Article published In:
Keeping Ourselves Alive[Journal of Narrative and Life History 3:2/3] 1993
► pp. 197–208
[Journal of Narrative and Life History 3:2/3] 1993
► pp. 197–208
"The Farcical History of Richard Greenow": Aldous Huxley and the Anxieties of Male Authorship
Abstract
Aldous Huxley's first piece of published fiction, "The Farcical History of Richard Greenow" (1920), reveals anxieties about authorship and sexual iden-tity that were typical of modernist male writers. This article situates this nou-vella in two contexts. The first concerns Huxley's relationship with his aunt, novelist and social activist Mary Augusta Arnold Ward; the second centers on medical theories of homosexuality presented by Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion (1897). The protagonist calls himself a spiritual hermaphrodite because his body is inhabited by two personalities: a male intellectual and an increasingly aggressive female novelist and war propagandist named Pearl Bellairs. As a caricature of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Pearl reveals Huxley's antagonism toward powerful and popular women novelists. But she also provides a way for protag-onist and author to defend themselves against same-sex eroticism. Ideology does not determine desire. Rather, in the story, as in Sexual Inversion, fears aroused by certain desires seek expression in specific cultural forms. (Literary criticism, psychological approach; gender studies)
References (14)
Bedford, S. (1974). Aldous Huxley: A biography. New York: Knopf.
Colby, V. (1970). The singular anomaly: Women novelists of the nineteenth century. New York: New York University Press.
Craft, C. (1989). "Kiss me with those red lips": Gender and inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula. In E. Showalter (Ed.), Speaking of gender (pp. 216–242). New York: Routledge.
Dellamora, R. (1990). Masculine desire: The sexual politics of Victorian aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Ellis, H. (1937). Sexual inversion. In Studies in the psychology of sex (Vol. 11, Pt. 4, pp. 1–384). New York: Random House. (Original work published 1897)
Firchow, P. (1972). Aldous Huxley: Satirist and novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (1988). No man's land: The place of the woman writer in the twentieth century: Vol. 1. The war of the words. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
(1989). No man's land: The place of the woman writer in the twentieth century: Vol. 2. Sexchanges. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Grosskurth, P. (1980). Havelock Ellis. New York: Knopf.
Huxley, A. (1920). The farcical history of Richard Greenow. In Limbo (pp. 1–115). London: Chatto & Windus.
(1929). Fashions in love. In Do what you will (pp. 143–155). New York: Doubleday.
(1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley G. Smith, Ed.). London: Chatto & Windus.
Robinson, P. A. (1973). Havelock Ellis and modern sexual theory. Salmagundi, 211, 27–62.
Sutherland, J. (1990). Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, preeminent Edwardian. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.