ABSTRACT
Coelho Netto’s novel Esphinge (1908) provides an example of how the Gothic operates as a discursive mode which is key to narrate modern sensibility, more particularly, in its engagement with the limits of genre, gender, and politics. The novel narrates the story of a British citizen James Marian, who displays a masculine, athletic physique and the delicate face of a woman. The character, whose name already encompasses aspects of such duplicity, is the result of a scientific experiment conducted by an oriental mystic man named Arhat, who saved the lives of a beheaded boy and a girl whose body was destroyed in an accident, by sewing the parts together. Any resemblance to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a mere coincidence; however, James Marian’s dilemma is different from The Creature’s, as it is much more centered in the lack of definition of his-her sexuality. Next to Arhat, the hybrid identified itself as female, but, once in Rio de Janeiro, it seeks to establish itself as a man. The themes of the double and the Gothic operate here on several different levels, which include the explorations and experimentations of James Marian’s body, the dialogues between Brazilian and British literature, and the aesthetics of the novel, which is a composite of different discursive styles. Coelho Netto’s novel-body can illuminate not only sexual boundary crossings (transgenderism) but also the state of affairs between Britain and Brazil (transpolitics), and the transition of Brazilian literature into Modernism (transgenres), which ultimately pushed Coelho Netto’s work to the fringes of the national literary canon.
