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Epilogue Androgyny, Fascism, and Beyond I began this study with Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America feared that the interest in androgyny that had spread across the Atlantic Ocean from postrevolutionary France might possibly create “weak men and disorderly women” out of the young republic’s male and female citizens. Democracy itself, implied the Frenchman, seemed to hang in the balance. Despite these fears, Tocqueville held out hope that the emerging economic liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century and its attendant ideology of separate spheres would prevent “so preposterous a medley of the works of nature.” Almost one hundred years later, Marita Bonner, the figure whose short stories are assessed in the pages directly preceding this epilogue, had come to radically different conclusions. For her, democracy hung in the balance when the inevitable hybridities of race, class, and especially gender were not allowed expression within the body politic. Yet as we have also seen in the previous chapter, the fascism that developed in Germany while Bonner was publishing her fiction coalesced in part against an androgynous specter, the red nurse, whose figurative vagina dentata threatened a German manhood already made vulnerable by humiliating defeat in the Great War. Indeed, fascism, a political ideology whose extreme nationalism was predicated on a rejection of the Enlightenment’s notion of the inherently rational subject,1 provided the crescendo of an interwar era that historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the ab 138 Epilogue “apogee of nationalism.”2 In concluding this study, I wish to examine more closely the relationship that has existed between androgyny and fascism, the most extreme and violent form of western nationalism to emerge in the first half of the twentieth century. By looking at this relationship, I suggest that while on its surface androgyny challenges the hypermasculinity that so often informed fascist thought, its unintended reinscription of gender fixity makes it fascism’s unwitting ally. These internal conflicts, as we shall see, have haunted androgyny well beyond fascism’s demise and have likewise helped frame the debate among second-wave and postmodern feminists about the role of gender in the formulation of nationalist sentiment. If Marita Bonner only suggests a link between brute masculinity and fascism in her short stories from the 1920s and 1930s, the British modernist Virginia Woolf makes the connection outright. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) regarded androgyny as the antidote to the “unmitigated masculinity” ruling the fascist mindset.3 In the book’s sixth chapter she recalls a time seeing a man and a woman get into a taxi together. “[W]hen I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a profound, if irrational , instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness” (101–2). The sight of the taxi and its two passengers becomes an epiphany, making Woolf realize that “in each of us two powers preside, one male and one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain, the woman predominates over the man” (102). Thus by invoking the kind of gender complementarity also found in Plato’s myth of the androgynes and in Carl Jung’s contemporaneous concepts of the masculine animus and the feminine anima,4 Woolf makes her famous case for the “androgynous mind” (102). In some critical respects, however, Woolf felt that the modern age had become overwhelmingly masculine. She cites as an example Benito Mussolini’s Italy: [A]ccording to the newspapers, there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is “to develop the Italian novel.” “Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the Fascist corporations” came together the other day and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope “that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it.” We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in...

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