SOURCE: Berry, Wanda Warren. “The Heterosexual Imagination and Aesthetic Existence in Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Part I.” In Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, edited by Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh, pp. 25-49. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Berry examines Either/Or within the context of modern concepts of sexual identity and sexual orientation.

Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship is populated with “fictive lover figures” who Kresten Nordentoft says share the concept of erotic love which is formulated in the essay on “The Immediate Erotic Stages” in Either/Or, 1. Nordentoft characterizes this view of eros as “now fixed upon sexual differentiation, that is (from the essay's masculine point of view) upon ‘the idea of the feminine.’”¹ This analysis encourages us to look at Either/Or, 1 in terms of the questions we have been learning to raise about fixed or stereotyped ideas of masculinity...