York (1994) which covers the period from 1890 to the outbreak
of the Second World War. Combining personal recollections
and private diaries with official archival sources, Chauncey not
only charts the changing fortunes of the city’s gay male
communities, but also examines the interface – the conflict and
the mutuality – between the nation’s ‘gay capital’ and the ‘normal’
or ‘straight’ world. Here different languages, vernacular and
regulatory, overlapped and collided. To the police, doctors and
anti-vice campaigners gay men were ‘inverts’, ‘perverts’, ‘degen-
erates’ or sometimes ‘homosexuals’ or ‘homosexualists’, while the
men would identify themselves variously as ‘faggots’, ‘fairies’ or
‘queens’, words that had many more subtle inflections than when
they were used homophobically as insults or as terms of abuse.
For these slang words were highly mobile: ‘faggot’ (later corrupted
to ‘fag’) seems, for example, to have originally circulated among
African-American gay men before it was taken up by whites.
However, as Chauncey notes, by the 1910s and 1920s the
word most often chosen to indicate that they belonged to ‘a
distinct category of men’ who were sexually interested in other
men (though not necessarily adopting or approving a blatantly
‘effeminate manner’) was queer (Chauncey 1994: 15–16). In the
1940s the preferred term had become ‘gay’, but by then the
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world had begun to change and the cultural climate had become
more inhospitable to lesbians and male homosexuals. ‘Gay’ was
not really an equivalent to ‘queer’: it was at once a more guarded
signifier of belonging, a word that was frequently used with caution
– outsiders would not at first have understood what ‘having a
gay time’ or being in a ‘gay bar’ meant. Yet it was also paradoxically
a more inclusive word, sometimes referring specifically to those
ostentatious styles of dress and deportment that the word ‘queer’
had tended to preclude. The next section considers some of the
reasons behind this change and looks at two individuals who
tried sometimes to confront and sometimes to side-step the
homophobic ethos of the 1950s and early 1960s: James Baldwin
(1925–87) and Andy Warhol (1928–87).
IN AND OUT OF THE CLOSET
Gay New York is essentially a work of retrieval. In it Chauncey
seeks to recover the lives and lifestyles of those gay men whose
past has been hidden from history, whose culture has been
forgotten and in part erased or distorted. One of Chauncey’s
central claims is that the common idea that same-sex desire was
necessarily a solitary, secretive longing that could not be given
public expression is a myth, and a relatively recent myth at that.
True, queer behaviour was parodied, proscribed and policed,
but, in New York in the early decades of the twentieth century
at least, it was by no means confined to the closet. The open
portrayal of gay men and women on stage in such Broadway
plays as Edouard Bournet’s The Captive or in comedienne Mae
West’s work is just one sign of the extent to which homosexuality
had come to be taken for granted in the city, leading the state
legislature to pass the repressive ‘Padlock Law’ in 1927 in an
attempt to outlaw this kind of subject matter, although allusions
to homosexuality continued to appear in Broadway productions
such as Noël Coward’s Design for Living (1933). During these
years drag balls were hugely popular events in New York and
were held at major public venues like Madison Square Gardens,
Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom or the Astor Hotel. Indeed, anti-gay
measures like the Padlock Law were deliberately intended to roll
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back the increasing visibility of the gay subculture, particularly
by targeting the social milieux where gay men and women
socialized. After 1933, for instance, it became an offence for gays
to gather in licensed public places like clubs or restaurants.
As a result of this legislative onslaught, homosexuals were forced
to go underground, to cut themselves off from the mainstream
of city life, and to exercise much more care and discretion about
the ways in which they presented themselves – in other words,
to enter the closet. The growing use of the term ‘gay’ as the most
common synonym for ‘homosexual’ was related to this new
experience of segregation for it presupposed a rigidly divided
world in which heterosexuality was the norm. In the space of a
generation ‘the lines had been drawn between the heterosexual
and the homosexual so sharply and publicly that men were no
longer able to participate in a homosexual encounter without
suspecting it meant (to the outside world, and to themselves)
that they were gay’ (Chauncey 1994: 22). This had not been
true of ‘queers’ or ‘fairies’: these were contrasting, sometimes
transitory, gendered personae or styles based upon an individual’s
sense of himself as masculine or feminine rather than his choice
of sexual partner.
Men who regarded themselves as queer could be intensely
hostile to the more effeminate fairies. William S. Burroughs’
early writings are a good example of this frequently aggressive
attitude. In a 1955 letter to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac,
for instance, Burroughs condemns those he calls ‘complete swish
fairies’ and wishes to see them all dead, not merely because
they are ‘traitors to the cause of queerness, but for selling out
the human race to the forces of negation and death’ (Burroughs
1994: 298). Burroughs’ murderous invective shows not only the
continuing survival of the older gendered vocabulary alongside
the new, more capacious rhetoric of gayness; it also indicates some
of the tensions arising from the policing of the closet and a fear
and hatred of those self-endangering forms of public display that
grated against the boundaries of heterosexual normalcy. As an
antidote to the repressiveness of the American scene, Burroughs
tended to idealize the sexual liaisons that occurred on his visits
to South America and North Africa, applauding the uninhibited
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124 QUEERING THE PITCH
ease with which the ‘average, non-queer Peruvian boy’ will ‘go to
bed with another male’ and underplaying the cash basis of this
type of sexual tourism (Burroughs 1994: 176).
Many of the gay men interviewed in Gay New York regarded
the 1930s as a relatively unthreatening time when compared to
the virulent campaigns against them in the aftermath of the Second
World War. The crude homophobia featured in bestselling crime
novelist Mickey Spillane’s work, ranging from the punches and
cold water thrown at gay men in I, the Jury (1947) to the depiction
of transvestism as the most monstrous symbol of evil in Vengeance
Is Mine! (1950), is symptomatic of the worst literary excesses of
this period. But other texts from the 1950s provide more complex
manifestations of this homophobic impulse. Robert J. Corber
has recently shown how the films of Alfred Hitchcock echoed
contemporary panics about the threat to national security arising
from the presence of gay employees in the US federal government.
In his 1951 film adaptation of the novel Strangers on a Train,
for instance, Hitchcock significantly moves the narrative’s locale
from New York and Connecticut to Washington DC and, by
portraying the criminal Charles Bruno as a homosexual, dramatizes
the widespread fear that straight men who became entangled
with gays were likely to find themselves the victims of blackmail.
Moreover, Bruno’s pathology is identified through one of the
major medical explanations of same-sex eroticism prevalent in
the 1950s: his homosexuality is a form of ‘arrested sexual develop-
ment’, ‘an unresolved Oedipus complex’ stemming from an
emotional overdependence on his mother (Corber 1993: 72). In
one shot we even see her manicuring Bruno’s nails.
From the other side of the homophobic divide, so to speak,
perhaps the most troubled and troubling American representation
of homosexuality from within the closet is James Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room (1957). Despite the success of his first novel Go
Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room was turned down
by Baldwin’s American publishers because they were afraid that
the book would make him known as a black homosexual writer.
It was only taken up in the United States after having initially
appeared in England. Giovanni’s Room is the story of a young
white man’s struggle with his desires as he looks back at the
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devastating consequences his irresolution has had upon the other
people in his life. At first the narrator implies that it is the sheer
complexity, the disordered multiplicity of his passions that leads
him to betray himself and the men and women who have loved
him. ‘I am too various to be trusted,’ David confesses by way of
explaining why ‘the great difficulty is to say Yes to life’ (Baldwin
1990: 11). But more is at stake than a failure of commitment,
for David’s self-interrogation takes place under the shadow of his
lover Giovanni’s impending execution for murder.
In a crucial passage, David queasily describes the gay bar,
‘a noisy, crowded, ill-lit sort of tunnel’, where he was introduced
to Giovanni. Or, more precisely, he describes its clientele, ‘les
folles’:
Occasionally one would swoop in, quite late in the evening, to convey
the news that he – but they always called each other ‘she’ – had just
spent time with a celebrated movie star, or boxer. Then all of the
others closed in on this newcomer and they looked like a peacock
garden and sounded like a barnyard. I always found it difficult to
believe that they ever went to bed with anybody for a man who wanted
a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who
wanted a man would certainly not want one of them. Perhaps, indeed,
that was why they screamed so loud.
(Baldwin 1990: 29–30)
Superficially, this description resembles the anathematization of
the ‘fairy’ that we found in Burroughs’ early writings and elsewhere
in the novel David expresses disgust at the ‘fairy’s mannerisms’
that he sees Giovanni starting to adopt (139). But David’s desire
lacks any point of lasting affirmation and his denial, condemned
by Giovanni as an inability to love, is the product of a complex
set of displacements, terrors that he scarcely knows how to articu-
late. For, on the one hand, David both hates and fears women,
often remembering or positioning himself as a vulnerable small
boy in their presence; while, on the other, the love that he can
never fully acknowledge is a love of black men: the brown-skinned
Joey who was his first lover or the ‘insolent and dark and leonine’
southern Italian barman Giovanni (31). This gives a special tone
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126 QUEERING THE PITCH
to Giovanni’s final accusation that David cannot embrace the
physicality of the other, that he wants ‘to despise Giovanni because
he is not afraid of the stink of love’ (134). And so, at the end
of the novel, when David tries to visualize Giovanni’s murder of
the bar-owner (‘a silly old queen’) who has dismissed him, the
scenario that David imagines is coloured by his own curiously
involuted homophobia. The ‘blackness’ that ‘comes and goes’
before Giovanni’s eyes brings to mind the ‘cavern’ that opens in
David’s mind, ‘black, full of rumor, suggestion, of halfheard, half-
forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words’, after he
has slept with Joey (14, 146–7). Lucidity and self-hatred go hand
in hand here: the more David sees, the more he is trapped by a
revulsion at his own deepest desires.
Baldwin’s own views about homosexuality provide an instruc-
tive counterpoint to Giovanni’s Room. In an early essay on the
gay French author André Gide written in 1954, for example,
Baldwin sought both to transcend the reduction of homosexuality
to mere sexual behaviour, whether natural or not, and at the
same time to insist that the division of the world into ‘two
sexes’ was an unavoidable fact with which everyone must in
some way come to terms, ‘no matter what demons drive them’.
What Baldwin saw as the compulsive promiscuity of gay life (‘a
meaningless round of conquests’) ultimately seemed to him to
be as dehumanizing as the superficial commodification of sexuality
manifested by ‘the breasts of Hollywood glamour girls and the
mindless grunting and swaggering of Hollywood he-men’ – not
forgetting ‘the heroes of Mickey Spillane’. For Baldwin human-
kind’s greatest need was ‘to arrive at something higher than a
natural state’, to strive towards the ‘genuine human involvement’
of love and friendship that must necessarily include ‘communion
between the sexes’ (Baldwin 1985: 101–5).
Some thirty years later he was to push these ideas in a still
more radical direction by arguing that our capacity for love had
been wholly distorted by the false ‘American ideal of masculinity’
with its dead-end oppositions: ‘punks and studs, tough guys and
softies, butch and faggot, black and white’. To be called a faggot
was to be ‘told simply that you had no balls’. Against this divisive
and destructive logic, Baldwin argued that ‘we are all androgynous’
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since ‘each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other –
male in female, female in male, white in black and black in
white’ (Baldwin 1985: 677–90). This formulation should not be
confused with the old nineteenth-century notion of homosexuality
as a ‘third’ or ‘intermediate sex’ in which male and female elements
commingle in the same person. Far from being a special case,
Baldwin identifies androgyny with the human condition per se.
Indeed his essay, originally entitled ‘Freaks and the American
Ideal of Manhood’ (and subsequently re-named ‘Here Be
Dragons’) was partly inspired by the gender-bending personae of
performers like Boy George and Michael Jackson, figures who
might be thought to play upon or externalize what is for Baldwin
our unrecognized inner being. But the danger in Baldwin’s
endeavour to deconstruct the category of homosexuality is that
the very possibility, not to mention the value, of a specifically
gay identity can all too easily be elided. Elsewhere Baldwin did
speak of the need to bear ‘a kind of witness’ to ‘that phenomenon
we call gay’; yet, as Kendall Thomas has shown, this insistence
has often been ignored in some of the attempts selectively to lay
claim to Baldwin’s cultural and political legacy since his death
in 1987 (Thomas 1996: 56).
To move to the creative world of Andy Warhol is at once to
enter a lighter, airier, apparently less serious domain, an oeuvre
that seems deliberately to eschew hard moral judgments and to
concern itself instead with style and pleasure. In that sense
Warhol’s work is frequently closer in spirit to that of Boy George
and Michael Jackson and indeed the Factory, Warhol’s New
York production base in the 1960s, was a place that brought
members of the worlds of art and pop together. To be sure, there
was always a puzzling and much darker side to Warhol’s art:
controversy still surrounds the possible meanings of his early
Disaster Series from around 1963 – multiple images of electric
chairs, race riots and car wrecks – and Warhol’s bleak 1981 series
of Self-Portraits in drag remain among his most haunting and
disturbing representations. But certainly in the 1960s Warhol’s
name also quickly became a synonym for everything that was
daring, outrageous, yet also fun.
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One of the key terms deployed to make sense of Warhol’s
art during this period was ‘Camp’. Like ‘drag’ or ‘queer’, the
word ‘camp’ has a primarily gay provenance. At the turn of the
nineteenth century it originally meant affected, theatrical or
effeminate, and to say ‘how very camp he is’ was effectively to
identify someone as a homosexual. While it retained this core
meaning, by the 1960s the use of the term had broadened (and
acquired a capital ‘C’) to signify a distinctive set of cultural
preferences or a kind of taste, a highly aestheticized way of looking
at things. Probably the single most influential account of this
sensibility appeared in Susan Sontag’s 1964 ‘Notes on “Camp”’,
an attempt to pin down some of the more elusive features of
a contradictory phenomenon that seemed to resist systematic
analysis. Sontag associated Camp with the artificial, the extrava-
gant, the frivolous, the stylish, the playful. But the inherent
complexity of these attributes means that none of them can be
allowed to stand without qualification. For example, to say that
Camp is typically ‘anti-serious’ is only half-true; rather, the serious
element in Camp is always punctured by its own excesses; hence
the paradox that in Camp ‘one can be serious about the frivolous,
frivolous about the serious’ (Sontag 1966: 288).
While Sontag suggests that ‘homosexuals, by and large, con-
stitute the vanguard – and the most articulate audience – of
Camp’, she denies that there is any necessary or intrinsic
connection, on the grounds that ‘if homosexuals hadn’t more or
less invented Camp, someone else would’ (291). Yet one of her
own most acute insights tells against this assertion. Early in her
article, Sontag observes that Camp recognizes an ‘unacknowledged
truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as
well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going
against the grain of one’s sex’. This is why the figure of the
androgyne is so highly prized by the Camp sensibility, but also
why there is ‘a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics
and personality mannerisms’: the overblown he-men and sex
goddesses of the Hollywood film industry. In other words, Camp
refuses to take at anything other than face value precisely those
figures whom James Baldwin took to be symptoms of the modern
American malaise. In Camp gender differences increasingly
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approximate to the condition of display or masquerade. Instead
of looking for the inner truth behind appearances, ‘Camp sees
everything in quotation marks . . . not a woman, but a “woman”’
(279–80).
Warhol’s preoccupation with fashion, image and glamour can
be traced back to his childhood when he collected signed
photographs of film stars and celebrities. But it was given added
impetus during his formative, post-college years as a commercial
artist hired by luxury department stores like New York’s Bonwit
Teller and was then carried over into his paintings, films and,
later, his journalism. Hence, among many others, the potentially
unlimited repetition of silkscreen images of Marilyn Monroe
(Marilyn Monroe [Twenty Times], 1961) or Twenty-Five Coloured
Marilyns, 1962) and Elvis Presley (Elvis 1, 1964). As in Warhol’s
famous canvases of multiple Campbell Soup cans there is a
provocative mixing of genres in these works. Publicity stills,
product design and news photographs were absorbed into painting
in such a way as to muddy the usually clear-cut distinction between
consumer culture and high art. Moreover Warhol’s preferred
techniques had the effect of foregrounding the constructed quality
of the image: starting from photographs that he would first
carefully modify or enhance, Warhol would prepare a coloured
image on canvas and then overlay this with a silkscreen print
that reproduced the details from the original photo; but the lack
of perfect fit between canvas and silkscreen created a discordant
sensation, as though the blocks of paint had been misapplied.
Here gendered identity looks as if it has been poorly simulated
or hastily assembled, an impression that is heightened by the
garish and metallic colours Warhol used. In a sense, artifice and
desire are being put into contradiction in the Marilyn Monroe
portraits. ‘Marilyn’s lips weren’t kissable,’ Warhol once observed,
‘but they were very photographable’ (Warhol 1977: 54).
In the popular magazines of the period, the vocabulary of Camp
allowed columnists to refer discreetly to Warhol’s gayness, or at
least to label him as unconventional or eccentric in his cultural
tastes. Reviewing his latest New York exhibition in December
1964, for example, Newsweek dubbed Warhol ‘Saint Andrew’
and placed him at the head of a ‘new hip world of blurred genders’
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130 QUEERING THE PITCH
(quoted in Whiting 1997: 183). But this was just the beginning.
As Warhol moved into film-making between 1968 and 1972,
the gay content of his work became more overt (or one might
say that his work became more Camp): his 1972 movie Women
in Revolt! starred three transvestites in the lead roles playing
‘women in varying degrees of “liberation”’ and in 1975 Warhol
produced a series of portraits of black and Hispanic drag queens
called Ladies and Gentlemen (Warhol 1977: 54). Drag queens
occupied an important place in Warhol’s imagination:
Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way
women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to
be, and the way some women still actually want to be. Drags are
ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a
documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the
glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection.
(Warhol 1977: 54)
Warhol was enormously impressed by the ‘very hard work’
required of ‘boys who spend their lives trying to be complete
girls’, work which he saw as centrally concerned with the imitation
of a fantasy – hence his droll one-liner on the paradoxes of
desire: ‘I always run into strong women who are looking for
weak men to dominate them’ (54–6). Nevertheless, according to
the logic of Warhol’s position, drag queens are by no means an
indispensable part of the show. For if drag queens were sometimes
preferable to ‘the real girls we knew’ who ‘couldn’t seem to get
excited about anything’, because ‘the drag queens could get excited
about anything’, once ‘the girls seem to be getting their energy
back’, then ‘real ones’ could be brought back into his movies
again (Warhol 1977: 55). On this view, gender is very much a
question of performance and gendered identity is largely a matter
of whoever performs best, of who has the most style.
In her ‘Notes on “Camp”’, Sontag argues that the ‘flamboyant
mannerisms’ associated with Camp are ‘gestures full of duplicity’,
operating on two levels: ‘a witty meaning for cognoscenti and
another, more impersonal, for outsiders’ (Sontag 1966: 281). Put
like this, Camp can be read as an ostentatious strategy of
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dissimulation or concealment, a way of signalling that one is
‘passing’ among straights while simultaneously having the last
laugh on them. But Warhol’s use of Camp was marked by a
tendency to dissolve identity into a deceptive play of surfaces,
cultivating a blank or disengaged persona that made the very idea
of a self more elusive than ever. Reflecting on his visit to the
Paris fashion shows in 1981, Warhol noted that ‘all the really
straight-looking [male] models are gay, and all the really gay-
looking models are straight’ and, after discussing this with a friend,
decided to ‘start telling people that despite how we look and talk,
that we’re not gay. Because then they don’t know what to do
with you’ (Warhol 1989: 369). In Warhol’s hands Camp becomes
more than an insider’s joke, it becomes an elaborate double bind
in which to trap the unwary by both publicly flaunting and
impassively denying his gayness at one and the same time.
QUEER SENSIBILITIES, QUEER THEORY
Just as Warhol’s deadpan swishiness helped to open up new
aesthetic possibilities for Camp as a cultural practice, so ‘queer’
is also a term that has been virtually reinvented by gay critics and
gay activists in recent years. Roughly speaking, ‘queer’ seems to
have passed through three main phases. When the word first came
into use in the United States it was not a mark of obloquy or
disdain; as one respondent who had been part of New York’s gay
world in the 1920s told George Chauncey: ‘It wasn’t like kike
or nigger . . . It just meant you were different’ (Chauncey 1994:
101). In deliberate contrast with the fairy, to identify oneself as
queer tended to indicate a quietly controlled, ‘manly’ demeanour
and a desire for other queer, or perhaps straight men. According
to Chauncey’s evidence, the queer/fairy opposition reflected the
social class backgrounds from which these gendered styles typically
originated. From the middle-class standpoint of the average queer
man, the fairy represented a tasteless, undignified, and above all
lower-class mode of self-presentation that brought same-sex
relationships into disrepute. But, on the other hand, class was
not always a source of antagonism; for many men class differences
could also stimulate desire, E.M. Forster’s wish ‘to love a strong
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young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even
hurt by him’ (and then to write ‘respectable novels’) being a
famous case in point (Forster 1989: 16).
By the 1940s queer had ceased to be a relatively neutral term.
Thus, when his publisher wanted to call his second book Fag
instead of Queer, William Burroughs was appalled. ‘I don’t mind
being called queer,’ he wrote to Allen Ginsberg, ‘but I’ll see him
castrated before I’ll be called a Fag’ (Burroughs 1994: 119). The
year was 1952 and Burroughs’ response reflects not only the habits
of mind of an earlier generation (not to mention his privileged
upbringing), but it also carries the clear implication that being
called ‘queer’ was now something that one might well mind. For
the letters repeatedly show how powerful a psychological and
cultural norm heterosexuality had become. In the early 1950s
Ginsberg was so distressed by his desire for men that he was
seeing a psychoanalyst to help him ‘to get over being queer’ (85).
So it is crucial to Burroughs’ defence of calling himself queer
that sleeping with women does not make him heterosexual:
‘Laying a woman, so far as I am concerned is O.K. if I can’t
score for a boy. But laying one woman or a thousand merely
emphasizes the fact that a woman is not what I want’ (88).
Revealingly, ‘queer’ also had another meaning in the 1950s.
When David in Giovanni’s Room tells one of his male companions
in a gay bar that ‘I’m sort of queer for girls myself’ he is turning
the word against a would-be lover and also using the word in a
somewhat different sense to indicate both the source and the
intensity of his desire. To say that you were ‘queer for someone’
meant that you felt passionately about that person, that you were
head over heels in love with them, and was a phrase that could
be used by men and women. In his autobiographical novel Junkie
(1953), William Burroughs writes of ‘queer joints’ (gay bars) and
the wealthy ‘international queer set’, but just a few pages later
the word’s inflection changes when a prostitute named Mary says
of her boyfriend ‘I’m queer for Jack’ – though she subsequently
tells the narrator that she is mostly attracted to women (Burroughs
1966: 9, 25).
Mad for a man, yet preferring women: this figure of a passion
that is aberrant precisely because it is uncontainable and
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uncontrollable, carries over into queer’s latest incarnation, a
phase in which queer becomes a signifier of attitude, of a refusal
to accept conventional sexual and gendered categories, of a defiant
desire beyond the regular confines of ‘heteronormativity’.
According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s marvellously eloquent
and much-quoted definition:
Queer can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,
dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when
the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality
aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.
(Sedgwick 1993: 8)
This is desire in all its incalculable, inconvenient unboundedness
and its corollary is, in Judith Butler’s celebrated phrase, gender
‘as trouble’ (Butler 1990: ix).
We should be careful therefore not to let the polymorphous
accents of this more permissive version of queer eradicate either
its radical edge or its unapologetically militant history. As Sedgwick
herself adds in a crucial qualification, ‘to disavow’ the specific
links between queerness and homosexuality or ‘to displace’ such
associations ‘from the term’s definitional centre’ would be to rob
it of its emancipatory potential (Sedgwick 1993: 8). For the first
strategic redeployment of the word came in 1990 with the
founding of the activist group Queer Nation in New York, a move
that grew directly out of political work on behalf of people suffering
from AIDS. By staging a series of daring affronts to contemporary
civic culture, Queer Nation has sought to force the general
public to face up to some of the unexamined lines of symbolic
demarcation between gays and straights in everyday life. Queer
Nation’s ‘visibility actions’ have combined the sardonic and the
provocative, the theatrical and the confrontational to create vivid,
highly charged moments of recognition: hence the surprise
occupations of exclusively heterosexual bars or the organized
‘kiss-ins’ at city plazas and shopping malls, tactics designed to
challenge the limits of the straight imagination. While these sorts
of happenings are in one sense celebratory manifestations of a gay
presence, they involve more than a simple transvaluation of ‘queer’
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134 QUEERING THE PITCH
that turns it from a negative into a positive term. The popular
slogan ‘We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!’ points a critical
finger at existing institutions and articulates a far-reaching demand
for change.
What difference might queer theory make to literary or cultural
criticism? These are still early days, but on the whole queer critics
have been more interested in developing new modes of inter-
preting literary texts or in asking new questions of them, than
in constructing a gay and lesbian counter-canon of great books,
though it goes without saying that queer theorists certainly have
strong views on what is worthy of their readers’ attention. The
results have been extremely varied: ‘queer readings’ of such major
writers as James Joyce and Henry James can be found side by
side with discussions of less established figures like Vita Sackville-
West, Audre Lorde or Neil Bartlett.
A sample from the recent critical history of Djuna Barnes’
1936 novel Nightwood provides an instructive example of some
of the ways in which queer theory departs from earlier approaches.
Barnes was rated highly by her peers – T.S. Eliot and James
Joyce both championed her work – yet her writings stand at an
odd angle to canonical modernism. And Nightwood, a book widely
acknowledged as Barnes’s chef-d’oeuvre, has proved particularly
difficult to place. Not surprisingly, it resists easy summary. The
novel begins with the birth of Felix Volkbein in Vienna at the
turn of the century, but then swiftly backtracks into a family
genealogy that shows the pomp of the Volkbein coat of arms to
be nothing more than the pretence of a Jewish parvenu. As a
grown man, Felix cultivates the eccentric company of circus artists
and theatre players who live on the fringes of European high
society and through whom he meets his young wife, Robin Vote.
But no sooner are they married than the novel swerves off into
what will become its central narrative, the story of Robin’s intense
affair with the circus publicity agent Nora Flood, a relationship
that is violently disrupted when Robin is seduced by the voracious
Jenny Petherbridge. Much of the rest of the book chronicles
Nora’s agonized and inconclusive efforts to repair this loss.
But to outline the plot as if it were a simple sequence of events
is to seriously misrepresent the true nature of Barnes’s achievement.
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For one thing, Nightwood is, above all else, a novel of talk, a book
that dazzles through its wonderfully inventive use of language, its
obsessive exploration of mood and metaphysics, rather than
through its analysis of character and situation. Thus it is entirely
appropriate that Dr Matthew O’Connor, arguably the most
extraordinary figure in the book, speaks almost entirely in lofty
yet racy monologues, even when he is engaged in conversation.
And so dense and ornate is the verbal texture of the novel that the
puzzling question of what is being said often pushes a character’s
motives for speaking into the background.
If the main relationships in the book are between women,
doesn’t it make sense to read Nightwood as ‘a narrative of lesbian
desire and power’ (Allen 1993: 181)? Especially, one might add,
since the novel relies heavily for its setting upon the Parisian gay
community in which Barnes herself lived and worked during the
1920s. Carolyn Allen succeeds brilliantly in tracing the ‘complex
dynamics between lesbian subjects’, in revealing the forces
that draw Nora and Robin together and wrench them apart (180).
But the problem with this optic is that it drastically reduces the
scope of the book, sidelining the carnivalesque world of misfits
and outsiders whose ‘ranting’ and ‘roaring’ provide Nightwood ’s
true ambience, irrespective of place. The antinomianism of this
strangely hybrid ‘crew’ is well illustrated by the promiscuous
gathering at Nora’s ‘“paupers” salon’ outside New York, a mecca
‘for poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love; for
Catholics, Protestants, Brahmins, dabblers in black magic and
medicine’, as well as the performers from the Denckman circus
(Barnes 1961: 50). Fittingly, Nora was ‘brought . . . into the
world’ by none other than the transvestite Dr O’Connor, who
subsequently fulfils the combined functions of Nora’s phallic
mother and father confessor, her priest and analyst (49). Never-
theless, it is important for Allen’s reading to emphasize that Dr
O’Connor’s ministrations must finally be seen to be defeated by
Nora in order for lesbian passion to retain its integrity in the face
of an unhappy ending.
O’Connor has also been described as a ‘witch doctor or medicine
man’, an appellation which seems to position him as Nightwood ’s
principal shaman or magician. According to Sandra Gilbert,
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136 QUEERING THE PITCH
O’Connor’s verbal magic bespeaks ‘the androgynous wholeness
and holiness of prehistory’ that is ultimately invoked by the text
in an attempt to escape from ‘the dis-order and dis-ease of
gender’. There is, she argues, a sharp distinction to be made
between the use of transvestism in the work of male modernists
like Joyce and Eliot as compared to that of Djuna Barnes or
Virginia Woolf. In the Nighttown episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, for
example, when the ‘massive’ brothelkeeper Bella Cohen makes
Leopold Bloom ‘shed [his] male garments’ for a ‘punishment
frock’ and ‘don the shot silk luxuriously rustling over head and
shoulders’, this ritualized unmanning is in fact a prelude to the
restoration of Bloom’s ‘proximate erection’ (Joyce 1964 [1922]:
647, 867). But in Nightwood – read by Gilbert as ‘a revisionary
response’ to Joyce’s Nighttown – the inconstancy of gendered
identities produces ‘a symbolic chaos’ whose sign is a ubiquitous
androgyny which precludes any return to patriarchal certainties.
And it is this ‘wild reality beyond gender’ that explains Nightwood ’s
strong affinity for the mythic and the transcendental. At the
novel’s close Nora follows Robin to a remote country chapel
where her former lover gets down on her hands and knees and
starts to behave like an animal. In Gilbert’s view this curious final
scene has an almost mystical significance, for ‘Robin actually does
become a kind of sacred Dog, a reversed God (or Goddess) of the
third sex, parodically barking before a conventional statuette of
the Madonna’ (Gilbert 1980: 413–15).
Each of these readings goes a long way towards illuminating
the difficulties inherent in what is often an opaque and obscure
text. But, if Allen’s specific focus on lesbian desire might be
thought to leave too much out, Gilbert’s more inclusive claim
that the novel finds its fulfilment in an all-encompassing androgyny
could be said to overlook the extent to which Nightwood perversely
refuses any such easy resolution. When Dr O’Connor suddenly
exclaims ‘It’s my mother without argument I want!’ (Barnes 1961:
149) or when the anguished Nora cries out ‘I can’t live without
my heart!’ (156), both characters are giving voice to their sense
of desolation and incompleteness by naming the lost object that
they cannot have. One of the many virtues of Joseph A. Boone’s
excellent queer reading of Nightwood in his book Libidinal Currents
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(1998) is its alertness to precisely these moments of frustration
and terror, its recognition that Barnes eschews any conclusion
‘that would impose final meaning on the queer desires of the
sexually disenfranchised that this text so defiantly champions’
(Boone 1998: 242).
Though in no way seeking to diminish the force of lesbianism’s
presence in Nightwood, Boone argues that the adoption of a
queer perspective may have a special relevance here. In the first
place, the world of the novel ‘transcends the limits of the hetero/
homo divide’ so completely that even those characters like Felix
Volkbein who yearn for respectability and security find them-
selves utterly undone (Boone 1998: 234). Indeed, the ordinary
categories of experience are repeatedly stretched to breaking-point:
O’Connor, the suspect doctor, is simultaneously ‘a boy’, ‘the
bearded lady’ and ‘the last woman left in this world’, while Robin
is ‘a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin, monstrously alone,
monstrously vain’ (Barnes 1961: 100, 146). As these examples
suggest, the term ‘queer’ can also be applied to Barnes’s language
and style since her words tend to operate ‘on the level of surface,
sound, and combination with other wordimages, rather than
serving as an index of rational meaning’. Moreover, Boone sees
a close parallel between the condition of ‘permanent alienation’
in which ‘the narrative’s queer subjects’ live as social and sexual
outcasts and the way in which the constant use of oxymorons,
discordant metaphors and almost surreal juxtapositions in the
novel tends to exile words from their established meanings (Boone
1998: 238–9). In its radical will to experiment, to re-make
language, Nightwood surely qualifies as one of the founding texts
of what we might now call ‘queer modernism’.
Barnes’s persistent denaturalization of language, her preference
for the artificial and the baroque, has an important effect upon
characterization for which the circus or the theatre provides the
most apposite image. Felix Volkbein, ‘the wandering Jew’, is a
man in search of the means of his own self-transformation and
what draws him to these actresses, acrobats and sword-swallowers
is their love of ‘pageantry’, ‘their splendid and reeking falsification’
(Barnes 1961: 7, 11). Just as language runs away with (and from)
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138 QUEERING THE PITCH
the novel’s characters, so any hope that we might gain access to
their inner thoughts is seriously undermined:
Rather, the intensely psychodramatic material of Nightwood is
projected outward onto the narrative plane, rendering interiority a
textual theatre where sexuality and identity are self-consciously staged
and performed. Even those narrative moments that the reader may
think provide glimpses into the inner depths of these characters
ultimately reveal that what lies ‘behind the surface’ is pure theatre,
a facade of surface upon surface that underscores the secondariness
and estrangement in all representation.
(Boone 1998: 248).
There is something close to the spirit of Camp in this stress
upon performance and superficiality and in Nightwood it occurs
in the most unlikely places. When Dr O’Connor is called to
Robin Vote’s hotel bedroom after she has fainted his first act is
lightly to use her perfume, powder and lipstick to make himself
up while Felix voyeuristically looks on from behind a jungle
of potted palms. What promised to be a privileged moment of
insight has turned into a carefully orchestrated spectacle, another
reminder that ‘the performative play of surfaces is all we ever
get’ (Boone 1998: 249). Robin’s emergence from her trance is
no less theatrical, her voice adopting ‘the pitch of one enchanted
with the gift of postponed abandon’, or of ‘the actor who, in the
soft usury of his speech, withholds a vocabulary until the profitable
moment when he shall be facing his audience’. Barnes’s queer
sensibility brings form and content into near perfect alignment
in Nightwood, ‘as an image and its reflection in a lake seem
parted only by the hesitation in the hour’ (Barnes 1961: 38).
‘ANTICOMMUNITARIAN IMPULSES’
Historically, as Nightwood amply confirms, both modernism and
same-sex passion have relied upon the twentieth-century metro-
polis as a place sufficiently large and diverse to enable them to
survive, and eventually to flourish. But this link between sexual
dissidence and urban geography can be found throughout gay
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and lesbian writing and not only in its modernist forms. Thus
in Radclyffe Hall’s distinctly non-modernist lesbian novel The
Well of Loneliness (1928) it is in Paris that Stephen Gordon
ultimately makes her home when she has been rejected by her
mother Lady Anna and it is there that she most fully realizes her
vocation as a writer. The novel requires that Stephen cannot find
personal happiness since her tragic fate is to embody and articulate
the crippling burden of social exclusion and denial that lesbians
must bear, to use her literary gifts on behalf of the sexual pariah.
Nevertheless, The Well of Loneliness does vouchsafe at least one
positive glimpse of an alternative future via the gregarious and
unbowed figure of Valerie Seymour, famed for her celebrated
Parisian salon, who cheerfully predicts that Nature will soon
redress the lesbian’s minority status by bringing ‘inverts’ into the
world in ever increasing numbers.
Despite their evident stylistic differences, The Well of Loneliness
and Nightwood have each been read as flawed anticipations of a
new kind of community in process. As we have seen, Boone is
careful to note the ways in which Barnes deliberately seeks to
estrange her readers from the text, refusing them any comfortable
points of identification in Nightwood’s crepuscular narrative. Yet,
at the same time, he argues that Barnes’s ‘perverse depiction of
an entire universe of outcasts banded in solidarity under the sign
of inversion’ is precisely what aligns the novel with ‘contemporary
idioms of queer world-making’ (Boone 1998: 235). The key word
in this sentence is of course ‘solidarity’, with its communal
overtones of belonging, companionship and self-sacrifice.
This line of argument has recently come under sustained attack
from Leo Bersani in his book Homos (1995), a polemic directed
against some of the most cherished assumptions within gay and
lesbian studies, including queer theory. Bersani suggests that there
is a profound ambivalence about what it currently means to be
gay, a doubt as to whether it is possible (or even justifiable) to
speak any longer of a specifically gay identity. The call for social
justice – the demand that gays or lesbians should be treated no
differently than anyone else – might be said to have the aggregate
effect of making them the same as everyone else, of reducing
their cultural visibility or distinctiveness as a group by assimilating
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140 QUEERING THE PITCH
them into the general (straight) population. Or again, some
commentators have questioned whether one’s choice of sexual
partner should be regarded as the single most important index
of who one is. In the words of Judith Butler’s forceful disclaimer:
The prospect of being anything, even for pay, has always produced
in me a certain anxiety, for ‘to be’ gay, ‘to be’ lesbian seems to be
more than a simple injunction to become who or what I already am.
And in no way does it settle the anxiety for me to say that this is
‘part’ of what I am. To write or speak as a lesbian appears a paradoxical
appearance of this ‘I,’ one which feels neither true nor false. For it
is a production, usually in response to a request, to come out or
write in the name of an identity which, once produced, sometimes
functions as a politically efficacious phantasm. I’m not at ease with
‘lesbian theories, gay theories,’ for as I’ve argued elsewhere, identity
categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as
the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying
points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression. This is
not to say that I will not appear at political occasions under the sign
of lesbian, but that I would like to have it permanently unclear what
precisely that sign signifies.
(Butler 1991: 13–14)
The attractions of this position are considerable: it invites one
to break free from the stigmatizing logic of gender differences,
to stop thinking of one’s gender as some sort of fixed core or
essence. Yet to refuse to be recognized as gay or lesbian is to
abandon, or as Bersani puts it, to ‘de-gay’ gayness itself. Worse
still, in practice it helps to make the homophobic dream become
a reality by bringing about ‘the elimination of gays’ (Bersani
1995: 5).
What alternative does Bersani offer? His title Homos is designed
to mark a distinction between his own work and queer theory
by insisting upon the value of homosexuality – or what he calls
‘homo-ness’ – rather than simply seeking to dismantle the hetero/
homo binary and replace it with an unconstrained and largely
free-floating model of desire. ‘Homo-ness’ directs attention to
what is unassimilable in gay life, an embracing of sameness that
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challenges conventional ideas about community, yet which is
also ‘a mode of connectedness to the world that it would be
absurd to reduce to sexual preference’ (Bersani 1995: 10). In
Bersani’s view ‘homo-ness’ provides an indispensable opportunity
for re-imagining both the self and the social by pushing them to
their limits, by taking them beyond what we would ordinarily
understand them to be.
In a way, Bersani’s position could be described as simultaneously
pre- and post-Foucauldian. His work is post-Foucauldian insofar
as he accepts the claim made in The History of Sexuality that
homosexuality was a product of late-nineteenth-century medical
and juridical thought, but believes that the lessons drawn from
Foucault’s genealogy have typically been too negative or too
restrictive in their implications. It is ‘almost as if homosexuality
were nothing but a reaction, the responses of a social group to
its own invention’ (Bersani 1995: 33). Bersani therefore puts aside
the project of historicizing homosexuality and turns for inspiration
to three modernist writers who have pursued their own obsessive
explorations of ‘homo-ness’ or ‘desire for the same’: André Gide,
Marcel Proust and Jean Genet. In its attempt to find a more
utopian space for gay desire, stepping outside the confines of
contemporary theoretical debates, Homos is primarily pre-
Foucauldian in its sources and in its substance, particularly where
it draws upon (and invariably revises) psychoanalytic insights.
Bersani’s readings are incisive and brilliantly creative, but they
are not without their problems. Take, for example, Bersani’s
account of Gide’s novel L’Immoraliste (1902), a book described
by its author as a gorgeous ‘fruit filled with bitter ashes’, offering
only a ‘cruel fierceness’ to the thirsty reader (Gide 1960: 7). In
it Michel, a bookish young man who once cared for nothing
but scholarship, tells how his discovery that he is suffering from
tuberculosis while on honeymoon in Tunisia transformed him
into an uncompromising hedonist. Bersani picks out two features
of this narrative: the obscurity of Michel’s transformation and
the strangely contradictory nature of his pleasure-seeking. In
Bersani’s view it is not the threat of illness that changes Michel’s
life, but rather his ‘discovery that he is a pederast’ (Bersani 1995:
114). However, this apparently stark realization is not only
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142 QUEERING THE PITCH
something that Michel fails fully to understand, it is also compli-
cated by his delight in other, less obviously sexual sensations.
Which is perhaps why the closing lines of the novel strike
such a curious note: Michel has returned to North Africa and
begins to spend his nights with a beautiful young prostitute, but
immediately gives her up when he finds out that his liaison
is upsetting the woman’s younger brother. In response she
tells Michel that he ‘prefer[s] the boy to her’ and Michel tenta-
tively admits that maybe ‘she is not altogether wrong . . .’ (Gide
1960: 159).
What is odd here is Michel’s belated, redundant admission of
a preference that has been glaringly obvious all along and openly
declared by Michel himself earlier in the book. How is it credible
that Michel, in narrating his own transformation, did not know
this? Bersani suggests that Michel’s desire is less transparent
than it seems, that his homosexuality is both ‘unmistakable yet
indefinable’ (Bersani 1995: 116). And in truth Michel’s epicurean
sensuality really is peculiarly oblique, often solipsistic or remote.
One of his most intense moments occurs on a visit to a lonely
spot in Italy where, his body still exquisitely sensitive after the
ravages of his illness, he takes off all his clothes and blissfully
exposes himself to the sun. Bersani underlines the paradox at
the heart of Michel’s desires, variously referring to them as
‘homosexuality without sexuality’, a ‘model for intimacies devoid
of intimacy’, invoking ‘a community in which the other, no longer
respected or violated as a person, would merely be cruised
as another opportunity, at once insignificant and precious, for
narcissistic pleasures’ (Bersani 1995: 121, 128–9). In short, an
‘anticommunitarian’ community in which relationships are
fleeting, elusive, attenuated to the point of absence.
The kind of self that such a ‘chaste promiscuity’ presupposes
is mapped out during Michel’s slow, solitary disrobing under the
Italian sun (Bersani 1995: 125):
The air was almost sharp, but the sun was burning. I exposed my
whole body to its flame. I sat down, lay down, turned myself about.
I felt the ground hard beneath me; the waving grass brushed me.
Though I was sheltered from the wind, I shivered and thrilled at every
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QUEERING THE PITCH 143
breath. Soon a delicious burning enveloped me; my whole being
surged up into my skin.
(Gide 1960: 55)
For Bersani it is the concentration of feeling upon the surfaces
of the skin that is so remarkable and so instructive in this passage.
What has been lost is the capacity for immediate or instantaneous
pleasure, suffocating under the dead weight of cultured learning.
It is therefore necessary for Michel to give himself up ‘to the
luxurious enjoyment of my own self, of external things, of all
existence, which seemed to me divine’ (Gide 1960: 52). There
are no hidden depths here, no long-buried interior self waiting
to be revealed to the world. Instead, in Bersani’s phrase, ‘the
authentic is the superficial’ and Michel’s being is absorbed into
‘a desiring skin’, a ‘desire that is satisfied just by the proximity
to the other, at the most by the other’s touch (analogous to
the touch of the soil and the grass on Michel’s body)’ (Bersani
1995: 120–1).
Born into a life of privilege Michel (L’Immoraliste) has set his
face against the values of modern civilization that formerly
provided the raison d’être of his scholarship. Even art comes to
be seen as a life-denying force (since it opposes itself to the
artistry of everyday living) while the stultifying necessity of manual
work (together with marriage) is held responsible for destroying
the beauty of young male bodies, as Michel discovers when he
returns to the boys he left behind in North Africa. Bersani regards
this as an invitation to imagine a new kind of erotic community
freed from property relations in which bodies are, in the strictest
sense, self-less: ‘shifting points of rest in a universal and mobile
communication of being’ (Bersani 1995: 128). Yet to activate
this interpretation Bersani has quickly to slide over the novel’s
sacrificial logic through which the price exacted for a fortified
male homosexuality is an enfeebled and displaced femininity.
Thus, just as the young Arab whore must be exiled from Michel’s
bed in order to release him into the company of boys, so his
wife Marceline’s tubercular lungs must fatally haemorrhage to
enable Michel to ‘feel the presence of happiness’ in ‘the midst
of splendour and death’ and to allow him ‘to begin over again’
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(Gide 1960: 157–8). As Naomi Segal observes, this is precisely
why ‘Marceline must be brought to her final haemorrhage at the
site of Michel’s erstwhile rebirth’ (Segal 1998: 187).
However, it is certainly possible to argue that these reservations
do not altogether detract from Homos’s central point, namely that
desire and pleasure are forces that have a devastating effect upon
us and upon our ordinary social relationships. In fact, Bersani
would probably want to claim that the perverse consequences of
Michel’s immoralism actually reinforce his thesis. Borrowing from
the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, Bersani refers to this
experience of disruption as an effect of ébranlement (literally ‘shock’
or ‘commotion’) or what he calls ‘self-shattering’. In self-shattering
the subject’s ego is thoroughly (if temporarily) undone and its
boundaries begin to dissolve, loosening any clear sense of the
difference between the self and others. Such ecstatic moments
put at risk ‘the whole concept of identity’ and ‘even more funda-
mentally, the notion of relationality itself’ (Bersani 1995: 42,
52). Self-shattering offers us an intimation of what it might mean
to speak of ‘an anti-identitarian identity’, an identity that would
erase any trace of what identity once was (Bersani 1995: 101).
Obviously a lot is at stake here. Bersani claims, for example,
that same-sex passion is transformed through self-shattering, since
its ‘privileging of sameness’ now derives ‘from the perspective of
a self already identified as different from itself’, that is from ‘a
desiring subject for whom the antagonism between the different
and the same no longer exists’ (Bersani 1995: 59–60). Sameness
seems to have the capacity to absorb – or perhaps to neutralize
– difference, disarming the threat of otherness. From this stand-
point gender divisions appear to provide the occasion or the
resources for their own supersession; for example, ‘the gay man’s
deployment of signifiers of the feminine may be a powerful
weapon in the defeat of those defensive maneuvers that have
defined sexual difference’. Identifying with women or incorpor-
ating ‘woman’s otherness’ into himself is part of a complex
trajectory of desire in which nothing is fixed in advance:
The gay man’s identification with women is countered by an imitation
of those desiring subjects with whom we have been officially identified:
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QUEERING THE PITCH 145
other men. In a sense, then, the very maintaining of the couples
man-woman, heterosexual-homosexual, serves to break down their
oppositional distinctions. These binary divisions help to create the
diversified desiring field across which we can move, thus reducing
sexual difference itself – at least as far as desire is concerned – to a
merely formal arrangement inviting us to transgress the very identity
assigned to us within the couple.
(Bersani 1995: 61)
There are a number of points to make about this revealing passage.
In the first place, one might question whether Bersani’s psycho-
analytically inspired description of the restless volatility of the
desiring imagination cannot be applied to all desire and not just
to that of the gay man. In the next chapter we shall see that
some of the recent work on how readers and viewers involve
themselves in literary and film texts suggests that Bersani’s
assumptions are less gay-specific than he tends to imply. For it
may be that cross-identification provides the key to the intensest
forms of visual and literary pleasure.
Indeed, the more Bersani stresses the mobility of subject
positions and the instability and the inconvenience of desire, the
more his argument begins to resemble the open-endedness of
queer accounts of identity whose allegedly ‘de-gaying’ conse-
quences he was at pains to critique. Part of his strategy for giving
priority to sameness, while at the same time allowing free rein
to difference, is to concentrate upon examples of gay texts that
continue to confront the reader with their own provocative mode
of ébranlement. But, as we saw in the case of Gide, attempts to
move beyond gender divisions can sometimes merely strengthen
them. For the violence and the pleasure of Michel’s trangressions
surely depend upon a series of gendered binaries through which
the untamed Mediterranean landscape is conceived as an all-male
preserve so hostile to feminine domesticity that a figure like
Marceline cannot survive there. And, as Mandy Merck has
observed in one of the most acute discussions of Bersani’s work
to date, to recognize this is to raise a far more difficult question
for men and women, gay and straight alike: ‘How might the
gendered opposition of wild and tame, savagery and domesticity,
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146 QUEERING THE PITCH
be thought otherwise?’ (Merck 1998: 235). That this question
can even be asked may be one sign that Bersani’s argument is
far less radical than he would have us believe.
Yet, caveats aside, it is undeniably the case that in Bersani’s
work – as in the move from ‘gay’ to ‘queer’ more generally – we
find the very notion of gendered identity placed under maximum
pressure. Indeed, Homos, with its call for an experience of selfhood
that is predicated upon its own dissolution, a mode of being that
is at once ephemeral and episodic, a flux of pleasurable sensations
and awesome intensities without an organizing centre, epitomizes
the dilemmas faced by those who would seek an identity that
does not simply mirror the alternatives offered by the straight
world. Is such a search a contradiction in terms? Is the vocabulary
in which we think about who we are so closely (and so damagingly)
tied to the contrast between male and female subjects that, in
order to do justice to the complexity of our desires, we need to
abandon the lineaments of identity and begin to imagine a form
of subjectivity that dispenses with the commonsense certainties
of gender? For all its faults and incoherences, Bersani’s polemic
shows why such a post-identity theory might be indispensable
and what it might look like. Too militantly suspicious fully to
endorse the label of ‘queer’, he nevertheless allows his readers a
taste of a queer future.
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4
READERS AND SPECTATORS
Reading is now such a basic skill, seeming to transcend consid-
erations of gender, that it is hard to think of it as having a history
at all, let alone a past that belongs to the history of the relationship
between men and women. But the act of reading has itself varied
enormously over time, a fact that is immediately apparent from
the physical form that the written word has taken. If we think
of the elaborately illustrated manuscripts copied out by medieval
scribes, for instance, we are obviously in a different world from
that presupposed by the mass production of printed books. An
early fifteenth-century manuscript of Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde pictures the author reading his narrative poem to King
Richard II and Queen Anne surrounded by lords and ladies of
the court, an image that underscores the oral, performative
character of reading in an age of limited literacy. Indeed, in this
period even reading to oneself seems typically to have meant
reading out loud. Thus, among the rules of the early medieval
Benedictine Order is a direction that ‘[a]fter the sixth hour, having
left the table let [the monks] rest on their beds in perfect silence;
or if anyone wishes to read by himself, let him read so as not
to disturb the others’ (quoted in McLuhan 1969: 116). Reading
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148 READERS AND SPECTATORS
might be an aid to meditation, but the fact that the words on
the page are spoken could also undermine an atmosphere of
concentration.
Here we have two brief examples of what might be called the
social relations of reading. In the first, to put a text into circulation
is to read it to an audience. Chaucer’s purpose is informed by
a deep moral seriousness: he wanted to contrast the love of
Christ with the precariousness of worldly passion, setting the
majesty of religion against the vicissitudes of courtly love, and
the illustration shows him standing in an outdoor pulpit. Yet his
poem was also written to entertain and to amuse, an emphasis
that came to predominate in the more secular, post-medieval
period. When printed books started to appear in court society
they were
intended less for reading in the study or in solitary leisure hours wrung
from one’s profession, than for social conviviality; they are a part and
continuation of conversation and social games, or, like the majority
of court memoirs, they are substitute conversations, dialogues in
which for some reason or other the partner is lacking.
(Elias 1982: 275)
Once again, reading has a public and occasional quality about it
in that it is an extension of the everyday rituals and routines of
courtly life. But Elias’s description also hints at a more modern
relationship to the book in which reading is a silent and deeply
private experience, an inner colloquy that entails a withdrawal
of the self from the social whirl. On this view the colourful
portraits to be found in the seventeenth-century Memoirs of the
Duc de Saint-Simon prefigure the minutely observed dissection
of Parisian society two centuries later depicted in the novels of
Balzac and Proust.
In general terms we can say that, despite its importance, the
ability to read and write was an exceptional accomplishment
until the middle of the sixteenth century. And only in the
nineteenth century did literacy become at all commonplace. As
David Cressy observes, ‘England, for most of her history, has
been a partially literate society, in which the art of writing and
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record-keeping was confined to a clerical, governmental and
commercial elite’ (Cressy 1990: 838). Reading, a skill that would
have been learned before writing, was probably more wide-
spread and was given a boost by the invention of printing, since
standardized type was easier to read than handwritten script.
Nevertheless, in the early years of printing the law was used to
prevent some people from reading. An Act of 1543 outlawed the
reading of the Bible in English among the ranks of the lower
orders which included apprentices, yeomen and women.
It is hard to be sure how many people could read at any given
time because, unlike writing, reading leaves no clear historical
traces. A rise in the number of books or pamphlets undoubtedly
shows an increase in the demand for reading material, but it is
impossible to know exactly how many people could make use of
it. However, taking the ability to sign one’s own name as a rough
guide to the distribution of literacy, it is clear that reading
was a highly gendered activity. ‘At the time of the English Civil
War’, says Cressy, ‘more than two-thirds of all Englishmen –
contemporaries of Milton and Cromwell – could not write their
names’, whereas for women the figure was ‘as high as 90 per
cent’ (Cressy 1990: 844). This gap continued despite the fall
in illiteracy rates, but with the growth of towns and cities as
commercial centres we begin to see significant variations. In
London, for example, about half the women had become literate
by the 1690s, about the same proportion as for men in the English
countryside, and this advance continued into the eighteenth
century. It is against this metropolitan background that the plays,
poems and novels by the female writer Aphra Behn (1640–89)
need to be understood, with their trenchant critique of male
power and gender ideologies.
If the cultural context of London life was crucial to Behn’s
achievement as one of the first women to make her living from
writing, the absence of social support elsewhere created real
obstacles. When Anne Bradstreet’s poem The Tenth Muse Lately
Sprung up in America (1650) was first published in New England
it was prefaced by a long apologia from her brother-in-law assuring
readers that she had not neglected any of her womanly duties in
making time to write. In colonial America many women seem
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150 READERS AND SPECTATORS
to have been able to read, but they were not expected or
encouraged to write. Michael Warner cites the example of a
printer’s wife in late-seventeenth-century Maryland who set type
and ran the press after her husband died, but could not sign her
name. Until the end of the eighteenth century the schools that
taught colonial American children to read were called ‘woman
schools’, while those that taught them to write were known as
‘masters’ schools.’ Women could not write without feeling some
sense of inappropriateness or inhibition. ‘To write’, Warner
emphasizes, ‘was to inhabit gender’ (Warner 1990: 15), but his
aphorism is no less true of reading. Even instruction within the
family was often gendered, the responsibility for teaching children
to read being vested in the mother, while writing remained the
pedagogic preserve of the father.
GENDER AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
One of the most important developments arising from the spread
of literacy in the late-seventeenth century was the emergence of a
new zone of free and open discussion, now known as the public
sphere. Distinct from either the family or government or the royal
court, this loose, unofficial network of social relations came into
being through gatherings occurring in several different types
of venue: receptions in salons or fashionable houses, meetings in
private clubs and literary societies, casual conversations in coffee
houses and taverns, all of them providing occasions when the
leading issues of the day could be examined or thrashed out. What
held these disparate encounters together (there were some 3,000
coffee houses in London alone in the early 1800s), informing and
underpinning their many controversies and topical debates, was
a rapidly expanding periodical press whose journals, featuring
essays, criticism and poetry, were widely available in towns and
cities. The public sphere was therefore more than simply a talking-
shop; it was a highly literate urban reading public.
In his classic account of what he sees as the rise and subsequent
decline of the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas (1962) claims that,
at its best, it was distinguished by three mutually reinforcing
characteristics. First, participants in the public sphere thought of
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it as an extended conversation among peers. Differences of social
status were necessarily irrelevant to the clarity and cogency with
which someone might convincingly state their case and thus
should always be ignored. Moreover, in principle, discussion was
open to anyone who had enough capital and education to enable
them to become involved. And, by the same token, no one could
ever be permanently disqualified from taking part. Finally and
relatedly, debate was primarily conceived in terms of the exercise
of one’s reason, so that no subject was beyond rational criticism
and all disputes could be settled through logical argument. Put
like this, the public sphere appeals strongly to the most hopeful
humanitarian values: the commitment to a judicious, dispassionate
exchange of views between free and equal individuals.
Of course, the weaknesses inherent in this formulation are also
obvious enough. In practice, as the historical data on illiteracy
would lead us to expect, the eighteenth-century public sphere
was confined to a relatively small minority of privileged people,
typically men, for whom mercantile capitalism provided the
money, leisure and expertise to take advantage of the opportunity
to engage in ‘rational-critical public debate’ (Habermas 1989:
43). Habermas is, however, well aware of these objections, noting
that in Britain, the earliest example of a flourishing public sphere,
the mass of the population were ‘so pauperized that they could
not even pay for literature’, whether they were able to read it or
not (Habermas 1989: 38). So it is important to see exactly why
Habermas regards the public sphere as such a major cultural
advance.
What matters most to Habermas is that, through the public
sphere, independent rational criticism became an ordinary every-
day occurrence, producing a lively, knowledgeable citizenry, at
least among members of the reformed aristocracy and the
commercial middle classes who formed the readership of journals
like The Tatler. The aim of popularizing ideas, of reaching the
broadest possible ‘publick’, while raising the general standard
of conduct and discussion, was enshrined in the pages of the
periodical press, or what Habermas has dubbed ‘the moral
weeklies’, from the outset. Writing in his paper The Spectator in
March 1711, Joseph Addison declared that he would be pleased
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‘to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of
Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs
and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses’ (Steele and
Addison 1982: 210). His twelve essays on ‘The Pleasures of the
Imagination’ which appeared in June and July the following year
were precisely designed to instruct his readers in the subtleties
of aesthetic discrimination, moving from the art of tea-drinking
to the appreciation of fine writing and explicitly recommending
‘Conversation with Men of a Polite Genius’ as a ‘Method for
improving our Natural Taste’ (366). Encouraged by such publica-
tions, men from different social classes turned their attention to
literary and cultural questions, as well as to matters of politics
and public affairs. They were able to pursue their arguments
further through the letter columns of their favourite journals, a
device that vastly extended the operations of the public sphere
across time and space. At Button’s Coffee House in London, for
example, a lion’s head was fixed to the wall ‘through whose jaws
the reader threw his letter’ to The Spectator (Habermas 1989:
42). In such small details Habermas discerns the origins of modern
democratic public opinion with its constitutionally guaranteed
freedoms of speech, assembly and expression.
What of women readers? Habermas paints a complex picture.
On the one hand, he recognizes that some key institutions like
the coffee house were closed to women, despite their protests:
hence the appearance of pamphlets like The Women’s Petition
against Coffee, representing to Public Consideration of the Grand
Inconveniences according to their Sex from the Excessive use of that
Drying, Enfeebling Liquor in 1674. On the other hand, he also
suggests that ‘the intimate sphere of the conjugal family created,
so to speak, its own public’, since the home was one of the
private domains in which discussion could take place (29). At
the grandest level, salons or receptions devoted to literature and
the arts were largely organized and orchestrated by wealthy and
influential women, especially in continental Europe, where they
sometimes acquired a reputation as centres of political intrigue.
In general, says Habermas, ‘female readers as well as apprentices
and servants often took a more active part in the literary public
sphere’ than male heads of households (56). Here, at least, women
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could distinguish themselves as something other than wives and
mothers. Moreover, from the standpoint of ‘the educated classes’
the world of letters and that of political debate were two sides
of the same coin: ‘in the self-understanding of public opinion
the public sphere appeared as one and indivisible’ (56).
In their concern with manners and decorum, writers like
Addison or Swift could be extremely condescending in their
treatment of women. Addison’s 1711 essay on ‘the Faults and
Imperfections of one Sex transplanted into another’ is actually
an occasion for mocking women’s presumption in holding strong
political views, chiefly on the grounds that they lack ‘that Caution
and Reservedness which are requisite in our Sex’ and soon reveal
their essentially emotional natures. Consequently,
When this unnatural Zeal gets into them, it throws them into ten
thousand Heats and Extravagances; their generous Souls set no
Bounds to their Love, or to their Hatred; and whether a Whig or a
Tory, a Lap-Dog or a Gallant, an Opera or a Puppet-Show, be the
Object of it, the Passion, while it reigns, engrosses the whole Woman.
(Steele and Addison 1982: 253)
Elsewhere, Addison distinguished between those women for whom
‘the right adjusting of their Hair [forms] the Principal Employment
of their Lives’ and those ‘reasonable Creatures’ who ‘move in an
exalted Sphere of Knowledge and Virtue . . . and inspire a kind
of Awe and Respect, as well as Love, into their Male-Beholders.’
Part of his motive in writing is, he asserts, ‘to encrease the Number’
of the latter by diverting ‘the Minds of my Female Readers from
greater Trifles’ (212). While couched in distinctly unflattering
terms, Addison’s tendentious contrast does have the effect of
aligning a version of femininity with progress and civilization. As
Jonathan Brody Kramnick has argued, it was ‘the prominence
of “gentle” readers from the “Female World”, whose leisurely
domesticity put “so much Time on their Hands” that augured the
mannered elegance of modern English culture’ which Addison and
others sought to promote (Kramnick 1997: 1089).
However, the most comprehensive analysis to date of the female
contribution to papers like The Spectator is far more pessimistic
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in its conclusions than Kramnick’s brief but suggestive remarks
on Addison and his circle might lead one to expect. In her 1989
study Women and Print Culture, Kathryn Shevelow surveys the
overall pattern of development followed by the early periodicals
and argues that, although the presence of women readers and
writers indicates that they were able to make significant inroads
into the male dominated public sphere, the terms on which they
entered tended to confirm their subordinate domestic status. To
document her point, Shevelow compares John Dunton’s Athenian
Mercury from the 1690s with The Tatler and The Spectator
nearly two decades later and notes their very different approaches
to readers’ letters. The Mercury was essentially an epistolary publi-
cation, consisting almost entirely of answers to queries raised
by readers. For John Dunton women were a vital segment of his
target audience and the first issue even carried a subtitle that
promised to resolve ‘all the most Nice and Curious Questions
proposed by the Ingenious of Either Sex’. How many of the letters
were genuine and how many were devised by journalists in pursuit
of good copy it is impossible to say. But certainly the Mercury
displayed advertisements encouraging correspondence from female
readers on ‘all manner of Questions’ (Shevelow 1989: 60). Not
so The Tatler. Despite the dubious ‘Honour’ of being ‘invented’
for ‘the Fair Sex’ (who ‘tattle’ or gossip), women were never meant
to be the primary recipients of Richard Steele’s periodical. Indeed,
letters were not the mainstay of The Tatler at all, for it gave
pride of place to essays or commentaries offered by a literary
persona who would incorporate various communications, ranging
from ‘Letters of Gallantry’ to letters from the country, into his
ruminations or flights of fancy. Under Steele and Addison’s
editorship the periodical moved to a more tightly structured,
rather ‘monologic framework’ in which ‘the persona usurped the
act of reader self-representation by determining its nature and its
context’; hence the tendency for the ‘I’ of the essay to summarize
or paraphrase or even ventriloquize his readers’ observations, rather
than allowing them the use of their own voices (106).
When Steele and Addison discuss the relations between men
and women they are essentially writing as moralists. In his essay
on ‘Poor and publick whores’ (1712), for example, Steele attacks
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for their lack of compassion those society ladies whom he dubs
‘the outragiously virtuous’, noting that although ‘[t]he unlawful
Commerce of the Sexes is of all other [Sins] the hardest to avoid;
. . . yet there is no one which you shall hear the rigider Part of
Womankind speak of with so little Mercy’ (Steele and Addison
1982: 266). As this comment suggests, for Steele and Addison
morals and gender were inextricably linked. Thus in an earlier
review in The Tatler, Steele had argued ‘That the Soul of a Man
and that of a Woman are made very unlike, according to the
Employments for which they are designed’, so that the ‘Virtues
have respectively a Masculine and a Feminine Cast’. Here the
idealization of femininity is made possible through a parallel
idealization of domesticity since, according to Steele, ‘to manage
well a great Family, is as worthy an Instance of Capacity, as to
execute a great Employment’ (156–7). This doctrine of separate
but complementary spheres – Steele is careful to say that men do
not have ‘superior Qualities’ – also underwrites Addison’s eulogy
on the ‘Pleasures’ of ‘a happy Marriage’ with all its ‘Enjoyments
of Sense and Reason’, from whose satisfied heights he deduced
that ‘Nothing is a greater Mark of a degenerate and vitious Age,
than the common Ridicule which passes on this State of Life’
(262). In the pages of The Tatler and The Spectator the elevation
of women rested upon their effective confinement to the private
domain of the home.
This raises a more general problem. As Shevelow points out,
part of the market logic of including women in the periodical
press was to move towards the specialization of content along
gender lines. Publications that catered for women tended to
concentrate upon ‘Domestick Life’ rather than ‘Publick Affairs’
and this was as true of the monthly ‘ladies’ issues’ produced by
the Athenian Mercury as it was of Eliza Haywood’s Female
Spectator, said to be the first periodical written by and for women
and published nearly half a century later. To be sure, the latter
represented an important new stage of development for, while it
drew upon some of the essayistic conventions established by Steele
and Addison, it also included readers’ letters and fiction and,
above all, relied explicitly upon the editorial identity of a female
persona that ‘substantially qualified or broke down altogether the
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156 READERS AND SPECTATORS
hierarchical distance between writer and reader’ typical of previous
male-dominated publications (Shevelow 1989: 168). However,
in adopting a more intimate form of address, the Female Spectator
was continuing to reinforce the assumption that the social world
could be divided between distinctively masculine and feminine
modes of experience. This stance paved the way for the early
women’s magazines such as novelist Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s
Museum (1760) with its miscellany of poems, essays, serials, letters
and illustrations; and by the mid-1770s titles like the Matrimonial
Magazine or Monthly Anecdotes of Love and Marriage began to
appear which also featured recipes, fashion items or needlework
patterns.
Shevelow believes that these publications not only ‘offered
images in which readers could locate themselves’, but that they
put in place an ‘ideology of domesticity’ whose final form was
the claustrophobic patriarchal household typified by the Victorian
phrase the ‘angel in the house’ (Shevelow 1989: 193). Read beside
Shevelow’s study, therefore, Habermas’s claims regarding women’s
participation in the literary public sphere – at least if we take
this as referring to those journals which tackle both political and
cultural issues – start to look disappointingly thin. However,
a thorough evaluation of the public sphere thesis also needs to
consider Habermas’s account of its decline as well as its rise, in
other words its ‘structural transformation’.
The test of whether this sphere of discussion and criticism
could really be described as ‘public’ ultimately rested upon ‘the
principle of universal access’. Clearly, ‘[a] public sphere from
which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than
merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all’ (Habermas
1989: 85). Habermas’s formulation suggests that the ideal was
always flawed, or perhaps more accurately, that there was a gap
between its universalistic pretensions and the narrow class and
gender base of its main constituency. As Shevelow shows, while
a journal like the Athenian Mercury was relatively even-handed
in its treatment of middle-class male and female readers, women
correspondents whose poor spelling and grammar and social
circumstances placed them beyond the pale of bourgeois propriety
were often denied a reply and could instead find themselves held
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up as a sad warning of ‘what almost all those sort of people must
at last come to’ (Shevelow 1989: 213). The democratic struggles
of the nineteenth century exacerbated these tensions and one
effect of these new demands for political representation was a
heightened sense of anxiety about readers and reading.
Victorian Britain can be described as a golden age of modern
print culture. Between 1837 and 1901 something like 60,000
works of fiction were published, a figure that takes no account
of the huge number of short stories in journals and magazines.
And from the 1850s and 1860s we also see the growth of a new
species of periodical, like the Cornhill or the Saturday Review,
whose editors and authors were determined ‘to establish between
themselves and their readers common principles and standards
on the major political, moral, religious, and cultural issues of the
day’ (Keating 1991: 35). Indeed, one could argue that this was
a key phase in the development of what Habermas refers to as
the literary public sphere.
Largely because of his predominantly eighteenth-century
focus, Habermas tends to underestimate not only its complexity
and importance, but also the central role played by women in
the nineteenth-century world of letters. Throughout this period
gender provided much of the vocabulary in terms of which
judgements of literary success were made. So Charles Reade’s
highly praised, but now long-forgotten bestseller It Is Never Too
Late To Mend (1856) was commended for the ‘superb physical
strength’ of his writing, prose that was ‘powerful’, ‘vigorous’,
‘lusty’ and ‘daring’ and whose stirring narrative offered a welcome
relief from ‘the sentimental woes and drawingroom distresses
which form the staple of so much of our circulating library fiction’.
Nearly three decades later this sort of language was still in play
in the obituary published by Punch magazine which contrasted
Reade’s ‘virile creations’ with the effete output characteristic of
the many ‘twaddlers tame and soft’ whose work defaced the literary
scene (Thompson 1996: 27–8). Signs of femininity were widely
held to indicate a fatal weakness in a writer’s style, so much so
that Mrs Margaret Oliphant could applaud her fellow-author
George Eliot for perfecting novels that were ‘less definable in
point of sex than the books of any other woman who has ever
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written’ (Tuchman and Fortin 1989: 186). This kind of thinking,
as Eliot herself keenly appreciated, placed women novelists in a
double-bind. For if literary greatness was predicated upon their
being able to negate or transcend their femininity, the critical
esteem accorded to ‘manly’ writing seemed to condemn women
to the perpetual risk of producing either pale imitations or
hypermasculine caricatures.
Behind this dilemma lay the larger question of who controlled
the literary public sphere. In their study Edging Women Out,
Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin trace a growing male reaction
against women’s commercial success as novelists in the 1840s
and 1850s and, using data from publishers’ archives, they show
how by the end of the nineteenth century more male authors
were finding their way into print than their female counterparts,
despite the fact that women submitted more manuscripts than
men. Equally important, Tuchman and Fortin argue that by the
1870s male reviewers were beginning to employ gendered criteria
to distinguish between serious fiction and popular entertain-
ment. Male writing was said to display ‘ideas capable of having
an impact upon the mind’, while women’s novels were associated
with ordinary feelings and the trivia of everyday life (78). But
these and other, far harsher views had deep roots in the official
culture of the Victorian era and could be found everywhere from
medical texts to advice manuals. In E.J.Tilt’s On the Preservation
of the Health of Women at the Critical Periods of Life (1851), for
example, there is a warning that:
Novels and romances, speaking generally, should be spurned, as
capable of calling forth emotions of the same morbid description
which, when habitually indulged in, exert a disastrous influence on
the nervous system, sufficient to explain that frequency of hysteria
and nervous diseases which we find among the highest classes.
(quoted in Flint 1993: 58)
Echoes of this same argument can still be heard at the century’s
close when Annie Swan, writing in answer to the question ‘What
Should Women Read?’ in the periodical Woman at Home, insists
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that to dwell too much on women’s ‘imaginative and emotional
side is to create the morbid’ (61).
This is not the whole story. There is no shortage of essays
proclaiming the necessity of ‘food for the mind’ or praising books
as the medium of self-development par excellence. But the idea
that a woman’s reading capacities were always already inscribed
in the female body itself, an integral part of her physiology, died
hard and was reinforced by a tendency to associate other changes
in the social order with feminine characteristics. As Andreas
Huyssen has argued more generally, throughout late nineteenth-
century Europe ‘a specific traditional male image of woman served
as a receptacle for all kinds of projections, displaced fears, and
anxieties’, so that a ‘fear of the masses’ was ‘also a fear of woman,
a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of
sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the
mass’ (Huyssen 1986: 52). One can see this interpretive slide at
work in the reception of the ‘New Woman’ fiction in Britain in
the 1890s, texts in which their chiefly female authors attempted
to challenge received ideas on sexuality, marriage, careers and
health. Predictably, male critics were quick to diagnose this kind
of writing as a ‘literature of hysteria’ or even ‘a literature of vituper-
ation and of sex-mania’, a symptom ‘of a restless and fretful age’
likely ‘to widen the breach between men and women, and to
make them more mutually distrustful than ever’ (Stutfield 1897:
109, 116). But, from a woman’s perspective, what this often
didactic fiction achieved was the opening up of a social space in
which issues like venereal disease or the male double standard
might be publicly discussed. In other words, the intimacy of the
household could become a site of controversy, something like
a feminized literary public sphere (see Flint 1993: 300). And it
was these controversies that prepared the ground for women’s
suffrage.
However, there is an important qualification that needs to
be entered here. The huge expansion in Victorian print culture
meant that publishing of all kinds was gradually ceasing to be a
‘small handicraft business’ (Habermas 1989: 180). It now had
the potential to become a large-scale commercial operation with
a relatively small number of powerful, highly capitalized and
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160 READERS AND SPECTATORS
technologically advanced companies reaching out to millions of
readers. For Habermas, this move towards economic concentration
combined with the growth of a mass audience spelled the end
of the public sphere. In his view, by the close of the nineteenth-
century print was ceasing to provide a means by which men and
women could engage in reasoned discussion of the major political
issues that faced them, including, we might add, the question of
their unequal relationship to each other, a point that Habermas
has largely ignored. There is a very real paradox in Habermas’s
account of cultural change. For, as we saw earlier, the eighteenth-
century public sphere may have facilitated remarkably open and
democratic exchanges among the relatively small number of people
who took part in it, but women were only allowed a subordinate
role at best.
The creation of a truly mass audience initially took place in
the newspaper industry where innovative printing techniques,
new styles of popular journalism and a steady stream of advertising
revenue helped to push daily circulation figures over the one
million mark by the first decade of the twentieth century. If
more men and women were reading newspapers than ever before,
the industry’s exceptional profitability meant that they were
being served by extremely powerful financial interests. Whereas
‘formerly the press was able to limit itself to the transmission
and amplification of the rational-critical debate of private people
assembled into a public’, Habermas believes that the modern
newspaper industry and the mass media more generally now tend
to shape the terms in which the key national issues are posed
from the outset. Another effect of this unprecedented growth
has been to transform ‘the public sphere into a medium of adver-
tising’ in which the reader is increasingly addressed as a consumer,
rather than as a citizen (188–9). And insofar as the home has
become the major site of consumption, women readers have
become a new target audience, though whether this has resulted
in their empowerment or simply in new ideologies of domesticity
continues to remain a controversial topic. Certainly, these changes
have raised ever more urgent questions about gender and the
nature of reading under contemporary conditions, particularly
given the tendency for texts to be organized into male and female
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genres. Can we still hold on to the notion of a literary public
sphere once texts start to be marketed to a vast, anonymous and
sometimes international pool of readers? Or, to paraphrase Terry
Eagleton, has all discussion become absorbed into the culture
industry (Eagleton 1984: 107)? Although writers like Habermas
or Eagleton can make these sound deceptively like gender-neutral
questions, they have frequently been framed and answered in
gendered terms, whether wittingly or not.
‘INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES’
As we saw in our brief account of the Victorian woman reader,
the idea of a mass public has typically been a source of worry
to the main centres of respectable middle-class opinion and has
often been seen as possessing feminine characteristics. In the late
1850s the novelist Wilkie Collins was shocked to discover that
‘the great bulk of the reading public of England’ preferred ‘penny-
novel Journals’ to his own novels, a semi-literate audience he
half-imagined as ‘two timid girls, who are respectively afraid of
a French invasion and dragon-flies’ (quoted in McAleer 1992:
1–2). But at least he believed that this ‘unknown public’ could
be won over.
A long quotation from Collins’s essay subsequently appeared
as one of the epigraphs to Queenie Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading
Public (1932), one of the earliest attempts at a systematic analysis
of the modern book market. But Leavis’s forecast was far less
optimistic than that of her predecessor. Surveying the use made
of public libraries, for example, Leavis argued that, despite the
achievement of universal literacy, ‘the book-borrowing public
has acquired the reading habit while somehow failing to exercise
any critical intelligence about its reading’ (Leavis 1979: 21).
Among the factors she cited as responsible for this lack of
discrimination was the role of women in selecting library books
and thus determining what texts will enter the home. According
to one librarian:
if a woman is taken up with a house all day, she doesn’t want tales
about married problems or misunderstood wives – she knows enough
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162 READERS AND SPECTATORS
about these already; she can’t be bothered with dialect after a day’s
work, and historical novels aren’t alive enough. What she enjoys is
something that is possible but outside her own experience . . .
(Leavis 1979: 22–3)
For Leavis this turn to undemanding or escapist forms of literature
represented the ‘disintegration’ of the serious reading public
and in some respects her argument parallels the account of the
structural transformation of the public sphere later advanced
by Habermas. Both critics chart a process of decline from the
eighteenth century to the present, much of it due to what Leavis
calls ‘the increasing control by Big Business’, though she also
mentions other causes like the growing anti-intellectualism of a
governing class whose men are expected to be ‘simple but virile’
rather than cultured and intelligent (29, 155). Leavis’s account
of the degradation of reading therefore seems to involve the
feminization of a culture that upper-class men had largely
abandoned. However, while she fails to think through the gender
implications of this line of analysis, Leavis does paint a picture
of a society in the grip of a shallow, feminine emotionalism. To
help flesh out this claim she uses the impressionable figure of
Gerty MacDowell from Joyce’s Ulysses to epitomize the modern
reader, characterizing her as a young woman whose predigested
attitudes are drawn from ‘memories of slightly similar situations
in cheap fiction’, who ‘thinks in terms of clichés drawn from the
same source, and is completely out of touch with reality’. The
imaginary Gerty is thus all too ‘typical of the level at which the
emotional life of the generality is now conducted’ (195–6).
In attempting to explain the success of the popular fiction of
her day, Leavis argues, largely on the basis of extracts from readers’
letters supplied by twenty-five authors, that these kinds of novels
‘excite in the ordinary person an emotional activity for which
there is no scope’ in modern life. But precisely why emotional
expression is assumed to be blocked among the majority of the
population remains unclear. Leavis variously points to the decline
of religion, to the failure of many modern individuals to develop
fully, and to the effects of an increasingly specialized division of
labour. Yet, while she does concede that novelists like Marie
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Corelli or Florence Barclay are ‘genuinely preoccupied with ethical
problems’, her steadfast belief that these texts have very little
redeeming value prevented her from looking closely at how they
were read and how the act of reading was related to the reader’s
social situation (63).
The sorts of assumption informing Leavis’s study were fairly
commonplace among cultural critics in the 1930s and it took
several decades before they came under scrutiny, not to say
empirical investigation. To gauge the extent to which the questions
asked about readers have changed in recent years, the best place
to start is Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984), first
published a little over half a century after Leavis’s book first
appeared. In broad outline Reading the Romance is not hard to
summarize, though its detailed findings are sometimes quite
complex. What Radway does is to take one of the most despised
categories of popular writing discussed in Fiction and the Reading
Public (though neither Leavis nor her book are explicitly men-
tioned by name) and try to show that there is more to domestic
romance or the romantic novel than critical prejudice would lead
one to expect. Her boldest move is to shift the spotlight away
from the formal properties of literary narratives and on to the
meanings that women readers ‘find’ there. This might sound as
if reading is a purely individual or subjective affair, a matter
of each reader’s uniquely personal relationship to a given text.
But, following the work of theorist Stanley Fish, Radway regards
reading as an act that occurs within a community of readers
using the same ‘interpretive strategies’: in other words, what a
text is and how it might be read are to be understood through
the shared conventions and social values of an ‘interpretive
community’ (Fish 1980: 161).
The setting for Radway’s research is the suburb of a midwestern
American city she calls by the pseudonym Smithton, a site partly
chosen because of its physical and cultural distance from New
York where most of the publishing industry’s major decisions
are made. Radway focuses upon a network of women grouped
around a bookseller named Dorothy Evans who published a
regular newsletter that served as a guide to her customers and
fellow readers by reviewing new titles, offering information and,
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perhaps most important of all, defending romance fiction against
the ridicule that has often been heaped upon it in the press, the
home and the workplace. This advisory and ideological work
required a delicate sense of balance, moving between the authors
and New York editors who increasingly sought her advice on
their manuscripts and the regular romance readers who turned
to her to help them save time and money. Dot’s proudest boast
was that she would never usurp her customers’ ‘right to choose
their own reading materials’, limiting herself only to making
suggestions ‘from my own experience’. So while her judgements
necessarily reinforced well-worn genre categories, she was also
careful to insist on ‘respecting [the] personal preferences’ of her
readers (Radway 1987: 52–3).
As well as looking at Dot’s pivotal opinion-shaping role,
Radway carried out in-depth studies of forty-two of her female
newsletter subscribers, asking them questions about their lives
and their tastes in fiction. Her findings defy neat enumeration,
for romance reading is revealed as an ‘indistinct’ or multifaceted
activity, a ‘complicated, polysemic event’ (209). It is not possible
to infer unambiguously from their reading whether these romance
novels either help to reconcile these women to their lives or make
them more restless, more critical. Not all romances are equally
successful, for example, and those that are judged to fail do so
because, however absorbing they might be, ultimately they leave
their readers without a sense ‘that men and marriage really do
mean good things for women’ (what Radway calls ‘the promise
of patriarchy’) and consequently impair their feelings of self-worth
and self-confidence (184). On the other hand, the social meaning
of romance does not reside solely between its covers. Radway
suggests that the act of reading itself, regardless of a particular
novel’s content, is simultaneously ‘combative and compensatory’
for these women:
It is combative in the sense that it enables them to refuse the other-
directed social role prescribed for them by their position within the
institution of marriage. In picking up a book, as they have so eloquently
told us, they refuse temporarily their family’s otherwise constant
demand that they attend to the wants of others even as they act
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READERS AND SPECTATORS 165
deliberately to do something for their own private pleasure. Their
activity is compensatory, then, in that it permits them to focus on
themselves and to carve out a solitary space within an arena . . .
where they are defined as a public resource to be mined at will by
the family.
(Radway 1987: 211)
What matters most of all, therefore, is that reading the romance
signifies a break in family time, a point of relief or suspension
within the everyday that arises out of, but is countermanded by,
ordinary domestic routine. The keen sense of disappointment
that is sometimes aroused by an unsatisfactory text is a product
not just of the puncturing of utopian desire, but derives from
the highly charged, intensely cathected moment in which reading
takes place. Because the reader is literally pleasing herself, the
temporary deferral of her responsibilities to others creates a volatile
mixture of hope and a sense of guilt that can easily be triggered
by frustrated narrative expectations.
Radway’s account of why these women read romances could
be said to follow a kind of situational logic that is based upon
the fit between the properties of the genre and the lives led by
her respondents. Yet what bonds the women to their preferred
texts is not their experience alone, but their involvement and
participation in a collective discourse about romance reading that
articulates their opinions and their enthusiasms. This discursive
field or tradition serves as the medium through which the act of
reading takes place, infusing it with meaning and value, principally
via the circulation of Dot’s newsletter. ‘Dorothy’s Diary of
Romance Reading’ activates the Smithton women’s ‘interpretive
community’, making texts and readers what they are.
It is important not to literalize the notion of ‘community’ in
this formulation. The Smithton women are not readers who are
organized or who meet regularly. Rather, they represent a virtual
community or a symbolic community, linked solely by the values
which they share. As Radway notes:
Because the oppositional act is carried out through the auspices
of a book and thus involves the fundamentally private, isolated
experience of reading, these women never get together to share either
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the experience of imaginative opposition, or, perhaps more important,
the discontent that gave rise to their need for the romance in the
first place. The women join forces only . . . in the privacy of their own
homes and in the culturally devalued sphere of leisure activity.
(Radway 1987: 212)
Radway is therefore in no doubt that ultimately romance reading
‘leaves unchallenged the male right to the public spheres of work,
politics, and power’ (217). In short, despite the self-awareness
that the newsletter provides, this fragmented reading public
lacks the cultural resources to challenge the terms of its own
fragmentation.
Although she emphasizes the role played by a communal
discourse in sustaining their reading habits, Radway often writes
as if there were a natural affinity between women readers and
romance novels. Indeed, if one reads Radway’s study in tandem
with, say, Ken Worpole’s essay ‘The American Connection:
Masculine Style in Popular Fiction’ (1983), it is easy to build
up a somewhat exaggerated picture of how reading is gendered.
Worpole argues that from the mid-1930s onwards many British
working-class male readers found in American writers a tough
vernacular realism that seemed to resonate with their own
experiences of the harsh realities of living and working in the
city. Yet Worpole is particularly concerned with those men who
were politically active and his anecdotal evidence seems to suggest
that it was their socialist ideology that drew them to the critique
of urban corruption in novelists like Upton Sinclair and also in
the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett. Put another
way, it is likely that socialist ideas provided the leading element
in the popular aesthetic (or ‘interpretive strategies’) that governed
or structured these men’s mode of reading. By contrast, the
Smithton women’s preferences appear far more indeterminate.
For, in their case, the suspension of time inherent in the act of
reading is potentially compatible with a whole variety of genres
or sub-genres (the racing thrillers written by Dick Francis have
a wide female readership, for example). Yet, in practice, they
seem to ignore these alternatives. One weakness of Reading the
Romance is that, for all its plausibility, it does not entirely explain
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why it is this particular literary formula that appeals to the women
Radway studied rather than another.
On the other hand, there are some indications that Radway’s
sample is unusual. They are remarkably dedicated readers and
very few are ‘avid television watchers’; rather surprisingly over
half the sample never watched soap operas (Radway 1983: 76).
As Steven Connor has warned, there is a danger here of
‘turning commercial into ethnographic homogeneity’ and then
of mistakenly assuming that this group is ‘typical of the readers
of mass-market fiction’. Before jumping to conclusions we should
consider the possibility that:
Romances are not read only by romance readers but also by readers
who are not ‘romance readers’ (academics, for example), or who will
not remain so, or who have not always been so, or who are only
occasionally so (though they may be intensely loyal during the periods
when they are); to specify only these variables.
(Connor 1996: 21)
Connor’s point is that reading is generally far more fluid (or
mutable) than Radway can envisage, especially under (post)modern
conditions. Today, readers are increasingly likely to have what
Connor calls ‘multiple allegiances’, moving between different
kinds of fiction and different kinds of reading experience. This
may well be true, but we can also turn this argument around by
suggesting that the act of reading is in itself characterized by a
greater degree of interior (or psychic) mobility than Reading the
Romance is prepared to allow. Much of the psychoanalytically
inspired work on fantasy and fantasy scenarios stresses that the
process of identification is not fixed but passes from character to
character, so that crossing the boundaries of gender can be an
integral part of the reader’s imaginative absorption in narrative
time (see Kaplan 1986). Responding to this criticism, Radway has
conceded the possibility that women ‘readers do not identify only
with the romantic heroine but in fact identify in multiple and
wandering fashion with the seducer, the seduced and the process
of seduction itself’ (Radway 1987: 243). And elsewhere, pushing
this point one step further, she has begun to see modern
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subjectivity as ‘nomadic’, shifting ‘actively, discontinuously . . . via
disparate associations and relations through day-to-day existence’
(Radway 1988: 366). The wheel has come full circle.
But in neither Radway’s early nor her slightly later arguments
does reading figure as anything other than an individual practice.
So, instead of swinging quickly from one style of analysis to its
polar opposite, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider
some of the evidence about the social occasions of reading, limited
though this is. In fact, organized reading groups have a long and
by no means negligible history, one that often connects them
to the ideal of a public sphere. At the turn of the nineteenth
century, American reading circles were linked to the women’s
club movement, for example, and in Texas in the Progressive Era
women’s reform groups also grew out of literary societies or book
discussion groups. Indeed, according to current British research,
reading groups continue to have ‘a discernible civic dimension’
in which serious reading is conceived as a means towards becoming
a responsible and ‘fully informed’ member of society (Hartley
1999: 18). Political activity can bring reading circles into existence
too, though sometimes indirectly: one of the Texas groups studied
by Elizabeth Long (1986) in the early 1980s had its origins a
quarter of a century earlier in a network of League of Women
Voters members.
The women in the four groups in Long’s exploratory study
were therefore very different from those in Radway’s sample. They
were typically college-educated, belonged to affluent, white
middle-class families, and tended to be in full-time professional
jobs. The groups ranged in size from seven to nineteen members
and would read a mixture of novels and nonfiction, excluding
only those texts that they considered downmarket, undemanding
or ‘trashy’ (reading romances or thrillers was out of the question,
though an exception might be made for a writer like Dorothy
L. Sayers). Books were selected according to an implicit ‘hierarchy
of taste’ based upon ‘a vague humanism that defines reading
truly great books as a morally and intellectually enhancing experi-
ence’ or, in the case of nonfiction, because of their ‘social relevance’
(Long 1986: 598–9). While such judgements display a marked
deference to established centres of cultural authority such as
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universities or élite cultural journalism, they are not set in stone:
the New York Times Book Review started to fall out of favour
once it began including genre fiction and mass-market paperbacks.
However, once a book has been chosen, its treatment in the
reading groups is not particularly reverent or constrained. The
women describe their discussions as ‘playful’, by which they
mean that their talk is allowed to jump from topic to topic, and
also that they ‘are willing to entertain a variety of readings’ (603).
What matters in discussions is not so much the free expression
of opinion as the tacit granting of permission ‘to take risks by
making idiosyncratic connections, to bring forward personal
experiences, to play with categories’: there is little evidence of
any ‘interpretive community’ at work during group meetings
(604). Within the general rubric of seriousness that legitimates
the group, reading can combine a sense of exhilaration with self-
exploration or self-analysis. Although its somewhat anarchic
clamour of different points of view reflects the individualistic
values of modern American life, the pleasure taken in the free
play of ideas means that, unusually, these discussions are regarded
as valuable in themselves rather than simply being a means to
an end.
But is there anything distinctively feminine about such groups?
This is a very difficult question to answer. Long’s subsequent
work suggests that women are far more likely than men to start
or join a reading circle. Out of over seventy reading groups she
located in Houston, Texas, forty-two were women’s groups,
twenty-eight were mixed, but only three consisted solely of
men. Long provides little systematic information about the latter,
but at least some of her evidence from the mixed groups shows
male readers gaining insight into their childhood through
memories released by reading about fictional characters in a way
that is similar to the responses of women readers. However, these
reactions are not necessarily typical of male readers and may
possibly be encouraged by the experience of reading with women.
For, as Long stresses, ‘women seem especially to merge psycho-
logical boundaries in this fashion’ (Long 1987: 320). Nevertheless,
it is clear that the male and female readers whom she studied
shared a broad commitment to an unexamined realist aesthetic
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in which the credibility and psychological interest of the narrative
reside in the possibility of identifying with its principal characters.
And in this they seem to differ from the women whose reading
consists exclusively of fiction such as romance aimed specifically
at a female audience, since Radway’s respondents and also most
of the women who took part in Bridget Fowler’s recent survey
of Scottish romance readers, actively distinguish their preferred
genre from the realist novel. In the eyes of these readers ‘formulaic
romance’ provides ‘an idealised vision of an unalienated, yet
hierarchical society’ in which ‘patriarchy fosters protective love
and true nobility of mind justifies privilege’. For those who are
‘enmeshed within the confines of kinship and still dependent
economically on men’ it remains ‘the “dream-book” of the family’
(Fowler 1991: 175).
SPECTATEUR, SPECTATRICE
If late-twentieth-century publishing increasingly became a
department or specialism within vast multi-media conglomerates,
it is also the case that for many men and women reading novels
is now inseparable from their wider consumption of cultural
narratives via film and television. To a large extent, these media
currently occupy the space that once belonged to the literary
public sphere and they are among the primary sites within which
our sense of ourselves as gendered subjects or individuals is
imaginatively engaged and tested out across a variety of cultural
forms. The multiplier effect of one cultural form upon another
can be considerable. To take a relatively small example: the
release of the Merchant-Ivory film of E.M. Forster’s A Room with
a View in 1985 led to the sale of two million copies of the novel,
compared to a mere 50,000 in Forster’s own lifetime (Glover
1996: 30). As we have already noted, in Habermas’s view this
massification of the media and their concentration in the hands
of a small number of giant corporations have been central to the
public sphere’s decline, turning a ‘culture-debating’ public into
an audience of culture-consumers (Habermas 1989: 159). In the
remainder of this chapter we will look at some of the weaknesses
of Habermas’s position from a gender perspective.
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While Habermas has recently conceded that his original analysis
was ‘too pessimistic’, partly because it ignored ‘the cultural context
of [media] reception’, his model of the public sphere was also
flawed by his idealization of print culture and his corresponding
failure to address fully its tendency to exclude female participants
(Habermas 1992: 427–8, 438–9). At one level these criticisms
suggest some fairly straightforward revisions. By simultaneously
questioning the assumptions behind Habermas’s model and taking
a fresh look at the history of the cinema, for example, it should
become possible to bring women back into the picture. However,
as we will see, it is debatable whether Habermas’s thesis can
really survive this kind of close, gender-sensitive scrutiny.
To begin at the beginning: one of the main themes in debates
about the impact of film on early twentieth-century society was
a fear that it would radically destabilize the relations between
the sexes. ‘Worst of all,’ opined the Chicago Daily News in 1907,
the new cheap movie theatres or nickelodeons ‘may become foci
for the spread of moral degradation’, places where ‘young girls
particularly are in danger of forming associations that are ruinous’
(quoted in Rabinovitz 1990: 74). Behind the paper’s vague, yet
undeniably sensationalizing language lay a number of what it
believed were worrying developments: the rapid migration into
Chicago of people new to American city life, especially young
(often immigrant) working-class women, who were able to evade
the control of their families in the vast metropolis. Again and
again, gullible young women cinema-goers were identified as the
problem generated by the new medium. In his satirical essay
‘The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies’, written in Germany in
the 1920s, cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer turned this prejudice
on its head and cynically suggested a two-way relay between
cinema and society: if ‘sensational film hits and life usually
correspond to each other’ it is ‘because the Little Miss Typists
[Tippmamsells] model themselves after the examples they see on
the screen’, but it may also be ‘that the most hypocritical instances
are stolen from life’ (Kracauer 1995: 292). In film it was possible
to have the worst of both worlds.
This mixture of condescension and alarm was not untypical.
On the one hand, women were attacked for failing to conform;
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on the other, they were ridiculed if they were seen as conforming
too much. Cinema appears therefore as a potential site of
transgression, a setting that allows women to reveal their troubling
otherness, their appetites and their desires. Above all it provided
access to new experiences. In 1897 one of the most popular
attractions in American movie theatres was a film of a heavyweight
boxing championship that ran for nearly two hours. What was
truly remarkable was that 60 per cent of the audience consisted
of women who, through the medium of film, were for the first
time able to watch an intensely physical contest usually reserved
for the gaze of men only. Under these novel relations of spectator-
ship boxing became visible as a sexually charged event.
Miriam Hansen, who opens her book Babel and Babylon:
Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991) with this vignette,
has argued that the vogue for The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight
among women breached ‘the taboo on an active female gaze’,
reversing the widespread assumption that it was men who alone
possessed the right to look. She reads this episode as a symptom
and sign of the emergence of what she regards as ‘an alternative
public sphere’ for women, a space within which their needs and
aspirations could be articulated, in however tentative a form.
Drawing upon Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s critique of
Habermas in Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (1972; translated as
The Public Sphere and Experience, 1993), Hansen’s methodology
locates this female counter-public negatively, searching for those
practices that seem to stand out against the dominant order of
the modern city and were subject to regulation or adverse
comment. Unlike Habermas’s concept of a public sphere, this
alternative domain is disorganized, fleeting, evanescent: it springs
to life in brief flashpoints or partial traces. Since female suffrage
was not achieved until after the First World War, the women
who frequented the movies during this period had little oppor-
tunity to participate in organized politics; indeed, a remarkably
detailed unpublished study of German women spectators by
Emilie Altenloh in 1914 actually observed that ‘[w]hile the men
are attending political meetings, women visit the movie theater
next door where they’ll be met by their spouses when the screening
is over’ (quoted in Hansen 1983: 178). At the same time, the
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cinema was one of the few forms of leisure available to working-
class women outside the home that was not an exclusively male
preserve. It was cheap and also convenient enough to be squeezed
into the interstices of an ordinary day, as part of a shopping trip
or on the way home from work, and this mundane accessibility
appealed to more affluent women too. Not only was a cross-class
audience coming into existence, but there is evidence of some
convergence between the classes; Altenloh noted ‘a remarkably
homogeneous attitude toward the cinema’ among her female
respondents, despite differences of class and marital status (Petro
1989: 19). In a sense, the early silent cinema capitalized upon
and extended the reach of the new consumerist economy,
epitomized by the department store and the advertisement
hoarding, in which women made the main purchasing decisions
for the household.
No matter how much or how little money these women had,
cinema offered them ‘a spectacle to be consumed’ (Mayne 1988:
78). Because of the growing prominence of female spectators
within the movie audience, films began to appear which directly
addressed them in a variety of forms. Serials like The Hazards of
Helen (1914) ‘featured adventurous, physically active heroines’
and provided ‘pleasure in images of female competence, courage,
and physical movement’ (Hansen 1991: 120). Although there
were more demure images of femininity in the persons of Lilian
Gish or Mary Pickford, representing the conventionally compliant
face of domestic virtue, the figure of the spirited modern girl
continued into the 1920s through such actresses as Gloria
Swanson. But, for Hansen, the star who most dramatically threw
the contradictions of female spectatorship into relief was the
matinée idol Rudolph Valentino. In the course of an unusually
short film career – he first began to attract attention in 1917,
yet by 1926 he was dead – Valentino not only made women
swoon, his appearances could lead to minor riots.
Valentino’s devoted following shows how the emerging star
system was able to give expression to modes of female desire that
were deeply at odds with the patriarchal cast of American culture.
In the first place, Valentino’s star persona combined considerable
exotic allure with a curiously indeterminate eroticism. As a wild
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Arab chief, a French nobleman or as a Latin-American horseman
and dancer, Valentino was both a sexual predator and a more
ambiguous figure whose dress and demeanour often seemed to
feminize him. Moreover, the very fact that the films frequently
made him the recipient of a prolonged female gaze, an object of
spectacular sensuality, served to invert the usual ‘gender economy
of vision’ in which it is the woman whose desirability interrupts
the forward movement of the narrative. But if Valentino appears
to occupy the filmic position traditionally reserved for the woman,
it is also crucial that his own gaze will eventually be brought into
play, that he is shown to be a desiring subject who can bestow
the gift of sexual rapture. However, neither of these moments
is ever fully resolved: Hansen insists that Valentino’s look and
the identification it provokes are always characterized by an
ineradicable ambivalence. Even when the actor’s eyes are ‘riveted
on the woman of his choice, he seems to become paralyzed rather
than aggressive or menacing’ (279). In the Valentino text, mastery
is always ready to yield to vulnerability.
Second, Valentino’s extraordinary appeal to female viewers
was extended and consolidated through the medium of publicity:
fan clubs and magazines, interviews, competitions and special
events. This was a mixed blessing for the movie industry. For
although the function of the star system was to guarantee and
then intensify the spectator’s psychic and emotional attachment
to each individual film, the creation of the star’s persona, of an
imaginary identity believed to exist outside the frame of the
cinematic text, could also operate in the opposite direction so
that visual pleasure was no longer concentrated in the narrative
but was instead dissolved into ‘a string of spectacular moments
that display the “essence” of the star’ (247). In such a system the
careful management of the fans themselves is inevitably a sensitive
issue, since they form a collective body whose legitimacy derives
from their claim to have brought the star into existence by their
own grassroots support; and the fan subculture invariably has
the potential to get out of control. In the case of Valentino the
relationship between star and female fans was peculiarly obsessive
and fetishistic and soon outstripped the bounds of moral and
sexual propriety. When women sent him their ‘intimate garments’
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in the mail requesting that he kiss and return them, he apparently
did so (294). As part of his erotic ‘pact’ with his fans, Valentino
arranged to have his corpse displayed before them after his death,
to tumultuous effect. It is therefore possible to read the scenes
of mass hysteria occasioned by his funeral not just as a collective
expression of grief at the loss of an icon, but as a kind of last-
ditch revolt by Valentino’s fans against the demise of a symbolic
world in which the narrow confines of gender no longer obtained.
This vision of an alternative public sphere is a far cry from
anything in Habermas. Yet it should be remembered that Hansen
is not concerned with the possibilities for rational-critical debate,
but with the opening up of what Negt and Kluge term a new ‘social
horizon of experience’, a place where ‘needs, conflicts, anxieties,
memories, and fantasies’ can begin to achieve ‘public recogni-
tion’ (92). Her arguments are cautious, necessarily provisional
and carefully qualified: since it is hard to know how these women
‘received the films they saw and what significance movie-
going had in relation to their lives’, the best that we can do is to
‘try to reconstruct the configurations of experience that shaped their
horizon of reception, and ask how the cinema, as a social and
aesthetic experience, might have interacted with that horizon’
(101). In a nutshell, Hansen’s credo presents the abiding methodo-
logical dilemma confronting all historically based reception studies
where first-hand accounts are unavailable, as they almost invariably
are.
The most common route out of this impasse is to sift through
the film review pages of newspapers and magazines in search of
clues to the discursive or ideological context within which viewing
took place. This is the approach adopted by Janet Staiger in her
book Interpreting Films (1992), an avowedly Marxist analysis of
the history of reception in American cinema, one of whose main
tasks is to distinguish between the use of ‘dominant’ and ‘marginal’
interpretive strategies among film spectators at any given cultural
and political moment. Staiger’s work is often ingenious: when
considering the reception of the Judy Garland movie A Star is
Born (1954), for example, she takes the opinions voiced by
reviewers in the mainstream press as the dominant or hegemonic
responses to the film and then takes these as the benchmark
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against which ‘alternative readings’ can be defined as the ones
‘that do not match’ (Staiger 1992: 157). She is especially interested
in explaining the Judy Garland cult among gay men, but her
immediate practical difficulty is that the criminal status of
homosexuality in the 1950s effectively outlawed any written record
of how the film and its star were regarded at the time of its
release. Staiger solves this problem by taking the later writings
of gay critics like Jack Babuscio and Richard Dyer and then
reading them back into the earlier context in order to show how
they focus on aspects of A Star is Born that were overlooked by
mainstream reviewers. Her warrant for this interpretive move is
the development of a new gay cultural criticism as part of the
struggle for gay rights following the 1969 Stonewall riots in New
York, events that coincided with Garland’s death in June of that
year. However, Staiger has to assume that this watershed in gay
politics created the conditions in which long-suppressed ideas
could be made public, a conjecture that begs the question of
whether Dyer or Babuscio’s readings really can provide an accurate
guide to how gay spectators saw the film several decades ago. In
the absence of any reliable evidence Staiger can only hope that
oral history will bridge the gap at some point in the future.
In their different ways both Staiger and Hansen set their face
against the kind of analysis that regards the spectator’s response
as always already encoded into the filmic text. Some of the most
widely discussed work on cinema proceeds on this basis. So,
for example, Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema’ draws upon psychoanalysis in order to argue
that looking is typically divided ‘between active/male and passive/
female’ components. That is to say, in terms of the positions
offered to the spectator in mainstream cinema, the ‘determining
male gaze projects its fantasy on to the female figure’, while
‘women are simultaneously looked at and displayed’ and are the
object of ‘erotic contemplation’ (Mulvey 1989 [1975]: 19). And
in a similar vein, Steve Neale has suggested that the male body
cannot comfortably be subjected to the same voyeuristic scrutiny
as the woman’s for fear of the homosexual undertones this may
evoke. Consequently the spectator’s absorption in the fight scenes
of a western or a thriller has a protective quality, denying any
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hint of an erotic subtext: masculinity is to be tested or proved
rather than looked at (Neale 1983).
By contrast, Staiger seeks to account for reader response without
privileging a psychoanalytic reading of the cinematic text. For
her, psychoanalysis is merely one interpretive strategy among
others and what matters is the extent of its influence in any
particular historical period. In Staiger’s view there can be no text
without an audience, for, without people to interpret it, it could
have no meaning: a proposition that she shares with Stanley Fish,
though she deploys it to somewhat different ends. As we have
seen, Hansen’s Babel and Babylon also aims to contextualize the
act of viewing but, rather than dispensing with the filmic text,
her approach is to historicize the text-centred model of gendered
spectatorship advanced by Mulvey and others by claiming that
what it really describes are the standardized ‘modes of organizing
vision and structuring narratives’ put in place by classic Hollywood
cinema from roughly the 1920s to the 1970s (Hansen 1991:
249). The value of studying early silent film is therefore that it
allows us to see a looser, less monolithic set of relations between
films and their spectators in operation before the Hollywood
mass audience had been fully formed. And it allows us ‘to take
the spectator seriously as a productive force’ that can never be
wholly swallowed up by the movie industry (89).
Today the spectator is arguably less in thrall to Hollywood
cinema than ever before. For despite the importance of feature
films to the television industry, the rise of video, satellite and
cable has altered the relationship between the public and the
private once again. Whereas cinema broke with the private
conditions of reading by setting narrative and fantasy in public
space, now ‘the compulsive temporality of public projection
has given way to ostensibly more self-regulated yet privatized,
distracted and fragmented acts of consumption’, placing new
stresses upon men and women in the home (Hansen 1993: 198).
This is not to say that privatized viewing is completely replacing
collective forms of spectatorship. The weekly American ritual of
watching Dynasty in gay bars discussed by Jane Feuer in her
study of 1980s television is an important contemporary example
of the ‘subcultural appropriation of a text’, a moment of collective
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178 READERS AND SPECTATORS
identity in a political climate not noticeably hospitable to gay
rights (Feuer 1995: 135). And the development of the kind of
intensive fan culture vividly portrayed in Constance Penley’s work
on ‘slash fandom’ points to some dramatic new possibilities for,
not only interpreting, but completely reconfiguring popular
narratives (see ch.2).
The Kirk/Spock fanzines and re-edited videos go beyond the
imitative idolization of stars – singing their songs, acting out
scenes from their films – traditionally associated with their
followers (see Stacey 1994). Penley argues that in re-imagining
the working partnership between the captain and first officer in
terms of a ‘passionate lifetime union’ these fanzines not only
rewrite the codes of the romance genre, but also construct ‘new
versions of female pornography’ through the invention of a
guardedly non-heterosexual form of masculinity (Penley 1992:
490–1). These subcultures are part of a wider phenomenon of
‘textual poaching’ which overturns many of the assumptions upon
which spectatorship is often thought to be based, giving it a
more intensively performative twist. The world of the fan is:
characterized precisely by its refusal to respect cultural hierarchies
(the boundary between high and low culture); its rejection of aesthetic
distance (the boundary between text and reader); its blurring of
distinctions between individual texts, genres, even media; its defiance
of conventional conceptions of literary property (the boundary between
reader and writer); and its attempt to integrate media content into
its everyday social experiences (the boundary between fantasy and
reality).
(Jenkins 1990: 151)
But, as we have seen, the irreverence of the fanzine world is far
from innocent of gender politics. Cheek by jowl with K/S
romances we find songs like Dennis Drew’s version of ‘I Need
A Little Girl’ which paradoxically uses the image of an alien
woman with dorsal fins and an extra eye to reinstate the normality
of male heterosexual desire, a desire that is given a humorous if
disturbing inflection, yet which is also reassuringly the same as
it has always supposedly been (Jenkins 1990: 161–2).
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The highly engaged modes of viewing discussed by critics
like Constance Penley and Henry Jenkins belong to the new
technological world of electronic reproduction and look forward
to the consolidation of new types of fan culture via the worldwide
web or the internet. Whether the enhanced possibilities for
manipulating the image will completely change the conditions
of spectatorship remains to be seen; though it is worth noting
that among the fans studied by Penley the distinction between
reader, viewer and writer is constantly blurred. If these viewers
of Star Trek belong to one of the most creative audiences that
have ever appeared, promoting extraordinarily sophisticated fan-
tasies and identifications – Kirk and Spock are felt to have revealed
themselves as more desirable because their romantic natures have
been demonstrated on screen through a relationship between
them that curiously cannot be imagined as gay – it is nevertheless
also true that these female fans see their interpretations ‘as
amplifying rather than negating or deforming the text’, bringing
out elements that were already implicit within it (Penley 1989:
259). Though their adaptations have scandalized the ordinary
Star Trek enthusiasts, trespassing upon the sacred preserve of the
text, K/S fans regard their activities in a properly conservative
light, ‘reading with the grain’ of the narrative instead of brushing
against it. Here, at the crossroads of the future, cross-identifications
are more star-crossed than ever as the lines between genders
become hopelessly entangled in the wake of authentic desire.
The K/S appropriation of Star Trek returns us to many of the
issues considered in this chapter and elsewhere in this book. For
the practices of these fans enact a virtual stand-off between
corporate capitalism, as represented by the owners of Star Trek,
and local patterns of gendered consumer power; between the
commodification of the body and the muddying of gender
boundaries; between the unregulated consumption of porno-
graphic imagery now possible through technologies like the
internet and attempts by ordinary men and women to use both
narrative and technology to gain greater control over their own
lives. At the same time, they perhaps also indicate the vanishing-
point of some of our most cherished assumptions: in the K/S
world gay and straight, male and female, public and private seem
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to fold in upon each other and threaten to implode. Neither is
quite thinkable without the other, yet as we boldly go into the
era of electronic reproduction with its associated struggles around
freedom of communication and access, no one can be quite sure
precisely where the new frontier of gender truly lies.
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CONCLUSION
‘Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity’, writes
Judith Butler. Instead, it should be seen as an ‘effect’, the
‘mundane’ product of regularly repeated ‘bodily gestures, move-
ments, and styles of various kinds’ that create the impression of
‘an abiding gendered self’, to cite once more a passage that was
quoted earlier (Butler 1990: 140). As we saw in the Introduction,
Butler calls this impression an ‘illusion’ because she wants to
underline the tenuous way in which gender is routinely realized
through those performances that allow it to be identified or
recognized for what it is, performances that are open to disruption,
unexpected variation and transformation. Put like this, gender is
apt to sound hollow, insubstantial, lacking in psychic depth; but
Butler’s point is that ultimately gender is only as solid as the
social and cultural practices that constitute it over time.
Butler’s emphasis upon the performative character of gender
echoes a number of contemporary trends: the deliberate theatri-
cality of issue-based political movements like Queer Nation,
fashionable and typically gender-ambiguous forms of body-art
such as tattooing and piercing, the increasing public visibility
of erotic minorities including transsexuals and transvestites. Her
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formulations seem to capture the fluidity and expressiveness
currently displayed by gendered bodies, our belief in their plasticity
and adaptability, the difficulties we face in ‘reading’ identity
from appearances. Under such a regime of difference the putative
distinction between sex and gender is frequently haphazard or
obscured, just as the new signification of ‘queer’ discussed in
Chapter 4 points to a blurring of the lines between heterosexual,
gay, lesbian and bisexual practices.
Throughout this book gender has figured as a chameleon-like
category, a name for a constantly changing phenomenon that
can sometimes be more and also sometimes rather less than an
identity: a system of hierarchical relationships, for example, or
at the other extreme, the glimpse or trace of a style on a busy
urban street. This is not to say that gender has not historically
been a major component of people’s sense of who they are or
what they would like to be. But it has not always been understood
as the naturally occurring foundation of an identity. For, as Judith
Halberstam has recently argued, gender has varied according to
a number of different principles in both modern and pre-modern
societies. In some circumstances what Halberstam calls ‘gender
variance’ may be determined primarily by a woman’s marital
status or its absence (the nineteenth-century ‘spinster’); in other
instances, like transsexualism or hermaphroditism, it may be
directly ‘measured on the body’ (Halberstam 1998: 59).
Halberstam’s challenging study Female Masculinity is exemplary
for its insistence upon the multiplicity of forms that gender
can take, refusing to lump them all carelessly together. But her
arguments take us to the limits of present-day gender theory.
Halberstam’s book is based upon the premise that women them-
selves have helped to create modern masculinity, not just via the
contrast with femininity, but by developing their own unique
kinds of masculine personae. Female masculinities have prolifer-
ated over the ages and include such different modes as the tomboy,
the female husband, the stone butch and the drag king, to cite
just a few. As their names suggest, these types are linked to
particular roles or performances and are not necessarily defined
by their sexual preferences. Halberstam notes that ‘some rural
women may be considered masculine by urban standards’, yet
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‘their masculinity may simply have to do with the fact that they
engage in more manual labour than other women’ (58). Similarly,
her brief discussion of American cowgirls makes the obvious point
that their tough self-presentation is partly a product of an intensely
physical outdoor lifestyle herding cattle and competing in rodeos.
These manifestations of masculinity are not merely imitative, as
George Mosse’s all-encompassing account of the Western manly
ideal discussed in Chapter 2 would lead us to believe; instead,
they represent an independent or alternative line of development:
‘masculinity without men’ (13).
Although, as this last phrase (and indeed the title of her book)
indicate, Halberstam sometimes seems to want to unify these
disparate identities, claiming at one point that ‘female masculinity
is a specific gender with its own cultural history’, her main concern
is to complicate and unravel our existing preconceptions (77).
So, from her perspective, lesbianism is too loose a catch-all to
do justice to the variety of positions that historically have been
available and consequently it is a descriptor that is often blind
to certain key differences in self-understanding. In her discussion
of Radclyffe Hall, for example, Halberstam argues that what
the author accomplishes in both her writing and her life is the
articulation of ‘a complex female masculinity, one that neither
copies male homosexuality nor male heterosexuality but that carves
out its own gender expression’ (90). Against Terry Castle who
in her book Kindred Spirits: Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall
(1996) has attempted to chart the mutual influences, the hidden
commonalities between lesbian and gay male styles in the 1920s,
Halberstam contends that Hall embraced the medical definition
of the ‘masculine invert’, a person who experienced herself as,
and who looked like a man, but whose body was, according to
strict anatomical criteria, female. Like her character Stephen
Gordon in The Well of Loneliness, Hall sought to find a mode
of dress that would enable her to feel comfortable with herself,
yet which stopped short of masquerading as a man, thereby
distinguishing herself from the figure of the transvestite or ‘the
passing woman’. On this reading, both Stephen and Hall (the
boundary between character and author tends to be elided here)
are portrayed as quintessentially modern gendered selves who see
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184 CONCLUSION
their identity not as ‘organically emanating from the flesh but
as a complex act of self-creation in which the dressed body’
rather than the naked or undressed body, ‘represents one’s desire’
(Halberstam 1998: 106).
There is a discernible tension in the argument at this stage,
for as Halberstam clearly recognizes (and as Hall’s recently
published letters show) she believed that to be an ‘invert’ was an
entirely ‘natural’ phenomenon, despite the fact that it condemned
one to a constant struggle against a blatantly discriminatory
world. Indeed, in the 1920s the category of the invert was
predicated precisely on its apparent fixity; and, of course, we will
never know how many women would have chosen ‘gender
reassignment’ by surgical means if such an option had then been
available. Yet elsewhere in her discussion, Halberstam notes that
Stephen Gordon’s ‘feelings about her body’ are ‘essentially
contradictory’ and it is as if her choice of clothing (her ‘sartorial
aesthetic’) functions as a cultural solvent of these corporeal anxieties
(90, 101).
These questions are restaged and replayed – though always
with a difference – in ongoing intersex and transgender campaigns
to secure ‘the rights to technologies that facilitate gender reassign-
ment’ raising, as Judith Butler notes in Undoing Gender, new sets
of feminist theoretical and ethical concerns about the limits and
possibilities of human perfectibility. The ‘important coalitional
thinking’ that need to be done in the movements which comprise
the ‘New Gender Politics . . . will doubtless have to do with
presumptions about bodily dimorphism, the uses and abuses of
technology, and the contested status of the human, and of life
itself.’ Resolutions will not banish or more than temporarily
resolve the conflicts that flow from the fact that gender ‘figures
as a precondition for the production and maintenance of legible
humanity.’ (Butler 2004: 11)
We return therefore not only to the vexed question of the
relationship between nature and culture, or to the lived significance
of discursive constructs and systems of classification, but to the
problem of how far change is possible, and the extent to which
gender can be imagined otherwise. For gender is never wholly
protean nor totally fluid; at any given time and place it is
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CONCLUSION 185
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configured within a range of technological, socio-economic and
cultural constraints. And though these constraints may mark the
discursive limits of our world, they are also the starting point
from which our imaginations may defiantly begin again.
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GLOSSARY
The historical evolution and/or contemporary understanding of terms such
as Gender, Sexuality, Femininity, Feminism, Masculinity, Lesbian, Gay
and Queer are treated at length in the book. This glossary offers clarification
of other key terms and concepts used throughout.
Abjection In common sense usage the condition of being thought by
others, or feeling, inferior. For feminist psychoanalysis abjection
describes a landscape of feeling that places women – and femininity
– before, below and beyond culture – so much so that they
themselves or the feminine itself cannot be represented within it.
For this latter use see in particular Julia Kristeva (1982) Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York, Columbia University Press).
Cathexis; Cathection A psychoanalytic term describing the process of
investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object or
idea.
Dimorphism Sexual dimorphism in humans is the systematic difference
in form between individuals of different sex and the subject of much
medical and scientific debate.
Phantasmatic A psychoanalytic term denoting the unconscious desires,
fears and drives of the individual.
Hermaphrodite Someone who combines features drawn from both sexes.
Heteronormative Those overt or implied rules, which may be social,
familial and/or legal, that force conformity to dominant heterosexual
standards of identity or behaviour. Related to Adrienne Rich’s earlier
formulation of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, the term was introduced
by critic and theorist Michael Warner in 1991. See Michael Warner
(1993) Fear of a Queer Planet and (2000) The Trouble with Normal:
Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life.
Intersexuality The condition of a living thing whose sex chromosomes,
genitalia and/or secondary sex characteristics are determined to
be neither exclusively male nor female. Now preferred by some
to hermaphrodite. However intersex movement campaigners who
critique current medical protocols of sex reassignment prefer other
neutral terms such as disorders of sexual development.
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GLOSSARY 187
Sensibility A concept alongside sentimentality that emerged in the
eighteenth century, denoting an acute response to things or to
people. While the two terms are close, sensibility refers to those
emotions that seem instinctive or physical, rather than the discourse
of moralized sentiment. Both excess sensibility and sentimentality
were often associated with women and feminity.
Transgender The state of gender identity not matching culturally or
physically assigned gender. It does not imply a particular sexual
orientation but often designates moves between conventional
notions of male or female gender, or a lack of identification with
the gender assigned at birth. One of a number of terms now used
to designate people along a continuum of gendered identities.
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of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press).
Russo, Mary (1995), The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity
(London: Routledge).
Santner, Eric (1996), ‘Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the Writing of Abjection’
in Stanley Corngold, trans. and ed., The Metamorphosis (New York:
W.W. Norton). Scott, Joan Wallach (1988), Gender and the Politics
of History (New York: Columbia University Press).
—— (1996), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of
Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993), Tendencies (Durham NC: Duke University
Press).
Segal, Lynne (1987), Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on
Contemporary Feminism (London: Virago).
Segal, Naomi (1998), André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (Oxford:
Clarendon Press).
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196 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Senelick, Laurence (1990), ‘Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the
Eighteenth-Century London Stage’, Journal of the History of Sexuality
1:1, 33–67.
Shevelow, Kathryn (1989), Women and Print Culture: The Construction of
Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge).
Showalter, Elaine (1978), A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists
from Brontë to Lessing (London: Virago).
Simpson, Mark (1996), It’s a Queer World (London: Vintage).
Snitow, Ann (1990), ‘A Gender Diary’, in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox
Keller, eds, Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge).
Sontag, Susan (1966), Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York:
Delta).
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1985), ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique
of Imperialism’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing and
Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press).
Stacey, Jackie (1994), Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female
Spectatorship (London: Routledge).
Staiger, Janet (1992), Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception
of American Cinema (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press).
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986), The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press).
Stepan, Nancy (1990), ‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’,
in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press).
Stoller, Robert J. (1968), Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity
and Femininity (London: Hogarth Press).
—— (1996), ‘Notes on Foucault’, Psychoanalytic Review 18:1, 11–20.
Stutfield, Hugh (1897), ‘The Psychology of Feminism’, Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine 161: 104–17.
Sussman, Herbert (1995), Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine
Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Taylor, Barbara (2003), Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Theweleit, Klaus (1987), Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies,
History, trans. Stephen Conway et al. (Cambridge: Polity Press).
—— (1989), Male Fantasies, Vol. 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White
Terror, trans. Stephen Conway et al. (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Thomas, Kendall (1996), ‘ “Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing”: Black
Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity’, in
Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham, eds, Representing
Black Men (New York: Routledge).
Thompson, Nicola Diane (1996), Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception
of Victorian Novels (London: Macmillan).
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 197
Torres, Enrique R. (1991), ‘A Perversion Named Desire’, International Journal
of Psycho-Analysis 72:1, 73–92.
Trumbach, Randolph (1987), ‘Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles,
and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: the Recent
Historiography’, in Robert P. Maccubin, ed., ’Tis Nature’s Fault
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Tuchman, Gaye and Nina E. Fortin (1989), Edging Women Out: Victorian
Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (New Haven CT: Yale
University Press).
Wall, Cheryl A. (1995), Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press).
Warner, Michael (1990), The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the
Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press).
Weed, David (1997/8), ‘Sexual Positions: Men of Pleasure, Economy, and
Dignity in Boswell’s London Journal’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 31:2,
215–34.
White, Jim (1999), ‘Queering the Pitch’, The Guardian G2 (4 March), 2–3.
Whiting, Cécile (1997), A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Williams, Patricia J. (1991), The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press).
Williams, Raymond (1965), ‘The Analysis of Culture’, in The Long Revolution
(Harmondsworth: Penguin).
—— (1984), ‘Charlotte and Emily Brontë’, in The English Novel from Dickens
to Lawrence (London: Hogarth Press).
Worpole, Ken (1983), Dockers and Detectives (London: Verso).
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INDEX
abjection 32, 33–4, 41, 46, 51, 65, 186
abortion 83
active/passive dichotomy 27, 176
Affinity (Waters) 80
After Dolores (Shulman) 75–6
AIDS 133
Allen, C. 135–6
All Quiet on the Western Front
(Remarque) 92–7, 108–9
Altenloh, E. 172–3
Alther, Lisa 77
Anderson, M.M. 110–11
androgyny 54, 68–72, 126–8, 136
Armstrong, N. 44–6
Armstrong, T. 98
Arnold, Matthew 116
‘The Art of Fiction’ (Woolf) 29
Atwood, Margaret 83
Aurora Leigh (Barrett Browning) 41
Babuscio, J. 176
Bakhtin, M. 94–7
Baldwin, James 122, 124–8, 132
Barbin, Herculine 5–7
Barclay, F. 163
Barnes, Djuna 73, 134–9
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 41
Bartlett, Neil 134,
Beckford, William 3
Behn, Aphra 149
Bersani, L. 139–46
Beyle, Henri 98
birth control 83
black women’s novels 59–65
body, classical female 96
body, classical male 89–92, 94,
96, 98
body, grotesque 94–7, 98, 107
bookstores, lesbian, gay and
feminist 78
Boone, J.A. 136–9
Boswell, James 99–104, 106, 108,
112
Bournet, E. 122
Bowen, Elizabeth 52–3, 54, 58, 64, 65
Bowlby, R. 52
boxing 172
Boy George 127
Bradstreet, A. 149
Bray, A. 118, 120
British Football Association 114
Brontë, Charlotte 26–7, 40, 41, 43,
45, 47–50, 48–9, 50, 55, 65
Brown, Rita Mae 76
Burroughs, W.S. 123–5
Butler, J. 16–19, 24–5, 63, 75, 133,
140, 181–2, 184
‘Camp’ 128–31, 138
Carby, H. 64
Carlyle, Thomas 103–6, 108, 112
Carter, Angela 80
Castle, T. 183
cathexis 165, 186
Chandler, Raymond 74
Chapman, G. 2–3
Chartist movement 40
Chaucer, Geoffrey 147–8
Chauncey, G. 121–4, 131
chauvinism 29
Chicago Daily News 171
Christie, Agatha 51, 74
Clarke, N. 105
class 45, 53, 62, 131–2
coffee house 152
Cohen, E. 116, 118
Collins, Wilkie 80, 161
The Color Purple (Walker) 77–8
Comfort, A. 11–12
Connell, R.W. 19
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Connor, S. 167
Corber, R.J. 124
The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (film)
172
Corelli, M. 162–3
The Cornhill 157
Coward, Noël 122
Craik, Dinah Mulock 41
Cressy, D. 148–9
cross-dressing 120–1, 124, 130, 135,
136, 183
cyborgs 83–4
David, J.L. 90
Davidson, A. 8
de Lauretis, T. 19
Desert Hearts (film) 78
Desert of the Heart (Rule) 78
Dickens, Charles 47
dimorphism 71, 184, 186
Disraeli, Benjamin 40
Dix, Otto 97–8
Dracula (Stoker) 105
drag 120–1, 127, 128, 130
drag balls 120, 122
Drew, D. 178
DuBois, W.E.B. 59
Du Maurier, Daphne 54–6, 58
Dunton, J. 154
Dwinger, E.E. 107
Dyer, R. 176
Dynasty (TV) 177
Eagleton, T. 161
ébranlement 144–5
‘écriture feminine’ 65
Elias, N. 148
Eliot, George 50, 157–8
Eliot, T.S. 134, 136
Ellis, H. 58, 117
Evans, D. 163–5
exercise 90
‘faggot’/‘fag’ 121, 126, 132
‘fairies’ 121, 123, 125, 131
fans 71–2, 174–6, 178–9
INDEX 199
fantasy 12, 13, 31, 34, 35, 52–3, 56–7, 59,
65–7, 72, 84, 95, 106–7, 130, 167,
175–9
fascism 107–8
female masculinities 182–3
Female Spectator 155–6
femininity 26–85 passim; and border
cases 42; and capitalism 47; and
imperialism 44, 53; private/public
45, 47
‘Femininity’ (Freud) 26, 27, 51, 65, 72
feminist movements and politics 14,
31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 49, 69
feminist presses 78
feminisation of men 106, 111, 174
Feuer, J. 177–8
film 128, 130, 170–77
Fingersmith (Waters) 80–1
Firestone, Shulamith 83
Fish, S. 163
Flint, K. 158–9
Flying (Millet) 77
football 114–15
Forster, E.M. 131–2, 170
Foucault, M. 4–8, 14, 16, 44, 116–18,
121, 141
Fowler, B. 170
Francis, Dick 166
Freikorps 106–7
French, Marilyn 77
Freud, Sigmund 8–10, 18, 26–7, 35–7,
51, 65, 69–70, 72–3
Fuss, D. 24
Garland, Judy 175–6
Garrick, David 101
Gaskell, Elizabeth 40, 46, 48
Gaskell, P. 46
‘gay’ 121, 122, 123, 146
Gay New York (Chauncey) 121–4, 131
‘A Gender Diary’ (Snitow) 31–3, 66
gender dysphoria/gender identity
disorder 13
Gender Identity Research Clinic 13
gender reassignment 17, 184
‘gender variance’ 182
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200 INDEX
Genet, J. 141
Gide, André 126, 141–5
Gilbert, S.M. 44, 135–6
Ginsberg, Allen 123, 132
Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin) 124–7, 132
Gish, Lilian 173
Gissing, George 115–16
Glendinning, Victoria 58
Glover, D. 170
Gombrich, E.H. 90
Gouges, O. de 33
Gubar, S. 44
Les Guérillères (Wittig) 23–4
Guest, H. 39–40, 46
Habermas, J. 150–2, 156–7, 159–62,
170–2, 175
Halberstam, J. 182–4
Hall, Radclyffe 56–8, 65, 66, 73, 76, 77,
139, 183–4
Hammett, Dashiel 74, 166
Hansen, M. 173–7
Haraway, D. 83–4
Harlem Renaissance 61
Harlequin (romance novels) 65
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins 59
Hartley, J. 168
Hays, Mary 39–40, 48
Haywood, Eliza 155
hermaphrodite 5, 69, 182, 186
heroes 103–4
heteronormativity 73, 132, 133, 186
Hitchcock, Alfred 124
Homos (Bersani) 139–46
homophobia 55, 121, 124, 126, 140
homosexuality 58, 73–81; 114–46, 176,
177–8, 179, 183; and
anticommunitarian impulses 142;
masculine/feminine rhetorics 28, 77;
derogatory terminology 121
Hornby, Nick 115
Horney, K. 36
Hovey, J. 54, 56
Hume, David 100
Hurston, Zora Neale 59–60
Huyssen, A. 109, 159
The Image of Man (Mosse) 89–92, 98
L’Immortaliste (Gide) 141–5
intersexuality 24, 184, 186
inversion, sexual 12, 56, 58, 117, 121,
139, 174, 183–4
It Is Never Too Late to Mend (Reade)
157
Jackson, Michael 127
Jaggi, M. 79
Jahn, F.L. 90
James, Henry 134
Jane Eyre (Brontë) 26–7, 41, 43, 44,
45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 65, 75, 96
Jazz Age 60
Jenkins, H. 178–9
Johnson, Samuel 3, 99, 102–6
Jones, E. 36
Joyce, James 134, 136, 162
Jünger, Ernst 86–8, 93, 94, 108–9,
110
Kafka, Franz 109–12, 114
Kaplan, C. 167
Keating, P. 157
Kerouac, Jack 123
Kinflicks (Alther) 77
Kinsey, Alfred C. et al. 10–11
kiss-ins 133
Kotz, L. 18
Kracauer, S. 171
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 7–9, 58, 116
Kramnick, J.B. 153–4
Kristeva, J. 32
Kroeber, Alfred and Theodora 69
Lacan, J. 36–7
Lady’s Museum (Lennox) 156
Lane, C. 112
Laplanche, J. 10, 144
Laqueur, T. 5, 35, 119
Larsen, Nella 61–4, 73
The Last September (Bowen) 52–3, 54,
64
League of Women Voters 168
Leavis, Q. 161–3
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The Left Hand of Darkness (LeGuin)
68–71, 72–3
LeGuin, Ursula K. 68–71, 72–3
Lennox, Charlotte 156
lesbian 21, 28, 54, 56, 73–81, 121, 122,
134–7, 139–40, 182–3; dress codes
77; novel 56, 73–81, 134–9;
‘pulp’/crime fiction 73–4, 78, 166;
bildungsroman 76, 79; presses 78
Les Guérillès (Wittig) 23–4
libraries 161–2
Light, A. 54–5
literacy 147–51, 161
Livingston, J. 120
London Journal 1762–1763 (Boswell)
99–102
Long, E. 168–70
Lorde, Audre 76–7, 134
McAleer, J. 161
McDowell, D. 60–1, 62, 63
McKeon, M. 98
McLuhan, M. 147
Male Fantasies (Theweleit) 106–8
manly ideal 89–91, 98, 103, 183
masculinity 86–113 passim; and the
battlefield 86–109 passim;
‘degeneration’ 93
masculinity complex 66
masquerade 66, 67, 75, 129, 183
masturbation 90–1
Mayne, J. 173
melodrama, Victorian 80
Men Behaving Badly (TV) 96
Merck, M. 145–6
Mercury 154–5
The Metamorphosis (Kafka) 109–12, 114
Meyer, S. 44
Millett, Kate 14, 35, 77
Mills & Boon 65
misogyny 29, 30, 68, 74, 88, 117
Mitchell, J. 36
mollies 119–20
Monroe, Marilyn 129
morality, sexual 43
Morning Herald 2–3
Mosse, G.L. 89–92, 98, 183
Mouffe, C. 19
Mulvey, L. 176–7
INDEX 201
Nashe, T. 119
Neale, S. 176–7
Negt, O. and Kluge, A. 172, 175
New Gender Politics 24, 184
Newsweek 129
New Yorker 81–2
New York Times Book Review 169
Nietzsche, F. 109
Nightwood (Barnes) 134–9
Nussbaum, F. 100–102
Oliphant, Mrs Margaret 157
Olive (Craik) 41
L’Opponax (Wittig) 22–3
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
(Winterson) 78–80
Orlando (Woolf) 52–4, 56, 62, 66, 79
orphaned heroines 43–4
Othello (Shakespeare) 3
Pacteau, F. 70
‘Padlock Law’ (1927) 122
Paré, Ambroise 5–6
Paris is Burning (film) 120
Passing (Larsen) 61–3
The Passion (Winterson) 79
passivity 27–8, 46, 111, 176
Past and Present (Carlyle) 105–6
Pater, Walter 116
Patience and Sarah (Routsong) 74–5
Penley, C. 71–2, 178–9
performativity 66, 75, 130, 138, 181
periodical press 151–61
Petro, P. 173
phantasmatic 106, 186
Pickford, Mary 173
Piercy, Marge 82–3
Pilgrimage (Richardson) 24
Poovey, M. 38, 41, 42
pornography 38, 73, 80, 178, 179
pre-Raphaelites 105
Presley, Elvis 129
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202 INDEX
pronouns 21–4
Proust, Marcel 141, 148
psychoanalysis 8–10, 35–7, 51, 66, 67,
141, 144–5, 167, 176–7
public sphere 150–2, 156–7, 159–62,
168, 170–2, 175, 177; and impact
of film 171–7; as medium of
advertising 160; and private
sphere 177
Punch 157
queer 114, 121, 122, 128, 131–3, 137,
146, 182
Queer (Burroughs) 132
Queer Nation 133, 181
queer theory 24, 134, 139, 140
Quicksand (Larsen) 61–4
Rabelais, François 94–7
Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 94–7
Rabinovitz, L. 171
race 39, 41, 44, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54,
59–65 passim, 78
racism 44, 59, 63, 76, 84, 114
Radway, J. 163–8, 170
Reade, Charles 157
reading 147–70
reading groups 168–9
Reading the Romance (Radway) 163–8
Rebecca (Du Maurier) 54–6, 62
Remarque, Erich Maria 92–7, 108–9
repression 93
reproductive rights and technologies
38, 83
retenu and étourdi (Boswell) 100–2
Rich, Adrienne 186
Richardson, Dorothy 24, 51
Riley, D. 33
Riviere, J. 66–7
Roberts, M. 81
robot 81–2
romance fiction 163–8, 170, 178
A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) 51
A Room with a View (Forster) 170
Rose, J. 34, 36–7
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 34, 70, 90
Routsong, Alma 74
Rubin, G. 15–16
Rubyfruit Jungle (Brown) 76
Rule, Jane 78
Russo, M. 96
Sackville-West, Vita 54, 134
The Sadeian Woman (Carter) 80
Saint-Simon, Duc de 148
salons 152
Santner, E. 111
Saturday Review 157
Sayers, Dorothy L. 74, 168
Scott, J. 15, 32
Seal Press 75
Sedgwick, E.K. 133
Segal, L. 30
Segal, N. 144
Senelick, L. 119
sensibility/emotion 39, 43, 48, 77, 153,
162, 186
‘sex’ 6–8; as distinct from gender
12–15, 115, 182
sexual difference 48
sexuality: ‘perversions’ 7, 9, 10, 116;
science of/sexology 4, 10, 58, 117;
sexual instinct 7, 9–10; meaning of
term 8
Shakespeare, William 3, 103–4, 116
Shevelow, K. 154–8
Showalter, Elaine 44
Shulman, Sarah 75–6
Simpson, M. 115
‘slash’ fiction and fanzines 71–2,
178–80
slavery 41, 48, 106
Snitow, A. 31–2, 66
sodomy 90, 117–20
Sontag, S. 128, 130
The Spectator 151–5
Spillane, Mickey 124, 126
Spivak, G.C. 44
Staiger, J. 175–7
Stallybrass, P. and White, A. 94
A Star is Born (film) 175–6
Star Trek 71–2, 178–80
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Steele, Richard and Addison, J. 151–5
Stein, Gertrude 24, 79
Stendhal 88, 98
Stepan, Nancy 48
Stoller, R.J. 12–14
Stonewall riots 176
The Storm of Steel (Jünger) 86–8, 93,
94, 109
Strangers on a Train (film) 124
Stutfield, H. 159
suffrage, women’s 29, 50, 51, 159, 172
Sussman, H. 106
Swan, Annie 158–9
Swanson, Gloria 173
taboo 73
The Tatler 98, 151, 154–5
Taylor, B. 34
television 71, 78, 167, 170, 177
‘textual poaching’ 178
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(Hurston) 59–60
Theweleit, K. 106–8
‘third sex’ 58, 127
Thomas, K. 127
Thompson, N.D. 157
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(Freud) 8–10
Tilt, E.J. 158
Tipping the Velvet (Waters) 80
Torres, E.R. 10
tragic mulatto 62–3
transgender 24, 184, 186
transsexuality 24, 182
transvestitism 13, 124, 130, 135–6, 181,
183
Trumbach, R. 118–19
Tuchman, G. And Fortin, N. 158
Ulysses (Joyce) 162
the unconscious 36, 93, 159
Valentino, Rudolph 173–5
Venus de Milo 96
INDEX 203
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(Wollstonecraft) 34, 38–9, 68, 69
Walker, Alice 77–8
Wall, C.A. 60, 62–3
Ward, Edward 119–20
Warhol, Andy 122, 127–31
Warner, M. 150
Waters, Sarah 78, 80–1
Weed, D. 100
The Well of Loneliness (Hall) 56–8, 62,
66, 73, 76, 77, 139, 183
West, M. 122
White, J. 114
Wilde, Oscar 115–16, 121
Williams, P. 82, 84–5
Williams, R. 42–3, 44–5
Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester
117–18, 119
Wilson, Barbara 74–5, 76
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim
89–90, 94
Winterson, Jeanette 24–5, 78–80
Wittig, Monique 19–24, 65–6
Wollstonecraft, Mary 34, 38–40, 48,
68, 69
Woman at Home 158–9
women: enfranchisement 29, 50, 51,
159, 172; inferiority 29–30, 32; legal
advances 30, 32, 83; as
sympathetic/nurturing 30; as
unfeminine 27–8
Women’s Press 75
The Women’s Room (French) 77
Woolf, Virginia 24, 29–30, 50, 51–4,
56, 58, 64–6, 73, 79, 136
Worpole, K. 166
Written on the Body (Winterson)
24
The Wrongs of Women
(Wollstonecraft) 38
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
(Lorde) 76–7