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Marcel And The Medusa: The Narrator's Obfuscated Homosexuality In A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Elizabeth Richardson Viti

French Faculty Publications

Although A la recherche du temps perdu places center stage an extraordinary number of homosexuals, the narrator resists joining their number himself and, indeed, insists on his heterosexuality throughout the novel. Certainly there are those critics who have taken the narrator at his word, and most convincing among them is Harry Levin. In a marvelous response to Justin O'Brien and his "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of the Sexes," which inspired the men-in-women's-clothing cliche in Proustian scholarship, Levin points out the pitfalls of disbelief. First of all, he notes, to use Proust's own suspected homosexuality as a justification …