Toward A Recognition of Androgyny

by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

In this quietly provocative book, Carolyn G. Heilbrun opens our eyes to the ways in which the concept of androgyny--the realization of man in woman and woman in man--has run, like a hidden river, from its source in pre-Hellenic myth through the literature of the Western world. The androgynous ideal shows itself to be a creative and civilizing force conducive to the survival of a truly human society.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Gender, Queer, Academic, LGBT, Psychology

189 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Carolyn Heilbrun was an American scholar, feminist critic, and novelist who wrote both influential academic works and popular mystery fiction. She built her career at Columbia University, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in its English department and eventually holding an endowed professorship. Trained in English literature, she focused on British modernism and feminist theory, publishing landmark works such as Writing a Woman's Life, which reshaped conversations about women's authorship and identity. Under the pseudonym Amanda Cross, she wrote a widely read series of Kate Fansler mystery novels that explored gender, power, and academic life with wit and insight. Her dual career allowed her to engage broad audiences while maintaining scholarly rigor, and her work was translated into numerous languages. Heilbrun was an outspoken advocate for women's intellectual and personal autonomy, addressing issues of aging, ambition, and independence. In addition to her scholarship and fiction, she helped shape feminist academic publishing through editorial work. Remembered for her candor, intelligence, and willingness to challenge institutional norms, she remains an important voice in feminist thought and modern American literature, leaving a lasting legacy through both scholarship and popular fiction for generations.

Reviews

[RB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Been reading this mostly for sentimental reasons.

It has been on my wish list since my Uni-graduation days back in 1996 and I recently found a copy of it, second hand, online. I just couldn’t resist buying it!

Reading this in this day and age with the background that I have, so many years after its original publication, makes it quite a dated read; nothing new in the terms of literary criticism, gender study or even feminism is brought to my attention. I've moved beyond this already.

Still, I think that this book has some merit today, especially for younger students of literary criticism and gender. Though I have to say that when picking it up, in order to get the most out of it, you would need to be well versed in the writings of Jane Austen, Emily Brontë,Virginia Woolf, Peter Abelard, George Eliot, Henry James, E.M. Forster just to name a few.

[Emily Cait · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly not too outdated despite being feminist lit crit from 1964...

[Tuesday · Rating 5 out of 5]

i <3 androgyny

weaves a beautiful argument for the necessity of androgyny/androgyny as a utopia where masculine and feminine energies harmonize.

i didn’t expect such heavy analysis of classic literature but it was a welcome surprise.

to the lighthouse is presented as an allegory for androgyny (the lighthouse as the goal and the goal as androgyny). mr and mrs ramsay representing the poles of masculinity and femininity and the lighthouse being both in its guiding light (feminine) and solid structure (masculine). it’s so funny because i just read that book for the first time very recently and had no idea this book would break it down. this perspective was enlightening and affirming for me. it spoke to something i hadn’t quite made sense of but had felt.

also funny that even before reading this i had decided to read wuthering heights as my next classic, which is mentioned here as another example of an androgynous novel. love that!

[Марија Николовска · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant retracing of androgyny throughout some anglophone literature. Truly an essay ahead of its time.

[Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heilbrun (who was mystery writer Amanda Cross) uses examples from literature to show patterns of androgyny. She also has a chapter on the Bloomsbury group, focusing primarily on Virgina Woolf. Austen, Bronte, Eliot, James, Hardy and many others are mentioned.

Androgyny: an ancient Greek word defining a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned. Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate.

I enjoyed this immensely...and will read the great classics through different eyes because of it. See also Yentl, My Brilliant Career and Tootsie.

[Christopher Nilssen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because Phyllis Webb mentioned reading it in Talking. In that book, Webb called it an “essay”, and that’s what it is, but it is also a 172-page book. When I think essay, I think a piece of writing I can get through before falling asleep at night. Androgyny was hard work, and I wasted my time. I say that because Heilbrun spends most of the text dissecting literature that is required reading, and I was unfamiliar with most of it.

Fortunately, I was able to get the gist of what she was saying: male novelists should seek inside themselves to temper their creative output with femininity, and female novelists the converse. I’m at a crossroads with my own work where I question the value of this, and of how far I should lean into my understanding of the feminine when writing. This is not something I’m conscious of in the first drafting stages: it comes out in editing. And I’m only conscious of it these days because it was so prevalent in the social media content I was poisoning my brain with for so many years.

I think, as a writer, that if one writes for men, one will get an audience made up of mostly men. If one writes for women, one will get an audience made up of mostly women. And if one tries to write right down the middle… what kind of audience will that produce? If I’m to write for myself, a man, then the choice for me is obvious. Anything else would require degrees of creative artifice that go beyond the basic energies expended in normal drafting, and it’s hard enough for me to muster even those precious sparks. Not only that, but such work would be inevitably disingenuous, to the point of pandering. I don’t think I’d like that one bit.

Perhaps it is enough simply to write, and let the cards fall where they may. If we, as a species, are destined to move towards a sexless, androgenous society that fully embraces the masculine and feminine to such a degree that the product becomes a perfectly balanced creature of aggression held in check by gentleness, then so be it. But that’s not the world we live in, not yet anyway.

[Alison Rice-Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very critical but fun to read

[Metin Dirim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Androjeni cinsiyetler arasında bir uzlaşma ruhunu ima eder; dahası kadın ise saldırgan, erkek ise şefkatli olabilecek bireylere kocaman bir deneyimler yelpazesinin açıldığını ima eder; insanların kendi yerlerini görgü kurallarından ve geleneklerden bağımsız seçebilecekleri bir spektrumu ima eder.

Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgeny