Costumes of The Mind. Transvestism As Metaphor in Modern Literature

Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor
in Modern Literature
Sandra M. Gilbert
What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it

crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary
waist. What is this current.
What is the wind, what is it.
Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a
dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green
are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes
it. A line just distinguishes it.
-GERTRUDE STEIN,"A Long Dress"'
"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not
we them," declared Virginia Woolf in Orlando (1928), adding that "we
may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but [clothes] mould our
hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."2 In the same year, how-
ever, W. B. Yeats published a collection of poems that included a very
different, and far more famous, statement about costume: "An aged
man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap
its hands and sing, and louder sing, / For every tatter in its mortal dress."
Where Woolf's view of clothing implied that costume is inseparable from
identity-indeed, that costume creates identity-Yeats' metaphor, re-
peated often throughout his career, posits a heart's truth which stands
apart from false costumes. For Woolf, we are what we wear, but for
1. "A Long Dress," TenderButtons: SelectedWritingsof GertrudeStein (New York, 1972),

p. 467.
2. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York, 1928), p. 188.
? 1980 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/80/0702-0001$01.00
391
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392 Sandra M. Gilbert Costumesof the Mind
Yeats, we may, like Lear, have to undo the last button of what we wear in
order to dis-cover and more truly re-cover what we are.
It is not surprising that literary men and women like Yeats and
Woolf should have speculated on the significance of costume, for both
were living in an era when the Industrial Revolution had produced a
corresponding revolution in what we have come to call "fashion."
Though there has always been a tradition of theatricality associated with
the expensive clothing of aristocrats and wealthy merchants as well as a
long literary tradition exploring the implications of transvestism, until
the middle or late nineteenth century most people wore what were
essentially uniforms: garments denoting the one form or single shape to
which each individual's life was confined by birth, by circumstance, by
custom, by decree. Thus the widow's weeds, the peasant's Sunday em-
broidery, the governess' sombre gown, the servant's apron, and the
child's smock were signs of class, age, and occupation as fated and in-
escapable as the judge's robes, the sergeant's stripes, and the nun's
habit.3
With the advent of the spinning jenny and the sewing machine,
common men and women, along with uncommon individuals from
Byron to Baudelaire, began to experience a new vision of the kinds of
costumes available to them and, as a corollary to that vision, a heightened
awareness of the theatrical nature of clothing itself.4 By 1833 Thomas
Carlyle was writing obsessively about the mystical significance of tailor-
ing, and by the 1890sfin de siecle literary circles were dominated by poets
who defined themselves at least in part as dandies, poets whose art in-
3. Lawrence Langner, in The Importanceof Wearing Clothes (New York, 1959), notes
that in ancient Greece "women were not permitted ... to wear more than three garments at
a time. In Rome ... the law restricted peasants to one color, officers to two, commanders to
three. . . . In the reign of Charles IX of France, the ornamentation of clothing was
regulated according to the rank of the wearer, and most of these laws remained in force
until the French Revolution. In England Henry VIII insisted that a countess must wear a
train both before and behind, while those below her in rank might not have this distinc-
tion" (p. 179).
4. The first of Yeats' visionary "Fragments," though probably intended as a comment
on the Industrial Revolution, mythologizes the transformative power of the spinning
jenny: "Locke sank into a swoon; / The Garden died; / God took the spinning-jenny / Out
of his side" (The CollectedPoems of W. B. Yeats [New York, 1955], p. 211).
Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of

California at Davis, is the author of Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H.
Lawrenceand In theFourth Worldand coauthor, with Susan Gubar, of The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writerand the Nineteenth-CenturyLiter-
ary Imagination; they currently are at work on a sequel to that volume, No
Man's Land: The Woman Writerand the Twentieth-Century LiteraryImagina-
tion.

Critical Inquiry Winter 1980 393
creasingly concerned itself with style in every sense of the word. In our
own century that literary concern with costume has, of course, con-
tinued, accompanying and in a sense commenting on the rise and fall of
hemlines and governments, houses of fashion and fashions of thought.
There is a striking difference, however, between the ways female
and male modernists define and describe literal or figurative costumes.
Balancing self against mask, true garment against false costume, Yeats
articulates a perception of himself and his place in society that most
other male modernists share, even those who experiment more radically
with costume as metaphor. But female modernists like Woolf, together
with their post-modernist heirs, imagine costumes of the mind with
much greater irony and ambiguity, in part because women's clothing is
more closely connected with the pressures and oppressions of gender
and in part because women have far more to gain from the identification
of costume with self or gender. Because clothing powerfully defines sex
roles, both overt and covert fantasies of transvestism are often associated
with the intensified clothes consciousness expressed by these writers. But
although such imagery is crucially important in works by Joyce, Law-
rence, and Eliot on the one hand, and in works by Barnes, Woolf, and
H. D. on the other, it functions very differently for male modernists
from the way it operates for feminist modernists.
Literary men, working variations upon the traditional dichotomy of
appearance and reality, often oppose false costumes to true clothing.
Sometimes, they oppose costume (seen as false or artificial) to nakedness
(which is true, "natural," and the equivalent of a suitable garment or
guise). Frequently, moreover, they see false costumes as unsexed or
wrongly sexed, transvestite travesties, while true costumes are properly
sexed. In defining such polarities, all are elaborating a deeply con-
servative vision of society both as it is and as it should be, working, that is,
on the assumption that the sociopolitical world should be hierarchical,
orderly, stylized. Often, indeed, in their anxiety about the vertiginous
freedom offered by an age of changing clothes, these men seem nostal-
gic for the old days of uniforms, and so they use costumes in poems and
novels in part to abuse them. Even more important, their obsessive use
of sex-connected costumes suggests that for most male modernists the
hierarchical order of society is and should be a pattern based upon
gender distinctions, since the ultimate reality is in their view the truth of
gender, a truth embodied or clothed in cultural paradigms which all
these writers see as both absolute and Platonically ideal and which the
most prominent among them-Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Eliot-
continually seek to revive.
The feminist counterparts of these men, however, not only regard
all clothing as costume, they also define all costume as false. Yet they
don't oppose false costume to "true" nakedness, for to most of these
writers that fundamental sexual self for which, say, Yeats uses nakedness

as a metaphor is itself merely another costume. Thus where even the

most theatrical male modernists differentiate between masks and selves,
false costumes and true garments, most female modernists and their
successors do not. On the contrary, many literary women from Woolf to
Plath see what literary men call "selves" as costumes and costumes as
"selves," in a witty revision of male costume metaphors that can be traced
back to such nineteenth-century foremothers as Charlotte Bronte and
Emily Dickinson. Moreover, just as male modernist costume imagery is
profoundly conservative, feminist modernist costume imagery is radi-
cally revisionary in a political as well as a literary sense, for it implies that
no one, male or female, can or should be confined to a uni-form, a single
form or self. On the contrary; where so many twentieth-century men
have sought to outline the enduring, gender-connected myths behind
history, many twentieth-century women have struggled-sometimes
exuberantly, sometimes anxiously-to define a gender-free reality be-
hind or beneath myth, an ontological essence so pure, so free that "it"
can "inhabit" any self, any costume. For the male modernist, in other
words, gender is most often an ultimate reality, while for the female
modernist an ultimate reality exists only if one journeys beyond gender.
I want to illustrate these points by considering both well-known
male modernist transvestite fantasies and famous feminist fantasies
which employ similar themes and plot devices but toward very different
ends. One of the most dramatic transvestite episodes in modern litera-
ture, for example, appears in the Nighttown episode at the heart of
Joyce's Ulysses. Here Leopold Bloom encounters a Circe named Bella
Cohen, the whorehouse madam, who turns herself into a male named
Bello and transforms Bloom first into a female, then into a pig, and
finally into an elaborately costumed "charming soubrette." Significantly,
it is the last of these transformations, the one depending upon costume,
which is the seal of Bloom's humiliation, just as Bello's dreadful ascen-
dancy is indicated by her/his clothing. "With bobbed hair,.. . fat mous-
tache rings,... alpine hat ... and breeches," Bello becomes a grotesque
parody of masculinized female mastery, what she/he calls "petticoat gov-
ernment," hunting and beating the tremblingly masochistic Bloom.5
Even more ludicrous clothing defines Bloom's disgrace. Pointing to the
whores, Bello growls that "as they are now, so will you be, wigged,
singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits.
Tape measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with
cruel force into vicelike corsets ... to the diamond trimmed pelvis ...
while your figure, plumper than when at large, will be restrained in
nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats, and fringes ..." (p. 523).
5. James Joyce, Ulysses(New York, 1934), p. 519; all further citations to this work will
be included in the text.

These sadomasochistic passages are important for several reasons.

Besides parodying fashion magazine descriptions of clothing and re-
minding us thereby that for the modernist both literary style and cos-
tume are often tools of ironic impersonation, Joyce is here specifically
parodying Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's famous Venus in Furs; but in
doing so, he is also parodying a distinctively nineteenth-century porno-
graphic genre:
Closely allied to [erotic histories of] spanking and whipping, were

the underground Victorian epics about bondage that usually re-
count how recalcitrant and unmanageable boys were put into tight
corsets and educated to be docile and feminine and lived more or
less happily as women. Two such works are Miss High Heels and
Gynocracy. . . . In the first, Dennis Evelyn Beryl is transformed
under the supervision of his stepsister Helen into a properly
trained young woman. As part of his corset discipline, he [is] sent to
a girls' school, where he [is] punished with canes, riding whips,
birch rods, and ever more restrictive corsets. . . . In the second
novel, Julian Robinson, Viscount Ladywood ... had showed too
much energy as a boy, and so his parents shipped him to a [similar]
school. The novel concluded: "The petticoat ... I consider ex-
tremely beneficial.... I confess that I love my bondage. ... There is
a wonderful luxuriousness and sensuality in being made to bow
down before a woman.... My lady's stockings and drawers upon
me give me . . . an electrifying thrill .... This world is woman's
earth, and it is petticoated all over. Theirs is the dominion, turn
and twist the matter as you will!"6
In the dialogue between Bloom and Bella/Bello, Joyce almost liter-

ally echoes some of this language. ("Married, I see," says Bella to Bloom.
"And the Missus is Master. Petticoat government"; "That is so," Bloom
replies, adding encomia to Bella as "Powerful being" and "Exuberant
female" [pp. 515-16].) Does Joyce's parody suggest a serious if covert
acceptance of the original pornography, a reinterpretation of the work
in a spirit in which it was not intended? Might we decide, for instance, as
several recent critics have suggested, that the grotesque androgyny Joyce
imagines for Bloom in Nighttown and elsewhere in Ulysseshints through
veils of parody at the possibility of a nobler and more vital androgyny?7 I
would like to agree with such an optimistic, and implicitly feminist,
interpretation of the Nighttown episode, but it strikes me as largely
mistaken.
6. Vern Bullough, Sexual Variancein Societyand History (New York, 1976), pp. 554-55.
7. See, e.g., Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Towarda RecognitionofAndrogyny(New York, 1974),
p. 95, and Suzette Henke,Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook:A Study of Ulysses (Columbus, Ohio,
1978), pp. 7, 93, and 194-97.

For one thing, Bloom's female costume is clearly a sign that he has
wrongly succumbed to "petticoat government" and thus that he has be-
come weak and womanish himself; his clothing tells us, accordingly, not
of his large androgynous soul but of his complete degradation. For
Joyce's parodic narrative implies that to become a female or femalelike is
not only figuratively but literally to be de-graded, to lose one's place in
the preordained hierarchy that patriarchal culture associates with gen-
der. If this is so, however, Joyce is also hinting that to be a woman is
inevitably to be degraded, to be "a thing under the yoke." And certainly
the language of the Nighttown episode supports this depressing notion,
for as Joyce (and all his readers) knew perfectly well, it was not just
Bella/Bello's whores who were "wigged, singed, perfumesprayed,
ricepowdered," shaven, corseted, and "restrained in nettight frocks";
this degrading reality of female costume is in fact the reality at the heart
of the pornography Joyce is parodying in Ulysses.(The sadism associated
with the male/female role reversal in transvestite Victorian pornography
suggests, moreover, that the pornography itself is perversely reversing,
exaggerating, and thereby parodying the male dominance/female sub-
mission that the authors of these works believe to be quite properly
associated with male/female relationships.)
In other words, just as Kate Millett extrapolated a true societal
evaluation of femaleness from the parodic posturings of Jean Genet's
male homosexual transvestites,8 we can extrapolate Joyce's vision of soci-
ety's vision of femaleness from Bloom's degraded androgyny. It is
significant, therefore, that after this episode the traveling salesman re-
turns home and, instead of increasing his commitment to nurturing
wholeness, femaleness, and androgyny, he figuratively, if only tem-
porarily, expels the suitors, gives the "viscous cream" ordinarily reserved
for "his wife Marion's breakfast" to his mysteriously mystical son
Stephen, and asserts his proper male mastery by ordering Molly to bring
him eggs for his own breakfast the next morning. Casting off his false
female costume, he has begun to dis-cover and re-cover his true male
potency, his masterful male self. "From infancy to maturity he had re-
sembled his maternal procreatrix," but from now on he will "increasingly
8. See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York, 1970), pp. 336-61. Discussing Genet,
Millett suggests that "as she minces along a street in the Village, the storm of outrage an
insouciant queen in drag may call down is due to the fact that she is both masculine and
feminine at once--or male, but feminine. [And thus] she has .. . challenged more than the
taboo on homosexuality, she has uncovered what the source of this contempt implies--the
fact that sex role is sex rank" (p. 343). See also Maria Ramas, "Freud's Dora, Dora's
Hysteria: The Negation of a Woman's Rebellion," Feminist Studies (forthcoming), for a
useful analysis of the connections between sex role, sex rank, and sadomasochistic fan-
tasies. "Ultimately," Ramas suggests, "heterosexual desire cannot be separated from what
psychoanalysis terms 'primal scene' phantasies [which] are sado-masochistic in content and
have rigidly defined masculine and feminine positions. They are cultural and are perhaps
the most profound ideology, precisely because they are erotised."

resemble his paternal creator" for he has at last taken his place in a
patrilineal order of success and succession (p. 692).
Bloom's dramatic recovering of power is, however, curiously as-
sociated not only with his repudiation of the female and the female
costume but also with his wearing of that costume. But this is not because
his new power is in any way androgynous. On the contrary, Bloom's
regained authority seems to have been energized by the sort of ritual
sexual inversion that, as Natalie Davis notes, traditionally accompanied
festive misrule. In sixteenth-century France, Davis tells us, the ceremo-
nial functions of such sexual inversion were mostly performed by males
disguised as grotesque cavorting females, and the primary purpose of
their masquerades was usually to reinforce the sexual/social hierarchy.9
Through enacting gender disorder, men and women learned the neces-
sity for male dominant/female submissive sexual order. At the same
time, through a paradoxical yielding to sexual disorder, the male, in
particular, was thought to gain the sexual energy (that is, the potency) he
needed for domination. For since women were traditionally defined as
"the lustier sex"-the sex made for sex-it was only natural, if paradoxi-
cal, that a man could achieve sexual strength by temporarily im-
personating a woman. Through grotesque submission, he would learn
dominance; through misrule, he might learn rule; through a brief ironic
concession to "petticoat government," he would learn not androgynous
wholeness but male mastery.
Moreover, Bloom's revitalized male mastery might not derive just
from the essentially conservative psychodramas of misrule that Davis
describes but also from a transvestite enigma recently analyzed by the
psychoanalyst Robert Stoller. Discussing the phenomenon of "the phallic
woman," Stoller argues that the male transvestite uses the degrading
apparatus of female costume to convert "humiliation" to "mastery" by
showing himself (and the world) that he is not '"just"like a woman, he is
better than a woman because he is a woman with a penis. Unlike the
transsexual, Stoller notes, the transvestite is constantly and excitedly
"aware of the penis under his women's clothes and, when it is not
dangerous to do so, gets great pleasure in revealing that he is a male-
woman and [proving as it were] that there is such a thing as a woman
with a penis. He therefore can tell himself that he is, or with practice will
become, a better woman than a biological female if he chooses to do
so."'' Such a "phallic woman" does not merely, as Davis suggested, gain
female sexual power by impersonating femaleness, he assimilates
9. Natalie Davis, "Women on Top," Societyand Culture in Early Modern France (Stan-
ford, Calif., 1975), p. 129.
10. Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender, 2 vols. (New York, 1975), 1:177. Significantly (in
view of the connections I have been examining between sex role, sex rank, and transves-
tism), Stoller asserts that "fetishistic cross-dressing is almost non-existent in women"
(1:143).

femaleness into his maleness-not his androgyny-so that he mysteri-

ously owns the power of both sexes in a covertly but thrillingly male
body.
In an analysis of transvestite masochism which is also obviously im-
portant for understanding Leopold-von-Sacher-Masoch-Bloom's be-
havior, Stoller reviews the pornography "that repeatedly shows cruelly
beautiful [women] ... bullying the poor, pretty, defenseless transves-
tite." This image is associated, he notes, with the terrifying ascendancy of
women (usually mothers or older sisters) in the lives of transvestites, Gea
Tellus-women-like Molly Bloom-who have made their man-children
impotent as little girls: "they hang those bosom-bombs heavily over his
head," says Stoller; "they are cruel and haughty; they are sure of them-
selves; their gigantically voluptuous bodies are strong, hard, slim, long,
and smooth, i.e., phallic. . . . [And] it takes little imagination," he re-
marks, "to recognize in the transvestite man's erotic daydream the little
boy's impression of the woman or older girl, who, in her greater power,
so damaged his masculinity." Yet, he adds, "by a remarkable tour de
force [the transvestite] takes the original humiliation and converts it into
an active process of sexual mastery and pleasure. . . . [For while the
archetypal pornographic] illustration makes him appear like a poor cow-
ering wretch, the fact is that the [transvestite] man who is excitedly
masturbating while looking at such a picture is ... filled with a sense of
triumph as he is successful in producing an erection, excitement, and
orgasm."11
11. Because it is so important to an understanding of the phenomenon Joyce de-

scribes in Nighttown, here is Stoller's key passage on transvestism in toto:
The transvestite, his sense of wholeness and worth in himself damaged, often before
the Oedipal phase, by the powerful feminizing effect of the woman who dressed
him or who otherwise scorned his maleness, has a disturbance in his sense of iden-
tity, in his taken-for-granted feeling of wholeness as a male. Because of this, he
senses that the prime insignia of maleness, his penis, is in danger. Then, knowing of
the biological and social "inferiority" of women, and also knowing that within him-
self there is a propensity toward being reduced to this "inferior" state, he denies that
such creatures exist and invents the "phallic" woman. In a way, he does not have to
invent such a person, for the living prototype actually has existed in his life-that is,
the fiercely dangerous and powerful woman who already so humiliated him as a
child. But he will have his triumph over her and all women, in the process of which
he will reestablish his masculinity, the scar of the perversion remaining as a perma-
nent sign of the original traumatic relationship. While it seems paradoxical, this
triumph comes when he dresses up as a woman, for then, appearing like a woman,
he can nonetheless say that he is a whole person, since he is the living proof that
there is such a thing as a woman who has a penis. [P. 215]
For a slightly different but related analysis of compensatory transvestism, see Freud's
analysis of Senatsprisident Schreber, who believed that he had been magically trans-
formed into a semidivine woman and even after his "cure" continued at times to cross-
dress ("Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia," The
StandardEdition of the CompletePsychologicalWorksof Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24
vols. (London, 1958), 12:3-82.

The transvestism in Joyce's Nighttown, like much of the costume

play imagined by Victorian pornographers, almost exactly recapitulates
the spirit of such sexually compensatory transvestism even while it de-
pends upon the energy of the traditional ritual transvestism Davis
analyzes. Because this transvestism is the parodic product of an age of
costumes rather than an era of uniforms, both its private/neurotic and its
public/ritual functions are of course disguised, ironic, and oblique com-
pared to those implicit in Stoller's case histories and Davis' social his-
tories. Nevertheless, Leopold Bloom's imaginary escapade in the Dublin
whorehouse is a kind of parodic Feast of Misrule from which this exiled
husband regains the strength for true rule. Recovering himself in his
proper male costume, he finds a spiritual son (Stephen), remembers a
lost real son (Rudy), and returns from his wanderings to a moderately
welcoming Penelope. Just as the ritual magic plant Moly saved Homer's
Ulysses from the degradation threatened by Circe, Joyce's Bloom saves
himself from the depravations of Bella/Bello Cohen by not only having
but ironically pretending to be his own Molly, a covertly but triumphantly
phallic version of the recumbent Ewig-Weibliche,a "new womanly man"
(p. 483) whose secret manliness must ultimately co-opt and conquer all
insubordinate "new women."12
D. H. Lawrence's "The Fox," another transvestite work, tells the tale

of Banford and March, two "new women" from the city who try to run a
farm together but who fail when a literal fox attacks their chickens and a
figurative fox, in the form of a young soldier, attacks them, first by
making love to March and thus disrupting the women's relationship, and
later by accidentally-on-purpose felling a tree in such a way that it kills
Banford. Thus the foxy soldier, Henry, and his two vulnerable female
opponents, Banford and March, form a love/hate triangle whose tension
is resolved only when Henry manages to divest the transvestite March of
her male clothing, her female companion, and her autonomous power.
In the beginning of the story, Lawrence tells us, March is dressed in
"putties and breeches . . . belted coat and . . . loose cap," a costume in
which "she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young
man." But he adds that "her face was not a man's face, ever," and it is not
surprising that shrewd, foxily masculine Henry soon decides that he
should marry her and take over the farm. "What if she was older than
12. It is quite clear that Joyce is referring consciously and sardonically to the turn-
of-the-century idea of the "new woman." He even introduces a bit of comic dialogue for "a
feminist" who comments on Bloom's fantasied achievements as a political leader (p. 472):
A Millionairess: (Richly.) Isn't he simply wonderful?
A Noblewoman: (Nobly.) All that man has seen!
A Feminist: (Masculinely.)And done!

he? It didn't matter. When he thought of her dark, startled, vulnerable

eyes, he smiled subtly to himself. He was older than she, really. He was
master of her."13
March's change of dress is the most dramatic sign that Henry's
appraisal of her is correct. Coming in to tea one day, he finds her "in a
dress of dull, green, silk crepe," and, as if to emphasize the sexual reve-
lation this costume change represents, Lawrence comments that "if she
had suddenly grown a mustache he could not have been more surprised"
(p. 156). Despite the surprise, however, March's dress confirms Henry's
mastery and definitively transforms the two of them into the true male
and true female each had been all along.
Seeing her always in the hard-cloth breeches ... strong as armour

... it had never occurred to [Henry] that she had a woman's legs
and feet. Now it came upon him. She had a woman's soft, skirted
legs, and she was accessible. ... He felt a man, quiet, with a little of
the heaviness of male destiny upon him. (P. 157)
But if March's dress emphasizes her true womanliness, it also reveals, by

comparison, the unwomanliness of Banford, who, with her little "iron
breasts" and her chiffon costumes, is a sort of grotesque female im-
personator of a male impersonating a female (p. 155). Thus Henry's
murder of Banford is his most powerful assertion of his "destiny" as well
as the final sign that he has achieved the virility he needs in order to
dominate March. Seeming "to flash up enormously tall and fearful" (p.
173), he fells Banford by felling "a weak, leaning tree" which had ap-
peared, in its attempt at upright assertiveness, to impersonate the phallic
strength that must by rights belong to him. Once again, though rather
more painfully than in Ulysses, a male modernist has shown the way to
rule by elaborating a costume drama of misrule. And once again, the
hierarchical principle of an order based upon male dominance/female
submission has been recovered from transvestite disorder.
That order undergoes a similar process of testing and regeneration
in The WasteLand, a poem that is obviously about sexuality but not quite
so clearly about the horrors of transsexuality. It is certain, of course,
that, as Carolyn Heilbrun notes, Tiresias' androgyny "made him of spe-
13. D. H. Lawrence, "The Fox," Four ShortNovels (1923; New York, 1965), p. 130; all
further citations to this work will be included in the text. "Tickets, Please," which Lawrence
wrote during World War I, is an interesting mirror image of "The Fox." In this tale, a
group of uniformed young women tram conductors attack an inspector who is given the
significant Lawrentian name of "John Thomas"; like vengeful Bacchae, they strip him of
the official tunic that is a sign of his power over them, and the mock rape-murder they
enact suggests, as dramatically as the scene in Bella Cohen's whorehouse, the horror and
disorder associated with female ascendancy (see The CompleteShortStoriesof D. H. Lawrence,
3 vols. [New York, 1961], 2:334-46).

cial interest to Eliot.""14But this is not necessarily because the author of

The Waste Land wanted to elide traditional gender definitions. On the
contrary, it seems likely that Eliot was using sexual costumes to promote
a vision of rule and misrule comparable to the visions that underlie "The
Fox" and Ulysses. For though androgyny-or, more accurately,
hermaphroditism---of the sort Tiresias possesses is not quite the same as
transvestism, metaphorically speaking the two are close indeed. Cer-
tainly when Tiresias describes himself as an "Old man with wrinkled
female breasts," he is defining his sexuality in much the same way that
Joyce defines Bloom's in Nighttown. But if, as Eliot himself noted, "what
Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem," we must assume that
the vision offered by The WasteLand is in some sense a comment on the
consciousness through which it is filtered. Just as a dream of Tiresias'
would speak to us primarily of Tiresias, so "what Tiresias sees" must
reveal more about Tiresias than about anyone else.
What Tiresias sees, however, is a Dantesque Inferno of sexual mis-
rule, an unreal (and unroyal) City enthralled by the false prophetess
Madame Sosostris and laid waste both by its emasculated king's infertility
and by the disorderly ascendancy of Belladonna, the Lady of Situations
(whose name, whether intentionally or not, echoes Bella Cohen's).
Moreover, just as the perverse ceremonies of Joyce's female-dominated
Nighttown inevitably organized themselves into a Black Mass in celebra-
tion of the unholy "Dooooog!" who is God spelled backward, Eliot's
infertile London is haunted by a sinister Dog, who threatens to dig up
corpses. For like Nighttown, this unreal City is a topsy-turvy kingdom
where towers that should be upright hang "upside down in air" and
babyfaced bats crawl "head downward down a blackened wall." And like
Nighttown, it is ruled (and may indeed have been magically created) by a
magical woman, a kind of sorceress, who draws "her long black hair out
tight" and fiddles terrifyingly sacrilegious "whisper music on those
strings."'5 Even the central scene Tiresias "sees" in the upside-down
14. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny,p. 11.
15. It is interesting to speculate that some of the imagery of The Waste Land un-
consciously (or consciously?) echoes the mythic imagery of Rider Haggard's extraor-
dinarily influential She (1887; New York, 1976), the best-selling tale of a sinister, "upside-
down" African matriarchy ruled by a semiimmortal, raven-haired femmefatale known as
"She-who-must-be-obeyed." In addition, it is also interesting to consider the connection
between Bram Stoker's Dracula and the upside-down bats described in "What the Thunder
Said." In early drafts of The Waste Land these were "a man/form" which "crawled head
downward down a blackened wall," and Valerie Eliot has noted the link between this figure
and the scene in Dracula where the count crawls in a similar way (see Leonard Wolf, The
AnnotatedDracula [New York, 1975], p. 37 n. 29). Count Dracula is, of course, a dead man
who must depend for sustenance on the blood of living women; after he has converted his
female victims to vampires, moreover, they prey on infants, unnaturally reversing woman's
maternal role. Finally, The WasteLand's "voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted
wells" are reminiscent of the voice of John the Baptist, who was the victim of yet another
"woman on top"-Herodias' unruly daughter Salome.

world he describes-the seduction of the typist by the young man

carbuncular-is merely a grotesquely disorderly parody of the male
dominance/female submission that should be associated with fertility and
order, for the young man is "One of the low on whom assurance sits / As
a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire," and the typist is not really submis-
sive but simply indifferent. Both, therefore, represent a society where
everything and everyone are out of place, not just women on top but
shopclerks unruly and carbuncular young men strutting in the false
costume of the nouveau riche.
Some of the passages Pound and Eliot excised from the original
manuscript of The Waste Land make it, finally, quite clear that both
Tiresias' terrible vision and Eliot's vision of Tiresias' anomalous sexuality
arise from sexual anxiety and specifically from anxiety about a blurring
of those gender distinctions in which human beings ought properly to be
clothed. The first draft of "The Burial of the Dead," for instance, begins
with a description of a visit to a whorehouse called "Myrtle's Place," a
house not unlike Bella Cohen's establishment-for Madame Myrtle
proves frighteningly independent, even masterful. Announcing that
"I'm not in business here for guys like you," she explains, as if anticipat-
ing Banford and March, that she's going to "retire and live on a farm."16
And though she is ultimately kinder than Bella-refusing to give the
speaker a woman, she does give him "a bed, and a bath, and ham and
eggs"-her kindness is disturbingly matriarchal. "Now you go get a
shave," she tells her would-be customer, as she turns him out into the
barren nighttime streets of the wasteland. Her emasculating sexual au-
tonomy foreshadows the frightening sexual dominance of sibylline
Madame Sosostris, of enthroned Belladonna-that chess queen who
moves in all directions, unlike her paralyzed king-and of the
freewheeling, unladylike ladies in the pub. It also adumbrates the
obscenely perverse power of another character who was summarily cut
from the final draft: "white-armed Fresca."
Appearing voluptuously "between the sheets," like insubordinate
Molly Bloom, Fresca "dreams of love and pleasant rapes" in a series of
antiheroic "heroic couplets" that parody Pope's often equally disturbing
eighteenth-century parodies of the lives and aspirations of "Blue Stock-
ings." Fresca's perverse dreams comment interestingly on those literal
and figurative rapes (of Philomel, the Thames daughters, and the typist)
which actually occur in Eliot's Waste Land. When she enters her
"steaming bath," moreover, she does not strip or purify herself; rather,
costuming herself in deceptive "odours, confected by the artful French,"
16. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including
the Annotationsof Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York, 1971), p. 5; all further citations
to this work will be included in the text. The Augustine allusions in "The Fire
Sermon"-"To Carthage then I came" and "Burning burning"-also of course recall "un-
holy loves" in a sort of ancient Nighttown.

she willfully disguises what Eliot describes as her "good old hearty
female stench."
Worse still, although Eliot/Tiresias tells us that "in other time or
other place" Fresca would have been her proper self, a creature devised
by male poets, "A meek and lowly weeping Magdalene; / More sinned
against than sinning, bruised and marred, I The lazy laughing Jenny of
the bard" (and at the same time "a doorstep dunged by every dog in
town"), in the upside-down realm Fresca now rules she is, of all im-
proper things, a woman poet, the inevitable product of an unnatural age
of transvestite costumes, masks, disguises:
Fresca was baptized in a soapy sea

Of Symonds-Walter Pater-Vernon Lee....
From such chaotic misch-masch potpourri
What are we to expect but poetry?
When restless nights distract her brain from sleep
She may as well write poetry, as count sheep.
[P. 27]
Thus, "by fate misbred, by flattering friends beguiled, I Fresca's arrived

(the Muses Nine declare) / To be a sort of can-can salonniere," and,
significantly, the immediate consequence of her literary triumph for the
speaker is that "at my back from time to time I hear / The rattle of the
bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear." For as this speaker-
Tiresias, Eliot, the lost disinherited son of the Fisher King-had earlier
reminded us, "Women grown intellectual grow dull, / And lose the
mother wit of natural trull." Losing nurturing motherwit, however, and
artificially separating themselves from the natural trull in themselves,
such women separate their men from the fertile and properly
mythologized order of nature, precipitating everyone, instead, into a
chaotic No Man's Land of unnatural, transvestite women.
It is no coincidence, then, that the third in the series of nineteenth-
century aesthetes who "baptized" Fresca into her unholy religion of art
really was, in an important sense, a female transvestite: Vernon Lee was
the male pseudonym under which a woman named Violet Paget
achieved considerable literary success in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Her fleeting appearance here is yet one more detail
which suggests that, rather than implying an optimistic vision of an-
drogyny, The Waste Land is precisely the Walpurgisnachtof misplaced
sexuality that a conservative male modernist like Eliot would define as
the fever dream of the hermaphrodite, the nightmare of gender dis-
order. Ultimately, after all, Eliot yearns with Joyce and Lawrence for
"the violet hour, the evening hour that strives homeward," to bring a
thoroughly male Ulysses home from the sea to his soft-skirted, de-
finitively female Penelope. Because both time and Tiresias are out of
joint, such a consummation does not happen in The WasteLand. But it is

devoutly wished, and thus it represents a patriarchal sexual rule which is

as implicit in the sorrowful misrule that haunts Eliot's poem as it is in the
Jovian voice of thunder that virtually concludes the work and in the
triumphantly orderly endings of Ulysses,and "The Fox."
Virginia Woolf knew, of course, these three works--Ulysses, "The

Fox," and The WasteLand-and it is to her use of metaphorical transves-
tism that I will now turn, for her radical revisions of male costume
dramas provide an extraordinarily useful paradigm of the gleeful skep-
ticism with which feminist modernists questioned, subverted, and even
repudiated the conservative, hierarchical views of their male counter-
parts.
When "Great Tom" Eliot came to Hogarth House and "sang" and
"chanted" and "rhythmed" The WasteLand, Woolf was so impressed by
its "great beauty" that Hogarth Press published the poem in book form
the following year.17 When Eliot defended Ulyssesto her, however, her
feelings about Joyce's novel were considerably less charitable. Though
Eliot was eventually to praise not only Joyce's literary abilities but also his
"ethical orthodoxy,"18 Woolf insisted in her diary that Ulysses was
"brackish" and "underbred," adding that "one hopes he'll grow out of it;
but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely."19But she herself was forty
when she made this remark, and, for herself, she considered the age
advantageous: "At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my
own brain" (WD, p. 46). Clearly, then, Joyce's "orthodox" but "under-
bred" novel inspired her with sufficient irritation so that her thinking
became uncharacteristically inconsistent. Could the sexual psychodrama
embedded in Ulysses and manifested in its transvestite fantasies have
anything to do with these feelings? Considering both Woolf's feminism
and her developing "Sapphism," such a possibility seems reasonable.
Certainly within a few weeks of her assertion that Ulysses was "under-
bred," she noted in her diary that when "Tom said '[Joyce] is a purely
literary writer,'" she had scornfully responded that he was "virile-a
he-goat ..." (WD, p. 49). Five years later, when Woolf herself wrote a
transvestite novel--Orlando-she seems to have deliberately set out to
shatter the "he-goat" vision of male mastery upon which Joyce based
Ulysses.
Orlando, a work that is nominally about a transsexual, depicts trans-
sexualism through sardonic costume changes rather than through actual
physical transformations. In fact, as if to emphasize that costume, not
17. See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf:A Biography, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), 2:86.
18. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London, 1934), p. 38.
19. Virginia Woolf, A Writer'sDiary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York, 1954), p. 48; all
further citations to this work, abbreviated as WD, will be included in the text.

anatomy, is destiny, Woolf comically eschews specific descriptions of the

bodily changes that mark Orlando's gender metamorphosis. As "man
become woman," Orlando stands naked before a mirror, but Woolf
merely remarks that he/she looks "ravishing," then brings on three
parodic "virtues" personified as ladies-Chastity, Purity, and Modesty
-who throw a towel at the unclothed being.20 That the towel bearers are
ladies suggests at once the connection between self-definition, sexual
definition, and costume, a connection that Woolf makes more clearly as
her narrative unfolds. Her transsexual, she argues, is no more than a
transvestite, for though Orlando has outwardly become a woman, "in
every other respect [she] remains precisely as he had been" (p. 138), and
this not because sexually defining costumes are false and selves are true
but because costumes are selves and thus easily, fluidly, interchangeable.
Unlike Leopold Bloom's humiliation, then, or the "corset discipline"
imposed upon Dennis Evelyn Beryl and Viscount Ladywood, Orlando's
metamorphosis is not a fall; it is simply a shift in fashion (so that Woolf
associates it with shifts in literary style, shifts in historical styles, changing
modalities of all kinds which remind us that, like Orlando, all is in flux,
all is appearances, no fixed hierarchy endures or should endure). As a
shift that is not a fall, moreover, Orlando's metamorphosis, and indeed
the whole of her history, seems to comment on Bella/Bello Cohen's
threat to Bloom that "As they are now, so shall you be"-wigged, pow-
dered, corseted, de-graded. Although Orlando's female costume dis-
comfits her at times, it never degrades her, for, declares Woolf, "it was a
change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress
and of a woman's sex [because] different though the sexes are, they
intermix" (p. 188). Orlando, in other words, really is androgynous (as
Tiresias, for instance, is not) in the sense that she has available to her a
sort of wardrobe of male and female selves, "far more" says Woolf, "than
we have been able to account for.., .since a person may well have
[thousands]" (p. 309). Making herself up daily out of such costumes,
Orlando rejoices in the flux and freedom of a society where there need
be no uni-forms, for indeed (as if confusing nakedness and costume)
Woolf remarks that Orlando's own "form combined in one the strength
of a man and a woman's grace" (p. 138).
Thus, unlike Tiresias, upon whom the worst of both sexes has been
inflicted as if to suggest that any departure from the fixity of gender
implies disorder and disease, Orlando has the best of both sexes in a
happy multiform which she herself has chosen. And in accordance with
this visionary multiplicity, she inhabits a world where almost anyone can
change his or her sexual habits at any time. Yet this is not, like Tiresias'
Waste Land, a kingdom of gender disorder but a realm of insouciant
shiftings. After Orlando has become a woman, for instance, the Arch-
20. Orlando, p. 138; all further citations to this work will be included in the text.

duchess Harriet becomes Archduke Harry; he/she and Orlando act "the
parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour, and then
[fall] into natural discourse" (p. 179). Similarly, marriage for Orlando
need not be the affair of pure masterful maleness embracing pure sub-
missive femaleness that it was for Lawrence's foxy Henry. Wed to the
magical sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Orlando comi-
cally accuses her simpatico husband of being a woman, and he happily
accuses her of being a man, "for ... it was to each .. . a revelation that a
woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as
strange and subtle as a woman" (p. 258). Thus a question with which
Bella Cohen's Fan surrealistically initiated the phantasmagoria of sick
horror that overtook Bloom in Nighttown aptly summarizes not the
disease but the delight of Orlando: "Is me her was you dreamed before?
Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now
we?" (Ulysses, p. 516).
Orlando is, of course, in one sense a utopia, a revisionary biography
of society not as Woolf thinks it is but as she believes it ought to be; and
in another sense Orlando is a kind of merry fairy tale, its protagonist an
eternally living doll whose wardrobe of costume selves enables her to
transcend the constraints of flesh and history. But though Woolf defined
the book as a happy escapade, satiric and wild, Orlando'scarefully plotted
transvestism contrasts so strikingly with the transvestism we have seen in
major works by male modernists that I believe we must consider this
fantastic historical romance more than merely a lighthearted jeu. How,
in fact, can we account for the extraordinary divergence between the
transvestism depicted in Ulysses, "The Fox," and The WasteLand, on the
one hand, and in Orlando on the other?
There is a major sense, of course, in which Orlando is first and
foremost a costume drama of wish fulfillment, a literary pageant (com-
parable to the one in Betweenthe Acts) designed to prove to Everywoman
that she can be exactly who or what she wants to be, including Everyman.
In this regard, it is significant that the tale forced its way out like a
mirage of health just when Woolf was preparing to defend Radclyffe
Hall's The Well of Loneliness and settling down to confront the painful
problems of female subordination in the treatise on Womenand Fiction
that was to become A Room of One's Own. "How extraordinarily unwilled
by me but potent in its own right ... Orlando was!" she exclaimed in her
diary. "As if it shoved everything aside to come into existence" (WD, p.
118). Yet if Orlando is primarily a fantasy of wish fulfillment which can be
explained as a feminist pipe dream, a self-deceptive response to the
anxieties instilled in women by a society structured around male
dominance/female submission, what male anxieties energize the night-
mare fantasies of Ulysses, "The Fox," and The Waste Land? And what
engendered such anxieties in artists like Joyce, Lawrence, and Eliot, all

Critical Inquiry Winter1980 407
of whom lived in a world that was still, as Woolf knew to her sorrow,
comfortably patriarchal?
Obviously this last question is not one that can be answered hastily.
Unique biographical irritants contributed, for instance, to the sexual
worries of each of these men: Lawrence's mother-dominated childhood,
and perhaps ambiguous sexuality, and maybe even his large, strong-
willed motherly wife; Joyce's ambivalent relationship to his mother, his
church, and his old gummy granny of a country; Eliot's clouded and
cloudy first marriage, perhaps his somewhat beclouded relationship to
the Frenchman Jean Verdenal, and maybe even his poet mother, who so
strongly disapproved of the vers libre her son had been writing.21 His-
tory, too, must have intensified these male anxieties, history which-as
Eliot wrote in "Gerontion"--"gives with such supple confusions I That
the giving famishes the craving." Certainly the nineteenth century's in-
cessant contrivance of costumes may have bewildered these writers,
along with what must often have seemed the threatening effeminacy of
the decadentfin de siecle and the threatening rise of serious feminism in
England and America. Yet another important irritant may have been the
hidden but powerful attraction that the modernists' ancestors, the
Romantic poets, felt for matriarchal modes and images.22 In addition,
many men of letters were obviously disturbed by the fact that "scribbling
women" on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to appropriate the
literary marketplace.23 These speculations are necessarily vague, how-
ever, and in place of further generalities I would like briefly to consider
one significant event which is in any case always associated with the
characteristics displayed by modernism: World War I.
21. For a discussion of Eliot's relationship with Jean Verdenal, see James E. Miller, Jr.,
T. S. Eliot's Personal WasteLand (University Park, Pa., 1977).
22. See Leslie A. Fiedler, "The Politics of Realism: A Mythological Approach," Sal-
magundi 42 (Summer/Fall 1978): 31-43, and Northrop Frye, "The Revelation to Eve," in
Paradise Lost: A TercentenaryTribute, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto, 1969), pp. 18-47.
There is, of course, a significant nineteenth-century tradition of writing about androgyny,
hermaphroditism, transvestism, and even transsexualism, with some key texts being Swin-
burne's lyric poem "Hermaphroditus" (1863) and Balzac's two short novels Sarrasine (1831)
and Seraphita (1835). (For a brilliant, though in some respects evasive, reading of Sarrasine,
see Roland Barthes, SIZ, trans. Richard Miller [New York, 1975].) In addition, Theodore
Roszak has noted the powerful but neglected impact of nineteenth-century feminism in his
"The Hard and the Soft: The Force of Feminism in Modern Times," in Masculine/Feminine:
Readings in Sexual Mythologyand the Liberationof Women, ed. Betty Roszak and Theodore
Roszak (New York, 1969), pp. 87-104. An important twentieth-century transvestite fan-
tasist who seems to have actually enacted many of Balzac's (and Joyce's) fictions was Marcel
Duchamp. Photographed by Man Ray as Rose Sselavy, his female alter ego, Duchamp
asked essential gender questions for many contemporary dadaists and surrealists (see
Calvin Tompkins, The Worldof Marcel Duchamp [New York, 1966]).
23. For a discussion of Hawthorne's "scribbling women" and their appropriation of
the literary marketplace in America, see Nina Baym, Woman'sFiction: A Guide to Novels by
and about Womenin America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), esp. chaps. 1 and 2.

Surely that Great War which so haunts modern memory had some-
thing to do with the different costume metaphors I have been reviewing
here and with their very different implications: male gloom and female
glee; male sexual anxiety and female sexual exuberance; male yearnings
to get backto myth and female desires to get behindmyth. For World War
I, after all, is a classic case of dissonance between official, male-centered
history and unofficial female history.24 Not only did the apocalyptic
events of the war have very different meanings for men and women,
such events were in fact very different for men and women.
As Paul Fussell has shown, World War I fostered characteristically
"modernist" irony in young men by revealing to them exactly how spuri-
ous were their visions of heroism and, by extension, history's images of
heroism.25 For these doomed young soldiers, history's "cunning pas-
sages" (Freudianly female!) had deceived "with whispering ambitions"
(like Belladonna's hair) and had guided "by vanities." But of course
young women had never had such illusions, either about themselves or
about history. Whether or not they consciously articulated the point,
almost all had always shared the belief of Jane Austen's Catherine Mor-
land that "history, real solemn history ... tells me nothing that does not
either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or
pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly
any women at all-it is very tiresome."26 With nothing to lose, therefore,
women in the terrible war years of 1914 to 1918 had everything to gain.
And indeed, when their menfolk went off to the trenches to be literally
and figuratively shattered, the women on the home front literally and
figuratively rose to the occasion and replaced them in farms and fac-
tories. While their brothers groped through the rubble of No Man's Land
for fragments to shore against the ruins of a dying culture, moreover,
these women manned the machines of state, urging more men to go off to
battle. At times, in fact, these vigorous, able-bodied young women, who
had so often been judged wanting by even the weakest of young men,
became frighteningly censorious judges of their male contemporaries.
Speaking with some bewilderment and disgust of "the gratification that
war gives to the instinct of pugnacity and admiration of courage that are
so strong in women," Bernard Shaw complained that "civilized young
women rush about handing white feathers to all young men who are not
in uniform."27 But though such behavior may have offended Shaw's (or
24. For a useful discussion of such "dissonance," see Joan Kelly-Gadol, "Did Women
Have a Renaissance?" in BecomingVisible:Womenin EuropeanHistory, ed. Renate Bridenthal
and Claudia Koonz (Boston, 1977), pp. 137-64.
25. See Paul Fussell, The Great Warand ModernMemory(New York, 1975), esp. chap. 1.
For equally telling analyses of the war, see also Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combatand
Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979).
26. Jane Austen, NorthangerAbbey(New York, 1965), chap. 14.
27. Shaw, quoted by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (New York, 1938), p. 182.

anyone's) pacifism, it is easy to understand once we recognize the differ-

ent meanings World War I had for men and women. Every feather given
to a young man, after all, might mean another job, another position, for a
young woman.
This is hyperbolic, of course, but it is worth considering that even
the most conventionally angelic women's ministrations-jobs like rolling
bandages, nursing the wounded, and entertaining the troops-must
have reminded both sexes that while men were now wounded, partial,
invalid, maybe even in-valid, women were triumphant survivors, gold
star mothers who might inherit the very state which had for so long
disinherited them. Consciously or not, then, even the "best" of women
must have seen themselves as living out a tradition first imagined in
Victorian fiction by the male novelist Charles Dickens who was obsessed,
as Alexander Welsh has argued, by female angels of death, and by the
female novelist George Eliot who was obsessed, as several critics have
demonstrated, by female angels of destruction.28 Indeed, in a triumph
of ambiguity, Eliot declared that the happiest hour of her life was the
hour she spent at her father's deathbed-and such a statement might
well have been made by even the most devoted of World War I sisters.
For to many of these women the war was, yes, a horror and a nightmare,
but it was also, alas, a nightmare from which they might awake (as Flor-
ence Nightingale did from the Crimean War) to find themselves on the
sofa, permanently invalid and in-valid. Thus, like Edith Wharton (whom
Henry James actually did shiveringly describe as an "Angel of Desola-
tion"),29 the noblest of women rushed about in the service of the Red
Cross, tending the wounded with the sinister tenderness displayed by
Isolde of the white hands in Tristanand Isolde-a work with which writers
like T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence were obsessed.
In this connection it is surely significant that the women's movement
in England recognized quite early a connection-though, as Emily
Dickinson would say, a "slant" one-between feminist goals and the ef-
fects of the war. In 1915 The Suffragette, the newspaper of the Women's
Social and Political Union, was renamed Britannia, with a new dedica-
tion: "For King, For Country, For Freedom." At last, it must have
seemed, women could begin to see themselves as coextensive with the
28. See Alexander Welsh, The Cityof Dickens (London, 1971), pp. 182-90 passim. For a
discussion of Eliot's stance as an "angel of destruction," see Carol Christ, "Aggression and
Providential Death in George Eliot's Fiction," Novel (Winter 1976): 130-40, and Gilbert
and Susan Gubar, "George Eliot as the Angel of Destruction," The Madwomanin the Attic:
The WomanWriterand theNineteenth-CenturyLiteraryImagination (New Haven, Conn., 1979),
pp. 478-535.
29. See Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words:The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New
York, 1977), pp. 144-45. Henry James' epithets for Wharton included "The Princess
Lointaine, the whirling princess, the great and glorious pendulum, the gyrator, the devil-
dancer, the golden eagle, the Fire Bird, the Shining One, the angel of desolation or of
devastation, the historic ravager."

state, and with a female state at that, a Britannia not a Union Jack. And,
as we know, the female intuition expressed in that renaming was quite
accurate: in 1918, when World War I was over, there were 8.5 million
European men dead, and there had been 37.5 million male casualties,
including killed, wounded, and missing, while all the women in England
over the age of thirty were finally, after a sixty-two year struggle, given
the vote. For four years, moreover, a sizable percentage of the young
men in England had been imprisoned in trenches and uniforms, while
the young women of England had been at liberty in farm and factory,
changing their clothes.
In an analysis of Austen's novels, Susan Gubar and I have used
Rudyard Kipling's "The Janeites" to show that Austen's heroines inhabit
"a tight place" not unlike the constricted trenches of World War I.30 But
of course the converse of the proposition is also true. If eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century women occupied a place as narrow as a trench, the
soldiers of World War I kept house in trenches as constricting as what
had heretofore been woman's place.31 Paradoxically, then, the war to
which so many men had gone in the hope of becoming heroes ended up
emasculating them, depriving them of autonomy, confining them as
closely as any of Austen's heroines, or any Victorian women, had been
confined. It is not surprising, therefore, that the heart of darkness Yeats
confronts in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" is the nightmare of the
return of Herodias' castrating daughters together with the horror of the
ascendance of that fiend Robert Artisson, a low and no doubt carbuncu-
lar creature "To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought / Bronzed
peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks." For while the Jake Barneses
of the early twentieth century were locked up like Victorian girls in the
trenches of No Man's Land, their female counterparts were coming out
of the closet as flappers, like Lady Brett, barelegged, short-haired, cor-
30. See The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 110-12.

31. For a brilliant analysis of spatial symbolism in World War I, see Leed, No Man's
Land, pp. 17-24. It is, of course, true that feminists like Woolf and Crystal Eastman were
also passionate pacifists whose anger at patriarchal culture was often specifically channeled
into contempt for masculine war-making, while such other literary women as Katherine
Mansfield and H. D. hated the Great War because they had suffered severe personal losses.
Nevertheless, the paradox of the war's asymmetrical effect on men and women must have
unconsciously (if not consciously) struck all these women. To many of them, moreover, the
devastation wrought by war may have seemed a punishment (for men) exactly fitted not
only to the crime of (masculine) war-making but to other (masculine) crimes. In a draft of
Three Guineas that is now part of the New York Public Library's Berg Collection, Woolf
wrote: "you [men] must help us. because that is the only way we can help you. if you allow
us to earn enough to live on to be independent you have a great instrument to prevent w.
[war?] We should say let there be war. We should go on earning our libings. We should say its is a
ridiculous and barbarousbut perhaps nec aary little popgun. The atwould be a help. Then we
should live oursleves the sight of happiness is very make you envious" (my italics; Woolf's
spelling and punctuation).

setless, in simple shifts, knickers, and slacks.32 For many, indeed, "wear-
ing the pants" in the family or even stepping into "his" shoes had finally
become a real possibility.
It is no wonder, then, that Lawrence's Henry, like Homer's Ulysses
(if not Joyce's), is a soldier from the wars returning-and returning
specifically to a home and farm that have been taken over by undutiful
Penelopes. It is no wonder, too, that Joyce's Stephen feels himself
haunted by the powerfully reproachful ghost of a mother who refuses to
lie down in the grave where she belongs and no wonder that in one
version of The WasteLand Eliot wrote that he had "spelt" these fragments
from his ruin, as one would painfully spell truths out of the sibyl's
leaves.33 Finally, it is no wonder that toward the end of the last draft of
The WasteLand a wounded voice babbles that "London Bridge is falling
down falling down falling down," hinting at and simultaneously re-
pressing the next line of the nursery rhyme: "Take a key and lock her up,
My Fair Lady" (my italics). Coerced by women, at the mercy of women,
bedded down in the terrible house of women, all these male modernists
must have felt that they had painfully to extract the truth of their gen-
der's ancient dominance from an overwhelming chaos of female leaves
and lives and leavings. For the feminist redefinitions fostered by World
War I had reminded them that even the brothel, ostensibly an institution
designed to serve men, had served-as it does in Ulysses-both to test
men and to reinforce female power, autonomy, sisterliness.34 Finally,
therefore, it is no wonder that when Woolf came to write those twin
meditations on gender, Orlando and A Room of One's Own, she had to set
herself against what Rebecca West astutely called "an invisible" but un-
friendly "literary wind." Woolf's argument, wrote West in an early re-
view of A Room, "is all the more courageous because anti-feminism is so
strikingly the correct fashion of the day among the intellectuals." And
West's explanation accurately summarizes what has been my speculation
here: "Before the war conditions were different. The man in the street
was anti-feminist but the writers of quality were pro-suffrage. Now the
case is reversed. The man in the street accepts the emancipation of
women .... But a very large number of the younger male writers adopt a
[misogynistic] attitude."35
32. In the unpublished essay "Original Sin in 'The Last Good Country'; or, The
Return of Catherine Barkley," Mark Spilka speculates, however, that Hemingway saw
"Lady Brett's defiance" as an "implicit tribute to male superiority: the girls were more like
men, they were copying male styles," and he adds that "androgyny ... was for Hemingway
a reassurance of manly superiority which allowed him to be womanly" (p. 25).
33. See The WasteLand: A Facsimile, p. 81.
34. For a discussion of the covertly feminist function of late nineteenth-century
brothels, see Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood:Prostitution in the AmericanPast (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Calif., Berkeley, 1976).
35. Rebecca West, "Autumn and Virginia Woolf," Ending in Earnest: A LiteraryLog
(New York, 1971), pp. 212-13.

In fact, the misogyny (or, more accurately, the sexual anxiety) of

these young male writers led them in the postwar years to just the obses-
sion with false and true costumes, deceptive history and true myth, and
transvestism and true "vestism" that we have observed in Ulysses, The
WasteLand, and "The Fox." For inevitably, in the aftermath of the emas-
culating terrors of the war, the male modernist insists that the ultimate
reality underlying history-the myth or ontology or, as Robert Scholes
would put it, "cybernetic" pattern-is and must be the Truth of Gen-
der.36 In Joyce's system, Bloom and Molly can and must be boiled down,
as it were, to Ulysses and Penelope, the "childman weary" and the
"fulfilled, recumbent" woman, Sinbad the Sailor and Gea Tellus (Ulysses,
pp. 720, 721). For Lawrence, all men, together with (or, more accurately,
over against) all women, can and should be reduced to the paradigmatic
polarities of "man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-
knowledge, man-being and woman-being.""37And Eliot, seeking beneath
the sexual chaos of the Waste Land the ultimate beginning which is his
true end, quite logically yearns toward the "significant soil" of gender,
imagining that on a summer midnight he can hear the Ur-music "of the
weak pipe and the little drum / And see them dancing around the
bonfire / The association of man and woman / In daunsinge, signifying
matrimonie- / A dignified and commodious sacrament."
Eliot's "East Coker," from which these last lines were drawn, is one
of the major works to which Woolf was responding in Between the Acts.
But this novel's Miss La Trobe, an ironic version of the lost Shake-
spearean sister Woolf imagined in A Room, holds many mirrors up to the
nature of Western culture in order to show that all our roles, even those
which appear most fated, are merely costumes. Indeed, rather than
shoring up fragments of history against her ruin, Miss La Trobe, like a
revisionary feminist Shakespeare, seems to want to fragment history in
order to ruin it. Together, she and her author imply that to find real
truth one must "tunnel" back, back to the night of the dinosaurs and the
mud, the "night before roads were made,"38 the night before costumes
and gender, the sacred shamanistic night of what Djuna Barnes' Dr.
O'Connor calls "the third sex.""39Woolf insisted that her own novelistic
art was based upon a "tunneling" process (WD, p. 60), but such tunneling
has long been a technique common to female writers, many of whom
wish either to identify "selves" with costumes or to strip away all cos-
36. Robert Scholes, StructuralismIn Literature:An Introduction (New Haven, Conn.,

1974), pp. 180-90.
37. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry Moore, 2 vols. (New York,
1962), 1:280.
38. Woolf, Between the Acts (New York, 1941), p. 219.
39. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1937; New York, 1961), p. 146; all further citations to
this work will be included in the text.

tumes (and selves) to reveal the pure, sexless (or third-sexed) being
behind gender and myth.
As early as 1847, for instance, Charlotte Bronte's Rochester dresses
himself as a female gypsy not to degrade himself but to try to "get at" the
truth about Jane; in Villette, moreover, Bronti's Lucy Snowe discovers
ultimate truths about herself, first, when she impersonates a man for the
school play and, later, when she perceives that the nun who has haunted
her is really no more than a costume worn by a transvestite male. Just as
Rochester is trying to communicate with the "savage free thing" trapped
in Jane, Lucy is trying to uncover that purely powerful element in her-
self and her life. Similarly, throughout the middle years of the century,
Emily Dickinson defines herself variously as Emily, Emilie, Uncle Emily,
Brother Emily, and Dickinson,40 as if attempting to name not what is
fixed but what is fluid in herself; in the same years Florence Nightingale
continually calls herself a "man of action" or a "man of business."41 Like
latter-day gnostics, moreover, many of these women see the transforma-
tion or annihilation of gender as theologically necessary. "The next
Christ will perhaps be a female Christ," writes Nightingale in Cassandra
in 1852, and in 1917 the feminist theorist Olive Schreiner fantasizes a
mystical encounter with "a lonely figure" standing "on a solitary peak,"
about whom she notes that "whether it were man or woman I could not
tell; for partly it seemed the figure of a woman but its limbs were the
mighty limbs of a man. I asked God whether it was man or woman. God
said, 'In the least Heaven sex reigns supreme, in the higher it is not
noticed; but in the highest it does not exist."42
More recent writers have elaborated the transvestite metaphors
Bronte, Dickinson, Nightingale, and Schreiner only provisionally imag-
ined. For example, Barnes' Nightwood (1937) hurls us back through tun-
nels of history and literature to the third-sexed figures of Robin Vote
and Dr. O'Connor. Both star in a novel that was, ironically enough,
introduced by Eliot himself, but despite the Jacobean eloquence that
must have appealed to the admirer of Webster and Beaumont and
Fletcher, Dr. O'Connor is an anti-Eliotian witch doctor or medicine man,
half Circe half Ulysses, who wears women's skirts and wigs. Robin Vote,
40. See Dickinson, The Lettersof Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson, 3 vols. (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1965). In a few poems, Dickinson speaks of an "it" with which she seems to
identify her ontological being, as if to emphasize a secret belief that ultimately her true self
is gender-free. See, for instance, "Why make it doubt-it hurts it so--" and "I want-it
pleaded-All its life--."
41. See Myra Stark's introduction to Florence Nightingale's Cassandra(Old Westbury,
N.Y., 1979), p. 17.
42. Nightingale, Cassandra, p. 53; Olive Schreiner, Stories,Dreams, and Allegories (Lon-
don, 1924), pp. 156-59. For further discussion of Schreiner's work, see Joyce Berkman,
"The Nurturant Fantasies of Olive Schreiner," Frontiers:A Journal of Women'sStudies 3, no.
3 (Fall 1977): 8-17.

moreover, is described as "outside the 'human type'-a wild thing caught

in a woman's skin" (p. 146), whose first name connects her with nature
and whose last name associates her with the triumphs of the women's
movement and the voting powers of the sacred. She is "my heart," says
Robin's lesbian lover Nora Flood, implying that Robin represents the
wild reality beyond gender, the pure potency to be found in what Yeats,
less optimistically, called "the rag and bone shop of the heart." "I, who
want power," says Nora, "chose a girl who resembles a boy," and Dr.
O'Connor glosses this line as follows: "The last doll, given to age, is the
girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a
girl! The love of that last doll was foreshadowed in that love of the first.
The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll
because it resembles but does not contain life, and, the thirdsex because it
contains life but resembles the doll" (p. 148). If we read Nightwood in the
aftermath of this speech-the way it seems we must-as a revisionary
response to male modernist touchstones like Nighttown and The Waste
Land, it is not surprising that by the end of the novel Robin actually does
become a kind of sacred Dog, a reversed God (or Goddess) of the third
sex, parodically barking before a conventional statuette of the Madonna.
Even more recently, H. D.'s Helen in Egypt (1961) suggests that
Helen and Achilles, the archetypal seductive female and the paradigma-
tic warrior male, must be redeemed as "New Mortals," a phrase that
seems to be a revision of the earlier "New Woman." Their salvation
begins in the sacred precincts of the Amen Temple and ends with a
rediscovery of the lost androgyny they had as children.43 Helen, for
instance, recalls that as Helen of Sparta she spoke in a "heroic voice,"
praising war, while the narrator reminds us that Achilles' mother-the
sea nymph Thetis-dressed her heroic boy as a girl to hide him from the
men who would make him into a warrior, and she argues that such
transvestism, far from being degrading, was appropriate and necessary.
Indeed, at the end of this enigmatic epic, H. D. suggests that the vulner-
able New Mortal Achilles, freed from the iron ring of his Myrmidons
through his mother's lucky failure to dip his heel into the river Styx, will
be reborn in Helen's arms as the potentially transvestite or third-sexed
boy he once was, "the child in Chiron's cave" who cherished a wooden
doll carved in his mother's image, a "Thetis-eidolon" (p. 284).
When we consider this last, fetishistic doll in the context of the dolls,
witch doctors, and magical third-sexed beings of Nightwood as well as in
connection with the visionary multiplicity of the costumes depicted in
Orlando and Between the Acts, it becomes quite clear that many feminist/
modernists are concerned not only with "savage free things" or "wild
things caught in women's skins" or "third sexes" but obsessed with a kind
43. H. D., Helen in Egypt (New York, 1961).

CriticalInquiry Winter 1980 415
of utopian ceremonial androgyny whose purpose is very different from

the ritual transvestism more "ethically orthodox" artists like Joyce, Eliot,
and Lawrence have used to maintain or reassert a fixed social order. For
in the view of such women as Woolf and Barnes, that social order is itself
fallen or at least misguided. Thus the only redemption that they can
imagine from the dis-order and dis-ease of gender is in the symbolic
chaos of transvestism, a symbolic chaos that is related not to the narrow
power of male mastery but, as in Miss La Trobe's play, to the androgy-
nous wholeness and holiness of prehistory. For, as Mircea Eliade has
noted, the ceremonial transvestism practiced in many non-Western
societies is "a coming out of one's self, a transcending of one's own
historically controlled situation . .. in order to restore, if only for a brief
moment, the initial completeness, the intact source of holiness and
power . . . the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation."44
Although Woolf would not have had access to most of the an-
thropological materials with which Eliade worked, she would have been
introduced to such ideas by at least one contemporary thinker-and a
thinker who links her not only with Schreiner but also with, of all un-
likely peers, Lawrence. I am referring, of course, to Edward Carpenter,
the well-known Fabian writer who was also in his own time a famous
Whitmanite and a major homosexual theorist of gender. The friend of
Havelock Ellis, Bernard Shaw, Lowes Dickinson, and E. M. Forster as
well as of Schreiner, Carpenter wrote two widely read books on the
so-called third-sexed beings he called "Uranians" or "Urnings," meaning
"children of heaven": The IntermediateSex: A Study of Some Transitional
Typesof Men and Women(1908) and IntermediateTypesamongPrimitiveFolk
(1914). In both works, but especially in the latter, he postulated a con-
nection between the third sex and what Eliade calls the ahistorical "Great
Time" of the sacred, a link between the bisexual or "homosexual tem-
perament and divinatory or unusual psychic powers."45 Carpenter's no-
tions of the "man-womanliness" of such artists as Shelley, Shakespeare,
and Michelangelo clearly influenced Woolf (probably through Forster
but perhaps more directly), for they are exactly analogous to the ideas
she defines in A Room of One's Own.46 Even more to the point here, the
ameliorative and mystical vision of sacred transvestism that he offers in
IntermediateTypes seems closely connected to the magical transvestism
depicted in Orlando and, by implication, in Between the Acts.
As Emile Delavenay has pointed out, Lawrence was also deeply in-
fluenced by Carpenter's sermons on sexuality, even by the Victorian
theorist's beliefs in the undifferentiated sexual energy that manifests
44. Mircea Eliade, Mephistophelesand the Androgyne (New York, 1965), p. 113.
45. See Edward Carpenter, IntermediateTypes among Primitive Folk: A Study in Social
Evolution (New York, 1914), p. 48.
46. See Carpenter, The IntermediateSex (London, 1908), pp. 170-71.

itself as "femaleness" in males and "maleness" in females.47 At the same

time, however, Delavenay has definitively demonstrated Lawrence's am-
bivalence about Carpenter's theories of androgyny, theories that were
essentially elaborations of images of ceremonial transvestism and sacred
bisexuality. Ultimately, Delavenay suggests, Lawrence withdrew as anx-
iously as Eliot or Joyce did from a final commitment to Carpenter's
"intermediate sex"-leaving the concept free and powerful for feminist
Carpenter disciples like Woolf.48 For Lawrence, as for Eliot and Joyce,
the "cybernetic" patterns of dominance/submission associated with
paradigms of gender were not only inevitable but necessary, not just
irrefutable but consoling.
That a male modernist should have wanted the consolation of or-
thodoxy is not surprising, for it is, after all, only those who are oppressed
or repressed by history and society who want to shatter the established
paradigms of dominance and submission associated with the hierarchies
of gender and restore the primordial chaos of transvestism or gender-
lessness. Such political devotees of "the third sex" wish to say "I am not
that fixed self you have restrained in those nettight garments; I am all
selves--and no selves." Given even a modicum of power, as they were,
for example, by the Great War, these women-for of course I am talking
mainly about women-will enact their ceremonies of ritual transvestism
with what we might call "a vengeance." Those to whom the social order
has traditionally given power, however, will inevitably use ceremonies of
transvestite misrule to recapture rule; they seek not a third sex but a way
of subordinating the second sex, and in their anxiety they play with
costumes to show that costumes are merely plays, seeking reassurance in
what they hope is the reality behind appearances.
Though I do not have space here to bring this argumentative his-
tory up to the present, I want in conclusion to suggest that even for
post-modernist women both the identification of self with costume and
the search for an ontological "savage free thing," a third sex beyond
gender, may be healthy rituals, enabling the sex that is still subordinated
to stand ironically outside subordination, like customers in a dress shop
refusing to buy uncomfortable clothes. In her marvelously witty TheLeft
Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin has created a ceremonial and
gender-free planet whose inhabitants may be alternately described with
the English pronouns "he" and "she"-as their author actually has de-
scribed them in different versions of the same romance.49 And although
47. Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter (New York, 1971), pp.
190-235.
48. Ibid., pp. 243-44.
49. See Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York, 1969), esp. p. 17:
"For it was impossible to think of him [Estraven] as a woman . . . and yet whenever I
thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness. .. ." For a revision of an early story
about Winter, in which Le Guin uses "she" instead of "he" to describe her androgynes, see

CriticalInquiry Winter 1980 417
Sylvia Plath in one of the Ariel poems sees her world as a series of
civilized suitcases "Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit I Bald
and shiny, with pockets of wishes,"'5 in another poem this paradigmatic
post-modernist transcends the pain of her own life by imagining her
"selves dissolving [like] old whore petticoats"-the old whore petticoats,
for instance, of the "tuppenny uprights" whose degradation Barnes de-
scribes with such nightmarish precision in Nightwood.51And in the fierce
monologue of reborn "Lady Lazarus," Plath boasts that she is a "big
striptease," a savagely naked shamanistic spirit who "eats men like air."
In the end, Plath may have been killed by the fixity of her situation,
her imprisonment in an identity the world refused to see as a costume.
But she fought by trying to throw away costumes, trying to redefine
herself as a "savage free thing," sexless and "pure as a baby," rather than
as "a thing under the yoke," like the masochistic female Bloom had
impersonated (Ulysses, p. 523). In The Bell Jar, for instance, Plath has
Esther Greenwood enact a Woolfian utopian fantasy on the roof of the
Amazon Hotel in New York City. Biblically queenly in her first name,
green with the untried chaotic power of forests and wishes in her last,
this cynical but feminist heroine renounces both true and false costumes
as casually as Orlando adopts them. "Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe
to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray
scraps were ferried off. .. ."52 To Bella Cohen's "As they are so shall you
be," she replies, like Orlando, no I shall not.
her "Winter's King," The Wind's Twelve Quarters (New York, 1976), pp. 85-108. See also
Dorothy Gilbert, "Interview with Ursula Le Guin," California Quarterly 13/14: 48-51.
50. Sylvia Plath, "Totem," Ariel (New York, 1963), p. 76.
51. Plath, "Fever 103," Ariel, p. 55; Barnes, Nightwood, pp. 130-31.
52. Plath, TheBellJar (New York, 1972), p. 91. FromJane Eyre and The Mill on theFloss
to Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, ruining, tearing, or
throwing away clothes is of course a general female metaphor for defiance of sex roles, but
Plath, especially in her poems, presses it farther than most of her precursors and con-
temporaries.


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Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it

1. "A Long Dress," TenderButtons: SelectedWritingsof GertrudeStein (New York, 1972),

? 1980 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/80/0702-0001$01.00

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Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of

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This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on May 05, 2018 09:22:52 AM

as a metaphor is itself merely another costume. Thus where even the

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These sadomasochistic passages are important for several reasons.

Closely allied to [erotic histories of] spanking and whipping, were

In the dialogue between Bloom and Bella/Bello, Joyce almost liter-

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femaleness into his maleness-not his androgyny-so that he mysteri-

11. Because it is so important to an understanding of the phenomenon Joyce de-

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The transvestism in Joyce's Nighttown, like much of the costume

D. H. Lawrence's "The Fox," another transvestite work, tells the tale

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he? It didn't matter. When he thought of her dark, startled, vulnerable

Seeing her always in the hard-cloth breeches ... strong as armour

But if March's dress emphasizes her true womanliness, it also reveals, by

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cial interest to Eliot.""14But this is not necessarily because the author of

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world he describes-the seduction of the typist by the young man

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Fresca was baptized in a soapy sea

Thus, "by fate misbred, by flattering friends beguiled, I Fresca's arrived

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devoutly wished, and thus it represents a patriarchal sexual rule which is

Virginia Woolf knew, of course, these three works--Ulysses, "The

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anatomy, is destiny, Woolf comically eschews specific descriptions of the

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anyone's) pacifism, it is easy to understand once we recognize the differ-

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30. See The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 110-12.

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In fact, the misogyny (or, more accurately, the sexual anxiety) of

36. Robert Scholes, StructuralismIn Literature:An Introduction (New Haven, Conn.,

This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on May 05, 2018 09:22:52 AM

This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on May 05, 2018 09:22:52 AM

moreover, is described as "outside the 'human type'-a wild thing caught

43. H. D., Helen in Egypt (New York, 1961).

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of utopian ceremonial androgyny whose purpose is very different from

This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on May 05, 2018 09:22:52 AM

itself as "femaleness" in males and "maleness" in females.47 At the same

This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on May 05, 2018 09:22:52 AM

This content downloaded from 136.159.235.223 on May 05, 2018 09:22:52 AM