historical

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir of a fascinating but so troubled human being. As a Catholic myself, I am especially impressed by how wonderful the people who surrounded Herculine were. Here these simple people were faced with a most complex and mystifying problem and they treated Herculine with so much kindness. As all were Catholics, I enjoy this memoir as a fine Catholic book.

The question of Herculine Barbin is one of profound impact within the realm of M. Foucault's work. Placed within the central problematic of "The Body" the question is not explored anywhere else within the book but in M. Foucault's introduction. The book plays out the vital issues. The subtitle tells it all: "Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite." - The problem is executed and explored in this book within the framework of the "Archive" - of 4 parts. The book is divided into M. Foucault's introduction, Barbin's Memoirs, The Dossier, and Oscar Panizza's "A Scandal at the Convent." M. Foucault begins his introduction with:

"Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative. They have obstinately brought into play this question of a "true sex" in an order of things where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures."

Here he sets up the problematic that sexuality revolves around institutions of power - the law, the church, the medical establishment, and society in general. Within this framework, sexuality then ceases to be a continuum and falls subject to our ever changing moods. Where exactly does a Hermaphrodite fit in, in all this? Is the Hermaphrodite male with female qualities? Is the reverse true? Who decides? What is the impact of what is decided? This is what the book tries to explore. The Dossier is a collection of the socially constructed perspectives - similar to "I Pierre Riviere..." (Also available on Amazon.com) before it; the editors take aim at the various perspectives and conclusions drawn by people within the framework of Power/Knowledge. We see how Barbin is constructed - outside of his/her voice (his/her voice we get from part 2 - "My Memoirs"). The memoirs paint a painful story of one's struggle to fit in within a very unforgiving structure that would allow Barbin to be neither a "girl" nor a "boy". It paints a tragic figure of a person torn within this framework to conform, to "be". Lastly, Oscar Panizza's "A Scandal at the Convent" is a fabrication, a poor rendition that stretches the Barbin story from the medico-legal issue that it is to one of sheer erotica. The movie that follows is an abomination to the archive the M. Foucault and his ilk uncover. Or is it simply a portrayal of the "edge" that discourse has in terms of Power/Knowledge. M. Foucault writes:

"The result is indeed remarkable. Panizza kept a few important elements of the case: the very name of Alexina, the scene of the medical examination. For a reason I have trouble grasping-perhaps because, relying on his memories of his reading without having Tardieu's book at hand, he availed himself of another study of a similar case that he had at his disposal-he altered the medical reports. But the most radical changes were those he made in the whole narrative. He transposed it in time; he altered many material elements and the entire atmosphere; and, above all, he took it out of the subjective mode and put it into objective narration. He gave everything a certain "eighteenth-century" manner: Diderot and his Religieuse do not seem far off. There is a rich convent for girls of the aristocracy, a sensual mother superior who shows an equivocal affection for her niece, intrigues and rivalries among the nuns, an erudite and skeptical abbe, a credulous country priest, and peasants who go - after the devil with their pitchforks. Throughout, there is a skin - deep licentiousness and a semi-naive play of not entirely innocent beliefs, which are just as far removed from the provincial seriousness of Alexina as they are from the baroque violence of The Council of Love.
But in inventing this whole landscape of perverse gallantry, Panizza deliberately leaves in the center of his narrative a vast area of shadow and that is precisely where he places Alexina. Sister, mistress, disturbing schoolgirl, strayed cherub, male and female lover, faun running in the forest, incubus stealing into the warm dormitories, hairy-legged satyr, exorcized demon-Panizza presents her only in the fleeting profiles which the others see. This boy-girl, this never eternal masculine-feminine, is nothing more than what passes at night in the dreams, the desires, and the fears of everyone. Panizza chose to make her only a shadowy figure, without an identity and without a name, who vanishes at the end of the narrative leaving no trace. He did not even choose to fix her with a suicide, whereby she would become a corpse, like Abel Barbin, to which curious doctors in the end assigned the reality of an inadequate sex.
I have brought these two texts together, thinking they deserved to be published side by side, first of all because both belong to the end of the nineteenth century, that century which was so powerfully haunted by the theme of the hermaphrodite-somewhat as the eighteenth century had been haunted by the theme of the transvestite."

In the end, the tragedy of Barbin allows one to take a step away from the theoretical to see the real impact all this power relations have. I revisit M. Foucault when he concludes his introduction:

"Most of the time, those who relate their change of sex belong to a world that is strongly bisexual; and their uneasiness about their identity finds expression in the desire to pass over to the other side-to the side of the sex they desire to have and in whose world they would like to belong. In this case, the intense monosexuality of religious and school life fosters the tender pleasures that sexual non-identity discovers and provokes when it goes astray in the midst of all those bodies that are similar to one another."

Pause. Think. Consider.

Miguel Llora

I had the pleasure of reading this novel for a college class, and I must admit that it was psychologically stimulating in one sense, and poignant in another sense. The fact that the story is actually based on true events makes the novel all the more appealing.