Mademoiselle de Maupin

Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835-6). Novel by Théophile Gautier, whose ‘Préface’ is better known than the novel itself as a manifesto of l' art pour l'art. The novel was, however, much admired by Baudelaire and Balzac, and by fin-de-siècle writers and artists, both in France and elsewhere, as a pure expression of dilettantish and dandyish aestheticism and eroticism. It is destined to attract new readers because of its surprising and complex play with narrative procedures and with gender roles and identities. Gautier's refusal to let anything be what it appears was obviously part of his enfantterrible strategy to confuse and scandalize the flat-footed, moralizing bourgeois and humanitarian readers he stigmatized so wittily in his ‘Préface’. In alternating epistolary and third-person forms, the novel shows the hero d'Albert as in turn melancholic and idealistic, cynical and libertine (but always narcissistic), and above all desperate to break out of solipsism and monotony and find true beauty embodied in corporeal form. Based on the strange adventures of the 17th-c. bisexual Madeleine de Maupin, who dressed and behaved like a swash-buckling swordsman and horseman, Gautier's novel, in conscious imitation of As You Like It, plays on the erotic attractions and misunderstandings of a young foursome.

— Brian Rigby