As to Shakespeare, my remarks on Chaucer apply in part. But even granting the unlikely postulate that Shakespeare (intentionally or "unconsciously") created male characters or female characters in any sense at issue here, his females are rather less convincing as females (and more convincing as the humanist's "illustrations of fundamental human nature") that are (say) the men of *Mansfield Park* *as men*. And his women are not remotely women (*as women*) in any sense relative to the debate here.
When I was in my 20s Rosalind (*As You Like It*) seemed the most glorious creature in all of literature -- but considered *as woman* the creation was clearly mine, not Shakespeare's.
GN: Nonsense. All characters are your own creation, you are always collaboratively engaged through the reading process and to the extent that you are not is the extent to which you don't buy into the work. Your Shakespeare *today* is still clearly yours. But merely because you have come to some epiphany today about who you were *then* doesn't mean that your appreciation *today* is any more Shakespeare than it was when you were twenty. Indeed, we may note, the fetish to play music on original intruments (e.g. Bach), which I love because I love the way the music sounds, is in fact not what Bach heard, because 200 year old instruments were new in Bach's day. A musicological reconstruction is as wildly interpretive as Toscanini's florid romantic overdoing (as in Fantasia), in spite of all its pretensions otherwise. And if one were firmly set, for purposes of a contemporary agenda, on seeing all male fictional depictions of women as flawed and unconvincing, then one would certainly succeed in making that point. Because the only person to convince is one's self; the texts being no more than words on a page with no power to compel acquiescence.
There is of course an empirical solution. Have various texts read by women who presumably don't know them and ask them which they find more "believable." One would have to give some thought to the randomizing the sample of texts but I'm sure it could be done. But is this mere male objectivity which reinforces oppressive social relations. Because after all the women randomly chosen for such a test might not be sufficiently "sensitized" to understand which literature represents them, and men, best. Mais ce n'est plus la litterature; ce n'est qu'un religion. But alas, what a disparaging view of women in their capacity as consumers. If men go to see a movie written by a man because they are buying into the dominant views which form their consciousness; and the women go along because they are stupid or willingly collaborating in an incredible farce. What a pity. So literature written by men for women in the audience is like religious sermons delivered to non-believers: a waste of time, a farce, or worse, self-serving propaganda designed to manipulate and control. But non-believers, as Gibbon once observed, could go to Church and keep an inner smile of disbelief; but the millions of women who flock to Titanic are all engaged in false consciousness because they show no trace of that inner smile of disbelief.
But you should go back to Pope. 'Tis most mannish of you to change your view on Shakespeare:
That each from other differs, first confess; Next, that he varies from himself no less: Add Nature's Custom's, Reason's, Passion's strife And all Opinion's colours cast on life.
Yet more; the difference is as great between The optics seeing, as the objects seen
(To Cobden: 19-24)
To wit, you are casting the opinions' colours (custom, in the form of lit crit fads, reason, in the act of applying your lit crit, and your passions) to your interpretation of Shakespeare. But of course here Pope is charging men with changeability and inconsistency, much as he does in the following essay on women; and insofar as the genre is designed to show foibles and instruct through mockery, neither is particularly flattering. This means that we have to debate whether Pope is somehow more derogatory, insulting, uncomprehending of women than he is of men. When in fact to reproach men of avarice is to a universalizing claim and a put-down.
Carol: In almost all literature prior to the late 17th century you really need a program to tell the gender of the characters. That is one of the reasons no one in Shakespeare can tell his/her husband/wife in the dark or boy/girl twins will do as identical twins.
Probably the first real effort to differentiate character by gender was *Paradise Lost*. And I'll give you one guess in which the following character sketch appears, Pope's *On the Knowledge and Characters of Men" or his" or his "Of the Characters of Women":
"Odious! in woolen! 'twould a Saint provoke, (Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke) "No, let a charming Chintz, and Brussels lace "Wrap my cold limbs, and shade my lifeless face: "One would not, sure, be frightful when one's dead-- "And--Betty--give this Cheek a little Red."
When he got around to dealing with women as women, he introduced his character sketches with
Nothing so true as what you once let fall, "Most Women have no Characters at all." Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.
Have you ever actually *read* Chaucer????
George Eliot was good enough at depicting male characters as to make almost all male critics choke on them or treat them the way one treats a fart at a formal dinner dance.
Carrol
Yes, I have read everything by Chaucer (the question is somewhat condescendingly put, implying: art thou a mere illiterate baboon, fie, go back to Sports Illustrated, Barron's, and political economy, tread not upon Chaucer, vile imp, had you but read him, you would see the truth; mais vraiment, puisque je ne suis pas toujours du cote politiquement comme-il-faut, vous me croyez barbare? Je peux meme lire les grands saints de l'obscurantisme, tel M. Derridas, dans l'original, si j'avais envie de me torturer), including the Parliament of the Fowls and Treatise on the Astrolab, Troilus and Cressida, the fragmentary translation of Le Roman de la Rose, in the original-ish English; I think the editor of my complete works was Robinson, and he may have standardized some of the spellings (rather than modernized); but that's a guess, as it was destroyed in a basement flood which robbed me of many books. So when I say I read everything I mean I read Robinson cover to cover, which I think was damn near everything. And with Milton why Eve and not Delilah. I thought Cressida was pretty well developed and Troilus, by contrast, a buffoon; a cartoon character, while Cressida is the "real" one. The Nun's Priest's Tale (if I'm remembering right, the nun who could eat chicken with her hands and then drink from a glass of wine without leaving a trace of grease on the glass, and who tells the vicious tale of a boy murdered in Jerusalem: is she not the perfect image of the sadistic uptight soul who only wears the outter garb of compassion, and perfectly cast, given the sexual repression that goes with the habit; the story could not have been the same, had it been cast in a priest with the same mannerisms). But it's been twenty odd years since I read Chaucer last.
And basically do you mean that "believable" female characters have only been created by women and that the test of a male character is a that one written by a woman makes a man gag? Or is the gold standard for male writing, to satisfy the p.c., to be Henry James? Is Moll Flanders a credible woman character? And we dismiss Shakespearean portraits because of the gender switching? Wouldn't that be rather an indication of non-bias? Juliet not a strong depiction of teen love? Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, all mere genderless ciphers because of some switcheroo gags in the comedies? Liaisons Dangereuses a portrait purely of male psychology?
I am sorry. I forget. All the Male Works are Wrong, and even when they were right (perhaps Mill, Engels) they were Wrong. And I looked at literary history and the Politically Correct Synthesizer held up a hand: and first I saw three fingers, and then there were six, and then they seemed to blur; and then I realized, there were as many as I the committee of scholars from the right journals said there were, neither more, nor less.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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