Novel Violations: The Hermaphrodite and the Failure of Form

In her recently rediscovered manuscript, The Hermaphrodite, Julia Ward Howe uses Laurence, a hermaphroditic aristocrat, to problematize English novelistic conventions. Howe’s use of a hermaphroditic protagonist not only reveals how completely the Victorian novel depends on gender-stable bodies for narrative progression, but also illustrates how a body that is neither wholly male nor female activates alternate plotlines that seek to classify, restrict, and, ultimately, expel the abnormal body from the narrative altogether. This essay analyzes the ways in which Laurence’s unusual body collapses the gender-stable identity categories on which the novel’s two marriage plots depend. Moreover, this essay demonstrates the ways in which science and culture collude in an attempt to categorize and expel Laurence’s body from the plotlines that it problematizes.