Ventriloquizing the Male

May Sinclair's novel The Divine Fire and Edith Wharton's novels Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive represent rare female-authored “portraits” of a young male writer's development. Breaking the cultural taboo against women “constructing” men, Sinclair's and Wharton's implementation of the narrative technique of “cross-writing” or “transvestite ventriloquism” exposes masculinity as a performative and contingent act of self-fashioning. Each novel moreover juxtaposes the male writer's development with a consideration of how traditional notions of a supermoral male “genius” are realized at the existential expense of women, revealing the position of muse as particularly insidious and detrimental. Rather than reiterating in their plot trajectories the domophobic flight from the sphere of the feminine/domestic that characterizes the male-authored künstlerroman, Sinclair and Wharton delineate a new model of male artistic development by promoting an integration of the man/genius split through the development of a loving relationship with a woman.