4Zoia Alexanian

the same claim about gender roles, though her aim is to unsettle the gender dichotomy

that Rainolds tries vainly to strengthen by, oddly enough, pointing out all the ways in

which it can be poisoned.

Shakespeare himself was fond of exposing these weaknesses, though to him they

are the inevitabilities of a system which tries to organize and delineate what it does not

wholly understand. As You Like It and Twelfth Night are both plays in which who

someone is (male or female, shepherd or princess) is no more and no less who they are

seen to be-identity changes as easily (and with as much difficulty) as appearance and

perception. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare heeds Rainolds' admonitions, though in an

altered marinc:r-the boy actor is not transformed into Viola; rather, Viola can never

retum to herself after she becomes Cesario. The distinction is not between truth and

fiction, ~""true" ge~der and a faise one", but between two fictions, t\\'o genders lacking

truth. Viola's Cesario is incompletely and irreversibly gendered as male,interior and

exterior states collapse as two sides of the same surface, and slhe reveals the extent to

which the other characters are not as"natural" as they seem. In As You Like It, the

difficulty is not in removing the costume but in locating something beyond costume,

. '. .

beyond artifice and masquerade. Rosalind strips Ganymede off as easily as "he" puts

Rosalind on, and the figure in the epilogue is either the boy actor stripped bare or the

layered Ganymede once more-and what is, ultimately, the difference between a boy and

a boy pretending to be a girl pretending to be a boy? Or between a boy dressed as a girl

and a boy dressed as a girl dressed as a boy pretending to be that girl: How can any strict

dichotomy exist between such :spiraling genders?

5Zoia Alexanian

In examining the various performances of gender ~hat Shakespeare explores in

T'rveljth Night and As You Like It, I have looked not only to the past-focusing; on

interpretations of gender and sexuality in early modem EJilgland as presented by Stephen

Orgel, Bruce R. Smith, Alan Bray, and Stephen Greenblatt-but to the present as well,

using theories put forth by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler,iLuce Irigaray, Michel Foucault,

and ~vIarjorie Garber to tease out the nuances of gender formation (and dissolution) as

• I

they relate to these two plays: a somewhat disparate buncr, but all intimately connected

I

to questions of gender, identity, and desire. Butler's argurpel1ts proceed from Freud's

conclusions, stretching them to their logical extremes and! building from there. Garber

takes a nlore Lacanian approach to gender and gender··cf(~ssings, but both \vo'men view

. .

drag performances and their effects in much the same ways, as disrupting the meanings

of individual terms (man, woman, self, other) and the relations between them. For

Irigaray, there is only ever one term, the masculine; established against a phantasmic

feminine Other, while for Foucault, any such categorical terms are ultimately

groundless--mcre constructions of sociopolitical discourses on gender. As Butler points

out,how6ver,"Centtal to each of these views [...] is the notion that sex appears within

hegemonic language as a ,~ubstance, as, metaphysically speaking, a self-identical being

, .

[...] through a petformative twist of language and/or discourse that conceals the fact that

'being' a sex or a gender is fnndamentally'impossible" (Gender, 25).

Language, then, is the central problem. But language can also bring to light its

own concealments, by displaying its inadequacies (which pronoun, which name must we

choose to 'refer to the cross-dressed figure, and why?), and allowing gender identities not

only to congeal, but splinter. Language is as central a character as any i!1 TweZfth Night

6Zoia Alexanian

andAs You Like It, arid Shakespeare uses it to expose its gendering pract~ces as practices,

substantial but contrived, as unnatural and illogical as anything on the Renaissance stage.

And our endless fascination with these plays, the multitude of critical attention they have

garnered, implies that despite the seeming coherence of sex as granted by biology and

modem science, we too acknowledge what Shakespeare intuited centuries ago-that

desire has no truth (it lies where it will) and that gender is above all a performance (one

that is never staged quite convincingly enough).

7Zoia Alexanian

II. Gender and Identity in Twelfth Night: A Natural Perspective (That Is, and Is

Not)

Despite the current concurrence with Shakespeare that notions of stable genders

are more deceptive than they seem, in much of the literary criticism of Twelfth Night

there remains an odd tendency towards elision and containment, a tendency which belies

the general waywardness of the play itself. Critics of an earlier era, such as C. L. Barber

and Northrop Frye, read this comedy (and all those Shakespeare wrote) with an eye for

restoration-to them, out of Twelfth Night's comic disorder emerges a more "natural"

order, one more tightly structured and socially acceptable than that which the play's madcap confusions initially disturbed. Other critics, most notably Jean E. Howard, contend

that nothing even needs restoring, for nothing is ever actually upset. In both of these

analyses, the cross-dressed heroine ultimately serves to bolster the distinction between

male and female (and its underlying dichotomy of self/other) rather than to unsettle it.

Naturally, such structuring readings are quite structured themselves in that they exclude

anything that does not fit the schema. These readings work-but only when those

moments in the play which cannot be neatly organized along gender lines are ignored,

omitted, or left unseen.

These moments of discord, when assembled together, provide a different (and

differing) ponrayal of gender identity in the play. Many have been cited in more recent

criticism to support analyses in which the comedy does effectively dismantle the

male/female division, either by erasing one of the terms or by blurring the line between

them. Still, these readings generally do not examine the implications of such a

dismantling in this particular work, and often conflate Twelfth Night's heroine with that

pinnacle of performativity, Rosalind. As Garber states in Vested Interests, Rosalind is the