14Zoia Alexanian

The humiliation of Cesario in the sword-fighting scene is the enactment of the

relation between the ego and the ego ideal: in imitating Sebastian, Cesario ought to be

able to fight; but because Cesario is only an imitation of the externally incorporated ("excorporated," if you will) ideal, s/he "may not do all that he [i.e., Sebastian] does."

Cesario's inability to clash swords (an inability which Sir Andrew shares) can be easily

read as testament to Viola's unalterable feminine core. But such an easy reading is not

without its problems, the most prominent of which is the way in which Shakespeare

presents this inability-as afailure on Cesario's part, something to be mocked rather than

lauded, making Cesario more comparable with Sir Andrew than with Viola's Ardenian

counterpart. Unlike Rosalind, who for all of her swooning and tears is always in control

of whatever situation she is in, Viola here is skillfully manipulated by Sir Toby, and

Shakespeare invites the audience to laugh at the cross-dressed heroine rather than with

her, and to play the role of the disparaging super-ego. Similarly, when Antonio rescues

Cesario from the sword-fight and is summarily arrested by Orsino's troops, it is Antonio

we pity, not Cesario. If Cesario were Sebastian rather than an imitation of him, s/he

would have the money Antonio asks for upon his arrest. Instead, Cesmio admits that "my

having is not"much" (TN, III.iv.353) and Antonio accuSes "Sebastian" of having "done

good feature shame" (TN, III.iv.375)-of "Sebastian's" internal ungratefulness shaming

his outward kind features. Again, Cesario's "interior" (the confused Viola) fails to equal

the ex-corporated image of Sebastian, for Cesario lacks the funds that Amonio gave to

Sebastian and now requests be returned to him. Freud notes "the prominence of the fear

of becoming poor" ("Mourning," 252) in melancholies, though as Cesario is an external

15Zoia Alexanian

rather than an internal incorporation, the fear and berating come not from within but from

without.

Admittedly, Vtola is not suicidal, nor does she herself commonly engage in such

deprecations of her egp as Freud finds symptomatic amongst melancholics.

l

The only

I

moment of "self'-deptecation comes upon Viola's realization that Olivia is in love with

I

I

I

Cesario: "My master lloves her dearly, / And I, poor monster, fond as much on him, / And

she, mistaken, seems Jo dote on me" (TN, ILii.32-4). Butler describes how "the fear of

I

homosexual desire in awoman may induce a panic that she is losing her femininity; that

I

she is [...] no longer Jproper woman; that, if she is not quite a man, she is like one and

hence monstrous in s1me way" ("Melancholy," 168). Viola, however, is a "monster" not

because she desires Olivia, but because as Cesario she desires Orsino: it is Cesario whose

"homosexual desire" makes him "no longer a proper [man]."

Indeed, most of the censure with which Viola must contend is a result of this

desire. Cesario's appearance is the externalized ego ideal; Viola's underlying feminine

love for Orsino (feminine not merely in its object choice but in its desire to be Orsino's

"wife") is another failure to match that appearance and as such must be punished-not by

the ego ideal itself but by other external figures such as Orsino. Viola, standing beside

Orsino as Cesario, is forced to listen to the Duke compare women to "roses, whose fair

flowed Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour" (TN, II.iv.37-8). Freud writes that

"in the two opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide the ego is

overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways" ("Mourning," 250). In

suicide, the overwhelming object (the lost other) is within the ego itself, whereas in love

the object is actually external. But as both the ex-corporated lost object and the love

I Such as the Shakespearean figure whom Freud himself deems to be suffering from melancholia, Hamlet.

16Zoia Alexanian

object are external to Viola, the two processes (love and suicide) conflate into one.

Orsino threatens to "sacrifice the lamb that I do love" (TN, V.i.128) upon Olivia's final

refusal of his affectIOns, and Cesario vows that "I most jocund, apt, and willingly, / To do

you rest, a thousand deaths would die" (TN, V.i. 130-1).

This conflation, however, is an ambiguous one. Is Cesario willing to sacrifice the

desiring and thus incompatible Viola in a suicidal move, or should the statement be taken

at face value, as a declaration of the intensity of Viola's love, in which death for the sake

of the beloved is no trial? What does "face value" even mean in relation to the crossdressed figure? 'YVhose face, Cesario's or Viola's? and what value should be given to

each? Put another way, to what extent has Sebastian been ex-corporated onto Viola in

Cesario? In melancholic incorporation, called "encryptment" by the post-Freudian

analysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, "there is an enveloping within one's

boundaries of an other that remains undigested, like Jonah to the whale" (Deutscher,