Prising apart sex from the Divine Plan inevitably led to an increasing emphasis on its recreative rather than its procreative function. This was made easier by the invention of the condom, which first became available in London and Paris in the seventeenth century. Though initially used as a prophylactic against venereal infection, the condom was soon functioning as a contraceptive device. The condom represented the first major step towards the transformation of sexual activity into a pursuit that was mainly, not just occasionally, recreational.188 The ability of women to protect themselves, and avoid pregnancy, challenged the biological determinism that lies behind so much misogyny. The anxiety that this creates, today as in the seventeenth century, is often disguised in moralizing that such protection makes women even more vulnerable to men’s lusts. But it cannot hide the essential fear of women controlling their reproductive fate, thus achieving the autonomy that all misogynists dread.
As the possibility of one form of autonomy began glimmering into view, science laid to rest the fantasy of another – that of the autonomous male, that lies behind the Greek myth of creation and Aristotle’s ‘scientific’ exposition of the lesser, even dispensable role women play in reproduction (see Chapter 1). For millennia both reduced the role of women to that of a pouch to nurture the all-life-giving seed. However, with the invention of the microscope a miniature world was opened up that was as fascinating as anything that the telescope had revealed. In 1672, the ovaries were discovered. It was gradually realized that a woman’s role in conception was not that of the passive incubator, with the male seed carrying all the essentials of life, including the soul, as had been propounded since Aristotle. Her eggs were shown to be essential to the creation as well as the sustenance of life. Athena might one day spring from a petri dish, but never from her father Zeus’ head.
The rise of science, the advancement of reason, the birth of democratic ideas, and the development of a philosophy centred on the individual, did not however banish misogyny, no more than the intellectual triumphs of the Greeks did 2,000 years earlier. Misogyny, like all prejudices, is often most powerfully felt as a reaction to changes that threaten its underlying assumptions. It must be remembered that the most lethal form of misogyny in history, witch-hunting, reached its peak in the seventeenth century, even as Locke was elucidating the rights of the individual and protesting against tight corsets. Every age, as the poet T. S. Eliot remarked, is an age of transition.189 But the seventeenth century was one of the most turbulent in human history, riven by moral, intellectual, social and political conflicts that have left their mark on the subsequent centuries.
In literature misogyny never went out of fashion in Europe during the period that we identify as the birth of the modern world. The sixteenth century and early seventeenth produced a rich crop of misogynistic writing. It ranged from scurrilous pamphlets, most notoriously Joseph Swetman’s ‘The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward and Unconstant Woman’, which went through ten editions between 1616 and 1634, to the morbid and bitter denunciations in the work of the finest of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and dramatists. Misogyny did not want for exponents.
It was not the first time that alongside lyric poetry, devoted to praising women for their beauty, there should run the sewer of misogyny, often issuing from the pen of the same poet. The French poet Clement Marot composed a poem in praise of women’s breasts that created a literary fashion:
A little ball of ivory
In the middle of which sits
A strawberry or cherry
When one sees you, many men feel
The desire within their hands
To touch you and to hold you.
Later, he composed its opposite:
Breast that is nothing but skin,
Flaccid breast, flaglike breast
Like that of a funnel,
Breast with a big, ugly black lip
Breast that’s good for nursing
Lucifer’s children in Hell.190
Many of these attacks on women are part of a rhetorical convention, and consist mostly of hoary clichés that go back to the Greek and Roman misogynistic tradition. In English, it persisted through the eighteenth century as a major literary tradition. In Epicoene: or, The Silent Woman by Ben Jonson (1573?–1637), a husband, Captain Otter, describes his wife in a manner that would have been understood – excepting the contemporary references – by the Roman poet Juvenal:
O most vile face! And yet she spends me forty pound a year in mercury and hogs-bones. All her teeth were made in Black-friars, both her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair in Silverstreet. Every part of the town owns a piece of her . . . She takes herself asunder still when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes; and about the next day noon, is put together again, like a great German clock.191
Misogynists deploy anti-make-up propaganda in every age, with more or less the same tedious lament. But a more psychologically disturbing anxiety arises that focuses on the independence of women. Epicoene features a coterie of independent women known as the Collegiates, who spend their time discussing poetry, politics and philosophy. Their independence is underscored by the fact that they can afford to ride around London in their own coaches. Their masculine traits stand in contrast to the male characters, who like Captain Otter are effeminized through their failure to control their wives. Gender roles are switched, as the independent women become masculine and the weak men become effeminate. The Collegiates are accused of pursuing sex for pure pleasure, like men, and of sleeping with each other. The result is moral and social chaos and disorder.
Such women were the target of scathing satire by Jonson and his contemporaries. Of one woman called Morilla, who like the Collegiate women, dared to ride around in her own coach – one supposes it was the Elizabethan equivalent of a woman roaring around on a motorbike – the satirist William Goddard wrote:
Speak: could you judge her less than be some man?
If less then this I’m sure you’d judge at least,
She was part man, part woman; part a beast.192
In The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), then an up-and-coming young playwright, dealt with the prevailing anxiety over women’s domestic rebellion. The play is a perennially popular comedy, which is both raucous and erotic. It deals with the issue of sex and power, and its ending, while ostensibly representing an outright male triumph, is framed somewhat ambiguously.
No man will marry the heroine Katherine Minola of Padua, because she is in a state of permanent insurrection about the prospect of being subservient to a husband. Petruchio, desperately needing to get married for economic reasons, proves her match. Katherine’s concession speech in Act 5, Scene 2, is a plea to women to surrender and abandon their struggle with men for dominance:
Fie, fie, unknit that threat’ning, unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds . . .
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land . . .
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe . . .193
To the male audience, it may be gratifying to see a woman hoist the white flag so conspicuously. The Taming of the Shrew seems to celebrate a return to the status quo, with woman as subject and man master.
However, in the play appearance and reality are confused. It is often forgotten that this is a play within a play. The Taming of the Shrew is an entertainment that two noblemen stage to dupe a hen-pecked and drunken beggar named Sly into believing that he is a lord. When it ends, they dump him on the street and he falls into an alcoholic stupor. Sly is reawakened from his dream of lordship to face the prospect of confronting a wife angry because he has been gone a
ll night drinking. He declares: ‘I know now how to tame a shrew,’ then quickly adds, ‘I dreamt upon it all this night till now.’ The taming of the shrew is a drunken man’s dream, a mere appearance of reality, which evaporates when Sly wakes. Shakespeare leaves his audience with an uncomfortable ambiguity. Is the crushing and domestication of the rebellious woman appearance or reality?
There is much in the work of William Shakespeare that is uncomfortable and ambiguous when he deals with women and their relationship to men. But to generalize about any aspect of Shakespeare is no easy matter, since he explored a bewildering range of emotions with extraordinary complexity and depth. In doing so, he produced the greatest body of dramatic literature since the Athenian dramatists of the fifth century, and filled it with poetry that ranks with that of Homer, Virgil and Dante. So it is not surprising that misogyny is among the feelings with which he deals. In two of his greatest tragedies, it is expressed with a poetic intensity that is perhaps unrivalled, raising the question as to whether or not the world’s greatest poet carried a deep-seated contempt for women.
Women play key roles in a majority of his works. In his comedies, their love affairs are pivotal to the plot, and in these plays he presents the audience with a wide range of love-sick, ironic, romantic, rebellious, clever, deceptive, spirited, and independent women characters, a range unmatched by any other writer. However, unlike the Athenian tragedians, Shakespeare did not make women the central figures in his greatest dramas – his tragedies, all written in an incredible ten-year period of poetic achievement between 1599 and 1609. Though women are crucial to the main action of all the tragedies, the principal focus is on the hero and the weaknesses that undo him. That is, in the tragedies, Shakespeare’s chief concern is with the qualities necessary for men to wield power and authority. In them, women do not challenge male authority as they do in the great Athenian tragedies. But their relationship to the hero is frequently the driving force that leads to his tragedy. Most famously, it is Lady Macbeth’s ambition for her husband to be king that pushes him to murder and even to regicide, and Antony’s infatuation for Cleopatra that inspires him to believe he can be sole ruler of Rome with her as his queen.
In neither of these plays does the doomed hero decry or condemn the woman for the part she played in his downfall. Shakespeare does not use the opportunity (which a misogynist might view as ideal) to replay the Fall of Man theme with Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra in the predictable role of Eve or Pandora, bringing about man’s destruction. Macbeth and Antony go to their deaths accepting full responsibility for their fate.
However, in both Hamlet and King Lear, women are blamed not as individuals only but as a sex in general for helping to bring about the hero’s suffering and downfall. Because these are regarded generally as Shakespeare’s two greatest works, they have led some to accuse him of being a misogynist or ‘at best, somewhat ambivalent about woman’s worth and sexuality’.194
It is not easy to draw conclusions about Shakespeare’s attitude to women and sexuality from Hamlet. The play is an enigma, and has been called ‘the Mona Lisa of literature’.195 At the same time as it has been praised as the greatest play ever written, it has been faulted as ‘most certainly an artistic failure’.196 The problem is the difficulty in identifying just what it is that Hamlet is actually about. Macbeth is about ambition; Antony and Cleopatra, passion; Coriolanus, pride; Othello, jealousy; King Lear, ingratitude. But Hamlet, which should have been the easiest of all to categorize, since it is on the surface at least a revenge play, eludes any such simple summary. If asked what the play is about, we can say that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius has murdered his father the king, married his mother; and thus preempted Hamlet’s succession to the throne. Hamlet must revenge his father’s death. But we will have not even touched upon the intense, complex and turbulent emotions, which spill out in some of the greatest poetry ever written. However, what makes Hamlet relevant to misogyny is the fact that one of those emotions, perhaps indeed the most powerful in the whole play, is an expression of his anger and disgust at his mother Gertrude for marrying his uncle.
Even before Hamlet is alerted to his uncle’s evil deed by the ghost of his father, we see him in a state of deep melancholy, verging on despair, because of Gertrude’s hasty remarriage. His anger at her has become generalized into a profound disgust at the world and at the human body itself, which is the subject of the first of the play’s great soliloquies, beginning (Act 1, Scene 2):
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew . . .
It is his mother’s lust that has ‘sullied’ the body and, as becomes apparent as the speech goes on, turned the world into:
. . . an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead, nay not so much, not two;
So excellent a king that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly; heaven and earth,
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on, and yet within a month –
Let me not think on’t; frailty, thy name is woman!
Hamlet’s first soliloquy reveals that he was angry with his mother even before her hasty remarriage. Gertrude’s sexual attachment to his father is regarded with revulsion, even though, given his description of his father as the very paragon of royalty, it should not be a surprise that she found him so attractive. After Gertrude loses her husband, her apparently insatiable appetite has led her into the arms of a man her son compares to a satyr – the half-man, half-goat figure of Greek myth, the very embodiment of animal lust, often represented as possessing an exaggerated penis. Hamlet’s denunciation of his mother turns into an attack on women that has become proverbial. Behind the disgust lurks the notion that once aroused, women’s sexual desires are uncontrollable.197
Later in the play, Hamlet returns to the theme of his mother’s sexual appetite as he presents her with a portrait of his father to compare to that of her current husband (Act 3, Scene 4):
You cannot call it love, for at your age
The hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble,
And waits upon the judgement, and what judgement
Would step from this to this?
Hamlet’s angry outburst continues as he nearly makes himself sick conjuring up an image of Gertrude and Claudius in bed together:
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty . . .
He expresses here a horror of human sexuality that belongs firmly to the misogynistic tradition of Christianity, and might have issued from the pen of St Augustine. But Hamlet’s anger at his mother is also provoked by her own inadequacy. She is one of the most negative female characters that Shakespeare ever created. She is not particularly wicked, nor especially cunning, nor manipulative; certainly, she is far from daring. Her rapid marriage to her dead husband’s brother is not an act of boldness by a woman defying convention, but of weakness. And in spite of what Hamlet says about her, she does not appear as a monster of lust. Indeed, her chief characteristic is her passivity. One suspects that her son has exaggerated her carnality and in doing so has revealed more about his own sexual obsessions than his mother’s.198
Ophelia, the only other woman character in the play, suffers because of Hamlet’s revulsion against female sexuality. Announcing (Act 3, Scene 2), that he no longer loves her, he tells her: ‘Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?’
What follows is one of the most famous outbursts of misogyny in literature: ‘I have heard of your paintings well enough; God hath given you one face, but you make yourselves ano
ther: you gig and amble; and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.’
Among the powerful emotions expressed in his speech, there is genuine bitterness and cruelty regarding Ophelia’s desire to be a ‘breeder of sinners’, which once more suggests a deep-seated anger at women for (according to Christian theology) perpetuating the curse of Original Sin. But we must recall that in the same speech Hamlet is trying to dupe Claudius and Polonius into believing that his unhappiness is caused by his problems with Ophelia, not with his uncle’s usurpation of the throne. That is, the most famous outburst of misogyny in literature is in fact a rhetorical exercise on Hamlet’s part, more related to his attempts to deceive his enemies than express his true feelings about Ophelia or women in general.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 15
