By Pamela L. Caughie
Author's Note: This essay provides a model for thinking about a scholar’s curriculum vitae, literally "the course of one's life." In tracing the trajectory of my scholarship on gender and sexuality over the past thirty-five years, this piece occupies various historical spaces, from Virginia Woolf’s and Lili Elbe’s writings in the late 1920s and early 30s, to my past authorial self of the 1980s and 90s, to my recent scholarship of the 2010s and 20s. No effort has been made to update the language—whether mine, Woolf’s, Elbe’s, or other modernist and gender scholars’—for words come saturated with their histories that reveal where they have been, with whom, and for what ends. To give this piece the flow and multivocal valence in keeping with its generic hybridity, passages from previous publications are placed in relation to images of their source texts, and passages in Lili Elbe’s voice are sometimes unattributed. Originally the essay was designed to include images and long quotations as popouts and rollovers, a format that proved to be too daunting. All references to Lili's life narrative can be found in the first American edition available on the Lili Elbe Digital Archive.
I didn’t much like Lili when I first met her over ten years ago, and certainly never expected to spend eight years in an intimate relationship with her. Her hyper femininity annoyed me,
her homophobia offended me,
During this summary of their profound judgment they regarded me with scarcely veiled irony: they looked upon me as an hysterical subject, plainly as a fraud, and one of them, the 'new specialist', even hinted that I was really homosexual. This suggestion almost broke down my self-control. If Grete had not saved the situation by a ringing laugh, repudiating on my behalf the supposition as utterly absurd, I should have seized the fellow by the throat. [MIW 118]
her exaggerated claims in her memoir aroused my skepticism,
''Will Claude ever find her again?''
''Whom?''
''Lili.''
Saying which, the invalid handed Inger a card, on which he had
scribbled a few lines.
''Did you write this?'' she asked.
''Yes, Inger.''
''But then she is there already; Claude's Lili. Just look.''
He gazed at the card and failed to recognize his writing. It was a
woman's script. [MIW 140]
and what I took to be Lili’s plodding literary style left me cold. When, a few years later, I found myself approaching the editors of Bloomsbury’s Modernist Archive series to see if they would be interested in publishing a new edition of Lili’s life narrative, I was dashed by their question, Is it modernist? I felt then that I had to admit it was not.
Dashed, but not defeated.
You see, I did not understand Lili very well back then. I had read her story as a “wrong body” narrative in keeping with early transgender memoirs. I took its title, Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, to indicate how Lili saw herself. And so, in an early conference presentation, I and my co-presenters misidentified her when we titled our presentation, “The Search for the First Transsexual,” even as we called out contemporary scholars who had rediscovered her but didn’t seem to understand her.
SOCIETY FOR TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP
17th Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference
March 6-8, 2013
Loyola University Chicago, Water Tower Campus
Hosted by Loyola's Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
Friday, March 8
2:30-3:45 sessions
20. Pamela Caughie, Anthony Betori, Niamh McGuigan, and Jonathan Reinhardt, “Recreating Lili Elbe: The Search for the First Transsexual”; Jan Gielkens, “Editor Predator. Why a Scholarly Editor Would Destroy More than 6000 Letters”; Fredrik Tydal, “Troubling Tales from the Home Front: Modern American Short Stories in the Armed Services Editions” [CLC 305; chair, Mark Byron]
Back then I understood Lili to be, if not the sole author, at least the agential subject of her own narrative. And I still had an aesthetic bias in my understanding of modernist writing. Clearly Lili had much to teach me.
The history of transgender is one I only began to study in the early 2000s, not long before I met Lili. Or so I thought. At the time I had completely forgotten that my very first Modern Language Association paper, presented in 1986 when I was a graduate student, was entitled "The Rhetoric of Transsexualism." That paper presented a reading of Virginia Woolf's Orlando in terms
of how its rhetorical play disrupts sexual dimorphism. Any novel that begins, “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex,” I quipped, arouses doubt about sex. I’ve now come to see that Orlando thematizes new concepts of sexual identity then circulating in scientific discourses, anthropological studies, and popular culture, but in 1986 I knew little about that cultural history, and nothing about transgender, a term that came to replace transsexualism in the 1990s. With some Freud, a little Havelock Ellis, and a lot of Foucault, I read transsexualism as a metaphor.
In "Fin de Siècle, Fin de Sexe: Transsexuality and the Death of History" (a 1996 article substantially revised in her 2000 book, Doing Time) Rita Felski acknowledges that in 1996 when she first published this article, she too had little familiarity with transgender scholarship: "My use of 'transsexual' and 'transgender' echoed the often casual metaphorical usage of these terms by postmodern theorists," she writes (148-149). Felski cautions that such metaphoric uses of transsexuality or transgender elide historical differences, in concepts of, and investments in, gender (150).
Similarly, Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002) cautions against applying contemporary notions of transsexuality to the past. According to Meyerowtiz, the earliest use of "transsexualism" was by Magnus Hirschfeld in a 1923 article, though Hirschfeld's term "transvestite," the title of his 1910 book, was closer to the contemporary meaning of "transsexual" than his later use of “transsexualism.” Because of historical differences in the use of the same terms, Meyerowitz, echoing Felski, cautions us "to avoid investing transsexuals of the past … with transhistoric symbolic weight" (11-12).
Historian Alison Oram also warns against asserting a trans-historical identity for the transsexual, “reading the confused category of the early twentieth-century invert as evidence of a past transsexual subject" (279).
Transsexualism in Orlando presents a rhetorical challenge to conventional assumptions about sexual identity, I said. I then went on to read the celebrated clothes philosophy passage in Chapter Four as best illustrating this point, a reading I later published.
The biographer-narrator vacillates between seeing clothes as a signifier of sexual difference, a matter of convention, to seeing them as “the symbol of something hid deep beneath.” This is the view taken in many contemporary memoirs by transsexuals, that gender difference is ontological, not merely conventional, that something “deep beneath” dictates the outward change. Both views, though, assume Orlando has a "true sex," whether performing a masquerade or exposed by it.
The issue in which I am interested is a broad metaphysical one: how to
understand the metaphysics of changing from woman to man or man to
woman. Who or what is changed, and who or what remains the same?
(Christine Overall, "Sex/Gender Transitions and Life-Changing Aspirations" in You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, edited by Laurie J. Shrage, Oxford UP, 2009)
"So Lili and I continued to live our double life, and no one, neither the 'initiated' nor myself, saw in this anything else than a pleasant kind of distraction and entertainment, a kind of artists' caprice, neither more nor less. We were as little perturbed at the obviously growing distinction, of an emotional kind, which increasingly manifested itself between the mystical girl and myself; nor did anyone take any serious notice of the delicate changes which gradually became perceptible in my physical form.” [MIW 92]
But then, two sentences later, Orlando's narrator offers the statement often quoted as Woolf’s theory of androgyny: “For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is above” (189). This view of bisexuality as an originary androgyny was dominant by the 1920s.
Yet if we accept the androgyny passage as a straightforward statement of Woolf’s philosophy of sexual identity, I argued in the 1980s, we focus on what the novel says, not what it does. Every time the biographer-narrator tries to clarify the ways Orlando has changed with the sex change, he ends up making stereotypical remarks; for he can make such distinctions only by relying on conventional assumptions about sexual difference. There is no getting around figurative language and gender conventions when it comes to sexual identity, and this is the insight we gain from Woolf’s novel, not any one theory of identity.
Moreover, by divesting Orlando of her property and patronym in the clothes philosophy chapter, putting both her paternity and her propriety into question, Woolf does not offer transsexuality as a liberating identity but instead calls attention to the historically specific categories by which sexual identity is determined and legalized. That is, it is not that the appropriate identity is androgynous, but that the metaphor of androgyny defies the notion of an appropriate identity, a “true sex.” One must attend to historical context and figurative language in any discussion of transsexuality. To read through the rhetoric to the meaningful content beneath is like reading through a person’s surface appearance to the “true sex” beneath. To read instead with attentiveness to the performative dimensions of language is to open up new imaginative possibilities that may lead to new forms of being. Woolf's Orlando teaches us not how to read a transsexual character as if she were a real person, but how to read a real person as a text.
It is that lesson I had to relearn thirty years later in reading Lili.
What Woolf does in Orlando is what Judith (Jack) Halberstam does in In a Queer Time and Place (2005). Reading the disturbing scene in Boys Don't Cry where Brandon Tina is exposed, Halberstam says we adopt Lana's gaze in this scene, we see Brandon as a castrated male, not as female. Lana's gaze is, Halberstam says, “a willingness to see what is not there (a condition of all fantasy), … a refusal to privilege the literal over the figurative” (87)—the kind of refusal the novel Orlando insists on.
To claim that transsexuality is a sign of liberation from conventional structures of gender is no more Halberstam's project than it is Woolf's. Reading transsexuality requires, instead, "queering" narrative. "Queer time" refers to modes of temporality outside the structure of reproductive and family time, of generational inheritance and capital accumulation—the very temporality Woolf exposes in Orlando. Woolf draws our attention to how time is organized rather than taking time as a “natural progression” (7), and to how sexual identity is organized by time. The point, for Woolf as for Halberstam, is not that transpeople hold the truth to their own life narratives, but that we do not want to force the transsubject to make sense in terms of conventional narratives. That is what I was initially doing to Lili, making her fit the dominant narratives of transgender familiar to me in the early 2000s.
A little over a year after the publication of Orlando, in March 1930, a Danish artist then living in Paris, entered Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. There the outpatient underwent a series of physical and psychological examinations, filled out a lengthy questionnaire, and was photographed, all in preparation for a series of surgeries, mostly in Dresden, that would usher Lili into life.
“There is very little that Lili can remember of this day, which henceforth she called the day of her proper birth.” [MIW 179]
Her life story was first published in Danish after her death in September 1931.
Initially I compared Lili’s narrative unfavorably with Woolf’s novel in a 2013 essay, published in a special issue on life writing in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, edited by the late John Paul Riquelme,
arguing that Woolf’s fictional work about a sex transformation is more true to the experience of transsexualism than Lili’s documentary narrative about an actual sex change. “Insofar as it reconceives the very concept and form of life writing,” I wrote, “Orlando radically refigures the narrative of transsexualism presented in Lili Elbe’s more conventional tale” (503). What I had failed to notice is that, aside from the subtitle of the English-language translation, the language of a sex change is never used in Lili’s story.
Working closely with Lili over the past six years, however, I have come to read her more generously, to see her life history as a modernist narrative more like Orlando than like a traditional memoir, biography, or case history, genres through which it is typically read. Man into Woman requires a new form for life writing as Woolf said she needed a new form for biography and the novel.
“On all sides writers are attempting what they cannot achieve, are forcing the form they use to contain a meaning which is strange to it.” (Virginia Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art”)
“What defines autobiography for the one who is reading is above all a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name.” (Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact”)
Given that the conventional form of a life narrative depends on the imperative that a person be self-identical across time, and that such continuity requires remembering the past in order to anticipate a future, the meaning of Lili’s life could not be forced into that form.
… my love for Germany, for Berlin, and above all for Dresden, is easy to understand; Andreas did not know these cities, these landscapes and the atmosphere of Germany, his acquaintance with them being of the most cursory character when he was in a dying condition. What a boon for me it was to be here, where it is only present and future for me, and where there is no past connected with Andreas! Here I have merely to fight for my future from thebasis of the present, unburdened by the painful past of another person. [MIW 276]
In Woolf’s 1927 essay,"The Narrow Bridge of Art," the metaphor of the narrow bridge signifies the passage to a new prose genre for the modernist era, "an age," Woolf says, "when we are not fast anchored where we are" (11). In Lili’s narrative, the metaphor of the bridge, likewise signifies a crossing of genres not genders. So often read as the passage from man to woman, the bridge signifies instead a new temporality produced by modern technology—including genital transformation surgery—an aesthetics that captures movement, crossings, transitions in an age “when we are not fast anchored where we are.”
"I feel like a bridge-builder. But it is a strange bridge that I am building, I stand on one of the banks, which is the present day. There I have driven in the first pile. And I must build it clear across to the other bank, which often I cannot see at all and sometimes only vaguely, and now and then in a dream. And then I often do not know whether the other bank is the past or the future. Frequently the question plagues me: Have I had only a past, or have I had no past at all? Or have I only a future without a past? [MIW 250]
Lili finds life-writing conventions (whether Rousseauian confessions, Gusdorfian autobiography, or sexological case histories) inadequate to the task of conveying her experience, an experience she felt was distorted by the title of her narrative.
”Fra Mand til Kvinde” er lidt tør og misvisende.
("From Man Into Woman" is a little dry and misleading.)
Som Titel havde jeg: ”Hvorledes Lili blev til en rigtig Pige”
(As the title I had: ”How Lili Became a Real Girl”)
[letter to Poul Knudsen, 31 January 1931]
In her very body and her body narrative, Lili embodies the kind of upheaval and reconstruction that defines modernism.
To appreciate Man into Woman as a modernist work, then, I had to attend more closely to its narrative form, not to aesthetic style or experimental language. To do that I began with what Michael Levenson has identified as a modernist genre, the case history.
In one sense, the sexological case history would seem not to be a modernist form insofar as sexologists from Richard von Krafft-Ebing to Magnus Hirschfeld were initially invested in the modern scientific project of classification, naming types of sexual perversions. And though Lili rejected that genre,
"And then, like so many sick persons who do not know what is really the matter with them, I began to procure all kinds of scientific books dealing with sexual problems. Within a short time I acquired an expert knowledge in this department, and knew many things of which the layman hardly dreams. But gradually it became clear to me that nothing which related to normal men and women could throw any light on my mysterious case." [100]
not so much her editor, Ernst Harthern (a.k.a. Niels Hoyer) and his fact-checker Kurt Warnekros, the doctor who performed the surgeries in Dresden.
Modernist writing, in contrast, was invested in thwarting classifications and generic conventions.
(words have yet to be coined for the selves have never yet been numbered)
[Orlando ms. 280]
Yet the sexologists’ case histories end up proliferating sexual types to such an extent that they actually upend typology. In his 1910 book Tranvestites, for example, Hirschfeld writes: “The separation of humanity into male and female halves belongs to the doctrines and guiding principles that have crossed over into the flesh and blood of every person.” Such deeply held truths “have become foundations of government, tradition, society, and religion” and thus are “doubly uncomfortable” when one is forced, through evidence of nature and science, to abandon them (17-18).
This passage has always reminded me of the dramatic monologue by the three virtues in Orlando, coming before Purity, Chastity and Modesty are banished by the cry for “truth, truth”—and the narrator must acknowledge Orlando is a she.
For there, not here dwell still in nest and boudoir, office and lawcourt
those who love us; those who honour us, virgins and city men; lawyers
and doctors; those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; those who praise without understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be praised) tribe of the respectable; … those still worship us, and with reason; for we have given them Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease. (Orlando 137)
In the end, Hirschfeld estimates there exits some 43 million types, defying any notion of a typology of sexual and gender identity.
43,046,721 combinations
This enormous number could at first be surprising,
since it equals approximately a third of the total
number of the world population …. [Hirschfeld 227]
Even Hirschfeld’s key term “transvestite” names not one type, the cross-dresser, but the many forms of cross-gender identification as well. (“Transsexual” didn’t come into popular use until c. 1950, by Hirschfeld’s protégé Harry Benjamin.)
Lili chafes against such institutional constraints enshrined in laws, cultural traditions, and social mores when, for example, she argues for legal papers giving her age as that which corresponds to her physical development as a woman.
"I know that only doctors can understand me when I speak of the question of my age. And a number of doctors have even promised to help me if I should later attempt to cut loose from Andreas in this respect, so that I am given an age that corresponds to my physical development as a woman. Others may ridicule this question or regard it with indifference; the important thing, in their view, is that one feels young and gives a youthful impression. I, on the other hand, believe just the contrary—that one is, in fact, actually as old as the official papers state, whether one feels young or old. … Don't forget: every time one books a room in an hotel, fills up a census paper, applies for a situation, or marries, one must always answer questions about age.” [MIW 245]
As newly female, her biological if not chronological age has changed in that the ovarian grafting she underwent was used in rejuvenation therapy.
The sexologists may have tried to sort the normal from the abnormal, but after listening to and reading hundreds of case histories, in the end they turned “sexual deviance” into “sexual difference,” as Anna Katharina Schaffner puts it in Modernism and Perversion. The categorizing impulse of modern science gives way to the diversifying expressions of modernist literature in the sexologists’ case studies. The perversions (homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetishism, voyeurism), Schaffner says, were part of the “modernist matrix” (10).
“Modern society is perverse … in actual fact and directly perverse.”
(Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, 47.)
The “transvestite” in particular came to preoccupy the imagination of modernists: Aldous Huxley’s “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” (1920), Sherwood Anderson's “The Man Who Became a Woman,” James Joyce’s Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (all 1922), Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Woolf's Orlando (both 1928), Hanns Heinz Ewers’s Fundvogel: Die Geschichte einer Wandlung [Fundvogel: The Story of a Change] (1929), and Djuana Barnes's Nightwood (1936). And if we stick with Hirschfeld’s original use of the term, we must include Fra Mand til Kvinde (1931).
Writing, then, is not to be associated simply with the feminine but rather with a more general transsexuality, an aesthetic elision of the conventional boundaries that delimit gender. (Michael North, Reading 1922 : A Return to the Scene of the Modern, 191)
Lili’s life narrative, however, deliberately departs from the case study, for that would have presented Lili as a “case,” a phenomenon. That is a category that Lili explicitly rejects: she was a woman, not a phenomenon.
"I am fighting against the prepossession of the Philistine who looks upon me as a phenomenon, as an abnormality. As I am now, I am a perfectly ordinary woman among other women. The scepticism of the Philistine, or rather the easy-going neighbours who only recognize the commonplace as the justification of life, who invest me and my fate with the quality of a sensation, often depresses me so severely that I find myself wanting to die and playing with the idea of suicide."[MIW 277]
Having no adequate models for writing this life, Lili had to invent a form, a new narrative that itself crosses boundaries of case history, memoir, and novel—that is, a more capacious form than the case history or autobiographical confession.
“Should I write a preface to the book, to explain why, when speaking of Andreas, I always use the third person, as in a novel? But, my dear friend, what other form of narrative could I have chosen? I could not relate the story of Andreas' life in the first person. Nor could I employ the third person when speaking of my own life and experiences, after Andreas had vanished. I was too close to everything. Hence, I often found it repugnant to speak of myself as of a third person.” [MIW 283]
The narrow bridge of art, the production of a new form capable of giving birth to a new being, makes the subject of the narrative a bridge-builder, as Lili calls herself, not her titular transition from man into woman. Lili’s narrative not only begins in medias res, it lingers there, on that temporal span. Lili insists throughout that she is a “creature without any past” (an awkward concession to make in a memoir). She was like “a newborn babe,” she says, created by the God-like professor who performed the surgeries.
“I was born under your auspices in Dresden, and my birthday is that April day on which you operated upon me.” [MIW 244]
Lili’s insistence that she cannot remember the past initially annoyed me as much as her self-conscious performance of a hyper femininity. But that’s because I was reading her narrative as about the life experiences of a transsexual, about a transition from one sex to another. That is the story Lili rejects when she disclaims the title Man into Woman. What I failed to see is that the narrative is not simply the recounting of a life but is engaged in particular rhetorical acts, such as disputing the accounts of others—as in “I am not a phenomenon”—and, most relevant to its importance in transgender history, inventing desirable futures.
Something I learned to see from reading Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001).
Man into Woman tells us not what it means for a man to become a woman; it tells us that Lili is a real girl. That is the naked and brutal truth.
"'I have read your confession, page for page, as you know, and I perceive something like timidity peeping out of avowal. You are a woman. Sometimes you are afraid of saying the last thing, for the last thing is the completely naked and the brutal. But all truth, in fact, is brutal. Much of it is even shameless, and there are very few people who can understand and endure the most intimate and perfect shame, that is the shame of shamelessness.'” [MIW 260]
In order to make that case, Lili must create a new temporality for “the new creature without a past” (MIW 217).
An artist at 42 can become a woman of 26; a 14-month-long existence can be deemed a whole human life.
But that I, Lili, am vital and have a right to life I have proved by living for fourteen months. It may be said that fourteen months is not much, but they seem to me like a whole and happy human life. The price which I have paid seems to me very small. [MIW 278]
The temporality of Lili’s life, like Orlando’s, is decidedly queer. The temporality of this life narrative immerses us in the moment, the moment when the “doctrines and guiding principles that have crossed over into the flesh and blood of every person” were no longer sustaining, when new ways of perceiving and experiencing embodiment were just beginning to take shape.
It was 1928. It was the present moment. No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? [Orlando 219]
Caught between old forms and the possibility of something new—that is the time sense of the modernist novel. It is what I have termed “writing in the lag.” Lili doesn’t represent the transgender subject of the past but rather captures the experience of a new identity at the very moment of its emergence.
When I prevaricated about calling Man into Woman modernist, I was prioritizing the formal experimentalism of avant-garde artists. Yet modernism actually hails from more mundane circumstances: everyday life in the early twentieth century, a life rendered miraculous through modern technologies—film and radio, telephones and phonographs, motor cars and airplanes, rejuvenation therapy and genital transformation surgery. Orlando steps into a lift at Marshall & Snelgrove department store and thinks: “The very fabric of life now … is magic. … here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying – but how it’s done I can’t even begin to wonder.” Lili’s transformation is likewise deemed a miracle.
If you had lived in the time of the old Greeks, perhaps they would have made you a demi-god. In the Middle Ages they would have burnt you, for miracles were then forbidden. But to-day doctors are, at any rate, permitted to accomplish something like a miracle. [MIW 54]
She always calls him her Professor, or else her miracle-man. About thepast she does not say a single word. It often seems to me as if she were without any past at all, as if she did not yet really believe in a present, as if she had been waiting for Kreutz, her miracle-man, in order to bring her to proper life. [MIW 138]
New technologies such as the camera or the radio change how we relate to our social and physical environment. Genital transformation surgeries function similarly; they don’t just change the genitals, they produce a perspectival shift. New visual, aural, and corporeal experiences created new sensory perceptions, new forms of imagination, and new states of consciousness conveyed in the aesthetic forms we call modernist. It is that understanding of modernism, the upheavals in sensory experience produced by modern everyday life and conveyed in modernist art, that makes Lili, her embodied life and her life narrative, modernist.