The Hermaphrodite (review)

With the publication of The Hermaphrodite one hundred and fifty years after she wrote the novel, Julia Ward Howe springs into the twenty-first century, demanding that we reconsider her work and revise our ideas about sex and sexuality in nineteenth-century America. The publication of the book is one of the most exciting developments in nineteenth-century American literary studies of the past decades. It parallels the recovery of many other works by women and writers of color, but because it is an intersexual text, it also brings a new voice and perspective into scholarly conversations.

It is now clear that sex and sexuality were central to Julia Ward Howe's writing. In his introduction, Gary Williams points out that Howe's first publication (in 1836, at age seventeen) was a book review of Jocelyn, a novel by Lamartine with a plot that centered on mistaken sexual identity. Later, in the 1840s, Howe wrote the text that has come to be called The Hermaphrodite. She may never have finished it; at some point, she put it aside, preserving it for the archives, and turned to writing poetry. Her first published book of poems, Passion Flowers (1853), included many meditations on sexual passion and on the frustrations of confining sex roles. Her best-known poem came later, when she adapted "John Brown's Body" into the Civil War anthem, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Howe turned away from poetry at this point, moving toward politics and metaphysics. She was a leader of the feminist movement, serving as president of the New England Women's Club and editor of the suffragist Women's Journal for decades. In 1874, she wrote the introduction to and edited Sex and Education, a series of essays by other writers refuting Edward Clarke's Sex in Education, which had argued that education unsexed women. During the decades after the Civil War, she also published numerous philosophical essays, many of which focused on working out her ideas about sex and gender. Without The Hermaphrodite, however, it has always been difficult to piece Howe's career together. With its publication, it becomes clear that a thread runs through her work: fascination with the philosophical conundrums posed by the sexed body and the gendered world.

Gary Williams has done an excellent job framing and presenting the manuscript. His introduction contextualizes The Hermaphrodite by providing a useful discussion of the literary history of androgyny in the nineteenth century. He focuses particularly on French novels, opening up an archive that may be new to many Americanists, but one which was certainly familiar to Howe. Williams also explains Swedenborgian and Emersonian discussions of sexual duality. Most significant, though, he offers a nuanced biographical context for the work, describing the complexities of Howe's marriage to a man who preferred Charles Sumner to her and who was affronted by her publications. Williams argues that Laurence, the main character of The Hermaphrodite, might in fact be read as a portrait of Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward Howe's husband; he also explores the possibility that Julia Ward Howe may have been describing her own experience of discomfort and confusion within an inappropriately sexed body.

Laurence is physiologically intersexual, but he has been raised male so that he can choose his "own terms in associating with the world" (3). He is mysteriously attractive to both men and women, and in the course of his story, he must fend off the passionate advances of one of each. Because of his intersexuality, he is terrified of intimacy, though as the novel progresses, he grows fonder and fonder of Ronald, his friend and pupil. Howe includes some highly charged erotic passages between them. Toward the end, as Laurence slips into a coma, his friends Berto and Briseida argue about his nature, each claiming him for their own sex. A doctor responds by describing him as "rather both than neither," which prompts Briseida to conclude that Laurence is "a heavenly, superhuman mystery, one undivided...