Deconstructing the Damsel in Distress: Gothic Revisions of Gender and Agency in Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite

Julia Ward Howe read voraciously throughout her youth, despite her father's efforts to restrict her reading. She particularly enjoyed perusing the books her brother Samuel brought home from Europe. As she recalled many years later in her autobiographical Reminiscences (1899), "I lived, indeed, much in my books, and my sphere of thought was a good deal enlarged . … Yet I seemed to myself like a young damsel of olden time, shut up within an enchanted castle … [and] my dear father, with all his noble generosity and overweening affection, sometimes appeared to me as my jailer."¹ When she characterizes herself as a hapless heroine entrapped by an older, overbearing villain, Howe simultaneously invokes another genre: the gothic novel.²

Howe also uses this familiar gothic motif to challenge antebellum American women's disenfranchisement in a much earlier text: her fragmentary tale about an ambiguously-sexed character named Laurence, which was posthumously published under the title The Hermaphrodite (2004). Because Howe wrote this story in the late 1840s during her difficult first years as a wife and mother, the scholars who initially examined it argued that its gothic elements reflect her domestic frustrations.³ More recently, critics have focused on the theme of monstrosity as it shapes not only Laurence's self-identification as a "beautiful monster" (193), but also the text's depictions of his prospective lovers, Emma and Ronald, whose unrequited passion overwhelms their reason and drives them to madness and violence.⁴ Yet while analyzing Laurence's fraught erotic bonds usefully illuminates how intricately the text depicts both same- and opposite-sex desire, we risk oversimplifying Laurence's significance as the antebellum era's most complexly gendered protagonist if we focus exclusively on his romantic and sexual experiences. In this essay, I turn away from these partnerships to focus on the equally troubled relationship between Laurence and his father, whom Laurence derisively refers to as Paternus. As Nicole Livengood has noted, this name frames Laurence's father as "a synecdoche for patriarchal culture."⁵ Building on this insight, I contend that examining the relationship between Laurence and his father yields a richer understanding of how The Hermaphrodite engages with questions of gender and power.

Specifically, I suggest that The Hermaphrodite structures Laurence and Paternus' relationship by appropriating and revising aspects of the genre now known as the female gothic.⁶ Ellen Moers describes the traditional female gothic plot as centering on "a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine" while an older male villain seizes her property, limits her mobility, and keeps family secrets from her until a younger male hero rescues and marries her.⁷ Through these stories about "women trying to escape from decaying family estates and perverse patriarchs," female gothic novels express fear of "the unchecked power of men and … explore possibilities of resistance to the patriarchal order."⁸ I begin this essay by surveying current scholarly debates about what this resistance looks like in canonical female gothic novels. In the section two, I show that The Hermaphrodite depicts Paternus as a gothic patriarch who threatens his child with disinheritance, imprisonment, and the exposure of his body's secrets. Simultaneously, I argue that the text casts the ambiguously-sexed but male-identifying Laurence as a gothic "heroine" who employs unconventional strategies to cope with these generically conventional threats to his physical and financial autonomy. Yet unlike many traditional gothic heroines, Laurence does not resist these threats by choosing a marriage partner and forming a new, more egalitarian family. Instead, as I discuss in section three, he refuses to maintain any interpersonal bond and establishes a financially and intellectually independent life. As The Hermaphrodite rejects a closure that prioritizes romance and reproduction, Howe indicts marriage and motherhood for circumscribing antebellum women's freedom, and she envisions what a life lived outside these institutions might resemble.

At the same time, because Laurence's repeated assertions of personal freedom result in perpetual loneliness and suffering, The Hermaphrodite does not finally present his character as a viable model...