Female Cross-Gendering

ELT 47 : 4 2004 gins, provides a wonderful compendium of ways of seeing the working woman who would have been outside Heron-Allen's experience (although her service helped run his houses) at the eve of these great changes. There is a certain amount of speaking from on high in these pages, servant problems, breakfasts and dinners, the silk lining on his volunteer 's uniform, references to "the jolly tommy," who is just like "a cunning child." Still the scene at the Tunbridge Wells train station as the week's batch goes off to war is heart wrenching: "an expression in their eyes which I never saw before and hope never to see again." "The morning hate has begun," he quotes a companion remarking on his battlefield tour, and it is that knowing, sceptical, ironic voice underlying the scientist 's dispassionate observing of all the material details of place, person, event, which gives one the sense of a great immediacy. This witnessing provides a useful companion text to Paul Fussell's indispensable The Great War and Modern Memory. And the literary links? There are not too many. Ford Madox Ford appears in these pages. He and Heron-Allen's old friend, Violet Hunt, rent a property from him. But Heron-Allen is convinced he is a German spy and Ford thinks Heron-Allen something of a fool and mocks him in a story called "The Scaremonger." However, "to give him his due," Heron-Allen remarks in a note added to the journal in 1920, "he is an able writer." Then there is the Pater link. Explaining why he published a story under the name of Flavian, he recalls that Pater had "model [led] his character 'Flavian' upon what I was as a boy of twenty-one." He was a friend of Oscar Wilde's wife and son and early on moved in Wilde and Pater circles. And yes he wrote fiction too, mostly in the genres of science fiction and fantasy under the name Christopher Blayre; also "The Cheetah Girl," apparently suppressed for its sexually scandalous carryings on. The text is carefully edited with useful biographical material. Quite a life and a book worth knowing, too. JUDITH SCHERER HERZ Concordia University Female Cross-Gendering Clare L. Taylor. Women, Writing, and Fetishism 1890-1950: Female Cross-Gendering. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. vi + 254 pp. $80.00 WHILE THE TITLE of this study appears deceptively simple and straightforward, the book itself contains layers of textual and theoreti455 BOOK REVIEWS cal complexity extensively unpacked by Clare Taylor. This exhaustively researched and highly specialized contribution to modernist and queer studies will appeal mostly to scholars intrigued by the intersection of psychoanalysis, experimental fiction, and female sexual practices in the modernist period. Drawing heavily from, but also complicating Freud's theories of fetishism and Teresa de Lauretis's appropriation of those theories for lesbian experience, Taylor maps out the development of female cross-gendering as literary trope in representative texts ranging from Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1892) to Anaïs Nin's diary-inspired novels of the 1940s. The book's originality lies in its methodological range and theoretical formulation: Taylor analyzes the "interrelation between clinical and literary texts" in their cultural and historical context, and both extends, and departs from, prior theories of fetishism and female masculinity. Therein also lies the book's difficulty: the collision of discourses and the use of jargon at times obscure Taylor's fine readings of important texts. Taylor states early on in her introduction that she wants to reclaim fetishism for women, and she presents a useful overview of Freud's theories of fetishism as a deviation from the sexual object brought on by castration anxieties. According to Freud, of course, girls "cannot be fetishists ," but theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis, who "reworks the castration complex and the concept of the phallus for lesbian subjectivity," have created a space for Taylor's articulation of cross-gendering as female textual practice. Taylor's study "extends points de Lauretis left undeveloped or ignored" such as the object of lesbian desire, the intersection of female fetishism and literary modernism, the ways literary and scientific discourses interact, and the...