Tam’d Shrews: A Brief Reflection on Antifeminism

The Shakespeareans I know (and being one myself, I know a few) aren’t entirely sure about how to read and to teach the Bard’s works that take as given certain prejudices common in the Elizabethan era.  Merchant of Venice, for example, is a source of never-ending (good-natured, usually) sparring between one of my colleagues and myself.  She maintains that the play is poking fun at English anti-Jewish bigotry; I think that it made money in the theaters precisely because it reinforced said bigotry.  (Our fights, raging as they do through the English department’s hallways, have become a sort of running joke in the department.)  And so the questions rage: is Othello an early black face minstrel show?  Is the subtext of Romeo and Juliet a working assumption that Italians are trigger-happy goons who marry too young?  What in the world does one do with Caliban from The Tempest?

Deserving at least honorable mention among those plays is the early comedy The Taming of the Shrew. If you’re not familiar with the text of the play or with its best-known movie adaption, Ten Things I Hate about You, the plot involves the family of Baptista, a gentleman in Padua, and his daughters Katherina and Bianca.  Bianca is a most desired bachelorette, largely because of her quiet ways (you knew this was going to be a feminist discussion, right?), but her father refuses to give her hand in marriage until he can find someone who will take the feisty Katherina (the shrew from the play’s title) off of his hands.

Over the course of the play, a young dandy named Petruchio, for reasons that critics cite variously as mercenary questing for dowry money and the challenge of “taming” her, agrees to marry her, then launches on a campaign of psychological abuse–showing up at his own wedding drunk and dragging her off before she can celebrate with friends and family, depriving her of food and sleep, contradicting everything that she says until she’s willing to agree with him on anything–and eventually taming her tongue and fists, thus taming her.  The debate among feminist critics, of course, is whether Shakespeare thinks Petruchio is a brutish boor or just the kind of man the world needs more of.  Being a suspicious Bard-reader myself, I’m inclined towards the latter.

In the final scene of the play (mercifully a scene without analogue in Ten Things), the audience learns quite vividly that Katherina’s violence and sharp tongue have not gone away; she simply has learned to turn them on socially acceptable targets, namely other women:

Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled-
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience-
Too little payment for so great a debt.

That’s about half the speech.  Again, critics debate whether Kate is a caricature or whether she’s Shakespeare’s ideal woman, but there’s the speech nonetheless.  When she finishes her tirade, Petruchio utters the play’s most famous line (“Kiss me, Kate!”), and the play shortly wraps up.  This week, as I browsed around some threads on The Ooze (I still read occasionally; I just don’t post any more), it occurred to me that The Taming of the Shrew sheds some light on the fact that some of the most vocally anti-feminist Christians are themselves women.

(You were hoping I’d get to a bit of Christian theology eventually, weren’t you?)

Like Shakespeare’s Kate, some of the antifeminists with whom I’ve interacted have no trouble breaking lutes over people’s heads.  (I do confess that I love that scene and the music tutor’s retelling of the story: “And there I stood amazed for a while”)  On the contrary, antifeminists seem to take a degree of pride in “putting in their place” both women and men whose philosophies do not match up with their favorite authors’ or preachers’.  They’re often just as skilled and less scrupulous in the ring when they set to textual brawling.  Such is not to condemn people who have a fighting streak: it’s only to say that it’s not especially becoming in women whose ideology calls on women to be silent in the assembly.  But there’s the rub: because by definition public spaces that allow women are not in these women’s “assemblies,” they use that green light pretty quickly to turn loose, to loose their venom on their fellow women (and on male feminists, if there happen to be any around), perhaps to get some kisses from their Petruchios.

Now I tend to prefer irenic exhanges, in Internet settings and otherwise, not because of any great virtue on my part but because I have no stomach for grand eristic exchanges with other Christians.  (I wouldn’t have made a very good Renaissance academic.)  So do take my suggestion with a grain of salt that perhaps in our exchanges with such Kates, we should not be lured into the violence of the exchange, that our own ethos should be one of mutual submission not only in marriage but among any group of Christians, no matter what the nature.  I know that some folks have a fighting streak more pronounced than mine, but if we are truly on a mission of peace as well as of justice, perhaps our light should shine as a contrast to the Kates of the world.

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