We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Plotting Ambiguous Gender
from Part II - Contextualizing High and Low Literary Narratives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2022
Chapter 3 reveals how long-forgotten popular novels become important intertexts for canonical fiction on hermaphrodism. Whether the influence is intentional and acknowledged as Balzac admits of Latouche’s Fragoletta, or perhaps unintentional or repressed as may have been the case with Cuisin’s Clémentine, these popular novels become a “missing link” between medical discourse and fictional representations of androgyny. In both Fragoletta and Clémentine, for example, doctors and medical sex determinations play important roles in plot development, which allows us to reconsider the stakes of Mademoiselle de Maupin’s transing enterprise, described by Gautier as a “medical” project. By examining classic fiction by Balzac, Gautier, and Zola through the lens of forgotten popular novels, we can see how works that have been described by literary critics as rehearsing a timeless version of myth are also interrogating the very same social anxiety one finds in contemporary debates surrounding hermaphrodism in medicine and the law. Just like their medical counterparts, novelists experiment with hermaphrodism using their own literary techniques, harnessing the power of unknown sex as a means to keep the reader reading.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
