How great literature can change your life

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Tuesday

A few weeks ago I saw people on social media debating which state had the most unhinged legislature. While Arizona came in first and Wisconsin second, my own state of Tennessee placed third. And that was before our state legislature passed a bill outlawing “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest.”

Critics have pointed out that there are already bills against public displays of obscenity—few people have problems with this—but the new Tennessee bill appears designed to elide the two, implying that men dressing up as women and women dressing up as men are, automatically, prurient.

This leads me to wonder whether Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies are in danger. Will high school productions of Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Merchant of Venice be banned for “grooming” young people?

And indeed, what the plays do is what drag shows do, which is explore gender by playing with it. I’ve repurposed here a past post on Twelfth Night to make clear the nature of this exploring.

My reading of the lightning strike that splits the ship that carries twins Viola and Sebastian, separating them, is Shakespeare’s way of conveying how we internalize social labels early on. Kids don’t naturally accept gender labels but, at a certain age, they find those labels thrust upon them. A lightning strike out of the blue, as it were. Shakespeare, who understood human beings as well as anyone ever has, realized that we are more complex than a simple gender binary. Society doesn’t like us acknowledging this, however, which is why he had to couch his observations in a comedy.

Twelfth Night captures the complexity of gender, showing 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 Olivia’s 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 female 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 the movie 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. He can unburden his heart to Viola as he never could to his male attendant Curio. In fact, at the end of the play when he discovers Viola is really a woman, he requests that she retain her male name and remain a man for just a little longer:

Cesario, come;
For so you shall be, while you are a man…

Viola’s gender fluidity opens up Olivia as well as Orsino. I believe it is Viola’s newly discovered freedom that draws Olivia to her: what Olivia really longs for—and falls in love with—is more Viola’s mobility than Viola herself. Olivia knows she doesn’t like being worshipped by Orsino–it’s as though he has stuck her on a pedestal–and her own internalized sense of how she’s supposed to behave as a woman makes her feel trapped: she believes she must be so super refined as to mourn her dead brother for seven years. She’s also supposed to just sit and listen when emissaries approach her with marriage proposals.

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 behaving like a man by chasing after Cesario/Viola. In the end, she hustles 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. In other words, traditional gender roles have been turned upside down. I note that the same was occurring in English politics of the time, with a woman reigning as monarch.

So far I have just talked about women discovering that they have a male side and men discovering that they have a female side. This is not the same as sexual attraction for one’s own sex. But the play offers that too in the figure of a gay man, Antonio, who clearly has sexual longings for Sebastian. “My desire, more sharp than filed steel, did spur me forth,” he explains to his love object in explaining why he has been following him.

All we need now to capture all possibilities is a woman with lesbian longings. And maybe we have that in Olivia falling in love with Viola.

Shakespeare understood that humans are far more fluid when it comes to gender than conservative America acknowledges. This is what drew people to Shakespeare’s comedies and what attracts them to drag shows. For that matter, it’s what caused Tennessee governor Bill Lee, who just signed the anti-drag show bill, to dress up as a girl once when he was in high school. It was all in fun, I imagine him saying, but that’s the point: in plays and cross-dressing movies and drag shows and Mardi Gras and other special occasions, we play around with identities that otherwise are hidden. If we could all acknowledge this, life would be so much easier.

Unfortunately, there are censorious Malvolios—Olivia’s puritanical steward—that take offense, sometimes resorting 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 within themselves (or in the case of women, the male). I’m waiting for Florida’s Moms for Liberty to object to school libraries carrying Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies. And maybe Othello as well since it shows systemic racism at work.

As both Freud and Jung have demonstrated, when we push under parts of ourselves that we consider shameful—say, sensitivity in males, assertiveness in females—they return as monsters, what Freud called “the return of the repressed.” I am willing to predict that the loudest voices opposing drag shows come from people who are drawn to, and ashamed of, repressed gender longings. The more repressed they are, the more prurient the drag shows appear to them.

I’m also pretty sure that Gov. Lee will never explain what prompted his adolescent self to dress up as a girl. Maybe if he read Shakespeare he’d understand, but now the political incentives dictate that he condemn rather than understand.