ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case studies of two francophone men: one a French nobleman born during the French Revolution, Astolphe de Custine, 1790–1856; and one a Swiss philosophy professor and a generation younger, Henri-Frédéric Amiel, 1821–81. For each, the central story of his life was how he related to his own fragile gender and sexuality – Custine was, it emerged, homosexual, whilst Amiel defined himself as lacking in all those attributes of strength, energy and productiveness which he himself defined as truly masculine. The histories of their gender-ing (because it was a process) oscillate suggestively between illness and text. That is to say, their stories are about illness, actual or perceived, selfdiagnosed or socially-determined, and their response – both in terms of diagnosis and resolution – is profoundly textual. By this I mean that they construe their problems in terms of a general cultural malaise exemplified by a piece of high literature, to which they respond textually, re-identifying themselves in the light of it and thus dramatising and playing out the tension between gender, sexuality, health and society that they had to live with. They therefore leave the label of ill health behind, and write themselves towards well-being. Or do they?
