William C. Carroll, The Virgin Not: Language and Sexuality in Shakespeare
William C. Carroll, The Virgin Not: Language and Sexuality in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey 46, Shakespeare and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 107-120.
My argument will therefore only concern female sexuality as a production of male discourse, and I mean to use the term ‘sexuality’ rather than ‘gender’ because I will examine the biological semantics at work in the plays. Some feminists have argued that female sexuality is, in patriarchal discourse, unrepresentable—conceptually available only as lack, invisibility, or negation. [One of the best discussions of sexuality in the early modern period is Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithica, 1988).] I will pursue that position through different, sometimes contradictory ways… (107)
Ultimately, I will examine some of the mystifications of the Tudor-Stuart discourse of virginity, the ne plus ultra, so to speak, of female sexuality—looking particularly at how certain modes of discourse registered the presence or absence of virginity. (107)
To begin with, female sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays is invariably articulated as linguistic transgression—that is, a verbal replication of female obliquity. (107)
…Cleopatra…the supreme Shakespearean example of female sexuality… (107)
Johnson … indicate[d] how Shakespeare’s masculine persuasive force, to borrow Donne’s term, was weakened and deflected by the ‘irresistible’ fascinations of the feminized quibble. For the heroic, manly playwright, ‘a quibble is the [107] golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. (Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York, 19580, p. 252) [108]
…Johnson’s understanding of unstable language as feminine and therefore seductive. Johnson thus suggests part of my argument here: that patriarchal discourse equates destabilizing verbal forms and female sexuality. (108)
The pun and its inversion, the malapropism, permit the introduction into utterance of female sexuality without ever seeming to name or recognize it. The references may be comic … or they may be sinister—as in the references to ‘country matters’ … This kind of wordplay permits the eruption of female sexuality into ordinary utterance. [Freud remarks that the malaprop ‘does not possess [any inner] inhibition as yet, so that he can produce nonsense and smut directly and without compromise’ (Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. James Strachey [New York, 1960], p. 185). (108)
If puns and malapropisms offer the sexual low road, … then their linguistics opposite is represented by a far more stylized form of verbal dislocation, the riddle. However riddles are categorized, one common structural feature is that ‘the referent of the description’ is withheld, to be guessed at by an audience—all signifiers and no signified, in short. [Roger D. Abrahams, ‘The Literary Study of the Riddle’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 14 (1972), p. 187.] Shakespeare’s plays encode female sexuality in riddles so as to mystify it in terms of obliqueness or absence. (109)
[in Pericles] the riddle he reads encodes incest, the missing signified the daughter or Antiochus [Sc. 1. 107-14]. It is worth recalling here that Shakespeare, as Goolden has noted, has altered his sources by making the missing signified of the ‘I’ in this riddle be, not the father, but the daughter. [P. Goolden, ‘Antiochus’s Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 6 (1955), 245-51.] This change… defines female sexuality as absence—and, in the riddle is answered, as transgression. (109) [110-111 missing in google-books preview.]
Paroles’ dialogue on virginity with Helen in All’s Well That Ends Well follows the same line of sophistic logic. His argument proceeds from the libertine assumption: ‘It is not politic in the commonwealth to preserve virginity’, because ‘loss of virginity is rational incrase’ (1.1.124-6). [Erasmus makes this argument in Proci et puellae (1523); see The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago, 1965, pp. 86-98). For a concise discussion of the Renaissance doctrine of Increase, with special attention to Shakespeare’s sonnets, see J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London, 1956), pp. 189-201. Donne (the attribution is in doubt) argues in Paradox XII, ‘That Virginity is a Vertue’, that ‘surely nothing is more unprofitable in the Commonwealth of Nature, then they that dy old maids, because they refuse to be used to that end for which they were only made… Virginity ever kept is ever lost’ (John Donne, Paradoxes and Problems, ed. Helen Peters (Oxford, 1980), pp. 56-7). Even the anti-libertine argument employed the same rhetoric, as may be seen in the thirteenth-century homily, Hali Meidenhad: ‘Maidenhood is a treasure that, if it be once lost, will never again be found. Maidenhood is the bloom that, if it be once foully plucked, never again sprouteth up’ (Hali Meidenhad, ed. Oswald Cockayne (London, 1866) p. 10] Virginity is a paradoxically self-annihilating commodity: ‘by being once lost [it] may be ten times found; by being ever kept it is ever lost … (129-30) … Turning the young maiden into the old courtier, this passage [1.1.152-60] moves toward an equation between the hymen and male impotence; for every intact virgin, it seems, another male has failed. (112)
The language which Shakespeare employs to signify virginity thus generally trades on various forms of paradoxical negation, but he names given to the hymen itself suggest both positive and negative categories. (112)
More metaphorically, the hymen is a ‘maidenhead’, a usage which the OED dates from the mid-thirteenth century. Shakespeare uses the term frequently, often in the sense of a commodity, a thing to be acquired or taken, or a trophy of male conquest and possession. … But Shakespeare also understands the symbolic inversion at work in this name, by which the head of a maiden becomes a maidenhead, resulting at times in fantasies of punishment and dismemberment. [Cf. Lear’s vision of the simpering dame, ‘Whose face between her forks presages snow’ (Lear, 4.5.117)] In Romeo and Juliet, Samson promises to be civil with the maids: ‘…I will cut off their heads. Gregory. The heads of the maids? Samson. Ay, the heads of the maids, or their/ maidenheads, take it in what sense thou wilt. (1.1.22-5) This displacement figures in several of the plays…. (113)
The hymen is further objectified as a valuable object; thus Laertes warns Ophelia not to open ‘your chaste treasure…/To [Hamlet’s] unmastered importunity’ (Hamlet 1.3.31-2).
Some contemporary scientific treatises, however, literalized the flower metaphor in their anatomical descriptions. In The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (1548), for example, Thomas Vicary uses the metaphor of ‘deflouring’ but reserves the term ‘flowres’ as a specific name for the menses, a term which had become common usage among Renaissance anatomists, midwives, and physicians. [Thomas Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (1548), ed. F. J. and Percy Furnivall (London, 1888), pp. 77-8. ] In his Microcosmographia (1615), however, Helkiah Crooke brings biology and metaphor more closely together. ‘The Caruncles [small pieces of flesh and membrane] are foure’, Crooke says in his description of the hymen, ‘and are like the berries of the Mirtle, in every corner of the bosome one.’ All these parts and others, taken ‘together make the forme of the cup of a little rose halfe blowne when the bearded leaves are taken away. Or this production’, he goes on, ‘with the lappe or privity may be likened to the great Clove Gilly-flower when it is moderately blowne’ (223 [sic: actually 235]). … Crooke’s attempt to bring the semantic domains or metaphor and biology together was echoed in other anatomies, including the anonymous Aristotle’s Master Piece, where the hymen ‘is like bud of a rose…’ [The Works of Aristotle, The Famous Philosopher, (New York, 1974), p. 18) ] The flower is thus both a metaphor and, through acts of transference and supposed observation, allegedly also a close description of the thing itself. (114)
Shakespeare employs one name which puns on all the dislocations and mystifications that we have already examined—that is, the virgin knot (thus my title again.) What was a virgin knot? It is equated with but apparently distinct from the so-called marriage knot and the true-lover’s knot. The true-lover’s knot is the iconographic image of the elaborately encoiled and overlapping thread, with no beginning or end, which unites true lovers … The marriage knot, on the other hand, was the mystic union of two lovers through marriage… The marriage knot could not be dissolved by man … Shakespeare’s usage is straight-forward: … Capulet plans to ‘have this knot knit up tomorrow morning’ between Juliet and Paris (Romeo, 4.2.24) … The knot of love may also indissolubly link friends or family… (115) … The marriage not or true-lover’s knot cannot be ‘undone’, ‘untied’, or ‘dissolv’d’ , then. It is forever. [31] / But the virgin knot is something else. … [Bertram is All’s Well… ] resists the eternal knot by refusing to untie the physical knot. … For Othello, the word [knot] conveys everything ugly about what he thought had been his virgin wife: turning the fountain of his life into ‘a cistern for foul toads/ To knot and gender in’ (4.2.63-4). [117-118 Missing]
Those who rely on the appearance of hymeneal blood as the sign of virginity are making a mistake, he [Ambrose Parey] argues, giving as one incredible example a story of prostitutes who have learned to counterfeit virginity, by putting into their vaginas ‘the bladders of fishes, or galles of beasts filled full of blood and so deceive the ignorant and young lecher, by the fraud and deceit of their evill arts, and in the time of copulation they mixe sighes with groans, and womanlike cryings, and the cocodiles teares, that they may seeme to be virgins… (Book 24, p. 938). Virginity here is reduced to one of the performing ‘arts’… (119)
[that the hymen] could be manipulated, or could not be relied upon to convey any truth about women, is the surprising discovery of much contemporary medical discourse, which questions the very existence of the hymen. (119)
Thus the mystery of virginity that attracts, confuses, and bedevils many of the male characters in Shakespeare’s plays, the fetishized commodity that is and is not. The plays circle round this mystification through an oblique language of indirections and negations. The not/knot pun slides further and further from its signified, unable to name it but unable to escape it. … Ophelia takes up Hamlet’s suggestive pun in similar language: ‘Hamlet: Be not you ashamed to show, he’ll not shame to tellyou what it means. Ophelia: You are naught, you are naught. (3.2.137-40). (119)
In the Shakespearean language of sexuality, then, a woman is not a virgin whose knot is nought because she has been naught. Virginity is continually invoked, described, celebrated, occluded, denied, and denounced, and language can only obliquely represent it. It remains a kind of negation ex creatio. ‘What I am and what I would’, Viola tells the audience, ‘are as secret as maidenhead’ (Twelfth Night 1.5.206-7).
My argument will therefore only concern female sexuality as a production of male discourse, and I mean to use the term ‘sexuality’ rather than ‘gender’ because I will examine the biological semantics at work in the plays. Some feminists have argued that female sexuality is, in patriarchal discourse, unrepresentable—conceptually available only as lack, invisibility, or negation. [One of the best discussions of sexuality in the early modern period is Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithica, 1988).] I will pursue that position through different, sometimes contradictory ways… (107)
Ultimately, I will examine some of the mystifications of the Tudor-Stuart discourse of virginity, the ne plus ultra, so to speak, of female sexuality—looking particularly at how certain modes of discourse registered the presence or absence of virginity. (107)
To begin with, female sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays is invariably articulated as linguistic transgression—that is, a verbal replication of female obliquity. (107)
…Cleopatra…the supreme Shakespearean example of female sexuality… (107)
Johnson … indicate[d] how Shakespeare’s masculine persuasive force, to borrow Donne’s term, was weakened and deflected by the ‘irresistible’ fascinations of the feminized quibble. For the heroic, manly playwright, ‘a quibble is the [107] golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. (Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York, 19580, p. 252) [108]
…Johnson’s understanding of unstable language as feminine and therefore seductive. Johnson thus suggests part of my argument here: that patriarchal discourse equates destabilizing verbal forms and female sexuality. (108)
The pun and its inversion, the malapropism, permit the introduction into utterance of female sexuality without ever seeming to name or recognize it. The references may be comic … or they may be sinister—as in the references to ‘country matters’ … This kind of wordplay permits the eruption of female sexuality into ordinary utterance. [Freud remarks that the malaprop ‘does not possess [any inner] inhibition as yet, so that he can produce nonsense and smut directly and without compromise’ (Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. James Strachey [New York, 1960], p. 185). (108)
If puns and malapropisms offer the sexual low road, … then their linguistics opposite is represented by a far more stylized form of verbal dislocation, the riddle. However riddles are categorized, one common structural feature is that ‘the referent of the description’ is withheld, to be guessed at by an audience—all signifiers and no signified, in short. [Roger D. Abrahams, ‘The Literary Study of the Riddle’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 14 (1972), p. 187.] Shakespeare’s plays encode female sexuality in riddles so as to mystify it in terms of obliqueness or absence. (109)
[in Pericles] the riddle he reads encodes incest, the missing signified the daughter or Antiochus [Sc. 1. 107-14]. It is worth recalling here that Shakespeare, as Goolden has noted, has altered his sources by making the missing signified of the ‘I’ in this riddle be, not the father, but the daughter. [P. Goolden, ‘Antiochus’s Riddle in Gower and Shakespeare’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 6 (1955), 245-51.] This change… defines female sexuality as absence—and, in the riddle is answered, as transgression. (109) [110-111 missing in google-books preview.]
Paroles’ dialogue on virginity with Helen in All’s Well That Ends Well follows the same line of sophistic logic. His argument proceeds from the libertine assumption: ‘It is not politic in the commonwealth to preserve virginity’, because ‘loss of virginity is rational incrase’ (1.1.124-6). [Erasmus makes this argument in Proci et puellae (1523); see The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago, 1965, pp. 86-98). For a concise discussion of the Renaissance doctrine of Increase, with special attention to Shakespeare’s sonnets, see J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London, 1956), pp. 189-201. Donne (the attribution is in doubt) argues in Paradox XII, ‘That Virginity is a Vertue’, that ‘surely nothing is more unprofitable in the Commonwealth of Nature, then they that dy old maids, because they refuse to be used to that end for which they were only made… Virginity ever kept is ever lost’ (John Donne, Paradoxes and Problems, ed. Helen Peters (Oxford, 1980), pp. 56-7). Even the anti-libertine argument employed the same rhetoric, as may be seen in the thirteenth-century homily, Hali Meidenhad: ‘Maidenhood is a treasure that, if it be once lost, will never again be found. Maidenhood is the bloom that, if it be once foully plucked, never again sprouteth up’ (Hali Meidenhad, ed. Oswald Cockayne (London, 1866) p. 10] Virginity is a paradoxically self-annihilating commodity: ‘by being once lost [it] may be ten times found; by being ever kept it is ever lost … (129-30) … Turning the young maiden into the old courtier, this passage [1.1.152-60] moves toward an equation between the hymen and male impotence; for every intact virgin, it seems, another male has failed. (112)
The language which Shakespeare employs to signify virginity thus generally trades on various forms of paradoxical negation, but he names given to the hymen itself suggest both positive and negative categories. (112)
More metaphorically, the hymen is a ‘maidenhead’, a usage which the OED dates from the mid-thirteenth century. Shakespeare uses the term frequently, often in the sense of a commodity, a thing to be acquired or taken, or a trophy of male conquest and possession. … But Shakespeare also understands the symbolic inversion at work in this name, by which the head of a maiden becomes a maidenhead, resulting at times in fantasies of punishment and dismemberment. [Cf. Lear’s vision of the simpering dame, ‘Whose face between her forks presages snow’ (Lear, 4.5.117)] In Romeo and Juliet, Samson promises to be civil with the maids: ‘…I will cut off their heads. Gregory. The heads of the maids? Samson. Ay, the heads of the maids, or their/ maidenheads, take it in what sense thou wilt. (1.1.22-5) This displacement figures in several of the plays…. (113)
The hymen is further objectified as a valuable object; thus Laertes warns Ophelia not to open ‘your chaste treasure…/To [Hamlet’s] unmastered importunity’ (Hamlet 1.3.31-2).
Some contemporary scientific treatises, however, literalized the flower metaphor in their anatomical descriptions. In The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (1548), for example, Thomas Vicary uses the metaphor of ‘deflouring’ but reserves the term ‘flowres’ as a specific name for the menses, a term which had become common usage among Renaissance anatomists, midwives, and physicians. [Thomas Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (1548), ed. F. J. and Percy Furnivall (London, 1888), pp. 77-8. ] In his Microcosmographia (1615), however, Helkiah Crooke brings biology and metaphor more closely together. ‘The Caruncles [small pieces of flesh and membrane] are foure’, Crooke says in his description of the hymen, ‘and are like the berries of the Mirtle, in every corner of the bosome one.’ All these parts and others, taken ‘together make the forme of the cup of a little rose halfe blowne when the bearded leaves are taken away. Or this production’, he goes on, ‘with the lappe or privity may be likened to the great Clove Gilly-flower when it is moderately blowne’ (223 [sic: actually 235]). … Crooke’s attempt to bring the semantic domains or metaphor and biology together was echoed in other anatomies, including the anonymous Aristotle’s Master Piece, where the hymen ‘is like bud of a rose…’ [The Works of Aristotle, The Famous Philosopher, (New York, 1974), p. 18) ] The flower is thus both a metaphor and, through acts of transference and supposed observation, allegedly also a close description of the thing itself. (114)
Shakespeare employs one name which puns on all the dislocations and mystifications that we have already examined—that is, the virgin knot (thus my title again.) What was a virgin knot? It is equated with but apparently distinct from the so-called marriage knot and the true-lover’s knot. The true-lover’s knot is the iconographic image of the elaborately encoiled and overlapping thread, with no beginning or end, which unites true lovers … The marriage knot, on the other hand, was the mystic union of two lovers through marriage… The marriage knot could not be dissolved by man … Shakespeare’s usage is straight-forward: … Capulet plans to ‘have this knot knit up tomorrow morning’ between Juliet and Paris (Romeo, 4.2.24) … The knot of love may also indissolubly link friends or family… (115) … The marriage not or true-lover’s knot cannot be ‘undone’, ‘untied’, or ‘dissolv’d’ , then. It is forever. [31] / But the virgin knot is something else. … [Bertram is All’s Well… ] resists the eternal knot by refusing to untie the physical knot. … For Othello, the word [knot] conveys everything ugly about what he thought had been his virgin wife: turning the fountain of his life into ‘a cistern for foul toads/ To knot and gender in’ (4.2.63-4). [117-118 Missing]
Those who rely on the appearance of hymeneal blood as the sign of virginity are making a mistake, he [Ambrose Parey] argues, giving as one incredible example a story of prostitutes who have learned to counterfeit virginity, by putting into their vaginas ‘the bladders of fishes, or galles of beasts filled full of blood and so deceive the ignorant and young lecher, by the fraud and deceit of their evill arts, and in the time of copulation they mixe sighes with groans, and womanlike cryings, and the cocodiles teares, that they may seeme to be virgins… (Book 24, p. 938). Virginity here is reduced to one of the performing ‘arts’… (119)
[that the hymen] could be manipulated, or could not be relied upon to convey any truth about women, is the surprising discovery of much contemporary medical discourse, which questions the very existence of the hymen. (119)
Thus the mystery of virginity that attracts, confuses, and bedevils many of the male characters in Shakespeare’s plays, the fetishized commodity that is and is not. The plays circle round this mystification through an oblique language of indirections and negations. The not/knot pun slides further and further from its signified, unable to name it but unable to escape it. … Ophelia takes up Hamlet’s suggestive pun in similar language: ‘Hamlet: Be not you ashamed to show, he’ll not shame to tellyou what it means. Ophelia: You are naught, you are naught. (3.2.137-40). (119)
In the Shakespearean language of sexuality, then, a woman is not a virgin whose knot is nought because she has been naught. Virginity is continually invoked, described, celebrated, occluded, denied, and denounced, and language can only obliquely represent it. It remains a kind of negation ex creatio. ‘What I am and what I would’, Viola tells the audience, ‘are as secret as maidenhead’ (Twelfth Night 1.5.206-7).
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