Orientation and Supplementation: Locating the “Hermaphrodite” in the Encyclopédie

Summary

WHEN CALLIOPE STEPHANIDES, the adolescent intersex protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex (2002), visits the New York Public Library in search of information about her physical condition, she is struck by the sheer size of the dictionary located at the center of the library's reading room:

I had never seen such a big dictionary before. The Webster's at the New York Public Library stood in the same relation to other dictionaries of my acquaintance as the Empire State Building did to other buildings. It was an ancient, medieval-looking thing, bound in brown leather that brought to mind a falconer's gauntlet. The pages were gilded like the Bible’s.

The dictionary's monumental size and its patina mark its authority. Its gilded pages eventually lead Calliope to the entry for “hermaphrodite,” the term used for the intersex condition in medical writing until the mid-twentieth century and still pervasive in popular discourse today. The Webster's entry allows Calliope to make sense of her doctor's medical jargon and his plan to perform surgery on her nonnormative genitals. Calliope's observation that “[h]ere was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past” (431) highlights the central role played by reference works in the curation and dissemination of knowledge. Reference works fully assumed this privileged position during the Enlightenment, with the publication of the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751– 72). The Webster's towering presence in twenty-first-century America mirrors the status of the monumental collection of knowledge spearheaded by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert in the mid-eighteenth century. Because French was the lingua franca of the intellectual sphere, the Encyclopédie's impact was not limited to France but extended to all of Europe, including German-speaking lands, which provided readers as well as authors. Like the Webster’s, the Encyclopédie and its sequel, the Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (1776–77), both contain an entry on the hermaphrodite. The complexity of the three-page Encyclopédie article and the existence of an even longer follow-up entry in the Supplément exemplify both the Enlightenment ideal to solve all mysteries and the struggle with this same ideal. At the same time that these reference works strive for objectivity and uniformity, they are shaped by the various contributors’ perceptions of the world.