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Chapter 2 Commercial Androgyny: Reformulating the Modern Liberal Subject in Frank Norris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman Though by the first decade of the twentieth century Henry James found his own way to reconcile romantic notions of androgyny with postbellum demands for a new model of national cohesion, his proposal for a transcendental vox Americana did little if nothing to address the material reality of the citizens—the New Woman or anyone else—who would literally embody that voice. Evolutionary and sexological science, with their suggestions of racial degeneracy and homosexuality, had come to remind James again and again that the body, in fact, was the national voice’s greatest nemesis. As this chapter explains in greater detail, making androgyny acceptable and respectable in materialist-economic realms was no easy task. In many cases, it involved rechanneling evolutionary discourse toward a larger theoretical project: reformulating the ideological and gendered parameters of the modern liberal subject. Attuned to this project, both Frank Norris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman offered a profound meditation on how prevailing concepts of androgyny were used to create a new form of civic participation for a nation positioned to be the new century’s foremost economic superpower. Debates about the imputed human characteristics of the theoretical liberal subject are traceable to the classical political philosophy of the seventeenth and ab 48 Commercial Androgyny eighteenth centuries. The liberal subject’s gender neutrality has its ontological grounding in John Locke’s famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which asserts that the human mind at birth is a “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas,” and waiting to be inscribed upon by experiences in the external material world.1 As Thomas Laqueur suggests, the liberal subject that evolved out of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith was neuter in order to represent the universality of God-given natural rights: “Social-contract theory at its most abstract postulated a body that, if not sexless, is nevertheless undifferentiated in its desires, interests, or capacity to reason. In striking contrast to the old teleology of the body as male, liberal theory begins with a neuter individual body: sexed but without gender, in principle of no consequence to culture, merely the location of the rational subject that constitutes the person.”2 Yet by the nineteenth century, the Lockean liberal subject’s tabula rasa became less a marker of gender neutrality and more a canvas on which the ideology of the separate spheres could inscribe its own discursive meanings. As Linda K. Kerber has remarked, “Separate spheres were neither due to cultural accident nor to biological determinism. They were social constructions, camouflaging social and economic service, a service whose benefits were unequally shared.”3 Thus the construct of the separate spheres took hold of American culture in the first part of the nineteenth century by assuring citizens that neither industry nor democracy presaged the end of male control of the family or of economic production. In fact, when Alexis de Tocqueville expressed his fears in Democracy in America that democracy might androgynize American citizens, he assuaged those fears by reminding himself, “The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which governs the manufacturers of our age, by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman in order that the great work of society may be better carried on.”4 More and more, the economic centrality of the agrarian homestead gave way to the new ideological paradigm that situated economic production squarely in the hands of men, whether that form or production was material/industrial, intellectual, governmental , or artistic in nature. Certainly women participated in production; in fact, America’s first textile factories located in Lowell, Massachusetts, were largely staffed by unmarried women. But as critics and historians have explained, the ideological parameters of gender and social propriety were such that working class women were, by their very need to labor in industry, precluded from inclusion as “women” in the strictest bourgeois sense of the word.5 In the thirty years leading up to the Civil War, American industry prompted unprecedented consumer activity. More and more, producers and merchants geared stores and commodities toward women with enough disposable income (or really their husbands’ income) and free time to make shopping a regular part of their lifestyle .6 By the middle of the nineteenth century, medical, religious, philosophical, and legal communities found their own ways to prove that women were innately suited 49 Frank Norris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman...

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