[In the following review, Erickson criticizes French's flawed examination of gender divisions in the works of William Shakespeare in Shakespeare's Division of Experience.]

Of the host of critics cited by Marilyn French, her deepest affinity is with Leslie Fiedler. Like its precursor The Stranger in Shakespeare, French's book [Shakespeare's Division of Experience] begins by analyzing men's perturbed relations with women in the Henry VI plays and ends by noting the evacuation from The Tempest of the dangerous sexuality represented by Venus and Cupid (IV, i, 86-101). French, like Fiedler, concentrates on the twin themes of male “sex nausea” and denigration of women. The two motifs connect because the male point of view identifies women with the physical and holds them accountable for its depredations: displaced from the male body and projected exclusively onto the female, sexuality is female sexuality. The site—“the dark and vicious place”—where heterosexual intercourse—“the act of darkness”—is performed becomes “the sulphurous pit” that arouses a palpable, defensive revulsion: “Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!” Again like Fiedler, French calls attention to the urgency and vividness of those passages in which male characters launch into outraged diatribes against women, as if it were possible to expectorate one's tribulation and be free of it:

A new kind of language appears in Much Ado, in Claudio's attack on Hero. (It is not entirely new; there are fragments of it in the first tetralogy and in Titus Andronicus.) It is brilliant, intense, and shattering to hear, or even to read. In every play in which such language appears, it is the strongest in the piece.

(p. 332)

The powerful antifeminist rhetoric in the plays cannot be ignored or passed over, but demands explanation: it is one of French's central purposes to account for this particular rhetoric.

In two respects, her approach to this problem implies a reformulation and extension of The Stranger in Shakespeare. First, French generally avoids Fiedler's tendency to assume a fixed, one-to-one correspondence between a male character's misogyny and Shakespeare's. She offers instead a more sophisticated view of Shakespeare's authorial presence that allows for his potential critical perspective. French is thus less likely than Fiedler to underestimate Shakespeare's capacity for probing rather than simply reflecting the misogynist aspects of his culture. Second, whereas Fiedler's main concern is psychological, French has a more systematic and fully developed argument about the status of gender in the plays, an argument whose feminist-inspired edge enables her to be more attuned to the political and social ramifications of gender arrangements.

In spite of these advances over The Stranger in Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Division of Experience disappoints. I think the most important elements of the book are French's general discussion of gender and her portrait of Shakespeare as an artist. I shall return to these key elements, but it is necessary first to assess the book's flaws. Having sifted these flaws, we can then more easily recover what is useful.

The formal structure of French's argument causes difficulty. The book is organized as a survey of the Shakespearean canon. (The coverage is not complete in that there are no sections on Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, King John, the second tetralogy, Julius Caesar or Henry VIII; but these omissions are not significant since I do not see that French would have any trouble including them.) In making the decision to be comprehensive rather than to focus intensively on selected, representative plays, French has set her sights on the woods rather than the trees. However, the overview she achieves is impoverished by the schematic, often cursory treatment of individual plays. The reader is whisked along on a guided tour which lurches too abruptly from place to place.

Though a number of plays are dispatched in four of five pages, the problem seems more basic than limited space. The brusquely declarative approach results in a disturbingly high ratio of assertion to evidence. Even within the constraints of space, gestures toward proof are too frequently perfunctory or entirely lacking. No play is treated with sufficient thoroughness and care to earn our trust in French as a reader. The cumulative effect is an account of Shakespeare that, though occasionally suggestive, is too terse, elliptical, fragmentary, scattered. Adding to this effect is French's style of quotation from the plays; though there is textual reference by way of brief illustration, French does not engage in rigorous, extended analysis. She holds back from total immersion in the particular language of a play; she neither inhabits the language nor puzzles over it. Instead she is drawn into abstract formulations about language, as when we are told that “language functions as action” in tragedy, whereas “the early comedies concentrate on language as a theme, language as the subject of language” (p. 35). Or dominion “is echoed in the very structure of Western languages, in the relation of subject-verb-object” (p. 14). Overall, French opts for flat assertion; she tells rather than demonstrates or enacts meaning; she forgoes wrestling with the textual angel.

Because we are never allowed in this book to experience the full power and complexity of Shakespeare's language in a specific play, a disproportionate emphasis is given to French's own terminology, which she derives ex nihilo in the introduction and first two chapters. French says at the outset that: “I did not bring my theory to the work; rather, the work of Shakespeare … brought me to see as I do” (p. 17). But she does not compellingly realize this claim in her actual practice. Despite her initial statement, the book's mode of presentation is almost wholly deductive rather than inductive. The theoretical framework precedes the discussion of individual plays and is generated largely in detachment from them. Given this undue prominence, the theory imposes itself on the plays in a circular and self-validating manner, instead of being delicately elicited from them. French's critical terminology—especially her repeated use of “masculine” and “feminine”—becomes reified, formulaic, at times opaque; it thus closes off access to the richness of Shakespeare's text and promotes a premature neatness of interpretation with which French seems too easily satisfied. If she used Shakespeare's language as the starting-point and worked outwards, gradually and sensitively generating the critical terms by grappling with specific moments in the play, permitting Shakespeare's language forcefully to inform and modify her own, I think French's theory would be invigorated and enlarged.

II

French's terminology is cut off from another resource which could sustain and enrich it. The most important context for her argument is missing from the elaborate apparatus of footnotes: there is no acknowledgement of other feminist theorists, nor is there any citation of feminist critics of Shakespeare. To take one example: French begins by examining the distinction between the human and the natural according to which men are assigned human status and women, because of the physical capacity to give birth, are equated with nature. In “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” (Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Rosaldo and Lamphere [Stanford University Press, 1974], pp. 67-87), Sherry B. Orlner has covered the same material with greater incisiveness. While it is unfair to complain about French's missing this one reference, its absence is symptomatic. Her general silence with regard to other feminist writers gives the impression that she is working in a vacuum, which may help to explain the anomalous combination of feminist conviction and conventional literary critical instinct in this book. At moments she insists on her credentials as a law-abiding reader who adheres to accepted norms. She is, for instance, anxious to make it clear that she does not subscribe to the concept of character. She agrees that “Shakespeare wrote out of a world view, not about character” (p. 31)—a spurious mutually exclusive distinction which fails to consider that both may be the case. She believes that “Shakespeare never really wrote drama of character. This seems to have been acknowledged in the last few decades” (pp. 34-35). French's invention of an imaginary consensus here may reassure critics of a staunchly anti-Bradley persuasion, but her opposition to character does not help her argument since it is inconsistent with her earlier point that men in Shakespeare are allowed the status of developing characters while women are restricted to types. In a similar vein, French also makes disparaging, facile remarks against “psychologizing” by appealing to a caricature version of psychological interests—to no good purpose that I can see.

French's traditionalist impulse is most pronounced, and most inhibiting, in her use of genre categories. She links gender and genre by defining tragedy as primarily a masculine form and comedy as primarily a feminine form. But this distinction is too global, arbitrary and vague to be illuminating in detailed analysis. In particular, French's treatment of the comedies suffers from the superficial, misleading generalization that her generic paradigm encourages. She notes in passing that male “power” as well as “love” is an issue in A Midsummer Night's Dream (p. 99), but is unable to develop this perception. In As You Like It, French sees that “to keep Rosalind from offending,” her freedom is circumscribed by “constant references to her femaleness, references located in a belief in ‘natural’ and basic differences in the genders” (p. 113), but again French does not follow through in a sustained, focused way. In both cases, French's insights—if pursued—would call into question the value of her notion of comedy as a “feminine” structure since the happy endings depend on the reinstatement of male control.

Her analysis of The Merchant of Venice can be readily assimilated to the standard view because the predictable labeling of Belmont as “feminine” (p. 101) leads to an uncritical view of Portia; French merely reproduces and participates in the complacent celebration of the heroine. The problem is that French argues from a thesis about comedy rather than from the actual experience of an individual play. Comedy as a genre is supposed to possess a positive mood: if French's interpretation moves sharply counter to the general definition, she adjusts the specific interpretation to the point of sacrificing it. For instance, she maintains that tragedy deals with “irrevocable” action, while comedy presents the “revocable.” Yet her analysis of Much Ado about Nothing rightly shows that Claudio and Don Pedro's misogynist attack on Hero is only technically revocable but is not genuinely cancelled, so that (as I would argue) Shakespeare deliberately makes the ending problematic; they “do not even question their own behavior” (p. 135). French then unconvincingly tries to minimize the explosiveness of the male-female antagonism she has exposed:

… the play is less problematic than it has appeared. Realistic problems … such as the unpleasantness of Claudio and his seeming lack of feeling, and the absence of reproach for Claudio and Don Pedro, diminish.

(p. 156)

The prevailing mood is lightheartedness, even in Much Ado, (This does not appear in my discussion of the play … But much of the play is devoted to the comic machinations …)

(p. 142)

This divided assessment of Much Ado about Nothing, this attempt to have it both ways, exemplifies the muddled stance caused by a fundamental conflict in French's approach. She has a good insight on the one hand and, on the other, attempts to take it back in order to preserve the superficial idea of comedy as handling problems “with a light touch” (p. 142), to preserve the appearance of not overstepping an unnecessarily narrow boundary of comic decorum.

This outcome is especially self-defeating in view of her contention that, relative to tragedy, comedy has been undervalued; “The comedies are held in less esteem than the tragedies by critics of earlier centuries, and some of our own” (p. 34). Despite her intention to raise its status, French does not take comic form seriously enough. Her romanticized portrait of the feminine which she associates with comedy in the chapter on “Formal Equivalents of the Gender Principles” contributes to an oversimplified view of comedy as a genre. Beneath the slight lyric grace, Shakespearean comedy is a much tougher and more problematic form than French allows. Her declension of genre begins by remarking on the continuities between comedy and tragedy, but ends by swerving emphatically toward their differences. I think it is more fruitful to reverse this procedure, to go back to the beginning and stress the ways in which the two forms converge. The tragedies

have been considered, by generations of critics, more serious and more realistic than the comedies. They are neither. They deal with much the same material, the same concerns, and use many of the same techniques and devices.

(p. 203)

French nicely addresses the substantial points of contact between comedy and tragedy, but her approach to comedy does not benefit from her eloquence here.

The single most important episode in the book is her encounter with King Lear, the play which most deeply engages, challenges and finally eludes her. The section on King Lear, the one play that resists French's customary brisk, neat treatment, is by far the longest. It breaks down into three parts whose uneasy coordination suggests three separate efforts to control the material: (1) “In King Lear, Shakespeare momentarily pushes aside the gender principles to examine the original terms of their division, the split between the human and nature” (p. 220); (2) “This is not to say, however, that gender divisions do not exist in the play. They do, and are extremely important on the subsurface of the tragedy” (p. 231); (3) “A few final words about Edgar” (p. 239). After starting out with the comment that the play “risks everything” (p. 219). French's reading of King Lear concludes with an emphasis on “affirmation” that seems to me falsely saccharine. Her failure with this play is, as I see it, the result of insufficient persistence with a feminist inquiry. She uses her concepts of gender half-heartedly, and ultimately abandons rather than refines and deepens them. In the final section on Edgar, which seems tacked on as an afterthought, French falls back on the orthodox notion that Edgar is not a character but an emblem:

But Edgar makes less sense as a character in the play. Although his main action is to preserve his father, his disguises actually prolong the old man's suffering … He does not function as a son to Gloucester in the scenes in which he leads him. He functions rather as a suffering witness.

… He is not so much a character as a composite.

… He personifies the quiet, unrecognized will to decency that exists in every people, every nation.

(pp. 240-241)

Although Stanley Cavell is not mentioned, he ought to be, for French in effect rebuts Cavell's account of the play by magically withdrawing Edgar's status as a character. In so doing, French turns away from her earlier, more apt observations: “Edgar, in a moment of mean-minded moralization, asserts that ‘the dark and vicious place’ where Gloucester conceived Edmund has now justly, in retribution, cost him his eyes” (p. 236); “Edgar is misogynistic when he reads Goneril's letter to Edmund and exclaims. ‘O indistinguish'd space of woman's will!’ … (p. 237). French convinces herself that

The rhetorical line of King Lear is enormously strong, so strong that it prevents any reading of the play other than the direction given by it … It is woven in, line by line, and its import is unmistakable. Except for Lear and Gloucester, who err and suffer and grow, who provide the human level of the play, the remaining characters are divided almost instantly into the utterly good and the utterly evil.

(p. 238)

Therefore Edgar must be one of the utterly good morality-play figures; indications to the contrary can be explained away by believing that he is not a character and hence cannot be held accountable for what he says. But, as Janet Adelman points out in her Introduction to Twentieth-Century Interpretations of King Lear, to acquiesce in such a reductive scheme is to absolve the character and to abdicate critical responsibility at the most crucial and complicated moments in King Lear. More particularly, French has so hedged herself in with conventional restrictions and expectations that she has made it all but impossible to give a thoroughgoing assessment of gender in the play.

III

I dwell on the deficiencies of Shakespeare's Division of Experience because of the danger that it will be used—incorrectly—to condemn all feminist criticism of Shakespeare on the grounds that any interest in gender will result, a priori, in schematic interpretation. But the problem with French's approach is not her “gender principles,” but rather her haphazard application of them. Now that psychoanalytic criticism has attained a measure of respectability, it has become possible as a matter of course to distinguish between good and bad versions of it. However, these distinctions are not yet widely and calmly made in considering feminist criticism. The New York Review of Books, for example, invites us to participate in indiscriminate, wholesale rejection of the study of gender in Shakespeare when the title of its review of French's book asks: “Was Shakespeare a Chauvinist?” (XXVIII [June 11, 1981], p. 20). We know this is not a genuinely open but a rhetorical question that trivializes and mocks the issue because we have already been alerted (as if a cue were needed!) by the bold print at the top of the front page announcing “Feminist Attack on Shakespeare.” The headline, marshalling a mindless group solidarity, licenses a generalized, all-out defense of Shakespeare as established cultural territory.

Yet—as I hope to show—the “attack” which is presumed to justify a counter-offensive never occurred. The reviewer Anne Barton, who has written perceptively about relations between men and women in her essay on Antony and Cleopatra and in her introductions to the comedies in The Riverside Shakespeare, cannot be blamed for these anonymous headlines. Nevertheless, though I feel her vigorous critique of French is valid, Barton's review emits an animosity out of proportion to the circumstances. For example, in her haste to condemn French, Barton inaccurately asserts that Queen Elizabeth is “never mentioned in this book.” In fact, French says: “Shakespeare's culture was misogynistic, despite being ruled (and well) by a woman” (p. 75). I believe Barton's excessively hostile tone can be explained by her determination to distance herself from feminist criticism in general, not only from its failure in this particular case. Such a repressive approach blocks an appreciation of the positive aspects of French's contribution.

The attack that French is alleged to have carried out against Shakespeare is actually an attack on—or more precisely, a violation of—the intentional fallacy which prohibits our making inferences about the author when analyzing a literary work. In theory, one must strictly suppress the “naive,” “irrelevant” questions: Would Shakespeare agree with my analysis? Is my interpretation consistent with Shakespeare's? But most critics glance discreetly at such questions by tacitly assuming that their analysis of the play's design coincides with Shakespeare's view. French commits the double indiscretion of talking loudly and clearly about Shakespeare as author and of suggesting forthrightly that he is imperfect. As usual, French is not always convincing and scrupulous in demonstrating exactly how, in particular instances, she moves from the text of a play to conclusions about Shakespeare's authorial role. Nonetheless, her general portrait of Shakespeare as an artist seems to me plausible, and I think much can be learned from it.

Perhaps the most significant lesson in French's disregarding the taboo against criticizing Shakespeare is that Western civilization does not come to an end as a consequence. Shakespeare not only survives without the protection of the intentional fallacy, but emerges in surprisingly positive form in French's depiction of him. Her Shakespeare is both heroic and human, as the following excepts suggest:

For Shakespeare, unlike some of his critics, did not unthinkingly adopt the received wisdom of his time. He really probed, dramatically, the subjects of power and legitimacy, his own attitudes toward sex and women; he struggled all his life for a vision of a proper ordering of society.

(p. 18)

Thus, for Shakespeare to plumb the consequences of his own sexual disgust is an act of particular moral courage. He probed, like a surgeon with a metal pick, the raw painful foundations of his own moral being. The agony and strain of this effort are reflected in the plays.

(pp. 144-145)

Thus, the tragedies are among the most radical criticism ever written of the values of Western society.

(p. 202)

Though tinged with melodrama, French's image of Shakespeare as anguished, struggling, and critical is a useful corrective to the Keatsian version of a serene, elusive Shakespeare who is totally “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” and who has “no identity.” (Joyce takes the impersonality of dramatic form to its extreme with his image of the artist as “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”) Keats marvels that “the camelion Poet” “has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen,” as if such polymorphous creation were entirely random and value-free. Yet, in the context of French's book, we can say that the two characters form a pair, bound by the logic of Shakespeare's exploration of masculine and feminine polarities. French, then, frees up our aesthetic picture of Shakespeare by offering a rough-hewn, workable alternative.

In outline form, the argument which supports French's revised image of Shakespeare is valuable. She summarizes the four central elements in her argument:

the abusiveness and insensitivity of many male power figures; the helplessness and agedness of most benevolent males; the viciousness of females who were sexual and/or wielded some power in the world; the adoring idealization of inlaw feminine—motherly—qualities of compassion nutritriveness, constancy, and givingness, although not in motherly figures.

(p. 324)

These elements come to life, for example, in Hamlet:

And for Hamlet, there is no mean between chastity—pure, cold and holy—and depravity in women. In addition, for Hamlet as for his ghost-father, men are divided into gods, the celestial, falling off into garbage, the ideal and the perversion … There is the superhuman and the subhuman, and his categories apply to both genders.

(pp. 148-149)

Overall, French sees as the basic configuration in Shakespeare's work an internal split within both the masculine and the feminine principles: order depends on “restraining the extremes of each principle” (p. 287). But, according to French, the two splits are not of equal importance. The anxiety attaching to disruptions in the benign operation of the feminine principle is far more threatening and emotionally charged for Shakespeare. Hence, although French is not always precise and consistent in her use of terms like “integration” and “synthesis,” the balance of masculine and feminine toward which Shakespeare moves is skewed in men's favor.

As French delineates Shakespeare's resolution, the reformation of masculinity—“the masculine principle must be feminized” (p. 322)—is accompanied by the continuation of constricted femininity:

First, … what is urged is a degree of synthesis. The “feminine” must submit to masculine control, the “masculine” must accept feminine subordination. This is less a synthesis, perhaps—for synthesis would require a suffusion of the principles by each other—than separate but equal maintenance, a subordination of each principle to the other, a mutual bowing. Second, the rightness of the masculine principle is affirmed …

(p. 322)

But the second point transforms “equal maintenance” into “an equality of a sort” (p. 330), for “the door between the gender principles opens only one way” (p. 29).

The visions of synthesis are invariably visions of male figures. It is never suggested that any female figure should or could absorb the masculine qualities of power, authority, or right …

(p. 30)

Even in those plays that center on a heroine, he was writing mainly for and about men … The woman is a stranger in Shakespeare because she is part of a male's self, a pole in his psyche …

(p. 326)

If feminist criticism of Shakespeare can be defined as reframing Ben Jonson's homage as the question “In what way is Shakespeare ‘for all time’?,” then I think French performs a valuable service by differentiating her views about gender from those she attributes to Shakespeare. French argues that Shakespeare could not solve the problem of gender within the terms he formulated it: “But because he—and his tradition—saw experience in terms of polar opposites, his work has been important in perpetuating the very division he sought to reconcile” (p. 341). By contrast, her own position points to “the way out of the bind” which she feels Shakespeare did not find: “My attitude, beyond this study, is that the identification of moral qualities with gender is itself the root of the problem …” (p. 340). The solution is “to abandon these divisions, to see all of human experience as good and available to all humans” (p. 341). It is only by “going beyond Shakespeare” (p. 310) in this explicit way that French is able, as Adrienne Rich puts it in When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1971), to “see with fresh eyes”: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.”

The objection usually raised against the kind of criticism of Shakespeare in which French engages is that it automatically entails a shameless, smug tone. But French's book does not, as a general rule, indulge in a sense of superiority. What is missing, however, is a consciousness on French's part that her own proposed solution to the problem of gender sounds blithely utopian. Perhaps it is incumbent on us as feminist critics of Shakespeare to take more responsibility for elaborating our own implied visions of gender reorganization after the model of Nancy Chodorow's discussion of “Future Possibilities” (Signs, 6, 3 [Spring, 1981], pp. 500-514). In Chodorow's case, “even in a nonsexist society, … gender would remain (even if not so rigidly dichotomized) …” What is at issue for literary critics is not ritual gestures of humility, but rather an acknowledgement that there is no ultimate solution in the sense that gender would cease to be problematic.