The Androgyne
Last week, after 2.5 cups of coffee, a malingering indignation caught me by the hand ushering me to carve my own destiny. I was reminded of the tour my friend and I took the other day at Orchard House (6th time there?), the home of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women. The docent who took us around had a distinct angle: isosceles. She said knowingly, looking me dead in the eye, “Louisa knew marriage was a choice, not THE choice.” This was a radical perspective/choice at the time, but one which her progressive parents supported in their raising of educated, well-rounded, morally bold young women.
I thought of Jo March, preferring boots and a quill over gloves and a fan. How could I pronounce (to myself and the world) my authentic feelings of independence and autonomy? I donned with determination black ripped jeans and my friend’s leather military-looking boots. It still didn’t feel sufficient.
It’s more difficult these days to stand out with Aquarian-age newness. So much has already been done or has lost its audacity. I got a flash-like memory of Jo cutting her own hair for money. I knife-like intuited the target as my own tendrils weighing me down. I instinctively grabbed some scissors, walked determinedly into my friend’s garage, and roughly cut my hair to an above-shoulder length--hoping for liberation from a societally inherited feminine image which somehow felt linked to passivity and a sugar-coated helplessness I was restless to discard.
In a non-tangential thought, I also thought perhaps going to the library might help, having already found a comfortable friendship in a book on Women writers’ lives. The mecca of a library I’d wanted to go to offered a distinct candelabra-glow enticing me to find other kindred Gender-rebels in the books and lore of past eras. Certainly, there would be a book or two on the topic, I surmised.
As I wandered the floors and corridors of the Lexington library, the books I needed found their way to me, I to them, and I was led to a delicious desk-nook on the 3rd floor to pour over my newly gathered finds. With a collection of heaped and spread books, I began to dissect and place the mosaic that is the androgynous conundrum.
“The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous”, says Coleridge.
The reality of today’s gendered cultural hegemony persists, the examination of which must be viewed with glasses cleaned from the smudges of societal biases. As Carolyn G. Heilbrun suggests in her book, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, we think we have moved past the Victorian era’s strict morally confining ethics, straight lacing individuals into patterned modes of living, but we haven’t. In some ways, the leash of power has been slackened, “Yet in the matter of sexual polarization and the rejection of androgyny we still accept the convictions of Victorianism; we view everything, from our study of animal habits to our reading of literature, through the paternalistic eyes of the Victorian era” ( Introduction, xiii).
She even goes back to citing Plato’s Symposium, reminding readers that in the myth there were originally three wholes: all male, all female and male and female. As she suggests, “each person seeking his other, original half might be in search with equal likelihood for someone of the same or of the other half.” What a thought! Now that was rebellious.
Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell had much to say on gender orientations masking in the world. Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God, says the traditionally patriarchal viewpoint is represented “by its setting apart of all pairs of opposites—male and female, life and death, true and false, good and evil.” The androgynous viewpoint, however, is made to be seen as predating these oppositional polarities. However, as the author Carolyn posits in this book, it is a future-bound orientational way of being.
So, what are some solid examples of androgynous identification in culture and myth? A famous exemplar is that of the Grecian mythic twins Artemis and Apollo, “who between them are the oracles and guardians of all human experience, sun and moon.” As children of Zeus, the Male Apollo embodies feminine characteristics, and the Female-identified Artemis many traditionally male characteristics. Furthermore, a fierce “virginity” is a trademark, which translates more to a rough autonomy.
Jumping timelines to early mid 19th century we have the predominantly male-attired female writer, George Sand. I learned just this morning from Literary Women: The Great Writers, by Ellen Moers, that the conception and self-emancipating birth of George Sand’s crossdressing life stemmed from an inspirational comment from her mother. Sand writes in Part IV of the Histoire de ma vie,
“I yearned to deprovincialize myself and become informed about the ideas and the arts of my time…; I was particularly thirsty for the theater. I was well aware that it was impossible for a poor woman to indulge herself in these delights…I took this problem to my mother…She replied: “…When I was young and your father was short of money, he had the idea of dressing me as a boy…That meant a saving of half our household budget.”…
So I had made for myself [the long, shapeless man’s outer coat of the 1830’s] in heavy gray cloth, pants and vest to match. With a gray hat and a large woolen cravat, I was a perfect first year student. I can’t express the pleasure my boots gave me…I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world…. I was no longer a lady, but I wasn’t a gentleman either… No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd” (9).
This freedom from societally dictated customs and expectations flies in the face of rigorously patriarchal Victorian and modern definitions of gendered etiquette; with the linking of outward dress with inwardly identified archetype.
Kathryn Aalto in Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World, includes a laundry list of women who eschewed convention for conformity’s sake. Vita Sackville-West is one such British female writer who defied the norms of female dress to align with inward polestar.
“Vita broke free of the gender binary and, in 1918 swapped feminine skirts, smock blouses, and ribboned hats for mannish breeches and leather gaiters. Being tomboyish brought her intense freedom….”
And later, re-emphasizing the point, “Vita’s confident androgyny would be her trademark and an outward link to the lost past, where she could ‘stride like any Sackville squire from the previous five or six centuries’ and take up residence in her own castle tower.” Vita “was a sapphic rebel” with a gendered fluidity which was bespoke and timeless, though I must say I’ve barely heard of her save for a remembrance of a movie showcasing Vita’s romance with Virginia Woolf.
It is interesting to note that Leslie Stephen, father to Virginia Woolf, had an extremely antagonistic stance towards androgyny, while his daughter was a pinnacle example of its fruit and fullness. Leslie Stephen suggested that, “the androgynous is nearly always dangerous.” Yet Virginia would write,
“Everyone is partly their ancestors; just as everyone is partly man and partly woman.”- Virginia Woolf.
Heilbrun in her book writes, “The fusion within the Bloomsbury group, perhaps for the first time, of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ made possible the ascendency of reason…Bloomsbury consciously rejected the Victorian stereotypes of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in favor of an androgynous ideal (126).
“There had been every expectation that Vanessa and Virginia Stephen would live the ordinary lives of two beautiful, well-born young ladies. That they did not do so is only partly attributable to the fact that they were extraordinarily talented, one a genius” (127).
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There has been a long-delayed embrace of female and male energies in balance as embodied in the Libra scales, but I believe we are coming into a world of more true equality as it relates to presentation and identification. Instead of seeing this change in fear for the “safeguarding of children” and preservation of “the family unit” we should see it as a transition to the true Middle path. The gender conundrum persists as it relates to Male-patterned success and “feminine” domestic stereotyping. Maybe Mulan cutting her hair and going off to war to save her father and country was not merely heroic, but revolutionary. Not to be sneered at, or scoffed at, androgyny may be attributable to the new human who has had both traits all along.
Can't wait to talk about all this with you in person. You are so well-read and a woman of deep thought! Very intriguing and deeply thought essay!