ABSTRACT
This chapter takes its departure in the narrative function of gender secrets and reveals in nineteenth-century fiction. More precisely, it details the “transing as suspense-narrative,” a literary tradition in which the “gender reveal” (Seid 2014) is used as a narrative prop to create suspense. In these narratives, the reader is provided with several clues of mismatched sex and gender. Female characters are described as strong and aggressive, like the frightening nun of Brontë’s Villette (1853); or with large hands, as Rochester’s role as fortune teller in her Jane Eyre (1847). Male characters, in contrast, are described as small and boyish, with high voices and soft hair, like “The Boy” of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893). The logic at play here is one in which gendered bodies are supposed to match a similarly gendered surface. As the body is considered “true” sex, all other signals are deemed disguise, and the reveal establishes the presumed essence of sex. The normatively gendered body becomes the key and final answer to any question of identity. These narratives demonstrate understandings of gender variance as deception (Bettcher 2007). They are precursors of several traditions of depicting gender variance in suspense literature, as well as of cisnormative understandings of trans. Tapping into understandings of binary, innate and natural sex, the transing as suspense-narrative demonstrates some of the logics at play in much cisnormative fiction. This chapter discusses these logics, and demonstrate nineteenth-century fiction as the foundation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century understandings of trans.
