Writers for most U.S. periodicals in the 1830s and 40s—the years in which the novels of Balzac, Eugène Sue, Paul de Kock, and preeminently George Sand began to be noticed—regarded French fiction as Satanic. Representative is a reviewer for Horace Greeley’s New-Yorker in 1836, provoked by Victor Hugo’s Lucretia Borgia: "Modern French literature is so atrociously corrupt that, whether its pictures be directly and openly subversive of moral rectitude or only descriptive of abominations which have or have not occurred, it is alike vicious and revolting" (I.349; 22 August 1836).

The frisson produced by such reviews, and by the experience of reading in secret the books thus demonized, was a liberating experience for some, especially women, in England and America. I’ve argued that Julia Ward Howe’s response to Sand’s works is manifest in the outré nature of her own unpublished narrative, particularly her exploitation of the idea of physical androgyny. By "exploitation," I mean to evoke the sensational aspects of Laurence the hermaphrodite’s story—the melodrama of the midnight scene with Emma and of his scary encounter with a drunken Ronald following the performance of Romeo and Juliet, the performative quality of the episodes with Berto’s sisters when Laurence is dressed in women’s clothes, the ruminations about living an existence free of gender assignment. I still do think that reading Sand prepared Howe to write a much more uncorseted narrative than would have been possible had her only models been British or American. But a reconsideration of Howe’s 1861 article on Sand in the Atlantic, as well as a better understanding of Sand’s writing in the late 1830s, has led me to see Sand as a possible source for other parts and themes of the Laurence manuscript as well—parts that would seem to have little to do with the "deluge of impurity, obscenity, and impiety" that the contemporary press regularly accused Sand of unleashing. [London Quarterly Review 56 (April 1836): 106] As Howe struggled to find thematic unity among the fragments of her manuscript, Sand’s own disintegral image and works may have offered models of style and, perhaps more surprisingly, conservative impulses that are reflected in Laurence’s resistance to sensuality and affinity for spirituality.

Howe’s essay on Sand was published in November 1861, the month she visited Washington, D.C., with her husband and, very early on the morning of the 19^th, wrote "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The essay is a review of Sand’s autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, which had appeared in the mid-1850s. Howe begins by noting the selectivity of the portrait Sand painted of herself in this work; in fact, the duality of Sand’s life and critical reputation provides her with a unifying theme for the whole essay. "[S]he [Sand] lets the eager public in; but what they were most intent to find still eludes them. . . . here are study, religion, marriage, maternity, authorship, friendship, travel, litigation: but the passionate loving woman, and whom she loved, are not here" (513). That’s OK with Howe: "We will not ask any Chronique Scandaleuse, of which there are plenty, to supply any hiatus in the dramatis personae of her life. We shall take her as she gives herself to us, bringing out the full significance of what she says, but not interpolating with it what other people say" (513).

Others had remarked on the two-ness of George Sand. Margaret Fuller’s published comments in the 1840s (in The Dial, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and the New-York Tribune), as well as her private reading notes on Sand, all voice a sense of a woman suspended between two selves—"rich in genius, of most tender sympathies, capable of high virtue and a chastened harmony" on the one hand, "outlaw" on the other. Earlier reviewers had noted the wide differences between Sand’s earliest novels—Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, Jacques—and those she published in the late 1830s and early 1840s: Sept Cordes de la Lyre, Spiridion, and particularly Consuelo. Sand’s doubleness is, one could say, the central fact of her reputation in the U.S. after translations of Consuelo and Jacques by Francis G. Shaw and Anna Blackwell were published in 1846 and 1847.

When Howe read Sand as a teenager, Sand stood for "revolutionary inspiration" as against "conservative discipline"—a novelist to read in "stolen hours" out of sight of parents. There might be "sin" in this, but the books brought (Howe says) a "gift," an "exceedingly precious ointment."

Fast forward to "a later day":

Yet throughout her Atlantic essay, Howe is intent on presenting the details of Sand’s life in such a way as to invoke sympathy for Sand’s heterodoxy as the predictable effect of her unstable childhood and arranged marriage. Sand is like Julie in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise, the moral of which novel, according to Howe, is "you can tell the tree only by its fruits, which slowly ripen with length of life." Doubleness is present also in Howe’s account of Sand’s transvestitism: it is "imaginable, even to an undepraved mind, that a woman might sometimes like to be on the other side of the fence," but "we would not be understood as relaxing in any degree the rigor of repudiation which such an act deserved." In sum, "the world knows that the life before us is no example for women to follow; but it also knows, we think, that she who led it was on the whole an earnest and sincere person . . . above all, honest in her errors and their acknowledgement." The doubleness is not perfectly balanced: I sense for the most part a greater sympathy for the Sand-out-of-bounds than for the Sand-redeemed-by-ripening. But at the end, the essay does not equivocate on which Sand we are to love most: "If there be a divine of passion for which it is noble to suffer and sacrifice, there is also a deeper divine of duty, far transcending the other in both sacrifice and in reward. To this divine, too often obscured to all of us, her later life increasingly renders homage."

A deeper divine of duty, far transcending . . . This sentiment will echo familiarly for readers of The Hermaphrodite. The work, for all its spectacular audacity, incorporates conservative attitudes that anticipate—or are perhaps the first articulation of--Howe’s sense of Sand as meaning something more than frenetic emotion and immorality. Affinities between the Eva-Rafael or the Nina-Gaetano stories and certain of Sand’s late-1830s works are striking. But before I address those, I want to consider the narrative’s construction of the issue of gender identity as an instance of its conservatism.

Gender appears to be much less flexible than the trope of the hermaphrodite suggests. Despite Laurence’s ambiguous body, the fact that he is raised male gives him an inescapably male mind. He exhibits little of the fluidity, the genuinely double personality that one might expect given his androgyny, and certainly little pleasure in his state. In speaking of his early interactions with men and women, Laurence notes that a simple ungendered soul, "not invested with the capacity of either entire possession or entire surrender, has but a lame and unsatisfactory part to play in this world" (5). To be gendered is to be enabled to live fully, and though his early years, in retrospect, look pleasant enough, he also remembers them as "interrupted by deepest melancholy" and threaded with "hope for something far better and brighter"—a state of existence for which, he notes, he is "waiting still" (6). The point scarcely needs detailing: in all of Laurence’s interactions and speculations, not once does he find liberation in his hermaphroditic identity. The reverse is true: he is at relative ease only when securely fixed within a gendered persona, as when he exhibits his maleness to Ronald by throwing big rocks or when hiding from discovery by his father’s minions by becoming "Cecelia" in the household of Berto’s sisters. It is never clear whether Berto knows all along of Laurence’s anomalous body, but in the opening sections of the narrative’s second part, the two of them behave entirely as two young gentlemen of their age, culture, and historical moment would plausibly behave, and these are the pages in which Laurence is most relaxed, least troubled by anxiety about being a "beautiful monster" (193).

The narrative’s misogyny might be taken as an argument against rigid gender distinctions: separate spheres produces scorn of the one sphere for the other. But despite a small amount of regret expressed by Laurence as he contemplates the constricted positions of Berto’s sisters Gigia and Briseida, the work doesn’t seriously interrogate the fact that women are diminished by conventional understandings of gender. Berto is regularly the mouthpiece for anti-female sentiments, as when he discusses his intention to educate Laurence through "the discipline of society"—a pedagogy he will employ with the supposedly-male Laurence but would never try with a female. "[T]hey [women] are educated rather to triviality and routine than to strength and virtue—they are taught to appeal to our indulgence, not to command our esteem," he says, which might be taken as an indication that he believes women’s putative failings to be a product of alterable nurture if he didn’t continue by assigning essentialist qualities to explain why women so readily embrace the trivial:

His failed attempts to dissuade the Swiss girl Eleonora from embracing the Church seem to have cemented his disdain for women: "’Who ever by reason convinced a woman, much less a girl? Born to feel, and not taught to think, they are ever the slaves of their own impulses, until they become the slaves of men, nor do they give up one caprice, until it is trampled under foot by its successor’" (101). Near the end, debating with his sister Briseida and the doctor treating Laurence about whether the male or the female predominates in Laurence, Berto again disparages women, this time on the basis of their allegedly shaky sense of duty. The "best" women, in his opinion, are in fact capable of arriving at a reasonable idea of duty, but once arrived, their application is dubious: "’The thing which they are most especially fond of doing, be it never so mischievous, is always their duty’" (194).

Laurence seems to share Berto’s opinions. He is given the narrative’s most extensive (and offensive) misogynistic rant in the passage in which he muses on women’s desire occasionally to "throw off their chains with their petticoats," assume male attire, and move freely in the world. So insistently masculine is this passage (and its larger context) that it tends to distort Laurence’s characterization in light of what he says about himself at the narrative’s beginning. There, we are told that he was raised male so as to be able to choose his own terms in associating with the world and "haply learn to seem that which [he] could never be" (3). Evidently he learned the terms well, and very little in the narrative suggests that another way of understanding gender identity would improve his (or anyone’s) lot.

Berto’s object in arranging for Laurence to live as a woman is allegedly so that he can "see men as women see them" and also "see women as they appear to each other, divested of the moral corset de précaution in which they always shew themselves to men" (133). Since Berto also needs to conceal Laurence from his dangerous father, this education-rationale is cast somewhat in doubt, and in truth, aside from certain mores regarding Roman love and marriage, Laurence’s sojourn doesn’t seem to teach him much. His women’s clothes are simply a disguise, never an identity, and his donning of and extrication from them is played for its humor. When the experiment comes to an end, the climactic note is Berto’s pleasure in the success of the deception and satisfaction with Laurence’s "investigations" of his youngest sister’s "symptoms" (187). Laurence’s apostrophe to his gown as a "toga of hypocrisy" and "the cruelest enemy of beauty" doesn’t register as a critique of gender imprisonment; he’s just relieved to resume his male identity.

Of the text’s women, Nina absorbs Laurence’s attention most fully. Why is she his favorite? Berto describes her as "not so clever or so ambitious" as her sisters (137), but, unlike them, defined by her capacity for love. Laurence’s first impression that she is "bloodless" and "icy" gives way quickly when the thought of her lover Gaetano makes her smile. In a paragraph-long reflection on how smiles reveal souls, Laurence contrasts Nina’s smile with the ordinary variety: "Nina’s smile was more like an electric gleam of delight which the same soul, enfranchised and soaring free, might in passing cast upon its human prison" (141). Enfranchised and soaring free: although essentially a "prisoner of hope" (as she is later described [183]), Nina appears to Laurence as the only entirely liberated being he knows, liberated precisely by her bondage in love. Identified emphatically by Berto as "the woman," she merits the term (in Laurence’s view) because she is "wife and mother" though also still "maiden bud" (142)—a being defined by her relationship to the male. Laurence’s (and the text’s) greatest enthusiasm is for the highly conventional master-servant relationship represented insistently by Rafael/Eva in the manuscript of Berto’s uncle. A strange thing, finally—that this astonishingly transgressive text should so avidly embrace the very binary it interrogates.

The narrative probably encodes, among other autobiographical notes, 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. Aside from the Eva/Rafael story, the text contains other suggestions regarding Howe’s resignation to her circumstances. A poem at the head of Chapter 7 encapsulates Howe’s determination to live in the world that existed for her:

Perhaps most poignant is what we learn of Ronald’s thesis. He is reluctant to show it to Laurence, sure that he won’t like it, knowing it is not at all what Laurence supposes, and finally delivers it with extreme reluctance. The story--of a pilgrim who worships the marble image of a saint, "impiously" praying that it will come to life and therefore dying just as his wish is granted (75)—might be taken as an expression of Howe’s fears regarding her own "thesis." Suppose life could proceed on terms hermaphroditic—freed from gender assignment, freed from the hierarchy attendant on gender—what then? What if that particular "saint" could come to life? Laurence leaves no doubt: "[W]hen we seek to wring the impossible from Heaven, we pray for our own destruction. The order of our lives, like the order of the universe, is good and beautiful, and the intervention of a miracle in the one might be as dangerous and destructive as the admission of some lawless comet in the other" (75).

* * * *

Of course, Howe would not have needed George Sand to understand this state of affairs. Virtually every aspect of her culture insisted on the rightness of this construction. But it needs to be noted that among the works of Sand that Howe named and celebrated in her Reminiscences were Les Sept Cordes de le Lyre and Spiridion, two closely-connected works from 1839 that significantly altered Sand’s image abroad. The works are built on the Christian socialism of the French philosophers Felicité de Lamennais and Pierre Leroux and advocate for a faith-infused reformation of human culture based on sacrifice of individual aspirations for the sake of the general good. I don’t say that The Hermaphrodite is an argument for this specific ethos—I only propose that these Sand works offered Howe (and many others) a strikingly different image of the French writer: a novelist whose outlaw persona could also generate works embracing faith-based social agendas and characters whose motivations are spiritual, rather than self-justifying—divines of duty rather than divines of passion. The characters of Helène in Sept Cordes and the seekers in Spiridion find echoes in the Laurence who immolates himself in the hermitage in Chapters 8 and 9, looking for "a new baptism, the baptism of the new Jesus, of the living Jesus," and in the Laurence who responds powerfully to Nina’s ecstatic song in Chapter 24—

"Perhaps," Laurence concludes, "the two are ever thus indistinguishably blent, in the intense moods of intense minds."

I would note two other instances of conservative sentiments in Sand’s works from this period. The first is an unambiguous hostility to "emancipated" women in a series of letters Sand wrote for Lamennais’s journal Le Monde, collectively called Lettres à Marcie. In the third of these letters, Sand wrote: "I am very far from thinking that woman is inferior to man. She is his equal in the sight of God, and nothing in the designs of Providence destines her to slavery. But she is not like man, and her nature and temperament assign to her another role, no less fine, no less noble, and of which I do not think she can complain unless mentally depraved" (trans. Curtis Cate, 419). The second instance is the plot of a play Sand wrote just after she finished Spiridion, called Gabriel. In this work, a girl who has been raised to the age of 17 to believe that she is male must struggle, once she embraces her biological gender, to keep from being constricted by cultural expectations that she will behave as a woman. In the end Gabriel/le dies willingly, accepting the fact that trying to be both male and female can lead only to madness. S/he blesses h/er murderer for having "carried out heaven’s will" (Gabriel 124-25). Gabriel, if it was a touchstone for Howe, would have struck her as tragic but true.