Male Impersonators

Abstract

‘Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation’ announces Daniel Martin’s narrator in vatic mode, anticipating as he does so the privilege attached in his novel to sight among the senses (John Fowles, Daniel Martin, p. 7). One of the problems Daniel finds most intractable as he contemplates the project of writing the novel of his life is how to get inside a woman’s experience (p. 430). To carry out his project, he needs to know what sort of thing a woman knows, what the inner life of a woman feels like. This is indeed for him beyond the limits of sight. At the same time, it is of course the kind of manoeuvre to account for which humanistic accounts of the novel have always drawn on the plenitude of ‘imagination’: the idea of a faculty which would permit the exceptional being in whom it was well developed to leap the narrow confines of time, space, or gender so as to empathise with another’s experience, however different that experience might initially appear from their own.

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously contructed in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body.

(Butler, 1990, p. 140)

If the pen is a metaphorical penis, with what organ can females generate texts? (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979, p. 7)