Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting

her because he recognizes her as a complete and sovereign being. Although Robin's gender identity is incidental

—or, one could say, hers in an androgyny that just happens to he gendered feminine

—the desire of Felix is heterosexualized in such a way that its object is but a part of plant, animal, and androgynous-human nature and not a person with a socially produced gender. She closed her eyes, and Felix, who had been looking into them intently because of their mysterious and shocking blue, found himself seeing them still faintly clear and timeless behind the lids

— the long unqualified range in the iris of the wild beasts who have not tamed the focus down to meet the human eye. The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is a beast turning human. Such a person's every moment will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory [...] (37) Robin Vote's subjectivity is not only not constrcuted by a heterosexual romance plot (as female subjectibities are in patriarchal texts), but, being the person desired by just about all characters in the novel, actually transcends all binarisms of gender and sexuality. What Barnes seems to suggest is that gender identity has nothing to do with desire or eroticism. This thesis is supported by several stories of the doctor, among them the one about the sailor falling in love with the French girl without legs

—only because of the way the sun was shining over her back. [...] which reminds me of Mademoiselle Basquette, who was damned from the waist down, a girl without legs, built like a medieval abuse. She used to wheel herself through the Pyrenees on a board. What there was of her was beautiful in a cheap traditional sort of way, the face that one sees on people who come to a racial, not a personal, amazement. [...] a sailor saw her one day and fell in love with her. She was going uphill and the sun was shining all over her back; it made a saddle across her bent neck and flickered along the curls of her head, gorgeous and bereft as the figurehead of a Norse vessel that the ship has abandoned. So he snatched her up, board and all, and took her away and had his will [...] (26) In the memorable final scene of the novel Robin, "in her boy's trousers" (169), tames Nora's dog by going down "on all fours, 116