Desire and Anxiety (Routledge Revivals)

Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama

Valerie Traub

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317619734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. Valerie Traub argues that desire and anxiety together constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama – circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing 'masculine' and 'feminine' sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments, and fears. This is the first book to present a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and the institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical methods, and using each to interrogate the other, the book synthesises the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional.

Part I
Erotic paranoia

Chapter 1
Jewels, statues and corpses: containment of female erotic power

Hamlet: What man dost thou dig it for?
First Clown: For no man, sir.
Hamlet: What woman, then?
First Clown: For none, neither.
Hamlet: Who is to be buried in't?
First Clown: One that was a woman, sir, but, rest her soul, she's dead.

(V.i. 130-6)

This moment in Hamlet — a macabre instance of comedy that presumes and enacts the effacement of "woman" — figuratively points to gender as a site of inquiry and definition. Having refused the generic "man" as an inadequate description of the body for whom he is digging a grave, the Clown would seem to be making room for, indeed, insisting on, that body's feminine specificity. But no, both the Clown and Hamlet insist — Ophelia, being dead, is no longer a woman. Whatever it is that gendered Ophelia is ungendered by her death.

In Shakespearean drama what engenders the female body is her sexuality. As the drama positions the female gender within its psychic and narrative frame, "woman" becomes synonymous with the presence or absence of chastity. This statement may seem innocuously self-evident, until one considers that at its theatrical extreme, the presence or absence of chastity arbitrates life and death. To Ruth Kelso's dictum in Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, "let a woman have chastity, she has all. Let her lack chastity and she has nothing," I would add: let her lack chastity, she is nothing.¹ To be a woman in Shakespearean drama means to embody a sexuality that often finds its ultimate expression in death.

Maid, wife, widow, whore: these are the positions accorded to women in early modern society. They are specifically erotic positions, locating women, via an erotic sphere of activity and signification, within the economy of patriarchal heterosexuality. By definition, a maid is virginal, a whore promiscuous; widows and wives can be either lusty or abstinent; all are defined, not merely by their biological sex, but by their sexual activity. The exceptional Queen Elizabeth only proves the rule, securing her power through the strategic manipulation of her virginity, raising it to an iconic level surpassed only by that of the Virgin Mary. As a defining characteristic, chastity renders woman's specifically erotic power incommensurate with her place in early modern gender and class hierarchies; the social importance accorded to chastity renders woman's erotic power inordinate, even excessive.

The Clown's burial of the female body, or more precisely, his interpretative designation of the body he is burying, metonymically signifies the psychic impulse and narrative teleology of three of Shakespeare's most compelling plays. In Hamlet (1600-1), Othello (1604), and The Winter's Tale (1610-11), male anxiety toward female erotic power is channeled into a strategy of containment; the erotic threat of the female body is psychically contained by means of a metaphoric and dramatic transformation of women into jewels, statues, and corpses. Indeed, together, the plays seem motivated toward this end: to give women speech only to silence them; to make women move only to still them; to represent their bodies on stage only to enclose them; to infuse their bodies with warmth only to coldly "encorpse" them.

What is crucial about these plays, however, is not so much the eventual status of women as reified objects (that, after all, is hardly unique to Shakespeare), but the process by which the drama renders them as such, the transformation that occurs as the motive and telos of dramatic action. Ophelia, Desdemona, and Hermione are not essentially objectified; rather, the plays enact the process of female objectification as the dramatic process. Inviting our complicity with this process as the very terms of their intelligibility, these plays seduce us with the promise of theatrical pleasure —either in the form of catharsis (tragedy) or heterosexual closure (romance) — actively working to obscure the possibility of female erotic agency.

Shakespeare's preoccupation with the uncontrollability of women's sexuality — witness the many plots concerning the need to prove female chastity, the threat of adultery, and references to cuckoldry in songs, jokes, and passing remarks — was not individual to him, but a shared vulnerability of men in his intensely patriarchal and patrilineal culture. Socially and psychologically, early modern men's erotic vulnerability was overdetermined: their infantile dependence on women, the development of their subjectivity in relation to "femininity," and their adult dependence on women's word for paternity of children all secure the importance of female chastity for the early modern male subject. Conversely, the psychic centrality of male vulnerability gives rise to defensive strategies to deny it. As Carol Cook's analysis of cuckoldry emphasizes, male power is restored through such mechanisms as cuckold jokes; by means of the vilification of women upon which cuckold jokes depend, female erotic autonomy is reduced to silence and absence.²

This masculine imposition of silence, and more particularly of stasis, on women is connected in the plays I shall be examining with a fear of chaos associated with heterosexual intercourse. Whereas phallic penetration in Shakespearean drama is rigorously upheld as the apex of masculine identity and power, the orgasm which follows is imagined in terms of dispersion, a psychic dissolution of power and identity. Sonnet 129 sums up this bifurcation and dispersal in temporal terms: "A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe;/ Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream." As many critics have argued, masculine identity in the early modern period is constructed in relation to a fantasy of the female body as different, oppositional, other.³ However, in the act of orgasm, male experience of the female body is not so much that of an object to be penetrated and possessed, but of an enclosure into which the male subject merges, dissolves, and in the early modern pun, dies. Orgasm within the body of a woman calls attention to — makes palpable — the myth of the unity and self-identity of the masculine subject: orgasmic release is precisely too much a release of the self. Insofar as women act as mirrors for the development of male subjectivity, female erotic mobility threatens the process by which male subjectivity is secured.⁴ For men to achieve the fantasy of full subjectivity, women must remain still.

It is this fear, ultimately, of the subject's demise that leads Hamlet, Othello, and Leontes to long for stasis, for a reprieve from the excitations and anxieties of erotic life. In response to their fear that such security and calm are not forthcoming, they displace their desire for stasis onto the women with whom they are most intimate. The result is what Abbe Blum has aptly termed the "monumentalizing" of woman:⁵ the fetishization of the dead, virginal Ophelia, the eroticized death of Desdemona, and the transformation of Hermione into a living but static form, a statue.

Within these plays, dominant metaphors set up a series of correspondences between temporal, sensate, and spatial experience. Within a rigid system of dichotomies — mobility/stasis, heat/cold, open/closed — bodily movement, heat, and integrity define the "erotic" in early modern terms.⁶ Stephen Greenblatt's notion of the erotic "friction" animating the early modern stage celebrates the affirmative aspect of this dichotomy;⁷ monumentalizing, on the other hand, is the strategy by which female erotic energy is disciplined and denied. For women in Shakespearean drama, "chastity" requires being still, cold, and closed; to be "unchaste" is to be mobile, hot, open. What is striking is the minimal room within which to maneuver; even a minimum of erotic "warmth" is quickly transmogrified into intemperate heat. Indeed, what the drama enacts is the disappearance of any middle ground, with the rigidity of this bifurcation following a unidirectional narrative: from a projection of too much movement, warmth, openness, to an enclosing fantasy of no movement or heat at all. As a strategy of containment, monumentalizing is itself excessive.

The metaphorical displacement of women into static objects takes various forms according to the requirements of genre; the specific strategy of monumentalizing is modified as Shakespeare's art uncovers, releases, and then reorganizes masculine anxieties into new modes of expression. According to Joel Fineman, "plays are not only a means of representative expression but as such constitute strategies of psychological defense, defending, that is, against the very fantasies they represent."⁸ My attempt is not to explicate Hamlet, Othello, or The Winter's Tale, but rather to analyze the multiple deployments of a recurring anxiety and the means by which the plays exorcise or assuage it. These plays demonstrate a progressive reworking of monumentalizing which challenges the benign developmental progression presumed to organize Shakespeare's own movement from tragedy to romance. As many critics have noted, in Hamlet, Gertrude's adultery and incest — the uncontrollability, in short, of her sexuality — are, in Hamlet's mind, projected outward to encompass the potential of such contamination in all heterosexual liaisons.⁹ As Gertrude's adultery turns all women into prostitutes and all men into potential cuckolds, Hamlet's world is contracted into "an unweeded garden/ That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely".¹⁰ In this vile yet seductive garden, sexually threatening women poison vulnerable and unwitting men. Thus, through their erotic power, women are seen to adjudicate life and death — a connection summed up by the "Mousetrap" player who reads the speech inserted by Hamlet in the play performed to "catch the conscience of the King": "A second time I kill my husband dead,/ When second husband kisses me in bed" (II.ii.606; III.ii. 182-3).

The threat posed by Gertrude's sexuality is paranoiacally projected onto Ophelia, whom Hamlet exhorts: "Get thee to a nunn'ry. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? ... I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me" (III.i. 122-5). As the culmination of this speech makes clear, those things of which Hamlet could accuse himself are less the pride, ambition, and knavery that he mentions, as his suspicion that he, like his father before him, will be cuckolded: "Get thee to a nunn'ry, farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them" (III.i. 138-41). As the pun on nunnery and brothel makes clear, Hamlet is not concerned with Ophelia's ability to contaminate other men; trapped as he is within the boundaries of an oedipal relation, Hamlet's paranoia extends only to himself and his beloved father.¹¹ Women make men into monsters, the early modern euphemism for cuckolds, because they deceive:

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, you nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no moe marriage.

(III.i. 144-50)

No more marriage because all marriage is madness and whoredom — degrading to both parties, but especially to the man who never knows who else has slept between his sheets. And not only is marriage likened to whoredom, but Hamlet himself self-identifies as a whore as he, unable to carry out the revenge thrust upon him by his father's Ghost, "Must, like a whore, unpack [his] heart with words,/ And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,/ A stallion" [male prostitute] (II.ii.586-8).

However potent Hamlet's fear of cuckoldry, one senses something else behind his vituperation of Ophelia: an anxiety associated with sexual activity itself. The language with which Hamlet describes sexuality is riddled throughout with metaphors of contagion and disease; his mother's hidden adultery and incest are imagined as an "ulcerous place" that "infects unseen" (III. iv. 154—6). For Hamlet who early asks, "And shall I couple hell?" (I.v.94) — the phraseology of which suggests the possibility of coupling with hell — all sexuality is unnatural.

Hamlet's sexual nausea finds its antecedent in his father's Ghost, who characterizes Gertrude thus: "But virtue, as it never will be moved,/ Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,/ So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd,/ Will sate itself in a celestial bed,/ And prey on garbage" (I.v.54-8).¹² Here the dualistic ideology that divides women into lustful whores and radiant angels collapses upon itself, revealing the fear upon which it is based: women are imagined either as angels or whores as a psychological defense against the uncomfortable suspicion that underneath, the angel is a whore. The collapse of this defensive structure unleashes precisely the masculine aggression it was originally built to contain. Even the Ghost's ostensible protection of Gertrude from Hamlet's wrath is sexually sadistic: "Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive/Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven/ And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,/ To prick and sting her" (I.v.86-9). Gertrude's conscience is imagined as an aggressive phallus, pricking and stinging her female breasts, in an act that reinscribes Hamlet Sr. within Gertrude's body, and thereby reappropriates the alien serpent, Claudius, as the legitimate patriarch-within: the conscience. It is at once a repossession, replication, and reprojection of the action that simultaneously "effeminized" King Hamlet, and deprived him of his life and wife: "The serpent that did sting thy father's life/ Now wears his crown" (I.v.40-1), crown symbolizing both his kingship and his wife's genitalia.

Identified as he is with his father, Hamlet displaces disgust for the Queen's erotic mobility onto Ophelia, and adopts his father's strategy of aggression. Although his violence remains verbal rather than physical, Ophelia's death is as much an outcome of Hamlet's rage as it is an expression of her grief, madness, or self-destruction. Killed off before she can deceive or defile Hamlet, only in death can Ophelia-as-whore regain the other half of her dichotomized being: chaste virgin. Contaminated in life by the taint of Gertrude's adultery, Ophelia reclaims sexual desirability only as a dead, but perpetual, virgin.

In our first view of Ophelia, Laertes warns his sister of the unlikelihood of Hamlet's fulfilling her expectations of betrothal:

Then weigh what loss your honor may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmast'red importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough
If she unmask her beauty to the moon.
Virtue itself 'scape...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Talking about sexuality in Shakespeare
• Part I Erotic paranoia
• Part II Erotic possibility
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index