Transgender and the Literary Imagination
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Transgender and the Literary Imagination 55805_Carroll.indd805_Carroll.indd i 008/08/188/08/18 111:011:01 AAMM 55805_Carroll.indd805_Carroll.indd iiii 008/08/188/08/18 111:011:01 AAMM Transgender and the Literary Imagination Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing Rachel Carroll 55805_Carroll.indd805_Carroll.indd iiiiii 008/08/188/08/18 111:011:01 AAMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Rachel Carroll, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1466 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1467 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1468 5 (epub) The right of Rachel Carroll to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 55805_Carroll.indd805_Carroll.indd iivv 008/08/188/08/18 111:011:01 AAMM Contents Introduction: Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing 1 1. ‘Two men, so dissimilar’: Class, Marriage and Masculinity in George Moore’s Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa’s The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1977) 37 2. ‘She had never been a woman’: Second Wave Feminism, Femininity and Transgender in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977) 64 3. Playing the Breeches Part: Feminist Appropriations, Biographical Fictions and Colonial Contexts in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry (1999) 87 4. Two Beings/One Body: Intersex Lives and Transsexual Narratives in Man into Woman (1931) and David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000) 125 5. Blue Births and Last Words: Rewriting Race, Nation and Family in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) 158 6. Never an Unhappy Hour: Revisiting Marriage in Film Adaptations of Albert Nobbs (2011) and The Danish Girl (2016) 191 Bibliography 233 Index 243 55805_Carroll.indd805_Carroll.indd v 008/08/188/08/18 111:011:01 AAMM 55805_Carroll.indd805_Carroll.indd vvii 008/08/188/08/18 111:011:01 AAMM Introduction Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing A fi gure in the throes of a furious struggle is illuminated against the darkness by the intermittent fl ash of a photographer’s bulb, the sounds of extreme human exertion and the slap of fi sts and feet against hard, damp surfaces testifying to an otherwise invisible contest between the human body and inanimate matter. In Becoming an Image (2012–) the performance artist Cassils applies the prowess and agility of a body disciplined by intensive training to the task of transforming a monumental block of clay. Capturing the artist in postures which are both frozen and fl eeting, photographic documentation does more than simply record: it frames the audience’s experience of the performance, imprinting images which are both arbitrary and forceful. One still image in particular uncannily evokes the traditions of classical statu- ary, depicting a human fi gure seemingly seated atop a battered ped- estal in a posture of Promethean ambiguity: is this a body emerging out of the clay, moulded by a hidden hand? Or is this the fi gure of the artist, fi xed to the rock in eternal punishment for the crime of creative presumption?1 Originating as a commission by the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, home to a longstanding LGBTQ archive, Becoming an Image draws attention to what is neither seen nor recorded: it is a tes- tament to the struggle to make an impression in the fi eld of representa- tion, to gain visibility in conditions of unseeing and to fi nd a foothold in the institutions of cultural memory. Cassils’s work speaks power- fully to the themes of this book, which examines questions of visibility, recognition and representation in relation to literary narrative. A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives – whether historical or fi ctional – have been ‘authored by others’: named, defi ned and appropriated in ways which obscure, displace or erase transgender 55805_Carroll.indd805_Carroll.indd 1 008/08/188/08/18 111:011:01 AAMM 2 Transgender and the Literary Imagination experiences, identities and histories. By revisiting twentieth-century narratives and their afterlives this book aims to examine the legacies of this representational history, exploring the extent to which trans- gender potential can be recovered and realised. Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fi ction by British, Irish and American authors fi rst published between 1918 and 2000, each text featuring a protagonist (and in some cases two) whose gender identity differs from that assigned to them at birth: George Moore’s naturalistic novella set in an 1860s Dublin hotel, Albert Nobbs (1918); Angela Carter’s dystopian feminist fan- tasy The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jackie Kay’s contemporary fi c- tion inspired by the life of a post-war jazz musician, Trumpet (1998); Patricia Duncker’s historical novel based on the life of a nineteenth- century colonial military surgeon, James Miranda Barry (1999); David Ebershoff’s historical fi ction The Danish Girl (2000), based on the life of Lili Elbe, reputed to be the fi rst person to undergo gender reassign- ment treatment. An interest in the intertextual relationship between these narratives and a range of source and adapted texts is central to this study, which explores memoir, biography, drama and fi lm, includ- ing historical biographies of James Miranda Barry, Niels Hoyer’s 1931 ‘memoir’ of the life of Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, and Simone Benmussa’s 1977 stage adaptation The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs; the afterlives of these narratives are explored with a special focus on contemporary fi lm adaptation, specifi cally Albert Nobbs (directed by Rodrigo García, 2011) and The Danish Girl (directed by Tom Hooper, 2016). ‘Transgender’ is a term whose current meanings can be traced to its origins in the 1990s in a combination of contexts, including com- munity formation, political activism and scholarly enquiry. The fi rst decades of the twenty-fi rst century have witnessed the entry of debates about transgender rights and representation into mainstream public discourse and popular culture.2 In this context, this study returns to the narrative representations of an earlier era, examining how they refl ect, shape or transform changing understandings of gender in the twentieth century and beyond. By identifying and analysing the narra- tive strategies and motifs which have characterised the representation of transgender lives in literary fi ction prior to the twenty-fi rst century, this book investigates the relationship between these narratives and dominant ideas about the origins, meaning and signifi cance of conven- tional categories of sex and gender. The American campaigner Virginia Prince (1912–2009) is widely credited as being the fi rst to coin the term ‘transgender’.3 However, the publication in 1992 of Leslie Feinberg’s pioneering Transgender 55805_Carroll.indd805_Carroll.indd 2 008/08/188/08/18 111:011:01 AAMM Introduction 3 Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come is seen by many as playing a pivotal role in establishing transgender as a concept refer- ring to ‘an imagined political alliance of all possible forms of gender antinormativity’.4 As T. Benjamin Singer writes: Feinberg’s manifesto resonated with an early 1990s social imaginary that infused the category transgender with the collective energy of a social movement – enabling a range of different bodies to congregate underneath a single umbrella. Without this sense of political collec- tivity, it would not have been possible to visually render transgen- der as an umbrella instead of a continuum of gender-nonconforming identities and behaviours or as a particular mode of being.5 Singer notes that the ‘original purpose’ of the term, as conceived by Feinberg, was for ‘political advocacy’,6 and from the late twentieth century onwards transgender activists and organisations have vari- ously challenged conventional assumptions about sex and gender and campaigned for social and legal change.7 While the term and its meanings have continued to evolve over the decades, it is worth refl ecting on the distinctive characteristics of this formative formu- lation. Firstly, the adoption of the term ‘transgender’ represents a rejection of existing clinical terms and defi nitions, with their origins in medical and psychiatric discourse, and an assertion of the right to self-determination: in this way, it constitutes a refusal to be named by others and an expression of a developing sense of collective iden- tity and agency. Secondly, the term embraces an identity grounded in the experience of transition, defying the pressures to conceal or deny a differently gendered past. In an essay which has proved a founding text for the fi eld of transgender studies, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, Sandy Stone wryly observed that the ‘highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase him/herself, to fade into the “normal” population as soon as possible’.8 To identify