Who is't can read a woman? : the fashionning of the female in Shakespeare

Abstract

In the patriarchal society of Renaissance England women played an important role in male self-definition. Since patriarchy was founded on the idea of male superiority, men fashioned woman as weak. Medicine, which began to replace religion in the degree of influence, also helped towards that definition, ascribing to female nature a coldness which was attributed to imperfection and a moisture that implied instability. The threat of female unpredictability subjected women to male scrutiny, and the unruly woman was punished in public to reinstate a man’s good name. My thesis explores the desperate attempts of Shakespeare’s men to fashion female identity in a way that ensures their own self-definition, and aims to prove how futile these efforts are. In Shakespeare the humorous body turns out to be more unstable in men than in women; men’s urge to decipher women only reveals the anxiety of the former; their attempt to reinstate male honour through the humiliation of the unruly woman is yet another reminder of their inability to control her. The anxiety of Shakespeare’s men about female nature often makes them charge women with crimes they have not committed, and this injustice raises the necessity of female vindication and revaluation. However, the refashioning of the abused heroine at the end of the plays merely ascribes to her new (positive) stereotypes, which seem as unstable as the (negative) stereotypes she was ascribed in the beginning. The Shakespearean woman eventually proves a text that cannot be deciphered, a natural force that cannot be fashioned.