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Hermaphrodite Edited by Renée Bergland and Gary Williams

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Hermaphrodite Edited by Renée Bergland and Gary Williams Philosophies of Sex Etching of Julia Ward Howe. By permission of The Boston Athenaeum hilosophies of Sex PCritical Essays on The Hermaphrodite EDITED BY RENÉE BERGLAND and GARY WILLIAMS THE OHIO State UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2012 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Philosophies of sex : critical essays on The hermaphrodite / Edited by Renée Bergland and Gary Williams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1189-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1189-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9290-7 (cd-rom) 1. Howe, Julia Ward, 1819–1910. Hermaphrodite. I. Bergland, Renée L., 1963– II. Williams, Gary, 1947 May 6– PS2018.P47 2012 818'.409—dc23 2011053530 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Type set in Adobe Minion Pro and Scala Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction GARY Williams and RENÉE Bergland 1 Foreword Meeting the Hermaphrodite MARY H. Grant 15 Chapter One Indeterminate Sex and Text: The Manuscript Status of The Hermaphrodite KAREN SÁnchez-Eppler 23 Chapter Two From Self-Erasure to Self-Possession: The Development of Julia Ward Howe’s Feminist Consciousness Marianne Noble 47 Chapter Three “Rather Both Than Neither”: The Polarity of Gender in Howe’s Hermaphrodite Laura Saltz 72 Chapter Four “Never the Half of Another”: Figuring and Foreclosing Marriage in The Hermaphrodite BetsY Klimasmith 93 vi • Contents Chapter Five Howe’s Hermaphrodite and Alcott’s “Mephistopheles”: Unpublished Cross-Gender Thinking JOYCE W. Warren 108 Chapter Six “The Cruelest Enemy of Beauty”: Sand’s Gabriel, Howe’s Laurence GARY Williams 120 Chapter Seven The Consummate Hermaphrodite BethanY Schneider 138 Chapter Eight Cold Stone: Sex and Sculpture in The Hermaphrodite RENÉE Bergland 157 Chapter Nine Spiritualized Bodies and Posthuman Possibilities: Technologies of Intimacy in The Hermaphrodite Suzanne Ashworth 186 Chapter Ten Unrealized: The Queer Time of The Hermaphrodite Dana Luciano 215 Afterword Howe Now? Elizabeth Young 242 Works Cited 253 Contributors 264 Index 266 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS hough writing can be a solitary activity, publishing is always collab- orative. The editors of this collection are particularly appreciative of Tthe intelligence and professionalism of all of the contributors, whose work delights and challenges us. We are grateful for the conversations that these essays grew out of and continue to encourage. We are also very grateful to Ohio State University Press. Sandy Crooms, Senior Acquisitions Editor, nur- tured this project, practically from inception. The external reviewers who read the first complete draft offered helpful insights and suggestions. Eugene O’Connor managed the production end seamlessly. Chris Dodge indexed and proofread with an eagle eye. We are very grateful to all of them. Thanks also to Jana Argersinger and Augusta Rohrbach, editors of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, for permission to reprint Suzanne Ashworth’s essay, which appeared in Issue 57.4 (2011). The Nineteenth Century American Women Writers Study group is a remarkable collective that has changed American literary study for the bet- ter. We are grateful to the group in general, and to Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Elizabeth Young in particular, for convening the 2005 meeting at Amherst College that led to this collection of essays. The European analog of the Nine- teenth Century American Women Writers Study Group, hosted by Professor Asun López-Varela of Madrid’s Universidad Complutense, provided a first opportunity to air some of the work in this volume at a conference in Madrid in 2009 on hermaphrodism. Other professional organizations, including the American Studies Association, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, and the American Literature Association, have offered additional conference opportunities for presentation of a good deal of this volume’s vii viii • Acknowledgments material. These networks—intellectual and social—have been deeply impor- tant to us. The following libraries and museums were kind enough to grant permis- sion for us to include visual images from their archives: The Boston Ath- enaeum, Yale University, Musée du Louvre, The Perkins School for the Blind, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. We thank them. At Simmons College, Renée Bergland’s colleagues in English and Gen- der and Cultural Studies have been supportive of this project in many ways. Graduate Student Anni Irish acted as research assistant for the manuscript. Rachel Lacasse provided hours of good conversation as well as meticulous administrative support. A grant from the Simmons College President’s Fund for Faculty Excellence supported the project. Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University granted research privileges that were very help- ful in researching this project. At Dartmouth College, Women’s and Gender Studies has been a second home for Renée. Cristen Brooks has offered great wisdom and joyous companionship along with unflagging administrative support, while colleagues affiliated with WGST at Dartmouth have listened to formal (and many informal) discussions of the project with generosity and keen insights. Renée wishes to express her gratitude to Dartmouth College and Harvard University, and most of all, to Simmons College. Further, she is grateful to the members of her writing group: Betsy Klimasmith, Sarah Luria, Robin Bernstein, Laura Saltz, and Augusta Rohrbach. Family mem- bers Mary Jo Litchard, Christopher Bergland, Sandy Bergland, Annelise Ber- gland Brinck-Johnsen and Kim Brinck-Johnsen have all enriched the years spent working on this book, and their love and generosity is an infinite gift. Finally, Renée wishes to thank Gary Williams for these years of joyful col- laboration. He is as kind as he is keen-witted, he writes a damn good email, and he knows how to find the best conference hotels out there. In short, he is the best colleague a scholar could ever hope for. At the University of Idaho, Gary Williams is grateful for the support of his English department and college colleagues and two deans, Kurt Olsson and Katherine Aiken, who successively offered financial support and encourage- ment as work on this collection proceeded. Research for his essay was funded in part by a sabbatical leave in 2005 and sustained with the help of cura- tors and librarians at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Boston Athenaeum, and the New York Public Library, as well as the University of Idaho’s superb library staff. Office assistants Brittney Carman, Lacey Schwab, and Karyn Resch provided much-valued logistical interventions. Joy Passanante, Idaho colleague and life-partner, has now been on the Julia Ward Howe Express for Acknowledgments • ix over two decades and has shown unwavering enthusiasm for the places this train has taken us. When Renée introduced herself to Gary via email on May 3, 2003, she reported having been on a “delightful detour” from her work on Maria Mitchell due to absorption in Hungry Heart and the Laurence manuscripts. Music to his ears, of course. What a boon to have had this collaboration, this collaborator, and a profusion of delightful detours along the road. I ntroduction GARY WILLIAMS and RENÉE BERGLAND n the last page, with his anomalous body arrayed in grave-clothes and laid in a coffin, Laurence, the hermaphrodite, speaks to us. He may or Omay not be dead, but he is certainly conscious. As he puts it, “[m]y brain was now excited to a vivid consciousness of the horror of my fate” (Howe, H 198). As we now know, Laurence’s fate—or at least the fate of the Laurence manuscript—was to rest unregarded for nearly a century and a half among the many unpublished letters, journals, and manuscripts that are Julia Ward Howe’s paper legacy before its—and his—resurrection for public viewing in 2004. This unclassifiable work has driven a surge in interest in Julia Ward Howe at the turn of the twenty-first century. Before its publication, late-twentieth- century readers knew Howe, if at all, as the author who rewrote the mid-nine- teenth century marching song “John Brown’s Body” as “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Apotheosized by artists as diverse as Marian Anderson, Elvis Pres- ley, and Judy Garland, and regularly featured in events like the Day of Prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral three days after September 11, 2001, the words of the “Battle Hymn” defined Howe as spokeswoman for U.S. patriotism, faith, and activism in righteous causes. Occasionally, Howe was also remembered as an ardent campaigner for women’s rights (and particu- 1 2 • Introduction larly women’s colleges) in the 1860s–70s, or as the founder of Mother’s Day. These somewhat sentimental characterizations might have surprised those who knew the woman as a daring poet. Nathaniel Hawthorne was among many who admired her first collection, Passion-Flowers, despite feeling that because the poems “let out a whole history of domestic unhappiness,” “the devil must be in the woman” who would choose to publish them (Hawthorne, Hawthorne, CE 17:177). Howe did not hesitate to make her marital difficulties public in her poetry. Married to a prominent doctor and abolitionist who had achieved early fame by assisting the Greeks in their fight for freedom from the Turks, she spent much of her married life fighting for her own fame and freedom, achieving a sense of personal equilibrium and purpose only after her husband’s death in 1876. But a century later, Julia Ward Howe was more likely to be thought of as an icon of American “family values” than as a pas- sionate rebel. For twenty-first century readers and critics, the resurrection of the mys- terious Laurence changed everything.
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