When Butler refers to Beauvoir’s idea of body as “a historical situation,” she emphasizes:
[T]he body suffers a certain cultural construction, not only through conventions that sanction and proscribe how one acts one’s body, the ‘act’ or performance that one’s body is, but also in the tacit conventions that structure the way the body is culturally perceived.(274)
Miranda’s body, as a living sign, is perceived and formed by the male community in the patriarchal ideology of The Tempest, and is read and coded in a larger culture beyond the text by the painters, directors, and audience.
The myth of this “perfect” woman conveys its meaning over time through both her appearance and actions, which later periods attribute to Shakespeare.
Recognized as a cultural ideal “in the tacit conventions,” Shakespeare’s imagined Miranda has been conditioned, standardized, and victimized in a sense, not only because certain feminine acts are randomly and strictly
inscribed on her but also because certain physical female characteristics are predictably tied with feminine acts. A link of a reified body type and of certain acts with the concept of perfection has historically been taken as Truth, with a stable and unchangeable meaning, even evoking authority and privilege.
In order to both destabilize the gender ideology in current theatrical practice and the larger culture and to resist the imperial, white, and male inscription on Miranda’s wonderful, “perfect,” and paradoxically insubstantial female body, I would propose to construct an imagined stage, casting a male actor as the anti-thesis of Shakespeare’s perfect woman.7 The chosen male actor would be heavy-set, large, small-eyed, big-mouthed, flat-nosed, and dark-skinned. In addition, he would be shown with a blonde wig, curly and long, over his black short hair, in the classic style of Waterhouse’s Miranda, and would be dressed in an elegant shining white skirt. Preferably, this stereotypically “imperfect” male-Miranda, while performing perfectly as a woman with modest and gentle acts, would resemble the deformed Caliban.
They would appear as twin sister-brother on stage to satirize the play’s hierarchical order and to reveal transparently and shockingly through visual effects the essence of their victimized and colonized bodies, in terms of gender and race respectively.8
7 I have been searching recent productions of The Tempest but unfortunately up to now still have no access to any particular production in which the director did interpret Miranda as a central character and challenged both the conventional gendered performance and the limited types of actresses by casting a stereotypically imperfect male actor in this ideal female role. Cross-dressed male impersonation of Prospero, though, was attempted in the Globe Theatre production in 2000.
Directed and designed by women (Lenka Udovicki and Bjanka Ursulov from Belgrade), the production cast Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero, playing the role as neither male nor female, but with “authority, humanity and humor . . . a watchful parent to both Miranda and Ariel” (Gay 171-72). This move, albeit intellectually challenging and visually as well as textually exciting, shifted the focus back to Prospero as most major interpretations of the play have done and did not question the role of Miranda as the “perfect” woman.
8 As a male Miranda is introduced into the context of the play, it needs to be clarified that this is cross-dressed casting, purposely crossing the bodylines, instead of a switch of roles. Miranda, although not such a substantial role as Prospero and Caliban in some major interpretations, determines in fact the structure and the patriarchal ideology of the play. Her important role as the only woman in the play and the daughter of the dominant character, Prospero, may not be switched to a man/son without making any changes to the lines and weakening the controversial power of the sex issue in the original text, even though the play’s resolution of the elder generation’s hatred through the love of their offspring can still be worked out if Prospero is cast with a son and King Alonso with a daughter. While casting a son cannot explain Caliban’s and Stephano’s sexual desire for Prospero’s wonderful daughter, a cross-dressed Miranda played by a
To call this practice of cross-dressing non-traditional casting may evoke indignation or disagreement, since casting boy actors in female roles has been a Renaissance tradition in English theater. The ideologies that my casting and Renaissance practice are based on and the purpose and effect each seeks to achieve, however, are different. It is because the normative gender attitudes and protocols of reception have changed significantly from Shakespeare’s stage and time to our contemporary theater and society.
According to Orgel in Impersonations, the Elizabethan theater assumes absolute interchangeability of sexes based on the material and superficial level of costumes, voices, and mannerisms. The acceptance of gender disguise by the audience reflects two important societal concepts of the sexes: (1) Man is the only sex, considering the hierarchal order of power, and thus there’s actually no need to clarify the difference of sexes; (2) Boys are analogically versions of women (Orgel, Impersonations 18-19). Under this situation, cross-dressed boys playing women are regarded as natural and would have caused no disturbance, whereas cross-dressing may be used strategically as a special effect and a parody of stable gender identity when it appears in our contemporary theater. This new contribution results from a modernist attribution of a fixed self and a close connection between sex and gender. To quote again from Orgel’s observation:
Ours is a theatre of named, known, and (most important for the purposes of this argument) gendered actors; to be seriously deceived by cross-gendered disguising is for us deeply disturbing, the stuff of classic horror movies like Psycho. We want to believe that the question of gender is settled, biological, controlled by issues of sexuality, and we claim to be quite clear about which sex is which—our genital organs, those inescapable facts, preclude any ultimate ambiguity. (19)
According to Orgel’s argument, the effect of a drag role by a cross-dressed male actor in my proposed casting of Miranda to destabilize gender identity and ideology would paradoxically depend on the audience’s familiarity with contemporary normative gender attitudes and behavior.
While aiming for subversive effect, I am critically conscious that cross-dressing in performance has generated dispute or even dissension over
male actor still fits into the text and can furthermore make a parody of the play’s patriarchal gender politics.
the past few decades. Contemporary drag, for example, has been argued by some critics to promulgate misogynistic images of women. In “Cross Left-drag 1,” Erika Munk examines the contemporary modes of cross-dressing and claims that there is a parallel between men in drag and blackface minstrel show. Munk says,
Most men in drag are no more subversive than whites in blackface were. . . . The more women fight for autonomy, the less helpful become restatements of stereotype which have lost their critical edge and turned into means of putting women down and aside. (89)
Other feminists like Jill Dolan and Peggy Phelan articulate similar theoretical points though with different focuses. In “Gender Impersonation Onstage: Destroying or Maintaining the Mirror of Gender Roles?” Dolan is concerned with the absence of women in drag performance, for “both spectator and performer conspire to construct a male-identified subject” (8).
In “Crisscrossing Cultures,” Phelan explores how the figure of woman in drag performance is “appropriated as a sign to validate male authority,”
which is determined by how fully men can “wear” women (161). It is indeed a controversial debate whether cross-dressing in drag performance makes politicized statements about gender hierarchies or cruelly parodies a hackneyed and stereotypical vision of female sexuality.
Although Dolan agrees with many other feminists that male drag may mirror women’s socially constructed roles, she does not hence deny the potential of theatre as a laboratory to experiment with non-gendered identities. Her ambiguous idea echoes Lesley Ferris in Crossing the Stage, in which various controversies of cross-dressing are discussed and understood as essential for a public forum of theatre. A public forum is free for players and spectators to debate, and performance in theatre can “become a kind of battleground for shifting moral dilemmas and social and cultural change”
(Ferris 9). Cross-dressing, particularly for its being controversial and its playing with thresholds, becomes a symbol of liminality. As Ferris further argues,
Theatrical cross-dressing has provided one way of playing with liminality and its multiple possibilities and extending that sense of the possible to the spectator/reader; a way of play, that while often reinforcing the social mores and status quo, carries with it
the possibility for exposing that liminal moment, that threshold of questioning, that slippery sense of a mutable self. (9)
Prominent use of cross-dressing in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, for example, exposes that liminal moment and forces audiences to recognize the counter-reality in her play, in which men play women, women play men, and adults play children. On the one hand, Churchill’s theatrical technique of cross-dressing is found by some critics to clothe gay male and lesbian desires in heterosexual attire (Harding 260). On the other hand, the performance achieves one of the main epic-theatre (anti-mimetic drama) goals: Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect). Verfremdungseffekt, according to Gerhard Knapp in The Literary Encyclopedia, applies to the function of any theatrical device designed to dispel the audience’s notion that “reality” is directly represented on stage and thus creates the estrangement effect:
Verfremdung creates an “estranged,” i.e. detached, and
potentially rational, reception of a play, and thus counteracts the spectator’s emotional involvement or identification with the characters or actions displayed.The gender bending in Churchill’s play makes the audience aware of the fact that the play is a play with and against reality. After the curtain falls, such an artifact intended as a tool of intervention to stimulate the audience’s thought processes should be applied to socio-political practices and help the audience discover their true reality and identity, as it “underscores the social construction of gender” and “deconstructs” the patriarchal “character of representation” (Reinelt 104).
Corresponding to Churchill’s subversive and provocative performative tactics in such plays as Cloud Nine, my casting of a male “Caliban-looking”
actor who would perform Miranda’s role as perfectly and “femininely” as Song Liling in David Huang’s M. Butterfly also seeks estrangement effect and liminal moments in which both the cross-dressed actor and the audience may be unsettled by the tension between subverting and consolidating gendered identity and perfection. At the beginning of the performance, Ferdinand alone would be seen on the stage. He would read passionately the lines—“Full many a lady / I have eyed with best regard/ But Miranda, O Miranda / So perfect and so beautiful, is created / Of every creature’s best”—in order to introduce Miranda as a central figure in this production
and to clue the audience in on both the cross-gendered casting and the parody of the beauty ideal and feminine perfection that a male
“Caliban-looking” Miranda is meant to complicate. After Ferdinand goes, the male actor playing Miranda in women’s clothes would follow Prospero silently and slowly to the center and start the play’s first act in the shipwreck scene. Lifting his/her face slightly upward to face Prospero, expressively knitting his/her eyebrows to show his/her grief and worry, the male Miranda parts his/her big mouth to urge her father to allay the tempest. With tears flowing down his/her face and his/her left hand touching his/her heart, s/he begs compassionately for the shipwrecked sailors in a soft voice.
Weeping—originally a perfect quality for the female heroine, stereotypically
“defined by that weakness, by her being other than manly”(Jardine 193)—is now taken over by a burly male actor, whose “imperfect” masculine features and “perfect” feminine performance dramatically relax the conventional connection between female features and feminine acts. In this theater house, the audience, from the opening of the first act, would be exposed to a “brave new world” (5.1. 186) of imagination in which Miranda would be the focus of the spotlight, not with her “typical” female beauty, but with her surreal embodiment of the binary distinctions between art and reality, female and male, feminine and masculine.
Because Miranda is a man in a dress, “a beauty” with the appearance of “a beast,” her body would be read, decoded, and shaped not only by the narrative structure of the play itself but also by the audience. As Ferdinand first catches sight of this hideous male Miranda on stage and exclaims “Most sure the goddess” and “O you wonder” (1.2. 425, 430), the seemingly satirical admiration of his/her physical attractiveness might stimulate the audience’s thought processes. The audience may appeal to their self-critical resources and hence not only recognize gender stereotypes but realize the absurdity of the cultural expectations of beauty. Otherwise, the audience, whose perception of beauty and gendered identity remains unaffected, may be prompted to produce a defensive suspicion. They may suspect that perhaps the pain-stricken Ferdinand, suffering from his assumption of his father’s death in the storm, has dizzily mistaken the beast Caliban for the beautiful Miranda or that the actor has just read wrong lines. Interactively both the perturbed audience’s self-criticism and spontaneous doubt should gradually adjust their original perception of genders to the expected
development of Shakespeare’s plot. The play’s irony may then be strengthened when the audience is made aware of the fact that the wondered-at body of Miranda as the idealized perfect woman is rendered visible only in the male characters’ narrow or paradoxically excessively far-reaching imagination.
The male imagination imposed on Miranda’s body, when it is repeated throughout the play, could elicit ridicule from the audience, especially from those who stick to the conventional view of beauty. For example, when Caliban seriously compares Miranda and his mother Sycorax to underscore Miranda’s greatest beauty, saying “I never saw a woman / But only Sycorax and she / But she as far as surpasseth Sycorax” (3.2. 95-98), the audience would be tempted to laugh sourly at Caliban’s ignorance. Looking exactly like Caliban, this large and fat Miranda is in fact visually no better looking than the literally described old and ugly hag-witch, Sycorax, if beauty can be simply judged by the standards of cultural authority.
The physical resemblance between Miranda and Caliban could not only tactically make the beauty of Shakespeare’s perfect woman sound particularly ironic but also increasingly intervene in the audience’s perception, when they are invited to notice that none of the male characters surrounding Miranda seem to be aware of her “true” “ugliness.” Both her intimate lover and later husband, Ferdinand, who claims to have eyed “full many a lady” (3.1. 40), and her respected and close father Prospero, who even roughly criticizes Sycorax’s appearance as a “blue-eyed hag” (1.2. 271), reject the false truth of her beauty, even though at the same time they remain committed to describing her gender identity at face value, on the notion of surface. The more bizarre the audience find this, the more aware they could become of the inclination to judge one’s appearance with certain conventional standards and of the play’s dangerous social reality, in which Miranda’s gender identity and female body are overlooked and overemphasized at the same time by the male community.
In the play’s gender hierarchy, Miranda as a woman, “the other” in the male community, is supposed to be overlooked and silenced, when she serves no use for her male dominators. Now, played by a corpulent man, Miranda could no longer be excluded as the weak of the other sex. Instead, in the eyes of the male audience, a cross-dressed male Miranda may also be a part of “we,” a role they may feel sympathy with. For example, at one of
the play’s most provocative moments, Prospero, the powerful father in Shakespeare’s creation, represses severely his gentle and tender daughter:
MIRANDA. O dear father,
Make not too rash a trial of him, for He’s gentle, and not fearful.
PROSPERO. What, I say,
My foot my tutor? Put thy sword up, traitor, . . . For I can here disarm thee with this stick And make thy weapon drop.
MIRANDA. Beseech you, father!
PROSPERO. Hence! Hang not on my garments.
MIRANDA. Sir, have pity.
I’ll be his surety.
PROSPERO. Silence! One word more
Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee. What, An advocate for an imposter? Hush! (1.2. 470-81)
At this point, a spectator planted in the audience would chauvinistically yell
“Coward!” The assignment of this added revolutionary voice seeks to invite the audience to rise to their better critical judgment and to ask themselves why this fat Miranda cannot fight “like a man” and curse back as Caliban does: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.
The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (1.2. 366-68).
When the advantages are set equally for both Caliban and this male Miranda that they are both taught language by Prospero and both strong enough to take action, the sex issue would come to the surface. The question, “to fight/speak, or not to fight/speak” in a patriarchal society, is concerned neither with one’s linguistic ability nor strength, but with gender.
The parody that this male Miranda endeavors to make of the play’s patriarchal politics, moreover, reveals the way a woman’s body is regarded as men’s property for and through which battles of power are fought and
settled. As Gilbert and Tompkins indicate, dramatists often represent rape, especially inter-racial rape “as an analogue for the colonisers’ violation of the land, and also for related forms of economic and political exploitation”
(23). For Shakespeare, an accused inter-racial rape of the European princess Miranda by the indigenous colonized Caliban is an even more complex issue, a prominent signifier, which furthermore signifies gender’s surrender to race.
As discussed earlier, Miranda’s female body functions as the space which Caliban attempts to occupy in order to establish his own realm and to overthrow his master Prospero’s control. The irony of this sexual oppression again lies in the male community’s arrogant ignorance and inevitable dependence on Miranda’s body. By casting a “Caliban-looking” male actor in this role, the tragic state of Miranda in the attempted but failed rape by Caliban could instead be transformed into one of the funniest jokes in the play, which delivers a “man-to-man” and “Caliban-to-Caliban” message to the audience. This scene may introduce black humor that the male playwright would not have anticipated, when Caliban lewdly responds to Prospero’s accusation: “O ho, O ho! / Would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (1.2. 352-53, emphasis added).
The audience’s laughter might be further stimulated to get bigger and bigger at the arrogance and ignorance of Miranda’s male dominators (father
The audience’s laughter might be further stimulated to get bigger and bigger at the arrogance and ignorance of Miranda’s male dominators (father