Identifies as integral to becoming sexed: the irreversible melancholic incorporation of the

lost love-object. Divorced from nature and never fully becoming male or remaining

female, Cesario'sgendering exposes the cultural myth of two disparate, unmistakable,

and "natural" genders as exactly that-a myth-while simultaneously displaying the

dangers and difficulties inherent in disrupting these fictions.

Greenblatt is only one of many critics who dismisses the creation of Cesario as a

"relatively unmotivated decision" (Greenblatt, 96) on Viola's part. And yet it is not based

on mere whimsy. The second question that Viola asks the Captain (the first establishes

her location) is: "And what should 1 do in Illyria? I My brother he is in Elysium" (TN,

Lil.3-4). Until this moment, Viola's destiny has been linked with her brother's, and in a

way, it still is-"Illyria" and "Elysium" are connected both phonically and in the

elusiveness of their reality (Illyria is many things, but an accurate sixteenth-century

representation of Yugoslavia it most certainly is not). At first Viola wishes to serve the

Lady Olivia, who is herself mourning the loss of a brother, but the Captain contends that

she will "admit no kind of suit" (TN, Lii.45). In serving Olivia, Viola would have been

12Zoia Alexanian

able to act out her sorrow by joining the lady in her grief. By dressing as a man and

serving Orsino instead, Viola grieves by acting out the one lost rather than the process of

losing. Viola cross-dresses in such a way that Cesario is not only a male version of

herself, but is an exact replica of Sebastian:

I my brother know

Yet living in my glass; even such and so

In favour was my brother, and he went

Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,

For him I imitate. (TN, III-iv.389-94)

The creation of Cesario allows Sebastian to remain "living." By taking on her brother's

image Viola can keep him with her-the possessive assertion of "my glass" implies that

Sebastian's identity is now wholly hers, encapsulated within her image of Cesario.

Yet Cesario's imitation of Sebastian ultimately fails, for Sebastian can do things

Cesario cannot, such as fight off Sir Toby and accept Olivia's love. A number of critics

have read these failures as intimations that whatever "his" appearance, there is never any

doubt that Cesario is, underneath it all, a woman. In "Crossdressing, The Theatre, and

Gender Struggle in Early Modem England," Howard asserts that "from the time Viola

meets Orsino in !.iv. there is no doubt in the audience's mind of her sexual orientation or

her properly 'feminine' subjectivity" (Howard, 431). Howard understands Viola's

statement that "whoe'er I woo, myself would be [Orsino's] wife" (TN, !.iv.46) to be a

reassurance of a normative heterosexuality that then undermines the sexual tension

present in the subsequent scenes between Cesario and Olivia. In fact, Howard argues that

Cesario "becomes the vehicle for humiliating the unruly woman [Olivia] in the eyes of

the audience" (Howard, 432).

13Zoia Alexanian

On the subject of Cesario's humiliation, however, Howard has little to say. True,

when gulled into fighting against Sir Andrew by Sir Toby, Cesario admits that "a little

thing would make rile tell them how much I lack of a man" (TN, IILiv.307-9). But the

fear is not that Cesario will be discovered as "so much a woman"; it is that others will

know how much s/he "lacks" as a man. Cesario depicts his/her "self' as almostmasculine (all it "lacks" is the "little thing") rather than wholly feminine. Cesario's

imitation of Sebastian, the externalized incorporation of Sebastian's identity over (rather

than into) Viola's, is not nonexistent or distinctly separate from Viola's "interior being"

(Howard, 432)-it is incomplete.

Such an incomplete incorporation is defined by Freud in "Mourning and

Melancholia" as a melancholic one, in which the lost other is incorporated into the ego

but remains both other and lost. The ego, rather than wholly consuming the other and

becoming an indistinguishable amalgamation, divides itself; and the part which contains

the other becomes other itself. And this "lost" ego is then reestablished as the super-ego,

the ego ideal: the other whom the ego attempts but inexorably fails to imitate. In "The

Ego and the Super-Ego," Freud describes how this inevitable failure, at least with regard

to the original (melancholic) incorporation of a gendered identity, is both presupposed

and condemned: "[The super-ega's] relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept:

·You ought to be like this (like your father).' It also comprises the prohibition: 'You may

not be like this (like your father)-thatis, you may not do all that he does; some things

are his prerogative.''' ("Ego," 34). The failure to live up to the ego ideal, then, is

symptomatic of the gendering process-Cesario's sense of "lack" is not so much an

aberration as an inevitability.