SOURCE: “‘Verily Bearing Blood’: Pornography, Sexual Love, and the Reclaimed Feminine in The Winter's Tale,” in Essays in Theatre, Vol. 9, No. 1, November, 1990, pp. 61-81.

[In the following essay, McCandless posits that Leontes's persecution of Hermione represents his attempt to cast away his source of sexual shame.]

Early in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Polixenes recalls the boyhood paradise he shared with Leontes and attributes its end to the intrusion of “blood”—here a synonym for man's “sensual, animal appetite” (OED 1: 929).

We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ th’
sun,
And bleat the one at th’ other. What we chang’d
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d
That any did. Had we pursu’d that life,
And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’d
With stronger blood, we should have answer’d heaven
Boldly, “not guilty”; the imposition clear’d,
Hereditary ours.

(1.1.67-75)

Not only were the two future kings unacquainted with evil (“knew not the doctrine of ill-doing”), they were effectively exempt from original sin itself, the “hereditary imposition” of guilt they would have “cleared” had they remained unaroused by “blood”—the animal appetite of sexual passion. The agent of that corruption, Polixenes implies, the snake in the garden, is woman:

Temptations have since then been born to 's: for
In those unfledg’d days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had then not cross’d the eyes
Of my young playfellow.

(1.1.77-80)

Hermione, in rebuttal, chides Polixenes, “Of this make no conclusion, lest you say / Your queen and I are devils” (1.1.81-82). Yet Polixenes's portrait of paradise lost accords precisely with the medieval view, still alive in Shakespeare's age, that women were indeed devils, or at least daughters of Eve, the alluring devil's accomplice who seduced man into sin.¹

This patriarchal myth, a projection of male dread of female sexuality, is no sooner invoked than it is mysteriously re-enacted, as Leontes, in some way newly aroused by “blood,” inexplicably imagines his innocent wife to be a conniving whore and falls apart before our eyes. I would like, in this paper, to employ Susan Griffin's definition of pornography in order to discuss Leontes's fatal delusion as a kind of pornographic fantasy, in which he degrades Hermione in order to punish her for having afflicted him with a shaming sexual knowledge, for having affronted a false ideal of incorruptibility to which he ruinously clings. True to Griffin's definition of the pornographer, Leontes defends masculine culture against feminine nature, enforcing the subjugation of women by enacting a fantasy of archetypal female treachery—a kind of revision of The Fall, in which Adam defeats Eve's attempts to corrupt and enslave him.

Pornography is an exceptionally complex subject. Even within feminist ranks attitudes towards it differ sharply. For instance, Linda Williams, who calls herself an “anti-censorship feminist” finds Griffin's position—and those of other “anti-pornography feminists” like Andrea Dworkin and Susanne Kappeler—needlessly prosecutorial and untenably utopian. She argues, in essence, that nature cannot conquer culture, that the notion of “a whole and natural sexuality that stands outside history and free of power” (23) is purely mythical, and that power is an ineradicable part of human sexuality. Indeed, Williams finds in as unlikely a place as hard-core sadomasochistic film an affirmation of female subjectivity.

Moreover, two of Griffin's targets—Sade and Sacher-Masoch, whose names are synonymous with pornographic sexual violence—inspire Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze not to eloquent rage but to philosophical exegesis. Indeed, Barthes calls Sade “a founder of language” (3) and Deleuze considers Sacher-Masoch “a pornologist” (18). The line between pornography and art begins to seem confoundingly blurry.

Though Griffin's view is but one among many, she does offer a particularly powerful dissection of the kind of culture that Leontes defends, as well as the sort of sadistic fantasy that he enacts. She also very poetically evokes a nature not far removed from that which the play unleashes as a liberating force. Griffin's vision may be utopian. But so, in this play, I think, is Shakespeare's.

For Griffin, culture is to nature as mind is to body, form to material, myth to experience, constraint to license, masculine to feminine—but not, it must emphasized, male to female. In fact, the feminine image so extravagantly demeaned in pornography represents the pornographer's disowned feminine self. He disclaims the feminine because he wishes to disclaim his own materiality, his creatureliness, his bodily vulnerability:

He would let his body speak; he would let the knowledge of the body in himself live; and yet this is also precisely the knowledge of which he is terrified. And so he tries to separate culture from nature. He would have what is natural in him be mute. But what is natural speaks in him. Therefore he gives “woman” a voice in pornography, but he gives her this voice only in order to silence her.

(40)

I will argue that, by ruthlessly persecuting and scheming to eliminate a Hermione re-made in the image of whore, Leontes similarly seeks to expel a demonized feminine self and so remain innocent of the bodily knowledge it compels. If Leontes lethally implements the constraints of culture in the play's first part, however, Florizel and Perdita turn the licenses of nature into a revitalizing force in its second part, reconciling the innocence and “blood” that Leontes so destructively polarizes. Not only do they hasten Leontes's recovery by bringing regenerative nature to his moribund culture, but Leontes himself atones for his crime of banishing the feminine and objectifying Hermione, first by submitting to feminization at Paulina's hands, and second by rejecting the image of Hermione-as-object in favor of Hermione-as-person, effectively summoning her off the pedestal at the play's end.

The opening scene sets up the image of Hermione as female intruder: two men, Camillo and Archidamus, make no mention of her but speak exclusively of the long-standing friendship between Leontes and Polixenes and of the great hopes residing in the gallant child Mamillius. The stage is set for the entrance of three male figures. The fourth who enters, unannounced and female, is therefore something of an alien presence.

Moreover, Polixenes's verbal evocation of the “boy eternal” paradise could receive visual support from the image of Leontes at play with Mamillius, a key piece of stage business that the text strongly hints at. Leontes clearly does not attend to the conversation of Polixenes and Hermione (“Is he won yet?” [1.1.86]), the young prince should not be ignored for 120 lines, and the juxtaposition of word and image allows Polixenes to speak of his former “young playfellow” while Leontes disports himself with a current one, as if aiming to preserve the lost paradise.² Indeed, Leontes's play with Mamillius could be taken as his attempt to recreate (and perhaps re-create) himself in the image of “boy eternal.”

This re-conjuring of the boyhood Eden extends the affirmations of Camillo and Archidamus, dramatizing the abiding friendship of Leontes and Polixenes and making of Mamillius a symbol for the continuity of its values. The return to paradise also has the effect of portending a second fall and of thus enhancing Hermione's status as suspicious outsider, potential snake in the garden. Can this intrinsically dangerous woman be safely integrated into male society? Can she possibly live up to male standards of purity and constancy? Leontes introduces doubt as he recalls the occasion of their betrothal:

Three crabbed months had sour’d themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand,
And clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter,
“I am yours for ever.”

(1.2.100-05)

Leontes yokes Hermione's vow of “forever” to a conception of time—a sour corrupting unto death—that denies the possibility of “forever” and thus seems to forecast a betrayal or at least to estrange her from the changeless innocence of the “boy eternal” world. In his essay “Of friendship,” Montaigne promotes the constancy of “brotherly affection” over the violent variability of sexual love. The latter

is more active, more scorching, and more intense. But it is an impetuous and fickle flame, undulating and variable, a fever flame, subject to fits and lulls, that holds us only by one corner. In friendship, it is a general and universal warmth, moderate and even, besides, a constant and settled warmth, all gentleness and smoothness, with nothing bitter and stinging about it.

(Frame 137)

When Hermione presents her hand to Polixenes, that fever flame—in the form of violent sexual jealousy—engulfs Leontes, and the much-anticipated fall takes place. “Too hot, too hot,” he cries, “To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods” (1.2.108-09). Woman's stirring of “stronger blood” once more assaults the tranquility of male friendship, once more destroys a vision of paradise. Having just recalled the occasion when Hermione's offering of her hand confirmed his selection as sexual partner, Leontes misreads Hermione's gesture as the choice of a new one.

Hermione unwittingly enacts the role of devilish seductress and precipitates a second fall. The notion of a “second fall” implies, however, that Hermione has somehow managed, at least until the moment of her alleged betrayal, to achieve integration into the “boy eternal” world—or that Leontes has managed to assimilate female sexuality to male myths of innocence. The sign of this assimilation is purely visual, for it is not once alluded to in the opening act: her pregnancy, her status as nurturing mother. As Coppelia Kahn says, “as mother and only as mother, woman is exonerated of Eve's crime … her pain in childbirth, her self-sacrifice in childraising, purify her sexuality” (78). Hermione can enter the “boy eternal” world solely in the guise of idealized madonna. Leontes's desire for her remains free of sexual taint so long as she remains an untainted mother-figure.

Her “entertainment” of Polixenes, however, immediately and irrevocably taints her. Her pregnancy ceases to be a sign of purity and becomes instead a mark of rank corruption, proof of infidelity. The ease with which Hermione moves, in Leontes's eyes, from madonna to whore suggests the extent to which he subjects her complex humanity to dehumanizing myth. He trades the myth of “boy eternal,” in which woman as sacred nurturer palliates sexual guilt, for the myth of “the fall,” in which woman as cunning seductress absorbs sexual shame. As Griffin observes, the pornographic mind “attempts to solve the problems of the psyche precisely by creating a world of illusion” (39).

The content of Leontes's fantasy obviously owes something to the patriarchal myth of woman as mysterious “other” who must be either exalted or reviled. He seems, however, to take that myth to its pornographic extreme, according to which woman is exalted precisely in order that she may be reviled. As Griffin explains, the pornographer's central project is to de-mystify his own mystified image of woman as beguiling, unattainable goddess, to expose her as pure flesh, to affirm her essential sordidness (29-35). Thus Leontes later salves his humiliation by savoring the fact that the wantonness of woman is all-pervasive, unmanageable, a “bawdy planet that will strike / Where ’tis predominant,” an elemental force that comes from all directions and penetrates all barriers (1.2.200-04).³

While there can be little doubt that Leontes is horrifically deluded, Howard Felperin makes a provocative point: it is highly problematic to assert that Leontes “misreads” Hermione's actions when those actions are available to us only through Leontes's mediations: “Unless we are ready to suppose a positively hallucinatory Leontes, gestures in some degree susceptible of such descriptions must take place in front of us” (7). True enough. Such gestures as we may infer from Leontes's commentary—Hermione's taking Polixenes by the hand, sighing and smiling, looking up at him as they walk arm-in-arm toward the garden (1.2.115, 125-26, 116-117, 183-85)—are certain to be sensually charged, since Hermione asserts from her first appearance an unapologetic—perhaps even unconscious—sensuality. Once encouraged to assist in detaining Polixenes, she casts off imposed standards of feminine modesty, steps boldly forward and works her will on him with entreaties as warm, witty, and expansive as Leontes's were spare (1.2.27-57). Moreover, while protesting against the devil's role that Polixenes assigns her, Hermione also shows herself utterly unthreatened by it, implicitly affirming the wholesomeness of marital sexuality:

Th’ offenses we have made you do we’ll answer,
If you first sinn’d with us, and that with us
You did continue fault, and that you slipp’d not
With any but with us.

(1.2.83-86)

Hermione's unself-conscious sensuality may also be discerned in her erotically-charged solicitation of Leontes's flattery: “cram's with praise, and make's / As fat as tame things. … You may ride 's / With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere / With spur we heat an acre. … Nay, let me have’t; I long” (1.2.91-2, 94-6, 101).

Thus, Hermione's friendly intimacy with Polixenes may indeed appear transgressive of feminine modesty. It undoubtedly should. Indeed, a director might be well-advised to make Hermione's displays of affection for Polixenes exuberant enough to afflict the audience with doubt, to attract a measure of sympathy for Leontes or at least to check a willingness to conclude unequivocally that his distress is unwarranted. Such a staging thus subjects Hermione's sexual charisma not only to Leontes's determining gaze but to the audience's as well, exploiting a prejudice against female sexuality, the prevailing notion that “nice girls don’t,” that warmth and sensuality too liberally dispersed convict a woman of lascivious intentions. In this manner audience members become implicated in Leontes's dementia and can only extricate themselves by questioning their instinctive stigmatizing of female sexuality.

Hermione's behavior appears so provocative because she combines the chastity and sexuality that Leontes (and patriarchy) insists on polarizing. She demonstrates that a woman may be a loyal and loving wife without requiring idealization as a madonna, that she can be a sexual being without meriting censure as a whore. Ironically, Leontes himself supplies the correct interpretation of her “entertainment” of Polixenes: it “derive[s] a liberty / From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom” (1.2.112-13). It discloses a forwardness (“liberty”) derived not from wantonness but from a prodigal graciousness and generous affection constitutive of a more human version of woman as nurturer (“fertile bosom”).

Unfortunately, Leontes harbors an “affection” of sexual jealousy that defeats this sound intuition. Indeed, rather than rest in his own assurance that affection “fellow’st nothing,” he concludes instead that this one “co-joins with something” and delivers himself to illusion (1.2.138-46). Leontes fatally confuses cause and effect, construing his violent jealousy as proof of his wife's guilt when, in fact, her guilt is a fiction that his violent jealousy creates. Leontes's precipitous progression from suspicion to belief—“thou may’st … thou dost … and I find it” (1.2.143-44)—suggests an eagerness to debase his wife, a readiness to enact a vindictive pornographic fantasy. In this context, his feverish punning and quibbling, the voyeuristic fervor with which he fixes on the physical interplay of Polixenes and Hermione, give an impression of autoerotic stimulation. He appears to be aroused by the very image that repels him, another experience common to pornographers.

Indeed, Leontes thinks himself infected by the corruption that he has uncovered:

                                                            There may be in the cup
A spider steep’d, and one may drink; depart,
And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge
Is not infected), but if one present
Th’ abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.

(2.1.39-45)

He has, he feels, imbibed poison from Hermione. The previously unglimpsed spider of female lewdness taints the elixir of conjugal love, infects Leontes with knowledge of his own depravity, incites him to ghastly spasms of violence in an attempt to expel the poison. Hermione is made to bear the burden of Leontes's own sexual guilt. Afflicted with fleshly shame, he will mortify the flesh by mortifying Hermione whom he reduces to pure flesh. He must deprive her of a soul in order to save his. He must protect himself from sin by eliminating its imagined source.

In a key passage, Leontes testifies to a hyperconsciousness of sin and a need to be cleansed:

                                                            I have trusted thee, Camillo,
With all the nearest things to my heart, as well
My chamber-councils, wherein, priest-like, thou
Hast cleans’d my bosom: I from thee departed
Thy penitent reform’d.

(1.2.235-38)

This speech offers proof of Leontes's fragile conscience and explains his desperate attempt to dissociate himself from a corruption to which he feels dangerously susceptible. In urging Camillo to be Polixenes's cupbearer, Leontes appears to transform him from priest to assassin. In fact, he asks him to perform the same service as before: to cleanse his soul. Indeed, Leontes's recovery of a purified self requires the elimination of Polixenes, the impure self, the evil “twin” or bad “brother” whose sexual dereliction threatens Leontes with knowledge of his own.

If Polixenes, the adult embodiment of the “boy eternal” myth, fails as a mirror of Leontes's purity, then Mamillius, the childish image, must succeed. Leontes thus maniacally scrutinizes his son for evidence of bastardy, for traces of contamination. “We must be neat; not neat, but cleanly,” Leontes declares while cleaning Mamillius's “smutch’d” nose—“a copy out of mine” (1.2.121-23). Leontes seeks to merge with an unblemished image of an innocent self, to move through Mamillius's looking-glass into the realm of “boy eternal.” “Looking on the lines of my boy's face,” he later tells Hermione and Polixenes,

                                                            methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d
In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove
(As ornament oft does) too dangerous.

(1.2.153-58)

Leontes adds a new detail to the boyhood dream: he owned a dangerous “dagger” that he kept “muzzled”—an image not of innocence but of repression, a symptom of sexual dread. Mamillius cannot bear the burden of Leontes's pathological need for purity. He cannot survive in actuality the expulsion of Hermione dictated by fantasy: separated from his mother, he sickens and dies.

In sum, Leontes's mistreatment of Hermione is a pornographer's mission of revenge: he punishes her for recalling him to his own fleshliness and frailty. The master of culture abhors exposure as a vulnerable creature of nature. Hermione's supposed sexual perfidy is but the sexual power that enforces knowledge of Leontes's essential powerlessness. He moves decisively to counter that power, which she so unthinkingly unleashes in her “entertainment” of Polixenes. With an entourage of guards, a male force, he violently invades a female space—presumably the queen's chamber (2.1.). This brutal male intrusion thus becomes emblematic of a rape, the violation of a woman's most private quarters. He arrests her, binds her, imprisons her, and threatens her with torture. He puts her on trial, adding trumped-up charges of treason to her supposed crime of adultery. In short, he brings the full power of the state to bear against this woman whose power he so fears, turning the instruments of male-centered authority into devices of subjugation, suppressing a potentially subversive female force. As Griffin observes, “when the pornographic mind creates an object, it prepares the stage for the enactment of its rage against that object. It is inevitable that this object must be rejected, humiliated, punished, tortured, bound up, silenced, even murdered” (46).

Ironically—as Peter Stallybrass says of Desdemona (141)—the more Hermione is persecuted, the more she appears to become the ideal wife: devoted, long-suffering, self-sacrificing. When first berated and arrested, she proclaims, “There’s some ill planet reigns; / I must be patient, till the heavens look / With an aspect more favorable” and concludes, “The King's will be performed!” (2.1.105-07, 115). At her trial, she calls his favor “the crown and comfort of my life” which, since lost, makes death trifling (3.2.90-96) and protests that she loved Polixenes as Leontes himself “commanded; / Which not to have done I think had been in me / Both disobedience and ingratitude / To you and toward your friend” (3.2.66-69). Hermione seems compelled to create an alternative, idealized image of herself as faithful wife. Death fixes her in that martyred image, makes of her a monument of Patience smiling at grief. Leontes gets his wish: Hermione as statue, as lifeless icon of wifely devotion, may now be “his forever.” Like Browning's Duke of Ferrara, he transforms a human being into an aesthetic object, bringing an independent woman under his firm control—but only by putting her to death. The Bohemian romance of Florizel and Perdita corrects Leontes's destructive dramatization of “The Fall.” These lovers, as in the “boy eternal” fantasy, are “two lambs frisking in the sun,” innocent playmates in a pastoral world. Their innocence is not, however, of the pre-sexual sort celebrated in the boyhood dream but is mature and sexually aware, dispelling the dream's dark shadow of misogyny and sexual dread. In Leontes's vision of “paradise lost,” woman destroys man's innocence and sexually defiles him. In Florizel's and Perdita's version of “paradise regained,” man joins with woman in a wholesome sexual partnership.

Indeed, in effecting a release from the strangulated court to the vibrant countryside, in setting nature against culture, Bohemia initiates the rectification of Leontes's wrongs. Certainly it accommodates the sexual experience that so bedeviled him. The Old Shepherd regards Perdita precisely as Leontes did: as the product of some illicit sexual liaison—“some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work” (3.3.74-75). Yet he unfussily, good-heartedly resolves to take care of her, accepting fleshly weakness as the way of the world. Similarly, sixteen years later when he exhorts Perdita, a reluctant “mistress of the feast,” to emulate the livelier ways of his lusty wife who “welcom’d all, serv’d all,” drank and sang, and danced with multiple partners (4.4.57), he seems to encourage the same sort of generous sensuality that in Hermione struck Leontes as shameless lust.

The sheep-shearing festival reinforces the naturalness of sexuality, depicting a whole pastoral society at earthy play. Autolycus sings randy songs and sells seductive trinkets, twelve “men of hair” perform a leaping, lusty satyr dance, and the shepherd's son, a bumpkin Don Juan, finds himself mediating an immodest squabble between two frisky mistresses, Mopsa and Dorcas. The festival sanctions the release of revitalizing libidinal energy, of the “red blood” that “reigns in the winter's pale” about which Autolycus sings (4.3.4). “Blood” here retains its sexual significance but adds connotations of “life-force,” of the “vital fluid upon which life depends” (OED, 1: 929). Like the may-games of Whitsuntide (to which Perdita refers at 4.4.134), the sheep-shearing festival is essentially a fertility rite, celebrating nature's powers of renewal. Revelers dress themselves in garlands of flowers, affirming a connectedness to nature that exalts their licentious antics, as C. L. Barber observes: “May-game wantonness has a reverence about it because it is a realization of a power of life larger than the individual, crescent both in men and in their green surroundings” (24). By clothing themselves in nature's foliage, celebrants relate “the emotions of love to its fructifying function” (24).

Thus Shakespeare's play enacts, at least until Polixenes's violent intrusion, the ancient comic mythos of seasonal renewal: summer defeats winter, fertility overcomes sterility and, in Griffin's terms, nature revitalizes culture. The flower-dispersing Perdita, costumed as Flora, resembling Persephone, functions as goddess of fertility. Cast out by culture, she becomes the embodiment of nature and, because uncorrupted by culture's fear of the body, generates precisely the healthful sexuality necessary for culture's recovery.

Indeed, Perdita and Florizel together reconcile the teeming sexuality of the festival with the purity that so obsessed Leontes. These pastoral lovers do not use festivity as a license for looseness. Florizel rejects the role of royal debaucher he might conceivably have played and which Perdita invokes when claiming that his outsized oaths resemble a seducer's tactical flatteries (4.4.146-51). Neither do they retreat into bloodless amorous warbling. Though their desire for each other is disciplined by chaste regard and marital design, it is not prettily abstract but potently sexual. Florizel makes his sexual passion perfectly clear. When Perdita chides him for humbling his royalty with a shepherd's robes, he compares himself favorably to those gods who assumed lower forms for love's sake:

                                                                                Jupiter
Became a bull and bellow’d; the green Neptune
A ram and bleated; and the fire-rob’d god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now. Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer,
Nor in a way so chaste, since my desires
Run not before mine honor, nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.

(4.4.27-35)

Florizel makes no attempt to hide his “lusts” and “desires”—indeed, he likens them to those appetites that made beasts of gods—but resolves to sanctify them in marriage, to reconcile passion and chastity, to harmonize the bleating of the lusty ram with that of the innocent lambs of Polixenes's Edenic vision.

Perdita, for her part, invokes Florizel's “desire to breed by me” with ingenuous frankness and evinces a longing for sexual satisfaction in wishing to bedeck Florizel with flowers and transform him into a “bank for love to lie and play on: / Not like a corpse; or if—not to be buried, / But quick, and in mine arms” (4.4.130-32). Perdita's sense of “play” combines the innocence and sexuality that Leontes insisted on polarizing. Indeed, Leontes's most telling pun is on the word “play”: “Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays” (1.2.187), insinuating a contrast between the innocent childish play of Mamillius—which is also the pastoral “boy eternal” play of himself and Polixenes—and the wicked sexual play of the corruptress Hermione. For Florizel and Perdita, sexual passion is not a corruptive force but the indispensable physical component to a fully generative love. Indeed, Florizel and Perdita are perhaps close to attaining the integration of body and soul that Montaigne considered the only means by which heterosexual love could surpass “brotherly affection”:

if such a relationship, free and voluntary, could be built up, in which not only would the souls have … complete enjoyment, but the bodies would also share in the alliance, so that the entire man would be engaged, it is certain that the resulting friend-ship would be fuller and more complete.

(Frame 138)

In surpassing the pastoral friendship of Leontes and Polixenes, in wedding innocence to sexual experience, Florizel and Perdita do indeed turn Bohemia into a kind of paradise regained. They soon meet a second snake-in-the-garden, however, a stand-in for the man whose misdeeds they are redressing: Polixenes, whose sexually-laced fulminations are very nearly as cataclysmic as Leontes's. He undertakes to control his son's sexuality as strictly as Leontes sought to control his wife's. He similarly employs patriarchal sanctions as instruments of domination, threatening to disinherit Florizel if he persists in courting this lowly shepherdess. Also like Leontes, he forces an innocent woman into the role of wicked seductress and threatens her in terms that suggest he is susceptible to the very “affection” he seeks to suppress:

                                                            if ever, henceforth, thou
These rural latches to his entrance open,
Or hoop his body more with thy embraces,
I will devise a death as cruel for thee
As thou art tender to’t.

(4.4.437-41)

In short, he too manifests a pornographic consciousness. He calls her “enchantment” and “fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft” (4.4.434, 422-23), linking her with the earliest victims of pornographic violence—the “witches,” the multitude of women tortured and murdered for their supposedly demonic sexual powers. Polixenes seems prepared to mete out a similar punishment. His promise to “have thy beauty scratched with briars” takes us back to Griffin's portrayal of the pornographer as desiring beauty in order to violate it. His threat to “devise a death as cruel for thee as thou art tender to ’t” parallels the pornographer's sadistic focus on the female's physical vulnerability. Polixenes means for Perdita to feel her “tenderness” and to cower before his power to hurt her.

Like Leontes, Polixenes appears to lord his authority over those who threaten it and to avenge himself on a force that bewitches him. That Perdita has such an effect on him seems evident: the very accusations of witchcraft are covert tributes to her sexual allure and twice he openly extols her beauty (4.4.78, 156-57). Yet Perdita, youthful queen of the feast, implicitly disqualifies this king from the ranks of amorous swains and suitors, welcoming him with flowers that signify—at least to Polixenes—his status as “man of winter” at a summer frolic (4.4.73-79). Florizel later seconds this characterization of Polixenes as a man past his prime, addressing his disguised father as “ancient sir who … hath sometime loved” (4.4.361-62) and enlisting him as a witness to the betrothal from which he has, in actuality, been excluded. Polixenes, however, seems unreconciled to his position as impotent observer of potent youthful revels. He not only sardonically commends Perdita for her choice of “winter” flowers but, while still disguised, warms up for his brutal tirade against the lovers with a scathingly exaggerated portrait of himself as “stupid with age and alt’ring rheums,” victim of a dreadfully incapacitating senility that makes him unfit for his own son's betrothal (4.4.397-402). The ferocity of the outburst that ensues may well owe something to a jealousy triggered by the sight of this perturbingly unattainable young woman's making amorous sport with a son seemingly intent on discarding him.

Polixenes could be considered a Pentheus-like character, adopting disguise for a mission of spying that discloses an almost prurient interest in the licentious proceedings he wishes to oppose, a craving for nature that culture demands he repel. The director could make clear the extent to which Polixenes not only passively witnesses the festival's mating rituals but is voyeuristically aroused by them. Indeed, the director might even play up the Polixenes-Leontes parallel by staging a moment of intimacy between Florizel and Perdita that moves Polixenes to Leontes-like excitation. Whatever sexual feeling is stirred in Polixenes can only cause frustration. In a festival brimming with sexual vigor, he is consigned to sexlessness. His response is to strike back against those who have neutered him—a son seemingly bent on overthrowing him and a woman whose untouchable youthful beauty is an insuperable provocation. Like Leontes, Polixenes explodes with sexual violence, prepared to destroy that which he lacks full power to possess.

Florizel's disregard of his father's interdictions, his determination to marry Perdita at the expense of his princely status, provides instructive contrast to Leontes's power-mad vendetta. If Leontes invests himself with the state's full power in order to destroy Hermione, Florizel renounces such power out of love for Perdita. In declaring himself “heir to my affection” rather than heir to the throne (4.4.481), Florizel chooses nature over culture, identifies with that vulnerable, feeling “feminine” self that Leontes so feverishly opposed. He gives himself to Perdita as Hermione gave herself to Leontes: “I cannot be / Mine own, nor any thing to any, if / I be not thine” (4.4.43-45). At the same time, his single-minded devotion to “affection,” his obsessive pursuit of a personal vision, his ready embrace of “madness” (4.4.484) make him as determined a lover as Leontes is intractable a lunatic. He is thus indispensable to Perdita's revitalization of Leontes's court.

The cocksure cony-catcher Autolycus also assists in the symbolic defeat of Leontes, exuberantly lampooning—whether intentionally or not—Polixenes's re-enactment of Leontes's despotic cruelty. Posing as a preposterously swaggering courtier, he reprises Polixenes's ranting denunciation of Florizel's and Perdita's betrothal, heaping abuse not on the absent lovers but on the terrified yokels he pretends not to recognize. “Draw our throne into a sheepcote!” he cries (4.4.79-80), echoing Polixenes's censure of Florizel, a “sceptre's heir / That thus affects a sheephook” (4.4.419-20). His loving recital of the gruesome tortures that await the clown translate Polixenes's brutal threats into unthreatening comic grotesquery. By so farcically and irreverently standing in for Leontes's stand-in, Autolycus helps dispel the spectre of tragedy and preserve the spirit of festivity that he first bumptiously introduced.

Indeed, throughout the Bohemian idyll, Autolycus stands in for Leontes himself, removing, by means of comic parody, much of the sting from the crazed king's depredations. Like Leontes, he addresses the audience directly with conspiratorial asides and soliloquies, unveiling an “angling” mind intent on entrapping people. Unlike Leontes, however, he wins our allegiance, secures our admiration for his expert deceptions and pilferies. Our delight in this con-man's virtuosity stirs none of the unnerving moral qualms of our attraction to the seductive cunning of an Iago or Richard III. Autolycus is mostly a figure of fun, a crowd-pleasing prankster. Like Leontes, he traffics in illusion, but the stooges of his confidence game fare far better than the pawns of Leontes's pornographic theater.

He may seem as remorselessly submerged in selfhood as Leontes, as devoted to a self-serving mission that estranges him from an entire community. Yet, unlike Leontes's, Autolycus's predaciousness and self-absorption are assimilable—indeed indispensable—to his society. Bohemia derives much of its lifelikeness from Autolycus's zestful cynicism, his hearty trouncing of honesty and trust, his cheerful contempt for his gullible victims. He ensures that the idealized love of Florizel and Perdita unfolds in a world sufficiently infused by a force resistant to idealization. He keeps Arcadia grounded in reality.

Finally, Autolycus, like Leontes, is his world's version of “fallen man,” the embodiment of a corrupt sexuality. He consorts with “doxies,” “aunts,” and “drabs” (4.3.2, 11, 27)—in other words, whores—and peddles songs full of “dildos and fadings” (4.4.195), the singing of which lulls celebrants into a collective stupor that Autolycus equates with desexualization: “You might have pinched a placket, it was senseless; ’twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse; I would have fil’d keys off that hung in chains” (4.4.609-12).

But Autolycus happily accepts the sexual passion that Leontes so passionately resisted. He is not so much a carrier of corruption as a bearer of “blood,” an embodiment of that pulsating life-force that revivifies a world deadened by Leontes's misdeeds. He contributes mightily to Bohemia's effect of festive release. He not only accepts, as Leontes does not, his creaturely status. He absolutely revels in it.

Of course the play ultimately accents the insufficiencies of Autolycus's creaturely life. Indeed, one measure of Perdita's and Florizel's triumph is their transcendence of his pure materiality. Autolycus embodies a kind of nature rather different from the one that Griffin imagines: animal nature, amorally predacious, invincibly self-involved. It is the same nature embodied by the hungry bear who makes a meal of Antigonus or, in a very different context, the nature that is Edmund's goddess. From another angle, however, Autolycus does not represent nature but marauding, despoiling culture. A refugee from court who picks on gullible rustics, Autolycus exploits nature in order to gratify a culture-bound greediness for profit and power. Thus, although Autolycus defeats Leontes through parodic doubling, he must also himself suffer defeat. He has no share in the happiness that reigns at the play's end and is left ruefully to acknowledge the limitations of his roguery (5.2.113-23). In the last analysis, his failure to find redemption provides contrast for Leontes's achievement of it.

Leontes has positioned himself for redemption by undergoing a superhuman sixteen-year penance which, to an important degree, takes the form of feminization, of submission to a woman he had previously abhorred. Indeed, Paulina's domination of Leontes effects a shift in the play from female subjugation to female empowerment. In appointing herself Hermione's champion, Paulina avenges Leontes's invasion of female space by penetrating a male bastion of power—presumably the king's chamber (2.3.)—and by maintaining a determination to talk even in the face of physical threats and scurrilous slander. Words are Paulina's weapons. She denounces the king's “dangerous, unsafe lunes” and resolves, “He must be told on’t,” adding, “If I prove honey-mouthed, let my tongue blister” (2.2.29, 31). For Paulina, militant speech serves as the substitute for manly combat, a means of vindicating the queen's honor (2.3.59-61). Her headstrong remonstrances naturally earn her the epithet of shrew. Leontes calls her “Lady Margery” and berates Antigonus for his inability to control her, declaring him “woman-tired; unroosted / By thy Dame Partlet,” a victim of beatings at her hands (2.3.160, 75-76, 92). Yet it is Leontes who takes a beating here. He yells at her, shrinks from her, implores his men to eject her and only succeeds in confirming his own impotence and cowardice.

Leontes's fear and attempted suppression of Paulina parallel his fear and attempted suppression of Hermione. The woman who is too free with her tongue is as threatening to male authority as the woman who is too free with her body. Indeed, in Shakespeare's era, a woman's verbal freedom was as strictly constrained as her sexual freedom. Patriarchy imposed on women a figurative veil of silence and the overly-talkative woman could be legitimately scorned as a whore. As Stallybrass explains, “silence, the closed mouth, is made a symbol of chastity” (127).

Since Paulina's unrestrained speech makes her as promiscuous and mutinous as Leontes imagines Hermione to be, his submission to chastisement at her hands is fitting atonement for his chastisement of Hermione. Since his need to control Hermione proved fatal to his marriage, he accepts as penance a metaphorical marriage to the uncontrollable Paulina, upon whom he confers full verbal freedom and authority. “Go on, go on; / Thou can’st not speak too much,” he says, submitting to her excoriative censure in the wake of Hermione's apparent death. “Thou didst speak but well / When most the truth; which I receive much better / Than to be pitied of thee” (3.2.214-15, 232-34). The heretofore blustering, misogynist tyrant puts himself under a woman's power. He voluntarily accepts what he had previously feared: unbridled femaleness. He submits to that “callat / Of boundless tongue” (2.3.91-92) who steps in for that wife of seemingly boundless sexuality.⁴

Although she may seem to shift from shrew to saint, although she may profess, as Carol Thomas Neely contends, “to drop her loquaciousness” and “identify herself as a woman subordinate to Leontes” (200), Paulina continues her fearless, recriminatory talk and holds the upper hand over Leontes to the end. Even when his first wave of penitence moves her to lament her rashness and retract her words, even after a lord has urged “say no more” and rebuked the “boldness of your speech” (2.3.216-18), she cannot refrain from reminding Leontes of his catastrophic misdeeds:

Sir, royal sir, forgive a foolish woman.
The love I bore your queen—lo, fool again!—
I’ll speak of her no more, nor of your children;
I’ll not remember you of my own lord,
Who is lost too. Take your patience to you,
And I’ll say nothing.

(3.2.227-32)

Similarly, sixteen years later when contesting Cleomenes's and Dion's case for Leontes's re-marriage, Paulina's reference to Hermione as “she you killed” draws an anguished protest from the grief-stricken king: “thou strik’st me / Sorely to say I did.” He implores her, “say so but seldom,” to which Cleomenes rejoins, “not at all, good lady” (5.1.15, 17-18, 20). Once more Paulina is urged to hold her tongue, to curb her wounding words. Her penchant for unpleasant truth-telling confirms her status as untameable shrew.

Yet this untameable shrew amasses an impressive amount of political power. She alone adjudicates the urgent matter of the king's succession. The unwaveringly deferential Leontes overrules the persuasive appeals of his political advisers and sides with Paulina, promising never to re-marry without her permission (5.1.71, 82).

In asking Leontes to re-marry, Cleomenes and Dion essentially ask him to end his “marriage” to Paulina, to free himself from her dominance and resume his rightful place as unmediated male authority. That Paulina so easily prevails, so readily retains Leontes's allegiance, implies a radical ascension of feminine influence within male-centered society, a startling alteration of the power structure.⁵

Shakespeare thus ingeniously elevates the stock role of the man-baiting shrew. Indeed, Paulina plays a role in relation to the ravaged king that is, in some ways, analogous to that of Lear's Fool. This unsilenceable shrew is, like Lear's Fool, an unsilenceable conscience, a relentless voice of truth who spurns the subordinate's proper role of mollifying the distressed and distracted monarch. Like Lear's Fool, she is a marginalized figure within the political order who becomes the king's soulmate. Just as Lear's kinship with the Fool represents a conscious flouting of hierarchical relations, an act of atonement for his kingly neglect of the outcast and unprivileged, so Leontes's submission to Paulina sweeps aside hierarchical imperatives and helps atone for his vilification of women. If, as Enid Welsford suggests, King Lear depicts the coronation of the Fool and the investment of the King with motley (269), then The Winter's Tale depicts the empowering of the shrew and the taming of the tyrant.

Leontes's “taming,” his metaphorical marriage to Paulina, is not merely a penance. Indeed, its penitential aspects—subordination to a dominant “wife,” acceptance of the sexlessness seemingly wished for in the crazed project of self-cleansing—make it a poor model for actual marriage. But it is also an intimate friendship, marked by mutual respect and understanding. Both Leontes and Paulina have lost a spouse, so each becomes the other's “mate” in an intense, sixteen-year alliance. Leontes does not simply do penance for his past error of depreciating the feminine but, by appreciating Paulina, corrects it in preparation for his future reconciliation with Hermione. Indeed, the path of feminization on which Paulina leads Leontes, the path to health and wholeness, is also the path back to Hermione.

Paulina's spectacular charade of animating a statue consummates the curing of Leontes's habit of objectification, the rehabilitation of his pornographic consciousness. Mesmerized by the statue's uncanny resemblance to the queen, Leontes once more elects to believe in an illusion—in this case a constructed, theatrical illusion—that, under the influence of a disarranging “affection,” impresses him as true. The “affection” is his profound remorse and yearning for Hermione's return, for the recovery not simply of the image but of the woman. This longing for the whole person redeems his past crime of imprisoning her in nonpersonhood. If Leontes originally accedes to the outlandish fiction of Hermione's infidelity and proceeds to coerce her into an iconic posture of wifely subservience—thus turning her into a statue—his final acceptance of the outlandish fiction of Hermione's metamorphosis from statue to woman signals his reception of her as a living, breathing, fully independent being. Hermione's stature as venerated icon has seemingly grown in accordance with Leontes's exorbitant penance and Paulina's project of preserving her memory. In his own recollections Leontes idealizes Hermione as “the sweet’st companion that e’er man / Bred his hopes out of” (5.1.11-12). Paulina takes the superlatives even further:

If, one by one, you wedded all the world,
Or, from the all that are, took something good
To make a perfect woman, she you kill’d
Would be unparallel’d.

(5.1.13-16)

Indeed, Paulina elicits Leontes's promise not to re-marry by activating a specific memory, riveting his mind on the image of her eyes. The eyes, we know, are the birthplace of fancy, of swooning infatuation and idealization (as well as pornographic depersonalization). Moved by the memory, Leontes himself spouts superlatives: “Stars, stars, / And all eyes else dead coals!” (5.1.67-68). He has passed from the extreme of pornographically degrading Hermione to that of rapturously idolizing her. Yet he still objectifies her.⁶ Impelled by his own immense grief and Paulina's injunctions to remember, Leontes holds Hermione captive to memory's romanticized gaze, putting her forever on a pedestal.

In the final scene, then, when Leontes confronts Hermione's statue, he is, in effect, confronting his own idolatrous image of her. Her physical position perpetuates the posture of exhibited object to which he has recurrently consigned her. In 1.2., he stands aside, “frames” and tremulously narrates her supposedly salacious behavior, presenting her intimacy with Polixenes as a kind of lurid peepshow (2.115-18, 83-85). In 2.1., he urges his male entourage to “look on her, mark her well,” displaying her as a woman whose beauty must be “seen through” to the harlotry that it hides (2.1.64-77). In 3.2., he turns her trial into a virtual sadomasochistic spectacle, showcasing her as a madonna-turned-whore, a degraded object, a shamed adulteress. He preys on the powerlessness to which he has sadistically reduced her, a powerlessness greatly aggravated by her physical weakness. While it would seem far-fetched to call Hermione a masochist, she does express love for her tormentor and assume a posture of martyred faithfulness, foreshadowing her statue's pose. Once pornographically displayed as sordid flesh, she is, in the final scene, idolatrously unveiled as sainted icon.

This final scene effects a reversal of Hermione's trial. Now Leontes is utterly powerless, a dazed participant in proceedings that he only imperfectly grasps, a pawn in the maneuverings of powerful women. Perdita, not Leontes, ends Hermione's cloistered withdrawal. Paulina, not Leontes, commands her to come to life. Hermione, not Leontes, holds the key to reconciliation: she may take him back or not. In one sense, Paulina and Hermione sadistically collude to sharpen Leontes's comeuppance. The already massively grieving king confronts, in the most wrenchingly vivid way, the consequences of his deranged objectification of his wife. “Here is the kind of wife that you wanted!” the statue seems mockingly to say. Its unveiling has the predictable effect of plunging him into new paroxysms of grief and guilt. Leontes is next made to suffer the exquisite torment of Paulina's teasing encouragement of his impossible, delirious longing for Hermione's recovery. Paulina acknowledges her sadistic manipulations: “I could afflict you further,” she promises. “Do, Paulina,” Leontes begs, “for this affliction has a taste as sweet / As any cordial comfort” (5.3.75-77). The scene salubriously re-works the pornographic sadomasochism of Hermione's trial: Leontes savors his ecstasy of distress, Paulina hurts him in order to please him. This time Leontes is put on trial, made to undergo a final penitential ritual in which Hermione may consent to return if the force of his grief-ridden longing compels her.

The detection of life in Hermione transforms Leontes from worshipful penitent to desiring husband. “Would you not deem it breathed?” he asks Polixenes, “and that those veins / Did verily bear blood?” (5.3.64-65). He ceases adoring a venerated icon and begins to covet a living being. To an important degree, that coveting draws on sheer physical longing. The dizzying excitement with which Leontes awaits his wife's return has a sexual charge. His detection of “blood” in her stirs “stronger blood” in him. Discerning motion in her eye and “breath” about her, he boldly resolves to kiss her (5.3.67, 78, 80). His red-blooded passion “reigns in winter's pale,” melting away frozen idealization. His physical desire for Hermione helps elicit her physical reanimation. His wholesome assimilation of “blood” assists in releasing her from the limbo of objectification to which abhorrence of “blood” had consigned her.

The subtext of Leontes's longing might thus be imagined as “wife, I come,” or—as he means to stimulate her, to elicit an arousal that betokens her satisfaction by him—“wife, please come,” inviting Hermione to consummate their marriage in life even as Cleopatra aims to consummate hers with Antony in death. As Stanley Cavell explains, a woman's satisfaction—which encompasses but surpasses sexual satisfaction—lies beyond a man's capacity to enforce or determine. It is not a matter of proof but of faith. It is, in fact, an aspect of the faith that Paulina makes requisite for Hermione's revival (5.3.94-95), a faith he had once so signally lacked.

Indeed, in the play's first part, Leontes punishes Hermione for afflicting him with the uncertainty of her satisfaction, for inciting the fear that not he but Polixenes satisfies her—hence his extreme agitation when Camillo attributes Polixenes's delayed departure to his wish to “satisfy” the queen's entreaties: “Satisfy? / Th’ entreaties of your mistress? Satisfy?” (1.2.233-34). As Cavell observes, assurance of satisfaction is a gift: “to elicit this gift, the extreme claim of male activeness, thus requires the man's acceptance of his absolute passiveness” (35). Leontes initially rejects this passiveness. He refuses to submit to the power she commands as judge of his sufficiency. He takes action. He asserts his own power. He converts the uncertainty of her satisfaction into the certainty of her dissatisfaction and brutally enacts a retributive dissatisfaction with her.

In the final scene, he amends his mistake, accepting a passive, submissive posture from which, insofar as he is able, he attempts to “elicit the gift” of Hermione's satisfaction. The sexually-charged longing is thus, in fact, a passionately chaste courtship. Leontes must woo and win Hermione once more. The scene functions as a second wedding, a theatrically extravagant renewal of vows. “O, thus she stood,” Leontes exclaims upon beholding the statue, “when I first wooed her” (5.3.34-36). Her descent from the pedestal brings about a second betrothal. “Nay, present your hand,” Paulina instructs an awestruck Leontes. “When she was young, you woo’d her; now, in age, / Is she become the suitor?” (5.3.107-109). This second joining of hands, this second betrothal, decisively ends the ill effects of that mock-betrothal that Leontes had perversely perceived in Hermione's presentation of her hand to Polixenes. The battle cry of “too hot, too hot” with which Leontes greeted that gesture gives way here to the joyous exclamation “Oh, she’s warm!” (5.3.109) as he takes Hermione's hand, perhaps the first time in the entire play that he touches her. The “too hot” fever flame of obsessive sexual “affection” gives way to the “constant and settled warmth” of loving devotion—possibly even to that harmonization of spiritual and physical satisfaction that Montaigne identified as the ideal of sexual love.

After joining hands, the two hold each other in a long, silent embrace (5.3.110-120), creating a second statue, or at least a piece of living sculpture, a tableau vivant of reconciliation and intimacy that replaces the image of the solitary frozen queen and all the pornographic displays and idolatrous images of her that have preceded it. Indeed, Camillo and Polixenes narrate and frame this moment of intimacy in a manner reminiscent of Leontes's demented commentary on Hermione's interplay with Polixenes. “She embraces him,” Camillo exclaims. “She hangs about his neck,” Polixenes adds (5.3.111-12).

The embrace could be staged as a further instance of dominance-and-submission: Hermione might collapse into Leontes's enfolding arms or, by contrast, draw her kneeling husband to her bosom in the manner of a mother comforting a distressed child. It ought instead, I think, to provide an image of mutuality, of reciprocally offered love and comfort. Neither party assumes a dominant position. Each submits and is submitted to. Each nurtures and receives nurturance. Each confesses neediness and consents to meet the other's needs.

To the extent that Hermione nurtures Leontes, she gratifies his wish to be “boy eternal.” To the extent, however, that he nurtures her, he allows her to be “girl eternal.” The “eternal childhood” thus affirmed differs radically from Leontes's previous regressive fantasy, permitting not only mutuality but sexuality as well. This accommodation of sexuality accords with Griffin's portrayal of childhood as a period not of sexlessness but of pre-sexual eros:

Isn’t it eros we rediscover in the child's world? The beauty of the child's body. The child's closeness to the natural world. The child's heart. Her love. Touch never divided from meaning. Her trust. Her ignorance of culture. The knowledge she has of her own body. That she eats when she is hungry. Sleeps when she is tired. Believes what she sees. That no part of her body has been forbidden to her. No part of this body is shamed, numbed, or denied. That anger, fear, love, and desire pass freely through this body. And for her, meaning is never separate from feeling.

(254)

Leontes's previous attempt to be “boy eternal” manifested adult terrors and constrictions utterly destructive of the child's trust and instinctuality and thus destructive of Mamillius, image of “boy eternal” and Hermione, preserver of “girl eternal.” Florizel and Perdita successfully assimilate the eros of childhood to the sexuality of adulthood, and Leontes and Hermione follow their lead. They stand together not only as nurturer and nurtured but as lover and beloved. The embrace represents a passionately chaste love-making, the climax of Leontes's fervent wooing and arousing, an experience of mutual satisfaction. They do not speak to each other. There are no idealized vows of “I am yours forever,” only the “speechless dialect” of a shared physical love, the silence of a savored, enveloping feeling. The two move, as it were, beyond speech, beyond the constructs of culture and into the sensations of nature, into a realm of pure feeling where simply to touch is to express love, a love that “doth verily bear blood.”

It might reasonably be objected that the nature I invoke, following Griffin, is itself a cultural construct and that even sensations—or rather our experience of them—are culturally regulated. (Does not one's experience of bodily harm or bliss depend upon culturally-instilled attitudes toward pain and pleasure?) The objection begs a philosophical debate beyond the purview of the present essay. My point is simply that I imagine in the embrace of Hermione and Leontes the consummation of a mutual need to touch and be touched—a need that each of us brings into this world—so physically powerful that it submerges them momentarily in pure sensation and rends the protective coverings of their “culturalized” selves. Indeed, to a crucial extent, the meaning of this moment lies in sensation, not only in the characters' (and, on the characters' behalf, the actors') but in the audience's as well. The audience too must allow itself to be “touched.”

More exacting feminist critics have discerned in the play's ending a revival of patriarchy and a re-subordination of women. They note that Hermione seems to return to Leontes exactly as she left him: a devoted, forgiving, long-suffering human icon, lacking the wit and feistiness that characterized her earlier displays of independence. Her return seems important mainly for its effect on Leontes, for the rapt experience of deliverance and achievement of wholeness that it affords him. From this angle, the recovered Hermione symbolizes Leontes's recovered feminine self. From another angle, Hermione returns precisely because Leontes has already integrated his feminine self and therefore no longer requires her to personify its sinister double. In that sense she returns as a person in her own right, not as an extension of Leontes. In addition, the implication that things have not changed all that much seems odd in light of Leontes's radical transformation and the utterly new mutuality that he and Hermione affirm through their embrace. It might also be added that exhibitions of wit and feistiness would seem out of keeping with the final scene's effect of sublime reconciliation. As Janet Adelman observes, Shakespeare's characters are sometimes shaped by “psychological pressures not their own” (140).

The revival of patriarchy does not seem to me, then, to be explicit in the play's action. Leontes does not—at least not unambiguously—reassert power or re-enslave women. True, the “open silence” of Paulina's response to his offer of Camillo as husband permits a mimed resistance on her part that could portray him as autocratically thwarting her. The open silence also lends itself, however, to a speechless happy compliance. Leontes's line “I partly know his mind” (5.3.142) suggests that Camillo might well present himself as a willing suitor. Certainly Paulina has little to fear from the institution of marriage itself. As Marianne Novy observes, “she has already demonstrated unambiguously how little marriage subordinates her” (177). Also, the words with which Paulina excludes herself from the “precious winners” celebration that she has overseen sound suspiciously like a death sentence (5.3.130-35) and could be taken as a self-martyring cue for precisely the invitation to the party that they elicit.

One could of course argue, as does Marilyn Williamson (149-153), that the revival of patriarchy and subordination of women is implicit rather than explicit, that regenerative female powers—Perdita's revitalizing youth, Hermione's loving forgiveness, Paulina's feminine guidance—work to “re-center” Leontes, to restore him fully to the status of husband, father and king. In preserving Leontes, the individual, that is, the women also necessarily preserve Leontes, the patriarch, and thus preserve patriarchy itself. Their gift of nurturance sustains a system that enforces their subjugation. Or, as Erickson less gloomily puts it, the play's female figures “are a powerful force for transforming the men, yet their power as facilitators is used to reform rather than to transcend the patriarchal framework” (167). The point is well-made, but to my mind under-appreciative of the implications of that “reform.” As a living work of art, as a play frequently performed in the present age, when the increased participation and influence of women have been accompanied by the increased assimilation of pornographic images and the increased incidence of violent sexual crimes, The Winter's Tale offers itself as a testament to the power and worth of women, affirming the feminine as an essential component of human wholeness, depicting the rehabilitation of a pornographic consciousness and dramatizing the transformation of a sadistic would-be wife-murderer to a deeply grieving man who repairs his life through integration of his “woman's part.” Indeed, if some ideologically-minded critics find that the play's fantasy does not go far enough, hard-headed realists might well find the fantasy untenable. In real life, violent, women-fearing men are seldom so amenable to reform. But, if The Winter's Tale demonstrates anything, it is the power and appeal of beautiful dreaming.

Notes

1. As Linda Woodbridge points out, the formal defenders of womanhood during the English Renaissance were at pains to downplay Eve's perfidy, either by ingeniously inventing excuses for her or by portraying her as the indispensable anti-type of the chaste Mary, whose devout obedience was thought to have redeemed womankind from Eve's sin as surely as Christ's had redeemed mankind from Adam's, a medieval formulation that recurs regularly in the formalist debate. Although Woodbridge emphasizes that this debate should not be taken as too exact a reflection of contemporaneous attitudes toward women, the image of Eve as seductress was a fixture of Renaissance anti-feminist mythology and her inevitable pairing with Mary promoted the perilous madonna/whore polarity that persists, in one form or another, to the present day.

2. See Pyle for a more extended consideration of the merits of this choice (14).

3. Woodbridge suggests that the plenitude of slandered women in Renaissance drama may point to actual male anxiety about the assertive, liberated women—most especially the notorious cross-dressers—who were increasingly visible in the second decade of the seventeenth century (177-81).

4. I do not mean to minimize the difference between “whores” and “shrews” or to imply that they are interchangeable. My point is that both belong to the species of “female-who-is-too-open,” both deviate from partriarchy's “normative woman.” Thus there seems to be a kind of poetic justice in Leontes's penance: having sought to dominate one unruly woman, he now submits to another.

5. Given the duration and political import of Paulina's “insubordination,” Erickson's assertion that “her domineering role is only temporary” seems a curious slighting of her achievement (163).

6. Neely believes that Leontes not only conceives of Hermione as “peerless” but as “sexual,” “human,” and “flawed” (205). It is indeed important to note that, in longing to kiss Hermione (5.1.54), the idealizing Leontes evinces a physical desire that foreshadows his intense yearning for her in the final scene. It seems to me, however, that the emphasis in this scene is overwhelmingly on idealization. When Leontes imagines Hermione “soul-vex’d,” for instance (5.1.58), he is imagining her not as a woman but as a vengeful spirit.

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Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

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