Posted on

Men writing about women: how male authors have depicted female characters

Lydia (Year 11) investigates the portrayal of women in literature, a field that has largely been controlled by the male voice, and how this has changed throughout the centuries.

The literary world has always been (and remains) dominated by men. As male writers create their female characters, they often fall short of capturing the interesting, vivid complexity of womanhood which we, as women, know to be reality. Since Shakespeare’s heyday, it’s fair to say that the role of women in society has changed significantly; but how has this change affected how male writers portray women in literature, if it has at all?

When Shakespeare’s Macbeth was performed (circa. 1602), women were expected to be submissive to their husbands, punished for being ‘scolds’ or ‘nags’. Fear of women’s speech was prevalent, spread by imperious treatises. The extremely popular treatise, Anatomy of a Woman’s Tongue, claimed

“A woman’s tongue it is the devil’s seat;

and that it is a most pernicious lyar,

a backbiter and a consuming fire”

summing up misogynistic attitudes of the Jacobeans with a catchy rhyme. And, of course, there were the witch burnings, vast numbers of women executed for being transgressive, reclusive or powerful.

This attitude towards women is noticeable in Shakespeare’s work as he links the powerful women in Macbeth to the world of spirits and demons. Through studying Macbeth and watching various productions, such as that performed at the National Theatre, it is easy to be struck by how Shakespeare presents women as a manipulative force, blaming them for the immoral actions of men. The misogynistic attitude behind this becomes obvious when compared to how Shakespeare presents Macbeth himself, murderer of the sleeping king and his own close friend, as a basically good, if slightly unhinged, man.

Another greatly beloved male writer is Charles Dickens. By the time Great Expectations was published in 1860, the Jacobeans and their witches were centuries dead, though reductive attitudes towards women lived on. The continued ownership of women by men and the surprising lack of social progress in the centuries between Macbeth and Great Expectations is revealed by similarities between Dickens’ and Shakespeare’s portrayal of women.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare portrays Lady Macbeth’s desire for power as unnatural and dangerous as she orders spirits to remove remorse and conscience from her body and replace her breast-milk with acid. Dickens uses uncannily similar imagery of mutilation and hardening in Great Expectations as the proud Estella claims “I have no heart … I have no softness there, no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense” and Miss Havisham echoes “I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.” This idea that all women who transgress the role of tender, servile femininity must be unnatural perversions of nature is used by both Shakespeare and Dickens, revealing that, despite the centuries passed, men continued to hold the same views regarding the role of women in society.

Dickens is famed for his portrayal of meek, simpering virgins (often paired with epithets such as ‘dear’ and ‘little’). In Great Expectations this trope manifests itself in Clara Barley. Clara is a paradigm of servility, tending constantly to her abusive father yet still managing to appear “natural and winning” and well as “confiding, loving and innocent”.  Dickens reveals Victorian attitudes that women should be submissive, praising Clara’s “modest manner of yielding herself to Herbert’s embracing arm.” The anti-Estella, Clara is just as two-dimensional, a figment of the imagination of the imperious male.

The 20th Century saw great change in how women were viewed in society, earning the vote in Britain in 1918. The end of the 1920s saw the Equal Franchise Act passed, granting equal voting rights to women. Did this rapid progress, and the surging momentum of the feminist movement, pave the way for a parade of wonderful heroines written by men?

It seems not, if John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, best-seller of the 1930s, is anything to go by, featuring not one named female character, only ‘Curley’s wife’, the self-absorbed, cruel and teasing caricature of female shallowness and naivety. Steinbeck punishes this woman for her crimes of promiscuity and stupidity with a broken neck, echoing the methods of past writers; Shakespeare delivers Lady Macbeth a grizzly suicide and Estella is condemned to a life of abuse at the hands of Drummel. Though Steinbeck sticks fast to the well-trodden tropes of two-dimensional femininity, the literary world has a growing female voice in this decade as Daphne du Morier, Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf begin penning novels of their own, featuring swathes of heroines.

However, men have, on occasion, written brilliant female characters: for example Shakespeare’s Juliet and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but these are exceptions to a centuries old pattern in which women are written as either fantastical paragons of innocence or cruel monsters. The recent twitter trend, which inspired this article, asserts that this pattern marches onwards to the present day. So as far as writing funny, interesting, realistic women goes, I guess it’s down to us.

Follow @English_WHS on Twitter

Posted on

Cross gender casting in Shakespeare’s plays: Does it solve the problem of gender inequality?

Cecelia (Year 12) investigates the modern and historical practice of cross gender casting in Shakespeare’s plays.

From Tamsin Grieg’s Malvolia to Maxine Peake’s Hamlet, cross gendered casting is becoming increasingly popular in British theatre, never more so than in Shakespeare’s plays. New adaptations wanting to put a spin on the 400-year-old productions now look to casting female actresses in the typically male roles of Lear, Macbeth and Othello. Whilst this allows the play to be seen through a different feminine perspective and offers a completely new interpretation of the character, cross gendered casting gives women the opportunities to embody some of theatre’s most complex and popular roles.

However, this seemingly ‘modern’ twist on Shakespeare’s work is not as revolutionary as we may think. When Shakespeare wrote the majority of his work, women were not allowed to perform on stage and so his female characters were always played by young boys or men. As much as gender blind casting can provide a wider range of roles for female actresses, is it always effective and when should the line be drawn?

It is no wonder that Shakespeare’s work is constantly being revisited and adapted, his original text is so complex and diverse that something new can be gleaned from it with every new actor. Hamlet is the most frequently adapted Shakespearian play and has one of the longest histories of women playing the title role. The character of Hamlet is uncertain, passive and lacks resolve – qualities that are typically seen as feminine. Hamlet’s effeminate side has led to the character often being portrayed by women, with some believing that they can inhabit the role with more ease as they are able to fully connect with the feminine side to his personality.

Some of the most famous Victorian Hamlets were women, Sarah Bernhardt and Alice Marriot’s Hamlets were highly regarded by most critics with the part said to have benefitted from their “injection of femininity” (Catherine Belsey). Despite this, some critics argued that it was impossible for an actress to truly comprehend and identify with the thoughts and emotions of a man – a line of argument that is still present today. With this in mind some productions choose to play the character of Hamlet as a woman as demonstrated in Asta Nielsen’s portrayal of Princess Hamlet in the 1920 silent film. Nielsen played Hamlet as a woman masquerading as a man, possessing all the masculine skills and lacking only the instinct to kill. But regardless of the past success of actresses playing the Dane, there is still a public reluctance to accept this change; a 2014 YouGov poll found that 48% of Britons were not happy with the idea of a female Hamlet.

Many argue that by changing the gender of the actor, the gender of the character is effectively altered as well; as such, must the text itself be adjusted and if so, to what extent?

Whilst Vanessa Redgrave played the male role of Prospero, Helen Mirren’s Prospera was a female rewrite of the original. For most of Julie Taymor’s film version of The Tempest, the change to Prospera worked but because her daughter, Miranda, stayed female, the relationship between the magician and the child became complicated. The dynamics between a father and a daughter are vastly different to that of a mother and a daughter, and the Tempest is inherently a complex dissection of the fraught bond between a father and his daughter. The removal of this crucial theme dramatically altered the message of the entire piece and as such did not sit well with many audience members.

Whilst cross gender casting did occur in the 18th and 19th century, it has gained huge popularity in the last 20 years. As gender is beginning to be seen less as a biological definition and more as a social construct, the idea of a woman playing a man or vice versa has become far more acceptable. Our intrinsic understanding of male and female characteristics have changed, along with the ways in which we wish to see them portrayed on stage.

Of course, the opportunity for great female actresses to play great Shakespearian roles is positive. As well as giving women the chance to play classic and multifaceted roles, it allows for directors to create something new out of a play that has been around for hundreds of years.

Despite this, as we move forward, the dramatic community must place more of an emphasis on the creation of original female roles which share the same complexity and breadth of emotion as that of their male counterparts. Juliet Stevenson summarised the debate neatly with her statement on the red carpet that she “want[s] great parts for women, not women playing great parts for men”.

Twitter: @English_WHS