To what extent may any two of Shakespeare's political plays be described as 'representations of patriarchal misogyny' (Kathleen McLuskie)?

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To what extent may any two of Shakespeare’s political plays be described as ‘representations of patriarchal misogyny’ (Kathleen McLuskie)?

        Elizabethan and Jacobean society was resolutely hierarchical and patriarchal.  Its structure was divinely ordained through the Great Chain of Being, with power emanating from God through to the monarch and the aristocracy, down to the ordinary man, who enjoyed private sovereignty over woman and the home.  The dominant ideology was recapitulated in all spheres, the domestic microcosm aligning with the structure of the macrocosm.

        Although female inferiority was established upon a want of their biological and intellectual capacities, perhaps the most convincing justification for female subjugation was the seminal misogynistic account offered in Genesis.  Not only does Genesis identify female moral fallibility with the fall of humanity, but offers the source of unstable and ambiguous interpretations of the woman as ‘other’.  Eve, created from the rib of Adam, constructs a dual reading of woman as both derivative creation (therefore less than man), and ‘yet at once more than man since she is an overspill of Adam, created from a bone which was in excess of his needs’.

        A misogynistic hatred of women normatively constitutes itself as a form of naming or categorisation which stresses and maintains gender differentiation by denigrating the female through a range of foul terms.  In Renaissance drama, misogyny is manifested as inherent within the malcontent pathology, and often gains a privileged voice within the play because of the particularly intimate and confidential position the malcontent holds with the audience.  In Othello, Iago’s frequent asides and divulging soliloquies give his misogynistic slurs a dramatic precedence, whilst his seemingly pragmatic knowledge of shared experience (i.e. with the audience) works to sanction them with some social credibility.  However, the use of the joke is the malcontent’s most insidious weapon, as any potential audience censure is dissipated through laughter.  During Desdemona and Iago’s verbal sparring and witty innuendo in II.i, the atmosphere of humour enables Iago to build a searing misogynistic assault, acceptable only because his sharp words are rounded by a light hearted tone.  Iago implies that women are both duplicitous, paragons of chaste and silent virtue in public (‘you are pictures out of doors’ II.i.9), yet cantankerous and loose-tongued within their domestic domains (‘wildcats in your kitchens’ II.i.10), and sexually dubious, ‘You rise to play, and go to bed to work’ (II.i.115).  The ambiguity of this last line comments variably on female industriousness and sexual appetite, implying that women are more attentive to sexual activities than household chores, or that women make hard work of being in bed with their husbands whilst entertaining more ‘playful’ exploits in other quarters.  The dislocation of moral judgement through comedy can draw the audience unwittingly into ideological recognition and implicit acceptance of the misogynistic standpoint endorsed.  As Callaghan summarises,

The humour with which misogyny is expressed is the crucial factor which allows it to masquerade as sub-discourse (anti-rhetoric) of tragedy and which permits and justifies its continual reiteration.

        In King Lear, Edmund’s sensitivity about his illegitimate status as a bastard differentiates him from Iago as the play’s malcontent.  Edmund has little personal investment in engaging in an attitude of male camaraderie that delineates female sexuality as incontinent, himself being the stigmatised product of such an aberrant and apparently voracious sexual nature. The categorisation of the female is shown to be dangerously subject to male vested interests, with the same woman labelled in both vulgar and derogative terms by a suspected cuckold (Gloucester states she is ‘good sport’ I.i.24), and in morally upright definition (an ‘honest madam’ I.ii.9) by a son desperate to legitimate his social status.  Othello’s wretched musing upon Desdemona at the end of the play, also envisages the female as a canvas open to male inscription and interpretation,

        Was this fair paper, this most godly book,

        Made to write whore upon?         (IV.ii.71-2)

Desdemona is portrayed curiously as ‘tabula rasa’, pure and white; a blank script upon which Othello can project his distorted fantasies.  The inscription Desdemona is destined to bear is whore, herself as an actualised and complex being silenced into one reductive syllable, which yet screams her infamy.

        Much misogynistic discourse is focused upon the status of women as property.  Legally inhibited from owning property themselves (all a woman’s possessions were forfeited to her husband upon marriage), the female becomes a passive object of exchange between men, whose value could be both literally and symbolically prized and depreciated according to male whim.  Brabantio challenges Othello, ‘O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow’d my daughter’ (I.ii.62), figuring Desdemona almost as ‘inanimate cargo’ as opposed to a fully fleshed individual.  Brabantio’s indignant rage derives less from the approbation Desdemona itself, than from the usurping of the patriarchal privilege to dispose of his daughterly property according to his own approbation.  Similarly, although Lear professes he loved Cordelia the ‘most’ (I.i.122), his youngest daughter still remains a precious bargaining tool.  However, the price upon her head is subject to fluctuation.  In her refusal to be a compliant participator in her father’s sham ceremony of daughterly devotion and patriarchal benediction, her value is diminished from honoured trophy to damaged goods (‘But now her price has fallen’ I.i.198), as she is denigrated to a piece of ‘little-seeming substance’, tarnished irreparably by fatherly ‘displeasure’ (I.i.199-200).  Cordelia’s status as a commodity in the cycle of rejection from, and restoration into, the patriarchal order, is testified by the King’s exercise of absolute prerogative in ‘seizing’ the unwanted treasure, ‘I take up what’s cast away’ (I.i.248).

        Desdemona and Cordelia’s turbulent exchange from father to husband represents the ‘generalized problem inherent in the female condition’, in that a daughter’s duty to the father, upon maturity, must necessarily be divided with the husband.  Cordelia plainly asserts that she must transfer half her love, ‘care and duty’ (I.i.102) from her father and lodge it in the bosom of ‘that lord whose hand must take my plight’ (I.i.101).  Her laconic statement may be testament to her simple integrity, yet its baldness bespeaks callous defiance to Lear who takes hypersensitive personal affront, ‘But goes your heart with this?’ (I.i.105).  However, Desdemona’s linguistic artfulness and diplomacy engineers to displace Brabantio from his possessively filial role to a more sympathetic perspective. Desdemona employs the analogy of her mother’s own ‘divided duty’ (I.iii.181) in preferring Brabantio to her own father, removing the raw private contention to more universal heights in emphasising the repetitious patterns of birth, growth, marriage, maturity and death.

        Lear’s rage (and to a lesser extent Brabantio’s, because of Desdemona’s contentious choice of husband) can be read as irrationally paradoxical.  In his refusal to relinquish the full share of his filial attention and commitment, he effectively attempts to monopolise all patriarchal roles (father, brother, husband), inattentive to the fact that absolute guardianship and daughterly deference must be transferred to the husband to ensure continuing stability of the patriarchal ideology.

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        Desdemona and Cordelia’s real transgressions may be more subtly subversive than a mere defection of allegiances.  Brabantio’s ranting assertions that the Moor has enchanted his daughter, signify he can only fathom that ‘spells and medicines’ (I.iii.61) can constitute any conceivable interpretation of his daughter’s uncharacteristically excessive behaviour (e.g. causing a ‘nature so preposterously to err’ I.iii.62).  Brabantio has constructed his daughter as a prodigy of virtue,

                        A maiden never bold

        Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion,

        Blush’d at herself.         (I.iii.94-6)

and thus the baffled ‘how got she out?’ (I.i.168) is less directed at her literal escape, than ...

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