Jessica plays an important role as a female character in the male-dominated society in
The Merchant of Venice. She, like Portia, is intelligent to have come up with a plan to
disguise herself in order to achieve her purpose. Jessica has disguised herself as a page in
order to elope with Lorenzo unnoticed by her father, Shylock, and others who are also in
league with him. Similarly, Portia is also intelligent to devise a plan to disguise herself as
a learned Doctor to help save her husband’s best friend, Antonio.
However, Jessica is considered an unfilial child who eloped with her lover, Lorenzo, and
left her father, resulting to Shylock, who is already being marginalized by the Christian
society, to become lonelier. In addition, Lorenzo is also a friend of the people who
mistreated Shylock. In this scene, Jessica also deceives her father by seeming at first to
respect her father and follow his instructions as he tells her to “lock up [the] doors” and
not to “clamber up to the casements then” after hearing about the masque. While her
father is around, she does not object to anything he says. However, the moment he steps
out of the house, Jessica reveals her true intentions of eloping, “Farewell; and if my
fortune be not crossed, / I have a father, you a daughter, lost.” We see how Shylock
himself is unaware that his own daughter is so comfortably putting on a show to deceive
him so that he would not suspect her intentions to elope.
While Portia’s deceptive personality can be compared to Jessica here, Portia’s filial piety
is also contrasted with Jessica’s unfilial act at the same time. Portia is different from
Jessica in being a filial daughter who is very obedient and loyal to her father who is
already dead. She is evidently frustrated at her father’s method of choosing the best suitor
to be her husband, feeling that her greatest decision in her life is bound by her father’s
wish. She stated that “my little body is aweary if this great world” and explained, “I may
neither choose who I / would nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living / daughter
curbed by the will of a dead father.” Yet she gladly submits herself to her father’s will
even when this decision concerns her lifelong happiness. However, Portia has also
deceived Shylock by first disguising herself as a Doctor who is sufficiently learned of the
law to help Antonio and through her disguise, picks out and finds a loophole in the bond
that eventually brings about Shylock’s defeat.
However, Jessica’s act has evoked some sympathy in us. Jessica, being Shylock’s
daughter, must have enough of suffering from the Christians in the Venetian society
where Jews are persecuted by the Christians. In the play, we can see how Shylock is
often discriminated against by the Jews. Thus, Jessica still faces racial prejudice from
other Christians due to her Jewish origins and religion. Subjected to this racial prejudice,
Jessica has so willingly left her father.
Another reason why Jessica left Shylock is because of her true love for Lorenzo. Her
courage is also evident here by being willing to go against her father to elope with
Lorenzo. She is a Jew (a lowly status in Venice) and she risks being shamed from her
elopement with a Christian. In other words, she might face social execution and become
an isolated person stuck in between the Jews and the Christians. Yet, she still summons
her courage to pursue what is dearest to her.
Similarly, Portia risked blowing her cover when she disguised herself as a lawyer to help
save her husband’s closest friend, Antonio. She also faces social execution if discovered
to be breaking the law, a serious offence, but she did it out of her love for her husband.
Thus, we can conclude that Jessica and Portia are similar in many aspects and are the
leading female characters that are manipulative to a certain extent in this male-dominated
society.