Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing
- 1 'Two men, so dissimilar': Class, Marriage and Masculinity in George Moore's Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa's The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1977)
- 2 ‘She had never been a woman’: Second Wave Feminism, Femininity and Transgender in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977)
- 3 Playing the Breeches Part: Feminist Appropriations, Biographical Fictions and Colonial Contexts in Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry (1999)
- 4 Two Beings/One Body: Intersex Lives and Transsexual Narratives in Man into Woman (1931) and David Ebershoff's The Danish Girl (2000)
- 5 Blue Births and Last Words: Rewriting Race, Nation and Family in Jackie Kay's Trumpet (1998)
- 6 Never an Unhappy Hour: Revisiting Marriage in Film Adaptations of Albert Nobbs (2011) and The Danish Girl (2016)
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - 'Two men, so dissimilar': Class, Marriage and Masculinity in George Moore's Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa's The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1977)
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing
- 1 'Two men, so dissimilar': Class, Marriage and Masculinity in George Moore's Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa's The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1977)
- 2 ‘She had never been a woman’: Second Wave Feminism, Femininity and Transgender in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977)
- 3 Playing the Breeches Part: Feminist Appropriations, Biographical Fictions and Colonial Contexts in Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry (1999)
- 4 Two Beings/One Body: Intersex Lives and Transsexual Narratives in Man into Woman (1931) and David Ebershoff's The Danish Girl (2000)
- 5 Blue Births and Last Words: Rewriting Race, Nation and Family in Jackie Kay's Trumpet (1998)
- 6 Never an Unhappy Hour: Revisiting Marriage in Film Adaptations of Albert Nobbs (2011) and The Danish Girl (2016)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Virginia Woolf's 1928 historical fantasy Orlando has assumed a central place within an Anglo-American literary tradition of representations of motifs of ‘gender crossing’ and ‘changing sex’. The eponymous protagonist is famously transformed from a man into a woman midway through a narrative which opens in the Elizabethan era and closes in 1928; the narrator's bold and playful insistence that 'in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been' exemplifies a challenge to conventional ideas about the relationship between sex and gender which has inspired subsequent generations of writers and critics. Indeed, some of the formative features of the treatment of transgender motifs in the literary imagination can be found in this novel. Firstly, it arguably helped to establish historical fiction and fantasy fiction as genres providing ‘natural’ homes for transgender characters or themes, which are often imagined as belonging to a bygone era or to a speculative future. Secondly, Woolf's narrative provides an important precedent for the figurative use of transgender as a conceptual conceit: that is, as a metaphorical vehicle for the exploration of abstract questions to do with identity. Finally, the legacy of Orlando has served to shape a particular relationship between transgender motifs, women's writing and feminist literary criticism, including in narratives which explore gender crossing as a form of feminist subversion (such as Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry) or which critique the cultural construction of femininity (such as Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve). By contrast, George Moore's 1918 novella Albert Nobbs - published a decade before Orlando - has received much less critical attention than Woolf 's extensively analysed fiction. Set in a Dublin hotel in the 1860s, it explores the repercussions of an encounter between two working men, hotel waiter Albert Nobbs and housepainter Hubert Page. The accidental revelation of Albert's sex to his temporary roommate prompts a disclosure by Hubert that he too is a femalebodied man; Hubert's accounts of his contented domestic life with his wife Polly inspire Albert to transform his own social and marital status, and his attempts to do so are central to the drama which subsequently unfolds. Moore's novella merits close and sustained critical attention for a number of reasons.
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- Transgender and The Literary ImaginationChanging Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing, pp. 37 - 63Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017