Monday
As I was teaching Twelfth Night to a University of Ljubljana Shakespeare class, I kept thinking how important it was that students encounter Shakespeare’s astounding vision of gender complexity. Slovenia no less than the United States is encountering rightwing attacks on LGBTQ+ initiatives, although thankfully the Slovenes are not witnessing mass shootings, attacks on power grids, and fascists with guns intimidating drag shows. Still, one of my former students—now a high school teacher—said that a student at their school, caught in gender confusion, committed suicide recently. Although his parents were supportive, general social disapproval proved too much.
I’ve written in the past how Twelfth Night gives us a framework to better understand gender. To repeat some of those ideas here, my reading of the lightning strike that splits the ship, separating twins Viola and Sebastian, is Shakespeare’s way of conveying how we internalize social labels at an early age. Suddenly we are thinking of ourselves as either male or female. What the play goes on to make clear, however, is that humans are far more complex than this binary.
The play shows men exploring their female side and women exploring their male side. Furthermore, there’s a man (Antonio) who falls in love with another man and a woman (Olivia) who falls in love with another woman (although in her case she thinks Viola is actually a man).
In Count Orsino we have a man discovering he has a female side and mimicking what he believes to be their behavior. Commanding his musicians to play sweet music (“If music be the food of love, play on”), Orsino lounges around refining his sensibilities. In doing so, he so unnerves his servants that one advocates a deer hunt to restore him to his manhood:
Curio: Will you go hunt, my lord?
Duke Orsino: What, Curio?
Curio: The hart.
Orsino: Why, so I do, the noblest that I have:
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn’d into a hart;
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me.
Orsino is thrilled when Viola, disguised as Cesario, enters his household. What a relief to find another effeminate man!
And what about Viola. Whether or not she wants to transition, she certainly enjoys the freedom that comes with being a man. For the first time in her life she can roam freely and have open and frank conversations with a member of the opposite sex. Although Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally informs Meg Ryan that men and women can’t be friends, Viola reveals that there is a way. The woman just needs to pass herself off as a guy, at which point she can become a man’s BFF.
The reverse is also true. Although Orsino may be tongue-tied around Olivia—or at least, he uses emissaries rather than approaching her directly—he has no such difficulties around Viola. Unlike with Curio, to her he can unburden his heart. In fact, at the end of the play when he discovers Viola is really a woman, he requests that she remain a man for just a little longer:
I believe that it is this newly discovered freedom that draws Olivia to Viola/Cesario: what she really longs for—and falls in love with—is Viola’s mobility. She knows she doesn’t like being worshipped by Orsino–it’s as though she’s stuck on a pedestal–and an exaggerated sense of proper female behavior is behind her vow to mourn her dead brother for seven years. When emissaries approach her, her role decrees that she sit and listen. When she encounters Viola/Cesario, however, other possibilities open up. She doesn’t have to remain a pedestal object.
Olivia may not know that Viola is actually a woman, but I think somewhere deep inside she senses that Viola represents a path for her. If Cesario/Viola can imagine herself courting someone with the famous “willow cabin speech,” then Olivia can as well. Here’s Viola fantasizing about doing what a man does (i.e., court a woman):
[I would]
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!
Sure enough, after encountering this different way of being, Olivia is chasing after Cesario/Viola and, in the end, hustling Sebastian off to the altar.
And what about Sebastian? If Viola has a male side, Sebastian has a female side. Here he is describing his readiness to shed tears:
I am yet so near the manners of my mother, that upon the least occasion more mine eyes will tell tales of me.
When Olivia, thinking Sebastian is Cesario/Viola, proposes marriage, Sebastian readily assents. One imagines traditional gender roles being reversed in their household (as they were in England generally at the time, given that a woman was monarch).
In addition to women discovering that they have a male side and men discovering that they have a female side, there’s also Antonio, who clearly has homosexual longing for Sebastian. All we need, now, is for a woman to have a lesbian longings. And maybe that’s Olivia falling in love with Viola.
What Shakespeare understood is what conservative America is denying: humans are far more fluid when it comes to gender than the official party line will acknowledge. Our instinctive realization that this is so helps account for why people go to drag shows. It’s a chance to play around with parts of ourselves that otherwise are hidden. If we could all acknowledge this, life would be so much easier.
Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies (As You Like It and Merchant of Venice are the other two) enjoy playing around with our complexity. They do so in a way that people find to be fun, just like their modern equivalents. These include movies that one film scholar has dubbed “temporary transvestite comedies.” These include Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Victor/Victoria, and She’s the Man (which is a teenpic version of Twelfth Night). It’s only the Malvolios of the world that take offense.
Unfortunately, these Malvolios are turning to terror tactics to threaten and attack gender play. Given the psychological dynamics of projection, this probably means that they are fighting to repress the female (or in the case of women) the male. Unfortunately, what we repress emerges as monstrous (Freud’s “return of the repressed”).
That monster is claiming victims.