Androgyny in Modern Literature engages with the ways in which the trope of androgyny has shifted during the late nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Alchemical, platonic, sexological, psychological and decadent representations of androgyny have provided writers with an icon which has been appropriated in diverse ways. This fascinating new study traces different revisions of the psycho-sexual, embodied, cultural and feminist fantasies and repudiations of this unstable but enduring trope across a broad range of writers from the fin de siècle to the present.
"A frank, passionate plea for us to move away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen. . . . An interesting, lively and valuable general introduction to a new way of perceiving our Western cultural tradition, with emphasis upon English literature." --Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review
Full of psychological and spiritual insights that speak to today's sexual confusion. Singer shows how a person can at once embrace complementary and contradictory attitudes toward sex and gender. Finally, she proposes a range of choices by which people can identify themselves, secure that the masculine/feminine interaction within each individual is not only normal, but the dynamic factor in their wholeness.
In the late nineteenth century, as changing cultural representations of gender roles and categories made differences between men and women increasingly difficult to define, theorists such as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud began to postulate a third, androgynous sex. For many modern artists, this challenge to familiar hierarchies of gender represented a crisis in artistic authority. Faced with the failure of the romantic muse and other two-sex tropes for the imagination, James Joyce, H. D., William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and other modernist writers of both sexes became attracted to a culturally specific notion of an androgynous imagination. In The Modern Androgyne Imagination, Lisa Rado explores the dynamic process through which these writers filled the imaginative space left by the departed muse. For Joyce, the androgynous imagination meant experimenting with the idea of a "new womanly man." H. D. personified her "overmind" as the androgynous Ray Bart. Faulkner supplanted the muse with the hermaphrodite. And Woolf became a kind of psychic transsexual. Although they selected these particular tropes for different reasons, literary men and women shared the desire to embody perceived strengths of both sexes and to transcend sexual and artistic limitation altogether. However, courting this androgynous imagination was a risky act. It often evoked the dynamics, even the specific vocabulary, of the sublime, which Rado characterizes as a perilous confrontation with and attempted identification between self and the transcendent other--that powerful, androgynous creative mind--through which they hoped to generate authority and find inspiration. This empowerment toward which Joyce, H. D., Faulkner, and Woolf gesture in texts such as Ulysses, HERmione, The Sound and the Fury, and Orlando is rarely achieved. Joyce and Faulkner were unable to silence their fears of feminization and the female body, while H. D. and Woolf remained troubled by the threat of ego incorporation and self-erasure that the androgynous model of the imagination portends. Still, their pursuit of new imaginative tropes yields important insights into the work of these writers and of literary modernism.
Romantic Androgyny is the first study to systematically apply the currents of French and Anglo-American feminist literary criticism to an analysis of the major poetry of the Romantic period. Diane Hoeveler argues that Romantic male poets self-consciously employed the feminine as "Other" and as an alternative source of value in order to engage in a fictional completion of their own psyches. Furthermore, a large proportion of the "women" in the poetry of the major Romantics cannot be understood apart from this radical metaphoric tradition of literary absorption. Because of the power of the feminine as "Other," women in English Romantic poetry have been on the one hand idealized and on the other denigrated by critics in the field. Hoeveler attempts to correct the flaws of both views by placing the various images of women into a psychoanalytical and historical framework. All six canonical poets participated in one of their culture's dominant ideological fantasies that imaginative creativity was possible for males only if they absorbed the feminine principle and thus became androgynous. Romantic Androgyny argues that the images of the symbolic woman were determined by the poets' adherence to the ideologies of both androgyny and the Eternal Feminine that permeated late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.
Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny confronts the entrenched mystique surrounding the hard drinker, bullfighter, and creator of characters steeled by their own code. Spilka stresses Hemingway's lifelong dependence on and secret identification with women, and in doing so shatters the myths of male bonding and heroic lives of "men without women." He develops the biographical, literary, and cultural implications of Hemingway's lifelong quarrel with androgyny to reveal a more psychologically complex man and writer than the mystique has allowed.
This book traces the long and complex history of the androgyne throughout Western aesthetics, philosophy, mythology and literature, from Plato to contemporary feminist theory, with particular attention given to the Romantic period. It notes that from the classical vision of the androgyne as a symbol of primordial totality and oneness created out of a union of opposed forces to Freud's theory of the libido, the figure has functioned as a conservative, even a misogynistic, ideal. Kari Weil shows that, rather than being a synthesis of male and female, the androgyne has been a construction of patriarchal ideology that has served to establish sexual, aesthetic and racial hierarchies.
