Free Tempest Essays: The Significance of Cross-dressing Tempest essays

The Tempest: The Significance of Cross-dressing

Echoes of both The Tempest and Marivaux's complicated comedy Triumph of Love sound in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The action of this play begins shortly after a damaging tempest shipwrecks the heroine, casting her upon foreign shores. Upon arrival in this strange seaport, Viola--like the Princess Leonide--dons male disguise which facilitates both employment and time enough to orient herself in this unfamiliar territory.

Viola's transvestism functions as emblematic of the antic nature of Illyrian society. As contemporary feminist and Shakespearean scholars are quick to point out, cross-dressing foregrounds not only the concept of role playing (a common practice during Twelfth Night revels) and thus the constructed or performative nature of gender but also the machinations of power. Viola can only make her way in this alien land if she assumes the trappings--and with these garments the--privileges of masculinity. Her doublet and hose act as her passport and provide her with a livelihood, a love interest, and friendship (just as Leonide's breeches allow her passage into Hermocrate's garden).

Viola's male masquerade also calls attention to the more general theme of masking. As Cesario, Viola suggests that things are not always as they seem, that identities are protean, that self-deception rivals self-knowledge and that only Time can untie complicated "knots." Coppelia Kahn points out that the cross-dressing in Twelfth Night forces the audience to "conceive of novel and conflicting ways in which sexual identity might be detached from personal identity; we are cut loose from our habitual assumption that the two are inextricable, that the person is defined by his or her sex. In effect, we experience that state of radical identity-confusion typical of adolescence, when the differences between the sexes are as fluid as their desires for each other."5 Gender identity might well be perceived as fluid in this play, for Viola does not simply impersonate a man but a eunuch, a persona that provides access to the even more compelling privileges of androgyny, as her liminal sexual identity exposes the limitations of masculinity and femininity and allows her to move beyond gender.

Just as Viola permeates gender boundaries, Olivia, Toby, Orsino, and Malvolio's love interests lead them across class lines--another example of the ways in which standards are relaxed or social codes reversed during Twelfth Night. Olivia spurns the love of her social equal Orsino (who many critics find to be more in love with love than he is with the "marble-breasted tyrant") and lights instead on the Duke's page. Sir Toby admires Olivia's waiting-gentlewoman Maria rather than favor an aristocratic matron, Orsino is perhaps too fond of his servant Cesario and Malvolio dreams of marrying Olivia. Significantly, it is only the steward's love that is regarded as "illegitimate" or forbiddingly transgressive while the upper-class individuals are permitted to indulge their socially illicit desire. Elliot Krieger argues that "Ultimately, there is no fundamental difference between Malvolio's fantasy of narcissistic withdrawal into a world in which he can be Count Malvolio . . . and Orsino's narcissistic withdrawal into the Petrarchan conventions and the beds of flowers."6

While Malvolio and Olivia's class status does not change within the course of the play, the social indiscretions made by the others are exonerated as Viola and Sebastian, whose blood--Orsino tells us--is "right noble," usurp the illegitimate prerogative of Cesario, and Maria is rewarded by the ruling class (who claim Toby only nominally) for her clever schemes by being allowed to rise in stature as she becomes the Knight's wife. Such ameliorating reversals are just as much a part of Illyria as its carnivalesque atmosphere. For while it is true that in this place conventional prescriptions are momentarily subverted, order does seem to emerge out of chaos. Northrop Frye explains that Illyria, like Belmont in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, is a metaphoric Green World where events are transferred from the "normal" world to an environment where dreams are realized, fantasies are worked out and lessons are learned.7 Again, Viola's experience proves representative as Illyria transforms her from woman to man to "Orsino's mistress" and joyfully enables her to live out the rest of her life in an earthly Elysium.

1- See "Introduction" to Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987) 1-3.

2- Anne Barton, "Twelfth Night," The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. g. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974) 404.

3- Ibid.

4- Bloom 1.

5- Coppelia Kahn, "Choosing the Right Mate in Twelfth Night," Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987) 43. For further discussion on renaissance gender performance and identity politics among Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroines, see Michael Shapiro's Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: The University of MIchigan Press, 1994).

6- Elliot Krieger, "Malvolio and Class Ideology in Twelfth Night," Modern Critical Interpretation, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea HousePublishers, 1987) 24.

7- J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik, "In troduction," The Arden Shakespeare: Twelfth Night , ed. Lothian and Craik (New York: Routledge, 1991) lvi.