At the Limits of the Social World: Fear and Pride in Troilus and Cressida

The story of the trojan war that Shakespeare retells in Troilus and Cressida seems to invoke Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of "homosociality," in which social bonds between men are secured through the bodies of women. ¹ The Greeks, after all, are fighting to restore the marriage bond, through which homosociality is guaranteed; moreover, the movement of Cressida from the Trojan camp to the Greek camp suggests an impulse to restore the imbalance caused by the abduction of Helen by "giving" the Greeks a Trojan woman who is said at every turn to be comparable to Helen. ²

Yet many warriors in Troilus and Cressida seem weary of homosocial bonds secured in this way. This weariness is expressed in the misogyny that afflicts the Greek warriors, who look upon Helen as a garden-variety whore, as well as the Trojan princes, who think that Helen should be returned. Troilus, for example, begins the play by announcing that Helen is "too starved a subject for my sword" (1.1.89), and Hector argues that Helen should be handed back to the Greeks because she is "a thing not ours" (2.2.22). ³ Helen is "not ours" both because she is Greek and because she is a woman. ⁴ Referring to the warriors who are also Trojan princes, Hector asks:

If we have lost so many tenths of ours
To guard a thing not ours, nor worth to us
(Had it our name) the value of one ten,
What merit's in that reason which denies
The yielding of her up?

(ll. 21-25)

The Greeks share Hector's point of view. During the prisoner exchange Diomedes goes out of his way to tell Paris that the Greeks, too, love their warriors more than they love Helen. She is, says Diomedes, "bitter to her country. Hear me, Paris: / For every false drop in her baudy veins / A Grecian's life hath sunk; for every scruple / Of her contaminated carrion weight / A Trojan hath been slain" (4.1.70-74). In the love for his own men Diomedes finds the only possible common ground with his enemy; he appeals to Paris on the grounds that the Trojans love Trojan men as much and in the same way as the Greeks love Greek men. It is a love that cannot easily be reduced to the geometries of homosociality.

I will argue, in fact, that fatigue with homosocial ties represents a desire for a discourse of sexuality that leaves the orbit of homosociability. According to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, sexuality as such does not arise until the nineteenth century and then it does so as a personal identity--sexual desire becomes an inner truth that defines one as heterosexual or homosexual or any of the more florid nineteenth-century species of sexuality Foucault discusses. ⁵ To scholars of the early modern period, a period when desire had not yet coalesced into personal identity, the notion of homosociality has seemed valuable precisely because it foregrounds the continuity between sexual relationships between men and social bonds between men screened by women. Sexual expression could thus inhabit a whole range of social relationships not specifically designated as sexual. As Jonathan Goldberg puts it, in the early modern period "sexuality . . . does not stand apart as a separate domain." ⁶ But by allowing warriors on both sides to openly express fatigue with homosocial ties, Shakespeare announces a desire to emphasize sexuality and produce knowledge about whatever distinguishes it from a whole range of social experiences.

The discourse of sexuality that emerges in Troilus and Cressida occupies a tenuous space. On the one hand, it must distance itself from the homosocial ties on which Shakespeare's unabashedly patriarchal society depends; but on the other hand, it does not attack homosociality in a way that would make sex seem aggressively antisocial or even revolutionary...