It requires
a very strong impetus to go against this compact social force which, on every
side, constrains the individual into the paths of heterosexual love. That
impetus […] can only be supplied by a fundamental—usually, it is probable,
inborn—perversion of the sexual instinct, rendering the individual organically
abnormal. It is with this fundamental abnormality, usually called sexual
inversion, that we shall here be concerned.[1]
Katherine Mansfield articulates the traditionalist theory of
sexual inversion in her short story, ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’. Written early
in 1918, it was first published in a small, privately printed edition;
Mansfield’s publisher insisted that the full text be expurgated before it would
be included in her 1920 collection, Bliss
and Other Stories.[2] The story centres on the
experiences of the male narrator, Raoul Duquette, who first introduces himself
as a ‘Parisian, a true Parisian.’(p. 125). We soon find out he is also a
‘gigolo, literary dilettante, homosexual, and liar.’[3] He later asserts that he
is ‘[a] little paid guide to the night pleasures of Paris.’ (p. 132). Mansfield’s
figuration of gender relationships subscribes to the popular late-nineteenth
century view of homosexuality as an inversion in her short story, through the
representation of androgyny, inverted gendered behaviours and explicitly
homosexual relationships.
Raoul’s original description of himself challenges gender
norms through his distinctly androgynous appearance. He describes himself as:
[L]ittle and light with an olive
skin, black eyes with long lashes, black silky hair cut short, tiny square
teeth that show when I smile. My hands are supple and small… I confess, without
my clothes I am rather charming. Plump, almost like a girl, with smooth
shoulders, and I wear a thin gold bracelet above my left elbow. (p. 128)
His appearance is overwhelmingly characterised by smallness,
daintiness, and femininity. The ‘long lashes’, ‘silky hair’, small and supple
hands and ‘smooth shoulders’ are all suggestively female traits, and conventionally
attractive ones at that. He lists the things he is given by women: ‘silk
underwear’, ‘gloves and powder boxes and a manicure set, perfumes, very good
soap’ (p. 127) – all particularly female-gendered items. Yet Raoul is never coy
about his own identity as a male. He expresses:
‘I am a young man who has his own
flat. I write for two newspapers. I am going in for serious literature. I am
starting a serious career.’ (p. 127)
The resulting androgyny draws attention to a complex
representation of gender, but also to the conventional ideology of the
homosexual as having an excess of femininity, as being a woman inside a man’s
body. Raoul is overwhelmingly effeminate– further exemplified in his role as a prostitute.
The representation of Raoul as paid gigolo, as an
objectified, sexualised, individual, brings complexities to the figuration of
gender relationships. Raoul boasts that
he has ‘never yet made the first advances to any woman’, that he is ‘rich,
rich’, and that yet ‘nothing is paid for’ (p. 127). Mansfield articulates a
world in which women are dominant, women own the wealth, and women have the
agency to hire a man for his sexual services. Raoul lists the range of women
who have approached him for sex:
[F]rom little prostitutes and kept
women and elderly widows and shop girls and wives of respectable men, and even
advanced modern literary ladies at the most select dinners and soirées… I’ve
met invariably with not only the same readiness, but with the same positive
invitation. (p. 127)
Sinisterly, Raoul asserts that if he ever finds himself in
need of ‘right-down cash – well, there’s always an African laundress and an
outhouse, and I am very frank and bon
enfant about plenty of sugar on the little fried cake afterwards.’ (127). He
refers to his sexual abuse by a woman as a young child and its impact on his
current state of prostituting himself. Gender relationships are darkly
inverted; where traditionally the victim of rape is female, and the aggressor
is male, in Mansfield’s short story, the woman becomes the dangerous sexual
aggressor and Raoul as a male child becomes the victim of sexual abuse. Mansfield
challenges gender stereotypes, but only to an extent – the female character who
is guilty of sexually abusing the young Raoul is also ‘African’, asserting that
this sort of behaviour is not carried out by women in general, but by the dark, dangerous ‘other’ woman. Raoul’s
role as desired object places him as a female-gendered character, as Mansfield
inverts traditional gender relationships. This further highlights the
underlying representation of Raoul as the sexual invert.
In ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’, Raoul is in love with another
man, Dick Harmon. The heavily homoerotic language in the text depicts a
male-to-male homosexual relationship. Nevertheless, Raoul’s relationship with
Dick is highly resonant of a heterosexual relationship, with Raoul again taking
on the role of sexual invert, of a woman within a man’s body. Dick maintains
the masculine position of authority and dominance, whilst Raoul is subservient,
a ‘little perfumed fox-terrier’ (p. 131), unconditionally subservient to his
master. Raoul is flirty and coquettish around Dick; he is described as ‘making
a pretty mouth at him’ (p. 129). The word ‘pretty’ invokes images of
femininity, delicacy and diminution,[4] and this palpably feminine
language is seen throughout the short story. Most notably, when Dick informs
Raoul that he will be leaving Paris the following day, Raoul draws direct
parallels with his own experience and that of a woman: ‘I felt hurt. I felt as
a woman must feel when a man takes out his watch and remembers an appointment
that cannot possibly concern her, except that its claim is the stronger.’ (p.
131) The language positions Raoul’s identity with that of a woman’s, and
articulates a strongly-gendered scenario in which the man absently disregards
the feminine who has lesser claim upon him, verbalising a world of business and
appointments in which women have no place.
Katherine Mansfield presents a heteronormative world in her
short story, ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’. Whilst for her time she explores and
challenges ground-breaking and radical issues, including female sexuality,
androgyny and homosexuality, for a twenty-first century readership, her representation
of homosexuality as sexual inversion is somewhat conservative. The figuration
of gender relationships in her work do much to push social and cultural
boundaries, but her traditionalist representation of homosexuality firmly
grounds her in her time.
Blog post by Holly Anderson, MA English Literature student at Cardiff University.
[1] Ellis, Havelock
(1927), Studies in
the Psychology of Sex Volume II: Sexual Inversion. 3rd Ed.
Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13611/13611-h/13611-h.htm#2_CHAPTER_I
[accessed 20 February 17].
[2] Katherine Mansfield, ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’ in Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories,
ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (New York; London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), p. 121,
n. †. All further references are to
this edition.
[3]
Sarah Henstra, ‘Looking the Part: Performative Narration in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Katherine Mansfield’s “Je
Ne Parle Pas Français”’, Twentieth-Century
Literature, 46.2 (2000), 125-149 (p. 127).
[4] ‘pretty’, adj., 2.a, OED Online
(2017). Available at: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/151023?rskey=B5ZQ8d&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid
[accessed 16 Feb. 17].
