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Tracy Hargreaves. Androgyny in Modern Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ix +202 pp.
Tracy Hargreaves offers us a study of androgyny in modern literature, a fascinating topic because of its protean nature: androgyny is a classical figure of nostalgic wholeness, a justification for the naturalness of heterosexuality, a term used by sexologists at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the intermediate type, a second wave feminist trope for the reconsideration of desires, an embodied subject, a misrecognition, an opportunity to reconsider the debate between nature and nurture in gender studies, an alchemical union, and even a humanist dream of "Man."
Hargreaves's book follows all these cultural and historical meanings of androgyny, relying on a wide range of texts spanning from Earl Lind's Autobiography of an Androgyne and Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" to Gore Vidal's Myron and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. Although part of the introduction and chapter 1 are devoted to writings that are not overtly literary, the overall focus of the volume is on how androgyny has figured in works of fiction.
The first chapter starts by tracing the influence of Plato's Symposium on sexologists, especially Havelock Ellis and Xavier Mayne, but also Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds. It is surprising, however, to see that even though chapter 1 "takes as its starting point the translation into English in 1871 of Plato's Symposium," there is neither a direct analysis of Plato's text (in any of the translations cited) nor any mention of Plato in the bibliography (which also omits mention of Lyndsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding, object of chapter 6). Together with these curious omissions, there are a few typographical errors that Palgrave Macmillan should have identifed at proof stage: a missing footnote in chapter 5 scrambles the following forty or so, and footnote twenty-three in chapter 2 repeats what has already been incorporated in the body of the text.
A more in-depth study of the English reception of the Symposium would have created even more persuasive claims about the "relationship between homosexual sexuality and the androgynous intermediate sex or type" and the role of the Symposium as a "homosexual code" (here backed up by the famous conversation between Clive and Maurice in E. M. Forster's novel) (16)....