Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Clara Claiborne Park (essay date 1973)
Clara Claiborne Park (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: "As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular," in American Scholar, Vol. 42, No. 2, Spring, 1973, pp. 262-78.
[In the following essay, Park analyzes characteristics of Shakespeare's lively, intelligent, and self-confident young women characters, focusing on Beatrice, from Much Ado about Nothing, Portia, from The Merchant of Venice; and Rosalind, from As You Like It.]
In the major literature there are no useful Bildungs-romans for girls. A boy's development into manhood through testing experience is one of the oldest themes in literature; Homer's Telemachus presents the first model of how to grow into the kind of man one's society approves and has need of. From the Odyssey to "The Bear," literature affords a long procession of raw youths; almost all manage to become men. Girls, however, had to wait out a twenty-five-hundred-year literary history before anyone...
[The entire page is 6558 words long]
Navigate
