“Their wives have sense like them...” An argument for the importance of female characters in Shakespeare’s plays.
Shakespeare’s female characters have a hard time. Vastly outnumbered by male characters, often marginalized in the plot, and originally written to be played by men, it is easy to see why many critics have either focused on their flaws or disregarded them entirely. Shakespeare named no play named solely for a woman; no female name appears except as the second part of a male-female couple. This could be an indication of a dislike of women on the part of the playwright, perhaps an (incorrectly) perceived inability to write women strong enough to carry a play, or simply a sign of the time and culture in which the plays were written. This essay will, I hope, address the question of why Shakespeare’s women are still regarded as inferior to his men, and put to bed the idea that “most [of Shakespeare’s] women have no character at all”.[1]
A.C. Bradley stated that “it is only in the love-tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest,” as he puts it “are single stars.”[2] By this I assume he is taking the view adopted by many before and since, that the female characters serve more as an impetus for plot progression than as fully formed characters in their own right. The characters can certainly be read that way, Ophelia is simply weak and mad, Lady Macbeth only wants power, Cleopatra only sex, but reading in this way is entirely uneven; why subject the male characters to intense Freudian psychoanalysis and take the women purely on face value? Upon closer reading all of the female characters have emotions, motivations, flaws and strengths equal to their male counterparts, or as Emilia from Othello puts it, “their wives have sense like them: they see and smell,/ and have their palates both for sweet and sour / as husbands have” (4.3.93-95).
For centuries Desdemona has wrongly been considered naive and weak-willed, as a “helplessly passive”[3] girl going to her death without a fight, despite the huge amount of textual evidence to the contrary. The statement that “everyone in the play fails to understand her, and fails her”[4] seems far more apt. The woman described by the men who surround her, the “maiden never bold”[5] (1.3.95) whom every man puts on a pedestal, is banished as soon as Desdemona herself enters the stage. We see before us a woman unafraid to stand up to her father and the heads of state in order to marry the man she chooses, regardless of the consequences. Neither is she the “cunning whore of Venice” (4.2.88) described in the latter half of the play; in fact, Desdemona throughout treats everyone she speaks to exactly the same, honestly, politely and openly. In a play as male dominated and set in such a feminine free environment as this, we are given a heroine who cannot be dismissed as a peripheral character or simply a catalyst for action. She has more lines than anyone excluding Othello and Iago, and shares a dramatic position equal to either of them. The play would quite simply not exist without her. Unlike other tragic heroines she seems to have no great flaw; she is not a shrew, nor maddened by ambition or blinded by love. Desdemona presents to us a fully rounded character, a creature of intense tenderness, but also of wit, humour and courage.
These characteristics are far more common for female characters in Shakespeare’s comedies, where the women are given more scope and are allowed to direct the action in a different way. I think this is summed up best in the introduction to ‘The Woman’s Part’ by stating that “in the comedies women are most often nurturing and powerful; as their values educate the men, mutuality between the sexes may be achieved...In tragedy...their roles are at once more varied, more constricted, and more precarious.”[6] If the values of the tragic heroines, Desdemona’s understanding, Cordelia’s level-headedness, even Lady Macbeth’s guilt, had influenced their male counterparts there is a sense that the outcomes of the plays could have been quite different. In the comedies the heroines bring about the resolution in a way entirely absent from the tragedies. The men of the comedies listen and are influenced by the women, in the tragedies “the men’s murderous fancies are untouched by the women’s affection, wit and shrewdishness”[7] and thus a peaceful resolution is never reached.
The heroine most in control of any Shakespeare play is almost undoubtedly Rosalind from As You Like It. Rosalind’s actions direct the play; it is her choice to hide in the Forest of Arden, her idea to adopt disguises, her agency which brings the four couples together at the end. Shakespeare gives her character all that she needs to do this, “in wit and energy, Rosalind has no male rival”[8]. Even this wit is unlike other Shakespeare heroines. As opposed to Catherine or Beatrice, Rosalind’s wit has no hint of shrewdishness, and is directed solely at lovers and women. Rosalind being both a woman and in love, she makes herself the butt of her jokes as much as anyone else, thus making her seem both self aware and self deprecating in a way that other heroines are not. Orlando’s character pales in comparison, he appears almost one dimensional, and were Rosalind not so persistently in love with him the match would seem dreadfully uneven.
The adoption of disguises, especially men’s clothes, allows the comic heroines a freedom never afforded to their tragic counterparts. These disguises gain a woman entrance to places she would never normally be allowed and let her act in a way which would be unthinkable for a respectable lady. It is by dressing as a man that Viola gets Orsino and that Rosalind gets Orlando. In disguise they are allowed to speak as men, and are spoken to openly, as friends. Orlando looks to Ganymede for advice where he had “Not one [word] to throw at a dog” (1.3.) upon his first meeting with Rosalind. She is free to tell him what she really thinks, rather than being constricted by propriety, “male dress transforms what otherwise could be experienced as aggression into simple high spirits”[9]. The element of disguise is denied to the women of tragedies, and consequently they are never given a platform to discuss their true feelings with the men of the play without fear of retribution. Had Desdemona been able to adopt a disguise and convince Othello of his wife’s fidelity the play might have ended in a different manner. When Emilia stands up to Othello and Iago in the final scene she is threatened and eventually killed for her trouble, despite tempering her outburst with an explanation, “’Tis proper I obey him, but not now” (5.2.195), and speaking nothing but the truth. Had she been a man there is a greater chance she would have been listened to and gone unpunished.
This gender bias on the part of the characters undoubtedly has something to do with the time in which the play was written, where “the employments of women, compared with those of men, [were] few; their condition and of course their manners, admit of less variety”[10]. Men expected their wives to be subservient, and even though Queen Elizabeth’s power and influence are undoubted, the society was still dominantly patriarchal. It is interesting to note that the women of the comedies, with all their wit, charm and influence, are all unmarried, whereas the stifled, thwarted and ultimately destroyed women of the tragedies are parts of couples from which they cannot or will not escape. Being spouses, they are controlled by the will of their lord, which inevitably brings about their downfall.
The question of whether female characters are unimportant in Shakespeare’s plays is, to me, one with a fairly obvious answer, but perhaps I am being obtuse. There is no question that the plays would not be the same if the female characters weren’t there, if Romeo or Antony were plays in their own right. Replacing the female characters with male ones would also entirely change the elements of the drama; undoubtedly Romeo and Julian would find an audience, but the essence of the tale would be altered. I find the accusation that “Shakespeare did not bring forward his female characters into a full and striking light”[11] to be entirely without merit. Working within tighter parameters than the male characters and hampered by the constraints of society, gender and class, these women are still written as complex characters, both gifted and flawed, each of them “capable of passion and pain, growth and decay”[12].
[1] William Richardson, Essays on Some of Shakespeare's Dramatic Characters to which is added an Essay on the Faults of Shakespeare (London : J. Murray and S. Highley, 1797), 5th edition, p.361
[2] A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd Edition (London, The Macmillan Press, 1905) p.7
[3] Bradley, p.179
[4] Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the confines of Art (London, Methuen, 1968) p.123
[5] William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E.A.J, Honigmann (London, Arden, 1997). All subsequent quotations are from this same edition.
[6] Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz and Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely, The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1983) p.6
[7] Neely, Carol Thomas, ‘Women and Men in Othello: “What should such a fool/Do with so good a woman?” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, p.215
[8] Claiborne Park, Clara, ‘As We Like It: How a Girl can be Smart and Still Popular’, in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, p.107
[9] Claiborne Park, p.108
[10] Richardson, p.341
[11] Richardson, p.339
[12] Lenz, Greene and Neely, p.5
Aren't i smart?! I promise the fashion, man-boobs and film-geekery will be back very soon.
2 comments:
Good essay -- well argued and an argument that needs to be made. Though it still seems odd that it does still need to be made, even after all the strong performances by great actresses of those great and complex characters. Go, LJ!
Nice! Eileen would be so proud of you :D
Poli
Post a Comment