Becoming Woman and Gender Typologies 205
Gender Typologies in the West and the Orient
Pickthall points to the separation of the sexes in Europe as a negative outcome
of limitless freedom which is also criticised by Shaw. The separation of the
sexes in turn leads to a tripartite typology for each gender. Pickthall introduces
this typology for Western women in The Valley of Kings. Iskender’s mother is
lamenting her son’s being disfavoured by the three missionary ladies after his
attempt to kiss Hilda, the youngest one:
“Ha, Carûlîn, most ancient virgin, thy stalk is a crane’s! There is neither
flesh nor blood in thee, but only gristle and dry skin. Thy heart is gall and
poison [...] O Jane, thou art a fruit all husk; half man, yet lacking man’s
core, half maid, yet lacking woman’s pulp!
“O poor little Hilda! Thou art a ripe fruit that whispers ‘Pluck me.’ But
those two sexless devils guard thee sleeplessly.41These three types in short are: the Virgin, the Androgynous or Hermaphrodite,
and the Ripe Fruit. A similar tripartite typology for men seems to be an inevi-
table outcome. Only two decades after Pickthall’s novel, for instance, we see
one suggested by Woolf for male authors in European literature: “Shakespeare
was androgynous; and so was Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and
Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Johnson had a dash too
much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust
was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman”.42
Lawrence, too, recognises androgyny in both sexes not as a fact but as a
fallacious reversal and role-play which begins in the imagination of men
primarily in “fulfilling the Christian love ideal”.43 He regards homosexual and
bisexual desires as perversities and argues for keeping “the sexes pure”.44 Yet, he
sees perfect “companionship between a man and a woman” as “an illusion”. 45
Man attains his fullness of being with a hero in his heart calling for full obe-
dience or comradeship (not homosexual but homosocial) balanced with a
successful heterosexual love which is secondary.46 For Lawrence, both ascetic
41 Pickthall, Valley of Kings, 2–3.
42 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 103.
43 D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922), 133, see also
136–7.
44 Ibid., 280.
45 Ibid., 132.
46 Ibid., 270.