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The last time I delved into Shakespeare's comedies, the play I related to the most was The Taming of the Shrew. I completely related to it - in all its politically incorrect glory - as the "ideal woman" is described as a docile, pliant, "yes-person" and all-around facilitator, and all of Kate's negative capability is whipped out of her, at least on the surface. In the beginning, Kate is, what they refer to in the remake (10 Things I Hate About You), a "heinous bitch." She is outspoken, ruthlessly honest, and funny. At the end, Kate is still Kate - and her language is still a discourse of resistance - but she has been forced to go underground, and to exercise her desire for independence, autonomy, and self-determination in sub-altern, surreptitious and underground ways.
It may seem rather absurd that I would feel a kindredship with Kate - after all, isn't this the U.S.? Am I not an empowered female? Well, that sounds good - until I think about the way I'm wired - psychologically and sociologically. I think I've come a long way (I hope), but I look back at my life, and I'm not at all comforted by the fact that it is easy for me to believe that I, too, need to be "tamed" in order to be accepted by society.
Is it "madness" to conform? Is conformity a kind of madness -- and, if love makes us want to betray our core values, is that also a kind of madness?
Shortly after reading The Taming of the Shrew for the first time, I embarked in what I now consider an "anthropological experiment." I had been traveling to Paraguay approximately 5 times/year, and I was fascinated by the macho culture and the roles of women there. The pressure to conform to a socially determined idea of womanhood was very pronounced - and, when a particularly obnoxious Paraguayan "chief of protocol" (official carrier of bribes and doctored documents) for the National Administration of Navigation and Ports (Paraguay, like Oklahoma, has river ports - like Muskogee and the Port of Catoosa) - told me I needed to be a "real woman" and to have light blonde hair and to wear only long skirts, long fingernails, and no glasses, I thought, "Hey, maybe he's right." Looking back, I think I must have been suffering from depression, or at least a bad case of masochism. But, to justify my actions, I have to say that I was recovering from a double hit of torture - Ph.D. dissertation plus divorce. I think I was filled with some sort of self-hatred. It is true -- my life had been fairly dismal up to that point, and I thought that perhaps I had become too "American" to ever be able to find (or tolerate) love. So - I obtained a nice, shiny set of fake nails from Nails-N-Heaven, bleached out my hair (which caused a lot of it to break off, since it was also over-permed at that point), bought some long skirts, and practiced walking around with no glasses (I hate contacts, so I refused to go to that extreme).
The "anthropological experiment" was a disaster. I went to Paraguay in January - right in the middle of the ghastly infernal summer they call "GREEN HELL." I sweated like a hot sow in long wool skirts and jackets. My long fingernails kept hanging up in things - and, my hair frizzed like some sort of weird Barbie doll stuck in an electrical outlet. Talk about Bride of Frankenstein. To make it worse, I fell down the stairs at the main Port Authority office - thanks to not wearing glasses.
And what impact did it have on my friend? He fell furiously in love - he started acting weird and possessive - and then gave me an engagement ring (which later turned out to be cubic zirconia). He also gave me a fake Rolex, which was so obviously fake that I thought it was a cool, anti-elitist, anti-status gift. That was before I realized he thought I couldn't tell the difference! I was indignant beyond words. I said - "I hope you didn't pay more than $20 for this - I got one near Central Park outside Bloomingdale's - that was before the police chased off the street vendor…"
I don't think he understood me at all. I certainly didn't understand him, although I did (finally) learn his Spanish-Guaraní dialect. After I learned it, I wished I hadn't. All he did was browbeat me about how I "talked too much" and that I needed to learn to "listen to him because he was right, and the sooner I realized that, the better it would be for me." Instead of reacting as I should have - by telling him to GO AWAY, I did something truly pathological. I though - "wow - this is how women throughout the world have to live - I wonder what it's like … I'll just go along with this & see what it feels like…"
It wasn't pleasant - in fact, I think it constituted an erasure of my self. In the middle of meetings, he would start pick up my things and gesture for me to leave; he would drive 115 mph down two-lane highways; he forced me to go to a wake for an accident victim that was already turning putrid green; he ridiculed me & told people at dinner I was prohibited from drinking; he told people I was his "girlfriend for Wednesdays," and then, (the worst) in shopping malls and grocery stores, he thought it was amusing to say in a loud voice, "Do you want me to BEAT YOU again???" It was so perverse that I laughed, too - but, the sad thing was all the humor was completely at my expense. I began to invent reasons for the times I started crying for no apparent reasons (my mother was sick, I was grieving my divorce, etc, etc). The truth was, I was feeling humiliated, even though I was, supposedly, simply participating in a self-designed sociological field test. I didn't know how it would feel to experience the things that most women in the world had to deal with on a daily basis. I didn't know what I would conclude - I needed to experience it all!
I concluded that it felt bad.
Sometime later I came to my senses, grew out my fried hair, dissolved off the fingernails, and returned to normal skirts. I refused to lend him money to bribe officials to clear the title on his house, and I refused to refrain from speaking my mind. The mental scars took longer to heal. It took me about a year to stop my perverse submissive act. Arrgh. The whole episode is a big embarrassment to me now. I cringe when I think about it. I escaped, but barely!! And still, every couple of months, he calls from Asunción (when I was still in the "anthropological experiment, he would call every day), and I can hear in his voice that he wants my old submissive self back, and he's hoping against hope that just maybe I've "come to my senses."
What a nightmare. I threw away all the pictures of us together - all I could think of was Titania's reaction when she rubbed the pansy juice off her eyes and realized that she had been under some sort of weird spell, and, (horror!!), the dream was true! She had actually fallen in love with a man with donkey's ears!
Who am I kidding - I was Bottom the Weaver, I was the one wearing donkey's ears. I was the one who transformed herself into a complete ass. So, by rights, he would be the one to feel betrayed - after all, I was the one in the disguise, not him. I was the one who was not who she claimed to be. I was the fake. On the other hand, the fake ring & the fake Rolex were something - but at least they weren't a disguise. So. He was the one who awoke and realized that he had fallen for an American woman with an opinion, who only pretended to be submissive. Unfortunately, in pretending to be submissive, I actually became submissive. That is what I find the most disturbing about the entire episode. It brings to mind the entire "nature vs. nurture" concept, and how, once "trained," how difficult it is to change. I don't think it is about behavior - it is more about a mindset, and a philosophical stance that is willing to admit that perhaps other value systems are valid. Perhaps they are - perhaps absolute right and wrong are unknowable. In Shakespeare, one never knows - right and wrong, male and female - all the things that are supposedly absolute in the world are not. They are ambiguous, and it is our life's task to unravel a meaning that is acceptable to us and to our sense of values and continuity.
It's interesting to return to Shakespeare and to be struck yet again by the vast & unshakeable humanity of his writings. The language is intimate and immediate - it crawls into my bloodstream even though I'm not likely to be speaking in Elizabethan couplets or blank verse any time soon. Although Shakespeare's comedies are not generally considered his greatest works - the "immortality" generally reserved for the great tragedies and romances, specifically King Lear, Hamlet, MacBeth, Tempest, Othello - and yet, for me, the comedies are equally great. Perhaps the comedies do not deal on such an obvious level with the fears, insecurities, sadnesses & madnesses of our lives - but all the elements are there.
Irony is inescapable in Shakespeare's comedies - appearances ALWAYS deceive, people are always betrayed by their own desires. Death (and its companions, separation & loss) hang on every hope-filled utterance, and war hovers on the edge of the most peaceful and verdant haven, replete with wine and merriment, as if such celebratory reveling could drown out the howls of the damned and the groaning of the mortally wounded.
Perhaps that is why at this point in my life, Twelfth Night resonates on many levels. I know what it is like to be betrayed by my own desires - and, it's not at all comfortable. I can certainly identify with Viola - in my inability to deal with loss, I try to become the thing I have lost. How many times have I read the books and listened to CDs that my ex-husband had - just trying to somehow invoke his presence in my home? How many times have I studied a language, just because I'm missing a person, or the concept of a person? I try to escape the limitations of who and what I am by becoming someone or something else - especially if the "Other" ignites my imagination and inflames my daydreams and longings.
And yet, I can't escape the essence of my identity, even if I don't wholly understand what that is. Will I ever understand my own identity? Will I ever accept who I am? Will I ever decide that there is a place for me, after all, in the world? It all hinges on that tricky notion of identity. Identity is something that observers understand more than the person herself or himself. That is most obviously true in Twelfth Night - the audience has a rollicking horselaugh at the expense of all the self-deceived (and yet, charmingly filled with hope and longing and optimism) people, who fall in love with what they think they are seeing and/or reading - in other words, they are believing what they have wanted to believe all along. The convergence between desire & appearances wreaks absolute havoc - and it generally makes people miserable (Malvolio and Sir Andrew and Antonio in particular - all the rest in somewhat less acute forms).
The audience knows exactly what is happening, but the sad "players" are "played" - either by others or (and always at least partially) by themselves and their own expectations. It is ludicrous. We laugh. We hope it never happens to us. We know it has happened to us. We hope not everyone knows. We hope NO ONE knows !!
Shakespeare's world was a complex world - not any less so than our own, although we are superficially informed with the Internet. I think the greatest difference between Shakespeare's times and our own is that of immediacy and contact. We have plague in our world (Ebola virus, AIDS, esp. as it rages in Sub-Sahara Africa, Hantavirus, dengue fever), but do we have it in our lives?
I think that what moves me at this point in my life is the fact that observing the absurdity of the human condition (and human nature) allows me to see how futile it is to be perfectionistic - either in performance or in expectations. I can lighten up a little and think about the moment now - living life today and in this moment. What a relief! And, yes, despite differences, people are people. How is that?? I don't understand at all the universality of human nature! I'm listening to a CD I bought in a dusty store along one of the main roads in Atyrau, Kazakhstan. Although it was in Kazakhstan, the CDis a Russian popular singer named "Linda" -- the song I'm listening to is "Ya Ni Magu" (I Can't) - it is expressing a psychological reality that is only accessible via music and performance. The intense emotional component has to be communicated via that arts in order to have impact on our emotions.
Perhaps that is what I respect most about Shakespeare - despite the fact that his plays seem to be about characters and history and places in time (with their attendant philosophical precepts and strictures) - the fundamental essence of Shakespeare is psychological. It is never tedious, never dryly didactic. They represent human psychology - and they map the dream or death - the transitional moments that represent life itself. It is incredible.
susan smith nash
June 2000
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