165). To begin with, Viola's "enveloping" is inside-out: she becomes the undigested self,

trapped within the boundaries of the pseudo-male Cesario. But where (and what) are

these "boundaries"? Puzzling over Olivia's love for Cesario, Viola wonders

What will become of this? As I am man,

My state is desperate for my master's love:

As I am woman (now alas the day!)

What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe? (TN, Il.i.35-8)

"As I am man" is how Viola begins, her primary attempt at identification; "As I am

woman (now alas the day!)" is the secondary identity and, significantly, the one that she

chooses to bemoan. Though Howard contends that "the audience always knows that

underneath the page's clothes is a 'real' woman, one who expresses dislike of her own

disguise" (Howard, 431), Viola does not so much abhor her disguise as she does the fact

17Zoia Alexanian

II

thatl "she" is incompatible with it-and it is the internal incompatibility rather than the

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disrrdant external expression that she decries. When trying to defend womanly love to

Orsino by telling him of a sister's devotion to her love, Cesario responds to the Duke's

onelconcern-"But died thy sister of her love, my boy?" (TN, II.iv.120)-with a

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chafacteristically equivocal statement: "1 am all the daughters of my father's house, / And

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all tre brothers too: and yet I know not" (TN, ILiv.121-2). Here, the primary

ideJtification is feminine, but while Viola is the daughter of Sebastian and sister of the

son IWhO shares his name, the tenn "sister" does not enter into Cesario's repIy, and slhe

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does not seem to know where this "sister" has gone to, or if she is even still alive. The

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"loie" that maylhave killed her i. for Orsino, which must remain hidden in order for

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Cesario to exist.. Viola is therefore willing to place Cesario's (and in turn Sebastian's)

exi~tence above her own-just as the ego is willing to sacrifice itself at the super-ego's

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beh~st. From the moment that Viola becomes Cesario, Viola's story becomes (as Cesario

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adl1llts) "a blank" (TN, II.iv.l11).

I Still, that does not answer the question of what value we should accord to the

her6ine versus her creation. How deeply should we read Viola/Cesario? Do we read

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thr9ugh the costume, or do we read the costume itself? Garber contends that most critics

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do ~he former and "appropriate the cross-dresser 'as' one of the two sexes" (Garber, 10),

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ratH,cr than looldng at the cross-dressed figure directly. Howard appropriates Cesario as

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an unmistakably female figure, looking past the page's outfit to the woman beneath. The

problem with such an appropriative reading is that there is no reason why we should stop

there: Viola herself is nothing more than a costume. With Viola, the innermost "self'

would be the yaung male actor playing her part, and indeed (as Garber points out) it is

18Zoia Alexanian

this "self' which Greenblatt sees as most prominent in his essay, "Fiction and Friction,"

enabling him to appropriate Viola/Cesario as male. He argues that Viola's (and, of

course, Rosalind's) cross-dressing enables the heroines to "[realize] their identities"

(Greenblatt, 117)-to become more perfect women-which in tum mimics the

Renaissance myth of gender formation in which males pass through a feminine state as

children before becoming men and dressing in masculine attire. To Greenblatt,

"Shakespearean women are [...] therepresentation of Shakespearean men, the projected

mirror images of masculine self-differentiation" (Greenblatt, 117). Orgel concludes

Impersonations: The Performance ofGender in Shakespeare's England with a similar

claim: "Acting like a man is the most successful, the most compelling way of acting like

a woman," which he believes hints to the audience "that women might not be objects but

subjects,not the other but the self' (Orgel, 153). As with Greenblatt, Orgel's "self' is

ultimately a masculine one; with boys serving functions similar to those of women in his

examination of early modem culture.

Yet the boyish body performing Viola/Cesario is no more true than the costumes

it dons. To Shakespeare, even the body that one is born with is a costume of a sort.

Accused of being a spirit by Cesario, Sebastian replies: "A spirit lam indeed, / But am in

that dimension grossly clad / \Vhich from the womb I did participate" (TN, V.i.234-6).

Sebastian's body is that with which his spirit has been "grossly clad" since birth; apparel

that \vill be removed only through death but apparel nonetheless. Cesario's accusation is

quite odd in and of itself-Antonio's mistaking of Cesario for Sebastian in the swordfighting scene should have prepared Cesario for Sebastian's subsequent appearance. But

perhaps Cesario's reaction to this misrecognition serves as a prelude for the strangeness