SPEAKING WITH THE VOICES OF OTHERS

JULIA WARD HOWE=S LAURENCE

Gary Williams

University of Idaho

In 1865 Julia Ward Howe=s beloved, versatile brother Sam Ward published a collection of poems, including one dedicated to his sister.  The poem, titled AMetempsychosis,@ is in part an argument for the superiority of poetry to literal image as a way of preserving and transmitting the potent human spirit of past ages.  Statues of great dead men give us Abut traits@; actions and words Aembalmed in song,@ on the other hand, serve as sparks to new endeavor.  The poem=s conclusion seems an admonition to Julia to persevere in her singing, even though her current themes may be woe-laden:

. . . bend every string

Thy hand can grasp, with zealous care!

Though from thy lyre but hoarse despair,

Fate=s ruthless sweep at first should wring.

Strain on!  Until thy spirit=s Sire

Awake that chord of happier fate

Whose jubilance shall modulate

Thy woe to joy=s celestial quire.^[i]

Since Howe had by the mid-1860s quite deliberately stepped away from the writing of poetry,^[ii] we might read Sam=s poem as a plea that she not relinquish the genre altogether.  Her first two collections, Passion-Flowers (1854) and Words for the Hour (1857)Bboth of which bear a heavy cargo of sadnessBhad brought  admiration and notoriety, and she had relished it all.  But as the country moved toward war, her early literary labors seemed (she wrote later) Aalmost a period of play,@ comparable to Athe tuning of instruments before some great musical solemnity,@^[iii] and particularly after experiencing the celebrity arising from publication of ABattle Hymn of the Republic@ (1862), Howe had turned to philosophy and ethics as a focus for her intellectual work.

We may also, however, understand Sam=s encouragement in a broader sense: as reaffirmation of his belief in her literary talent (a note he alone, among the male Wards, consistently sounded) and perhaps additionally as indication of his belief in the value of her particular voice to struggling singers in future generations--Ashadowy@ now, but audible later to souls who will quicken to its sound.  In light of the manuscript now published here for the first time--a text Sam is unlikely to have read, but one that in certain crucial ways he arguably enabled--his lines to Julia resonate with a prescience beyond their probable intent.

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The writing of what is here called The Hermaphrodite  probably began in the winter of 1846-47, about three years after Julia Ward=s marriage to Samuel Gridley Howe and after the births of her first two (of six) children.  The approximately 400 pages of manuscript at Harvard=s Houghton Library are in fact several distinct pieces, the various sections difficult to date precisely.^[iv]  The first page and key bridge passages are missing, and even when one can deduce how Howe intended various episodes to fit together, ambiguity about chronology remains.   Information about the project, apart from what the manuscript itself suggests, is scanty.  The earliest unequivocal reference in Howe's letters is from May 1847, in a note to her sister and confidante Louisa.  She apologized for not having written for months, citing her "studious, meditative, and most uncommunicative frame of mind" and mentioning that, although she had written much poetry during the winter, "it is of a kind wh[ich] I do not readily show."  She did, however, enclose four stanzas of a poem entitled "Eva to Rafael" and offered to send more of her characters' "correspondence," should Louisa be interested.  "I have made quite a little romance about them,@ she added.^[v]

Eva and Rafael's story, viewed in the context Howe eventually created for it, is not the central narrative, but rather an intact (mostly prose) piece set within a larger primary story, of which the protagonist is variously called Laurence or Laurent.  His conspicuous characteristic is that he is a hermaphrodite.^[vi]  Whether this character was part of Howe's earliest conception of the narrative, or whether the two stories arose independently and were later welded, is impossible to determine with certainty, but one undated piece of evidence suggests they were conceived simultaneously.  On page 30 of her 1843 diary appears this fragment, evidently a piece of a letter to an unidentified person:

Yet my pen has been unusually busy during the last year--it has brought me some happy inspirations, and though the golden tide is now at its ebb, I live in the hope that it may rise again in time to float off the stranded wreck of a novel, or rather story, in the which I have been deeply engaged for three months past.  It is not, understand me, a moral and fashionable work, destined to be published in three volumes, but the history of a strange being, written as truly as I knew how to write it.  Whether it will ever be published, I cannot tell, but I should like to have had you read it, and to talk with you about it.

This is almost certainly a reference to the Laurence portion of the work, and although the fragment isn't dated, its location in the diary adjacent to other fragments argues strongly that the characters of Eva, Rafael, and Laurence all date from this period. 

Julia was twenty-eight years old in May of 1847, living in a small house near the Perkins Institution for the Blind in South Boston, trying to maintain emotional equilibrium while beset by myriad disappointments and deprivations.  The narrative, as I suggest below, is solidly rooted in the psychological terrain of that period of Howe=s life.  But the ground for its germination was cultivated about ten years earlier--the moment of her brother=s return from a four-year sojourn in Europe, during which he acquired and shipped home an extraordinarily rich array of Continental literature. The history of The Hermaphrodite properly begins with Sam=s reentry into the life of 2 Bond Street in New York City in 1836, when Julia Ward started to read French novels.

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The impact of Sam on his sister=s sense of the world can hardly be overestimated.   Howe characterized him in Reminiscences as Amy ideal and my idol,@ who, when he returned from four years abroad, Abrought into the Puritanic limits of our family circle a flavor of European life and culture which greatly delighted me@ (67-68).  The title of Louise Tharp=s lively 1956 account of the intertwined lives of the Ward siblings--Three Saints and a Sinner--suggests the nature of this impact. While away, Sam had embraced life in Paris, Heidelberg, and Dresden with unambivalent gusto, playing out in actuality the wicked delights hinted at in Edward Bulwer=s novel Pelham (which he had read on the sly while a young boy).  He drastically overspent his expense account and repeatedly delayed his return, meanwhile enjoying the charms of numerous demimondaines.  In Paris he became an intimate friend of Jules Janin, critic for the influential Journal des Débats; took singing lessons three times a week from a teacher who shared his apartment with Franz Liszt; attended the opera and other cultural events almost nightly; and in these ways came to know--certainly by reputation and probably in person--George Sand.  When Sam returned to the U.S., he brought with him several of Sand=s early novels.

In their late-life memoirs, both Sam and Julia tended toward the decorous in describing (or often eliding) their youthful verve, but their letters from the 1830s and 1840s uncover the passionate intensity with which they each embraced the possibilities afforded by their station in life and with which they satisfied their hunger for intellectual and aesthetic pleasures.  Although Howe=s Reminiscences note that after Sam=s return she Aread such works of George Sand and Balzac as [Sam] would allow [her] to choose from his library@--implying that he exercised an older brother=s regulatory prerogative--and although Sam claimed to his European friend Charles Mersch that in New York he always wore an Airon mask,@ it seems likely that the information-flow between sister and brother was uninhibited.  Julia=s daughter Maud Howe Elliott, who published Sam=s letters, tellingly undercut his dour metaphor: AIf Sam wore any mask at all it was the classic serio-comic mask, tragedy on one side, farce on the reverse.  The clear eyes of his sisters and brothers saw through his masquerading.  They saw him as he was, brilliant, frail, unstable, above all kindly, generous, fascinating.@^[vii]

Sam, far from intervening censoriously in Julia=s desire to expand her horizons, provided not only the means for growth but some protection as well.  Howe described her father--Awith all his noble generosity and overweening affection@--as her Ajailer@; Sam was the senior Ward=s combatant in his efforts to narrow and control the scope of Julia=s life during these years.  A July 1838 letter illustrates Sam=s typical role:  AYou always exact too much of her,@ he complained to his father, Ain desiring not only that she obey you but be happier in so doing than in following up certain wishes of her own@ (Elliott 176).  Julia, for her part, Agreatly coveted an enlargement of intercourse with the world@--which she satisfied by availing herself of the books her father built a room to house.  AMy sphere of thought,@ she asserted, Awas a good deal enlarged by the foreign literatures, German, French, and Italian, with which I became familiar@--by these, and, always, by Sam=s presence, which Aopened the door a little for me. [. . .] His wit, social talent, and literary taste opened a new world to me, and enabled me to share some of the best results of his long residence in Europe@ (Reminiscences 58; 48-49).

Exactly what might Julia Ward have read in the late 1830s, thanks to her brother?  Many of the books Sam acquired are a matter of record, since they formed the nucleus of the library that John Jacob Astor (with the help of the Ward family=s in-house tutor and close friend Joseph Cogswell) assembled in the 1840s.  Sam commissioned a catalogue of the bulk of the books in 1833; this ornately scripted volume was acquired by the New York Public Library in 1880.^[viii]  In a section headed ABelles Lettres@ are included works by Chateaubriand, La Motte-Fouque, Janin, Lafontaine, Lamartine, and others.  Novels by Balzac or Sand do not appear in this listing, but their absence is not surprising, since the catalogue emphasizes the mathematical and scientific works that formed the heart of Sam=s purchases, and since novels, especially recently-published ones, would generally have been regarded as occasional or ephemeral reading, not appropriately a part of such a record.  Howe=s Reminiscences identifies four works by Sand that she read soon after her brother=s return: Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre, Spiridion, Jacques, and André (noting also that it was years after this time that the 1842 novel Consuelo Arevealed to the world the real George Sand, and thereby made her peace with the society which she had defied and scandalized@ [58-59]).  This list--supposing we can assume accuracy in Howe=s memory of a period more than sixty years past--is notable in two ways: first, for its indication that some of the reading she did of Sand=s works could not have been the result of Sam=s having acquired the books during his time abroad;^[ix] and second, for its relative tameness.  Of these four works, only Jacques might have been thought inappropriate for an unmarried woman.^[x]  Missing from Howe=s list are the early Sand works that had made her notorious--Indiana, Valentine, the first version of Leila--works of the kind Howe seemed to have in mind when she described Sand in 1861 as Aa name of doubt, dread, and enchantment.@^[xi]

Whatever she read, the impact is not in doubt: the novels changed her world.  Howe remembered Sand as the touchstone for her youthful thinking about Athe world=s great struggle between conservative discipline and revolutionary inspiration@: 

We knew our parents would not have us read her, if they knew.  We knew they were right.  Yet we read her at stolen hours, with waning and still entreated light; and as we read, in a dreary wintry room, with the flickering candle warning us of late hours and confiding expectations, the atmosphere grew warm and glorious about us,B-a true human company, a living sympathy crept near us,B-the very world seemed not the same world after as before.  She had given us a real gift; no criticism could take it away.  The hands might be sinful, but the box they broke contained an exceedingly precious ointment. (ASand@ 514)

It would be years before this Agift@ bloomed conspicuously in Howe=s own writing, yet one might fairly say that her desire to be a writer, her early conviction that she would Awrite the novel or play of the age@(Reminiscences 57), was due in some measure to the impression Sand made.  Very few women of Julia Ward=s age, class, and marital status considered writing to be an appropriate activity.  For an unmarried woman to be Aliterary@ was to invite opprobrium and to put at risk her desirability in the marriage marketplace.^[xii]  Despite such attitudesB-rendered palpable to her by discouragement from her father and her uncleB-it is perhaps no coincidence that Julia=s first published work, a review of Lamartine=s long narrative poem Jocelyn, was written in the year of Sam=s return from Europe with Sand=s novels.  If The Hermaphrodite is somehow an expression of the mental liberation Howe attributed to her reading of Sand around 1836, it is tempting to draw a further connection between that year and her hermaphrodite narrative.  Lamartine=s work, although in tone nothing like Sand=s fevered novels, does nonetheless bear the impress of a fascination among French writers of the period with the figure of the ambiguously-gendered creature.

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The best guide to this preoccupation is A.J.L. Busst=s comprehensive and detailed study, AThe Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century.@^[xiii]   Busst=s tracing of the image in the thought of Saint-Simon and Pierre Leroux and in such novels as Latouche=s Fragoletta (1829), Balzac=s Séraphîta (1834-35) and Théophile Gautier=s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835-36) uncovers competing interpretive conventions.   The phenomenon is allied both with redemptionB-the androgyne restores original perfect human unity and is therefore the ideal toward which all life strivesB-and also (in Busst=s priggish terms) with Acerebral lechery,@ Adecadence,@ and Aperversion.@  Particularly later in the century, but in this period too, the hermaphrodite additionally emblemized homosexuality.

The Balzac and Gautier novels illustrate all these motifs.  Séraphîta describes an androgynous figure--first called Séraphîtus, later SéraphîtaB-who offers instruction to two young people on how to move beyond materiality to a sexually-undifferentiated plane of spiritual existence.  The young people, Minna and Wilfred, are each separately in love with Séraphîta, to whom s/he appears as the opposite gender, either male or female.  The work (which reflects Balzac=s interest in the theological mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg) ends with Séraphîta=s ascent into heaven through an act of will; this apotheosis inspires a salvific vision in Minna and Wilfred and enables their own psychological escape from the scepticism of their envious minister.

Gautier=s novel, in contrast, represents androgyny pruriently from start to finish: the trope is a convenience for introducing a variety of titillating situations.  The work is mainly an epistolary novel, beginning with letters from the Chevalier D=Albert to a (male) friend, Silvio, describing his amatory activity.  D=Albert initially settles his affection on Rosette, who, though an energetic lover, does not fulfill some undefined need of D=Albert=s.  Enter Théodore de Serrano, a young cavalier who immediately speaks to this need: D=Albert notes his grace, his Asoft and undulating@ walk, and especially his delicate features, and thinks, AHere, then, is at last one of the types of beauty that I dreamed of realised and walking before me!  What pity it is that he is a man, or rather that I am not a woman!@^[xiv]  Théodore is before long revealed to be female; she is in fact Mademoiselle Madelaine de Maupin, a curious and restless young woman who (readers learn through her confessional letters to her friend Graciosa) has determined to masquerade as a man in order to spy.  She explains: AI felt there were many faulty and obscure sides to their lives, which were carefully veiled from our gaze, and which it was very important that we should know.[. . .] It is a frightful thing to think of, and one which is not thought of, how profoundly ignorant we are of the life and conduct of those who appear to love us, and whom we are going to marry@(152, 154).  Madelaine=s true physical nature eventually dawns on D=Albert through their mutual participation in a production of As You Like It, but Gautier contrives to maintain ambiguity for a while longer, and finally confounds the notion of rigid gender identity altogether in Madelaine=s statement that AIt often happens that the sex of the soul does not at all correspond with that of the body, and this is a contradiction which cannot fail to produce great disorder.[. . .] Beneath my smooth forehead and silken hair move strong and manly thoughts@ (225-26).  By the end Madelaine feels distant from the emotions and modes of behavior of both sexes:

I have not the imbecile submission, the timidity or the littleness of women; I have not the vices, the disgusting intemperance, or the brutal propensities of men: I belong to a third, distinct sex, which as yet has 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. (282)

In the novel=s last chapter, Madelaine does, however, Apair@ with both D=Albert and Rosette (who, like D=Albert, has fallen in love with AThéodore@) in a glorious night of sex, one extravagant hedonistic indulgence before she leaves them both.  This conclusion is triply salacious, offering readers the voyeuristic pleasures of same-sex and opposite-sex couplings, as well as the spectacle of a woman controlling both the evening=s agenda and its no-strings aftermath. 

Gautier=s central plot echoes a 17^th-century tale that had appeared in the weekly paper L=Artiste in 1830, but he was also moved to write the work, according to P.E. Tennant, by widespread public interest in an ambiguous relationship between George Sand and an actress, Marie Dorval.^[xv]  Indeed, Sand=s writings account for only part of the attention she attracted in the early 1830s; she was at least as famous for her cross-dressing and for the gossip arising from her possibly-physical friendship with Dorval as for her novels.  When SandB-then still Madame Aurore DudevantB-first moved from her husband=s country estate to Paris in 1831, she adopted male dress partly because it was less expensive and more convenient (men=s boots, in particular, enabled her to negotiate Paris=s cobblestones with ease), but also because it rendered her invisible to men and thus free to move among the artists and intellectuals she had come to the city to join.   When she began to publish in 1833 under the pseudonym George Sand, both French and English reviewers made sure readers knew she was female, although it seems not to have been until 1837, four years later, that the fact of her cross-dressing also entered reviewers= assessments of her work.  Jules Janin in the British journal Atheneum wrote: AGeorge Sand, in his own home, is, by turns, a capricious young man, of eighteen, and a very pretty woman of from five-and-twenty to thirty,--a youth of eighteen, who smokes and takes snuff with peculiar grace, and a grande dame whose brilliancy and fancy at once astonish and humble you.@^[xvi]  Several of Sand=s early works, too, blurred the male-female distinction.  Isabelle Naginksi notes that her fiction Ais rife with narrators grammatically defined as male.  And when these voices develop into fully embodied characters in the text, they appear in male costume, with the physical traits and the traditional occupations of [. . .] men.@^[xvii]  The name itself, George Sand, refuses linguistic association with either gender, since the French version of the English male name AGeorge@ requires an As@ at the end.

Much of this information about Sand, I think we can assume, Julia Ward heard from her brother; it is likely part of what she meant in saying that Sam Abrought into the Puritanic limits of our family circle a flavor of European life and culture.@  Like his friend Janin in the sentence quoted above, Sam was deeply struck with Sand=s intersexual self-positioning.  He wrote in 1839 to Longfellow that he considered Sand superior to Balzac, finding it Ainconceivable how the free genius of that woman gives birth to ideas of the highest order of masculine beauty@ (Elliott 251).  A few years later, when Longfellow asked him to pave the way for a meeting with Sand, Sam wrote:

As for George Sand, nothing will be easier than for you to know him, should your travels lead you her way.  I will furnish you with a warm letter to Janin who will have great pleasure in making you known to him, and I candidly think her worth seeking.  Besides his genius for writing she has an impulse toward perfectibilitification, and is intimate with that fiery apostle Lammenais who sympathises in his efforts to elevate people and recognizes in her a kindred spirit.  Should it be your fortune to fall in with him do not fall in love with her.  He will enchant you more in an evening, if the fit of Psychic inspiration be upon her, than any being you ever knew, & is a kind of moral hermaphrodite.  (Elliott 342-43)

It was presumably in a context in which such issues were in some way Aon the table@ that Julia wrote her review of Lamartine=s Jocelyn.

The piece appeared in the December 1836 Literary and Theological Review, a journal edited by one of her father's friends, Leonard Woods.  It suggests remarkable breadth of reading in both French literature and European culture: Julia authoritatively distinguishes Lamartine from his poetic predecessors and draws on differences between styles of pre-Renaissance Italian painting to illustrate the nature of the distinction.  She clearly sets forth the grounds for the aesthetic judgments she renders and shows herself capable of severity in the judgments themselves.^[xviii]  Unsurprisingly for a girl raised in a religious household, she finds the chief value of Jocelyn to be in its picture of the virtuous heroism of the title character:

His enthusiastic piety, the spirit of devotion and humility in which he sacrifices happiness to duty, his universal benevolence and philanthropy, diffusing itself alike over all men, his deep and unchanging love, form one of the fairest modes of excellence which ever suggested itself to a poet's imagination.

This opinion leads her to conclude that the surest way for a "monument of literary renown" to resist the encroachments of time is to be built on "the sacred ground of truth and moral excellence" rather than "the mere force of intellect"--a sentiment underscored in her own inclination toward religious subject matter in her early poems.

The review, published of course anonymously, attracted comment from those who knew it to be her work.  It was distinctly not the kind of thing her culture expected a 17-year-old female to produce.  Julia=s Uncle John undoubtedly spoke for many of the males around her when, after showing her a favorable notice of her essay in a daily newspaper, he said: "'This is my little girl who knows about books, and writes an article and has it printed, but I wish that she knew more about housekeeping'" (Reminiscences 20).   In this review (and in a second, published three years later, on John S. Dwight=s collection of translations of poems by Goethe and Schiller), Julia speaks without reference to gender, either hers or that of her supposed readership.  It is a tacit assumption that her reflections and assessments will carry the sort of impersonal authority automatically assumed to be that of the male literary critic.  During this historical moment, among American writing women whose efforts are known, only the work of Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Ellet, Lydia Maria Child, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (ranging from six to thirteen years older than Julia Ward and all the beneficiaries of strong and extensive male intellectual communities) exhibits comparable confidence and scholarship.  But the fact of its having been written and printed, and even its display of erudition, are less notable signals of Julia Ward=s heterodoxy than its one or two indications that her aesthetic frame of reference might have been wider than her father or Uncle John could have countenanced.

Lamartine's eponymous hero is a young man studying for the priesthood at the time of the French Revolution, forced at the outbreak of the Terror to take refuge in a cave high in the Alps.  Two other refugees, father and son, find their way to Jocelyn's hideout, but the father has been wounded and soon dies, leaving his child--a beautiful boy whose name happens to be Laurence--in Jocelyn's care.  Love grows between the two, described at first in asexual quasi-Platonic terms as the attraction of soul for its lost other half,^[xix] but as intimacy grows, Jocelyn's fascination seems increasingly the product of Laurence's physical appeal.  He notes the beauty of his forehead, eyes, hair, voice, way of dressing, etc., and ultimately is forced to ask himself whether such powerful feelings aren't somehow tainted:

I condemn oft in me those sympathies which melt

Much too sudden in me, much too sensibly felt,

Those instincts of the first sight, and those first movements,

Which of my slight impressions soon make sentiments;

I've said to myself often, perhaps God doth blame

Those inclinations which may profane the heart's flame,

But alas! spite of us tow'rds the light our eyes rove,

Is't a crime O my God! beauty too much to love? (137)

The emotional center of Jocelyn is the "Fourth Epoque," essentially a collection of rapturous love-duets exchanged between Jocelyn and Laurence, which continue until one day Laurence injures himself and Jocelyn discovers, in treating him, that Laurence is actually a woman.

Julia=s review indirectly addresses the oddness, the potential indecency, of the relationship between Jocelyn and Laurence.  She praises Lamartine for not "guiding us through the diversified regions of fancy to mislead us at last."  Lamartine is not Byron, she says; we don't worry that he is

casting a robe of noble and majestic imagery around that which in itself is base and polluted; nor that his love for the beautiful, his worship of the sublime is but a mask beneath the shelter of which he may scorn and blaspheme the Being whose image is impressed upon all that is beautiful and sublime.  Every word carries with it the conviction that it comes from the abundance of a heart purified and refined by the influences of religion.

On the same page of Howe=s Reminiscences in which she describes her early encounter with Sand=s novels, she notes that, although Shelley was forbidden, Byron was Asparingly conceded@ to her and her sisters (58), and she quotes two lines from The Giaour.  The reference in the Jocelyn review is general.  And yet in this context the allusion inevitably invokes Byron=s own ambiguous sexualityB-possibly even the specific ambiguity of the AThyrza@ elegies, Byron=s love poems to a fellow choirboy at Cambridge, the pronouns in which he changed from male to female to conceal the nature of his affection.  It does not require too strained a stretch of credibility to imagine this reviewB-perhaps including the decision to review this particular workB-as of a piece with the general Agreat emancipation@ coincident upon Sam=s return.  Lamartine, Sand, Balzac, possibly even (as I urge in greater detail below) the louche Théophile Gautier brought about a change of perspective that both made imaginable the woman Julia Ward was to become and provided certain specificsB-a character=s name, a narrative circumstance, a themeB-for a story that, in 1836, she certainly could not have foreseen the need to write.

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Julia Ward=s decision to marry Samuel Gridley Howe in 1843 was the culmination of a process of development that began with her first visits to Boston; he was far from what her family had assumed would be her marital destiny.  In 1837 Julia had met Mary Ward of Dorchester, MassachusettsB-not a relation, but also the daughter of a banker and, like Julia, intellectually inclined.  Through this friendship, Julia was gradually exposed to Unitarian and Transcendental thinking, and to the Boston intelligentsia, including Fuller, Emerson, Longfellow, and Charles Sumner.  Boston, Julia wrote to Mary, was Aan oasis in the desert, a place where the larger proportion of people are loving, rational, and happy.@  Her growing investment in Aits pure intellectual atmosphere and its sunlight of kindness and truth@^[xx] seemed to reach an apotheosis in Howe.

Samuel Howe was widely regarded as handsome.  Late in his life, a woman told his daughter Laura Richards that when in his twenties and thirties he would ride down Beacon Street on his black horse, "'all the girls ran to their windows to look after him.'@^[xxi]  Julia Ward had just turned 22 in the summer of 1841 when Longfellow and Sumner drove her, her sisters, and Mary Ward out to the Perkins Institution in South Boston.  Howe--internationally-famous war hero in his youth, decorated for his service to Greece, now in mid-life equally renowned for his philanthropic work with Laura Bridgman and other blind children--galloped into Julia Ward's young life in just the way to make the strongest possible romantic impression.  It's hardly surprising that she would find him attractive.  He seemed the very embodiment of two of Boston's most salient characteristics in Julia=s mind: high seriousness and passionate commitment to the alleviation of social evils.

The marriage lasted 33 years, until Samuel Howe=s death in 1876, yet its periods of tranquility were rare.  It was from earliest daysB-before it even took place, in factB-plagued by a sharp misalignment in one=s expectations of the other and by Howe=s reluctance or inability to transfer his deepest emotional commitment from his best friend, Charles Sumner, to his wife.  The vague shape of the relationship between Samuel Howe and his nine-years-younger friend rests on hints, scraps, scissored letters, truncated expressions, a sense of a fuller interchange the texts of which have either disappeared or possibly never existed as actual Atexts.@  Its clearest articulation leaps out from a letter to Sumner that Howe wrote in September 1844.  He tells his friend: "When my heart is full of joy or sorrow it turns to you & yearns for your sympathy; in fact as Julia often says--Sumner ought to have been a woman & you to have married her: but I should not agree to this in any monygamic land, for Julia is my love as a wife."^[xxii]  Suggested in this jocular remark, I believe, is a plausible explanation for at least one of the forces that eventually propelled Julia to the writing of The Hermaphrodite.  Sumner, though perhaps not the cause of her husband=s distance, grew to be for Julia more or less the focus of it, and her mode of understanding this intense connection between her husband and his younger friend was to recast it as a narrative of guilt, imperfectly understood desire, and sexual ambiguity.

Howe=s close friendship with Sumner, which began in 1840, was sufficiently intense by the spring of 1842 to provoke humorous comment from their mutual friends.  Two running themes in letters exchanged between the two men, as well as in their friends= letters, are Sumner=s inability to find a woman to fall in love with and his inseparability from Howe.  As Howe=s relationship with Julia Ward began to deepen, Sumner exhibited a series of telling responses to the situation, ranging from various subtle articulations of hostility toward Julia to a scheme to marry Julia=s sister Louisa to melodramatic lamentations over Howe=s impending desertion.  Once the engagement was announced, Sumner wrote to Sam Ward to sing Howe=s praisesB-and, secondarily, to give vent to his own anxieties:

I feel sometimes that I am about to lose a dear friend; for the intimate confidence of friendship may die away, when love usurps the breast, absorbing the whole nature of a man--as the nourishment that supports a tree gradually retires from the distant branches, absorbed entirely by the trunk.  But Howe's nature is too generous, I believe, for such a fate.  His heart is large enough for her to whom he has given it, & for his friends besides.  Him I shall not lose, then; & have I not gained a friend in Julia?  I trust she will let me be the friend to her, that Howe will say I have been to him.

For his part, Howe penned numerous notes and letters to Sumner in a strenuous effort to assure him that his fears were groundless.  Excerpts from one written immediately after docking in Liverpool on his wedding trip and another written a month later are illustrative:

[Y]our forebodings are not realised--the torrent of affection which is continually flowing from my breast toward the new object of my love diminishes not by one drop the tide of feeling which ever swells within my bosom at the thought of thee dear Sumner: I love thee not less because I love her more.

* * *

You complain of your lonely lot, & seem to think your friends will lose their sympathy with you as they form new ties of love, but dearest Sumner it is not so with me and in the days of my loneliness & sadness I never longed more for your society than I do now in my joy & in the whirl of London life: hardly a day passes but [I] think of you & long to have you by my side.

Despite such pledges, Sumner=s already-fragile stability vanished during the first winter of the Howes= marriage.  He fell into a severe depression, which he tried to alleviate through overwork, which brought on tuberculosis.  By mid-July 1844, a month before the Howes returned from Europe, he was so weak and ill that his doctors declared him beyond hope of recovery (a false prognosis, of course).

How Julia positioned herself in relation to this vortex of emotion is already suggested in her remarkB-quoted by her husband later that fallB-that Sumner ought to have been a woman, so Howe could have married Aher.@  The portrait of Sumner in Julia=s Reminiscences is of small use in discerning how she felt about him in the early days of her marriage; the memoir was written 25 years after his death and is inevitably colored not only by her own advanced age, but by consciousness of the decades of distinguished service Charles Sumner gave to the United States.  We learn little from her letters of the time, either: both her sisters were with her for most of the first year of married life, and so Julia had not much occasion to write self-revealingly.  Generally, when Sumner=s name appears, the tone is wryly affectionate, humorously sarcastic. 

What we do have, that seem to bring us near the truth of her feelings, are several poems in a diary Julia began keeping in 1843B-sharply personal poems exhibiting a woman in a pit of depression over the departure of her Apowers,@ her Asoul,@ and over a husband whose emotional distance seems to prevent him from offering solace.  AWe are not born alike,@ she laments in one of these:

Often I turn away

From thee, to weep and pray;

I cannot rise on high,

        My sad soul looks to God, and asks him why.

He says: Aye are not akin,

Your union was a sin;

Your natures meet and jar,

        And thus, the order of Creation mar.[A]

Despite notes of mea culpa and hopes for joyful reconciliation, despite alleged resolutions in which A[r]egret departs, and love is born anew,@ one can=t help reading these teary plaints in light of many similar sentiments (similar but harder-edged, and less likely to eventuate in happy closure) voiced in letters to her sisters through the later 1840s and 1850s.  Is such despair a result specifically of her husband=s affectional apostasy in Sumner=s direction?  Viewed in the context of the ALaurence@ manuscript, I believe this is the likeliest explanation.

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The narrative, as indicated earlier, is disjointed.  Yet the handwriting and paper are consistent throughout all sections, and the characters are uniform and reasonably cohesive.  In piecing together a more or less continuous story from these fragments, I have been led by indications within each segment of a likely chronology of events.   The tale, which Laurence himself narrates, is of his repudiation by his family; his involvement with an attractive widow; his subsequent wanderings and eventual attachment to a 16-year-old boy, Ronald, whose tutor and love-object he becomes; his estrangement from Ronald; his own tutelage by a Roman nobleman named Berto (and by Berto=s sisters); and his ultimate reunion with Ronald just before death. 

Section I begins with Laurence=s account of his youthB-raised as a male, he tells us, to give him freedom "to choose my own terms in associating with the world, and secure to me an independence of position most desirable for one who could never hope to become the half of another."   He is sent to a boys= boarding school "that I might become robust and manly, and haply learn to seem that which I could never be" (1).   Two story-lines dominate this section.  The first chronicles Laurence=s involvement with Emma von P., ending with her discovery that her beloved is no man, but a Amonster@ (29), and her immediate death from grief.  The second follows Ronald=s increasingly passionate obsession with Laurence, culminating in an explosion of jealousy, lust, and remorse that propels Laurence to flee for his safety.  Approached with knowledge of the Howes= marital tribulations, this portion of the manuscript reads plausibly as an interior narrativeB-a repository for certain of Julia=s most deep-seated anxieties and a staging ground for conceptualizing the causes of the situation in which she found herself.

In a letter to Louisa at the end of January 1847, Howe exulted that for the first time since her marriage she had "waked up," escaped the somnambulistic state in which her concerns were limited to digestion, sleep, and babies.  Though she acknowledged that the causes of her dullness were in part physical, the burdens arising from childbirth and its aftermath, she also wanted Louisa to understand her husband's role in having produced this lethargy:

It is partly, sweet child, the result of an utter want of sympathy in those around me, which has, like a winter's frost, benumbed my whole nature.  Do not chide me, my blessing, for thus faintly explaining to you what has so long been cold and heavy at my heart.  You cannot, cannot know the history, the inner history of the last four years.^[xxiii]

Despite the fact that she was ill with a light case of scarlet fever in March, the period was full of energy and confidence, seeming to climax in the May letter to Louisa which included the Eva-Rafael poem.  She was "thin & languid," but clearer of mind than since before her marriage,  feeling both the difficulty and the necessity of holding on to her sense of self against the world's efforts to strip her of it.

The trope of the hermaphrodite seems to have offered a scaffold for trying to understand in corporeal terms why a(n apparent) man might wish to deflect the attentions of a beautiful and devoted woman.  Samuel Howe=s indifference to her (and responsiveness to Sumner) is then a principle of his very constitution rather than the result of shortcomings on her part.  It is not coincidental, I think, that Emma von P. is precisely Julia Howe's age.  Discovering the "truth" about Laurence drives Emma into mental instability and early death, a melodramatic but still recognizable version of the state of mind Julia describes as hers beginning just weeks after her marriage.  The outcome, of course, is disastrous in both fiction and fact, but to attribute the rejection to a physical cause (the logic would go) renders her husband in some measure less blameworthy.  This remarkable empathy is compounded by the fact that the first-person narrative necessarily foregrounds the torment Laurence lives with and his readiness to sacrifice his own prospect of happiness in order not to inflict his blasted self on another person.

The character of Ronald, and Laurence's ambivalent response to him, became another means by which Julia Howe limned for herself the "inner history" of her marriage.  The younger man whose beautiful face draws Laurence back from the abyss of a religious trance replaces Emma in his emotional life; she vanishes from the narrative.  Although at first Ronald believes Laurence to be a woman in male attire, Laurence=s insistence on his behavioral maleness ensures that the affection that grows on both sides will be understood as happening between two men.  Ronald's adoration of Laurence is clear from his first appearance, but Laurence's reciprocal emotion is presented as something of which he is imperfectly conscious or inclined to deny to himself.  Although he calls Ronald "my pretty young Baron"(100), and although he can't decide whether it's the setting sun or "a pair of starry eyes" (99) that warms his soul, Laurence professes to be uneasy when Ronald wants to kiss him or to declare his love.  The seeds Laurence says he never intended to sow, the impulses with which he says he can't sympathize, do seem to have found fertile soil in his own constitution as well as in Ronald's. 

To posit similarities between the Ronald/Laurence and Sumner/Samuel Howe relationships may seem overstatement, and a crude one at that, given the equivocal quality of the "evidence."  It may even strike some as perverse, in light of the fact that Julia Howe=s husband (unlike the Whitman self-described in his infamous letter to John Addington Symonds) did indeed father six children.  I make no argument for a physical relationship between Sumner and Samuel Howe.  Yet the eroticism in the attachment between Laurence and Ronald inevitably seems predicated, in some degree, by Julia's feeling that Sumner Aought to have been@ a woman, and thereby a legitimate love-object for her husband.   In Julia=s thinking, her spouse was himself in some sense a "woman" in the intensity of his feelings for Sumner.   But since he was married, and therefore culturally male, the female element in the conjunction would have to be supplied by Sumner, though it resided in both.   At any rate, although other readings of the manuscript=s ambiguously-gendered protagonist are equally plausible, there is sufficient reason to feel that Laurence is at least in part an embodiment of the "beautiful monster" Julia Howe discovered she had married.^[xxiv]

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But suppose, now, a different sense in which the manuscript inscribes Julia Howe=s newly-waked-up state four years into her marriage.  Although Emma=s plight seems to reflect Julia=s grief in marriage, the idea of the hermaphrodite was arguably also useful as a screen on which to project certain other aspects of her situation.  Laurence may be Samuel Howe, yes, but Ahe@ is also Julia, a being fusing culturally-ascribed impulses of both genders and thereby consigned, according to the logic of American domestic ideology, to a loveless and sexless existence.  Julia=s intellectual ambitionsBher determination to engage in the unwomanly activity of publication, or advanced study generallyBhad caused male anxiety about whether she would be adequately prepared as a wife and housekeeper.  Some of this anxiety, Julia clearly internalized.  Both her Reminiscences and the letters from her early married life testify to the difficulties she encountered in trying joyfully to embrace conventional expectations of domesticity.  Her pregnancies coincided with the periods of deepest estrangement between the Howes and became, for Julia, both an occasion for self-doubt and a grim emblem of the way marriage impeded her intellectual and aesthetic development.  At such moments the hermaphroditic existence of a George Sand must have exerted great, if guilt-laden, appeal.

Laurence=s function as a site for Julia Howe=s contemplation of her own psychological androgyny becomes clearer in Section II.  The spirit of this section is conveyed in Berto=s explanation of his plan to educate Laurence not with books, but with experience:

AKnow that I abhor onesidedness, fixed idea, and all the insanities of the learned.  For them, the earth should stand still, for me, it turns round, and shows me a new face every day. . . . I desire to do entire justice to every fibre of my brain, every nerve and muscle of my body.@ (156)

Laurence=s tutelage involves consideration of the restrictive roles into which culture shoehorns women.   In society, says Berto, women are educated not to strength or virtue, but rather "to triviality and routine. [. . .] They are taught to appeal to our indulgence, not to command our esteem" (163).   And apart from society, the options are even worse.  Berto acquaints Laurence with Eleanora, a young girl bred from an early age to a religious vocation.  Now she is a novitiate, and the two are witnesses as she takes the veil, Laurence reflecting morosely on the sour undersides of lives lived in sequestered devotion to the church.  An extended sequence then focuses on a childhood friend of Laurence=s, Rösli, now a ballerina, whose life offstage consists of fending off advances from dissolute men.

In the major story-line in this section, Laurence, dressed as a woman, is living familiarly in Rome with Berto=s three sisters.  Regarding Rome as a setting for this segment of the story, it=s important to note that Howe=s first two published collections of poemsBPassion-Flowers (1854) and Words for the Hour (1857)Bheavily emblemize Rome as a site of liberation and insight for her.  This investiture of meaning arose mainly from her sojourn there in 1850-51, when she was sharing a villa with her sister Louisa=s family and considering a more permanent separation from her husband.   But Howe=s first visit to Rome occurred during her wedding journey in 1843-44; she gave birth there to her first child, Julia Romana, in March 1844.  During this time she first visited the Villa Borghese with its ASala dell= Ermafrodito@ (Hermaphrodite Room)Bthe source for an observation in the first section of the narrative that Laurence resembles Athe lovely hermaphrodite in the villa Borghese@ (24).  The reference is to the Sala=s copy of a celebrated Greek statue, "The Sleeping Hermaphrodite"; the chamber also features paintings by Buonvicini illustrating Ovid's story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis.^[xxv]    In putting Laurence into women=s clothes, Berto=s intention is to enable him to Asee men as women see them@ and also Asee women as they appear to each other@--@divested,@ says Berto, Aof the moral corset de précaution in which they always shew themselves@ when men are present (224).  The situation reverses that of Madelaine in Gautier=s Mademoiselle de MaupinBso pointedly, in fact, that it=s hard to imagine the work wasn=t part of the Aenlargement@ Julia associated with her brother=s return from Europe.  (The character of Berto serves Laurence precisely in the way Sam Ward served his sister, and the resemblance of Berto and Sam is nowhere more striking or provocative than in the later scene in which, following Berto=s return from a sojourn in Naples, he and Laurence gleefully burn Laurence=s female disguiseBas if to suggest Sam=s collusion in liberating Julia from the bondage of gender masquerade.)

From the vantage point of 170 years later, Mademoiselle de Maupin is among the 19^th century=s most influential works of fiction, partly because of its Preface=s insouciant defense of art for art=s sake.  Swinburne loved the novel, as did Baudelaire, Huysmans, Henry James, and above all Oscar Wilde.  But the work was assuredly not on lists of reading appropriate for young antebellum American women.  As late as 1868, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly, reviewing Gautier=s career, frequently interrupted his descriptions of works to remind readers of the A>voluptuousness@ of Gautier=s values: AWe must frankly admit that Gautier outrages the common sentiment of the American mind; [. . .] Gautier represents what has no place in our literature, still less in our life. He represents the supremacy of the artistic.@  As for Mademoiselle de Maupin, Ait holds a series of pictures of more than questionable taste; in some pages it outrages all the delicate and modest instincts of human nature.@^[xxvi]  Undoubtedly part of its continuing outrage-quotient was Madelaine=s claim to belong to Aa third, distinct sex,@ having Athe body and soul of a woman, the mind and power of a man@ (Gautier 282).  The novel was not published in an English translation until the 1880s, fifty years after its initial appearance.^[xxvii]

Of course, the quantity of genuinely salacious detail in Gautier=s novel is remarkable, as is the level of religious heterodoxy (itself a kind of pornography, presumably).  The Chevalier d=Albert relishes not just the form of his love-object AThéodore,@ but also the pagan quality of his own fantasies, as in this passage about the very statue of the sleeping hermaphrodite that Howe references in her own tale:

ASince the time of Christ there was not been a single human statue in which adolescent beauty has been idealised and represented with the care that characterises the ancient sculptors. [. . .] This son of Hermes and Aphrodite is, in fact, one of the sweetest creations of Pagan genius.  Nothing in the world can be imagined more ravishing than these two bodies, harmoniously blended together and both perfect, these two beauties so equal and so different, forming but one superior to both, because they are reciprocally tempered and improved.  To an exclusive worshipper of form, can there be a more delightful uncertainty than that into which you are thrown by the sight of the back, the ambiguous loins, and the strong, delicate legs, which you are doubtful whether to attribute to Mercury ready to take his flight or to Diana coming forth from the bath?  The torso is a compound of the most charming monstrosities: on the bosom, which is plump and quite pubescent, swells with strange grace the breast of a young maiden; beneath the sides, which are well covered and quite feminine in their softness, you may divine the muscles and the ribs, as in the sides of a young lad; the belly is rather flat for a woman , and rather round for a man, and in the whole habit of the body there is something cloudy and undecided which it is impossible to describe, and which possesses quite a peculiar attraction.@  (146-47)

Nothing in Howe=s narrative goes quite this far, although in scenes between Laurence and Emma and between Laurence and Ronald there are equivalently suggestive interludes.  Once Gautier introduces Madelaine=s narrative voice, however, the novel strikingly resembles the central situation in the second long portion of Howe=s work, in which Laurence contemplates the world through women=s eyes.  Madelaine dresses as a man because she is hungry to know what men talk about when women aren=t present: ATheir real existence is as completely unknown to us as if they were inhabitants of Saturn or of some other planet a hundred million leagues from our sublunary ball; one would think they were of a different species@ (152).  She recognizes that the world will think her mad for relinquishing the comforts and protection of her gender, but, as she observes, Athe truly mad are those who fling their souls to the wind, and sow their love at random on stone and rock, not knowing whether a single seed will germinate@ (158).   In the late 1840s, Julia Howe would certainly have resonated to that sentiment.

Madelaine=s ruse affords her exactly the kind of liberation that, earlier in the novel, her admirer d=Albert, too, has longed for: AI have never wished so much for anything as, like Tiresias the soothsayer, to meet on the mountain the serpents which cause a change of sex, and what I envy most in the monstrous and whimsical gods of India are their perpetual avatars and their countless transformations@ (49).  Howe=s Laurence seems to pick up the train of thought suggested by Madelaine=s emancipation.  He speculates that it is Anatural@ for women to want to acquire cross-gender knowledge, even though it also is marked as Adangerous@:

[W]omen [. . .] are very naturally glad now and then to throw off their chains with their petticoats, and to assume for a time the right to go where they please, and the power of doing as they please.  What a new world does this open to a woman! what a delightful, dangerous abyss of novelty!  It is a world of reality in exchange for a world of dreams--it is dealing with facts instead of forms, with flesh and blood, instead of satins and laces. [. . .] According to her own powers of feeling and perception, she may find a keen pleasure in new investigations of men and things, a mischievous delight in the usurpation of rights not her own, or a philosophical satisfaction in intellectual relations divested of the dangerous attraction and repulsion of sex. (219)

Developing the character of Laurence provided access for Howe to this Adelightful, dangerous@ new world, as well as sharpened understanding of the Abondage of [. . .] narrow life@ that Laurence submits to by going the other direction.  AHow would I bear the endless tedium of its trivial details, or mimic a sympathy with its microscopic interests?@ he wonders.  He expects the strictures to feel like Hercules= vest, Afull of uneasiness and of torture@ (228)--an apt metaphor for Julia=s own despair at the somnambulistic half-life she lived during the early years of her marriage.

Interestingly, part of what Laurence learns through the ruse of his disguise is the opposite of his expectations: female life can proceed on terms established by women and can offer a measure of liberty.  Two of Berto=s sisters, Briseida and Gigia, are extremely worldly--enlightened, expansive, and Atoo proud to present themselves as candidates for selection in the great woman market of society@ (229).  They resemble Gautier=s heroine in their mental and sexual independence.  Laurence=s conversations with them acquaint him with the various means they have devised to live rich lives, and he concludes that women Aare like the vines that ripen on the sides of volcanos--it is only on the perilous brink of destruction that their finest qualities are called out@ (261).  

Howe likely recognized a version of this same sentiment in Margaret Fuller=s comments on George Sand in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, then recently published.  Fuller had first read French Romantic literature in the summer of 1839 and immediately urged Sand=s novels on Emerson.  Her journal from that period records astonishment at Sand=s Ainsight into the life of thought@--almost exclusively (in Fuller=s experience to that time) the province of male writers.  In Woman, Fuller regards women like Sand as Arich in genius, of most tender sympathies, capable of high virtue and a chastened harmony,@ but born into Aa place so narrow that, in breaking bonds, they become outlaws.@  So positioned, they lose force as world-reformers, whose lives to be effective must be Aunstained by passionate error.@^[xxviii] 

In her 1883 biography of Fuller, Howe, recounting Fuller=s enthusiasm for Sand, describes a response that was probably as much her own as Fuller=s: ATo the literary merit of [Sand=s] work was added the interest of a mysterious personality, which rebelled against the limits of sex, and, not content to be either man or woman, touched with a new and strange protest the imagination of the time.@^[xxix]  This evidence of shared intense response to the Sand phenomenon suggests that the impact Sand had already made on Julia in the 1830s was perhaps reinforced for her by witnessing the workings of Fuller=s own hermaphroditic mind on Sand=s significance.  I am inclined to see the image of George Sand, shadowy, behind Fuller=s story of Mariana in Summer on the Lakes.  Mariana has long been regarded, of course, as Fuller=s masked self-representation, and this is certainly true of the younger Mariana.  But Fuller=s heroine marriesB-something Fuller was not to do until five years later.  There is a sense of gender-displacement in Mariana=s falling in love with Sylvain: she loves first, and her love excites his.  But, says Fuller, Ait is a curse to woman to love first, or most.  In so doing she reverses the natural relations, and her heart can never, never be satisfied with what ensues.@   And so it proves.  The marriage is a disaster: Athere was absolutely a whole province of her being to which nothing in his answered.@  He is kind, but preoccupied, usually out with his male companions; she is solitary and wretched, and eventually dies.  Fuller notes that had Mariana been a man, many resources would have presented themselves to distract and fulfill her.  Mariana reminds her of the heroine of Henry Taylor=s Philip van Artevelde; each has Aa mind whose large impulses are disproportioned to the persons and occasions she meets, and which carry her beyond those reserves which mark the appointed lot of women.@^[xxx]  The script of Mariana=s married life is closely a forecast of the marriage of Julia and Samuel.

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Yet it is also clear that Briseida and Gigia, the older sisters, do not inspire Laurence=s admiration, and the turn that the narrative takes in its final section toward the youngest sister, Nina, signifies a third way in which Julia=s work on The Hermaphrodite helped her deal with the space she inhabited.  If Gautier and Sand are plausible pilot lights for Howe=s contemplation of the ambiguously-gendered figure, to the range of possibilities they may have ignited we must add another kind of inspiration--one explicitly named toward the end of The Hermaphrodite: Emanuel Swedenborg.  During Laurence=s final illness, a doctor is called in and is asked whether the suffering being is man or woman.  "=I shall speak most justly,=@ says the physician, @=if I say that he is rather both than neither.="   Briseida understands this assessment in Swedenborgian terms: Laurence, she says, is "=a heavenly superhuman mystery, one undivided, integral soul, needing not to seek on earth its other moiety, needing only to adore the God above it, and to labour for its brethren around it=" (326).

The role of this Swedish theologian and mystic (1688-1772) in the blooming of Transcendental thought in the 1830s has been extensively chronicled (Emerson heard Samson Reed=s AOration on Genius@ in 1821 and began reading Reed=s articles on Swedenborg in 1827), but his larger cultural impact on Americans began with the translation into English in 1841 of a collection of letters and testimonials by friends.  This was re-edited and printed in the U.S. six years later and gave rise to a spate of biographies.  Henry James, Sr., who had learned Swedenborgian thought from a series of articles by J.J. Garth Wilkinson in the London Monthly Magazine, began publishing about Swedenborg in 1846; Emerson delivered his lecture on Swedenborg (published in 1850 in Representative Men) in late 1847.  Howe=s Reminiscences records her deep interest in Swedenborg, and her letters show that she was already something of an authority on his work by 1847.  She also knew of Balzac=s deep fascination with Swedenborg=s thought, displayed most evidently in Séraphîta (1834), the main character and conclusion of which bear sharp resemblance to aspects of Laurence=s story.

The issue invoked by Briseida=s comment and Balzac=s Séraphîta is Swedenborg=s views about the role of sex in heaven.  These were understood in approximately opposite ways by different readers in mid-nineteenth-century America.  In the eyes of some, Swedenborg was scandalous for insisting on the preservation of sexual difference after deathB-indeed, for his too-graphic-for-polite-sensibilities depiction of the marriage bond among heavenly souls.  Others, however, understood Swedenborg to be saying that sexual distinctions vanish when we dieB-that (in Emerson=s formulation, for example) Ain the spiritual world we change sexes every moment.@^[xxxi]  Whether Laurence, like Séraphîta, is intended to be understood as an earthly incarnation of a Swedenborgian hermaphroditic angel is unclear at the narrative=s end.  But the moral import of Howe=s concluding scene feels heavily determined by her reading of Swedenborg.

Berto=s third sister, Nina, who has spent many years waiting for the return of her absent lover Gaetano, is nearly an object of veneration for Laurence.  Her eerie, vatic response to Laurence=s reading of the fable of Eva and Rafael, AAshes of an Angel=s Heart,@ is one of The Hermaphrodite=s most arresting scenes.  Like Nina, Eva is an icon of patient, unshakable devotion to her single love, and she is rewarded by heavenly consummation with Rafael, blessed by God.  ANow, truly, are we wedded and inseparable@ says Rafael; their voices blend Ain one harmonious strain@ and they vanish from sight (302).  In her wild singing of Eva=s song, ARelease thou, the prisoner of hope,@ Nina seems, to Laurence, Eva=s incarnation.  Her exaltation evokes a similar state in everyone listening: AWe were borne with it to unseen realms, to unexplored depths of feeling and of foreboding [. . .] there was a rapture in her anguish, and an anguish in her rapture.  Perhaps the two are ever thus indistinguishably blent, in the intense moods of intense minds@ (307-08).  This dual intensity, anguish and rapture, likewise describes Laurence=s final moments.

The reappearance of Ronald, now a melancholy but dutiful member of the landed gentry, seems to generate a possibility of renewal.   Ronald is apparently hoping for re-ignition of Athat holy love which your heart gave me, and of which your will defrauded me@ (317), and Laurence, in a frenzy equivalent to Nina=s, appears ready at last to give it.   But Ronald has come only to say that the two are now to part forever.  His leave-taking renders Laurence a Abeautiful monster [. . .] mute and dead@ (322); he falls ill, and in his delirium has a vision in which a woman and a man are fighting for possession of his body.  He feels his bowels torn asunder by his love for both, a pain that finds expression in an image of crucifixion.  A voice whose imagery recalls Eva=s angel of despair tells him, A>a cross is not formed otherwise than of two loves or two desires which cross each other or conflict=@ (327). 

It is illuminating to consider Laurence=s failure to achieve the harmony emblemized by Eva and Rafael in light of an 1848 letter from Howe to Louisa, written about their sister Annie two years after her marriage.  ALike all of us,@ Howe says, Annie Ahas had to sacrifice many illusions--marriage is not what she expected, and men still less.  Like us, after dreaming of perfect union of minds, intimate sympathy etc, she will have to fall back upon her own resources, and to find that, after all, the soul has but two possessions, itself & God.@  As Howe explains the ethos that enabled her continuing commitment to her husband, Swedenborg is explicitly on her mind :

I do not see why one should pretend to be excessively happy when one is not, or why one should try to say to oneself "I love this man," when love is a matter out of the question.  But marriage is not an affair simply of happiness, it does not promise us a boundless gratification of any taste or feeling. [. . .] I cannot pretend to say that I am perfectly happy, or that there are not vast and painful longings of my soul which, in this life, will never be satisfied, but I am to live forever, and I shall be more likely to attain happiness hereafter, by cultivating in this life, a spirit of humility, of gratitude, and the love of uses, upon which my Swedenborg so insists. [. . .] I still bear in my heart the traces of much suffering, but there was good in it for me, and there shall be good for others.  This life is eminently one of duties, of thought and of action, in another world, we shall know more and love more, and these two worlds comprise for me all of happiness--for the having is little to us, it is what we are to others & what they are to us that constitutes our well-being.^[xxxii]

If this rhetoric is somewhat less exalted than that which Howe gave Eva and Nina, the position is very near theirs.  Each of us is a Aprisoner of hope@; we all desire release, but satisfaction derives from embracing the challenges set for us here.  In her life, although it gave rise to the notes of Ahoarse despair@ her brother Sam heard in her poems, Julia Howe managed this embrace. 

But The Hermaphrodite in the end discards this sort of pious resolution.  Howe=s protagonist, dying, is patently not the Aundivided, integral soul, [. . . ] needing only to adore the God above it.@  Rather, s/he is the embodiment of a crossB-Atwo loves or two desires which cross each other or conflict@B-and the last image is of irreducible doubleness, irresolution, pain.  Like Margaret Fuller=s Mariana in Summer on the Lakes, like Gautier=s Madelaine de Maupin, Laurence vividly instantiates the being trapped by the conventions of gender.  S/he is an apt emblem (as is the text itself, in its unresolvable duality) for all ardent, multivalent 19^th century creatures, male and female, caught between their symphonic richness of spirit and their age=s ear for mostly a monotone.

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I have found no indication that Howe ever attempted to publish the Laurence manuscript, or even that anyone else, while she was alive, actually read it in its entirety.^[xxxiii]  It is nearly unthinkable that she would have approached a publisher.  Her trepidation regarding Passion-Flowers expressed in letters from the fall of 1853 suggests that even that much tamer literary project (volatile though it, too, is) posed a substantial emotional challenge.  And certainly her husband=s fury after the appearance of that book would have imposed an additional deterrent.  I think finally, though, that it was her own determination to accommodate herself to her culture, to be useful within its stricturesB-to not become Fuller=s Mariana but rather the best Eva she could beB-that caused her to lay aside The Hermaphrodite.

But thankfully she did not destroy it.   A passage embedded in the second long numbered section speaks to the need for disguise in articulating such matters as these.  Berto observes that people during the Carnival season relish the opportunity to wear masks that, in fact, express the truth--hiding their faces in order to show their hearts.  The man in the mask is "far less disguised than the man one meets every day face to face."  Laurence sees this truth in "a wider and a sadder sense":

So intolerant, so incomprehensive is society become, that fervent hearts must borrow the disguise of art, if they would win the right to express, in any outward form, the internal fire that consumes them.  There is scarcely one great passion of the soul which would not, if revealed, offend the narrow sense and breeding of the respectable world, and the few who are capable of these powerful emotions, and who must express them, must speak as with the voices of others. (202-03)

Howe=s Laurence was a product of a time in her marriage not only when her husband=s affection for another man seemed to displace any he might have had for her, but also when culture-wide premises about her appropriate role in patriarchal structures seriously threatened her intellectual and emotional survival.   Howe saved herself with this Ahistory of a strange being@B-a projection of both her husband and herself, and thus hermaphroditic in yet another wayB-which apparently brought her a measure of clarity sufficient to carry her through a rough time.  The writing of it permitted her to occupy a speculative region otherwise inaccessible in her historical moment, especially to American women.

But while its personal significance to Howe is an important consideration in this edition=s effort to make the text available to 21^st-century readers, The Hermaphrodite merits attention for another reasonB-one suggested by the indication in Sam=s poem to his sister that her voice will be important to those in future ages suffering under similar strictures.  One evening while in female masquerade, Laurence is called upon to perform musically for guests of Briseida and Gigia.  Weary of trivial conversation, he does so willingly, and while playing and singing falls into a Amusical reverie@ that lifts him altogether out of his surroundings.  Laurence reflects:

And here let me ask, what true artist ever sings to the audience actually present before him? [. . . ] His soul breathes for the time a wider, purer atmosphere than that of theatre or concert room.  To somewhat infinitely above himself, yet also infinitely within himself he addresses those deeply breathed passages, those daring flights, those high notes which seem, like the song of the soaring lark, to drop, full of liquid light, from the empyrean.  He could not sing thus for moneyB-he could not sing thus for patronage.  He may be needy and desirous of both, but for the moment he is not venal, not vulgar.  He is lost in the impersonality of art. (251)

At the climax of the performance, completely possessed by the passion of the moment, Laurence reprises a melody he has heard sung that morning in St. Peter=s, but as he concludes he overhears someone compare his voice to that of Uberto, the Pope=s famous castrato.  Panicked by the possibility that such singing will betray who he really is, he determines to sing no more in Rome.

The incident, I would argue, encodes Howe=s own sense of the danger of discovery and perhaps explains both the manuscript=s unfinished state and its obscurity for these 150-plus years since it was furtively written.   Sam=s poem, with its supplication to his sister not to stop singing, is in sympathy with Laurence=s conviction that a song takes the singer to Aa wider, purer atmosphere@ than that of his or her own moment.  It foresees the value of such texts, the encouragement they might offer to others struggling to sing their full natures with passion, without inhibition, despite cultural interdictions perceived or real.