SOURCE: Schanfield, Lillian. “Singer's ‘Yentl’: The Fantastic Case of a Perplexed Soul.” In Spectrum of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Sixth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald Palumbo, pp. 185-92. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Schanfield compares Singer' short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” to the film adaptation, Yentl, arguing that the element of fantasy in Singer's story is lost in the film's realism.]

Ironically, the recent film adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” underscores through its deviations from the original story Singer's own flirtation with the enigmatic world of fantasy. Singer's is an ambiguous tale of hermaphroditic experience in a world “where anything can happen.” Barbra Streisand's Yentl (based on a screenplay coauthored with Jack Rosenthal) is at best a prosaic story about stifled opportunity, written in the wake of such trendy role reversal and transvestite films as Tootsie, Victor/Victoria, Mr. Mom, La Cage aux Folles, and All of Me. Predictably, film critics concentrated their sound and fury on everything except Streisand's interpretation of Singer—her directorial abilities, her inaccuracies in depicting orthodox Jewish rituals, the politics underlying her failure to receive an Oscar nomination, her midlife rediscovery of Jewish roots, her mystical communication with her dead father, her egomania, and even her prominent nose! The story could have survived metamorphosis into musical comedy, particularly since the songs are interior monologues, but it is diluted by a feminist thrust toward relevance—and hence, realism—that compels Streisand to expunge Singer's fantasy framework. Streisand's Yentl escapes from a circumscribed world that forces her to masquerade as a boy to the new world of opportunity, the America of 1904. Singer, seen by many as a literary trustee of Kabbalistic lore, creates a Yentl who lives in, and ultimately fades into, a terrain governed by laws that challenge reasonable notions of probability.

The story and the film are similar in their depiction of the sociology of the patriarchal shtetl culture in late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. This is a rigid society whose unquestioned division of gender roles dictates that Yentl's destiny as a woman, ordained by God and predetermined by nature, is to be a wife and mother—and nothing more. Underlying this strict role definition is the patriarchal assumption that the male, closer to God because he is created in His image, can engage in the highest pursuits, which are spiritual and intellectual, while the female, born closer to the material world, is properly relegated to domestic, maternal, and other noncerebral duties. The various women in the story—Peshe, Hadass's mother, Hadass herself—accept their roles as the property of and servicers to men and children.

Significantly, in Yentl's home, as in that of many Shakespeare heroines, there is no mother. The absence of a female role model and the presence of a mentor-father who is willing to violate, if not to challenge, the strictures against women engaging in scholarship enables Yentl to study the Torah and Talmud behind drawn curtains. Streisand's expository invention of a traveling book peddler who will sell Yentl only storybooks, reserving the sacred texts for the men because “it's the law,” announces with a realistic touch the theme of women's intellectual deprivation. Yentl grows up ill-disposed towards and inept at the tasks designated for women. She fears that in a future marriage she will lose control to a powerful mother-in-law, and she disparages other women as “jabbering and chattering creatures.” Scholarship becomes more than just an activity she tucks into her round of domestic duties for her father; it becomes an insatiable, lifelong passion that exists in irreconcilable opposition to woman's mindless lot. Singer, who ultimately delivers a fantasy about a “perplexed soul,” emphasizes the tragic inevitability implicit in Yentl's addiction to learning; given a choice between living a women's role or the scholar's life, she would “rather lose her share in the world to come.”¹

The motif of a girl disguising herself as a young man to flee her narrow world evokes the many spunky Shakespearian heroines who, while providing comic scenes of mistaken identity and dramatic irony, also explore the possibilities of androgyny.² Shakespeare did not set out to shake a lance at the demarcation between Elizabethan male and female roles. However, having committed his plots to the disguise convention, he seems to have discovered the possibilities of growth attendant upon role playing. A woman from a sheltered background is liberated into a world previously denied her. “Masculine” interaction and experience precipitate the growth that derives from expanded educational and social opportunities. Shakespeare-goers accept the experience as symbolic, knowing that the consequences of deprivation are not so easily overcome in real life.

Streisand's film skirts the issue of role confusion that Singer's story embraces. The film is a simple tale of an adolescent girl who questions “where I belong in the scheme of things,” cuts off her hair except for forelocks, assumes the black garb of an Orthodox Jewish student, and then finds herself unable, like Viola, “to tell her love.” Her conflict is the stuff of situation comedy, not the angst of deep moral guilt or an identity crisis. Streisand's Yentl may blithely sing, “anything can happen,” but Singer's is a physical embodiment of that idea.

Singer creates a realistic setting and then draws his unsuspecting readers into fantasy. Yentl is “boyish”: She has narrow hips, small breasts, and down on her upper lip. This, the success of her disguise, which allows her to travel masculine roads as safely as a male Jew, seems plausible. Furthermore, in this patriarchal culture, a man like Yentl's father would have preferred a son and in the absence of any mitigating female influence might have encouraged Yentl's role departure. Even Yentl's earlier transvestite activities—her pleasure in dressing up in her father's clothes and smoking his pipe—seem merely to foreshadow what appears to be only a hoax. But this apparently recognizable story about assuming a false identity then merges into a tale of confused identity, a theme explored elsewhere in Singer's fiction.

Reb Todros, in admitting to his daughter that “even Heaven makes mistakes” (p. 136), verbalizes the fantastic dichotomy that informs the tale. His enunciation of the seemingly playful idea that Yentl, the woman, has “the soul of a man” (p. 136) draws the tale irrevocably into the fantasy mode. What could be a figure of speech—as, for example, when Queen Elizabeth I said, “I may have the weak body of a woman but I have the heart and stomach of a man”—is interpreted literally and given allegorical concretization. Singer's Yentl, then, is not just a girl disguised as a boy. Her identity becomes a fusion of Yentl and Anshel, male and female. This is a story about a supernatural mistake, and it cannot have a happy ending.

Anshel, the male side, is able to penetrate the brotherhood of the Yeshiva and to establish a friendship with Avigdor that is explicitly biblical in its intensity (David-Jonathan, Jacob-Benjamin). As Yentl, she exhibits her growing love for Avigdor in her nurturing activities: daily purchases of buckwheat cakes, sewing jacket buttons, buying little presents for Avigdor. Her hybrid nature is implied in Singer's manipulation of the personal pronouns “he” and “she”: “Anshel kept his boots well polished and did not drop his eyes in the presence of women … he joked with them in such a worldly fashion that they marvelled … his eyes, smiling yet distant, seemed always fixed on some faraway point” (p. 149). But “Anshel could not sleep at night … Hadass's love and tenderness shamed her. The devotion of her mother- and father-in-law … were a burden” (p. 155). Or, “Judging by the youth's years his beard should certainly have begun to sprout yet his cheeks remained smooth,” but “Anshel knew she had to find a way to free herself” (p. 156).

Even though Yentl consciously thinks of herself as a girl, her soul is not so sure. As she struggles with guilt over the Torah's prohibition against cross-dressing, she comes to feel that she is deceiving not only the world but also herself: “Even the soul was perplexed, finding itself incarnate in a strange body” (p. 145).

In a strange dream she sees herself as both a man, wearing the fringed garment, and a woman, wearing a bodice; the dream reflects her unconscious belief that she is both male and female. The forbidden ramifications of this ambiguous gender awaken her with a start: “Yentl's period was late and she was suddenly afraid … who knew?” (p. 145). Who knew what? We are left to infer that Yentl might be miraculously pregnant as a result of her forbidden thoughts—a not-unheard-of plight mentioned in Medrash Talpioth—or perhaps that menstrual periods do not come to Anshels. A perplexed soul indeed.

The concept of a man's soul mistakenly trapped in a woman's body is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's hypothetical Judith Shakespeare, the sister of William, who came to represent for Woolf the conflict for women between gender and talent in a patriarchal society. Driven to madness by the consequences of her female body—she is impregnated by a stage doorkeeper—as well as by the frustration of unexpressed genius, Judith Shakespeare commits suicide “crazed by the torture that her gift had put her to.” Exploring the same conflict that informs “Yentl,” Woolf asks, “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?” Yentl's sex demands that she pluck chickens, push the baking shovel and bear children; her genius drives her inexorably toward the heated intellectual combat of the Yeshiva. In violating the inner sanctum she sidesteps one form of madness only to substitute for it another.³

In proposing androgyny as an ideal state, Woolf was seeking a way of being that permitted full expression of both femaleness and maleness; this idea is akin to Jungian self-actualization, which depends on acceptance and expression of both the animus and the anima within the personality: “If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her.”⁴ Defining a great author as one who wrote unimpeded by consciousness of sex, Woolf characterized Shakespeare as an androgynous mind, awake to both the female and male elements within.⁵

While Singer's story may suggest androgyny, it must be distinguished from two related phenomena—hermaphroditism and transmigration of souls. Singer's vision only seems androgynous because his character, embodying the conflict of a talented, ambitious woman trapped within the female ghetto, attempts to function in a man's world as a man. But the union of Yentl and Anshel produces a state of unresolvable disharmony, not androgynous harmony. The fusion is a Kabbalist's nightmare rather than a feminist's dream.

The tale's fantasy elements hamper a feminist interpretation because they deflect interest from the “relevant” issues, the intellectual and social deprivation of women. Thus, the demons, devils, dybbuks, and imps that inhabit Singer's fiction are excised, or at least transformed into figures of speech (as when Avigdor calls Yentl “a devil”), in the film. While Singer's Kabbalistic mysticism is discomforting to those readers interested in a realistic reconstruction of the sociology of a culture that vanished in the Holocaust, a reading faithful to the spirit of the author's work cannot ignore his interest in an eclectic Jewish demonology, which Kabbalists attempted to systematize, and must acknowledge that the story addresses the mystical doctrine of metempsychosis. The strange tale of a male soul entering a female body was available to Singer in Kabbalistic lore. Seen in this light, Yentl's choice of barrenness and scholarship over female fertility could be another manifestation of those demons that urge humanity to self-destruction.

Other, apparently minor, alterations in the film de-fantasize the Singer tale still further. For example, the absurd marriage between the two women is made to follow logically from the other events of the plot. The film opens with Avigdor still engaged to Hadass; their engagement is then broken due to the discovery of Avigdor's brother's suicide. In torment, Avigdor forces Yentl to choose between the unnatural marriage and losing his friendship; in spite of her vociferous resistance, he convinces her to marry Hadass to provide him access to his beloved. More victim than trickster, Yentl goes through with the outrageous plan. The comedy then exploits the potential humor of the wedding night by turning Yentl into a clever prankster who has actually begun to enjoy the success of her dissembling. She manipulates her ingenuous young bride into collusion, and they pass the next morning's fertility rite inspection by spilling wine on the sheets.

The engagement had been terminated before Singer's story begins. Avigdor's broken heart has no apparent mitigating effect on his urgent sexual needs; when he decides to marry Peshe the widow, he admits that he “would marry a she-goat” (p. 143). The story's plot does not demand a marriage between Yentl and Hadass, as does the film's. Although Avigdor had mentioned it, the impulse to marry is Yentl's. But Yentl may be the victim of diabolical forces: It is suggested that she is an imp or a sprite and that she is controlled by an irresistible power or an evil force. Later, the narrator throws doubt upon this supernatural interpretation by providing several reasons—all conflicting—for the marriage: “Only then did Anshel remember that it was Avidgor who had wanted her to marry Hadass … a plan emerged; she would exact vengeance for Avigdor, and at the same time through Hadass, draw him closer to herself” (p. 147); “Anshel said she had married Hadass only in order to be near Avidgor” (p. 161); and “I did it for your sake. I knew that Peshe would torment you and at our house you would have some peace” (p. 148). True to the fantasy mode, these possibilities demonstrate the ambiguous nature of psychological truth.

Yentl deliberately places herself in a position where she is certain to be discovered, like a criminal who leaves incriminating clues. Surely the ridiculous marriage charade is not the only way to ensure a continuing bond with Avigdor. Furthermore, having achieved that bond, why does Yentl goad Avigdor on against his wife, aggravating his disquiet and teasing him (and possibly herself) with the idea that if she were a woman and married to him, she would know how to appreciate him? The hermaphroditic nature of her character suggests one answer. As Yentl she is in love with Avigdor and unconsciously jealous of his wife, but as Anshel she is moved by Hadass's beauty and enjoys the services a male receives from a female. Significantly, Singer's version of the wedding night is not a comedy of manufactured sounds and wine-stained sheets. The reader is informed that a way had been found to deflower the bride.

Another important alteration occurs when Yentl reveals her identity to Avigdor. In both story and film, this disclosure threatens the foundations of Avigdor's comfortable world. Seeing himself implicated in her transgressions against the natural order of the universe, Avidgor lashes out misogynistically, charging Yentl with hypocrisy, deception, and heresy. Unable to accept as his former brilliant “brother” this person with breasts, his anguish highlights the body/soul dichotomy that informs the tale. Physically she is a woman; as for her soul, he cannot get beyond her body. His most liberated thought is that she is an intelligent woman who might have been his wife; he cannot see the implicit contradiction the term “intelligent woman” conveys to Yentl: “I wanted to study the Gemara and Commentaries with you, not darn your socks!” (p. 161) Streisand's Avigdor aptly notes that Yentl will not need to study any more because, as a woman, she will know everything she needs to know without opening a book. Avigdor is sent home to marry Hadass, and Yentl decides to emigrate. In these details the film interprets the story fairly accurately, although the Hadass to whom Streisand's Avigdor returns is not an illiterate, complacent traditional girl but a woman whose consciousness has been raised by a female mentor.

Although Singer's Avigdor proves equally tradition-bound, he gropes for understanding and is more deeply affected. “The law forbade Avigdor to stay in the room alone with Anshel, but he could not think of her just as a woman. What a strange power there is in clothing, he thought” (p. 162). This insight touches on the confusion between appearance and reality that can attend the person in disguise. Ironically, in an earlier conversation with Anshel, Avigdor had asked “Why can't a woman be like a man? … Why couldn't Hadass be just like you?” (p. 141) Avigdor had wanted the best of all possible worlds—a woman who was like his male comrade, Anshel. But Avigdor cannot transfer this fantasy of androgynous desire to the reality of his own life. Learning that Yentl is indeed a woman “like Anshel” dissolves his sense of what is natural, his sense of order. Consequently, he cannot comprehend Yentl's assertion that “I'm neither one nor the other” (p. 158). This acknowledgment of hybridity is ignored in the film. Avigdor's lack of comprehension deepens into a melancholy that beclouds his life, even on his wedding day. Finally, the incarnation of an integrated Anshel/Yentl in the baby Anshel born to Avigdor and Hadass is wryly suggested at the end of Singer's story, leaving the reader to wonder at the mysteries of the universe.

Streisand's selective interpretation leaves the film's audience with the impression that this is in part a comedy about unrequited love. Disregarding the fact that Singer's lean and hungry scholar is a bony fellow with sunken cheeks and eyebrows that meet across the bridge of his nose, the film provides an Avigdor whose robust sexuality and physical attractiveness mesmerize the budding Yentl. Thus, humorous scenes abound that depict Yentl's unassuagable adolescent passion leading her to the brink of imminent discovery: Avigdor undressing for bed, Avigdor swimming in the nude, Yentl tossing in sleepless reveries next to Avigdor, a modest Yentl being fitted for her wedding suit by male tailors with probing hands, Avigdor roughhousing with Yentl. Conditioned to happy endings, the movie audience finds itself hoping this attractive couple with so much in common will end this silly business and work out a solution. This romantic interpretation, together with the “sitcom” humor in these scenes, deflects interest from the central intellectual passion that motivates Yentl, for which she is willing to gamble with her share in an afterlife. Thus, her attempt to explain her motives to Avigdor is unwelcome and unconvincing to the audience.

Since a romantic solution is impossible, the next best movie ending has Yentl sail toward the New World dressed in what one critic has called “immigrant chic.” Streisand seems to identify with the Yentl character—a competitive woman who, more talented than most of her male peers and stifled by the patriarchal establishment, finds her way to the home of the brave and the land of the gender-free. It is unlikely that the orthodox yeshivas in America would have welcomed Yentl with open doors, and the question of the kind of opportunity awaiting Streisand's Yentl—as she sails past the Statue of Liberty singing “Poppa, watch me fly” and “Why settle for a piece of the sky?”—is moot.

Singer could have written a realistic liberation story, but it would have been a different story. Singer is intentionally ambiguous, and his tale leaves the reader in a state of doubt. Thus, as Yentl slips into the amorphous landscape in search of other yeshivas in which to “live out my time as I am” (p. 162), the narration offers a hodgepodge of perspectives, representing the community's many and divergent points of view, in trying to come to terms with what cannot be explained logically; the narrator tries to process the whispers, suggestions, thoughts, and hypotheses, and finally concludes, “It was all a great riddle to the town” (p. 163). Also, the story is deliberately ambiguous at critical moments: the reader is told, for example, “It was as if she had sealed a pact with Satan” (p. 147); and “All Anshel's explanations seemed to point to one thing” (p. 161). Is Singer a skeptic, smiling patronizingly at folk superstitions, or a mystic wondering at the inexplicable? This state of ambiguity satisfies Tzvetan Todorov's criterion that a fantastic work keep the reader in a state of uncertainty or “hesitation” as to whether the events are to be accorded natural or supernatural causes.⁶

Neither the New World nor the “real world” of 1904 would have provided Yentl with the option of transcending gender. The world that does provide this opportunity is that of dream, legend, or myth; the world of fable, allegory, or fairy tale; the world of any fantasy genre that immerses its audience in a realm whose laws of cause and effect are unpredictable. Streisand's Yentl doffs her disguise and steps out of the mimetic frame; for Singer's Yentl, there is no exit. Realists may mutter that Yentl could not escape taking a bath; fantasts, aware that “truth” and “realism” are not synonymous, will suspend disbelief enough to experience this strange tale of hermaphroditism.

Notes

1. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1953), p. 159. Further references to this text are cited parenthetically.

2. Singer, in conversation with the author, has denied any Shakespearian influence in his use of either the disguise convention or the motif of the motherless girls.

3. Virgina Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), pp. 85, 83.

4. Ibid., p. 170.

5. Of interest also is Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, a fantastic novel about a nobleman/noblewoman who is liberated from the constraints of both sex and time.

6. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), p. 25.