Abstract
Using the model of the sexual invert of Karl Ulrichs, Edward Carpenter, and Sigmund Freud, this paper attempts to place the character of Aldous Huxley’s Richard Greenow as a figure of modernism’s disintegrated and fragmented subject. To Greenow, Aldous Huxley assigns the figure of the trans feminine, a growing metaphor of gender proliferation in modernist literature, similar to Eliot’s Tiresias or Barnes’ O’Connor. Published in 1920, Richard Greenow’s character lives at the edge of an imminent drift between science and literature, a period on the verge of societal collapse in faith and religion. Richard Greenow’s repression of his identity as a trans feminine in “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” (1920) arises out of the inability to negotiate his identity in a society characterised by heterosexual unanimity resulting in the degeneracy of the individual. From Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, whom Huxley also calls “Our Freud”, is derived Huxley’s vital ideas of the human unconscious. On the other hand, studies in sexology located the cause of the sexual invert in the body and claimed to offer ‘cure’ for trans individuals in the form of sex reassignment surgery. Modernism’s principle of fragmentation in identity is displayed in the rise of the unconscious, that is, the trans femininity in Greenow.
Keywords: hermaphrodite, modernism, homosexual, sexual invert.
Aldous Huxley was a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf to name a few among the modernist writers. Never much compared or likened to the canon of modernist writers and often known mostly for the utopic/dystopic science fiction Brave New World, Huxley’s career as a novelist had in fact started with the publication of Limbo (1920), a collection of short stories. It was an age in which there were rapid developments in science, discoveries, and theories. In fact, Huxley’s own grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley (known as Darwin’s Bulldog) was an advocate of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Fresh developments in technology and invention along with scientific discoveries made many writers feel that “the arts and the ‘hard’ or ‘natural’ sciences were growing further apart” (Deery 1-2). And many assumed that this drift was “unhealthy” and a solution was needed to harmonize them, while some others “adopted defensive postures, positively guarding themselves against acquiring scientific knowledge and demonizing the technological project” (Deery 2). While the divide between art and science expanded, the first World War contributed a great deal to the traumatic effect on a society that was already plagued by various swift changes. Huxley took this opportunity to explore the relations between religion, art, and science as “modes of knowing, as perspectives on reality, as devices for creating order” (Deery 3), and upheld the belief that “literary artists were under an intellectual and moral obligation to engage with science and explicitly refer to its ideas in their writing in order to heal the division between what later became known as the ‘two cultures’” (Deery 2).
The starting point of modernism, according to Friedman, was the “crisis of belief that pervades twentieth century western culture: loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration, and the shattering of cultural symbols and norms” (Friedman 97). Modernism in fiction contradicted the social novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century by focusing on psychology and human consciousness, and attempted “to render human subjectivity in ways more real than realism: to represent consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual’s relation to society through interior monologue, stream of consciousness, tunnelling, defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution…” (Childs 3). Huxley wrote at a time when modernist writers started experimenting with new techniques, styles, and subject matters in opposition to the Romantic and Victorian constraints. Sigmund Freud’s theories on psychology and sexuality appeared controversial and revolutionary in relation to the rigidity of Victorian constraints. Huxley’s works consistently allude to Freud. His Limbo(1920), containing a noteable short bildungsroman, “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow”, is considered a satire against Freud’s psychoanalytic theories on sexuality. But, many debates about Huxley’s anti-Freudian stance has arisen in recent studies. Sybille Bedford, Huxley’s biographer, Jerome Meckier, and Vibbert posit Huxley as an anti-Freudian. Yet, Huxley’s obsession with Freud and psychoanalysis is at the core of all of his works. For instance, in Brave New World , Huxley states : “Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers— was therefore full of misery; full of mothers— therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts— full of madness and suicide” (Huxley 36-37). Buchanan in “Oedipus in Dystopia, Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World” (2002) argues that Huxley used the Oedipus complex “as a weapon in his satirical attack on the mores of modern life and on its utopian fantasies” (89). Even with the debate around whether Huxley was Freudian or anti-Freudian in his stance, it is clear that Freud and his ideas form an integral part of Huxley’s novels, as Robert S. Baker observes: “The Freudian family romance, despite Huxley’s repeatedly expressed misgivings concerning Freud’s emphasis on erotic behaviour, is one of the principal satirical conventions of his social satire” (Baker 142). Freud’s impact on Huxley cannot be merely dismissed owing to the fact that Huxley had a close friendship with D. H. Lawrence who was in turn, very much influenced by Freud. “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” foreshadows Huxley’s engagement with human sexuality and psychology which novels like Island and Brave New World prove.
This paper analyzes Huxley’s “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” (1920) in the light of specific studies in sexology and psychology that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It highlights the theories of the sexual invert as proposed by Karl Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter, and relies mostly on Freud’s influence on Huxley to analyse the short fiction as modernist in it’s disintegrated subject. The story of Richard Greenow reveals Huxley’s understanding of sexuality as derived from the theories on sexuality that circulated during that period. Aldous Huxley based the main character Richard Greenow, also called Dick in the novella, on his own life as a college student at Eton.
In the late nineteenth century, there was an intensive scrutiny of human sexuality and anatomy which continued even into the early twentieth century. Foucault posited that the claim of a disinterested attitude towards sex in the nineteenth and early twentieth century contradictorily led to a “steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex” (Foucault 18). The taboo around the topic of sex was such that demographers and psychiatrists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century “thought it advisable to excuse themselves for asking their readers to dwell on matters so trivial and base” (Foucault 6). But, it was seen that while a feigning ignorance and disinterestedness in sex was being displayed by the bourgeoisie, there emerged “a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities”, and “the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities” (Foucault 49), which were achieved through mechanisms like the implantation of perversions. In Foucault’s opinion, “a great archive of the pleasures of sex was constituted by dissemination of procedures of confession, a multiple localization of their constraint, a widening of their domain” until “medicine, psychiatry and pedagogy began to solidify it: Campe, Salzman, and especially Kaan, Krafft Ebing , Tardieu, Molle, Havelock Ellis carefully assembled this whole pitiful, lyrical outpouring from the sexual mosaic” (Foucault 63-64). By assigning names to this strange ‘alien strain’, Foucault suggests, psychiatry and medicine gave these individuals an “analytical, visible, and permanent reality” (Foucault 44). For instance, the invention of names for sexual preferences or practices like “Krafft-Ebing's zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohleder's auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women” (Foucault 43). While ‘homosexual’ or homosexuality was coined only in 1869 by Karl Maria Kertbeny in a letter to Karl Ulrichs which demarcated a distinction between men who desired men and trans feminine inverts, terms like ‘androgyne’ and ‘hermaphrodite’ were already in use and gaining prominence through constant usage in psychiatry and sexology. Homosexuality was characterized “less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul” (Foucault 43). This ‘hermaphrodism of the soul’ or an interior androgeneity characterizes Dick in “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” when Huxley assigns to him the identity of a ‘hermaphrodite’.
In the fictional world of “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow”, Dick’s alter ego begins to emerge at night and write the novel “Heartsease Fitzroy: The Story of a Young Girl”. On receiving this manuscript for publication, the editor of Hildebrand’s Home Weekly writes a letter to Dick addressing him as ‘Madam’. After reading the letter, Dick cancels all engagements for the day and goes on a solitary walk and sits at an inn contemplating. As he sat in the inn parlour which Huxley calls a “hermetically sealed chamber”, Dick solves his problem:
Keywords: hermaphrodite, modernism, homosexual, sexual invert.
Aldous Huxley was a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf to name a few among the modernist writers. Never much compared or likened to the canon of modernist writers and often known mostly for the utopic/dystopic science fiction Brave New World, Huxley’s career as a novelist had in fact started with the publication of Limbo (1920), a collection of short stories. It was an age in which there were rapid developments in science, discoveries, and theories. In fact, Huxley’s own grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley (known as Darwin’s Bulldog) was an advocate of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Fresh developments in technology and invention along with scientific discoveries made many writers feel that “the arts and the ‘hard’ or ‘natural’ sciences were growing further apart” (Deery 1-2). And many assumed that this drift was “unhealthy” and a solution was needed to harmonize them, while some others “adopted defensive postures, positively guarding themselves against acquiring scientific knowledge and demonizing the technological project” (Deery 2). While the divide between art and science expanded, the first World War contributed a great deal to the traumatic effect on a society that was already plagued by various swift changes. Huxley took this opportunity to explore the relations between religion, art, and science as “modes of knowing, as perspectives on reality, as devices for creating order” (Deery 3), and upheld the belief that “literary artists were under an intellectual and moral obligation to engage with science and explicitly refer to its ideas in their writing in order to heal the division between what later became known as the ‘two cultures’” (Deery 2).
The starting point of modernism, according to Friedman, was the “crisis of belief that pervades twentieth century western culture: loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration, and the shattering of cultural symbols and norms” (Friedman 97). Modernism in fiction contradicted the social novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century by focusing on psychology and human consciousness, and attempted “to render human subjectivity in ways more real than realism: to represent consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual’s relation to society through interior monologue, stream of consciousness, tunnelling, defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution…” (Childs 3). Huxley wrote at a time when modernist writers started experimenting with new techniques, styles, and subject matters in opposition to the Romantic and Victorian constraints. Sigmund Freud’s theories on psychology and sexuality appeared controversial and revolutionary in relation to the rigidity of Victorian constraints. Huxley’s works consistently allude to Freud. His Limbo(1920), containing a noteable short bildungsroman, “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow”, is considered a satire against Freud’s psychoanalytic theories on sexuality. But, many debates about Huxley’s anti-Freudian stance has arisen in recent studies. Sybille Bedford, Huxley’s biographer, Jerome Meckier, and Vibbert posit Huxley as an anti-Freudian. Yet, Huxley’s obsession with Freud and psychoanalysis is at the core of all of his works. For instance, in Brave New World , Huxley states : “Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers— was therefore full of misery; full of mothers— therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts— full of madness and suicide” (Huxley 36-37). Buchanan in “Oedipus in Dystopia, Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World” (2002) argues that Huxley used the Oedipus complex “as a weapon in his satirical attack on the mores of modern life and on its utopian fantasies” (89). Even with the debate around whether Huxley was Freudian or anti-Freudian in his stance, it is clear that Freud and his ideas form an integral part of Huxley’s novels, as Robert S. Baker observes: “The Freudian family romance, despite Huxley’s repeatedly expressed misgivings concerning Freud’s emphasis on erotic behaviour, is one of the principal satirical conventions of his social satire” (Baker 142). Freud’s impact on Huxley cannot be merely dismissed owing to the fact that Huxley had a close friendship with D. H. Lawrence who was in turn, very much influenced by Freud. “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” foreshadows Huxley’s engagement with human sexuality and psychology which novels like Island and Brave New World prove.
This paper analyzes Huxley’s “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” (1920) in the light of specific studies in sexology and psychology that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It highlights the theories of the sexual invert as proposed by Karl Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter, and relies mostly on Freud’s influence on Huxley to analyse the short fiction as modernist in it’s disintegrated subject. The story of Richard Greenow reveals Huxley’s understanding of sexuality as derived from the theories on sexuality that circulated during that period. Aldous Huxley based the main character Richard Greenow, also called Dick in the novella, on his own life as a college student at Eton.
In the late nineteenth century, there was an intensive scrutiny of human sexuality and anatomy which continued even into the early twentieth century. Foucault posited that the claim of a disinterested attitude towards sex in the nineteenth and early twentieth century contradictorily led to a “steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex” (Foucault 18). The taboo around the topic of sex was such that demographers and psychiatrists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century “thought it advisable to excuse themselves for asking their readers to dwell on matters so trivial and base” (Foucault 6). But, it was seen that while a feigning ignorance and disinterestedness in sex was being displayed by the bourgeoisie, there emerged “a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities”, and “the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities” (Foucault 49), which were achieved through mechanisms like the implantation of perversions. In Foucault’s opinion, “a great archive of the pleasures of sex was constituted by dissemination of procedures of confession, a multiple localization of their constraint, a widening of their domain” until “medicine, psychiatry and pedagogy began to solidify it: Campe, Salzman, and especially Kaan, Krafft Ebing , Tardieu, Molle, Havelock Ellis carefully assembled this whole pitiful, lyrical outpouring from the sexual mosaic” (Foucault 63-64). By assigning names to this strange ‘alien strain’, Foucault suggests, psychiatry and medicine gave these individuals an “analytical, visible, and permanent reality” (Foucault 44). For instance, the invention of names for sexual preferences or practices like “Krafft-Ebing's zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohleder's auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women” (Foucault 43). While ‘homosexual’ or homosexuality was coined only in 1869 by Karl Maria Kertbeny in a letter to Karl Ulrichs which demarcated a distinction between men who desired men and trans feminine inverts, terms like ‘androgyne’ and ‘hermaphrodite’ were already in use and gaining prominence through constant usage in psychiatry and sexology. Homosexuality was characterized “less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul” (Foucault 43). This ‘hermaphrodism of the soul’ or an interior androgeneity characterizes Dick in “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” when Huxley assigns to him the identity of a ‘hermaphrodite’.
In the fictional world of “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow”, Dick’s alter ego begins to emerge at night and write the novel “Heartsease Fitzroy: The Story of a Young Girl”. On receiving this manuscript for publication, the editor of Hildebrand’s Home Weekly writes a letter to Dick addressing him as ‘Madam’. After reading the letter, Dick cancels all engagements for the day and goes on a solitary walk and sits at an inn contemplating. As he sat in the inn parlour which Huxley calls a “hermetically sealed chamber”, Dick solves his problem:
It was necessary to be alone, to think. He made his way along the Seven Bridges Road…and it was there, in the inn parlour, surrounded by engravings of the late Queen, and breathing the slightly mouldy preserved air bottled some three centuries ago into that hermetically sealed chamber—it was there that he solved the problem, perceived the strange truth about himself. He was a hermaphrodite. (Huxley 37)
This self realization about himself in a sealed chamber that is private is already a metaphorical closet of the modern age. Dick’s moment of self realization, the dawn upon him of his queerness evades events of greater corroboration such as when he finds himself attracted and falling in love with Frances Quarles:
It was Francis Quarles, clad in white flannels and the radiance of the sunshine. He appeared like a revelation, bright, beautiful, and sudden, before Dick’s eyes. A violent emotion seized him; his heart leapt, his bowels were moved within him; he felt a little sick and faint—he had fallen in love. (Huxley 10)
One may question the irony of Dick’s self realization at the inn that comes so late because the readers are already aware of Dick’s queerness even before his own realization, such as when he falls in love with the same-sex object or when he covets his sister’s dollhouse as a young boy or the moment he questions himself: “He wanted something which his friends could not give him; but what, but what?” (Huxley 8). It takes nights of unconscious possession of Dick’s body by his alter ego whom he names Pearl Bellairs. Dick wakes up on numerous mornings astonished by the ever growing bulk of pages added to the novel “Heartsease Fitzroy: The Story of a Young Girl” written by Pearl to dawn upon him that he was a hermaphrodite ‘spiritually’.
Dick’s self realization may seem antithetical to his explanation of ‘hermaphrodite’ as “not in the gross obvious sense, of course, but spiritually. Two persons in one, male and female…or rather a new William Sharp and Fiona MacLeod- a more intelligent William, a vulgarer Fiona” (Huxley 37); because hermaphrodite, as a term, is associated with reproductive biology indicating an organism having two kinds of reproductive organs (‘Intersex’ became a term that substituted hermaphrodite to escape the latters league to derogatory connections). Since Dick explains his hermaphrodism as a duality in his spirit, it is evident that Dick’s anatomy does not display hermaphrodism in sexological terms or as defined by reproductive biology. Unlike Doctor O Connor in Nightwood (1961), who is able to bare before god and question “What is this thing, Lord?” and say “I have tried to seek and I only find…It is I, my Lord, who know there’s beauty in any permanent mistake like me. . . . So tell me, what is permanent of me, me or him?” (Barnes 112), Dick cannot bare his body to God and ask what is wrong with him. Neither can he figure if he is a ‘permanent mistake’ in creation like O’Connor. Dick is momentarily satisfied with his discovery of his feminine side for it served him a purpose:
As long as the two parts of him kept well apart, as long as his male self could understand mathematics, and as long as his lady novelist’s self kept up her regular habit of writing at night and retiring from business during the day, the arrangement would be admirable. (Huxley 37-38)
Pearl’s emergence only at night is related to Freud’s idea of the ‘unconscious’ that emerges in the form of dreams. Dick and Pearl are metaphorical splits between the conscious and the unconscious that is suppressed. But the gradual occupancy of the unconscious over the body, signified by Pearls’ surfacing even during daytime, cuts the cord of balance in Dick. Huxley allots the name Dick to Richard Greenow as an allegory of phallocentric economy. Pearl’s surfacing disrupts this phallocentrism and leads to the disintegration of Dick’s identity, which signals modernism’s “shattering of cultural symbols” as suggested by Friedman (97). Dick, therefore, writes, struggling against the ever growing powerful Pearl Bellairs, to send his body for examination by the doctors because he himself cannot figure what or who he is: “If die, send corp. to hosp. for anatomy. Useful for once in my life!” (Huxley 111). He can only guess that Pearl’s growing situation must come from an underlying invisible abnormality. However, his incomprehensible message is overwritten by Pearl who calls anatomy too horrible and digusting. Pearl’s aversion to anatomy may be symbolically related to feminism’s dissociation of sex from gender, a paradigmatic shift from essentialism to constructivism.
Even though ‘transgender’ is a term coined, only in 1965 by John F. Oliven, to mean a mismatch between genitals and self identifcation with an opposite gender, it had been the topic of research for long. Grounding upon the theory of mismatch between body and mind, Magnus Hirschfeld worked to provide consultancy, diagnosis, and surgical sex change to bring uniformity to a person’s identity. Dora Richter was the first among the trans patients to receive sexual reassignment surgery in Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Research) which opened in 1919 (Sheldon). The expansion in popularity of Hirschfeld’s institute attracted a crowd of people who were confused about their identity and longed for a diagnosis, volunteering and presenting themselves as subjects. In the fiction, Dick’s act of calling upon the doctors to dissect and analyse his anatomy after his death is such an act of a voluntary subject. Dick’s self pathologization portends the reliance on medical explanations of homosexuality by the homophile movements and organizations of the 1950’s and 60’s who “represented homosexuals as abnormal, arguing that since homosexuality is a congenital condition, they deserved pity rather than persecution” (Jagose 27).
Before the medical intervention initiated by Hirschfeld, psychology dominated the arena of sexual diagnosis mostly by citing causes of the androgynous mind. Long before his tragic death, Dick had gone to Rogers who “knew all about psychology— from books, at any rate: Freud, Jung, Morton Prince and people like that. He used to try hypnotic experiments on his friends and even dabbled in amateur psychology” (Huxley 63). Dick says to Rogers: “I want you to nose out my suppressed complexes, analyse me, dissect me” (Huxley 64). Rogers fails to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion and could only apprehensively say that Dick must have “had, as a child, consciously or unconsciously, a great Freudian passion for his aunt” (Huxley 68) and “later on he had had another passion, almost religious in its fervour and intensity, for somebody called Wilkinson” (Huxley 68). Rogers might have located the Freudian anxiety in Dick wrongly, but Dick had indeed suppressed his sexuality during childhood, and Pearl was a result of his ‘unconscious’ flaring up. Dick is dissatisfied with Rogers diagnosis and leaves for home declining Rogers’ insistence to probe further. Dick’s dissatisfaction with Rogers might indicate Huxley’s dismissal of psychoanalysis and a manifestation of his anti-Freudian attitude. If O’Connor calls to God and wants a diagnosis by asking “What is this thing?”, Dick does so too, but by calling upon the modern era’s gods⸻psychiatrists and doctors. Years later, when Huxley published Brave New World, his satirical voice finds it’s outlet in the phrase “Our Ford-or Our Freud”, a parodical utterance of Christianity’s “Our Father”.
During the psychoanalytic session that is similar to the modern world’s word association test with Rogers, Dick gives discordant replies to words. When Rogers utters “breast”, Dick replies “chicken”, and “novelist” to “woman”. When Dick doesn’t associate “woman” to the word “breast”, it exposes his non-conformity with the heterosexual organization of desire. In fact, he falls in love with a breastless being, Frances Quarles, for whom he composes several poetic lines adoring and revering him like a maiden smitten by a handsome man:
All, all I lay at thy proud marble feet—
My heart, my love and all my future days.
Upon thy brow for ever let me gaze,
For ever touch thy hair: oh (something) sweet . . .(Huxley 18)
Dick’s exhibition of a feminine adoration for Quarles exhibits the traits of Karl Ulrichs’ model of the Urning which implied a woman’s soul in a man’s body or a female mind in a male body, which was the popular explanation for effeminate men, and men desiring men. Ulrichs coined the term Urning in The Riddle of man-Manly Love written in 1864-65 by referring to Plato’s Symposium where Greek myth is presented to explain the origin of two forms of love (man-man love and man-woman love). The English equivalent of Urning which was “Uranian” was taken up by latter sexologists like Carpenter in their writings to mean man-manly love and friendship. Carpenter supports Ulrichs’ claim of a natural origin to the Urning or sexual invert as he explains in his book The Intermediate Sex (1908):
Nature, it might appear, in mixing the elements which go to compose each individual, does not always keep her two groups of ingredients- which represent the two sexes- properly apart, but often throws them crosswise in a somewhat baffling manner, now this way and now that…As it is, there are some remarkable and (we think) indispensable types of character in whom there is such a union or balance of the feminine and masculine qualities that these people become to a great extent the interpreters of men and women to each other. (Carpenter 10)
For Carpenter, Urnings were the intermediate sexes who maintained a sense of continuity to the polarity of the two sexes.
Dick’s condition as a hermaphrodite however, doesn’t maintain this amiable sense of continuity of the two sexes because the two personalities inside him scuffle for autonomy over the body. Richard is assigned male sex at birth, but Pearl emerges later. While saying that he “was able to realize the two great ambitions of his life—to wear silk underclothing and to smoke good (but really good) cigars” (Huxley 39), Dick relays that he has not one but two ‘truths’ to him. The act of smoking cigars and wearing silk underwear are two oppositional performances. While Dick performs his masculinity by smoking cigars publicly, he also performs femininity by wearing silk underwear, a private affair known only to him, like his being a hermaphrodite. This secret parody of Dick is emblematic of gender trouble, the beginning of a symbolic degeneration of the rigid structures of sex. Richard Greenow was written even before T.S. Eliot introduced the blind seer Tiresias in The Wasteland. Like Dick, Tiresias oscillates between two identities as he says: “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts…” (Eliot 218-219). Dick’s other ‘truth’ Pearl, the novelist, also reciprocates the rising prominence of modern women in the early twentieth century and their precursors of the nineteenth century who had taken to writing such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and the Bronte sisters.
The clerk at the Wibley Town Council already assumes a falsity in Dick’s identity as he sees Dick dressed in corduroys and gaiters, “but not having the air of a genuine agricultural labourer” (Huxley 101). He freaks out when Dick introduces himself as the novelist Pearl Bellairs and asks to be registered for voting rights as a woman. The clerk is confronted with a confusing situation where he sees a man who claims to be a woman. He takes Dick’s identification as a woman as illusory, and therefore calls him a loony and “a dangerous looking brute” (Huxley 102). In Butlerian sense, the reaction of the clerk at the Wibley Town Council expresses the failure of the usual cultural perception when “one cannot with surety read the body that one sees” (Butler xxiii ). The term ‘trans feminine’ is used by Emma Heaney to signify persons assigned male at birth who “avow a female or feminine gender identity by using female pronouns, identifying with one or more vernacular trans feminine terms (around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, Britain, and France these terms include fairy, Mary, molly, queen, tante, and molle) and/or identifying as women” (Heaney xiii). The twentieth century trans feminine taking the terms fairy, molly, queen or tante to assign an identity to themselves were socially functioning as women. They provided sexual services to both cis men and homosexual men. They adjusted their identity according to the needs of the clients. Medical intervention, however, made the need for alignment of sexuality with body an urgency. In this context, Heaney states: “This model insisted that trans women regard their womanhood as only an aspiration, in order to legitimate a program of hormone prescriptions and surgical sex change as a medical cure” (Heaney 7). Medical intervention took over the subjects of psychoanalysis by asserting their ‘cure’ for misaligned identities. Magnus Hirschfeld’s experiment in sex reassignment surgery was influnced by Eugen Steinach’s study on male castration among mammals like rats and guinea pigs, and the discovery of the relationship between sex hormones and human sexual behaviour and physical traits. Steinach’s study shifted the understanding of the origin of sexual behaviour which was previously located in the mind (psychoanalysis) to the body (hormones).
The possibility of crossing-over of the gender bridge, however, could not be an answer to all. Freud’s observation of some gay men who were attracted to trans feminine people were neither homosexual nor heterosexual in their object-choice. This enabled his theory of psychoanalysis to posit sexuality “as organized by psychical orientation rather than genital impulse” (Heaney 42). Huxley’s understanding of sexuality, as in the case of Dick, arises from this psychical orientation. Huxley’s ideas may also be connected to Freud’s ideas on ancient Greek man-boy relationship. For Freud, the sexual love object among the Geek erostes was “not someone of the same sex but someone who combines the characters of both sexes; there is, as it were, a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one that seeks for a woman, while it remains a paramount condition that the object’s body (i.e. genitals) shall be masculine” (Freud 10). In this case of the erostes-eromenos relationship, the man (erostes) who is attracted to the feminine traits with male genitals doesn’t fit into the category of homosexual proper. This idea of Freud rebuts the sexual inversion theory. Huxley might have worked upon this theory of Freud on Dick who desires Quarles. But the complexity of the Dick-Pearl duality distinguishes Dick from the erostes. Therefore, considering Dick from his amorous gaze and the composition of love poems for Quarles in his imagination, he can be placed on the other end as the eromenos. In this case, Dick wouldn’t have been the one to desire penetration, but rather desired to be penetrated, which is signified and realized in the character of Pearl. If Dick is assumed to be an eromenos, the sex reassigment surgery would be worthless on him as he ‘is’ already what he feels. The question of who Dick ‘is’ does not rest on his genitals. Dick’s transsexuality is rather, a discontinuity between his body and desire. Regarding the relation between desire and body, in Butler’s opinion, “the phantasmatic nature of desire reveals the body not as its ground or cause, but as its occasion and its object. The strategy of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself. Indeed, in order to desire at all it may be necessary to believe in an altered bodily ego” (Butler 90), a situation that relates to the emergence of Dick’s alter ego⸻Pearl. Butler further suggests that “this imaginary condition of desire always exceeds the physical body through or on which it works” (Butler 90). Dick’s circumstance destabilizes ‘sex’ as he disavows the body, and hence relegates the meaning and significance of bodily parts.
Dick’s confused identity contests and violates normative stability which can be associated with the scheme of discordance that is at the heart of modernism. As Childs states, “In terms of sexuality and the family, Modernism introduced a new openness with candid descriptions often sympathetic to feminism, homosexuality, androgyny and bisexuality beside a questioning of the constraints of the nuclear family which seemed to hamper the individual’s search for personal values” (19). Pearl is thus, the metaphorical figure in search of an identity, the motif of quest amidst constraints and crises, which is a common feature in modernist literature. The emergence of Pearl from within the constraint of consciousness embodied by Dick is a Freudian triumph and may indicate Huxley’s positive inclination towards Freud. However, Dick’s disappointment in Rogers’ diagnosis mirrors Huxley’s own distrust in psychoanalysis. In any case, Huxley’s exploration of the human psyche owes a great deal to Freud and to ideas from sexology. Dick’s identity and the subject matter of an individual’s unconscious in “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” can be connected to several other threads of modernism, such as the issue of Oedipus complex in D.H. Lawrence, the consciousness of individuals in Virginia Woolf and the motif of quest in James Joyce.
At the core of modernism is the breach between science and faith intensified by Darwin’s theory of evolution which obviated God, and the first World War which expanded the chasm between religion and man. Cantor (1988) ascribes the feeling of despair and apocalypse in the modernists to the decades of growing Victorian doubt which reached it’s peak in the twentieth century. Modernism’s disillusionment with the first World War and the mental toll it takes upon individuals is displayed in Dick’s physical disorder that relatively facilitates Pearl’s growth. Upon hearing that war had broken out, Dick’s body exhibits slight impairment: “he made little involuntary movements with his limbs, and every now and then the muscles of his face began twitching in a spasmodic and uncontrollable tic” (Huxley 54). Like Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the war initiates the spiral turn of Dick. The consequence of Pearl’s usurpation over Dick’s body can be surmised as equivalent to a sort of disintegration, which is characteristic of modernism. Pearl’s surfacing foreshadows the materialization of the trans feminine in modernist literature. In Huxley’s fiction, the trans feminine figure disavows it’s corporeality. Pearl is the transfiguration of Dick’s desire towards a same sex object. Thus, the confusion that ensues within the subject about his own identity is expressive of gender trouble, the onset of queer imaginings.
Baker, Robert S. Brave New World: History, Science and Dystopia. Twayne, 1990.
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New Directions, 1961.
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography Volume One 1894-1939. Chatto and Windus,
Dick’s confused identity contests and violates normative stability which can be associated with the scheme of discordance that is at the heart of modernism. As Childs states, “In terms of sexuality and the family, Modernism introduced a new openness with candid descriptions often sympathetic to feminism, homosexuality, androgyny and bisexuality beside a questioning of the constraints of the nuclear family which seemed to hamper the individual’s search for personal values” (19). Pearl is thus, the metaphorical figure in search of an identity, the motif of quest amidst constraints and crises, which is a common feature in modernist literature. The emergence of Pearl from within the constraint of consciousness embodied by Dick is a Freudian triumph and may indicate Huxley’s positive inclination towards Freud. However, Dick’s disappointment in Rogers’ diagnosis mirrors Huxley’s own distrust in psychoanalysis. In any case, Huxley’s exploration of the human psyche owes a great deal to Freud and to ideas from sexology. Dick’s identity and the subject matter of an individual’s unconscious in “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” can be connected to several other threads of modernism, such as the issue of Oedipus complex in D.H. Lawrence, the consciousness of individuals in Virginia Woolf and the motif of quest in James Joyce.
At the core of modernism is the breach between science and faith intensified by Darwin’s theory of evolution which obviated God, and the first World War which expanded the chasm between religion and man. Cantor (1988) ascribes the feeling of despair and apocalypse in the modernists to the decades of growing Victorian doubt which reached it’s peak in the twentieth century. Modernism’s disillusionment with the first World War and the mental toll it takes upon individuals is displayed in Dick’s physical disorder that relatively facilitates Pearl’s growth. Upon hearing that war had broken out, Dick’s body exhibits slight impairment: “he made little involuntary movements with his limbs, and every now and then the muscles of his face began twitching in a spasmodic and uncontrollable tic” (Huxley 54). Like Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the war initiates the spiral turn of Dick. The consequence of Pearl’s usurpation over Dick’s body can be surmised as equivalent to a sort of disintegration, which is characteristic of modernism. Pearl’s surfacing foreshadows the materialization of the trans feminine in modernist literature. In Huxley’s fiction, the trans feminine figure disavows it’s corporeality. Pearl is the transfiguration of Dick’s desire towards a same sex object. Thus, the confusion that ensues within the subject about his own identity is expressive of gender trouble, the onset of queer imaginings.
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