A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (21 page)

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.
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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 another: 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.

Hamlet’s
main focus is on the relationship between a mother and her son.
King Lear,
the other play in which misogyny is a main theme, is centred on the relationship between a father and his daughters. It marked a noticeable change in emotional emphasis. According to a recent biographer of Shakespeare ‘after about 1606 the father-daughter bond becomes an almost obsessive theme in his work.’
¹⁹⁹

If psychology has a theory of misogyny, it is one that traces its origins to the primal relationship between mother and son. Usually, by the time a man has daughters, his character is set, and even if they are as wicked as Lear’s Goneril and Regan, their behaviour will not form their father’s feelings about women in general, it will merely confirm it. For this reason, misogyny, however powerfully expressed in
King Lear,
is less central to the play’s dynamic than it is in
Hamlet.
The plot merely affords Lear the opportunity to vent. Made homeless by Goneril and Regan, to whom the old king has foolishly given over his kingdom, abandoned to the elements, Lear erupts in one of the most powerful scenes in literature (Act 4, Scene 6):

Behold yon simpering dame,
Whose face between her forks presageth snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure’s name;
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they’re centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle to the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends’;
There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphury pit,
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie,
Fie, pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good
Apothecary, to sweeten my imagination . . .

Again, as in
Hamlet,
what begins as an attack on a particular woman (or a particular kind of woman – in this case, one who parades false modesty) turns into a fierce denunciation of female sexuality. And once again, as with Gertrude and Desdemona in
Othello,
it is woman’s ‘appetite’ for sex that disgusts the hero and sours his imagination. But unlike Hamlet, King Lear is redeemed by a woman – his third daughter Cordelia, who stood up to him at the beginning of the play with a display of honesty that undercuts the play’s misogyny. Refusing to flatter him with false praise, she demonstrates the link between truth and love that her father does not fully grasp until the end – and only at the cost of Cordelia’s life, which she loses attempting to rescue him. Misogyny does not survive Shakespeare’s tragic vision any more than do other follies that bring about human unhappiness. Pity, which springs from a profound sympathy for the human condition, as endured by men and women alike, replaces them as the dominant emotion of his greatest plays. The triumph of Shakespearean tragedy is
that through pity it reveals that we share a common humanity, in which all distinctions, including those between men and women, are rendered insignificant.

In the plays that followed, the works of his last years as a dramatist, such as
The Tempest
and
The Winter’s Tale
the diatribes against women – whether rhetorical or deeply felt – disappear. The prevailing mood is reconciliation, usually between father and daughter. The conflict between men and women is resolved satisfactorily in the relationship that a father has with his daughter.

Elsewhere, misogyny showed its resilience throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the face of social, moral, economic and political developments that would profoundly transform women’s status. In England, a dual process can be discerned. As a new model of family developed among the rising middle classes, with increased emphasis on mutual affection between man and wife, a breakdown in traditional sexual morality took place among the wits of the court circles of the post-1660 period, that at times approached nihilism. Along with it appeared some of the most scurrilous poetic attacks on women since Juvenal (see
Chapter 2
).

John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (1647–80), the poet who penned some of the most exquisite love lyrics in the English language, including that beginning, ‘An age in her embraces passed/Would seem a winter’s day,’ could also describe a woman as ‘a passive pot for fools to spend in’ (that is, a chamber pot) and liken female genitalia to a sewer.
²⁰⁰
The Earl of Rochester belonged to a new phenomenon – the first generation of rakes, young upper-class males who followed a libertine life style, bawdy, open-minded, rebellious, irreligious, often politically progressive, and at the same time, unrelenting satirists, as given to outbursts of misanthropic despair as they were to misogynistic verses. Theirs was a fierce
rejection of the official Puritanism that had prevailed in the previous generation; they would set off a series of moral cycles in the West, with periods of sexual conservatism being followed by outbreaks of hedonism followed by conservative reaction, which would last to this day.

The rakes effectively created a subculture around the court of the Restoration period (1660–88) where sex was pursued only for pleasure. On the continent, the same kind of hedonism prevailed at the court of Louis XIV (1643–1713). It constituted a rebellion against Judaeo-Christian sexual morality, inspired by the humanism of Renaissance Italy. In the past, as in the Rome of the late Republic and early Empire, there had been comparable ‘breakdowns’ of conventional morality among sections of the ruling class. But in general, they were severely punished. In the late seventeenth century, however, with the weakening of the authority of the churches, and an emerging middle-class world-view from which a coherent morality had yet to be derived, no institution had the power to curb the new hedonism.