Love Medicine

Love Medicine
Detail of beadwork from an Ojibwe medicine pouch

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Taming of the English Department

Look at the first comment to see Kevin's info on feminist criticism.
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1 comment:

Jessica Deckard said...

Kevin Says:
Three modes of feminist criticism of Shakespeare,

*compensatory criticism, which focuses on strong women; focuses on assertive women. On the powerful, prominent, eloquent women characters in Shakespeare's plays; we celebrate their virtues, compensate for traditional criticism, which minimizes or stereotypes them.
These include the shrewish-ness of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. Kate’s mistaken identity is her appearance of her being rude and defiant, and the reader sees her love and obedience. On the outside, Kate appears harsh, cruel and frightening to all of the characters, even her own father is scared of her monstrous temper, begging anyone to marry her. In Act 5, Katherine removes her cap from her head, liberating herself from the subordination to her husband Petruchio, and even stomping on the hat, this destroying the traditional values of society. On one level, it is Petruchio's conflict to tame Kate or live with a shrew the rest of his life, to tame Kate is also to reveal her actual personality

*justificatory criticism, which focuses on male power;
emphasizes what the first mode neglected - women's inferior position and the frequency of male power in Shakespeare's plays and in the period. In this, we must acknowledge that women characters are as often victims as heroines, that they are in the end defined and also define themselves in relation to men, most often to men they love. This justifies, or at least accounts for, the inadequate roles of women. In this, we see that the heroine is silenced by the marriages at the ends of the plays. The most controversial part of the play, comes with Kate’s speech of submission in Act 5, some say that she is giving up on her values, and saying that men are the supreme being, however, the true way she depicts this speech, is with a wink to the audience, in the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1990, Kate ended her speech “by ‘accidentally’ sending Petruchio sprawling. The first predicament that supports the theme is Petruchio's relationship with Katherine. Shakespeare is not saying that female bitterness or male aggression is acceptable, but perhaps a touch of a woman’s wildness will keep a man’s life from getting boring

*transformational criticism, which combines and extends the other two perspectives. (Lenz 119)transformational mode examines the relative position and authority of men, women and the relations between culture and literary texts. It loosens the interaction between the confining culture and the witty heroines, between the idealization and humiliation of women, between patriarchal structures and female sub-cultures. The goal is not only to balance the omissions and inadequacies of traditional criticism by supplementing it and is not just to justify the appearance of women by understanding the culture from which it springs but to transform criticism. In this we can examine the relations between the genders in different genres. We can explore interactions between male fears of being feminized, male fears of women, and male control over women.
When Petruchio speaks about Kate he speaks of her as a piece of property, always eluding to the fact that he is in control of her and not the other way around. Kate instills fear in Petruchio he knows that she is the one that is ultimately in control not him. He needs her for her dowry and his climb up the social ladder, he desperately wants to impress others in his social circle. In the end Kate comes through for Petruchio in the end by submitting to him in her final speech, proving to others that he can tame the women that no one else dared too.

November 8, 2007 at 11:06 AM

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