ABSTRACT
A major task of the feminist revival of the 1960s and 1970s was a search for new tools for investigating and challenging gender assumptions. The tool seized on by many feminist women and men was androgyny. It's a myth, 'a purely imaginative construct, unusually malleable because it corresponds to nothing we commonly observe in our experience'. Eskridge's story invokes many different ways of signifying sexual ambiguity, including those exploited by Oscar Wilde in the play that Eskridge's characters are performing and those envisioned by Aubrey Beardsley for his illustrations to Wilde's play. The poignant tone of the 'Spence' sections may reflect not only the character's fear of losing masculine prerogatives but also the high valuation of her own gender on the part of a contemporary women writer like Jones. Movement away from a feminine identity can now be seen as sacrificing distinctiveness, rather than as simply gaining power.
