Hermaphroditism, Androgyny, and the Swedenborgian Integral Soul: Functions of the Man-Woman Protagonist in Julia Ward Howe’s "Laurence" Manuscript

Gary Williams

University of Idaho

Society for the Study of American Women Writers International Conference

San Antonio, Texas

February 2001

I

In this paper I speculate further about a never-published 400-page narrative written by Julia Ward Howe in the late 1840s, featuring a hermaphrodite protagonist named Laurence. My account of the work, here and in my 1999 book on Howe, is based on suppositions about her intentions as derived from letters, scraps pasted in her 1843 diary, and the manuscript itself. The first page and other key passages are missing, but it is clear that Laurence, the narrator, is physically both male and female--a hermaphrodite, therefore, and not an androgyne (a term suggesting asexual psychic unity). Laurence is raised 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." The first segment of the manuscript features a budding romance between Laurence and a 28-year-old lady named Emma (28 was Julia Howe’s age when she began writing this narrative), described as "an accomplished, fully developed woman," beautiful, witty, charming. The romance buds until one night Emma comes to Laurence’s room and offers herself to "him," at which point Laurence is forced to exhibit the "monstrous" self that will forever prevent consummation. Emma, aghast, shrieks, collapses, and within a day is dead from the horror of discovery and grief. Laurence, too, is grief-stricken, but a few pages later begins to find solace as tutor to a beautiful younger boy named Ronald, whose love-object he becomes. The rest of this segment chronicles the intensifying of this relationship and culminates in a scene in which Laurence barely escapes being raped by Ronald.

My reading of this work in my book emphasizes this portion of the story, which amounts to only about a third of the entire manuscript. I regarded it there as an attempt on Howe’s part to understand in explicitly corporeal terms the reasons for her husband’s deep intimacy with Charles Sumner and--the effect of that intimacy, as I saw it--his emotional indifference to her. Samuel Gridley Howe wrote to Sumner in 1844: "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."

My focus here is on the second part, which has few connections to the lurid tale I just summarized. In this section, Laurence is receiving an education from a Roman gentleman named Berto, a part of which involves living familiarly, dressed as a woman, with Berto’s three sisters. Berto’s intention is to enable Laurence to "see men as women see them" and also "see women as they appear to each other"--"divested," says Berto, "of the moral corset [of] precaution in which they always shew themselves" when men are present. I hope this text will be available in print within the next year, so that conversation can begin (as opposed to monologue), but in the interim I can only refer you to the plot summary in my book and continue to offer speculation. Today I am suggesting that the character of the hermaphrodite, in addition to its use as a way of conceptualizing her husband’s emotional defection, may equally have been a site for Howe’s contemplation of her own psychological androgyny and, by extension, of the "Mariana Syndrome" (so called after Margaret Fuller’s veiled self-representation in Summer on the Lakes), in which ardent, multivalent women imprison themselves in marriages to convention-bound men. I consider the manuscript in the context of French Romantic fiction; the impact of George Sand on American intellectuals; Emerson’s and Fuller’s ruminations on androgyny; and the Emanuel Swedenborg vogue in the mid-nineteenth century.

II

The spirit of this second long section of the manuscript is conveyed in two passages from the first chapter. In the first, Berto explains his plan to educate Laurence not with books, but with experience:

"Know 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."

The second, through a suggestive metaphor, specifies one especially aggravating cause of anxiety about fixity:

Finding the room at last rather narrow for minds of so expansive a character, we walked out into the streets of Rome. . . . Even here, however, Berto felt himself cramped and confined. "Fie on these streets!" he cried. "The houses almost kiss each other--like parted lovers, they threaten destruction to the wretch that comes between them. Give me air, air! an open space that does not, like these blind alleys, exhale charnel-like corruption!"

Single-angle vision is a curse, and Berto’s kissing-houses analogy seems to suggest that gender-driven behavior, specifically, produces dangerous terrain inhibiting wider vision. An "open space," one that secures escape from the threat of getting caught in the crossfire of desire, is what’s wanted for uncorrupted sight.

Apart from anything that happens in this narrative, Howe’s decision to write about an ambiguously-gendered character would itself have opened a space still unmapped in the 1840s by American writers. When Howe was in her teens (and was "Ward" still, instead of "Howe"), she had published a review of Lamartine’s Jocelyn, a work featuring a romance between two young men--or so the reader is led to believe, until one is revealed to be female. Julia Ward was careful to note in her review that, although Lamartine guides readers through "diversified regions of fancy," he steers us safely away from indecencies: "We do not fear that, like Byron, he is casting a robe of noble and majestic imagery around that which in itself is base and polluted." This is probably a reference to Byron’s Thyrza elegies, inspired by his desire for and grief at the death of a Cambridge pal John Edelstone but employing gender-indefinite pronouns. But she might have substituted several names for Byron’s--writers who in print and in person generously fed the era’s audience for such confusions.

The titillating situation of Jocelyn is an instance of a particular concentration of such narratives in French literature in the two decades before Howe began work on Laurence. Isabelle Naginski, writing about George Sand, notes that "[a]s a topos, androgyny . . . constitutes an almost obsessive preoccupation among many French Romantic prose writers. Fragoletta by Henri de Latouche, Lamiel by Stendahl, Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier, and Séraphita by Balzac are key examples" (17). Howe’s early reading of French works--thanks to language lessons from earliest childhood and the huge library her brother Sam brought from Europe in 1835--included, by her account, Sand and Balzac. It is intriguing to speculate whether Sam’s collection included Gautier’s scandalous 1834 novel, which is the clearest textual antecedent to Howe’s Laurence manuscript.

Mademoiselle de Maupin is among the 19^th century’s most influential novels, partly because of its Preface’s insouciant defense of art for art’s sake. Swinburne loved Gautier, as did Baudelaire, Huysmans, Henry James, and above all Oscar Wilde. The work was assuredly not on lists of reading appropriate for young 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 "‘voluptuousness" of Gautier’s values: "We 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, "it holds a series of pictures of more than questionable taste; in some pages it outrages all the delicate and modest instincts of human nature." And before quoting from the work, the reviewer sarcastically underlined the passage’s distance from all things American: "You probably never read anything like it. But it is characteristic of our epoch to entertain everything; and, above all, the critical mind, necessarily keeping open house, must be ready to show hospitality even to the most foreign thought. We are not to ask Gautier to live with us ; we simply shelter him under our roof for the night" (Benson 665, 667).

The sexually ambiguous character of Gautier’s novel is not literally a hermaphrodite: she, Madelaine de Maupin, is biologically female. But she enters the text as male through the narration of the novel’s first teller, the Chevalier d’Albert, who meets her when she is disguised as Théodore de Sérannes. D’Albert’s letters to his friend Silvio describe his instant attraction to Théodore, as well as his embarrassment about being drawn sexually toward a man. Readers are kept from certainty about Théodore’s gender for the first half of the novel, until Madelaine (through her letters to her confidante Graciosa) becomes the narrator and explains the reasons she has adopted male attire. Until that point, Gautier--through both d’Albert’s musings and the voice of a third-person narrator-- teases readers with the possibility that Théodore is in fact neither male nor female, but rather some in-between indeterminate.

The chief function of this ambiguity for Gautier, it appears, is to prepare the ground for a variety of what we might now call non-reproductive erotic encounters. The quantity of salacious detail in the novel is remarkable, as is the level of religious heterodoxy--itself a kind of pornography, presumably. D’Albert, in the grip of his passion for Théodore, writes that "[t]hose strange loves of which the elegies of the ancient poets are full, which surprised us so much and which we could not understand, are probable, therefore, and possible. In the translations that we used to make of them we substituted the names of women for those which were actually there." This perception makes him, he says, "a man of the Homeric times; the world in which I live is not mine, and I have no comprehension of the society which surrounds me. Christ has not come for me; I am as much a pagan as were Alcibides and Phidias" (132-33).

Nothing in Howe’s narrative goes quite this far, although in scenes between Laurence and Emma and Laurence and Ronald there are equivalently suggestive interludes. Once Gautier introduces Madelaine’s narrative voice, however, the novel begins to sound a good deal like the portion of Howe’s work in which Laurence contemplates the world through women’s eyes (the direction of the crossover being reversed, of course). Madelaine dresses as a man because she is hungry to know what men talk about when women aren’t present: "I 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" (149). This desire has a practical aspect:

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. Their 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, "the 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--five years and three children deep into her marriage to the increasingly inscrutable Samuel Gridley Howe--Julia Howe would certainly have resonated to that sentiment.

Madelaine’s project is immediately successful: a single night spent in disguise among young cavaliers in a tavern generates the twofold payoff of revealing the men’s "deep and genuine feeling of perfect contempt for women" (164) and of awakening her own sexuality. Her ruse affords her exactly the kind of liberation that, earlier in the novel, d’Albert, too, has longed for: "I 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). Wider sight: the air and open space that, in Howe’s work, Berto seeks and Laurence achieves by escaping gender boundaries. The ultimate consequence for Madelaine is the discovery that she is, in fact, a hermaphrodite:

In truth, neither of the two sexes are mine; 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. (276-77)

In the novel’s last chapter, Madelaine does, however, "pair" with both d’Albert and his longtime mistress Rosette (who, like d’Albert, has fallen in love with Théodore) in a glorious night of sex, one extravagant hedonistic indulgence before she leaves them both. This conclusion is triply dissolute, 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. Art for art’s sake, you know.

Howe’s Laurence seems to pick up the train of thought suggested by Madelaine’s emancipation. He speculates that it is "natural" for women to want to move toward this open space, even though it also is marked as "dangerous":

[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.

Developing the character of Laurence provides access for Howe to this "delightful, dangerous" new world, as well as sharpened understanding of the "bondage of . . . narrow life" Laurence submits to by going the other direction. "How 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, "full of uneasiness and of torture."

Interestingly, part of what he 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 are extremely worldly--enlightened, expansive, and "too proud to present themselves as candidates for selection in the great woman market of society." 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 "are like the vines that ripen on the sides of volcanoes--it is only on the perilous brink of destruction that their finest qualities are called out."

III

Whether Howe read Gautier’s work or not, the 1830s offered an actual "Mademoiselle de Maupin" in the figure of Aurore Dudevant, better known as George Sand. When Madame 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 (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 that the fact of her cross-dressing also entered reviewers’ assessments of her work. 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" (quoted in Thomson 16). Several of her early works, too, blurred the male-female distinction. Isabelle Naginksi notes that her fiction "is 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" (22). The name itself, George Sand, refuses linguistic association with either gender, since the French version of the English male name "George" requires an "s" at the end.

Sand’s primary sexual orientation appears to have been hetero, but in the early months of 1833 she became infatuated with an actress, Marie Dorval. Sand biographer Curtis Cate does not believe they became physical lovers, but their attachment was immediately noticed and commented on, and it became an aspect of the public image constructed of Sand.

Julia Ward was among the first young women in the U.S. to read Sand, thanks to brother Sam’s library brought back in 1835. Twenty-five years later, in an Atlantic Monthly essay, Howe recalled the impact of those first novels:

Was she not to all of us, in our early years, a name of doubt, dread, and enchantment? Did not all of us feel, in our young admiration for her, something of 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 . . . and as we read, . . . a true human company, a living sympathy crept near us,--the very world seemed not the same world as before. (513)

We can be reasonably sure that part of the frisson Howe describes was a function of Sand’s sexually multivalent persona. Certainly her brother would have emphasized that persona, as he did in an 1842 letter to his friend Longfellow, who had asked Sam to arrange 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. . . . 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)

Among other Americans struck by Sand’s work and image was Margaret Fuller, who first read French Romantic literature in the summer of 1839 and immediately urged Sand’s novels on Emerson. Her journal records her astonishment at Sand’s "insight into the life of thought"--almost exclusively (in Fuller’s experience to that time) the province of male writers. So widely intellectual were the novels that Fuller supposed she could only have been tutored by a man to be able to write so:

Women, under any circumstances, can scarce do more than dip the foot in this broad and deep river; they have no strength to contend with the current. . . . It is easy for women to be heroic in action, but when it comes to interrogating God, the universe, the soul, and, above all, trying to live above their own hearts, they dart down to their nests like so many larks. (Memoirs 1:247)

Sand seemed the sole exception to this rubric, but Fuller decided on further reading that even Sand was incapable of consistency. About Lettres d’un voyageur Fuller lamented, "she has genius, and a manly grasp of mind, but not a manly heart! Will there never be a being to combine a man’s mind and a woman’s heart and who yet finds life too rich to weep over?" (quoted in von Mehren 113). Later, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller regards women like Sand and Mary Wolstonecraft as creatures "rich in genius, of most tender sympathies, capable of high virtue and a chastened harmony," but born into "a place so narrow that, in breaking bonds, they become outlaws" (Woman 44). So positioned, they lose force as world-reformers, whose lives to be effective must be "unstained by passionate error."

Whatever her later reservations, however, Sand’s work made Fuller for the first time think she might be capable of writing unmarked by gender. "I have always thought that I would not [write of human nature], that I would keep all that behind the curtain, that I would not write, like a woman, of love and hope and disappointment, but like a man of the world of intellect and action. But now I am tempted . . ." (quoted in von Mehren 114). Her example seemed to provoke Emerson, as well, to think in a new track about gender distinctions and to define the highest human sensibility as the androgynous being. In his journal, three days after having praised Sand to Fuller as a writer of "fervid eloquence" who "makes sometimes authentic relations of what passes in man & in woman," Emerson wrote: "Women see better than men. Men see lazily if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act. Men of genius are said to partake of the masculine & feminine traits." (Letters II.235-36; JMN 7:310) And later, in June 1842: "A highly endowed man with good intellect & good conscience is a Man-woman & does not so much need the complement of Woman to his being, as another" (JMN 8:175).

Earlier in 1842, Julia Ward had had her first encounters with both Fuller and Emerson; she attended a Conversation and heard Emerson lecture. As Howe acknowledged later on numerous occasions, Transcendental thought and particularly the example of Margaret Fuller were among the significant intellectual lasers that helped free her from a Calvinistic lockbox. Howe’s 1883 biography of Fuller, while in the main a decorous retelling of the narrative of the Emerson-Clarke-Channing Memoir of 1852, occasionally shines a light on Howe’s own experiences. One such moment is Howe’s account of Fuller’s response to George Sand. Sand, says Howe,

was then [1844] in the full bloom of her reputation. . . . To the literary merit of her 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. . . . When Margaret wrote of her, the woman was at the zenith of her power, and the intoxication of her influence was so great that a calm judgment concerning it was difficult. (Fuller 135-36)

This evidence of shared intense response to the Sand phenomenon suggests that the impact Sand had already made on Julia almost a decade before 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 marries--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, "it 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" (Summer 126). And so it proves. The marriage is a disaster: "there 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, anticipating one of Woman in the Nineteenth Century’s major themes, 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 "a 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" (Summer 131).

Although Fuller is unlikely to have known it, the script of Mariana’s married life is closely a transcript of the marriage of Julia and Samuel.

IV

If Gautier and Sand and Fuller 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 in the Laurence narrative. That is Emanuel Swedenborg. During Laurence’s final illness, a doctor is called in and is asked whether "he" is man or woman. "’I shall speak most justly,’" says the physician, "’if I say that he is rather both than neither.’" One of Berto’s sisters 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.’" Laurence, meanwhile, is in the grip of a vision in which a woman and a man are fighting for possession of his body. The woman shrieks, "‘he is mine, I have died for him’"; the man cries, "‘give her up to me, she is mine alone, I have lived for her a life worse than a thousand deaths.’" Laurence commends himself to neither, but instead to God, "for my bowels were utterly torn asunder by the love I bore to both of them, the woman and the man."

Here isn’t the place for a full setting-forth of Howe’s involvement in the writings of this Swedish theologian and mystic (1688-1772). Swedenborg’s role in the blooming of Transcendental thought in the 1830s is extensively chronicled (Emerson began reading him 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. Howe’s Reminiscences records her interest in Swedenborg, and her unpublished letters show that she was already something of an authority on his work by 1847. Without doubt, she also knew of Balzac’s deep fascination with Swedenborg’s thought, displayed most evidently in his novel Séraphita (1834), the main character and conclusion of which bear sharp resemblance to aspects of the Laurence narrative. What particularly struck Howe was Swedenborg’s positing of a heaven in which human gender distinctions vanish.

V

In an earlier stage of consideration of the materials described in this paper, I suggested a context constructed out of an anecdote in a 1998 essay by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in Critical Inquiry, "Sex in Public." In this essay Berlant and Warner describe "a young straight couple . . . people whose reproductivity governs their lives, their aspirations, and their relations to money and entailment, mediating their relations to everyone and everything else." As a result of experimentation with sex toys and other forms of nonreproductive eroticism, say Berlant and Warner, this couple’s bodies "have become disorganized and exciting to them" (564). I saw the writing of the Laurence manuscript as performing an analogous function for Howe, permitting her to occupy a speculative region otherwise inaccessible in her historical moment and enabling a more nuanced understanding of the manacles of heteronormativity. Berlant and Warner’s work theorizes the "changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture" (548). 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 patriarchial structures seriously threatened her intellectual and emotional survival. Howe saved herself with what she described in her journal as "not . . . 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." This "being," I proposed--a projection of both her husband and herself, and thus hermaphroditic in yet another way--brought Howe a measure of clarity sufficient to carry her through a rough time.

This is, with a vengeance, to perform the operation our panel is interrogating--attributing to the past our age’s preoccupations "even as we endeavor to be rigorously faithful to a text’s historical context and to the differences between then and now" (Greg’s words). My current state of thinking about this issue is that the past is always only a vehicle for consideration of our own concerns. Other claims about the activity are suspect. The notion that we are engaged in acts of "retrieval" is true only as a description of the surfacing and the making public of interests peculiarly ours, possibly unacknowledged prior to the allegedly historical act we say we’re executing. The value of "retrieval" is in the opportunity it provides us to validate our present-day concerns. We justify our interest in whatever topic by finding evidence that people who lived before us were (arguably) interested in the same thing.

A second anecdote related by Berlant and Warner now seems more germane to the process we all are engaged in. They describe a visit to "a garden-variety leather bar" in which they viewed a performance of "erotic vomiting" involving two men. One pours milk and food down the throat of the other, establishing a dynamic in which, for as long as possible, "they carefully keep at the threshold of gagging." The watching crowd "is transfixed by the scene of intimacy and display, control and abandon, ferocity and abjection." Berlant and Warner suggest that this and other such acts are "the usual: amateur, everyday practitioners strutting for everyone else’s gratification, not unlike an academic conference" (564-65). Well, exactly. This paper and all our exhibitions serve precisely the function for us I have argued that the Laurence manuscript served for Howe, and that is their chief value, not their incidental value. We meet to perform our sex in public.