The Androgyne in Early Modern France: Contextualizing the Power of Gender by Marian Rothstein (review)

For scholars of early modernity, the hermaphrodite and the androgyne have been compelling figures through which to explore beliefs and ideas about the body, sexuality, and gender. As Marian Rothstein notes, the two are often conflated, but she seeks to recuperate the androgyne specifically as representing "completion, perfection, or plenitude, of originary and ultimate human possibilities and strengths" (2). Where the hermaphrodite became a pejorative metaphor, the androgyne allowed for positive imagery about gender plenitude that circulated in a wide range of contexts, including literature, visual arts, and perhaps above all, in the political representations of female rulers. For Rothstein, the androgyne is the figural embodiment of what she calls "functional gender," by which she means, "a mode of gendering that can be seen to allow all humans potential access to the functions or roles . . . customarily attributed to a single sex" (27). This definition allows Rothstein to assert that early modern authors, artists, and their publics accepted and even admired women embodying the characteristics of both genders. While Rothstein demonstrates that the androgyne clearly fascinated, her positive view of gender representation in early modern culture relies on reading her notion of functional gender as equivalent to the figure she is analyzing. In the end, this equivalency inspires as many questions as it does answers.

Rothstein opens with the double, often intertwined histories of the androgyne derived from Genesis and Plato's Symposium. Two versions of the androgyne in the Bible—Genesis 1:26–27, in which it appears that there was an originary human who was both male and female, and Genesis 2:22–24, in which male and female are joined as one in marriage—formed the basis for understanding the androgyne as the immaterial image of God, as well as an image of marital union of man and woman. Interpretations of Plato often emphasized spiritual completion as the central message of the androgyne. For Marsilio Ficino, for instance, Plato's doubled creatures become different kinds of souls, and the purpose of splitting them was to reveal that the body was merely an instrument of the soul. Following Ficino, French interlocutors such as Symphorien Champier and Louis Le Roy emphasized spiritual completion. They also downplayed or eliminated Plato's single-sex androgynes in favor of heterosexual, marital union.

The philosophical texts, visual images, and literary references provided three principal ways of thinking about the androgyne in early modern French culture. In a physical mode, the androgyne represented the joining of two bodies, while a more spiritual mode emphasized the human soul made in the image of God, and the marital mode presented man and wife as a unity in spiritual harmony. As the three modes suggest, the disembodied impulses of Neoplatonism existed alongside more material images of the androgyne. In its various guises, the androgyne appeared in influential texts coming out of the Italian Neoplatonic tradition of the early sixteenth century, such as Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani (1505), Castiglione's The Courtier (1528), and Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore (1535). Even as Italian texts (both in Italian and translated into French) circulated in France, a native tradition quickly developed that elaborated on the meanings of the androgyne and solidified it as a heterosexual figure. Rabelais included a complicated reference to the androgyne depicted on the badge of Gargantua's hat, and Heroët's "L'Androgyne de Platon" took some liberties with the Platonic original, including rendering the androgyne as resolutely heterosexual. Bonaventure des Périers's "Le Nombril" (1544), Marguerite de Navarre's Les Prisons (after 1547), and Étienne Pasquier's Monophile (1553) were among the efforts that emphasized spiritual readings of the androgyne. More complex movements between the spiritual and physical modes by Béroalde de Verville and Agrippa d'Aubigné appear later in the century, while the variable imagery of the androgyne in the works by Louise Labé, Pontus de Tyard, Pierre de Ronsard...