Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Marianne Novy (essay date 1981)
Marianne Novy (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "Demythologizing Shakespeare," in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1981, pp. 17-27.
[In the following essay, Novy examines Shakespeare's presentation of a range of female character types from a feminist critical perspective.']
I begin with a question: what is it about the experience of feminist Shakespeare criticism that is different from the experience of feminist criticism of Spenser, Milton, Hemingway, or Virginia Woolf? Suppose that feminist critics of all these writers are interested in the relationships of characters and imagery (and other literary elements) to sex roles and expectations, and refuse to take conventional stereotypes for male and female behavior for granted as normative. Are there any experiences specific to the Shakespeare critic?
In addition to demythologizing masculine and feminine stereotypes, the feminist Shakespeare critic must also deal...
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