The Vagabond: A Modern Heroine

Abstract

Rousseau’s autobiography, The Confessions (1782-89), is generally considered to herald the official advent into the literary canon of the sexually ambiguous romantic hero. I underscore “official” because I am challenging the heterosexuality of the romantic hero in the literary canon as far back as troubadour lyric poetry and medieval romance. The heterosexuality of artist-heroes of autobiographical texts by male writers after Rousseau, such as Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774), Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800), Chateaubriand’s Rene (1802), Constant’s Adolphe (1816), Byron’s Manfred (1817), Shelley’s Epipsychidion (1821), and Flaubert’s ironic portrait of the Romantic artist, L’Education sentimentale (Sentimental Education) (1869), is explicitly dubious. The women they yearn for are unavailable, dead, or so unbelievable as to be parodies of femininity fashioned to expose the romantic hero’s love of women either as a great sin, because it involves incestuous desire—or a great joke.’ One of the more blatant examples of the ridiculous role women play is found in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale in which Frederic, the artisthero, is overwhelmed with desire for Marie Arnoux—angelic, virtuous, and married. His desire intensifies when she offers a song as a divertissement for her guests after a dinner party attended by the enamored would-be romantic lover.

And she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink. To her enormous surprise, there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping. She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they did.

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando