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Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 56, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 110-112

(Review)
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DOI: 10.1353/shq.2005.0046

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shq/summary/v056/56.1malcolmson.html

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more expansive yet still quite traditional denition of gender roles, these duels and
duellists seem to enact not the aristocratic struggle for place and honor but a valorization of truth, virtue, and a correspondence of word and deed more akin to the medieval
trial by combat than to the duel of honor. The cumulative eect is not simply a critique of aristocratic self-fashioning but the implication of an alternative set of goals
and values.
Low gestures toward this alternative in chapter 4s discussion of diering class perspectives on duelling and honor, where she observes that, in addition to ridiculing the
triviality and self-aggrandisement of the duel of honor, middle-class dramatists often
supplied the duel with more serious causes and purposes. Her explanation of this refunctionalization, however, is less ideological than dramaturgicalso that the audience might more easily empathize with the story (94) and the analysis of the plays discussed in chapter 4 is focused less on the reasons for or meanings of the duels than on
the subversion of their rituals, which she attributes to middle-class skepticism concerning aristocratic mores. Such an account falls short of the complex cultural work of
the plays, casting them in a reactive position in relation to aristocratic cultural agency
at the expense of a thorough consideration of the goals, values, and perceptionsclassbased or otherwisethat may lie behind the public theaters reconceptualization of the
duel as a means of defending home, family, and virtue. Manhood and the Duel has much
of value to say about the centrality of the duel to aristocratic masculinity in early modern Englandso much so that objections of this sort might seem to demand too much.
But its privileging of aristocratic concerns at the expense of the Other voices that
nonetheless clamor insistently from its peripheries renders its account of class conict
a distinctly uneven combat.

Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in

Shakespearean Tragedy. By CRISTINA LEN ALFAR. Newark:
University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University
Presses, 2003. Pp. 254. $46.50 cloth.
Reviewed by CRISTINA MALCOLMSON
In Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy,
Cristina Len Alfar challenges both traditional and feminist views of the evil woman
characters in Shakespeare. Her central thesis is that Shakespeare exposes rather than
reinforces masculinist fantasies of female evil (29). This claim is particularly persuasive for Macbeth, although not for King Lear. In all cases, the book oers an interpretation of the socioeconomic basis for these fantasies that is far more nuanced than
any proposed to date. Alfar argues that Goneril, Regan, and Lady Macbeth should be
analyzed alongside Juliet, Cleopatra, and Hermione, and that Shakespeare uses these
characters to make visible the violence of patrilineal structures of power (29).
The project is especially valuable in its determined eort to consider gender in the
light of early modern social and political formations. For example, Alfar demonstrates

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111

that conduct books of the period portray the loss of female chastity as treason. The
power of the husband and father reproduces the power of the monarch because all
three have the ability to use or destroy the bodies of their subjects. Therefore, when
women begin to exercise political power in the plays, their cruelty is another manifestation of the political system that usually victimizes them.
According to Alfar, critics who have labeled characters like Lady Macbeth as evil
have ignored the complexity of their motivation. In fact they are tragic heroines whose
corruption displays the ruthlessness of state power. The interpretation of Lady
Macbeth is a compelling new view, and the analysis of Romeo and Juliet, Antony and
Cleopatra, and The Winters Tale quite convincing. But Alfar gives too much credit to
Shakespeare, in my opinion, in her estimates of both his knowledge of the structures of
power she describes and his sympathy for the women caught within them. Nevertheless
her readings of how these systems operate in the plays are always fruitful.
Alfar uses theorists such as Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, Julia Kristeva, and
Jacques Derrida to consider women as commodities transformed into specters, created
by fantasy and haunting the patrilineal order (32). The evil woman is conjured up by
the economic need to control womens bodies. Although Shakespeare escapes blame for
this conjuration, Alfar nds many other authors contributing to it, including Juan Luis
Vives in his conduct books and Joseph Swetnam in the pamphlet wars of 161520.
Contemporary feminist critics are seen as complicit in a modern version of this conjuring process, reproducing gendered binaries of good and evil through their horror at
Lady Macbeth, Goneril and Regan, Cleopatra, and others like them. This horror not
only obscures the tragic dimension of these characters; it also reinforces the beliefs that
a natural woman is domestic and passive, and that political self-interest, violence, and
greed are masculine traits. However, I dont think it is accurate to say that feminist critics of Shakespeare have reproduced gender binaries. Their goal is not to denounce Lady
Macbeth as monstrous but to explore why Shakespeare creates her as such. They can
nally be criticized only for misinterpreting Shakespeares purposes, if in fact they have
done so.
Alfar makes the best case for Shakespeares violent women as tragic heroines rather
than evil monsters in her chapter on Macbeth. This chapter develops a critical perspective that could signicantly revise traditional views. According to Alfar, Lady Macbeths
ruthlessness stems not from her unnatural desire but from her decision to adopt a masculinist culture of violence already revealed as bloodthirsty on Duncans eld of battle.
Alfar argues convincingly that it is problematic to blame Lady Macbeth for a murder
that her husband proposes before he sees her, a murder that is not inherently dierent
from the brutal acts of revenge ordered by Duncan against Macdonald and the thane
of Cawdor. Lady Macbeths invocation to the spirits to unsex her and her declaration
of willingness to crush her own infants skull display her corruption by a system that
equates power with violence. Alfar rightly points out that Lady Macbeth acts quite conventionally as the wife supporting the desires of the husband. As the play indicts the
patrilinear system, Shakespeare parodies the ideal of wifely duty.
This interpretation is strongly bolstered by evidence that Shakespeare exposes
masculinist fantasies of female evil in Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and
Winters Tale. Leontess jealousy is the prime example of these fantasies, but Capulet,

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Caesar, and several other male characters exhibit the same mental disease that threatens the body of Leontess queen (172). In her chapters on these plays, Alfars analysis
cuts to the quick of the socioeconomic structures that underlie marriage, primogeniture, monarchy, and imperialism. Cleopatras erotics of domination are not an expression of free desire but a political strategy that uses fantasies of femininity, Africanness,
and kingship in order to protect herself and her country (136). Her condemnation as
an evil whore by Antony and other male characters reects not only the need of the
patrilinear system to exorcise the unruly woman but also the Wests need to justify its
own imperial aggression. In the discussion of Winters Tale, Gouxs theory of the neurotic subject is used to read Leontess jealousy as motivated by specic socioeconomic
processes, including the increasing economic necessity for pure lines of descent (166).
The play condemns tyranny through the devastating eects of Leontess jealousy, and
the playwright demonstrates his awareness of how the system maintains itself through
the threat of violence against women.
The problem with this argument emerges in the chapter on King Lear. Alfar claims
that Shakespeare vilies not Goneril and Regan but absolutist monarchy, whether
practiced by Lear or his daughters. These daughters should be considered as tragic as
Edmund, since all have complex motivations. Gonerils cruelty to Lear is motivated by
his curse, and the cruelty of both sisters to Gloucester stems from his traitorous acts.
Goneril and Regan cannot be labeled as monstrous, because there is no feminine way
to exercise power according to this system; and indeed Queen Elizabeth was equally
ruthless when it served her purposes. Perhaps Alfar is right that critical responses to
Goneril and Regan have been simplistic. Nevertheless, the play does indict Goneril
and Regan for their heartlessness, as it condemns Edmund for his. It is true that Lears
rule is in no way ideal, but banishing a daughter is hardly comparable to gouging out
the eyes of a subject. In my opinion, the argument that the cruelty of all the characters
stems from absolutist monarchy obscures Shakespeares nostalgia for feudal benevolence, which neither the old nor the new order embodies in the play, but which the
good characters come to recognize is the essence of social relationships. Alfars analysis, often quite compelling, cannot overcome the evidence that the binaries of good and
evil in this play belong to Shakespeare. The ideal of feudal benevolence is best
expressed in the good king, and, as Alfar admits, Winters Tale ends not with the
destruction of the patrilinear system but with the restoration of benevolent kingship.
Moreover, the clearest expression of this feudal benevolence is Lady Macbeths overtly
gendered phrase, the milk of human kindness (1.5.17). As other feminist critics have
suggested, Shakespeares nostalgia for feudalism includes an entirely conventional
vision of womens roles.
The book could use a more careful discussion of women writers within the pamphlet wars, since, despite current scholarship, Alfar assumes that those writers with
female pseudonyms were in fact women. But Fantasies of Female Evil would benet most
from an acknowledgment that its central hero, Shakespeare, accepted at least some of
the ideology that Alfar so ably critiques.