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Our new translation of Gautier's novel 'Mademoiselle de Maupin', is now available for browsing and download here

His mainly epistolatory novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, published in 1835, is a part-parody of both the erotic novels and novels of sentiment of the eighteenth century, though its focus is the search for the ideal beloved.  Gautier named one of his three main characters, ‘Madeleine’ de Maupin, after the notorious and likely bi-sexual adventuress ‘La Maupin’, born Julie d’Aubigny (1673–1707), who enjoyed a wild cross-dressing youth, a career as an opera singer, and ultimately retired to a convent. In Gautier’s somewhat calmer novel, set in his own nineteenth century, her namesake, disguised as a man, with the pseudonym Théodore de Sérannes, sets out to understand the male sex. Both D’Albert, initially an example of the ‘superfluous’ and misogynistic man but one still in search of the ideal woman of his dreams, and his amorous mistress, Rosette, fall in love with Madeleine, her disguise, and androgynous nature (she deems herself a member of an as yet unnamed third sex), causing a high degree of gender confusion. The characters’ involvement in a performance of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, in which Madeleine/Théodore, takes the part of Rosalind/Ganymede, sets the scene for the latter half of the story.

In the preface, Gautier famously articulates his anti-utilitarian credo of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ (the phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’, had been coined by the philosopher Victor Cousin, in 1818), while evident throughout is his Romanticism, including his desire for the Ideal, his love of the fanciful, and of the imaginatively-constructed worlds of artistic endeavour, particularly those of Classical and Renaissance art, and his delight in the natural world, and all its creatures. Here he exceeds the boundaries of what was acceptable in the bourgeois literature of his day, so as to assert the ideal, without praising immorality but rather asserting the permanent values of love, truth, beauty and liberty of action.