ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss some linked pieces in the complex mosaic of a trend in literature and the arts. It focuses on a figure particularly compelling to writers and artists of the early twentieth century: the aerialist. The chapter pursues one aspect of aerial artist-figure, its perceived sexual ambiguity. Two major European writers, Jean Cocteau and Thomas Mann, develop opposing aesthetics from their remarkably comparable views of such androgyny. The circus offers the perfect home for the androgyne, that creature who lives between two sexes. Perhaps the prime difference between our two texts concerns narrative voice. Cocteau writes in the first person as a critic, author and homosexual. He clearly identifies with his admired subject. The androgyny of Andromache relates her to many similar figures in both Krull and other works of Mann. Indeed earnest tone Krull adopts to describe her, contrasting with his usual deadpan irony, shows that Andromache raises some of the serious concerns of the author.
