Definition
The combination of male and female characteristics. The word itself combines the Greek words for male (andros) and female (gynous). The literary tradition rests on the myth, recorded in Plato, of an ancient unified being of whom male and female are displaced halves seeking in sexual contact a long lost union.
In its literary adaptation, androgyny assumes a number of forms. One is the motif of boy-girl twins. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Dickens's unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1838), and John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (1974) employ opposite-sex twins as embodiments of androgynous ideals.Another form is the motif of a woman disguised as a man (in Shakespeare's comedies), or man disguised as a woman (Thomas Branson's Charley's Aunt, 1892; Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, 1959). Still another is the androgynous hero: Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Orlando in Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), and the hero/heroine of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1968). These novels and others exemplify what the critic Carolyn Heilbrun calls "the androgynous ideal," based not upon the polarization of men and women, but on their integration.Feminist criticism has created a new sensitivity about the presence of androgyny in less obvious forms, for example in that most unlikely of places, the life of Ernest Hemingway. The critic Mark Spilka has argued that Hemingway's strenuously masculine exploits, such as bullfighting and big game hunting, were efforts to repress an attraction to androgyny deeply rooted in the writer's childhood.
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