May 9th (3rd Week) 5.15-6.30pm

Sam Bailey (Jesus College)
'Beauty or the Beast? Literary Representations of the Hermaphrodite in Late Eighteenth-Century
France'

This paper examines the figure of the hermaphrodite in French literature from 1772 to 1798. It draws on Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772), the Chevalier d'Eon’s La Pucelle de Tonnerre (1785) and two pornographic novels by the Comte de Mirabeau (1783 and 1798) to study the significance of this literary figure in the context of the French Enlightenment. This paper initiates a dialogue between eighteenth-century material and recently published theoretical works to investigate the hermaphrodite’s relation to a performative conception of gender, the pathologisation of non-standard bodies and eroticism. The different literary hermaphrodites depicted in these texts complicate the traditional picture of the eighteenth century as one of demystification in which an overriding philosophical and scientific desire to classify caused binaries of all kinds to solidify. Furthermore, they clash with much of the non-fiction literature relating to gender and the hermaphrodite that was circulating in late eighteenth-century France. Far from conforming to existing norms, these hermaphrodite texts suggest a new interpretive lens through which to view this figure: that of le fantastique, a nascent literary genre that deals in worlds where realism shades off into make-believe by almost imperceptible degrees. The texts offer an alternative view of gender in late eighteenth-century France in which empirical investigation fails, all categories prove chimerical and monsters could very well be real.

Melissa Purkiss (Wolfson College)
'Gaito Gazdanov, a 'Russian Proust'? The question of French influence for Russian émigrés in interwar Paris'