Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within

James W. Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136979057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

In this book, Stone effects a return to gender, after many years of neglect by Twenty-First-Century critics, via a methodology of close reading that foregrounds moments of sexual decentering and disequilibrium within the text and in the interstices of the dialogue between Shakespeare and his critics. Issues addressed range from the cross dressing of Viola and Imogen to the cross gartering of Malvolio, the sound of "un" and the uncanny lyric narcissism of Richard II, Hamlet's misogyny, androgyny, and the poison of marital/political "union, " Othello's fears of impotence, rumors of Antony's emasculation versus the militant yet nurturing triumphalism of Cleopatra's suicide, and Posthumus's hysterical reaction to the "woman's part" in himself and his compensatory fantasies of parthenogenesis. Stone unpacks ideologically powerful but unsustainable male claims to self-identity and sameness, set over against man's type-gendering of women as the origin of divisive sexual difference, discord, and the dissolution of marriage. Men who blame women for the difference that divides and weakens their sense of unity and sameness to oneself are unconscious that the uncanny feminine is not outside the masculine, its reassuring canny opposite; it is inside the masculine, its uncanny difference from itself.

1
The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night

Unlike nineteenth-century science as examined in Michel Foucault’s study of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, the fluidity and ambivalence of sexual identity in Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies describes a paradigm that calls univocal sexual truth into question, and that finds pleasure in dwelling upon the questionable margins of truth. The hermaphrodite that informs my reading of Twelfth Night derives from Ovid and the many Renaissance translations and reworkings of his myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. This is not the hermaphrodite as anatomical monster or scandalous prodigy, but rather the conventional literary figure that calls into question the body as the locus or ground of sexual truth. The hermaphrodite as metaphor defies the doctors who would reduce its definition to anatomy. My feminist and psychoanalytic approach to the play will unravel what I call hermaphroditic anamorphism, the quality of being and simultaneously not being one sex; of being both male and female and therefore neither one nor the other.

Along the way I will engage Stephen Greenblatt’s celebrated essay, “Fiction and Friction,” in an effort to revaluate and reposition the relationship between anatomical and literary-metaphorical hermaphrodites.¹ A range of cases brings to the fore the interplay between the body and its chafing (friction) and its representation in literary characters on stage (fiction): the boy actor clothed as a woman; the hermaphrodite veiled beneath the ostensibly disambiguating dress of one sex or the other; the female character on stage who takes on male dress. Is clothing a metaphor for sexual identity as changeable surface, manipulable more or less at will? Or is clothing instead an integument for some bedrock corporeality beneath? In the latter sense clothing would be a deictic pointer, an index, a signifier of the truth of the underlying body. So Puritan antitheatricalists insisted on defining the law of clothing. In opposition to this I believe that the clothing of bodies on stage in Twelfth Night, like the words of actors, is a textual construction whose underlying meaning is unstable. Conventions of law and the theatrical stage necessitate, of course, that the body cannot present itself in its naked truth, but only in the vestments that re-present such truth at a distance. Representation detours via costume and metaphor round about the body that is condemned to be mute and unsignifying in itself, not visible on stage except by the metonymic displacement of clothing.

Viola’s male clothing allows her both to mourn and to fill in vicariously for the loss of what she takes to be her recently deceased brother, Sebastian. Because she looks identical to him under male cover of Cesario, she will be able providentially to effect his resurrection. In finding a prop for her male persona once Sebastian is brought back from the dead—a place, as it were, to hang her male clothing upon—Viola is able to become fully female at the end of the play by entering into matrimony. The more fundamental fantasy of hermaphroditical identical twins also comes to a head at the end of the play: that a person need not be forced to choose exclusively between one sex or the other. Running counter to these hopeful signs, however, is the pathos of Viola’s gendered double bind, as she testifies in muffled and self-divided voices that the man she plays is not what she is, and therefore she cannot have what she wants. The man for whom she woos as messenger is the one she would rather wed, while the woman who falls for Cesario’s masculine persona holds no interest for Viola as a future partner. Her masculine clothing straitjackets her in this intermediate crux, double bound to unsatisfying alternatives whichever way she turns.

A sexual transformation even more punishing than Viola’s is the case of Malvolio, who is turned inside out when he receives the forged love letter supposedly from his lady Olivia. His reversal of orientation towards love is symbolized by the risible cross garters and yellow stockings that he assumes. Unlike Viola, who comes to have faith in a male twin upon whom she can parcel out her gender confusion, Malvolio is unable to find a complementary prop for his shadow side. Far from hiding his embarrassment, his disguise exacerbates the visibility of the ostentatious display. The more he thinks he loves another, the more hysterical his narcissism becomes. He ends up playing both sex roles in himself alone, both lover and beloved, an implosion that drives him into the punitive darkness of the lock-up and finally into isolate exile. In addition to this transgression, the social structures of Illyria cannot tolerate a steward who seeks to appropriate the love and the status of the countess whom he serves. Malvolio violates sumptuary taboos in a way that he must pay for, so different from the rewards that may accrue to Viola for her patient self-erasure under the guise of a man. His wearing the cross garters is the all too visible sign that he has been double-crossed by the alluring but fictitious love letter, making him more an object of ridicule than Viola who, rendered almost invisible by her cross dressing, is a speaking subject of pathos.

At the most general structural level, two models of sexual transformation operate in Twelfth Night: one looks to textured clothing as the locus for reading gender, the other to textual inscription in the words that conventionally designate and distinguish the sexes. In one model the cross dresser seeks to effect a gender transition by manipulating visible textile symbols. In the other, which posits a natural distinction between the descriptive languages used to designate men and women, the temptation of sexual ventriloquism arises, of becoming the other by assuming his/her characteristic tongue.² Invoking the terminology of Roland Barthes on the fashion system, I want to show in what follows how Viola and Malvolio undergo gender transformation by means of both the transvestic transition from one image-text or vestment to another, and the manipulation (and the correlative fracturing and recombination) of a linguistic word-text. ³ The two agents of clothing and linguistic sign cohabit in the images of Viola’s cross dressing, Malvolio’s cross garters, and Feste’s motley anatomy of both wit and sexual excitation in the image of turning a leather glove inside out. Glove and garters are both articles of apparel and rhetorical figures for the way that language, as well as the sexual body clothed under its sign, is unstable. Viola and Malvolio are inverted images of gender crossing, hermaphroditical complements; one is the other turned inside out. Viola’s cross dressing, Malvolio’s cross gartering, and Feste’s motley: the operation of this three-ply textuality is epitomized in the chev’ril glove that can be turned wrong side outwards with such apparent ease, representing the wanton reversibility of clothing as a metaphor for the wantonness of words. And for the ease of gender transformation by means of the wanton manipulation of image- and word-texts.

I

Olivia. Ourselves we do not owe. (1.5.314)

According to C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies license misrule temporarily, like carnival, in order to purge the restive urges of subordinate social groups:

The disguising of a girl as a boy in Twelfth Night is exploited so as to renew in a special way our sense of the difference. Just as a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation.⁴

Barber’s sanguine teleology sounds to me like a more accurate description of As You Like It than Twelfth Night. Viola’s disguise condemns her to a sexual passivity and futility before Olivia that contrasts with Rosalind’s or Portia’s active use of masking to further their sexual ends. “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much” (2.2.26–27), she laments. Disguised as Cesario, Viola apostrophizes herself as allegorical Disguise, casting herself in the shadowy figure of the Devil, whose superior potency is gendered as the pregnant maleness of Viola’s masculine persona.⁵ Containing both male and female elements, Viola either impregnates herself or is impregnated by the devil. However conceived, the birth threatens to be a monstrous one (2.2.33), as if Viola’s anxious regret here serves as a testimonial to the warnings of Puritan antitheatricalists like Phillip Stubbes that transvestism is indeed the devil’s preferred instrument.

Forced to perform at Duke Orsino’s suit the role of love page, Viola is constrained within a gendered double bind: a woman’s body (and soul) straitjacketed in the supposedly liberating clothing of a man. Her disguise, unlike Rosalind’s in As You Like It, estranges her into an alien role. The performance of gender is not as simple as assuming a persona at will, for Viola, unlike Rosalind, finds sloughing off the disguise not so easy. Gender is not just skin deep in Viola’s case; she is no swashbuckling Hic Mulier or Roaring Girl, women who take on the confident and aggressive roles that their clothing signifies. Double crossed and torn two ways by her situation as go-between, Viola’s transvested Cesario is marked by passive suffering: she represents herself under the guise of a fictive lost sister who “pin’d in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief” (2.4.113–16). The comic player’s costume masks a melancholic interior, the patient suffering for the unrequited love of Viola’s sister-as-monument. A private, psychological depth is opened up beneath superficial masculine confidence, an interior space of feminine grieving that can express itself only on condition that it not be seen, except under a riddling veil. And also on condition that it not be heard by her interlocutor, since most of the remarks that reveal Viola’s interior are spoken awry, aside to the audience. Perhaps the sense of depth that we derive from Viola’s soliloquies is part and parcel of her sense of self-estrangement, and of our uneasy position as spectators who take qualified pleasure from her momentary grief.

Disguise and displacement in the play operate at both sumptuary and linguistic levels. Olivia accuses Viola of speaking a poetic and therefore feigning text scripted by Duke Orsino, to which Viola responds by calling Olivia’s bluff, teasing her to lift the black veil of mourning for her brother. Like the affectations of love-making satirized in the following exchange, mourning too forms an unspontaneous tissue of formalities and clichés:

Olivia. Now, sir, what is your text?

Viola. Most sweet lady—

Olivia. A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it. Where lies your text?

Viola. In Orsino’s bosom.

Olivia. In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom?

Viola. To answer by the method, in the first of his heart.

Olivia. O, I have read it: it is heresy. Have you no more to say?

Viola. Good madam, let me see your face.

Olivia. Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my face? You are now out of your text: but we will draw the curtain and show you the picture. [Unveiling] Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. Is’t not well done?

Viola. Excellently done, if God did all. (1.5.223–39)

The pre-scripted love text that Viola is prepared to deliver on the Duke’s behalf is no more affected than the textile covering that Olivia wears not so much to mourn her brother as to veil how insubstantial her pose of mourning is. Even when she purports to draw the curtain from her melancholyveiled visage, Olivia reveals instead of transparent flesh only a painted portrait, a cosmetic face. The only “present” that this face can lay claim to is as the cover of an unrecoverable absence (“was”), so the ostensible presentation of the flesh is just another mask of representation.⁶ Olivia proposes that her beauty is reducible to its postscript, the sum of what can be written about it in her will: “I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labeled to my will” (1.5.247–50). Uninventoried, uninscribed in a codicil, the beautiful face is mute without the testimony of letters, illegible without textual ascription, Viola’s witness notwithstanding. In short, the possibility of an uninscribed state of sincere nature is made risible in this hothouse world of both sumptuary and linguistic excess.⁷

Although Viola opts for the disguise of a page, her initial choice of posing as a eunuch reflects more accurately the sexual indecision (and impotence) that her attire cloaks, in that a eunuch is neither a fully equipped male nor a female. Viola’s male garments effect an uneasy liaison with Duke Orsino whereby she plays the go-between in his suit to Olivia, a match that she would rather not see realized: “I’ll do my best / To woo your lady: [Aside] yet, a barful strife! / Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (1.4.40–42). The clothing that she has taken on to escape the threat of assault does violence to her peace of mind by confining her to a position of impossible in-betweenness: she is both jailer and prisoner, always at guard with a self that threatens to escape the bars (male dress) behind which it has willingly imprisoned itself. The double bind that constrains her is at once sumptuary, theatrical, and psychological. In posing to herself the situation of loving a man who employs her to woo a woman who in turn falls for the messenger, Viola ricochets between rival gender hypotheses:

As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master’s love:
As I am woman (now alas the day!)
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?
O time, thou must untangle this, not I,
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie. (2.2.35–40)

Viola is tied up in a knot, a word that, unravelled, contains its homonym not, which occurs in emphatic proximity in the preceding line. The haunting coupling of the conflated knot/not with the doubled negative prefix unserves to reiterate what I take to be Viola’s leitmotif of “I am not what I am” (3.1.143).⁸ Viola cannot untie and untangle what she is from what she inextricably is not.⁹

Viola is the only one of his transvestite heroines to whom Shakespeare gives the proto-tragic depth of undergoing suffering but having to express it as if it were another’s. Epitomizing her divided sexual and social condition, she confesses to Olivia, “I am not what I am.” This is a paradoxical articulation of the truth that nonetheless remains opaque to Olivia. In engaging the Liar’s paradox,¹⁰ the case of Viola belies society’s insistence that sexuality must have as its truth an exclusive either/or, for she is like Hermaphroditus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses both “am” and “am not” at once. The speaker is not the integral whole that she seems, the unity of a vestiary surface that represents the self-possessed, self-same male, like Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian. He is self-sufficient because he does not need Viola as she needs him; he, unlike Viola, does not have to cross dress to recuperate a lost sibling. (He is dependent, however, on the devotions of his friend Antonio.) In this play not only the articulated, interior depth, but also the duplicity that differs from surface male constancy, is gendered female, that which “is not” male. Woman is the “is not” to man’s “is,” the none to man’s one. Woman negates man; asymmetrically, she is defined (by man) as un-man. (But Sebastian is not constant either, especially in his relationship with Antonio.)

Speaking as Cesario, Viola expresses to Olivia her opinion that the male remains independent in not needing a woman to second or ratify his oneness:

By innocence I swear, and by my youth,
I have one heart, one bosom, a...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night
• 2 The Sound of “Un” in Richard II
• 3 Androgynous “Union” and the Woman in Hamlet
• 4 Impotence and the Feminine in Othello
• 5 Martial Cleopatra and the Remasculation of Antony
• 6 The Woman Within in Cymbeline
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index