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Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite. Edited by Renée Bergland and Gary Williams. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012. ix + 274 pp. $49-95 cloth. Heather Barrett, Boston University
A palpable current of excitement unites the diverse essays collected in Philosophies of Sex. Renée Bergland and Gary Williams account for the volume's "generative richness" by observing that its focal point, Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite, is "literally like nothing else in nineteenth-century American literary history" (12, 2). Howe's tale of the ambiguously gendered Laurence only began to receive critical attention after Williams's 2004 edition brought the novel into print. Philosophies of Sex constitutes the first book-length study of this text, but its editors hope that it will not be the last. The collection, they write, offers "alternative and sometimes sharply conflicting readings" of The Hermaphrodite in order to "foster an ongoing conversation among an infinite array of possible interpretations" (11). Despite their varied claims, the contributing scholars agree that any analysis of Howe's text has implications beyond this individual work. As Bergland and Williams assert, The Hermaphrodite "forces us to reexamine what we thought we knew about the range of possibilities entertained by writers in Howe's era concerning variations in sex, gender, and sexuality" as well as the possibilities in our own time (2). Ambitious in scope but grounded in responsible scholarship, Philosophies of Sex sets a precedent for sophisticated critical work on The Hermaphrodite and the topics it fearlessly engages.
Early readers of The Hermaphrodite understood it biographically as an expression of Howe's marital and domestic...