Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within (review)

James W. Stone’s Crossing Gender in Shakespeare is the most recent of the Routledge Studies in Shakespeare series. Responding to the predominance of historicizing criticism over the past decade, Stone seeks to revitalize the psychoanalytic and gender criticism of the last decades of the twentieth century by offering a close reading of “gendered subjectivity” (xiii) that focuses on linguistic and rhetorical difference as the “defining locus of sexual difference and its discontents” (xiv). Throughout his study, he critiques “the traditional paradigm that man is the principle of sameness-unto-itself (self-identity)” and strives to “unpack its misogynistic corollary, which projects the responsibility of all difference onto women” (1). In exploring gender crossing, Stone draws upon the conventional literary figure of the hermaphrodite, tracing what he calls “hermaphroditic anamorphism”—the quality of being both male and female and therefore neither one nor the other—in Shakespearean drama (24). Although he does discuss the more obvious examples of Viola’s and Imogen’s transvestism, Stone importantly also investigates the internal and psychological “emasculating androgyny” of male tragic heroes (1), foregrounding how linguistic details such as negating prefixes, puns, chiasmus, and anagrams reveal the instability of words and of gender dichotomies.

In “The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night,” Stone engages with Stephen Greenblatt’s “Fiction and Friction” in renegotiating the relationship between anatomical and literary-metaphorical hermaphrodites. Drawing upon the terminology of Roland Barthes on the fashion system, Stone argues that Malvolio’s crossed garters are emblematic of his “newfound openness, or subjection, to the feminine, an equal but opposite replay of the way that Viola’s feminine interior blushes outward through her masculine-usurped attire” (34). He pays particular attention to words like “pipe,” “organ,” and “part” in the play, and to the reversible “chev’ril glove” mentioned by Feste. Where Greenblatt’s interpretation of the glove’s significance stresses its materiality and corporality, Stone’s stresses its figurativeness.

Influenced by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Sigmund Freud, in “The Sound of ‘Un’ in Richard II,” Stone examines the ways in which the double, the prefix “un-,” and other linguistic examples reveal how Richard becomes divided against kingdom and self as he becomes “crossed androgynously by feminine difference and contradiction” (44). In the play, “un-” indicates “the uncanny sound of negation (of the masculine) and castration, the opening up of the putatively self-identical into an efflorescence of difference” (44). Stone argues that while Richard possesses some of the “feminine” qualities critics assign him, these qualities are “indistinguishable from his character as a man,” and “they open within him a lyrical range of feeling unknown to more ‘manly’ kings” (44). The chapter “Androgynous ‘Union’ and the Woman in Hamlet” explores the crossing of gender in Hamlet through the depiction of Hamlet as a femininized, impotent man and Gertrude as a masculinized, castrating woman. Stone asserts that the argument that Hamlet’s tragedy lies in his need to “expel the woman in himself ” so that he can take “manly action” and “re-establish sexual difference” is undermined by the “catastrophic ‘union’ . . . that concludes the tragic action. The union that erases the ambiguously gendered divisions between mind and body, deeds and words, duty and affect, gives rise to a catastrophic crisis of non-difference” (62).

The focus of “Impotence and the Feminine in Othello” is not on Othello’s race, the subject of much recent criticism, but on his anxieties about age, impotence, and femininity. Drawing on the work of André Green, Stone suggests that military virtue may be regarded in terms of the Same, what is familiar and therefore not threatening to Othello’s sense of self, whereas his love for Desde-mona, the Other, makes Othello “differ from himself ”; Othello’s description of Desdemona as his “‘fair warrior’” thus reveals his desire to see her as the “safely military (Same)” rather than the “romantic (Other)” (20, 81...