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Strolling through the Slums of the Past: Ralph Werther's Love Affair with Victorian Womanhood in Autobiography of an Androgyne

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Aaron Shaheen
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Abstract

Love Affair with Victorian Womanhood in Autobiography of an Androgyne This essay examines the role of flânerie in Ralph Werther's 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne. In his everyday male existence, Werther lived a life of self-alienation. Strolls through urban slums in search of same-sex pickups, however, allowed him to become the woman he felt himself to be at his core. Critical assessments of the memoir largely overlook his preferred model of femininity, which derived from Victorian-era assumptions that women were, psychologically and morally, little more than children. Autobiography shows that flânerie was an ontology built on a paradox, for just as the flâneur's static identity consists of constant movement, Werther based his identity on the notion that childhood, itself transitional and peripatetic, was the destination of Victorian womanhood. By aligning flânerie with Victorian womanhood we might better understand how the latter is not antithetical to modern notions of sexuality but is the foundation on which the parameters of modern sexuality were constructed.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 923 - 937
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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