Public Privates
 
			  Al Cacicedo
 
[The following are some very preliminary notes for a longish essay on gender
identity in Shakespeare.]
 
        The centrality of women in Shakespeare's work, and in particular of the
question that appears as the title of Mary Beth Rose's influential essay,
"Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare?"1, has become a commonplace of recent
studies of Shakespeare.  On the other hand, as a participant in a recent SAA
seminar put it, given the relative scarcity of mothers in the plays, perhaps
one ought to focus attention on the fathers in Shakespeare.2 Immediately,
however, one runs into profound ambiguity.  Consider, for instance, Lear's
words as he begins to understand just how thoroughly he has lost status and
control:
                O how this mother swells up towards my
                        heart!
                Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing
                        sorrow,
                Thy element's below.  (2.4.56-58)3
The Riverside edition glosses "mother" as hysteria, but then "hysteria" is the
womb itself.4  Perhaps one should understand the term figuratively, as meaning
that Lear begins to feel the "errant womb" that signals his impending madness.
And yet my inclination is to take the passage literally:  Lear really does feel
the female organ inside himself, displaced from its properly submerged position
and rising to strangulate him.  To Rose's question, then, I answer as Juliet
does when the Nurse, coming from her conference with Romeo, irrelevantly asks
where Lady Capulet is:
                Where is my mother! why, she is within,
                Where should she be?  (2.4.58-59).
        I first came across a literal reading of Juliet's remark in an avowedly
psychoanalytic context, an essay by Elenore and Robert Fliess.5  Recent work,
however, has allowed me to reconceive the psychological perspective of the
Fliesses in a more material and historical mode. Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex
has demonstrated in detail the physiological and medical ideas that underlie
Renaissance assumptions about female and male genitalia.  [To be developed.]
        My point of departure is that although such ideas about the genitals of
the two sexes privilege maleness as the more perfect sex, at the same time they
suggest that maleness can encompass femaleness, and vice versa--that the
"mother is within" not only for the female Juliet but also for the male Lear,
and that the phallus is "without" not only for Lear but also for Juliet.  On
the one hand, as Laqueur and others have noted, such convertibility leads to
anxieties of all sorts, particularly in the privileged sex. Contact with the
female can, as Steven Greenblatt says, provide the warmth that "chafes" the
overgrown child from an androgynous adolescent into a man.6  On the other hand,
contact with the female can transform the male into an "effeminate," as Romeo
affirms about himself when he learns that Tybalt has killed Mercutio (3.1.114);
and it can reverse mythological identifications, so that Antony, in Cleopatra's
"tires" while she wears "his sword Philippan" (2.5.21-22), reverts so much to
the condition of the adolescent Hercules that the adult Hercules, Antony's
tutelary spirit, "Now leaves him" (4.3.17).
         But convertibility of sex--the fact that always the "mother is
within"--also raises the possibility that one sex can be in complete control of
reproduction.  In a commonsensical way, of course, men fantasize about women as
the ones who control reproduction--hence the trite observation, central to Much
Ado as to WinterUs Tale, that only a mother can know her child to be her own.
The other posibility, that males control reproduction, is present at the level
of ideology:  it is, one might say, the entire focus of patriarchal rule to
subordinate reproduction to male control.  The biological counterpart of
ideology, however, is equally powerful.  In European history, the desire for
male control of reproduction is articulated early, for instance in Jason's
earnest statement in Medea that
                                It would have been better far
                                        for men
                To have got their children in some other
                        way, and women
                Not to have existed.  Then life would have
                        been good.  (573-75)7
In The Tempest, perhaps, the appropriation of reproduction that Jason wishes to
have is more or less accomplished, albeit at the level of mystified ideology.8
The same idea is more effectively at work at an even earlier stage of history,
in the appropriation of reproduction by the male God of the Old Testament,
whose conception is entirely intellective and yet produces offspring much as
would a woman's.9  Benedick's rejection of marriage in Much Ado provides an
anxiety- laden version of the desire for such male control :
                That a woman conceiv'd me, I thank her;
                that she  brought me up, I likewise give her
                most humble thanks; but that I will have a
                rechate winded in my forehead, or hang my
                bugle  in an invisible baldrick, all women
                shall pardon me.  Because I will not do them
                the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself
                the right to trust none; and the fine is (for
                the which I may go the finer), I will live a
                bachelor.  (1.1.238-46)
Of course, in Much Ado, as in the comedies generally, the fantasy of male
sufficiency collapses fairly quickly. Benedick concludes that since "the world
must be peopled" (2.3.242) he will be "horribly in love" (2.3.235) with
Beatrice and marry her.  Indeed, Benedick's anxiety is already evidence that
the ideology on which male control is founded is suspect.  In the final cuckold
joke of Much Ado, Benedick seems to acknowledge that marriage will not be an
institutional guarantee of male appropriation of the womb:  "There is no staff
more reverent than one tipp'd with horn" (5.4.123-24), he says to Don Pedro.
        Nonetheless, the sexually ambiguous world of Shakespeare's plays
locates the fantasy of absolute male control of reproduction squarely in the
ideology of patriarchal social structures.  When at the beginning of Much Ado
Benedick rejects women, it is because he fears being made a cuckold and so, as
Carol Cook has convincingly shown, losing control over his own self
definition.10  The psychological motive for misogyny is almost palpable in the
dynamics of Benedick's desire to control his self-presentation; and perhaps one
can understand the desire for such control to be exactly parallel to the desire
to control reproduction.  But Much Ado also demonstrates the political result
of the failure to effect either form of control:  cuckoldry, presented in the
play in the person of Don John, the illegitimate--and, it seems, therefore
bellicose--half brother of Don Pedro. Don John is a constant reminder of the
concrete dangers of not controlling reproduction, of allowing or encountering
an "errant womb."
        By contrast, the histories, especially the second tetralogy, seem to
erase the womb as the central issue of legitimacy.  Instead, the histories are
obsessively political in their presentation of legitimacy, and the
practicalities of such political questions seem to foreclose the patriarchal
concerns so evident in the comedies. Nonetheless, in the sequence of the two
tetralogies, and in the plays' increasingly desperate search for legitimacy, it
becomes clearer and clearer that the woman is absolutely essential to monarchy.
 It is a critical commonplace that Richard II affiliates himself with Christ,
and increasingly so as Richard goes on his via dolorosa to Pomfret.  Less
obvious, perhaps, is that Richard's assumption of divine right also presupposes
a christic function, one closely associated with the medieval image of an
androgynous Christ, female as well as male:
                As a long-parted mother with her child
                Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in
                        meeting,
                So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
                And do thee favors with my royal hands.
                        (3.2.8-11)11
Richard's failure, then, is a failure of the androgynous model to guarantee
male control of legitimacy.  As he awaits death, Richard says
                My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
                My soul the father, and these two beget
                A generation of still-breeding thoughts.
                        (5.5.6-8)
But it is a mere sterile conception of the intellect.
        Richard's loss to Henry IV does not certify that the sword is the mode
by which legitimacy is established.  On the contrary, Henry V discovers that
without the right mother, he must constantly flourish his blade to affirm
legitimacy.  Henry V's mode of legitimating himself is therefore instructive.
Not only does Henry V claim the throne of France via the female line, but he
uses his right to the French throne overtly to lay claim to legitimacy in his
English possessions:  "No king of England, if not king of France" (2.2.193).
Moreover, as the play insistently declares, the right to France depends on
Henry's possessing the body of the French princess.  From the penetration of
Harfleur's walls (3.3) to Katherine's misconception about English "foot" and
"count" (3.4.52- 57) is one continuous movement, certified by the elision of
maids and cities in the French King's acceptance of Henry as his heir:  "the
cities [are] turn'd into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls
that war hath never ent'red" (5.2.321-23).  Henry's ultimate failure to "redeem
time," as he promises in 1Henry IV (1.2.217) may be simply proof of Fluellen's
affirmation that "Fortune is an excellent moral" (3.6.38):  but the circular
motion of Fortune's wheel is, as the Epilogue of Henry V reminds us, one that
takes us back to the future that Shakespeare had already represented on the
stage, in the first tetralogy, where a maid destroys and a mother curses.  One
may well see in Henry V's failure a failure of the male to control the
"mother."
        The tragedies, from Romeo and Juliet to Coriolanus, in one way or other
detail the danger of an actually or supposedly errant "mother," whether in a
disobedient daughter or an apparently lecherous wife, or in the uncontrolled
passion of a father or husband or son.12  The ideological construction of the
womb in the tragedies needs to be examined.
        Sometimes, as Paulina says when she accosts Hermione's jailer, the womb
is the enfranchiser.  So, although Perdita "was prisoner to the womb," yet now
she "is/ By law and process of great Nature thence/ Freed and enfranchis'd"
(2.2.57-59).  However, far more commonplace from the male point of view is the
perspective implied in Love's Labours Lost, when Navarre's desire for
immortality crystallizes, "Not [in] marble nor the gilded monuments/ Of
princes" (Son. 55.1-2), but rather in the more tenuous "war against your own
affections/ And the huge army of the world's desires" (1.1.9-10).  The
inescapable inference is that, for Navarre at least, the womb may be a fine and
private place, but those who there do meet end up dead.
         The trope that underlies Navarre's concern has a noble pedigree in
European Literature.  [To be developed.]
        In the plays the enfleshment of spirit enabled by the womb suggests
that, if there is an enfranchisement such as Paulina alleges, it is only into
certain death. Paulina suggests as much, since she specifies that the new-born
Perdita is subject to "The anger of the King" (2.2.60), who has already
condemned her to death.  In sharp contrast to Navarre, however, Paulina locates
death in social institutions rather than in nature--in Leontes' prison rather
than Hermione's womb.  Thus Paulina's construction of death is complexly
inscribed in patriarchal ideology.  From the male point of view--which is to
say, from the point of view of the ideology rather than of its demystifiers--it
is "great Nature" itself, not the ideology, that is guilty of the inevitable
death.  So, Leontes orders Antigonus to expose Perdita to the rigors of nature
where, as Lear says, being "unaccommodated [wo]man" (3.4.106-107), she can
"feel what naked wretches feel" (3.4.34) and so die knowing that to "Allow not
nature more than nature needs./ Man's life is cheap as beast's" (2.4.266-67).
        The supplement to nature, which would comprehend Lear's "true need"
(2.4.270), but which is notably absent from the heath scenes of Lear, is
Polixenes' "art/ Which does mend Nature" (4.4.95-96). According to Perdita, art
specifically introduces the possibility of "bastards" into nature (4.4.83).
Polixenes, on the contrary, argues that
                                                over that art
                Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
                That Nature makes.  You see, sweet maid, we
                        marry
                A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
                And make conceive a bark of baser kind
                By bud of nobler race.  (4.4.90-95).
On the surface of this speech, Polixenes seems to argue against his own
position, since he suggests that a "wild" stock such as Perdita seems to be may
give rise to nobility.  The contradiction is only apparent, however. Polixenes'
language grounds the entire hierarchy of patriarchy, defining "gentler,"
"baser," and "nobler" in its discourse.  For Polixenes art is affiliated
evidently with the hierarchical patriarchy of which he, except for Florizel's
affection for Perdita and hence dis-affection with his father, is the Bohemian
sinecure.  That he makes "art" a function of nature suggests the degree to
which ideology is perceived as naturalized by those who are, in Roland Barthes'
term, its consumers.13  In short, Polixenes' language remystifies patriarchal
ideology.
        In the event, of course, Polixenes' insistence on patriarchal rights
over Florizel produces for him exactly the same loss of dynastic possibility
that Leontes' jealousy has already produced.  As Florizel says to Perdita, her
elevation
                                        cannot fail, but by
                The violation of my faith, and then
                Let nature crush the sides o' th' earth
                        together,
                And mar the seeds within!  Lift up thy looks.
                From my succession wipe me, father, I
                Am heir to my affection.  (4.4.476-81)
In other words, one can conclude that Paulina is right, that the ideology, the
"art," and not "nature" or the womb is responsible for death--or rather, here,
generational suicide.  But then again, the play is saved from such tragedy
purely by art, not only Paulina's, with which the play concludes, but more
immediately Camillo's.  He it is who will have Florizel "royally appointed, as
if/ The scene you play were mine" (4.4.592-93) and who convinces Perdita,
inartistic though she claims to be, that "the play so lies/ That I must bear a
part" (4.4.655-56).  The play, and of course Camillo and Paulina in particular
"lie":  and in that lie is Apollo's Sibyl confirmed true.
 
1Rose, "Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare?"  Shakespeare
Quarterly 42.3 (1991):  291-314.
2The seminar, titled "Constructing Masculinity in Shakespeare
and directed by Gary Waller and Mary Ellen Lamb, took place at
the April, 1992 meeting of the SAA.  The comment was made by
Phyllis Rackin.
3All references to Shakespeare are from The Riverside
Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans et al. (Boston:  Houghton Miffling,
1974).
4The Arden edition refers the reader to Harsnett's A Declaration
of Egregious Popishe Impostures, in which one of the people
mentioned by Harsnett suffers from "the mother," and to Edward
Jordan's A Brief Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of
the Mother (1605), which makes "the mother" parallel in
meaning to "Passio Hysterica, Suffocatio, Priefocatio, and
Strangulatus uteri, Caducus Matricis."  Oddly enough, Kenneth
Muir, who presents the text based on the edition of W. J. Craig,
ends the note as follows:  "Craig thinks the word may be only a
contraction of smother."  That sentence does not quite engulf all
the evident associations with women's organs.  King Lear, ed.
Kenneth Muir, The Arden Edition of the Works of William
Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP, 1957) 85.
5Fliess and Fliess, "Shakespeare's Juliet and Her Nurse," American
Imago 33 (1976):  244-60.
6See Greenblatt's discussion of "friction" in Shakespearean
Negotiations:  The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England (Berkeley:  U of California P, 1988), 73-93.
7Euripides, The Medea, trans. Rex Warner, in Euripides, I, The
Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 1955) 77.
8In an unpublished paper titled " ," Mary Ellen Lamb points out
that Prospero.  See also Mary Loeffelholz, "Two Masques of Ceres
and Proserpine:  Comus and The Tempest," Re-membering Milton:
Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret
W. Ferguson.  New York:  Methuen, 1987) 25-30.
9See Gerda Lerner's analysis in The Creation of Patriarchy.
10Cook, "'The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor':  Reading Gender
Difference in Much Ado About Nothing," PMLA 101.2 (1986):  186-
202.
11See Carolin Bynum Walker, Jesus as Mother
12'Tis Pity She's a Whore treats the fraternal passion
straightforwardly.  In Shakespeare the fraternal is displaced.  It
appears as Syracusan Antipholus' desire for a brother and his
apparent sister-in-law, or as the confusion of brother and sister
in Twelfth Night.
13Barthes, "Myth Today," Mythologies