Of Beauty and Blood: Revisiting Renaissance Shakespearean Tragic Women

Of Beauty and Blood: Revisiting Renaissance Shakespearean Tragic Women Rawan G. Agha “ The Woman is Perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment.” - Sylvia Plath Abstract This paper aims to revisit two of William Shakespeare’s works: Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet in order to provide a feminist reading which examines his female characters further. As a Renaissance playwright, Shakespeare is fascinated by adding classical Greek elements in his own work; thus, he believes that tragedy is the epitome of literature and that beauty is to be idolized and sometimes feared. Combining both attributes, Shakespeare seems to be bewitched by killing most of his fair characters, especially women; to crown them as more impeccable, beautiful, and tragic. Using the concept of “angel of death,” first scored by Alexander Welsh and further explained by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, this paper inspects and discusses the repetitive dramatized death of Shakespeare’s most prominent beautiful female figures: Juliet and Ophelia. Just as the Romans were often known as Greek imitators, the writers and artists of the Renaissance took a big interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture. Therefore, the Renaissance came to be known as an era of revival, one that is influenced by the Greeks and Romans. The Renaissance authors understood that classical texts focus on human decisions and feelings rather than unquestioningly following the rules set forth by the Catholic Church. The human’s actions and faults moved the plot, rather the pre-destined plots that had made every work of literature a manuscript of God’s plan. Renaissance literature is characterized by humanist themes and a return to classical ideals of tragedy and comedy. Shakespeare's works are great examples of this; his works embrace themes like human agency, life's non-religious meanings, and the true nature of man. Literature’s real intention is to dulce et utile, to entertain and teach. These were the words that Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 BCE–8 BCE ), more commonly known as Horace, has used to describe the sublime nature of literature. His words are considered an immaculate precise example of how the Greeks and Romans view literature. The Greek theatre likely sprang from the lyrical performance of ancient epic poetry and the rituals performed in the worship of the Dionysus, the god of theater and wine. From the 6th century BCE, Greek tragedy plays were performed in open-air theatres at religious festivals and this format would lead to the new genre of Greek comedy plays. Ancient Greek mythology, when it came to displays of male importance and power in the patriarchy, upheld the prominence of men’s positions in the community over the harsh attitude towards women. Greek myths were full of double standards for men and women, with men clearly getting the benefit of the doubt in most situations (Meehan 4). In most stories, female characters, humans and demi-goddesses, end up either dead or cursed. The examples include Daphne who almost died, turned into a plant, to escape the lustful Apollo, Euridice, who has lost her life to a snake and had to move to the underworld on her wedding day, and Medusa, who has been turned into a monster as a result of the gods’ vengefulness. Another common quality these women have shared is their physical beauty, as told by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Another repetitive narrative in Greek myth is the death of beautiful young men who happen to hold some feminine qualities. Adonis’ gift of beauty has ended his normal life, so did Narcissus’ splendor. Beauty is a quality that is often related to a sense of womanhood, or goddess-hood, but rarely to manhood in Greek myth. Therefore, the greatest gods were great because Zeus has been described as “master strategist,” Poseidon as “encircler of Earth,” and Hades as “stern and pitiless” (Homer 7, 14, 16). Thus, beauty seems to only belong to femininity; and femininity to death. Shakespeare’s mythopoetic imagination was fired by the Greeks; he incorporated numerous plots, themes, dramaturgy, allusions, tropes, allegory, and words taken from the Greek canon. Shakespeare has obviously read, studied, and mastered classical Greek Tragedy and Comedy. He has adapted many elements of Athenian plays to enhance his own. He excelled in leaving his audience in awe after his catastrophic and tragic ending. However, he has used wit and comedy as subplots to offer the audience comic relief. Such infatuation with the Greeks did not only influence the genres and the structure of Shakespeare’s works, but it has also seeped into the way he portrayed his character’s ill-fated destiny, especially that of his female characters: Juliet and Ophelia. In their canonical article “Madwoman in the Attic,” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss Alexander Welsh’s concept of the “angel of death.” Welsh analyzes how a spiritualized heroine “assists in the translation of the dying to a future state,” also by maternally welcoming the sufferer “from the other side of death” (Gilbert and Gubar 24). The two feminist critics believe that women who possess an unearthly quality, extraordinary beauty, and a sense of rebellion in this paper’s case, are already dead. These female characters resemble a spiritual messenger, an interpreter of mysteries to wondering and devoted men, finally become a messenger of the mystical otherness of death. Not only ministering to the dying, these angels, who lure men with their physical beauty or rebel against society, actually bring death. It’s the male author’s “duty” to release the reader’s dramatic sense of catharsis by displaying the angelic purity of the heroines, the dead ones. On the realistic everyday-life scale, death repents all sins: one compliments the dead despite their mistakes. Male authors display the same ideology by killing their female characters to present them as saint-like, pure, and redeemable. The aesthetical print on a dead beautiful woman brings out her “passiveness” back; a woman is no longer passionate, loud, strong-willed, nor unbending. She finally meets the portrayed expectations of a beautiful woman: she is silent, obedient, beautiful, and pure. Hence, one can assume that most male authors kill their female characters to perfect and refine them to meet a certain societal standard. However, they decide to kill most of their male characters as just a consequence of their mistakes and hamartia. Writers kill their female characters for breaking social norms but kill their male characters when they are sinners, traitors, or warriors. William Shakespeare, as a Renaissance writer, is fully aware of the socially accepted views on women. The Renaissance woman is expected to be a daughter and then a wife, mother, or widow. In contrast, male roles were generally defined by social position or occupation: merchant, knight, priest, peasant, etc. In upper-class societies, women were allowed to have a share in the family’s estate. However, upper-class women had less freedom and individual sovereignty in contrast to peasants and lower-class women (Camden). Thus, Men basically functioned as the ruling voice over all aspects of society; “all forms of public and domestic authority in Elizabethan England were vested in men: in fathers, husbands, masters, teachers, preachers, magistrates, [and] lords” (Montrose 68). Conversely, such empowerment was denied to women as they had virtually no control over their role in society. The most honorable life for the renaissance man included not only scholarly activity, but also political and public service. This life was impossible for women because for a woman, “a public reputation was dishonorable, a sure sign of immorality and scandal” (Wiesner 12). The only thing the Renaissance woman was expected to be known for is her physical beauty. Women, therefore, were often only valued for their physical features. The beauty of a woman is more praised and esteemed than any other beauty; “for it appears to be the order of nature that what is lacking in one sex is supplied in the other, and since man is endowed with wit, judgment, and a mind almost divine, a woman is given bodily beauty that she may be superior to man in this respect” (Camden 20). Women were deprived of the right to be seen for any worth other than their outer beauty. However, they were valued for qualities that would define them as submissive and passive. A woman’s character should consist of specific attributions such as chastity, modesty, humility, temperance, patience, and kindness. A woman must be silent most of the time and not speak out or argue, “she must never be witty or clever” (Dunn 17). It becomes quite obvious that the value of women during the Renaissance was almost opposite to that of men. Therefore, when Shakespearean heroines possessed passion, strongwellness, and madness, they are to be punished or redeemed and purified by death. Thus, unlike their Greek and Roman counterparts, in which murder is a woman’s crime and counts as one of the model feminine atrocities, the women of Early modern English tragedy tended to kill only themselves (Beehler 3). One cannot, for sure, speak for Shakespeare about the feminist ideologies and tendencies that he may have possessed; it is arguable and disputed. However, one can argue whether Shakespeare killed his female characters to support women with unconventional traits by evoking the catharsis of his audience or to punish them for atrophying and escaping the Renaissance’s gender roles. Allison Findlay, a specialist in feminist approaches to Shakespeare, has advanced an argument that the Renaissance tragedy is a “female genre” because, among other reasons, it violates the law of the father, resists patriarchy, and promotes insubordination (Findlay 86). Such suggestion may portray Shakespeare as a progressive renaissance writer and a women-supporter; thus, he tends to kill his female characters to portray them in an angelic light that evokes people’s catharsis and stir their emotions. Hence, people would be more accepting and understanding of such rebellious and controversial behaviors, which are usually condemned in Renaissance society. However, Jodi Mikalachki’s account of the early Britain, in her book The Legacy of Boadicea Gender and Nation in Early Modern England, suggests that scholars and writers of early modern English have a romanticized culture of the warrior man and the passive woman; they have tended to advocate for and accept the misogynist model that molds the “perfect woman” into chastity, silence, and obedience (Mikalachki). The early modern English culture refused, dismissed, and demolished the behavior of “unruly women” and it was seen as a violation of the divine ordinance based on obedience. Criticizing and mocking such ideology have become very common in the scription of feminist critical theories. Regarding this as Shakespeare’s true intention would suggest that his authority over the lives of his female characters’ fates is a reflection of a misogynistic phallocentric and traditional mentality, which matches the ideas of his age. In that sense, the death of Shakespearean tragic heroines would resemble a punishment that strips the physically beautiful woman from the “unruliness” which ruins and spoils her beauty. One of the most prominent Shakespearean female martyrs is Juliet Capulet from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Juliet, throughout the play, is marked by her otherworldly beauty. Romeo himself described her as ethereally beautiful, and hence, he fell in love with her. ROMEO: Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear! Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night. (IV. 47, 53) From the very beginning, Juliet’s beauty is highlighted, which matches the renaissance point of view on how women’s beauty is the most graceful among wonders. It is what makes them loveworthy, charming, and alluring. Juliet’s loveliness positions her as unearthly; this sense of inhumanness and mystic already moves her closer to the realm of the dead rather than those who are alive. This is foreshadowed in Romeo’s words that the beauty of Juliet is too dear for this Earth and too rich to be put in use. Reflecting this on Gubar’s and Gilbert’s “Mad Woman in the Attic,” Juliet’s extraordinary beauty, one that resembles angels, makes her belong to the side of death, but not totally alive. Gilbert and Gubar continue by saying that “if the angel-woman in some curious way simultaneously inhabits both this world and the next, then there is a sense in which, besides ministering to the dying, she is herself already dead” (Gilbert&Gubar 29). Thus, since Juliet’s beauty is perceived as a reflection of the divine, it takes some of her humanness away. According to the Renaissance’s doctrine, a sense of alliance between physical beauty and inner goodness in women is revealed and expected. However, such disobedience and evocative sensuality shatter the idea that the physical beauty of the woman is a reflection of virtue. Therefore, when Juliet’s beauty was used to lure Romeo, although described as most angelic, declares her a fallen woman according to the perspective of the Elizabethan society. While appearing quiet and obedient, Juliet displays inner strength, intelligence, bravery, wit, and independence. What announces Juliet’s beauty lacking in virtue lies in her rebellion against her family, her intense desire to become a lover, and that sense of infidelity as she chose to become enamored by the offspring of the enemy. With the societal disapproval, that outcasts her, due to her being an explicit sexual self that seduces men and a traitor to her father and family, Juliet takes another step towards the realm of the dead. ROMEO: For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes This vault a feasting presence full of light. (V.iii.85–86). Juliet’s death, feigned or not, seems to have an aesthetical power over people. She is still romanticized, eroticized, and purified in her death. The erotic power of breath is often linked to imminent death and its early modern associations with orgasm, sensuality, and intimacy. Looking at the lifeless body of Juliet, Romeo laments that death “hath suck’d the honey of thy breath” (Act 5.3.92). Juliet is carried to church in her best attire with her ‘bridal flowers’ of rosemary. The association between death and the bride suggests a strong sexual connotation: Death is blamed for "deflowering" such a virgin beauty. Therefore, death could not spoil or ruin her physical beauty; however, death managed to purify her of her “unwanted” qualities that she would have been criticized for if she were alive. The renaissance society would consider the living Juliet a naïve, silly, fallen, disobedient woman. However, the dead Juliet is romanticized into a more angel-like creature who possesses a misfortunate dainty physical beauty. Ophelia, a character in the Shakespearean drama, Hamlet, also possesses the same daintiness and beauty as Juliet. Among the Shakespearean female characters, Ophelia is known as the epitome of femininity and the symbol of purity. Ophelia is, for many scholars and nonscholars alike, the tragic, pitiful creature who drowns herself towards the end. The beautiful maiden gets immortalized in Sir John Everett Millais’s painting. Unlike Juliet, Ophelia is a minor character most often remembered for going mad and doling out flowers. However, Ophelia has possessed the same miraculous otherworldly beauty that brought her misfortune. From the very beginning, she is described as a beautiful virgin, obedient daughter, and the perfect fit to wed a prince. Ophelia's beauty takes a transitional form: as she transforms from the perfect image of a renaissance virtuous maiden to a madwoman whose beauty is flawed and corrupted by madness, then to a corpse surrounded by "fantastic garlands." There was a common cultural association between female speech and female promiscuity; this resulted in many women being branded harlots and whores (DiGangi 264). This ideology encouraged suppressing women’s speech, and therefore their thoughts and actions. Such restrictions on women helped control their sexual licentiousness and maintain the social order of a male-dominated society. Women’s unwanted speech was considered a symptom of female insanity, which in turn created an inferred correlation between madness and sexuality. Therefore, when the lovely, biddable, and silent Ophelia started speaking out of “madness,” she transformed from a symbol of purity to an emblem of vulgar sexual explicitness. From the very start, Hamlet tells Ophelia that if she is both virtuous and beautiful, her virtue should not come into contact with her beauty, as if her beauty might corrupt her virtue. HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty. OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? HAMLET: Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once. (III.1, 6) At first, Ophelia seems to convince Hamlet of the traditional Renaissance idea that beauty and virtue do come together. However, as her mental state deteriorates due to the pressure imposed on her by oppressive patriarchy, Ophelia’s madness is initially linked to the loss of her lover or the loss of her virginity. Madness was the predicted outcome for a young female experiencing a loss of love. This blanket idea illuminates the demeaning patriarchy of the time: women are too frail to handle their emotions, specifically a loss of love. As Elaine Showalter says “ Clinically speaking, Ophelia’s behavior and appearance [in her mad state] are characteristic of the malady the Elizabethans would have diagnosed as female love-melancholy, or erotomania. Women’s melancholy was seen as biological and emotional in origins” (Showalter 225). Therefore, in the ideology of the Renaissance man, Ophelia’s beauty brought her madness, her madness announced her as a fallen woman, and this has caused her death. Reflecting on Robert Welsh’s “Angel of Death,” Ophelia’s extraordinary beauty, honesty, and madness were a stairway to her calamitous death. Despite looking like a beautiful nymph surrounded by flowers, Ophelia’s death has a paradoxical effect on people. Some, like Gertrude and Laertes, compare Ophelia’s dead body to a sleeping angel whose flesh is unpolluted. GERTRUDE: Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid-like awhile, they bore her up. Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and endued unto that element. (Act 4.7.147-158) The image of Ophelia that Gertrude proposes is that Ophelia’s beauty is one of nymphs or mermaids; she fits in so well with this nature as if she belonged there: as if it were her home. This shows how the otherworldly beauty of Ophelia does not match one of the human beings, or the living, therefore, she is closer to death than life. Ophelia’s corpse is also eroticized when Gertrude throws in the flowers, she hoped to have used for the wedding bed, and both Hamlet and Laertes leap into the grave (Act5.1.244–60). Laertes proposes and personifies the suggested idea that death purifies the “unwanted” traits of the body by mentioning that “ from her fair and unpolluted flesh, May violets spring!” (5.1.11) However, the priest supports the ideology of the traditional Christian Renaissance man: women go mad when they are not virtuous; thus, a woman will not kill herself unless she is fallen. The Priest even alludes to Mary Magdalene, the prostitute, by saying that Ophelia should have rocks and stones thrown at her instead of having a beautiful funeral and a tomb full of flowers. Thus, he suggests that Ophelia’s beauty can never accompany virtue; and that her suspicious death is not a result of society’s pressure, but is a result of her unvirtuous acts. PRIEST: She should in ground unsanctified have lodged Till the last trumpet. For charitable prayers Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her. Yet here she is allowed her virgin crants, Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home Of bell and burial. (5.1.10) Finally, the question, whether Shakespeare used the death of his beautiful characters as punishment or a way to evoke catharsis and defend Ophelia and Juliet, is still raised. If one were to consider Shakespeare’s intention of misogynistic tendencies, it is reasonable to see the death of Juliet and Ophelia as educational and moralizing. Shakespeare would employ the death of his female characters either to match their personality to their beauty, by getting rid of the unsolicited traits they have developed in their lives: like disobedience, boldness, passion, or madness or to make an example out of them; to resemble a warning to any female who considers breaking the doctrine of the Elizabethan society. Such claims can be supported by considering the fascination writers and intellectuals had with self-fashioning during the Renaissance. Alan Sinfield, in an introduction to Medieval Renaissance Drama in England, introduces Greenblatt’s assumptions on how during the Renaissance period, writing and power came hand in hand. He states that literature was written by people closer to or more dependent on centers of power (Sinfield 324). Keeping this in mind, one can fathom that Shakespeare would mirror the traditional ideologies of the upper-classes that originally and feverishly rejected freewheeling or liberal acts, especially if carried out by women. The other argument supports the view that the humanist aesthete Shakespeare decided to end the miseries of these women and save them from the ignorant society that restricts and abuses them. He intended to portray them in a more angelic light that evokes catharsis and makes their progressive ideas more palatable to the audience. In Hamlet, Gertrude suggests that Ophelia may have killed herself to escape her life without her father and lover. Juliet also decides to end her life after realizing that Romeo has died. One can argue that Shakespeare has encouraged the spirit of rebellion in those women and approved of how they shaped their own destiny, although ill-fated. The romanticized description of Juliet’s and Ophelia’s death could aim to infect or affect the audience; evoke their sympathy towards these women and hence, they would be more understanding towards similar women in their daily life. Shakespeare as well connects the death of the male protagonists to the death of the two female characters. In that sense, the death of Ophelia resembles the last straw that has kept Hamlet from going feverishly feral. After her death, Hamlet seems to become more vengeful, hastier, and more suicidal which led to his epic death. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo initially had no intention of dying: he was more hopeful to start a life with his beloved. However, witnessing his lover’s death, he decides to take his own life. Thus, one may detect that Shakespeare has aimed to highlight that the absence of feminine energy leads to the man’s downfall. To sum up, Shakespeare’s works are a great example of how Renaissance literature is characterized by humanist themes and a return to classical ideals of tragedy. He excelled in leaving his audience in awe by the catastrophic endings of his plays. Shakespeare did not only excel in putting heart-wrenching endings to his plays but also to portray the prettiest of maidens and then evoking questions about their ill-fated deaths. Juliet and Ophelia are considered two of his most physically beautiful female characters and two of his literary victims as well. Outstanding physical gracefulness is not the only mutual thing between Juliet and Ophelia: both of them broke free from the gender roles and expectations of the conservative Elizabethan society. Juliet refused to obey her father and fell in love with the offspring of their family’s enemy. Ophelia, as well, murmured words that shouldn’t be said by a woman as a result of her madness. The death of Juliet and Ophelia raises the question of whether their death is to punish them or to glorify and eternalize their beauty. Although there can not be a definite answer that unveils the intentions of the long-gone author, his works are eligible for interpretations and inspections. If one were to consider Shakespeare a supporter of women, Ophelia and Juliet’s death would be a way to highlight their angelic beauty and evoke people’s catharsis; therefore, their acts of rebellion may become forgiven or forgotten. If Shakespeare’s intentions are of a misogynistic value, their death would be their ultimate punishment. 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