French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

The history of French literature can be revisited by considering texts that negotiate with gender otherness and present different forms of resistance to the normative gender roles assigned to individuals outside and inside national boundaries. Some of these texts arrive in France from other lands, some are invented by French authors, and yet others cross over from France to various parts of the globe. The fictional representations I will highlight are all examples of subversive literary transgressions of conventional patriarchal gender arrangements. As such, they express, each in its fashion, a longing for the lessening, or the disappearance, of the strictures that govern men and women’s social behavior. They look to the past, and, as we will see, have a long history that winds its way through mythologies and legends, Arabic oral and written literature, folktales, the Renaissance, and the modern period. As a literary topos, transgression of gender norms skips over geographical borders, artistic genres, and chronological distinctions, but as a historical category, gender crossings raise important social and philosophical questions that are grounded in historical time and space. Literature allows us to see both the persistence of the thematic and its explorations in different time frames. I will concentrate here on the modern period in France, its antecedents and its afterlife, and attempt to show that while imagined rearrangements of gender roles often entertain, they have a serious purpose. In Judith Butler’s words, “The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess to the real; it points else-where, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.”¹

Bringing the “elsewhere home” by transgressing gender boundaries can be said to begin with foundational myths and basic narrative frameworks that drive the fictional power of gender crossings and disseminate it across the western part of the globe. In these fictional constructions, gender blendings attempt to go beyond binary masculine or feminine definitions of selfhood, gender disguises allow women to take on the appearance and the gender characteristics of men and allow men to look and act like women, and gender bendings are more subtle ways of taking on some of the socially accepted characteristics of the other sex while retaining one’s original gender assignment.

A special place must be granted to the force of love (Eros) and the creation of humanity as depicted in Plato’s Symposium. This portrayal serves, as we shall see, to ground future study of French literary texts such as d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, George Sand’s Gabriel, and Balzac’s Séraphita/Séraphitus. At the beginnings, Aristophanes, narrator of the myth, explains that there were three types of human beings, each joined together in two connected halves: the first was made up of two males, the second of a male and a female, and the third of two females. Because they challenged the gods, each type was split in two. Thereafter, each half spends its life seeking for its other half. This quest is not merely sexual: what is insisted on in the Symposium is the deeply spiritual quest of finding and joining with the Other, be it—to use our contemporary terms—homosexual, androgynous, or lesbian:

Although the androgynous “model” is foregrounded in the canonical texts of the Western Renaissance, the other two types of human personhood remain as possibilities of spiritual self-realization. The literary depictions of gender crossings in the French literary tradition usually represents this “intense yearning” by telling the tales of men and women who “become the other”—Céladon, in L’Astrée, is a prime example—or take on some of the characteristics of the other, as does the shepherdess Astrée, or, again, move to an adumbration of a “beyond gender,” of which we only have an aristophanic “dark and doubtful presentiment,” where personhood is no longer lived in terms of society’s binary definitions: such fictional creations as Balzac’s Seraphita/Seraphitus or, in another vein, Gautier’s Camille Maupin will be examined.

Other foundational sources that inform the gender writings of the modern period are to be found in the immensely rich contribution of the literary Middle East, which functions here historically as the depository of Platonic thought as well as of various other Eastern traditions. The Arabian Nights is a collection of Persian, Indian, Greek, and Sumerian folktales that weaves its way to the West in the Middle Ages through invasions and mercantile exchanges. Consider the “Three Ladies of Baghdad,” with its frame story and its five subsequent narrations, and the Amazon stories in the “Seven Vizirs” cycle that present a magic world of virile and powerful women and the feminized men who must confront them.³ Here, sex changes and cross-dressing are part of the game of love, power, and desire, where women are the (often dangerous) initiators and mentors of men who will experience spiritual growth when they meet the “woman who can spark” their quest.

En attente perpétuelle, l’amant prend feu à toute femme-étincelle, femelle fécondante qui porte la semence attendue dans l’âme et la chair de l’homme. Nous aurons sans cesse à le redire, la virilité, dans nos contes, est l’apanage des amantes.⁴

[In a state of perpetual waiting, the lover is fired by every spark-woman, the fecund female who carries the seed that is waited for in the man’s soul and flesh. We will have to say it over and again, virility, in our tales, is the attribute of female lovers.]

Through the Arabic tales, the theme of the “virility” of female lovers, whether expressed by military valor or by the capacity to impose their strength in other ways is intertwined with the aristophanic myth of androgyny. Becoming the other, in the texts we shall examine, partakes of both traditions. Transgressing gender normativity becomes an organizing principle of the life worth living, and as such it infuses the oral and written literature of the Mediterranean and European world throughout the modern period. As Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli write, “the androgynous or multiply gendered beloved of early-modern times becomes a vehicle for expressing the desire of men (and women) for a new congruence between sexual desire and intellectual and spiritual companionship as well as a representation of the aspirations of women to full participation in the life of their societies.”⁵

Let us begin with the final clause of this quotation and consider one of the more famous French fictional works devoted to the aspirations of women: Christine de Pizan’s La cité des dames, written in 1405 and widely circulated in manuscript form, but first published in translation in England in 1521 as The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes. Here, women decide not to strive for shared status in a world that excludes them from knowledge and power. Instead, they create a female utopia in which women adopt the characteristics of men to form their own, single-sexed societies and to rewrite the history of women from women’s point of view. This can be seen as an extreme form of gender crossing, for the heroines at once eliminate the sexual other and appropriate its qualities and functions. This utopia is imagined (and created) in contradistinction to the bitter reality of a male-governed world. It is one of the first French texts in the long literary history of La querelle des femmes, which spans more than four hundred years—if we begin it in 1361–62 with Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus—and was dismissed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of literature as “uninteresting.” Quite to the contrary, the Querelle is the expression of an ongoing debate between those who believe in gender blending and those who wish to hold to the traditional view of the inferiority of women. It can be read as a repository of powerful and heroic (read masculine) figures of Amazons, female warriors, queens, and martyrs.⁶ In France, the several regencies of queens in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century who wished to legitimize their political power encouraged authors to publish “galleries” of Femmes illustres, Femmes fortes, and Femmes héroïques, which then peopled the imagination and the aesthetic of artists, rulers, and thinkers.⁷ In these representations, women do not create a separate society in order to fulfill their aspirations, but use the different strategies available to them in a given period to loosen some of the gender strictures imposed upon them.

Take the case of women who exercise cultural power in seventeenth-century France: they “bend gender” in order to be taken seriously in a homosocial society. Here, gender disguise can take the form of accentuating one’s own normative gender characteristics to gain access to the prerogatives of the other gender. “Womanliness as masquerade”⁸ is the name of the game and an often-successful ploy. Madeleine de Scudéry’s Sappho, for example, explains at length in the heroic novel Artamène ou le grand Cyrus (1649–53) how crucial it is for women intellectuals to stay modestly feminine in order to gain respect and influence, thus avoiding being called pedants, or worse. This novel and many of Scudéry’s other works were immensely successful in their time and were rapidly translated into Italian, Spanish, German, and English.

If we now consider the literary world of women warriors, a pageant unfolds before us where manly valor, military capacities, and woman’s ability to exercise power cross time and geographical borders. Coming down from the same Greek and Arabic sources, the persistence of such tales bears witness to the fascination for representations of women who reach far beyond their assigned places in their society’s sexual arrangements.⁹ In the sixteenth century, when Italian states were exercising considerable cultural and economic influence in France, epics written in Italian, and fast translated into French, were abundantly peopled by dashing women warriors: Bradamante and Marphise (in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) and Clorinda (in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata) fight alongside men and against them. Such portrayals are taken up in French literature, particularly in the heroic novels written in the first half of the seventeenth century. Amazon warriors people the world of heroic fantasy in such works as La Calprenède’s Cassandre (1642–45), translated into English in 1652.¹⁰ Women warriors continue to fascinate and have inspired twentieth-century writers such as Monique Wittig, who refers to these mythical women in Les guérillières, using the epic form to transport us into a utopic world in which a new conception of personhood is presented. Her statement can be applied to many of the literary portrayals of the women we have just mentioned, if we read them as so many figures reaching beyond normative and prescribed gender roles:

Le lecteur entre dans un livre et se trouve confronté avec un elles qui n’est pas familier, pas ordinaire et qui est nouveau et héroïque. En tout cas, c’est ce qui m’a guidée et l’espoir que ce elles pourrait situer le lecteur dans un espace au-delà des catégories de sexe pour la durée du livre. C’est peut-être ici que réside l’utopie.¹¹

[The reader enters a book and is confronted by a they (feminine plural) that is not familiar, not ordinary and that is new and heroic. In any case, this is what guided me and the hope that this they could place the reader in a space beyond sexual categories for the duration of the book. Perhaps this is where utopia resides.]

If women reach out to take the social characteristics of men in these fictional worlds, what is the position of men? How do they reach beyond their own gender, and why? For the modern period, the historical answer is to be found in the underlying philosophical beliefs that come into play during the Renaissance. Adopting the essentialized gender attributes of the other sex—power and autonomy for women, sensitivity, tenderness, creativity, and moral virtue for men—is a gender blending that allows for the possibility of being “fully human.”

We must now pay close attention to L’Astrée, Honoré d’Urfé’s decolonizing text (1607–35), undoubtedly the most important French seventeenth-century contribution to literary gender crossings.¹³ This historical pastoral novel is set in Gaul in the fifth century, and it draws heavily on Celtic, Greek, Roman and Oriental traditions, weaving and naturalizing the many strands of gender transgression. Peopled by shepherds and shepherdesses whose quest is to find the congruence between sexual desire and intellectual and spiritual companionship, in contradistinction to the nymphs and knights who seek glory, self-interest, and mere sexual gratification, the historical setting also refers to the contemporary religious wars. Gérard Genette, in Figures, reminds the readers of the extraordinary reception of this novel, which lasted far beyond the seventeenth century and influenced Rousseau and Stendhal, Chateaubriand and Proust. Genette proceeds to sum up the heritage, “plus imposant encore” (even more impressive) used by d’Urfé to construct his text. Sannazar’s Arcadia, Cervantes’s Galatea, and Montemayor’s Diana represent pastoral tradition; the “littérature courtoise” of chivalric narratives from the Tristan to the Amadis cycles are also to be found—not to mention Ariosto and Tasso, along with Heliodorus, Longus, Virgil, and Theocritus. The pagan, Christian, humanist, and baroque romanesque, created by this condensation of sources, enables d’Urfé to invent the first modern novel. L’Astrée is “l’étroit goulet par où tout l’ancien se déverse, se reverse dans tout le moderne [The narrow funnel through which all of the old world passes and flows into the modern].”

Sexual masquerades figure abundantly throughout L’Astrée, and all the shades of gender crossings are enacted. Five men disguised as women, five women disguised as men, and two cases of identity exchange involving couples crisscross the narrative.¹⁴ The most playful example is that of Melandre, who becomes a knight to defend her rather faithless swain, Lydias, when he is taken prisoner and needs someone to win in chivalric combat in order to obtain his release. Melandre, a small woman inexperienced in the art of war, fights a huge choleric knight, Lepandas, and lives to tell the tale of how she won by default. The gigantic Lepandas falls on his own spear. For the attentive reader, Melandre’s self-mockery does not obfuscate her physical courage.¹⁵ Others are more tragic tales: a girl child, Filidas, brought up as a boy, explicitly rebels against the lot of women, and wants to stay socially a man. At the end of her life, she falls in love with a man, Filandre, who is really a woman.¹⁶ The best-known, most elaborate, and perhaps more profound exploration of gender crossing is, of course, that of the transformation of the hero of the frame story, Celadon. The title of the novel refers us to Greek mythology. Astrea is the daughter of Zeus and Themis, who leaves the earthly realm where she reigned when men discovered war and destroyed the vestiges of the golden age. Mountains shield the idyllic, utopic kingdom of the Forez, where the novel is set, from the outside world. There, only queens may reign, and the desire to become the other finds its mystical expression. The conviction (or convention) that women are superior to men empowers Neoplatonic ideals of love and drives the narrative. Indeed, the Renaissance theory of love, as expressed by Lorenzo de’ Medici, makes it very clear that the lover must become the loved one and that the essence of love is the transformation of the lover into the beloved:

How can lovers live “marvellously in each other”? In other words, how can the theory be translated and applied in an imaginary literary work of the dimension of L’Astrée? Throughout the volumes, many discussions take place between two protagonists, Silvandre, the Platonist, and Hylas, the sensualist, that provide a running commentary on the process of becoming the other. Hylas, the inconstant swain, holds up a mocking mirror to all those who espouse the doctrine of Neoplatonic love, reminding the reader that platonic (and sexless) gender blending has its limits. First, Silvandre explains that he indeed is the one he loves:

Sachez donc qu’ily a deux parties en l’homme: l’une, ce corps que nous voyons, et que nous touchons, et l’autre, l’âme qui ne se voit ni ne se touche point, mais se reconnaît par les paroles et par les actions, car les actions ni les paroles ne soient point du corps, mais de l’âme, qui toutefois se sert du corps comme d’un instrument.

[Know then that there are two parts in man: One is this body that we see and that we touch, and the other is the soul that cannot be seen or touched, but that is recognized by our speech and our actions, for speech and actions are not corporeal acts but acts of the soul that always use the body as an instrument.]

Hylas responds that he loves the body as well as the soul (“j’aime le corps aussi bien que l’âme”) and that, furthermore, he is much more interested in the mingling of bodies than of souls. He makes fun of Silvandre’s ethereal love for his beloved Diane.

Eh quoi? dit Hylas, vous êtes donc Diane? Et votre chapeau aussi n’estil point changé en sa coiffure, et votre jupe en sa robe? . . . Vous devriez donc vous habiller en fille, car il n’est point raisonnable qu’une sage bergère comme vous êtes se déguise de cette sorte en homme.¹⁸

[What? says Hylas, so you’re Diane? And your hat isn’t changed into her headgear, and your skirt into her dress? . . . You should dress like a girl, for it isn’t reasonable that such a wise shepherdess as you be disguised, as you are, as a man.]

The double take on gender crossings, expressed by Hylas’s joke when he takes literally what Silvandre is expressing metaphorically, is, in fact, applied throughout the book. The many sexual masquerades, by changing the appearance of the lover, do precisely what Hylas derides. And none more so than Celadon, whose gender changes exemplify the theory of love.

Celadon disguises himself as a woman three times. He does so once as an adolescent when he dresses as a girl in order to see Astrée naked during an all-girl Greek game where she is enacting one of the three goddesses that Paris is to choose. Celadon—now a girl—is chosen by the girls to play the male role of Paris: a double gender crossing. He chooses Astrée. The second cross-dressing occurs when he is disguised as a young woman in order to escape from the palace of a princess nymph who wants to seduce him. But the third transformation is by far the most important. Astrée has banished Céladon from her sight, believing (wrongly) that he has been untrue to her, and Céladon, as a true lover must, obeys his lady unconditionally. However, his defining transformation will lift the ban and permit union.

Celadon is to become Alexis, the young daughter of Adamas, the Celtic high priest and the spiritual father figure in the novel. Disguised as a druid nun, “she” will be able to live in Astrée’s company. It is important to note that Adamas himself organizes this travesty so that the hero may accomplish the rite of “becoming woman,” thus finding his true identity, and gaining Astrée’s love. Celadon-Alexis becomes an androgynous man who asks himself whether he is male or female, whether he is Celadon or Alexis: “je suis sans doute un meslange d’homme et de femme [I must be a mixture of man and woman],”¹⁹ and, further, he repeats: “je suis sans doute un meslange et d’Alexis et de Celadon.”²⁰ Clearly animated by physical desire (as is Astrée herself), Celadon can be seen as occupying a middle ground between Silvandre and Hylas. By living with Astrée as a girl, Celadon learns to be as tender and delicate as she but without losing his manhood. For Celadon does not suffer from gender confusion, rather, he is learning to be a woman as well as a man. Love is union, and the lover loses himself in the loved one, and dies to be reborn in her. At the end of the novel, after overcoming many obstacles, the lovers will be united by a happy marriage of bodies as well as souls.

This traditional ending has been read as reinforcing existing binary and normative gender arrangements, but a close reading suggests that it signifies a change in these arrangements and points the way toward new and more positive ways of looking at gender. Celadon’s trajectory can best be described by turning to Butler’s analysis of the limits of sexual autonomy. This trajectory “underscores the value of being beside oneself [italics mine], of being a porous boundary, given over to others,” the “others” here being first Adamas, and primarily Astrée. Indeed, Celadon finds himself “in a trajectory of desire in which one is taken out of oneself, and resituated irreversibly in a field of others [Astrée and all she represents] in which one is not the presumptive center.”²¹ Celadon becomes a feminized man subservient to Astrée’s will and Astrée, the acme of “feminine” beauty, is masculinized by her inflexible and undaunted will to impose a line of conduct on herself and Celadon, and by her power to do so. I argue here for a reading of the woman-centered ethos of Renaissance love as a means to engage the process of becoming other than what one was, according to normative gender bindings.

Oral literature is also a powerful vehicle for gender transgression tales across time and place. The seventeenth-century writer and folklorist Mademoiselle L’Héritier transcribed and published stories such as Marmoisan ou l’innocente tromperie (Mormoisan or the Innocent Deception) (1696). In the preface of the second edition, she writes, “this History, which apparently finds its origins in our old romances, is one of those that have come down through the ages without having been written.”²² The heroine is an identical twin from an aristocratic family. When her profligate brother, Marmoisan, is killed when attempting to rape a woman, she takes on his name and his gender in order to join the king’s army, live at the court, and uphold the family honor. The new Marmoisan combines the best values of both sexes, being at once valorous, civilized, and modest. She is eventually unmasked. The prince at the court is presented as easily swayed by his male courtiers, weak, and completely uninterested in women. Nevertheless, he marries her, strongly encouraged to do so by the king, who thinks his son will be wisely guided through life by the virile and lovely Marmoisan. It is relevant to note that identical twins are often the protagonists of such representations: on one level, it is certainly easier to change genders when resemblance is striking, and on another, twinhood illustrates the myth of androgyny. Catherine Velay-Vallantin, in La fille en garçon (1992), convincingly compares Marmoisan et l’innocente tromperie with the “Histoire d’al-Gayda,” found in the Sirat Antara or Roman d’Antar, an anonymous chivalric novel written in Arabic in the twelfth century. In this story as well, the “happy ending” of the marriage trope can only be read as a reinforcement of normative heterosexuality by considerable gender bending. The chiasmus feminine/man and masculine/woman implies that gender characteristics overlap, or cross over, and that certain transformations are necessary in order to maintain heterosexual arrangements.

Like history, gender is a category that is in process and subject to change. Late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century gender crossings partake both in the new emphasis on the pursuit of personal happiness and the growing sense of the need for new definitions of normative gender roles. The story entitled “Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville” (1695) is a case in point. First attributed to the Abbé de Choisy, famous for having lived as a cross-dresser, it is now thought to have been written in collaboration with Charles Perrault and Mademoiselle L’Héritier.²³ A double cross-gender intrigue captivates the reader. A boy child is brought up as a girl by a mother who does not want him to go to war, and a girl child is brought up as a boy for questions of inheritance. The “girl who is a boy” falls in love with the “boy who is a girl.” The resulting gender confusion, artfully presented, resides in the legitimatization of cross-dressing, recognized as an acceptable social custom:

Madame, voilà un beau garçon. Il est vrai, dit la comtesse, mais il fait le beau, et cela ne sied point à un homme. Que ne s’habille-t-il pas en fille? . . . Tout vous sied bien, Monsieur, lui dit la petite marquise en rougissant, et vous pouvez vous mettre des mouches et des bracelets sans que nous nousy opposions. Vous ne serez pas le premier, et les jeunes gens s’ajustent présentement comme les filles.²⁴

[Madam, here’s a handsome boy. True, said the countess, but he is too vain and that doesn’t suit a man. Why doesn’t he dress as a girl? . . . Everything suits you, Sir, said the little marquise, blushing, and, as far as we are concerned, you can wear beauty spots and bracelets. You won’t be the first, and young men nowadays dress up like girls.]

When the mother of the boy brought up as a girl tells him the truth about his sex, “oui mon enfant, lui dit sa mère en l’embrassant, vous êtes un garçon, je vois bien combien cette nouvelle vous afflige, l’habitude a fait en vous une autre nature [yes, my child, said his mother, kissing him, you are a boy, I realize how the news saddens you, habit has created in you another nature].”²⁵ He is indeed afflicted for he thinks he is in love with a boy, (who is really a girl) and that marriage will prove impossible. A tutor uncle is all in favor of a same-sex marriage, since there will not be any heirs and he will inherit the estate. We know, however, even if the tutor does not, that the “boy” is a girl and that a conventional heterosexual closure will follow. But does it? When the couple does marry, the young man tells his bride that he will stop acting like a girl: “Je me corrigerais seulement sur les manières un peu efféminées que je n’ai pu quitter tout à fait [I’ll only change the slightly effeminate manners I’ve been unable to cast off entirely],” she answers “Ah, Marquis, ne les quittez pas. Y a-t-il rien de plus aimable que de savoir joindre la valeur de Mars aux agréments de Venus? [Oh, Marquis, don’t you do it. Is there anything more pleasing than knowing how to join the value of Mars to the delights of Venus?].” The couple decides to live out their lives according to the genders the mothers have attributed to them and not to tell the world about their sexes. That way, each can enjoy the social attributes of the other gender, delights of Venus for the man, and freedom for the woman. The original gender switch first experienced as producing confusion is really productive of exhilarating pleasure. “Another nature” accompanies each “marquis-marquise” and establishes what we can call a different kind of sexual difference. Such lighthearted play with gender can only be compared, if we skip centuries, and turn to Virginia Woolf, to her handling of the same theme in Orlando. When Orlando, as a “she,” meets Shelmerdine, a “he,” “an awful suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously. ‘You’re a woman, Shel!’ she cried. ‘You’re a man, Orlando!’ he cried.” Time and again, they marvel over the difference between sex and gender:

Such felicitous ventures in representations of gender crossings are exceptional. Sexual masquerades do not always, as I argue in all the examples I have selected, reflect or prefigure even fictional change and many authors challenge the binary order by a momentary perturbation so that the naturalized categories that govern a society can be, in fact, reinforced. Consider a counterexample, Marivaux’s play La fausse suivante (1724). The heroine, disguised as a man—throughout considered the male “chevalier”—engages in male bonding with her future fiancé to find out what he is really like, and on the way, seduces a countess who falls in love with “him.” But neither love nor testing the limits of her own gender inclinations is on her mind. Her transvestism serves to unmask the follies of the other characters in the play without exploring the possibility of a becoming man (for women) or a becoming woman for men. Seen through her eyes (or rather Marivaux’s), sexual disguise is a means to critique a decadent society and to maintain her own solitary independence. Some scholars do not think transvestism ever involves a radical questioning of gender identity, and indeed, in many cases, are right: “the world may turn topsy-turvy, but it all comes back to place once truth is restored and couples revert to the norm.²⁷ But does “le chevalier” “return” to gender normativity? Nothing in the play indicates it.

Even one of the most frivolous of libertine novels that abound in the later eighteenth century, Les amours du chevalier de Faublas, written by Louvet de Couvray just before the French Revolution (in which he was to take a notable part as a patriot) can be read in terms of gender bending. Faublas is very young and very handsome, and he constantly disguises himself as a woman in order to seduce women. This banal use of the cross-dressing ploy, with its endless repetitions, does not lead, however, to couples “reverting to the norm” and a conventional ending. In the words of one the best critics of this work, Michel Delon, this hero becomes “the allegory of a desire that is not as concerned with transgression as with sensual satisfaction” and, throughout, “Loin des calculs de Don Juan ou de Valmont, loin même de la mâle assurance d’un Casanova, Faublas séduit parce qu’il ne sait pas refuser [unlike the calculating Don Juan or Valmont, unlike the male assurance of a Casanova, Faublas seduces because he doesn’t know how to say no]” (my italics).²⁸ As the narrative develops, Faublas becomes more and more passive and the women he seduces take the active, masculine, rational role. The lightheartedness of the intrigue gives way to tragedy, two loved women die, and Faublas loses his voice and his reason: “Celui qui incarnait l’heureuse facilité des amours, la confusion du masculin et du féminin, ne survit pas [The one who incarnated the felicitous ease of loving, the confusion of the masculine and the feminine, does not survive].”²⁹ According to Delon, “Dans le roman de Louvet, c’est un homme qui perd la raison, après la mort de deux femmes qui avaient rêvé de changer le monde. La société au masculin se défait, la société au féminin ne peut advenir [in Louvet’s novel, it is a man who goes mad after the death of two women who had dreamed of changing the world. Masculine society is coming undone, a feminine society cannot come into being].”³⁰ In fact, the “masculine society” that is disaggregating is that of the ancien régime.

Literary life in the eighteenth century in France had witnessed the growing influence of women who, through the “salons” they headed, and their own writings, claimed an important place in the mingling of the attributes of the sexes. Indeed, the distance between the sexes, if considered in terms of civility and social behavior, was often considered negligible. Montesquieu, Rousseau, and many English observers complained that you could not tell Frenchmen from Frenchwomen. “There is only one sex left; we are all women in spirit,” notes Montesquieu. Rousseau states categorically “the members of this weaker sex, no longer wishing to tolerate separation, unable to make themselves into men, make us into women,” and the eighteenth-century English bluestocking, Elizabeth Montagu, repeating the commonplace, concludes, “French women have too much of the male character, the men of the female.”³¹ The late eighteenth century, and especially the French Revolution, did indeed put a stop, as Delon states, to “a feminine society that did not come into being.” Women were systematically excluded from public life and revolutionary concepts of manhood and womanhood attempted a rigorous separation of the sexes, with women relegated to a strictly subordinate sphere, that of the domestic. For men, transgressing gender norms, now considered effeminate, seemed relegated to an aristocratic, and decadent, past.³² The long history of a particular kind of gender blending, starting with Plato’s myth, running into European imagination through its Persian and Arabic heritage, and taking new life through the literature of the Renaissance, seems to come to an end.

Readers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature know that such a relegation was not to be. Resistance to normative gender arrangements simply took other paths and found new venues for expression.

As could be expected, playing with gender takes a tragic turn during the Romantic period. Starting with Corinne ou l’Italie (1807), we learn that the heroine, a poet and a musical genius, will be punished for wanting to be fully recognized as an artist and, at the same time, for wanting to love and be loved as a woman. Transgressing gender by taking on masculine attributes is socially condemned and leads to death. In Germaine de Staël’s words, for women “la gloire elle-même ne saurait être pour une femme qu’un deuil éclatant du bonheur [Glory itself, for a woman, can only be the brilliant mourning for happiness].”³³

George Sand’s heroine in Gabriel (1839) does not simply want to exercise male prerogatives; she has been brought up as a boy by her grandfather, the prince of Bramante, so that “he/she” will inherit the title, reserved to males. When she falls in love with her weak and jealous first cousin, Astolphe, she keeps her masculine gender to protect them both from the prince. Astolphe wants a secret marriage in order to make of Gabriel/Gabrielle a wife who will be obliged to obey him. Gabriel/Gabrielle’s preceptor tries to dissuade Astolphe of this plan:

Ne contractez pas de mariage avec Gabrielle. Qu’elle vive et qu’elle meure travestie, heureuse et libre à vos côtés. Héritier d’une grande fortune, il vous y fera participer autant que lui-même. Amante chaste et fidèle, elle sera enchaînée, au sein de la liberté, par votre amour et le sien.³⁴

[Don’t contract a marriage with Gabrielle. Let her live and die in travesty, happy and free at your side. Heir to a great fortune, he will have you share it with him. A chaste and faithful lover, in the bosom of freedom, she will be fettered by your love and hers.]

This gender blending—Gabriel will be female and male throughout his/her life—was not to be, and the play ends with the androgynous heroine, in her male costume, stabbed to death.

Much attention has been given to Balzac’s handling of the theme. In Sarrasine (1830), in La fille aux yeux d’or (1835), in Beatrix (1839), and in Seraphita/ Seraphitus (1835), he plays with gender in multiple ways. In the first, castration of a male makes a “perfect” woman, Zambinella, who is neither male or female but also the great-uncle of twins of different sexes who look like hermaphrodites; in the second, the tragic lesbian love of Paquita and Madame de San-Réal reveals that San-Real and the dandy de Marsay (who also becomes Paquita’s lover) are half-brother and sister and that each is the other’s double; in the third, an author is portrayed as woman/man (an homage to George Sand). Finally, the total blending of gender is the theme of his mystical Swedenborgian tale:

Le vieux serviteur resta pendant quelques moments debout à contempler avec amour l’être singulier qui reposait sous ses yeux, et dont personne n’eût su définir le genre. A le voir ainsi posé, enveloppé de son vêtement habituel, qui ressemblait autant à un peignoir de femme qu’à un manteau d’homme, il était impossible de ne pas attribuer à une jeune fille les pieds menus qu’il laissait pendre, comme pour montrer la délicatesse avec laquelle la nature les avait attachés; mais son front, mais le profil de sa tête, eût semblé l’expression de la force humaine arrivée à son plus haut degré.³⁵

[The old servant stayed for several moments contemplating with love the singular being resting in front of him, whose gender no one could have defined. Seeing him thus in this pose, wrapped in his usual garment resembling as much a woman’s dressing gown as a man’s mantle, it was impossible not to attribute to a young girl the small feet he let hang, as if to show the delicacy with which nature had attached them: but his forehead, but the profile of his head seemed to express human strength in the highest degree.]

The woman/man is, as indicated in her/his name, a seraphim and must die to accede to a truer realm, that of angels who, according to Balzac and certain traditions, are androgynous. The strands of the old myths are here twisted in yet another transgression of gender in which a “beyond” of male and female attributes can be reached only by a death that allows for transcendence and the elimination of sexual difference.

Old myths and past literary gender transgression are brought back once again in Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). The founding myth here is be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV, 270–93), with the story of Salmacis and Hermaphrodite: the water nymph Salmacis draws down into a lake whose waters are too emollient, the beautiful fifteen-year old boy Hermaphrodite and their bodies, united, form a “male-female” being. Gautier also bases his story on a historical seventeenth-century woman, Madame de Maupin, who lived a man’s and a woman’s life (1673–1707). In his novel, it is the woman-man who is able to successfully combine male and female attributes, while the man, a poet, is portrayed as having dissociated beauty from the possibility of earthly love, at least in the Neoplatonic sense.³⁶ Gautier alludes to many past literary representations and legends of gender crossings to which his hero, d’Albert, and his heroine, Theodore/Madeleine, are prey. For d’Albert, falling in love with a man—Theodore/Madeleine passes for a man, dresses and acts like a man—raises the first possibility of homosexual love. D’Albert, however, guesses rightly that the object of his desire is a woman after staging Shakespeare’s As You Like It and playing Orlando to Theodore/Madeleine’s Rosalind. He describes his Rosalind as being like Ariosto’s female knight:

Je me suis épris d’une beauté en pourpoint et en bottes, d’une fière Bradamante qui dédaigne les habits de son sexe, et qui vous laisse par moments flotter dans les plus inquiétantes perplexités; ses traits et son corps sont bien des traits et un corps de femme, mais son esprit est incontestablement celui d’un homme.³⁷

[I have fallen for a beauty wearing a doublet and boots, she is a proud Bradamant who disdains the clothing of her sex, and who lets you, at times, float in the most troubling perplexities; her features and her body are really the features and body of a woman, but her mind is indubitably that of a man.]

Theodore/Madeleine is far from being as malevolent as the Marquise de Merteuil in Les liaisons dangereuses, but she definitely has the upper hand. Having begun to cross-dress to find out what men are like when not in the company of women, she is first disgusted by their gendered behavior, but gradually becomes more and more enamored of the freedom she has gained by being considered a man. She even undergoes a metamorphosis of sorts:

En vérité, ni l’un ni l’autre de ces deux sexes n’est le mien; je n’ai ni la soumission imbécile, ni la timidité, ni les petitesses de la femme; je n’ai pas les vices des hommes, leur dégoûtante crapule et leurs penchants brutaux : je suis d’un troisième sexe à part qui n’a pas encore de nom.³⁸

[In truth, neither of the two sexes is mine; I don’t partake of the imbecilic submissiveness of women, nor of their shyness and their pettiness; I don’t share the vices of men, their disgusting baseness and their brutal tendencies: I belong to a separate third sex, that doesn’t yet have a name.]

This “third sex” is not, however, a blending of the two and we are far from Celadon and Astrée. Nor is sexual desire linked to the love of those souls who will take on characteristics of the other. If the crossing of genders is still in order, it is for oneself only. “Je n’aime pas d’Albert,” she states, “mais j’ai certainement du goût et du penchant pour lui [I don’t love d’Albert, but I certainly am attracted to him].”³⁹ Theodore/Madeleine will, one night, mate with (s’accoupler avec) d’Albert to know what pleasure is like with a man. However, this act in no way performs a return to heteronormativity, and the novel closes with another scenario. Theodore/Madeleine does not return to her room that night but goes to visit Rosette, the third protagonist in Mademoiselle de Maupin, who is in love with him/her and who has taken on d’Albert as a lover faute de mieux. What happens between the two women remains a mystery in spite of the diligent research undertaken by the narrator to find out the truth. Rosette’s chambermaid does say that Rosette’s bed had been undone and that two people had lain in it, “le lit était rompu et défait, et portait l’empreinte de deux corps [the bed was opened and undone and two bodies had lain on it]” and furthermore, when she had made the bed, she had found two pearls, worn by “Theodore” when he played the role of Rosalind. And “Theodore” only leaves Rosette’s room at noon the next day. The mystery, that of lesbian desire and love, is almost, but not quite, solved:

Theodore/Madeleine, donning her masculine habit, rides off alone into the sunset, sending a final letter to d’Albert in which she gracefully declines his love and hopes he will be happy. She/he even suggests that he turn again to Rosette:

The gateway to twentieth-century playing with gender is now wide open, and readers will find at the door Proust, Gide, and, of course Colette, with whom we close. In L’étoile vesper (1946), she describes her “male pregnancy,” ending this marvelous passage with the phrase, imaginatively attributed to her mother, “tu ne seras jamais qu’un écrivain qui a fait un enfant [you will never be anything but a writer (male) who ‘made’ a child].” And she deplores that the gender blendings she has known in her life never reach the beauty of the Hellenistic statue of Hermaphrodite, the gracious son-daughter of Aphrodite and Hermes to be found sleeping in the Louvre.

Tracing in French literature some of the moments “where the binary system of gender is disputed or challenged, where the coherence of the categories are put into question, and where the very social life of gender turns out to be malleable and transformable”⁴² will have given readers some insights into the dialogical relationship between contingent limits and normative centers. Such a relationship crosses national borders and is informed by the contributions of many cultures. Coded by law, religion, and custom and represented as natural and even ontological, and therefore not subject to change, gender normativity occupies center stage in most parts of the globe during the modern period and has many advocates. Prime examples of this majority view are the ongoing condemnations of gender crossings by clergy and others within political and social power structures and the dismissal, by some historians of literature, of their literary representations as unworthy of attention. Nevertheless, transgressive gender crossings do also continually cross territorial borders and time frames and perform an insistent contrapuntal dance. Do the enchanted imaginings of “fantasy” manipulate normativity and therefore change its definitions? That remains an open question. If transgressive gender texts do, in many instances, point to the androgynous and/or multiple identities of personhood and enact possibilities of undoing existing norms, it is nevertheless clear that normativity does, at the same time, manipulate the margins, that is, tolerates marginal expressions of resistance and does so in order to define its own legitimacy. We, the readers of the twenty-first century, are players in the minefield of the tensions created by these oppositional forces. And our readings are an exercise in wonder. We are transported into another realm and encouraged to divert from the beaten path, and to consider making real what is no longer, or not yet, accepted as real.

13. L’Astrée was published in the first third of the seventeenth century, the first three parts in 1607, 1610, and 1619 respectively. Each part is divided into twelve books. The two last parts were published after d’Urfé’s death (1625) by his secretary, Balthazar Baro, in 1632–33. There is a first English translation in 1620, The Historie of Astrea, and another in 1657–58. An online critical edition is being prepared: www.astree.paris-sorbonne.fr. The Slatkine reprint (1962, 1992) of the Vaganay edition (1925–28) is used here to identify the books, unless indicated otherwise. This edition is online: www.uni-stuttgart.de/lettres/krueger/astree/html. The Gallimard edition of an abridged version, with an excellent introduction by Jean Lafond, is readily available.