Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex

8. Body Trouble: Gippius and the Staging of an Anatomy of Criticism

217 8 Body Trouble Gippius and the Staging of an Anatomy of Criticism So they resolved to get the views of wise Tiresias. He knew both sides of love. For once in a green copse when two huge snakes Were mating, he attacked them with his stick, And was transformed (a miracle!) from man To woman; and spent seven autumns so; Till in the eighth he saw the snakes once more And said “If striking you has magic power To change the striker to the other sex, I’ll strike you now again.” He struck the snakes And so regained the shape he had at birth. Ovid, Metamorphoses “You all think that it’s a boy,” [Peredonov] said screwing up his eyes sardonically, “but it’s no boy, it’s a girl, and some girl she is!” Fedor Sologub, The Petty Demon (Melkii bes) (1907) He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice but confess—he was a woman. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928) 218 Writing against the Body The surprise that Virginia Woolf’s fictional biographer experiences in reading the body of the poet in Orlando: A Biography is in many ways similar to that experienced by Zinaida Gippius’s critics and contemporaries . Though Gippius never appeared as a new female Adam the way that Orlando does halfway through Woolf’s fictional biography, she did evince an antipathy toward her own femininity and the female body that confounded her critics’ and contemporaries’ attempt to read and interpret her as a gendered body. Gippius, as we have seen, not only frequently employed the masculine persona in her writing and engaged in cross-dressing in the salon, but she also manifested a genuine skepticism about the possibility of embodying the eternal feminine in her writings. Yet, at the same time, she willingly flaunted her femininity in the salon, appearing sometimes as the earthly incarnation of Aphrodite Uranus and at other times in ultrafeminine clothing that approximated that of the female impersonator. Perplexed by Gippius’s willingness to assume such contradictory gendered identities, many of her early critics and contemporaries insisted that they must have been rooted in a physiological cause.1 And, therefore, rather than analyzing the ways in which she constructed these different identities, they set out to determine what Michel Foucault would ironically refer to in quotation marks as her “‘true’ sex.”2 This tendency to make the body of Gippius the subject of a literal “anatomy of criticism” would appear, at first glance, to be distinctly at odds with the active resistance she put up to the issue of embodiment in her writings. Nonetheless, this mode of reading predominates in the works of her critics and contemporaries. As a case in point, Sergei Makovsky begins his essay on Gippius in On the Parnassus of the “Silver Age” (Na Parnase “Serebrianogo veka”) (1962) with the “theory” that she was not a normal woman in the physical sense. He prefaces his reading of her poetry with a reading of her body that focuses on her sexual ambiguity . He recalls: She was about thirty at the time, but it seemed that she, so very thin and svelte, was much younger. She was of average height, slim-hipped without the suggestion of a chest, and with small feet . . . Pretty? Oh, without a doubt. “What a captivating youth!” one thought at first glance. A sweet, proudly turned-up little head, elongated slightly squinting grayish-green eyes, a bright expressively formed mouth turned up at the corners, and a rarely proportioned little figure made her look like an androgyne from a canvas of Sodoma. In addition, she did her thick, gently wavy bronzish-red hair into a long braid as a sign of her virginity (in Body Trouble 219 spite of her ten-year marriage) . . . A most telling detail! Only she could come up with the idea of flagrantly flaunting the “purity” of conjugal life (which for her took on a very unusual form).3 Simon Karlinsky has suggested that “like several other memoirists, Makovsky hints that Gippius was physically a hermaphrodite and was biologically incapable of engaging in heterosexual relations.”4 Makovsky was not the only one to suggest that Gippius may have been a hermaphrodite or, in any case, was not a “normal” woman. Rumors of the poet’s supposed anatomical idiosyncrasies...