SOURCE: “Explaining Woman's Frailty: Feminist Readings of Gertrude,” in Hamlet, edited by Peter J. Smith and Nigel Wood, Open University Press, 1996, pp. 83-107.

[In the following essay, Ouditt examines three feminist studies of Gertrude (from Shakespeare's Hamlet) in order to demonstrate the various types of concerns which serve as the focus of feminist criticism, and to highlight the shortcomings of these approaches.]

INTRODUCTION

What might feminism offer to Shakespeare studies? Or, to reorder the proposition slightly, what might Shakespeare offer to feminist studies? What kind of relationships exist between the archetypal symbol of English literary heritage and the textual wing of a political movement bent on stripping bare and eradicating the structural inequalities between the sexes?

In fact, the intersections are many and fruitful, and one might detect a gradual evolution in feminist approaches. Lisa Jardine describes her ‘growing tide of personal irritation’ at the ‘reverence’ of early feminist critics for Shakespearian ‘realism’ (Jardine 1989: 1); Lynda E. Boose, on the other hand, is unhappy with Marxist critic Kate McLuskie's argument that the only viable position open to feminist readers of Shakespeare is radical resistance. McLuskie's line is that to imagine Shakespeare as an advocate for feminism is merely a sentimental attempt to co-opt his authority (Boose 1987: 723). Elaine Showalter takes the debate a stage further in her essay on representations of Ophelia. Here she outlines and implicitly dismisses three possible feminist approaches: first, the idealist pursuit of the ‘real’ Ophelia; second, a French psychoanalytical approach that would see Ophelia as ‘nothing’, ‘the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation’; and third, the construction of Ophelia as ‘the female’, the weakness and emotional instability which needs to be jettisoned from the patriarchal world of the play before Hamlet can act (Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’, in Parker and Hartman 1985: 78-80). Showalter's modest responsible and historically researched feminism, conscious of the ‘age of critical hubris’ which it inhabits, takes the path of considering Ophelia in her particular historical representations, from the seventeenth century to the present day, and thus produces a character of ‘multiple perspectives’; a cultural icon, which takes on the preoccupations of its age, whether on-stage, in paintings, or in lunatic asylums, rather than the ‘“true” Ophelia, for whom feminist criticism must unambiguously speak’ (Parker and Hartman 1985: 92).

Faced with these developing approaches, it is as well to remember that feminism is a living, political practice with a range of goals. It constantly questions its own aims, blindnesses, methods and assumptions from a number of perspectives. Showalter's essay raises some recurring criticisms within feminist theory, explicitly and implicitly. These might be summarized as follows:

1 Its tendency to idealize, universalize or essentialize women, that is, to see women as fundamentally the same and similarly victimized and misrepresented by patriarchy, irrespective of race, class, sex and historical differences.

2 A tendency to celebrate madness in women as a form of deviation from the suffocating patriarchal symbolic order; to see women as culture's victims, slipping through the gaps in rational representation.

3 Its preoccupation with questions of identity, ideology and discourse at the expense of a radical political analysis; in the name of diversity it has fragmented, lost sight of its original goals.

Not all of these criticisms are valid all of the time. Some refer to particular approaches, and there is no doubt that feminism is presently characterized by its diversity, by a global as well as a local framework, by its attention to culturally specific detail, by the scope of its objectives and objects of study. For some, a populist political agenda can seem alienating—for example, Diana Fuss on Tania Modleski: ‘Why … do I find Modleski's concluding invocation of “female empowerment” so distinctly disempowering?’ (Fuss 1989, 28).¹ For others, feminism's basis in women's experiences (the personal as the political) can appear tiresomely unprofessional—for example, Lisa Jardine on Marilyn French: ‘French's book reveals rather depressingly clearly the common misapprehension that to be a literary feminist is adequate qualifications [sic] to make one a specialist feminist critic’ (Jardine 1989: 8, n. 15).

Feminist literary theory is often said to have begun, in the context of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s, with the recognition of a mismatch between the experience of women readers and the representation of female experience in texts, resulting in ‘images of women in’ studies. This gave way to the rediscovery of lost narratives, lost heroines, lost writers, whose recovered stories began to redress the balance, tell the other side, put the woman's point of view. This, however, did not answer the problem of ‘femininity’. What is it? How is it constructed? Where and in what form does it exist? Social and psychoanalytical studies were useful here in analysing difference, questioning the universality of female identity, theorizing ‘otherness’. And thus arose the question of cultural blindness, the recognition that white, Western middle-class concerns had routinely been privileged above those of other races and classes, in ignorance of the complexities of sexuality and the effects of imperialism. Subsequently came the development of sophisticated theories concerned with destabilizing hierarchies, reconstructing coalitions, recognizing diversity, announcing that there are many ways in which to be a feminist. What begins as ‘This does not meet with my experience’ ends with a similar kind of recognition, but from a scholarly, political and theoretical base that has taken on some of the implications of ‘difference’ rather than being a reaction to the experience of feeling excluded from a patriarchal interpretative game.

Feminism, then, is not ‘simply one thing’. The précis above is intended to give an impression of a theory that is, and always has been, on the move. It is a theory that is not an originary fable but a social and cultural practice. It changes, develops, revises, reflects, is lashed against, regroups, is over, is poised on the brink of a revolution—in relationship with the cultural register of its day. It may come as no surprise, then, that I should request the tolerance of the reader and deviate slightly from the standard format of this series. Contributors are generally expected to take a single, influential, theoretical text, identify its main features, then apply it to a single, influential, literary text. There is, however, such diversity within feminism that I would consider it impossible to do justice to the range of responses—by both critics and students—if I were to take a single voice and consider it representative.

Instead, I should like to consider three perspectives and the interpretative possibilities that they present. This will not solve the problem of representativeness, but it will go some way towards articulating the kinds of concerns with which feminism is engaged and against which readers can test their own responses. In order to mitigate the potentially fragmented effect that this approach may have, I have chosen pieces that relate directly to the play itself, and particularly to the role of Gertrude. These are Rebecca Smith's ‘A Heart Cleft in Twain’ (in Lenz et al. 1983), Jacqueline Rose's ‘Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure’ (in Drakakis 1985) and Lisa Jardine's Still Harping on Daughters (1989). I have chosen these in order to represent three different feminist perspectives, respectively ‘reading as a woman’, psychoanalytic, and materialist feminist. These perspectives exemplify particular preoccupations in feminist literary theory that concern, first, the different interpretation that a woman reader might bring to a character that has traditionally been analysed (and in the case of a play, produced, both in the theatre and on screen) by men; second, arguments centring on the ‘inscrutable’ nature of female sexuality, and the burden of guilt borne by women for social, sexual and aesthetic failure; and third, the effect of summoning a broad cultural and historical framework of ideas and practices concerning the changing roles of women in the Renaissance period, accompanied by an alert scepticism about the omniscience and objectivity of literary criticism.

The individual essays raise specific issues concerning the nature and limits of interpretation. In the meantime, however, I should like to set up three basic questions which underpin feminist theoretical enquiry. The first is whether women read differently from men. Does the different experiential ground of women's lives inevitably produce alternative readings? The spectrum between the responses ‘yes’ and ‘no’ is vast and is complicated by many questions often stimulated by the idea of ‘difference’ itself: that between men and women, that which arises from sexual orientation, class, race, relationship to power, and that which is constructed internally, on the level of subjectivity, that is to say, the many different ideologies, discourses, social, sexual and aesthetic practices that intersect in any one person, or subject. The second is to ask what feminism does to texts. Does it expose patriarchal attitudes? Locate articulations of femininity as ‘other’? Investigate the immediate context in order to cut through ‘universal’ ideas of femininity? The third, and related, question asks what is the object of feminist study. This might be the words on the page, myth, ideology or discourse—the form of speech that constructs concepts of gender and its social operations. Equally, it could be femininity itself (its social sexual, verbal, aesthetic manifestations), historical documents, theatrical conventions, inheritance laws, religious change—the complexity of the social environment in which a text was originally produced, and in which it continues to be produced in different historical periods. All of these possible approaches, in feminist criticism, are situated in the context of wanting to produce social change. That desire is their common feature.

REBECCA SMITH, ‘A HEART CLEFT IN TWAIN’

Rebecca Smith's essay on Gertrude (‘A Heart Cleft in Twain: The Dilemma of Shakespeare's Gertrude’) was first published in 1980 in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Lenz et al. 1983). It is representative of the kind of approach Elaine Showalter, in a germinal essay, called ‘the feminist critique’.² That is, in taking male-authored texts as the object of study, it seeks to reveal patriarchal attitudes particularly through the representation of female characters as stereotypes, whose role is to further male fantasy.³ Smith sets out to unlock the prison house of misconceptions that has resulted in a historically consistent, but nevertheless inaccurate portrayal of Gertrude. The interesting thing about this essay, though, is that it does not criticize Shakespeare for his part in a patriarchal conspiracy. He is—at least partly—exonerated from blame. The guilty parties are the other male characters and ‘most stage and film directors’ (she names Olivier, Kozintsev and Richardson), who ‘have simply taken the men's words and created a Gertrude based on their reactions’ (Lenz et al. 1983: 194). We can gather two things from this: first, that Smith considers Shakespeare to exist somehow above and beyond the boorish chauvinism of his interpreters (and his characters) as a liberal humanist of exceptional sympathy; and second, that there is a ‘real Gertrude’ for whom Smith must speak. This seems to suggest a certain naïvety about literary ‘realism’: the dubious conviction that literary characters are accessible as ‘people’. If we accept this stance, then the essential Gertrude can be properly recognized from an analysis of the words she herself speaks—rather than the things said about her by the Ghost and by Hamlet. The suggestion is that a proper interpretation can only be attained by reading against the grain of the male-originated comments and listening attentively to what she has to say for herself. Smith is thus reading as a woman; offering a ‘herstory’⁴ of the dowager Queen. She is Gertrude's advocate, defending her against false accusations of lasciviousness and cunning.

Smith's line of argument is that Gertrude is portrayed as a sex object by the Ghost, Hamlet and Claudius, and that this is an unjust representation. She is ‘the ultimate sexual object’ in Olivier's Hamlet (Lenz et al. 1983: 195) and seen ‘in quite heightened terms as a sexual object’ by the triad of male combatants (1983: 207). Her self-representation, however, does not add up to the same thing. Instead, when we listen to her alone, we are presented with ‘a quiet, biddable, careful mother and wife’ who ‘obviously loves both Hamlet and Claudius and feels pain and guilt at her inability to please both’ (1983: 201, 204). This, we are told, is the Gertrude that Shakespeare created (and who has nothing to do with the one described by the Ghost, Hamlet, etc.). So the lascivious Gertrude is a projection by the ‘jilted’ husband and anxious son who cannot bear the idea of his mother remarrying. The real Gertrude needs to be rescued from the portrayal of sexual objectification and seen for what she is: ‘a compliant, loving, unimaginative woman’ who marries Claudius ‘probably because of her extremely dependent personality’ (1983: 207). Smith admits that Gertrude is not fully rounded and densely layered, that she appears in only ten of the twenty scenes and takes up only 3.8 per cent of the dialogue (1983: 199) and that she, Smith, is probably only outlining another stereotype (‘malleable, submissive … solicitous of others at the expense of herself’ (1983: 207)), but she maintains that this is a more positive stereotype than that of the temptress and that it ‘more accurately reflects the Gertrude that Shakespeare created’ (1983: 208).

One could point out here that this ‘Gertrude’, distinct from the whole play, merely creates a further problem: how to understand the part played by dramatic gestures (even those that are performed when Gertrude is not needed on-stage) over and above excerptable speeches assigned to her. The relative paucity of words she utters does not decree how significant such speech actually becomes within the dramatic text. For instance, the single line ‘But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading’ (II.ii.168) sounds so alternatively in the context of the male voices in the scene (Polonius on the cause of Hamlet's madness, Claudius' businesslike efficiency), that it gathers enhanced attention to itself. The projection of Hamlet's fears and logic during the Player Queen's speeches in Act III, scene ii, should not be confused with any propria persona utterance from Gertrude, yet it could still be influential when we observe Gertrude's relationship with Claudius in Act IV, scene i, and the apparent pragmatism with which she initially reflects on Ophelia's mad fit at IV.v.14-16. Does this information provide a context for the full reversal of Gertrude's perspective at her lyrical account of Ophelia's drowning (IV.vii.141-58)? Or are we simply overlaying inappropriate novelistic reading conventions that assume the construction of characters along ‘normal’ patriarchal lines, that is, ‘knowing’ another person on the strength of how they are permitted to utter? If so, the noting of female silence comes dangerously close to the assumption that Renaissance women had no characters at all.

The interpretative categories that Smith uses resemble many of those in books such as Dale Spender's Manmade Language (1980), that seek to emphasize women's nurturing, caring, enabling capacities (see for example, Dinnerstein 1976; Chodorow 1978; Sara Ruddick, ‘Preservative Love and Military Destruction’, in Treblicot 1983). Gertrude does not say very much, as indicated above. When she does speak, she usually asks questions or ‘voices solicitude for the well-being and safety of other characters’ (Lenz et al. 1983: 200); she demonstrates ‘perspicuity’ and intuition and her actions are similarly unlascivious. She rarely appears without her husband, and does what he tells her; she scatters flowers on Ophelia's grave and wipes Hamlet's face with a napkin during the fencing match. In short, she is not a whore, she is a good mother who made a mistake in marrying Claudius (not much perspicacity there) and who has been unfortunately branded ever since. She cannot be made responsible for the imagination of a dead husband and a tormented son.

What is puzzling about this is not this particular reinterpretation of a character whose portrayal has been coloured by masculine obsession and fantasy (which element of the analysis is, surely, perfectly credible), but the apparent need to think of characters as though they are human beings, as though there is an essential Gertrude to whom the right-minded critic with appropriate interpretative equipment can gain access. Smith admits that, as a speaking part, it is pretty sparse; Showalter comments that Shakespeare did not really leave a great deal of evidence on which to base that kind of detective work (Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’, in Parker and Hartman 1985: 78). Jardine (1989: 4) simply considers Smith's approach ‘endearing’. A lot of this is a matter of critical fashion, and it is perhaps a little cheap to criticize a critic for holding assumptions that are not presently in vogue; nevertheless, let us see how this estimation of Gertrude helps with the business of interpretation. Three questions suggest themselves. First, was Gertrude involved in the murder of her first husband? Second, did she have a sexual relationship with Claudius before the murder? And third, do we need definitive answers concerning either matter? The first two recur in analyses by critics who try to assess Gertrude's character and role in the play, and are considered by Smith. The third arises from a critical consideration of Smith's approach.

‘When speaking to Hamlet, the Ghost does not state or suggest Gertrude's guilt in his murder, only in her “falling-off” from him to Claudius (I.v.47)’ (Lenz et al. 1983: 201-2). It seems indeed to be the case that the Ghost accuses only the ‘serpent’ Claudius of ‘stinging’ his life—and of seducing his wife. It could be (if she were involved in the murder) that the Ghost had no knowledge of it, or that he wants to enlist Hamlet's vengeful passion purely against Claudius in order that he should immediately lose the crown, while Gertrude can be left to the heavens and to her own conscience. On the other hand, Gertrude, unlike Claudius, at no stage admits guilt of any specific crime. When faced with Hamlet's implied accusation, ‘almost as bad, good mother / As kill a king and marry with his brother’ (III.iv.29-30), she merely retorts ‘As kill a king?’ (III.iv.31). Smith suggests that she exclaims this in horror (Lenz et al. 1983: 202); it could be horror or disbelief at the extraordinary sequence of events—first Hamlet, with no provocation, kills Polonius, then, expressing no immediate regret for this, he retorts that it is not quite as bad as murdering a monarch. Hamlet could be mocking his mother, who may understand his jibe and be faking innocence. On the other hand, Gertrude, as far as we are aware, has no knowledge at this stage that Claudius was responsible for her first husband's death, so there need be no guilt either on her own account or on Claudius'—merely bewilderment at Hamlet's extraordinary and violent behaviour, accompanied by the strange flux of his imagination (all of which is of a piece with his ‘antic disposition’ and vile treatment of Ophelia during the play). Why on earth, she may be wondering, should he think that I killed his father? Or, even more difficult for the critic eager to attribute blame to her, what on earth is he talking about? The scene continues. Having understood Hamlet's professed intention to ‘wring [her] heart’ (III.iv.36), she asks two questions: ‘What have I done, that thou dar’st wag thy tongue / In noise so rude against me?’ (III.iv.40-1), and ‘Ay me, what act / That roars so loud and thunders in the index?’ (III.iv.52-3). These questions seem to indicate innocence, or at least a lack of understanding as to why her ‘o’erhasty’ marriage should produce such tempestuous emotions in her son. It is only when Hamlet has been through the ‘counterfeit presentment of two brothers’ (III.iv.55) and demonstrated the grace and majesty of the one as against the ‘mildewed ear’ of the other, that she cracks a little and admits to seeing ‘black and grainèd spots’ in her soul (III.iv.82). This might, of course, be her greatest virtue, that she is ruthlessly self-critical of negligible faults. She then implores Hamlet to ‘speak no more’ several times until his passionate flow is interrupted by the appearance of the Ghost.

Hamlet's line of attack concerns his mother's irrational choice and unthinking sexual response. It is not until line 88 that he names Claudius ‘A murderer and a villain’, and these epithets might be taken by her to be metaphorical, or yet another symptom of Hamlet's hyperbolic frame of mind. Whether she believes him or not, she cannot bear to hear any more either against herself or her second husband. One might easily assume that she knew nothing about it.

But how far-reaching was her involvement with Claudius? Many critics argue that the Ghost's description of her ‘falling-off’ (I.v.47), his description of Claudius as ‘adulterate’, the description of lust sating itself in a celestial bed and then preying on garbage (I.v.56-7) amounts to a clear implication of Gertrude's guilt. She is clearly guilty in the Belleforest source. The term ‘seeming-virtuous’ (I.v.46) seems to imply duplicity in marriage, the comparison between his love, that was faithful to its marriage vows, and hers all add up to a reading that condemns her for adultery (cf., for example, Bradley 1974: 134). Smith, however, maintains that she is innocent. She points up the ambiguity in the Ghost's narrative—it cannot be clearly concluded that he is describing simultaneous events rather than a close sequence of events. It might appear equally immodest to marry hastily after the death of a husband, without leaving due mourning time, and thereby revealing an unwarranted sexual appetite. The sequence of ‘falling-off’ and ‘declin[ing] / Upon a wretch’ (I.v.50-1) might equally have taken place after the King's death as before it. The time-scale is brief. The same could be said of the celestial bed/preying on garbage sequence (I.v.42-57). Hamlet's concern, Smith insists, is with the speed of his mother's remarriage and with her apparent betrayal of the memory of King Hamlet—this is what ‘makes marriage vows / As false as dicers' oaths’ (III.iv.45-6) (Lenz et al. 1983: 202-3).

This reading of Gertrude as a solicitous matriarch, her heart ‘cleft in twain’ by her equal loyalties to her son and to her husband, releases her from the female stereotype of ‘lascivious whore’ even if only to place her uncomfortably close to its dumb and vulnerable counterpart, characterized by unreflective passivity. Both interpretations are drawn from the same information—the words on the page—plus a general cultural sense of what women's roles might be in a violent and vengeful setting. It is that latter, unacknowledged source that persuades critics to supply the parts of the drama omitted by the dramatist; that is, to make whole and coherent that which is inevitably sparse, ambiguous and driven by forces other than the creation of a full range of psychologically consistent characters.

The process of attempting to answer the questions concerning Gertrude's guilt and adultery lead one to consider whether or not those questions should require a definitive answer. And this in turn recalls my earlier comment on the nature and limits of interpretation in the framework of feminist criticism. The text can never be autonomous. It invites readings, and the nature of that process is not bounded by the horizon of the text, no matter how close the reading becomes. The text does not provide definitive answers to those questions concerning Gertrude's guilt or otherwise; it is the act of intervention on the part of the critic that might decide this, and that act is, in this case, performed with the explicit intention of preventing the occlusion of the female by the male; preventing the silence that is the result of heeding only the play's main (male) protagonists. So the nature of this interpretative act is interventionist, radical, aligned to the feminist cause of rescuing women from silence, obscurity and the presumption of guilt.

The limitations of Smith's interpretative strategy coincide with assumptions concerning the close reading of ‘character’ in a dramatic text. The shortage of verbal evidence on the part of Gertrude herself, allied to the exclusion of non-verbal, performance elements that might shape the direction of the play combine to produce a reading based on conviction rather than certainty. The ambiguity, in any case, leaves us as readers/audience in a similar position to that of Hamlet: we do not know. We are invited to interpret, and we may do so on the basis of textual evidence, in an attempt to undo the repressive interpretations that have dominated discussions of Gertrude. But, in the context of a practice of close reading, a discursive, interventionist strategy leaves us not with ‘knowledge’, but with an angle, a position from which to speak and interrogate, and one buttressed by the weight of a firm ideological commitment which extends to cultural practices beyond literary criticism.

JACQUELINE ROSE, ‘SEXUALITY IN THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE’

Jaqueline Rose is best known for her feminist and psychoanalytic criticism (see Rose 1982; 1991; 1993). Her essay on Hamlet appeared in Alternative Shakespeares edited by John Drakakis, which sets out to dismantle the ‘myth’ of Shakespeare (Drakakis 1985: 24); in her own book, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (Rose 1986); and again in the Norton edition of Hamlet (Hoy 1991), Rose moves away from direct concentration on the play and from any attempt at a direct ‘reading’ in the light of psychoanalytic theory, and looks instead at the concept of ‘femininity’ and the way it has been used to explain away the shortcomings of Shakespeare's most problematic play. Her object of study, then, is not ‘women’ or ‘Shakespeare’, but the common ground of ‘language, fantasy and sexuality’ in which ‘the woman occupies a crucial, but difficult place’ (Drakakis 1985: 95). In this essay, language, fantasy and sexuality are seen to circulate in literary, literary-critical and psychoanalytical texts—namely Hamlet, T. S. Eliot's ‘Hamlet’ (Eliot 1975: 45-9) and extracts from Freud and from Ernest Jones.

Rose addresses the same initial problem as that addressed by Rebecca Smith: that Gertrude stands accused of lasciviousness. This is linked to the question of the play's ‘problematic’ status: that it has been described as an aesthetic failure because it demands too much of the act of interpretation (Drakakis 1985: 95). The two accused, then, the woman and the play, form the focus of an essay which looks at the relationships between sexuality and aesthetic form and finds that it has been all too easy to make the woman bear the burden of failure when the cause really lies elsewhere, in the failure to integrate the self both within language and subjectivity. In other words, critics such as Eliot are looking in the wrong place and with misguided motivations when they scapegoat Gertrude. A more fruitful focus of attention and more appropriate motivations, Rose suggests, can only be properly discovered using the tools that have arisen from the study of psychoanalysis within a post-structuralist framework.

Eliot is first in the dock, and is called to account for adopting the attitude of a literary policeman: a ‘particularly harsh type of literary super-ego’, whose general tendency towards repression (which was to find other outlets in political terms) demanded the too-neat resolution of linguistic, sexual and aesthetic complexes (Drakakis 1985: 102). Rose explains her questioning of Eliot's influential assumptions with reference to his concept of the ‘objective correlative’, which he developed in his essay on Hamlet. The objective correlative is ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts […] are given, the emotion is immediately evoked’ (Eliot 1975: 48). In other words, the route towards experiencing the ‘particular emotion’ is external to, and not to be confused with, the emotion itself. Proper artistic control means that the emotion must be brought under control in the mind of the artist and rendered in an aesthetically contained and objective form. The problem with Hamlet, in Eliot's eyes, is that there is a mismatch between the character of Gertrude and the emotional excess that she has apparently generated in her son. The emotional effect that she has on the play thus causes it to veer out of aesthetic control, Hamlet's mother being an inadequate stimulant of Hamlet's reaction to her: ‘his disgust envelops and exceeds her’ (Eliot 1975: 48).

So, Eliot suggests, Gertrude is to blame for the play's artistic failure. Which is not to say that the play lacks interest: indeed it is, according to Eliot, ‘the “Mona Lisa” of literature’ (Eliot 1975: 47). Rose picks up this analogy, precisely because we see Eliot using another image of a woman to convey the play's failure: ‘Like the Mona Lisa, Hamlet is a flawed masterpiece whose very failing acts as a pull on spectator and critic alike. Its very imperfection brings with it the power to seduce’ (Drakakis 1985: 96). So the idea of undecipherability, of the enigmatic, of that which lures only to refuse to yield up its meanings, is transferred between play and painting with the woman as common, and deceptive, currency, implicitly denigrated by male authority.

In Hamlet, then, sexuality is unmanageable. Gertrude's impropriety provokes disorder and tumult. To Hamlet it is disgusting: he cannot control his response to it. It is horrific. And this excessive emotional reaction, the object of which is too insubstantial a dramatic presence to warrant it, leads to a problem of interpretation: ‘how to read, or control by reading, a play whose inscrutability (like that of the Mona Lisa) has baffled—and seduced so many critics’ (Drakakis 1985: 98). Rose's argument is that Eliot's criticism operates on the principle of strict control and proper example. He demands formal constraint in the body of works that comprise the ‘Literature’ that is worthy of that status. Formal constraint is exemplified by the objective correlative, which ‘carries the burden of social order itself’ (Drakakis 1985: 98) in that it forces emotion into the strait-jacket of object. And Gertrude's character, in its weakness and deficiency, is indicative of the crisis that occurs when the (ever-present, but none the less) unknowable, the incomprehensible in social and affective life, refuses to be contained by aesthetic form. Rose is thus setting up a comparison between the objective correlative and social order. The former is to art as the latter is to life—but they are linked by an unacknowledged concern with what is considered proper behaviour in the normal world.

Rose's real interest is not so much in Eliot's critical formulations in themselves, as in the surprising resemblance that they bear to psychoanalytical concepts. Her essay progresses along lines that are more associative than linear, and her next move is to indicate the similarity between Eliot's formulation and the psychoanalytic account of subjectivity. Just as Eliot (1975: 49) sees the dangers of the ‘inexpressibly horrible’ threatening to upset aesthetic form, so psychoanalysis sees speech, or utterance, as open to disruption by the ungovernable forces of the unconscious. The more obvious manifestations of this are found in dreams, slips of the tongue and jokes, but ordinary language use might be similarly affected. Where Eliot (1975: 49) observes the ‘buffoonery’ of Hamlet's unchanelled emotional excess delivered in the form of puns, repetitions and other instances of word-play, in the light of psychoanalysis we could equally see traces of the unrepresentable (the unconscious). Thus aesthetic coherence (which Eliot detects in many other Shakespeare plays) is perilously close to aesthetic collapse. One false move and the Bard, instead of displaying masterly control, ‘slips off the edge of representation itself’ (Drakakis 1985: 99). In other words, the insistence on control always bears traces of its flip side, chaos and disorder, and the example of psychoanalysis suggests that readers and critics should be aware of their proximity. This need not necessarily result in Eliot-style condemnation of the work in question, but might, on the other hand, open up new avenues of enquiry.

In another associative move, Rose points up the similarities between the (psychoanalytic) Oedipal drama and Eliot's cultural theories in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (Eliot 1975: 37-44). The former is central to the Freudian psychoanalytic theory which accounts for the division of human subjects into male and female and for the direction of desire on to its appropriate object. The boy child, for example, perceives his father as a rival for his mother's love and fantasizes about killing him in order to possess the mother. Fears of castration, however, which the father, the source of all authority, threatens, persuade the child to relinquish desire for his mother and move towards identification with the father, on the understanding that one day he, too, will be similarly empowered. In ‘Tradition’ the artist must submit to something outside himself and surrender to the tradition which precedes and surrounds him. Just as the son pays his debt to the father and thus becomes a male subject, so the artist pays his debt to the dead poets and thus becomes a poet. Either son or poet may, of course, fail to submit: alternative claims may prevail over those of patrilineal tradition. Rose's point is that, as well as this being another scenario suggestive of the capitulation to order of the growing (literary and social) subject, it also recalls the numerous pleas for appropriate mourning in Hamlet which go unheeded, or remain unresolved (Drakakis 1985: 99-100). The play is, of course, noted for its palpable inadequacy of mourning (of King Hamlet, of Polonius, of Ophelia): ‘a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer’ than Gertrude, in Hamlet's eyes (I.ii.150-1).

Having set up a literary-psychoanalytical context in which order is repeatedly asserted and frequently fails, Rose returns to the issue that it is a woman who is seen as the cause of excess and deficiency in the play and a woman (the Mona Lisa) who symbolizes this in Eliot's essay. She now relates this to the drama of sexual difference, as described by Freud, where woman is failure in representation, is something deficient, is lacking or threatening to ordered systems, whether these be aesthetic or sexual (Drakakis 1985: 100).⁵ This can result in fetishization or mystification - or inscrutability. Enter the Mona Lisa once more: again, it is evoked as that which cannot be controlled, managed, that which is in excess, that which is not an ‘objective correlative’ to the range of emotions which it seems to produce - but this time Rose is setting this in the context of psychoanalysis and reveals Freud's similar interest (at around the same time) in the enigma of the representation of ‘the contrasts which dominate the erotic life of women’ (Freud 1953-74, 11: 108; cited in Drakakis 1985: 101). Rose's deduction from this is that Eliot's invocation of the Mona Lisa suggests that what seems unmanageable to a rigidly controlled aesthetic theory is ‘nothing other than femininity itself (Drakakis 1985: 101). So what needs explanation is not why Gertrude is so inadequate as an object for the emotions generated in the play, but why she should be expected to support them. Why should Gertrude be responsible for her son's feelings towards her? Why does she bear the guilt? Why does Hamlet not concentrate more on his revenge project and less on her sexuality? Woman embodies a whole range of fantasies concerning sexuality, disruption, seduction, reserve, voracity, cruelty, compassion, grace—many of which are seen lurking behind La Gioconda's smile, and many of which are projected on to Gertrude, the scapegoat for the failure of the play. Rose's point is that behind Eliot's reference to Leonardo's painting lies a whole history of the fantasies that woman embodies and is required to uphold. Furthermore, the burden of guilt, like the male-orientated construction of femininity, falls unfairly, displacing attention on to a fetishized concept of woman and away from more demanding considerations concerning language and subjectivity.

Thus

writing which proclaims its integrity, and literary theory which demands such integrity (objectivity/correlation) of writing, merely repeat that moment of repression when language and sexuality were first ordered into place, putting down the unconscious processes which threaten the resolution of the Oedipal drama and of narrative form alike.

(Drakakis 1985: 102)

So Eliot's aesthetic demands are ethically oppressive. He blames the woman for the play's lack of resolution on the level of form (she is not an adequate objective correlative) and theme (she obstructs the resolution of the revenge plot). Femininity, as Rose puts it, ‘is the image of that problem’—is the concept through which that problem is represented. As a locus of lack of representation, of excess, of inscrutability, femininity is a focus for the threat of disintegration, on both literary and psychic levels, that can rise through the cracks in normative representation at any time. Gertrude disrupts the surface of the representation of Hamlet—both character and play.

An account of readings by Ernest Jones and D. W. Winnicott (Drakakis 1985: 109-15) brings Rose on to the question of interpretation through the psychoanalytic concept of resistance: this is where meaning disguises itself, is overwhelming or escapes. It is not a question of simple concealment, but represents the ‘truth’ of a subject ‘caught in the division between conscious and unconscious which will always function at one level as a split’ (Drakakis 1985: 116). Interpretation can only move on when resistance is seen not as obstacle, but as process. Hamlet's problem is that he cannot act. He also cannot make sense of, cannot interpret his immediate situation. The fact of being unable to interpret what the intervention of the Ghost means, what Gertrude's change of sexual partner means, what Ophelia's behaviour means, ‘leaves the relationship between word and action held in unbearable suspense’ (Drakakis 1985: 117). The tension between words and actions, the difficulty of interpreting the incapacity of words (in this case ‘revenge’) to complete themselves in action (to kill Claudius) provides the productive focus of critical uncertainty. Rose suggests that Gertrude has been a kind of victim of this tension: ‘Failing in a woman, whether aesthetic or moral, is always easier to point to than a failure of integration within language and subjectivity itself’ (Drakakis 1985: 118).

The kind of ‘failure’ of which Gertrude stands accused could only be upheld within discourses based on coherence models—and coherence models which take partriarchy as the norm. Rose is suggesting that Eliot's repressive desire to see Hamlet conform to the aesthetic coherence of Shakespeare's ‘more successful’ plays is of a piece with an attitude that ignores the gaps and chasms in representation, that seeks to smooth over interpretative inconsistencies or to arraign them for breaking the law of aesthetic unity. Rose is suggesting that the critic should turn his or her attention away from apportioning blame for shortcomings in the literary meritocracy, and instead turn towards subjectivity, which is not unified, but is a space, cross-hatched with a multiplicity of conflicting drives, desires and duties. In this way femininity might cease to become a scapegoat for the incoherence of the human subject.

LISA JARDINE, ‘WEALTH, INHERITANCE AND THE SPECTRE OF STRONG WOMEN’

The approaches that we have examined so far have considered Gertrude's ‘character’, in an attempt to come to a more accurate understanding of her role in the play than that traditionally portrayed. These approaches have analysed why Gertrude takes the ‘blame’ for the play's ‘failures’, from a psychoanalytic perspective that considers ‘femininity’, not only as it is represented in the play, but also in terms of the history of myths and fantasies that it supports and which are read into the play by critics, psychoanalytic and otherwise.

The third approach looks to the place of the female subject in history and fits somewhere between the categories ‘new historicist’ and ‘materialist feminist’. Lisa Jardine, in her updated preface to Still Harping on Daughters, describes her ambivalence towards the discovery that she was considered as part of a general critical trend ‘loosely called the “new history”’ (Jardine 1989: viii), and also describes her debt of intellectual gratitude to American feminist psychoanalytic critics, in particular Coppélia Kahn and Carol Neely. Valerie Wayne, in her introduction to The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, outlines a rift between feminism and new historicism in which the latter is criticized for its apolitical and élitist tendencies (Wayne 1991: 4-5).⁶ Lisa Jardine's description of her own method aligns her more with materialist feminism, and it is within this broad theoretical context that I should like to consider her.

She states that, in her case, ‘the move forwards towards a new fusion of methodologies and material from cultural history and text studies was made in order to retrieve agency for the female subject in history’ (Jardine 1989: viii). Her object is to build back in for woman her place in history as agent as well as receiver of masculine ideologies. She does this by ‘treating the individual female subject in the drama as a “cultural artifact” … I look for the subject in history at the intersection of systems of behaviour, customs, beliefs, out of which, I consider, personal identity is constructed’ (Jardine 1989: viii-ix).⁷ By using the term ‘cultural artifact’ she is distinguishing her approach from those who see characters as ‘people’ and from those who seek to understand concepts such as ‘femininity’ in terms of their relation to ahistorical psychic drives—that is, from the two approaches we have already considered. Catherine Belsey describes materialist feminism's ‘concern with the social and the economic, as opposed to the purely psychological, and with historical difference, as opposed to the universal and essential categories of ‘woman’ or ‘patriarchy’ (‘Afterword: A Future for Materialist Feminist Criticism?’, in Wayne 1991: 257). In other words, ‘the past is another culture’ (Jardine 1989: ix). Our access to it and to those subjects who participate in it should be formed by an understanding of the values and practices of that culture, which give shape and meaning to individual action and to representation. Jardine's practice, then, is to offer detailed historical documentation concerning, for example, the changes in education, the effects on women of religious reform and the complications involving inheritance laws as ‘avenues of approach’ to the representations of women in Renaissance drama (Jardine 1989: 6). She does this not with the conviction that the plays offer an accurate reflection of the social scene or articulate explicitly the changing views on ‘the woman question’ (for this see Dusinberre 1975) but with the belief that plays are one form, among others, in which concern about social change is registered.

Now, how does this help with the question of interpretation? What form of activity is involved in putting into practice this broadly historicist, materialist, feminist theory? Perhaps, first of all, we should say that Jardine (1989: 6) rejects the status of ‘theory’ for her analysis and calls it instead ‘a practice of feminist interest in literature’. The heuristic work, she suggests, involves detailed contextualization of the plays, in which social formations, conventions and practices are seen as intersecting systems, which are articulated in the form of texts or subjects. For our purposes here, Jardine's chapter on ‘Wealth, Inheritance and the Spectre of Strong Women’, coupled with other documentary evidence (gathered by materialist critics such as Catherine Belsey and Sara Eaton⁸), can help put Gertrude in the context of beliefs concerning women, power and sexuality in the Shakespearian period.

Belsey speaks of the ‘silence’ of women in the period: women were

enjoined to silence, discouraged from any form of speech which was not an act of submission to the authority of their fathers or husbands. … [T]hey speak with equal conviction from incompatible subject positions, displaying a discontinuity of being, an ‘inconstancy’ which is seen as characteristically feminine.

(Belsey 1985: 149)

Their legal position was in flux, their position in the family ambiguous, their power position in the state non-existent. Some women did resist, but they were nevertheless ‘placed at the margins of the social body, while at the same time, in the new model of marriage they were uneasily, silently at the heart of the private realm which was its microcosm and its centre’ (Belsey 1985: 150). The notable exception was, of course, Elizabeth I. Perhaps this can help us out with an explanation of Gertrude's relative silence in comparison with the psychological weight that she bears in terms of Hamlet's relation to her as his mother. The ‘positions’ from which she speaks are normally as Claudius' wife, and as Hamlet's mother—for example, at I.ii.68-73 she bids Hamlet, ‘cast [his] nightly colour off’; in Act III, scene i, she obeys Claudius' request that she leave, but only after she has expressed the hope that Ophelia's ‘virtues’ will restore Hamlet's sanity; in Act III, scene iv, however, the closet scene, which Gertrude opens by criticizing her son's behaviour, Hamlet names her conflicting roles and his own troubled relation to them: ‘You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife, / But—would you were not so—you are my mother’ (ll. 16-17). Her heart is ‘cleft in twain’ when the demands of her present husband and son, the present occupants of her familial microcosm, pull in opposite directions. Her ‘inconstancy’ is notorious. But instead of looking for a psychological motivation that could explain her ‘frailty’, we might consider instead her awkward duty to speak from the position of Claudius' wife. When Hamlet reminds her of the qualities of her former husband, all she can do is request his silence (‘speak no more’ (III.iv.80)): her past life, her past position as King Hamlet's wife, is at odds with her present position. She can do little more than try not to acknowledge the discontinuity and thereby to maintain some kind of dignity in the role in which she presently has, as it were, a speaking part. Hamlet's attention to her lack of judgement—‘what judgement / Would step from this to this?’ (III.iv.71-2)—and lack of constancy—‘O shame, where is thy blush?’ (III.iv.74)—elicit no explanations. This is the consequence of remarriage in the Renaissance period. One is a wife, and then, one is a wife. There is no opportunity to explain the discordance in the sequence. Gertrude's single, terse comment on female prolixity—‘The lady protests too much’ (III.ii.216)—is perhaps not so much an admission of her own sexual laxness as an indication that verbal excess is either not an appropriate aspect of female behaviour, or that it is positively dangerous in such a threatening patriarchal world. However we interpret it, it seems to suggest the difficulty of making the autonomous female voice heard, especially for one in her ‘cleft’ position.

We can add to this Jardine's (1989: 69) point that the ‘female hero moves in an exclusively masculine stage world, in which it is the task of the male characters to “read” her’. This is almost exclusively what happens to Gertrude (and largely what happened to Elizabeth I). Gertrude is ‘read’ by the Ghost and by Hamlet who find in her ‘frailty’, a ‘falling-off’, absence of reason and an unseemly lasciviousness. The atmosphere surrounding these assessments of her motivations is thick with sexual accusations, which we can take as an accurate judgement or leave as the overheated imaginative response of a husband in hell and distraught son. As far as Gertrude is concerned, the rest is silence. Contemporary sources warn against ‘dishonest’ behaviour. Ophelia is given a good talking to by her brother and her father: ‘weigh what loss your honour may sustain / If … you … / … your chaste treasure open / To his unmastered importunity’ (I.iii.29-32); ‘Tender yourself more dearly, / Or … / … you’ll tender me a fool’ (I.iii.107-9). Women, in general, were assumed to be the ‘Image of sweetnesse, curtesie and shamefastnesse’ (quoted by Jardine 1989: 76, from Boccaccio 1963: 177): any sign of sexual awareness would brand a woman as Eve or Magdalene rather than Mary (Jardine 1989: 77): Gertrude would thus have been seen as ‘wanton’ because of her rapid remarriage, irrespective of her son's vile imaginings.

Widows, however, were often expected to remarry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite the Church's emphasis on the chastity of widows and the assumption that they would remain true to the man they married with God's blessing. As Jardine (1989: 83) puts it, ‘the widows of wealthy men were married off again with quite undignified haste where those responsible for them considered it financially advantageous to the line to do so’. Gertrude's own status is deeply ambiguous. It does seem that Claudius was probably elected King by a group of elders—he ‘Popped in between th’election and [Hamlet's] hopes’ (V.ii.66)—and that he married Gertrude once this position was secure, rather than her bestowing the monarchy on him by marriage (which even now is not possible in English law). It is also not clear whether one can assume that Shakespeare had English or Danish law in mind—or, whether his original audience would have had any knowledge of Danish law. This operated on the principle of elective monarchies, although, according to Jas. Howell, in 1632, the last three kings of Denmark had ensured, before their deaths, that their eldest sons were confirmed as successors (Jenkins 1982: 434).

Jardine (1989: 192) argues that Gertrude's remarriage excites in Hamlet a ‘suppressed fear of female interference in patrilinear inheritance’. This focuses his revulsion at her remarriage because it places in question his own position as successor to the throne. According to the (English) law of tail male, the estate passes from eldest son to eldest son, and thus would pass next to Hamlet. If Hamlet were to remain childless, however, his paternal uncle Claudius and his offspring would then be next in line. This would be the case regardless of the marriage of Claudius to Gertrude. The fact of their marriage, however, means that a child born of that union would displace Hamlet. This might explain Hamlet's insistence that Gertrude ‘go not to [his] uncle's bed’ (III.iv.155) in an age of unreliable contraception. The whole scenario—lust interfering with inheritance—would make Gertrude guilty of the disruption of patrilineal tradition irrespective of any conscious intention on her part.

Jardine's (1989: 93) argument is that the question of inheritance adds a dimension to Hamlet's reaction to the marriage that a modern audience would probably miss, at the same time as it renders Gertrude ‘guilty’ by the simple fact of her having a (potentially interventionist) sexual role in a drama that circles around patriarchal power. She comments that the inheritance theme is subsidiary in the play, but that it nevertheless sheds some light on the supposition of Gertrude's culpability (in the absence of any ‘proof’ of her involvement in murder or adultery) and on Hamlet's obsession with her sexual relations with Claudius.

Sara Eaton, in her essay on ‘Defacing the Feminine in Renaissance Tragedy’ (in Wayne 1991) makes the basic point that the female characters of the period give less of an impression of their physical and psychological fullness than do the males: ‘their expressions of desire, of will, of being, their explanations for their actions, rarely add up to the complicated declarations of interiority common to male characters by the 1590s' (Wayne 1991: 186). This is clearly the case with Gertrude, who is notably silent on her own motivations. Eaton also comments on the increasingly private treatment of female sexual misdemeanours, at a time when women's lives were gradually being redefined as domestic (Wayne 1991: 191). What is interesting is that while punishment was private, the theatrical space publicized it, most notably in somewhat later plays such as Webster's The Duchess of Malfi or Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness (Wayne 1991: 193); male protagonists are frequently concerned with female virtue (a concern that dominated the public performances of Elizabeth I), and punishments are often enacted in private spaces—such as the ‘closet’ in which Hamlet upbraids Gertrude. ‘Men's power to punish is made visible by their actions, and is rarely questioned, demonstrating the power of the patriarchy to construct the “realities” of women's lives’ (Wayne 1991: 193). Lust is not to be permitted to interfere with inheritance.

Eaton's essay does not refer directly to Hamlet. Its implications suggest, however, that one might interpret Gertrude's silent suffering, her plea that she should hear ‘no more’, as an indication that she has no way of answering Hamlet's accusations; that her role as wife determines one set of loyalties at the same time as her role as mother sets out another. The men surrounding her continue to interpret her life in terms of their lives. Her silence and passivity make her an object on to which their demands (and deepest fears), in all their contradictions, are projected. When Ophelia speaks in her own voice—actively, without status—she utters ‘things in doubt / That carry but half sense’. Perhaps more crucially, according to Horatio, ‘Her speech is nothing’ (IV.v.6-7). The single occasion when Gertrude acts in propria persona, in defiance of Claudius' wishes, she drinks poison, the prelude to her own extinction.

A reading of Gertrude as a subject in history, then, offers explanations for her silence and for the presumption of her guilt that rely on an understanding of the ideologies concerning marriage, inheritance and submission to authority that were current at the time.

CONCLUSION

What, then, are the problems in each of these three approaches, and how do they help us to interpret Gertrude?

It has already been suggested that Rebecca Smith relies on the idea of re-presenting Gertrude ‘as she really is’, stripped of the voyeuristic trimmings imposed upon her by the masculine eye and mind, solicitous in her maternal duties. This is a ‘rereading’ in the light of an alternative vision—a woman's—and one that takes account of the ways in which the accretion of stage and screen representations of Gertrude constructs a dominant cultural vision of her which should be challenged. Jacqueline Rose does not attempt to offer us a clear interpretation of who Gertrude ‘is’, or what her role is in the play. She suggests instead that the cultural construction of ‘femininity’, with all its fantasies of seduction, cunning, grace, etc., have blinded critics such as Eliot to the essence of the play's ‘problem’. Eliot ‘blames’ Gertrude for the play's failure. In doing so he is revealing his own authoritarian insistence on order and missing the point. The point is that subjectivity and language are infinitely complex systems, criss-crossed with incompatible motivations and unknowable drives which rarely resolve themselves in any easy or ‘unitary’ meaning. The reason for Hamlet's inability to act is not necessarily something ‘inexpressibly horrible’ that concerns his relationship with his mother, but might equally be read as an articulation of the nature of subjectivity itself. The weight of interpretative activity that Gertrude seems to require is not an aspect of a fault in the play's construction, but a comment on the way language and subjectivity operate. The feminist point here is that Gertrude is absolved. Rose is indicating a cultural obsession with the ‘inscrutability’ of femininity and the way that it tends to serve as a decoy, an easy target, deflecting attention from areas perhaps more analytically complex, but less susceptible to the combination of seduction and blame.

The Jardine approach offers us a Gertrude who is a ‘subject’, that is, who is constructed by the cultural position of her femininity at a particular historical moment. The interpretative problem here is in gaining access to the specifics of that historical period and in combining this, in all its conflicting multiplicity, with a reading of a notoriously unstable text. Many feminist Shakespearians who take this path seem to do so with a sense of modesty, combining detailed scholarship with a recognition that they are producing a contribution to an ongoing project (Jardine 1989: 6-7; Wayne 1991: 23-4). And this seems an appropriate point on which to conclude. Feminism, by its very nature as a political programme as well as an aspect of literary study, is a continuing project. The contributions to it and the readings of Gertrude considered here form part of a changing cultural and critical history. They are interventions, committed to a form of social change that will undo the inequalities between men and women. As such they read against the grain of a predominantly patriarchal and conservative cultural inheritance in order to undermine the tendency to represent women in terms of common stereotypes and to shed some historical, cultural, analytical light on the particular circumstances in which femininity has been constructed.

SUPPLEMENT

nigel wood: In Janet Adelman's Suffocating Mothers (Adelman 1992) Gertrude's ‘maternal body’, the intrusion of her mark on masculine identity and its destabilizing effects, casts a long shadow (see Adelman 1992: 11-37). She regards the matter of female characterization as bearing more or less directly on masculine identity as well as signs of the female. This seems a manœuvre that is not catered for in your review of feminist positions. I wonder whether you could say more about the particular challenge the ‘mother-figure’ sets in Shakespeare or other texts?

sharon ouditt: I think that there is something of this implicit in Rose's reading of Eliot's position, and that is precisely what she—Rose—is steering clear of. The ‘inexpressibly horrible’ that Eliot describes bears some relation to the ‘horrific maternal body’ to which Adelman alludes. It seems to speak to an invocation of ‘deep fantasy’, of the Oedipal forces that align the female body with the power to engulf, to render into nothingness, to emasculate? Perhaps it speaks more to male fantasy about women than to female experience. This doesn’t mean, of course, that it is invalid as an approach: it’s very useful in elucidating a masculine fear of femininity that troubles so many texts—Shakespearian and other—and in explaining the inability of this particular kind of masculinity to ‘grow up’, that is, to perceive women in any function other than the maternal/sexual. The best example in a modern text that I can think of that explores both sides of this kind of figure (positive and negative) is Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. She is oceanic in some respects, but also limited and limiting, preventing the younger generation from outgrowing her dictates while she still lives. She does indeed cast a long shadow—over Lily Briscoe's canvas. But that’s another story.

nw: Is there a contradiction between the impulse towards public or general meanings in materialist approaches and the private histories uncovered in psychoanalytic readings?

so: Not in so far as the personal and the political, or the general, are elements of the same continuum in the context of women's oppression. There has been some considerable friction between psychoanalytic approaches (commonly characterized as ‘French’) and social, or materialist approaches (often described as ‘Anglo-American’) and, while I don’t want to suggest that there is no distinction, I think that the idea of the ‘subject’ has provided a lot of common ground. That is to say, psychic meanings are also social meanings. The forces which make up the unconscious are socially as well as privately induced. The subject is a kind of battleground in which drives, ideologies, discourses struggle against each other and in which the private is barely distinguishable from the public. We can see this in all three readings of Gertrude that I’ve outlined: the private meanings which the Ghost and Hamlet apply to her are aligned with public ideas of what it means to be female. Her silence, confusion, lack of coherence, whether it be explained in the language of personal motivation or public duty, seems to be a product of the inevitable ‘inconstancy’ of woman's position when she has a number of roles to play and each is viewed separately from a male-orientated perspective. I think the two approaches are complementary rather than contradictory.

nw: You state … that several of the disagreements within feminist criticism could be attributed to ‘critical fashion’. Are there approaches that are distinct from transient cultural forces?

so: Perhaps the word ‘fashion’ suggests a capriciousness that I didn’t really intend. I can’t imagine an approach that is not inflected by the cultural and historical forces of its day even if aspects of that approach remain stable across long periods of time. In the case of feminism (in the recent term) emphases have shifted, alliances have been established, changes have been made - it has been a learning process for all - but many of the core considerations are still there because our culture has not yet been able to change them.

nw: How would you confront the common resistance to feminist critiques that emerges whenever it is pointed out that what is now held as an article of good faith just could not be true of Renaissance perceptions?

so: First, I would say that this is not a problem borne by feminism alone. I don’t think any approach, from practical criticism to present-day post-modernist preoccupations, can entirely divest itself of the prejudices—conscious and unconscious—of its time. Then, I would say that feminism, like a lot of other politically inflected theories, is by nature interventionist. That is, it is not trying, by some mysterious act of transhistorical osmosis, to get to and re-experience the object of its study, in the historicist and literal terms derived from that object's temporal location. Feminism is, on the whole, conscious that there is historical and cultural difference between Renaissance perceptions and those of the present day. Its concern is to elucidate the position, roles, cultural existence of women at that time and to unpick the silencing of women's issues in literary criticism that has dominated our cultural understanding of that period since. It reads against the grain, when that grain is characterized by patriarchal attitudes, in an effort to analyse the effects of those attitudes. And to examine the various ways in which women, who are not always perceived by feminists as victims of a patriarchal conspiracy, have dealt with them.

Notes

1. Fuss is referring to Modleski's essay ‘Feminism and the Power of Interpretation: Critical Readings' (de Lauretis 1986), in which Modleski argues for the empowering of ‘real’ women readers. Fuss takes issue with Modleski's democratizing impulse on the grounds that she does not account for the material differences between women of different races, class backgrounds or sexual orientations. Modleski is trying to assert feminist criticism as something that is for women; a tool in the female resistance to patriarchy, rather than simply existing as one theoretical approach among many. The debate is explained in Landry and MacLean (1993: 149-50).

2. Showalter's essay, ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics' was originally printed in Jacobus (1979); it is reprinted in Showalter (1986).

3. The best-known practitioners of the feminist critique are Kate Millett (see Millett 1970) and Germaine Greer (see Greer 1970). For an American perspective see also Fetterley (1978).

4. The term ‘herstory’ became part of feminist linguistic currency towards the beginning of the ‘second wave’. It is normally used to emphasize that ‘women's lives, deeds and participation in human affairs have been neglected or undervalued in standard histories’ (see Miller and Swift 1976: 135).

5. Rose cites Freud's ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (Freud 1953-74, 19: 173-9) and ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ (Freud 1953-74, 19: 243-58). See also Mitchell (1974), esp. Chapters 6-8.

6. Boose (1987) goes into this further. She points up a division, commencing in or around 1982, between, on the one hand, approaches characterized by psychoanalysis, gender, the family, with emphasis on the microcosmic, and, on the other, new historicist approaches concentrating on what is implicitly masculine, Court politics, the macrocosmic. The problem with new historicism for feminists appears to be that it erases gender and femininity as analytical foci or contextual forces. In a Woolfian analogy, she further characterizes feminism as born ‘outside’ the ‘manor of literary fathers’ and thus detached and philosophically free to constitute itself, while new historicism she sees as the ‘son and heir’, born ‘inside the academy and inside Renaissance studies’ and therefore ‘doomed by the obligation to repeat the oppressive struggle for power’ (Boose 1987: 738).

7. In terms of method this may appear indistinguishable from new historicism; the political inflection is given by the specific concentration on the female subject.

8. See, for example Belsey (1985); and Eaton ‘Defacing the Feminine in Renaissance Tragedy’, in Wayne (1991).

Works Cited

Belsey, Catherine (1985) The Subject of Tragedy.

Boose, Linda E. (1987) ‘The Family in Shakespeare Studies—or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans—or—The Politics of Politics’, Renaissance Quarterly, 40: 707-42.

Fetterley, Judith (1978) The Resisting Reader. Bloomington, IN.

Freud, Sigmund (1953-74) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. J. Strachey, 24 vols.

Fuss, Diana (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference.

Greer, Germaine (1970) The Female Eunuch.

Jacobus, Mary (ed.) (1979) Women Writing and Writing about Women.

Landry, Donna and MacLean, Gerald (eds) (1993) Materialist Feminisms. Oxford.

de Lauretis, Teresa (ed.) (1986) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington, IN.

Miller, Casey and Swift, Kate (1976) Words and Women: New Language in New Times. New York.

Millett, Kate (1970) Sexual Politics.

Mitchell, Juliet (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Harmondsworth.

Showalter, Elaine (ed.) (1986) The New Feminist Criticism.

Wayne, Valerie (ed.) (1991) The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Hemel Hempstead.