AN EXCHANGE OF SOULS
First edition of this gender-transition tale of body-switching imposed upon a young woman by a ghoulish medical man.
Very good.
Price: $300.00
AN EXCHANGE OF SOULS
"That was, perhaps, the supreme touch of terror--the eyes of the man looking from the woman's face."
The novel's experimental exchange of souls, undertaken to prove the "independent existence of the Ego," can "only take place between two persons of opposite sexes," transporting the Victorian comedy trope started by Anstey's VICE VERSA into the realm of gender terror and the uncanny.
AN EXCHANGE OF SOULS is both more serious and more scientific than its 1903 predecessor, Richardson's THE BAYSWATER MIRACLE, in which a man and woman temporarily switch bodies and the latter has a wonderful time with her new trousers and mustaches. (Comic fantasy welcomes change of sex as a jolly adventure and a learning experience, if a temporary one, while scientific horror, overwhelmed with panicked emotion, runs screaming from the very thought.) Yet this novel's approach to the theme luxuriates in the horror of a fine male mind struggling to think with the sluggish and inferior "cortex" of the unfortunate Alice Lade, whose "plastic and receptive" nature was vulnerable to the "dominant force" of his Ego. Alice's partial survival — the lingering presence of her own soul and the consequent merging of two natures — is itself another source of ineffable horror to the narrator. "It is said that there is no place for me, neither in this world nor elsewhere."
Read more: Garber and Paleo, Uranian Worlds.
The Object
First printing. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1911. 7.5'' x 4.75''. Original gilt-stamped green cloth with pictorial paste-on. 256 pages. Early ink owner stamp, with evidence of bookplate removal, to front pastedown. Faint rubbing and soil to boards, bumping to extremities, gilt on spine tarnished. Spotting to text block edges. Strong hinges.
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