Volume 27, Number 15 · October 9, 1980
The Heroic Hermaphrodite
By Frederick Brown
Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite
introduced by Michel Foucault
Pantheon, 199 pp., $4.95 (paper)
As Michel Foucault notes in his preface to Herculine Barbin, the nineteenth century was haunted by the theme of the hermaphrodite. Among French romantic writers who sought to violate the doctrine of a rational aesthetic order by mixing up the classical genres, bisexuality became synonymous with Beauty, with Nature at its most forceful or the Divine in natural guise. What often seems to distinguish the heroes and heroines of Balzac, Gautier, and Stendhal is a physical ambivalence that renders them unfit for social life while constituting the sign of a superior destiny. They exist not to love but to exercise universal fascination, not to reproduce but to illustrate their one-and-onlyness. As Balzac put it in Béatrix:
Review, 2317 words
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