Julia Ward Howe’s Hermaphrodite Novel:
Conceptualizing Gender Ambiguity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
Gary Williams
University of Idaho
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are sown
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword
His truth is marching on.
Julia Ward Howe, where she is known at all, is typically known as the author of these lines, written in the middle of one night in November 1861 after she’d witnessed an early skirmish in the Civil War. Published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” made her a celebrity. In giving stirring language to the American North’s sense of holy mission in fighting to preserve the nation’s unity, she became an icon of patriotism, an image she assiduously sustained through the rest of the 19th century.
At that moment in 1862, Howe already possessed a certain notoriety, the result of two previous books of poetry and a play that had been produced in New York and Boston. The poems in the first book, Passion-Flowers (1854), had prompted Nathaniel Hawthorne to observe to his friend William Ticknor that “the devil must be in the woman to publish them,” since they seemed “to let out a whole history of domestic unhappiness.” Hawthorne wondered how her husband had countenanced this betrayal of their family privacy. The second volume, Words for the Hour (1857), went even further, including love poems inscribed to men other than her husband as well as verses explicitly laying out her woe. One of these is reproduced on your handout, “The Shadow That is Born with Us.”
I give you this poem to exemplify not only how unconventionally open Howe was willing to be about personal pain, but also how simultaneously secretive she remained. In light of the text I’m here to talk about, the third and fourth stanzas are especially intriguing. Beyond her published work, in fact apparently before she began writing the poems of Passion-Flowers, 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 this summer to all readers in my reconstruction published by the University of Nebraska Press.
The writing of what is now to be called The Hermaphrodite (the press’s title, not Howe’s) probably began in the winter of 1846-47, three years after Julia Ward=s marriage to Samuel Gridley Howe and after the births of her first two (of six) children. The earliest unequivocal 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).
The protagonist and narrator of the primary story, 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 Ato 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). The tale 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 after Ronald nearly rapes him; his own tutelage by a Roman nobleman named Berto (and by Berto=s sisters, whom he lives with while masquerading as a woman); and his ultimate reunion with Ronald just before death.
Section I describes Laurence=s youth and college days. He is sent to a boys= boarding school "that [he] might become robust and manly, and haply learn to seem that which [he] could never be" (1). Two story-lines dominate this section. The first chronicles Laurence=s relationship 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. The narrative breaks off here.
In Section II, Ronald is for the most part a submerged memory, and the center of interest is Laurence’s attention to the restrictive roles into which culture shoehorns women. In society, says his 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 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 the ruse of his disguise 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 Atoo proud to present themselves as candidates for selection in the great woman market of society@ (229). 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).
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 argued elsewhere) 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.
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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. Sam supported Julia=s desire to expand her own horizons by providing the means for growth. AMy sphere of thought,@ she asserted in her late-life memoir, 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.@
Howe=s Reminiscences 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 Aa name of doubt, dread, and enchantment.@
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 . . . 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: 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.@
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.
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 Acerebral lechery,@ Adecadence,@ and Aperversion.@ 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. 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. Gautier=s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), in contrast, represents androgyny pruriently from start to finish: the trope is a convenience for introducing a variety of titillating, homoerotically-inflected situations. Gautier confounds the notion of rigid gender identity altogether in his heroine=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. . . 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). 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. To acknowledge writing such a work 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 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 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 19th century creatures, male and female, caught between their symphonic richness of spirit and their age=s ear for mostly a monotone. 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 in her historical moment, especially to American women. There is literally nothing else like it in nineteenth-century American letters.