Gender Dualism in Cavafy's Erotic Poetry

Cavafy consciously endeavored to create art without using women as an erotic subject. Instead, he molded his erotic world on gender dualism. Female beauty was replaced by the ambisexual beauty of the hermaphrodite and that of the male ephebos with its dewy girlishness. Cavafy's literary experiment is a pro- duct of nineteenth-century aesthetics. His acknowledged erotic corpus went through two phases. In the first phase, the poet focused mainly on the indeterminacy of gender (1904-1917). In the second phase (1919-1932), the Cavafian paramour is presented as an adolescent youth or as an adult male between the ages of 22 and 29 without any external masculine characteristics. In the first phase, erotic experience often results in poetic procreation. In the second phase, it results mostly in a vision of beauty. After 1919 Cavafy seems to tone down the decadent doctrines of the autonomy of art while he draws closer to Platonic ideas on eros and beauty.