Before I get into the meat of my post I really wish to make a comparison between Gilbert Hassall and Humbert Humbert. These two characters, though their obsessions with young girls are completely different and their texts are obviously different, they have surprisingly similar thoughts on young girls. They both love the innocents of young girls and they both hate the way a girl becomes contorted by the evils of adulthood. Of course for Humbert this love accumulates into a sexual urge, while Gilbert's urge, though he thinks it sexual, accumulates into homicide. There are even more similarities in the characters as they are both literature scholars with impeccable mental capability and their incapability to truly reason through their attraction to their crime. Both characters also have a history of mental instability that they try to ignore and avoid treatment for.
The thing I wish to focus mostly on is the lack of gender complications in relation to the Person in this section of the text. In the previous sections of the book there was always a complication between Verona and their subhuman friend due to Verona's put-on gender. With Andrew the complication came when he fell in love with the "female" Verona, but that love was not reciprocated. This could be seen as not being a gender related issue due to Andrew's knowledge that the Person was in fact genderless, but it becomes a gender problem because Andrew had already associated Verona as a woman and was inclined to think if them as such, even though a strange woman Verona made. With Leonora there was attraction to Verona's gender first and the rest of the Person later. If Verona had been masked as a man there would have been no interaction between the two of them that could have lead to a friendship due to Leonora's issues with gender. For Gilbert, it isn't until after Verona engages with him and Gilbert has agreed to sit with Verona that we discover his aversion to women. Gilbert doesn't even look at Verona until he's already been drug in by the other's personality.
After Gilbert discovers Verona is not actually human, which is pretty quick into their interactions, there is no question of "his" gender. It never comes up. Gilbert's aversion to women is the meat and potatoes of the chapter, but Verona's gender is never questioned. Gilbert even mentions how his house keeper thinks that they're homosexuals, but Verona never mentions gender. This feels like such an unusual chapter because of this.
Questions:
Do you think that the lack of focus on the gender of Verona changes the feel of this chapter?
Do you think that Gilbert has actually changed due to Verona's interference or that he just merely gives up in the end?
Do you think that Verona's gender would have changed how Gilbert and the Person interacted initially?
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