In "Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies," Carole Levine makes a case for a more complex and systematic analysis of the relationship between "social" and "literary forms." Her claim is that older attempts to make sense of past cultural practices got tied up because they failed to take into account the haphazard nature of the social "order," in which forms interact and collide in unpredictable ways. As a Victorianist, her prime example is the discourse of the separate spheres, which had become a contentious topic in Victorian studies with some scholars going so far as to advocate discarding the term altogether. This was because they realized that what in theory was a reactionary and antifeminist mode of thought sometimes behaved in practice very differently. Levine's use of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Cry of the Children" to demonstrate how traditional imagery relating to the "separate spheres" ideology could be conflated with other prevailing social and literary forms to undermine not only those forms but perhaps, in the final analysis, Barrett Browning's argument itself, provides a rubric for further scholarship. In this post, I propose to bring her insights to bear on the social forms which find expression in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
The hilarity of this play perhaps results in part from the wide array of such forms which jostle each other on its pages: discourses of authority, marriage, piety, and sexual purity often reach absurd compromises with each other in Shakespeare's Vienna. There is, to begin with, the strange case of Barnardine, the convicted murderer who cannot be executed because he does not repent his crime. Barnardine has unwittingly become the site of a clash between a mode of thinking punishment as a process of spiritual reform or purgation of sin (represented by the Friar/Duke's constant presence in the prison) and a secular discourse of enforced obedience through managed anxiety (discussed in last week's post). Paradoxically, by behaving in such a way as to merit the most extreme punishment, he has consistently escaped his death sentence and is pardoned at the conclusion of the play. The tactics employed by the civil authorities to arouse his anxiety fail due to his utter moral depravity: "We have very oft waked him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it; it hath not moved him at all" (4.2.127-9). This leaves only the actual execution of the sentence as an option to secure his (bodily) obedience; but at this point Barnardine's similarly intransigent resistance to spiritual discipline comes to his aid: as the Duke (in his role of friar) recognizes, he is "A creature unprepared, unmeet for death; / And to transport him in the mind he is / Were damnable" (4.3.54-6). These two "social forms," then, which in theory promise a well-ordered society in which civil punishment regulates subjects' bodies while religious discipline regulates their subjectivities, in practice step on each others' toes in this instance, allowing a convicted murderer to walk away scot free.
In a less farcical register, Measure for Measure plays the early modern obsession with purity (racial, sexual, religious) against its valorization of marriage. These two cultural imperatives had always had an uneasy relationship. John Stubbs, for instance, in his polemic against Elizabeth's proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou, rejects the notion that the contact with impurity involved in an unequal marriage could ever be construed positively as the improvement of the faulty partner: "And here note this, that everywhere it is set down how the wicked perverted the good, but nowhere that the better part converted the wicked" (11). But in the spate of marriages demanded by the comic plot of the play, Measure for Measure needs this fear of corruption to give place to reconciliation and union. It does, but the dissonance between the two is perhaps more pronounced than in any other Shakespearian comedy. Isabella (a novitiate nun) famously does not respond in any way to the Duke's offer of marriage; while Lucio is forced to marry a prostitute he has impregnated, a fate he claims is equivalent to "pressing to death, whipping, and hanging" (5.1.520-1). Most interesting of all is Mariana's plea for Angelo's life, which actually inverts the normal judgment against impurity: "They say best men are molded out of faults, / And, for the most, become much more the better / For being a little bad. So may my husband" (5.1.435-7). The comedic form thus shunts aside cultural demands for purity in favor of marriage, in the process calling into question the desirability of either.
Works Cited
Stubbs, John. John Stubbs's Gaping Gulf with Letters and Other Relevant Documents. Ed. Lloyd E. Berry. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1968. Print.
Hey Kenny! I like your reading of Barnadine, and it seems to do justice to Levine's strategy. I find it interesting that you then choose to discuss marriage, since it, like capital punishment, is also a site where civil and religious ideologies intersect. I'm not quite sure, though, how the comedic form calls into question the desirability of purity and/or marriage, or how this relates to your application of Levine's strategic formalism. Is marriage an example of a site where these competing ordering principles duke it out? If so, doesn't your analysis suggest that, contrary to Levine's post-post structuralist approach, the binary here is functioning in more of a post-structuralist way? It seems as though the discourse of purity fails to maintain itself, and actually creates a space for a laudable instance of badness, rather than "rubbing up" against it, as Levine puts it. Perhaps there's a step missing in your analysis that someone like me requires to follow your logic?
ReplyDeleteHi, Kenny! I think that your first reading of the punishment encountering its own limitations when confronted with its ideological origins is compelling (very much so!) and an insightful analysis. I am less convinced by the second reading whereby marriage is confirmed through a triumph over purity when it inscribes a lack of purity within itself...I think it needs a bit more development to convince that marriage is not, instead, portrayed simply as a rotten institution, -- one that debases --which would be a simpler reading. Can you please try to anticipate all possible objections to your argument while still keeping it under 600 words in the future?
ReplyDeleteJk.
Hey Steph! If someone like you fails to notice a step in my argument, that's probably because it isn't there. (:
ReplyDeleteI think you guys are both right about my argument about marriage and purity as competing forms being weaker than the first one. I think it's clear that in the period this was the case, and another example I didn't have time to mention is the rash of misogynist tracts which are often specifically anti-marriage. The inflated rhetoric of such works, which assume that all women are unfaithful shrews, highlights a male anxiety common in the period about tying one's honor, status, and (for the wealthy) the inheritance of one's estate to a person invariably considered "the weaker vessel," incapable of self-control. Physical (through VD), social, and spiritual decay thus seem inevitable consequences of marriage, an institution paradoxically valorized much more in newly Protestant England than at any previous time. And I think you can see this play out in MfM, too, but I should have set out more clearly the range of responses the characters have to their perceived dissonance in the first paragraph of the sentence: for Lucio, clearly, purity trumps marriage (though the play still forces him to marry); for Mariana, the reverse; and in Isabella's case the play is radically ambiguous.