“The cruelest enemy of beauty”:
Sand’s Gabriel, Howe’s Laurence
American Literature Association Conference
Boston, MA / May 2005
Gary Williams
University of Idaho
Full text here.
Julia Ward Howe, who learned French pretty much at the same time that she learned English, remembered a tutor from her youth who “did not forget to impress upon us her conviction that to be French was to be virtuous, but to be Parisian was to be perfect” (“Paris” 38). Howe added, “To speak French with ease was, in those days, considered the most desirable of accomplishments.” The days Howe speaks of were the late 1820s in New York, following the triumphal return and tour of the Marquis de Lafayette. As James Fenimore Cooper noted in Notions of the Americans, Lafayette’s visit taught Americans to “forget our prejudices. We not only loved him, but we began to love his nation for his sake” (Notions 41). Furthermore, the Paris of the 1830s, Howe remarked, was “civil, civic, free, witty . . . the Mecca of students in all sciences.” A visit to Paris was “the ne plus ultra of what parents could do to forward a son’s studies, or perfect a daughter’s accomplishments” (“Paris” 44).
I’m amused to set this enthusiasm in the context of a few notes to be found in the diary of George Templeton Strong, New York attorney and indefatigable recorder of the city’s mores between 1835 and 1875. He felt obliged to learn French in the 1840s, although he observed at the outset of his lessons, “I’m ashamed of myself for complying so far with popular prejudices as to have aught to do with so despicable a dialect.” Before long he was dismissing it as the “miserable dialect of monkeys, hyenas, and man-milliners,” and after reading a work by French novelist Paul de Kock, he found himself in entire agreement with Samuel Johnson’s opinion of the French: “’possessing the manners (and the mind) of a dancing master and the morals of a whore’” (Diary I.204, I.287-90).
We can account in part for these disparate attitudes by considering the face the French presented to Americans in the 1830s. It was a face created largely by its novelists—Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Sue, possibly Gautier, and above all George Sand. French fiction created a potent imaginative space for Americans to explore cultural paradigms alternative to those they lived within. Some welcomed this space; others, like Strong, found it deeply threatening.
In my introduction to Howe’s hermaphrodite narrative (the title, by the way, is the press’s, not Howe’s), I trace Howe’s exposure to Sand through her brother Sam’s agency and posit that reading Sand’s early works gave important impetus to Howe’s desire to be a writer. Howe first wrote in 1861 of this impact, remembering stolen hours with a flickering candle in a wintry room and how “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” (“Sand,” 514). Even in much later life, when the “powerful ideas of life and character” that Sand’s novels offered seem faded and readers had tired of hearing of “women whose merit consists in their loving everything better than their husbands,” Sand herself still burned in Howe’s memory as a purveyor of “wicked delight,” a personage “not content to be either man or woman” who beckoned “like a wild Bacchante” (“Paris” 39, 69; Fuller 135-36).
Today I consider The Hermaphrodite in the light of a relatively obscure Sand work, Gabriel, a novel in the form of a play written in 1839 and published in three installments in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Howe, as far as I know, never mentioned Gabriel and perhaps never read it (though she might have). But those who have read The Hermaphrodite will agree, I think, that the parallels are striking. Both provide a remarkable window into the process of a female-identified writer trying to imagine an existence unbound by the strictures of gender.
I’m in the debt of three critics who have written about Gabriel: Gay Manifold (who provided the work’s first English translation in 1992), Ann McCall for a 1995 article called “George Sand and the Genealogy of Terror,” and Pratima Prasad for a 1999 article, “Deceiving Disclosures: Androgyny and George Sand’s Gabriel.”
Sand’s work, set in Italy in the 1630s, tells the story of a female raised as a male so that her branch of the family can maintain property rights. At age 17 Gabriel does not know that she is female—in fact, she has been raised to despise everything associated with women. When the intentions and deceptions of her upbringing become known to her, Gabriel sets out to thwart her grandfather’s desires by meeting the (male) cousin whose inheritance rights she has unintentionally compromised. Despite the fact that she eventually claims her femaleness for the sake of an intimate relationship with her cousin (with whom she falls in love), Gabriel throughout the work is psychically hermaphroditic: “I don’t feel my soul is one sex or the other,” she tells us in a speech responding to her tutor’s conventional essentializing of gender roles. “I want to know everything, feel everything, possess everything, brave everything!” (Gabriel 14). We might hear this sentiment echoed in Howe’s narrative, in Berto’s ethos for educating Laurence: “Know that I abhor onesidedness, fixed idea, and all the insanities of the learned. . . . I desire to do entire justice to every fibre of my brain, every nerve and muscle of my body” (Hermaphrodite 95).
Gabriel, still presenting herself as male, first encounters her cousin Astolphe in a down-and-dirty tavern. Astolphe is conspicuously steeped in male identity from his first entrance, and furthermore, he evaluates Gabriel’s actions and looks in terms of how male he is. After a bloody bar fight among gangsters and students, Gabriel and Astolphe wind up together in a jail cell. While Gabriel sleeps, Astolphe looks at him/her and is conscious of strong and surprising feelings; this moment begins Astolphe’s own interrogation of the gender binary. “I feel I like that boy, I love such bravura in a delicate constitution,” he muses. “I’d like to have a mistress who looked like him. But a woman would never have that kind of beauty, that candor mixed with strength” (Gabriel 36).
In the second act, set during Carnival in Florence, Astolphe, in pursuit of his androgynous fantasy, has persuaded Gabriel to go out dressed as a woman. Pratima Prasad concisely describes the innovative qualities of Sand’s handling of this scene:
Transvestism implies a transgression; it is based on the assumption of an inside core . . . that precedes the act of disguise, which the disguise then proceeds to “cross” or “transgress.” In masculine clothing, Gabriel can be said to be disguised since h/er anatomy is female. However, which gender boundaries can s/he be said to be crossing, if h/er gender identifications are mostly masculine and sometimes fluid? What if we consider the fact that the cross-dressed subject h/erself perceives her “inner” self as masculine and therefore considers her [usual] costume to be gender normative, not transgressive? On the other hand, when s/he is in feminine clothing, there is continuity between anatomy and costume; yet it functions as a disguise. . . . Exterior costume, whether masculine or feminine, is always already a travesty. (342)
This scene evokes its parallel in The Hermaphrodite, in which male-identified Laurence chooses a gender-neutral costume, a domino, in order to escape notice by “the crowd of squeaking and grinning buffoons” and thereby better position himself as an observer. His insight--fueled by Berto’s perception that many in the crowd wear disguises “that they might act the truth,” hiding their faces in order to reveal their hearts--is that fervent hearts in general are always necessarily in drag. Passions of the soul must be clothed in the apparel of normativity; artists must speak with the voices of others—as Sand’s ungendered heart does in the guise of Gabriel, as Howe does through her dual-gendered Laurence (Hermaphrodite 121).
As the Carnival scene in Gabriel spins forward, Sand progressively undermines gender fixedness in both her main characters. Astolphe is smitten with Gabriel in a beautiful dress, but his reaction is not only to her appearance; it is equally to her character. Note the absence of physical descriptors in what he says to him/her: “I have in my imagination, in my heart, an ideal woman! And it’s a woman who resembles you, Gabriel. An intelligent and simple being, forthright and refined, courageous and timid, generous and proud” (Gabriel 52). Gabriel, meanwhile, has had her dress made to reflect the appearance of a being she dreamed of—“not an inhabitant of this world. I had wings, and could fly high enough to traverse other worlds, toward I don’t know what ideal place” (Gabriel 12). Astolphe says Gabriel dreams of angels and advises her (him, he still thinks), “Don’t wake up, because you’ll only find women in real life!” (Gabriel 53). The charged fluidity in these exchanges crashes abruptly into binary genderedness at evening’s end when Astolphe interrupts Gabriel undressing. Gabriel, unable to undo the dress’s ties and pins, in frustration rips the dress open (Sand’s translated stage direction stunningly reads, “he takes his sword from the table and cuts the corset’s laces, baring his breasts” [Gabriel 64]), and thereafter relations between the two proceed according to the world’s expectations for an anatomical woman and anatomical man. When we next see Gabriel and Astolphe, they are a living-together couple.
Coupled, and predictably discontent. Gabrielle [now spelled “elle”] hates being left at home with servants and Astolphe’s mother, expected to make small talk and mend household linens. Priest and mother register objections to her desire to read Thucydides. Gabrielle says, “Look, Astolphe, you made me become a woman again, but I haven’t given up altogether being a man. Even though I put on the clothes and occupations of my sex, I keep in me that instinct for moral grandeur; that calm of power that a male education develops and cultivates. It seems that I am something more than a woman” (Gabriel 78). Astolphe, to his credit, is deeply sympathetic and willingly embraces “this bizarre and delicious voyage” they’ve charted (Gabriel 80). Gabrielle experiences what Laurence discerns when he lives as a woman with Berto’s sisters. Addressing his gown, the engendering mask that renders him specifically female and thus less than his whole self, Laurence fumes, “’Toga of hypocrisy . . . what an odious imposture art thou! Thou art the ally of weakness and deformity, the cruelest enemy of beauty—thou art a very tissue of lies’” (Hermaphrodite 188).
In Gabriel’’s Act IV, a compromise has been worked out: the couple lives several months in the mountains of Calabria (Gabrielle as a woman) and then in Florence as brothers for the balance of the year. Astolphe would prefer to lengthen the Calabrian existence, Gabrielle the Florentine, but Astolphe becomes maniacally jealous when other men in Florence, believing Gabriel to be male, treat him with easy familiarity. The unexpected arrival of one of Astolphe’s former associates in their Calabrian hideaway blasts the fragile equilibrium, and Gabrielle flees. The last act presents a nightmare of pursuit and attempted coercion. Astolphe tries to persuade Gabriel’s former tutor to reveal her whereabouts and then marry them: “I feel that a little authority, legitimized by solemn vows on her part, would protect me against her independence and pride” (Gabriel 103). The tutor urges Astolphe to “let her live and die in disguise, happy and free, with you,” but Gabrielle recognizes that Astolphe’s putative love is really “savage pride, a thirst for vengeance and domination.” Because he’s male, she says, a life “made up only of love and contemplation could not suffice for him” (Gabriel 105, 120). As Astolphe’s efforts to force Gabrielle into unambivalent femaleness escalate, Gabrielle electrifyingly foresees the shipwreck of their “bizarre and delicious voyage”:
He wants to call me before a court, before an assembly of men. And there, before the judges, before the mob, have the guards tear away my doublet, and, for proof of his rights to fortune and power, unveil me for all to see the female breasts that he alone has seen palpitate! . . . But as for me, I say never! I refuse to lend myself to this final insult, and rather than suffer that affront, I will rip open my chest, mutilate my breasts to render them objects of horror to all who look on, and no man will smile at the sight of my nakedness. (Gabriel 122)
As Ann McCall astutely remarks, Gabrielle’s “secret and essential illegality remains her body.” Her death in the final scene, in McCall’s reading, illustrates “how systematic rejection and destruction of the feminine allow for the peaceful transition of power between males who bond over her dead body” (McCall 43). And, I would add, it signifies the death of Sand’s dream of a non-hegemonic relationship. The work surely reflects, as so many of Sand’s novels in the 1830s do, her own despair in trying to construct alliances with the men in her life that would afford her the same degree of freedom they enjoyed.
Sand’s Gabriel is the nearest thing to a hermaphrodite that conventional biology allows. Her construction as a male provides her with a sense of ungendered normativity. Peggy McIntosh’s “invisible knapsack” metaphor is useful in explaining Gabriel’s sense of freedom in the play’s initial pages.… Yet simultaneously her female body appears to liberate her from the desire to dominate and gives her the will to live generously, companionably, lovingly, on equal ground with her beloved (and nearly redeemed) Astolphe. The world, however, will not allow it. Astolphe’s maleness will not allow it. Only death permits Gabriel to become the being of her dream: “free . . . the dream . . . flying,” she murmurs as she dies at the hand of a hired assassin (Gabriel 126).
(It’s the grandfather, by the way, who hires the assassin. His goal throughout is to prevent Gabriel from rendering her inheritance into the branch of the family represented by Astolphe. But Astolphe explicitly understands, in the last scene, that it is he, Astolphe, who has really killed Gabriel.)
Howe’s hermaphrodite Laurence, we might speculate, provides a site for considering ungendered or dual-gendered existence not as a dream beyond death, but as an embodied possibility. What if the hermaphroditism were actual, not metaphorical? Howe seems to wonder. Howe’s trope, like Sand’s, opens room for consideration of whether gender is in fact immutable (an extremely rare phenomenon in 1840s American culture, much rarer than in France, where fascination with the ambiguously-gendered creature was widespread). But Howe’s own conflicted attitudes on the subject appear to have generated a plot no less melancholy in its implications than Sand’s narrative.
Being raised male seems to give Laurence an inescapably male mind; he exhibits little of the fluidity, the genuinely double personality, that is Gabriel’s defining characteristic. Several early readers of The Hermaphrodite have been troubled by passages with a misogynistic cast to them—such as this one, in which Laurence muses on women’s desire occasionally to “throw off their chains with their petticoats,” assume male attire, and move freely in the world:
And this masculine mania may last long, and go far, but it will not last forever. However strong, or depraved, or metaphysical the emancipated woman may be, she will in the end feel the want of some one to bully and protect her, the necessity of being cherished and admired, or kicked and cuffed. And so some day she will ignominiously strike her flag of defiance, and creep back to her woman’s trappings, and to her woman’s life as best she may, happy after all her wanderings if she can find some kind brute to play the Beast to her Beauty, some one who though he may outrage her best feelings, laugh at her convictions, and offend her taste, will yet praise her eyebrows, and pay her bills. (Hermaphrodite 131)
Laurence himself never feels anything but confined when he is obliged to perform femaleness. Ronald’s love for him (when Ronald believes Laurence to be a woman) makes Laurence uncomfortable, most so when he begins to feel in himself a responsive chord. Laurence’s (and the text’s) greatest enthusiasm is for the highly conventional master-servant relationships represented by Gaetano and Nina and Rafael and Eva. A strange thing, finally—that this astonishingly transgressive text should seem in parts so avidly to embrace the very binary it interrogates.
I have argued elsewhere that the narrative encodes Howe’s decision to embrace the inevitability of this unequal power distribution in her own marriage. Both practicality and her own ethics compelled such a resolution in the 1840s. But there is more to be said about this subject, and further inquiry might begin by considering Valarie Ziegler’s suggestion in Diva Julia that Eva and Rafael’s transfiguration into a single being at the climax of that story emblemizes a true hermaphroditism born from “transformative spirituality” (Ziegler 70), possibly more radical and disruptive of 19th century gender prescriptions than the blighted, monster-like figure of Laurence.
Whatever is said now and in the future about it (and I very much look forward to what my fellow panelists are about to say), its very existence strenuously complicates our information about what women thought and felt, and about who Julia Ward Howe in fact was.