Women in Shakespearean literature

Although Shakespeare reflects and at times supports the English Renaissance stereotypes of women and men and their various roles and responsibilities in society, he is also a writer who questions, challenges, and modifies those representations.

In his time, Shakespeare seems to be raising questions on what it means to be feminine or masculine.

Women are supposed to have the following virtues: obedience, silence, sexual chastity, piety, humility, constancy, and patience. Shakespeare however, rises above the stereotypical views of Renaissance society as he portrays women as more than passive vessels. For Example, in his play Alls well that Ends Well, the main character Helena is able to get what she wants through modes of deception. She is able to get Bertram to marry her, and then is further able to trick him into having sexual intercourse with her in order to keep him as her husband.

 Another example, is Venus from Venus and Adonis- here the male role of hypersexual is reversed, and within this poem, Venus is treated as the sexual aggressor while Adonis is treated as the effeminate boy, trying to escape Venus’ clutch.  Venus possesses agency in this poem, which is also a trait not typically given to women within this time period. She is able to influence and direct the outcome of events, unlike Adonis, who is left in her clutch. Not only are the roles reversed within this poem, Venus’ body is literally transformed into a superhuman body that is much larger than Adonis. She is able to pluck him from his horse and carry him over her shoulder, yet her weight can be supported by a flower? Contradictory? I think so.

Women within Shakespeare’s plays are given larger roles than many other stories allow for. Within both of these previously stated examples, the woman is able to overcome her male counterpart through their influences on other characters. These women are insistent in their right to direct their own destinies, and find ways to make sure that they can do so. 

Helena in Alls Well That Ends Well Is projected as an orphaned daughter, yet she possesses scientific knowledge that allows her to present the king with a cure for his ailment. By allowing Helena to be educated, Shakespeare is already placing Helena on a higher social scale than most women were placed on. Helena challenges these traditional attitudes about gender and sexuality that say that a woman should be chaste, obedient, and silent. Helena is a schemer, she is the female version of many of the kings in previous stories and plays. She uses her intelligence to get what she wants, and ultimately she is able to choose her husband instead of the other way around.

Both of the women in these play/poem are unique and are not afraid of a fight. These characters are unlike any of the other traditional characters, and they pave the road for more feminist characters that reject societal norms.

For further readings:

http://shakespeare.about.com/od/criticalapproaches/a/intro_women.htm 

For women’s monologue’s within Shakespearian plays:

http://www.shakespeare-monologues.org/women/

Body Language: Gore as Metaphor in Visual Media

In media involving physical performance, like theater and film, the human body becomes another weapon in the writer's storytelling arsenal. The body's posture and movements can speak volumes about a character before they even open their mouth; the way a character chooses to clothe and present their body gives hints about their background and values. There are also less conventional ways of using the figure to convey information - for example, distorting and perverting the expected human form to create an disarming language of visual metaphor. In other words, gore.

Shakespeare uses gore to great effect throughout Titus Andronicus, but nowhere is the meaning behind it more clear than with Lavinia's maiming. It's not a subtle technique; the characters who assault her go out of their way to explain to the audience why they've done what they've done to her. Her wounds harken back to mythology Shakespeare's audience would have been familiar with, with her tongue and hands cut away to render her mute and prevent her from identifying her attackers. In a grander sense, her injuries are the silencing of a female voice, particularly one that could be disruptive to a patriarchal status quo.

As Shakespeare's work was intended to be performed, not read, an actor would have portrayed Lavinia's disfigured body on stage. The characters around her make abundantly clear with their lines what the injuries she's suffered signify, but even before those lines are uttered, the audience would see her body maimed and understand the intent behind it. The visual would have been a powerful indicator of Lavinia's new position in the world.

Techniques for simulating gore have naturally improved since the days of the Globe, and visual media continue to convey story through carefully crafted viscera. A good recent example is NBC's series Hannibal, based on the tetralogy by Thomas Harris. The show centers around Will Graham, a profiler working for the FBI, and his friendship with his psychiatrist, the culturally ubiquitous Hannibal Lecter. While Dr. Lecter is naturally the story's main antagonist, Will encounters other violent tableaus in his work, each of which is a deliberate addition to a growing repertoire of thematic imagery that repeats throughout the show.

The scene above marks the first on-screen death of a recurring character - Beverly Katz, a forensic pathologist who works out what Dr. Lecter is up to, at the cost of her life. Dr. Lecter affords her the same 'consideration' he does all of his victims, aesthetically arranging her body for her coworkers to find. Though the tableau is incredibly morbid, it, like every other murder scene portrayed in the show, is designed by the showrunners to convey information about Beverly's character and the meaning of her death to the audience without relying on verbal cues.

Beverly had spent the story increasingly divided between loyalty to the FBI and loyalty to Will Graham, her friend, who encouraged her to begin an off-duty investigation of Dr. Lecter. The visual nod to that component of her story is fairly obvious; the part of her that sided with and supported Will, represented by the left half of her body, was ultimately the part that got her killed, and is the part dismantled by Dr. Lecter, while the right side of her body remains intact and undisturbed.

There are a number of other things at play in Beverly's tableau - a reference to her work in pathology, and, naturally, the aesthetic of raw meat - and it, too, makes a nod to contemporary art, specifically exhibits like Bodies, which display cross sections of human remains for the purpose of education. And much like Lavinia, Beverly is silenced by her maiming; the name of her attacker dies with her voice, and the characters who loved her are left with aimless anger.

Both Titus Andronicus and Hannibal are full of other examples of gore being used as a visual mode of storytelling, and both demonstrate the uncanny narrative power of deliberately distorted bodies.

The Grit of a Girl

I was fortunate enough growing up to spend countless hours rewinding my VHS tape featuring Mulan saving China. As kickass as Mulan was, I now realize the problematic constraints she underwent to successfully save her country. After failing an interview for an arranged marriage, in which she had to reveal her feminine beauty by wearing a beautiful Chinese dress and by applying a large sum of makeup, Mulan felt disgraced for not bringing honor to her family. After singing some Christina Aguilera, the song Reflection, Mulan felt incompetent, but soon discovered the opportunity to fight in the war for her father since he was somewhat crippled. Of course, no women were allowed to fight in the war, so Mulan had to chop her hair off, change her name to Ping, and take on an entirely masculine identity. And she couldn’t possibly have done so as a woman without a sidekick or advisor, Mushu (aka Eddie Murphy).

 At the beginning of her army training, she struggles alongside other trainees. The song, Make a Man out of You, featuring the beginning lyrics from general Shang:

 Let's get down to business

To defeat the Huns.
Did they send me daughters
When I asked for sons?
You're the saddest bunch I've ever met,
But you can bet before were through,
Mister I'll make a man out of you.

 

            Clearly, this is a slap in the face to women. Shang is claiming these all male trainees—and Mulan who is undercover—are not yet men. He views them as weak and unworthy to fight in the war. Notice that Tamora, Lavinia, or any women in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus are not allowed to enter the war. Countless number of men enter into combat, but no women participate in such activity. Titus alone loses many sons as Marcus notes: “He [Titus] by the Senate is accited home/ From weary wars against the barbarous Goths,/ That with his sons, a terror to our foes,/ Hath yoked a nation strong, trained up in arms./ Ten years are spent since first he undertook/ This cause of Rome, and chastised it with arms/ Our enemies’ pride. Five time he hath returned/ Bleeding to Rome, Bearing his valiant sons/ In coffins from the field;” (1.1.27-35).

There is no mention of Lavinia over the ten year time span Titus led Rome in war; not once did it mention her given the choice to fight for her country. Instead Titus only reflects on the loss of his sons, “Rome, I have been thy soldier for forty years,/ And led my country’s strength successfully,/ And buried one-and-twenty valiant sons/ Knighted in field, slain manfully in arms/” (193-196). And Lavinia is left at home to welcome her father and surviving brothers’ return.

In addition, Lavinia is assigned to an arranged marriage like Mulan. While her brothers and father argue over which man is fit for her, Lavinia is not asked what her own preference is (1.1). This trend carries throughout the rest of the play.

Shakespeare’s play and Mulan both display the unfair disadvantage women are faced with. Although women are free to enroll in the Armed Forces today, the weak and passive feminist ideal still exists. Young children already buy into this binary as shown by the Always commercial “Like a Girl.”

 

 Even if women have the grit of Mulan to save China, they are hindered from doing so.

 

*lyrics provided by lyricsmode.com

Of course hands can’t just be hands. What would Freud say?

In one of the most devastating scenes of Titus Andronicus, Lavinia begs Tamora for a quick death rather than suffer gang rape at the hands of Tamora’s sons. Hm. Hands. Hands are surprisingly prevalent throughout the play. Lavinia’s rape is much more gruesome because of the subsequent mutilation: Chiron and Demitrius cut out her tongue and both of her hands.  This was ostensibly done to prevent her from identifying her attacker, but the removal of Lavinias’ hands is also symbolic of her lack of agency. Her hands are referred to as “ornaments,” and Marcus implies their own only purpose was to hold a man “circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in.” Her hands held a certain kind of power that was lost when they were severed.

What other body part is representative of a person’s power, especially power held over others to seduce or “sleep in”? A penis. Or less specifically, genitals. Yes, Lavinia’s loss of limb was actually a representation of female castration because they were her source of the limited power granted to Elizabethan women: to seduce men.

Now, thinking of other body parts as genitalia is not unheard of. When Oedipus Rex gauges out his own eyes after discovering what he had done, Freud attributes his self-inflicted punishment as castration and compares his eyes to testicles. Hands, although not shaped like testicles, still represent power and human agency similar to a person’s sexuality and the sexual organs that represent it.

Severed limbs appear later in the plot as well when Titus dismembers himself as an attempt to save his sons’ lives. Why would Titus allegorically castrate himself? The emphasis isn’t on the hand lost, but the hand used to sever the other. By fooling the other characters who want to donate their hand into leaving the scene to fetch a sword, Titus excises control over the situation and creates agency guaranteeing his sacrifice in order to save his sons from the brink of death. The hand doing the actual sacrificing, representing the power wielded by a hand to bring his children to life, parallels to the power his penis wielded years before to create the sons in the first place.

Consider when Lavinia, Titus and company are exiting the scene of Titus’s dismemberment. Lavinia, who has just been upstaged by Titus because of the dramatic cutting off of his own hand, is forced to carry Titus’s hand between her teeth. (“Lavinia, thou shalt be employ'd: these arms!/Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth”). Clearly, Titus has dominated this scene and forces Lavinia’s problems into submission below his own. This is shown most graphically by the phallic symbol of Titus’s severed hand between her teeth, demonstrating Titus’s domination over Lavinia as even her sorrows become overlooked with Titus’s scheme.

A Tragedy of Principle

            In the article we read by Coppelia Kahn, Kahn asserts that “Lavinia…helped precipitate rape by boasting of her chastity…” (Kahn 64). From a psychological standpoint, I wondered why Lavinia decides to employ a biting tone unique to her otherwise reserved role in the play.
“’Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning, / And to be doubted (suspected) that your Moor and you / Are singled forth to try experiments,” Lavinia says to Tamora upon seeing her with Aaron in the forest (2.3.67-9). After Chiron and Demetrius murder Bassianus, Lavinia becomes fiercer still. “Ay, come, Semiramis (Assyrian Queen with attributes of the Goddess of Lust Ishtar) – nay, barbarous Tamora, / For no name fits thy nature but thy own,” she scolds (2.3.118-9). Given that Lavinia does not give caustic criticisms or personal attacks at any other point in the play, why would she do so now, especially as she faces the wrath of Tamora and her sons?
            I’ve attached a link to a recent article examining the psychology of "slut shaming". According to Marisa Taylor, "slut shaming" has less to do with sexual behavior as was previously thought and more to do with social class. Sociologists followed fifty-three women from their freshman year of college until after graduation as part of a five year study, examining their social behaviors. Professor of sociology and organizational studies Elizabeth Armstrong noted that in general women who perceive themselves to be higher in the social hierarchy engage in "slut shaming", or “…the practice of maligning women for presumed sexual activity,” to make room for their own sexual promiscuity. The study concluded that the overall purpose of slut-shaming is to send a message to lower-class women that they aren’t welcome in high-status groups.
            Putting Lavinia’s actions in this contemporary perspective, I see two possibilities as to why she feels comfortable criticizing Tamora. Either Lavinia views Tamora as lower in Rome’s social order because of her outsider status (her “otherness”) and wants to make clear that she is not welcome or views herself as above or exempt from the kind of social order where Tamora is higher. I think that the latter is a much more interesting interpretation because it speaks to the patriarchal origins of Lavinia's belief system.
            From the play’s beginning, Lavinia is “Rome’s rich ornament” (1.1.52). Her agency is as a valuable object to Rome and most of the characters, namely men, for her ability to serve (you guessed it) men. Lavinia is an ornament, a jewel, a form of currency backed by the gold standard of her chastity. Following my “thesis,” Lavinia attempts to supersede Tamora in the social hierarchy by virtue of this status. Lavinia scorns Tamora’s sexuality to demonstrate that she believes she is higher in a society where Tamora is considered royalty as a matter of principle. Lavinia does not heed her situational reality (for Chiron and Demetrius are about to ravage her) or agency (for she has no agency of her own to lose as an object viewed in terms of her service to men). And since Lavinia is obviously not slandering Tamora's sexuality to make room for her own sexual promiscuity, I believe that Lavinia’s comments show her supreme adherence to patriarchal principles where a woman's sexuality may be put under a microscope at the expense of, well, women, leading only to women losing more and more of their agency through objectification overall. For Lavinia looks and more like a mute object than ever after her disfigurement, and Tamora goes on to willingly discard her agency as a woman (in becoming Revenge) while ironically looking like an object (without hands) in the movie we watched. What does everyone think?
           

 

Slut-shaming has little to do with sex, study finds

 

Here's the link to that study, if you guys are interested.

Lavinia's Story Retold with a Twist

     The great majority of women had very restricted social, economic, and legal statues. They weren't able to voice their opinion or make any decision on their own. In Titus Andronicus these expectations can be seen in Lavinia role where she is rendered as powerless even though she comes from a noble family. Lavinia was spoken of highly due to her beauty and her pureness.

   The same idea can apply when making the connection to the movie Maleficent but with a twist. In the movie Maleficent the main character is played by Angelina Jolie and she comes from a royal family but unlike Lavinia she held a great deal of power and was respected immensely due to having the biggest and strongest wings. 

 

   Both Lavinia and Maleficent end up losing what was considered their source of power and they are rendered as useless and even helpless. 

The only difference is that even when Lavinia gets raped and has her tongue as well as both her hands cut of she doesn't think of seeking revenge on those who did her wrong. She just relies on the male figure in her life to help her. Where as in Maleficent she is blinded by rage and betrayal that it fuels her even more when plotting her revenge on the person who cut of her wings. Maleficent breaks out of the expectations that are placed on what a woman can and can’t do. She doesn't wait around for a man to save her but rather takes matters into her own hands and in the end she is respected so much more and the best part is that after seeking her revenge she also gets her wings back where as Lavinia’s character is overlooked because she relies solely on her father and even than in the end he kills her. She never finds peace.