As You Like It: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Expression of Desire

Abstract

In Thomas Hardy Writing Dress (2011), Simon Gatrell notes Ethelberta’s melodramatic and sensational tale of cross-dressing: one that she tells so well that her would-be lover Christopher Julian is convinced that it must have actually happened. Gatrell comments:

This is not quite so unintelligent a conclusion as it appears out of context; Hardy has one of the newspaper reviewers of her first public performance make the point that its chief interest lay in the success of ‘the method whereby the teller identifies herself with the leading character in the story’.

(Gatrell, 2011: 143)

He concludes that Ethelberta’s narrative may be regarded as ‘as a kind of wish-fulfilment; throughout the novel Hardy emphasizes that she has to forge a path for herself and her family in a society structured and ruled by men’ (144).¹ In taking on her father’s role in providing for her family, and managing to outmanoeuvre her suitors in the marriage game by skilfully playing the trump cards in her ‘hand’, Ethelberta’s desire to live ‘in excess of the real’, in Butler’s terms, leads her to engage in various forms of ‘transgression’, or ‘going beyond the limits’ in which she crosses classes, genders and, most strikingly perhaps, the line between what is real and what is possible. Her fantastical ‘self-fashioning’ in her life and in her art is the means by which Ethelberta ‘brings the elsewhere home’ (Butler, 2004: 217).

Fantasy is what establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points […] elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.

(Butler, 2004: 217)