The Role of Women in Shakespeare Plays

Through his plays, Shakespeare does more than simply tell a story to entertain his audience; he also gives present-day readers a glimpse into what life in the XVI century was.  To me, one of the most interesting cultural issues Shakespeare addresses is the role women played during that time period—however, two of his plays give completely different female roles.  “Taming of the Shrew” and “Measure for Measure,” both written in the late 1500s, have a female in the lead role.

During the XVI century, women were expected to be chaste, silent, and obedient. This was the definition of a perfect woman.  Having said this, readers today would expect to read about main characters that fit this definition.  Isabella, from “Measure for Measure” fits the stereotype quite well; on the other hand, Katherina, from “Taming of the Shrew,” embodies all the opposite characteristics expected in a woman.

Isabella is first introduced at the beginning of Act I, scene 4: She is in the process of entering a nunnery, and she is having a conversation with a nun, Francesca. She is inquiring about nun’s privileges, not because she thinks what the convent offers is not enough, but “rather wishing a more strict restraint” (I.4.4).  This shows that she is obedient, and likes to have rules to abide by.  As the conversation proceeds, a man calls to the doors of the convent.  Francesca asks Isabella to tend to him, for she cannot speak to men.  She says,  “When you have vowed, you must not speak with men / But in the presence of the prioress. / Then if you speak, you must not show your face; / Or if you show your face, you must not speak” (1.4.10-13).  When Isabella asks who calls at the door and shows herself, the man, Lucio, says, “Hail, virgin, if you be—as those cheek-roses / Proclaim you are no less” (1.4.16-17).  Isabella most certainly conforms to society, and is ready to have this be her life, her reality, her routine; it is fair to assume, then, that she is silent, obedient, and chaste, as the perfect woman should be.

As opposed to Isabella, who begins the dialogue in I.4 of “Measure for Measure,” Katherina is introduced by her father, Baptista, in a conversation with friends of his (I.I.48-56):

Gentlemen, importune me no farther,
For how I firmly am resolved you know:
That is, not to bestow my youngest daughter
Before I have a husband for the elder.
If either of you both love Katherina,
Because I know you well and love you well
Leave shall you have to court her at your pleasure.

Bianca, Baptista’s youngest daughter, has several suitors; but Baptista says that he will not allow Bianca to marry until Katherina marries. The situation worsens, because the men reply with such rude remarks as, “To cart her rather. She’s too rough for me,” (I.1.55), and, “No mates for you [Katherina] / Unless you were of gentler, milder mould,” (I.55.59-50).  Katherina does not make matters easier by replying,

I’faith, sir, you shall never need to fear.
Iwis it is not half-way to her heart,
But if it were, doubt not her care should be
To comb your noodle with a three-legged stool,
And paint your face, and use you like a fool. (I.1.61-65)

Clearly, Katherina defies all preconceived notions of society, by not being silent, and seemingly disobedient. Her chastity, however, plays no role in this passage. I think it is fair to assume that she is chaste—however rude, impolite, disobedient, and talkative she might be. After Hortensio’s description of Katherina, there is no doubt that she defies social conformity and the idea of a perfect woman:

[Katherina is a woman] with wealth enough, and young and beauteous,
Brought up as best becomes a gentlewoman,
Her only fault—and that is faults enough—
Is that she is intolerable curst,
And shrewed and forward so beyond all measure
That, were my state far worser than it is,
I would not wed her for a mine of gold. (I.2.82-88)
Her name is Katherina Minola,
Renowned in Padua for her scolding tongue. (I.2.95-96)

The initial representation of the two women—Isabella and Katherina, respectively—is very different: one is autonomous enough to introduce herself in the action of the play, the other needs to be introduced (in a very unkind manner, if I may add).  Lucio flatters Isabella as soon as they meet; both Hortensio and Gremio insult Katherina after her father introduces them.

Although Isabella and Katherina are two very different women, and “Measure for Measure” and “Taming of the Shrew” two very different plays, the other characters treat the women in much the same way: they want to change something in or about them.

In the case of Isabella, she is being persuaded to give up her chastity to save her brother’s life: “If I would yield him [Angelo] my virginity, / Thou might’st be freed!” (III.1.96-97).  Claudio, her brother, slept and impregnated a woman, Juliet, before they contracted marriage. Under the law of the time, this was illegal, and punishable with death. When Angelo, the highest law official, discovers this incident, he punishes Claudio to death. Lucio, Claudio’s friend, goes to the convent to inform Isabella of the events, and Isabella goes to talk to Angelo, who tells her that “…to redeem him [Claudio], / Give up your body of such sweet uncleanness / As she that he hath stained” (II.4.52-54).  Angelo tries to convince her by adding, “Might there not be charity in sin / To save this brother’s life?” (II.4.63-64).  Lucio, who is with her the whole time, tries to persuade her to give in to Angelo’s desires and give up her most precious possession: her virginity.  He instigates the situation, making comments such as:

           To him again;
entreat him.
Kneel down before him; hang upon his gown.
You are too cold. If you should need a pin,
You could not with more tame a tongue desire it.
To him, I say! (II.2.42-47)

Ay, touch him; there is the vein. (II.2.73)

O, to him, to him, wench! He will
Relent. (II.2.127-128)

Yet, it is not only Angelo and Lucio who try to change Isabella’s mind; Claudio, her guilty brother, does so as well, saying, “Sweet sister, let me live. / What sin you do to save a brother’s life, / Nature dispenses with the deed so far / That is becomes a virtue” (III.1.134-137).

It is interesting to see how these three different characters (Angelo, Lucio, and Claudio) are trying to persuade Isabella to change her mind, overlook her principles, and give up her most valued possession to save Claudio; nevertheless, she remains firm in her convictions and autonomous in her decisions, and does not give in to them.

In much the same way, characters in “Taming of the Shrew” are also trying to change Katherina. It is left unsaid throughout the play, but all characters want Katherina to stop being a Shrew; it is Petruccio, however, who undertakes the task of changing Katherina.  He begins by stating that he wants a wife, a rich one, if possible, and cares not who she is.  After Hortensio tells him about Katherina, he makes it his duty to make her his wife. He speaks to her father, Baptista, and they arrange a wedding; but, Katherina does not want to wed: when Petruccio says “And to conclude, we have ‘greed so well together / That upon Sunday is the wedding day”; to which Katherina replies, “I’ll see thee hanged on Sunday first,” (II.1.28-291).  However, Petruccio marries her and ends up changing her from an evil Shrew to an obedient wife: When he and two other men call upon their wives, only Katherina answers, saying, “What is your will, sir, that you send / for me?” (V.2.103-104).  In her closing monologue, Katherina gives evidence of her change of mind, by saying “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee (…) / love, fair looks, and true obedience, / Too little payment for so great a debt. / Such duty as the subject hold the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband,” (V.2.150-160).

Whether they end up changing or not, neither of the women have autonomy throughout their respective plays.  Isabella, who seems to be perfectly autonomous and independent, does as she is told—as far as she agrees. Having denied any possibility of giving her virginity for her brother’s life, the Duke (dressed as a Friar) plans for another woman to sleep with Angelo, but still make him believe that it is Isabella he is sleeping with; this plan will not only save Claudio’s life but it will also not taint Isabella’s body.  Isabella goes along with the Duke’s plan, not stopping to think twice about another woman’s body being tainted. The moment in which Shakespeare best portrays Isabella’s lack of autonomy is at the end, when the Duke tells her, “…and for your lovely sake / Give me your hand, and say you will be mine,” (V.1.485-486).  The Duke continues his monologue, without giving her a chance to accept or decline his proposal.

Yet, Katherina’s lack of autonomy is worse that Isabella’s: Petruccio does not ask for her hand in marriage, but rather informs her of their engagement (“And will you, nill, you, I will marry you,” II.1.263; “And kiss me, Kate. We will be married o’ Sunday,” II.1.316; “I must forsooth be forced / To give my hand opposed against my heart,” III.2.8-9).  Once they are married, the situation gets worse for Katherina: she leaves when Petruccio wants to leave, she goes where Petruccio wants to go… and she sees what Petruccio wants her to see.  There is one incident, as they are going back to Padua, when Petruccio mentions the moon—and it is clearly the sun, and Katherina says so (IV.6.1-23); however, she changes her mind, saying “What you will have it named, even that it is, / And so it shall be still for Katherine,” (IV.6.22-23).  When she marries Petruccio, she loses herself completely; she thinks as Petruccio thinks, she does as Petruccio does, she says as Petruccio says she should say.

Initially, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Katherina is that of subverted femininity; however, throughout the play, she modifies her behavior, her thoughts, and herself to fit the regressive notion of femininity, and reinforce it.  Isabella reinforces the notion of femininity from beginning to end.  Both women have the lead roles; both women are strong and willful; yet, although they develop differently throughout their plays, they end up in much the same way: reinforcing the idea that women should be chaste, silent, obedient, and compliant.

To Have and Have Not

In his 1930s novel “To Have and Have Not,” Ernest Hemingway narrates the story of Harry Morgan’s death—not his life, for all that is left for Morgan to do is die. Not only through the actual narration, but also with the writing style, Hemingway helps the reader catch a glimpse of Morgan’s life of uncertainty and instability by changing the speaker from time to time, without notice. Once a police officer in Miami, Fla., Morgan later became a fisherman (who also rented his boat out to tourists and taught them how to fish), alternating between Cuba and the Florida Keys.  Morgan’s life is not an easy one; desperate times demand desperate measures, and the 30s sure were desperate times. A Greek philosopher once said that man is born good and society corrupts him—is this Morgan’s case? Is Harry Morgan a victim of the circumstances? Is he a tragic hero?

Harry Morgan lost his arm while bootlegging: he was trying to earn some extra dollars to feed his family with, but American Marshals caught him; to make things worse, his boat got impounded.  This gives the reader a sense of Morgan as a wounded hero—the limitations of his physical body and his possessions express the limitations of his environment.  All these tragedies together do not make a martyr out of Morgan; on the contrary, he is determined to do something to not let his family starve: “But let me tell you, my kids ain’t going to have their bellies hurt and I ain’t going to dig sewers for the government for less money than will feed them. I can’t dig now anyway. I don’t know who made the laws but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry,” (Hemingway, 96).  His determination to get not only himself but also his family out of the current bad situation makes him a hero: He will do whatever he has to do to avoid his family from starving.  However, it all goes bad.

There is not much that Morgan can do—he lost his boat, so he cannot collect money from tourists; he lost an arm, so he can no longer dig for the government; all that is left for him to do is go into illegal businesses: He gets hired by three Cubans who steal a bank, and Morgan’s job is to provide the escape vehicle—a boat.  As they are escaping, things go terribly wrong and all aboard get shot, including Morgan. As he lies dying in the boat, Morgan thinks,

I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had all right up the end. Nobody’ll know what happened. I wish I could do something about Marie: Plenty money on this boat.  I don’t even know how much.  Anybody be O.K. with that money. […] I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go on boats. There’s no honest money in boats any more.  (Hemingway, 174)

As these words echo in the reader’s mind, Morgan is slowly transformed from an evil-doing, revengeful individualist into a caring husband and father (later on in the passage he wonders what will happen to Marie, his wife, and his two daughters), who regrets getting into this dirty business. Whether his regret arises from a sincere remorse for what has happened or because of his pitiful ending is irrelevant—by this time, the reader feels nothing but sympathy and compassion for Morgan, his wife, and kids. As he dies, Harry Morgan becomes a tragic hero.

For Morgan, everything is about the money, or about a job that will bring in money—it all basically boils down to survival. This is certainly a characteristic of male providers during the Great Depression—taking desperate measures during desperate times. David Gagne says that “[Harry Morgan] represents all the characters of the 1930s struggling to continue through hopelessness,” (“Placing Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not in the 1930s”).  Does this relation to the Depression “everyman” compensate for the wrong Morgan did? Does it forgive him? Does the fact that Morgan did all he did to prevent his daughters and wife from starving, or working for the government digging sewers, glorify him?  Is Harry Morgan the ultimate, glorified, tragic wounded hero that was persecuted by censorhip?

 

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. To Have and Have Not. New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1937.

Atkinson, Ted. Law and Order: Gangsters and Fascists.  8 Mar. 2004.  Law and Order: Gangsters and Fascists slide show presentation, 9 Mar. 2004. <http://www.aug.edu/~lngtba/4100/fascism_files/frame.htm&gt;

Poor Land Makes Poor People

A common thought during the Great Depression was that “Poor Land” made “Poor People.”  William Faulkner agrees with this statement in his novel “As I Lay Dying” (1930): The Bundren family each narrate a piece of the story from their own point of view—and it is because of this narrative frame that the reader is able to dive deep into each character’s mind and catch a glimpse of how their poor land has made each of them poor people.

“As I Lay Dying” is the narration of the Bundren family’s journey from New Hope to Jefferson.  They embark on this journey to fulfill Addie Bundren’s death wish: to be buried with her family.  Early in the book, Addie dies, and the journey begins.  However, during the journey Addie (who is dead) speaks to the reader—and it is here when the reader understands why the Bundren family is so complex.

Addie married Anse Bundren for his land.  She was a school teacher who hated her job, and he seemed like a good catch because he owned a small piece of land. Being from “poor land,” having no parents alive, Addie decides to marry Anse—but she does not love him; in fact, she despises them.  She teaches herself that words like “love” are worthless, and lives her life awaiting her death.  Having been brought up in a poor land, Addie knows of nothing else but a poor life—and hence becomes another “poor person.”

This idea is reinforced when she describes her children and her reactions toward them: She does not consider herself mother to Cash nor Darl; she states that she “gave Anse the children,” and says that she “did not ask for them.”  Even Cora Tull told her that she “was not a true mother.”  She refused her breast to Cash and Darl after their time was up; however, with Jewel, her “love child” (she had a child out of wedlock, with the Reverend Whitfield), “there was only the milk, warm and calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence…”  So, Addie had Jewel for herself; then she “gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel,” and then she gave him “Vardaman to replace the child [she] had robbed him of.”  Had she not been a “poor people,” she would have been brought up to love, not only love in the word form, but love in the feeling form.

It would be easy to blame all the poorness on the mother and wife, Addie, having only read her chapter. However, throughout the novel Anse shows his signs of poorness, having lived all his life in poor land.  Anse is a farmer who has “a little property,” and a “good honest name.”  Anse is very rapidly depicted as the “anti-hero,” the character who does everything to get the bigger and better end of any circumstance. For instance, he makes his son Cash make the coffin for his mother; persuades Jewel and Darl to work to get $3.00 extra while their mother is dying (claiming that he himself cannot work, for he is allergic to sweat); convinces his neighbors to help him when he needs them (for example, getting the team of mules, food and housing while on the journey, and the spades while in Jefferson) using the argument of “good Christians;”  makes Cash, Darl and Jewel transport the coffin across the river; sells Jewel’s horse to purchase a team of mules; and ends up stealing Dewey Dell’s $10.00.

Anse’s poor mentality has made him a poor person; one who finds the need to carry his wife’s dead body from one town to another, in a journey that lasts long enough for the body to rot, stink, and attract buzzards.  However, Addie is not much better than he is: She was getting her revenge by asking Anse to promise to take her “back to Jefferson when [she] died.”

Had this couple not lived in poor land, they might not have grown to be such poor people.  Poorness in “As I Lay Dying” is not only seen in economical poverty, but in intellectual, social and emotional poverty: During the journey, when Cash breaks his leg only a few miles out of Jefferson, Anse’s solution is to cover his leg with cement; Peabody says it best when he says that he would “be damned if the man that’d let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement aint got more spare legs.”  This shows Anse’s intellectual poverty—not even adding some kind of cream or gel to Cash’s leg before applying the cement; the Bundren’s social poverty is depicted when they stop at Grummet’s hardware store, and the marshall approaches the wagon parked in front, and requests that Anse remove that dead body from the town—a body which has been dead for more that eight days, and whose stench saturates the city until the Bundrens reach Jefferson; finally, the emotional poverty of the Bundrens is shown through the children, mostly, and their lack of a clear mother figure: Vardaman’s mother is a fish; Jewel’s mother is a horse; Darl’s mother is “is not”; and Cash’s mother is a wooden plank.  This, of course, relative to a mother who did not have children for herself, but rather gave them all to Anse.

Throughout the novel, Faulkner goes around and around the idea of poor land making poor people. The Bundrens are an example of poor land making poor people, in more than one generation.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

It is not easy for people in the XXI century to understand what life during the Great Depression must have been like—let alone for a legal alien belonging to the Generation X to try and comprehend a situation seven decades ago.  However, the way Edna St. Vincent Millay puts it in her untitled sonnet XXX published in “Fatal Interview” in 1931, anyone from any time and place can take a glimpse into a part of life during the Great Depression that few people think about.  How much of her sonnet corresponds to the literary style of the 1920s, as opposed to that of the 1930s?

Commonly known as “Love is not all,” this traditionalist poet uses her excellent way with words to talk about love.  However, Millay is not directly responding to the depression, but rather posing a question: “What would a person give up for love?”  According to Millay, she would give up everything—even peace and food.  A seemingly straight-forward poem, there is more to the poet’s words than one can read.  Experimenting with form, Millay begins by saying “Love is not all.”  This sets the tone of the poem, one might think: this will be an exemplary poem for the depression times, in which a woman shares how much love lacks the power to help with survival during hard times.  Yet, in the middle of the poem the author goes on to say that “It well may be that in a difficult hour / [. . .] I might be driven to sell your love…”  Here is the twist of the poem—Millay states that love is not enough to live with, and then proceeds to say that she might sell it.  But the very last verse, “I do not think I would,” allows the reader to understand that some might: Some people might have sold their love for food, or shelter, or peace—but not her.  As a true traditionalist poet, she remains true to her principles, to her love, to her significant other.  Does Millay have a political agenda up her sleeve that she tries to address with this poem? Is she striving for some kind of reform for “reform’s sake”?

A simple—yet not simplistic—poem like this leaves the reader doubtless: This is a work of art created for the enjoyment of the power of sheer creation, not to establish some sort of social reform, with no political agenda at hand.  Millay is not trying to convince all the women in America to fight for love until the end; she is not trying to convince men to lose all in the name of love; she is not implying that it is acceptable to starve in the name of love.  All the poet is stating in her poem is that love is not all—a timeless statement.  Love does not provide food nor shelter, as Millay states.  She also states that some people might give away their love to get something in return—but she would not.  That is it.  This is the “message” of her poem: She would not let go of love.  She is not standing on a soapbox telling women that love is all that is needed to survive the depression; she has no political agenda.  Millay is not writing this poem to express the power of social reality, and have people live their lives like she does.  This apolitical work of art is meant to please readers with it’s inutility—there is no “swift action” in this poem; there is no deep moral in this poem; there is no political or social reformation undertones.  All there is, is art for aesthetic pleasure, art for art’s sake.

With her poetry, Millay won many awards—including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.  She led a very peculiar life (being bisexual and leading a very open marriage to a man, living the perfect bohemian life in New York), which might lead to an understanding of her peculiar poetry.  Although her poems were not meant to educate the readers, but rather to present her thoughts on current issues, Millay gave people in the 1930s a reason to live through the rough times of the depression: if there was love, although love was not all, there was a reason to keep striving.  And nothing, nothing, should ever replace love, “not meat nor drink.”