The Bard was perhaps the most radical and experimental writer of his day when dealing with themes of homosexuality in the sonnets, but he was conservative when it came to the “weaker sex”. His heroines can be broadly classified into two categories: enduring and independent. I’m using the term “heroine” strictly to denote the female leads, and not the supporting cast. As far as the main female characters are concerned, most of them are good girls with a natural persevering nature and hardly any ambition of their own. Those who have this spark fall into the category of ‘independents’ and are mostly referred to as ‘witches’.
Let’s start with the ladies from the negative category, so we can slowly compare them to the heroines who followed the rules. The first name that comes to mind is Lady Macbeth. If she takes it as a modern lady, she is ambitious, persuasive and determined. If she had been the CEO of a company these days, she would have given a fair amount of competition to many male CEOs around the world. But she is a woman, known by the name of her husband. She cannot actively do anything, because she is the second sex. Even if she tried to obtain the destiny that she believed she and her husband deserved, society, in the form of destiny, abandons her and death becomes her final destiny.
The second lady whose portrait we need to deconstruct is Katherina from The Taming of the Shrew. She is the harpy, because she is smart. She has a mind of her own and can make her own decisions, so she needs to be tamed. And domestication is such a harsh process that when we read or watch this work in these modern times, we feel that she was inflicted with almost inhuman cruelty. The pleasure of subduing a powerful woman is always there, and it was with the great Shakespeare as well.
The good girls, who got all the rewards, were undoubtedly the most persevering and naive. When a Juliet loves with all her innocence, she has to sacrifice her life to be accepted as a pure lady. She couldn’t stand her ground in the face of trouble or her fate would have forbidden her as well. Likewise, ladies like Ophelia, Desdemona, and Hermione had to sacrifice her lives, or at least pretend to, to gain the status of a virtuous lady.
There are heroines like Rosalind, Viola, and Portia who try to break from the norm, but somehow fall short of being the powerful women they should have been. What is common in these is that they all take on the appearance of a man, as if trying to move beyond their identity as a weak woman. But in the end, they do it for the good of the common god, just as a good girl is expected to give up everything for the good of the men in her life. Rosalind disguised herself as Ganymede to save herself and her sister, Viola did it to survive in the strange land of Illyria, and Portia did it to save her husband’s friend. The most daring feat was performed by Portia, as she stepped forward and challenged a group of men. But the temporary insult she received at the hands of her own husband when Bassanio gave her the wedding ring for saving her friend Antonio’s life is perhaps her punishment for defying a world of male laws.
To conclude, I would like to mention the example of the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. She also took on the appearance of a man, but for her own good, for her own amusement. And we all remember her tragic fate. She was ambitious, energetic and independent. But the ignominious end of her came drowning in shame and frustration. So, it is not just Shakespeare, but the woman of all time in literature has been shown as a model of virtue for men to triumph over her and boast of her strength.
