[In the following essay, Asp analyzes the character of Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, maintaining that her motivations and actions point toward a re-evaluation of female desire and a critique of the patriarchal social order.]

"That man should be at a woman's command and yet no hurt done!"

I.iii.92

According to prevailing opinion, All's Well That Ends Well is a "problem play" whose major difficulty is located in the very assertion that the title makes in summarizing the action. In the opinions of many critics the play does not "end well" because the resolution remains on the structural level rather than moving to the psychological level.¹ The frog prince remains a frog until the end and the princess chooses to overlook his slimy skin. If the reader or theatergoer expects the romance of heterosexual coupling that concludes Shakespeare's "high comedies," disappointment is inevitable.

Singular among the plays in Shakespeare's canon, All's Well That Ends Well is written out of the history of the female subject and this history is the history of her desire. The inadequacy of the male as subject is not only NOT repressed; it is emphasized. In this, the play challenges both culture and theory which both subordinate the issue of woman-as-subject-of-desire to the question of male subjectivity and desire. Renaissance notions of female inferiority (and consequent objectification) were largely based on physiological schemes. The cultural stereotypes that mandated female subordination were (and are) often legitimized by the appeal to the irreducible realm of the real, i.e., nature. Both Aristotle and Galen after him declared that the female is characterized by deprived, passive, material traits and is cold and moist (earthy) in her dominant humours. Because the female is less fully developed than the male, her sexual organs have remained internal; she is therefore incomplete in a teleological scheme that aims toward perfection, i.e., the male. Heat, associated with perfection on the physical level, is a male characteristic; it is the lack of heat in the process of generation that causes the genitalia of the female to remain internal and therefore imperfect. The male characteristic of heat thrusts out the genitalia and produces a perfect human specimen.² To round off the paradigm, this assumed frailty of body was thought to be accompanied by mental and emotional weaknesses which were the natural justification of the female's exclusion from responsibility and moral fulfillment. Although the explanations used to justify female subordination to patriarchal structures have become increasingly complex in our day, the figure of the female hero in Renaissance drama, a figure who, especially in the comedies, rebels against her "natural" inferior position (or better yet, pays it no heed), still serves as a model of self-determination, i.e., as the subject of her desire, not the object of another's. Because there was much of the new in the old, much of the old in the new, I wish to use certain paradigms from psychoanalytic theory that are congruent with Renaissance notions of the character and place of the female to discuss the complexities and ambiguities of the central female character in All's Well That Ends Well. Viewed from this perspective Helena can be seen as coming to independent womanhood by surmounting attitudes and theories of female deprivation and inferiority.³ Psychoanalytic theory is a useful tool for such an investigation because it attempts to account for the phenomenon of female inferiority in terms of structural psychic formations and introjected cultural ideals; but it is also limited in that it insufficiently addresses itself to female psychic formation, i.e., to a female version of the Oedipal crisis. Until recently, despite Freud's late interest in the "pre-Oedipal phase," which stresses the mother-infant relationship,⁴ psychoanalytic theory had largely ignored that stage of development. Helena, in her ambiguity, represents a challenging subject for the psychoanalytic critic in that she breaks out of both the cultural (historical) and psychic (transhistorical) strictures applied to women in both her time and our own. She does this by the assertion of desire, the refusal of objectification and by interaction with other women in the play.

According to psychoanalytic theory, particularly Lacanian theory, the inauguration of subjectivity and desire is based upon a male model, the model of the Oedipal crisis. That model stipulates the phallus as the signifier for the needs and drives which the subject must relinquish to gain access to the symbolic order, the order of language, culture, and symbolization. In the Lacanian scheme the phallus is not identifiable with the penis; it is, however, the signifier for the cultural privileges which define male subjectivity and legitimate his desire within the patriarchal order. The female subject remains isolated from this register, ironically, because she has no penis to lose or exchange for the phallus.⁵ As Luce Irigaray comments: "All theories of the 'subject' will always have been appropriated by 'the masculine'. . . . The subjectivity denied to the woman is, without doubt, the condition which guarantees the constitution of any object: object of representation, of discourse, of desire.⁶ " The scene of "castration" has only one subject as the concept of penis envy implies; the little girl sees herself through the eyes of the boy as "lacking." The "truth" of female sexuality, therefore, is "truth-as-lack."

The male subject, on the other hand, gives up the penis (direct expression of his own sexuality) to attain the phallus (the privileges of the patriarchal order). The female subject does not succumb to as radical an alienation from sexuality but neither does she enjoy as full a participation in the patriarchal order. Female sexuality, then, is not represented by the phallus (power) but by "castration" or lack. Since female sexuality cannot be represented (it is lack or absence) it remains "a dark continent" that, according to male theory, threatens to overpower both the female and the patriarchal order. According to Antonia Fraser, this "menacing" aspect to female sexuality was well known and greatly feared by seventeenth century males. In addition to the testimony of countless dramatis personae, there is the witness of such men as Thomas Wythorne and poets from Wyatt to Lovelace.⁷

Although there is a nice logic about this paradigm it is contrary to common sense to assume that the female is outside of signification or that her sexuality is any less structured or repressed by culture than is the male's. In entering into meaning and symbolization the female makes a sacrifice analogous to that of the male, i.e., the sacrifice of the mother and the gratifications she supplies.⁸ The difference is that the girl's sexuality is negatively rather than positively defined.⁹ This definition occurs on a cultural level which as-signs public power and prestige to the male. In developmental processes gender myths of female lack and male fullness are internalized and treated as "true" and identification with stereotyped characteristics takes place. On this cultural, or symbolic level, then, the both men and women are conditioned to think of the male as "all" and the female as "not-all" (Lacan, Séminaire III 198). Prior to the Oedipal crisis, however, the subject is bisexual (Freud, SE XX: 118) undetermined by gender myths. Although physiological lack may be used to justify the idea of female inferiority, it is not the cause. Penis-envy, such as it is, is symbolic rather than organic, referring to social power rather than to physical potency. Since the female functions as a signifier of lack in culture the male must accommodate himself to the fact of difference by either establishing the woman's unworthiness or by transforming her into a compensatory object. This objectification of woman (as castrated) is designed to annihilate the threat that she represents. Similar relief is found in the disparagement of women by which the male takes pleasure through control and punishment.

The subject's entry into the Symbolic Order (language, culture, power) displaces the mother as the central object of desire with the father; this transaction is of crucial importance in the constitution of the subject. The son identifies with the father as possessor of cultural power; the daughter with the mother as one who lacks such power. The result of such internalization is a profound sense of inadequacy both for the male and the female—the son can never be equivalent to the symbolic father (the position with which he identifies and with which he identifies the actual father); the daughter is denied even an identification with that position (Silverman 191).

This was especially true in matters of sexuality and marriage in Renaissance England where the role of female desire was widely held to be small, even non-existent. According to Lawrence Stone, the qualities most valued in a woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were weakness, submissiveness, charity and modesty: "the theological and legal doctrine of the time were especially insistent upon the subordination of women to men in general and to their husbands in particular."¹⁰ Ian McLean, after an extensive review of the learned documents devoted to the discussion of women in Renaissance theory, comes to the conclusion that the single greatest force preventing fundamental changes in the notion of women in the Renaissance was the institution of marriage; in the eyes of Renaissance thinkers—all male, by the way—marriage is a divine, natural and social institution and any alternative is considered subversive (85). Rethe Waraicke states that " . . . women were expected to marry, and those who did not were denied the respect of their communities."¹¹ Any change in the position of the si-lent and submissive wife in relationship to her lordly husband would require a new vision of the mental and physical predispositions of the sexes; this was too radical even for such Utopian writers as Thomas More and Rabelais.

Renaissance handbooks on marriage speak of the "choice of a wife" but never the choice of a husband. It is the man—the suitor—who seeks, who chooses. He does not expect the woman to seek him or to take the initiative in declaring her love first. It was generally agreed by wise heads that both physical desire and romantic love were unsafe bases of an enduring marriage, since both were regarded as violent mental disturbances which could only be of short duration. Women were especially prone to fits of passion; a menacing aspect of female desire was the woman's suspected carnality as the sixteenth century mysogynist, Thomas Wythorne, states: "Though they be weaker vessels, yet they will overcome 2. 3. or 4 [sic] men in satisfying their carnal appetites" (qtd. in Fraser 4). Women were considered incapable of making a wise choice in the best interests of marriage. After arguing against "enforced marriages" in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton adds: "A woman should give unto her parents the choice of her husband lest she be reputed to be malapert and wanton, if she take upon her to make her own choice, for she should rather seem to be desired by a man than to desire a man herself."¹² Somewhat later in the century (1688) Lord Halifax writes in his Advice to a Daughter: "It is one of the disadvantages belonging to your sex, that young women are seldom permitted to make their own choice; their friends' care and experience are thought safer guides to them than their own fancies, and their modesty often forbiddeth them to refuse when their parents recommend, though their inward consent may not entirely go along with it. . . . You must first lay it down for a foundation in general that there is inequality in the sexes, and that for the better economy of the world, men, who were to be law-givers, had the larger share of reason bestowed upon them, by which means your sex is better prepared for the compliance that is necessary for the better performance of those duties which seem to be most properly assigned to it" (Stone 278), i.e., the duties of marriage. This representative patriarchal statement implies that the duties of compliance and subservience which the marriage doctrine enjoins could only be performed by those limited by nature (biological determinism) to a lesser level of intelligence than man. As late as 1706 Mary Astell still laments; "A woman, indeed, can't properly be said to choose; all that is allowed her is to refuse or accept what is offered" (Stone 275).

Ruth Kelso, who has surveyed an impressive variety of treatises on female behavior in The Doctrine of the Lady of the Renaissance, finally speculates that such emphasis would probably not have been placed on the submission and obedience of women and the inborn superiority of men if women in general were not asserting themselves in the pragmatic sphere. According to Kelso, the womanly ideal as found in male writings represents a most unrealistic separation of theory from fact.¹³ Joan Kelly adds another dimension to the pragmatic argument by quoting Lucrezia Marinella who speculates that the psychology of educated men (the authors and authorities) who both vituperated and idealized women was based on both the necessity of feeling superior to women and the displacement of sexual feelings.¹⁴ The re-ceived opinion on the value and place of women in a male world was based on male psycho-sexual experiences, not on observation and truth to experience (Kelly 82). Learned treatises on the relations of the sexes and marriage were contaminated by the need to maintain male supremacy even if that meant flying in the face of truth. In the face of such bias, how was a true image of woman to be recovered?

It was in the drama in particular that a new portrait of the female began to emerge during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. No matter what the various guises in which she appears, this woman has one consistent trait: she does not think of herself merely as an appendage of man; she insists on making her own decisions. It is this insistence that is so threatening to the patriarchal prerogative; it sets her apart from the conventional woman and often subjects her to attack or disapproval. One of the most interesting types of female rebels is the one who, like Helena, insists on the right to choose her own husband, to assert her own desire. This was a radical demand. A woman's right to love and marry according to her own desires could not be admitted without upsetting an established order which regarded women as inferior beings who needed to be governed by the sex for whose pleasure and convenience they had been created. Yet with the recognition that woman as well as man was "a reasonable creature" came the acceptance of the fact that she should use her reason in one of the most vital concerns of her life—the choice of a marriage partner and her relations with him. To find this type of assertive woman very much alive and extremely articulate in Renaissance drama is surely a surprise given the repressive nature of the tracts and sermons. But it is a surprise that leads to a deeper understanding of what is actually new in what seems old; it also provides an interesting and often amusing instance of that gradual process by which new attitudes supplant old ones over a period of time and produce profound societal changes.¹⁵

Helena, in the opening scene, seems to have internalized the "lack" mapped onto the female body; she acquiesces in her own powerlessness as defined by her context and tearfully accepts Bertram's inaccessibility as a love object. In this scene she plays out her role as passive, even masochistic female. This problematic first appearance can be explained by looking at her behavior from the viewpoint of psychoanalytic theory which postulates that female masochism is connected with gender identity and sexual desire, both social products. When the girl completes the Oedipal crisis, she also, like the boy must renounce the mother, the first love-object, and turn to the father who will not affirm the phallus in her (as he does for the boy), but instead will give it to her. When she turns to the father, she represses the active part of her libido: "hand in hand (with turning to the father)" says Freud, "there is to be observed a marked lowering of the active sexual impulses and the rise of the passive ones. . . . The transition to the father is accomplished with the help of passive trends insofar as they have escaped from the catastrophe. The path of femininity now lies open to the girl" (Freud, SE 21:239). It is this path of powerlessness and dependence which Helena initially believes she must adopt in regard to her desire for Bertram.

The ascendence of passivity in the girl is due to her recognition of the futility of realizing her active desire and of the unequal terms of the struggle. A segment of erotic possibility (female desire) is constrained. This realization, reinforced by cultural norms, prompts Helena's excessive and according to the other characters, unspecified emotional response. The creation of "femininity" in women as they are socialized also leaves in them a resentment of the constraints to which they were subjected but they have few ways of expressing this residual anger, even rage. Not only is passivity inculcated in the girl; masochism is as well. When she turns to the father because she must, she discovers that "castration" (lack of power) is the condition of the father's love, that she must be a woman (signifier of lack) to evoke his love. She therefore begins to desire to be castrated, or powerless, trying to turn a disaster into a wish. In finding her place in the sexual system, then, the woman is robbed of libido and guided into masochistic eroticism (Freud, SE XXII: 128).

Although Helena at first seems to embody these psychoanalytic paradigms of psychic masochism and powerlessness, she struggles at several points in the play to defy them and moves from tearful and powerless acceptance of her position—and a concomitant construction of herself as object—to an assertive desire of which she is the subject. How does this shift occur? In her bawdy and witty banter with Parolles on the subject of virginity they both speak of sexuality with the metaphors of warfare. This conversation brings wit into contact with aggressivity and narcissism, thus establishing a contact with unconscious desire. Desire can be restricted within the bounds of societal gender myths or it can follow its own trajectory and operate independently of them. Helena quickly shifts into resolve rooted in desire and determines upon cunning, aggressive action: a woman need not always defend her virginity against attack, i.e., remain an object; she may in fact, go on the offensive and "lose it to her own liking" (I.i.145). Desire here overcomes both gender and class; under the impress of its mobile power the unpropertied, educated female had much to gain even though such a desirous woman was regarded as a usurper of the masculine function and prerogative. Filled with resolve she casts off abjection: "Who ever strove / To show her merit that did miss her love?" (I.i.218-219).

Helena is not alone in her struggle, however. In a canon in which mother-daughter relationships are so few, this play is unusual in having several. Although Helena is a ward of the Countess, it is obvious that the countess extends to her the love of a mother for a child: "you ne'er oppressed me with a mother's groan," she tells Helena, "yet I express to you a mother's care" (I.iii.140-141). Helena quibbles, rejecting a fraternal relationship with Bertram: not "daughter" but "daughter-in-law" is the title she desires. When Helena admits her love to the Countess as well as her scheme to cure the King, the Countess allows Helena to speak of her desire, gives her an empathetic hearing, and bids her success, promising what aid she can. Helena appeals to the Countess' own youthful female experience thus creating a bond of womanly desire that transcends class.¹⁶ It is obvious that the Countess regards Helena as an appropriate wife for Bertram, but leaves the initiative to her (the King as Bertram's guardian, has the right to dispose of the young man). Once Helena has legally secured the reluctant Bertram and he rejects her, she returns to the Countess who verbally castigates her son but can do nothing to change the situation. The Countess functions as an emotional center who utters the correct—and truly felt—sentiments, but who is ineffectual to help Helena in any way except through verbal support. Albeit a kind and caring woman, a validator of Helena's desire, the Countess limits her effectiveness and accepts her position of dependence within the patriarchal order.

Helena leaves the maternal aegis of the Countess on the strength of her paternal inheritance; "prescriptions of rare and prov'd effects", male learning passed on to her as her dowry. She must leave the mother-figure to insert herself with a larger, public group and utilize the skill bequeathed her by her father. Armed with the patriarchal legacy of language and learning, she confronts and confounds "the schools" and attempts the king's cure. By curing the debilitating fistula (a sexually symbolic disease) Helena restores the king's manly vigor upon which the success of her project depends. But prior to the cure, she engages the royal honor: "Then shalt thou give me with thy kingly hand / What husband in thy power I will command" (II.i.194-95). It is in her best interest to restore power to the patriarchy which she plans to engage in her behalf.

This request, which depends upon patriarchal power for its implementation, paradoxically subverts the very order of patriarchy itself. Throughout history women, not men, have been sexual objects, gifts. The "exchange of women" expresses the social relations of a kinship system that specify that men have certain rights in their female kin and that women do not have such rights over themselves or their male relatives. In this system the preferred female sexuality is one that responds to the desires of others rather than one which actively seeks an object and a response (Lacan, Séminaire II, 306). We ask: "What would happen if a woman demanded a certain man as her gift rather than the other way around?" This play shows us what happens. The king's debt to Helena is reckoned in Bertram's flesh; he must become the sexual partner to her to whom he is "owed" as the reward for the restoration of the king's flesh.¹⁷ Bertram resists this struc-tural "feminization" loudly voicing the resentment that accompanies objectification, a resentment that arises from having been given no choice; "I beseech your highness, / In such a business give me leave to use / The help of mine own eyes" (II.iii.105-7).

The play contains a series of triangular exchange transactions of which this is the first. By power the king provides a substitute sexual partner for Helena who will function as his "stand in." It is obvious that he values and desires Helena more than any other male in the play—what man does not love the woman who restores his virility? But Helena is determined to have Bertram and the king, by virtue of his position, is outside the circuit of desire, Subject par excellence! Up to this point Helena attempts to control events less through her own sexuality and desire than through patriarchal gifts to her. These gifts come to her in language: prescriptions, learning, promises that will enable her to possess legally what she desires. Even though she is emboldened by desire, she is unable to evoke the desire of the other (Bertram), the ultimate goal in Lacanian psychic dynamics. So what she gets is a marriage in name only—an ironic reward—a marriage that Bertram never intends to honor with his flesh. The letter but not the spirit of the law is fulfilled. So her scheme has both succeeded and failed. This seems to be the limit for female desire that relies too heavily on even the best-intentioned of men.

After the check of Bertram's rejection Helena initiates a complex and indirect action for attaining her desire, an action in which she relies both on her own cunning and on bonding with other women. Taking up the apparently impossible conditions of Bertram's rejection as a challenge—"When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which shall never come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband, but in such a 'then' I write 'never'" (III.ii.56-59). Helena paradoxically weaves her net of capture by literally following his directives, turning his language into a trap. Her campaign initiatives arise from the very messages he sends denying her. Responding to his refusal to return to his ancestral lands "till I have no wife" she disguises herself as a pilgrim and sets out for Florence where it is possible she knows he is stationed. Ostensibly she appears submissive to his will, but her submission is also a strategy; her success from this point until the end is linked to her ability to assume a "feminized" (inferior, powerless) position and yet remain in cognitive control of the situation. This combination of positions is exceedingly potent and establishes her mastery in the second half of the play.

In the early part of the play the ideal that Helena thinks she sees in Bertram is not merely hidden; it is absent, lacking. She eventually must come to terms with this fact. Bertram is not a sufficient representation of the "virile object" that Helena sees only in her fantasy. We might wonder why she so desires him. In Lacanian terms, Helena is initially trapped in the level of consciousness called the Imaginary, i.e., the register in which opposition and identity are the only possible interrelationships between self and other. This "other" is usually someone or something which is thought to complete the subject or reflects back to him/her an ideal image (Lacan Ecrits 2-4). The Imaginary is the register of the ego, a construct that involves a purely dual either/or relationship that resembles that of the Hegelian master/slave paradigm. The predominance of the Imaginary in relationships results in the conversion of interdependent similarities and differences between man and woman into pathological identities and oppositions (as between images of man and woman). To enter into productive relationships it is necessary to transcend the oppositional relationships and reduce mastery to insignificance by means of this transcendence. During the course of the action Helena traverses this path of development, passing from the register of the Imaginary to that of the Symbolic Order (Lacan, Séminaire I 215). Early in the play she is almost overwhelmed by opposition in her relationship with Bertram; she can see only unbridgeable separations. Then she swings to the opposite, narcissistically identifying his desire with her own, never doubting her ability to win him. His severe rejection forces her to align herself with the limits of the possible. Finally she comes to a third position within the Symbolic Order, the register of similarities and differences, of the social and the cultural. She must accept the fact that his desire, whatever it may be, may be different from her own. Her original desire for Bertram seems to be displaced by her own maternity and by her return to the mother so that she is inserted into the larger cultural sphere of social and familial engagement. Paradoxically she does this by remaining true to her desire (is this type of maturation initiated, then, by desire within the register of the Imaginary?); as desiring subject she not only gets what she thinks she wants but more. And it is in this "more," this excess, that Helena's real triumph is located. This excess has to do with her increasing realization of the pragmatic and psychological support that female bonding provides for her in her erotic adventures.

In contrast to the Countess who is a very real but passive support, the Florentine women, a mother and daughter with whom Helena plots, are active on her behalf. Fallen from fortune, they must make their way in the world and struggle to defend their hard-earned gains. The precious jewel of her treasury is Diana's chastity, a "commodity" that commands a high price. As a consequence, these women have nothing but distrust and contempt for male language, especially the male language of seduction; instead, they rely on female lore: "My mother told me just how he would woo, / As if she sat in's heart" (IV.ii.69-70) says Diana, fore-armed against Bertram's vows. When these women show a willingness to believe her story, Helena grasps the opportunity to fulfill the letter of Bertram's law, an opportunity that Bertram's "sick desires" for Diana give her. In a scene of many exchanges she buys Diana's place with gold while Bertram thinks he is purchasing Diana's "ring" (genitals) with the patriarchal ring of Rosillon.¹⁸ What occurs is a triangular transaction between women in the possession of a man. In this circuit of desire Diana remains aloof, Helena gets what she wants and Bertram gets what he does not know he does not want. Without cognitive power, Bertram assumes the role of a circulatable commodity; again he is "feminized."

In transactions of heterosexual desire, there can be hidden strategies of bonding which seem to occur here; the bond between Helena and Diana is cemented by means of sexual substitution. Earlier in the play (I.iii) there is an odd conversation between Lavatch and the Countess in which Lavatch describes the use he will make of Isbel to create "friends" for himself. Voluntary cuckoldry creates a bond among men with the "other" (the partner of the opposite sex) as the object to be exchanged among them. When the Countess remonstrates: "Such friends are thine enemies, knave," Lavatch points out to her this new type of bonding: "He that comforts my wife is the cherisher of my flesh and blood; he that cherishes my flesh and blood loves my flesh and blood; he that loves my flesh and blood is my friend; ergo, he that kisses my wife is my friend" (I.iii.43-47). Lavatch describes a literal series of heterosexual displacements in which implicit homoerotic desire is represented as heterosexual adultery. Isbel will mediate a communion among males. Is Lavatch a fool or a knave or neither? He describes himself as involved in triangular sexual transactions in which he maintains control through knowledge and manipulation. As either thief or distributor he regards women as circulatable commodities, objects of desire. His song invoking Helen of Troy underlines this paradigm of the shared woman, the common ground of male desire.

Helena's sexual experience with Bertram, in which she substitues her body for that of the desired Diana's, leaves her with the conviction of the impersonality of the act. "Strange men"—in several senses of that word—make sweet use of what they hate, i.e., the female body with its threatening lack. "Lust doth play / With what it loathes" (IV.iv.24-25) in the darkness which hides both the particularity (subjectivity) of the woman and the place of castration. Lacan explains this imbalance by commenting that what man approaches in the sexual act is the cause of his desire (lack). The male identifies the woman with what he has repressed in himself and makes love to complete himself in her. Thus the woman's specificity is subordinate to the man's quest for this own fulfillment (Ragland-Sullivan 292). Helena seems both shocked and disillusioned by this experience of sexual objectification in which she is not seen and in which she may not speak. Yet from this place of apparent lack (her genitals) and seeming powerlessness she traps the cozened Bertram's wild desires and lures them into consummating the legal bond. Publically commenting on her experience later in the play, Helena admits that Bertram's sexual performance was "wondrous kind" (V.iii.305), gentle and natural.

After Helena has fulfilled Bertram's stipulations, the ensuing action is excessive, almost gratuitous. I believe that it is only at this point that Helena moves beyond the Imaginary (projected idealizations) with respect to Bertram and begins to see him as he is. All traces of psychological masochism vanish from her character and she begins to express a residual anger toward him, a desire to punish him for having rejected her desire and objectified her. It becomes clear that she has his public humiliation in mind since she now has achieved a cognitive leverage over him which gives her power. She has sent back word to France that she is "dead," i.e., she represents "castration" or loss as the ultimate lack or absence. Paradoxically it is from this position of "castration" or loss that she is able to achieve her greatest power as an active subject.¹⁹ What is thought to be absent can be ignored; what is regarded as lost can be thought of as without power. Yet the very veil of disappearance allows the subject room to act with impunity. Once again she enlists the aid of the Florentine women to carry out her project.

Having arrived in France Helena sends a letter ahead to the King via messenger. Because of the unforeseen concatenation of events, it becomes clear that this letter had been prepared in advance by Helena although it is signed with Diana's name. It lays claim to Bertram as a fair exchange for the latter's honor. What becomes increasingly apparent is that Helena is preparing a public confrontation between Diana and Bertram based on a non-event, i.e., an absence that will entrap him in a web of signs (rings) and language (lies) from which he will be unable to escape. The effectiveness of Diana's script turns upon an exchange of rings prior to the bed trick. Here the plot becomes increasingly dense since neither the audience nor most of the characters knows the history of the rings. The disclosure that the ring Diana gave to Bertram had been given to Helena by the King is a shocking surprise. What is even more disquieting is the fact that Helena had given it to Diana explicitly to exchange for Bertram's patriarchal ring, a transfer that indicates Helena's intent to entrap, since encoded in this ring is a secret message to the King: she is in need of his help. The sight of Bertram wearing this ring coupled with Helena's fictional account of her own death leads the King to suspect Bertram of foul deeds. On the defensive, Bertram entangles himself more and more tightly in the snare; brazenly lying, he repudiates Diana and denies any knowledge of Helena. As the pièce de résistance Diana produces Bertram's ring, alleging that with it he purchased her honor. Although like Parolles, Bertram may play with language, he cannot deny the object, irrefutable proof of his complicity. Publically revealed as a liar, a coward and a faithless husband, Bertram has no choice but to stand shamed and endure humiliation. At this point Helena enters triumphant as the dea ex machina to clarify and forgive.

By reading events of the second half of the play backwards, so to speak, we can see Helena's complex plan to turn Bertram's desires and fears against him and then make his weakness, perfidy and ignorance public through the accusations of others, herself remaining aloof.²⁰ It is evident that there is little ro-mance in Helena's attitude toward Bertram at the end of the play; when she greets him she merely makes known her fulfillment of his conditions. When he further questions her, her final words to him are distant and almost foreboding: "If it appear not plain and prove untrue / Deadly divorce step between me and you" (V.iii.314-315). This marriage is an unknown item, a risk whose outcome is to be determined beyond the limits of the play. In contrast her greeting to the Countess is warm and affectionate: "O my dear mother, do I see thee living?" (V.iii.316). These, her last words in the play, seem to indicate that she has re-adjusted the focus of her desire.

Along with the power shift that occurs in the second half of the play there seems also to be a psychological reversal. I would go so far as to say that lurking behind Helena's apparent psychological masochism of her initial attitude towards Bertram lies its opposite, i.e., anger or rage at having been denied subjectivity by him and a willingness to inflict pain, a psychological form of sadism.²¹ In some ways her reversal is quite shocking but it certainly is not an unusual female paradigm. As mentioned earlier in this essay, the constraint of female desire in a patriarchal system leaves a residual resentment and anger in the woman which most women, unlike Helena, do not have the opportunity to act on. Granted, her action is indirect, even cunning, but for all that, it is eminently effective. As Helena moves from object position into subject status, from passive to active (the latter associated with the masculine "position") she concomitantly exchanges psychological masochism for a certain degree of willingness to inflict pain or humiliation in the assertion of mastery. Shakespeare manages to put Helena in the subject (sadistic) position without depriving her of our sympathy by shielding her behind the accusations and anger of others whom she has convinced to act in her place. Her agency has been displaced, certainly veiled. We cannot deny that Bertram deserves the punishment she arranges; our puzzlement is reserved for the "reconciliation" on which the play ends. If there is a reconciliation, then how does it come about and whose attitudes must change?

Helena's shift occurs in two phases in an encounter with the Real, i.e., the given field of existence, nature in self and in the world. The first phase is Bertram's rejection and abandonment of her which forces her to see him as he is; the second is her sexual encounter with him which is lustful and procreative rather than romantic. These encounters with the Real shake her out of the narcissism and the false perceptions associated with the Imaginary register and precipitate her into positioning herself within the Symbolic Order as a viable alternative to the delusory projections of the early part of the play. There is loss but there is also gain. Her position in culture and the collective is ratified by her obvious "wife-li-ness" and maternity. She is the fleshly sign of the link between the generations and as such holds a secure place in the Symbolic Order (Welsh 21). Helena has successfully rejected the powerlessness of her original position in the Imaginary, emerging from it at another level, carrying the signs of her transaction. It is she, not Bertram, who has both the ring and the child and she will exchange both for his acceptance of her as his wife and mother of his child. Helena's desire now locates itself within the social order—the child in her womb is the heir—but that order is not exclusively patriarchal. In the process of pursuing her desire for Bertram, Helena has come to experience the loyalty, support, and kindness of women who not only never doubted her but who never failed her. What began as a pursuit of a man developed into a transaction among women. With skill, intelligence and cunning they use Bertram's very desires to bind him to what his position and phallic potency demand of him. Through the trajectory of desire he becomes the victim of the trick. But the paradox does not operate only in Bertram's case. Let us entertain the possibility that in the pursuit of a husband Helena has actually found a mother, has discovered the power of feminine bonding. Although she carries the sign of her heterosexual eroticism and Bertram's potency, her desire seems to have transcended the narrow limits of such eroticism and moved into the larger sphere of female affectivity. Her sexual experiences and her own maternity seem to create a new awareness of and desire for the maternal body.

Is Helena's turning to women at the end of the play unusual in her immediate social context? Or does it signal some kind of change in sensibility that was actually occurring at the time? Although there has not yet been much investigation of primary documents relating to the bonding of women in the Renaissance, there are many collateral sources which refer to this phenomenon, including works of poetry, fiction and drama which depict strong, loyal, and loving relationships between and among women. In addition, it seems likely that in a society so constrained by rigid gender-role differentiations there would be both the emotional segregation of women from the male world and a corresponding development of bonding within the female circle. It is certainly true that biological realities centered around incessant pregnancies and childbirth traumas bound women together in intimacy. Supportive female networks paralleled the social restrictions on intimacy between men and women. Courtesy books, advice books, sermons, and other male-originated texts all stress gender-role differentiations as well as the social segregation characteristic of the culture.²²

Although generally speaking the mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of the female world, in Renaissance literature we see bonds of kinship and service forming the basis of intense friendships. The literature frequently depicts a "conspiracy of women" that organizes itself around female desire. When the male is indifferent or hostile to such desire, the female characters find support in female kin, friends, or servants. Celia conspires with Rosalind; Emilia defends Desdemona to the death; Paulina refuses to abandon Hermione; Cleopatra surrounds herself with her women in the hour of her final triumph. This woman's world has a dignity and integrity that spring from mutual affection and the shared experiences of being a woman in a man's world. The drama of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England, then, provides many examples of not only strong women but of strong friendships between women. According to Juliet Dusinberre, the struggles of many of the heroines in Shakespeare's plays are struggles against the male idea of womanhood; they are efforts to be considered human in a world that sees them only as female, i.e., as powerless, "castrated" devoid of initiating desire. In these conflicts women are intimate not just as individuals but as women; they develop a loyalty to their sex which can express itself in confederacy, even cunning.²³ For ex-ample, in the play under consideration, the Countess is more sympathetic toward Helena than she is to her own son. She assures Helena: " . . . be sure of this / What I can help thee to, thou shalt not miss" (I.iii.248-49).

Helena succeeds in her scheme because she heeds and follows her desire even though the caveats of internalized gender values and the constraints of society make her task seem impossible. Frequently she occupies the so-called male position, the position of knowledge and power, through the very paradox of her "castration"; in this position she sets up the exchanges upon which society depends for its continuation. By the play's end she has come to value and depend on the world of women whose power Bertram, with some humility, is forced to acknowledge. Her success argues for a reevaluation of the patriarchal denigration of female desire and a reconsideration of that desire's power and validity in the social order. Through Helena's single-minded action a redefinition of gender prerogatives has occurred and as a consequence the patriarchal order is modified, if ever so slightly.²⁴ Fired by her desire,Helena refuses to submit to gender myths that link the female with loss unless that loss can be turned to gain. The play ends as well as it can—all only "seems well" the king states at the conclusion—given the fact that sexual relations will never be harmonious, that psychic unity is tenuous at best.²⁵

Notes

¹ Paula S. Berggren, "The Woman's Part: Female Sexu-ality as Power in Shakespeare's Plays," in The Woman 's Part, ed. Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Neely (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980). pp. 22-23; G. K. Hunter, "Introduction" to All's Well That Ends Well, Arden Edition (Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1959), xxix-xxxi; Hunter also comments (liv-lv) that "in these plays [the problem plays] the strand of psychological realism makes the absence of personal reconciliation seem wanton and careless." Richard Wheeler states that the ending of the play is not a true resolution but merely a superficial denial of the hero's rebellion: "Marriage and Manhood in All's Well That Ends Well" Bucknell Review, 21 (1973), 103-24. Roger Warren in "Why Does It End Well?: Helena, Bertram and the Sonnets", Shakespeare Survey 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 79-92, faults Shakespeare for failing to provide a "powerful and reassuring speech" for Helena at the finale, a definite dramatic weakness in his opinion.

² Ian McLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 33.

³ Warren sees Helena as "unbearably poignant" and tends to idealize her masochistic tendencies; my argument follows Hunter's insight that "to fit Helena into the play or to adapt the play to Helena is obviously the central problem of interpretation (xiviii). I agree with Hunter that "her role is a complex one, but there is an absence of adequate external correlatives to justify this complexity; we are drawn to regard her as an isolated, complex individual" (xlix). In his enlightening study of the play, Wheeler (Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981]) keeps to a middle ground when he asserts both her humble, adoring love for Bertram and her "vigorous, cunning and determined pursuit" of him. p. 63. Psychoanalytic theory can provide paradigms to account for her complex attitudes and behaviors.

⁴ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), XXII, 112-135. Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1978) has developed this theory in great detail.

⁵ Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 66.

⁶ Luce Irigaray, Speculumde l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), p. 165.

⁷ Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 4.

⁸ Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, JacquesLacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 297-98.

⁹ Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 198.

¹⁰ Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage inEngland: 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 199.

¹¹ Rethe Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissanceand Reformation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 178.

¹² Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Vintage, 1932), "Third Partition", p. 238.

¹³ Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the Lady in the Renaissance (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 208.

¹⁴ Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 81.

¹⁵ Jean Gagen, The New Woman (New York: Twayne, 1954), p. 119.

¹⁶ Carol McKewin, "Counsels of Gall and Grace: In-timate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare's Plays," in The Woman's Part, pp. 117-132.

¹⁷ Eva Sedgewick, "Sexualism and the Citizen of the World," Critical Inquiry (December, 1984), p. 233. See also Wheeler, pp. 49-51 on the deflection of male sexual interest from women to men.

¹⁸ Alexander Welsh in "The Loss of Men and the Getting of Children: All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure," Modern Language Review, Vol. 73, Part I (January, 1978), argues against Wheeler and later Kirsch (Shakespeare and the Experience of Love [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981]) in their emphasis on the "threat of castration inherent in the Oedipal situation," i.e., Bertram's identification of Helena with her mother. He asserts that "inheritance and succession are far more important concerns than Oedipal jealousies" p. 21. Although my focus is not on Bertram, I agree with Welsh that the Oedipal argument is quite weak and unconvincing. Aside from the "punning" scene between the Countess and Helena, there is no reference to such a motive in the play. In that scene Helena specifically and somewhat playfully, refers to brother/sister incest.

¹⁹ Here I disagree with Hunter (xxxii) on the power of coincidence and submission to supernatural forces as the dynamic forces of the second half of the play. Helena actively uses and arranges the circumstances that lead to her success.

²⁰ R. B. Parker, "War and Sex in All's Well That Ends Well," Shakespeare Survey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37: 111-112.

²¹ Wheeler states that "the exposure of Bertram re-leases a righteous feeling of moral outrage and with it a kind of vindictive pleasure that corresponds to the sadistic attack on the internalized object lost in reality described by Freud", pp. 72-73.

²² Carroll Camden in The Elizabethan Woman (New York: Elsevier Press, 1952) quotes from many such treatises which lead us to believe that women spent a great deal of time together. In his satirical pamphlet, The Gossips Greeting, Henry Parrot inveighs against talkative and outgoing women. Burton also refers to gossiping among women as "their merrie meetings and frequent visitations, mutual invitations in good towns . . . which are so in use." A Dutch traveller named Van Meieren found this mode of entertainment a notable one among Elizabethan women. He writes: "all the rest of their time they employ in walking and riding, in playing cards or otherwise, in visiting their friends and keeping company, conversing with their equals and their neighbors and making merry" (162). Educated women also spent time carrying on an extended correspondence with their female friends.

²³ Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 282.

²⁴ Even at the end of the play the king proposes to repeat the process he inaugurated with Helena by finding Diana, the professed virgin, a husband. Lefew's daughter is offered to Bertram and then summarily withdrawn without any consultation with her. The tableau of women at the end of the play is intriguing; it ranges from Diana, who has vowed not to marry, to "fair Maudlin" who is given and taken back. The widow Countess stands with the newly restored wife-mother, Helena. What seems to be emphasized is the lack of or problematic nature of heterosexual relationships.

²⁵ Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973-74), p. 14. Other references to the Séminaires in the text refer to the French editions published by Seuil and edited by Miller.