Androgyny in the Merchant of Venice: towards a feminist ideal
Date
1992
Authors
Rensley, Penelope Jane Howell
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Abstract
The Renaissance notion of androgyny was a mythic and allegorised view of the perfectibility of human beings through the union of male and female, based on such models as the Aristophanic androgyne and Judaeo-Christian projections of Adam as a perfect totality before the removal into Eve of the female element. The modern conception of androgyny, however, focuses on gender and is defined as the mix within a person of traits conventionally seen in Western culture as appropriately either feminine or masculine. Androgyny thus posits a breakdown of segregated, gendered spheres of experience, dictated by sex and constructed by cultures, which is still an unrealised ideal. This idea of gender androgyny has been prominent--and a focus of controversy--in feminist thought since the 1970s, and has often been used as a critical approach to Shakespeare's transvestite comedies, with As You Like It and Twelfth Night being generally viewed as more androgynous plays than The Merchant of Venice.
This thesis offers the contrary view that The Merchant of Venice is both the most androgynous and the most feminist of Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedies. Although Shakespeare never refers to androgyny, I argue that elements in The Merchant give the potential for a reading of the text as a celebration of the balanced, androgynous personality. The study works specifically from a belief of androgyny as an ideal that is compatible with feminist approaches to gender, and, while examining Elizabethan ideas of women and religion, I emphasise the text's possible reception by a modern, rather than by the original, reader/audience.
Chapter one examines the Renaissance belief that essential, inherent differences between women and men mandate separation of abilities and experiences according to sex. Rosalind and Viola are explored as literary representations of the cultural view that femaleness posits circumscribed abilities and experiences. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Portia who, in contrast to Shakespeare's other transvestite heroines, is a fully androgynous character in a text that validates female access to a whole range of human traits.
In the second chapter, I look at Shylock as the Other, in Venetian society, alienated from the Christians because of his Judaism, but also because his excessively masculine character sets him aslant their androgynous natures. The chapter thus provides an insight into the text's valuation of qualities associated with the feminine principle through the negative example of Shylock.
The last chapter focuses on The Merchant's littleĀ discussed mutability motif in a further examination of the text's implicit celebration of the androgynous personality. I suggest that Shylock's one-sided nature victimises him as he fails to cope with changes in fortune as successfully as do the androgynous Venetians, who hazard themselves in a world subject to flux, and win.
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UN SDG 5: Gender Equality