(3) See, for example, Barolini, "'Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi'"; Cavallero; Migiel, especially chapter 4: "To
Transvest not to Transgress" (83-108); Paris; and Wayne.
An analysis of the representation of women who assume roles traditionally assigned to man is the subject of "To
Transvest not to Transgress".
(2.) Occasionally writers decline to apply the term berdache to girls who
transvest, but see further below why this is wrong.
a) The first aggravated form is when: the perpetrator is masked,
transvested or disguised, when the act takes place at night in a public place or in a means of transport.
The genre of travesty also applies to Evans's work in its original semantic sense, that is: to be disguised,
transvested, to be dressed in the garb of the opposite gender.
Robert published more on Whitman, James, Forster, and Melville than on Hawthorne, but his work on Hawthorne was always provocative --no essay more so than "Hester Prynne, C'estMoi: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Anxieties of Gender" (in the collection Engendering Men, 1990), which includes an insightful, culturally sensitive reading of "The Custom House" as "an essay in sexual politics," whose author constructs himself as a
transvested "scarlet woman." In this preface to a "story of a woman scorned by her community for a sexual transgression," Robert argues, "Hawthorne dramatizes his own inability to find a place to locate safely both his vocation and his gender."