A failed sublime: The modern androgyne imagination.

Abstract

This study investigates a new portrayal of the imagination that appears in the early twentieth century. In particular, I analyze how Joyce, H.D., Faulkner, and Woolf rethink the creative process in response to changing cultural representations of gender. As differences between men and women became more and more difficult to define, theorists like Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud 'discovered' the existence of a third, androgynous sex that seriously disrupted familiar hierarchies between men and women. For many modern artists, these changes contributed to a growing crisis of artistic authority. Simply put, old tropes for the imagination rooted in what Thomas Lacqueur has called a two-sex model of the body--such as the romantic muse--fail to work because the gendered power structure that produced them is itself called into question. Unable to justify artistic privilege on old grounds, male authors find themselves scrambling to restore their prerogative while their female contemporaries search for a creative model that would transform their position from aesthetic objects to active creators. Faced with this challenge to existing ideas about gender and authorship, modernist writers of both sexes become increasingly attracted to a culturally specific notion of a third-sexed, or androgynous imagination in which the creative mind is represented as a body which is both male and female. For Joyce this means experimenting with ideas of a 'new womanly man;' for H.D., personifying her "overmind" as the androgynous Ray Bart, for Faulkner, supplanting the muse with the hermaphrodite; for Woolf, identifying with a transsexual. In practice, imagining the imagination as androgynous becomes an exceedingly risky act. I demonstrate how these writers' efforts evoke the dynamics, if not the specific vocabulary, of the sublime. Through the perilous confrontation with and attempted identification between self and a powerful, androgynous creative body, these writers hope to generate authority and inspiration. However, the empowerment toward which they gesture is rarely achieved due to unsilenced fears of feminization and/or self-erasure.