The Subversive Androgyne

The Subversive Androgyne Sara Friedrichsmeyer Contemporary critics often tend to approach androgyny as a fresh, new hybrid invented to reflect certain synthesizing pursuits particular to our age. Even those who acknowledge its ancient origins frequently disregard its history and the implications of that history for contemporary thinking. Today we no longer find the term useful to describe an incomprehensible, allencompassing deity as was the case millenia ago. We do not see in the androgyne an occult paradigm for the combining of "masculine" and "feminine" elements in alchemical retorts, and we certainly do not have an intuition of a spiritual androgyne leading us ever onward to some mystical reunion with the All, both- of which were not uncommon practices just a few centuries ago. Instead, critical interest in androgyny today is focused on its potential to denote wholeness in the social or psychological sphere, apart from any connection with biological gender. To these critics an androgyne represents a model for the obliteration of societal expectations regarding masculinity or femininity. Their goal--sexual equality through the overcoming of gender-specific behavior and the consequent opening up of a range of possibilities for all human action—is certainly laudable. However, for reasons intricately bound up with our cultural tradition, our language, and our inherited modes of thinking, I suggest that, appealing as it is, androgyny will not bring about the desired results and will instead prove itself dangerously counterproductive. I wish to argue that there is a weighty literary and philosophical tradition which has already glimpsed in androgyny a similar paradigm for social and psychological completion and which has effected not equality, but instead a renewed entrenchment of polarized spheres. I would like to demonstrate my contention by drawing on the works of several German writers and thinkers in which some of the most important shifts in understanding this particular variant of androgyny have emerged. I will offer an examination first of all of an early seventeenth-century mystic whose influence on further seekers of personal wholeness via the androgynous model is perceptible, not only in Germany, but—if one were interested in following the thread—in France, Russia, and England as well. Then I would like to demonstrate the significance and vitality of that version of androgyny in the German cultural tradition by focusing on two representative works of literature written over one hundred years apart, one around 1800 and the other in the early part of our own century. 63 One of the pivotal figures in the conception and transmission of androgyny as a model for human perfection was Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), a Silesian shoemaker and theosopher. Although his works were censored during his own lifetime and were for the most part composed after he had been warned to refrain from further writing, they continued to be published and translated outside Germany, perhaps because Böhme has achieved what other thinkers before him had attempted less successfully, a combination of the Hermetic and Christian traditions. Earlier proponents of androgyny had been associated almost exclusively with the Hermetic, or occult, tradition, a branch of philosophy which had existed for centuries as an alternative to the more mainstream rationalist modes of thought. Hermetic thinkers saw their goal as a harmony resulting from the recombination of the polarous forces posited by rationalist philosophy. Certain Gnostics, the alchemists, and both Christian and Jewish mystics drew sustenance from the Hermetic tradition with its primary symbol of an androgyne. Böhme's contribution was to impose the structure of the Hermetic androgyne upon the contours of Christian salvation, a merger possible because of similarities in the way these traditions perceived wholeness. In their apprehension of history as well as their method for attaining individual perfection, both Christianity and Hermetism exhibited a three-fold pattern beginning with primal oneness, followed by the fall into polarities, and concluded by a reunion of opposing forces into divine oneness. Böhme's reliance on androgyny in the process of Christian salvation is detectable in the majority of his works, although most recent critics who have dealt with his writings have ignored its importance. My examination of Böhme's thinking is taken primarily from Mysterium Magnum, his exegesis of...