ALA2004

“Myself is all my grief”: Julia Ward Howe and Gender Ambiguity
(a revision of the BAAS 2004 paper)

Gary Williams

University of Idaho

I’d like to begin with a poem from Julia Ward Howe’s 1857 collection Words for the Hour, reproduced on your handout: “The Shadow That is Born with Us.” The poem, like many others in her first two collections, indicates not only how unconventionally open Howe was willing to be about personal pain, but also how simultaneously secretive about its cause. In light of the text I’m here to talk about, the third and fourth stanzas are especially intriguing. [READ first two lines and stanzas 3-4.] In the late 1840s, Howe worked for some months on a novel she never attempted to publish (which would in any case have been unpublishable), which may be her referent as she describes an effort to frame the “legendary” sorrows of her youth. This narrative about an ambiguously-gendered being survived in fragmentary manuscript among Howe’s papers in Harvard’s Houghton Library and will be available in print in the fall in my reconstruction published by the University of Nebraska Press. It will be the first book in a new series, “Legacies of 19^th Century American Women Writers,” edited by Karen Dandurand and Sharon Harris.

The writing of what is now to be called The Hermaphrodite (the press’s title, not Howe’s) probably began three years after Julia Ward’s marriage to Samuel Gridley Howe and after the births of her first two (of six) children. The earliest clear reference in Howe's letters is from May 1847, in a note to her sister and confidante Louisa (who was likely the only person to see the manuscript in Howe’s lifetime). I’ll provide here a brief account of the plot, with apologies to those who may already have heard a version of this summary.

The protagonist and narrator, variously called Laurence or Laurent, has both male and female physical characteristics but tells us that his parents raised him as a male in order to give him freedom “to choose [his] own terms in associating with the world, and secure to [him] an independence of position most desirable for one who could never hope to become the half of another”(1). Section I describes Laurence’s youth and college days. Two story-lines dominate this section. The first chronicles Laurence’s relationship with a young, attractive widow, Emma von P., ending with her discovery that her beloved is no man, but a “monster”(29), and her immediate death from grief. The second follows a 16-year-old boy’s increasingly passionate obsession with Laurence, culminating in an explosion of jealousy, lust, and remorse that propels Laurence to flee for his safety. The narrative breaks off at that point.

In Section II, Ronald, the young boy, is for the most part a submerged memory; the center of interest is Laurence’s attention to the restrictive roles into which culture shoehorns women. In society, says Laurence’s tutor 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 Eleonora, 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 female lives lived in sequestered devotion to the church. An extended sequence then focuses on a childhood friend of Laurence, 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, contemplating life’s options as they present themselves to these women. Interestingly, part of what Laurence learns through performing femininity is that female life can proceed on terms established by women and can offer a measure of liberty. Two of Berto’s sisters are extremely worldly--enlightened, expansive, and “too proud to present themselves as candidates for selection in the great woman market of society”(229). Laurence’s experience in their home acquaints him with the various means they have devised to live rich lives, and he concludes that women “are 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).

There is a third section to the narrative, focusing on the youngest of Berto’s sisters, who has seemingly lost her wits while waiting for the return of her betrothed from exile in America. Her unshakable devotion to him fascinates and impresses Laurence, serving as a counterpoint to the cynicism articulated by the older sisters. At the conclusion, Laurence falls ill. As s/he nears death, his/her body becomes a text to be read by onlookers: is Laurence female or male? The doctor says: "I cannot pronounce Laurent either man or woman, [. . .] but I shall speak most justly if I say that he is rather both than neither." One of the sisters, “who ha[s] read something of Swedenborg,” brings the discussion to a close by calling Laurence "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."

Julia Ward Howe 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, especially the first section, is solidly rooted in the psychological terrain of that period of Howe’s life and may be plausibly read as an interior narrative--a repository for certain of Julia’s most deep-seated anxieties and a staging ground for conceptualizing the causes of the difficult situation in which she found herself. Her marriage from earliest days--before it even took place, in fact—was plagued by her husband’s reluctance or inability to transfer his deepest emotional commitment from his best friend, Charles Sumner, to his wife. The degree of his attachment is suggested in an observation of Julia’s that Samuel Howe reported to Sumner in an 1844 letter. 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.” Julia’s mode of understanding this intense connection between her husband and Charles Sumner (as I’ve proposed in my 1999 book Hungry Heart) was to recast it as a tale of guilt, imperfectly understood desire, and sexual ambiguity.

Today I want to suggest that the ground for the germination of the novel’s second section was cultivated about ten years earlier--the moment of Julia’s brother Samuel Ward’s return from a four-year sojourn in Europe. The history of The Hermaphrodite properly begins with Sam’s reentry into the life of the family in New York City in 1836, when Julia, age 17, started to read French novels. The Hermaphrodite bears the imprint of her reading of George Sand and points also toward Honoré de Balzac and Théophile Gautier as influences in her thinking about the unexplored space outside of cultural definitions of gender roles.

Sam Ward had embraced life in Paris, Heidelberg, and Dresden with unambivalent gusto. 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, thus enabling his sister Julia to be one of the first American women to read Sand. Sam supported Julia’s desire to expand her own horizons by providing the means for growth. “My sphere of thought,” she asserted in her late-life memoir, “was 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 “opened 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.”

Howe’s Reminiscences specifically identifies four early works by Sand that she read soon after her brother’s return: Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre, Spiridion, Jacques, and André. Other later statements by Howe indicate her familiarity also with Indiana, Valentine, Consuelo, Lettres d’un Voyager, the first version of Lélia--works Howe clearly had in mind when she described Sand in 1861 as “a name of doubt, dread, and enchantment.@

The novels changed her world. Howe remembered Sand as the touchstone for her youthful thinking about “the 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 . . . the atmosphere grew warm and glorious about us,--a true human company, a living sympathy crept near us,--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.

Sand’s writings accounted for only part of the attention she attracted in the mid-1830s; she was at least as famous for her cross-dressing and for the gossip arising from her possibly-physical friendship with the actress Marie Dorval as for her novels. When Sand--then still Madame Aurore Dudevant--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, 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. Jules Janin in the British journal Atheneum wrote: “George 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.”

Much of this information about Sand, I think we can assume, Julia Ward heard from her brother. Like his friend Janin, Sam was deeply struck with Sand’s intersexual self-positioning. In 1841, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow asked Sam 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. . . . 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.

The poet Elizabeth Barrett also described Sand as a dually-gendered being, apostrophizing her in an 1844 sonnet as “Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man.” Margaret Fuller reproduced this poem as a note to her discussion of Sand in Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845.

Sand’s persona is just one sign of a general preoccupation among French writers of the 1830s with the figure of the ambiguously-gendered creature. The phenomenon is allied both with redemption--the androgyne restores original perfect human unity and is therefore the ideal toward which all life strives--and also (in historian A.J.L. Busst’s priggish terms) with “cerebral lechery, decadence, and perversion.” Particularly later in the century, but in this period, as well, the hermaphrodite additionally emblemized homosexuality.

Novels by Balzac and Gautier illustrate all these motifs. A good, if sensationalized, account of French works featuring hermaphroditic characters is to be found in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. Balzac’s Séraphîta (1834) describes an androgynous figure--first called Séraphîtus, later Séraphîta--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. The third section of Howe’s manuscript, in particular, appears to draw its spiritual imagery from Balzac’s work and from Howe’s own extensive reading of Swedenborg.

Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), in contrast, represents androgyny pruriently from start to finish: the trope is a convenience for introducing an array of titillating, homoerotically-inflected 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 “soft and undulating”walk, and especially his delicate features, and thinks, “Here, 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!”Théodore is before long revealed to readers to be female; she is Mademoiselle Madelaine de Maupin, a curious and restless young woman who has determined to masquerade as a man in order to spy. She explains: “I felt there were many faulty and obscure sides to [men’s] 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 his heroine’s statement that “It 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. [. . .] 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.” A longer version of this paper traces the particular echoes of Balzac and Gautier in Howe’s narrative.

Howe’s memoir makes it very clear that reading such material necessitated secrecy. (No proof positive exists, by the way, to show that Howe did read Gautier. As far as I’ve been able to determine, Mademoiselle de Maupin was not mentioned in the American press until the late 1860s, and even then in terms leaving no doubt as to the reviewer’s moral distaste for the work.) To acknowledge writing such a work, for a person positioned as Howe was, would be unthinkable. Her letters from several years later, just before the publication of Passion-Flowers, suggest 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 (she was able to bring him back from near-insanity only by agreeing to bear a fifth child) would have justified her discretion not only in not attempting to publish The Hermaphrodite, but in devising a trope within the narrative that would encode her true concerns. A passage from Section II speaks to the need for disguise in articulating such matters as these. Laurence’s tutor Berto observes that people during the Roman 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.

Howe’s Laurence was a product of a time when culture-wide premises about her appropriate role in patriarchal structures seriously threatened her intellectual and emotional survival—when any woman presuming to imagine a life outside these premises risked being branded (as Louisa McCord, a few years later, anathematized the women of the 1850 Worcester Convention) a “third sex.” Howe saved herself by speaking “in fables,” as she suggests in this passage and in the poem with which we began. Laurence is a vivid instance of the “angel” in the second-to-last stanza, hewn from the somber mass of Julia’s existence as woman and writer. S/he (by which I mean both Laurence and Julia and possibly also her husband and Charles Sumner) is an emblem 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. “Myself,” as she says in an earlier line, “is all my grief.” It is striking that the poem ends by suggesting that the “secret” is kept from all but God, who, paradoxically, enjoins both “silence” and “song.” The Laurence manuscript, we might say, represents both—the secret and the singing of the secret. The writing of it clearly permitted Julia to occupy a speculative region otherwise inaccessible to American women in her historical moment. Her achievement, one might say, is analogous to that argued recently by Kari Lokke about novels by Staël, Mary Shelley, and Sand: it depicts “sociocultural possibilities and obstacles presented by a specific historical moment to the imagination of the individual woman artist” and articulates “a forward-looking spirit that seeks to mobilize forces of change . . . for the benefit of future women and disenfranchised others” (PMLA May 2003, p. 517). There is literally nothing else like it in antebellum American letters.