Anne Shakespeare’s feminine voice, again (Part 2)

Following on from the last blog post, in this post I want to expand a little more on what I consider to be Anne Shakespeare’s feminine voice. In the last post I pointed to what I considered to be the major influence on Anne’s feminine voice as that of existentialist feminism, especially that feminism as proposed by Simone de Beauvoir.

De Beauvoir asserted that the freedom as proposed by Sartre was not the same for women as for men. For men, being the dominant force within a patriarchal social structure, controlling the narrative of power (political, economic, cultural), the male freedom to transcend their situation was much more easily achieved than it was for women. De Beauvoir departs from Sartre in that where Sartre talks of freedom he is predominantly speaking of freedom for men, whereas for de Beauvoir, women face situations that prevent them from accessing and achieving that full freedom promised to men by Sartre’s existentialism. Women, for de Beauvoir, are constrained by their particular situation which includes being constrained by their bodies and thus being seen as the Other or as an object (usually an object of the male gaze and the site for male desire and lust). As Shepherd (2018) notes, “De Beauvoir argues that woman’s current existence operates differently to that of man’s, as hers sets limitations on what projects are possible for her in ways men’s do not. The notion of freedom is gendered … [and that] Choices are to be understood as reactions to situations and, in the case of woman, her situation is experienced as oppressive, and constricts her from engagement in projects. Nonetheless, what she makes of that situation is not fixed [that is, not pre-determined]. Choices for de Beauvoir are always possible, but they may each be problematic in some way. For her, this situation, her practical freedom, impacts a woman’s ontological freedom, her capacity for transcendence.” Which is to say that women, because of their particular situation, may have their capacity for total freedom curtailed by their situation.

And, regarding a woman’s situation, in Anne’s view, this situation falls within the dimensions of her core beliefs in love, nature, free will and humanism. That is, a woman’s potential for transcendence (her ontological freedom) is constrained through not just how she views her practical situation regarding these constraints, she is also constrained by the “facticity” of her existence; her being perceived of as a body, and as a body that has a specific species function – that of reproducing the human species. But as noted above, this body is also the site for the male gaze, desire and lust.

However, I believe that Anne is more closely aligned with de Beauvoir’s theory of feminism. To be clear though, Anne did not have the advantage of living in a society that had a plethora of feminist theory to draw on, or a formal community of academic, research and community groups focussed on feminism. What Anne did have, though, is her own lived experience to draw on and to look through history for those strong and capable women and learn from them what a possible feminist “revolution” may achieve. And this included not just “famous” women of high social standing, but she also drew on those women who are so often “hidden” from social view such as prostitutes and women from the lower classes such as tavern owners and boarding house keepers (see T&C and Pandarus’ final speech and in All’s Well Diana and her mother, for example). However, her main inspiration for her feminine voice was not just her own lived experience (and observations of her own community) but was grounded in her humanist project; a project that was focussed on what it meant to be human, not split into gender or sex (or even race and religion). And perhaps, her existential crisis around 1600 can be attributed to not just the failure as she saw it of her humanist project (or of humanism in general) but more specifically, that she had to confront the facticity of her own feminine position within the emerging capitalist moment. And it was this facticity, that whereas previously Anne had been fighting for the humanist position of equality between men and women (that all are created equal), she now had to confront the fact that this was no longer a tenable position to hold because it was now clearly obviously untrue. There was not equality between the sexes; women were, perhaps now more than ever, seen and treated as the Other. An object of male gaze, of male desire, of male lust and as a domestic help; that is, now actively excluded from the economic, political, social, and cultural life emerging under capitalism. Indeed, now just a “body”, without recourse to justice in any of the spheres dominated by males and male ideology of them as the captains of emerging industrial world, and females reduced to mere workers (both as low paid producers of goods but more importantly, as reproducing that workforce). Thus, it is no coincidence that Anne now depicts and has sympathy for, the emerging proletarian class, the “masses”; especially as we see in her later plays (after 1600). However, like de Beauvoir (1963), Anne came to see these differences not as a natural difference, but one created through the cultural changes, “what I contended [in The Second Sex] was that these dissimilarities are of a cultural and not a natural order.” That is, the differences are not confined solely to a class struggle, but are what de Beauvoir (Gerassi/de Beauvoir interview, 1976) calls, “Put another way: once inside the class struggle, women understood that the class struggle did not eliminate the sex struggle. It’s at that point that I myself became aware of what I have just said. Before that I was convinced that equality of the sexes can only be possible once capitalism is destroyed and therefore – and it’s this “therefore” which is the fallacy – we must first fight the class struggle. It is true that equality of the sexes is impossible under capitalism.”

The question that comes to mind regarding this turn of events in Anne’s life, the trigger for her disillusionment, is what could have happened to make her change from her optimistic humanism to this crisis of her selfhood? If we return to her Sonnets, I think we may be able to detect a possible reason; her husband, William’s affairs, especially the lasting one with the dark lady of the Sonnets. This, combined with the historical shifts occurring across the economic, political, social, and cultural landscape, could have led quite easily into a crisis of meaning; here Anne was witnessing the dissolution of her core beliefs in love, nature, free will and humanism. Not only for her alone, but this was a phenomenon that was occurring across all levels of society; the divide between the emerging proletariat and the bourgeoisie was becoming not just more apparent but was significantly impacting the lives of those class divisions. And for Anne, who was but just one lone female voice constrained by patriarchal ideology, without any hope (and it became apparent to her) for any mass uprising of women to demand change, then she was literally a lone voice for feminine equality. Further, as her existential crisis shows, she was being forced to confront this reality of increasing male dominance because of the failure of humanism to make the necessary changes needed for true equality of the sexes to be achieved. And, in addition, because she was a female writer constrained by social roles to not confirm this but to use her husband as her “front”, then she was also constrained artistically in how forceful she could portray the feminine case for equality (given that for her, the humanist project of equality between the sexes had failed or was in decline). And in some important ways it was this lack of not being able to rouse the mass of women into taking action that Anne also came to despair of (and thus being reduced to trying to portray women as they were in their lived experience; captured by the male patriarchy and apparently content to live their life according this ideological fetter); to her it must have seemed that for all of her portrayal up to this critical time (around 1600) of women had not moved any of them to join in any mass movement to seek equality and justice. As de Beauvoir (Gerassi/de Beauvoir interview, 1976) makes clear, “What I’m saying is that, in mass actions, women can have power. The more women become conscious of the need for such mass action, the more progress will be achieved. And, to return to the woman who can afford to seek individual liberation, the more she can influence her friends and sisters, the more that consciousness will spread, which in turn, when frustrated by the system, will stimulate mass action. Of course, the more that consciousness spreads, the more men will be aggressive and violent. But then, the more men are aggressive, the more women will need other women to fight back, that is, the more the need for mass action will be clear.” That is, in Anne’s case, she was pursuing what Zapffe (1933) called “sublimation”, where to avoid the reality of witnessing existence, the person turns toward artistic pursuits and puts their thoughts toward making sense of their existence through, in Anne’s case, her writing.

More to come.