FEMINIST CRITICISM AND
TEACHING SHAKESPEARE
Carol Thomas Neely
ELEVEN years ago, when involuntarily unemployed after eight years of teaching, I
began to write a paper on what seemed to me a manageable and innocuous topic—the
women in Othello . This paper gradually and inadvertently became an article on a
broader and less manageable topic, “Women and Men in Othello ”; its scarcely
innocuous subtitle, “What should such a fool/Do with so good a woman?” is an angry
question that (in the Quarto's version of the text) Emilia hurls at Othello and that I, in
effect, ask of all the male characters in the play. The article was published; then
reprinted in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare , an anthology that
I coedited with Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz and Gayle Greene; and, much later and after
revisions, became a chapter in my own book that explores relations between women
and men throughout the Shakespeare canon. In these eleven years I have gone from
being an undeclared feminist and an inadvertent feminist critic to being a selfdeclared feminist and a self-conscious feminist critic and, I guess, a feminist teacher,
although I am not altogether sure I can say just what this means.
This brief personal history has, I hope, more than merely personal relevance. First, it
demonstrates an important convention of feminist criticism—beginning with an
autobiographical prologue to emphasize and embody this criticism's contention that
the personal is the political and that life is intertwined with criticism. Second, it is not
a unique but a typical narrative for feminist critics, and, as such, it can reveal some of
the characteristics, strengths, and risks of this criticism.
Feminist criticism—at least for critics of my generation, who did not grow up with
it—started as an ad hoc personal affair. We often did it before we knew what we were
doing or knew that others were doing it too. This was apparent in the letters
accompanying submissions to the anthology I coedited. They almost invariably began,
“I don't really know if this is feminist or not.” My coeditors and I did not really know
either, and we did not formally define what we were anthologizing until after we had
selected the strongest papers and came to write our introduction. Even then we did not
define feminist criticism to our satisfaction, and I cannot do so now. What I will do is
to suggest some of its qualities, categorize some of the things that feminist critics of
Shakespeare do, and suggest some of the implications that this criticism has for my
teaching.
Feminist criticism is not a methodology; feminist critics can be new critics,
psychoanalytic critics, historical critics, textual editors. Feminist critics are, broadly,
feminists, but they are male as well as female, scholarly as well as political, practical
as well as theoretical. Feminism itself is in a way ad hoc too. Unlike, for example,
Marxism or psychoanalysis, it lacks the single seminal figure and the core theoretical
texts from which basic assumptions and methodology derive. Feminist critics of
Shakespeare have probably read some of the multitude of works of feminist analysis:
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women , Virginia Woolf's A
Room of One's Own , Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex , Luce Irigary's The Sex
Which Is Not One , or Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice , for example. But they
may not have read the same things, and they do not necessarily make explicit
reference to them in their criticism. Feminist criticism of Shakespeare also lacks its
own unique subject matter. Although critics of later literature bring women writers
back into the canon, define a female aesthetics, or formulate a female literary history,
the women in Shakespeare were created by a man, and neither they nor their author
have ever been invisible. Nor are women the only subject of feminist critics of
Shakespeare, who also examine war, marriage and the family, male identity,
patriarchal structures.
Lacking a unique theory, methodology, subject matter, or style, feminist critics are
united by a number of shared perceptions. They assume that women have been
oppressed by men and by the social and literary structures that men have devised; they
believe that women deserve equal rights, equal time, and equal voice. They dislike
and expose sexist criticism that ignores, misrepresents, or devalues women. They call
attention to (whatever the specific subject matter) the nature of patriarchy and its
consequences for women. The characteristic perspective of feminist criticism derives
from such assumptions. But its approaches and effects vary widely, as I will show by
describing briefly what I have defined at length elsewhere—three modes of feminist
criticism of Shakespeare, categorized according to their aims and their focus. 1 These
are compensatory criticism, which focuses on strong women; justificatory criticism,
which focuses on male power; and transformational criticism, which combines and
extends the other two perspectives.
The first mode, compensatory criticism, focuses like compensatory women's history
on assertive women—on Shakespeare's powerful, prominent, eloquent women
characters; it optimistically celebrates their virtues, compensating for traditional
criticism, which has minimized or stereotyped them. This mode is exemplified by
Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women , which argues for the
existence of feminist sentiments and improvement in women's status in the drama and
in the period, as well as by Irene Dash's Wooing, Wedding, and Power: The Women in
Shakespeare's Plays . Such critics sympathize with and applaud the shrewishness of
Kate in The Taming of the Shrew , analyze the manipulative power and witty
assertiveness of heroines like Rosalind and Portia, define Cleopatra as a hero. They
may also reinterpret the characters and roles of apparently more subordinate women,
stressing, as I did in my Othello article, the healthy sexuality, realism, and courage of
Desdemona and Emilia.
Critics may call attention to the extraordinary power Gertrude has in Hamlet to attract,
repel, influence, or obsess all the men in the play—not only Hamlet father, Hamlet
son, and Claudius but also Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They might
see Ophelia's madness as not merely pretty and passive but as dramatically and
psychologically revelatory. Ophelia presents to the court of Elsinore fragmented
images of her own desires for Hamlet and her fears of his sexual betrayal (“Men will
do't if they come to't / By Cock, they are to blame” [4.5.61-62]), punning references to
her father's death (“They bore him barefaced on the bier” [4.5.165]), emblems of the
court's corruption (as she gives the courtiers fennel for flattery, columbines for
cuckoldry, daisies for dissembling), and of the values the court has renounced (“God
be at your table!” [4.5.44]). Such criticism may illuminate much that has been ignored
but may overemphasize women's virtues and ignore the constraining contexts in
which the women characters act and the purposes to which their representations are
put.
The second mode, justificatory criticism, emphasizes what the first mode neglected—
women's subordinate position and the pervasiveness of male power in Shakespeare's
plays and in the period. It acknowledges that women characters are as often victims as
heroines, that they are inevitably defined and define themselves in relation to men—
most often to men they love. Such criticism justifies, or at least accounts for, the
limited roles of women and the limiting conceptions of women held by male
characters as well as by male critics and laments these limits. The mode is
exemplified by Coppélia Kahn's Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare , by
Peter Erickson's Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama , and by Lisa
Jardine's Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare ,
which argues (denying Dusinberre's claims for a “feminist” drama) that the drama
serves men's needs to contain women's power, reflecting the period's misogynist
anxieties. In this mode critics stress that the heroines of the comedies are silenced by
the marriages at the ends of the plays, that the courage of Emilia and of Desdemona is
powerless to prevent their deaths, that Lady Macbeth evaporates as a character when
her connection with Macbeth is lost, that even Cleopatra dies for love. Ophelia, until
her mad scene, is dominated and submissive, repeatedly an object of male
admonition, manipulation, and control. Her father and brother control her chastity,
Claudius uses her to trap Hamlet. Reinforcing earlier mixed messages, Hamlet calls
her a whore and orders her to a nunnery.
The third, transformational mode examines the relative position and power of men
and women and the relations between culture and literary texts. It unravels the
interaction between the witty heroines and the confining culture, between the
idealization and degradation of women, between patriarchal structures and female
sub-cultures, examining the mutually transforming roles of men and women
throughout the canon. Its goal is not only to compensate for the omissions and
inadequacies of traditional criticism by supplementing it and is not merely to justify
the presentation of women by understanding the culture from which it springs but to
transform criticism. In this mode a number of critics examine the relations between
the genders in different genres. Others explore interactions between male fears of
being feminized, male fears of women, and male domination of women. Marianne
Novy in Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare weighs the negotiations
between heterosexual mutuality and patriarchal control, between reason and emotion
in the plays. Such a critic might look at, in Hamlet , the ways in which Ophelia is
freed for madness by her father's death and Hamlet's absence, how this madness
allows her to become a surrogate for Hamlet, expressing his obsessions and taking
center stage to discomfit the court as he had done. This madness influences all the
rest, driving Laertes to revenge, Gertrude to an acknowledgement of guilt, and
Claudius to further corruption. Her death by drowning frees her from the poison that
contaminates the others. Like Gertrude later, she refuses, finally, her subordinate
position, but the women's deaths are not active and not central. Feminist critics are
pledged to tell Ophelia's story and report her “causearight / To the unsatisfied” (as
Horatio must report Hamlet's [5.2.34-2]) and to reinterpret the stories of tragedy,
comedy, and romance.
Recently this reinterpretation has moved in a new direction. Influenced by
developments in feminism and critical theory that emphasize the historical specificity
of women's experiences and the gap between those experiences and representations of
them, feminist critics of Shakespeare wish to understand the plays within a historical
context and to look at the women characters in relation to the roles of and attitudes
toward women in the period. They assume not that this context will explain the
characters but, rather, that all representations of women, literary or nonliterary, reveal
attitudes toward them, anxieties about them, conflicts in their roles.
Marriage is perhaps the Renaissance institution that most profoundly shapes women's
lives. Their status in the plays, as in the period, is defined by their place in the
paradigm of marriage—maid/wife/widow. Renaissance discourses about these three
roles reveal conflict and anxiety about women's status, about their sexuality, and
about the degree of control that men can or should maintain over women, husbands
over wives. The defining characteristic of maids is their virginity, which they are
cautioned to defend against their own desires, male deceits, and the possibility of
slander. The best protection is to stay at home since, as Vives, an influential Spanish
humanist, argues in his Instruction of a Christian Woman , “if a slander once take
hold in a maid's name by folks' opinion, it is in a manner everlasting, nor cannot be
washed away without great tokens and shows of chastity and wisdom” (105). In the
light of such prescriptions, Laertes's warnings to Ophelia to guard against her own
credulous weakness and Hamlet's aggressive desire seem conventional: “Then weigh
what loss your honor may sustain / If with too credent ear you list his songs, / Or lose
your heart, or your chaste treasure open / To his unmastered importunity. / Fear it,
Ophelia, fear it …” (1.3.2933). Hamlet's rant at Ophelia in the nunnery scene, of
course, grows out of his anxiety about his mother's sexuality and his own
corruptibility, but it also seems a hyperbolic extension of Vives's advice. Hamlet
merely exaggerates the inevitability of male deceit: “We are arrant knaves all; believe
none of us”; the degree of protection needed: “Go thy ways to a nunnery”; and the
vulnerability of women's reputations: “If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for
thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny”
(3.1.129, 130, 13637).
Even if maids preserve their chastity and reputation and acquire dowries and get
married, their sexuality is still dangerous and endangered; hence they must still be
restricted. Renaissance wives were expected to be sexually loving and sexually
faithful, to be both companionable with and obedient to their husbands. The tension
between the new ideal of mutual friendship and the continuing necessity for male
authority and female subordination is reflected in Edmund Tilney's Flower of
Friendship , a lively dialogue that defines husbands' and wives' duties in marriage. (I
have modernized spelling and punctuation in the following quotations.) When
Isabella, throughout the dialogue an advocate of more rights for women, argues that
obedience should be a reciprocal duty like all the others—“But as meet is it that the
husband should obey the wife, as the wife the husband, or at the least that there be no
superiority between them,” (sig./D8)—her position is denied by all present including
the well-known humanist “father Erasmus,” a mostly silent character in the dialogue
who speaks up at this point to declare without opposition that “both divine and human
laws in our religion giveth the man absolute authority over the woman in all places”
(sig./E1).
Gertrude in Hamlet embodies exactly this appropriate obedience. “I shall obey you,”
she characteristically tells Claudius as she acquiesces in his plan to trap Hamlet
(3.1.37). When, in the closet scene, Hamlet begins to give her orders, she becomes
equally obedient to him: “What should I do?” she asks (3.4.181). But in spite of
Gertrude's womanly and wifely silence, obedience, and passivity, her sexuality is
threatening to both Hamlet and his father, who imagine it as violent, excessive,
contaminated: “Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in
corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (3.4.9295); “So lust,
though to a radient angel linked, / Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on
garbage” (1.5.5557). The men's fantasies of a lascivious Gertrude grow out of their
jealousy and possessiveness and justify their attempts to control her. They also
dovetail perfectly with Renaissance attitudes toward the widow's anomalous role in
the marriage paradigm—a role Gertrude assumes only briefly. Widows, because they
are not virgins and not under the control of men, are perceived as threatening figures
and are often portrayed as aggressively lusty. Gertrude's “o'erhasty” remarriage seems
to Hamlet and his father to confirm the stereotype.
But the representations of women in this Shakespeare play, as in others, do not merely
embody but also disrupt paradigmatic women's roles and reveal poignant
contradictions in them. Ophelia in her madness can express indirectly the desires she
is forbidden to act on; can present herself as a victim of male lust and betrayal: “Then
up he rose and donned his clothes / And dupped the chamber door, / Let in the maid,
that out a maid / Never departed more” (4.5.5255); can register the brutal
transformation that is the consequence of daughterly obedience: “They say the owl
was a baker's daughter” (4.5.42). Finally, Ophelia's death becomes the emblem of her
enforced and traumatic rolelessness and homelessness in a society where women were
to stay at home under the authority of men. Gertrude's death, in contrast, manifests the
conflict between her role as wife and her role as mother, a conflict engendered in part
by Claudius's villainy. Seconding Claudius's hypocritical “ Our son shall win”
(5.2.289; italics mine), she disobeys, for the first time, his command: “Gertrude, do
not drink.” “I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me” (29293). Poisoned by his
treacherous cup, she warns “My dear Hamlet” against her husband, abandoning at the
end the docility that has characterized her throughout. Placing these female characters
in the context of women's roles in the Renaissance helps my students to understand
the characters better, the plays better, and the Renaissance better—and to see
connections with their own lives.
Although my criticism and teaching are in every way intertwined, I do not feel quite
as comfortable calling myself a feminist teacher as I do calling myself a feminist
critic; but I would not reject the description. If one of the difficulties of being a
feminist critic is that it is a role too nebulous to be easily defined, one of the
difficulties of thinking of myself as a feminist teacher is that this seems too narrow a
label to encompass all the things I teach and do in the classroom. I think of myself as
teaching Shakespeare, not feminist Shakespeare, and my goal is to enable students to
think and write intelligently about the plays, not to make them feminists or feminist
critics. I don't teach a lot of feminist theory in my classes, and I assign feminist essays
along with those representative of other critical approaches. In class we discuss many
aspects of Hamlet other than gender relations: the ghost and Elizabethan attitudes
toward ghosts, the function of the play within the play, the imagery of poison, the
gravediggers.
But like all teachers, especially perhaps teachers of Shakespeare, for everything I put
in, I leave something out, and I have put in a lot of new things since I became a
feminist. Many of the pedagogical choices I make reflect consciously or
unconsciously my feminist perspective, and this certainly influences which
Shakespeare my students read. In class now we discuss Hamlet's relations to Gertrude
and Ophelia as much as or more than his relations to Laertes, Fortinbras, and
Horatio—or even to his father and Claudius. We analyze Ophelia's mad scenes as
carefully as Hamlet's soliloquies—perhaps more carefully because students have great
difficulty understanding their language, their meaning, or their purpose in the play.
Paper topics always include one involving gender roles, marriage, or family. As my
focus has shifted, my syllabus has changed too. I now teach fewer history plays and
more comedies in early Shakespeare, fewer tragedies and more problem comedies and
romances in later Shakespeare. Perhaps more important, whatever I teach, I try to help
my students to understand how both literature and the teaching, criticism, and study of
it reflect and influence cultural values.
I wish in fact that more of my students had read a Shakespearean comedy or problem
comedy and a late romance in high school along with (but not in place of) a tragedy
and that the tragedy was less often Julius Caesar or Macbeth , the plays most often
read by them before they get to college. They hate the first and love the second, but
neither provides a variety of central, strong, and sympathetic women characters or a
full introduction to the range of issues I discuss. Both seem to me, though for different
reasons, safe plays. Neither forces students to confront in Shakespeare issues—parentchild relationships, courtship conventions, anxieties about sexuality and marriage,
inequalities in gender relations—that they must deal with in their lives. These issues
make Shakespeare resonant for students today but also perhaps dangerous. Even so
small a change as substituting one play for another in the curriculum means taking
thought, taking time, taking risks. There is the risk that the bawdy in Romeo and Juliet
or the adulterous passion in Antony and Cleopatra will offend students, parents,
colleagues, or school boards. There is the risk that students will refuse to engage
themselves in issues that hit so close to home. There is the greater risk that they will
take seriously the implications of the feminist perspective; for many of them this
experience will be as painful as it is illuminating. As teachers we always take the
great risk of influencing students' lives in ways we cannot control and will never be
forced to answer for. It is perhaps because of the risks involved that it took me so long
to recognize that I was a feminist critic and is taking me longer still to realize that I
have become a feminist teacher.
The author is Professor of English at Illinois State University. This paper was
originally presented at an ADE-sponsored session, Recent Critical Approaches
toShakespeare, at the NCTE convention in Detroit in November 1984.
NOTE
1
Parts of this paper are derived from more extensive discussions in my published
work. For a fuller consideration of feminist scholarship devoted to Shakespeare, see
“Feminist Modes,” which was reprinted, revised, as part of a longer essay, “Feminist
Criticism in Motion” (Treichler 6990). I explore Ophelia's and Gertrude's roles in
Hamlet in Broken Nuptials (10304); see also the discussion in that book of the status
of women in Renaissance marriage (720).
WORKS CITED
Dash, Irene. Wooing, Wedding, and Power: The Women in Shakespeare's Plays . New
York: Columbia UP, 1981.
Dusinberre, Juliet. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women . New York: Barnes, 1975.
Erickson, Peter. Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama . Berkeley: U of
California P, 1985.
Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of
Shakespeare . Totowa: Barnes, 1983.
Kahn, Coppélia. Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare . Berkeley: U of
California P, 1981.
Lenz, Carolyn R. S., Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. The Woman's Part:
Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare . Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.
Neely, Carol Thomas. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays . New Haven: Yale
UP, 1985.
———. “Feminist Modes of Shakespearean Criticism: Compensatory, Justificatory,
and Transformational.” Women's Studies 9.1 (1981): 315.
Novy, Marianne. Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare . Chapel Hill: U
of North Carolina P, 1985.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare . Ed. Sylvan Barnet.
New York: Harcourt, 1972.
Tilney, Edmund. A Brief and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Mariage Called the
Flower of Friendshippe . London: Denham, 1568.
Treichler, Paula, Cheris Kramarae, and Beth Stafford, eds. For Alma Mater: Theory
and Practice in Feminist Scholarship . Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985.
Vives, Juan Luis. Instruction of a Christian Woman . 1532. Trans. Richard Hyrd.
London: Berthlet, 1540. Excerpted in Vives and the Renascence Education of Women
. Ed. Foster Watson. New York: Longmans, 1912.
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
ADE Bulletin 087 (Fall 1987): 15-18
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