Novel Violations: <em>The Hermaphrodite</em> and the Failure of Form

Abstract

Studies of gender and sexuality in the Victorian novel tend to focus on narrative plot and progression. Sharon Marcus’s recent book, Between Women, offers a compelling analysis of female friendships and the plots they enable. Marcus uses Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849) to explain how homosocial female bonds enable the heterosexual marriage plot, as the mutual loyalty of Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone allow both women to attain desirable and advantageous marriages (99). As a further example, Holly Furneaux’s Queer Dickens pursues similar aims, tracing the ways in which queer characters, namely bachelors, play a vital role in propping up hetero normative narratives (7–8). But because each of these arguments presumes a body whose gender is stable and therefore clearly readable as either female or male, they leave open a haunting question: what kinds of novelistic plotlines might more unclassifiable bodies open up or foreclose? How might the confounding body of the hermaphrodite alter or transform the familiar plots of the British novel? What would become of the marriage plots or the plots of property inheritance that so often struc ture nineteenth-century fiction?