Jessica goes into more great pain to escape and elope with Lorenzo by dressing up as a man. In those days, wearing men clothes was a great shame, as evident by Jessica’s response when asked to be Lorenzo’s torchbearer - “What, must I hold a candle to my shames?/ They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light.” The world light does not just connotate that being a torchbearer will illuminate the fact that Jessica is disguised, but also the noun ‘light’ could refer to sexual immorality. So we can see that Jessica is cross dresses to escape her situation, because by acting as a man, no one would question her, however, she would have been questioned if she did not disguise herself because women were not meant to leave their homes late at night in the elizabethan era. Jessica breaks society's rules.
Portia also cross dresses to escape the restrictions society had placed on woman in the sixteenth century. Portia could not have just gone to the court and defended Antonio, pretending to be herself, but instead she had to assume the clothes of the opposite sex, and by doing so, she enable herself to assume the power and position denied to her as a woman. She escapes her position as a female because she felt confident that she could outwit any male competitor, declaring, “And wear my dagger with the braver grace”. We can argue this by analysing the language of this quotation. In the sentence, ‘dagger’ is not literally meant to represent a dagger, but it is meant to represent power. Portia is trying to say that a men have a lot of power in society, and she thinks she could use(‘wear’) the power really easily - she is implying that she is worthy of the power men had in society in those days.
If we analyse how the women in The Merchant of Venice struggle to escape, we notice that there is a recurring theme of women breaking society’s rules to manipulate their situation and make it more favorable to them. Shakespeare builds strong, clever and rebellious female characters that is contrasting to the typical woman from the elizabethan era - Portia and Jessica both challenge male authority, which means that they try to escape being inferior to men. The dominant themes in the Merchant of Venice are greed, wealth and power. In the elizabethan society, women had no power, but Portia and Jessica escape the restrictions placed on women by opposing society’s rules.
How does the poetry that I have studied in class present women struggling to escape?
In the compelling dramatic monologue ‘Cousin Kate’, the author (Christina Rossetti) explores how women struggled to escape in the 19th century by using the imagery of women being a ‘dove’. This imagery is first used in line 15. A dove is meant to represent a free spirit, and Christina Rossetti is trying to imply that women like being a dove, but they usually don’t remain a dove (they lose their independence) because they are captured by men’s show of love and care. The author uses the imagery of women being a dove in the fourth stanza: in line 32, the narrator says that Kate ‘had the stronger wing’, which means that Kate struggled to escape the lord’s clutches and resisted the lord’s advances more than the narrator. The author shows women struggling to escape in the second, fourth and fifth stanza.
As the narrator is a ‘fallen woman’, she is financially insecure, and so she has to ‘howl’. The verb ‘howl’ depicts how desperate the narrator is to escape her situation, but she remains ‘in dust’, because she is a fallen woman. Also, in CK, the foundations of marriage is less based on love than on the greed of the male. This message is contradictory to the view the society had at that time. Victorians thought that marriage was the key for a stable society. However, the poem shows that marriage was a great burden for women at that time; Kate is expected to bear a child for the lord, but she is unable to and so she is sad.
‘A married state’ advises that the only way to escape the pains and sorrows of marriage is by turning ‘apostate to love’s levity’ (line 14). This quote expresses the fact that being unmarried is the ideal state for a woman, as evident by the quote ‘A virgin state is crown’d with much content’. A connotation of the noun ‘levity’(which means treatment of a serious matter with humour or lack of due respect) is that love seem idyllic and fun at first, but the reality is that it only brings pain - a echoed theme in CK. The author of ‘A married state’ describes being married makes a woman burdened. In the ‘Cousin Kate’ and ‘A married state’, women struggle to escape by struggling to less dependant on men. Also, there is a difference between the CK’ and AMS. The in first poem, children are the only positive outcome of a marriage (the narrator takes pride in her son) but in the latter poem, a child is just another nuisance that exacerbates the hardship of marriage for the woman. Another difference between CK and AMS is that CK is written in a sad tone (the narrator is grieving about her ruined life) whereas the AMS is written in light, playful tone.
Now, let us compare ‘Cousin Kate’ to ‘A willing mistress’. At first, it would seem as if ‘A willing mistress’ is the opposite of ‘Cousin Kate’, because it portrays women to find happiness in a relationship. In ‘Cousin Kate’, the women struggle to escape men’s oppression, but in ‘The Willing Mistress’, the woman seems to be equal to the man. We know this from line 10, where it says ‘And we did begin to play’. In ‘Cousin Kate’, women were the passive recipients of men’s actions (‘lured’, ‘wore’, ‘changed’, ‘bound’...) whereas in ‘The Willing Mistress’ the woman participates in the actions. The ‘return’d’ her lover many ‘kisses’, she gives in to passion, which would have been seen as virtuous and dishonest in the 17th century. However, the actual intent of the author is not to show that women were equal to men in the 17th Century, but women desired to be equal to men in the 1600s. In the 17th century, women were portrayed to lesser than men, but Aphra Behn challenges this. The woman in the poem expresses the desire to be heard and be able to express honest feelings. Aphra is using the character to show that women should have more power society; a meaning of mistress is a woman in a position of authority or control. The author wrote the poem to fight for the inequality between women and men in the 16th century, the characters are a symbol of gender equality - not the reality of that time. We know that the poem is meant to be myth because ‘Amyntas’ is a greek character from mythology. A difference we can see between CK and TWM is the difference in the rhyming scheme, in CK the rhyming scheme runs ‘abcbdbeb’ whereas in the TWM the rhyming scheme runs ‘ababcdcd’, also, in TWM the rhyming scheme is constant whereas in the CK this not true (the first five stanza has even lines rhyming and odd lines rhyming but in the last stanza only the even stanzas rhyme).
My response to the literature that I have read.
In the Merchant of Venice, women try to escape by challenging the authority of men. In the poems AMS and CK, women struggle to escape by trying to be less dependant on men. However, in TWM, women struggle to escape by trying to be equal to men. Let me now compare MOV with AMS. Both MOV and AMS shows that in the past, women were not content in marriage because of the limited role they had in the relationships, and the commitments they had to make to keep their husbands happy. In the MOV, the example of a woman who is not content in marriage is Jessica. At the beginning of act 5, scene, Jessica and Lorenzo discuss about mythical lovers in the moonlight. Lorenzo talks about men who were betrayed by their female lovers, and Jessica talks about women who were betrayed by their male lovers - they are both accusing each other of infidelity. This shows that they are discontent with their marriage, but this is not all. Jessica also directly confronts Lorenzo by saying that his love for her is not true - ‘Stealing her soul with many vows of faith/And never a true one’ (line 20). This quote represents the displeasure Jessica is feeling in her marriage to Lorenzo. Cousin Kate also is similar to MOV because it shows that relationships are regretted by women sometimes, but there also another similarity between CK and MOV which I will explore in the next paragraph.
‘The Merchant of Venice’ shows how men value his lover more than after their marriage - Bassanio worships Portia before their marriage, and after their marriage he offers Portia life for Antonio’s in Act 4 Scene 1. This is also reflected in ‘Cousin Kate’, at first the lord deeply admires the maid, but then uses her as a possession when he takes her as mistress. Finally, both work of literature uses ‘rings’ to show that woman is the property of the man and that man has more power in society; Portia becomes Bassanio’s property when she (“This house, these servants, and this same myself, Are yours- my lord's”) pledges herself to Bassanio by calling him his lord. Men are the only people who are the lord of the house, in the play and in the poem. The fact that men treat women as a possession may be the cause of the displeasure women feel in marriage. The narrator in CK is laments about being treated like a ‘silken knot’ or a ‘glove’ by the lord. In MOV, it could be said that Portia and Nerissa punish their husbands by taking the rings (while they are disguised as the lawyer and lawyer’s clerk) from them and then accusing of being disloyal, after the court scene where Bassanio and Gratiano pledge their wifes’ life for Antonio’s - they treat their wife as a possession to give away.
‘The Merchant of Venice’ and the poems that I have read all is similar because they show women wanting to escape being inferior to men. However, ‘The Willing Mistress’ differs from the other literature I have read because it takes the reader from the reality of the era (men were superior than women in the 17th century) to an idyllic situation where men and women are equal. We know this because Amyntas first ‘led’ the mistress the the ‘grove’, but then both characters participates in their love equally. The grove is symbolic of the future the author wants - the author desires that men and women would be equal in the future.
From the literature that I have read in class, I have learned that inequality is wrong, because the victim of inequality could be hurt greatly. For example, in ‘Cousin Kate’, because of gender inequality that operated at that time, the narrator is put into an unfair situation where she is financially insecure and emotionally hurt because she is an abandoned mistress with a child. The narrator is in this situation for no fault of hers, but because of the decision the ‘lord’ took. The lord does receive punishment for having sex with a person he is not married to (he is pardoned because he is a man), but the narrator is because she is a woman. This example proves that inequality is unnecessary, unjust and simply wrong.
