Sex, Blood, Injustice

The New York Times, having gotten wind of my recent Shakespeare experience, declares its unqualified support for my position in an editorial appearing today:

[T]he integrity of the classroom is sacrosanct. What matters is the basic honesty of the intellectual transaction that takes place there. Anyone who has ever taught understands the currents that flow through a crowded classroom. It is a theater of expectation, an arena where the interests of students and faculty converge.... What the college classroom requires is the best a professor can bring to it.

... unless conceivably they are talking about that matter of the fanciful Vietnam historian.

But in our Shakespeare classroom dynamic, there was another element that I must now introduce.

The prof was female; 90% of the students were female; and issues of sexism were very prominent in class discussions, for example the ones we held on The Winter's Tale.

Shakespeare usually gets to the point pretty quickly. The Winter's Tale's opening lines have two characters speaking effusively of the great love that exists between their respective kings, who have been best friends since childhood. One of them says: "I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it." So you know there's likely to be trouble.

Sure enough, in no time one of the two kings, Leontes, suddenly takes a hard, second look at the way his wife is exchanging looks with his friend, and he says to himself:

Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances;
But not for joy; not joy. This entertainment
May a free face put on, derive a liberty
From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom,
And well become the agent; 't may, I grant;
But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,
As now they are, and making practised smiles,
As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh, as 'twere
The mort o' the deer; O, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows!

Leontes asks his advisers to confirm his suspicions. They tell him he's out of his mind, his queen has always been true to him. Leontes is convinced they're all either stupid or crooked, and he orders his fellow king killed. The latter escapes back to his own country, but Leontes has his wife arrested. At her trial, where Leontes is judge and prosecutor, she is accused:

of high treason, in committing adultery with Polixenes, king of Bohemia, and conspiring with Camillo to take away the life of our sovereign lord the king, thy royal husband: the pretence whereof being by circumstances partly laid open, thou, Hermione, contrary to the faith and allegiance of a true subject, didst counsel and aid them, for their better safety, to fly away by night.

What do you say to something like that? As the queen points out, it does little good to claim innocence when you're thought to have no integrity:

Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say 'not guilty:' mine integrity
Being counted falsehood, shall, as I express it,
Be so received.

Anyway, it's a totally unfair trial, the woman has no rights, and a husband's paranoia is enough to convict his wife.

The injustice, the inferior position of women, their lack of rights -- these things are not difficult to figure out; but in discussing The Winter's Tale and other plays, these considerations were endlessly belabored by Prof. Green: how if a woman was too talkative it provoked suspicions that she was a witch (or that she was possessed by the devil); how the woman's duty was to submit and serve; how women were viewed as sources of temptation, entrapment and sin, even when -- O injustice! -- the sexual overtures were initiated by the man.

In fairness, I must acknowledge that the prof convinced me there is substantial misogyny in some of Shakespeare's works. Consider Titus Andronicus, in which Aaron, an evil, cunning devil surrogate, makes a hidden hole in the ground to trap Martius. Aaron first has the emperor's brother stabbed to death and thrown into the pit; then he gets Martius to fall into the same pit so he can frame him for the murder. Following Shakespeare's "[Falls into the pit]" stage direction, Martius's brother says:

What art thou fall'n? What subtle hole is this,
Whose mouth is cover'd with rude-growing briers,
Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood
As fresh as morning dew distill'd on flowers?
A very fatal place it seems to me.

Martius asks to be helped out "from this unhallowed and blood-stained hole". He also refers to it as a "detested, dark, blood-drinking pit."

People, you didn't miss it, did you? This is unambiguous vagina symbolism.

Anyhow, no question about it, women's lib hadn't yet scored major successes 400 years ago. And what I'm trying to say is that this issue seemed to hold inexhaustible fascination for Prof. Green. But there were also implications for the classroom of the present. I gradually formed the distinct impression that the prof viewed me, personally, through a prism of radical feminism. Not yielding an inch when I disagreed with her view? It was the persistent battering of a mindless phallus that she was repelling, don't you see.

Not only that, but some of my fellow students seemed quite sympathetic to this orientation of the prof's. One of them, Sara, seemed particularly in tune with her. They seemed to be on identical wavelengths, Sara conveying a sense of assurance, whenever she spoke in class, that she had the prof's full support, and the prof showing total agreement with whatever Sara said.

One day Sara offered a comment on Othello, suggesting -- with a kind of "hmmmmphhh" gesture as if to say "isn't this just like a man?" -- that Othello's view that he "loved not wisely but too well" is a bit difficult to credit, expressed as it is just after he has murdered Desdemona.

The professor received this with a little smile of fellow feeling, saying nothing. She had not addressed the subject of Othello's love for Desdemona, and there had been no other discussion on this point besides Sara's comment. Discussion was about to move along to other things.

But hold on a minute. Were we just going to accept, without discussion, the aberrant view that Othello never really loved Desdemona? I spoke up to demur.

The prof listened to me with a glass-eyed look -- then, when I was finished, wordlessly nodded to another student waiting to speak in her turn. Then the prof spoke, offering her response.

I don't know if her response was malicious, or if she imagined she was reading my mind instead of listening to my words. Every so often when I spoke, she would respond to things I hadn't said even when I thought I'd expressed myself fairly clearly. Certainly she was far from being in tune with me the way she was with Sara. In any case, her response on this occasion led to our third and last email exchange:

From: "Uriel Wittenberg"
To: Reina Green
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2001 11:03 AM
Subject: I don't believe in murder -- Acknowledge please

Yesterday, Sara commented that she found Othello's murder of Desdemona inconsistent with his declaration immediately afterwards that he "loved not wisely but too well." You accepted this without comment. I saw it differently. I responded that there is no inconsistency -- that, indeed, the depth of Othello's sense of betrayal is a measure of his former love for her.

You did not call on Sara to respond in her turn. You had another student speak, then offered your own view to the class. In doing so, you characterized my view as an attempt to "justify" the murder. You spoke very much as though I had opined that it is generally appropriate for a jealous husband to murder his wife. You said it would "certainly" not be justifiable by today's standards; and you then addressed how it would be viewed in Elizabethan society. I was given no opportunity to comment.

Obviously this is a colossal misrepresentation of the reasonable view I expressed.

I assume your misinterpretation was genuine, but it again reflects your undue haste in rejecting views that don't fit your preconceptions. It also seems to reflect the workings of a strangely fervid imagination as regards my own personality and my attitude towards women. And it's not the first time.

Would you agree to acknowledge your improper characterization of my view to the class on Monday?

[To be, obviously, continued.]