Herculine Barbin must be understood from the circumstances that surrounded her growth and development. She grows and experiences important development changes in 1800 when the intellectuals and social scientists were engaged in a sort of spree to assign each member their sex. She defines this period as being in engaged in “Occident's volonté de savoir (or "will to truth")” in which matters “around questions of sex and sexuality was at its most intense” (LaFrance, 2011, p.165). Besides, the period is described as being preoccupied with studies on sexuality as though it was an “urgent scientific-juridical need to assign true sex to each and every individual” (LaFrance, 2011, p.167). Therefore, the subject of individual sexuality depended upon the scientific perception of sexuality and remained to be decided at the discretion of the scientists or the intellectuals as if it was something to be patented.
Barbin uses the single and triple exclamations to express her feelings to the various circumstances in her life but to a different magnitude. While using the single exclamation (!), she appears to be blaming the society for her tribulations. When she says “ I have suffered much, and I have suffered alone! Alone! Forsaken by everyone! My place was not marked out in this world that shunned me, that had cursed me …” (3), she hints that the circumstances could have been different if those around had acted right. As seen from the choices of language and punctuation (triple exclamation marks), her condition conveys the distress or the burden in her/his heart to have her understood in a world that was sharply bent to consider the conventional sexes as the authentic sex. She writes “ When I look back to that already vanished past, I believe that I must have been dreaming!!! How many memories of that kind arise to crowd my imagination!!!” (35). By using triple exclamation marks (!!!), she appears to be regretting and blaming herself and not other people a seen with single exclamations.
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The phrase “ Avait-elle le droit de devenir un homme? ” (Barbin, 1980) signifies a process of transition from one sex to another concerning principle rather than physical translation. She must be referring to the struggles that she underwent in her education being confined to her “ adventurous, romantic life, which transpired primarily at night in the closely monitored dormitory” (LaFrance, 2011, p.167). The confined dormitories and strict adherence to time in a militaristic form had the potential to change the thinking of those confined in including the sexual orientation (LaFrance, 2011). Barbin seeks to live what she has become without the societal interference; this manifest anger in the system that confined her and contributed to her status by attempting to condemn her.
References
Barbin, H. (1980). Herculine Barbin. Vintage.
LaFrance, M. (2011). The struggle for true sex: Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B and the work of Michel Foucault. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 32(2): 161-182
