In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Between Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism
  • Diana Knight
Between Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism. By Nathaniel Wing . Newark, University of Delaware Press — London, Associated University Presses, 2004. 206 pp. Hb £30.50.

Nathaniel Wing's book covers rather familiar territory, but does so in a series of well-written and useful close readings of five important French texts from the early and mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, the corpus is chosen for its generic diversity and Wing remains alert throughout to narrative strategies. On the other, the texts reveal a continuity of preccupation with the experience and vicissitudes of gender construction, both in personal and social arenas. The first section of Wing's study explores the 'play of gender' across Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin and Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo, the plots of which turn on heavily ironized treatments of androgyny and transvestism. Not only are the boundaries of hetero- and homosexual desire disturbed in these texts, but the relation between the categories of the erotic and the aesthetic is brought into sharp focus. The second section introduces a change of tone with analyses of the way an initial social acceptance of difference (racial or biological) gives way to brutal rejection in the lives recounted in two confessional narratives; despite the entirely dissimilar contexts, the Senegalese protagonist of Claire de Duras's Ourika and the hermaphrodite narrator of Herculine Barbin both find themselves filling the role of 'the abjected other of the dominant order' (p. 25). Finally, in an analysis of Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Wing argues that Henri de Marsay's failed bid for phallic omnipotence is parallelled by that of the realist narrator in his claims to epistemological mastery of the city of Paris. At stake in all these texts, according to Wing's readings, is a political and cultural crisis of values and authority played out on the gendered body: 'The dominant fiction of gender identity is preeminent in forming bourgeois cultural identity, yet much of the interest of these fascinating texts is attributable to the ways in which it is so vigorously contested in each of [End Page 132] the narratives' (p. 168). Arguably, Wing has set up a straw target of fixed and stable body images (the inevitable 'binary gender difference'), and it is this that leads his argument into the paradoxes he struggles with in his conclusion: for all that his chosen texts end with the more or less violent containments of social withdrawal, suicide or murder, still they are animated throughout by all manner of gender variables. However, Wing gets out of this neatly enough by calling up the concept of dénégation ('a denial contains affirmation in the very form of the negation'), and on this basis his five narratives 'continue to resonate as powerful interrogations of a culture that might be organized otherwise' (p. 170).

Diana Knight
University of Nottingham
...

pdf

Share