Gender Trouble in Arcadia or a World of Multigendered Possibility?: Intersubjectivity and Gender in 'The Wind in the Willows'

Abstract

While Kuznets' and Gaarden's readings offer a valuable entry point for critiquing the role of gender in 'The Wind and the Willows', in this paper I demonstrate an alternative approach using Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic feminist theory of intersubjectivity and gender development. First I outline Benjamin's 'postconventional' (1995, p.76) approach to gender, and then follow with an 'intersubjective' reading of 'The Wind in the Willows' that unsettles 'fixed' notions of gender identity, replacing the 'discourse of identity' with the notion of 'plural identifications' (Benjamin 1995, p.75). Integral to this paper is Benjamin's idea that the subject can maintain plural identifications by managing an awareness of both 'sameness' and 'difference' in a intersubjective state of tension, and not as mutually exclusive oppositions conceptualised as 'either/or'.