In Octavia E.
Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the
audience is presented with a character, Lauren, who chooses/if forced to cross dress
as a man due to the circumstances of her environment. She makes it clear to her
travelling companions (Henry and Zahra) the importance of keeping her true
gender a secret from any others they should encounter in their travels, the
potential risk the group faced should it be revealed. However, despite this,
Henry still proves incapable of keeping said secret, referring to Lauren as her
in front of another group of wanderers. When called out on this, “smiling embarrassingly”
(Butler 212) he replied “I’ve known you all my life. It isn’t easy to remember
to switch all your pronouns.” (Butler 212)
Yet
in As You Like It, no such slip is
made, nor even apparently a worry. Celia shows little apparent difficulty in altering
her referral to Rosalind/Ganymede, and is able to keep the truth of the matter
a secret until the appropriate time. This raises the question then of whether
or not Parable of the Sower’s presentation
of Henry’s difficulty in adapting is reasonable and truly a simple mistake on
the character’s part when compared to the fluidity shown in Shakespeare.
I
believe much of the variation in these situations can actually be attributed
primarily to the underlying needs of the narratives themselves, and the differing
themes Shakespeare and Butler were concerned with addressing. The comedic
nature of As You Like It might have
potentially benefited from an accidental reveal of Rosalind’s identity;
however, the removal of the actual “reveal” would have cheated the piece of a
measure of its ability to play with and blur the lines of gender.
Alternatively, the far more grim nature of Parable
of the Sower, the society it chronicles spiraling into dystopia, creates a
greater necessity for this accidental reveal. The added tension of Lauren’s
true gender being revealed, even if only slight, builds on the already
substantial strain placed on Lauren, and sets in motion key events of the
narrative. The accidental reveal in this case, the questioning of Lauren’s “true”
gender, is something the text needed to address to continue to build on its
concepts, where the same accidental reveal/questioning would have likely proved
damaging to the pursuits of As You Like
It.
