[In the following review of Sexchanges, Patterson explores Gubar and Gilbert's emphasis on World War I as a cause and metaphor for the sexual struggle between men and women at the beginning of the twentieth century.]

Sexchanges explores revisions of gender that occurred in society and were reflected in literature from the 1880s through the 1930s. As in their first volume (1988), in volume two Gilbert and Gubar continue to associate sexual difference with sexual antagonism, although they focus here on the antagonism specifically related to redefinitions of gender and sexuality: “the sexes battle because sex roles change, but, when the sexes battle, sex itself (that is, eroticism) changes” (p. xi).

The book begins with an analysis of Rider Haggard's She (1887). The heroine, She-who-must-be-obeyed, is “a monstrously passionate woman with angelic charm” (p. 6) that no man can resist, the matriarchal ruler of an African kingdom, the possessor of the secret of immortality, all of which make her particularly threatening to the male who has been sent to destroy her. Her misrule is ended when she is annihilated by a “phallic pillar of fire” (p. 46), a denouement that resolves the problem of female power and restores patriarchal authority, thus alleviating male anxiety over the rising autonomy of the New Woman in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This apocalyptic destruction of the heroine sets the standard for the great male hostility toward female power that Gilbert and Gubar extract from every male text they analyze. Male perception of increasing female power as a threat is not matched, however, by female perception of the “fragility or even the fictionality” (p. xii) of that power. This “asymmetry” (an asymmetry that Gilbert and Gubar christen “the MLA syndrome,” “given the ambivalent responses to the visibility of women in our own largest professional organization,” p. 50) sets the measure for comparisons throughout the volume. In the literary battle between the sexes, the male strategy is to win by destroying the enemy; the female strategy is to win “without directly engaging in combat” (p. 50). Sometimes a female author's tactics of avoiding the enemy involve either the heroine's chosen self-destruction or her unavoidable destruction due to natural and cultural constraints placed on her eroticism. Sometimes a heroine is saved by repudiating eroticism, like the women in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland who reproduce through parthenogenesis. Sometimes female desire is ignored altogether or found “unsayable” (p. 168), as in works by Edith Wharton and Willa Cather who concentrate on analyzing the social aspects of the American version of “feminization and its discontents” (p. 120).

As the literary battle of the sexes moved into the modernist period, female authors began to imagine successful alternatives to the gender definitions that constrained their desire. Eschewing “the fatality of heterosexuality” (p. 193), the lesbian expatriates in Paris in the early part of the twentieth century devoted themselves to “reinventing gender” (p. 213) in life and in literature. Alienated from both male and female literary traditions, they developed the aesthetic strategy of collaboration, constructing “a literary tradition out of what they had: each other” (p. 222). (This strategy has been recuperated by Gilbert and Gubar through their own collaboration as feminist critics alienated from male critical traditions.) Many female modernists also engaged in cross-dressing, in their lives as well as in their texts, as a means of redressing gender difference and as a metaphor for transcending biological sexuality. Regarding costumes as selves (that is, as psychological identities) and selves as costumes, they changed both with equal ease, thus subverting the idea of categorical gender difference altogether, the source of that antagonism Gilbert and Gubar implicitly identify as the basis for sexual battles.

Undoubtedly chapter 7, “‘Soldier's Heart’: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War” (reprinted here from Signs, 8, No. 3 [1983]) will serve as the “heart” of all three volumes. The Great War provides the title for their work, “no man's land,” the strip of land between opposing trenches that no man could inhabit. The war also seems to be the source of their consistently militaristic rhetoric and serves as a paradigm for their theme, the battle of the sexes. They rewrite the history of the war, representing it not so much as a struggle between the Central and the Allied Powers as a struggle between male and female powers, “as if the Great War itself were primarily a climactic episode in a battle of the sexes that had already been raging for years” (p. 260, emphasis mine). The “unmanning terrors of combat” (p. 260) turned men into “no-men” “not men” (p. 260), while women assumed positions of power on the homefront—taking the jobs the men left behind—or served at the front as nurses and ambulance drivers with passive and dependent male patients, so reversing the normal social order. While men fell, women rose, much (contend Gilbert and Gubar) to women's satisfaction. Understandably women appreciated, even celebrated, the higher wages, the autonomy, the positions of power, the sense of participating in history that the war provided many women for the first time; unfortunately men often perceived women's attitudes toward their new power as ghoulish, depicting their female characters as vampires “who feed on wounds and are fertilized by blood” (p. 262). Gilbert and Gubar seem to concur in this opinion in their analysis of both male and female texts of the period, positing a female “sexual glee” in contrast to a male “sexual gloom” (p. 264). The proposition is a disturbing one. No wonder they ask for mercy in their preface: “Reader, we felt we had to write it, but please don't kill the messenger” (p. xvii).