Offprinted from

MO DERN LANG UAGE REVIEW

VO L UM E 107, PA RT 1

JANUARY 2012

© Modern Humanities Research Association 

J A NU ARY V  .  P 

ANDROGYNOUS DESIRE: FLAUBERT, JOYCE, PUIG,

AND THE TRADITION OF THE FEMALE QUIXOTE
is article examines the literary tradition of the female Quixote, its develop-
ment across the centuries, and its complex interrelations in Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary, the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses (), and Puig’s e Buenos
Aires Affair (). It takes as a point of departure Kierkegaard’s famous call
in  for the mapping of a new novelistic sensibility founded on the figure of
the lady reader, through which Cervantes’s Don Quixote undergoes a gender
metamorphosis. e article begins with a literary overview of the early history
of female Quixotism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe in order
to demonstrate that the foundations of the tradition had already been laid long
before Kierkegaard. It elevates Madame Bovary as a landmark novel which
staked out new territory in the textual aerlife of Don Quixote and marked
the important shi from Quixotism to a new form of illusion known as Bo-
varysm. It will provide a detailed analysis of the pervasive impact of Flaubert’s
legacy in Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa’ and Puig’s e Buenos Aires Affair, both of which
adopted Emma Bovary’s romantic and escapist disposition and took to further
lengths her transgressive sexual behaviour, which resulted in the well-known
censorship cases of Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and e Buenos Aires Affair. By
showing that Flaubert’s Emma Bovary reignited the debate about the dangers
entailed in fiction-reading, the article reveals that Joyce’s and Puig’s Quixotic
heroines followed in the footsteps of their French sister as they were in turn
accused of obscenity and corrupting young, vulnerable readers. In sum, this
triple comparative study demonstrates that Flaubert not only invested his fe-
male Quixote with the archetypal attributes of her male ancestor, associated
with delusion, addiction to reading, and the reality versus illusion motif, but
also reinforced a new gender dimension linked to androgyny, sexual desire,
and eroticism, which has been continued and developed by Joyce and Puig in
twentieth-century Irish and Latin American literature.

Mapping the Novelistic Continent of the Female Quixote

‘It is remarkable that the whole of European literature lacks a feminine
counterpart to Don Quixote’, proclaimed the Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard in . ‘May not the time for this be coming, may not the
continent of sentimentality yet be discovered?’ Kierkegaard’s urgent call for
 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. by David Swenson and Lillian Swenson (London: Oxford
University Press, ), p. .

Modern Language Review,  (), –

© Modern Humanities Research Association 
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
Western literature to extend its domains to seemingly uncharted territories
and discover a new sentimental geography does not necessarily mean that
the sphere of female subjectivity had been previously unexplored. It does,
however, point to a site informed purely by gender demanding ‘a feminine
counterpart to Don Quixote’, which is undoubtedly centred on the figure
of the lady reader. A female Quixote, then, would entail the invention
of a heroine whose head has been turned by over-reading—and, later,
by a consumption of popular culture generally—and perceives the world
refracted through the prism of her fictional code. Equally significant is the
subject of gender transformation and the implications this has for the field
of sexuality as a female Quixote emerges as a double-gendered identity.
It must be stressed, however, that Kierkegaard’s hoped-for ‘continent of
sentimentality’ was far from uncharted, but had already been mapped out in
late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and Britain. e book that
laid the foundations of this novelistic tradition is Adrien omas Perdoux
de Subligny’s pioneering La Fausse Clélie (; e Mock-Clelia; or, Madam
Quixote, ). Written with unmistakable satirical and parodic purposes,
e Mock-Clelia chronicles the adventures of Mademoiselle Juliette d’Arviane,
whose intellect has been clouded by her excessive diet of French historical
romances—chiefly Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie—which has led her to
believe she is the Roman heroine Clelia. At this early stage in the tradition of
the female Quixote, the principal aim of the book is to amuse and entertain
the reader by poking fun at the eccentricities and anachronisms of French
romances, although Nicholas Paige has recently claimed that La Fausse Clélie
offers ‘a particularly instructive lesson on how to read in a world dominated
by concerns of referentiality’. Pierre de Marivaux may also be regarded as
one of the founding fathers of the tradition. is is attested in his novel
Pharsamon, ou Les Nouvelles Folies romanesques (–; Pharsamond;
or, e New Knight-Errant, ), an anti-roman written in the tradition of
Cervantes whose main aim was to offer a parody of the medieval roman de
chevalerie. Gérard Genette has claimed that Pharsamon introduced the female
Quixote Cidalise, who stands as one of the ‘chaînons manquants entre Don
Quichotte et Madame Bovary’. Marivaux’s description of Cidalise offers the
unmistakable quixotic portrait of a deluded heroine whose imagination has
been saturated by the fantastic stories she has read:
Notre jeune demoiselle avait le cerveau encore plus dérangé que Pharsamon, quoique
le jeune homme fût passablement extravagant. Les romans ne lui avaient pas manqué
non plus qu’à lui, mais l’imagination d’une femme, dans ces sortes de lectures, soit
 Nicholas Paige, ‘Relearning to Read: Truth and Reference in Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie’, in e
Art of Instruction: Essays on Pedagogy and Literature in Seventeenth Century France, ed. by Anne L.
Birberick (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, ), pp. – (p. ).
 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, ), p. .
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dit sans les offenser, va bien plus vite que celle d’un homme, et en est bien plus tôt
remplie.

Written in the wake of Don Quixote, e Mock-Clelia, and Pharsamon,

Charlotte Lennox’s much-acclaimed e Female Quixote; or, e Adventures
of Arabella (, a work that received at the time the unconditional praise and
support of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson) emerges as yet another
variation of the same literary game, another Quixote in petticoats, another
young lady’s addiction to reading, another female intellect that has been pol-
luted by the powerful effects of romances. Yet Lennox incorporated into the
novel a moral note which is related to the education of women at this crucial
historical time. In this sense, female Quixotism took a fundamental turn in
eighteenth-century Britain as it became the property of women writers writ-
ing about women readers in a larger attempt to examine the social and moral
effects that prose fiction exerted on the female imagination. ‘By gendering
the novel reader female’, remarks William Warner, ‘Lennox incorporates the
fantasm of the woman novel reader into her narrative.’ Jacqueline Pearson
has also drawn attention to the growth of female reading audiences during
this important historical juncture: ‘Between  and the mid s literacy
among women increased and women became increasingly significant in the
literary marketplace.’ We cannot avoid mentioning, at the same time, the
crucial fact that the ‘fantasm’ of the female reader remains at the heart of
Mary Wollstonecra’s didactic and unfinished novel Maria; or, e Wrongs
of Woman (). It must be underlined, none the less, that Wollstonecra’s
novel lacks the humorous vein of Lennox’s in that it remains an acid attack
on the subject of novel-reading in particular and a reflection on women’s
education in general, a topic that she had fervently explored in oughts
on the Education of Daughters (), A Vindication of the Rights of Women
(), and e Female Reader (). is debate about the perils associated
with reading ‘corrupting’ fiction occupied centre stage in the works of female
eighteenth-century writers during this period, characterized by the rise of the
novel. As David Marshall suggests, ‘Fears about the risks of reading novels,
however, even works whose content would not be considered harmful, are
also reflected in the period’s renewed interest in the figure of Don Quixote.’
e heyday of Don Quixote as a widespread metaphor that best encapsu-
 Marivaux, as quoted by Genette, p. .
 William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: e Elevation of the Novel in Britain (–)
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), p. .
 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain –: A Dangerous Recreation (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .
 Equally significant is the fact that Wollstonecra was viewed at the time as a transgressive
woman, in other words, a female Quixote.
 David Marshall, e Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, – (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. .
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
lated the cultural anxieties associated with over-reading at the time became a
commonplace trope that circulated under various forms, allowing writers to
exploit its comic and satiric narrative potential, as well as giving free rein to
moralists and educators in their overt condemnation of the supposedly harm-
ful effects that novels may exert on lady readers who suffered from extreme
sensitivity. e development and consolidation of the topos of the female
Quixote reached its apotheosis in Jane Austen’s first novel Northanger Ab-
bey (–), in which the story’s heroine, Catherine Morland, has been led
astray by her avid reading of Gothic romances. Moreover, Austen is able dely
to incorporate Lennox’s and Wollstonecra’s concerns about novel-reading
in a book strewn with irony, humour, and self-conscious literary devices.
e decisive point to highlight at this stage is that the transformation of a
male into a female Quixote did not happen overnight, but rather as part of an
embryonic development in which were laid the foundations for the various
layers and features of a new novelistic tradition. Female Quixotes, then, seek
to replace their mundane lives devoid of excitement, happiness, and/or fulfil-
ment with the fantastic and romanticized world offered by the books that have
sparked a new fire in their wild imaginations. ‘e world’s male chivalry has
perished out’, declared the Victorian writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘but
women are knights-errant to the last; | And if Cervantes had been Shakespeare
too, | He had made his Don a Donna.’ Barrett Browning’s new age of female
chivalry, or Kierkegaard’s new ‘continent of sentimentality’, has already been
discovered, and the pioneering novels of French and British seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century writers served as the fertile ground in which the seeds
of the tradition of the female Quixote were sown, an auspicious climate that
patiently nurtured its most enduring flower: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. e
critic Harry Levin, for example, has interpreted Kierkegaard’s emphatic call
as ‘prophetic’ since it heralded the arrival of ‘the most acclaimed female
Quixote, Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary’, the most celebrated of all the
female bifurcations of Don Quixote. If the continent of Quixotic sentimenta-
lity had been previously charted by Subligny, Marivaux, Lennox, and Austen,
this promising map was consolidated and expanded by the long-lasting effect
that the tradition of Bovarysm has exerted throughout Western literature.
Gérard Genette argues that the historical importance of pioneering works
such as Lennox’s and Marivaux’s resides in the fact that they initiated the
evolution that was to lead away from ‘[le] quichottisme proprement dit à cette
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. by Margaret Reynolds (Athens: Ohio University
Press, ), p. .
 Harry Levin, e Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University
Press, ), p. .
 Alexander Welsh, ‘e Influence of Cervantes’, in e Cambridge Companion to Cervantes,
ed. by Anthony J. Cascardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) pp. – (p. ).
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forme d’illusion réputée spécifiquement féminine qu’on appellera plus tard le

bovarysme’.
But the novelistic evolution from Quixotism to Bovarysm, I shall argue
here, has also produced complex variations, thus setting a new and evolving
structure upon the edifice that had been erected in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. Above all, Flaubert is concerned with the representation of
the Quixotic woman in literature through the effeminate stylistic mask of a
male author. Whereas in eighteenth-century Britain the figure of the female
Quixote is intertwined with the emerging figure of the woman writer—
as in Lennox and Austen—in nineteenth-century France, on the contrary,
Flaubert’s main stylistic strategy rests on the male writer’s ability to vent-
riloquize a female voice. Harry Levin, once again, has applauded Flaubert’s
decision to cross-gender, stressing that the complexity of a figure such as the
female Quixote lies in its ambivalent fusion of both genders: ‘To set forth
what Kierkegaard had spied out, to invade the continent of sentimentality, to
create a female Quixote—mock-romantic where Cervantes had been mock-
heroic—was a man’s job.’ For Levin, therefore, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is
a masterpiece of female impersonation. Meanwhile, Flaubert also introduced
a sexualized element in the figure of the adulterous Emma Bovary, which
had a long-lasting impact in the subsequent development of the tradition.
is significant shi becomes an influential fictional strand that is directly
related to an obsessive preoccupation with sexual gratification in ‘Nausicaa’
and e Buenos Aires Affair, as Joyce’s and Puig’s Quixotic heroines are not
only addicted to sentimental fiction but also presented as extremely sexualized
characters.
A specific type of female consciousness is therefore born out of Don Quix-
ote’s idealism, voracious reading of romances, daydreaming, and exclusive
pursuit of romantic beliefs. By becoming an androgynous character the fe-
male Quixote transgresses gender behaviour norms in her incarnation of Don
Quixote, a hero who symbolizes the freedom of the imagination, reinvention
through fiction, and the manipulation of fiction as a foil to authorize subver-
sive behaviour. Just as in Ulysses Leopold Bloom becomes the archetypical
figure for the ‘new womanly man’, so a female Quixote would therefore
emerge as the ‘new manly woman’ or, as Baudelaire convincingly put it in
relation to Emma Bovary, ‘a bizarre androgyne’. e new Quixotic wo-
man moves centre stage in the post-Cervantes novelistic project of European
 Genette, p. .
 Levin, p. .
 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler (London: Bodley Head, ), . –.
Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois,  vols (Paris: Gallimard, –),
, .
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
and Latin American writers who astutely recognized the inherent narrative
potential implicit in the creation of transvestite subjectivities.
It was henceforth crucial that female Quixotes, in accordance with their
status as the ‘new manly woman’, inherited Don Quixote’s addictive obsession
with a fantasy world and developed a form of romantic illusion that furnished
them with their own sentimental adventures and elevated them as the parodic
avatars of a renewed formula of female chivalry. In this way, Emma Bovary,
Gerty MacDowell, and Gladys D’Onofrio (the respective heroines of Madame
Bovary, ‘Nausicaa’, and e Buenos Aires Affair) stand as female voices im-
personated by three male writers. So in this respect the issue of transvestism
goes both ways: gender binary oppositions are disintegrated through Don
Quixote’s undergoing a sexual transformation as a female heroine, and also
through Flaubert’s, Joyce’s, and Puig’s masterful ventriloquizing of female
voices. e female trinity of Emma, Gerty, and Gladys emerges as a masculine
fantasy, or more precisely, as the female parodies of a male parody (Don
Quixote) by three male authors.

Female Quixotes and Censorship

At the same time Flaubert’s female Quixote has become synonymous with the
legal discourse of censorship associated with the trial and ensuing publica-
tion of Madame Bovary. In Napoleon III’s (Louis-Napoléon) Second French
Republic (–) the issue of art and morality was at the forefront of a
government that would relentlessly pursue books which were considered im-
moral. Flaubert’s novel reignited the moral debate concerning the dangers
entailed in reading corrupting books, especially those that might pervert the
minds of young lady readers. Had not Emma Bovary’s sentimental education
been responsible for her romantic delusions and her yearning for the idealized
life which her bourgeois, provincial existence could not afford her? Would
female readers not seek to emulate Emma’s adulterous liaisons? As Jacqueline
Pearson reminds us, ‘female readers were kept in a state of anxiety about how
much to read, what to read, where and when to read. Even liberals believed
it was necessary to control access to literature for women, especially young
women’. Reality holds up a mirror to art: just as Emma succumbed to the
platitudes of romantic fiction, so moralists claimed that young and married
women readers would be misled by Emma’s foolish behaviour.
In December  Flaubert and the editor of La Revue de Paris, Maxime
Du Camp, were charged with outraging public and religious morals. On a
political level what is also central here is that the government of Napoleon III,
as Frederick Brown points out, ‘regarded La Revue as a hostile camp on ac-
 Pearson, p. .
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count of its having published writers who, though not chiefly concerned with
politics, had resigned university positions aer the coup d’état’. Flaubert’s
trial took place in  under the imperial prosecution of Ernest Pinard, who,
not insignificantly, would also act as prosecutor in the trial of Baudelaire’s Les
Fleurs du mal () later that year. At the heart of Pinard’s legal case was the
crucial fact that Madame Bovary lacked a character—usually portrayed as the
‘Reasoner’ in the hugely popular plays of Dumas fils—able to censure Emma’s
adultery: ‘Qui peut condanner cette femme dans le livre? Personne. Telle est la
conclusion. Il n’y a pas dans le livre un personnage qui puisse la condanner.’
His unbending conclusion was that there was no moral purpose underpin-
ning the book as a whole. Indeed, the moralizing Pinard depicted Madame
Bovary as a dangerous novel which could prove extremely harmful if it fell
into the hands of susceptible lady readers suffering from excessive sensibility.
For the imperial prosecutor, therefore, the crucial question at this stage was
‘qui est-ce qui lit le roman de M. Flaubert?’. An alarmed Pinard maintained
that the principal readership of Flaubert’s novel was not constituted by men
who ‘s’occupent d’économie politique ou sociale’ (OC, ), warning that,
instead, the pages of Madame Bovary would be turned by the hands of ‘jeunes
filles, quelquefois de femmes mariées’, the same naive, young married wives
who, like Emma Bovary, would not be able to differentiate between reality
and illusion: ‘lorsque l’imagination aura été séduite, lorsque le cœur aura parlé
aux sens, est-ce que vous croyez qu’un raisonnement bien froid será bien fort
contre cette séduction des sens et du sentiment?’ (OC, ).
Yet the defence plea convincingly brought forward by Maître Jules Sénard—
an old friend of Dr Flaubert père—gave a twist to Pinard’s case by arguing
that Flaubert’s novel depicted ‘la vertu par l’horreur du vice’ (OC, ), and
that at the heart of the seemingly immoral book was a strong moral lesson, a
didactic principle that readers would, ultimately, be able to intuit and respond
to. In the end, Sénard’s strong defence plea successfully managed to acquit
Flaubert of the charge of publishing an immoral book, as it was announced in
the court’s verdict in February  (see OC, ). Still, it remains undeniable
that the trial brought instant notoriety to Flaubert, and that the history of Ma-
dame Bovary would thereaer be deeply embedded in the various intricacies
of the legal case and moral censorship.
Moreover, in the novelistic evolution from Quixotism to Bovarysm the
scandal of Madame Bovary anticipated the scandal of Ulysses, as history re-
 Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (London: Heinemann, ), p. .
 Flaubert, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bernard Masson,  vols (Paris: Seuil, ), , . Further
references will be cited parenthetically in the text. See also Brown, pp. –, for a general
overview of the trial; Dominick LaCapra’s comprehensive study, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca,
NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ); and Elisabeth Ladenson’s insightful study, Dirt
for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘Lolita’ (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell
University Press, ).
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
peated itself more than fiy years later with a direct descendant of Emma
Bovary, Gerty MacDowell, the limping heroine of ‘Nausicaa’ whose mind has
been ‘lamed’, and ‘painfully misled’—as R. Brandon Kershner puts it—by
her excessive reading of popular romances. e deluded Gerty MacDowell,
as Suzette Henke also claims, has been ‘brainwashed by popular culture’; ‘her
mind is saturated with the orts, scraps, and fragments of Victorian popular
culture’. us the lame Gerty becomes, via the intermediacy of Flaubert,
a twentieth-century female successor of Don Quixote, whose head has been
turned not by chivalric romances, but by the mellifluous prose style of ladies’
magazines, popular sentimental fiction, and a female-targeted consumerist
culture. From a moral standpoint, Gerty MacDowell has inherited Emma
Bovary’s egotistical impulses, libidinal desires, and transgressive sexual be-
haviour, as Gerty derives increasing pleasure from the famous masturbation
scene in ‘Nausicaa’, which eventually fell prey to the inquisitorial scrutiny of
the censor.
Indeed, the ‘Nausicaa’ episode was the detonator of a full-scale court suit
against Ulysses in the United States as one of the editors of the Little Re-
view, Margaret Anderson, had sent an unsolicited copy of their ‘Nausicaa’
instalment to the daughter of an eminent New York lawyer. e young lady
in question was neither impressed by Gerty’s exhibitionism—‘he [Bloom]
could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses
the skin [. . .] she let him and she saw that he saw’ (U, . –)—nor by
Bloom’s voyeurism and onanism: ‘Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed
his wet shirt. O Lord, that little limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy.
Aereffect not unpleasant. Still you have to get rid of it someway’ (U, .
–). e much-offended puritanical daughter dutifully protested to her
father, who in turn referred the whole matter to John Sumner, the secretary
of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. e main issue at stake
here, as Paul Vanderham makes clear, was that Sumner believed (like Ernest
Pinard in the trial of Madame Bovary) that Bloom’s masturbatory scene in
front of the not-so-innocent Gerty might reach—and therefore corrupt—the
minds of young lady readers:
[Sumner] believed that the episode of Ulysses before him constituted a double violation
of the young person he was sworn to protect. e first offence was committed when
the July–August instalment of Ulysses penetrated the domestic realm to corrupt the
lawyer’s daughter with a story of sexual perversity. [. . .] e gravity of the second
 R. B. Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder (Chapel Hill
and London: University of North Carolina Press, ), p. .
 Suzette Henke, ‘Gerty MacDowell: Joyce’s Sentimental Heroine’, in Women in Joyce, ed. by
Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (Brighton: Harvester Press, ), pp. – (pp. , ).
 Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: e Trials of ‘Ulysses’ (London: Macmillan,
), p. .
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offence undoubtedly lay not so much in Bloom’s immorality as in the young person’s
impurity: she was not the innocent of the Victorian imagination.

In the end, and in spite of John Quinn’s strong defence plea which argued
that ‘a young person would not understand the sex allusions and therefore
could not be corrupted by them’, Sumner’s legal prosecution of the Little
Review for publishing obscenity prevailed, and in February  Ulysses be-
came prohibited in the United States, a verdict that would not be overridden
for more than a decade. In this way, beneath the surface of Flaubert’s and
Joyce’s trials emerges a complex pattern that draws a correlation between the
modern figure of the female Quixote and the larger forces of censorship, a
relationship that becomes even more discernible when a third scandal takes
place. Charges of immorality and political subversion were brought against
Manuel Puig, one of the most important post-Boom Latin American writers.
In this way, e Buenos Aires Affair was added to the international blacklist
of immoral novels and followed in the legal footsteps of Madame Bovary and
Ulysses.
e Buenos Aires Affair unfolds a detective story in which Gladys D’Onofrio,
an artist manquée, is kidnapped by her sadist lover, the successful art critic
Leopoldo Druscovich. Although the heroine mysteriously disappears in the
first chapter of the book, this is not a conventional detective thriller, but
rather a deeper exploration of the character’s libidinal obsessions, aspirations,
and childhood traumas set against the background of Argentina’s political
turmoil in the s. In effect, the novel fell under the scrutiny of the cen-
sorship policy during the government of Juan Domingo Perón. Puig’s official
biographer and translator, Suzanne Jill Levine, states that in April  ‘the
book was withdrawn from circulation and in April released in censored form:
entire paragraphs with references to Perón, or to police and military brutality
during the first Peronist era, were whited out, as were “obscene” or “perverse”
sexual details’. e following year, adds Levine, ‘the situation grew worse
and the book was banned as pornography. Words became actions when the
Morality Division of the Federal Police sequestered all copies of the novel
in January ’. e so-called ‘obscene’ sexual details that the Morality
Division found particularly unpalatable were the explicit masturbation scenes
of Gladys D’Onofrio, which were signalled in the text through a stream of
experimental footnotes that culminated in Gladys’s sexual climax. (Molly
 Ibid., pp. –.
 Ibid., p. .
 Suzanne Jill Levine, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), p. .
 Ibid.
 See Manuel Puig, e Buenos Aires Affair: novela policial (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, ),
pp. –.
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
Bloom’s orgasmic, unpunctuated soliloquy may well have provided the model
for these erotic passages.) We can then deduce that the evolution from Quix-
otism to Bovarysm and MacDowellism, or the diasporic movement of Don
Quixote into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across both sides of the
Atlantic, has been marked by a reception history characterized by suppression
and prohibition as the relationship between Flaubert, Joyce, and Puig is trian-
gulated by censorship and fused in a legal dictum that labelled their novels as
filthy, obscene, and pornographic.
Like her French and Irish predecessors, Puig’s heroine Gladys is not only
an eager devotee of ladies’ journals and sentimental fiction but also a con-
summate fan of radio soap operas and romantic Hollywood movies starring
female luminaries such as Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. Gladys shares
the sexual desires of her French and Irish sisters (which also differentiates
them from the virtuous, desexualized female Quixotes of the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century French and English traditions) and overtly engages
in scenes of genital pleasure which raised many eyebrows in s Argentina.
In her comparative study of ‘Nausicaa’ and e Lamplighter, for example,
Kimberly Devlin highlights the crucial fact that ‘Joyce endows Gerty [. . .]
with one attribute missing from Cummin’s heroine and anti-heroine alike:
the capacity to feel sexual desire for the hero’. e sexual promiscuousness
implicit in Emma’s, Gerty’s, and Gladys’s transgressive desire—we can think
of Emma’s veiled cab ride with her new lover Léon through the streets of
Rouen, Gerty’s awareness of Bloom’s masturbation and her rapturous orgas-
mic Os, and Gladys’s sexual permissiveness and genital gratification—became
one of the most significant moral predicaments about the dangers of reading
corrupting books.

‘Madame Bovary est restée un homme’ (Baudelaire)

If from a very early age Joyce revealed his predilection for the Greek hero
Ulysses, which stemmed from his reading of Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses,
Flaubert had shown a similar predilection for Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which
he also encountered in an abridged children’s version. From then on, the
looming figure of the knight of the sad countenance exerted a pervasive in-
fluence in Flaubert’s writing. It is well documented that Flaubert referred
to Cervantes extensively throughout his correspondence, declaring to Louise
Colet in November  (as he was writing Chapter  of Madame Bovary):
‘En fait de lectures, je ne dé-lis pas Rabelais et Don Quichotte, le dimanche,
avec Bouilhet.’ What Flaubert most admired in Cervantes was his ‘per-
 Kimberly Devlin, ‘e Romance Heroine Exposed: “Nausicaa” and e Lamplighter’, James
Joyce Quarterly,  (), – (pp. –).
 Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. by Jean Bruneau,  vols (Paris: Gallimard, ), , .
            -       

pétuelle fusion de l’illusion et de la réalité qui en fait un livre si comique et si

poétique’. In effect, the fusional process through which the illusory world of
chivalric romances comes face to face with the prosaic reality of seventeenth-
century Spain became the cornerstone of Flaubert’s post-Cervantes novelistic
project, only the anachronistic world of armed knights has been replaced
by the high-flown illusions of romantic literature. On a larger transtextual
and transcultural level, moreover, the central aesthetic underlying Flaubert’s
composition of Madame Bovary resembles Joyce’s writing of Ulysses as he ra-
dically transposed Homer’s Odyssey to twentieth-century Dublin, shiing the
legendary Greek hero Ulysses across history, language, and culture, thus echo-
ing the previous transformative exercises of Virgil and Dante. Just as Emma
Bovary is a new female Quixote (and a new manly woman), so Leopold Bloom
is a new Ulysses (and a new womanly man): both are reincarnations of the
most celebrated literary creations in Western literature and have been reborn
to wander through the streets of Yonville and Dublin. In this manner, the
pervasive presence of Cervantes in Flaubert’s work may well have prompted
the type of question that Kierkegaard raised in . erefore, Flaubert may
have asked himself: how can the most celebrated Spanish seventeenth-century
novel, Don Quixote, be transposed into nineteenth-century provincial France?
For Flaubert, the answer involved subjecting the Spanish knight—and himself
as a male writer—to a gender transformation: ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi’,
which in turn implied replacing the chivalric genre with the type of fiction
that was popular and clichéd at the time: romantic literature. is composite,
ambiguous sexual identity which lies at the very heart of Flaubert’s identifi-
cation with his female heroine did not pass unnoticed by Charles Baudelaire,
who effusively and pertinently remarked: ‘Il ne restait plus à l’auteur, pour
accomplir le tour de force dans son entier, que de se dépouiller (autant que
possible) de son sexe et de se faire femme.’ It took a poet to recognize the an-
drogynous dimension of Emma Bovary. Baudelaire thus applauded Flaubert’s
absolute embodiment of his female creation, an act of artistic empowerment
which in turn suffused Emma Bovary with an unmistakably masculine es-
sence: ‘Madame Bovary est restée un homme. Comme la Pallas armée, sortie
du cerveau de Zeus, ce bizarre androgyne a gardé toutes les séductions d’une
âme virile dans un charmant corps féminin.’
e androgynous aspect of Emma Bovary, or her successive male authorial
layers, reveals above all two literary monuments fused in a double-gendered
creation: Flaubert vis-à-vis Cervantes. It can be argued that the superimposed
 Ibid.
 As Margaret Cohen has pointed out: ‘In identifying with a heroine, Flaubert dresses himself
in one of the commonplaces of his time concerning the dangerous effect of literature, in particular
on women readers’ (‘Flaubert lectrice: Flaubert Lady Reader’, MLN,  (), – (p. )).
 Baudelaire, , .
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
male scripts that lie behind the seemingly female façade of Flaubert’s Emma
Bovary are also projected onto the romantic imagination of Joyce’s Gerty
MacDowell. Whatever vestiges of masculinity we may detect in her senti-
mental vagaries—Martha Fodaski Black has branded Gerty as Joyce’s female
parody of ‘masculinist models’ and ‘the deluded womanly woman’—she
still remains a by-product of the fantasies of her other male creator, Leopold
Bloom. According to Arthur Power, Bloom’s erotic imagination may have fab-
ricated the whole scene upon Sandymount Strand as he internally suffered the
slings and arrows of Molly’s outrageous adultery: ‘Nothing happened between
them,’ revealed Joyce to Power, ‘it all took place in Bloom’s imagination.’
e motif of Bloom’s onanist desires has been touched upon by Patrick Par-
rinder, who has deliberately stretched the possible implications of Bloom’s
sexual dream on the beach: ‘And if this is Bloom’s dream it raises the possibi-
lity that the whole episode, far from offering a free-standing characterization
of Gerty, might simply be read as the expression of Bloom’s masturbatory
imagination.’
In e Buenos Aires Affair, meanwhile, Manuel Puig shis Gerty’s and
Bloom’s erotic fantasy on Sandymount Strand into the remote seaside resort
of Playa Blanca in Argentina, where Leopoldo and Gladys have their first
amorous encounter. e idea of a sexual dream on the beach is particularly
fitting to Gladys as a modern-day Emma Bovary, whose overheated mind
may be read as an expression of entrenched female stereotypes emulated by
masculine discourses and Hollywood clichés, which she has absorbed in the
romantic films and ladies’ magazines she avidly consumed. It is also worth
noting that for a Latin American gay writer such as Manuel Puig, sexual
identity ought to be androgynous, ambiguous, and indeterminate, as he no-
toriously showed in his acclaimed novel El beso de la mujer araña [Kiss of the
Spider Woman] (), in which he offered a fictional space that ultimately
stages a bisexual ideal or dream. For Levine, this androgynous dimension is
particularly embodied in the protagonists of e Buenos Aires Affair, Gladys
and Leopoldo, who represent the masculine and female sides of Puig.
And yet there is more to e Buenos Aires Affair than initially meets the
eye, particularly as the reader encounters a complex, multivoiced novel that
experiments with formal modernist techniques, including temporal disloca-
tion, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, and cinematic devices, to name
just a few. James Joyce’s widespread influence in twentieth- and twenty-first-
 Martha Fodaski Black, ‘S/He-Male Voices in Ulysses’, in Gender in Joyce, ed. by Jolanda W.
Wawrzycka and Marlena G. Corcoran (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ), pp. –
(p. ).
 Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (Dublin: Lilliput Press, ), p. .
 Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .
 Levine, p. .
            -       

century world literature is particularly strong in Spanish America, having

shaped entire literary generations from Jorge Luis Borges to Guillermo Ca-
brera Infante, and the recently acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. In
the case of the novelist and playwright Manuel Puig it suffices to say that his
relationship with Joyce followed the fragmentary model of reading founded
by fellow Argentinian writer Borges. In  the youthful Borges openly and
unreservedly confessed to not having read Ulysses in its entirety: ‘Confieso
no haber desbrozado las setecientas páginas que lo integran, confieso haberlo
practicado solamente a retazos’ (‘I confess to not having ploughed through
its entire seven hundred pages; I confess I have read only bits and pieces’).
Borges justified this claim, however, by arguing that notwithstanding his in-
complete reading, he still professed to know the book with ‘esa aventurera y
legítima certidumbre que hay en nosotros, al afirmar nuestro conocimiento
de la ciudad, sin adjudicarnos por ello la intimidad de cuantas calles in-
cluye’ (‘that adventurous and legitimate certainty we show when asserting
our knowledge of a city, without claiming to know intimately all the many
streets it includes’). Empowered by Borges’s irreverent shortcut through the
labyrinth of Ulysses, Puig chose only the Joycean roads which would lead
him to certain select destinations, as he claimed in an interview with Saúl
Sosnowski: ‘Muchos me han dicho que en mí hay influencias de Joyce. Yo lo
que tomé conscientemente de Joyce es esto: hojeé un poco el Ulises y vi que
era un libro compuesto con técnicas diferentes. Basta. Eso me gustó’ (‘Many
have told me that I have been influenced by Joyce. What I consciously took
from Joyce is this: I leafed through Ulysses and saw that it was a book written
in different styles. Enough. I liked that’). For a self-confessed admirer of
ladies’ magazines, soap operas, romantic movies, camp, and kitsch artistic
expressions, it is undeniable that Puig found his match in the sentimental
vagaries of the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses, as well as in Molly Bloom’s erotic
ruminations in ‘Penelope’.

Lame Female Quixotes

At this point it must be stressed that Gerty MacDowell and Gladys D’Onofrio
emerge as defective, worse-off versions of Emma Bovary. Neither married nor
possessors of the beauty of their French sister, they remain imperfect heroines
 For a comprehensive study of Joyce’s impact in Latin American literature, see José Luis
Venegas, Decolonizing Modernism: James Joyce and the Development of Spanish American Fiction
(London: Legenda, ), and Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation
(London: Legenda, ).
 Jorge Luis Borges, Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, ), p. . All Spanish
translations are mine, unless otherwise stated.
 Ibid.
 Saúl Sosnowski, ‘Manuel Puig: entrevista’, Hispamérica, . (), – (p. ).
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
on their way to spinsterhood. If Gerty’s ‘one shortcoming’ (U, . ), her
unflattering lameness, is revealed as the result of an unfortunate accident
on Dalkey Hill (U, . ), Gladys is the victim of an attempted rape in
which she lost her le eye as she defended herself from a physical attack.
Furthermore, Gladys D’Onofrio is united with Gerty MacDowell through
the onomastics of her Christian name: Gladys is an Anglicized form of the
Welsh name Gwladus, which in turn derives from the Latin name Claudia,
literally meaning ‘lame’ or ‘disabled’, and thus fuses them as part of a literary
tradition of impaired, handicapped heroines. Vulnerable and insecure, Gerty
and Gladys seek refuge in the sugary, sentimental columns of ladies’ jour-
nals, whose mellifluous pages have fuelled their romantic imaginations. Gerty
MacDowell and Gladys D’Onofrio borrow the sentimental language, clichés,
and mannerisms of Emma’s sentimental personality. ‘Had kind fate but willed
her to be born a gentlewoman of high degree in her own right’—reports
the third-person narrator of ‘Nausicaa’—‘Gerty MacDowell might easily have
held her own beside any lady in the land and have seen herself exquisitely
gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors at her feet’ (U, .
–). Indeed, Gerty and Gladys share Emma’s desires to become an aris-
tocratic romantic heroine, which are, as Soledad Fox puts it, ‘as absurd as
Alonso Quijano’s dreams of being a knight’. No other female character in
the history of the novel has voiced this desire to enter the world of romantic
fiction more intensely than in Emma Bovary’s rapturous exclamation: ‘J’ai un
amant! un amant!’, as she contemplated her unusually large black eyes in
front of a mirror, the same mirror that projected the ghostly silhouettes of all
the adulterous heroines from the books she has read, and the same mirror that
reflects the faint images of her Irish and Argentinian sisters. ere are echoes
of this metafictional scene in Joyce and Puig. For example, Suzette Henke
argues that ‘Gerty MacDowell longs to write herself into a work of romantic
fiction but her “one shortcoming” disqualifies her from playing the traditional
heroine’. Similarly, Francine Masiello has claimed that: ‘Like Gerty, Gladys
is a consummate reader of popular fiction and mass market publications for
women; through them, and in the style of Gerty, she envisions a perfect
romance and also a language of love.’ ese amorous platitudes appear in
an imaginary interview with the American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar
 Soledad Fox, ‘Flaubert and Don Quixote’, New England Review,  (), – (p. ).
For a more detailed study of the relationship between Flaubert and Cervantes see Fox’s insightful
Flaubert and ‘Don Quijote’: e Influence of Cervantes on ‘Madame Bovary’ (Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, ).
 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: mœurs de province, ed. by ierry Laget (Paris: Gallimard,
), p. . Further quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text.
 Henke, p. .
 Francine Masiello, ‘Joyce in Buenos Aires (Talking Sexuality through Translation)’, Diacritics,
 (), – (p. ).
            -       

in which Gladys confesses to the lady reporter that: ‘mi mayor ambición
es realizarme como mujer en el amor’ (‘my highest ambition as a woman
is to fulfil myself in love’). In this fictional interview a seductive Gladys
transforms herself into the author and protagonist of the type of sentimental
fiction she has read in the rose-tinted columns of glossy women’s magazines
and romantic Hollywood films.
Joyce and Puig juxtapose the clichés of romantic fiction with the language
of popular culture, namely newspapers, pulp fiction, publicity slogans, beauty
products, and the current trends in feminine fashion. is polyphonic dimen-
sion of Gerty MacDowell is foregrounded in Joyce’s o-quoted letter to his
friend Frank Budgen, in which he famously described the ‘Nausicaa’ episode
as ‘written in a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto là) style with
effects of incense, Mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette,
chitchat, circumlocutions, etc etc’. In ‘Nausicaa’ this heteroglossic effect is
further underlined by the disparity between the conventional description of
Gerty MacDowell as a romantic heroine, ‘slight and graceful, inclining even to
fragility’ (U, . –), and the powerful discourse of female-targeted publi-
city slogans which advertised quack remedies, ‘but those iron jelloids she had
been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow
Welch’s female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to
get and that tired feeling’ (U, . –). For Suzette Henke the artificially
enhanced and narcissistic Gerty ‘serves as a herald of the twentieth-century
goddesses staring from the covers of Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Day, and Play-
boy’. It may also be claimed that Gerty serves as a herald of her Argentinian
avatar, Gladys D’Onofrio, who stares from the covers of the glossy fashion
magazines of the Southern Continent of the Americas. Like her Irish sister,
Gladys has fallen easy prey to the seductive powers of female-targeted pub-
licity spaces of Harper’s Bazaar: ‘En este momento lo que ansiaría es pasar
por mi piel el perfume corporal polinesio que recomienda una página en-
tera de su revista, porque esta noche quiero sorprender a alguien con una
nueva fragancia’ (p. : ‘Right now what I’d most desire is to spread on my
skin the Polynesian body fragrance which is recommended on a full page
of your magazine, because tonight I want to surprise someone with a new
scent’). If Emma Bovary became the victim of the unscrupulous commercial
manœuvres of Lheureux, so Gerty and Gladys emerge as the unhappy and
vulnerable targets of the proliferating world of media advertisement. Gerty
MacDowell owes her pastiche existence to Bovarysm and, of course, to other
Western female models ranging from Homer’s virgin princess Nausicaa to the
Blessed Virgin Mary and, as Kimberly Devlin has convincingly argued, the
 Puig, p. . Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
 Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, ), p. .
 Henke, p. .
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
heroine from Maria Cummin’s novel e Lamplighter. In e Buenos Aires Af-
fair Puig drew from this pool of Bovarysm and MacDowellism, albeit blended
with the stereotypes of romantic Hollywood films.
At the same time the evolution from Quixotism to Bovarysm and Mac-
Dowellism is populated with ultimately tragic creations, whose existence is
marked by sudden death or a profound disillusionment, as the romanticized,
high-flown ideals of their cherished romances, novelettes, magazines, or films,
collides with the sordid reality of their everyday lives. It is noteworthy that
Cervantes finished the second part of Don Quixote with the death of his hero,
who lucidly remarks on his deathbed: ‘Yo fui loco y ya soy cuerdo; fui don Qui-
jote de la Mancha y soy ahora, como he dicho, Alonso Quijano el Bueno’ (‘I
was mad and now I’m sane; I was Don Quijote de la Mancha and now, as I’ve
said, I’m Alonso Quijano the Good’). e peaceful yet pitiful death of a sane
Alonso Quijano sets a stark contrast with the horrific and disturbing death of
his female avatar, Emma Bovary, with arsenic poisoning. According to Laden-
son, ‘the fate Emma meets is differently literary: dying in sordid agony, she
is plagued by a persistent taste of ink, a nauseous reminder of the books that
had intoxicated her’. As a form of illusion, Bovarysm is intrinsically tragic,
thus disavowing its extended novelistic kinship with the comic impulses of
Quixotism: Emma Bovary can only signal the beginning of a tragic act that
will endlessly circulate across the centuries in different languages and places.
erefore Gerty and Gladys can only inherit the frustration and dissatisfac-
tion of their French predecessor. eir personal and social circumstances in
their marginal Ireland and Argentina will not be able to fulfil their romantic
dreams: Gerty’s thwarted relationship with Reggy Wylie, her drunken father,
and unflattering lameness; while Gladys’s facial deformity, her masochistic
relationship with Leopoldo Druscovich, and the general political turmoil in
Argentina have almost driven her to suicide. Gerty’s lameness and Gladys’s
facial deformity mark the end of their romantic dreams and the impossibility
of attaining the idyllic life they fervently desired. In other words, the limping
leg—‘Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O!’ (U, . )—and the blind eye—‘el
párpado izquierdo también había sido desgarrado y el globo ocular había
quedado destruído’ (p. : ‘Her le eyelid had also been torn and the eyeball
had been destroyed’)—violate the code of romantic perfection, becoming a
synecdoche in which the disabled part stands for the rest of the body.

e Fear of Fiction
e motif of the powerful effects of reading, the idea that the contents of
a book may be capable of infiltrating the minds of susceptible readers and
 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha (San Pablo: Real Academia
Española, ), p. .  Ladenson, p. .
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that their reality will, as a result, be perceived through the fabrics of fiction,
remains at the core of Cervantes’s masterpiece. e mysterious, almost threa-
tening idea that the everyday world in which we live may be overtaken by
the hidden laws of fiction underscores a disquieting situation in which the
power of literature envelops its readers, or victims, under its mesmerizing and
deceptive magic. In a way, Cervantes not only paved the way for the arrival of
a female Quixote, but also anticipated the metaphysical anxieties of Borges,
as readers read books in whose pages they are also written, and the secret
powers of an encyclopedia or infinite library will eventually absorb the reality
in which we live. ‘[e] fear of fiction’, Alberto Manguel reminds us, ‘has been
expressed in the Western world since the days of Plato, who banned poets
from his ideal Republic.’ In Chapter  of Don Quixote the priest and the
barber believe that the only way to cure their deluded master is by destroying
the very books which have poisoned his understanding. As they scrutinize the
library of Don Quixote, which stands as a monument of the chivalric genre,
priest and barber busily pass their judgement upon the hundreds of titles
that fall into their hands and, with the backing of Don Quixote’s niece and
maid, mercilessly condemn them to the fire (although a few first editions are
mercifully saved).
e moral of the story—or the lesson the priest and the barber seek to
inculcate here—is that by burning a whole archive of chivalric fiction they
will be able to restore the sanity of their friend. But the combustion of a whole
library is unable to erase the long-lasting impressions these books have made
on the hero’s imagination, so the adventures of the ingenious hidalgo Don
Quixote de la Mancha acquire a new heroic impetus from the smouldering
ashes of the burning pyre. In a similar situation, Madame Bovary senior urged
her son Charles to cancel Emma’s subscription to Rouen’s lending library,
complaining that Emma is only occupied with reading ‘des romans, des mau-
vais livres, des ouvrages qui sont contre la religion’ (p. ). As Fox has argued,
‘she [Madame Bovary senior] does not burn Emma’s books, for it is civilized
bureaucratic France, not inquisitorial Spain, but she does threaten to report
the book lender to the police’: ‘N’aurait-on pas le droit d’avertir la police, si
le libraire persistait quand même dans son métier d’empoisonneur?’ (p. ).
Elisabeth Ladenson maintains that Flaubert is deliberately drawing attention
to the age-old moralistic belief that ‘excessive novel-reading is poisonous and
should be prevented, if necessary by official intervention’. Yet Emma’s ima-
gination has already been filled with sorrowful lovers gazing at the moon,
long passionate kisses, Walter Scott’s romantic old manor houses, Lamartine’s
poetic sensibility, the clandestine novels she read in the convent, and the fine
 Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, ), pp. –.
 Fox, p. .
 Ladenson, p. .
 e Tradition of the Female Quixote
satin bindings of the keepsakes that made her shiver as she carefully unfolded
them. By the same token, in e Buenos Aires Affair Gladys’s mother objects
to her daughter’s consumption of the popular Buenos Aires magazine Rico
Tipo [Wise Guy], which featured colourful drawings of sensual female figures
who are described as ‘invariablemente altísimas muchachas bronceadas de
breve cintura, talle mínimo, flotante busto esférico y largas piernas carnosas’
(p. : ‘girls invariably very tall and tanned, with narrow waists, size zero,
floating round bosom and long shapely legs’). She complains that her daugh-
ter ‘se pasaba el día [leyendo porquerías] con la columna vertebral arqueada’
(p. : ‘spends all day long bent over reading this trash’) and instructs her
father never to buy them again. But Gladys’s imagination has already been
saturated with the female stereotypes endorsed by popular fiction, and the
‘rags to riches’ stories advertised in Hollywood films and radio soap operas
that would have an enduring and disastrous effect in her life.
e female Quixotes of Flaubert, Joyce, and Puig stand at the forefront of
a fictional canonicity which implies the return of a transgendered version of
Don Quixote, as Cervantes’s hero is reborn in a different gender, culture, and
history. e rebirth of Don Quixote as a female Quixote from Flaubert to
Puig signals a self-conscious aesthetic act that endlessly exposes the parodic
effects of the original—whether what is parodied are chivalric romances, ro-
mantic literature, or popular romances—as well as taking to greater lengths
the moral predicaments about the dangerous effects of reading ‘corrupting’
books. Inevitably, their highly provocative lady readers became inextricably
bound up with the larger forces of censorship, the same moral law that recast
them in the new role of immoral heroines. And while Flaubert’s, Joyce’s, and
Puig’s Quixotic protagonists have inherited the archetypal romantic and de-
luded attributes of their seventeenth-century male ancestor, their modernity is
also reinforced with a stronger gender dimension associated with androgyny,
sexual transgression, and eroticism.
e motif of a fictional character whose powers of reason have been ob-
scured by the veil of romance has exerted an irresistible fascination through-
out the last four hundred years: from Cervantes to Flaubert, Joyce, and
Puig. When Joyce conjured up the ghost of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary he also
summoned (in)advertently the ghost of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. ere even
remains the aerthought that the whole design of Ulysses may have been
modelled not just on the great epic masters, Homer, Virgil, and Dante, but
also on the medieval and Renaissance legacy of Rabelais and Cervantes, as
Joyce told Arthur Power: ‘Just as Rabelais smells of France in the Middle Ages
and Don Quixote smells of the Spain of his time, so Ulysses smells of the
Dublin of my day.’ But the flavour and atmosphere that Joyce instilled in
 Power, p. .
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Ulysses in general and ‘Nausicaa’ in particular went much further, in that he

also created a bridge between Flaubert and Puig, just as Flaubert had served
as intermediary between Cervantes and Joyce. Ultimately, Flaubert’s decision
to cross-gender has gied to Don Quixote his most celebrated female des-
cendant, so that the continent of sentimentality which Kierkegaard predicted
in  could be fully charted.
U  K  C P N-C