If Wolfe's represents one possible modem extension or intonation of the genre of the sage, Germaine Greer's use of grotesque technological manipulation of the human body exemplifies how work in other forms of nonfiction can employ symbolical grotesques. At the close of her discussion in The Female Eunuch of the sexual stereotypes that confine women, Greer tells the tale of April Ashley, who was born male but so longed to become a woman that he had an operation to change his sex. "He wanted," she adds, "soft fabrics, jewels, furs, makeup, the love and protection of men" — all those things women typically desire, according to the stereotype. Impotent and not attracted to women, he also did not "particularly welcome homosexual addresses. He did not think of himself as a pervert, or even as a transvestite, but as a woman cruelly transmogrified into manhood.''
He finally found a doctor in Casablanca who proposed a solution acceptable to Ashley: He would remake him into a woman, or something very like a woman, slicing away the unnecessary apparatus and re-engineering it into something more desired. "He was to be castrated, and his penis used as the lining of a surgically constructed cleft, which would be a vagina. He would be infertile, but that has never affected the attribution of femininity." After hormone treatments had removed his beard and produced tiny breasts, April retumed to England, "became a model, and began to illustrate the feminine stereotype as he was perfectly qualified to do, for he was elegant, voluptuous, beautifully groomed, and in love with his own image."
Unfortunately for him (her?), April made the mistake of marrying an heir to a peerage, thus "acting out the highest achievement of the feminine dream, and went to live with him in a villa in Marbella." The marriage was never consummated, and Justice Omerod ruled that April remained in law a member of the male sex.
About this failed attempt to make something of oneself, Greer concludes that April's sexual incompetence as a woman is to be expected from a castrated male, but in fact it does not differ from the impotence of stereotypically "feminine women," who endure sexual relations without experiencing sexual desire. As long, says Greer, as the feminine stereotype "remains the definition of the female sex, April Ashley is a woman, regardless of the legal decision ensuing from her divorce. She is as much a casualty of the sexes as we all are. Disgraced, unsexed April Ashley is our sister and our symbol." Like the Victorian sage, Greer has taken a contemporary phenomenon, in this case an identifiable person, and by looking closely at this person, she has transformed him into a grotesque emblem of woman, a sexual Sign of the Times.
Similarities obviously exist between Greer's treatment of April Ashley and Wolfe's treatment of Carol Doda: Both take as the object of interpretation living human bodies that physicians, using the latest technology, have modified to attract men. Both writers make clear that although these technological reconstructions have made female celebrities of the people involved, the knife and the needle failed to create true sexuality; technology can parody, not create, the natural. Although both authors present suitably chilling descriptions of the procedures involved, they concentrate instead upon the meanings implicit in having chosen to undergo such changes and deformations. Both Greer and Wolfe, in other words, present a person as a grotesque Sign of the Times, an incarnation of the sickness of the age. Both authors emphasize that society dehumanizes women's bodies, and both derive this dehumanization at least in part from the power that men hold over women. Both, finally, employ their satirical grotesques as a means of discussing the nature of power and status in modem life.
Nonetheless, despite the fact that they have many of the same ideas and emphases, they use this technique of the sage for somewhat different literary purposes. Wolfe employs his symbolical grotesque as the stylistic and formal center of "The Put-Together Girl" — it essentially generates his entire essay — whereas Greer uses hers, much as Ruskin often does, to provide a set piece that sums up and extends all the ideas of a chapter. Furthermore, although one can justifiably categorize Wolfe's "Put-Together Girl" and similar essays as new or extended versions of the genre of the sage, one cannot do the same with The Female Eunuch, a work that exemplifies the ways individual devices of this genre have become common property in recent nonfiction. I must emphasize that when I claim one work belongs to the genre of the sage and another does not, I am not making judgments concerning their literary value or even their polemical effectiveness. In fact, in the case of Greer's and Wolfe's Put-Together Girls, I have chosen examples that both work equally well, though in quite different literary and ideological settings. If my hypothesis that defining such a genre makes for better reading of nonfiction proves correct, then I hope it would follow that one can cast light on related literary forms, including the novel, by showing how the sage has made particular techniques popular and available.
Last modified 19 March 2008