Between Genders : Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism [1 ed.] 9781936249664, 9780874138450

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BETWEEN GENDERS

BETWEEN GENDERS Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism

Nathaniel Wing

Newark: University of Delaware Press London: Associated University Presses

䉷 2004 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-845-0/04 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press).

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512 Associated University Presses Unit 304, The Chandlery 50 Westminster Bridge Road London SE1 7QY, England Associated University Presses P.O. Box 338, Port Credit Mississauga, Ontario Canada L5G 4L8

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wing, Nathaniel, 1938– Between genders : narrating difference in early French modernism / Nathaniel Wing. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87413-845-0 (alk. paper) 1. French literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Gender identity in literature. I. Title. PQ283.W56 2004 840.9⬘353—dc21 2003007960 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Betsy

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

9 13

Part I: The Play of Gender 1. ‘‘Vous eˆ tes sans doute tre`s surpris, mon cher d’Albert’’: Improvisation and Gender in The´ ophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin 2. Androgyny, Hysteria, and the Poet in Charles Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo

29 51

Part II: Difference and Disbarment 3. Admissions of Difference: Gender and Ethnicity in Ourika 4. How Herculine’s/Abel’s Story Is Simplified: Bringing Truth to Sexuality in Herculine Barbin

103

Part III: Urban Body, Erotic Body 5. Urban Body, Erotic Body: Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or

131

Conclusions

166

Notes Bibliography Index

171 198 202

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Acknowledgments I WISH TO THANK THE EDITORS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE Press for permission to reprint chapter one which originally appeared in Brian Nelson, Anne Freadman, Philip Anderson, ed., Telling Performances: Essays on Gender, Narrative and Performance, 2001. An abridged version of chapter two appeared in Romance Quarterly, 45, 3 (Spring 1998): 143– 53. Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Published by Heldret Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20036-1802. Copyright 䉷 1998. Thanks are due to the editor for permission to reprint this text. Several colleagues at Louisiana State University have read and commented on portions Between Genders, Kate Jensen, Michelle Masse´ , John Protevi; I wish to express my gratitude for their insights and suggestions. Finally, Betsy Wing has given invaluable support to me and to this project since I began working on the manuscript. I am most grateful for her understanding and encouragement.

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Introduction IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW I EXPLORE THE WAYS IN WHICH A diverse group of texts, two novels, a novella, a pseudoconfession narrative, and an autobiography, written and published in France in the early and middle nineteenth century, represent gender in the bodies and desires of their protagonists. Diverse in both literary form and theme, the novels, Honore´ de Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or, (The Girl with the Golden Eyes), The´ ophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, Charles Baudelaire’s novella, La Fanfarlo, Claire de Duras’s short pseudo-confession narrative, Ourika, and an autobiography of a hermaphrodite or intersexual, currently known by the title Herculine Barbin1 share a common preoccupation with the experiences of gender and the vicissitudes of gender identities. The actors in each of the texts come to know their identities through the experience of sexuality, or more accurately, sexualities, which permits them to ‘‘recognize’’ themselves as subjects.2 Their bodies and desires serve as the site in which their imaginary selfidentities engage with and disarrange the cultural norms that have shaped them.3 While their notions of self and other are inextricably bound to body images and gendered practices assumed to be fixed and stable in each of these narratives—consistent with the sociopolitical context in which they were written—the energy mobilized in these texts, for protagonists and readers alike, derives from the remarkable instability and dynamism of those body images and gendered practices. On the one hand, each of these narratives reveals that what the protagonists assume and what narrators accept or feign to assume to be most fundamental to self-identity, the sexed body and its gendered desires, is a dynamic social construction and the site of intense contestations which implicate a complex range of other, seemingly unrelated issues—personal, ethical, aesthetic, or po13

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INTRODUCTION

litical.4 In contrasting ways, each of these texts asks what it is to ‘‘be’’ masculine or feminine, frequently, not surprisingly, in the context of an erotic narrative, and with greater or lesser degrees of explicitness: what are the configurations of gendered identity, and what are the social practices that determine them? While each of the narratives unfolds as an intensely personal ‘‘drama,’’ to borrow a familiar term from Balzac, they raise with equal intensity the problem of how sociopolitical structures form particular bodies with specific desires. The essays in this book attempt to show what is at stake when the individual, the protagonist of these texts, recognizing herself as a sexual subject, engages with a cultural field of constraints and regulatory practices that the fictions reveal as exceeding the seemingly limited personal experience of the body and its desires. In the following discussions sexuality and experience are understood in the senses proposed by Michel Foucault as both ‘‘individual’’ and collective: an interrelation between very diverse domains of knowledge by which individuals confer meaning and value to their actions, their ethical choices, their pleasures and emotions.5 It is through such experience that cultures organize and shape themselves ‘‘si on entend par expe´ rience la corre´ lation, dans une culture entre domaines de savoir, types de normativite´ et formes de subjectivite´ ’’ [where experience is understood as the correlation between fields of knowledge, types or normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture].6 In the chronological order of their composition, which is not the sequence in which they will be discussed here, these texts raise diverse yet interrelated issues concerning experiences of gender identities in relation to social institutions, norms of self-knowledge, and practices that determine them. Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) is a pseudoconfession narrative of a young black woman raised by Parisian aristocrats during and after the Revolution of 1789; it raises issues about the formation of gender and ethnic identities in post-Revolutionary France, the access of women, of blacks, and in a wider sense, of the disempowered in general, to both private and public spheres. Balzac’s erotic adventure story, La Fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes) (1834), takes the form of a narrative

INTRODUCTION

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enigma, the discovery by the hero, Henri de Marsay, of the identity of the girl with the golden eyes, Paquita Valdes, sequestered by a despotic, mysterious lover. The enigma is unraveled in the course of the erotic adventure between Paquita and Henri. The deciphering of that mystery reveals that it serves as a screen for a more complex series of mixed identities, implicating the hero’s aggressively assertive phallic yet distinctly hybrid sexuality, lesbian love, and thinly veiled incest. In The´ ophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), the narrative of a transvestite heroine—the male protagonist d’Albert’s story of desire for the ideal woman, who by chance, appears in the guise of a beautiful young man—and the narrative of Rosette, the lustful young widow who becomes a lover to both Madelaine and d’Albert, animates a play of mobile gender configurations that profoundly disrupts the conventional gender opposition of heterosexual identities. Baudelaire’s novella, La Fanfarlo (1847), one of his first published texts, is the story of a love affair between a latter day Romantic poet, Samuel Cramer, who is a ‘‘hermaphrodite,’’ half genius, in the words of the narrator, and a beautiful dancer, whose body, costumes and performances are a quirky mix of masculine and feminine attributes. This witty and ironic story reconfigures interrelations between conventionally opposed terms: masculine/ feminine, reason/fantasy, mind/body, classical/romantic, insistently subverting their hierarchical relationship and the privilege of the first over the second, producing complex intermixing that implicates both erotic and aesthetic experiences. The autobiography of a nineteenth-century intersexual, first published in a medical journal and reedited by Michel Foucault in 1978 under the title Herculine Barbin, is a frequently naive life story that recounts the narrator’s confusing discovery of her indeterminate sex and of increasingly anomalous gender identities. An initial complicity between the hero/ine’s unusual sexuality and gender and his/her society—both the biological and adoptive family, schoolmates, and school authorities—reaches a crisis as s/he is forced to assume a simple, ‘‘true’’ identity as a male and is expelled from the female world in which s/he was raised, educated, and served as a mistress in a provincial school. Alexina is counseled, rather, coerced, by a doctor,

16

INTRODUCTION

a priest, and a judge to assume a sexual and professional identity as a male, to remove herself from her provincial home and seek a new career in Paris. In this narrative the social construction of the sexual body and of gendered identity and the effects of the heterosexual imperative are revealed in the starkest terms and they are lethal: Alexina, renamed Abel, commits suicide, having failed in ‘‘his’’ efforts to integrate herself into a heterosexual society in conformity with his adopted gender. The first, most obvious links between such formally and thematically diverse texts—which include novels, a novella, a pseudo-confession narrative, and an autobiography—and such apparently diverse themes as the sentimental education of young girls (Ourika); lesbianism, incest, and a catastrophic failure of phallic potency (La Fille aux yeux d’or); transvestism, bisexuality, and not so thinly veiled homosexual and lesbian desire (Mademoiselle de Maupin); androgyny (La Fanfarlo); and hermaphroditism or intersexuality (Herculine Barbin) is the insistence upon gender as the source of self-identity and its quite astonishing fluidity. Each text develops its narrative in the context of what may be called the ‘‘dominant fiction’’ of heterosexual gender norms, following Kaja Silverman, and others, whose binary categories are sustained, as feminist theorists of the past thirty years have so convincingly demonstrated, by a long and tenacious tradition of Western thought.7 The male/female duality of the heterosexual figure extends to a wide range of thought and sensibility, beginning with terms such as mind/body or reason/passion and resonating with innumerable issues in ethics, metaphysics, and sociopolitical thought. One could not claim that the fact that these texts contain such diverse gender relations is unique to the historical moment in which they were written, the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, a highly volatile period in French history. To be persuaded otherwise, one has only to browse in the description of the library of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s decadent hero, Des Esseintes, in the late nineteenth-century novel A Rebours (Against the Grain) (1884), whose texts explore a wide range of ‘‘anomalous’’ sexualities by writers from ancient to modern times, or perhaps,

INTRODUCTION

17

from a less biased perspective to subject the majority of texts in the French literary canon to a deconstructive or psychoanalytic reading. It is not simply the fact that the term ‘‘sexuality’’ comes into use in France in the early nineteenth century, as Foucault has observed, that is so significant, nor, by extension, that the experience of gender identity becomes such a central concern in fiction of that period. What is of very considerable importance is that the use of the word and the figuration of gendered relations are established in association with other quite diverse phenomena, thus opening up an extensive field of cultural concerns. As one astute reader of Foucault has noted, the issue is to observe the connections between ‘‘how we organize our pleasures with one other person and the larger forms of social organization.’’8 These phenomena include the development of diverse domains of knowledge concerning biological reproduction, individual and social types of behavior; the establishment of rules and norms regulating sexuality, some traditional, others newly formed, sustained by diverse religious, juridical, pedagogical, and medical institutions; and changes in the ways in which one was led to experience and evaluate one’s conduct, moral obligations, pleasures, dreams, and sentiments.9 The question, then, becomes not simply that these texts represent multiple gender identities, but how the blurring of one category implicates numerous others through an interconnectedness that the norms of dominant fictions seek to maintain as distinct and remote. Apparently fixed and stable cultural boundaries are revealed in these narratives to be remarkably permeable and unstable.10 A second issue that emerges from my readings concerns the most basic understanding of the terms in which the norms, and anomalies, of gender identity are formulated, understood, and experienced: sex, body, nature, gender. ‘‘Sex’’ and the body, consistent with cultural conventions, then and now, are assumed in these texts to be fixed, given identities; sex is presumed to be a fact or a stable condition of the body. Consistently, the reader, and frequently the protagonists, are led to consider gender as neither given nor stable but as a socially regulated construct.11 These fictions reveal that the body itself, since its desires stray con-

18

INTRODUCTION

sistently from the culturally defined limits of the ‘‘natural,’’ cannot be considered as the natural ground for gender but as formed by ‘‘materialization’’ through practices that produce the bodies that they regulate.12 In short, what it is to ‘‘be’’ a man or a woman, what is it to ‘‘have’’ a woman’s or a man’s body, is constantly problematized in these texts. In spite of the ever prevalent imaginary ideal of heterosexual identity, desires, and practices, these narratives reveal that gender and the sexual body are produced in a culturally specific context, and much of the narrative tension—and consequently the energy of the texts—results from the discrepancies between the protagonists’ experiences and the heterosexual norm and related symbolic structures of the dominant fiction. Judith Butler, drawing on Foucault and on her own reworking of speech act theory has theorized this process in terms that I shall use throughout my discussions: The category of ‘‘sex’’ is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a ‘‘regulatory ideal.’’ In this sense, then, ‘‘sex’’ not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls. Thus, ‘‘sex’’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, ‘‘sex’’ is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time.13

The process by which norms materialize sex occurs through reiteration of those very regulatory norms: sex is ‘‘performative,’’ involving citations that reiterate normative practices. Each of the texts discussed below, in contrasting ways, situates its protagonists and its narratives in a gap between a heterosexual norm, assumed implicitly or more directly, and the character’s desires, fantasies, and acts. That gap, and the instabilities that make it possible, derive from the fact that reiterations, by definition, allow for multiple possibilities of modifying and deflecting the norms that they materialize or sustain.

INTRODUCTION

19

Indeed, it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialization, opened up by this process that mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law.14

Each of the texts discussed below engages the inherent mobility of gender performatives; the instabilities in reiteration allow for differences from the norm.15 A ‘‘productive crisis’’ results from the characters assuming sex otherwise in these texts, frequently in culturally abjected forms. While the crisis most often yields through the logic of narrative denouement to a reformation of heterosexual relations and of social norms, this only occurs following a dramatic collision with these norms that induces, in the protagonist, the reader, or both, a profound questioning of their assumed validity. In Ourika the adolescent black heroine speculates on the reevaluation under the Revolution of the rights of all those who had been excluded from the body politic, principally women and blacks, and also all who had been disempowered, in the hope of the advent of a more equitable society. In the course of the narrative, she herself is excluded from her adoptive family when she attains marriageable age and thus becomes a threat to the racial and social identity of the aristocracy, the class whose identity and very existence have been thoroughly besieged during the Revolution and its aftermath. The fear of miscegenation that has haunted French society since its earliest colonial days, codified in the intricate laws regulating slavery and the interaction between the races in the Code noir, determine her expulsion.16 Ourika retreats to a convent, tells her story to a doctor, a representative of the emerging bourgeoisie, and dies. At the end of Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or, Henri de Marsay plots to kill his lover, Paquita, when he learns during an erotic encounter that he had served as a surrogate for a woman, yet he is preempted by his own sister, revealed to be his hidden and secret rival who murders Paquita just as Henri penetrates his rival’s mansion. In the final pages of the novel, following an extensive and quite lurid description of the murder scene, Henri returns to his former

20

INTRODUCTION

haunts, the public gardens of Paris, as a rakish seducer, his phallic potency restored and apparently intact. Samuel Cramer, the ironic ‘‘hermaphrodite’’ half-genius, whose mistress, La Fanfarlo, is described also as a quirky combination of mixed gender traits, ends up as a bourgeois pater familias; La Fanfarlo herself gives birth to two children and becomes plump and matronly. Abandoning his feminine pen name, Manuella de Monteverde, Samuel turns toward writing popular moral treatises and essays on aesthetics and dabbles in political journalism. Alexina, the intersexual narrator of Herculine Barbin, is forced to assume a masculine identity, to abandon her profession as a schoolteacher, and to find employment as a man. The imperatives of sexual and social norms are starkly apparent in this text, and their consequences for Abel, who is subjected to them, are lethal. Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin is the only text in which the narrative does not officially exclude or foreclose the vagrant sexuality of its protagonists. After a night of love with both male and female lovers, d’Albert and Rosette, Madelaine de Maupin simply departs, returning to the travels that led to her encounter with them, leaving a letter to d’Albert explaining that she cannot remain as his mistress for the very conventional reason that they would soon tire of each other. The question of who among the three protagonists finally assumes what sexual identity is literally left undecided. The ending is thus at once both highly conventional and totally unresolved. As these brief summaries of narrative denouements suggest, the reimposition of heterosexual norms, because it is so highly conventional, and because the narratives themselves have been so strikingly unconventional, leaves open precisely the very central questions that the narrative conclusions are ostensibly recruited to resolve, questions concerning the validity and universality of gender norms, the location of cultural boundaries. The last and perhaps most far-reaching issue that I explore in my discussions concerns a pervasive yet frequently veiled crisis of authority, not only regarding who or what institution is to determine ‘‘correct’’ gender relations, but what values might prevail in a vast range of other cultural

INTRODUCTION

21

issues including economic, ethical, and political questions. While Ourika is the only text that explicitly addresses fundamental questions about freedom, rights of citizenship, are issues of moral and political authority. In a more restricted manner, Herculine Barbin also engages with social issues, questions about the moral and economic status of the sexed subject. All of the narratives, however, present a dynamic antagonism of competing values in the absence of any consensus about final principles. Since each text, in varying manner and degree, represents transgressions of norms of gender relations, each opposes other values that sustain the dominant fictions upon which social order is assumed to rest. These texts pose the question, implicitly or more directly, of where authority resides in a post-Revolutionary society, in which the old aristocratic order is declining and being eclipsed while the newly emergent bourgeoisie’s power and self-definition take hold and take shape. The old hierarchies of power and value having been displaced, no new social equilibrium has emerged. Though represented in widely different ways, a remarkable disarray of values and authority prevails. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson has noted in her excellent Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City, there is a pervasive sense during the first three quarters of the century that ‘‘everything is new’’ and that urban instability and political volatility go hand in hand. In the space and time of seventy years France moved through an impressive number of political regimes. Two monarchies, two empires, and three republics were ushered in variously by two revolutions (1830 and 1848), two military defeats (1815 and 1870–1), one coup d’e´ tat (1851), and one civil war (1871).17

Each text is situated differently against this political turmoil, yet each in some way bears the mark of the general instability of values and relations of social and political power that characterize the entire period. It would be well beyond the scope of this book, and perhaps futile, to propose specific political, historical correlatives to the uncertainties about cultural relations of author-

22

INTRODUCTION

ity and order that are so consistently represented in the permutations of desire and shifting configurations of gender in the texts discussed below. I contend, however, that the very openness to change that is figured in these narratives, even if repeatedly foreclosed in their denouements, signals an intense awareness of possibilities for cultural, historical renewal and, at the same time, paradoxically, deep underlying anxiety about the forms that those changes might assume and the new relations of power that might emerge. Two points should be noted here. First, as suggested above, a general historical malaise about social order, the acceleration of change, and an absence of consensus concerning what institutions or agents will embody authority in post-Revolutionary France subtends each text, forming a contextual background. Second, that malaise emerges in different forms in each text, from the more inward turning aesthetic questions about literature and the arts in Mademoiselle de Maupin and La Fanfarlo, which lack any explicit political or economic reference, to La Fille aux yeux d’or, in which the claims of realist aesthetics are implicitly linked to a fantasy of political order, and finally, Ourika and Herculine Barbin, in which gender is specifically linked to questions of moral, political, and legal rights and to the very definition of the person as a subject of the state. In the chapters which follow, I attempt to strike a balance between literary, aesthetic analysis and considerations of the wider social implications of these narratives. In short, it will be seen that the aesthetic constantly resonates with historical, political issues. While these narratives may put in question the dominant order by engaging in a scrutiny of a wider crisis of values— ethical, aesthetic, political—because they promote the centrality of sexuality and gendered relations as defining cultural issues they are themselves part of a pervasive selfaffirmation of the bourgeoisie. As Foucault has observed, the newly emerging dominant class established its sexuality as a new discursive distribution of pleasures, truths, and power.18 Rather than ignoring or displacing from its body a sexuality no longer directed solely to reproduction, the newly emerging bourgeoisie conferred upon itself a body to care for and protect, isolating it from other social bodies in

INTRODUCTION

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order to mark and preserve its difference.19 Foucault has attributed wide ranging effects in other diverse, yet related, domains to the bourgeoisie’s investment in its sexuality; the ‘‘high political value’’ of the bourgeois body is linked to a new ‘‘technology of sex,’’ a new distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers.20 While it is evident that the texts discussed below participate in this phenomenon, it is equally clear that their engagement with it is far from being an uncritical affirmation of emerging bourgeois values and power; they problematize the very phenomenon in which they partake. Engaging in that proliferation of attention to sex and gendered relations that was so widespread throughout the period, these texts also question the authority of the values that are coming to be attached to these historically particular bodies and desires. Though they confirm the centrality of this imaginary body to the construction of bourgeois values, they also reveal its contingencies and the fragility of its presuppositions, as well as its availability to change. What comes to pass as the dominant fiction can and is travestied and contested frequently and in many ways in these fascinating narratives. The texts considered in the following chapters locate problematic aspects of the cultural constructedness of gender in this particular period; they ‘‘read’’ its configurations and therefor its impasses and its underlying investments. They do not affirm secure alternatives to this particular patriarchal symbolic order. Their narrative denouements even appear to yield to its imperatives, as I have noted above. Ourika’s wasting death in a convent, Samuel Cramer’s comic embracing of family values, Henri de Marsay’s return to the heterosexual playing fields of the Tuileries, Madelaine’s self-imposed return to errancy, even Abel’s tragic confirmation by suicide of the potency of the bourgeois heterosexual regime, while they appear to capitulate to the imperatives of social order are not without irony. Having divulged the constructedness of gender and, through their narratives of desire, having questioned the values that adhere to the dominant heterosexual order, the texts’ return to things ‘‘as they are’’ can scarcely be interpreted as a valorization of the dominant fictions. The engagement of these texts with masculinist sexual economies

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INTRODUCTION

loosens the oppressive grasp of these economies and encourages speculation on alternative ways of understanding and experiencing gender, and more broadly, of alternate ways of experiencing cultural differences. Rather than engaging in an endless confirmation of difference as the negative of the dominant masculine, these texts, as I interpret them, suggest the urgency of understanding differences otherwise; the texts open up possibilities, one might even claim, imperatives for recontextualizing such experiences.21 From Claire de Duras’s Ourika to Alexina/Abel’s autobiography, these narratives question the configurations of a collective embodiment and its values in terms of identities that have been excluded from the collective or admitted to it as its abjected other. By showing the effects of that disbarment they encourage speculation on alternative experiences of difference which, since we continue to read and engage with these compelling narratives, necessarily have implications for understanding our own experiences of embodiment, its openness to change, and our relations to differences of gender, class, and race. In this introduction I have discussed briefly the various thematic and discursive links between the five texts that are the subject of the following chapters. I have grouped the chapters in three sections according to affinities among the texts and to distinctions based on their quite remarkable contrasts. Part 1, ‘‘The Play of Gender,’’ contains a chapter on The´ ophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and a second chapter on Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo, focusing on their treatment of androgyny, transvestism, and a loosening of the boundaries of heterosexual identity and desire. Both texts suggest productive and original redefinitions of Romantic aesthetics and explore multilayered implications of what might be called an erotics of aesthetic experience. The virtuoso scrambling of genre and gender in these narratives has wide ranging implications for the affective and aesthetic experiences that they relate. Both texts explicitly link the assumption of gender roles with theater, theatricality and with display and performance in general. A second section, ‘‘Difference and Disbarment,’’ discusses Ourika, by Claire de Duras, and Herculine Barbin, the

INTRODUCTION

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autobiography of the intersexual, Alexina/Abel. Both texts raise the possibility of reconfiguring the personal and social spheres by extending the limits of tolerated gendered behavior to include beings who have been excluded traditionally as the abjected other of the dominant order. Each narrative is a story of the protagonist’s inclusion in a social milieu, either provisionally, in the case of Ourika, or, in the case of the intersexual narrator Alexina/Abel, of h/er admission through the unacknowledged complicity of social institutions, the family and the girl’s boarding schools in which s/he was raised and later served as a teacher. These texts represent inclusions that are temporarily viable yet brutally rejected at a point of crisis. For Ourika this rejection occurs at the moment that this model daughter attains marriageable age and when her race, which had earlier been virtually invisible, suddenly becomes the determining feature of her identity and she comes to embody an inadmissible threat of miscegenation. For Alexina the crisis arises when her anomalous anatomy is discovered in two episodes during which s/he seeks treatment for medical problems caused by his/her unusual physical configuration. In both texts the crisis is at once emotional and moral and it is occasioned during the transition from adolescence to adulthood by the immanent imposition of social imperatives linked to gender roles. Finally, these chapters examine certain implications of the invocation of authority— moral, political, and legal—in the rejection of subjects and experiences that are denied admission to the social order, differences that it refuses to tolerate. ‘‘Urban Body: Erotic Body,’’ the final section, on Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or, discusses this realist text in terms of parallel fictions of phallic mastery that engage not only the erotic narrative of the affair between Henri de Marsay and Paquita Valdes but also implicate the realist narrator’s claims to comprehensive knowledge of contemporary Parisian society, its history, demographics, social and economic institutions, desires, and pleasures—in short, everything that can be understood by what the narrator calls ‘‘le Paris moral . . . le Paris physique.’’ The realist narrator’s claims to comprehensive knowledge of every sphere or stratum of Parisian society and the implicit claims of realist aesthetics

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INTRODUCTION

are shown to be vulnerable in ways that are surprisingly akin to the hero’s failed fantasy of unimpaired masculine sexual omnipotence. The narrator’s failure to attain a mastery that he asserts repeatedly and insistently is linked to the quite ambiguous hybrid sexuality of the novel’s hero. These fictions of artistic mastery and phallic erotic potency in La Fille aux yeux d’or are set in the context of a pervasive crisis of value and authority that extends throughout the nineteenth century in France and resonates in each of the narratives discussed in this book.

I The Play of Gender

1 ‘‘Vous eˆ tes sans doute tre`s surpris, mon cher d’Albert’’: Improvisation and Gender in The´ ophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin MY TITLE IS TAKEN FROM A PASSAGE IN THE LAST CHAPTER OF Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, from the opening lines of a letter to d’Albert, breaking off a liaison after a night of love: Vous eˆ tes sans doute tre`s surpris, mon cher d’Albert, de ce que je viens de faire apre`s ce que j’ai fait.—Je vous le permets, il y a de quoi. (370) [You are no doubt quite surprised, my dear d’Albert, at what I have just done after acting as I did. That’s all right. You have good reason. (292)]1

This quirky and unconventional novel ends with an amusing twist on narrative conventions, emblematic of a much wider set of disruptions at work throughout the text; here it is not the man who loves, leaves, and takes to the road, but rather Madelaine/The´ odore, a lover whose equivocal sexuality escapes the closure of the text, remaining an undecided, and mobile mix of gender permutations. In an early chapter of the novel, d’Albert, a central protagonist engaged in an erotic and aesthetic quest for the perfect mistress, proclaims glibly that he prefers women who read extensively: ‘‘on est plus toˆ t arrive´ a` la fin du chapitre; et en toutes choses, et surtout en amour, ce qu’il faut conside´ rer, c’est la fin’’ (51) ‘‘[we arrive sooner at the end of the chapter; and in everything, and especially in love, the end is what we 29

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have to consider (10)]. The de´ nouement, however, produces very different effects from those he anticipates early on. Like the open road that The´ odore/Madelaine embraces at the end of the novel, her/his sexuality remains vagrant, refusing closure, whether in domestic stability with either of the protagonists, d’Albert or Rosette, a young, libertine widow who desires her/him, or in gender categories in which Rosette and d’Albert have experienced their desires. The novel itself, similarly, deflects interpretive certainties and resolutions at every turn, and that, I believe, accounts for the considerable interest that it has generated among readers in recent years.2 Just as it mixes literary genres— first person confession in pseudo-epistolary form, dialogue, aesthetic essay, picaresque narrative—the text problematizes gender through complex gender asymmetries. Mademoiselle de Maupin produces a very considerable puzzlement in conventional categories even as it reiterates them, whether they be heterosexual, homosexual, or lesbian.3 This chapter closely follows the narrative development of the novel, exploring the protagonists’ own provisional explorations of their desires. By examining the complex disruptions of conventional gender categories this chapter traces the ways in which the novel maintains the conundrum of plural and equivocal gender identities even as the narrative appears to seek its resolution. The novel’s central theme concerns the two main protagonists’ awakening to desire and to an understanding of their presumed core identities in terms of their sexuality. Gender identity and self-knowledge are linked in a manner that was to become a major topos of the century and, indeed, as Foucault and others have shown, continues as a prominent motif in a great variety of contemporary fictions and critical inquiries.4 Madelaine and d’Albert enter their narratives with seemingly unquestioned heterosexual identities. For d’Albert, it is a question of locating and possessing the ideal woman, to be determined unequivocally in terms of androcentric, heterosexual identity. By assuaging his desire, he assumes that he will gain greater self-knowledge. In an overtly Platonic context, d’Albert frequently speculates about the ideal mistress as an abstract figure to be given sculpted form according to masculine aesthetic ideals and

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erotic desire: ‘‘Qui nous a donne´ l’ide´ e de cette femme imaginaire? de quelle argile avons nous pe´ tri cette statue invisible?’’ (63) [Who has given us the idea of this imaginary woman? From what clay have we formed this invisible statue? (21)]. Madelaine’s quest, on the other hand, begins with a critique of the social-sexual subservience of women and with a repudiation of social constraints burdening them. She also assumes that she will attain self-knowledge and self-definition by entering the masculine world in transvestite disguise. Madelaine anticipates that this project will make available to her a knowledge of men ‘‘as they are.’’ By attaining that knowledge she will ground her own identity outside the traditional social schema that she has disparaged and will then reenter heterosexual relations with a secure identity as a woman. On one level, then, the novel can be considered as a transvestite progress narrative. In the first letter to her confidant, Graciosa, Madelaine characterizes young women’s social education as a schooling in ignorance: Pauvres jeunes filles que nous sommes; e´ leve´ es avec tant de soin, si virginalement entoure´ es d’un triple mur de pre´ cautions et de re´ ticences,—nous, a` qui on ne laisse rien entendre, rien soupc¸onner, et dont la principale science est de ne rien savoir, dans quelles e´ tranges erreurs nous vivons, et quelles perfides chime`res nous bercent entre leurs bras! (206) [Poor young girls that we are, brought up with so much care, surrounded in such maidenly fashion with a triple wall of reticence and precaution, who are allowed to understand nothing, to suspect nothing, and whose principal knowledge is to know nothing, in what strange errors do we live, and what treacherous chimeras cradle us in their arms! (147)]

Having mastered the masculine arts of horsemanship and the sword, she begins her quest: ‘‘decide´ e a` n’y revenir qu’avec l’expe´ rience la plus comple`te’’ (210) [determined not to return without the most complete experience (151)]. Her goal is to know the ‘‘true story’’ of men, not their self serving fictions: ‘‘les femmes n’ont lu que le roman de l’homme et jamais son histoire’’ (210) [women have read only man’s romance and never his history (152)]. The terms of this quest

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set feminine ‘‘transparency’’ to the penetrating male gaze (‘‘notre vie est claire et se peut pe´ ne´ trer d’un regard’’ [211] [our life is clear and may be pierced at a glance (152)]) against the socially sanctioned opacity and illegibility of male difference. Madelaine’s role as a voyeur, however, privileges a phallic dominated schema of heterosexuality. Paradoxically, the project of understanding men and, consequently, herself, by becoming a woman different from the trivial beings that she disavows, relies on a well-known schema of heterosexuality in which woman is constructed symbolically as absence and lack and man is figured as being and presence.5 Both d’Albert and Madelaine are initially situated, then, in quite similar configurations of gender, being, and knowledge. By linking gender identities and being to performance, however, the novel inscribes identities as effects of surface, and thus produces vigorous and often exhilarating disruptions of heterosexuality.6 This puzzlement of androcentric heterosexuality and the various anxious or exhilarating effects of its disruption are the subjects of this study. Though never fully acknowledged by the protagonists of the text and never assumed by an extradiegetic narrator, gender, in Mademoiselle de Maupin, can be understood as a performative, not the self-defining core of being that proves so elusive in the novel.7 A performative utterance in speech act theory is a discursive practice that produces what it names. As Derrida suggests in his writings on Austin and the problems of performatives and iterability, performatives succeed because they repeat a coded or iterable utterance, as when I launch a boat, or open a meeting. Performative citation is a complex affair in this novel; it involves d’Albert’s anxious meditations on the constraints of the heterosexual code, and it engages with transvestism, theatrical performance, and the unnamed errancy at the end of the novel. The text raises the question of how citation operates in producing the subject as a consequence of dissimulation or theatricality.8 The novel also suggests the potentially open-endedness of gender performatives and the extent to which gender differences are effects of negotiations, necessarily susceptible to reconfiguration. If, as Ross Chambers has shown so insightfully, many

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early modernist texts are characterized by the fogs of melancholy that scramble identities and blur discourses,9 this early modernist text, exceeding its male protagonist’s predictably anxious surprise about his non-heterosexual desire produces euphoric and giddy multiplicities that are very different from those that inhabit the fogs of ennui. This euphoric difference is all the more effective because it repeats, as citation, aesthetic and gender codes that it reconfigures and supplements. The opening section of the novel, the first five chapters, combines a libertine plot of erotic conquest with aesthetic meditations on beauty and desire which alternate between classical models and a newly forming romantic ideal as d’Albert speculates on his quest for the elusive perfect mistress.10 D’Albert shares with the typical mal du sie`cle hero an abundance of passion and a perceived lack of being, yearning for fulfillment in an ever retreating object, yet he also professes to know what he wants: the coincidence of the ideal and the material in perfect love. More simply put, he desires a woman who would be as much his own as his favorite horse: ‘‘une maıˆtresse tout a` fait a` moi—comme le cheval’’ (48) [A mistress quite my own—like the horse (7)].11 D’Albert’s playfully fatuous discussion of his inability to be satisfied with any given type of woman—young girls, mothers, widows, candid virgins or coquettes, etc. (chapter 2)— attributes his failure to a general human defect, the inability to find the material realization of the ideal: Ce que je cherche n’existe point. . . . Cependant, si la femme que nous revons n’est pas dans les conditions de la nature humaine, qui fait donc que nous n’aimons que celle-la` et point les autres, puisque nous sommes des hommes, et que notre instinct devrait nous y porter d’une invincible manie`re? (63) [What I am looking for does not exist. . . . Yet if the woman of our dreams is impossible to the conditions of human nature, what is it that causes us to love her only and none other, since we are men, and our instinct should be an infallible guide? (my translation)]

‘‘Human nature’’ and the inadequacies about which d’Albert meditates turn out to be pervasively heterosexual, and

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male: ‘‘En ve´ rite´ , je crois que l’homme, et par l’homme j’entends aussi la femme, est le plus vilain animal qui soit sur terre’’ (60) [In truth I believe that man, and by man also understand woman, is the ugliest animal on earth (17)]. All configurations of the heterosexual ideal in d’Albert’s speculations center upon the figure of the masculine, and one might observe that this is hardly surprising in a narrative of erotic conquest, whose principal protagonist is a brilliant, if ironically presented, alter-ego of the male writer. I will examine briefly these figurations of the androcentric heterosexual ideal, and the narrative in which it is imperfectly realized, the affair with Rosette. I will then turn to d’Albert’s projected identification with woman, and his thoughts on what he calls the monstrous. These sequences lead the reader, or at least this reader, to speculate on how the text reveals the precariousness of the heterosexual norm and how it invites questioning of its legitimacy as a quasi-permanent symbolic structure.12 When d’Albert becomes ‘‘l’amant en pied de la dame en rose’’ [the established lover of the lady in rose], Rosette, in chapter 3, he professes that he is unable to take possession of her as a mistress, assimilating the other to the self: ‘‘Jamais personne autant que moi n’a de´ sire´ vivre de la vie des autres, et s’assimmiler une autre nature; — jamais personne n’y a moins re´ ussi’’ (92) [Never has anyone desired so strongly as myself to live the life of others, and to assimilate another nature; never has anyone succeeded less in doing so (46)]. This unrealized desire is specifically linked at the end of chapter 3 to an idealization of the other and to d’Albert’s inability to embrace the ‘‘real’’: Cette tension acharne´ de l’oeil de mon aˆ me vers un objet invisible m’a fausse´ la vue. Je ne sais pas voir ce qui est, a` force d’avoir regarde´ ce qui n’est pas, et mon oeil si subtil pour l’ide´ al est tout a` fait myope dans la re´ alite´ . (81) [This intense straining of the eye of my soul after an invisible object has distorted my vision. I cannot see what is for my gazing at what is not; and my eye, so keen for the ideal, is perfectly near-sighted in matters of reality. (81)]

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The persistent ideal of the feminine, never attained, turns out to be a narcissistic figuration of the self: ‘‘Peuteˆ tre que, ne trouvant rien en le monde qui soit digne de mon amour, je finirai par m’y adorer moi-meˆ me, comme feu Narcisse d’e´ goiste me´ moire’’ (82) [Perhaps, too, finding nothing in the world worthy of my love, I shall end by adoring myself, like Narcissus of egotistical memory (38)].13 Within a quite conventional erotic narrative recounting a witty and playful affair with a sophisticated and ironic mistress, d’Albert’s desire excludes the other, though not in the terms that he professes, as in a passage in which he likens himself to a drop of oil in a glass of water: ‘‘repoussant invinciblement toute alliance et toute mixtion’’ (93) [the oil can never mix with it (48)]. According to now familiar scenarios of specularization and assimilation, the other that d’Albert claims to seek is desirable only as a double of the one or as assimilated by the one. This is true even in apparently transgresessive moments, as when d’Albert says that he wishes to be a woman: ‘‘j’aurais pre´ fe´ re´ d’eˆ tre femme . . . et aux instants de plaisir j’aurais volontiers change´ de roˆ le, car il est bien impatientant de ne pas avoir la conscience de l’effet que l’on produit’’ (95) [I would have preferred to be a woman . . . and at particular moments, I would willingly have changed my part, for it is very provoking to be unaware of the effect that one produces (50)]. The sought after pleasure, projected as becoming the female other, would be the consequence of masculine pleasure objectified. The other is a reiteration of the masculine, as is stated ironically at the conclusion of chapter 3, if one reads the statement in the light of my remarks above: ‘‘la femme oˆ te´ e, il me reste du moins un joli compagnon, plein d’esprit, et tre`s agre´ ablement de´ moralise´ ’’ (105) [putting the woman aside, there remains at least a pretty companion, full of wit, and very agreeably demoralized (my translation)]. The homoerotic implications of specular desire, as in the passage quoted above alluding to Narcissus, or the ‘‘joli compagnon,’’ or any hint that the boundaries configuring the exclusions might be unstable or contingent, are recuperated here by the protagonist’s repeated assertions of an androcentric heterosexuality. All imagined roles affirm the heterosexual masculine, as in d’Albert’s lyric allusion to the

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Ovidian hermaphrodite: ‘‘Comme l’antique Salmacis, l’amoureuse du jeune Hermaphrodite, je taˆ chais de fondre son corps avec le mien; je buvais son haleine’’ (96) [Like the ancient Salmacis enamoured of the young Hermaphrodite, I strove to blend her frame with mine; I drank her breath (50–51)], and in another passage: ‘‘L’aˆ me de Rosette e´ tait entre´ e toute entie`re dans mon corps’’ (100) [Rosette’s soul had entirely entered my body (my translation)]. The figure of the Ovidian hermaphrodite haunts this narrative, reappearing in d’Albert’s musings on pre-Christian desire and the lures of homoerotic beauty in antiquity (chapter 5) and in key scenes in which heterosexual gender identity is represented as most menaced by homoerotic desire. I will discuss its resonances in greater detail later, but one can observe here that the sexual ‘‘completeness’’ of the hermaphrodite is an allegorical figuration of the one, a desired wholeness that is invariably androcentric at its root. There is a curious residue of melancholy in the passage quoted above. Melancholy can be linked to the incorporation of homosexual desires, in d’Albert’s fantasy in an episode in chapter 3 in which he muses upon his inabilities to experience sexual delight other than as an extension of himself (94). He imagines himself as a spectator in the scene of his own erotic activities: ‘‘Mon aˆ me, assise tristement, regardait d’un air de pitie´ ce de´ plorble hyme`ne ou` elle n’e´ tait pas invite´ e’’ (96) [My soul, seated mournfully, gazed with an air of pity on this lamentable marriage to which she was not invited (51)]. This melancholy is closely associated with d’Albert’s passive heterosexuality and merits examination, for it can be linked later in the novel to his anxious awakenings to desires that can only be understood as homoerotic. Melancholy is intimately tied throughout the text to heterosexual male gender identity and to its disturbances. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, reading Freud’s ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ (1917) and ‘‘The Ego and the Id’’ (1923), makes the extremely suggestive claim that melancholy is constitutive of all heterosexual identity. Following Freud, melancholy is understood as the effect of an ungrieved loss. Gender melancholy, according to Butler, is ‘‘an attachment to and a loss and refusal of the figure of femininity by the man.’’14 Melancholia is ‘‘a sustaining of the

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lost object/other as a psychic figure with the consequence of heightened identification with the Other, self-beratement and the acting out of unresolved anger and love.’’15 Butler suggests that this process of internalizing lost loves becomes pertinent to gender formation, since the incest taboo produces a loss of a love-object for the ego; the ‘‘ego recuperates from this loss through the internalization of the tabooed object of desire.’’16 Heterosexual melancholy in d’Albert’s musings throughout the novel, then, can be understood as an incorporative fantasy, taking in an object which he refuses to relinqish, a fantasy that retains not only the mother but also the father, in an unyielding homoerotic attachment. The arrival of The´ odore de Se´ rannes, the persona adopted by Madelaine, provides d’Albert with a way out of his fretful sadness by disrupting the erotic attachment to Rosette. This heterosexual romantic intoxication (‘‘Rosette est soˆ ule de moi, comme je suis soul d’elle’’ [125] [Rosette has had enough of me as I of her (76)] is revealed to be quite intolerable: ‘‘elle est assomante d’esprit, de tendresse et de complaisance, elle est d’une perfection a` jeter par la feneˆ tre’’ (124) [she is wearisome with wit, tenderness, and kindness; she is perfect enough to be thrown out of the window (76)].17 Prepared by the impossible intimacy of this heterosexual teˆ te a` teˆ te, The´ odore’s arrival astonishes d’Albert, for The´ odore is the embodiment of beauty: ‘‘Cette beaute´ excessive, meˆ me pour une femme, n’est pas la beaute´ d’un homme’’ (187) [Such beauty, even for a woman, is not the beauty of a man (130)]. This description hints at the loosening of the oppressive dyadic gender schema that is more fully developed later in the novel, following the performance by the major protagonists of As You Like It and in the final pages of the novel. These shifts in the boundaries of gender identities occur not simply because d’Albert is so obviously drawn to a figure whom he takes to be a man, but, in a more powerful sense, because gender here is associated with an undefined supplement.18 That supplement, as we will see, opens gender to the exclusions that have up until this point in the novel served to define the masculine heterosexual self, and it proves to be very destabilizing in its effects. It is not until later in the novel, and the perform-

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ance of As You Like It, with its linking of identity and gender to theatricality and performance, that the possibility of radically different and mobile configurations of gender will be advanced. The´ odore/Madelaine’s narrative begins in a manner very similar to d’Albert’s, as indicated in my discussion above. The´ odore is a mal du sie`cle hero, very like d’Albert, highly sensitive, melancholic, pursued by desires s/he is incapable of assuaging, and haunted by indeterminacy, as revealed by this conversation with Rosette: Ah! si je pouvais savoir ce que je veux; si l’ide´ e qui me poursuit se de´ gageait nette et pre´ cise du brouillard qui l’entoure; si l’e´ toile favorable ou fatale apparaissait au fond de mon ciel . . . si je savais ou je vais, dusse´ -je n’aboutir qu’a` un pre´ cipice! (161) [Ah! If I could know what I want; if the idea which pursues me would extricate itself clear and precise from the fog that envelops it; if the fortunate or fatal star would appear in the depth of my sky . . . if I knew whither I am going, though I were only to come to a precipice! (108)]

The effects of Madelaine’s disguise in the pages preceding the central episode of the staging of As You Like It are worked out both for her and for d’Albert within an only slightly disturbed heterosexual schema of desire and subject positions. Madelaine wishes to know the world of men from within by disguising herself as a man, to observe for herself a masculine transparency that would be equivalent to the transparency that she says defines the role of women: ‘‘Nous autres, notre vie est claire et se peut pe´ ne´ trer d’un regard. Il est facile de nous suivre de la maison au pensionnnat, du pensionnat a` la maison’’ (211) [As for us, our life is clear and may be pierced at a glance. It is easy to follow us from our home to the boarding-school, and from the boarding-school to our home (152)]. Her strategy of knowing men by appropriating a male role and acting as a voyeur within a male world is indeed transgressive initially insofar as it is a forced entry of an excluded difference within the borders of male activities—drinking binges in an inn (chapter 10), duels (chapters 11 and 14), mastery of horsemanship, and the like. But prior to the pivotal reenactment of Shake-

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speare’s play, neither Theodore nor d’Albert go all the way to embrace a sexual otherness that displaces an overbearing heterosexual model. Each strains the limits of heterosexuality, however, and thereby exposes the fragility of configurations of gender that each had presumed to be so firmly in place. The sequence of narrative presentation plays a crucial role in differentiating between d’Albert and The´ odore/Madelaine regarding a dominant, though disturbed heterosexuality. D’Albert’s narrative of his desire for The´ odore/Madelaine, in chapters 7, 8, and 9, precedes the account of the play, and is resumed after the play in a single chapter (13). Madelaine/The´ odore’s narrative, however, is more radically divided and more complex in its narrational perspectives, containing the initial episode alluded to above, which is recounted before the play, and a second analeptic narrative sequence in two chapters following the play (14 and 15), one preceding and one following d’Albert’s resumed narrative in chapter 13. Madelaine thus narrates events that occur between that early sequence and the play from a double perspective. Madelaine tells most of her narrative, her near seduction of or by Rosette, her wounding of Rosette’s brother who had discovered Rosette and The´ odore in bed, her arrival at the chateau where she rejoins Rosette and meets d’Albert and where the play is staged, after the play itself. These episodes are thus recounted from a perspective of greater knowledge about her desires and her gender identities than when she engaged in the events themselves. Like her gender, her story is split and her narrational voice multiple. D’Albert, however, tells the story of his desire before the play and only regains narrative voice in a single chapter (13) in which he asserts that the play has permitted him to resolve the enigma of The´ odore’s gender: ‘‘je vous ai vue dans le costume de votre sexe. . . . vous eˆ tes femme, et mon amour n’est plus re´ pre´ hensible’’ (319) [I have seen you in the costume of your sex. . . . you are a woman, and my love is no longer reprehensible (248)]. D’Albert’s certainty, of course, is based on a complex of disguise and fiction, yet that does not deter him from reinstating a normative model of gender, even as it has been effectively disrupted and displaced.

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D’Albert’s account of his attraction for The´ odore is presented as an investigation into the mystery of his/her gender (is he a woman? I am in love with a man who must be a woman, etc.) in which the only alternatives are heterosexual male or female, or abjected sexuality referred to as ‘‘monstrous.’’ In chapter 8, d’Albert confesses that, as he speculates on The´ odore’s sexual identity, his own sexuality has become an enigma: en ve´ rite´ , ce que j’e´ prouve depuis quelque temps est d’une telle e´ trangete´ que j’ose a` peine en convenir devant moi-meˆ me. Je t’ai dit quelque part que j’avais peur, a` force de chercher le beau et de m’agiter pour y parvenir, de tomber a` la fin dans l’impossible ou dans le monstrueux. (177) [in truth, what I have experienced for some time is so strange, that I can scarcely dare to acknowledge it to myself. I told you somewhere that I feared lest, from seeking the beautiful and disquieting myself to attain it, I should at last fall into the impossible or monstrous. (121)]

The enigma of his desire, though it puts in question stable heterosexuality, is nonetheless formulated in terms that reinstate binary gender relations, however puzzlingly disrupted: C’est la plus de´ plorable de toutes mes abe´ rations, je n’y conc¸ois rien, je n’y comprends rien, tout en moi s’est brouille´ et renverse´ ; je ne sais plus qui je suis ni ce que sont les autres, je doute si je suis un homme ou une femme, J’ai horreur de moimeˆ me, j’e´ prouve des mouvements singuliers et inexplicables. (184) [It is the most lamentable of all my aberrations, I cannot comprehend it at all, everything is confused and upset within me; I can no longer tell who I am or what others are, I doubt whether I am a man or a woman, I have a horror of myself, I experience strange and inexplicable emotions. (128)]

While implicitly revealing the fragility of d’Albert’s own gender identity, his descriptions of The´ odore, observed in a melancholy pose at his window, reveal the very fluidity and

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mobility of the signs and boundaries that mark the terms of gender identity: Avec ses longs cheveux que la brise remuait doucement, ce cou de marbre ainsi de´ couvert, cette grande robe serre´ e autour de sa taille, ces belles mains sortant de leurs manchettes comme les pistils d’une fleur du milieu de leurs pe´ tales,—il avait l’air non du plus beau des hommes, mais de la plus belle des femmes, et je me disais dans mon coeur:—C’est une femme, oh! c’est une femme. (187) [With his long hair stirred softly by the breeze, his marble neck thus uncovered, his ample robe clasped around his waist, and his beautiful hands issuing from their ruffles like the pistils of a flower from the midst of their petals, he looked not the handsomest of men but the most beautiful of women, and I said in my heart — ‘‘It is a woman, oh! It is a woman.’’ (130)] Cette beaute´ excessive, meˆ me pour une femme, n’est pas la beaute´ d’un homme . . . —C’est une femme, parbleu, et je suis bien fou de m’eˆ tre ainsi tourmente´ . De la sorte tout s’explique le plus naturellement du monde, et je ne suis pas aussi monstre que je le croyais. (187) [Such beauty, even for a woman, is not the beauty of a man . . . It is a woman, by heaven, and I was very foolish to torment myself in such a manner. In this way everything is explained in the most natural fashion in the world, and I am not such a monster as I believed. (130)]

‘‘Natural’’ explanations of desire and gender fail, however, as d’Albert’s speculations return consistantly to the conundrum of The´ odore’s ‘‘true’’ gender identity and to d’Albert’s enigmatically ‘‘monstrous’’ desire. Of course, it is the very category of the ‘‘natural’’ that is at stake here. D’Albert’s reasoning operates according to a logic that recent critics have explored from both philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives.19 Gender is said to be explained by nature or biology, while the symbolic configurations of gender are, in fact, applied to nature and constitute nature as a category and as a set of symbolic configurations.20 What Butler refers to as the ‘‘substantive effect of gender,’’ ‘‘is performatively produced and compelled by regulatory

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practices of gender coherence.’’21 The ‘‘natural’’ explanation that d’Albert seeks, grounded in perceivable differences, is an effect of performative signification.22 In the final pages of the novel, Madelaine/The´ odore professes to be neither woman nor man, having too much or not enough of one or the other sex to adhere to fixed, binary gender identities. There are crucial scenes preceding these emancipatory revelations, however, in which Madelaine describes her awakening desires for Rosette in terms of disruptions of dyadic heterosexual roles. In two episodes Rosette draws Madelaine into a comic-erotic encounter, an unintended consequence of Madelaine’s travestied identity as The´ odore. Having fallen in love with The´ odore, Rosette lures him into a rustic cabin, in a seduction scene which is interrupted ‘‘fortuitously’’ by her brother’s dog and by her brother. In the second episode, Rosette’s exasperated desire leads her to Madelaine’s bedroom, and to her bed. At a crucial moment, the couple is again interrupted by the intrusion of Rosette’s brother, resulting in a duel between Madelaine/The´ odore and Alcibiade in which Madelaine/ The´ odore triumphs and hastily departs. These scenes provide voyeuristic titillation for the reader in the representation of an arousal to lesbian desire (‘‘je l’aimais re´ ellement beaucoup et plus qu’une femme aime une femme’’ (310) [I did really love her very much and more than any woman loves a woman (240)], while denying its possibility through reiterations of The´ odore/Madelaine’s incapicity ‘‘to be’’ and ‘‘to do’’ as the heterosexual male that Rosette assumes that she is. Prohibitions against same sex desire are strained in Madelaine’s detailed description of Rosette’s voluptuous and aroused body and of Madelaine’s own arousal. Prohibitions are embraced throughout, however, in the very terms in which the scene is narrated and in which the erotic is evaluated (290–91, 294). Madelaine speculates on the enviable pleasures of men who are said to actively possess and dominate women, while women remain passive: ‘‘cette re´ flexion me vient que les hommes e´ taient plus favorise´ s que nous dans leurs amours, que nous leur donnions a` posse´ der les plus charmants tre´ sors, et qu’ils n’avaient rien de pareil a` nous offrir. . . . Nos caresses a` nous ne peuvent gue`re eˆ tre que passives’’ (296) [this reflection occurred to me that men

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were more favored in their loves than we, seeing that we gave them possession of the most charming treasures while they had nothing similar to offer us. . . . Our caresses can scarcely be other than passive, and yet it is a greater pleasure to give than to receive (228)]. While declaring herself to be no longer woman and not yet man (297), she reasserts key components of androcentric heterosexuality, alluding to her ‘‘viriles pense´ es’’ (288) [manly thoughts (220)], opposed to feminine ‘‘pre´ cieuses niaiseries’’ (288) [affected nonsense (221)] and by quite blatantly ascribing to woman passive roles and a lesser status than men. In the scene in which Rosette arrives scantily dressed and uninvited to Madelaine/The´ odore’s bedroom on a moonlit night, The´ odore is restrained from pursuing ‘‘des ide´ es singulie`res (326) [strange ideas (254)] by constantly recalling the constraints imposed by his disguise, speculating ‘‘peut-eˆ tre aurais-je fait quelque vaine et folle tentative pour donner un semblant de re´ alite a` l’ombre de plaisir que ma belle amoureuse embrassait avec tant d’ardeur’’ (326) [(had I not dreaded the betrayal of my incognito) I should have given play to Rosette’s impassioned bursts, and should, perhaps, have made some vain and mad attempt to impart a semblance of reality to the shadow of pleasure so ardently embraced by my fair mistress (254)]. This passage overtly denies to the protagonists the ultimate satisfaction of orgasmic pleasure, and thus remains within the literal limits of heterosexual identities. Rosette is presumed to seek satisfaction from a man, and that satisfaction is presumed to rely on a (missing) phallic organ. Madelaine’s enactment of that desire would be an ‘‘empty,’’ ‘‘mad effort’’ [une vaine et folle tentative]. The material stability of dyadic heterosexuality, however, is set in a disarray not unlike that of Rosette’s passionately disordered garments. The kernel theme of the scene, that of mistaken identity, is staged in a way that suggests that any assumption of a stable, materially grounded gender identity is phantasmatic. On the one hand, Madelaine/The´ odore’s gender is caught up in travesty, a performance enacted by an avowedly equivocally gendered persona; on the other hand, Rosette’s pleasure is presented as very real, produced necessarily by her phantasmatic identification of the other: ‘‘cette ombre de plaisir que ma belle amoureuse em-

44

BETWEEN GENDERS

brassait avec tant d’ardeur’’ [the shadow of pleasure so ardently embraced by my fair mistress (254)]. In these passages, the novel can be said to have it both ways, straining the limits of heterosexual decorum and prohibitions while evoking desires represented as non-heterosexual. Heterosexual prohibitions are reiterated at every turn, however, and same sex desire is denied the finality of a narrative/ erotic climax. In its descriptive detail and in its reiteration of terms alluding to the violation of heterosexual norms (‘‘Ma situation devenait fort embarrassante et passablement ridicule’’ [299] [My situation was becoming very embarrassing and tolerably ridiculous (230)]), this scene offers voyeuristic pleasures to the reader, while both denying and affirming the transgressive character of the activities: ‘‘Cette sce`ne, tout e´ quivoque que le caracte`re en fuˆ t pour moi, ne manquait pas d’un certain charme qui me tentait plus qu’il n’euˆ t fallu’’ (299) [the scene, equivocal as its nature was for me, was not without a charm which detained me more than it should have done (231)]. Beyond the overtly contained titillating transgressions, however, the scene affirms in many ways the precariousness and constructed character of all gender identities, preparing Madelaine’s final moments in the narrative. In short, the scenes both assert components of heterosexual identities and dismantle them at the same time. It is also worth noting that the threat of violence, symbolic or ‘‘real,’’ at the heart of the dynamics of heterosexual identities, the threat of castration, takes a curious turn in the bedroom episode. Rosette’s brother violently interrupts the scene by offering the guilty The´ odore the conventional resolutions of either revenge and death or marriage. It is a travesty of the law which prevails here, for Madelaine/The´ odore practically kills the brother, the avenger of family order and guardian of the continuity of heterosexuality. Madelaine retreats to reemerge in the final pages of the novel to engage alternative configurations of sexuality of desire. The alternatives to the heterosexual construct grounded in the threat of castration that Madelaine/The´ odore’s actions will propose at the end of the text is the constant disrupton of gender equilibriums that castration is burdened with assuring. In the final pages of the novel, Madelaine/The´ odore’s re-

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lation to binary sexuality is asserted as either inadequate or excessive: En ve´ rite´ , ni l’un ni l’autre de ces deux sexes n’est le mien, je n’ai ni la soumission imbe´ cile, ni la timidite´ , ni les petitesses de la femme; je n’ai pas les vices des hommes, leur de´ goutante crapule et leurs penchants brutaux:—je suis d’un troisie`me sexe a` part qui n’a pas encore de nom: au-dessus ou au-dessous, plus de´ fectueux ou supe´ rieur: j’ai le corps et l’aˆ me d’une femme, l’esprit et la force d’un homme, et j’ai trop ou pas assez de l’un et de l’autre pour me pouvoir accoupler avec l’un d’eux. (352) [In truth, neither of the two sexes are mine; I don’t have the imbecile submission, the timidity or the pettiness of women; I don’t have the vices of men, their disgusting intemperance, or the brutal propensities of men: I belong to a third distinct sex, which has yet no name: higher or lower, more defective or superior; I have the body and soul of a woman, the mind and power of a man, and I have too much or too little of both to be able to pair with either. (my translation)]

While d’Albert professes to be relieved that his desires for The´ odore are not eccentric and, as he says, monstrous, having assured himself of The´ odore’s ‘‘true identity’’ as a woman, Madelaine/The´ odore embraces plural gender identities in an open ended process of disguise and performance. Her/his ‘‘monster’’ is the chimera: Ma chime`re serait d’avoir tour a` tour les deux sexes pour satisfaire a` cette double nature: car le vrai bonheur est de se pouvoir de´ velopper librement en tous sens et d’eˆ tre tout ce qu’on peut eˆ tre. (353) [My chimera would be to have both sexes in turn in order to satisfy this double nature: for true happiness consists in the ability to develop freely in every direction and to be all that it is possible to be. (271)]

The wholeness (tout) alluded to here does not imply a completion of self by the addition of gender identities, as in the Platonic androgyne myth, or in a synthesis producing a third term, but, I believe, something quite different. The´ o-

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dore/Madelaine embraces a social/sexual identity (en tout sens [in every direction]) which never fully inhabits itself and which is characterized by constant rearticulation, transformation, and supplementation. The play, a staging of As You Like It, recounted by d’Albert in chapter 11, is a pivotal point in the novel, a mise en abyme of the situation of the protagonists, as critics have noted. It affords d’Albert an opportunity to understand The´ odore/ Madelaine’s gender as multiple and mobile, emerging through the roles that he/she assumes, yet d’Albert chooses, rather, a deluded ‘‘proof’’ of her identity as a woman.23 Referring to his earlier anguish over his desires for The´ odore as unspeakable, monstrous, insense´ s, he now finds authorization for his passion in the ‘‘proof’’ afforded by The´ odore’s costume and performance in the role of Rosalinde. Identity here, of course, is in d’Albert’s own words, a ‘‘frail house of cards’’ (255). He comes to know ‘‘true’’ gender as a performance of a fiction of a disguise. Because The´ odore’s role in the play parallels that which d’Albert speculates has been assumed in life, a woman playing a man who adopts in the play a persona of a man playing a woman, as Rosalinde disguised as Ganymede plays Rosalind in As You Like It, d’Albert assumes that he has penetrated the mystery of The´ odore’s identity. His understanding will be flawed in many ways, as this passage suggests: L’image qui jusqu’alors ne s’e´ tait dessine´ e que faiblement et avec des contours vagues, le fantoˆ me adore´ et vainement poursuivi e´ tait la`, devant mes yeux, vivant, palpable, non plus dans le demi-jour et la vapeur, mais inonde´ de flots d’une blanche lumie`re; non pas sous un vain de´ guisement, mais sous son costume re´ el; non plus avec la forme de´ risoire d’un jeune homme, mais avec les traits de la plus charmante femme. (256) [The image which, till then, had shown itself only feebly and with vague outlines, the phantom that I had worshipped and vainly pursued was there before my eyes, living, palpable, no longer in twilight and vapour, but bathed in floods of white light; not in a vain disguise, but in its real costume; no longer in the derisive form of a young man, but with all the features of the most charming woman. (192)]

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Retrieving the image of his desire, a ‘‘real woman’’ beneath the clothes of a man, d’Albert settles upon a ‘‘real costume,’’ as though, paradoxically, a signifying surface designated a material core identity in this complex of disguise and theatricality. His understanding is flawed in at least two ways. D’Albert’s ‘‘failures’’ are exploited in the novel to produce an exhilarating dispersal of sexual possibilities and mobility of desires, into which d’Albert himself is drawn. First, d’Albert has participated in understanding gender, as presented in the play and as figured by Madelaine/The´ odore, as the effects of a desiring fantasy ‘‘materialized’’ on costumed surfaces, enactments of fictions of desire. This complex and elusive understanding of gender mutability, which d’Albert naively denies, heightens the futility of his quest for ‘‘proofs’’ of stable identities in matters of gender and desire. Second, he misapprehends The´ odore/ Madelaine’s sexuality as though it were linked to an originary identity, failing to see the possibilities of multiple gendered identities and the mobile configurations in which he is engaged. If, as I have suggested, gender is a citing of the symbolic law, a performativity, reiterated and produced as law by the citations it is said to command, d’Albert and Madelaine/The´ odore assume very different positions regarding this process.24 D’Albert anxiously reassumes a binary heterosexual discourse through role playing, through the mise en abyme of the character’s own situation in the play, the aim of which is to deny its own status as performance by masquerading as the natural. Madeleine/The´ odore, however, affirms a virtually open ended dynamics of citation. The performance of As You Like It reveals that the gendered subject is identified by the gendered role that it performs. Thus the novel suggests that the production of the subject as originator of his or her effects—that ‘‘real’’ identity that d’Albert anxiously seeks for himself and for The´ odore/Madelaine— is a process of ordinarily dissimulated citation that both drag and theatrical performance make explicit. The narrative denouement in the novel, the satisfaction of d’Albert’s aesthetic/erotic quest, Madelaine’s ‘‘gift’’ of her virginity, her ‘‘metamorphosis’’ from ‘‘girl’’ to ‘‘woman’’ (365), is recounted by a third person narrator in chapter 16. In its very traditional aspects, releasing erotic and herme-

48

BETWEEN GENDERS

neutic tensions, simultaneously, when all things come together, as it were, this chapter quite subtly prepares the jolt, the unresolvable puzzlement of the last pages of the text, alluded to at the beginning of this study. In chapter 16, having received no response to a desperate letter to The´ odore declaring his love, d’Albert commits a further and equally foolish indiscretion by writing and sending a second letter; he then prepares to throw himself in a river when he is stayed unexpectedly by a restraining hand: La main e´ tait emmanche´ e au bout d’un bras qui repondait a` une e´ paule faisant partie d’un corps, lequel n’e´ tait autre chose que The´ dore/Rosalinde, Mademoiselle d’Aubigny, ou Madelaine de Maupin, pour l’appeler de son ve´ ritable nom. (360) [The hand was at the extremity of an arm which corresponded to a shoulder forming part of a body, which was nothing else but The´ odore-Rosalinde, Mademoiselle d’Aubigny, or Madelaine de Maupin, to call her by her real name. (284)]

While this passage reiterates multiple identities, d’Albert and Madelaine/The´ odore initially address each other in their roles of Rosalinde and Orlando. Madelaine/The´ odore asserts that she is Rosalinde only at night and can be The´ odore only by day. D’Albert remains deluded by his passionate urgency to know and to possess. In the final pages d’Albert has before him an unveiled body which conforms to his ideal of beauty and which is also real and palpable: Tout e´ tait re´ uni dans le beau corps qui posait devant lui:—de´ licatesse et force, forme et couleur, les lignes d’une statue grecque du meilleur temps et le ton d’un Titien.—Il voyait la`, palpable et cristallise´ e, la nuageuse chime`re qu’il avait tant de fois vainement essaye´ d’arreˆ ter dans son val. (366) [Everything was united in the beautiful form standing before him—delicacy and strength, grace and color, the lines of a Geeek statue of the best period and the tone of a Titian. There he saw, palpable and crystallized, the cloudy chimera that he had so often vainly sought to stay in its flight. (289)]

Both the idealist aesthete and the lover will be satisfied (366–68). Madelaine plays out her role as a virgin who will

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finally know heterosexual satisfaction, and, as the passage makes abundantly clear, will enjoy it repeatedly throughout a long night of love. The links between gender, knowledge of self and other, are also underscored. As initiator into orgasmic sex, d’Albert appears confirmed in his heterosexual mastery and prowess: le divin moment approchait, un dernier obstacle fut surmonte´ , un spasme supreˆ me agita convulsivement les deux amants,—et la curieuse Rosalinde fut aussi e´ claire´ e que possible sur ce point obscure qui l’intriguait si fort. (367) [The divine moment approached. A supreme spasm convulsed the two lovers, and the curious Rosalind became as enlightened as possible on a matter which had so deeply perplexed her. (290)]

The narrator coyly observes that decorum prohibits him from revealing the number of these ‘‘lessons’’ and ‘‘enlightenments’’ (367), Here, however, as throughout, stable resolutions, whether they be erotic, psychological, or narrative, are fleeting and illusory, and the gendered subject remains as plural as the several names of the intervening Madelaine/Rosalinde/The´ odore suggest. The play of plural identities is further complicated in the final pages of the text, of course, since Rosalinde leaves a sleeping d’Albert to enter Rosette’s chamber in an episode which is never described. The figure that emerges from Rosette’s room subsequent to the night of love with d’Albert is The´ odore. Oddly, the only core identity missing in these final narrative episodes is Madelaine de Maupin, who, presumably, would be the subject of d’Albert’s desire, the woman who had served as the body for his dreams (370). One of the many ironies of the erotic encounter between d’Albert and Rosalinde in the penultimate chapter is that throughout d’Albert’s hyperbolic male sexual performance, as he gives her repeated ‘‘lessons’’ (the word in the text) in sexual ecstasy (367), the male protagonist remains so apparently untouched by the narrative’s revelations about the performativity of all gendered subjectivity. As he reinstates his own heterosexual masculinity, so tempted by The´ odore,

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d’Albert ignores the foreclosed boundaries that he has himself been led to encounter and that are, indeed, embraced by the very body that he is caressing. D’Albert may have arrived at the final chapter of his own erotic narrative, safely reinserted in his assumed heterosexual identity, but the novel has added an erotic encounter between Madelaine/ The´ odore and Rosette from which the voyeuristic gaze has been excluded; the reader can only conjecture about the permutations of gender that are played out behind that closed door. The narrative, in the end, refuses closure, as Madelaine/ The´ odore resumes his/her wanderings, leaving behind a letter and a considerable puzzlement for d’Albert. The writer, whose voice does not assume any of her/his several names, affirms: Vous aviez envie de moi; vous m’aimiez, j’e´ tais votre ide´ al; fort bien. Je vous ai accorde´ sur le champ ce que vous demandiez; il n’a tenu qu’a` vous de l’avoir plus toˆ t. J’ai servi de corps a` votre reˆ ve. . . . maintenant que je vous ai satisfait, il me plaıˆt de m’en aller—qu’y a-t-il de si monstrueux? (370) [You desired me, you loved me, I was your ideal;—very well, I at once granted you what you asked; it was your own fault that you did not have it sooner. I served as a body for your dream as compliantly as possible. . . . Now that I have satisfied you, it pleases me to go away. What is there so monstrous in this? (292)]

The writer of the letter, though consistently gendered grammatically as feminine, specifically maintains the conundrum of plural and equivocal gender identities and does not provide an identifying signature, refusing both by narrative act and narrational inscription to give a name or a stable identity to the desiring subject. The final words of Gautier’s novel are an imperative to d’Albert and Rosette to love each other. While overtly inciting restoration of the heterosexual couple, this passage delightfully activates further spirals of desires and identities: ‘‘Aimez-vous tous deux en souvenir de moi, que vous avez aime´ e l’un et l’autre, et dites-vous quelquefois mon nom dans un baiser.’’ [Love each other in memory of me, whom both of you have loved, and breathe my name sometimes in a kiss (294)]. What name are we to suppose that Rosette and d’Albert might properly attach to that memory?

2 Androgyny, Hysteria, and the Poet in Charles Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo L’hyste´ rie! Pourquoi ce myste`re physiologique ne feraitil pas le fond et le tuf d’une oeuvre litte´ raire . . . ? —Charles Baudelaire, ‘‘Madame Bovary’’ [Why wouldn’t this physiological mystery be the basis and substance of a literary work . . . ?] Au moral comme au physique, j’ai toujours eu la sensation du gouffre, non seulement du gouffre du sommeil, mais du gouffre de l’action, du reˆ ve, du souvenir, du de´ sir, du regret, du remords, du beau du nombre, etc. . . . J’ai cultive´ mon hyste´ rie avec jouissance et terreur. —Charles Baudelaire, Fuse´ es1 [Spiritually as well as physically, I have always had the sensation of the abyss, not only the abyss of sleep, but the abyss of action, dream, memory, regret, remorse, of the beauty of numbers, etc. I have cultivated my hysteria with intense pleasure and terror.]

THROUGHOUT

BAUDELAIRE’S

WRITINGS,

FROM

THE

EARLY

novella, La Fanfarlo, to an article on Madame Bovary, published in 1857, shortly after the appearance of Flaubert’s novel, to the intimate journals, Fuse´ es (Rockets) and the prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), there are allusions to fluid or mixed gender identities in contexts that are themselves a mixture of approval and anxious fascination. In Baudelaire’s version of the male malady, an ideal of virile male intellect and imagination is intermixed with stereotypically feminine traits, among them hypersensitivity 51

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and excessive sensuality. One finds in these passages an uneasy disequilibrium in gendered definitions of self and other. As Jan Goldstein has shown in discussing Baudelaire’s reading of Madame Bovary, in her excellent study of ‘‘hysteria’’ in nineteenth-century male writers, the motifs of androgyny and hysteria are intermixed in Baudelaire and associated with heightened capacity for imagination, hypersensitivity, various forms of impotence, and a ‘‘proclivity to excess.’’2 The hysterical or androgynous figure, whether male or female, is thus paradoxically assumed to have an increased capacity to enter into expanded states of consciousness that nourish the poetic imagination, and to suffer from the inability to give them verbal form through the exercise of the ‘‘male’’ imagination and its ‘‘voice.’’3 The hysteric, the androgyne, and the poet are frequently interchangeable figures; their veins are infused with the same blood.4 This chapter proposes a reading of the configurations of gender in Baudelaire’s early prose text, the novella La Fanfarlo (1847), in light of several other disparate contexts, the famous lapidary pronouncement about his ‘‘hysteria’’ in Fuse´ es, quoted above, dated 23 January 1862, and the extensive discussion of gender, the imagination and the figure of the writer in the essay on Madame Bovary (1857). In each instance, a certain ambiguity of gender is valorized and a conceptual space opened up for possible reconfigurations of gender that might reposition identities beyond dichotomous phallocentric structures; at the same time, each case produces a space for a newly improvised, male-dominated hierarchy of the masculine and the feminine. In La Fanfarlo, the novella’s hero, Samuel Cramer, is an ironic portrait of the artist as a failed or partial genius.5 He is an alter-ego of the narrator, himself an avatar of Baudelaire, a latter day Romantic, ‘‘l’homme des belles oeuvres rate´ es’’ (553) [the man of fine works gone haywire],6 who appears to the narrator as an incarnation of impotence, ‘‘dieu moderne et hermaphrodite’’ (553) [a modern, hermaphrodite god].7 The frequent linking in this text of ambiguous gender, modernity, and socially ‘‘unproductive’’ activities—late Romantic lyric poetry, cafe´ culture, flaˆ nerie—even in deprecatory ironic contexts, suggests that Baudelaire was keenly aware of the social and political im-

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53

plications of gender relations. In the year preceding what the writer refers to in his Journaux intimes as ‘‘mon ivresse en 1848’’ [my intoxication in 1848],8 Baudelaire’s ironic modern hero is identified by temperament and activity with disruptions of values that will contribute to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in the emerging nation state. As I indicate later in this chapter, Samuel’s subversiveness results from his disruption of culturally received ideas about aesthetics and gender identity, and it opens the way for reconfigurations of social order. In the article on Madame Bovary, consistent with symptomologies of hysteria emerging in the nineteenth century, Baudelaire is the first to comment on Emma’s evident hysterical tendencies and on the ‘‘masculine’’ characteristics of ‘‘une aˆ me virile dans un charmant corps fe´ minin’’ (81) [a virile soul in a charming feminine body]. Baudelaire finds in Flaubert’s heroine a joining of masculine and feminine identities in a ‘‘bizarre androgyne’’ (81). Finally, the writer of Fuse´ es speaks of cultivating his hysteria through expanded states of consciousness in dream, memory, desire, remorse, etc., ‘‘avec jouissance et terreur’’ [with intense pleasure and terror], indicating, implicitly, the extraordinary pull that the intermixing of gender exerted upon the poet and, at the same time, the intense fear that such ambiguities evoked in him. The excesses of the ‘‘abyss,’’ in their virtually limitless forms, are profoundly irrational; hysteria is thus linked to a disruption of the rational being that is consistently assumed elsewhere in Baudelaire’s writings to be gendered as male. The passage in the Journals is followed by a comment that the poet has been ‘‘brushed by the wings of imbecility,’’ thus recording a premonition of being deprived of his intellect and of his will. The final paragraph of the passage on hysteria reads: J’ai cultive´ mon hysterie avec jouissance et terreur. Maintenant j’ai toujours le vertige, et aujourd’hui 23 janvier 1862, j’ai subi un singulier avertissement, j’ai senti passer sur moi le vent de l’aile de l’imbe´ cilite´ . (668) [I have cultivated my hysteria with intense pleasure and terror. Now I am always dizzy, and today January 23, 1862, I have re-

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ceived a singular warning. I have been brushed by the wings of imbecility.]

The ultimate consequence of hysteria here is a more radical form of impotence than that associated with Samuel’s lavishly ambitious, yet only half accomplished projects; it is the impotence of the writer in the first person menaced by the immanent loss of reason and voice. In Baudelaire’s essay on Flaubert’s novel, hysteria and androgyny are inextricably intertwined, as they are in all the references to these terms to be considered here. Two passages from that text will provide a valuable starting point for a discussion of La Fanfarlo. In the first, Baudelaire asserts that Flaubert audaciously divests himself of his gender as a man and makes himself woman. The novelist cannot, however, fully divest himself of his masculinity, with the result that Emma acquires certain masculine traits; Emma herself is infused with masculine blood: il n’a pas pu ne pas infuser un sang viril dans les veines de sa cre´ ature, et . . . madame Bovary, pour ce qu’il y a en elle de plus e´ nergique et de plus ambitieux et aussi de plus reˆ veur, madame Bovary est reste´ e un homme. Comme la Pallas arme´ e, sortie du cerveau de Zeus, ce bizarre androgyne a garde´ toutes les se´ ductions d’une aˆ me virile dans un charmant corps fe´ minin. (81) [he was unable to resist infusing virile blood in the veins of his creature, and . . . Madame Bovary, insofar as she is more energetic and ambitious and also a dreamer, Madame Bovary remains a man. Like armed Pallas, emerging from Zeus’s head, this bizarre angrogyne has kept all the seductiveness of a male soul in a charming feminine body.]

In this combination of the corporeal and the cerebral, the material and sensual, bodily aspects of identity are marked as feminine, while those that are linked to the powers of the mind and soul, not surprisingly, remain masculine. This reconfiguration of gender identities, although it extends the reach of the artist’s material and expands the range of gendered experiences, significantly renewing the scope of the

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55

nineteenth-century novel, retains, nonetheless, the ultimate sanctions of male privilege. In the second passage, Baudelaire appropriates contemporary medical discourse on hysteria from unspecified sources and provides a traditional symptomology of the pathology as it relates to women. The hysterical women’s voice is choked off by the ascending ‘‘ball’’ of the malady.9 He is more audacious, however, in taking the controversial, though not unique, position that hysteria affects males as well as females; the male hysteric is an errant creature, with an aptitude for excesses: L’hyste´ rie! Pourquoi ce myste`re physiologique ne ferait-il pas le fond et le tuf d’une oeuvre litte´ raire, ce myste`re que l’Acade´ mie de me´ decine n’a pas encore re´ solu, et qui, s’exprimant dans les femmes par la sensation d’une boule ascendante et asphyxiante (je ne parle que du symptoˆ me principal), se traduit chez les hommes nerveux par toutes les impuissances et aussi par l’aptitude a` tous les exce`s? (83)10 [Hysteria! Why wouldn’t this physiological mystery be the basis and substance for a literary work, this mystery that the Academy of Medicine has not yet resolved, that expresses itself in women by the sensation of an ascending asphyxiating ball, and manifests itself in nervous men as all manner of impotence and as an aptitude for all manner of excesses?]

Several of these traits will appear in the complex splitting of gender in the fluid identities of the protagonists in La Fanfarlo. As in Baudelaire’s discussion of Emma Bovary some ten years later, the central protagonist of La Fanfarlo, Samuel Cramer is said to have ‘‘bizarre complications of character’’ (553), the principal feature being an androgynous intermixing of gender traits. From the outset, this is a question of names, of ascribing a proper name to an improper mix of genders. Thus, Samuel bears two names: the first is masculine and is linked to his German father, ‘‘un bleˆ me allemand’’ (553) [a palid German (27)], and the second is feminine, Manuela de Monteverde, his nom de plume, associated with his Hispanic mother, ‘‘une brune Chilienne’’ (553) [a dark Chilean woman] (27). From the very first lines of this text, the narrator confers a feminine name to the

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figure of the writer, indicating that the act of writing involves split identities including the assumption of another gender. In this early and wittily ironic version of the many figures of the homo duplex in Baudelaire, Samuel is an unstable complex of active and passive, masculine and feminine traits: C’est a` la fois un grand faine´ ant, un ambitieux triste, et un illustre malheureux; car il n’a gue`re eu dans sa vie que des moitie´ s d’ide´ es. Le soleil de la paresse qui resplendit sans cesse au-dedans de lui, lui vaporise et lui mange cette moitie´ de ge´ nie dont le ciel l’a doue´ . (553) [He is at the same time a great idler, an ambitious failure, and a notorious wretch; for in all his life he has hardly ever had any but half-baked ideas. The sun of indolence which shines unceasingly within him evaporates and eats away that half-portion of genius with which heaven has endowed him. (28)]

Inactive, yet ambitious, Samuel combines femininity and masculinity and lacks the fully formed masculine genius that will permit full elaboration and realization of his ideas and projects. His feminine passivity makes possible his hypersensitive imagination, yet consumes him from within: ‘‘lui vaporise et lui mange cette moitie´ de ge´ nie’’ (553) [evaporates and eats away that half-portion of genius with which heaven has endowed him (28)].11 Consistent with ancient traditions, going back to the early Roman agrarian culture before the Christian era, genius is the guardian of masculine strength, energy, and physical potency. The modern dandy aesthete, however, is characterized as beset by impotence, with Samuel as its personification: ‘‘dieu de l’impuissance,—dieu moderne et hermaphrodite,—impuissance si colossale et si e´ norme qu’elle en est e´ pique!’’ [god of impotence—a modern, hermaphrodite god—an impotence so colossal and so enormous that it is epic! (my translation)].12 Samuel is presented as a type of modern persona, and, while the narrator ironically deprecates him as failing to equal the great minds and the great texts to which he compares himself, he is clearly a seductive figure, for the narrator and the reader:

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— Un des travers les plus naturels de Samuel e´ tait de se conside´ rer comme l’e´ gal de ceux qu’il avait su admirer; apre`s une lecture passionne´ d’un beau livre, sa conclusion involontaire e´ tait: voila` qui est assez beau pour eˆ tre de moi! — et de la` a` penser; c’est donc de moi, — il n’y que l’espace d’un tiret. Dans le monde actuel, ce genre de caracte`re est plus fre´ quent qu’on ne le pense; les rues, les promenades publiques, les estaminets, et tous les asiles de la flaˆ nerie fourmillent d’eˆ tres de cette espe`ce. (554) [One of Samuel’s most characteristic failings was to identify himself with those he had come to admire; after the impassioned reading of a good book, his involuntary conclusion would be: ‘‘That’s good enough for me to have written it’’ — and the distance from there to thinking ‘‘so I did write it’’ is only a hair’s breath. In the world of today, this type of personality is more common than one might think; the streets, the public walkways, the little cafe´ s and taverns and all the idler’s retreats fairly swarm with individuals of this type. (29)]

His impudence and his naivete´ derive from his flitting from great text to great text, absorbing the thoughts and the aesthetic achievements of others in a process described as a series of ‘‘metamorphoses’’ (554).13 In a context so charged with attention to shifting and fluid gender identities, this designation of the process of assimilating diverse and incongruous writings as a metamorphosis inevitably suggests an association with Ovid’s tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. New combinations of knowledge are thus dependant on new (re)combinations of gender. One day Samuel reads mystics, Plotinus or Porphyrus, another day, Cre´ billon le fils, followed by Sterne and Rabelais. Although the narrator chides his protagonist as a late Romantic literary dilettante (‘‘Tel e´ tait le pauvre Samuel’’ [Such was poor Samuel’’ (29)]), it is clear that this passage traces a very powerful contemporary cultural upheaval. Samuel’s ecclectic readings show him to be engaged in a reconfiguration of the literary canon that holds the promise of new aesthetic achievements based not incidentally on a blurring of generic categories, in the dual sense of literary genre and sexual gender: the English novel of the eighteenth century is

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set beside Rabelais; Neo-Platonic philosophers Plotinus and Porphyrus are followed by a French eighteenth-century libertine novelist, Cre´ billon fils, etc. Beyond the clever irony of the passage, the narrator is cannily placing into consideration explosive cultural issues, and alluding to the unfinished business of Romantic aesthetics and metaphysics. This fragmentation and reconfiguration of culture, however, fails as it is linked to Samuel, because it does not yeild a new textual and conceptual synthesis. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have noted in their studies of Romantic aesthetics and metaphysics, this ‘‘failure’’ may be inherent to the project itself, characteristic of a new literature that is always exceeding the limits of gender and genre, always in a state of excess.14 Significantly, Samuel’s efforts at artistic production are linked to his androgyny, since he cannot produce ‘‘offspring’’ equal to the properly male genius of his models (554), but only ‘‘monsters.’’15 On the one hand, a revitalization of culture is linked to a characteristically modern scrambling of gender identities, yet on the other, the androgynous poet fails to produce viable offspring: Comment vous mettre au fait, et vous faire voir bien clair dans cette nature te´ ne´ breuse, bariole´ e de vifs e´ clairs, — paresseuse et entreprenante a` la fois, — fe´conde en desseins difficiles et en risibles avortements. (553, emphasis added) [How can I acquaint you with the facts, and make you see quite clearly into this murky nature streaked with bright flashes of lightning — at once both lazy and enterprising — a prolific producer of intricate plans and laughable fiascoes. (28)16

The Romantic genius, one who would assume a new and ‘‘original’’ place in a redefined cultural legacy, has yet to appear. Samuel’s ‘‘profound originality’’ (555) is his volatile and unstable mixing of gendered traits in an ongoing process of conceiving as yet unrealized projects: Il e´ tait toujours le doux, le fantasque, le paresseux, le terrible, le savant, l’ignorant, l’e´ braille´ , le coquet Samuel Cramer, la romanatique Manuela de Monteverde. Il raffolait d’un ami

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comme d’une femme, aimait une femme comme un camarade. Il posse´ dait la logique de tous les bons sentiments et la science de toutes les roueries, et ne´ anmoins n’a jamais re´ ussi a` rien, parce qu’il croyait trop a` l’impossible.—Quoi d’e´ tonnant? il e´ tait toujours en train de le concevoir. (555) [He was always the gentle, the whimsical, the lazy the terrible, the learned, the ignorant, the slovenly, the dapper Samuel Cramer, the romantic Manuela de Monteverde. He could be as infatuated with a male friend as if he were a woman, and could love a woman as if she were a comrade. He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it! (31)]

Paradoxically, while serving as an example of the new writer (‘‘la romantique Manuela de Monteverde’’), Samuel is placed in the space of an irreconcilable dilemma. The modern poet has set himself beyond the generic traditions derived from the ancients; he is different in kind from the masculine genius of the past, yet his own defining genius is incomplete, partial, and androgynous, capable only of producing aborted offspring or monsters. A key attribute of Samuel’s character is implicitly linked to his androgyny and hysteria: his poetry is more apparent in his person than in his writings, marked more in his actions and gestures than in his poems, and as we will see, evident also in his role as an actor. Insofar as creativity is linked to an only partially ‘‘masculine’’ body, it is associated with the feminine and displaced from a fantasized ideal of a fully ‘‘virile’’ imagination. This conflict is, I believe, the central motivating feature of the text, to be played out in different ways in the gendered roles assumed by the protagonists. The narrative of the novella is constructed as a sequence of ironic reversals. The central one is a tale of the deceiver deceived, in which Samuel assumes a masculine initiative and assertiveness in order to gain the favors of Mme de Cosmelly, a married woman, only to discover that she has recruited his services for other purposes and that she has duped him and will remain faithful to her husband. The

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masculine control of the seducer exercised by Samuel is revealed at the end of the novella to be secondary to the overreaching control of a woman; in the gender coded terms of the text, Mme de Cosmelly has herself engaged in a ‘‘masculine’’ initiative, more powerful and effective than Samuel’s naively cynical plot. When Samuel meets the beautiful Mme de Cosmelly, a childhood friend, each plays a stereotypically gendered role; he is the elegant and eloquent man of letters and she the sensitive, yet vulnerable nineteenth-century feminine reader. Assuming as his own a contemporary cultural cliche´ , Samuel proclaims: ‘‘Madame, dit sententieusement Samuel, le vrai public du dix-neuvie`me sie`cle est les femmes;’’ (558) [‘‘Madame,’’ said Samuel sententiously, ‘‘the true reading public of the nineteenth century is women’’ (36)]. In a passage presaging gender reversals yet to come, Mme de Cosmelly readily assumes her gendered role as a reader and a potential admirer of the male writer by asking to read Samuel’s collection of poems, Les Orfraies (Ospreys). She then offers an acute and insightful critique of their selfindulgent excesses, citing their bizarre incongruities of style and theme: ’’Par un contraste des plus singuliers, et dont la cause myste´ rieuse m’est encore inconnue, vous re´ servez votre encens le plus mystique a` des cre´ atures bizarres qui lisent encore moins que les dames, et vous vous paˆ mez platoniquement devant les sultanes de bas lieu’’ (559) [In contrast to this, for some peculiar reason which remains a mystery to me, you reserve your most mystical incense for bizarre creatures who read even less than ladies do, and you swoon platonically before some sultanas of the underworld (38)]. Samuel responds in a long and rhetorically inflated declamation of late Romantic motifs, on the isolation and self-loathing of poets of his generation, on their excessive sensibilities, and on their sufferings: Nous nous sommes tellement applique´ s a` sophistiquer notre coeur, nous avons tant abuse´ du microscope pour e´ tudier les hideuses excroissances et les honteuses verrues dont il est couvert, et que nous grossissons a` plaisir, qu’il est impossible que nous parlions le langage des autres hommes. (559–60)

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[We have tried so hard to adulterate our hearts, and have so greatly abused the microscope to study the hideous excrescences and shameful warts which cover them and which we take pleasure in magnifying, that it is impossible for us to speak the language of other men. (39)]

When Mme de Cosmelly recognizes Samuel’s pronouncements as yet more ‘‘literature’’ in the vein of his sonnets (‘‘Encore des Orfraies’’ (560) [More Ospreys! (39)]), he changes thematic and rhetorical registers and meditates in periodic prose on more traditional poetic motifs, on sufferings resulting from memories, on the disappointments of love. Mme de Cosmelly, in turn, offers a declamation of her own, a confession which, with appropriate ‘‘feminine’’ modesty, she refers to as ‘‘une douleur de province’’ (564) [a provincial tale of woe (45)]. Specifically addressing Samuel in terms of his assumed masculine attributes, she solicits his protection and perhaps his intervention: ‘‘J’attends de vous, monsieur Cramer, de vous, le savant, l’homme d’esprit, les conseils et peut-eˆ tre les secours d’un ami’’ (564) [I am counting on you—on Monsieur Cramer the scholar and thinker— for the advice and perhaps the help of a friend (45)]. Her confession reveals a domestic drama of a wife’s undivided devotion to a husband who repays that virtue with betrayal. Generalizing about the lot of women, she attributes her status as a victim to women’s general ignorance of men’s vices, while at the same time she appears to confirm feminine weakness and subservience by placing her fate in the hands of yet another man: Il manque a` ces malheureuses victimes, qu’on nomme filles a` marier, une honteuse e´ ducation, je veux dire la connaissance des vices d’un homme. (565) [The unfortunate victims called ‘‘marriageable girls’’ are lacking in education about intimate matters; that is in knowledge about intimate matters; that is, in knowledge about masculine vices. (47)]

The seducer, Samuel accepts this appeal to his masculinity and is seduced by ‘‘cette charmante victime’’ (565); he is drawn into a pact in which Mme de Cosmelly implies that

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she will reward him with her love if he is successful in seducing her husband’s mistress, the actress, La Fanfarlo, and in separating the husband and the mistress. While assuming the role of a typically feminine victim, Mme de Cosmelly initiates a strategy of dissimulation and control whereby she will be the principal beneficiary of Samuel’s actions, seeing the profit that can be gained from ‘‘ce sce´ le´ rat novice.’’ (569) [this novice scoundrel (55)]: Bref, elle fit de la coquetterie pour le bon motif, et notre jeune roue´ , qui e´ tait plus nigaud qu’un savant, promit d’arracher la Fanfarlo a` M. de Cosmelly, et de le de´ barrasser de la courtisane,—espe´ rant trouver dans les bras de l’honneˆ te femme la re´ compense de cette oeuvre me´ ritoire.—Il n’y a que les poe`tes qui soient assez candides pour inventer de pareilles monstruosite´ s. (569) [In short, she played the coquette with the best of motives; and our young rake, who was more foolish than any scholar, promised to take La Fanfarlo away from Monsieur de Cosmelly and to rid him of the courtesan — expecting to receive in the arms of the virtuous woman his reward for this meritorious achievement. Only poets are ingenuous enough to concoct such monstrous schemes. (55)]

Clearly, the first and most obvious meaning of the last sentence on the candor of poets and the monstrous products of their imagination applies to Samuel, consistent with his paradoxical character. As a jeune roue´ (young rake), he will benefit from the wiles of a coquette, Mme de Cosmelly, in conformity with gendered roles as he understands them. Samuel is an assemblage of contradictions, unpredictable, yet vulnerable to an overdeveloped male vanity. In another more interesting sense, however, that is quite consistent with the fluid attributions of gender in this narrative, the term ‘‘poet’’ here can apply to Mme de Cosmelly, who, by her calculations and her canny initiatives, becomes ‘‘masculine.’’ Mme de Cosmelly, like Emma in Baudelaire’s reading of Madame Bovary, becomes an artist. She rises above her subservient status in conjugal domesticity by divesting herself provisionally of a ‘‘feminine’’ characteristic that has been a

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major motif in her confession to Samuel: her emotion. Concealing her strategies from Samuel, she displays ingenuity and a capacity for calculation that are frequently said by Baudelaire to be masculine attributes. She manifests three key qualities: imagination, a capacity for action, and a desire for domination that Baudelaire will later enumerate as the masculine characteristics of Emma Bovary. In the article on Flaubert, Baudelaire glosses Emma’s ‘‘virile qualities’’ in terms that are already active in perhaps more subdued form in Mme de Cosmelly’s initiative: 1. L’imagination, faculte´ supreˆ me et tyrannique, substitue´ e au coeur, ou a` ce qu’on appelle le coeur, d’ou` le raisonnement est d’ordinaire exclu, et qui domine ge´ ne´ ralement dans la femme comme dans l’animal; 2. Energie soudaine d’action, rapidite´ de de´ cision, fusion mystique du raisonnement et de la passion, qui caracte´ rise les hommes cre´ e´ s pour agir; 3. Gouˆ t immode´ re´ de la se´ duction, de la domination et meˆ me de tous les moyens vulgaires de se´ duction, descendant jusqu’au charlatanisme du costume, des parfums et de la pommade,—le tout se re´ sumant en deux mots: dandysme, amour exclusif de la domination. (‘‘Madame Bovary,’’ 82)17 [1. The imagination, a supreme and tyrannical faculty, substituted for the heart, or for what is called the heart, from which reason is excluded, dominant in woman as it is in animals; 2. Energy quick to action, rapidity in decision, a mystical fusion of reason and passion, which characterizes men destined for action; 3. Immoderate taste for seduction, domination and even for all the common means of seduction, even down to charlatanism in dress, in perfumes and creams,—everything summarized in two words: dandyism and singular fondness for domination.]

Mme de Cosmelly rises to the level of an androgynous artist by adopting male qualities and strategies of domination. She thus artfully initiates a narrative that will be played out by the unsuspecting Samuel and, in the narrator’s eyes, she attains a status superior to that she had occupied as a ‘‘woman,’’ dominated by her heart, by her animality, and dedicated to domestic submissiveness. She, like Samuel Cramer, and so many other figures in Baudelaire’s writings,

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has become a figure of the poet/comedian, a clever hypocrite, an actor always playing out duplicitous identities.18 The role of the woman as artist is more explicit and more complex in the sequences that recount Samuel’s affair with the actress, La Fanfarlo. This protagonist, of course, is by profession an actress, a dazzling mime and a brilliant dancer. Like Mme de Cosmelly, yet more explicitly, she attains her status as an admirable artist by rising beyond a devalued femininity. She has transformed and complicated her gender from a core femininity, which for Baudelaire is always animal, linked to the heart, which, as noted in the article on Madame Bovary, ‘‘domine ge´ ne´ ralement dans la femme comme dans l’animal’’ [dominant in woman as it is in animals].19 In a process similar to that by which Mme de Cosmelly becomes androgynous, La Fanfarlo rises beyond the ‘‘natural’’ corporeality of woman. Through costume, makeup and movement, her body is in the service of complex aesthetic strategies. The material body is thus transformed by the abstract gestures of dance and mime, as will be shown later. When she first appears in the novella, she rises above feminine sentimentality by recognizing the artifice of Samuel’s imaginative and clever strategies and by the ways in which she actively engages with the seduction.20 La Fanfarlo’s reception and interpretation of Samuel’s ironic strategies of seduction is proof of her genius as an artist. Samuel cannily perceives that a direct approach and a declaration of love would result in being barred from access to the actress; he chooses, instead, a cleverly oblique strategy. He attacks her repeatedly in a series of caustic newspaper articles, criticizing her for being awkward, mannish, vulgar, and for having a perverse fondness for small dogs and little girls: Elle fut accuse´ e d’eˆ tre brutale, commune, de´ nue´ e de gouˆ t, de vouloir importer sur le the´ aˆ tre des habitudes d’outre-Rhin et d’outre-Pyre´ ne´ es, des castagnettes, des e´ perons, des talons de bottes,—sans compter qu’elle buvait comme un grenadier, qu’elle aimait trop les petits chiens et la fille de sa portie`re, . . . (570–71) [So she was accused of being crude, common and devoid of taste; of trying to bring into the theater customs from beyond

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the Rhine or the Pyrenees (castanets, spurs, boot heels); to say nothing of drinking like a trooper, of having a bit too much affection for small dogs and for her doorkeeper’s daughter, . . . (58)]

It is significant that the spark that kindles both aesthetic and erotic curiosity is provided by that mixing of gender and genre that we have noted earlier in the novella. La Fanfarlo is accused of questionable and decidedly unfeminine sexual initiatives with dogs and children. Her ‘‘brutal’’ gestures, her whips and boots are perhaps both those of a man and a dominatrix. She has the thirst of a soldier, a grenadier. Her performances, though implicitly criticized for lacking in classically French restraint and purity, energetically intermix the art of Germanic and Hispanic dancers. The appeal here is intimately linked to vital reconfigurations of genre and gender. La Fanfarlo is aroused to respond and interprets the articles for what they are, grasping that they are constructed as rhetorical reversals, with blame and vilification concealing praise and admiration: ‘‘elle comprit vaguement qu’il y avait la` quelquechose a` deviner, et que ce terrible article du lundi pouvait fort bien n’eˆ tre qu’une sorte particulie`re de bouquet hebdomadaire’’ (571) [it dawned on her that there was probably something mysterious going on here, and that those terrible Monday articles could very well be just a peculiar sort of weekly bouquet, or the calling card of a persistent suitor (59)]. By reading Samuel’s writings as ironic in the most general sense, as meaning other than what they assert, she demonstrates a capacity for interpretive abstraction that, in the view of both Samuel and the narrator, enables her to rise above ordinary femininity. La Fanfarlo thus both responds to eroticized provocation and retains a rational interpretive distance. Throughout the narrative of the affair between Samuel and the actress, La Fanfarlo is presented as an androgyne and an artist. Her sensuous leg is described in a bizarre style replete with medical terms, such as that criticized in Samuel’s writings earlier by Mme de Cosmelly; the narrator concludes with an observation about the ambiguous gender of her form:

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Une vraie jambe d’homme est trop dure, les jambes de femmes crayonne´ es par Deve´ ria sont trop molles pour en donner une ide´ e. (572) [A typical man’s leg is too hard, and the women’s leg drawn by Deveria too soft, to give one an idea of it. (60)]

Further description of the actress’s body, a continuation of this passage recounting Samuel’s first appearance at La Fanfarlo’s dressing room, stresses a mix of masculine and feminine physical features; she has the neck of a proconsul, wide and strong. Thick, abundant hair flows down, embracing her breasts. At the same time, she has the impatient and unruly gestures of a child, and she moves constantly to reveal new poses, ‘‘de nouveaux effets de lignes et de couleur’’ (572) [new effects of lines and color (60)]. She thus combines masculine solidity and strength with a feminine grace and a sense of display. Her art as a mime or a dancer is the result of her ability to adopt several ‘‘metamorphoses,’’ a succession of characters: Elle y paraissait par une agre´ able succession de me´ tamorphoses sous les personnages de Colombine, de Marguerite, d’Elvire et de Ze´ phyrine, et recevait, le plus gaıˆment du monde, les baisers de plusieurs ge´ ne´ rations de personnages emprunte´ s a` divers pays et diverses litte´ ratures. (573) [In it she appeared, in a pleasing succession of metamorphoses, as the characters of Colombine, Marguerite, Elvire and Zephyrinne, and in the gayest of spirits received kisses from characters of several generations, borrowed from diverse countries and literatures. (62)]

While all her characters are feminine, her art of subjecting the material body to aesthetic control and of assuming a succession of roles is, implicitly, a ‘‘masculine’’ achievement; the body transcends its ‘‘feminine’’ materiality, responding to commands of the imagination, which Baudelaire invariably links to masculine inventiveness. Similarly, the eulogy of dance, one of several interesting aesthetic meditations in the novella, praises it as an art too often overlooked because it rises above the materiality of the

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body to become poetry. Dance combines the sensuous abstractions of music with a more earthly materiality. In a complementary process of supplementarity, music becomes ‘‘palpable,’’ assuming human form, and the body, through ordered movement, becomes poetic: La danse peut re´ ve´ ler tout ce que la musique rece`le de myste´ rieux, et elle a de plus le me´ rite d’eˆ tre humaine et palpable. La danse, c’est la poe´ sie avec des bras et des jambes, c’est la matie`re, gracieuse et terrible, anime´ e, embellie par le mouvement. (573) [The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs. It is matter, graceful and terrible, animated and embellished by movement. (62)]

The sensuality shared by Samuel and La Fanfarlo at the beginning of their love affair is not centered on the sexual, physical body, but displaced and sublimated in shared exotic and refined culinary pleasures. In the passages relating the first moments of their love affair, the bodily materiality of sexual desire is transformed and, like the female body in dance, becomes poetic: ‘‘Les viandes niaises, les poissons fades e´ taient exclus des soupers de cette sire`ne. Le champagne de´ shonorait rarement sa table’’ (575) [All tasteless meats and bland fishes were excluded from this siren’s suppers. Champagne seldom dishonored her table (64)]. The celebrated passage on truffles exemplifies the couple’s taste for the mysterious and exotic; they enjoy what supplements food in its unadorned form, sauces, spices, truffles: La truffe, cette ve´ ge´ tation sourde et myste´ rieuse de Cybe`le, cette maladie savoureuse qu’elle a cache´ e dans ses entrailles plus longtemps que le me´ tal le plus pre´ cieux, cette exquise matie`re qui de´ fie la science de l’agromane, comme l’or celle des Paraclese; la truffe qui fait la distinction du monde ancien et du moderne, et qui, avant un verre de Chio, a l’effet de plusieurs ze´ ros apre`s un chiffre. (575) [The truffle, that secret, mysterious growth of Cybele’s, that savory cancer she has kept hidden within her bowels longer

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than the most precious metal, that exquisite substance which defies the science of the agriculturist just as gold has defied that of the Paracelsuses; the truffle, which has graced both the ancient world and the modern, and which, when followed by a glass of Chio, has the effect of many zeros after a number. (65)]

The truffle, extracted from the body of the earth goddess, paradoxically, intensifies the material enjoyment of foods or of wine and, as suggested by the metaphor characterizing its taste, induces the pleasure of pure abstraction without sacrificing its earthy substance. Samuel and La Fanfarlo come together over their shared tastes: ‘‘cet accord d’opinions pour le bien-vivre, cette similitude de gouˆ ts les lia vivement’’ (575) [This concord of opinion on the good life, this similarity of tastes, bound them warmly together (66)]. On their first night of love, Samuel embraces not the unveiled, naked body of a dream in material form, but La Fanfarlo in her costume of Colombine: Quel est l’homme qui ne voudrait, meˆ me au prix de la moitie´ de ses jours, voir son reˆ ve, son vrai reˆ ve poser sans voile devant lui, et le fantoˆ me adore´ de son imagination faire tomber un a` un tous les veˆ tements destine´ s a` prote´ ger contre les yeux du vulgaire? Mais voila` que Samuel, pris d’un caprice bizarre, se mit a` crier comme un enfant gaˆ te´ : ‘‘Je veux Colombine, rendsmoi Colombine; rends-la-moi telle qu’elle m’est apparue le soir qu’elle m’a rendu fou avec son accoutrement fantasque et son corsage de saltimbanque!’’ (576–77) [What kind of man would not wish, even at the price of half his days, to see his dream, his dream-come-true, pose unveiled before him, and to see the adorned phantom of his imagination let fall, one by one, all the garments designed to provide protection against the eyes of the ordinary man? But lo and behold — Samuel, seized by a bizarre whim, began to bellow like a spoiled child: ‘‘I want Colombine! Give me back Colombine! Give her back to me as she looked the night she drove me mad with her outlandish get-up and her acrobat’s halter!’’ (68)]

Obeying Samuel’s caprice, La Fanfarlo sends her servant out in the middle of the night to retrieve the costume, and Samuel, seized by another impulsive desire, cries after her:

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‘‘Eh! n’oubliez pas le rouge’’ [Hey! Don’t forget the rouge! (68)]. This high point of erotic tension in the narrative continues not with an account of their pleasure in fulfilling sexual desire, but with a climax of a very different order. The narrator intervenes with an analysis of Samuel’s enjoyments in love, which are derived from aesthetic and abstract delights, rather than from ordinary pleasures as understood by more ‘‘vulgar men’’ (578). The woman’s body and its gendered differences, even costumed and made up as if for the theater, disappears completely from the narrative: Quoique Sameul fuˆ t une imagination de´ prave´ e, et peut- eˆ tre a` cause de cela meˆ me, l’amour e´ tait chez lui moins une affaire des sens que du raisonnement. C’e´ tait surtout l’admiration et l’appe´ tit du beau; il conside´ rait la reproduction comme un vice de l’amour, la grossesse comme une maladie d’arraigne´ e. Il a e´ crit quelque part: les anges sont hermaphrodites et ste´ riles. (577) [Although Samuel had a depraved imagination — perhaps even because of this — love, for him, was less a matter of the senses than of the intellect. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty: he considered reproduction a flaw of love, and pregnancy a form of insanity. He wrote on one occasion ‘‘Angels are hermaphrodite and sterile.’’ (69)]21

Hermaphroditism, thus, is valorized in this novella insofar as it is linked to the figure of the artist: Samuel’s ambiguous gender, his late Romantic ecclectic tastes, the poetry of his person; Mme de Cosmelly’s assertiveness, imagination, and aptitude for domination; La Fanfarlo’s art of transforming her body by turning it into the poetry of dance or the metamorphoses of mime, her fondness for elaborate and often outrageous costumes. Fluid and shifting gender identities open vast new possibilities for poetic sensation, for increased affective and cognitive experience. As the feminine nom de plume, Manuella de Monteverde, makes clear from the outset, divided and plural gender is inseparable from writing itself. Hermaphroditism falls out of consideration, however, insofar as reconfigurations of gender might implicate a restructuring of social relations, revisions of

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gendered relations of power, as will be seen in my discussion of the last pages of the novella. In love, woman becomes for Samuel a threshold to the infinite, a space of passage. Gazing into La Fanfarlo’s eyes, he penetrates to a beyond of infinite horizons, where he remains alone in a state of absolute yet precarious self-sufficient sensation and consciousness: il la regardait, il lui semblait voir l’infini derrie`re les yeux clairs de cette beaute´ , et que les siens a` la longue planaient dans d’immenses horizons. Du reste, comme il arrive aux hommes exceptionnels, il e´ tait souvent seul dans son paradis, nul ne pouvant l’habiter avec lui; et si, de hasard, il l’y ravissait et l’y tranait presque de force, elle restait toujours en arrie`re: aussi, dans le ciel ou` il re´ gnait, son amour commenc¸ait d’eˆ tre triste et malade de la me´ lancholie du bleu, comme un royal solitaire. (578) [it seemed to him that he could see the infinite behind the limpid eyes of this beauty, and after a time, that his own vision was soaring to far horizons. Moreover, as happens to exceptional men, he was often alone in his paradise, for no one could inhabit it with him; and if by chance he carried her off and dragged her there almost forcibly, she would always be trailing behind: and so, in that heaven where he reigned, his love would begin to sadden and sicken with the melancholy of the blue, like a lonely sovereign. (69)]

Absolute enjoyment is represented figurally as a solitary paradise, from which all gender difference has been effaced, that of the other and that of a complex otherness within. While the earlier hermaphroditism that characterized Samuel and the two women was said to be sterile, that sterility applied only in the narrowest senses as an exclusion of heterosexual reproductive sexuality. The narrative revealed hermaphroditism to be productive of poetic achievements. In its narcissism, the solitary contentment of Samuel figured in the passage above, however, is sterile in other senses, unavailable to the complex mixing of gender that produces poetry, narrative, mime, or poetic states of consciousness. This timeless sovereignty, however, proves vulnerable to time, and the novella ends with Samuel’s fall

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into passion and corporeal fertility, the very kinds of emotion and animality that, paradoxically, have been associated throughout the novella with a femininity unmediated by fluid mixings of gender. At the conclusion of the text, Mme de Cosmelly has regained her husband; professing to him her sorrow at the pain he has suffered from loosing his mistress, she has restored domestic relations, if not domestic harmony. Samuel’s narrative concludes after he receives a letter from Mme de Cosmelly in which she thanks him for returning her husband to her, promises Samuel an eternal friendship, and assures him that she believes him to prefer friendship over all other recompense. Samuel responds to La Fanfarlo’s inquiry concerning the letter: ‘‘Ah! rien, . . . — Une lettre d’honneˆ te femme a` qui j’avais promis d’eˆ tre aime´ de toi’’ (579) [‘‘It’s nothing,’’ said Samuel. ‘‘Just a letter from a lady I had promised I would take you to bed’’ (72)]. The revenge that La Fanfarlo says she will exact arrives soon after, as Samuel falls prey to the torments of passion and jealousy: Samuel connut toutes les tortures de la jalousie, et l’abaissement et la tristesse ou` nous jette la conscience d’un mal incurable et constitutionnel,—bref, toutes les horreurs de ce mariage vicieux qu’on nomme le concubinage. (580) Samuel has come to know all the tortures of jealousy, as well as the degradation and depression of being aware that he has an incurable, constitutional disease — in short, all the horrors of that flawed marriage called concubinage. (73)]

A conventional dynamics between the sexes is restored. In contrast with their earlier eccentric and original social roles, the final passage stresses Samuel’s and La Fanfarlo’s place on the margins of bourgeois society. She has become plump: ‘‘elle est devenue une beaute´ grasse, propre, lustre´ e et ruse´ e, une espe`ce de lorette ministe´ rielle. Un de ces jours elle fera ses paˆ ques et rendra le pain be´ nit a` sa paroisse’’ (580) [she is putting on weight every day and has become a fat, scrubbed, shiny-pink beauty, a kind of ministerial trollop. One of these days she’ll be taking Easter communion and dispensing consecrated bread to her par-

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ish. (73)].22 She has learned how to make babies and gives birth to twins. Plump and prosperous, devout and fertile, La Fanfarlo has abandoned her earlier ambiguous gender, entering heterosexuality in conformity with hegemonic heterosexual bourgeois values. Samuel is no longer the hermaphrodite poet; he has domesticated his art and ‘‘gives birth’’ to four texts. They are strikingly different from his earlier poetry, since all share the traits of utility or monetary profitability: ‘‘un livre sur les quatre e´ vange´ listes,—un autre sur la symbolique des couleurs, un me´ moire sur un nouveau syste`me d’annonces,—et un quatrie`me dont je ne veux pas me rappeler le titre’’ (580) [a book of the four evangelists: another on the symbolism of colors, a memoir on a new system of advertising, and a fourth of which I prefer not to remember the title (73)]. From the bizarre excesses of Les Orfraies (Osprays), Samuel has descended to the practice of lesser forms of writing: moral and aesthetic studies, writings on social or political topics, texts that will assure him of public recognition. La Fanfarlo, for her part, entertains aspirations for her lover to enter the Institute, and the narrator reports hearing that Samuel has founded a socialist newspaper. No longer eccentric to society, the couple now aspires to distinction by wealth and, in the name of the male writer, presumably soon to be recognized by the Institute, by title. While the tone of the passage is appropriate to a slightly caustic irony, it nevertheless underscores bourgeois truths: the socially dominant assures the integrity of its symbolic order by conflating sexuality and fertility. It excludes fluid gender identities that may not be ‘‘productive’’ in terms of social utility, while embracing other more mundane forms of writing, journalism, political tracts, or popular forms of philosophy. The final paragraph of the novella underscores this displacement of ambiguous and plural gender; in rejecting his former late Romantic writings, Samuel also has abandoned his feminine nom de plume: ‘‘Pauvre chantre des Orfraies! Pauvre Manuela de Monteverde!’’ (580) [Poor bard of the Ospreys! Poor Manuela de Monteverde! (74)]. Samuel has exchanged his feminine pen name and his hermaphrodite poetic half-genius for a ‘‘properly’’ masculine name and banal distinctions conferred on the male writer by bourgeois society. Gender identities are

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now circumscribed by social conformity at the expense of poetic experience and writing. Baudelaire’s early novella is strong evidence that he is keenly aware of the disruptive and productive potential of multiple, fluid gender identities as they contribute to new forms of poetic sensibility and as they facilitate new forms of writing. Gender ambiguities are linked to the unfinished business of Romanticism, understood as a literature of excess, of infinitization, ever in a state of incompletion. When this multiplicity implicates stratifications of power relations between gendered subjects, reaching to the underlying symbolic structures that determine social bonds, however, it becomes reabsorbed in a traditionally hierarchical and ultimately conservative social order. The conclusion of the novella, with its ironic treatment of Samuel’s productivity as pe`re de famille (‘‘pater familias’’), and political journalist, bears the mark of an intense cultural anxiety that manifests itself in Baudelaire from his early writings. The potentially infinite aesthetic and philosophical project, which is earlier named romantic, depends in large measure on loosening ancient boundary lines of genre and gender, yet that project ends in the ruins of Samuel’s domestic activities: his new writings and his family. He enters into cultural productivity, but at an uncomplex level; assuring the continuity of his descent by siring his progeny, he has failed to revitalize his generation intellectually and aesthetically. A new generation comes into being without a redefined intellectual horizon. The vast if unrealized projects of the beginning of the novella, and the energy and originality that motivate them are now suspended, yet they have not been replaced by any achievement that is valorized as authentic. Cynicism prevails, and money and personal power, serving here as quintessential bourgeois values, remain as the principal driving forces of the degraded hero. Society thus continues to reproduce itself without the intellectual and aesthetic vitality that was glimpsed in the early sections of the novella. Alternatives to the corrupt values associated here with bourgeois culture suggested earlier in the novella imply a necessary reconfiguration of gendered identities, yet the project is reabsorbed by a symbolic order that it had earlier promised to displace and reconfigure.

II Difference and Disbarment

3 Admissions of Difference: Gender and Ethnicity in Ourika

OURIKA, A SHORT NOVELLA, WRITTEN AND FIRST PUBLISHED BY the Duchesse de Duras in 1823, is a fictional confession narrative of a young black woman, saved from embarkation on a slave ship at the age of two by the colonial governor of Senegal, M. de B., and raised in a Parisian aristocratic family. Recounted in the first person, the story tells of Ourika’s life as a child, of her sentimental education and intimate inclusion in the family of her protectors. The novella portrays both the heroine and the social world of Parisian aristocracy just prior to and during the Revolution, the time of the Terror, the period of Emigration and its immediate aftermath. The narrative also tells of Ourika’s ultimate, brutal exclusion as a black from the society that had nurtured her and recounts her self-imposed retreat from the world to a convent. Her story is a retrospective narrative told to a doctor summoned to the convent to treat her mysterious and ultimately fatal malady. This short text was much admired in its time for its emotional intensity and attracted considerable attention for raising inherently scandalous issues about racial difference, and about deep cultural anxieties concerning racial intermixing. The narrative is remarkable for its audacity for bringing an African to France after a law forbidding such immigration had gone into effect and for raising the possibility of racial intermixing on continental French soil, the very creolization that French laws were designed to forbid.1 Equally remarkable was the favorable reception of the text during the Restoration by the aristocratic, conservative, even rightwing milieu of the author. Ourika was admired by Chateaubriand, a confident 77

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and close associate of the author; it also received praise from a number of prominent social and literary figures, including Princess Louise of Prussia and Walter Scott.2 Since the narrating voice in Ourika is that of a black woman who recounts the effects of racism from a supposedly authentic black perspective, the text generated considerable interest at a time when questions about slavery and abolition were burning issues, both among those sympathetic to abolitionist arguments and others who held rightist and even reactionary beliefs aligned with colonialist ideological and economic interests committed to maintaining slavery.3 There were two re-editions of the text in 1823 and nine editions between 1826 and 1878. The novella seems to have disappeared from the literary horizon after the late nineteenth century, yet in 1979 Ourika again became an object of interest when it was reissued in Paris by a feminist press, in the series ‘‘Des Femmes,’’ with a preface by Claudine Herrmann.4 Its recent publication by the Modern Language Association in a French edition with excellent brief introductions by Margaret Waller and Joan DeJean and in an English edition translated and prefaced by John Fowles suggests that Ourika has finally been included in a revised canon of post-Revolutionary French writings.5 This chapter will reexamine the two interrelated motifs in Ourika that have propelled this seemingly unassuming text so forcefully into current debates on literature and culture: the forces defining gender and situating female subjects in a network of cultural relations on the one hand and, on the other, those that are assumed to define the subject by her ethnic identity. The story of Ourika’s upbringing, her sentimental education, reveals with particular clarity the ways in which an identity is formed and comes to know herself as a subject and to assume her own truths. This condensed narration, although overtly naive and uncomplex, traces processes of subjectification analogous to those that Foucault proposed as the organizing theme of his analyses in the second volume of his study on the history of sexuality, L’Usage des plaisirs: une analyse des ‘‘jeux de ve´ rite´ ,’’ des jeux du vrai et du faux a` travers lesquels l’eˆ tre se constitue historiquement comme expe´ rience, c’est a` dire comme pouvant et devant eˆ tre pense´ .6

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[An analysis of ‘‘games of truth,’’ the games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience, that is, as something that can and must be thought.]7

As a story of coming to self-knowledge and coming to desire, Ourika’s narrative defines the conditions in which she becomes a subject and ‘‘problematizes’’ what she is, how she understands what she may do and comprehends the world in which she may act. Initially oblivious to class and ethnic distinctions, Ourika is raised by Mme de B. to assimilate successfully the attributes of an ideal daughter in a late eighteenth-century salon society; she develops her keen intelligence, becomes schooled in literature, the arts, music, and dance, and excels as an alert and cultivated conversationalist.8 In short, when she arrives at adolescence, Ourika has the requisite cultural and emotional attributes to merit a place in aristocratic society and to enter into a promising marriage. She is brutally severed from these possibilities, however, when the ‘‘truth’’ of her situation is revealed to her and she must confront the terms of an imposed ethnic identity; she overhears a conversation between her adoptive mother, Mme de B., and an unnamed friend, la Marquise de . . . who intervenes as the anonymous doxa of contemporary French white society: Pendant que nous sommes seules, dit madame de . . . a` madame de B., je veux vous parler d’Ourika: elle devient charmante, son esprit est tout a` fait forme´ , elle causera comme vous, elle est pleine de talents, elle est piquante, naturelle; mais que deviendra-t-elle? et enfin qu’en ferez-vous? (12) ‘‘Now that we are alone,’’ said the marquise to Mme de B., ‘‘I must speak to you about Ourika. She’s become a charming girl and her mind is mature. Soon she’ll be able to converse as well as you. She’s talented, unusual, has ease of manner. But what next? To come to the point—what do you intend doing with her?’’ (12)9

The ‘‘truth’’ affirmed by Mme de B. is that of contemporary post-Enlightenment racism: because of her color, Ourika’s situation is ‘‘sans reme`de’’ [without solution], she is alone in the white, European world and will remain alone

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throughout her life (12).10 She can never be admitted to adult French society as a lover, a wife, or a mother. Ourika soon internalizes the terms of her exclusion, becoming beset by intense shame and suffering. She eventually takes refuge in a convent where she tells her story to a young French doctor who had been summoned to treat Ourika’s mysterious and soon fatal malady. The novella clearly implies that there is a congruity between the subordination of ethnic difference and gender determined subservience to which women in patriarchal societies are subjected as domestic partners. The heroine has often been read as a figure analogous to Mme de Duras; Ourika’s brutal severance from her most cherished associations would reiterate the affective impasses of Madame de Duras’s life.11 The novella thus establishes a troubling congruence between the obvious brutal arbitrariness of racial prejudice and forms of gender determined inequality that are perhaps less dramatically obvious, but are nonetheless pervasive. The chronological space separating the time of narration, roughly the late 1780s and early 1790s, and the time in which the text was written, 1822, was marked by an increasing displacement of women from the public sphere during and following the Revolution; Ourika can be read as contributing to the efforts of women during the Restoration to regain the intellectual and social power and status enjoyed earlier in the Enlightenment. The marginalization of issues concerning both blacks and women by the Revolution and the unfinished business of their enduring claims to rights and equality will be an underlying concern of this chapter.12 I will first examine treatment of the overlapping motifs of gendered and ethnic subservience in recent readings of the novella, for the most part written by feminist critics, and then turn to a reading of the text itself. In my view, recent feminist interpretations quite rightly disengage the highly destructive, even mortal, effects of patriarchal restrictions of women’s affective and intellectual possibilities represented in the novella. Due to certain omissions or elisions, however, these readings also demonstrate the need to rethink issues concerning gender in this novella in terms of their relation to the representation of ethnic identity. Contemporary readings that elucidate the interdependence be-

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tween forms of gendered and ethnic subservience, frequently read ‘‘race’’ as a general metaphor for women’s subjectivity and racism as a figure for cultural violence imposed upon women. The specific operations of racism in this text are thus attenuated by their assimilation to other—if highly significant—modalities by which gender differences are subjected to male dominance. Sainte-Beuve’s reading of Ourika and of Mme de Duras’s other published and unpublished writings provides a model for all subsequent interpretations that metaphorically link the author’s own social situation and her thwarted desires as a friend and mother with the estrangement that characterizes all of her protagonists: L’idee´ d’Ourika, d’Edouard, et problablement celle qui anime les autres re´ cits de Mme de Duras, c’est une ide´ e d’ine´ galite´ , soit de nature, soit de position sociale, une ide´ e d’empeˆ chement, d’obstacle entre le de´ sir de l’aˆ me et l’objet mortel; c’est quelque chose qui manque et qui de´ vore et qui cre´ e une sorte d’envie sur la tendresse; c’est la laideur et la couleur d’Ourika, la naissance d’Edouard.13 [The theme of Ourika of Edouard and probably of all the other narratives of Mme de Duras, is the theme of inequality, either in nature or in social position, a theme of hindering, of an obstacle between the soul’s desire and a human object. There is something missing which devours and creates a desire in addition to tenderness; it is Ourika’s ugliness and color, Edouard’s birth. (my translation)]

In her preface to the re-edition of Ourika, Claudine Herrmann also interprets Ourika as a figure who exemplifies the frustrations of Mme de Duras’s unconditional love. Herrmann gives a moving account of the author’s formative emotional deprivations which she experienced in her intense friendship with Chateaubriand and her passionate devotion to and estrangement from her daughter, Fe´ licie: ‘‘Claire de Duras s’est e´ puise´ e a` donner toujours plusqu’on ne lui rendait’’14 [Claire de Duras exhausted herself by always giving more than she received (my translation)]. The similarities between Ourika’s unfulfilled devotion to her adoptive mother and her estrangement from her protective

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family may reproduce in more intense and more poignantly dramatic form, Herrmann suggests, deprivations suffered by the novella’s author. Herrmann also contends that Ourika’s torments reflect those of all women in (European) patriarchal societies, where deference to masculine social privilege, powers of creativity, and career constitutes a norm that unjustly circumscribes women’s affective and creative potentials. Franc¸oise Massardier-Keeney reiterates similar congruencies between the protagonist and the writer, noting Duras’s estrangement from her own class.15 In a broader, though related context, she insightfully links Duras’s negative views on translation with the novella’s core narrative: although she herself, like many of her contemporaries, practiced translation, Duras claimed that it inevitably failed to reproduce the genius of the original text or its gracefulness and subtlty.16 Ourika’s fate, Massardier-Keeny remarks, reflects a similar pessimism concerning the translation or transposition of one being into another culture. The inexorable effects of European racism are reflected both in the narrative of Ourika and in the author’s general view about the limits of cultural intermixing: The message is pessimistic: there is no place where Ourika can live; the white world can only accommodate her as long as she does not reproduce. We are now back to Duras’s pessimistic view of translation: the foreign text (or the foreign body) cannot be transferred to and integrated into the dominant culture without being distorted or smothered. (17)

While I concur in many ways with the insightful observations of both Herrmann and Massardier-Kenny, my reading proposes that race does not become in any sense secondary to gender or class in this text. The apparent absoluteness of ethnic exclusion does not, in fact, prevail, either in the mental and conceptual universe of the narrative or in the historical context in which the text was written.17 The exclusionary oppositions between European/African and white/ black are not so clearly polarized and resolutely pure in this text as virtually all recent critics have contended. European racism in the novella is not as monolithic as has been assumed; it bears the marks of a phobic repudiation of cul-

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tural intermixing and hybridization already in place. Surely, it is not negligible that the novella’s heroine is expelled from white society and dies in a convent having internalized the devastating effects of racism. Readers have overlooked, however, what I take to be a key component of the text, one that has resonance in other texts to be considered in this book. One can approach these questions by borrowing Foucault’s observations on the fallacy of the ‘‘hypothesis of repression’’ concerning nineteenth-century discourse on sexuality. Foucault contended that, far from being relegated to the shadows and silenced by Victorian or proto-Victorian repression, sexuality is ever apparent throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, voiced in a multitude of ways.18 In a similar manner in this early nineteenth-century text, racial difference, though clearly not overtly admitted into the sphere of adult social interaction, is not, in fact, repressed at all, but given subjective being and voice. Even though it may be displaced by racist constraints, ethnic difference quite properly inhabits the terrain of its exclusion. Ourika appropriates the name of a protagonist in Mme de Stae¨ l’s story Mirza, written sometime before Duras’s text and widely known to members of her society.19 The novella also takes its narrative point of departure from a recent incident of a young African girl brought to France by the governor of Senegal, the Chevalier de Boufflers, and ‘‘given’’ to the Princess of Beauveau.20 At the age of sixteen, the young woman dies of a mysterious illness, in 1799.21 Although the Mare´ chale Princesse de Beauveau does not publish a written account of this story until well after Mme de Duras’s death, the story of her adopted African was widely circulated in the salons of the time, as noted by Sainte-Beuve.22 A brief introduction to Ourika’s story is narrated by a doctor who recounts having been summoned to an Ursuline convent to tend to an ailing young nun. This passage serves as a conventional frame for the main narrative; it also introduces the historical context by situating the young woman’s trauma in the aftermath of the French Revolution under the reign of Napoleon. Descriptive details about the convent evoke the effects of anticlerical revolutionary violence; partially demolished structures and broken grave

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stones provide a familiar melancholy Romantic tableau. These details also serve as memory traces of cultural upheavals during the Revolution that Ourika’s narrative will reveal to be as yet unresolved, extending to issues of race and gender that are set forth in her story. The frame narrative also lends the credence of male ‘‘scientific’’ reason to the account, since Ourika’s story is mediated by a male doctor. One cannot fail to observe, however, that the male narrator indirectly repeats the displacement of the black and the woman that takes place in the main narrative. The woman’s voice does not ‘‘speak for itself,’’ directly, but is repeated by a male representative of patriarchal order. The threatening disorder of Ourika’s intervention into European society is doubly redeemed: by its removal to the confines of the convent, where it is subjected to regulation by religion and by its mediation by a representative of medical science.23 The doctor serves as witness to the social forces that come into play in Ourika’s narrative; he implicitly attests to their inevitability. In an exchange between the doctor and Ourika about the verisimilitude and sincerity of her narrative, Ourika affirms at the outset that, while she will be considered ‘‘sincere,’’ one might read, faithful to her womanly emotions, she will also be judged as unreasonable, outside the limits of rational social propriety: ‘‘Les chagrins que j’ai e´ prouve´ s, dit-elle, doivent paraıˆtre e´ tranges, que j’ai toujours senti une grande re´ pugnance a` les confier: il n’y a point de juge des peines des autres, et les confidents sont presque toujours des accusateurs.’’ ‘‘Ne craignez pas cela de moi, lui dis-je; je vois assez le ravage que le chagrin a fait en vous pour croire le votre since`re.’’ ‘‘Vous la trouverez since`re,’’ dit-elle, ‘‘mais il vous paraıˆtra de´ raisonable.’’ (5) [‘‘The miseries of my life must seem so peculiar that I’ve always been very reluctant to talk about them. No one can gauge how much another has suffered. You confide in people—then they tell you it was your own fault.’’ ‘‘I would never do that. I can see the terrible effects of unhappiness too clearly to doubt your sincerity.’’ ‘‘But you will doubt my reason.’’ (5–6)]

The story is thus overtly subordinated to the limits of social ‘‘reason’’ on the most obvious narrative and psycho-

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logical levels, yet this statement and the narrative that follows can also be read as offering a powerful challenge to those limits. Ourika modestly states that her story has emotional verisimilitude, but not logical, rational authenticity; she thus reiterates a conventional opposition between feminine emotion and masculine reason, and between the personal and the social.24 This schema establishes a context in which Ourika appears to acknowledge that she has transgressed the bounds of social order, driven by emotion, and has yielded to a fate determined by a higher reason. This apparently conventional feminine self-effacement solicits interpretation according to another logic, however, as obliquely setting a context for a story that lays bare key underpinnings of patriarchal reason and tests the limits of its validity. The possibility of ‘‘another reason’’ underlies this text, both as it concerns the cultural and affective impasses that beset women and as it concerns other, overlapping social concerns, notably the central issues of racial identity and interethnic relations. While seeming to confirm the inevitability of the social order to which she has been submitted, Ourika’s narrative repeatedly provides occasions to question its structure and validity. Ourika’s narrative begins with her severance from any personal and cultural history linking her to Africa. Taken from a slave ship at the age of two, she is ‘‘given’’ to Mme de B., and thus, as she notes, is ‘‘born twice’’ (7). The first pages of the narrative thus establish as an unspoken condition of her inclusion in European society that she have no history other than the personal history that she will acquire in the aristocratic society of her adoptive mother. As she enters the protective world of French society, she provisionally becomes a participant in a general denial of that society’s interdependence with its colonies and its economic and cultural involvement with slavery. That denial is ambivalent, however, for her presence on French soil and within the intimate space of the family affirms a persistent need to include and domesticate the ethnic other. Ourika receives a ‘‘perfect education’’ (9); she is trained in singing, painting, (European) languages, and literature. Her moral, affective, and intellectual formation take place in a fully nurturing maternal world presided over by Mme

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de B. (34). It is a world without conflict, yet it is apparently founded on the impossible exclusion of a wider social context, the most pertinent exclusions, of course, being any intrusion of the pre-Revolutionary political context, or interethnic relations. The salon of Mme de B. provides Ourika with access to the ‘‘taste’’ (10) and values of an apparently secure and stable aristocratic society. Ourika’s situation, however, can be taken to represent a powerful social dilemma and a profound source of cultural anxiety for the society that has embraced her seemingly without condition: her security depends on her own ignorance of her difference and on its denial by her European maternal family. Ourika serves as a figure of an unacknowledged Otherness within that society. She is accommodated only if her difference remains ‘‘invisible’’ and its implications with an entire range of social and economic issues denied. Ourika’s harmonious existence is broken shortly after she participates in a ball during which, as a young adolescent, she has played the role of ‘‘Africa’’ in a quadrille representing the four corners of the world (10). In preparation for this allegorical dance, Ourika and Mme de B. learn about African culture by reading traveler’s narratives and by consulting books on exotic costumes and learned texts on African music. She thus acquires an ‘‘African’’ culture that has been thoroughly mediated and ‘‘translated’’ by Western observers, and is prepared to assume those representations through an allegorical spectacle by acting out a fiction of authenticity. At the ball, Ourika dances the comba, ‘‘dance nationale de mon pays’’ (10) [national dance of my country (10)]. African otherness is thus admitted and celebrated when turned into an exotic spectacle, an allegory, and accommodated to the cultural rites of the French aristocracy:25 Toute entie`re au plaisir du bal, je dansai la comba, et j’eus tout le succes qu’on pouvait attendre de la nouveaute´ du spectacle et du choix des spectateurs, dont la plupart, amis de madame de B., s’enthousiasmaient pour moi et croyoient lui faire plaisir en se laissant aller a` toute la vivacite´ de ce sentiment. (10) [I threw myself into the pleasures of the ball and danced the comba with all the success one might expect from so novel a

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spectacle. The audience were for the most part friends of Mme de B. and they thought the warmer their applause, the more she would be pleased. (10–11)]

The artificiality of Ourika’s place in the society of Mme de B is revealed brutally by Mme de B.’s friend, the unnamed Marquise de. . . . As noted above, the Marquise serves as the voice of European society. In place of the invisible African, Ourika’s identity as the perfect daughter of Mme de B., and in place of the allegorical African, Ourika dancing the comba, the Marquise de . . . affirms the contemporary representation of the ‘‘real’’ black. She bluntly asserts the absolute impossibility of admitting an ethnic Other into the adult world of French society. Implicitly, the African could enter that society by a prolongation of pre-adult life, thus assuming and validating the stereotype of the black as child.26 The Marquise de . . . , however, signals the threat represented by Ourika as she comes of age, poised to enter white society as an adult, sexual being: Je crains, disait madame de . . . , que vous ne la rendiez malheureuse. Que voulez-vous qui la satisfasse, maintenant qu’elle a passe´ sa vie dans l’intimite´ de votre socie´ te´ ? Mais elle y restera, dit madame de B. Oui, reprit madame de . . . , tant qu’elle est une enfant: mais elle a quinze ans; a` qui la marierez-vous, avec l’esprit qu’elle a et l’e´ ducation que vous lui avez donne´ e? Qui voudra jamais e´ pouser une ne´ gresse? . . . la philosophie nous place au-dessus des maux de la fortune, mais elle ne peut rien contre les maux qui viennent d’avoir brise´ l’ordre de la nature. Ourika n’a pas rempli sa destine´ e: elle s’est place´ e dans la socie´ te´ sans sa permission; la socie´ te´ se vengera. (12–13, emphasis added) [‘‘What concerns me is that you are making her future misery certain. What could please her now, having spent all her life close by your side?’’ ‘‘But she will continue there.’’ ‘‘Very well—so long as she remains a child. But she’s fifteen already. To whom do you propose to marry her? With her intelligence, with the education you’ve given her? What kind of man would marry a negress? Even supposing you could bribe some fellow to father mulatto children, he could only be of low birth.

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She could never be happy with such a man. She can only want the kind of husband who would never look at her.’’ (13)]

Ourika’s performance in the allegory in which she had assumed a place in an ordered world calls forth associations that the allegory has failed to contain and which were essential components of the West’s understanding of the identity and social role of the black. On the one hand, Africa is admitted into Western consciousness as a part of the colonized world, yet, on the other hand, this Other threatens the very order that has subjugated it. As Fanon observed, the black is ‘‘phobogenic,’’ the incarnation of genital potency.27 Ourika as a child can be accommodated within the family; Ourika as potential lover, wife, and mother, becomes a threat of contaminating sexuality and of miscegenation. Cultural intermixing is entertained in this novella only insofar as it estheticized as allegorical spectacle. This episode is a cardinal point early in Ourika’s story, but it does not bring about the swift and inexorable narrative conclusion that it seems to prepare. What follows is the painful, introspective account of Ourika’s awakened consciousness of her difference and of the suffering that leads to her final withdrawal from the world. She accepts the terms of her subordination, suddenly seeing herself as simian, ugly, shameful, belonging to another species, not fully human; in short, she internalizes the racist stereotypes of the time. In a process that Fanon was to theorize later, Ourika’s self-awareness is theatricalized as she sees herself in the alienating representations of the dominant, white culture.28 She enacts what Bhabha calls ‘‘consent in objectification,’’ submitting to surveillance and the regime of colonial scopic power.29 The story is generally read as an account of the painful effects that this objectification inflicts upon Ourika, of the effects of the virulent terms of late eighteenth-, early nineteenth-century racism. While partially affirming this reading, I would also like to suggest that the novella provides insights into the ambivalence of this racism. The black is both feared and desired; in conformity with a process discussed by Bhabha in his analysis of stereotypes and racism, she serves as a fetish, signifying a lack that is both feared and desired, both admitted and disavowed.30

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In the pivotal conversation between Mme de B. and the Marquise, addressing Ourika’s unassimilable difference, racial identity and sexual/social economies are intertwined: a` qui la marierez-vous, avec l’esprit qu’elle a et l’e´ ducation que vous lui avez donne´ e? Qui voudra jamais e´ pouser une ne´ gresse? Et si a force d’argent vous trouvez quelqu’un qui consente a` avoir des enfants ne`gres, ce sera un homme d’une condition infe´ rieure, et avec qui elle se trouvera malheureuse. (13) [What kind of man would marry a negress? Even supposing you could bribe some fellow to father mulatto children, he could only be of low birth. She could never be happy with such a man. (13)]

This passage contains a highly charged superimposition of terms that, together, form a nexus of cultural concerns.31 The African is seen as a menace to the genetic integrity of the western European, yet this biological concern is the vehicle for a vast regime of other social questions; here, the related issue is stated starkly as a concern for the integrity of one’s caste. Ourika has already assumed the culture and values of the aristocracy and cannot, therefore, be expected to tolerate a marriage with a man of lower class. Maintaining genetic purity is thus linked to preserving social and economic class distinctions. The black is linked conventionally to fears of complex forms of contamination, assumed to constitute threats to genetic, sexual, and economic purity.32 Authority for the Marquise’s pronouncements is implicitly grounded in philosophy and science, for she says that Ourika has broken with ‘‘l’ordre de la nature’’ (13) [her natural destiny (14)]. By conferring this universality to her social ‘‘truths,’’ the Marquise detaches them from local, historical particulars, yet her stereotyped representation of Ourika’s blackness is evidence of a pervasive anguish concerning the possible permeability of cultural boundaries signals an imperative to preserve their integrity. The racist or sexist stereotype attempts to construct a stable representation of otherness, reiterating what is always known, but, because it must be ever repeated, reveals ambivalence and anxiety

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about the stability of that identity. While Ourika’s moral and cultural education has ‘‘sanitized’’ her of her blackness, ‘‘knowledge’’ of the cultural inferiority of the African and her sexual license can never be displaced. It is indeed when the sexual threat of the black woman within the family of Mme de B. becomes explicit that the narrative denouement is precipitated at the end of the story. In a second passage near the end of the novel,33 the Marquise confronts Ourika directly, accusing her of harboring a shameful secret: ‘‘Confiez-moi votre secret’’ (40) [Tell me your secret (41)]. When Ourika responds that she has none, confessing that blackness alone is the source of her suffering (40), the Marquise reveals the ‘‘evidence’’ that Ourika is unable to avow, a quasi-incestuous love for her adoptive bother, Charles: Ourika, je me chargerai de vous apprendre que vous en avez un. Oui, Ourika, tous vos regrets, toutes vos douleurs ne viennent que d’une passion malheureuse, d’une passion insense´ e; et si vous n’e´ tiez pas folle d’amour pour Charles, vous prendriez fort bien votre parti d’eˆ tre ne´ gresse. (41) [I shall take it upon myself to inform you that there is. Yes my child. All your misery, all your suffering comes from just one thing: an insane and doomed passion for Charles. And if you weren’t madly in love with him, you could come perfectly well to terms with being black. (41)]

I will return to this passage later, particularly to the question of Ourika’s internalization of racist representations, but it is important to note that a final, decisive ‘‘proof’’ of the threat of blackness is marshaled here to validate the knowledge that the stereotype is charged with securing as self-evident. As I have suggested above, a central, unacknowledged secret of the European cultural imaginaire is that blackness and genitality are coextensive. The passages between these two explosive moments of ‘‘enlightenment’’ make up the longest section of the narrative, and they provide an interesting, emotionally intense dual perspective. The first is formed by Ourika’s self-reflexive revelations and analysis of her growing sense of irrevocable alienation. The second is her chronicle and eval-

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uation of events of the historical period that extends from just before the Revolution to the early years of the Napoleonic era of the nineteenth century. Narrated from a fictionalized black perspective, the turmoil of the Revolution and its aftermath is represented as implicating necessarily the ‘‘black question’’ among the possibilities for restructuring social consciousness and political and cultural institutions at issue during that time. Ourika’s first self-reflexive observations on her difference from the white world in which she lives establishes her ‘‘identity’’ as a construct of white representations of African otherness. She dares not look in the mirror, observing: J’e´ puisais ma pitie´ sur moi-meˆ me; ma figure me faisait horreur, je n’osais plus me regarder dans une glace; lorsque mes yeux se portaient sur mes mains noires, je croyais voir celles d’un singe; je m’exage´ rais ma laideur, et cette couleur me paroissait comme le signe de ma re´ probration; c’est elle qui me se´ parait de tous les eˆ tres de mon espe`ce, qui me condamnait a` eˆ tre seule, toujours seule! (15) [All my pity was for myself. My face revolted me, I no longer dared to look in a mirror. My black hands seemed like monkey’s paws. I exaggerated my ugliness to myself, and this skin color of mine seemed to me like the brand of shame. It exiled me from everyone else of my natural kind. (15–16)]

Ourika’s mirror is a figure for alienating representations of the black through which all her growing self-awareness will be mediated.34 The figure that Ourika sees in that mirror is that of stereotyped features of the African: she is more akin to apes than to European man; her race belongs to a separate species, and that species is less than human: Helas! je n’appartenais plus a` personne; j’e´ tais e´ trange`re a` la race humaine tout entie`re! (15, emphasis added) [I no longer belonged anywhere. I was cut off from the entire human race. (16, emphasis added)]

The intense pathos of these introspective comments results from Ourika’s naive and anguished incorporation of

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racist representations of black identity. By assuming these representations in her definitions of self, Ourika comes to understand her identity through self-loathing. She engages here in that double consciousness that Fanon has discussed in detail. As in a scene referred to earlier in which Fanon is confronted by a little girl and her mother and the child points out the black man: ‘‘Look a Negro!’’ Ourika is overtaken by a ‘‘racial, epidermal schema.’’ At this moment of recognition she becomes responsible for her body, her race, and, as in Fanon’s anecdote, becomes ‘‘battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects.’’35 Her identity is situated on the threshold of her awareness of European constructions of ‘‘African’’ identity; she thus affirms the stereotype of the African as lacking any inherent powers of judgment or high capacities for abstraction: Je vis que je ne savais rien avant mon malheur, mes impressions e´ taient toutes des sentiments; je ne jugeais pas, j’aimais. . . . j’examinai, en le critiquant, presque tout ce qui m’avait plu jusqu’alors. (16) [And I had known nothing before my bitter awakening. I’d seen everything in terms of feelings. I didn’t judge, I simply liked. . . . I analyzed and criticized almost all that had previously satisfied me. (16–17)]

While her self-alienating consciousness develops internally as an increasingly intense pathology, it allows the protagonist to serve as a (pseudo) naive observer and commentator on events during and after the Revolution. She is disempowered, ‘‘outside’’ French society and consistently raises issues implicating blacks and, not incidentally, women, in debates about the cultural upheavals of the time. The Revolution is presented from the outset as going to the source of great political and moral interests, submitting them to debate and reevaluation. Because of her own alienation, Ourika is associated with all those who desire greater social justice: Je me disais quelquefois, que moi, pauvre ne´ gresse, je tenais pourtant a` toutes les aˆ mes e´ leve´ es, par le besoin de la justice

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que j’e´ prouvais en commun avec elles: le jour du triomphe de la vertu et de la ve´ rite´ serait un jour de triomphe pour moi comme pour elles: mais, he´ las, ce jour e´ tait bien loin. (22) [Sometimes I used to tell myself that, poor negress though I was, I still belonged with all the noblest spirits, because of our shared longing for justice. The day when decency and truth were victorious would be their day of triumph, and mine. But that day was sadly remote. (23)]

Ourika’s representation of the debates engendered by the Revolution is generally pessimistic. While great issues are addressed and possibilities for major realignments of power are opened up, the results are negative: des hommes distingue´ s remettaient chaque jour en question tout ce qu’on avait pu croire juge´ jusqu’alors. Ils approfondissaient tous les sujets, remontaient a` l’origine de toutes les institutions, mais trop souvent pour tout e´ branler et tout de´ truire. (18) [Every day I listened to clever men reexamining what had till then been considered settled. They left nothing undissected, tracked every human institution back to its origins . . . though only too often they finally left everything undermined and destroyed. (19)]

Out of this disorder Ourika hopes to find a place for herself; her speculations thus implicate a wide range of issues that haunted political and moral debates of the Revolution concerning the status of blacks (slaves, mulattos, freemen of color) as humans and the question of what political and economic rights might be granted to them. Underlying Ourika’s self-effacing statements about her hopes that she ‘‘might find a place’’ in the general disorder, there are urgent questions concerning the humanity of blacks and their role in French society, and interethnic relations in the colonies, as well as within the hexagon. J’entrevis donc que, dans ce grand de´ sordre, je pourrais trouver ma place; que toutes les fortunes renverse´ es, tous les rangs confondus, tous les pre´ juge´ s e´ vanouis, ameneraient peut-eˆ tre un e´ tat de choses ou` je serais moins e´ trange`re; et que si j’avais

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quelque superiorite´ d’aˆ me, quelque qualite´ cache´ e, on l’appre´ cierait lorsque ma couleur ne m’isolerait plus au milieu du monde, comme elle avait fait jusqu’alors. (18–19) [I sensed that at the end of this great chaos I might find my true place. When personal destiny was turned upside down, all social caste overthrown, all prejudices had disappeared, a state of affairs might one day come to pass where I would feel myself less exiled. If I truly possessed some superiority of mind, some hidden quality, then it would be appreciated when my color no longer isolated me, as it had until then, in the heart of society. (19)]

If the hope that Ourika voices for an amelioration of her condition as an individual is weakened by the spectacle of divisiveness and querulous self-interest witnessed from within the aristocratic salon, it is further diminished and ultimately wrecked by the event that haunted all contemporary debates on blacks, on the degree of their humanity and even on the possibility of their liberty and participation in the political process: the Revolution in St. Domingue. The violence of this insurrection is represented by Ourika as a savagery and barbarism that justifies continued proscription of an entire race. She thus gives voice to colonialist stereotypes of the black as always potentially murderous, incapable of self-governance, requiring ever vigilant control:36 On commencait a` parler de la liberte´ des ne`gres: il e´ tait impossible que cette question ne me touchat pas vivement; c’etait une illusion que j’aimais encore a` me faire, qu’ailleurs, du moins, j’avais des semblables: comme ils e´ taient malheureux, je les croyais bons, et je m’inte´ ressais a` leur sort. Helas! je fus promptement de´ trompe´ e! Les massacres de Saint-Domingue me cause`rent une douleur nouvelle et de´ chirante: jusqu’ici je m’e´ tais afflige´ e d’appartenir a` une race proscrite; maintenant j’avais honte d’appartenir a` une race de barbares et d’assassins. (20) [About this time talk started of emancipating the Negores. Of course this question passionately interested me. I still cherished the illusion that at least somewhere else in the world there were others like myself. I knew they were not happy and I supposed them to be noble hearted. I was eager to know what

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would happen to them. But alas, I soon learned my lesson. The Santo Domingo massacres gave me cause for fresh and heartrendering sadness. Ill then I had regretted belonging to a race of outcasts. Now I had the shame of belong to a race of barbarous murderers. (21)]

While this passage effectively denies the possibility of black participation in ‘‘higher’’ (European) civilization, it also reveals the uneasy interdependence between France and her West Indian colonies and her consequent reliance on black servitude. An unspoken corollary of the assertion of black barbarism and depravity is a subtext of this passage: less than human, they are fit for the brutal forms of labor required of the slave. Ourika’s earlier hopes for a new order disappear when black revolution menaces white dominance in the colonies. Her remarks are inscribed in the margins of complex questions in which the novella is implicated, but which it represses: the profound importance of the colonies to contemporary France, the dependence of the rising French bourgeoisie on colonial trade, and above all, the practice of absentee ownership of colonial plantations, in which the author of Ourika was directly implicated.37 When the equilibrium maintained by what Fanon has called ‘‘racial terror’’ is disturbed, the spectre of black violence takes on the configurations of an inhumanity which justifies continued relegation of the black to the status of the less than human; from that proscription it is but a very short step to the implicit conclusion that their valid contribution to (European) society is to remain in servitude for the benefit of higher civilization and its universal values. Ourika’s account of the Revolution relates the effects of day to day events upon the family of Mme de B.: the flight of friends and relatives to foreign countries or to the provinces during the Terror, Mme de B.’s troubled and imperiled life in Paris during the same time, and the death of the king in 1792. Ourika remains secure and exempt from all social responsibilities under the nurturing protection of Mme de B.: on n’e´ tait responsible de rien. . . . Jamais on ne sentait de vide ni d’ennui dans sa conversation; tout lui servait d’aliment: . . .

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L’ide´ e la plus ordinaire devenait fe´ conde si elle passait par la bouche de Madame de B. (24) [One was never called to unreasonable account. . . . Her talk was never empty or boring, and everything was food for it. . . . The most banal thought became fertile in Mme de B.’s mouth. (25)]

While external disorder prevails, Ourika also enjoys an idyllic friendship with Charles, the son of Mme de B.: Depuis si longtemps il comptait sur moi, que mon amitie´ e´ tait pour lui comme sa vie; il en jouissait sans la sentir il ne me demandait ni inte´ ret ni attention; il savait bien qu’en me parlant de lui, il me parlait de moi, et que j’e´ tais plus lui que lui-meˆ me: charme d’une telle confiance, vous pouvez tout remplacer, remplacer le bonheur meˆ me! (26) [He had depended on me for so long. To him, my companionship was like existence itself. He enjoyed it without noticing it. I was not required to pay attention, so show interest. He knew very well that when he talked about himself, he talked about me. I was closer to him than he was himself. The magic of such intimacy is that it can be a substitute for anything—even happiness. (26–27)]

This intense bond can endure, however, only amid the social disarray of the Revolution; when ‘‘reason’’ and social order are reestablished, Charles marries and Ourika’s sense of her exclusion and irremediable difference is reactivated. Charles’s marriage restores patriarchal order to the family and also provides a link between the family and renewed political order. The young woman Charles will marry, Mlle de The´ mines, has lost all but an aged aunt to the violence of the Terror; in marrying her, Charles brings her back into society and serves as her protector. His love itself, as indicated in Charles’s conversations with Ourika, fulfills all familial roles, father, mother, brother. The return to social equilibrium, thus, evinces the possibility of a place or an expression of feminine desire. In 1795, following the Terror, Mme de B.’s immediate society is reconstituted and Ourika must reassume her position as the outsider:

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Ma position e´ tait si fausse dans le monde, que plus la socie´ te´ rentrait dans son ordre naturel, plus je m’en sentais dehors. (27) [My position in the world was so false that the more society got back to its usual ways, the less I felt a part of it. (28)]

Ourika’s self-effacement becomes increasingly intense and desperate; she removes all mirrors from her bedroom, wears gloves, covers her arms, and wears a hat and veil (27). Her physical and emotional deterioration increases as she recounts Charles’s marriage and the birth of his son. Following an emotional and physical crisis, when she faints and collapses during a walk with the family, Ourika’s mind wanders in intimations of her impending death; she fantasizes a narrative of the life she might have had as a slave and a mother. This scene marks Ourika’s last moments of self-alienating desperation, as she adopts a white scenario of the productive and contented black, toiler in the fields of benign colonialists: Qu’avais-je fait a` ceux qui crurent me sauver en m’amenant sur cette terre d’exil? Pourquoi ne me laissait-on pas suivre mon sort? Et bien! je serais la ne´ gresse esclave de quelque riche colon; brule´ e par le soleil, je cultiverais la terre d’un autre: mais j’aurais mon humble cabane pour me retirer le soir; j’aurais un compagnon de ma vie, et des enfants de ma couleur, qui m’apelleraient: Ma me`re! (38, emphasis added) [What harm had I ever done those who had pretended to save me by bringing me to this land of exile? Why hadn’t I been left to follow my own destiny? What did it matter that I might now have been the black slave of some rich planter? Scorched by the sun, I should be laboring on someone else’s land. But I would have a poor hut of my own to go to at day’s end; a partner in my life, children of my own race who would call me their mother. (39)]

The issue of the ‘‘proper place’’ of the black in relation to Western European society has come full circle. The novella raises unrelenting questions concerning the interdependence of blacks and the dominant European classes, and concerning the possibilities for a more just social order in

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which blacks and women would enjoy equality in a restructured and renovated society, only to foreclose them by reiterating a stereotypical vision of black submission to white mastery uncontaminated by racial terror. Ethnic and gender servitude converge in the figure of the contented black mother, doubly dependent, subservient both to her white master and to her husband. This stereotype of the contented slave woman intermixes issues of gender and race and presents a profoundly pessimistic view of paradigms of domesticity in patriarchal cultures.38 Ourika serves as an extreme figure of alienation which, while it may relate specifically to the situation of the African, also allegorizes the status of women in general in patriarchal Western societies. While the novella may be read as exposing the social construction of racial identity, and as suggesting that the Revolution thrust the issues of imposed racial inequality and of slavery into the broader context of human rights in general, Ourika retreats from any suggestion of possible resolutions of these conflicts. Should Ourika’s desperate fantasy of maternal love as a dutiful slave be read as a bitterly ironic repetition of a perversely self-serving colonialist stereotype, quite common in both abolitionist and pro-slavery writings of the time? Or should it be read without irony as the ‘‘positive’’ component of stereotyped representations of the African in the early nineteenth century, the fantasized docile, virtuous, domesticated African? Is Ourika’s American tableau a cruel naturalization of inhumane servitude or does it represent a pessimistic valorization of a first step in ‘‘civilizing’’ the potentially violent and primitive African, admitting her into productive Western civilization? To resolve these interpretive enigmas would be to efface the ambiguity that animates such stereotypes and reassemble that splitting that Bhabha has shown to underlie the demand placed upon representations of the black by colonial discourse. The stereotypes of blackness maintain ambiguities, as Bhabha observes: It is recognizably true that the chain of stereotypical signification is curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse, an articulation of multiple belief. The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the

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bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; . . . In each case, what is being dramatized is a separation—between races, cultures, histories, within histories—a separation between before and after that repeats obsessively the mythical moment or disjunction.39

Ourika’s final break with society occurs when the ‘‘secret’’ of her unacknowledged love for Charles is revealed to her by the Marquise de . . . (60–61). It is certainly important to note that this near incestuous bond repeats the theme of the ‘‘criminal passion’’ of Ame´ lie for Rene´ in Chateaubriand’s extremely popular novel. First published in 1802, Rene´ was still enjoying great popularity in the 1820s, and echoes with this text would have produced intense emotional resonance. Here, however, the representation of Ourika’s love is heavily overdetermined by the motif of racial purity threatened by miscegenation.40 Significantly, when Ourika is overwhelmed by the realization that she is obsessed by a ‘‘guilty love’’ she understands her earlier desire to attain a place on the great chain of being as a displaced effect of her impossible love: Ce de´ sir de tenir ma place dans la chaine des eˆ tres, ce besoin des affections de la nature, cette douleur de l’isolement, c’e´ taient les regrets d’un amour coupable! (41) [That longing to have a place in the chain of being, that need of natural affection, that agonized fear of isolation—no more than the sour by-products of a forbidden lust? (43)]

The end of the narrative recounts Ourika’s near mortal illness following this revelation of her heretofore unacknowledged love for Charles, and her rescue from imminent death by a priest who offers her a message of possible reconciliation with divine law. However conventional this ending may be, in which a suffering heroine, fatefully illadapted to society, takes refuge in a convent, it nonetheless should also be read as retreating from the issues concerning possible reconfigurations of ethnic and (by implication) gendered identities, that were posed by the heroine in the course of the narrative of the ‘‘disorders’’ of the Revolution. The pious ending of the novella validates positive compo-

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nents of split representations of the ethnic other, enclosed by reconstituted strategies of control. Ourika accepts retreat from society by embracing Christian claims of a higher, universal law, which transcends differences between black and white, accepting God as the goal of all Man.41 She is to enter a new ‘‘family:’’ Je vis qu’en effet je n’avais point connu mes devoirs: Dieu en a prescrit aux personnes isole´ es comme a` celles qui tiennent au monde; s’il les a prive´ es des liens du sang, il leur a donne´ l’humanite´ tout entie`re pour famille. La soeur de la charite´ , me disais-je, n’est point seule dans la vie, quoiqu’elle ait renonce´ a` tout; elle s’est cre´ e une famille de choix. (44) [I realized that I had indeed never recognized my proper responsibilities. God has ordained them to the solitary as much as to those in society. If He has deprived some people of family, He has given them all mankind as a substitute. A nun, I told myself, may have renounced everything, but she is not alone in the world. She has chosen a family. (45)]

Ourika herself thus ambiguously neutralizes and maintains at the same time the threat of eroticized black otherness within the European family. Her decision to turn to the convent indirectly acknowledges this threat to racial integrity: Jouet insense´ des mouvements involontaires de mon aˆ me, j’avais couru apre`s les jouissances de la vie, et j’en avais ne´ glige´ le bonheur. (44) [The unreasoning toy of instinct, I had chased after the pleasures of life and neglected true happiness. (46)]

Here jouissance (pleasures) remains bound to the interdicted, fatefully failed effort to achieve an identity as a ‘‘white’’ or as a black woman within the European family and its society; bonheur (happiness) is associated with renunciation of difference, and desire for an active social existence. Ourika’s final words to Charles, who protests her decision to join the convent, affirms her phobogenic role as a black within the Western family:

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Laissez-moi aller, Charles, dans le seul lieu ou` il me soit permis de penser sans cesse a` vous. (45) [Let me go, Charles, to the one place where I may still think of you day and night. (46)]

Immediately preceding these final words from Ourika, Mme de B. has responded to Ourika’s announcement of her decision to join the convent by acquiescing to her decision and also by a lucid and wrenching self-accusation: Je vous ai fait tant de mal en voulant vous faire du bien, que je ne me sens pas le droit de m’opposer a` votre re´ solution. (45) [I’ve done you so much harm in wishing to do you good. I don’t feel I have the right to oppose you now. (46)]

Ourika is thus removed from the scene of overt cultural intermixing, but her narrative and her final exile remain as the novella’s anxious acknowledgment of the fears that she has inspired. Even though the ethnic other is expelled from the circles of white society, the white protagonists of Ourika are not, as the novella clearly represents them, exempt from modalities of interaction with ‘‘Africa,’’ or with forms of cultural intermixing. The very intensity of cultural anxiety over ethnic difference evoked in Ourika is evidence of the failure to control interethnic relations through exclusion of the nonEuropean Other. In oblique, though effective ways, Ourika confirms the very productive observations made by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness: while the modern world is fragmented along the axis of race conflict and while blacks haunt European modernity’s dreams of ordered civilization, cultural hybridizations that intermix ethnic differences are, in fact, constitutive of Western modernity.42 In the case of Ourika, the novella attests, if obliquely, to the underlying interdependence between French society and the far flung worlds beyond the French hexagon and confirms that Revolutionary and postRevolutionary French society is at the core transnational and intercultural. During the time of the Revolution and its immediate aftermath, concerns for the colonies and de-

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bates over slavery and the rights of the freed men of color, both in the colonies and in France, were pushed aside in favor of concerns directly related to the formation of the French nation state. Concern for blacks and for the rights of their colonial masters were to become secondary to issues felt to be more immediately pressing. It is tempting to interpret Ourika’s exile to the convent in the 1790s as a similar displacement of questions about ethnic identities and about their place in the reforming post-Revolutionary society. That Ourika’s narrative is written in the early 1820s is evidence that the status of the ethnic other and the relation between France and her colonies remain intensely problematic. On the final page of the narrative, Mme de B. bids adieu to Ourika, stating that she cannot oppose her decision to join a convent: Je vous ai fait tant de mal en voulant vous faire du bien, que je ne me sens pas le droit de m’opposer a` votre re´ solution. (45) [I have done you so much harm in wishing to do you good. I don’t feel I have the right to oppose you now. (46)]

Mme de B.’s guilt, expressed in these last words, represents an uneasy awareness of the complex and perverse split representations of the black and of the exclusions which continue to define her in post-Revolutionary society, enduring forms of marginalization that affect both blacks and women. Guilt here serves to endorse racial exclusion as inevitable, yet it affirms Mme de B.’s engagement with ‘‘race’’ in complex if frequently diffuse forms, and by extension, that of French society in general. While the novella can be interpreted as a transposition of the author’s own estrangement from relations of unconditional love, it must also be read as linking ethnicity and gender, raising forcefully a wide range of issues about personal and social identity that remain powerfully active and unresolved during the first decades of the nineteenth century in France.

4 How Herculine’s/Abel’s Story Is Simplified: Bringing Truth to Sexuality in Herculine Barbin

HERCULINE BARBIN IS THE TITLE GIVEN BY MICHEL FOUCAULT TO a confession narrative written by a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite, originally published in a French medical journal in 1874 as ‘‘La question me´ dico-le´ gale de l’identite´ dans les rapports avec les vices de conformation des organes sexuels’’ (‘‘The Medical/Legal Issue of Identity in Relation to Irregular Formation of the Sexual Organs’’) and reissued by Foucault in 1978.1 It is the autobiography of Alexina Herculine Barbin, who lived from 1838 until his/her suicide in 1868. Among the many issues posed in this often melodramatic and naive narrative are complex questions concerning what might constitute a ‘‘true gender’’; how sexuality is regulated and shaped by pedagogical institutions of the mid nineteenth century; how prohibitions are mingled with tolerance and even incitement of transgression in pedagogical institutions, the medical profession, the church, and bourgeois society in general; how the social body institutionalized as heterosexual powerfully resists and expels anomalous subjectivities and bodies. Designated as female at birth, Alexina Herculine was raised as a girl in convent schools, attended normal school, and after passing her certifying exam, became a teacher in a girl’s boarding school. In her early twenties, provoked by increasing emotional suffering and intense, though unexplained physical pain, Alexina Herculine addressed a series of confessions to priests and submitted to medical examinations. When it was determined that Alexina Herculine was not anatomically female, s/he was then instructed 103

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to rectify the ‘‘error’’ of gender assigned at birth and to assume a correct(ed) identity as a male.2 The birth certificate was altered, his/her name changed to Abel; at the same time she was encouraged to relocate to Paris, to abandon the teaching profession and to seek a career as a male. While Foucault’s comments on the text are very brief, limited in the French edition to a few details concerning the celebrity of Alexina’s case at the end of the nineteenth century, his announcement that an entire volume of Histoire de la sexualite´ (History of Sexuality) would be devoted to hermaphrodites indicates clearly the very considerable significance of intersexuality to his ongoing archaeology of sexuality.3 He also situates the narrative as the first in a projected series of texts to be called ‘‘Les Vies paralle`les’’ (Parallel Lives). Alluding to Plutarch and the classical tradition of pairing the accounts of illustrious men, Foucault suggests that the lives to be included in the projected Vies paralle`les, rather than joining in infinity, will remain forever divergent: Souvent elles n’ont eu d’autre e´ cho que celui de leur condamnation. Il faudrait les saisir dans la force du mouvement qui les se´ pare: il faudrait retrouver le sillage instantane´ et e´ clatant qu’elles ont laisse´ lorsqu’elles se sont pre´ cipite´ es vers une obscurite´ ou` ‘‘c¸a ne se raconte plus’’ et ou` toute ‘‘renomme´ e’’ est perdue.4 [Often they have no other echo than that of their condemnation. One must seize them in the force of the movement that separates them. One must recover the momentary and brilliant trace that they have left when they hurled themselves into obscurity in which ‘‘one does not speak about that,’’ where all renown is lost. (my translation)]

Clearly the narrative of Herculine Barbin is to be read intertextually with volume 1 of Histoire de la sexualite´ , published earlier in 1976, yet its placement under the rubric of ‘‘Parallel Lives,’’ suggests that it is distinctive in certain ways from the sexualities elaborated in the Histoire.5 In his preface to the American translation of the narrative, Foucault provides uncharacteristically explicit and positive observations on indeterminate sexuality and gender.6 Her-

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culine becomes the figure of valorized indeterminacy. Foucault notes that throughout the ages hermaphrodites were assigned male or female sex and gender at birth, yet could themselves choose the other sex and gender in adolescence. It was not until the nineteenth century that biological theories of sexuality, juridical conceptions of the individual, and modern administrative systems of control rejected the idea of a mixing of the two sexes in a single body. The question became one of signifying the true gender and of avoiding the ‘‘error’’ of improper identification.7 The case of Herculine points to the tensions existing in the 1860s and 1870s between the two systems for understanding intersexuals, and integrating them into medical, juridical, and other discourses. Foucault states that Herculine experienced her/his sexuality as a ‘‘happy limbo of non-identity’’; he thus valorizes an anomalous gender, neither heterosexual, nor homosexual, but occupying an elusive, liminal, ever shifting ground, ‘‘outside of’’ or ‘‘beyond’’ heterosexual sanctions or prohibitions: One has the impression, at least if one gives credence to Alexina’s story, that everything took place in a world of feelings—enthusiasm, pleasure, sorrow, warmth, sweetness, bitterness—where the identity of the partners and above all the enigmatic character around whom everything centered, had no importance. It was a world in which grins hung about without the cat. (xiii)

In many ways, Herculine/Alexina’s narrative conforms to the major themes of Foucault’s Histoire. The narrator and all participants in the drama recounted concur in assuming that sexuality is the innermost core of identity, the intimate secret; far from remaining silent among the shadows, however, it is subjected to constant invitations to verbal revelation.8 The narrative itself is an example of that general incitement to self-revelation in the exposure of intimate details of sexuality that proliferates throughout the nineteenth century. More specifically, the narrative gives an extensive account of the dynamic relation between the silence on sexuality that prevails in the institutions in which Alexina lived, the convent school, the normal school, and

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the colle`ge where s/he taught, and what Foucault calls the internal discourse of the institution.9 Although ostensibly designed to contain sexuality through a perpetual and multiform alert, the internal discourse everywhere speaks of it, taking form in architectural design, disciplinary rules, the daily regimen of activities, the space of the dormitories, and the regulation of recreational activities.10 My reading of Herculine Barbin will draw upon Foucault’s theory of sexuality elaborated in the Histoire in an effort to show how sexuality emerges in Herculine’s early years within an entirely feminine milieu through interactions with regulatory practices that both interdict and incite sexual activity. This chapter will examine forms assumed by indeterminate gender in the two sequences of the text, the first recounting the first twenty years of Alexina/Camille’s life, and the second, shorter narrative of Abel’s life in Paris, leading to the break in the text that marks his/her suicide; finally, I will advance some observations on the effects of Camille/Abel’s transgressions of ‘‘the laws of man and nature.’’11 This reading questions how her/his sexuality both emerges from those social regulations and yet threatens to disrupt their categories, remaining anomalous and inassimilable.12 I will also question Foucault’s own assumptions regarding the meaning of Herculine’s intersexual status, which take on the value of an emancipating example. Finally, focusing on the pivotal episodes of the narrative, when Alexina Herculine is forced to change gender and civil status, and on the final sequences recounting Abel’s new life in Paris, I will examine the implications and consequences of the failed attempts to redefine and recuperate Alexina Herculine’s/Abel’s sexuality into heterosexual categories and social practices. In short, what are the implications of the shift in the text from the grins hung about in the first part of the text to Abel’s anguished grimaces in the final sections of the narrative? The form of the text, with its climactic turning point at which Camille is induced to change her/his civil status and to assume a new sexual role, an ‘‘authentic’’ sex, by ‘‘becoming’’ male (102), would seem to divide in two both the narrative and his/her sexuality.13 This dyadic structure, one might suppose, would mirror that of the heterosexual re-

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gime mapped as female/male, Ade´ laı¨de/Herculine, Camille/ Abel and sustained by those who counsel Camille, Bishop Monseigneur de B . . . , the doctors, and the civil authorities who effect the change in his/her name and her/his birth certificate. This apparent opposition is reinforced in several ways throughout the narrative and frequently assumed by the narrator, most explicitly in the text in a passage in which Abel, in Paris, summarizes his/her life, prior to embarking upon a new existence in Paris as a male. She recites the principal events and roles of his/her former life and takes on a new identity, signified by dress, and a new civil status. Linguistic indicators—pronouns, nouns, and gender markers—confirm a shift from female to male: Je suis seul! De mon arrive´ e a` Paris, date une nouvelle phase de ma double et bizarre existence. Eleve´ pendant vingt ans au milieu de jeunes filles, je fus d’abord et pendant deux anne´ es, au plus, femme de chambre. A seize ans et demi j’entrais en qualite´ d’e´ le`ve-maıˆtresse a` l’e´ cole normale de . . . A dix-neuf ans j’obtins mon brevet d’institutrice; quelques mois apre`s je dirigeais un pensionnat assez renomme´ dans l’arrondissement de . . . ; j’en sortais a` vingt et un ans. C’e´ tait au mois d’avril. A la fin de la meˆ me anne´ e j’e´ tais a` Paris, au chemin de fer . . .14 [I am alone! My arrival in Paris marks the beginning of a new phase of my double and bizarre existence. Brought up for twenty years among girls, I was at first and for two years at the most a lady’s maid. When I was sixteen and a half I entered the normal school of . . . as a student-teacher. When I was nineteen I obtained my teaching certificate. A few months later I was directing a rather well-known boarding school in the arrondissement of . . . I left it when I was twenty-one. That was in the month of April. At the end of the same year I was in Paris, with the railroad of . . . (98)]

Everything linked to past time, to then, is associated with a feminine world and with feminine roles. In the new identity, Abel enters the fraternity of men, albeit uneasily and painfully isolated: ‘‘Proscrit au milieu de mes fre`res!’’ (lll) [outlawed amidst of my brothers (98)]. While Camille/Abel is clearly subjected to a dyadic defi-

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nition of sex and gender, as the ‘‘error’’ of his/her former gender identity is rectified, Camille/Abel, never assumes decisively or enters fully into an unambivalent place in dyadic heterosexuality, neither in the early years nor subsequently in Paris. While it underlies the entire narrative, this discordance is most apparent in the final pages of the confession, as indicated in this proclamation of his/her intense suffering and status as a stranger or exile in the world of men: .

Le monde que tu invoques n’e´ tait pas fait pour toi. Tu n’e´ tais pas fait pour lui. Dans ce vaste univers, ou` toutes les douleurs ont place, tu y chercheras en vain un coin pour y abriter la tienne. Elle y fait tache. Elle renverse toutes les lois de la nature et de l’humanite´ . (111, emphasis added)15 [The world that you invoke was not made for you. You were not made for it. In this vast universe, where every grief has its place, you shall search in vain for a corner where you may shelter your own, for it would be a blemish there. It overturns all the laws of nature and humanity. (98, 99 emphasis added)]

Abel’s suffering and his/her inability to find work leads ultimately to suicide, and it is far removed from the often euphoric emotions recounted in the first sequences of the text, yet it precedes from the same lack of stable gender identity. While one might easily dismiss the significance of Abel’s grandiloquent cry about his/her intense suffering: ‘‘Elle renverse toutes les lois de la nature et de l’humanite´ ’’ [It overturns all the laws of nature and humanity] with its inflated, ‘‘literary’’ rhetorical tone, I propose to take it seriously, if not literally. Camille/Abel does not actually reverse the laws of nature and culture, inverting dyadic, structured identities, values, and roles, though they are ever apparent and form the institutional frame for her/his life; s/he is a constantly discordant figure who, however unwittingly and naively, poses a threat to the stability of conventional symbolic structures. S/he is asymmetrical to the symbolic structures of her/his society which, in the persons of priest, doctor, judge, and patron, asserts an ultimately deadly imperative to conform to supposedly immutable categories of sex. As examples of a potential fluidity of gender

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his/her body, desires, and actions are denied and excluded from social institutions in which s/he lived. Camille/Abel’s ambivalent relations toward heterosexuality differ in the two sections of the text, yet they are similar in their divergence from heterosexual norms. In the early years lived for the most part in totally feminine milieu, Camille develops emotional and erotic attachments for her/his adult superiors and with several of her companions: Le´ a in the orphanage; Clothilde de R. in a family with which Camille resides briefly; The´ cla in the convent school; and Sara, with whom s/he shares responsibilities for running the boarding school of Mme P., Sara’s mother. These love relationships are indeed transgressive, in that they exceed the limits of propriety institutionally defined, but not in the terms proscribed by social order. Camille him/herself does not identify her/ his desires as either female homosexual or as furtively male. Similarly, in Paris, Abel sees him/herself as a ‘‘foreigner’’ in the world of his/her ‘‘fellow men,’’ and she is tormented by an intense and unrelenting melancholy that perpetuates by incorporation the non-identity of his/her earlier sexual indeterminacy. In the opening sections of the text, preceding the reassignment of Camille’s gender and the renaming of his/her sexual anatomy, one can trace parallel developments within the narrative that, like the parallel lives to which Foucault refers, remain ever divergent. On the one hand are the institutional regimens and the authorities that enforce discipline within the schools, prohibiting sexuality, specifically female homosexual contact among the girls and between the girls and their adult ‘‘mistresses.’’ These prohibitions include direct injunctions against becoming ‘‘too close,’’ and they are stratified throughout the institution, in the disposition of the dormitories, in the daily schedule, and in the organization of recreational activities. These prohibitions are, in fact, part of an ‘‘economic complex where they . . . mingle with incitements, manifestations and valorizations.’’16 On the other hand are the development of Camille’s desire and the increasingly frequent and increasingly intense erotic contacts with his/her favored companions. These desires and activities are never experienced in terms of the supposedly univocal categories of gender of the

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prohibitive law; her/his sense of her/his own gender remains anomalous to its context. Camille never assigns gender identity to her/his desires, first because of profound ignorance about any aspect of sexuality, and then, because they confound any categories available to her/his consciousness. S/he is an avid reader of novels, and, in conformity to the nineteenth-century stereotypes concerning girls who read novels and their supposed proclivity toward promiscuousness, madness, or hysteria, s/he should be expected to pursue erotic contacts.17 Camille does explicitly situate his/her narrative in relation to the novelistic tradition; in an unexpected twist on the sincerity topos in autobiography, however, his/her conventional declaration that his/her story is truer and stranger than fiction, takes on new meaning: Si j’e´ crivais un roman, je pourrais, en les interrogeant, fournir des pages les plus dramatiques, les plus saisissantes qu’aient jamais cre´ e´ es un A. Dumas, un Paul Fe´ val!!! Ma plume ne peut se mesurer a` celle de ces ge´ ants du drame. . . . Quelle destine´ e e´ tait la mienne, oˆ mon Dieu! Et quels jugements porteront sur moi ceux qui me suivront pas a` pas dans cette incroyable carrie`re, que pas un eˆ tre vivant avant moi n’aura parcourue!18 [If I were to write a novel, I could, by consulting them, produce pages that would be as dramatic, as gripping, as any that have ever been created by Alexandre Dumas or Paul Fe´ val!!! My skill as a writer cannot match that of those giants of drama. . . . What a destiny was mine, O my God! And what judgments shall be passed upon my life by those who follow me step by step in this incredible journey, which no other living creature before me has taken! (35)]

Camille proclaims quite unexceptionally that the events of his/her narrative are not the products of a literary imagination and that they strain the limits of vraisemblance, because they are true. More simply, and more radically, however, these statements suggest that there are no narrative models available to Camille that will confirm or valorize his/her desires. Like numerous heroines of nineteenth-century fiction, Mathilde de la Moˆ le in Le Rouge et le noir, or

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Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary, for example, s/he frequently imagines his/her life in terms of literary models, yet s/he finds no representations of him/her yearnings in the catalog of literary stereotypes available to him/her. Finding no confirmation in literary models, Camille’s desires are experienced as intensely dis-ordered. An episode early in the narrative evokes a confusion and an incomprehensibility that is repeated throughout the narrative. During what is described as a terrifying stormy night, at the convent school, Camille seeks comfort and protection in the bed of his/her superior, Soeur Marie des Anges: Mue par un ressort e´ lectrique, j’e´ tais tombe´ e ane´ antie dans les bras de soeur Marie-des-Anges, qui ne put se de´ gager de mon e´ treinte impre´ vue. . . . . . Le premier moment de frayeur apaise´ , soeur Marie-des-Anges me fit remarquer doucement l’e´ tat de nudite´ dans lequel je me trouvais. Certes, je n’y songeais pas, mais je la compris sans l’entendre. Une sensation inouı¨e me dominait tout entie`re et m’accablait de honte. Ma situation ne peut s’exprimer. (40) [Moved as if by an electric spring, I had fallen prostrate into the arms of Sister Marie-des-Anges, who could not disentangle herself from my unforeseen embrace. . . . . . When my first moment of terror had been allayed, Sister Marie-des-Anges gently called to my attention the fact that I happened to be naked. Indeed, I was not thinking of it, but I understood her without hearing her. An incredible sensation dominated me completely and overwhelmed me with shame. My predicament cannot be expressed. (32)]

Having passionately kissed the sister’s hand, Camille regains his/her own bed: ‘‘J’e´ tais partie sans oser jeter les yeux sur ma maıˆtresse. Un de´ sordre complet re´ gnait dans mes ide´ es’’ (41) [I had left without daring to cast my eyes upon my teacher. A total confusion reigned in my thoughts (33)]. That radical confusion is interwoven throughout the

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narrative in repeated manifestations of Camille’s unassimilable difference. The episodes which dominate the first part of the narrative relate an intense and highly pleasurable affair with Sara P., who, under the observation of Sara’s mother, titular head of a boarding school, shared with Camille the duties of running the institution. While the liaison with Sara P. is the most intense and prolonged relationship in the narrative, finally resulting in a confusion of emotional pain and physical suffering that leads to consultations with confessors and medical doctors, each narrative of Camille’s contacts with her/his companions, and of the development and intensification of his/her desires is similar to all others, conforming to a scenario of desire and regulation repeated again and again. There is the presence of 1) a desired companion, generally a school mate, but occasionally an authority figure; 2) a prohibition, either the silent yet pervasive injunction against sexual contact that underlies the architectural disposition of the school and that is reflected in its schedule and regimen of its activities, or an explicit admonition against contact spoken by a school authority; 3) a space of encounter within the institution or ordered by its regimen, generally the dormitory, or during hours of recreation, a garden, a walk among ‘‘les magnifiques alle´ es de ce modeste Eden’’ (21) [the magnificent paths of that modest Eden (14)] or an outing to the beach; 4) a contact, caress, kiss, or embrace. The first attachment recounted is a typical, although undeveloped, prototype of all others. In the Ursuline convent school when Camille is twelve years old, s/he develops a passion for an older companion, Le´ a, whom s/he encounters during recreation in the garden, and frequently at night, though their beds are separated by several others (17–18). They walk, arm in arm, or Camille furtively kisses Le´ a at night in her bed (18). When Camille is surprised by one of the sisters, while making her way at night to Le´ a’s bed, s/he is reported to the superior Sister Ele´ onore. Camille is threatened with a severe punishment, deferral of first communion, but tenderness and encouragement prevail and no sanction is imposed: Je pleurais silencieusement la teˆ te appuye´ e sur l’un de ses bras qu’elle ne retira pas.

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Alors commenc¸a pour moi l’une de ces pieuses exhortations qui re´ ve´ laient toute la grandeur de cette aˆ me vraiment pure et ge´ ne´ reuse. . . . les accents de cette voix aime´ e retentissent de´ licieusement a` mon oreille, et me font battre le coeur. (18–19) [I wept silently, my head leaning against her arm, which she did not withdraw. Then began for me one of those pious exhortations that revealed all the greatness of that truly pure and generous soul. . . . the accents of that beloved voice echo deliciously in my ears and make my heart beat faster. (12)]

Manifestations of authority are everywhere present, everywhere they evoke sexuality. The explicit prohibition, voiced by Sister Ele´ onore, is spoken as a highly ambiguous message, more incitement than interdiction. The extensive narrative recounting Camille’s and Sara’s love affair is the most detailed and longest sequence in the text devoted to Camille’s ambiguous passions. While Camille experiences euphoric physical and emotional enjoyment, s/he is increasingly haunted by guilt and a combination of spiritual and physical anguish leading to the confessions that will provoke the imposed change of gender status. The crisis of revelation is not caused by the pressures of prohibitions against sexuality between the two young lovers from within the institution, or by the ever present surveillance of authorities, whether it be Sara’s mother, or a system of espionage devised by the local cure´ who repeatedly questioned Camille’s and Sara’s students regarding their conduct.19 It can easily be shown that these authorities do not repress sexuality, but, paradoxically, like Sister Ele´ onore, facilitate it. Sara’s mother, the major representative of private and public morality, responsible both for the propriety and honor of her family and also for that of the institution, for example, from the very beginning encourages intimacy between Sara and Camille: L’excellente femme voyait avec la plus grande joie l’intimite´ qui re´ gnait entre sa fille et moi, et nous en re´ compensait par mille attentions. Tout ce qui pouvait flatter nos gouˆ ts, elle nous le re´ servait comme surprise. (58)

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[It was with the greatest joy that the excellent woman saw the intimacy that prevailed between her daughter and myself, and she rewarded us for it with a thousand attentions. She kept for us as surprises all the things we liked to eat. (48–49)]

Throughout this narrative, Camille mentions repeatedly Mme P.’s blindness or her tender complicity with a love that she refuses to recognize as transgressive, even after pointed, yet veiled, revelations from the first doctor who examines Camille.20 I believe that the crisis leading to Camille’s confessions is not brought about by shame toward Sara’s mother, or by guilt resulting from a liaison perceived as lesbian or heterosexual, but, rather, by Camille’s more profound sense of confusion and estrangement from the very categories of heterosexual desires and transgressions. The crisis is provoked by Camille’s confused understanding that his/her desires are, in the words of her mother, inconceivable: ‘‘Camille, me dit-elle, tu as compris, n’est-ce-pas, que tu ne peux t’e´ loigner ainsi de nous. Tes paroles, ta conduite inconcevables exigent une explication que je te supplie de m’accorder.’’ (87) [‘‘Camille,’’ she said to me, ‘‘you’ve understood, haven’t you, that you can’t go away from us like this. Your inconceivable words and behavior call for an explanation, which I beg you to give me.’’ (74–75)]

Among the many senses of the term inconceivable that might be evoked here, there are the common elements of being unavailable to common understanding, of being out of place, and, of course, other resonances that suggest, more literally, being barren, unable to reproduce. In all senses, then, Camille’s torment stems from his/her confused but intense understanding that s/he is anomalous to the categories of the heterosexual regime that constitutes social norms. In a passage reflecting upon his/her transgressions with Sara, immediately following a night spent together in bed, Camille characterizes his/her role as that of usurper; s/he is

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Sara’s amant (male lover) without having proper ‘‘title’’ to that role: je n’avais pas la force de lever les yeux sur Mme P . . . , pauvre femme qui ne voyait en moi que l’amie de sa fille, tandis que j’e´ tais son amant! Une anne´ e s’e´ coula de la sorte! . . . Certes, je le voyais bien, l’avenir e´ tait sombre! Il me faudrait, toˆ t ou tard, rompre avec un genre de vie qui n’e´ tait pas le mien. Mais, he´ las! comment sortir de cet affreux de´ dale? Ou` trouver la force de de´ clarer au monde que j’usurpais une place, un titre que m’interdisaient les lois divines et humaines? (62 emphasis added) [I did not have the strength to raise my eyes to Madame P. Poor woman, she saw me only her daughter’s girlfriend, while in fact I was her lover! A year slipped by in that manner! Indeed, I saw it very well, the future was dark! Sooner of later I would have to break with a kind of life that was no longer mine. But alas! How was I to get out of that frightful maze? Where would I find the strength to declare to the world that I was usurping a place, a title, that human and divine laws forbade me? (52 emphasis added)]

The language of this passage mixes registers conventionally regarded as distinct, the sentimental/sexual and the juridical, and links them to what might be called a failure of inscription. This consciousness of failure derives from a sense of being misplaced in language, and in a wider sense, in law, of being without proper ‘‘title,’’ that pervades the entire text. Here, indeed, there is a crisis in the genre of Camille’s life, for s/he does not belong to the conceptual, legal, or sexual (genre) categories in which s/he participates and in which s/he is presumed to be situated. As Judith Butler has noted in her discussion of this text, the language of usurpation ‘‘suggests a participation in the very categories from which s/he feels inevitably distanced,’’ and also suggests ‘‘the denaturalized and fluid possibilities of such categories once they are no longer linked causally or expressively to the presumed fixity of sex.’’21 Camille has usurped—taken false possession of—a mistress and also of a title, a false

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name (amie) (girlfriend) and, furthermore, is inscribed in a language that literally does not have a place for his/her anomalous being. Camille speaks of his/her situation and gender as an incorrect assignment of place, an error: Ai-je e´ te´ coupable, criminel, parce qu’une erreur grossie`re m’avait assigne´ dans le monde une place qui n’aurait pas duˆ eˆ tre la mienne? (64) [Was I guilty, criminal, because a gross mistake had assigned me a place in the world that should not have been mine? (54)]

The ‘‘error’’ of his/her gender is marked throughout the narrative by an uncertainty of terms referring to his/her identity and role; they are wanderings (errer [to wander]) among available terms, never settling into a single gender. Although Camille initially refers to his/her physical consummation of love for Sara in terms of a masculine mastery, ‘‘Elle e´ tait a` moi!!!’’ [she was mine!!!], that same passage contains feminine adjectives describing her/his emotions. On one occasion when Camille experiences intense physical pain in the abdomen, Sara comforts her/him by sharing Camille’s bed: ‘‘Heureuse de ce pre´ texte . . . je priai un soir mon amie de partager mon lit. . . . J’e´ tais folle de joie!’’ (61) [Happy about this pretext, which was only too true, one evening I asked my friend to share my bed. . . . I was wild with joy! (51)]. This shifting sense of gender is marked throughout this and other episodes in the language of the text. A series of pages in which pronouns, adjectives, and verb agreements are all feminine is followed by uses of the same lexical terms in the masculine. In the sequence narrating the events from first meeting Sara to their night of love, for example (53–61), pronouns and other marked components are all feminine; then (61–62) one finds both masculine and feminine terms (‘‘amie,’’ ‘‘amant,’’ ‘‘fou,’’ ‘‘assis’’ [girl friend, boyfriend, mad, seated]), followed (65) by masculine terms (e.g., ‘‘J’e´ tais arrive´ la` profonde´ ment humilie´ ’’ [I had gone there profoundly humbled (55]), and on page 66, there is a return to the feminine, as scandal threatens: ‘‘j’e´ tais gravement inculpe´ e’’ [I was gravely censured (56)]. Sara herself

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participates in the duplicities of Camille’s shifting gender by referring to her lover in their teˆ te a` teˆ te not only as feminine but also as masculine: ‘‘elle se plaisait a` me donner la qualification masculine que devait, plus tard, m’accorder l’e´ tat civil. Mon cher Camille, je vous aime tant!!!’’ (68) [she took pleasure in using masculine qualifiers for me, qualifiers which would later suit my official status. ‘‘Mon cher Camille, I love you so much!!!’’ (58)]. Camille’s shifting, anomalous gender identity becomes, ultimately, an insurmountable impasse. Returning on a school holiday to the surrogate family of the de Saint M . . . , Camille is burdened by an inner secret and haunted by the fear that it has become ‘‘legible’’ on his/her ‘‘physiognomy’’: Selon mon habitude, j’embrassai M. de Saint M . . . , qui fut frappe´ du changement ope´ re´ dans ma physionomie. Un mieux sensible se lisait dans tout mon eˆ tre. (70) [According to my custom, I kissed Monsieur de Saint-M, who was struck by the change that had been brought about in my appearance. My whole person showed a noticeable improvement. (60)]

The terms used earlier by Camille to refer to both his/her divergence from the codes of gender identity and to an unspecified resolution of his/her anomalous position,’’ ‘‘usurpation’’ of a ‘‘title,’’ and the term ‘‘legibility,’’ in the passage above, all indicate a desire to find a name and an authorized role in a symbolic order that his/her anatomy and sexuality have radically disrupted. S/he seeks a priest to whom to confess her/his secrets, who will serve as a judge, deciding upon the course of her/his existence.22 There are two sequences of confessions and medical examinations; they initially appear to be diametrically opposed in terms of the counsel offered, since in the first passage the priest and the doctor propose to maintain silence about Camille’s anatomical/sexual anomaly, hence deny the difference, and in the second, the counselors initiate measures to ‘‘resolve’’ it by affirmation in an open avowal of a corrected, ‘‘true’’ gender, identified as masculine. It will be seen, however, that the sequences are fundamentally con-

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gruent, for each constitutes a form of denial of Camille’s status as an intersexual, a denial of both anatomical variance from dyadic heterosexuality and of divergent and fluid gender identity. The course of action suggested by the first priest is based on a denial of the ‘‘scandal’’ of his/her identity as a ‘‘male’’: ‘‘vous pouvez, de`s a` pre´ sent, prendre dans le monde le titre d’homme qui vous appartient’’ (72) [you are here and now entitled to call yourself a man in society (62)]. Openly assuming a male identity would cause too great a scandal, however, the priest offers a curious alternative: that Camille enter religious orders as a nun. This denial of gender anomaly, presumably, would preserve the appearance of the conventional symbolic order, upholding the law, while violating it from within. The priest recognizes cannily—if, perhaps, unconsciously or obliquely—that the law depends upon its performance, not upon some material or ontological identity. The threat posed by Camille’s non-identity within the terms of heterosexual order is more directly represented in a subsequent scene devoted to a medical examination. Immediately following the discussion with the priest, Camille returns to the school and to his/her life with Sara, and she continues to experience intense physical pains. A doctor is summoned, and during the course of his examination he manually probes Camille’s abdomen seeking the source of the suffering: Il avait trouve´ l’explication qu’il cherchait! Mais il e´ tait facile de voir qu’elle de´ passait toutes ses pre´ visions. (79) [He had found the explanation that he was looking for! But it was easy to see that it exceeded all his expectations! (68–69)]

The doctor does not offer a diagnosis of the causes of Camille’s pain, for his astonishment literally renders him speechless: ‘‘Des phrases entrecoupe´ es s’e´ chappaient de sa gorge’’ (79) [Sentences escaped from his throat by fits and starts (69)]. In a very literal sense, Camille’s difference represents a threat to the symbolic construction of gender so severe that it is not brought into language. The doctor’s speechlessness is not only the sign of his great astonish-

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ment, but of his inability to speak of a difference so radical as to confound his verbal/conceptual world; a terrifying difference is repressed and displaced from language. The doctor, like the priest, fails to act on his discovery and identify Camille’s condition, by assigning a name and a place for his/ her identity, as s/he anticipates; like the priest, the doctor proposes that s/he leave the school to assume an unspecified alternative place and identity. Although phrased in the naive moral lexicon that characterizes Camille’s entire narration, h/er statements condemning the doctor’s silence and denial reveal indirectly, but with remarkable accuracy, the central dilemma posed by his/her anatomy and gender: s/he is an inassimilable infraction of the laws of an order that naturalizes itself in the sociocultural artifact of the heterosexual body:23 En pareille circonstance, l’inde´ cision n’e´ tait pas permise; elle e´ tait une faute grave, non-seulement vis-a`-vis de la morale, mais aux yeux de la loi. Epouvante´ du secret qu’il avait surpris, il pre´ fe´ ra l’ensevelir a` tout jamais! (81) [In such a circumstance, indecision was not permitted; it was a grave fault, not only morally but in the eyes of the law. Terrified by the secret that he had come upon unexpectedly, he preferred to bury it forever. (70)]

It is not the doctor, who is ‘‘indecisive’’ before the law, for he does in fact affirm the dominance of the heterosexual order by denying an anomalous identity. ‘‘Indecision’’ is fundamental to Camille’s status as an intersexual, however; it is the difference of the hermaphrodite body and sexuality. Camille has sought and been denied an impossible reconciliation with symbolic structures that constitute the bourgeois body, sustained as natural and universal by the institutions of the school, the church, and medicine.24 Camille has violated this nineteenth-century version of ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ by telling the unspeakable and asking the impossible: assignment of a ‘‘proper’’ title and a corporeal and affective identity in a system which invests its integrity in the exclusion of terms that disrupt its dyadic symbolic structures.

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The second series of confessions and medical examinations is more conclusive in its outcome than the first; Camille’s ‘‘supreme cry of distress’’ (88) leads to an official reassignment of gender as a male, sanctioned by the church, the medical establishment, and the courts. Camille enters a new life as Abel. In the sequence preceding the reassignment of gender, Camille visits his/her mother and surrogate family, and is confronted by his/her mother with a request to explain the meaning of Camille’s recently discovered passionate correspondence with Sara. Seeking guidance in resolving his/her untenable position, Camille confesses to Monseigneur de B . . . , who offers both understanding and a referral to his personal physician. In a clear example of the medicalization of sexuality that Foucault and others have identified as a crucial component of nineteenth-century culture and of the overlapping of institutional roles in regulating sexuality, the bishop defers to his doctor. The physician himself assumes the dual role of physician and confessor, and explicitly defines his responsibility as the requirement to answer to his profession, to the church, and to the judicial system: Ici, me dit-il alors, vous ne devez pas seulement voir en moi un me´ decin, mais un confesseur. Si j’ai besoin de voir, j’ai aussi besoin de tout savoir. Le moment est grave pour vous, plus que vous ne le pensez peut-eˆ tre. Je dois pouvoir re´ pondre de vous en toute se´ curite´ , a` Monseigneur d’abord, et sans doute aussi devant la loi, qui en appellera a` mon te´ moignage. (89) [He said to me then, ‘‘Here you must regard me not onlyas a doctor but also as a confessor. I must not only see for myself, I must also know everything you can tell me. This is a grave moment for you with complete assurance, before Monseigneur first of all, and also, no doubt, before the law, which will appeal to my evidence.’’ (78)]

This overlapping of controlling discourses in the testimony of the doctor, in which to see is to know, confirms visually that the dominance of patriarchal order is invested in key corporeal sites, or, one might well add, corporeal sights: testimonium, from testis, witness . . . to virility, and the male reproductive gland. The logic of the doctor’s science, sim-

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ply put is: Camille is not female; s/he is, therefore, male. The doctor then assumes the responsibility of correcting an ‘‘error’’ that exceeds ordinary laws, and of setting right, rectifying, the situation: Il lui restait maintenant a` faire re´ parer une erreur commise en dehors de toutes les re`gles ordinaires. Pour la re´ parer, il fallait provoquer un jugement en rectification de mon e´ tat civil. (90) [It now remained for him to bring about the correction of an error that had been committed beyond the bounds of all ordinary rules. To do so, it was necessary to instigate a judgment that would rectify my civil status. (78)]

Within ordinary laws determining personal and civil gender identity there is no space for the ‘‘error’’ of the indeterminate; the only available possiblities here are determined by binary heterosexual identities, female or male. Camille’s mother, aghast at the enormity of the situation, is consoled with the assurance that, though she has lost a daughter, she has gained a son: ‘‘vous retrouvez un fils que vous n’attendiez pas’’ (90) [you have found a son whom you were not expecting (78)]. Camille’s earlier ‘‘inconceivable’’ words and conduct have been regularized before family, church, medicine, and the judicial system by the imposition of a determinate identity. Although the new status as a male, bearing a new name, Abel, is sanctioned by the patronage of Monseigneur de B . . . , M. de Saint M, the courts, a provincial prefect, and a deputy, among others, it proves to be a fatal alienation.25 Disqualified from exercising his/her profession as a teacher by the irregularities of his/her past life, Abel is counseled to leave the provinces for Paris and to seek a new profession. While the Paris sections of the narrative were edited by Tardieu, and so may be subject to distorting omissions, it is clear that Abel led a solitary and alienated existence in Paris. S/he was unable to secure permanent employment in the enterprises that s/he sought out, a railroad company, a financial enterprise, or as a domestic servant; Abel finally accepts a very subordinate position on a ship in the transat-

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lantic trade. Just before embarking on that new career, s/he commits suicide. Abel describes his suffering endured in Paris as that of a wandering Jew, or, alternatively, of a sadly disinherited person (105), displaced from love and family attachment: Chaˆ timent terrible et sans nom! qui jamais pourra te comprendre. Porter en soi d’ineffables tre´ sors d’amour et eˆ tre condamne´ a` les cacher comme une honte, comme un crime! Avoir une aˆ me de feu et se dire: Jamais une vierge ne t’accordera les droits sacre´ s d’un e´ poux. (105) [What a terrible nameless punishment! Who will ever be able to understand it? To carry in oneself ineffable treasures of love and to be condemned to hide them like a shameful thing, like a crime! To have a soul of fire and to say to oneself: Never shall a virgin grant you the sacred rights of a husband. (92)]

S/he characterizes his/her plight in the lofty vocabulary of romantic suffering, as a conflict between ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘reason’’ (116), between the unspeakable treasures of love hidden by shame (l05), and the restrictions of social order. In a highly inflated rhetorical passage, Abel speaks elsewhere of his/her detachment from the material cares of men, of his/her disembodied soaring above the multitude (112), and haughtily defies their misplaced disdain: ‘‘Et c’est a` moi que vous jetterez votre insultant de´ dain, comme a` un de´ she´ rite´ , a` un eˆ tre sans nom!’’ (113) [And it is upon me that you will cast your insulting disdain, as upon a disinherited creature, a being without a name! (100)]. What s/he fails to comprehend and to articulate, of course, is what proves to be fatal: the killing effects of a bourgeois culture that excludes and dispels anomalous indeterminacy, and of heterosexual roles that have no name or place for the shifting configurations of Camille/Abel’s multiple gender. Abel’s narrative describes a life of constant displacement and wandering (errer) in the streets of Paris, in an enactment, if not an assumption of the persistent ‘‘error’’ of his/ her difference. Although the anomaly of Abel’s gender has been officially set straight, regularized in name and title, the story of his/her troubles and isolation in Paris suggests that s/he remains threatening and eccentric to bourgeois

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order. Abel’s sexuality and character constitute a menace to that valorization of the bourgeois heterosexual body that emerged with the development of bourgeois political hegemony during the nineteenth century. As Foucault has suggested, the self-affirmation of the bourgeoisie was an indefinite expansion of force, vigor, health, and life.26 Affirmation of sexuality and of class identity were coextensive: la classe qui devenant he´ ge´ monique au XVIIIe sie`cle . . . s’est donne´ un corps a` soigner, a` prote´ ger, a` cultiver, a` pre´ server de tous les dangers et de tous les contacts, a` isoler des autres pour qu’il garde sa valeur diffe´ rentielle. [the class which in the eighteenth century became hegemonic . . . provided itself with a body to be cared for, protected, cultivated and preserved from the many dangers and contacts, to be isolated from others so that it would retain its differential value.]27

In the social order of Paris into which s/he is thrown, care and cultivation of the bourgeois body require that it defend itself from the anatomical and affective eccentricities that mark Abel’s body and experience. His/her difference is uniformly interpreted as a challenge to the presumed integrity of the dominant social body. As an otherness within, Abel belies the differential value assumed by the bourgeois body as integral to itself. This exclusion manifests itself in his/ her inability to form liaisons, either professional or personal, that will foster the attributes associated with the social body. S/he cannot marry and procreate, for s/he senses him/herself to be ever excluded from heterosexual love and fertility.28 S/he cannot find a professional position consistent with a bourgeois class status: A charge aux autres et a` moi-meˆ me, sans nulle affection, sans aucune de ces perspectives qui, du moins, viennent illuminer parfois d’un rayon doux et pur le front soucieux de celui qui souffre. Mais non, rien. Toujours l’abandon, la solitude, le me´ pris outrageant. (123) [A burden to others and to myself, without any affection, without any of those prospects that at least sometimes brighten

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with their pure and tender rays the careworn brows of those who suffer. But no, nothing. Always abandonment, solitude, outrageous scorn. (110)]

Abel is thus excluded from two of the most prized forms of class affirmation, reproductive fertility and economic productivity. The social dynamics of Abel’s position is similar to the pathology identified with the hysteric during the same period; like the medical/social diagnosis of hysteria, Abel’s marginalization is brought about in the service of social conservatism. As Janet Beizer has noted in her excellent analysis of the regulation of hysteria in the nineteenth century, unacceptable elements of society are marginalized, ‘‘exiled as mobile, deviant, eccentric.’’29 Abel’s estrangement, like that imposed upon the hysteric, entails a reinforcement of a complex of class values that serve to sustain bourgeois culture. While the first years of Camille’s life represent an ascent from working class origins to a modest position in bourgeois society, Abel’s final brief years in Paris reverse that trajectory, reflecting his/her marginalization from dominant values. A chance encounter with a man s/he had known in years past, an agent for an important shipping company, leads Abel to request a position as a waiter (garc¸ on de salle) on a ship. Both Abel and his/her associate regard this position as socially inferior, yet Abel grasps at the opportunity, desperately seeking a stability unavailable elsewhere.30 S/he thus consigns him/herself to a life displaced from the city, with diminished possibility for permanent affective attachment, constantly travelling, constantly mobile. Abel never embarks upon this new career; the narrative ends with the death by suicide of Abel Herculine Ade´ laı¨de Barbin in February 1868. Following the interrupted autobiographical narrative, three reports that describe and assess the case are included among other documents—records of birth, change of name and sex, press accounts—in an epilogue to the text. Each of the reports asserts with considerable emphasis that Alexina/Abel’s case represents an error corrected and that Abel had been restored to his ‘‘true’’ masculine identity,

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both in terms of anatomical nature and in social role. Each is remarkable also, however, for its revelation of the stress that the case had placed on naturalized representations of gender that takes anatomy to be its witness. All concur in placing blame on the initial ‘‘misassignment’’ of sex, and each avoids the issue of the obvious social intolerance of alternative, anomalous anatomies and alternative gendered practices. As William Connolly has noted in his discussion of the texts in this epilogue, for the contemporary commentators the division between the sexes must be naturalized: so that culturally en-gendered terms of bodily inscription cannot be disrupted or shaken through the multiplication of possibilities that scramble them, so that people will not be pressed to interrogate the confident correspondence between the cultural organization that inhabits them and an intrinsic purpose in nature taken to precede it.31

In the guise of moral generosity or of neutral scientific observation, the texts mask their insistent assertion of the power to exclude. Tardieu’s introduction to his original publication of the narrative in a French medical journal specifies both the dilemma and its official resolution. Alexina/Abel was the victim of an error committed at his birth, the misassignment of sex. During the course of adolescence, the awakening of his/ her senses brings on a crisis that is ultimately resolved by an official ‘‘correction’’ of sex and gender, when Abel assumes his proper, authentic sex as a male: On doit voir la victime d’une semblable erreur, apre`s vingt ans passe´ s sous les habits d’un sexe qui n’est pas le sien, aux prises avec une passion qui s’ignore elle-meˆ me, avertie enfin par l’explosion des sens, puis rendue a` son ve´ ritable sexe en meˆ me temps qu’au sentiment re´ el de son infirmite´ physique, prenant la vie en de´ gouˆ t et y mettant fin par le suicide. (135) [We are about to see the victim of such an error, who, after spending twenty years in the clothing of a sex that was not his own, at the mercy of a passion that was unconscious of itself until the explosion of his senses finally alerted him about the

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nature of it, had his true sex recognized and at the same time became really aware of his physical disability, whereupon, disgusted with his life, he put an end to it by committing suicide. (122)]

Tardieu also suggests that there is a fundamental difference between the appearance of feminine traits and the true sex: ‘‘les apparences du sexe fe´ minin ont e´ te´ pousse´ es bien loin’’ (136) [the appearances that are typical of the feminine sex were carried very far in this case, (123)]. He recuperates that supposedly superficial, but troubling ambiguity by asserting that science and the law ‘‘restore’’ the authentic sex to the young man. Consistent with philosophical and medical definitions of anatomy and gender reaching back to the ancients, the only ‘‘true’’ sex is identified as male, and the feminine is relegated to mere appearance, secondary to the masculine. Tardieu’s discussion thus both affirms cultural presuppositions about sex and gender and, by the supposed objectivity of his scientific discourse, denies that definitions of anatomy are inscribed in and defined by the conventions of culture. The division between sexes and genders is dichotomous and naturalized.32 The report from the examining physician who reassigned Alexina’s sex as male, Dr. Chesnet, discusses in considerable detail the confusion of anatomical attributes that he observed, female as well as male, and directly poses the question: ‘‘Alexina est-elle une femme?’’ (140) [Is Alexina a woman? (127)]. The decisive factors for Dr. Chesnet are the presence of spermatic ejaculation, testicles, and a divided scrotum: Voila` les vrais te´ moins du sexe; nous pouvons a` pre´ sent conclure et dire: Alexina est un homme, hermaphrodite sans doute, mais avec pre´ dominance e´ vidente du sexe masculin. (140, emphasis added) [These are the real proofs of sex. We can now conclude and say: Alexina is a man, hermaphroditic, no doubt, but with an obvious predominance of masculine sexual characteristics. (128, emphasis added)]

Masculine identity here may not require a penis, but it depends on features that are advanced as the guarantor of sex

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and gender, witnesses to authenticity: male reproductive glands and the seed necessary for reproduction. Law, anatomy, and moral and reproductive economy all converge in this discussion to affirm the predominance of social order grounded by the hegemony of the heterosexual. This is also a key issue in a third document, a study published in 1869 by E. Goujon, who performed an autopsy of Abel’s body. He comments on the medical and social history of ‘‘the young man,’’ and notes that the mixture of sexual anatomy was extreme. Goujon advances the results of his own investigation to confirm the judgments made earlier; ‘‘restoration’’ of his ‘‘true sex’’ is at the same time ‘‘restoration’’ of ‘‘his true place in society’’ (143). Sexual identity hinges on the claim that Alexina was capable of ejaculating sperm and thus could enter into marriage and procreate: La procre´ ation e´ tant le but naturel du mariage, Alexina e´ tait porteur des organes caracte´ ristiques de son sexe et dont les fonctions s’exerc¸aient. La disposition des canaux e´ jaculateurs s’opposait a` ce que la semance fut porte´ e directement au fond du vagin; mais l’on sait tre`s bien aujourd’hui que la fe´ condation peut se produire alors meˆ me que le fluide se´ minal impre`gne seulement l’entre´ e du vagin. (153) [Procreation is the natural goal of marriage, and Alexina possessed the organs of his sex and whose functions he exercised. This arrangement of the ejaculatory canals was opposed to the semen’s being carried directly to the bottom of the vagina; but it is very well known today that fecundation can be brought about even when the seminal fluid impregnates only the entrance of the vagina. (143)]

Sexuality is defined by reproductive fertility, which is naturalized as the purpose of the heterosexual family. All three reports acknowledge initially that Herculine/ Abel’s anatomy is complex and that the story of his/her life up to the reassignment of sex and gender is complicated and most unusual, but, presumably, all would agree with this conclusion from the newspaper Inde´ pendant de la Charente-Infe´ rieure, from 21 July 1860: Voila` toute l’histoire, nous ne dirons plus de notre jeune institutrice, mais de notre jeune compatriote: histoire bien simple

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et qui ne peut que lui concilier l’estime, l’inte´ reˆ t de tous ceux qui le connaissent. (156) This is the whole story—we shall no longer say, of our young school mistress, but of our young fellow citizen. It is a very simple story that can only win him the esteem and interest of all who know him. (146)]

Subjected to the correction of scientific analysis and further validated by juridical decision, the errant has become familiar, the pious and innocent deviant has become a compatriot, and the complex personal narrative has become a simple story of heterosexual conformity. The three reports are remarkable for their naively confident intermixing of moral/legal/political registers with scientific, medical description. They are examples of the operations of a politics of gender that influences the evaluation of clinical data and strongly contributes to its production.33 This confusion of discursive registers signals a strong imperative to maintain heterosexual priorities while deflecting examination of the contingent cultural factors that enter into the definitions of sex, the assignment and enforcement of heterosexual gender. The reports consistently reveal what they would contain, however: the threatening anomaly of Alexina/Abel’s anatomy and affective experiences to the heterosexual regime and to the social order that is presumed to depend upon it. Any potentially corrosive effects of admitting and accommodating her/his difference are deferred, ‘‘histoire bien simple’’ [a very simple story]. One can speculate on the disruptive possibilities for reconfiguring anatomical and affective differences by opening up a space for the otherness of Alexina/Abel, and by acknowledging the contingent and ultimately fragile constructions of gender identity. The ‘‘case’’ of Alexina/Abel is witness not to the inevitable need for a ‘‘true’’ sex and gender, or to the possibility of a bucolic indeterminacy of body and desire, but to the multiform and powerful social imperative to defeat or reabsorb the anomalous—such ‘‘errors’’ and differences that, uncannily, might find analogs in ourselves.

III Urban Body, Erotic Body

5 Urban Body, Erotic Body: Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or VARIOUS INTERPRETATIONS HAVE BEEN ADVANCED TO ACCOUNT for the curious coupling in Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes) of the panoramic view of Parisian society in the long preface to the novel and the melodramatic erotic adventure story that is generally taken to be the body of the text.1 The preface presents a panoptic view of contemporary Paris and Parisian society, a ‘‘spectacle,’’ representing social strata and economic distinctions from the lowest to the most lofty, ‘‘les grands.’’ The passage accumulates abundant detail about the activities of this society, and the physical and moral attributes of representative figures—workers, petty bourgeois, the bourgeois, aristocrats, and artists, who constitute a distinct aristocracy of the mind. The second part of the text, a narrative of erotic adventure, is the story of an affair between the beautiful young Henri de Marsay and the exotic Paquita Valde`s, the girl with the golden eyes. It is a story of erotic conquest, displaced sexual identities, murder, and thinly disguised incest. One interpretation of the thematic link between the two segments of the text notes the evident continuity between the narrator’s repeated references in the opening passage to the motor forces of Parisian society, gold and pleasure, the lust for monetary or erotic acquisition, for expenditure in all imaginable forms and the figure of Paquita, the golden eyed beauty coveted by Henri. Paquita would be the embodiment of perfect erotic pleasure, and the narrative is interpreted as the fulfillment of the common drive motivating both contemporary society and the dandy hero of the text.2 A figural link has also been proposed between 131

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the narrator’s repeated allusions in the preface to the infernal circles of Parisian society, since the Balzacian narrator presents himself as a modern day Dante, and the erotic narrative of forbidden or infernal passions.3 A third homology between the two sections has been observed, referring to the descriptions of hierarchies and their laws in both sections. Parisian society is stratified according to lines of demarcation determined by economics and political power, from the lowest worker to the highest of ‘‘les grands.’’ The gendered hierarchy in the story, determined initially by male dominance and subordination of feminine difference can be read as a similar masculinist fantasy of division and order. The struggle that animates the frenetic activities of Parisian society is connected to the sexual struggle according to a ‘‘structure of division’’ which ‘‘organizes the division as an authoritative order.’’4 Shoshana Felman’s detailed and brilliant reading of La Fille aux yeux d’or demonstrates that the male dominated sexual hierarchy in this text is subverted as the narrative unfolds, when Henri discovers that his rival for Paquita is not, as anticipated, a man, but a woman who holds Paquita in bondage: the substitution of woman for man and of man for woman, the interchangeability and the reversibility of masculine and feminine manifests a disorder which subverts the limits and compromises the coherence of the two principles.5

Felman concludes that the male self-identity represented in the novel is both a sexual and a political fantasy ‘‘subverted by the dynamics of bisexuality and by the reversibility of masculine and feminine’’ (31). While concurring with these insightful interpretations of Balzac’s novel, I would like to suggest an alternative reading by exploring in detail the important link between the preface and the narrative based on a fantasy of male mastery and an aversion to ambiguity—cultural, economic, sexual—that undermine it in both sections. My discussion will trace the various components of this fantasy as it is played out in each section of the novel. The impossibility of restoring this hybrid text to thematic or narrative unity is the mark of a ‘‘failure’’ occurring in each section in different

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registers: the apprehension of self-coherent unity.6 On the one hand, in the prologue the narrator’s desire for total knowledge about all aspects of Parisian society and its underlying moral, social, and economic laws remains unfulfilled, and his ambition of elaborating a comprehensive representation of an entire social universe is undermined by its own rhetorical complexities. In the erotic narrative the hero’s assumption of a fantasmatic all conquering masculine identity ends in a catastrophic failure. The ‘‘spectacle’’ of contemporary Parisian society remains partial and incomplete. The erotic narrative concludes in a bloody scene, also referred to as a ‘‘spectacle’’ (345) when de Marsay penetrates his rival’s mansion seeking revenge only to find that he has arrived just after Paquita’s murder. In different, though congruent ways, these two spectacles represent the wreckage of a male fantasy of unified subjectivity, of empowerment and control; both the narrator and Henri, phallocentric subjects, are riven by divisions. In each case a dream of potency, intellectual or erotic, is revealed as flawed. Castration and its denial, it would seem, are at the heart of this text. In the preface, the panoptic vision, the representation of an entire population and an entire epoch remains ever incomplete and partial. In the opening pages of the text, the infernal circles of the Parisian world, lacking a center, spiral ever forward. As Chantal Massol-Bedoin clearly shows, the metaphor of the circle rapidly disintegrates.7 Initially, the circle serves as an image of a perfect form organized around a central point, a center of coherence. The Balzacian narrator, presenting himself as a modern Dante, lays claim to a coherent and comprehensive vision of this new world: Chaque sphe`re jette ainsi tout son frai dans sa sphe`re supe´ rieure. Le fils du riche e´ picier se fait notaire, le fils du marchand de bois devient magistrat. Pas une dent ne manque a` mordre sa rainure, et tout stimule le mouvement ascensioinnel de l’argent. (256) [Thus each sphere directs all its efforts towards the sphere above it. The son of the rich grocer becomes a notary, the son

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of the timber merchant becomes a magistrate. No link is wanting in the chain, and everything stimulates the upward march of money.]8

In this modern urban version of Hell, the divine principle of order is replaced by money, which is said to supply the motivating force for economic productivity and social mobility. The unifying figure of the circle does not hold, however, for spheres are replaced by another radically different figure, the spiral. The figures used to represent a global, panoptic vision of the spectacle of contemporary society yields rapidly to images of an atomized world in perpetual crisis and disorder. Similarly, in the second part of the text, the exemplary, empowered male subject, he who ‘‘has something’’ (‘‘Le jeune homme qui a quelquechose’’ (274) [The young man who has something (56)], unified and centered like the narrator’s fantasized vision, is revealed to be a complex of internal divisions and hybrid sexuality. The coincidence of the penis and the phallus, the central assumption of a fantasy of male potency, is revealed as disastrously flawed, since the passions activated in Henri de Marsay’s affair subvert his heterosexual narrative model.9 The desires that motivate each of the figures in the love triangle played out in the narrative are remarkably diverse and include lesbian and incestuous desires and a sexual duality that drives each of the three protagonists. The opening sentences of the prologue, representing Paris as a spectacle, establish a logic of spectatorship in which the narrator assumes a place of all knowing mastery. The narrator/spectator serenely dominates all that he surveys and presumes to have the capacity to encompass the entire field of urban activity.10 The narrator’s look, however, does not acknowledge its own participation in the spectacle, its own desire for an elusive and ultimately unattainable, all comprehending view of Parisian society.11 The various figures employed by the narrator to represent his comprehensive view of the spectacle displace any underlying, implicit claim to unity and undermine its structural coherence. The spectacle of the Parisian population quickly becomes a ‘‘field’’ shaken by a tempest of interests (245). The

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capital is then referred to as a ‘‘vaste atelier de jouissances’’ (246) [vast workshop of delights (18)]. A few lines below this figure is the first mention of the term Hell and the introduction of a rich lexicon of fire: ˆ le, tout brille, tout bouillonne, tout La` tout fume, tout bru flambe, s’e´ vapore, s’e´ teint, se rallume, e´ tincelle, pe´ tille et se consume. Jamais vie en aucun pays ne fut plus ardente, ni plus cuisante. Cette nature sociale toujours en fusion, semble se dire apre`s chaque oeuvre finie:—A une autre! comme se dit la nature elle-meˆ me. (246) [There all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights up again with shooting sparks, and is consumed. In no other country has life ever been more ardent or acute. The social nature, ever in fusion seems to say after each completed work: ‘‘Pass on to another!’’ (18)]

The entire prologue is marked by a dynamic tension between figures that attempt to represent every aspect of society in geometric terms—circles, spheres, architectural metaphors—fixing each component in a stable hierarchy, and contrasting figures evoking fusion, intermixing, accumulation, or degradation of energy. The ‘‘identity’’ of each social group is precarious, in disequlibrium. The worker labors to gain the salary that will enable him to secure some measure of stability: eh bien, ce sous-chef est venu promettre a` ce monde de sueur et de volonte´ , d’e´ tude et de patience, un salaire excessif, soit au nom des caprices de la ville, soit a` la voix du monstre nomme´ Spe´ culation. Alors ces quadrumanes se sont mis a` veiller, paˆ tir, travailler, jurer, jeuner, marcher; tous se sont exce´ de´ s pour gagner cet or qui les fascine. (248) [Well, this middleman has come to that world of sweat and goodwill, of study and patience, with promises of lavish wages, either in the names of the town’s caprices or with the voice of the monster dubbed speculation. Thus these quadrumanes set themselves to watch, work and suffer, to fast, sweat and bestir them. All step beyond themselves to earn the gold that so fascinates them. (my translation)]

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The worker dissipates this force and wealth, however, in drink and debauchery; his life is an unsteady mix of accumulation and expenditure. This lowest level of Parisian society, the ‘‘active part,’’ by squandering its energy and its will fails to provide a stable base for the levels above (248). The worker’s patron is Vulcan, who serves as an enigmatic figure providing the fire that energizes his work and also the potentially destructive fire of Revolution, which underlies this entire panorama as an inescapable threat to social order: Vulcain, avec sa laideur et sa force, n’est-il pas l’emble`me de cette laide et forte nation, sublime d’intelligence me´ canique, patiente a` ses heures, terrible un jour par sie`cle, inflammable comme la poudre, et pre´ pare´ e a` l’incendie re´ volutionnaire par l’eau-de-vie. (249) [Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation—sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for the madness of revolution. (21–22)]

A premonition of the destabilizing force of the erotic in the novella is provided by a passage on prostitution, establishing at the outset a link between the maintenance of social order and regulation of sexual practices: En comprenant tous ceux qui tendent la main pour une aumoˆ ne, pour de le´ gitimes salaires ou pour cinq francs accorde´ s a` tous les genres de prostitution parisienne, encore pour tout argent bien ou mal gagne´ , ce peuple compte cent mille individus. (249)12 If we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an alms, for lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of Parisian prostitution, in short for all money well or ill earned, this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. (22)]

The sphere representing the bourgeoisie is itself divided between the petty bourgeoisie, the mercier, allied with the

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proletariat and with the professional middle class, lawyers, doctors, notaries, businessmen, bankers, financial speculators, etc. All here are menaced by degeneracy, brought on by an undivided attention to their specialized activities: ‘‘Ils s’usent et se de´ moralisent . . . ils ne sentent plus. . . . Emporte´ s par leur existence torrentueuse, ils ne sont ni e´ poux, ni pe`res, ni amants; ils glissent a` la ramasse sur les choses de la vie, et vivent a` toute heure pousse´ s par les affaires de la grande cite´ ’’ (257) [They wear themselves out; they become demoralized. . . . they feel no more. . . . Borne along by their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers; they glide on sledges over the facts of life, and live at all times at the high pressure conduced by business and the vast city (my translation)]. Implicitly, the vitality of bourgeois society requires a vigorous, healthy constitution, yet its activities vitiate the very power and health upon which its well-being rests: Aussi leurs figures offrent-elles cette paˆ leur aigre, ces colorations fausses, ces yeux ternis, cerne´ s, ces bouches bavardes et sensuelles ou` l’observateur reconnaˆ it les symptoˆ mes de l’abaˆ tardissement de la pense´ e et sa rotation dans le cirque d’une spe´ cialite´ qui tue les faculte´ s ge´ ne´ ratives du cerveau, le don de voir en grand, de ge´ ne´ raliser et de de´ duire. (258) [So, too, their faces present the harsh palor, the deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished eyes and garrulous, sensual mouths, in which the observer recognizes the symptoms of the degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the circle of a special idea which destroys the creative faculties of the brain and the gift of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. (34)]

There is a congruent menace to corporeal integrity and to fully potent cognition and mental creativity; the threatened weakening of bourgeois bodies undermines the integral strength of self, failing to maintain its purity (abaˆ tardissement, degeneracy), or to successfully govern ‘‘generative faculties.’’ The crisis of the narrator’s overarching capacity to apprehend and fix in a tableau the meaning of the world he describes throughout the prologue is paralleled by symptoms affecting the bourgeoisie by menacing ‘‘le don de

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voir en grand, de ge´ ne´ raliser et de de´ duire’’ (258) [the gift of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing (34)]. Artists, in Balzac’s Paris, constitute a class of their own, a fourth sphere above the bourgeoisie; they too are divided from within, their energies split between their creative work, their art, and the relentless imperative to make money, to pay their creditors (260). Desire divides the artist between producing art and engendering debts: ‘‘ses besoins enfantent les dettes, et ses dettes lui demandent ses nuits’’ (260) [His necessities beget his debts, and his debts require of him his nights (35)]. Artists are thus split by a double economy, the productive economy of their genius (l’art, la gloire, art, fame) and the expenditures occasioned by their worldly desires (le monde, l’argent, society, money). The narrator’s project of producing a comprehensive spectacle of Parisian society thus depends on a subject that is itself a complex process, ever in flux, marked by division and lack. Before turning to the main episodes of the erotic narrative, I would like to explore briefly the final view of Paris in the last pages of the prologue and to look also at the first pages of the narrative, which present the central protagonist’s genealogy and childhood education. The prologue ends with a familiar Balzacian rhetorical tautology; the narrator asserts that Paris must be as it has been represented, that it is as it is: ‘‘Cette vue de Paris moral prouve que le Paris physique ne saurait eˆ tre autrement qu’il n’est’’ (263) [Such a view of moral Paris proves that physical Paris could not be other than it is (39)]. This assertion that a complete representation of Paris has been attained signals a general imperative that underlies Balzac’s realism, as Roland Barthes has noted: the imperative of the text to finish, join, unify, responding to a horror of the incomplete.13 Following this declaration, a series of allegorical personifications, though drawn from the stock of traditional figures for describing the city, promptly undoes the narrator’s authoritative claims. Paris is: une reine qui, toujours grosse, a des envies irre´ sistiblement furieuses . . . la teˆ te du globe, un cerveau qui cre`ve de ge´ nie et conduit la civilisation humaine, un grand homme, un artiste incessamment cre´ ateur, un politique a` seconde vue. . . . Sa phy-

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sionomie sous-entend la germination du bien et du mal, le combat et la victoire. (263) [This coronetted town is like a queen, who, being always with child, has desires of irresistible fury . . . the crown of the world, a brain which perishes of genius and leads human civilization; it is a great man, a perpetually creative artist, a politician with second sight. . . . Its physiognomy suggests the evolution of good and evil, battle and victory. (390]

The city thus lacks a single head, a single source of authority; its body is a many headed being, woman (queen), man (‘‘un grand homme . . . artiste’’ [a great man . . . artist]) constantly creative, uncontrollably energetic. These traditional figures of the city, then, function allegorically in odd ways to exceed the visual and moral truths that they seem to promise: the central figure personifying the city is many figures, a sublime monster. The rest of the passage is no less of a rhetorical tour de force, and it also reiterates a traditional allegory: the city is a sailing vessel, not as it appears on contemporary seals of the city of Paris,14 but as a pyroscaphe, a steam driven ship, with Napoleon serving as lookout at the masthead: Cette nauf a bien son tangage et son roulis; mais elle sillone le monde, y fait feu par les cent bouches de ses tribunes, laboure les mers scientifiques, y vogue a pleines voiles, crie du haut de ses huniers par la voix de ses savants et de ses artistes;—‘‘En avant, marchez! suivez-moi!’’ (263–64) [The bark may roll and pitch, but she cleaves the world, illuminates it through the hundred mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the seas of science, rides with full sail, cries from the height of her tops, with the voice of her scientists and artists: ‘‘Onward, advance! Follow me!’’] (40)

The various classes of Paris evoked earlier man the ship, though in a rather alarming disorder; there are cabin boys in the rigging; the ‘‘lourde bourgeoisie’’ provide ballast; contented passengers relax in the cabins; soldiers and ‘‘innovators’’ are on deck. Paradoxically, the lookout, the guide of the entire enterprise, Napoleon, had earlier been pre-

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sented in defeat as the powerful and exemplary, though failed, historical figure leading the search for new order and direction. This remarkable passage, thus, like the ‘‘spectacle’’ of the city and its inhabitants in the preceding pages makes sweeping claims to provide a comprehensive and truthful representation of contemporary Paris, yet it succeeds admirably in quite different ways: the allegorical figures advance multiple and diverse meanings, presented in open-ended enumeration in contrasting terms: female, male; head, body; human, machine. The summary allegorical representations are driven by the excess of meaningful activities, yet, lacking defined and recognized principles of organization, their meaning is derived not from the unity of the figures animating the allegory, but from their surprising and vitalizing heterogeneity. Valorized heterogeneity and vital incompleteness provide a useful transition between the closing pages of the prologue and the first pages of the narrative. Henri de Marsay, the central male protagonist, is described from the outset as a complex mix of diverse traits, like the city of Paris in the prologue. Presented as a perfect figure of masculine beauty, the effect of his appearance on women is described in ways that, from the very first, link his beauty to femininity: Aussi les femmes admirent-elles aussitoˆ t ces jeunes gens avec ce plaisir avide que prennent les hommes a` regarder une jolie personne, de´ cente, gracieuse, de´ core´ e de toutes les virginite´ s dont notre imagination se plait a` embellir la fille parfaite. (266) [So women, too, admire such young people with that eager pleasure which men take in watching a pretty girl, elegant, gracious, and embellished with all the virginal charms with which our imagination pleases to adorn the perfect woman. (43)]

Women enjoy his appearance as men enjoy the sight of a beautiful woman. In this specular scenario, Henri assumes a passive role, the (feminine) object of a scopophilic gaze. Physically, Henri combines features from both his father and his mother: De son pe`re, lord Dudley, il avait pris les yeux bleus les plus amoureusement de´ cevants; de sa me`re, les cheveux noirs les

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plus touffus; de tous deux, un sang pur, une peau de jeune fille, un air doux et modeste, une taille fine et aristocratique, de fort belles mains. (271) [From his father, Lord Dudley, he had derived a pair of the most amorously deceiving blue eyes; from his mother the bushiest of black hair; from both pure blood, the skin of a young girl, a gentle and modest expression, a refined and aristocratic figure, and beautiful hands. (52)]

From the outset, thus, Henri is not an unambiguously male figure, but a complex persona in whom conventionally opposed genders are intermixed. Like the city of Paris, he is characterized by the mobility and excess of his defining features. Henri’s origin is also an unstable mix of differences that is never subjected to an unambiguous, masculine paternal authority.15 The description of his origins and childhood education is an amusing and complex amalgam, summarized by the narrator: ‘‘La paternite´ de M. de Marsay fut naturellement tre`s incomple`te’’ (268) [The paternity of M. de Marsay was naturally most incomplete (49)]. Henri is the love child of an English nobleman, Lord Dudley and the ‘‘celebrated’’ Marquise de Vordac. Lord Dudley, having no interest in assuming domestic responsibilities as a husband or a father, marries off Henri’s young mother to an old gentleman, M. de Marsay, who accepts the child as his own in exchange for a handsome yearly income. The Marquise, however, takes no interest in the child, and, when war between England and France separates the love parents, the vice-ridden M. de Marsay consigns the boy to the care of a virtuous maiden sister, ‘‘une demoiselle de Marsay.’’ The only parental nurturing extended to the boy is exercised by yet another surrogate, an impecunious cleric, who becomes his preceptor, l’abbe´ de Maronis. From him Henri will receive a cynical and profoundly worldly education: il le nourrit de son expe´ rience, le traina fort peu dans les e´ glises, alors ferme´ es; le promena quelquefois dans les coulises, plus souvent chez les courtisanes; il lui de´ monta les sentiments humains pie`ce a` pie`ce; lui enseigna la politique au ` elle se roˆ tissait alors; il lui nume´ rota les coeur des salons ou machines du gouvernement. (269)

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[he nourished him on his experience, led him little into churches, which at that time were closed; introduced him sometimes behind the scenes of theatres, more often into the houses of courtesans; he exhibited human emotions to him one by one; taught him politics in the drawing-rooms, where they simmered at the time; explained to him the machinery of government. (49– 50)]

Although the narrator notes in conclusion that the abbot strove to ‘‘virily replace’’ his mother, the cleric is implicitly a sexually neutral figure. In this interplay of paternal/maternal substitutes there is no stable culturally sanctioned principle of authority; ‘‘fathering’’ and ‘‘mothering’’ are performed by sexually neutered subjects, an old maid and an aging cleric. The scenario is further complicated by the not too veiled suggestion that Henri’s biological father enjoys a homosexual, incestuous desire for his son. He encounters Henri by chance after being forced to leave England for behavior euphemistically referred to as ‘‘oriental’’: ‘‘afin d’e´ viter la justice anglaise qui, de l’Orient, ne prote`ge que la marchandise’’ (272) [to take refuge from the pursuit of English justice, which protects nothing Oriental except commerce’’ (54)]. Inquiring about the identity of this handsome young man and learning that he is his own son, Lord Dudley proclaims: ‘‘Ah, c’est mon fils, quel malheur!’’ (273) [Ah, its my son . . . what a pity! (54)]. The allusion to ‘‘English’’ vices imported from the Orient and to the lord’s professed disappointment on learning that the beautiful young man is his son are clear. This passage, thus, introduces the motif of incest into the narrative from the very beginning as well as the motif of homosexual desire, which it deflects with an amusing euphemism. Destabilized family relations are further complicated in these opening pages by the inclusion of Henri’s sister among the progeny abandoned by Lord Dudley: Son second chef-d’oeuvre en ce genre fut une jeune fille nomme´ e Euphe´ mie, ne´ e d’une dame espagnole, e´ le´ ve´ e a` la Havane, ramene´ e a` Madrid avec une jeune cre´ ole des Antilles, avec les gouˆ ts ruineux des colonies. (272) [His second masterpiece of this kind was a young girl named Euphe´ mie, born of a Spanish lady, reared in Havana, and

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brought to Madrid with a young Creole woman of the Antilles, with all the ruinous tastes of the Colonies. (53–54)]

There is no hint in this passage of the origin or meaning of the daughter’s unusual name, Euphe´ mie, other than the association between euphemism and the father’s errant sexual disposition. The identity attached to this name and the role of the sister in the narrative about to unfold are, of course, key issues in the text. Euphemism, it will be seen, returns at the end of the novel in a way that paradoxically plays with realist conventions of narrative closure, yet conserves an unspoken alterity within the dominant fiction of social order. The society in which Henri is born and educated knows no culturally naturalized order; filial and paternal relations are not linked conventionally to biological relations, but, rather, are set in a complex of surrogate roles, a hybrid mix of cultures and ambiguously gendered subjects. In one sense this indeterminacy confers upon Henri a fantasmatic freedom: he appears to enter the adult world free from the law of castration. The consequences of this imaginary phallic potency will be a key issue in the novel. To summarize this intricately fragmented complex of paternal, maternal, and filial connections, I note the striking disarray of social bonds: father, mother, son, brother, daughter, and sister neither have any mutually acknowledged familial ties nor assume any recognized social bond between them. Furthermore, and this will be a key issue in this novel, gender is not linked to cultural rituals: there is no apparent or implicit culturally acknowledged principle of authority determining gender identity. The novel cannily situates two of its central protagonists, Henri and Euphe´ mie, whose role will be veiled yet decisive, in an ambiguous relation to this void in the symbolic system of gender relations. At the beginning of the story Henri is represented as a beautiful, genteel, masculine free agent, lacking in principle and ‘‘free’’ to pursue and assuage any sexual desire: Vers la fin de 1814, Henri de Marsay n’avait donc sur terre aucun sentiment obligatoire et se trouvait libre autant que l’oiseau sans compagne. (271)

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[Towards the end of 1814, then, Henri de Marsay had no sentiment of obligation in the world, and was as free as an unmated bird. (52)]

The narrative itself begins as Henri de Marsay is strolling in the Tuileries; he is a flaˆ neur observing everything, available to any chance erotic encounter. He is represented from the outset as a predator: Que fais-tu donc ici le dimanche?’’ dit a` Henri le marquis de Ronquerolles en passant. Il y a du poisson dans la nasse, re´ pondit le jeune homme. (273, emphasis added) [What are you doing here on Sunday?’’ said the Marquis de Ronquerolles to Henri, as he passes. ‘‘There’s a fish in the net,’’ answered the young man. (55)

Public space is the space of erotic availability and Henri is positioned as an empowered male subject.16 He brutally asserts his phallic potency in this brief exchange with the Marquis in a context which immediately links his sexual aggression to his masterful, all-knowing gaze. This relation between the gaze and knowledge is congruent to that in the preface, providing a link between the two sections of the text; it will be central to the erotic narrative. The gaze here is constitutive of male identity and power, intimately linking looking and knowing, in a process that Peter Brooks in his discussions of realist representation calls ‘‘epistemophilia.’’17 This all-knowing gaze establishes the basis for Henri’s exercise of erotic mastery over the feminine object of desire and also serves to introduce obliquely the basis for its undoing. Henri’s second encounter during this Sunday excursion is with his friend, Paul de Mannerville, and their conversation introduces the erotic narrative. Henri reveals that he is seeking an encounter with a girl whose beauty had stunned him earlier: Je me trouve nez a` nez avec une femme, ou plutoˆ t avec une jeune personne qui, si elle ne m’a pas saute´ au cou, fut arreˆ te´ e,

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je crois, moins par le respect humain que par un de ces e´ tonnements profonds qui coupent bras et jambes. (280) [I came face to face with a woman, or rather with a young girl, who, if she did not throw herself at my head, stopped short, less, I think, from human respect, than from one of those movements of profound surprise which affect the limbs. (64)]

The encounter is represented here unremarkably as a coup de foudre, yet it is also important to note that, beyond the familiar terms used to describe such meetings, the masterful erotic gaze directed to the woman does not fix a passive, narcissistic feminine object but animates an intense and threatening reaction, implicitly castrating: qui coupent bras et jambes (literally: ‘‘to cut off arms and legs’’). There is in this passage a nexus of presuppositions about the relationship between the desiring male and the beautiful girl who is the object of his desire: seeing her introduces the possibility of knowing her identity, learning the story of her closely guarded life in Paris, and possessing her sexually. The empowered erotic gaze in the passage above is vulnerable to several implications undermining its potency, however, as the continued description of the encounter suggests, adding further to the implicit threats to male mastery even as it is asserted. Henri has the beautiful young woman speak her desire; as he imagines it: sa figure semblait dire: ‘‘Quoi, te voila, mon ide´ al, l’eˆ tre de mes pense´ es, de mes reˆ ves du soir et du matin. Comment es-tu la`? pourquoi ce matin? pourquoi pas hier? Prends-moi, je suis a` toi, et coetera!’’ (280, emphasis added) [her face seemed to say: ‘‘What, it is you, my ideal! The creation of my thoughts, of my morning and evening dreams! What, are you there? Why, this morning? Why not yesterday? Take me, I am thine, et cetera!’’ (64)]

The woman here speaks of desire in the voice of the male; she is, to use Janet Beizer’s suggestive phrase, a ‘‘ventriloquized body.’’18 From the outset in this novel the woman’s body gives voice to man’s desire, as in the passage above, or becomes the site upon which it is inscribed. In either case,

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feminine difference is implicitly denied and subordinated to a male centered scenario. The drama throughout the narrative will emerge as this subordination is undermined and even reversed. The overt plot of masculine conquest progressively disengages another narrative, formed by the complex effects of feminine difference. The passage just quoted and one following it introduce key components upon which the narrative will turn. The description of the woman fixes upon her startlingly beautiful eyes: Ah!, mon cher, physiquement parlant, l’inconnue est la personne la plus adorablement femme que j’aie jamais rencontre´ e. Elle appartient a` cette varie´ te´ fe´ minine que les Romains nommaient fulva, flava, la femme de feu. Et d’abord, ce qui m’a le plus frappe´ , ce dont je suis encore e´ pris, ce sont deux yeux jaunes comme ceux des tigres; un jaune d’or qui brille, de l’or vivant qui pense, de l’or qui aime et veut absolument venir dans votre gousset! (281) [Ah, my dear fellow, speaking physically, my incognita is the most adorable feminine person whom I ever met. She belongs to that feminine variety which the Romans call fulva, flava—the woman of fire. And first, what struck me the most, what I am still taken with, are her two yellow eyes, like a tiger’s, a golden yellow that gleams, living gold, gold which thinks, gold which loves, and is determined to take refuge in your pocket. (my translation)]

This woman, who speaks the man’s ventriloquized desire, is an ideal vision of the erotic object, as subsequent passages constantly reiterate; yet as an ideal she is necessarily an imaginary construct. Her identity is concentrated metonymically in her exceptional golden eyes; capturing her gaze promises possession of her entire person. The eyes, however, are linked with potential violence, for they are tiger’s eyes. By fetishizing the woman, fixing Henri’s desire on a fragment of her body, the passage opens up numerous questions concerning the hero’s relation to castration. The phallic ideal is implicitly put in question by the fetishistic desire that arises in pursuit of its object. In Freud’s scenario of the origins of fetishistic desire, the apprehen-

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sion of sexual identity for the young (male) child turns on the assumption that all persons are like himself and have a penis. The child’s perception of an unexplained difference, the absence of a penis in the female body, particularly the mother’s body, is rationalized by a compromise solution. The missing object is replaced by another, a substitute object that fulfills the role of the absent penis, a shoe, a piece of fur, a scarf—golden eyes, which stands in imaginary relationship to the penis. This substitution permits the fetishist to deny a threat to his own penis, since if he were to admit its absence in others he would also have to admit to the possibility that he himself might be threatened with its loss. Sexual difference is thus explained in a scenario that also denies it: she is different, but she is also the same. The erotic narrative in La Fille aux yeux d’or turns on an analogous process of affirmation and denial, implicating both Henri and the girl with the golden eyes and also that absent participant, Henri’s rival. Just as Henri is represented as a fully empowered subject, his ideal woman is equally exempt from the law of castration. Henri belongs to the class of those who ‘‘have something’’ (274) and the girl with the golden eyes is ‘‘woman herself:’’ c’est toute la femme, un abime de plaisirs ou` l’on roule sans en trouver la fin. . . . c’est la femme ide´ ale’’ (282, emphasis added) [it is the whole woman, an abyss of pleasure into which one plunges and finds no end . . . it is the ideal woman’’ (67)]. Furthermore, as will be seen later, a central component of the enigma of the girl’s identity for Henri is her literal ignorance of sexual difference. In an odd way, the narrative plays out a discovery of sexual difference that is centered not only on the figure of the woman—Paquita, Henri learns, does not know male sexuality—but implicates the male protagonist as well. Henri’s phallocentric identity at the beginning of the text will be undone in the course of the narrative by his contact with a complex femininity as he engages not only with Paquita’s femininity but with his own as well. In the conversation between Henri and Paul de Mannerville, quoted above, Henri dismisses an apparently parenthetical series of comments from his companion about a second, remarkably beautiful woman. Because his atten-

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tion focuses obsessively upon the girl with the golden eyes, he refuses to consider the other woman, who is, in fact, his feminine double; that refusal, of course, will lead to the adventure with the girl with the golden eyes and to the catastrophic denouement of the narrative. After recognizing the girl with the golden eyes from Henri’s description, Paul asserts that she is frequently accompanied by another woman, ‘‘une femme qui vaut cent mille fois qu’elle’’ (281) [but with a woman who was worth a hundred thousand of her (65)]. In spite of Henri’s professed disinterest, Paul provides an extensive description of her: Ah! l’autre! mon cher de Marsay. Elle vous a des yeux noirs qui n’ont jamais pleure´ , mais qui brulent; des sourcils noirs qui se rejoinent et lui donnent un air de durete´ de´ mentie par le re´ seau plisse´ de ses le`vres, sur lesquelles un baiser ne reste pas, des le`vres ardentes et fraiches; un teint mauresque auquel un homme se chauffe comme au soleil; mais, ma parole d’honneur, elle te ressemble. (281–82) Ah, the other, my dear de Marsay! She has black eyes which have never wept, but which burn; black eyebrows which meet and give her an air of hardness contradicted by the compact curve of her lips, on which the kisses do not stay; lips burning and fresh; a Moorish color that warms a man like the sun. But— upon my word of honor, she is like you! (65–66)]

The identity of this second woman contributes a second element to what Barthes has called a hermeneutic code, a narrative enigma woven into the plot and resolved at its conclusion. The knowledge that Henri refuses to consider will be a principal theme throughout the text, knowledge about a different woman, about relations between women, about feminine difference in general, and about the implications of the resemblance between himself and the other woman. If Henri is represented in the passages discussed above as an empowered, phallic male whose fetishistic fantasies preserve intact an identity unchallenged by overt questions about his vulnerability to the law of castration, it is important to note as well that other details in the introductory pages of the narrative put in question this identity. In an ex-

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tensive scene in chapter two, he plays a traditionally ‘‘feminine’’ role as he prepares his assault on the girl with the golden eyes. The narrator first describes him in a cascading series of stereotypical attributes of masculine strength. ‘‘Armed’’ with these attributes, he is assured of triumph: Et que faudrait-il donc penser d’une femme sans amant, qui aurait su re´ sister a` un jeune homme arme´ de la beaute´ qui est l’esprit du corps, arme´ de l’esprit qui est une grace de l’aˆ me, arme´ de la force morale et de la fortune qui sont les deux seules puissances re´ elles? Mais en triomphant aussi facilement, de Marsay devait s’ennuyer de ses triomphes; aussi depuis environ deux ans s’ennuyait-il beaucoup. (290) [And what could one think of a woman, having no lover, who should have known how to resist a young man armed with beauty which is the intelligence of the body, with intelligence which is a grace of the soul, armed with moral force and fortune, which are the only two real powers? Yet, in triumphing with such ease, De Marsay was bound to grow weary of his triumphs; thus, for about two years he had grown very weary indeed. (75)]

In the scene immediately following this description, Henri prepares his toilette before the admiring gaze of his companion, Paul de Mannerville. In the logic of spectatorship characteristic of this text, he plays a feminized role. He is the object of a male’s gaze as he preens and adorns himself in front of his mirror and before his friend, while he expounds upon a theory of ‘‘foppishness.’’ As Henri dresses himself, Paul questions this ‘‘unnatural’’ attention to his appearance: explique-moi pourquoi un homme supe´ rieur autant que tu es, car tu es supe´ rieur, affecte d’outrer une fatuite´ qui ne doit pas eˆ tre naturelle en lui. (292, emphasis added) [explain to me why a man as superior as yourself—for you are superior—should effect to exaggerate a foppery which cannot be natural. (78)]

Henri’s explanation of his excessive attention to his appearance is that women love such conceited men (le fat):

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Mon ami les fats sont les seuls hommes qui aient soin d’euxmeˆ mes. Or, avoir trop soin de soi, n’est-ce pas dire qu’on soigne le bien d’autrui? L’homme qui ne s’appartient pas est pre´ cise´ ment l’homme dont les femmes sont friands. (293) [My friend, fops are the only men who take care of themselves. Now, to take excessive care of oneself, does it not imply that one takes care in oneself of what belongs to another? The man who does not belong to himself is precisely the man on whom women are keen. (79)]

This remarkable and enigmatic passage suggests that Henri’s masculine self-possession is effective precisely to the extent that it is lost, that he becomes the property (‘‘le bien’’) of another, and that he no longer is in full possession of himself (‘‘ne s’appartient pas’’). Further on in the discussion of fatuousness, the dispossession of self is linked to Henri’s acceptance and cultivation of a difference that is quite properly feminine: Un fat qui s’occupe de sa personne s’occupe d’une niaiserie, de petites choses. Et qu’est-ce que la femme? Une petite chose, un ensemble de niaiseries. (293) [A fop, who is concerned about his person, is concerned with folly, with petty things. And what is a woman? A pretty thing, a bundle of follies. (79)]

The ‘‘little thing’’ that the fatuous man concerns himself with bears quite specifically the mark of the feminine: the silliness or inaness that is said to be the property of women. The expression ‘‘little thing,’’ of course, has another rather obvious resonance as a euphemism in the context of this discussion of identity and gender. In Freud’s well-known discussions of childhood sexuality, children’s early perceptions and conceptualizations of anatomical difference, the little girl’s organ is frequently referred to as a little thing, insignificant in the eyes of either the male or female child when compared to the penis. In Freud’s scenario, the little girl’s visible sex is a ‘‘small and inconspicuous organ,’’ analogous, yet inferior, to the male child’s penis.19 The ‘‘little thing,’’ to return again to Freud, that the fetishist refuses to

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see, a woman’s sex, the ‘‘castrated’’ form of the male’s penis, a ‘‘nothing’’ that provokes such anxiety, reemerges in Balzac’s dialog in Henri’s own body. The erotic narrative itself, as this passage affirms, overtly denies castration, nonetheless, like the fetishist’s story, affirms it at the same time. Before the sequences in which the two lovers encounter each other, Henri affirms and embraces his ‘‘own’’ femininity. While the subsequent encounters engage him in certain theatricalized feminine roles, it is his failure to recognize the intermixing of gendered traits and the absence of definite and stable boundaries between feminine and masculine that drive the narrative and lead to its violent denouement. The first of the three amorous meetings between Henri and Paquita is set in a context that affirms Henri’s (and the reader’s) anticipations about conventional, melodramatic narratives of forbidden love and improbable obstacles.20 Under a fictitious name, Henri writes Paquita a letter which he sends with two bottles, one of opium and one of ink, so that she might both drug her guardian and reply to his letter. Paquita’s response reaffirms Henri’s anticipations that he is entering a plot thick with mystery, drugs, and passion. She sends an emissary, a gigantic mulatto, who speaks only a certain Spanish patois, and an interpreter, who translates Paquita’s message relayed by the servant. She instructs Henri to appear the following evening on the Boulevard Montmartre, where a waiting carriage will transport him to Paquita, and she warns that he must proceed with the greatest caution or both will meet a violent death, struck down by daggers. Henri cynically interprets the plan and the death threat as the excesses of a woman’s imagination: ‘‘une adventure bien romanesque’’ [an adventure straight out of a novel (my translation)]: Gentille cre´ ature, va, saute. Mourir? pauvre enfant! Des poignards? imagination de femmes! Elles sentent toutes le besoin de faire valoir leur petite plaisanterie. D’ailleurs on y pensera, Paquita! on y pensera, ma fille! Le diable m’emporte, maintenant que je sais que cette belle fille, ce chef-d’oeuvre de la nature est a` moi, l’aventure a perdu de son piquant. (301–2) [Pretty creature, jump then! To die? Poor child! Daggers? Oh, imagination of women! They cannot help trying to find author-

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ity for their little jests. Besides, can one think of it, Paquita? Can one think of it my child? The devil take me, now that I know this beautiful girl, this master piece of nature, is mine, the adventure has lost its charm. (89–90)]

Henri’s misreading of the situation is based on his glib refusal to admit any narrative of desire different from the one that he anticipates: a sexual scenario based on binary gender opposition in which the woman submits to a man who is empowered to conquer all obstacles. This scene, however, activates a complex mix of differences and divided identities. The language of this ‘‘novelistic’’ affair is encoded in terms strikingly different from those brought to bear on the situation by Henri. Paquita does not respond to the letter in writing but by sending an emissary who does not speak Henri’s language. The language in which Paquita’s message is delivered requires translation, and Henri is shown from the outset as a deficient translator of messages. On the contrary, he substitutes his own terms in interpreting this message, drawing on a language and on narrative models that prove to be disastrously inadequate. Although this scene contains implicit warnings that the ‘‘perfect masterpiece of nature’’ whom Henri desires cannot be apprehended as anticipated, he pursues his own imaginary scenario of desire, masculine conquest, and feminine submission. In the first clandestine meeting between Henri and Paquita, he intuits that there is something to be read in Paquita’s very evident distraction: Paquita lui parut occupe´ e de quelquechose qui n’e´ tait pas lui, comme une femme e´ galement contrainte par le remords et la passion. (307) [Paquita appeared to him occupied by something which was not himself, like a woman constrained equally by remorse and passion. (99)]

Although Paquita appears to be mysterious, Henri interprets the enigma in terms of his commanding knowledge of women: en la contemplant avec la savante attention de l’homme blase´ , affame´ de volupte´ s nouvelles, comme ce roi d’Orient qui de-

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mandait qu’on lui cre´ aˆ t un plaisir, soit horrible, dont les grandes aˆ mes sont saisies. (308) [as he contemplated her with the scientific attention of the blase´ man, famished for new pleasures, like that Eastern king who asked that a pleasure should be created for him—a horrible thirst with which great souls are seized. (99)]

Henri recognizes in her the objectification of pleasure: Henri reconnaissait dans Paquita la plus riche organisation que la nature se fut complu a` composer pour l’amour. Le jeu presume´ de cette machine, l’aˆ me mise a` part, eut effraye´ tout autre homme que de Marsay: mais il fut fascine´ par cette riche moisson de plaisirs promis, par cette constante varie´ te´ dans le bonheur, le reˆ ve de tout homme, et que toute femme aimante ambitionne aussi. Il fut affole´ par l’infini rendu palpable et transporte´ dans les plus excessives jouissances de la cre´ ature. (308) Henri recognized in Paquita the richest organization that nature had ever deigned to compose for love. The presumptive play of this machinery, setting aside the soul, would have frightened any other man than Henri; but he was fascinated by that rich harvest of promised pleasures, by that constant variety in happiness, the dream of every man, and the desire of every loving woman too. He was infuriated by the infinite rendered palpable, and transported into the most excessive raptures of which the creature is capable. (99–100)]

This ‘‘recognition’’ of course, is a misrecognition; what is ‘‘transported,’’ or one might say, translated into this creature is Henri’s ideal, the imaginary woman of his fantasy. Henri sees the figure of his own ideal, a ‘‘machine’’ for pleasure, every man’s ideal. This passage sets the stage for a series of missed cues signalling Paquita’s enigmatic difference from Henri’s ideal. The first is provided by Paquita’s mother, who is present in this scene; she is an old woman from Georgia who also speaks a language different from Henri’s. The narrator presents her as wondering why Henri is there: Elle semblait se demander par quel sortile`ge il e´ tait la`, par quel caprice la nature avait fait un homme si se´ duisant. (309, emphasis added)

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[She seemed to ask by what fatality she was there, from what caprice Nature had made so seductive a man. 101, emphasis added)]

Simply put, Henri’s presence as a man in an erotic encounter with her daughter is a source of puzzlement for the old woman. A further clue that Henri’s role is not as he anticipated is provided by his own doubts: ‘‘Ces femmes se moquent de moi, se dit-il’’ (309) [‘‘These women are mocking me,’’ he said to himself (my translation)]. Just as Henri does not recognize that this affair will necessitate acknowledgment of Paquita’s difference, he fails to hear a revealing exclamation from Paquita regarding his own identity: C’est la meˆ me voix! dit Paquita me´ lancholiquement, sans que de Marsay puˆ t l’entendre, et . . . la meˆ me ardeur, ajouta-t-elle. (310) [‘‘It’s the same voice!’’ said Paquita in a melancholy voice, which De Marsay could not overhear, ‘‘and the same ardour,’’ she added. (102)]

In this scene, then, there is an apparently symmetrical confusion of sameness and difference: Henri ‘‘recognizes’’ in Paquita the idol, the dream of all men; Paquita ‘‘recognizes’’ in Henri traits that identify him as a double of someone else. Following this encounter, in a pause in the narrative, Henri’s pleasure itself is represented as a doubling of self: ‘‘Il ne fut plus lui-meˆ me’’ (311) [He was no longer himself (104)]. A new atmosphere surrounds him: Ce fut quelquechose de sombre, de myste´ rieux, de doux , de tendre, de contraint et d’expansif, un accouplement de l’horrible et du cele´ ste, du paradis et de l’enfer qui rendit de Marsay comme ivre. Il ne fut plus lui-meˆ me et il e´ tait assez grand cependant pour pouvoir re´ sister aux enivrements du plaisir. (311, emphasis added) [There was something sombre, mysterious, sweet, tender, constrained and expansive, an intermingling of the awful and the

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celestial, of paradise and hell, which made De Marsay like a drunken man. He was no longer himself, and he was, withal, great enough to be able to resist the intoxication of pleasure. (104, emphasis added)]

Henri’s exhilaration is a new combination of traits ordinarily set in opposition. His identity, shattered by the pleasurable experience, is now available to a new ‘‘coupling’’ of otherwise distinct sensations: ‘‘un accouplement de l’horrible et du ce´ leste’’ (311) [an intermingling of the awful and the celestial (104)]. Consistent with other moments in the text, Henri is presented as open to a vitalizing inconsistency of character, yet his other persona, the unified, conquering male subject is reintroduced in the pages immediately following this description. As in each of the erotic encounters, Henri is characterized by seemingly incompatible traits; he is both ‘‘despotic’’ male and open to a mobile recombination of traits held in opposition by his heterosexual identity. Henri is presented as a member of the secret society, les De´ vorants, though it is not named here, in a passage remarkable for its explicit and hyperbolic characterization of phallic omnipotence: Ce jeune homme avait en main un sceptre plus puissant que ne l’est celui des rois modernes presque tous bride´ s par les lois dans leurs moindres volonte´ s. (312) [This young man held in his hand a sceptre more powerful than that of modern kings, almost all of whom are curbed in their least wishes by laws. (104)]

This autocratic power is reinforced by a uniquely French intellectual acuity: ‘‘l’esprit franc¸ ais, le plus vif, le plus ace´ re´ de tous les instruments intelligentiels’’ (312) [French wit—the most subtle, the keenest of all intellectual instruments (105)]. This passage thus reinforces the interconnectedness of social, political and erotic themes, and links exceptional power in each of those domains to intellectual genius—the central attribute of the narrator, thus underscoring the motifs of mastery and control that run throughout the entire text. As indicated earlier, a crisis of totality

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implicates both the social realm of the city and the individual desiring subject. Having power over life and death, Henri has special command over women: Les femmes aiment prodigieusement ces gens qui se nomment pachas eux meˆ mes. . . . Il en re´ sulte chez ces hommes une se´ curite´ d’action, une certitude du pouvoir, une fie`rte´ de regard, une conscience le´ onine qui re´ alise pour les femmes le type de force qu’elles reˆ vent toutes. Ainsi e´ tait de Marsay. (313) [Women are prodigiously fond of those persons who call themselves pachas. . . . The result, in the case of such men, is a security of action, a certitude of power, a pride of gaze, a leonine consciousness, which makes women realize the type of strength of which they all dream. Such was De Marsay. (106)]

In a vacillation between omnipotence and powerlessness that characterizes this protagonist, de Marsay yields to a castrating submissiveness when he is taken by carriage at night to his second rendez-vous by the mulatto, Christemeo. His eyes are covered by a scarf (313); his efforts of resistance are useless, for ‘‘Henri e´ tait sans armes’’ (314) [Henri was unarmed (108)]. Henri is thus symbolically blinded and disarmed. Even the act of penetrating the feminine sanctuary, the very locus of erotic pleasure, fails to confirm Henri’s male potency; he is carried on a litter by two men up the stairs to the boudoir where Paquita awaits.21 In contrast to the hovel in which Henri first encountered Paquita, this boudoir is resplendent with light, decorated sumptuously in colors that harmonize perfectly with passion and voluptuousness, as the narrator observes: white, red, and gold. It is a perfect ‘‘shell for Venus,’’ Henri notes, and it is constructed so as to muffle any sound of passion or terror resulting from violent encounters within. Paquita’s actions and Henri’s speculations concerning his mistress and her jealous lover who rules over this sanctuary indicate the precarious fragility of Henri’s masculine persona. When Henri asks about the identity of the ruler of the boudoir: ‘‘Qui a donc si bien compris la jalousie et ses besoins?’’ (319) [Who has understood jealousy and its needs so well? (114)], Paquita replies that he must never inquire fur-

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ther, and she also remains silent to a second request about the master of this refuge: ‘‘Et si je voulais savoir qui re`gne ici?’’ (319) [And if I wished to know who reigns here? (114)]. Paquita is both totally submissive, an ‘‘animal attached to a picket’’ (320), and all powerful, a ‘‘queen.’’ She begs Henri to possess and then kill her to preserve their passion and shield them from revenge. She also proclaims the power to destroy Henri, to have him killed and thrown into a pit of lye. Feminine sexuality is thus represented as both submissive to male power and potentially mortal; it also remains bound by an exterior force, inaccessible to Henri. The wellknown Balzacian motif of the mortal effects of feminine sexuality has new and different resonance in this context.22 Henri’s masculine role in these episodes is supplemented by distinctly feminine attributes and attitudes, as revealed in the narrative that follows. Paquita’s equivocal sexuality also merits attention; she is not only ignorant of male sexuality, she herself is endowed with traits encoded here as masculine, most notably, the power over life and death. This unexpected mobility of gendered activity is linked to exhilaratingly new and intense experiences and to the expansion of consciousness and sensation. While Paquita’s identity is potentially knowable, the key identifying term remains elusive: tu es, foi d’honneˆ te homme, une charade vivante dont le mot me semble bien difficile a` trouver. (320) [you are, upon my word of honor, a living riddle, the answer to which is very difficult to find. (118)]

Indeed, that identity will never be spoken in this text and its repression, assuming that a single term might be available to name it, will remain as a central interpretive enigma of the novel.23 Like the euphemism, the charade is a signal of complex gender identity that is never situated unequivocally in language. Duplicities of gender are spoken by duplicities of language. A curiously indeterminate sexuality animates the sexual encounters between Paquita and Henri, in both this episode and in one that will follow soon after. This indetermi-

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nacy is a source of impassioned curiosity for each, and for each it looms as a potentially mortal threat. In the second episode, when Henri regains his composure (‘‘son aisance de fat’’ (321) [his foppish ease (118)] after being transported to the rendez-vous , Paquita arranges him ‘‘to suit her tastes’’: ‘‘Et bien, lui dit-elle, laisse-moi t’arranger a` mon gouˆ t’’ (321) [‘‘Well,’’ she said, ‘‘let me arrange you as I would like’’ (118)]. She dresses him in a long red velvet dress and a woman’s bonnet. Thus adorned in drag, Henri enjoys Paquita sexually and learns that she was ‘‘virgin but not innocent’’ (322). Henri’s masculine triumph is a transvestite performance, affirming in this context, paradoxically, both his secure virility, as is generally the case for male transvestites according to psychoanalytic theory, and his potential femininity.24 He is costumed by Paquita to play a role that conforms to her sexual scenarios. This ambiguity is suggested more explicitly in the following passage: Tout ce que la volupte´ la plus raffine´ a de plus savant, tout ce que pouvait connaıˆtre Henri de cette poe´ sie des sens que l’on nomme l’amour, fut de´ passe´ par les tre´ sors que de´ roula cette fille dont les yeux jaillissants ne mentirent a` aucune des promesses qu’ils faisaient. (322) [All the utmost science of the most refined pleasure, all that Henri could know of that poetry of the senses which is called love, was excelled by the treasures poured forth by this girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie to none of the promises which they made. (119–20)]

All that is known by Henri about love, all that is named love, in short, presumably, all his experiences of heterosexual love, are exceeded by this encounter with Paquita; he enters into a realm of the senses that is unknown to him and that has no name in the language of his desire. As Henri has lost his previous identity, Paquita is also represented as a bizarre union of antithetical traits, enumerated in a rather conventional series of oppositions: L’union si bizarre du myste´ rieux et du re´ el, de l’ombre et de la lumie`re, de l’horrible et du beau, du plaisir et du danger, du paradis et de l’enfer, qui s’e´ tait de´ ja` rencontre´ dans cette ad-

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venture se continuait dans l’eˆ tre capricieux et sublime dont se jouait de Marsay. (322) [The fantastic union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and light, horror and beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell, which had already been met with in this adventure, was resumed in the capricious and sublime being with whom De Marsay dallied. (119)]

This enumeration of antinomies, it would seem, serves to conjure the threat to binary oppositions that is played out in this passage and throughout the erotic narrative. The pause in the narrative preceding the third and final erotic encounter between Henri and Paquita reinforces the enigma that is Henri’s central concern. It is said that he is able to read Paquita, to devine her hidden sense: Il put alors lire dans cette page si brillante d’effet, en deviner le sens cache´ . L’innocence purement physique de Paquita, l’e´ tonnement de sa joie, quelques mots d’abord obscurs et maintenant clairs, e´ chappe´ s au milieu de la joie, tout lui prouva qu’il avait pose´ pour une autre personne. (330–31) [He could read, at last, that page in effect so brilliant, divine its hidden meaning. The purely physical innocence of Paquita, the bewilderment of her joy, certain words, obscure at first, but now clear, which had escaped her in the midst of that joy, all proved to him that he had posed for another person. (128–29)]

This passage raises the question of not one but three enigmas: not simply the reiterated issue of Paquita’s true identity, but also that of the other whose place de Marsay has taken, and finally, by extension, the question of the identity of Henri himself, who is capable of serving as a substitute for an unknown lover. Henri interprets this complex interplay of roles and subjectivities in the narrowest sense as a castrating wound to himself: il ne s’effaroucha pas du vice, il le connaissait comme on connaıˆt un ami, mais il fut blesse´ de lui avoir servi de pature. Si ses pre´ somptions e´ taient justes, il avait e´ te´ outrage´ dans le vif de son eˆ tre. (331, emphasis added)

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[he was not startled at vice, he knew it as one knows a friend, but he was wounded at having served as sustenance for it. If his presumption was right, he had been outraged in the most sensitive part of him. (129, emphasis added)]

Since Henri has not in fact dominated the interplay of identities, he perceives himself to have been wounded to the quick of his being, perhaps irrevocably compromised. This inability to relinquish a predetermined sense of masculine identity based on a clear opposition between genders is, of course, the failure that will be presented later as a catastrophe. To know the other sex, for Henri, is implicitly to confirm male identity, yet the text introduces an anxious uncertainty. The unknown other, the rival, may not be Henri’s male equivalent. The intrusion of an uncertain alterity concerning the rival, his partner, Paquita, and Henri himself, can only be read as a wound to ‘‘the vitality of his being.’’ The final love scene makes it clear to the reader, if not to the protagonist, that the stakes in this game are very high indeed. Paquita is a ‘‘seraglio’’ for Henri, the source of intense pleasures, and, beyond that, she responds to his ‘‘passion for the infinite’’ (337). Henri’s passion is likened to that of Faust and Don Juan, and is said to be a quest for ‘‘knowledge without limit’’: passion myste´ rieuse si dramatiquement exprime´ dans Faust, si poe´ tiquement traduite dans Manfred, et qui poussait Don Juan a` fouiller le coeur des femmes, en espe´ rant y trouver cette pense´ e sans bornes a` la recherche de laquelle se mettent tant de chasseurs de spectres . . . 337–38) [that mysterious passion so dramatically expressed in Faust, so poetically translated in Manfred, and which urged Don Juan to search the heart of women, in his hope to find there that limitless thought in pursuit of which so many hunters after spectres have started . . . 137)]

Although he offers to put on his dress in preparation for their love making, Paquita refuses, asking only that he remain ‘‘what he is,’’ ‘‘un de ces anges qu’on m’avait appris a` hair’’ (335) [one of those angels whom I have been taught to

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hate (134)]. Henri does not take on an unequivocally masculine role in their encounter, however, since he is not only his lover’s ‘‘conqueror,’’ but he also ‘‘looses himself,’’ in a process of surrender that is invariably associated in this text with femininity: il fut entraine´ par dela` les limites dans lesquelles jusqu’alors il avait enferme´ la passion. Il ne voulait pas eˆ tre depasse´ par cette fille qu’un amour en quelque sorte artificiel avait forme´ par avance aux besoins de son aˆ me, et alors il trouva dans cette vanite´ qui pousse l’homme a` rester en tout vainqueur des forces pour dompter cette fille; mais, aussi, jete´ par dela cette ligne ou l’aˆ me est maıˆtresse d’elle-meˆ me, il se perdit dans ces limbes de´ licieuses que le vulgaire nomme si niaisement les espaces imaginaires. Il fut tendre, bon, communicatif. (338, emphasis added, except for final words of the passage) [he was carried beyond the limits within which he had hitherto confined passion. He would not be surprised by this girl, whom a somewhat artificial love had formed already for the needs of his soul and then found in that vanity which urges a man to be in all things a victor, strength enough to tame the girl; but, at the same time, urged beyond that line where the soul is mistress over herself, he lost himself in those delicious limboes, which the vulgar call so foolishly ‘‘the imaginary regions.’’ He was tender, kind, and confidential. (138, emphasis added)]

Several terms clearly associated with masculine aggression vainqueur, dompter, victor, tame, are supplemented in this passage by others, marked with equal clarity as feminine, conveying passivity and loss: jete´ , se perdit, tendre, bon, communicatif (urged beyond, he lost himself, tender, kind, confidential). This moment of exalted subjectivity, beyond the limits of masculine consciousness, emotion, and action, performs an androgynous unification of terms that are required by Henri’s masculine imaginaire to remain in opposition. This transgressive reconfiguration of gender is shortlived, however; Henri reassumes a conventionally masculine role, wishing to possess this woman forever: ‘‘s’approprier a` jamais cette cre´ ature’’ (340) [to appropriate this creature forever (140)]. At the height of their ecstasy, Paquita’s impassioned cry

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‘‘Oh! Mariquita’’ comes as a violent, piercing blow to Henri’s ‘‘heart,’’ at the highest ‘‘expansion’’ of his masculine vanity: il rec¸ut au milieu de sa joie un coup de poignard qui traversa de part en part son coeur mortifie´ pour la premie`re fois. (340) [he received in the midst of his joy a dagger thrust, which smote through his heart and mortified it for the first time. (140)] L’exclamation de Paquita fut d’autant plus horrible pour lui ˆ t jamais qu’il avait e´ te´ de´ trone´ du plus doux triomphe qui eu agrandi sa vanite´ d’homme. (342) [Paquita’s exclamation had been all the more horrible to him, in that it had dethroned him from the sweetest triumph which had ever flattered his man’s vanity. (145)]

This penetrating dagger blow is castrating in its effects; threatening Henri’s identity, it provokes his violent rage and leads to the very real threat to kill his lover. The revelation of the existence of Henri’s alter ego, a feminine double, of course, raises the question once again of Henri’s ambiguous and unresolved relation to his own femininity. Consistent with the logic of the fetishist, discussed earlier, Henri’s denial is an indirect acknowledgment of a threat to a phantasm of his integral masculinity. By refusing to acknowledge any ambiguity of gender and by denying any mitigation of his fully phallic potency he thereby affirms the castrating effects of his discovery. Prevented from murderous revenge then and there by the intervention of Christemeo, who has been summoned by Paquita, Henri retreats to plan his attack with two of his associates among the De´ vorants. He plots with Ferragus, leader of the group, to penetrate the Hoˆ tel de San Real and assassinate Paquita; his vengeance is defeated, however, by his rival, the Marquise herself. When Henri arrives in the Marquise’s chambers he is greeted by the bloody spectacle of Paquita dying at the feet of her half-naked mistress. Both women and the entire room are drenched in blood. Le spectacle qui s’offrit a` ses regards eut d’ailleurs pour lui plus d’une cause d’e´ tonnement. La marquise e´ tait femme: elle

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avait calcule´ sa vengeance avec cette prefection de perfidie qui distingue les animaux faibles. Elle avait dissimule´ sa cole`re pour s’assurer du crime avant de le punir. (345) [The spectacle which was offered to his view was, moreover, in more than one respect astonishing to him. The Marquise was a woman: she had calculated her vengeance with that perfection of perfidy which distinguishes the weaker animals. She had dissimulated her anger in order to assure herself of the crime before she punished it. (149)]

The scene in which Henri was to have regained his mastery is a ‘‘spectacle’’ of its catastrophic demise. When the Marquise turns toward Henri, they immediately recognize each other: Ils dirent ensemble le meˆ me mot: Lord Dudley doit eˆ tre votre pe`re? (347) [With one accord they uttered the same phrase: ‘‘Lord Dudley must have been your father?’’ (152)]

In this discovery of their common origin, brother and sister appear to recognize not only that they are siblings, but also that they share an intense and troubling sexual duality.25 This passage, however, leaves the issue of their divided identities in suspense. The novel closes with a mutual denial of their complex sexuality and of the incestuous implications of their passions. Clearly, just as Henri is ‘‘not just’’ a heterosexual male, the Marquise is ‘‘not just’’ a lesbian woman. The cry ‘‘Oh! Mariquita’’ has indirectly drawn Henri’s sister into a sexual performance whose activities, if clearly not lesbian, equally clearly cannot be identified as heterosexual as it had been defined in masculinist terms throughout the novel. Gendered roles have been rescrambled and reconfigured and have assumed a mutability that touches all participants. Order is restored, however, by a logic more fitting to novelistic denouements than to the complexity of the issues raised by this text. As Paquita expires at the feet of her mistress, the Marquise, Euphe´ mie, proclaims that she will withdraw from society forever, seeking refuge in a convent. Henri protests that she is too beau-

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tiful and too young and takes her in his arms—and departs. Having resumed his walks in the Tuileries, he once again encounters Paul de Mannerville, bringing the narrative full circle. The final words of the text are an exchange between Henri de Marsay and Paul de Mannerville, who inquires several days after the scene of the massacre about the girl with the golden eyes. Henri informs him that she has died: Elle est morte. De quoi? De la poitrine. (349) [‘‘She died.’’ ‘‘What of?’’ ‘‘An ailment of the chest.’’ (my translation)]26

The text thus ends with a euphemism, refusing to speak directly and to divulge the cause of Paquita’s death, or implicitly, to conclude about the nature of Henri’s liaison. Equally important, the shifting gender identities of those involved in this amorous intrigue remain unspoken. The only transgression remaining intact at the end of the novel is a violation of an aesthetic convention of the realist novel that it fulfill the promise of the hermeneutic code and that it end in a denouement in which all components of the narrative are resolved.27 Paul’s question at the end of the text regarding Henri’s liaison opens on to all those questions of identity that permeate the text, yet they are deflected and remain fragmented and dispersed. The crisis of order, authority, and identity remains unresolved. The paradox of this euphemism at the end of the novel is that it does not conceal a single word or phrase that would be the true meaning of the end, providing once and for all ‘‘le mot de la charade’’ [the key to the charade]. It serves as a screen for several truths that remain suspended at the end of the text: the failures of representation to seize and relate unequivocal meanings; the links between sexual fantasies of domination and authority and a political fantasy of social order; the vulnerability of the polarities between masculine and feminine to substitutions and reversals; the insistent and futile imperative to ground cultural order on an ideal of unques-

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tioned male supremacy, etc. Henri thus repudiates the ambiguities of his gender, the dark and exhilarating desires that he has experienced with such intensity. Euphe´ mie retreats to a convent; the diverse and powerful gendered identities divulged in the narrative are covered over by the euphemism, yet they are nonetheless deflected back into social discourse as a complex, unspoken alterity.

Conclusions AT THIS POINT, AT THE END OF MY OBSERVATIONS, IN THE CONVENtional space for concluding remarks, I would like to return to and expand upon my brief discussion in the introduction of the narrative denouements of the texts read in the preceding chapters. My interest here is to explore further implications of the return to conventional social and aesthetic order in those denouements in light of what my analyses of the various narratives in this book have revealed. Several aspects of the texts discussed need to be recalled here, however, as a preface to that discussion; the first is the remarkable diversity of the texts in terms of narrative genre, including confession and pseudo-confession narratives, Herculine Barbin, and Claire de Duras’s Ourika; two novels that are themselves hybrid in form: Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes) and Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin; and a short novella, La Fanfarlo by Baudelaire. The preeminence of gender differentiation as a core cultural issue throughout the period extending from the aftermath of the Revolution of 1789 to the decade preceding the political upheavals of 1870–71 is thus attested to not only by its centrality to the narratives discussed but also by this very migration between prose genres. Although I do not discuss verse in this study, recent work on the lyric during the same period has shown its crucial importance there as well.1 In a text such as Georges Sand’s Gabrielle, a transvestite dramatic work, one could also explore in the theater the issues raised in Between Genders. One can conclude that the representation of gender mutability and the mapping of its effects is not genre specific but a phenomenon that emerges in historically specific ways in many literary genres throughout the period, continuing with considerable insistence in our own times. Between Genders has revealed a pervasive, yet frequently 166

CONCLUSIONS

167

veiled, crisis of authority throughout the century, not only about who or what institution is to determine ‘‘correct’’ gender relations, but what values might prevail in a wide range of other cultural issues. Most notably in these narratives, the issues and values that are reexamined and problematized include aesthetic values: the redefinition of Romanticism and of the limits of genre in Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo; the presuppositions about realist narrators and their scopophilic relation to ‘‘spectacle’’ in Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or; ideals of beauty that are repeatedly challenged in the course of the erotic narrative and in numerous monologues by the male protagonist in Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. Ethical issues about deviance from compulsory heterosexuality are raised directly in Mademoiselle de Maupin and in Herculine Barbin and more obliquely in La Fanfarlo and La Fille aux yeux d’or. In Ourika, ethical issues are linked to powerful restrictions against interracial marriage with tragic consequences. My discussions of Balzac’s novel have explored some of the aspects of a male fantasy of sexual and political self-identity. Finally, Herculine Barbin, in addition to the ethical dilemmas posed by transgressions of heterosexuality, recounts attempts to impose order on anomalous sexual and gender identity by the intervention of religious, legal, economic, and medical regimes of authority, both in the narrative and in the documents appended to it. As I have observed throughout Between Genders, the crisis of authority not only manifests itself in more or less direct relation to specific issues, such as those enumerated above, a generalized anxiety about social order pervades the sociocultural context of these narratives. Mutable gender produces destabalizing effects in a variety of areas of social order, initiating what I have referred to, following Marjorie Garber, as a category crisis. My readings have shown that the notions of self and other in this group of texts are inextricably bound to body images and gendered practices assumed to be fixed and stable, consistent with the sociopolitical context in which they were written and with the imaginary body that the increasingly hegemonic bourgeoisie was constructing for itself. Throughout Between Genders I have traced the ways that the texts powerfully contest that dominant fiction (Silverman)

168

CONCLUSIONS

by engaging with and disarranging the cultural norms that shape the protagonists and the narratives of desire available to them. The sexed body and its gendered desires are consistently revealed in these stories as a dynamic social construction, the site of intense contestations. The period of French cultural history spanning the aftermath of the French Revolution to the Second Empire and the decade preceding the political upheavals of 1870–71 is often cited as the moment that invented modernity. Between Genders has demonstrated that an important component of what is conceived by protagonists and narrators as fundamental to the experience and understanding of the modern is inextricably tied to gender identity as a system of differentiation serving as a ground for social and political organization. The dominant fiction of gender identity is preeminent in forming bourgeois cultural identity, yet much of the interest of these fascinating texts is attributable to the ways in which it is also so vigorously contested in each of the narratives. What, then, might be some broad implications of the fact that narrative denouements of these texts return so consistently to conventional social order? The denouements, with only the slightest exception, appear to effect a cultural reintegration at the narrative’s end, a return to a docile world of bourgeois social equilibrium, to ‘‘things as they are,’’ just as they return to generically conventional forms of concluding stories. We recall that only Madelaine de Maupin steps outside of conventional narrative closure by taking again to the road, refusing the heterosexual roles that she counsels for her two lovers in a letter of adieu. D’Albert has returned to the safety of heterosexual identity; Rosette, presumably, has enjoyed a fleeting lesbian encounter, though the reader is quite literally left in the dark about that. Madelaine, also quite literally, however, embraces a mobile and vagrant gender identity. In returning to his/her wanderings, however, she rejoins the conventions of picaresque narratives, leaving the chateau for further adventures. The other narratives, however, ostensibly foreclose the gender mutabilities that animate each of the stories. The hermaphrodite half-genius, Samuel Cramer, and his ambiguously androgynous lover, La Fanfarlo, marry, produce children and good works, and seek the rewards

CONCLUSIONS

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conferred by institutions of high culture: election to the Institute and award of ‘‘la croix’’ (the cross). Samuel engages in quite traditional forms of writing, publishing works on aesthetics, religion, etc. Ourika’s narrative confers upon her a quite conventional fate: she withdraws from her adoptive family and joins a convent, where, after narrating her story to a doctor, she dies of an unspecified ailment. Alexina/Abel in Herculine Barbin, though not a fictional protagonist, quite tragically commits suicide, choosing a resolution to his/her still unresolved gender ambiguity that allies him with the legion of fictional characters who meet the same fate. In Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or, the bloody murder scene in which Euphe´ mie assassinates Paquita, the lover whom her brother had shared, is said to be an allusion to Delacroix’s famous painting, La Mort de Sardanapale, thus resolving the narrative by allusion to a figural fiction, doubling as it were the fictional status of the denouement. De Marsay’s quip to his friend Paul de Mannerville that Paquita died ‘‘de la poitrine’’ [of a chest ailment] deviously ascribes to her the conventional fate of scores of heroines of novels who succumb to consumption, and the euphemism itself begs the question of the sexual crisis that provokes her death, permitting that difference to reenter culture as an unspoken otherness. I wish to suggest here, by way of conclusion, that even as the conclusions to the narratives discussed return to conventions of narrative fictions and to a fictional world of restored bourgeois cultural equilibrium, they serve to signal the violence that underlies the cultural imperative to dispel gendered differences by denying their viability. The denouements also serve to affirm the effectiveness of the narratives as mapping possible reconfigurations of cultural differences, as I suggested in the opening pages of this book. The apparent foreclosure of possibilities for reconfiguring social-cultural relations attests to the corrosive, disruptive potential of those gendered differences engaged in the narratives. It would seem equally clear that the very conventional qualities of the denouements point to the need that the reader recognize the powerful cultural investment underlying and enforcing that conventionality, for each narrative ending rests on the severe limitation of pos-

170

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sibilities, either through renunciation, as holds true for two of the three protagonists in Mademoiselle de Maupin and for the lovers in La Fanfarlo, or through death, in Ourika, La Fille aux yeux d’or, and Herculine Barbin. The conventions ‘‘appropriate’’ to narrative genre are thus revealed here as imposing a violence of containment that excludes forms of disruptive alterity, directed against the dominant fiction of binary gender difference. The denial of possibility that is the subject of the denouements is, of course, as de´ ne´ gation, a negative that affirms. In both the grammatical/logical and psychoanalytic senses, a denial contains affirmation in the very form of the negation. If Samuel Cramer’s actions at the end of La Fanfarlo seem to signal something like ‘‘I never was a hermaphrodite half-genius,’’ the phrase nonetheless reiterates what is denied. The denouements in general, similarly serve to gesture toward the disruptive differences that they seem to have normalized, in the very act of bringing them back to the conventions of literary and cultural norms. Irony, of course, in the case of La Fanfarlo or La Fille aux yeux d’or may be considered as a wink to the reader indirectly acknowledging that the final appropriation of narrative conventions signals that the reader’s interpretive work is not at an end, that meanings generated by the very conventionality of the conclusions still remain to be explored and that they may be far from conventional. We may turn the last page and take leave of the narratives, but their stories continue to resonate as powerful interrogations of a culture that might be organized otherwise.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B., ed. Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). Foucault reissued this manuscript, which originally appeared as Question me´ dico-le´ gale de l’identite´ dans les rapports avec les vices de conformation des organes sexuels in 1874. A section of the manuscript was published in Annales d’hygie`ne publique, 1972. 2. See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite´ . 2, L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). The Uses of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985). My project is informed by Foucault’s understanding of the individual’s construction of his/her status as a subject by means of ‘‘les pratiques par lesquelles les individus ont e´ te´ amene´ s a` porter attention a` eux-meˆ mes, a` se de´ chiffrer, a` se reconnaıˆtre et a` s’avouer comme sujet de de´ sir, faisant jouer entre eux-meˆ mes et euxmeˆ mes un certain rapport qui leur permet de de´ courvir dans le de´ sir la ve´ rite´ de leur eˆ tre, qu’il soit naturel ou de´ chu’’ (11) [the practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between themselves and themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being] (The Uses of Pleasure, 5)]. The first volume of Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualite´ : La volonte´ de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) establishes the centrality of sexuality and the body to the emerging selfdefinition of the bourgeoisie. See especially ‘‘Le Dispositif de sexualite´ : Pe´ riodisation’’ (152–73) (‘‘The Development of Sexuality: Periodization,’’ 115–32). 3. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993). Butler discusses Foucault’s concept of sex as a ‘‘regulatory ideal’’ and its relation to cultural norms: ‘‘ ‘sex’ not only functions as a norm but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls’’ (1); ‘‘ ‘Sex’ is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility’’ (2). See also Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996).

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4. Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality in Histoire de la sexualite´ (1), traces the proliferation of discourses of sexuality in four principal domains: the medical, which focuses on both women’s bodies (and will lead to theories of hysteria and the invention of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century), and on ‘‘perversions’’; pedagogical institutions, which regulate the sexuality of children and adolescents; economics and demography, which administer fertility, public health and urban space. See ‘‘Le dispositif de sexualite´ ,’’ 101–35 (‘‘The Development of Sexuality,’’ 75–132). Gaetens’s Imaginary Bodies has been invaluable to me for its explorations of corporeal representation in philosophy and the body politic. 5. L’Usage des plaisirs, 10. (The Uses of Pleasure, 4). Commenting on the emergence of the term ‘‘sexuality’’ in the nineteenth century and on its use in relation to the development of other phenomena, diverse domains of knowledge, and the establishment of norms and rules, Foucault’s project traces the emergence of a discourse of sexuality that is to be found in a very diverse range of cultural institutions. 6. Histoire de la sexualite´ : L’Usage des plaisirs, 10 (The Uses of Pleasure, 4). 7. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). ‘‘The dominant fiction’s most rudimentary binary opposition is that distinguishing masculinity from femininity; its most fundamental equation is that of penis and phallus; and its most central signifier is the family. All of the other elements of a given dominant fiction are articulated in relation to these core terms. . . . The dominant fiction can sustain itself only so long as the larger society affirms it. This affirmation does not involve only—or even primarily—conscious belief. It involves, rather, the activation of certain desires and identifications. Those desires and identifications are first and foremost those produced through the positive Oedipus complex, but they are always also carriers of more directly social values, such as race and class’’ (178–79). Silverman first theorized the dominant fiction as what passes for reality in her Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15–51. 8. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: 1995), 81. 9. Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs, 9–10 (The Uses of Pleasure, 3–4). 10. See Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper-Collins, 1993). Garber’s observations on the ‘‘category crisis’’ provoked in Western cultures by transvestism apply not only to the frequent motif of transvestism in the texts studied here, but also to practices that destabilize gender in these narratives: ‘‘By ‘category crisis’ I mean a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another: black/white, Jew/Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave. The binarism male/female, one apparent ground of distinction (in contemporary eyes, at least) between ‘this’ and ‘that,’ ‘him’ and ‘me,’ is itself put in question or under erasure in transvestism, and a transvestite figure, or

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a transvestite mode, will always function as a sign of overdetermination—a mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another’’ (16). 11. Gaetens’s intelligent discussion of the history and theoretical distinctions between sex and gender from Freud to the present correctly proclaims the need to get beyond definitions based on biology/ culture, body/mind oppositions and to come to an understanding of the situated body as the site of cultural experiences: ‘‘If we locate social practices and behaviors as embedded in the subject, as we have with perception, rather than ‘in consciousness’ or ‘in the body’ then this has the important repercussion that the subject is always a sexed subject. If one accepts the notion of the sexually specific subject, that is, the male or female subject, then one must dismiss the notion that patriarchy can be characterized as a system of social organization that valorizes the masculine gender over the feminine gender. Gender is not the issue; sexual difference is. The very same behaviors (whether they be masculine or feminine) have quite different personal and social significances when acted out by the male subject on the one hand and the female subject on the other’’ (Imaginary Bodies, 8–9). See also Elizabeth Grosz, ‘‘Refiguring Bodies,’’ in Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3–24. Grosz proposes that the body is the threshold of binary pairs, such as mind/body, poised at the ‘‘pivotal’’ point of these pairs: ‘‘The body is neither—while also being both—the private or the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social, instinctive or learned, genetically or environmentally determined. In the face of social constructivism, the body’s tangibility, its matter, its (quasi) nature may be invoked; but in opposition to essentialism, biologism, and naturalism, it is the body as a cultural product that must be stressed’’ (23–24). Neither the term sex nor the term gender is available to ready containment; I use each throughout this study on the understanding that one calls forth the other in a network of mutual implication. 12. I do not wish to rehearse here the debates between materialist and constructivist views. Butler’s views outlined in the introduction to Bodies That Matter and elaborated in chapter 1 provide a useful frame for my discussions. Linking her understanding of gender performativity to the conception of materialization, Butler states: ‘‘performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ’act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names. . . . the regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative’’ (2). 13. Ibid., 1. 14. Ibid., 2. 15. ‘‘As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilit-

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ies in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which ‘sex’ is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of ‘sex’ into a potentially productive crisis’’ (Butler, Bodies That Matter,10). 16. See Joan DeJean’s excellent preface to a recent edition of the text: Ourika, by Claire de Duras (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994), vii–xii. On the history of the ‘‘Code noir’’ see ‘‘Le Code noir a` la lumie`re des pre´ juge´ s,’’ in Le Code noir ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987), 20–87. 17. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing in the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 55. In a discussion of the great number of guidebooks of the city published during the century, in her chapter ‘‘Mapping the City’’ (36–79), Ferguson notes the changes in the topography of the city, its political volatility and the sense of urban instability that prevails following the Revolution of 1789 and throughout the century. 18. Historie de la sexualite´ , 1, 162 (The History of Sexuality, 123). 19. ‘‘Pe´ riodisation,’’ in Histoire de la sexualite´ , 1, 152–73. ‘‘Et loin que la classe qui devenait he´ ge´ monique au XVIIIe sie` cle ait cru devoir amputer son corps d’un sexe inutile, de´ pensier et dangereux de`s lorsqu’il n’e´ tait pas voue´ a` la seule reproduction, on peut dire au contraire qu’elle s’est donne´ un corps a` soigner, a` prote´ ger, a` cultiver, a` pre´ server de tous les dangers et de tous les contacts, a` isoler des autres pour qu’il garde sa valeur diffe´ rentielle; et cela en se donnant, entre autres moyens, une technologie du sexe’’ (163) [and this was far from being a matter of the class which in the eighteenth century became hegemonic believing itself obliged to amputate from its body a sex that was useless, expensive, and dangerous as soon as it was no longer given over exclusively to reproduction; we can assert on the contrary that it provided itself with a body to be cared for, protected, cultivated, and preserved from the many dangers and contacts, to be isolated from others so that it would retain its differential value; and this, by equipping itself with—among other resources—a technology of sex (123)]. 20. Histoire de la sexualite´ , 1, 163 (History of Sexuality, 123). 21. Gaetens, in ‘‘Embodiment, Ethics, Difference,’’ in Imaginary Bodies, analyzes traditionalist modernist narratives of the genesis of political society that represses both political and ethical difference (95– 107). ‘‘Much of the character of our contemporary ethical lives has been produced by the encoding of the preferences, desires and interests of a very specific and embodied collective and as such is inadequate to the task of addressing pressing contemporary issues concerning those who have been barred from the historical development of the dominant parts of this body.’’ In proposing to locate the material effects of this disbarment, she calls for ‘‘a politics of difference—which seems the obvious register in with to analyze class, race and sex differ-

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ences—but also for an ethics of difference—which would be capable of acknowledging that different forms of embodiment are themselves historical and open to change’’ (105).

CHAPTER 1. ‘‘VOUS Eˆ TES SANS DOUTE TRE`S SURPRIS’’ 1. The´ ophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (Paris: Editions Garnier, 1966), 370. All quotations are from this edition. English translations are from Mademoiselle de Maupin, translator unidentified (New York: Random House, n.d.). Page numbers are incorporated into the text. Translation of this quotation is my own. 2. See Pierre Albouy, ‘‘Le Mythe de l’androgyne dans Mademoiselle de Maupin,’’ Revue d’Histoire litte´ raire de la France, no. 4 (July–August, 1972): 600–608; Michel Crouzet, ‘‘Gautier et le proble`me de ‘cre´ er,’ ’’ Revue d’Histoire litte´ raire de la France, no. 4 (July–August, 1972): 659–87; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper, 1993), 73–75; Rosemary Lloyd, ‘‘Rereading Mademoiselle de Maupin,’’ Orbis Litterarum 41, no. 1 (1986): 19–32; Kari Weil, ‘‘Romantic Androgyny and Its Discontents: The Case of Mlle de Maupin,’’ Romanic Review 78, no. 3 (1987): 348–58. 3. The motif of transvestism in this novel activates a questioning of binary sexual oppositions, and of binarity in general, by introducing a third term which destabilizes the categories of ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female,’’ as Marjorie Garber notes in Vested Interests: ‘‘The ‘‘third’’ is that which questions binary thinking and introduces crisis—a crisis which is symptomatized by both the overestimation and the underestimation of cross-dressing. But what is crucial here . . . is that the ‘‘third term’’ is not a term. Much less is it a sex, certainly not an instantiated ‘‘blurred’’ sex as signified by a term like ‘‘androgyne’’ or ‘‘hermaphrodite,’’ although these words have culturally specific significance at certain historical moments. The ‘‘third’’ is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge’’ (11). While cross-dressing is certainly a central motif in Gautier’s novel, it alone does not bear the burden, as I will show, of a multifaceted questioning of gender identities. 4. Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualite´ : La Volonte´ de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) demonstrates the intimate link in investigations, descriptions, and regulations of sexuality in the late eighteenth-century and throughout the nineteenth-century between sexuality and innermost subjectivity and self-knowledge. Gautier’s novel can be seen as part of a widespread ‘‘incitement’’ and mise en discours of polymorphous sexuality (Foucault, 21), which reaches with considerable vigor into several domains in the late nineteenth-century: pedagogy, medicine, demography, and, of course, literature. The particular attention accorded throughout the nineteenth-century to the formation of the category of perversion is of special relevance to our discussion, since former moral categories, such as debauchery or excess, associated with specific practices, are re-

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placed during the course of the century by medical technologies which seek to define the individual him or herself as a subject. (Foucault, 156). This motif haunts Gautier’s novel, as both the threat of the ‘‘monstrous’’ and an exhilarating temptation of polymorphous sexuality proscribed by heterosexual codes. 5. On ‘‘feminine lack’’ in phallocentric systems of representation, see Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974); and, especially, the essay entitled ‘‘Pouvoir du discours, subordination du fe´ minin,’’ in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), 67–82. 6. Margorie Garber, Vested Interests, 16–17, discusses ‘‘transvestite effects,’’ producing a ‘‘category crisis,’’ a failure of definitional distinction. ‘‘The binarism male/female, one apparent ground of distinction (in contemporary eyes, at least) between ‘‘this’’ and ‘‘that,’’ ‘‘him’’ and ‘‘me,’’ is itself put in question or under erasure in transvestism, and a transvestite figure, or a transvestite mode, will always function as a sign of overdetermination—a mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another’’ (16). 7. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990), 24–25, 134–41; and Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1993), 12–16: ‘‘The forming, crafting, bearing, circulation, signification of the sexed body will not be a set of actions performed in compliance with the law; on the contrary, they will be a set of actions mobilized by the law, the citational accumulation and dissimulation of the law that produces material effects, the lived necessity of those effects as well as the lived contestation of that necessity. Performativity is thus not a singular ‘‘act,’’ for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an actlike status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition;’’ (12). 8. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 13. 9. Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism, trans. by Mary Seidman Trouille (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 10. Kari Weil’s excellent article, cited above, ‘‘Romantic Androgyny and Its Discontents,’’ discusses the opposition between classical ideals of beauty and an emerging romantic aesthetic ideal, linked respectively to the figures of the androgyne and the hermaphrodite. 11. For an extensive study of the ‘‘mal du sie`cle’’ hero in novels of the first half of the nineteenth-century, see Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993). 12. Judith Butler, ‘‘The Lesbian Phallus,’’ in Bodies That Matter, 57–91, demonstrating that ‘‘the hegemonic imaginary constitutes itself through the naturalization of an exclusionary heterosexual morphology’’ (91), proposes possible alternatives to the heterosexual imaginary. 13. See Sarah Kofman, L’Enigme de la femme: La Femme dans les textes

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de Freud (Paris: Galile´ e, 1980). Kofman examines the role of male narcissism in the object choice of a narcissistic woman. She asserts that, in loving the narcissistic woman, the male projects upon her a portion of his own narcissism, which he had appeared to have abandoned (66). 14. Butler, Gender Trouble, 57–72, 105–; Bodies That Matter, 234–36. 15. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 234. 16. Butler, Gender Trouble, 58. 17. In a study of several prose poems by Baudelaire, ‘‘On Certain Relations,’’ in The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Mallarme´ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19–40, I discuss the violent effects produced by encounters with feminine difference when it is conceived in terms of an ideal of a perfect union of thought and sentiment. The poem ‘‘Portraits de maıˆtresses’’ has clear affinities with these passages in Gautier’s text. 18. The passage in which d’Albert confesses that he loves a man begins: ‘‘Cela est ainsi.—J’aime un homme, Silvio.—J’ai cherche´ longtemps a` me faire illusion; j’ai donne´ un nom diffe´ rent au sentiment que j’e´ prouvais, je l’ai veˆ tu de l’habit d’une amitie´ pure et de´ sinteresse´ e; j’ai cru que cela n’e´ tait que l’admiration que j’ai pour toutes les belles personnes et les belles choses; je me suis promene´ plusieurs jours dans les sentiers perfides et riants qui errent autour de toute passion naissante; mais je reconnais maintenant dans quelle profonde et terrible voie je me suis engage´ ’’ (185) [It is so. I love a man, Silvio. I long sought to delude myself; I gave a different name to the feeling that I experienced; I clothed it in the garment of pure and disinterested friendship; I believed that it was merely the admiration which I entertain for all beautiful persons and things; for several days I walked in the treacherous, pleasant paths that wander about every waking passion; but I now recognise the profound and terrible road to which I am pledged (128)]. 19. See, for example, Judith Butler, ‘‘The Lesbian Phallus,’’ in Bodies That Matter, 57–91. 20. Butler, Gender Trouble, 7. 21. Butler, Gender Trouble, 24. 22. Butler, Bodies That Matter: ‘‘. the materialization of norms requires those identificatory processes by which norms are assumed or appropriated, and these identifications precede and enable the formation of a subject, but are not, strictly speaking, performed by a subject’’ (15). 23. Garber, Vested Interests, 73–75, discusses the central psychological and narrative role of the performance of the play and several aspects of the ‘‘conundrum of gender indecidability’’ realized by its performance in the novel. 24. See Butler, Bodies That Matter, 14.

CHAPTER 2. ANDROGNY, HYSTERIA, AND THE POET 1. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres comple`tes, vols. 1 and 2 (Paris: Gallimard, ‘‘Bibliothe`que de la Ple´ ı¨ade,’’ 1975, 1976). All references are to this

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edition. Translations from Baudelaire’s essay on Madame Bovary and from the intimate journals are mine. 2. Jan Goldstein, ‘‘The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France,’’ Representations 34 (Spring 1991): 134–65. 3. See Goldstein, 144–45. Baudelaire, in his review of Flaubert’s Mme Bovary, lists the imagination as among the ‘‘virile traits’’ of Flaubert’s protagonist: ‘‘L’imagination, faculte´ supreˆ me et tyrannique, substitue´ e au coeur, ou a` ce qu’on appelle le coeur, d’ou` le raisonnement est d’ordinaire exclu, et qui domine ge´ ne´ ralement dans la femme, comme dans l’animal’’ (Baudelaire, Oeuvres comple` tes, 2:82) [The imagination, a supreme and tyrannical faculty, takes the place of the heart, or what is called the heart, from which reason is normally excluded and which generally dominates in women as well as in animals (my translation)]. 4. This expression is a paraphrase of a comment on Madame Bovary in Baudelaire’s article on the novel (‘‘Madame Bovary,’’ 81). 5. On irony in this text, see my ‘‘The Poetics of Irony in Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo,’’ Neoplilologus 59, no. 2 (April 1975): 165–89. 6. Translations are from La Fanfarlo, trans. Greg Boyd (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1986), 28. 7. My translation. This passage is omitted from Boyd’s translation. 8. Baudelaire, Oeuvres comple`tes, 1:679. 9. On case studies, observations and identifications of the symptoms of hysteria in the nineteenth century, particularly following the passage of the law of 1838 separating mental patients from prisoners and incarcerating them in asylums and, later in Charcot’s famous Salpetriere, see Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 128–55. 10. In a note to her article on male hysteria, Goldstein refers to this passage and suggests that Baudelaire may have been referring to two of the most up to date works on hysteria at the time, both of which were honored by the Royal Academy of Medecine: Landouzy, Traite´ complet de l’hyste´ rie and Brachet, Traite´ de l’hyste´ rie. Goldstein also notes that Baudelaire makes the controversial gesture of assuming the existence of hysteria in both men and women (145). On the appearance of male hysterics in medical discourse later in the century, see Janet Beizer’s discussion of Charcot in Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 49–50. 11. It has often been observed that the terms vaporiser and vaporisation have powerful poetic and philosophical resonances in Baudelaire. A famous passage in the Journaux intimes opposes vaporization to condensation of the self: the loss and dispersal of being is set in opposition to intensification and expansion of the self: ‘‘De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. Tout est la`’’ (676). In ‘‘Au Lecteur,’’ it is ‘‘Satan Trismegiste,’’ alchemist of evil, who dissipates the substance of our being: Sur l’oreillier du mal c’est Satan Trismegiste Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchante´ ,

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Et le riche metal de notre volonte´ Est tout vaporise´ par ce savant chimiste.

Vaporization, being subject to the vapors, of course, inescapably calls up the association between the pathological condition of having the vapors and hysteria, primarily female maladies in nineteenth-century symptomology. The title of a well known, early nineteenth-century medical treatise of hysteria, for instance, links together all nervous disorders, hysteria and the vapors, J. B. Louyer Villermay’s Traite´ des maladies nerveuses ou vapeurs et particulierement de l’hyse´ trie et de l’hypochondrie. Cited by Beizer, 32. Beizer notes, in commenting on Monique Schneider’s work on nineteenth-century phantasms of femininity, that concrete woman’s space is said to be the locus of the imagination. A citation from Schneider makes it clear that the womb is assumed to be the source of ‘‘vapors’’ from which dreams are produced: ‘‘La dimension imaginaire . . . se trouve pre´ cise´ ment localise´ e, assigne´ e a` re´ sidence a` l’inte´ rieur de la matrice fe´ minine: la` est le foyer de tous les reˆ ves et de toutes les divagations de´ lirantes; le re`gne onirique est regarde´ tout entier comme la concre´ tion de ces noires vapeurs exhale´ es par la matrice.’’ Monique Schneider, De l’exorcisme a` la psychanalyse: Le fe´ minin expurge´ (Paris: Retz, 1979), 125. Quoted in Beizer, 70–71. 12. See Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: The Women’s Press, 1989). ‘‘The Genesis of Genius,’’ 52– 60. Battersby traces the cultural history of genius in pre-Augustinian Rome, in which genius is a god associated with the ownership, protection, and cultivation of property and land, linked to patrilineal authority and descendence. In a broad sense genius is what dwells in man, meaning the male, his potential virility, energy, and life-giving force (52–53). 13. ‘‘Ils sont d’ailleurs si heureux dans chacune de leurs me´ tamorphoses, qu’ils n’en veulent pas le moins du monde a` tous ces beaux ge´ nies de les avoir devance´ s dans l’estime de la poste´ rite´ . Naive et respectable impudence! Tel e´ tait le pauvre Samuel’’ (554). 14. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘‘Genre,’’ Glyphe, 7 (1980): 1–14. Commenting on passages from Schlegel’s The Essence of Criticism, they observe: ‘‘It is understandable, then how in this situation, Literature, or Poetry, the ‘Romantic genre,’ insofar as the thing exists at all, is always sought for as a kind of ‘‘beyond’’ of literature itself. . . . The process as such of absolutization or infinitization exceeds, in all senses of the word, the theoretical or philosophical power in general of which it is, after all, the fulfillment. The ‘auto’ movement, if it can be called that—auto-formation, auto-organization, auto-dissolution, etc.—is always in a state of excess with itself’’ (11). 15. This energetic and active combination of the new and the old, in the generation of constantly regenerated definitions of literary genre, is characteristic of Romanticism in general, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have shown in ‘‘Genre.’’ The processes are linked to genre and to questions of generation: ‘‘Without a doubt, genre is the completed, differentiated, and identifiable product of an engenderment or of a generation. . . . the process of generation or of assembly obviously

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presupposes interpenetration and confusion; that is to say, a mixture (gattieren, in German, means ‘‘to mix’’). This would seem to be precisely what the Romantics sought as the very essence of literature: union, in the satire (another name for mixture) or in the novel (or even in the Platonic dialogue), the union of poetry and philosophy, the confusion of all the genres that had previously been delimited by ancient poetics, the interpenetration of the old and the new, etc.’’ (10). 16. Boyd’s translation misses the gender specific connotations of the final clause of this passage: ‘‘fe´ conde en desseins difficiles et en risibles avortements’’ [fertile with difficult plans and with laughable miscarriages]. 17. Clearly, these traits are far more pronounced as they apply to Emma Bovary than as they characterize Mme de Cosmelly’s persona in the passage discussed above. This is particularly true for the dandyism that Baudelaire attributes to Emma, to her excesses in buying expensive cloths, and to her love of costumes. In a passage of Mme de Cosmelly’s story that is told to Samuel in her ‘‘provincial tale,’’ however, she recounts her efforts to win back her husband’s affections by adopting provocative costumes in terms that are entirely consistent with the excesses attributed to Emma: ‘‘Moi, la chaste e´ pouse qu’il e´ tait alle´ chercher au fond d’un pauvre chateau, j’ai parade´ devant lui avec des robes de fille’’ (567–68). 18. See ‘‘Au Lecteur,’’ the liminal poem of Les Fleurs du mal, in which the narrator identifies Ennui as the supreme vice shared by the reader and the poet: Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre de´ licat, —Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon fre`re.

It has often been noted that Baudelaire is quite probably drawing upon the Greek origin of the word hypocrite, from hupocrites, meaning actor. 19. Baudelaire, ‘‘Madame Bovary,’’ 82. 20. See Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 21. Boyd translates: ‘‘une maladie d’arraigne´ e: literally, ‘‘a spider ailment.’’ Avoir une arraigne´ e au plafond means ‘‘to have a screw loose,’’ ‘‘to be a little touched in the head.’’ 22. Boyd’s translation gives ‘‘shiny pink,’’ following an editor’s incorrect version which substituted rose´ e for ruse´ e, ‘‘sly.’’ See Baudelaire, Oeuvres Comple`tes, 1:1428.

CHAPTER 3. ADMISSIONS OF DIFFERENCE 1. Joan DeJean comments on this audacity in her excellent introduction to Ourika in an edition recently published by the Modern Language Association: Claire de Duras, Ourika, ed. Joan DeJean (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994), x. All references below are

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to this edition. English translations are from Claire de Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994). 2. See Claudine Herrmann’s introduction to her edition of Ourika. Claire de Duras, Ourika: Une e´ dition fe´ ministe, ed. Claudine Herrmann, (Paris: Des femmes, 1973), 7–22. Herrmann discusses in detail the reception of the novella by Duras’s contemporaries. 3. Herrmann notes in her introduction that the political sense of the novella did not escape contemporaries of Claire de Duras, and quotes a letter from Martinique addressed in 1825 to Humboldt: Nous autres officiers de la marine royale, nous sommes tre`s mal vus ici a` cause des ne´ gotiations de M. de Recque a` Haiti. Le commerce clandestin de chair humaine va a` merveille. Les colons regardent chaque Franc¸ ais re´ cemment arrive´ comme un ne´ grophile et le spirituel et ge´ ne´ reux auteur d’Ourika est accuse´ a` chaque instant d’avoir rendu inte´ ressante dans son de´ testable roman une ne´ gresse qui n’avait pas meˆ me l’avantage d’eˆ tre une ne´ gresse cre´ ole. (introduction to Ourika, 21) [We officers of the Royal Navy are poorly regarded here because of then negotiations of M. de Reque in Haiti. The commerce in human flesh is thriving. The colonists look upon every recently arrived Frenchman as a negrophile and the witty and magnanimous author of Ourika is constantly accused of having made this negress interesting in her detestable novel although she didn’t even have the advantage of being creole. [my translation)]

See also Le´ on-Franc¸ois Hoffmann, Le Ne`gre Romantique: personnage litte´ raire et obsession collective (Paris: Payot, 1973), 225. For discussion of debates during the French Revolution and in the early nineteenth century regarding slavery, the rights of blacks, and the abolitionist movement in France, see William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, (New York: Vintage, 2d ed. 1989); Le Code noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan, ed. Louis Sala-Molins, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989). This edition of the Code noir, the set of laws governing the status of slaves, originally signed by Louis XIV in 1685, and its revisions, contains an abundant commentary by Sala Molins on the Code, its history, and the political and moral debates that it occasioned up to the time that slavery was abolished in 1848. 4. Duras, Ourika, ed. Claudine Herrmann. 5. Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles. 6. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite´ , 2, L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 12–13. The Uses of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon: 1985). By extending the subjects identified in the following passage to include the black woman, the inquiry proposed by Foucault provides a useful orientation for the issues to be raised in this chapter: A travers quels jeux de ve´ rite´ l’homme se donne-t-il a` penser son eˆ tre propre quand il se perc¸oit comme fou, quand il se regarde comme malade, quand il se

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re´ fle´ chit comme eˆ tre vivant, parlant et travaillant, quand il se juge et se punit a` titre de criminel? A travers quels jeux de ve´ rite´ l’eˆ tre humain est-il reconnu comme homme de de´ sir? (13). [What are the games of truth by which man proposes to think his own nature when he perceives himself to be mad; when he considers himself to be ill; when he conceives of himself as a living, speaking, laboring being; when he judges and punishes himself as a criminal? What were the games of truth by which human beings came to see themselves as desiring individuals? (7)]

7. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, 6–7. 8. On the role of women and the importance of conversation in Enlightenment salons, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 9. Ourika, trans. John Fowles, 12. 10. This passage will be discussed in detail below, but I note here that it represents a process whereby, as Frantz Fanon has remarked, the black assumes a ‘‘cultural imposition.’’ Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 11. Herrmann, introduction to Ourika, 10: ‘‘Il y a dans la vie de Madame de Duras deux blesssures dont on trouve la trace dans Ourika: son amitie´ pour Chateabriand et son amour de´ c¸u pour sa fille Fe´ licie’’ [There are in Madame de Duras’s life two wounds whose the traces of which are found in Ourika: her friendship for Chateaubriand and her disappointed love for her daughter Fe´ licie (my translation). For a discussion of these personal sufferings and their traces in Ourika, see Herrmann, 10–21. 12. See Goodman, The Republic of Letters, for a discussion of the role of women in the literary, social, and political culture of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), discusses the efforts of French feminists, from Olympe de Gouges during and after the French Revolution, to Madeleine Pelletier, in the early twentieth century, to gain access to the political arena and to shape political and philosophical debates and the diverse strategies marshaled to assure their exclusion. Scott’s chapter on Olympe de Gouges, author of a well-known Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen (1791), analyzes several themes of De Gouge’s writings and the contemporary debates about women as citizens that have particular relevance to Ourika, most particularly the role of sexual difference in politics and as a factor determining citizenship in general: The point was not to establish women’s likeness to men in order to qualify for citizenship, but to refute the prevailing equation of active citizenship with masculinity, to make sexual difference irrelevant for politics and at the same time, to associate women—explicitly as women—with the notion of the ‘‘active’’ subject. (33)

The conjunction between ‘‘race’’ and gender in Ourika can be seen as an extension of debates, during the Revolution and the early nineteenth

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century on the links between biological and political identity. Scott, 47–53. 13. Sainte-Beuve, Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Editions de la Ple´ iade, 1960), 1049. Quoted in David O’Connell, ‘‘Ourika: Black Face, White Mask,’’ French Review 47, no. 6 (spring 1974), 47–56. 14. Herrmann, introduction to Durika, 20. 15. Franc¸ oise Massardier-Kenney, ‘‘Duras, Racism, and Class,’’ in Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783– 1823, ed. Doris Y. Kadish and Franc¸oise Massardier-Kenny (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994), 185–94. 16. Ibid., 188. 17. See Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, chapters 3, 4, and 5: ‘‘Three Patterns of Interaction’’ ‘‘The Issue of Slavery’’ and ‘‘The Nineteenth Century Confronts Slavery.’’ 18. Foucault, ‘‘L’Hypothe`se re´ pre´ ssive,’’ in Histoire de la sexualite´ , 25– 67. (‘‘The Repressive Hypothesis,’’ 15–50.) 19. Similarities between the texts are limited to the recurrence of the name Ourika. Mme de Stae¨ l’s Mirza is set in a fantasized, exotic Africa and recounts the story of an African warrior, Xime´ o, saved from slavery by the eloquent pleas of an extraordinary African woman, Mirza, taken captive with her beloved Xime´ o. Although the hero loves Mirza, he has not renounced his wife Ourika, and this divided love will lead Mirza to take her life. Mirza decries the injustices of slavery, imposed by Africans upon themselves or by Europeans, but wins the freedom of her Xime´ o by the example of her devotion. She prefers death to freedom, however, and commits suicide as Xime´ o is granted his freedom. The story is recounted by Xime´ o to an anonymous European traveler, who has visited an African plantation modeled on those of San Domingo and overseen by Xime´ o. The story provides a utopian vision of ‘‘civilizing’’ Africans, through the intervention of Europeans, of their toiling productively without the cruelties of slavery, and engaging in commerce with Europe, for the benefit of Europeans and Africans alike. 20. Massardier-Keeney, in Duras, Racism, and Class,’’ 189. 21. David O’Connell, ‘‘Ourika: Black Face, White Mask.’’ 22. See ibid., 50–1. 23. See Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). The link between woman’s suffering and pathology in Ourika is consistent with an association that was to become increasingly pronounced in nineteenth-century France, as Beizer’s study of ‘‘hysteria’’ and representations of feminine sensibility in novels written during the course of the century demonstrates persuasively. 24. See Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer. In her chapter ‘‘The Uses of Imagination: Olympe de Gouges in the French Revolution,’’ Scott discusses De Gouge’s resistance to the consolidation in the early 1790s of the connection between law, order, masculine virtue, her defense of active imagination, and claims of women’s rights of citizenship. 25. See Sander L. Gilman, ‘‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward

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an Iconography of Female Sexuality,’’ in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76–108. Gilman traces the association between the black, particularly the black female, with concupiscence. Ourika’s dance and the allegory of Africa serve to neutralize these associations at this point in the narrative. 26. See Leon-Franc¸ois Hoffmann, ‘‘Le Ne`gre romantique, 1815–48,’’ in Le Ne`gre romantique, 147–68. The stereotype of the black as an incomplete being, incapable of abstract thought, childlike, appears throughout writings on Africans and on slavery. See also Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: ‘‘The Negro loves to jabber, and from this theory it is not a long road that leads to a new proposition: The Negro is just a child. The psychoanalysts have a fine start here, and the term orality is soon heard’’ (27). 27. Fanon, ‘‘The Negro and Psychopathology,’’ in Black Skin, White Masks, 141–209, esp. 154 and 180. 28. See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 111–14 and the discussion of the problematic of seeing and being seen in the author’s account of his reactions to a child’s exclaiming to her mother: ‘‘Look, a Negro!’’ See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,’’ in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 66–84. Bhabha discusses this episode as a ‘‘primal scene,’’ in which the white locates the black in a recognition and disavowal of the Negroid type: a ‘‘myth of the origin of the marking of the subject within the racist practices and discourses of a colonial culture’’ (75–76). 29. Bhabha: ‘‘one has to see the surveillance of colonial power as functining in relation to the regime of the scopic drive. That is, the drive that represents the pleasure in ‘seeing,’ which has the look as its object of desire, is related both to the myth of origins, the primal scene, and to the problematic of fetishism and locates the surveyed object within the ‘imaginary’ relation. Like voyeurism, surveillance must depend for its effectivity on the active consent which is its real or mythical correlate (but always real as myth) and establishes in the scopic space the illusion of the object relation. . . . The ambivalence of this form of ‘consent’ in objectification—real as mythical—is the ambivalence on which the stereotype turns’’ (‘‘The Other Question,’’ 76). 30. Ibid., 76–77. 31. Bhabha: ’’The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference—racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power’’ (Ibid., 67). 32. Bhabha: ‘‘Fixity, as a sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacil-

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lates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated . . . as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial licence of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved’’ (66). 33. Ourika: ‘‘Quelle lumie` re affreuse avait-elle jete` e sur l’abıˆ me de mes douleurs! Grand Dieu! C’e´ tait comme la lumie`re que pe´ ne´ tra une fois au fond des enfers, et qui fit regretter les te´ ne`bres a` ses malheureux habitants’’ (41) [What she had just revealed to me threw a terrifying illumination over the depths of my suffering. It was like the shaft of light that once penetrated to the bottom of hell and made the miserable beings there weep for the darkness of their existence’’ (42–43)]. 34. Bhabha discusses Fanon’s ‘‘primal scene,’’ an alienating identification analogous to Ourika’s self representations, in terms of Lacan’s mirror phase (‘‘The Other Question,’’ 77). 35. Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, 111–14. 36. On defenses of slavery based on reactions to the revolution in Saint Domingue, see Hoffmann, 116–20. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins. A more sympathetic view of the revolutionaries is offered in James’s discussion of the violence during the uprisings: ‘‘They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind’’ (88). 37. Joan DeJean, introduction to Ourika, vii. 38. Michelle Chilcoat, ‘‘Confinement, the Family Institution, and the Case of Claire de Duras’s Ourika,’’ L’Esprit cre´ ateur 38, no. 3 (fall 1998): 6–16. Chilcoat traces the emergence of the bourgeois family during the Revolution and in early nineteenth-century France as a basic unit of social order upon which the nation is built. She correctly observes that Ourika is incapable of conceiving her identity outside the space of family and domesticity, a fate shared by the author (16). 39. Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question,’’ 82. On the ambivalence of the colonialist fantasy, Bhabha observes: ‘‘Despite the structural similarities with the play of need and desire in primal fantasies, the colonial fantasy does not try to cover up that moment of separation. It is more ambivalent. On the one hand, it poses a teleology—under certain conditions of colonial domination and control the native is progressively reformable. On the other, however, it effectively displays the ‘separation,’ makes it more visible. It is the visibility of this separation which, in denying the colonized the capacities of self-government, independence, Western modes of civility, lends authority to the official version and mission of colonial power’’ (82–83). 40. Modifications to the Code noir in the late eighteenth century directed the strict interdiction of interracial marriages and denied admission of blacks to France, where it was feared that they would multiply in profusion and intermarry with whites. See Sala Molins, Le Code noir, 220. 41. See Abbe´ Gabriel Pailhe`s, La Duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand d’apre`s des documents ine´ dits (Paris: Perrin, 1910). Pailhe`s juxtaposes de-

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votional texts by Duras and Ourika overlooking completely any ironic reading of the novella’s conclusion. 42. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 187–223.

CHAPTER 4. HOW HERCULINE’S/ABEL’S STORY IS SIMPLIFIED 1. Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B, presente´ par Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). Referred to hereafter as HB. 2. In dealing with intersexed infants, in spite of advances in medical technology, including cytologic screening, chromosomal analysis, serum electrolytes assessment, radiographic genitography, and hormone, gonadotropin and steroids evaluation, contemporary physicians continue to rely primarily on cultural assumptions designed to insure physical conformity of the two gender systems. Criteria that come into play are the presence of a ‘‘good sized’’ penis, or of a vagina large enough to receive an ‘‘average’’ penis. For a discussion of medical (re)construction in intersexuals and the cultural construction of gender, see Susan J. Kessler, ‘‘The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants,’’ Signs 16 (autumn 1990): 3–26; and Lessons from the Intersexed (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). See also John Money, Biographies of Gender and Hermaphroditism in Paired Comparisons (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1991). For an excellent discussion of the history of sociocultural, legal, and medico-surgical treatments of hermaphroditism and for what these treatments reveal about the cultural reception of sexual ambiguity, see Julia Epstein, ‘‘Either/Or—Neither/Both: Sexual Ambiguity and the Ideology of Gender,’’ Genre 7 (spring 1990), 99–142. Epstein discusses the Barbin case as inscribed in social ideology as a challenge to gender-defined privilege (122–25). 3. HB, 131. 4. HB, back jacket. 5. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite´ : la volonte´ de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Foucault noted in an interview that all of his works are to be read intertextually, since each deals in some way with discursive constructions of truth and with the diagrammatic operations of power. In addition to La Volonte´ de savoir, there are many developments in Surveiller et punir that are to be correlated with the regulations of activities described in Herculine Barbin, most notably, passages dealing with the procedures through which discipline produces and defines subjects. 6. Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, introduced by Michel Foucault, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980), vii–xviii. Referred to hereafter as HB, translation. 7. HB, translation, viii. In nineteenth-century juridical and medical discourses, the term ‘‘error’’ is understood in the most traditionally phil-

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osophical sense as ‘‘a manner of acting that is not adequate to reality’’ (x). 8. ‘‘Ce qui est propre aux socie´ te´ s modernes, ce n’est pas qu’elles aient voue´ le sexe a` rester dans l’ombre, c’est qu’elles se soient voue´ es a` en parler toujours, en le faisant valoir comme le secret’’ (Histoire, 49) [What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret] (History, 35)]. 9. Histoire, 39 (History, 29). 10. Histoire, 39. Speaking of the colle`ges of the eighteenth century, Foucault states: ‘‘L’espace de la classe, la forme des tables, l’ame´ nagement des cours de re´ cre´ ation, la distribution des dortoirs (avec ou sans cloisons, avec ou sans rideaux), les re`glements pre´ vus pour la surveillance du coucher et du sommeil, tout cela renvoie, de la manie`re la plus prolixe, a` la sexualite´ des enfants’’ [The space for classes. The shape of the tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution of the dormitories (with or without partitions, with or without curtains), the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods—all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the sexuality of children (History, 28)]. 11. HB, 111. 12. For Foucault, power and knowledge are not discontinuous, but linked in a complex relation. Deleuze notes in his Foucault: ‘‘jamais la connaissance ne renvoie a` un sujet qui serait libre par rapport a` un diagramme de pouvoir, mais jamais celui-ci n’est libre par rapport aux savoirs qui l’actualisent.’’ Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1986), 82. In discussing the linkage between sexuality, power, and knowledge, Foucault observed: ‘‘Si la sexualite´ s’est constitue´ e comme domaine a` connaıˆtre, c’est a` partir de relations de pouvoir qui l’ont institue´ e comme objet possible; et en retour si le pouvoir a pu la prendre pour cible, c’est parce que des techniques de ce savoir, des proce´ dures de discours ont e´ te´ capables de l’investir. Entre techniques de savoir et strate´ gies de pouvoir, nulle exte´ riorite´ ’’ (Histoire, 130) [If sexuality was constituted as an area of investigation, this was only because relations of power had established it as a possible object; and conversely, if power was able to take it as a target, this was because techniques of knowledge and procedures of discourse were capable of investing it. Between techniques of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority’’ (History, 98)]. It follows from those observations that the revelation that Alexina Herculine’s body is anomalous to the ‘‘possible objects’’ which are subject to regulation, that it is an ‘‘impossible body,’’ having the potential to provoke radical disruptions in the dynamics between power and knowledge. 13. In discussing the narrative, I will refer to Alexina Herculine as Camille, using the name that appears in the text, provided by Tardieu, in the first published version of the autobiography. 14. HB, 111. 15. HB, 111; emphasis added. 16. ‘‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex,’’ in Michel Foucault, Foucault

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Live (Interviews, 1966–84). Trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylve` re Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), ‘‘Foreign Agents’’ Series, 1989), 138. 17. Camille notes that, while residing with his/her benefactor, monsieur de Saint-M . . . , she read widely from ancient and modern authors in his library. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is singled out for mention as having had a particular impact upon his/her young consciousness. The tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus is never mentioned, however, and does not seem to have provided a model for his/her subjectivity or desires. On the tradition linking the reading of novels, the disposition to erotic excesses, and the development of sexual pathologies, see Janet Beizer, ‘‘Reading Women: The Novel in the Text of Hysteria,’’ in Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 55–73. On nineteenth-century perceptions of the seductive dangers of the novel, see Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press), 1994. 18. On Rousseau’s treatment of this convention in his Confessions, see Paul DeMan, ‘‘Excuses,’’ in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 278–301: ‘‘Confessions occur in the name of an absolute truth which is said to exist ‘for itself’ (’Pour elle seule,’ [1028]) and of which particular truths are only derivative and secondary aspects’’ (279). See also my ‘‘The Autobiography of Rhetoric: On Reading Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer,’’ in The Limits of Narrative Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, and Mallarme´ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 78–95. 19. ‘‘Pour se de´ dommager de notre silence a` son e´ gard, il avait imagine´ un espionnage, le plus douloureux de tous. La plupart de nos e´ le`ves se confessaient a` lui. Non content de leur adresser une foule de questions personnelles, plus ou moins de´ place´ es, vis-a`-vis d’enfants si jeunes, il en arrivait adroitement a` se faire rendre par elles un compte de´ taille´ de toutes nos actions. Incapables d’e´ chapper a` cette inquisition, les pauvres enfants avouaient tout et nous en pre´ venaient ensuite. Je m’abstiens ici de qualifier un pareil acte!!!’’ (HB, 76) [To make up to himself for our silence toward him, he had invented a form of espionage, the most painful of all. The majority of our students confessed to him. Not content to ask them a host of personal questions that were more or less out of place with regard to children as young as they, he adroitly succeeded in having them give him a detailed account of all our activities. Incapable of escaping this inquisition, the poor children would confess everything and would inform us afterward. I shall refrain here from giving a name to such an act!!! (HB, translation, 65)]. 20. ‘‘D’abord elle craignait un e´ clat pouvant porter atteinte a` l’honorabilite´ de sa maison et compromettre ses inte´ reˆ ts. Ensuite elle avait en moi une confiance sans bornes. Accepter les insinuations du docteur, c’e´ tait en meˆ me temps douter de sa fille, et son orgueil se re´ voltait a` cette ide´ e. Elle poussait la naı¨vete´ jusqu’a` croire que j’e´ tais dans une ignorance comple`te de ma position. . . . C’e´ tait l’absurde pousse´ au dernier degre´ !!!’’ (HB, 81) [First of all, she was afraid of a scandal that might harm

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the respectability of her house and compromise her interests. Then, she had boundless trust in me. To accept the insinuations of the doctor was to doubt her daughter at the same time, and her pride rebelled at that idea. She drove her naivete´ so far as to believe that I was completely ignorant of my position . . . That was absurdity pushed to the last degree!!! (HB, translation, 70)]. 21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 100. 22. ‘‘J’avais, pour ainsi dire, mis ma destine´ e entre ses mains, en l’e´ tablissant mon juge!’’ (HB, 72) [In setting him up as my judge, I had put my destiny in his hands, as it were (HB, translation, 62)]. 23. See Butler, Gender Trouble, 106. 24. The formation of a bourgeois body as a multiform symbolic construction is a key component in the emergence of bourgeois cultural hegemony, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing throughout the nineteenth cetury. Foucault proposed that the bourgeois body marks the class as a distinct cast: ‘‘N’imaginons pas la bourgeoisie se chaˆ trant symboliquement pour mieux refuser aux autres le droit d’avoir un sexe et d’en user a` leur gre´ . Il faut plutoˆ t la voir s’employer, a` partir du milieu du XVIIe sie`cle, a` se donner une sexualite´ et a` se constituer a` partir d’elle un corps spe´ cifique, un corps ‘de classe’ avec une sante´ , une hygie`ne, une descendance, une race: autosexualisation de son corps, incarnation du sexe dans son corps propre, endogamie du sexe et du corps’’ (Histoire, 164) [Let us not picture the bourgeoisie symbolically castrating itself the better to refuse others the right to have a sex and make use of it as they please. This class must be seen rather as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a ‘‘class’’ body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race: the autosexualization of its body, the incarnation of sex in its body, the endogamy of sex and the body (History, 124)]. 25. One might wonder what values those who renamed Herculine Ade´ laı¨de wished to accrue to the new subject named Abel. If Herculine/Ade´ laı¨de’s mother has gained a new son, who is the father of this new subject? Is he a composite social persona, combining the priest, the doctor, and the judge? Does Herculine/Ade´ laı¨de become a second born to himself? Does the infertile hermaphrodite thus become symbolically fertile, generating his own new identity? Or does Herculine/Ade´ laı¨de gain with the name Abel, like his namesake in Genesis, a divine favor that carries with it an early death? Is there not some uncanny anticipation here that Abel will die not as the result of the jealous anger of a sibling, but by other forms of fratricidal expulsion? 26. Foucault, Histoire, 163. 27. Foucault, Histoire, 163; History, 123. 28. HB, 114. 29. Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies, commenting on Charcot’s diagnosis of lower class male ‘‘hysterics’’ and the transmutation of sexual pathology into class pathology, observes: ‘‘This, of course, is another case of social conservatism that is being practiced in the name of pathology or

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power that is masquerading as diagnosis. When the clinicians separate the normal from the abnormal, they also designate a fixed, stable center of society as distinct from a devalued periphery; society’s unacceptable elements are exiled as mobile, deviant, eccentric. By the latter part of the century the hysteria label was an attempt to pin down or arrest the upwardly mobile desires of various social outcasts’’ (50). 30. ‘‘Je lui demandai tout simplement de me faire embarquer a` bord d’un paquebot, comme garc¸on de salle. Ma proposition l’e´ tonna fort. Il eut voulu faire mieux pour moi’’ (HB, 124–25) [I asked him quite simply to let me sail on board a steamship as a waiter’s assistant. My proposal astonished him a great deal. He wished he could do better for me (HB, 111)]. 31. William E. Connolly, ‘‘Voices from the Whirlwind,’’ in The Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment, ed. Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 219. 32. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Laqueur demonstrates that prevailing nineteenth-century medical theory differed from earlier speculations on sex and gender, from Aristotle to the mid eighteenth century, which held that there was only one sex, the male, and that the female organs were lesser analogs of the male. A two sex opposition emerged with advances in anatomy and embryology in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, with the categories of male and female resituated in opposite and incommensurate biological sexes. Frequent and persistent traces of the ancient model can be observed throughout the nineteenth century, however, and they can be seen in Tardieu’s analysis. Within the apparent opposition there is an underlying cultural imperative that bears the mark of earlier theories serving to sustain the dominance of the male in both gender and sex. See ‘‘Discovery of the Sexes,’’ in Making Sex, 149–92. 33. See Laqueur, Making Sex: ‘‘Scientists did far more than offer neutral data to ideologues. They lent their prestige to the whole enterprise; they discovered or bore witness to aspects of sexual difference that had been ignored. Moreover, the politics of gender very clearly affected not only the interpretation of clinical and laboratory data but also its production’’ (153).

CHAPTER 5. URBAN BODY 1. Balzac, Histoire des Treize: La Duchesse de Langeais, Ferragus, La Fille aux yeux d’or, ed. Pierre Barbe´ ris (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1983) ‘‘Il est e´ tonnant de constater que ce texte e´ rotique et ‘prive´ ’ s’ouvre par une vaste introduction d’une tout autre nature, et dont on voit mal, a` premie`re vue, la relation avec la suite. On peut meˆ me se demander, lorsqu’on constate que Balzac y re´ utilise sans pudeur des textes et chroniques de lui de´ ja` publie´ s, si cette introduction ne constitue pas un de ces placages dont d’autres oeuvres offrent tant d’exemples. La couture, il est vrai et si l’on

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en veut une, semble bien artificielle’’ (473) ]It is astonishing to remark that this erotic and ‘‘private’’ text opens with a vast introduction of a very different nature. At first it is difficult to see its relation to what follows. When one observes that Balzac reuses shamelessly in the introduction already published texts and chronicles one may even ask if this isn’t one of those overlays found in so many other works. The link, if there is one or if one wishes to find one, seems quite artificial.] Virtually all readings of this text comment on its hybrid structure. See also Chantal Massol-Bedoin, ‘‘La Charade et la chime`re. Du re´ cit e´ nigmatique dans La Fille aux yeux d’or,’’ Poe´ tique 89 (February 1992): 31–45, who notes the composite ordering of passages in this text and the prior publication of some of the sequences. The preface appeared alone under the title Physionomies parisiennes (‘‘Parisian Psyognomies’’) in April 1834, in the third volume of Sce`nes de la vie parisienne, Scenes of Parisian Life. The prologue itself incorporates a passage on ‘‘Le Petit mercier’’ (‘‘The Little Haberdasher’’), which was published in 1830 in La Caricature. The second part of the text, relating De Marsay’s adventure, was published in the fourth volume of Sce`nes in May 1835. 2. Barbe´ ris, Histoire des Treize, 472, notes this link in his comments on the title: ‘‘Des yeux d’or, et connus pour tels, sont des yeux publics, des yeux dont la splendeur est a` tous. Mais l’or leur ajoute encore quelque chose. L’or et le plaisir sont lie´ s, comme le proclame emphatiquement le prologue. L’or est diabolique. Il signifie l’e´ change, le mouvement par opposition aux stabilite´ s de la tradition. L’or est ce qui remue, ce qui de´ stabilise, ce qui affole et s’affole. . . . La fille aux yeux d’or, c’est donc la figure fe´ minine de tous les interdits’’ [Golden eyes, known as such, are public eyes, whose splendor is for everyone. But gold adds something else to them. Gold and pleasure are linked, as the prologue emphatically proclaims. Gold is diabolical. It signifies exchange, movement in opposition to the stability of tradition. Gold is what causes madness and is mad. The Girl With The Golden Eyes is thus the feminine figure of all that is forbidden]. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970) comments on the significance of gold in Balzac’s novella Sarrasine. Gold is associated at the end of the text with a general collapse of economies, economies of language, of the body and of money: ‘‘l’Or parisien produit par la nouvelle classe sociale, spe´ culatrice et non plus terrienne, cet or est sans origine, il a re´ pudie´ tout code de circulation, toute re`gle d’e´ change, toute ligne de proprie´ te´ ’’ (221) [Parisian Gold produced by the new social class, speculative and no longer land-based—such gold is without origin, it has repudiated every circulatory code, every rule of exchange, every line of propriety]. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974) 215. 3. Barbe´ ris, Histoire des Treize, 473–74; Massol-Bedoin, ‘‘La charade,’’ 32–33. 4. Shoshana Felman, ‘‘Rereading Femininity,’’ Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 19–44. The quotations are from p. 22. 5. Ibid., 31. 6. Doris Kadish, in ‘‘Hybrids in Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or,’’ Nine-

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teenth-Century French Studies 16 (spring–summer 1988), 270–78, discusses hybridity in the interrelation between the themes of mixed sexuality and mixed nationality in La Fille. Underlying these motifs is the ‘‘political statement’’ that in Restoration society ‘‘class differences have been obscured and undermined, but not wholly obliterated.’’ A new adulterated upper-class, ‘‘personified by hybrid figures like de Marsay and the Treize,’’ stands in place of a legitimate aristocracy. The hybrid, thus, is a symbol of deviant politics. 7. Massol-Bedoin, ‘‘La Charade,’’ 33–34: ‘‘La vieille me´ taphore the´ ologique du cercle, qui s’est impose´ e a` l’e´ crivain en queˆ te de totalite´ , se montre en train de perdre toute valeur e´ piste´ mologique’’ (33) [The old theological metaphor of the circle, which has imposed itself on the writer seeking totality, is in the process of loosing all epistemological value (my translation)]. 8. The Girl with the Golden Eyes, trans. Ernest Dowson (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1931), 30. All translations are from this edition. 9. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). Silverman’s discussion of ‘‘the dominant fiction,’’ what passes for reality in a society, notes that ‘‘the dominant fiction’s most rudimentary binary opposition is that distinguishing masculinity from femininity; its most fundamental equation is that of penis and phallus and its most central signifier is the family.’’ The dominant fiction can be sustained only as it is affirmed by the larger society: ‘‘This affirmation does not involve only—or even primarily—conscious belief. It involves, rather, the activation of certain desires and identifications’’ (178). See also Silverman’s ‘‘The Dominant Fiction,’’ in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15–51. 10. See Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Commenting on the obsession with looking in Balzac’s novels, Brooks notes: ‘‘The most insistent observer of all is the Balzacian narrator, who constantly scrutinizes and interrogates faces, surfaces, and appearances, in order to detect the meanings that they cannot help contain. . . . Vision in Balzac . . . almost always is ‘scopophilia,’ to use Freud’s term: an investment of sexual desire in the gaze’’ (84). Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962). In the second essay, ‘‘Infantile Sexuality,’’ Freud links the instinct for knowledge with the sexual life of children and with the desire for mastery: ‘‘This instinct [for knowledge] cannot be counted among the elementary instinctual components, nor can it be classed as exclusively belonging to sexuality. Its activity corresponds on the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on the other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia’’ (60). See also Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth-Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 52–59. Prendergast’s excellent discussion of the opening section of Balzac’s text notes the failure of the narrator’s mastery, its vulnerability to the very excesses said to characterize the city and that emerge in the narrator’s language in its eclectic and ‘‘promiscuously mixed’’ metaphors, its repetitions, and its deferral of the promised

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total vision. This discussion does not address the possible interrelations between the two sections of the novel. 11. Kaja Silverman’s revisionary reading of Lacan’s theory of the gaze and the look, in The Threshold of the Visible World, draws out differences between the two categories. The gaze ‘‘would seem to be the registration within the field of vision of the dependence of the social subject upon the Other for his or her own meaning. It is thus necessarily independent of any individual look, and exterior to the subject in its constitutive effects.’’ The look would seem ‘‘to be always finite, always embodied, and always within spectacle, although it does not necessarily acknowledge itself as such (134, emphasis added). As both a psychic and visual category it is unavoidably marked by lack and Silverman concludes: ’’It would consequently seem to be propelled by desire, and to be vulnerable to the lures of the imaginary‘‘ (134). 12. On prostitution and the maintenance of public order in nineteenthcentury France, see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Jann Matlock, in Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) discusses laws regulating prostitution and their impact on political protests of the Revolution of 1830: ‘‘The prostitute’s body took a central position in these struggles because she mobilized a series of old obsessions about revolution, libertinism, sexuality, gender, and class. Viewed as marginalized, she could be made to stand in for other members of the disenfranchised classes. . . . Depicted as degraded, she could be associated with movements feared and hated by opposing groups’’ (61). 13. Roland Barthes, S/Z: ‘‘Finir, remplir, joindre, unifier, on dirait que c’est la` l’exigence fondamentale du lisible, comme si une peur obsessionnelle le saisissait: celle d’omettre une jointure’’ (112) [To end, to fill, to join, to unify—one might say that this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection (105)]. 14. See Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the 19th-Century City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Ferguson discusses traditional and midnineteenth century iconographic representations of the city on seals of Paris in ‘‘Haussmann’s Paris and the Revolution of Representation,’’ 115–51. Traditional emblems of the city of Paris, from the earliest seal of 1215 to the seal of Paris, 1853, of the prefect of the department of the Seine, the Baron Georges-Euge`ne Haussmann, contain a ship in full sail and other traditional components, a chateau-crown, the fleur-de-lys, signalling the monarchy. 15. Kadish, ‘‘Hybrids,’’ 272–73 discusses this mix of gendered traits and Henri’s mixed national origins linking them to the political themes of the novel. 16. The flaˆ neur, of course, is a very familiar figure in nineteenth-century French writings. He strolls the streets in search of entertainment,

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viewing the persons and places that he meets as legible texts, doubling his identity with those whom he encounters by chance in his wanderings throughout the streets, parks, or arcades. The most famous figure of the flaˆ neur, perhaps, is Baudelaire’s narrator in the prose poem, ‘‘Les Foules,’’ but he is a familiar persona in Flaubert and in Balzac, as well as in this well-known passage spoken by the narrator in ‘‘Facino cane’’: ‘‘Une seule passion m’entraıˆnait en dehors de mes habitudes studieuses—mais n’e´ tait-ce pas encore de l’e´ tude?—: j’allais observer les moeurs du faubourg, ses habitants et leurs caracte` res. Aussi mal veˆ tu que les ouvriers, indiffe´ rent au de´ corum, je ne les mettais point en garde contre moi. Je pouvais me meˆ ler a` leurs groupes, les voir concluant leurs marche´ s, et se disputant a` l’heure ou` ils quittent le travail.’’ ‘‘Facino Cane,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes (Paris: Guy LePrat, 1959), 373–74. [A singular passion drew me out of my studious habits, but wasn’t this also study? I was going to observe the ways of the faubourg, its habits and its characters. As poorly clothed as the workers, indifferent to decorum, I didn’t put them on guard. I could mingle with their groups, watch them make deals, haggling as they left work (my translation)]. On the flaˆ neur in general as a figure of a modern, urban far niente, see Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 155–200; Richard Burton, ‘‘The Unseen Seer, of Proteus in the City: Aspects of a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Myth,’’ French Studies 42, no. 1 (January 1988): 50–68; Ross Chambers, ‘‘Baudelaire’s Street Poetry,’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 15, nos. 1–2 (fall–winter 1986): 244–59; Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, ’’The Flaˆ neur: The City and Its Discontents,‘‘ in Paris as Revolution, 80–114; Marie Maclean, ’’The Writer as Performer,‘‘ in Narrative as Performance (London: Routledge, 1988), 43–70; Nathaniel Wing, ‘‘Baudelaire’s frisson fraternel: Horror and Enchantment in ‘‘Les Tableaux parisiens,’’ Neophilologus 81, no. 1 (January 1997): 21–33. 17. Brooks, Body Work, 96. 18. Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). This excellent study examines representations and narratives of the female body, principally but not exclusively ‘‘hysterics,’’ in nineteenth-century fictions, and medical and legal discourses that give voice to a wide range of concerns of the male writers of those texts: ‘‘The growing belief, in the nineteenth century, in the superiority of impersonal or objective styles of narration finds a support in the hysteric’s semiotic body, which relays language to gesture and physical symptom. The hysteric becomes a useful device for authors who strive to hide words behind matter and to disguise telling as showing. The sleight of hand is easily revealed. Female bodily discourse, an illusionist’s work, turns out to be a ventriloquist’s hoax’’ (9). De Marsay’s observations stage this projection of male centered fantasies on the female body in a particularly explicit manner. 19. See Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,’’ in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 183–93. In speaking of the pre-

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history of the Oedipus complex in this essay and the discovery of the genital zones, the girl’s realization of the ‘‘inferiority’’ of her organ and the consequent arousal of ‘‘penis envy,’’ Freud asserts: ‘‘I shall leave it an open question whether it is really true that the child takes the newly found source of pleasure in exchange for the recent loss of the mother’s nipple—a possibility to which later phantasies (fellatio) seem to point. Be that as it may, the genital zone is discovered at some time or other, and there seems no justification for attributing any psychical content to its first stimulations. But the first step in the phallic phase which begins in this way is not the linking-up of the masturbation with the object cathexes of the Oedipus situation, but a momentous discovery which little girls are destined to make. They notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis’’ (187). I cite this passage as one of many examples of Freud’s deprecatory vocabulary in referring to anatomical distinctions between the sexes. 20. Chantal Massol-Bedoin correctly identifies the central role of the enigma in the narrative structure of the text, on hidden identities that can ultimately be identified and named. From the outset, the narrative engages with questions linking identity to reading and legibility. See Massol-Bedoin, ‘‘La Charade,’’ 36. Christopher Prendergast, in Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), notes that the novel follows many of the ‘‘trappings’’ of the mystery story: ‘‘ignorance, suspense, allusion detour, leading finally to the disclosure of connection by means of the standard ‘recognition scene’ ’’ (63). He also observes, following Walter Benjamin, that there is a distinct link between the mystery story and the developing modern city: ‘‘it is clear that the experience of the size, anonymity and complexity of the modern city provided an extremely fruitful terrain for the increasingly labyrinthine ramifications of the mystery story’’ (68). 21. The first text of L’Histoire des treize, La Duchesse de Langeais (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), ends with the assault by the hero of the novel, Montriveau and a band composed of the treize on the convent in which his would be lover had sought refuge. The episode is described in terms that suggest explicitly a penetration and opening of a feminine sanctuary: ‘‘Sur le champ, son plan fut fait et adopte´ . S’ouvrir un passage par la feneˆ tre de ce parloir qui en e´ clairait la partie affecte´ e aux carme´ lites, pe´ ne´ trer dans les corridors, voir si les noms e´ taient inscrits sur chaque cellule, aller a` celle de la soeur The´ re`se, y surprendre et baillonner la religieuse pendant son sommeil, la lier et l’enle`ver, toutes ces parties du programme e´ taient faciles’’ (238) [Right then and there his plan was concluded and accepted. Open up a passage through the window of this visitor’s room which would illuminate the part occupied by the Carmelites, penetrate the corridors, see if the names were written on each cell, go to Sister Teresa’s, surprise and gag the nun as she sleeps, tie her up and carry her away (my translation)]. 22. See, for example, Peter Brooks, ‘‘Balzac’s Bodily Marks,’’ in Body

196

NOTES

Work, 66–88: ‘‘The presence in the Come´ die humaine of such texts as Une Passion dans le de´ sert, La Duchesse de Langeais, La Fille aux yeux d’or—and there are others in a similar vein—forces us to reflect on the destinies of the sexual body in Balzac’s more overtly social and ‘realist’ texts, and to perceive how much the body, there too, is marked by primitive scenarios which commingle intense desire with fear, and desire for the woman’s body with dire results to the male body’’ (82). 23. Massol-Bedoin comments on this passage as the first, explicit instance of the narrative structure of the enigma: ‘‘La mise en oeuvre du proce´ de´ narratif de l’e´ nigme donne lieu, dans le roman, a` une se´ rie de me´ taphores, frappantes par leur nombre, par lesquelles le texte offre une fiction de lui-meˆ me. Intense ‘re´ flexion textuelle’ dont il importe de relever les emble`mes. Ainsi de la ‘charade’, terme employe´ , dans la die´ ge`se, pour de´ signer le myste`re que repre´ sente le personnage de Paquita, et qui doit aussi renvoyer le lecteur, de fac¸on me´ talinguistique, au texte e´ nigmatique luimeˆ me’’ (‘‘La Charade,’’ 36) [Activating the narrative device of the enigma in the novel gives rise to a strikingly numerous series of metaphors by which the text offers a fiction of itself. It is important to pick out the emblems of this intense ‘textual reflection.’ And so the ‘charade,’ the term used in the diegesis, to designate the mystery represented by the character Paquita also sends the reader back metalinguistically to the enigmatic text itself]. 24. See Robert J. Stoller, Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity (London: Karnac Books, 1984). Stoller, a psychoanalyst and professor of psychology at UCLA, is frequently cited on this question: ‘‘The whole complex psychological system that we call transvestism is a rather efficient method of handling very strong feminine identifications without the patient having to succumb to the feeling that his sense of masculinity is being submerged by feminine wishes. The transvestite fights this battle against being destroyed by his feminine desires, first, by alternating his masculinity with the feminine behavior, and thus reassuring himself even when feminine that it isn’t permanent; and, second, by being always aware even at the height of the feminine behavior—when he is fully dressed in women’s clothes—that he has the absolute insignia of maleness, a penis. And there is no more acute awareness of its presence than when he is reassuringly experiencing it with an erection’’ (186). 25. Prendergast, p. 65. Prendergast also notes the oblique, yet forceful, surfacing of the incest theme in this passage. This is evident in an ambiguous kiss exchanged between Margarita and her brother, fraternal or sexual, and in the implication that Paquita’s blood, released as she is deflowered by Henri and spilled in violence by his sister, is absorbed into the blood relation itself; as if in loving Paquita they had loved each other. (65–66). 26. There is no adequate translation for the expression: ‘‘de la poitrine,’’ which means, ‘‘of consumption, of tuberculosis,’’ but, here in the context of Paquita’s violent death, it suggests also ‘‘wounds to the chest.’’ 27. See Peter Brooks, ‘‘Freud’s Masterplot,’’ in Reading for the Plot: De-

NOTES

197

sign and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 90–112. Commenting on the relations of implication tying beginnings to narrative endings, Brooks defines the novelistic convention that endings retroactively account for all elements of a narrative: ‘‘The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments—in literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot. To say ‘I have begun . . .’ (whatever it may be) acquires meaning only through postulation of a narrative begun, and that beginning depends on its ending’’ (94).

CONCLUSIONS 1. See Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric : Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999).

Bibliography EDITIONS Balzac, Honore´ de. La Duchesse de Langeais. La Fille aux yeux d’or. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres comple`tes. 2 vols. Edited by Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 1975, 1976. de Duras, Claire. Ourika. Edited by Claudine Herrmann. Paris: des Femmes, 1979. ———. Ourika. Edited by Joan DeJean and Margaret Waller. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994. Foucault, Michel, ed. Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Gautier, The´ ophile. Mademoiselle De Maupin. Paris: Garnier, 1966.

WORKS CONSULTED Books Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. London: The Women’s Press, 1989. Beizer, Janet. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in NineteenthCentury France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth Century France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1984. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984. ———. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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199

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Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hoffmann, Leon-Franc¸ ois. Le Ne`gre Romantique: Personnage litte´ raire et obsession collective. Paris: Payot, 1973. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum de l’autre femme. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974. ———. Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989. Kadish, Doris, and Francoise Massardier-Keeney. Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994. Kelly, Dorothy. Fictional Genders: Role and Representation in NineteenthCentury French Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Kessler, Susan. Lessons of the Intersexed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Kofman, Sarah. L’ Enigme de la femme. Paris: Galile´ e, 1980. Laquer, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Maclean, Marie. Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairian Experiment. London: Routledge, 1988. Matlock, Jann. Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Money, John. Biographies of Gender and Hermaphroditism in Paired Comparisons. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1991. Pailhes, Gabriel. La Duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand d’apre`s des documents ine´ dits. Paris: Perrin, 1910. Prendergast, Christopher. Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978. ———. Paris and the Nineteenth Century: Writing the City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Schultz, Gretchen. The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999. Scott, Joan. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Stoller, Robert. Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Feminity. London: Karnac Books, 1984. Waller, Margaret. The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Wing, Nathaniel. The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Mallarme´ . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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Articles Albouy, Pierre. ‘‘Le Mythe de l’androgyne dans Mademoiselle De Maupin.’’ Revue d’histoire litte´ raire de la France, no. 4 (1972): 600–608. Bertrand-Jennings, Chantal. ‘‘Proble´ matique d’un sujet fe´ minin en re´ gime patriarcal: Ourika De Mme De Duras.’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 23, no. 1–2 (1994–1995): 42–58. Burton, Richard. ‘‘The Unseen Seer, of Proteus in the City: Aspects of a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Myth.’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 15, no. 1/2 (1988): 50–68. Chilcoat, Michelle. ‘‘Confinement, the Family Institution, and the Case of Claire De Duras’s Ourika.’’ L’Esprit Cre´ ateur 38, no. 3 (1998): 6–16. Epstein, Julia. ‘‘Either/or—Neither/Both: Sexual Ambiguity and the Ideology of Gender.’’ Genre 7 (Spring 1990). Felman, Shoshana. ‘‘Rereading Femininity.’’ Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 19–44. Goldstein, Jan. ‘‘The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France.’’ Representations 34, (Spring 1991): 134–65. Hanoosh, Michele. ‘‘The Functions of Literature in Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo.’’ L’Esprit Cre´ ateur 28, no. 1 (1988): 42–55. Kadish, Doris. ‘‘Hybrids in Balzac’s La Fille Aux Yeux D’or.’’ NineteenthCentury French Studies 16, no. 3–4 (1988): 270–78. Kessler, Susan. ‘‘The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants.’’ Signs 16 (Autumn 1990): 3–26. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. ‘‘Genre.’’ Glyphe 7 (1980): 1–14. Lloyd, Rosmary. ‘‘Rereading Mademoiselle De Maupin.’’ Orbis Litterarum 41, no. 1 (1986): 19–32. Majewski, Henry. ‘‘Painting as Intertext in Balzac’s La Fille Aux Yeux D’or.’’ Symposium 23, no. 89 (1991): 31–45. Massol-Bedoin, Chantal. ‘‘La Charade et la chime`re. Du Re´ cit e´ nigmatique dans La Fille aux yeux d’or.’’ Poe´ tique 89 (February 1992): 31–45. Meilly, Michelle. ‘‘Madeleine Se´ ductrice/The´ odore Se´ ducteur: Rupture et re´ conciliation dans Mademoiselle De Maupin.’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 25, no. 1–2 (1996–97): 50–59. O’Connell, David. ‘‘Ourika: Black Face, White Mask.’’ French Review 6 (1974): 46–57. Perrone-Moises, Leyl. ‘‘Le Re´ cit Euphe´ mique.’’ Poe´ tique 17 (1974): 27–38. Weil, Kari. ‘‘Romantic Androgyny and Its Discontents: The Case of Mademoiselle De Maupin.’’ Romanic Review 78, no. 3 (1987): 348–58. Wing, Nathaniel. ‘‘The Poetics of Irony in Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo.’’ Neophilologus 59, no. 2 (1975): 165–89. ———. ‘‘Baudelaire’s Frisson Fraternel: Horror and Enchantment in ‘‘Les Tableaux Parisiens.’’ Neophilologus 81, no. 1 (1997): 21–33.

Index A Rebours (Huysmans), 16 abolition, 78 Against the Grain. See A Rebours Alexina/Abel, 15, 20, 24 alienation, 79–80, 82–83, 88, 91–92 androgyny, 16, 24, 51, 52, 53, 55, 58, 63, 168, 178n. 3 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 37–38, 46 authority: imposed order of, 166 autobiography: Alexina Herculine Barbin, 103; hermaphrodite’s, 13, 15 Balzac, Honore´ de, 13, 14, 19, 25, 131, 166 Barthes, Roland, 148 Baudelaire, Charles, 13, 15, 24, 51, 166 beauty ideals, 167 Beizer, Janet, 124, 189n. 29 binary gender differences: ‘‘dominant fiction’’ of, 40, 170 bisexuality, 16, 39–40, 44–45, 47 Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, The (Gilroy), 101 body images: fixed, 13, 167 Bonaparte, Napole´ on, 83, 139 Brooks, Peter, 144 Butler, Judith, 18; on Foucault’s concept of sex, 171n. 3; on gender melancholy, 36–37, 41, 115 castration: masculinity and, 162–63; threat of, 44 Chambers, Ross, 32–33 Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois-AugusteRene´ de, 77–78, 81, 99

citizenship: rights of, 21 classical/romantic, 15 confession narrative, 166 Connolly, William, 125 Cramer, Samuel, 23, 52, 59–60, 61– 64, 65, 69–73; androgyny, 55; hermaphrodite, 15, 20 Cre´ billon, 57, 58 cultural conventions: upholding of, 169–70 cultural imperatives: to dispel gendered differences, 169 d’Albert, 15, 20, 29–30, 32–37, 38, 39– 40, 45–50 de Maupin, Madelaine, 15, 20, 29– 32, 37–40, 41, 42–45, 46, 47, 48–50, 168 death: caused by sexual crisis, 16, 19, 20, 23, 169, 170 DeJean, Joan, 78 Delacroix, Euge´ ne, 169 denouements: narrative, 168–69, 170 Derrida, Jacques, 32 desires, 24; genderless, 110; heterosexual, 30; homosexual, 16, 30, 35–36; lesbian, 16, 30, 42–43, 163 dominant fictions: of binary gender differences, 140, 170; of gender identity, 41, 168; of heterosexual gender norms, 16, 20, 32, 152 Duras, Claire de, 13, 14, 77, 81, 83, 166 erotic gaze, 145 erotic narratives, 151, 167; femininity in, 13; masculinity in, 13 ethnic identities, 14, 78, 79, 88

202

INDEX

Fanfarlo, La (Baudelaire), 13, 15, 22, 24, 51, 170; androgyny, 16, 24, 51, 52, 53, 55, 58, 63, 168, 178n. 3; Samuel Cramer in, 15, 20, 23, 52, 55, 59–60, 61–64, 65, 69–73; ethical issues and deviation from heterosexuality, 167; La Fanfarlo in, 20, 64, 66–68; hermaphrodite, 15, 20, 54, 66, 69, 70; hysteria, 52, 53–54, 110, 178n. 10; limits of genre, 167; Manuella de Monteverde, in, 20, 55, 59; narrative denouement in, 20, 70–72, 73, 168–69; novella, 13, 70, 73, 166; reconfiguration of gender identities, 54, 62, 64–65, 69, 154–55; redefinition of Romantic, 58, 73, 167; Romantic, 15, 52, 58, 60, 84, 167 Felman, Shoshana, 132 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 21, 174n. 17 Fille aux yeux d’or, La (Balzac), 13, 14, 19, 22, 26, 131, 170; erotic gaze, 145; ethical issues and deviation from heterosexuality, 167; failure of phallic potency, 16; geometric hierarchy in, 134–38; hybrid novel, 131, 166; incest in, 15, 16, 163; lesbianism, 16; male fantasy, 132, 167; Paul de Mannerville in, 144, 149; Henri de Marsay in, 15, 19, 23, 25, 131, 134, 140–44, 147–48, 150–65; murder in, 19, 131, 162, 169; narrative denouement in, 19–20, 164–65, 169; narrator’s relation to spectacle, 131–32, 134, 167; phallic ideal, 146; phallic potency, 16, 20; presuppositions about realist narrators, 132, 167; productive crisis in, 19; sexual and political selfidentity, 167; social bonds, 142–43; ‘‘spectacle,’’ 131, 134, 140; Paquita Valdes in, 15, 19, 25, 147– 48, 151–54, 156–58, 159–60, 162, 163 Flaubert, Gustave, 51, 54 Foucault, Michel, 15, 17, 22, 78, 103

203

Fowles, John, 78 freedom: issues of, 21 French Revolution, 83–84 Freud, Sigmund, 36, 146, 150–51 Fuse´ es (Beaudelaire), 51, 52, 53 Gabrielle (Sand), 166 Garber, Marjorie, 167 Gautier, The´ ophile, 13, 15, 20, 24, 29, 166 gender differentiation: as postRevolution core cultural issue, 16–17, 166 gender identities, 13, 15, 30; dominant fiction of, 41, 168; modernity and, 168; reconfiguration of, 54, 62, 64–65, 69, 154–55; sexed bodies as fixed, 17, 168 gender melancholy, 36–37 gender mutability: mapping of effects, 166; representation of, 166, 168 gender relations: determining ‘‘correct,’’ 167 Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter (Butler), 36–37 gendered desires, 168 gendered differences, 169 gendered practices, 167 genderless desires, 110 genre: limits of, 167 geometric hierarchies, 134–38 Gilroy, Paul, 101 Girl with the Golden Eyes, The (Balzac), 13, 14, 131, 166. See also La Fille aux yeux d’or Goldstein, Jan, 52 Goujon, E., 127 Herculine Barbin (Foucault), 13, 15, 22, 103, 170, 171n. 1; Alexina/ Abel, 15, 20, 24; authority’s imposed order in, 105, 113, 121, 166; confession narrative, 166; ethical issues and deviation from heterosexuality, 114, 166, 167; female to male shift, 107–8, 116, 120–21; gender ‘‘correction,’’ 101; genderless desires, 110; her-

204

INDEX

maphroditism/intersexuality, 16, 104–5, 109; narrative denouement in, 20, 169; suicide in, 16, 20, 169 Herculine Barbin, Alexina, 103 hermaphrodites, 15, 20, 54, 66, 69, 70, 168; assigned gender, 105, 120–21; Ovidian, 36; ‘‘true’’ gender of, 15, 105, 124 hermaphroditism, 16 Herrmann, Claudine, 78, 81–82 heterosexual gender norms: dominant fiction of, 16, 32 heterosexual ideals, 34 heterosexual identities, 18, 24, 168; gender opposition of, 15 heterosexual roles: ‘‘dominant fiction’’ of, 16, 20, 32, 152; refusal of conventional, 168 heterosexuality: conforming to, 16; ethical issues and deviation from, 167 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 103, 104 homosexual desire, 16 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 16 hybrid novel, 13, 166 hysteria, 52, 53–54; female, 110; male, 178 n. 10; as motif in nineteenth-century writing, 24, 53–54; symptoms of, 178n. 9 hysteric, 52, 178n. 3 incest, 15, 16, 163 Inde´ pendant de la Charente-Infe´ rieure, 127 intersexuality, 16 Jolyot, Proser. See Cre´ billon La Fanfarlo, 20 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 58, 179 n. 14 lesbian, 168; love, 15, 16 lesbian desires, 16, 42–43, 163 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 51, 52, 111 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier),

13, 15, 22, 24, 29, 170; ambiguous ending, 20, 29–30, 50; As You Like It, 37–38, 46; beauty ideals challenged in, 37, 48, 167; bisexuality, 16, 39–40, 44–45, 47; d’Albert, 15, 20, 29–30, 32–37, 38, 39–40, 45–50; erotic narrative, 35, 167; ethical issues and deviation from heterosexuality, 32, 33, 39, 43–44, 167; heterosexual desire, 30; heterosexual ideals, 34; homosexual desires, 16, 30, 35–36; hybrid novel, 30, 166; lesbian desire, 16, 30, 42; Madelaine de Maupin/ The´ odore, 20, 29–32, 37–40, 41, 42– 45, 46, 47, 48–50, 168; narrative denouement in, 20, 30, 168; Rosette, 15, 20, 30, 34, 39, 42, 43–44, 49–50; transvestism, 16, 24, 30, 31, 45; transvestite, 15 male fantasy, 132, 167 Mannerville, Paul de, 144, 149 Marsay, Henri de, 15, 134, 147–48, 150–65; as predator, 19, 23, 25, 131, 144 masculine/feminine, 15, 16, 56 Massardier-Keeney, Franc¸ ois, 82 Massol-Bedoin, Chantal, 133 Medical/Legal Issue of Identity in Relation to Irregular Formation of the Sexual Organs, The (Herculine Barbin), 103 metamorphoses, 57 metaphysics, 58 mind/body, 15, 16 Mirza (de Stael), 83 miscegenation, 19, 77, 88–89, 99; fear of, 82, 83 Modern Language Association, 78 modernity: and gender identity, 168 Monteverde, Manuella de, 20 Mort de Sardanapale, Le (Delacroix), 169 murder, 162; in La Fille aux yeux d’or, 19, 131, 169 mutable gender, 167 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 58, 179n. 14 Narcissus, 35

INDEX

narrative denouements, 19–21, 20, 30, 70–72, 73, 164–65, 168–69, 170 narrative genre: conventions of, 170 novella, 13, 15, 70, 73, 166 opposed terms: classical/romantic, 15; European/African, 82; masculine/feminine, 15, 16, 107; mind/ body, 15, 16; personal/social, 85; reason/fantasy, 15; subverting of, 15; white/black, 82 Ourika: death of, 23 Ourika (Duras), 13, 14, 22, 24, 77; abolition, 78; alienation, 79–80, 82– 83, 88, 91–92; death in, 19, 23, 169, 170; ethical issues and interracial marriage, 167; ethnic identity, 78, 79; exclusion of blacks, 19, 77, 79–80, 84, 87, 92; exclusion of women, 19, 80, 82, 84, 92; issues of freedom in, 21, 79; miscegenation, 19, 77, 82, 83, 88–89, 99; narrative denouement in, 19, 90–91, 99–102, 169; productive crisis in, 19; pseudo-confession narrative, 77, 166; racism, 78, 81, 82, 88, 91–92; rights of citizenship in, 21; self-effacement, 97; slavery, 19, 78, 102; stereotype, 86–87, 91–92, 98 Ovid, 57 Paris: social hierarchy of, 134–38; spectacle of, 131, 134, 140 Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Ferguson), 21 phallic ideal, 146 phallic potency: failure of, 16; restoration of, 20 Plotinus, 57, 58 poet, 52, 178n. 3 political self-identity, 167 Porphyrus, 57, 58 productive crisis, 19 pseudo-confession narrative, 13, 14, 77, 166

205

Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 57, 58 racial identity, 88–91 racism, 78, 81, 82, 88, 91–92 realist narrators: presuppositions about, 167 reason/fantasy, 15 Rene´ (Chateaubriand), 99 Revolution: as core cultural issue, 16–17, 166; French, 83–84; St. Domingue, 94–96 Romantic, 58, 60; redefinition of, 167 Romantic poet, 15, 52 Romantic tableau, 84 Rosette, 15, 20, 30, 34, 39, 42, 43–44, 49–50 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 81, 83 Sand, Georges, 166 Scott, Walter, 78, 181n. 2 self: effacement, 97; knowledge, 30–31; notions of, 167 self-identities, 171n. 3; gender as source of, 16; political, 167; sexual, 30, 105, 167 sexed body, 168; as fixed gender identities, 17 sexual crisis, 15, 169 sexual self-identity, 30, 105, 167 Shakespeare, William, 37, 38–39 Silverman, Kaja, 16, 172n. 7 slavery, 19, 78, 102 social bonds, 142–43 social constructs: gendered desire’s, 13, 168; gendered identity’s, 15; sexual body’s, 15 social order: mutable gender’s destabilizing effects on, 167; return to, 168 space: institutionalized, 112; private, 14; public, 14, 144 spectacle, 131, 132, 134, 140; narrator’s relation to, 167 Spleen de Paris, Le (Baudelaire), 51 St. Domingue Revolution, 94–96 stereotype, 86–87, 91–92, 98 suicide: caused by sexual crisis, 16, 20, 169

206

INDEX

texts: autobiography, 13, 15; confession narrative, 166; erotic narrative, 151, 167; hybrid novels, 13, 166; narrative denouements of, 168; novella, 13, 15, 70, 73, 166; pseudo-confession narrative, 13, 14, 166 transvestism, 16, 24, 30, 31, 45

transvestites, 15 Vades, Paquita, 15, 19, 25, 131, 147– 48, 151–54, 156–58, 159–60, 162, 163 Vulcan, 136 Waller, Margaret, 78