Fictional Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism (review)

In his new book, Nathaniel Wing, author of The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé (Cambridge University Press, 1986), again sets the work of Charles Baudelaire in the company of other prominent nineteenth century French authors. This time one of Baudelaire's provocative novellas, La Fanfarlo, joins texts whose non-conforming protagonists face demands that they adopt and embody the normative, gendered practices of modern bourgeois patriarchy. Following Michel Foucault, the readings in Wing's book confirm this period as a time when gender and sexuality were seen as the intimate secret of identity whose revelation and expression were nevertheless continually solicited, produced, and disciplined.

From among the countless works from early and mid-nineteenth century France matching this description, Wing has made an excellent, diverse selection. Part 1 of Between Genders features chapters on Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo (1847) that focus on "The Play of Gender." The essays on Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823) and on the autobiography of Herculine Barbin, who committed suicide in 1868, which form Part 2, explicitly thematize "Difference and Disbarment." Part 3 takes on Honoré de Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or (1834) as "Urban Body, Erotic Body." Feminist and poststructuralist work in nineteenth century French studies have given all five of these texts considerable critical attention, but Wing's study is the first to set them all explicitly in thematic relation to one another. Readers not yet familiar with these works will be intrigued and surprised by their topicality.

All five chapters and the introduction explore an essential tension both within the texts and in nineteenth century French society. On the one hand, they show a bourgeois ideology insistent on maintaining that its notions of gender identity and normative sexuality are not only fixed and stable but natural and universal. On the other hand, the plot, characterization, narrator, and/or narrative frame of all five works demonstrate "how sociopolitical structures form particular bodies with specific desires" (14), thus revealing gender as a dynamic, fragile, and contingent social construction and "the site of intense contestations" (13).

Scholars interested in seeing how these and other poststructuralist theoretical insights about gender and sexuality can be applied to specific nineteenth century works will find Between Genders useful. For example, Judith Butler's notion of the "materialization of sex" (i.e., how social practices continually "produce the [gendered] bodies that they regulate" [18]) and Michel Foucault's insights about the bourgeoisie's new "technology of sex" as a "distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers" (23) are not just mentioned, they are explained. Moreover, individual chapters show how these abstract concepts play out in a variety of literary forms, from a novella (La Fanfarlo) to a fictional first-person confession (Ourika), from autobiography (Herculine Barbin) and omniscient literary realism (La Fille aux yeux d'or) to a text that defies generic categorization (Mademoiselle de Maupin). In richly detailed, somewhat dense individual readings, Wing teases out the intricacies of each text's sometimes uneasy and always complex representations of what we might call, to borrow and expand Luce Irigaray's famous title, "this sex [but also any sex] which is not one" (Editions de Minuit, 1977). In other words, gender is revealed to be never the same, never just one thing, and never just gender. One of the strengths of Between Genders is the author's subtle grasp of the sexual and heterosexual politics at work in these plays of difference.

According to the introduction, however, Wing's approach and objective is socio-historical as well. He writes, for example, of his attempt "to strike a balance between literary, aesthetic analysis and considerations of the wider social implications of these narratives. In short, it will be seen that the aesthetic constantly resonates with historical, political issues" (22). The reader comes away with a clear sense that what characterizes nineteenth century French literature is...