To Carolyn Heilbrun … the very salvation of our species depends upon our "recognition of androgyny" as a conscious ideal; her book [Toward a Recognition of Androgyny] is a frank, passionate plea for us to move "away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen." Though she has constructed a critical-scholarly study to support her argument—she moves with dizzying rapidity from Homer to Joan Didion in 189 pages—the essence of her book is this imperative….

Heilbrun's is an interesting, lively, and valuable general introduction to a new way of perceiving our Western cultural tradition, with emphasis upon English literature from Clarissa Harlowe to Clarissa Dalloway. Fired by a passionate need to express her belief in the imminent doom of our species unless we move toward an androgynous ideal, she has done a fantastic amount of reading: She attempts a re-evaluation of the role of woman in practically everything ever written, Greek literature, the Bible, the epic, the romance, the plays of Shakespeare ("a genius as devoted to the androgynous ideal as anyone who has ever written"), and, of course, Richardson, Ibsen, James, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Lawrence.

It was a heroic undertaking and, having herself admitted that she was not entirely suited for the task, lacking much knowledge of history or language, she is certainly not to be blamed for having produced a sketchy book. The section on the Bloomsbury Group is most rewarding, because Heilbrun is convinced that Woolf and her friends were the first people to actually attempt, in daily life, the androgynous ideal.

We keep returning to that word, and we never know exactly what it means. Sometimes it means simply sexless, sometimes bisexual; sometimes it means (in the case of the novel) a work in which "the reader identifies with the male and female characters equally; in feminist novels only with the female hero." Sometimes it means simply a synthesis of Taoist opposites of activity/passivity, Yin/Yang, rationality, intuitions—which no sane person would quarrel with. Who is the admitted enemy of equilibrium in individual and society?

Unfortunately, when sexual politics enter literary criticism, and when unique works of art—"Women in Love," for instance—are to be put on trial, ransacked for stray sentences that appear to be chauvinistic, it is easy to lose one's equilibrium. Heilbrun has done an excellent job in avoiding the excesses of anti-Lawrentian feminist criticism, and her detailed analysis of "The Rainbow" is a sympathetic one, since Ursula answers the demands of a currently fashionable ethic (that a woman be "emancipated"—and that the esthetic beauty of the novel she happens to be portrayed in is simply a secondary consideration). Yet even Heilbrun is so biased against Lawrence generally as to fail to recognize that "Women in Love" is exactly the androgynous-ideal novel she might have praised. (p. 7)

It is puzzling that Heilbrun totally neglects a number of very important contemporary novelists who would have supported her thesis and who have written near-masterpieces. What of Sarah in John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," what of Martha Quest in Doris Lessing's "Children of Violence" series? What about Iris Murdoch, who has attempted to deal with androgyny in book after book? The young English novelist, Margaret Drabble, has written a number of important novels of this type, but she is not even mentioned. Heilbrun spends far too much time with Clarissa and Lovelace at the expense of Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor (there was a fierce imagination) and others. Malamud's "Pictures of Fidelman" attempts a bisexual-androgynous ideal but it is not mentioned either. Heilbrun concludes her study by saying that she is confident that "great androgynous works will soon be written"; she might more accurately have said greater. (pp. 7, 10)