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Desire and anxiety: The circulation of sexuality in Shakespearean drama
Abstract
The five essays that comprise this text are linked by a central problematic: the relation between erotic desire and its corollary, anxiety, and their role in the construction of gendered subjects in Shakespearean drama. Situated at the nexus of feminist, psychoanalytic, and historical inquiry, the essays together are structured by four relationships: between sexuality and gender, subjectivity, transgression, and critical practice. Four bodily figures are interrogated: the Oedipal male, heterosexual body, the fantasized female reproductive body, the male homoerotic body, and the female homoerotic body. "Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power" argues that the strategies of containment employed in Hamlet and Othello are evident also in The Winter's Tale. Metaphorically and dramatically, erotically threatening women are transformed into jewels, statues, and corpses. "Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body" offers an analysis of the parallel construction of male subjectivity and sexuality in the Henriad and psychoanalytic theory. Both "narratives" perpetrate similar repressions of the fantasized maternal, upon which "normative" male development depends. "Sex, Gender, Desire: What Difference Does it Make?" argues that in much contemporary criticism, gender is misrecognized as a signifier for sexuality in such a way that erotic practice is conveniently forgotten. The conflation of gender and sexuality is historicized by examining Freud's account of homosexuality and the contradictions that existed between gender and eroticism in the early modern experience of homosexuality. "The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy" applies the historical information of Chapter III, arguing that a textual circulation of homoerotic desire transgresses the binary logic upon which patriarchal mandates depend. In As You Like It, Orlando's effusion of desire toward an object simultaneously hetero- and homoerotic prevents the stable reinstitution of heterosexuality. However, in Twelfth Night, fears of erotic exclusivity are conflated with anxiety about generational reproduction, with the result that the male homoerotic position is scapegoated at the same time the female gender is resecured in a patriarchal economy. "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and New Historicism: Subject, Structure, and Agency" places the conclusions of the preceding chapters in the context of contemporary debates about the relation between these critical methods, highlighting their particular affordances and limitations.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Theater|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Traub, Valerie Jean, "Desire and anxiety: The circulation of sexuality in Shakespearean drama" (1990). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9022752.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9022752