Unsex Me Here
Jan. 13th, 2005 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
revenaOk, I'm posting the "turned-in" version of an essay I did last semester... those of you who read the friendslocked pre-turned-in version won't find much difference, and may want to just skip it, unless you've got some weird desire to read essays of mine... And hey, if that's the case, just lemme know and I'll post my _Tristram Shandy_ masterpiece!
Anyway, this is something I wrote for my English Honors Seminar last semester. I should note, in my defense, that I was really sick and sort of high on Tylenol when I did the actual writing... I'm not very happy with it at all, mostly because I felt like I really wanted to go on after the ten page limit. So, think of it more as some interesting thinking points than a polished, final paper... I had to leave all kinds of stuff out. There's not even any theory, just a close reading of several texts... And, oh, man, how badly I wanted to read even closer yet... Where's a -twenty page- paper when you need one?
Please pretend that the formatting is correct, and that appropriate things are underlined, etc. It's so long I don't wanna edit it for LJ. Without further ado:
“Unsex Me Here”: Man-Hearted Women and the Defeminization of Violence in Drama
Robyn C. Fleming
Professor Zwinger
ENGL 495B
12/17/04
In Western culture, where stereotypical views of the feminine indicate that women are somehow naturally unfit for physical aggression, depictions of feminine violence are difficult for writers to explain. But our stories have always included the occasional violent woman, and writers have struggled since the days of the ancient Greek tragedies to account for them. One method that is extremely popular is to create a female character who is not only unfeminine in her violent approaches to life, but in other ways as well. This technique has been used throughout history by a number of notable writers, including the great Greek tragedian, Aeschylus, in his Oresteia trilogy, and William Shakespeare in Macbeth. A more modern application of this same narrative technique can be seen in Ridley Scott’s 1997 film G.I. Jane. All three of these dramas contain aggressive female characters who shed their markers of femininity, though the methods used differ, as do the results for the characters.
There are several defeminized characters in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. The first of these is Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon. Though she is not the first character on the stage in the first play of the Oresteia, Agamemnon, her importance to the narrative, as well as her dubious femininity, is indicated very early on in the prologue to the action. The Watchman, speaking from the roof of Agamemnon’s palace, tells the audience that he is on the lookout for beacon fires, and that he is meant to alert a woman (Clytemnestra) whom he describes as possessing a “male strength of heart” (Ag., 11). The intimation that there is something in Clytemnestra that is somehow male in nature is no doubt meant in a metaphorical sense, but might as well literally describe her possession of a male organ. The infamous Clytemnestra is not, for the purposes of the play, and in the understanding of the audience, fully female.
Her characterization along these lines continues neatly throughout the rest of Agamemnon. As Clytemnestra explains to the chorus of male elders how she knows that Troy has fallen (Ag., 264-350), she responds sharply to their insinuations that she is an unreliable messenger, showing a certain defiance on her part for their (male) authority. The words she chooses to defend herself and her reliability are also telling. “Am I some young girl,” she asks, “that you find my thoughts so silly?” (Ag., 277). Of course, Clytemnestra is not young. She is, in Aeschylus’s narrative, a woman grown and a mother of three. But her rhetorical question also serves as yet another indication that she might not be quite female, either. The chorus, after listening to her explanation about the beacons, supports this strange possibility, saying “[m]y lady, no man could speak with better grace” (Ag., 351), indicating that Clytemnestra is perhaps more manlike than womanlike.
Clytemnestra’s successful challenging of male authority can also be seen in her interactions with her returning husband, the famous “tapestry scene.” Clytemnestra asks Agamemnon to walk across some tapestries, exhibiting a dangerous hubris. He claims that he will not make his will “soft” for her (Ag., 932), but she is able to override his objections using an aggressive series of rapid-fire arguments. Agamemnon concedes, but questions plaintively just before giving in “[s]urely this lust for conflict is not womanlike?” (Ag., 940). Again, Clytemnestra is, if not masculine, at least not feminine. There is something in her behavior which makes her “not womanlike.”
But though there are some things about Clytemnestra which are male, and some things which are not quite female, she still clings to certain markers of femininity. In most cases, this manifests as attempts on her part to hide behind stereotypes. One such incident occurs right after Clytemnestra rudely dismisses a herald from her husband, a man she ought to have treated with respect (Ag., 598). She attempts immediately to mask her moment of aggression, which may have revealed more about her true nature than she would wish, by retreating behind a convenient stereotype. She bids the herald to take a message of her fidelity to the king, saying “[w]ith no man else have I known delight, nor any shame / of evil speech, more than I know how to temper bronze” (Ag., 611-612). She is intimating to the chorus and to the herald that she has been chaste, since a woman would not ordinarily know how to temper bronze. Aeschylus’s audience, however, would have been familiar with the myth of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and would have known that she had indeed “known delight” with another man – her husband’s cousin, Aegisthus. The intimation becomes, then, that Clytemnestra may have actually learned “how to temper bronze”, how to craft weapons and armor, something that no ordinary woman would have done.
That attempt of Clytemnestra’s to hide behind a stereotype, to show herself as a normal woman, works on the chorus and on the herald, therefore, but not on the audience. And her later, more dramatic attempt to draw her femininity around herself like a shield fails utterly. In The Libation Bearers, the second play of the Oresteia, Clytemnestra, who has become a murderess, slaying her husband and his concubine, Cassandra, is threatened by her son, Orestes, who wishes to avenge his father’s death. When she is confronted directly by Orestes, Clytemnestra once tries to cling to her outward femininity in an attempt to preserve herself, saying:
Hold, my son. Oh take pity, child, before this breast
where many a time, a drowsing baby, you would feed
and with soft gums sucked in the milk that made you strong. (896)
Clytemnestra is figuring herself as a stereotypical, nurturing mother-figure of a woman in an attempt to disguise her more defeminized and masculinized tendencies. Unfortunately for her, it does not work. The audience has already been informed by Cilissia, Orestes’s nurse, that Clytemnestra’s feelings towards her son are les than motherly (Lib., 737), and that Cilissa herself has a better claim to the mothering of Orestes. Additionally, Clytemnestra has revealed her aggressive, violent tendencies quite openly just a few lines before, saying “[b]ring me quick, somebody, an ax to kill a man” (Lib., 889), intending quite clearly to kill her son if that is what is required to save herself.
But Clytemnestra can’t have it both ways. Either she is an aggressive, violent, defeminized woman, with all of the power that that entails, or she is a female of stereotypical nurturing and tenderness. Her attempt to be both, or to appear as one while behaving like the other, fails, and she is killed for it. She is not by any means the only female character to die in the Oresteia. She herself has killed Cassandra, and the murder of her daughter, Iphigenia, by Agamemnon is mentioned. But Clytemnestra, unlike Cassandra, is reviled and scorned by those who survive her. Aeschylus no doubt conceived of the defeminization of Clytemnestra in order to explain how a woman could come to murder her husband and his concubine, the actions that result in her being so hated. If this is the case, it is natural that she should be the only defeminized female in the Oresteia – she is the only murderess.
It happens, however, that Clytemnestra is not the only defeminized female character in the Oresteia. Clytemnestra is keeping company with goddesses. One of these is Athena, who is similar to Clytemnestra in several important ways. Like Clytemnestra, she expects (and receives) the obedience of men who are under her control, as evidenced in the scene in The Eumenides where she sets up and instructs a jury for Orestes’s trial (681-710), and she would have been familiar to Aeschylus’s audience as the virgin goddess of wisdom and war, a woman unlike other women. The other goddesses with whom Clytemnestra is keeping company are the Furies, who make up the chorus in The Eumenides. The connection between Clytemnestra and the Furies is even stronger, as she links herself to the avenging goddesses in Agamemnon, claiming that she has killed her husband because he had killed their daughter (Ag., 1432-1433).
The Furies, like Clytemnestra, are described quite openly by other characters as being female and yet not female. The prologue to The Eumenides has the priestess of Apollo describing a scene inside a temple, where Orestes sits with bloodstained hands:
In front of this man slept a startling company
of women lying all upon the chairs. Or not
women, I think I call them gorgons, only
not gorgons, either, since their shape is not the same. (46-49)
These “not women” also share Clytemnestra’s violent tendencies. They make their intent to kill Orestes clear in the “song of the Furies” in lines 307-396, and when they feel their authority is challenged, they threaten to “let loose indiscriminate death” (Eum., 502).
But the Furies, and Athena, finish up the Oresteia as respected figures, and are portrayed in a positive light, whereas Clytemnestra is no more than an angry ghost. The Furies are even rewarded with a new ceremonial function, as the Eumenides, to placate them when Athena and Apollo prevent them from killing Orestes. This is because there are some key differences between Clytemnestra and the goddesses. For one, Athena shows herself to be, in her own words, “always for the male / with all my heart” (Eum., 737-738), whereas Clytemnestra behaved the way she did for her own (female) benefit, and to avenge her daughter.
Additionally, while the Furies, Athena, and Clytemnestra all gain some amount of power, influence, and the ability to do violence by giving up aspects of their femininity, only Clytemnestra attempts to retain her more stereotypical feminine attributes. The Furies seem to be perfectly content in their roles as “not women”, and Athena has, as mentioned above, thrown in her lot entirely with “the male.” It would seem that in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a female character can gain something by losing her femininity, but only if she is willing to give it up completely.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in the characters of Lady Macbeth and the Witches. The blurred line between femininity and masculinity is a staple in Shakespeare’s plays. Female characters disguise themselves as men in plays such as As You Like It, for the sake of comedy, and to move the plot along. Because of stage conventions of the time, these cross-dressing scenes would have been especially hilarious (and titillating) to an audience of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. As in the earlier Greek tragedies, all of the roles, including those of female characters, were played by male actors without exception. A man acting as a woman acting as a man certainly opens up all kinds of possibilities for comic farce.
But in Macbeth, this line is smudged even more than in other plays, and the results are not particularly humorous. Bring up the topic of gendered identities in Macbeth at a cocktail party, and the first character to spring to mind for most people will undoubtedly be the horrifying Lady Macbeth, and her famous “unsex me here” soliloquy:
…Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, no keep peace between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall… (1.5, 39-49)
The intimation here, that a woman cannot engage in violence or murder until she has been somehow “unsexed”, is quite clear. Also clear is Lady Macbeth’s abandonment of the sexual identity of a nurturing mother, in that she has offered to exchange her “milk for gall”. Shakespeare indicates that Lady Macbeth did indeed have this identity to barter, in the later lines “I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me” (1.7, 54-55), and that she is completely given over to violence when she concludes:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from it’s boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to do this. (1.7, 56-59)
That particular quote demonstrates not only Lady Macbeth’s violent tendencies, and her trading of a traditional feminine role for a defeminized state, but also, in its context, her aggressive persuasion tactics, which she uses on her husband (Clytemnestra-like) to great effect. Macbeth is so impressed with the force of her arguments in this scene, in fact, that he proclaims that she should “[b]ring forth men-children only; / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” (1.7, 72-74). Once again, there is something strangely masculine about a violent female character.
Lady Macbeth, however, like Clytemnestra in the Oresteia, ends up dead by the end of Macbeth. The more successful defeminized females in Macbeth, like those in the Oresteia, are the ones that finish the job, becoming masculine enough to lose the identities of women entirely. These are the Witches. Most female characters on Shakespeare’s stage were played by boys or very young men, so as to create as much of an illusion of femininity as possible with a slender body and a high voice. The Witches, on the other hand, might well have been played in Shakespeare’s original composition by adult men. This likelihood is indicated by the physical descriptions of the Witches as given by the other characters. For example, in act one, scene three, Banquo says “You should be women, / and yet your beards forbid me to interpret / that you are so” (45-47). It should be noted that the belief that there is something masculine about a witch was not a creation of Shakespeare’s. The 1484 publication The Malleus Maleficarum, for example, describes the ways in which witches can come into possession of male sexual organs (118-122), among other strange powers. Nonetheless, the extent of the defeminization of the Witches in Macbeth is notable.
And the Witches, less feminine than Lady Macbeth, also have more power. While she is the whisperer in Macbeth’s ear that changes the power structure of an entire kingdom, and a very powerful not-quite-woman, they can reveal or hide, and also affect, the very fates of the other characters. Lady Macbeth has limited power over the lives of only a handful of the characters in the play, but it is implied that the Witches have power over all of them, though they choose to exercise it in only a few cases.
Similarly, the character of Lt. Jordan O’Neill, in Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane, is almost completely defeminized, and ends the film significantly better off than either Clytemnestra or Lady Macbeth in their respective narratives. The character of O’Neill is introduced to the audience as a fairly feminine woman. She wears pearl earrings and eye shadow, and has long hair, which she wears in a tidy bun. Quite early in the film, though, she begins to defeminize herself, and the process continues, with the help of the other characters, until it has been completed.
“We’re not trying to change your sex, Lieutenant,” O’Neill’s commanding officer says, at one point. But it seems that that is just what is going on. O’Neill begins her metamorphosis by taking out her earrings. She wearls pearls and then gold in interviews with Senator DeHaven and her new commanding officer, Salem, but has given up on earrings by the first training sequence in the film, where she is dressed identically to her male counterparts, though, of course, the clothes fit her a bit differently. Next to go is her long, feminine hair. O’Neill shaves it off in a lengthy scene in an empty barber shop, while pop music plays in the background. At the climax of the scene, as O’Neill shaves off the last strands of hair, the pop musician in the background sings “it’s just as well, the bitch is gone.” At this point, O’Neill looks as much like the men in the training program with her as a woman is capable of doing.
She is also giving up less obvious aspects of her femininity. Over the course of the film, O’Neill moves into the male barracks, and begins using the same shower facilities as the men. She also is shown, at one point, sharing a cigar with her lover. Earlier, in a conversation with C.O. Salem, O’Neill declines to be offended by the “phallic nature” of Salem’s cigar, but claims to be offended by the “goddamn sweet smell” of it. Near the end of the film, however, she has accepted the cigar (masculinity?) entirely.
Perhaps most interesting, though it seems a very incidental point in the dialogue, is a revelation about what O’Neill that is given during a scene with the stereotypically mothering nurse-figure, Lt. Blondell. As Blondell gives O’Neill a physical check-up, she notes that O’Neill has stopped menstruating. O’Neill has clearly retained her secondary sexual characteristics (as is quite apparent in a tasteless nude shower scene), but her primary sexual organs have been called into question. Master Chief Urgayle describes her at one point (after the capture of her team during a training exercise) as having a “worthless womb,” casting further doubt on what, exactly, O’Neill’s sexual identity is. It is clear that she is no longer a woman. When O’Neill utters the line that becomes first a chant and then a toast later in the film, “[s]uck my dick!” to Urgayle, she has been so thoroughly defeminized that there may even be some concern on the part of the viewer that she might actually have one.
Ultimately, O’Neill picks up the last marker of a defeminized woman, the power of aggressive argument. In a conflict with Senator DeHaven, who warns her “[d]on't ever think of playing politics with me, little darlin', or you'll be up way past your bedtime,” she triumphs, and is able to bend the senator to her will. O’Neill may not have a gender, but she has all the power she needs.
So what does all of this really mean? Are the Oresteia, Macbeth and G.I. Jane dramas about the impossibility of aggression in stereotypically feminine women? They do seem to point at a fundamental problem in the way women are perceived and written about. In order for a female character to commit violence, or wield power for any length of time, she must first be defeminized, and, as Clytemnestra shows, she can never go back.
But it may be that there is something even broader being shown in these dramas. There are, after all, not only defeminized women in all three, but also demasculinized men. Aegisthus in the Oresteia is, according to the chorus of old men, “like a woman” (Ag., 1625), and was incapable of killing Agamemnon himself, leaving it to Clytemnestra. Malcom, in Macbeth, reveals himself to be “yet / Unknown to woman” (4.3, 125-126), which seems hardly manly in an adult man, and Macbeth himself is led into most of his actions by his wife or the Witches, calling into question his own fitness as a man. By far the best examples of ambiguously gendered men, however, comes from G.I. Jane. Royce stays home and waits for O’Neill while she essentially goes off to war, though he himself has indicated in an opening scene that there is something less than manly about that behavior. Master Chief Urgayle drinks whiskey, but it is imported Jameson. He listens to opera, and recites poetry. He also wears teeny-tiny shorts.
One of the taglines used to promote G.I. Jane when it was released, a line which flashed during the preview shown in theatres, was “[t]here are two sides to every conflict.” The film itself, of course, shows far more than two sides to what is overtly the central conflict of the narrative. DeHaven, Hayes, Urgayle, and O’Neill all have different and conflicting interests. The viewer, and the filmmakers, would like to see two sides, but it is undeniable that every issue is more complicated than that. So perhaps what the Oresteia, Macbeth and G.I. Jane are really doing is showing the failure of a binary system. It is not that Clytemnestra, Lady Macbeth and Lt. O’Neill are defeminized women. It is that the very label “feminine” (and its binary counterpart, “masculine”) has no veracity, either in life or in drama.
Works Cited
Aeschylus. Aeschylus I: Oresteia. ed. Richard Lattimore. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1953.
G.I. Jane. Dir. Ridley Scott. Hollywood Pictures, 1997.
Kramer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. Montague
Summers. New York: Dover, 1971.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Signet
Classic, 1998.
Anyway, this is something I wrote for my English Honors Seminar last semester. I should note, in my defense, that I was really sick and sort of high on Tylenol when I did the actual writing... I'm not very happy with it at all, mostly because I felt like I really wanted to go on after the ten page limit. So, think of it more as some interesting thinking points than a polished, final paper... I had to leave all kinds of stuff out. There's not even any theory, just a close reading of several texts... And, oh, man, how badly I wanted to read even closer yet... Where's a -twenty page- paper when you need one?
Please pretend that the formatting is correct, and that appropriate things are underlined, etc. It's so long I don't wanna edit it for LJ. Without further ado:
“Unsex Me Here”: Man-Hearted Women and the Defeminization of Violence in Drama
Robyn C. Fleming
Professor Zwinger
ENGL 495B
12/17/04
In Western culture, where stereotypical views of the feminine indicate that women are somehow naturally unfit for physical aggression, depictions of feminine violence are difficult for writers to explain. But our stories have always included the occasional violent woman, and writers have struggled since the days of the ancient Greek tragedies to account for them. One method that is extremely popular is to create a female character who is not only unfeminine in her violent approaches to life, but in other ways as well. This technique has been used throughout history by a number of notable writers, including the great Greek tragedian, Aeschylus, in his Oresteia trilogy, and William Shakespeare in Macbeth. A more modern application of this same narrative technique can be seen in Ridley Scott’s 1997 film G.I. Jane. All three of these dramas contain aggressive female characters who shed their markers of femininity, though the methods used differ, as do the results for the characters.
There are several defeminized characters in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. The first of these is Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon. Though she is not the first character on the stage in the first play of the Oresteia, Agamemnon, her importance to the narrative, as well as her dubious femininity, is indicated very early on in the prologue to the action. The Watchman, speaking from the roof of Agamemnon’s palace, tells the audience that he is on the lookout for beacon fires, and that he is meant to alert a woman (Clytemnestra) whom he describes as possessing a “male strength of heart” (Ag., 11). The intimation that there is something in Clytemnestra that is somehow male in nature is no doubt meant in a metaphorical sense, but might as well literally describe her possession of a male organ. The infamous Clytemnestra is not, for the purposes of the play, and in the understanding of the audience, fully female.
Her characterization along these lines continues neatly throughout the rest of Agamemnon. As Clytemnestra explains to the chorus of male elders how she knows that Troy has fallen (Ag., 264-350), she responds sharply to their insinuations that she is an unreliable messenger, showing a certain defiance on her part for their (male) authority. The words she chooses to defend herself and her reliability are also telling. “Am I some young girl,” she asks, “that you find my thoughts so silly?” (Ag., 277). Of course, Clytemnestra is not young. She is, in Aeschylus’s narrative, a woman grown and a mother of three. But her rhetorical question also serves as yet another indication that she might not be quite female, either. The chorus, after listening to her explanation about the beacons, supports this strange possibility, saying “[m]y lady, no man could speak with better grace” (Ag., 351), indicating that Clytemnestra is perhaps more manlike than womanlike.
Clytemnestra’s successful challenging of male authority can also be seen in her interactions with her returning husband, the famous “tapestry scene.” Clytemnestra asks Agamemnon to walk across some tapestries, exhibiting a dangerous hubris. He claims that he will not make his will “soft” for her (Ag., 932), but she is able to override his objections using an aggressive series of rapid-fire arguments. Agamemnon concedes, but questions plaintively just before giving in “[s]urely this lust for conflict is not womanlike?” (Ag., 940). Again, Clytemnestra is, if not masculine, at least not feminine. There is something in her behavior which makes her “not womanlike.”
But though there are some things about Clytemnestra which are male, and some things which are not quite female, she still clings to certain markers of femininity. In most cases, this manifests as attempts on her part to hide behind stereotypes. One such incident occurs right after Clytemnestra rudely dismisses a herald from her husband, a man she ought to have treated with respect (Ag., 598). She attempts immediately to mask her moment of aggression, which may have revealed more about her true nature than she would wish, by retreating behind a convenient stereotype. She bids the herald to take a message of her fidelity to the king, saying “[w]ith no man else have I known delight, nor any shame / of evil speech, more than I know how to temper bronze” (Ag., 611-612). She is intimating to the chorus and to the herald that she has been chaste, since a woman would not ordinarily know how to temper bronze. Aeschylus’s audience, however, would have been familiar with the myth of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and would have known that she had indeed “known delight” with another man – her husband’s cousin, Aegisthus. The intimation becomes, then, that Clytemnestra may have actually learned “how to temper bronze”, how to craft weapons and armor, something that no ordinary woman would have done.
That attempt of Clytemnestra’s to hide behind a stereotype, to show herself as a normal woman, works on the chorus and on the herald, therefore, but not on the audience. And her later, more dramatic attempt to draw her femininity around herself like a shield fails utterly. In The Libation Bearers, the second play of the Oresteia, Clytemnestra, who has become a murderess, slaying her husband and his concubine, Cassandra, is threatened by her son, Orestes, who wishes to avenge his father’s death. When she is confronted directly by Orestes, Clytemnestra once tries to cling to her outward femininity in an attempt to preserve herself, saying:
Hold, my son. Oh take pity, child, before this breast
where many a time, a drowsing baby, you would feed
and with soft gums sucked in the milk that made you strong. (896)
Clytemnestra is figuring herself as a stereotypical, nurturing mother-figure of a woman in an attempt to disguise her more defeminized and masculinized tendencies. Unfortunately for her, it does not work. The audience has already been informed by Cilissia, Orestes’s nurse, that Clytemnestra’s feelings towards her son are les than motherly (Lib., 737), and that Cilissa herself has a better claim to the mothering of Orestes. Additionally, Clytemnestra has revealed her aggressive, violent tendencies quite openly just a few lines before, saying “[b]ring me quick, somebody, an ax to kill a man” (Lib., 889), intending quite clearly to kill her son if that is what is required to save herself.
But Clytemnestra can’t have it both ways. Either she is an aggressive, violent, defeminized woman, with all of the power that that entails, or she is a female of stereotypical nurturing and tenderness. Her attempt to be both, or to appear as one while behaving like the other, fails, and she is killed for it. She is not by any means the only female character to die in the Oresteia. She herself has killed Cassandra, and the murder of her daughter, Iphigenia, by Agamemnon is mentioned. But Clytemnestra, unlike Cassandra, is reviled and scorned by those who survive her. Aeschylus no doubt conceived of the defeminization of Clytemnestra in order to explain how a woman could come to murder her husband and his concubine, the actions that result in her being so hated. If this is the case, it is natural that she should be the only defeminized female in the Oresteia – she is the only murderess.
It happens, however, that Clytemnestra is not the only defeminized female character in the Oresteia. Clytemnestra is keeping company with goddesses. One of these is Athena, who is similar to Clytemnestra in several important ways. Like Clytemnestra, she expects (and receives) the obedience of men who are under her control, as evidenced in the scene in The Eumenides where she sets up and instructs a jury for Orestes’s trial (681-710), and she would have been familiar to Aeschylus’s audience as the virgin goddess of wisdom and war, a woman unlike other women. The other goddesses with whom Clytemnestra is keeping company are the Furies, who make up the chorus in The Eumenides. The connection between Clytemnestra and the Furies is even stronger, as she links herself to the avenging goddesses in Agamemnon, claiming that she has killed her husband because he had killed their daughter (Ag., 1432-1433).
The Furies, like Clytemnestra, are described quite openly by other characters as being female and yet not female. The prologue to The Eumenides has the priestess of Apollo describing a scene inside a temple, where Orestes sits with bloodstained hands:
In front of this man slept a startling company
of women lying all upon the chairs. Or not
women, I think I call them gorgons, only
not gorgons, either, since their shape is not the same. (46-49)
These “not women” also share Clytemnestra’s violent tendencies. They make their intent to kill Orestes clear in the “song of the Furies” in lines 307-396, and when they feel their authority is challenged, they threaten to “let loose indiscriminate death” (Eum., 502).
But the Furies, and Athena, finish up the Oresteia as respected figures, and are portrayed in a positive light, whereas Clytemnestra is no more than an angry ghost. The Furies are even rewarded with a new ceremonial function, as the Eumenides, to placate them when Athena and Apollo prevent them from killing Orestes. This is because there are some key differences between Clytemnestra and the goddesses. For one, Athena shows herself to be, in her own words, “always for the male / with all my heart” (Eum., 737-738), whereas Clytemnestra behaved the way she did for her own (female) benefit, and to avenge her daughter.
Additionally, while the Furies, Athena, and Clytemnestra all gain some amount of power, influence, and the ability to do violence by giving up aspects of their femininity, only Clytemnestra attempts to retain her more stereotypical feminine attributes. The Furies seem to be perfectly content in their roles as “not women”, and Athena has, as mentioned above, thrown in her lot entirely with “the male.” It would seem that in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a female character can gain something by losing her femininity, but only if she is willing to give it up completely.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in the characters of Lady Macbeth and the Witches. The blurred line between femininity and masculinity is a staple in Shakespeare’s plays. Female characters disguise themselves as men in plays such as As You Like It, for the sake of comedy, and to move the plot along. Because of stage conventions of the time, these cross-dressing scenes would have been especially hilarious (and titillating) to an audience of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. As in the earlier Greek tragedies, all of the roles, including those of female characters, were played by male actors without exception. A man acting as a woman acting as a man certainly opens up all kinds of possibilities for comic farce.
But in Macbeth, this line is smudged even more than in other plays, and the results are not particularly humorous. Bring up the topic of gendered identities in Macbeth at a cocktail party, and the first character to spring to mind for most people will undoubtedly be the horrifying Lady Macbeth, and her famous “unsex me here” soliloquy:
…Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, no keep peace between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall… (1.5, 39-49)
The intimation here, that a woman cannot engage in violence or murder until she has been somehow “unsexed”, is quite clear. Also clear is Lady Macbeth’s abandonment of the sexual identity of a nurturing mother, in that she has offered to exchange her “milk for gall”. Shakespeare indicates that Lady Macbeth did indeed have this identity to barter, in the later lines “I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me” (1.7, 54-55), and that she is completely given over to violence when she concludes:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from it’s boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to do this. (1.7, 56-59)
That particular quote demonstrates not only Lady Macbeth’s violent tendencies, and her trading of a traditional feminine role for a defeminized state, but also, in its context, her aggressive persuasion tactics, which she uses on her husband (Clytemnestra-like) to great effect. Macbeth is so impressed with the force of her arguments in this scene, in fact, that he proclaims that she should “[b]ring forth men-children only; / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” (1.7, 72-74). Once again, there is something strangely masculine about a violent female character.
Lady Macbeth, however, like Clytemnestra in the Oresteia, ends up dead by the end of Macbeth. The more successful defeminized females in Macbeth, like those in the Oresteia, are the ones that finish the job, becoming masculine enough to lose the identities of women entirely. These are the Witches. Most female characters on Shakespeare’s stage were played by boys or very young men, so as to create as much of an illusion of femininity as possible with a slender body and a high voice. The Witches, on the other hand, might well have been played in Shakespeare’s original composition by adult men. This likelihood is indicated by the physical descriptions of the Witches as given by the other characters. For example, in act one, scene three, Banquo says “You should be women, / and yet your beards forbid me to interpret / that you are so” (45-47). It should be noted that the belief that there is something masculine about a witch was not a creation of Shakespeare’s. The 1484 publication The Malleus Maleficarum, for example, describes the ways in which witches can come into possession of male sexual organs (118-122), among other strange powers. Nonetheless, the extent of the defeminization of the Witches in Macbeth is notable.
And the Witches, less feminine than Lady Macbeth, also have more power. While she is the whisperer in Macbeth’s ear that changes the power structure of an entire kingdom, and a very powerful not-quite-woman, they can reveal or hide, and also affect, the very fates of the other characters. Lady Macbeth has limited power over the lives of only a handful of the characters in the play, but it is implied that the Witches have power over all of them, though they choose to exercise it in only a few cases.
Similarly, the character of Lt. Jordan O’Neill, in Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane, is almost completely defeminized, and ends the film significantly better off than either Clytemnestra or Lady Macbeth in their respective narratives. The character of O’Neill is introduced to the audience as a fairly feminine woman. She wears pearl earrings and eye shadow, and has long hair, which she wears in a tidy bun. Quite early in the film, though, she begins to defeminize herself, and the process continues, with the help of the other characters, until it has been completed.
“We’re not trying to change your sex, Lieutenant,” O’Neill’s commanding officer says, at one point. But it seems that that is just what is going on. O’Neill begins her metamorphosis by taking out her earrings. She wearls pearls and then gold in interviews with Senator DeHaven and her new commanding officer, Salem, but has given up on earrings by the first training sequence in the film, where she is dressed identically to her male counterparts, though, of course, the clothes fit her a bit differently. Next to go is her long, feminine hair. O’Neill shaves it off in a lengthy scene in an empty barber shop, while pop music plays in the background. At the climax of the scene, as O’Neill shaves off the last strands of hair, the pop musician in the background sings “it’s just as well, the bitch is gone.” At this point, O’Neill looks as much like the men in the training program with her as a woman is capable of doing.
She is also giving up less obvious aspects of her femininity. Over the course of the film, O’Neill moves into the male barracks, and begins using the same shower facilities as the men. She also is shown, at one point, sharing a cigar with her lover. Earlier, in a conversation with C.O. Salem, O’Neill declines to be offended by the “phallic nature” of Salem’s cigar, but claims to be offended by the “goddamn sweet smell” of it. Near the end of the film, however, she has accepted the cigar (masculinity?) entirely.
Perhaps most interesting, though it seems a very incidental point in the dialogue, is a revelation about what O’Neill that is given during a scene with the stereotypically mothering nurse-figure, Lt. Blondell. As Blondell gives O’Neill a physical check-up, she notes that O’Neill has stopped menstruating. O’Neill has clearly retained her secondary sexual characteristics (as is quite apparent in a tasteless nude shower scene), but her primary sexual organs have been called into question. Master Chief Urgayle describes her at one point (after the capture of her team during a training exercise) as having a “worthless womb,” casting further doubt on what, exactly, O’Neill’s sexual identity is. It is clear that she is no longer a woman. When O’Neill utters the line that becomes first a chant and then a toast later in the film, “[s]uck my dick!” to Urgayle, she has been so thoroughly defeminized that there may even be some concern on the part of the viewer that she might actually have one.
Ultimately, O’Neill picks up the last marker of a defeminized woman, the power of aggressive argument. In a conflict with Senator DeHaven, who warns her “[d]on't ever think of playing politics with me, little darlin', or you'll be up way past your bedtime,” she triumphs, and is able to bend the senator to her will. O’Neill may not have a gender, but she has all the power she needs.
So what does all of this really mean? Are the Oresteia, Macbeth and G.I. Jane dramas about the impossibility of aggression in stereotypically feminine women? They do seem to point at a fundamental problem in the way women are perceived and written about. In order for a female character to commit violence, or wield power for any length of time, she must first be defeminized, and, as Clytemnestra shows, she can never go back.
But it may be that there is something even broader being shown in these dramas. There are, after all, not only defeminized women in all three, but also demasculinized men. Aegisthus in the Oresteia is, according to the chorus of old men, “like a woman” (Ag., 1625), and was incapable of killing Agamemnon himself, leaving it to Clytemnestra. Malcom, in Macbeth, reveals himself to be “yet / Unknown to woman” (4.3, 125-126), which seems hardly manly in an adult man, and Macbeth himself is led into most of his actions by his wife or the Witches, calling into question his own fitness as a man. By far the best examples of ambiguously gendered men, however, comes from G.I. Jane. Royce stays home and waits for O’Neill while she essentially goes off to war, though he himself has indicated in an opening scene that there is something less than manly about that behavior. Master Chief Urgayle drinks whiskey, but it is imported Jameson. He listens to opera, and recites poetry. He also wears teeny-tiny shorts.
One of the taglines used to promote G.I. Jane when it was released, a line which flashed during the preview shown in theatres, was “[t]here are two sides to every conflict.” The film itself, of course, shows far more than two sides to what is overtly the central conflict of the narrative. DeHaven, Hayes, Urgayle, and O’Neill all have different and conflicting interests. The viewer, and the filmmakers, would like to see two sides, but it is undeniable that every issue is more complicated than that. So perhaps what the Oresteia, Macbeth and G.I. Jane are really doing is showing the failure of a binary system. It is not that Clytemnestra, Lady Macbeth and Lt. O’Neill are defeminized women. It is that the very label “feminine” (and its binary counterpart, “masculine”) has no veracity, either in life or in drama.
Works Cited
Aeschylus. Aeschylus I: Oresteia. ed. Richard Lattimore. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1953.
G.I. Jane. Dir. Ridley Scott. Hollywood Pictures, 1997.
Kramer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. Montague
Summers. New York: Dover, 1971.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Signet
Classic, 1998.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-25 07:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-25 09:25 pm (UTC)Good lord, yes. I hadn't really even begun to dip my toes into gender studies when I wrote that paper, but at the time it was clear to me nonetheless that what I was trying to get at is a lot larger and more all-encompassing than the texts I was examining. I'm sorta poking at the edges of gender with my undergraduate thesis that I'm working on right now, but, as is usual even for very large papers, after a while you just have to accept that things are gonna get left out... Perhaps the next big project I tackle will be more overtly about binary gendered systems. I find constructions of gender eternally fascinating.
If you haven't read it already, I suspect you'd enjoy reading Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein. I had it assigned for a lesbian and gay literature class this semester, and found it very interesting and, in many ways, enlightening. I had been fumbling around trying to express my dissatisfaction with binary gender, before (like in the paper above), but I didn't really realise what I was doing until after I read Bornstein's book.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-25 10:19 pm (UTC)