NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Feminist approach to reading "The Merchant of Venice" The Merchant of Venice is widely considered Shakespeare's one of the most controversial plays. Among the many issues that merit discussion, besides the one of anti-Semitism, are the relationships between parents and children (there are three sets of them in the play), particularly involving permission to marry, the position of women in society generally, justice and mercy, friendship, matrimony, and the various kinds of bonds that connect human beings with each other. Since marriage, including elopement, is a major focus in The Merchant of Venice it is necessary to mention that the position of women in Renaissance England was quite different from their position today. As Virginia Woolf wrote in her "A Room of One's Own": "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size." And as Simone de Beauvoir stated in her "The Second Sex: Myth and Reality": "what is a woman? Tota juliet in utero, says one, woman is a womb. But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest." These citations confirm that women had few rights.
For example, they could not attend university, they could not vote or be elected to political office, and they had very limited control over their own property. In order to prove it Virginia Woolf in her essay "A Room of One's Own" tried to understand whether women were able to produce a work of William Shakespeare's quality. So Woolf created a fictional "Shakespeare's Sister", Judith, to show that a woman with Shakespeare's talents would have been denied the same opportunities to use them because of those doors that were always closed to women. As children, women were utterly subjugated to their parents, especially their fathers. As wives, they were under the domination of their husbands, who had control of all their personal property.
Women had little recourse to the law, which of course admitted no women as judges or attorneys. That is why Portia, capable and intelligent though she maybe, must assume the disguise of Dr. Balthasar in The Merchant of Venice when she appears in the trial scene. To enter a man's world, as she and Nerissa do in act 4, they must appear as men. The ideal woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was one who, at least in men's minds, was submissive, meek, obedient to her lord and master, virtuous, soft-spoken or (better) silent, and modest in both dress and comportment (Halio 97). "Man can think of himself without woman.
She cannot think of herself without man", - wrote Simone de Beauvoir in her "The Second Sex: Myth and Reality." Were a woman otherwise, for example, if she dared to oppose her husband's will, she was subject to his discipline, which could involve a beating, or possibly worse. Petruchio's treatment of his shrewish wife, Katherine, in the Taming of the Shrew after they are married would not be considered extraordinary, and certainly not illegal. Patriarchy was thus the order of the day. Men ran the family, the church, business and trade, the courts, and every other major social enterprise.
Women, after all, were the weaker sex, weaker in every sense - intellectually, emotionally, and physically. It was only proper, therefore, that women should be subordinated to men. Women were relegated to housekeeping (again, under male supervision) and the breeding of children (Hunt 162). The concept of patriarchy, moreover, derives from Scripture, where woman was created as "a help meet" for man. The patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, later ruled as head of the family and founded the lineage of the children of Israel.
But patriarchal structures were and are not limited to the Judeo-Christian tradition. They exist in many other cultures, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Chinese and Japanese in Asia, and in many African cultures, where again women are considered to be less competent than men (Cohen 37). Only recently have women fought for and won more rights than they ever had before, at least in the West, although the movement is gradually spreading throughout the rest of the world. In Shakespeare's England patriarchal control began at birth, where children were concerned.
Fathers had complete charge of their offspring and could do with them what they wished. Parental consent was required for marriage. A father could bestow his child in marriage as he saw fit, and the child had little or no recourse, although his or her agreement was advisable, if not required, to forestall rebelliousness or unhappiness. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, Juliet's father, Old Capulet, advises her suitor Paris to win Juliet's heart first before he gives his consent to the marriage, but later he orders Juliet to marry Paris, regardless of her feelings.
In such a way Halio explained the peculiarities of patriarchy in Shakespeare's England. Elopements, available to both male and female children, provided one escape from parental tyranny, but they were rare and hazardous. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, who were in any case of the wealthy aristocracy, young people in sixteenth-century England tended to marry late: the national average for women was between twenty-two and twenty-five; for men, twenty-four to thirty. People married late because they needed to have the economic resources to maintain a family before marrying (Cohen 36). Overhasty marriages could and often did lead to poverty for impetuous couples. The average age for women in the upper levels of society entering their first marriages was lower, however, than that of other women.
Hence, fathers took whatever precautions they could to insure that their daughters did not marry unwisely, that is, to a fortune hunter or other undesirable man. If the daughter was still unmarried at the time of her father's death, his will sometimes carried provisions to restrict her freedom of choice or run the risk disinheritance (Hunt 163). The conditions in the will of Portia's father are extraordinary - for example, that her husband must choose the right casket - and probably not enforceable legally, but they are a dramatic device to show her father's care for his daughter, that is, his concern that she not choose her mate unwisely. Although Portia in bridles against those conditions, she ultimately recognizes their significance and determines to abide by them, even after she finds Bassanio, the person she truly loves.
In Elizabethan England, church weddings were not required for a binding marriage, although of course the Church did its utmost to insist on its role in blessing all unions between men and women. Ecclesiastically as well as legally, all that was required for a marriage to be binding was for the couple to make their vows to each other before witnesses (Halio 95). Notwithstanding, in The Merchant of Venice, before sending Bassanio off to Venice to try to rescue Antonio, Portia demands that they first go to church and get married. Once a couple wed and the marriage was consummated, they were bound to each other forever.
Divorce was difficult if not impossible, certainly among all but the aristocracy, and then only for the reason of adultery (Cohen 36). Halio also explains that intermarriage between faiths was severely frowned upon; in fact, it was forbidden unless the non-Christian member of the couple respect, the marginal gloss - the annotations in the margin - found in the Geneva Bible beside Gen. 24. 3 - 4 is instructive. There Abraham commands his eldest servant to get a wife for his son Isaac not from among the daughters of the Canaanites but from his own country" (93). The annotation reads: "He would not that his son should marry out of the godly family. " A further gloss on verse 37 says: "For the Canaanites were accursed and therefore the godly could not join with them in marriage" (cited in Halio 92). For Christians, Jews fell into the category of the ungodly, or infidels (despite her conversion, Graziano still refers to Jessica as an "infidel" when she arrives at Belmont with Lorenzo). But in the New Testament allowance was made for some intermarriages.
In I Cor. 7. 14, for example, Paul says: "For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband. " The Geneva Bible glosses: "Meaning, that the faith of the believer hath more power to sanctify marriage than the wickedness of the other to pollute it. " Nevertheless, in 2 Cor. 6. 14, Paul warns against intermarriage: "Be not unequally yoked with infidels; for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?" (cited in Hunt 164). Although Jessica believes she is "saved" by her husband, who has made her a Christian, Lancelot Gobbo continues to tease her unmercifully on her intermarriage with Lorenzo. After marriage, a wife's possessions reverted to her husband's control, as Portia recognizes when Bassanio chooses the lead casket and thereby wins the right to make her his wife. Since she is in love with him, she does not demur; on the contrary, Portia says she wishes she were "A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich" for his benefit. "Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours Is now converted, " she says: But now I was the lord Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, Queen o'er myself; and even now, but now, This house, these servants, and this same myself Are yours, my lord's" (cited in Hunt 167).
While this may sound strange to modern ears, indeed, offensive even to those who are not feminists to an Elizabethan it did not. Morally as well as legally it was regarded as only right and proper, as many Christian preachers taught and sermonized. The foundation for these views lay, again, in Scripture, in Adam's lordship over Eve and the later patriarchs' rule over their families. At the macro / micro level, as the king was the supreme head of the state, the husband was supreme head of the family. The Protestant Reformation did nothing to change this; instead, it repeatedly stressed wives's ub ordination to the husbands. It would be centuries before this arrangement changed, although in many practical affairs women in fact did exercise a good deal of control in their families and, when taken by their husbands into business, in commercial enterprises as well (Hunt 164).
The following excerpts show how seriously marriage was regarded in the sixteenth century, at least among clergy and others trying to improve morality in society. Shakespeare himself, like his great contemporary Edmund Spenser, apparently believed in married love. In his plays, illicit love ends disastrously, as in Troilus and Cressida. Whether or not Shakespeare himself was the victim of a "shotgun marriage, " his plays seem to emphasize the need for restraint before marriage, as in The Tempest, where Prospero warns his daughter and her fiance Ferdinand not to engage in any premarital sex (at the end they are discovered together, chastely playing chess) (Cohen 38). In The Merchant of Venice all the couples are interested only in marriage. The one exception is the serving man, Lancelot Gobbo, whom Lorenzo criticizes for seducing a Moorish woman.
Thus, typical Elizabethan unwritten laws towards women, together with the sanctity of marriage, the importance of children's obedience to their parents, and the supremacy of the husband and father were really severe and couldn't be violated. Shakespeare also told us about the dangers of intermarriage, though he recognizes ways in which such marriages may be allowed and can work, provided that the non-Christian spouse follows the religion and teachings of Christianity, as Jessica seems willing to do in The Merchant of Venice. And in order to forget about all those restrictions Helene Cixous in her The Laugh of the Medusa proposes to all women to become free using any ways, for example, writing: it will tear her away from the super-ego ized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being 'too hot'; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing... ) - tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of a marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak. A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can't possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
Inscribe the breath of the whole woman. Works Cited Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa. " March 17 2006. web Cohen, Stephen A. ""The Quality of Mercy": Law, Equity and Ideology in the Merchant of Venice. " Mosaic (Winnipeg) 27. 4 (1994): 35. De Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex: Myth and Reality. " March 17 2006. web Halio, Jay L. Understanding the Merchant of Venice: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Halio, Jay L. , ed. The Merchant of Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hunt, Maurice. "Shakespeare's Venetian Paradigm: Stereotyping and Sadism in the Merchant of Venice and Othello. " Papers on Language & Literature 39. 2 (2003): 162.
Woolf, Virginia. "A room of one's own. " March 17 2006. web
Free research essays on topics related to: romeo and juliet, room of one, head of the family, merchant of venice, position of women
Research essay sample on Merchant Of Venice Room Of One
