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Plotting Ambiguous Gender
from Part II - Contextualizing High and Low Literary Narratives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2022
Chapter 3 reveals how long-forgotten popular novels become important intertexts for canonical fiction on hermaphrodism. Whether the influence is intentional and acknowledged as Balzac admits of Latouche’s Fragoletta, or perhaps unintentional or repressed as may have been the case with Cuisin’s Clémentine, these popular novels become a “missing link” between medical discourse and fictional representations of androgyny. In both Fragoletta and Clémentine, for example, doctors and medical sex determinations play important roles in plot development, which allows us to reconsider the stakes of Mademoiselle de Maupin’s transing enterprise, described by Gautier as a “medical” project. By examining classic fiction by Balzac, Gautier, and Zola through the lens of forgotten popular novels, we can see how works that have been described by literary critics as rehearsing a timeless version of myth are also interrogating the very same social anxiety one finds in contemporary debates surrounding hermaphrodism in medicine and the law. Just like their medical counterparts, novelists experiment with hermaphrodism using their own literary techniques, harnessing the power of unknown sex as a means to keep the reader reading.
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