TUGAS TRANSLATE JURNAL
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Nursing nothing: Witchcraft and female
sexuality in The Winter's Tale
Kirstie Gulick Rosenfield.Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature; Winnipeg Vol. 35, Iss. 1, (Mar 2002): 95-112.
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Tidak ada keperawatan: Sihir dan seksualitas
perempuan dalam The Winter's Tale
Penerjemah:
WARTIYEM
NIM: G0A01888
PROGRAM DIPLOMA III KEPERAWATAN
FAKULTAS ILMU KEPERAWATAN DAN KESEHATAN
UNIVERSITAS MUHAMMADIYAH SEMARANG
HASILTERJEMAHAN
Judul:
Tidak ada keperawatan: Sihir dan seksualitas perempuan dalam The Winter's Tale
Abstrak
Teks karya William Shakespeare "The Winter's Tale" mengasosiasikan
santet dengan seksualitas yang rakus, kesesatan bersalin, dan pidato yang tidak
pantas, tetapi kemudian menunjukkan bahwa pertunjukan itu adalah santet.
Pengambilalihan Shakespeare tentang sihir sebagai metafora untuk teater dapat
dibaca sebagai kritik terhadap anti-teatrikal dan sebagai narasi budaya yang
menghubungkan feminitas dan kelahiran terhadap seni.
Naskah Lengkap
Pendahuluan singkat
Teks The Winter's Tale mengaitkan ilmu sihir dengan seksualitas yang
rakus, kesesatan bersalin, dan pidato yang tidak pantas, tetapi kemudian
menunjukkan bahwa pertunjukan itu adalah santet. Pengambilalihan Shakespeare
tentang sihir sebagai metafora untuk teater dapat dibaca sebagai kritik terhadap
anti-teatrikal dan sebagai narasi budaya yang menghubungkan feminitas dan kelahiran
terhadap seni.
Ketika pembaca modern berpikir tentang penyihir Shakespeare,
kemungkinan besar The Winter's Tale bukanlah permainan pertama yang muncul
di pikiran. Lebih mungkin kita memikirkan saudara-saudara aneh Macbeth;
wanita-wanita tua nubuatan dan kekacauan, sementara tidak pernah secara eksplisit dilabeli
seperti itu di dalam teks, menanggung ciri-ciri umum wanita desa yang dituduh
melakukan sihir di Inggris modern awal. Dalam The Winter's Tale, bagaimanapun,
momok sihir menghantui teks sebagai menakutkan seperti halnya di Macbeth.
Setiap karakter perempuan utama akhirnya dituduh melakukan kejahatan khusus
perempuan ini. Paulina, "mankind witch" (2.3.8), jatuh ke tangan Leontes karena
perannya sebagai bidan dan ketegarannya. Perselingkuhan seksual yang dirasakan
Leontes juga mengutuk putrinya, Perdita. Perdita adalah "potongan segar / sihir luar
biasa" (4.4.424-5), dilabeli dengan cara ini karena kemiskinan dan pernikahannya
yang bergerak naik ke Florizel mengancam untuk mengganggu hierarki sosial.
Kepercayaan sihir kontemporer memasukkan semua gambar ini ke dalam definisi
penyihir. Dia adalah pengemis desa, tidak teratur dan mengumpat; dia adalah
wanita di luar struktur patriarki, belum menikah, janda, atau aktif secara seksual;
dia adalah dukun atau bidan, dalam kontes dengan profesi medis yang muncul; dia
adalah pendongeng dan wanita aksi. Keyakinan semacam itu meresap di Inggris
Shakespeare dan dibangun secara kompleks dari kebiasaan lokal populer dan
doktrin teologis dari pengaruh yang lebih Kontinental. Penyihir, baik melalui
praktik lingkungan jahat atau sabat-sabat setan, memiliki imajinasi Inggris sebagai
perwujudan kekacauan dan kejahatan, kebalikan dari semua yang saleh dan baik.
The Winter's Tale, yang ditulis selama meningkatnya minat masyarakat
terhadap sihir, secara halus memanipulasi konstruksi budaya dan ideologi yang
mendasari kepercayaan sihir. Teks mengidentifikasi vokalitas perempuan,
seksualitas, bersalin, dan kebidanan dengan penyihir dan kemudian
mengungkapkan asosiasi-asosiasi itu sebagai tuduhan yang dirancang untuk
mengandung ancaman perempuan yang melampaui batas. Ancaman perempuan
berubah menjadi penegasan tatanan patriarkal selama pertunjukan, tetapi urutan itu
sendiri dipertanyakan. Sihir disesuaikan dengan penyembuhan, seni, kelahiran
kembali, dan kekuatan pertunjukan teater, dalam formulasi yang menghubungkan
feminitas dengan kreativitas dan sekaligus meruntuhkan retorika gerakan
anti-teatrikal. Dengan menghubungkan sihir, pertunjukan, dan tontonan, drama ini
mengawali gerakan anti-teatrikal pada awal abad ketujuh belas - yang menuduh
teater sebagai bentuk sihir-ke konstruksi ideologis dari feminitas yang
diselewengkan. Penggunaan kembali sihir Shakespeare sebagai sebuah metafora
yang kompleks untuk penciptaan artistik dapat dibaca sebagai kritik terhadap
anti-teatrikal dan sebagai bagian dari narasi budaya yang menghubungkan feminitas dan
Pembacaan terbaru dari sihir Shakespeare (terutama berurusan dengan
Macbeth) bergantung pada pendekatan psikoanalitik yang menunjukkan bahwa
representasi tubuh penyihir adalah perpanjangan dari kecemasan yang diciptakan
oleh ibu. Kecemasan seperti itu dihasilkan dari dualitas tubuh ibu, yang tentu saja
baik memelihara dan seksual. Janet Adelman, misalnya, berpendapat bahwa
Macbeth merepresentasikan konstruksi kekuatan ibu yang absolut dan destruktif
yang kuat, yang diekspresikan melalui para penyihir dan sifat-sifat penyihir Lady
Macbeth. Drama itu menawarkan fantasi pelarian dari kekuatan itu melalui dunia
generasi maskulin (Adelman 90-121). Deborah Willis membahas lebih banyak teks
tetapi menggunakan lensa teoritis yang sama. Pendekatan psikoanalisis ini secara
problematik memanasi permusuhan terhadap wanita dengan mengabaikan masalah
sejarah dan budaya. Sebaliknya, penekanan pada ambivalensi esensialis yang
mengelilingi tubuh ibu, menghubungkan konstruksi ibu pengasuhan dan penyihir
keperawatan, bersikeras bahwa ibu harus ditolak secara universal untuk
perkembangan psikologis anak yang tepat. Dalam karyanya yang penting tentang
feminitas modern awal, Karen Newman berpendapat sebaliknya untuk pembacaan
politik ambiguitas ibu: konstruksi Renaissance dari ibu sebagai alami merupakan
bagian dari perjuangan untuk otoritas budaya laki-laki di mana perempuan, saat
mengasuh, tidak mewakili diri mereka sendiri dan oleh karena itu tidak
menghasilkan otoritas budaya mereka sendiri (65).
Kisah Musim Dingin menyuarakan ilmu sihir dengan menghubungkannya
dengan nafsu seksual yang rakus, bersalin palsu, dan menyusui tetapi kemudian
mengidentifikasi hubungan ini sebagai konstruksi budaya daripada perkembangan
psiko-sosial "alami", sehingga melemahkan pembacaan psikoanalitik tradisional.
Perampasan laki-laki dari simbol-simbol keibuan (kehamilan, melahirkan, laktasi,
keperawatan) dalam permainan mencoba untuk mendefinisikan kembali proses
reproduksi sebagai produksi otoritas budaya laki-laki sambil menghilangkan
potensi representasi perempuan. Ideologi bersalin yang menghubungkan ibu
dengan pelacur dan proses reproduksi dengan santet terekspos sebagai retorika
terancam maskulinitas, yang mirip dengan retorika yang mendefinisikan
seksualitas dan bersalin dengan sihir adalah proyeksi kecemasan laki-laki tentang
kelahiran, bukti ayah, dan konstruksi laki-laki dari diri. Teks menghantui fantasi
reproduksi laki-laki dengan impotensi sesuatu yang diciptakan dari laki-laki tidak
ada-yaitu, kata-kata dan desas-desus, yang bertentangan dengan anak-anak bahwa
perempuan "tidak ada" menghasilkan. Metafora kelahiran oleh imajinasi laki-laki,
dilambangkan dengan kata tidak ada, mengambil alih otoritas reproduksi
perempuan, mencoba mendefinisikan kembali proses reproduksi sebagai produksi
otoritas budaya laki-laki. Namun, apropriasi semacam itu, apakah melalui
representasi ide-ide sebagai bentuk kehamilan laki-laki, atau melalui metafora
anak-anak sebagai salinan cetak dari ayah mereka, adalah kebalikan dari kekuatan
feminin. Inversi-inversi itu, menurut The Winter's Tale, sama mesumnya dengan
inversi kehamilan yang terkandung dalam keyakinan sihir.
Leontes dan Polixenes berbagi persepsi bahwa semua wanita adalah
penyihir, dirusak oleh semangat Hawa dan hasrat seksual mereka sendiri.
Pandangan serupa diungkapkan oleh Heinrich Kramer dan James Sprenger di
Malleus Maleficarum; mereka berpendapat bahwa sihir itu berakar pada sifat
perempuan, suatu sifat yang secara mendasar menginginkan pengkhianatan umat
manusia. "Kejatuhan Manusia" berakar pada Perempuan, dan Perempuan berakar
dalam kejahatan, dibuktikan oleh perjanjian perempuan dengan setan dan, secara
tautologis, oleh kecenderungannya untuk melakukan sihir (47). Bagi Polixenes dan
Leontes, hasrat perempuan adalah akar dari godaan laki-laki dan sumber dari semua
kejahatan, dan kedua lelaki itu dengan senangnya mengingat hari-hari mereka
sebagai "anak-anak kembar kembaran" dan pemuda "tak terkatung-katung", ketika
mereka "bermimpi tidak / Doktrin sakit lakukan, atau bermimpi / Itu ada yang
"(1.2.69-71). Gairah seksual, bagaimanapun, adalah kejatuhan dari rahmat, dan
wanita, seperti Hermione tunjukkan, 11 adalah setan "(1.2.82) untuk peran yang
mereka mainkan. Untuk Leontes, mimpi dan keinginan memburuk dalam penyakit
dan ketidakpercayaan:
Engkau membuat hal-hal yang mungkin tidak dipegang,
Komunikasikan Anda dengan mimpi - bagaimana ini bisa terjadi?
Dengan apa yang tidak nyata, seni koaktif Anda,
Dan tidak ada yang lain. Maka itu sangat kredibel
Engkau mungkin bergabung dengan sesuatu; dan saya menemukannya,
Dan itu untuk infeksi otak saya
Dan mengeraskan alisku. (1.2.138-45)
Dia mengatakan bahwa hasrat membuat yang tidak mungkin menjadi
mungkin dan, mimpi, berkolaborasi dengan yang imajinatif. Bagaimana mungkin
itu harus, kemudian, untuk imajinasi untuk melekat pada sesuatu yang nyata.
Leontes mendekonstruksi rasa maskulinnya dengan tindakan imajinasi yang tidak
membedakan antara realitas dan fantasi. Fantasinya, bagaimanapun, menciptakan
realitas yang dirasakan dari momok perzinahan. Menciptakan sesuatu dari tak
berdosa tak berdosa, ia membuat pengkhianatan umat manusia sebagai seksualitas
perempuan yang tak terelakkan.
Jika Hermione berbagi rasa bersalah Hawa, dia juga akan berbagi
hukumannya, karena kutukan Hawa terhadap godaan adalah untuk membawa
anak-anak kesakitan. Hermione adalah "sesuatu sebelum waktunya disampaikan"
(2.2.25) dan menderita penderitaan tambahan karena bayinya diambil dari
payudaranya sampai mati. Proses kelahiran itu sendiri adalah ciptaan dari
"sesuatu" dari "tidak ada yang nyata", baik dalam arti tidak adanya yang menjadi
kehadiran bayi dan dalam pengiriman melalui "hal-hal" wanita, yang berimplikasi
konsepsi dari tidak ada apa-apa juga. Kelahiran, oleh karena itu, adalah bagian
dari nexus kecemasan Leontes: ia dihantui oleh pelanggaran atas hal-hal yang
apa-apanya, dan sesuatu yang tidak diketahui yang terjadi. Saat kelahiran, saran
Jeanne Addison Roberts, menghadapkan pria dengan bukti seksualitas wanita,
memprovokasi kecemasan atas paternitas. Pada saat itu, ia harus mendamaikan
dikotomi antara perawan dan pelacur, rekonseptualisasi istri / ibu dalam
pengakuan bahwa seksualitasnya melahirkan melahirkan (124-25). Leontes tidak
dapat merundingkan wilayah ini, sebaliknya melihat hantu pelacur itu bukan
apa-apa dalam sesuatu dari proses kelahiran sang ibu.
Dalam risalah kontemporer, penyihir itu muncul sebagai model ibu yang
mengerikan: dia merawat iblis dari payudaranya dan mengeluarkan bayi untuk
kualinya. Dalam The Winter's Tale, pembalikan kehamilan yang tidak wajar
didorong pada Hermione oleh tindakan Leontes, bukan dihasilkan sendiri.
Sementara dia "berjalan cepat" dia "memecahkan ngarai, sisi-sisinya dengan
kekejaman yang keras" (2.1.44, 45), kemarahannya merupakan bentuk kelahiran
mengerikan yang melanda kelahirannya. Anak mereka, digambarkan sebagai
"tahanan rahim" (2.2.58), dilahirkan bukan untuk kebebasan tetapi ke sel penjara.
Menolak hak istimewa untuk menjadi ibu yang mengasuh, Hermione menganggap
peran lawannya, pelacur yang sakit:
Sukacita kedua saya
Dan buah sulung dari tubuhku, dari hadiratnya
Saya dilarang, seperti orang yang menular. Kenyamanan ketiga saya,
Berbintang paling sial, berasal dari payudara saya,
Susu tak bersalah di mulutnya yang paling polos,
Dihentikan untuk pembunuhan; diri saya di setiap pos
Kiasan Hermione untuk tidak bersalah ASI dan kualitas yang memberi
hidup menyandingkan pembunuhan bayi, menentang alam, menyusui bersalin
dengan kejahatan ibu yang menular. Kecemasan budaya kontemporer tentang
kekuatan yang diasumsikan perempuan melalui kehamilan muncul dalam
keprihatinan bersama tentang penyakit yang ditularkan melalui keperawatan.
Kolostrum, susu pertama ibu baru, secara konvensional disebut sebagai "susu
penyihir" dan berpikir untuk menyampaikan penyakit dan darah wanita kepada bayi
laki-laki yang tidak berdaya (Radbill 249). Memperkuat hubungan imajinatif antara
wanita menyusui dan penyihir adalah keyakinan bahwa penyihir memberi makan
familiars mereka pada susu dari puting supernumerary (Henderson dan McManus
378). Sementara Hermione merusak denaturisasi pengasuhan keibuan, Leontes
menumbuhkan sebuah visi tentang dirinya sebagai seorang penyihir. Dia
menekankan pentingnya kebebasan Mamillius dari menyusui; anak, yang namanya
menunjukkan hubungannya dengan payudaranya, tidak diberi makan dari itu: "Beri
aku anak laki-laki itu. Aku senang kamu tidak merawatnya. / Meskipun dia
benar-benar menunjukkan tanda-tanda diriku, tetapi kamu / Memiliki terlalu banyak darah
dalam dirinya "(2.1.56-58). Anak laki-laki harus dilindungi dari kekuatan
mengkonsumsi susu ibu penyihir, sementara darah patriark harus tetap murni, tidak
tercemar oleh darah dari pelacur.
Leontes tahu bahwa Mamillius memiliki tanda-tanda kepadanya, yang
memberinya jaminan bahwa bocah lelaki itu adalah keturunannya sendiri. Tetapi
tidak mungkin bagi Leontes untuk mengetahui hal ini dengan pasti, dan
ketidakpastian melanda dirinya. Ketika dia mulai bertanya-tanya tentang kesetiaan
istrinya, dia mempertanyakan legitimasi putranya: "Mamillius, / Artakah anakku?"
dia bertanya (1.2.119-20). Mamillius meyakinkannya bahwa dia memang anak
lelakinya, dan sang ayah melihat dalam dirinya "salinan" dirinya. Tapi keraguannya
tetap: "Namun mereka mengatakan kita / Hampir sama seperti telur. Wanita
mengatakan demikian, / Itu akan mengatakan apa-apa" (1.2.129-31). Keraguan
mengatakan apa-apa dan juga melakukan apa saja, membuka mulut mereka dan alat
kelamin mereka dengan perselingkuhan. Meskipun kemiripannya dengan
Mamillius ("sama seperti telur"), Leontes tidak dapat secara fisik membuktikan
hubungannya sebagai ayah kepada Mamillius. Menurut Gail Kern Paster, The
Winter's Tale merumuskan kelahiran sebagai kegiatan yang ingin dikendalikan oleh
negara. Perempuan di Eropa modern awal melahirkan di bawah kondisi yang
dipantau hanya oleh perempuan lain, oleh karena itu persalinan merupakan
kebalikan dari hierarki gender adat. Kehamilan, persalinan, dan menyusui adalah
contoh dari pemberdayaan wanita sementara tetapi asli. Namun, kekuatan seperti
itu terkandung oleh strategi nyata dan simbolis yang dirancang untuk
mempromosikan pemahaman tentang tubuh ibu sebagai tercemar / polusi dan
berbahaya terbuka (Paster 165).
Argumen Paster, tidak seperti Adelman dan Willis, tidak menaturalisasikan
kebencian pada ibu sebagai bagian dari perkembangan psiko-sosial; melainkan
menempatkannya dalam konteks otoritas yang diperebutkan. Formulasi Leontes
tentang Hermione sebagai ibu penyihir / yang tidak alamiah keduanya mengakui
kekuatan kehadirannya dan ancaman terhadap garis keturunan ayahnya, dan secara
bersamaan memperkuat otoritas patriarkatnya dengan mengandung dia sebagai
tersangka penyihir terkandung.
Untuk wanita bersalin, bidannya mengasumsikan kekuatan representasi,
menyuarakan hasil dan menyaksikan peristiwa yang tidak termasuk laki-laki. Dia
mengesahkan momen yang mempertanyakan otoritas patriarkal melalui
ketidakmungkinan bukti dari pihak ayah. Leontes dapat mengusir istrinya untuk
melahirkan di penjara, tetapi begitu dia ada di sana, dia tidak dapat mencegah
penjara menjadi ruang rahasia persalinan, di mana dia tidak memiliki kendali. Sihir
telah dikaitkan dengan kebidanan sejak Abad Pertengahan (Macfarlane 67), sebuah
hubungan yang dipetakan Leontes ke Paulina, merujuk padanya secara bergantian
sebagai "seorang penyihir manusia" (2.3.68), "wanita brengsek" (108), dan " bidan
Anda di sana "(168). Antigonus "istri cabul-berlidah" (172) memiliki ciri-ciri lain
pemberontakan perempuan yang tampak mengklaim masalah yang sebenarnya
untuk generasi palsu. Menurut Elizabeth Harvey, bidan melayani peran simbolis
serta praktis dalam masyarakat modern awal karena mereka memastikan
keperawanan, didiagnosis kehamilan, legitimasi bersertifikat, dan memastikan
bahwa bayi tidak dipertukarkan. Peran bidan sebagai penjaga kesucian dan
kemurnian dalam budaya patriarkal membuatnya berpotensi berbahaya, dan
berpotensi menjadi penyihir (Harvey 81). Ketika Paulina menyatakan legitimasi
Perdita, dia hanyalah salah satu wanita yang "akan mengatakan apa-apa." Seperti
bidan lainnya, dia memiliki kekuatan untuk berbohong tentang peristiwa yang telah
dia saksikan. Leontes bersikeras agar dia dibungkam, suara otoritatifnya
mengandung judul "penyihir," sementara bayinya dihukum terbakar, seolah-olah
itu juga, adalah seorang penyihir. Sangat disayangkan lagi bahwa Leontes
membangun kejahatan yang dia rasakan dan menciptakan sesuatu dari ketiadaan,
mencerminkan baik ideologi penyihir yang dikriminalisasi dan kejahatannya
sendiri. Seperti dicatat Paulina, "Ini adalah bidaah yang membuat api, / Bukan dia
yang terbakar tidak" (2.3.115-16).
Seperti persidangan yang mengikuti, tuduhan itu menekankan tampilan:
"Anda mungkin tuanku, / Lihat dia, tandai dia dengan baik" (2.1.65-66). Objek yang
dipamerkan kepada para pengamat pria adalah seksualitas Hermione. "Oh, ya
ampun!" memproklamirkan Leontes, menghina wanita dan menyiratkan rasa
bersalahnya dengan menguranginya ke anatomi seksual. Sedangkan seksualitas
wanita suci adalah "tidak ada apa-apa," Hermione menjadi "hal" dari seorang
pezina. Dihantui oleh penampakan apa-apa, Leontes membutuhkan bukti:
Apakah ini bukan apa-apa?
Mengapa, maka dunia dan semua yang tidak ada apa-apa,
Langit yang menutupi tidak ada apa-apa, Bohemia tidak ada,
Jika ini bukan apa-apa. (1.2.291-95)
Ironisnya, dia menunjukkan kemungkinan bahwa imajinasinya tidak ada dan bukti
itu tidak mungkin ketika buktinya tidak ada apa-apanya. Hanya dalam
memberantasnya, yaitu, dengan mengembalikannya ke status tidak ada apa-apa,
dapatkah dia mendapatkan kembali statusnya, dan rasa damai: "[...] mengatakan
bahwa dia telah pergi, / Diberikan pada api, sebuah bagian istirahat saya / Mungkin
datang ke saya lagi "(2.3.7-9). Jika dia tidak bisa mengembalikannya ke
keperawanan, paling tidak dia bisa menguranginya dengan eksekusi. Seperti
penyihir, bidah, atau konspirator, dia bisa dibakar di tiang untuk mengembalikan
otoritasnya.
Baik dakwaan maupun persidangan, tayangan publik dari ketidaksetiaan
Hermione, menggunakan format perburuan penyihir, menampilkan lalu menghina
tubuh orang yang tak berdaya. Leontes menginstruksikan Lords-nya untuk
"melihat" tubuh post-partum Hermione yang kelelahan dan untuk "menandai dia
dengan baik." Markus mengambil makna ganda dalam konteks ini; itu adalah
tindakan pengamatan, tetapi juga membangkitkan tanda penyihir, yang telah
menjadi bukti hukum untuk penuntutan dan keyakinan. Tanda yang dicurigai,
dimodelkan setelah puting, bisa menjadi tahi lalat, benjolan, atau untuk hakim jahil,
bahkan klitoris (Barstow 141). Bagian tubuh khusus wanita adalah fokus
kecurigaan, yaitu bagian-bagian yang menunjukkan seksualitas perempuan,
perbedaan, dan kerahasiaan. Leontes khawatir tentang tepatnya area-area ini di
tubuh Hermione. Namun, instruksi untuk menandai dirinya dengan baik, sekali lagi
menunjukkan bahwa ia melakukan kejahatan, menciptakan seorang penyihir
dengan tanda yang tidak berarti sampai ditampilkan dan diberi label.
Seorang penyihir dapat ditemukan bersalah atas dasar kesaksian untuk motif atau
efek, dengan tanda, atau oleh tes penyihir yang biasa dipraktekkan: membakar,
menusuk bintik-bintik, mencelupkan, misalnya, sering dicurangi mendukung si
dilepaskan dari masyarakat umum dan diidentifikasi, diciptakan dari ketiadaan.
Sementara Hermione diberikan pengadilan, itu adalah salah satu di mana, seperti
penyihir, dia bersalah hanya karena dia telah karena apa yang harus saya katakan
harus tetapi itu yang bertentangan dengan tuduhan saya.
Shakespeare bermain di kegelisahan seputar seksualitas dan panggung dalam The
Winter's Tale, menyatukan gagasan keyakinan sihir dan pelanggaran seksual wanita
dalam bahasa Leontes sementara penonton menyaksikan imajinasi angkernya
membangun karakternya agar sesuai dengan rasa cemburunya: "Pergilah bermain,
nak, mainkan. Ibu-Mu bermain, dan aku / Bermain juga, tetapi sangat
mempermalukan bagian, yang mengeluarkan / Akan mendesisku ke kuburanku
"(1.2.187-89). "Main" adalah kepolosan anak dan penyimpangan seksual, dan
Leontes menunjukkan definisi teatrikalnya: ia memainkan peran dalam
terungkapnya drama kejahatan. "Masalah" sekali lagi dipertaruhkan, tetapi
ditambahkan ke masalah palsu perzinahan adalah masalah kinerja yang berbahaya.
Dalam adegan berikut, kita melihat Mamillius bermain, kejenakaan "nakal" nya
dibahas berdampingan dengan kehamilan Hermione dan kelahiran yang akan
datang. Digunakan tentang anak, "nakal," yang berarti "bermain" dan "tidak kudus",
tampaknya menghubungkan kepolosan anak dengan masalah ibunya sementara
menyinggung tuduhan yang akan datang. Mamillius melanjutkan dengan
menceritakan kisah sedih musim dingin, penuh sprite dan goblin, dan berbisik di
telinga Hermione. Narasi adalah bentuk permainan untuk anak, dan narasinya
khusus berbagi tema dengan judul drama ini. Di Othello, narasi direpresentasikan
sebagai pengganti santet; dalam The Winter's Tale, kisah ini terikat dalam kompleks
permainan, seksualitas, dan teater, yang menghubungkannya dengan sihir seni.
Mamillius "kuat" dalam bercerita; narasi tampaknya memberikan suara yang
mewakili dirinya sendiri kepada anak yang tidak berdaya seperti yang dilakukan
oleh panggung pada wanita yang tidak berdaya. Narasi Mamillius terpotong,
bagaimanapun, oleh konsep permainan ayahnya.
Mengingat semangat dan semangat para juru kampanye anti-teatrikal, dan ancaman
peresmian diri yang sadar terhadap keselarasan ini tampak sangat subversif. Di
dunia di mana penyihir secara dramatis dieksekusi dalam pertunjukan perancah,
tampaknya ada sedikit ruang untuk metafora Shakespeare tentang praktisi teater
sebagai penyihir. Dalam wacana yang ia mainkan, pemain dan dramawan harus
menjadi objek algojo. Ketika Hermione melangkah turun dari tumpuannya, The
Winter's Tale memunculkan momok dari scaffold algojo, persis ketika itu
menciptakan kembali penuntutan penyihir dalam persidangannya. Momen
"kelahiran kembali" -nya menyoroti perbedaan dan persamaan antara santet dan
stagecraft dan bekerja untuk membubarkan oposisi-oposisi representasional yang
menopang kekuatan ideologis. Scaffold algojo meleleh ke perancah panggung, dan
sihir menjadi konstruksi dalam kekuatan representasi yang diperebutkan. Saat
merayakan persatuan romantis konvensional, yang secara dangkal meneguhkan
otoritas patriarkal, The Winter's Tale mendekonstruksi ideologi yang
mempertahankan otoritas itu. Teks mereproduksi dunia yang dibagi berdasarkan
gender dan diganggu oleh ketergantungan patriarki pada generasi perempuan.
Tertanam dalam fantasi generasi laki-laki adalah impotensi dari sesuatu yang
diciptakan dari laki-laki tidak ada, tetapi rumor adalah semua yang pria berikan
dalam drama ini. Takut akan kebobrokan dan perselingkuhan perempuan
meninggalkan imajinasi laki-laki angker yang dengan susah-payah bergumul ke
tempat-tempat yang tepat dari otoritas perempuan. Perampasan itu adalah inversi
kekuatan feminin, yang sejajar dengan inversi kehamilan yang memberi keyakinan
sihir, dan itu sendiri adalah realitas yang dibayangkan.
Kekuatan bersalin dalam The Winter's Tale direkonstruksi melalui
kehilangannya dan dengan itu hilangnya semua kemungkinan generatif. Waktu
tandus mengambil korban dalam drama, dengan kematian yang tak dapat dibatalkan
dari suami Antigonus dan putra Mamillius, tetapi jam pasir pada akhirnya
dibingungkan oleh kelahiran kembali ibu dan anak perempuan dan reuni mereka
dengan ayah. Darah patriarki dan susu ibu bersatu di Perdita. Teks berusaha untuk
denaturisasi ideologi ibu yang tidak dapat memisahkan tubuh ibu, dengan kegiatan
seksual tersirat dan payudara keperawatan, dari tubuh penyihir / pelacur. Dengan
menghasilkan dan mengklaim kekuatan nubuat untuk teater. Sebaliknya, drama
Shakespeare mengubah konvensi kepercayaan sihir di kepalanya, menampilkan
kecerdasan dengan mana kepercayaan tersebut mengontrol peran perempuan dan
kecemasan laki-laki yang menghasilkan kontrol itu. Merayakan pernikahan dan
keibuan merasionalisasi seksualitas perempuan dalam batas perkawinan dan
persalinan dan menjadikan tempat tidur perkawinan aman bagi laki-laki, sementara
mendekonstruksi penyihir menghipnotis kearifan dan pidato perempuan. Dengan
mengaitkan seksualitas perempuan dengan kecemburuan laki-laki dan kekuatan
generatif perempuan terhadap kemandulan narasi laki-laki, ancaman perempuan
seksual berkurang. Demikian pula, menyesuaikan suara yang feminin untuk teater
- di mana panggung sangat diserang - memungkinkan kinerja untuk mendefinisikan
kembali batas-batas kekuasaan patriarkal. "Kisah istri lama" menceritakan kembali
kisah-kisah patriarki dan menemukan otoritas di atas panggung, sedangkan seni
sebagai sihir memberdayakan artis. The Winter's Tale menyerahkan kekuatan sihir
kembali kepada seniman, memberikan suara kepada orang yang salah dikuasai
setan, dan merekayasa ulang sihir. Jika teater adalah sihir, itu adalah nafas setan,
tetapi, jika sihir adalah konstruksi, anti-teatrikal hanya udara panas.
Sumber :
Kirstie, G. R. (2002). Nursing nothing: Witchcraft and female sexuality in the
winter's tale.
Mosaic : A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature, 35
(1), 95-112. Retrieved from
LAMPIRAN : NASKAH ASLI
Nursing nothing: Witchcraft and female
sexuality in The Winter's Tale
Kirstie Gulick Rosenfield.Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature; Winnipeg Vol. 35, Iss. 1, (Mar 2002): 95-112.
1. Teks lengkap
2. Abstrak/Detail Sembunyikan sorotan
Abstrak
TerjemahkanAbstrak
The text of William Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale" associates witchcraft with
voracious sexuality, perverted maternity, and inappropriate speech but then suggests that performance is witchcraft. Shakespeare's reappropriation of witchcraft as a
metaphor for theater can be read as a critique of anti-theatricality and as a cultural
narrative linking femininity and birthing to art.
Teks Lengkap
TerjemahkanTeks lengkap Aktifkan navigasi istilah pencarian
Headnote
The text of The Winter's Tale associates witchcraft with voracious sexuality,
perverted maternity, and inappropriate speech but then suggests that performance is witchcraft. Shakespeare's reappropriation of witchcraft as a metaphor for theatre can
be read as a critique of anti-theatricality and as a cultural narrative linking femininity
and birthing to art.
When modern readers think of Shakespearean witches, most likely The Winter's Tale
is not the first play to come to mind. More likely we think of Macbeth's weird sisters;
those aged hags of prophecy and chaos, while never explicitly labelled as such within
the text, bear the common traits of the village woman accused of witchcraft in early
text as eerily as it does in Macbeth. Every primary female character is eventually
accused of this specifically female crime. Paulina, the "mankind witch" (2.3.8), falls
foul of Leontes on account of her role as midwife and her vociferousness. Hermione's
perceived sexual infidelity leads to a spectacle trial and potential burning, a
punishment with which Leontes also condemns his daughter Perdita. Perdita is a
"fresh piece / of excellent witchcraft" (4.4.424-5), labelled this way because her
poverty and her upwardly mobile marriage to Florizel threaten to disrupt social
hierarchy. Contemporary witchcraft belief incorporated all these images into the
definition of the witch. She was the village beggar, disorderly and cursing; she was
the woman outside patriarchal structure, unmarried, widowed, or sexually active; she
was the healer or midwife, in contest with the emerging medical profession; she was
the storyteller and woman of action. Such belief was pervasive in Shakespeare's
England and was complexly constructed from both popular local customs and
theological doctrines of more Continental influence. The witch, whether through
malevolent neighbourhood practices or satanic sabbats, possessed the English
imagination as the embodiment of disorder and evil, the opposite of all that was godly
and good.
The Winter's Tale, written during a heightening of public interest in witchcraft, subtly
manipulates the cultural and ideological constructions that underlie witchcraft belief.
The text identifies female vocality, sexuality, maternity, and midwifery with the witch and then reveals those associations as accusations designed to contain the threat of
the transgressing woman. Female menace transforms to an affirmation of patriarchal
order during the play, but that order itself is questioned. Witchcraft is realigned with
healing, art, rebirth, and the power of theatrical performance, in a formulation that
connects femininity to creativity and simultaneously undermines the rhetoric of the
anti-theatrical movement. By correlating witchcraft, performance, and spectacle, the
play weds the anti-theatrical movement in the early seventeenth century-which
accused the theatre of being a form of witchcraft-to ideological constructions of
perverted femininity. Shakespeare's re-appropriation of witchcraft as a complex
metaphor for artistic creation can be read both as a critique of anti-theatricality and as
part of a cultural narrative that links femininity and birthing to art.
Recent readings of Shakespearean witchcraft (primarily dealing with Macbeth) rely
on a psychoanalytic approach that suggests that the representation of the witch's
the duality of the maternal body, which is necessarily both nurturing and sexual.
Janet Adelman, for example, argues that Macbeth represents a powerful construction
of absolute and destructive maternal power, expressed through the witches and Lady
Macbeth's witchlike traits. The play offers the fantasy of escape from that power
through a world of masculine generation (Adelman 90-121). Deborah Willis
addresses a wider range of texts but uses a similar theoretical lens. This
psychoanalytic approach problematically naturalizes hostility toward women by
ignoring historical and cultural concerns. Instead, the emphasis on an essentialist
ambivalence surrounding the mother's body, correlating construction of the nurturing
mother and the nursing witch, insists that the mother must universally be rejected for appropriate psychological development of the child. In her important work on early
modern femininity, Karen Newman argues instead for a political reading of maternal
ambiguity: the Renaissance construction of the maternal as natural is part of a
struggle for male cultural authority in which women, while nurturing, are not
representing themselves and therefore are not producing their own cultural authority
(65). The Winter's Tale sexualizes witchcraft by linking it to voracious sexual appetite,
perverted maternity, and breast-feeding but then identifies these linkages as cultural constructions rather than "natural" psycho-social developments, thus undermining a
traditional psychoanalytic reading. Male appropriation of the symbols of mothering
(pregnancy, birthing, lactation, nursing) in the play attempts to redefine the reproductive process as the production of male cultural authority while eliminating
female representational potency. The ideology of maternity that associates mothers with whores and the process of reproduction with witchcraft is exposed as the
rhetoric of threatened masculinity, which is similar to the rhetoric that defines women
as witches. The play suggests that the conflation of sexuality and maternity with witchcraft is a projection of male anxiety about birth, paternal proof, and the male
construction of self. The text haunts fantasies of male reproduction with the
impotency of something created from male nothing-that is, words and rumours, as
opposed to the children that female "nothing" generates. The metaphor of birthing by
the male imagination, symbolized by the word nothing, appropriates female
reproductive authority, attempting to redefine the reproductive process as the
production of male cultural authority. Such appropriation, however, whether through
the representation of ideas as a form of male pregnancy, or through the metaphor of
inversions, according to The Winter's Tale, are as perverted as the inversion
of maternity contained within witchcraft belief.
Leontes and Polixenes share a perception that all women are witches, corrupted by
the spirit of Eve and their own sexual desire. A similar view is expressed by Heinrich
Kramer and James Sprenger in Malleus Maleficarum; they argue that witchcraft finds
its very roots in the nature of the female, a nature that fundamentally desires the
betrayal of humankind. The "fall of Man" is rooted in Woman, and Woman is rooted in
evil, proved by the female pact with the devil and, tautologically, by her propensity to
witchcraft (47). For Polixenes and Leontes, female desire is the root of male
temptation and the source of all evil, and the two men fondly recall their days as
"twinned lambs" and "unbreached" youth, when they "dreamed not / The doctrine of
ill-doing, nor dreamed / That any did" (1.2.69-71). Sexual passion, however, is the fall
from grace, and women, as Hermione points out, 11 are devils" (1.2.82) for the role
they play. For Leontes, dreams and desires fester in disease and distrust:
Affection, thy intention stabs the center.
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st thou with dreams - how can this be?
With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing. Then tis very credent
Thou mayst cojoin with something; and I find it,
And that to the infection of my brains
And hardening of my brows. (1.2.138-45)
He is saying that passion makes the impossible possible and, dreamlike, collaborates
with the imaginative. How probable it must be, then, for imagination to latch onto
something real. Leontes deconstructs his sense of masculine self with an act of
imagination that makes no distinction between reality and fantasy. His fantasies,
out of innocent nothings, he makes the betrayal of humankind an inevitability of
female sexuality.
If Hermione shares Eve's guilt, she shares her punishment as well, for Eve's curse for
temptation was to bring forth children in pain. Hermione is "something before her time
delivered" (2.2.25) and suffers the additional agony of having her infant taken from
her breast to its death. The process of birth itself is a creation of "something" from an
apparent "nothing," both in the sense of an absence that becomes the presence of an
infant and in the delivery via a woman's "no-thing," which implicates conception from
that nothing as well. Birth, therefore, is part of the nexus of Leontes's anxieties: he is
haunted by the violation of her no-thing, the loss of his seed, and therefore his
certainty, into her nothing, and the unknown something that results. The moment of
birth, suggests Jeanne Addison Roberts, confronts the male with dear evidence of
female sexuality, provoking anxiety over paternity. In that moment, he must reconcile
the dichotomy between the virgin and the whore, reconceptualizing the wife/mother in
an acknowledgement that her sexuality creates maternity(124-25). Leontes is unable to negotiate this territory, instead seeing ghosts of the whore's nothing in the
something of the mother's parturition.
In contemporary treatises, the witch appears as a model of the monstrous mother:
she nurses devils from her breast and dismembers babies for her cauldron. In The
Winter's Tale, unnatural reversals of maternity are thrust upon Hermione by Leontes's actions, not self-generated. While she "rounds apace" he "cracks his
gorge, his sides with violent hefts" (2.1.44, 45), his anger a form of monstrous
birthing that overwhelms her delivery. Their child, described as a "prisoner to the
womb" (2.2.58), is born not to freedom but to a prison cell. Denied the privilege of
being a nurturing mother, Hermione assumes the role of her opposite, the diseased
whore:
My second joy
And firstfruits of my body, from his presence
I am barred, like one infectious. My third comfort,
The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth,
Haled out to murder; myself on every post
Proclaimed a strumpet. (3.2.96-102)
Hermione's allusion to the innocence of breast milk and its life-giving qualities
juxtaposes the infant's murder, opposing natural, nursingmaternity with the
wickedness of the infectious mother. Contemporary cultural anxiety about the power
that women assumed through maternitysurfaced in common concerns about ills transmitted through nursing. Colostrum, the new mother's first milk, was
conventionally referred to as "witch's milk" and thought to convey both disease and
female blood to the helpless male infant (Radbill 249). Strengthening the imaginative
connection between the nursing woman and the witch was the belief that witches fed their familiars on milk from supernumerary nipples (Henderson and McManus 378).
While Hermione undermines this denaturalizing of maternal nurturing, Leontes
germinates a vision of her as a witch. He stresses the importance of Mamillius's
freedom from breast-feeding; the child, whose very name suggests his connection
with her breast, was not fed from it: "Give me the boy. I am glad you did not nurse
him. / Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in
him"(2.1.56-58). The male child must be protected from the consuming power of the
witch-mother's milk, while the blood of the patriarch must be kept pure, unsullied by
the blood of the witch-whore.
Leontes knows that Mamillius bears signs of him, which gives him some security that
the boy is his own progeny. But it is impossible for Leontes to know this for certain,
and uncertainty plagues him. As he begins to wonder about his wife's fidelity, he
questions his son's legitimacy: "Mamillius, / Art thou my boy?" he asks (1.2.119-20).
Mamillius assures him that he is indeed his boy, and the father sees in him a "copy"
of himself. But his doubt persists: "Yet they say we are / Almost as like as eggs.
Women say so, / That will say anything" (1.2.129-31). Doubt leads Leontes back to
women's unfaithfulness: they will say anything and likewise do anything, opening
their mouths and their genitals with indiscretion. Despite his resemblance to
Mamillius (being "as like as eggs"), Leontes cannot physically prove his relationship
as father to Mamillius. According to Gail Kern Paster, The Winter's Tale formulates
gave birth under conditions monitored only by other women, therefore childbirth was
an inversion of customary gender hierarchies. Pregnancy, birthing, and nursing were instances of temporary but genuine female empowerment. Such power was
contained, however, by real and symbolic strategies that were designed to promote
an understanding of the maternal body as polluted/polluting and dangerously open
(Paster 165). Paster's argument, unlike those of Adelman and Willis, does not
naturalize maternal loathing as part of psycho-social development; rather, it puts it in
the context of contested authority. Leontes's formulation of Hermione as
witch/unnatural mother both acknowledges the power of her presence and the threat
to his paternal line, and simultaneously reinforces his patriarchal authority by
containing her as the accused witch is contained.
For the birthing woman, her midwife assumes the power of representation, voicing
the outcome and witnessing an event that excludes the male. She authorizes a
moment that questions patriarchal authority through the impossibility of paternal
proof. Leontes can banish his wife to give birth in prison, but once she is there, he
cannot prevent the prison from becoming the secret chamber of birthing, over which
he has no control. Witchcraft has been associated with midwifery since the Middle
Ages (Macfarlane 67), a relationship that Leontes maps onto Paulina, referring to her
alternately as "a mankind witch" (2.3.68), "a gross hag" (108), and "your midwife
there" (168). Antigonus's "lewd-tongued wife" (172) bears other familiar traits of the
hex: wisdom and shrewishness, and in this case the seeming female rebellion of
claiming true issue for false generation. According to Elizabeth Harvey, midwives
served symbolic as well as practical roles in early modern society because they
ascertained virginity, diagnosed pregnancy, certified legitimacy, and ensured that
infants were not exchanged. The midwife's role as a guardian of chastity and purity in
patriarchal culture makes her potentially dangerous, and potentially a witch (Harvey
81). When Paulina proclaims Perdita's legitimacy, she is just one of the women who
"will say anything." Like other midwives, she has the power to lie about the event she
has witnessed. Leontes insists she be silenced, her authoritative voice contained with
the title of "witch," while the baby is sentenced to burning, as if it, too, were a witch. It
is dear again that Leontes constructs the crimes he perceives and creates something
from nothing, reflecting both the ideology of the criminalized witch and his own crime.
As Paulina notes, "It is an heretic that makes the fire, / Not she which burns in't"
Like the trial that follows, the accusation emphasizes display: "You may my lords, /
Look on her, mark her well" (2.1.65-66). The object on display to the male observers
is Hermione's sexuality. "Oh thou thing!" proclaims Leontes, effacing the woman and
implying her guilt by reducing her to sexual anatomy. Whereas the chaste woman's
sexuality is "nothing," Hermione becomes the "thing" of an adulteress. Haunted by
the apparition of nothing, Leontes needs proof:
Is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings
If this be nothing. (1.2.291-95)
Ironically, he points out the possibility that his own imagination is nothing and that
proof is impossible when the evidence is nothing. Only in eradicating her, that is, in
returning her to the status of nothing, can he regain his own status, and a sense of
peace: "[...] say that she were gone, / Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest / Might
come to me again" (2.3.7-9). If he cannot return her to the nothing of virginity, at least
he can reduce her to nothing by execution. Like the witch, heretic, or conspirator, she
can be burnt at the stake to reinstate his authority.
Both accusation and trial, the public displays of Hermione's infidelity, invoke the
format of the witch hunt, displaying then effacing the body of the powerless. Leontes
instructs his Lords to "look on" Hermione's exhausted post-partum body and to "mark
her well." Mark takes on a double meaning in this context; it is the action of
observation, but it also evokes the witch's mark, which had become legal evidence
for prosecution and conviction. The suspected mark, modelled after a nipple, could
be a mole, a bump, or for the ignorant judge, even a clitoris (Barstow 141).
Specifically female body parts were the focus of suspicion, that is, those parts that
were indicative of female sexuality, difference, and secrecy. Leontes worries about
precisely these areas on Hermione's body. His instruction to mark her well, however,
again indicates that he perpetrates the crime, creating a witch with a mark that is
A witch could be found guilty on the basis of testimony to motive or effect, by marks,
or by commonly practised witch tests: burning, pricking of spots, dunking, for
example, often rigged in the accuser's favour. Subjects were rarely obvious
practitioners; rather, they had to be hunted: extricated from the general public and
identified, created from nothing. While Hermione is granted a trial, it is one in which,
like the witch, she is guilty simply because she has been accused:
Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation,
[...]
it shall scarce boot me
To say "not guilty." (3.2.22-26)
Newman writes: "The practice of witchcraft is a semiotic activity that depends on acts
of reading, systems of differences. A charm, an incantation, or a blemish has no
inherent meaning but comes to mean only in relation to a given speaker and a
specific set of circumstances" (66). For Hermione, no defense is possible, because
she has been "read" by Leontes as sexually corrupt. She "shall be condemned upon
surmises" (110) of Leontes's circumstantial evidence and testimony to effect.
Additionally, anyone who comes to her defense will be implicated in the crime: "He
who shall speak for her is afar off guilty/ But that he speaks" (2.1.105-06). The "just
and open trial" (2.1.205) becomes the spectacle of a witch hunt, "played to take
spectators" "i' th'open air" (3.2.37,105).
Because the trial's verdict is predetermined, disproving Hermione's guilt necessitates
the voice of the oracle, a voice so "ear-deafening" it reduces the human being to
"nothing" (3.1.9, 11). The all-powerful deity is the only source of authority that can
undermine Leontes's agenda of patriarchal power and its perpetuation. In calling
upon this authority, the text highlights the misrepresentation enacted by the trial,
showing the demonized to be natural and its demonization to be a public
construction. When Leontes fails to listen to the prophetic voice, it destroys his
legitimate issue, and the paternity that he longed to prove. If the Renaissance
on the cast of evil, eating himself up by destroying everything around him that he
cares for. For sixteen years, Hermione is dead and he is nothing, a scenario that only
apparent witchcraft can redeem.
The inversion of the natural and unnatural in cultural constructions recurs in the
romance half of the play and is exposed with increasing absurdity. Borne by
Polixenes, the infection of courtly ideology brings the haunted memory of Sicilia to
the pastoral landscape but is transformed there. Polixenes, the tragic outcast,
becomes the comic agon, anti-youth, anti-marriage, and anti-nature. Female
demonization seems antithetical to the harvest dance, but Polixenes molds Perdita
into the evil witch: "And thou, fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must
know / The royal fool thou cop'st with-" (4.4.424-26). Her youthful beauty's
"enchantment" lures Florizel into the witch's den of marriage below his class. Perdita
maintains the witch's sin of poverty and from Polixenes's accusing view entraps his
son with sexuality for her own gain. He calls upon popular witchcraft belief, painting
her as the social-climbing, sexually-deviant, order-threatening female. Perdita,
however, is already firmly associated with the natural order; likened to the fertility
goddess Proserpina, she presides over the rustic feast. Polixenes's rough
accusations of class mobility echo hollowly in this idyll, as does his rupture of public
ceremony. In contrast to the distorted public proclamation of adultery in the winter
part of the tale, marriage in Bohemia is celebrated as an event naturally secured in
public. Polixenes, however, defies this bucolic world with ghosts of Sicilian paternal
power and the making public of things private:
FLORIZEL: Mark our contract.
POLiXENES: Mark your divorce, young sir,
Whom son I dare not call. Thou art too base
To be acknowledged. Thou a scepter's heir,
That thus affects a sheephook? (4.4.419-22)
The "mark" of a contract recalls the mark of a witch and the marking of infidelity by
male courtiers, all "marks" of the structures of patriarchy. While paternal proof does
learn her name), transmission of patriarchal power depends on the purity of his
hereditary line in generations to come. The female threat, in this case, contains the
pollution of class difference, an unnatural disordering that he attempts to contain with
a public announcement, or marking, of divorce and an accusation of witchcraft.
Polixenes's tactic, however, is displayed for what it is: a manipulation of power that
aligns him with Leontes, whom we left in the solitude of his own construction. Their
association with the very evil that they linked to witchcraft is balanced by a
reconstruction of the hex's traits. While Leontes refuses Cleomenes's advice to
"forget your evil" and "forgive yourself" (5.1.5, 6), Hermione becomes a "sainted
spirit" (57), and Perdita inherits the authority of a religious founder:
This is a creature
Would she begin a sect, might quench the zeal
Of all professors else, make proselytes
Of who she but bid follow. (5.1.106-09)
Paulina's shrewishness becomes wisdom, and midwifery takes on a magical aura.
The language of the shrew is now the language of prophecy, which becomes a
language associated with women. Paulina rejects "superstition" and "wicked powers"
(5.2.43, 90) but casts "lawful" spells. The witch no longer bears evil and chaos but
presides at Hermione's rebirth. Hermione, too, has elements of this new witch, for
she, too, prophesies, and the power of the sorceress is the power to foresee the
future. As spoken at her accusation, the line "I never wished to see you sorry; now a
trust I shall" (2.1.124) proves only too true.
If the fantasy of a world without women seems embedded in the opening scene of
the play, the closing act transforms this to a fantasy of male delivery but
simultaneously debunks that fantasy. Autolycus and the male informants of Act 5
Scene 2 play on the idea that delivery of information is a form of issue. The first
gentleman "heard the old shepherd deliver" the details of finding Perdita but can
make only a "broken delivery of the business" (5.2.4, 10). Autolycus longs to "know
the issue of it" (5.2.9). Later, Paulina's steward can "deliver [ ...] more" (5.2.27), filling
concerned with issue, delivery, and pregnancy, it is a potent suggestion that the male
can give birth only to words and play midwife only to information. But information
itself is subject to miscarriage, and the male deliverer is barren if "report will bear no
credit" (5.1.180).
While the male midwife can deliver only "news" that "is so like a tale that the verity of
it is in strong suspicion" (5.2.29, 30), the female midwife possesses the power of
faith, and perhaps even magic. Proof of paternity, the text suggests, is always "an old
wives' tale." Ocular witness can prove infidelity but not fidelity; only oracular proof has
that power. Acting as midwife to Hermione's rebirth, Paulina incants, "It is required /
You do awake your faith" (5.3.94-95). David Schalkwyk has written:
The female potency of speech and birth, being indispensable for the continuation of
the patriarchal bloodline is, as we have seen, usually reviled as the product of
witchcraft. The last scene, presided over by the "mankind witch" Paulina, thus enacts
a containment of patriarchal fear and loathing as well as a gradual exorcism of the
specter of witchcraft as the unholy power that is supposed to inform all that issues
from the female. Leontes is now required to participate in the rebirth of Hermione,
and Paulina seeks to annul the prior taint of witchcraft by openly invoking and then
dispelling its fear through Leontes's irresistible desire to acquiescence in its practice.
(265)
Witchcraft is transformed in this final act. Like maternity, it is purified in its rebirth. Hermione steps down from her pedestal with actions as "holy" as Paulina's "spell is
lawful" (5.3.104, 05). She embraces her husband but speaks only to her recovered
daughter:
For thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved
Myself to see the issue. (5.3.127-30)
Hermione has returned to see her maternal issue, as well as the issue of the oracular
But the transformation of witchcraft in the final scene is not simply a containment of
patriarchal fear and loathing, as Schalkwyk suggests. He argues that in The Winter's
Tale female words are the ground of "phobic patriarchal repression" (240) and that
these words are contained by the play's conclusion. "In the final act we witness both
the necessity of women's power and the reappropriation and repression of their
power by men" (264). The containment is accomplished by the appropriation of
female words by male voices in the last minutes of the play. His argument does not
take into account, however, that the continuation of patriarchal lineage is made
possible through female prophecy nor that the lineage is passed on through Perdita.
Whereas Hermione and Perdita are exonerated from the accusations of witchcraft as
soon as they are uttered, Paulina remains implicated through the play's final scene.
Initially associated with shrewishness, her words are uncontainable with an
accusation of witchcraft. She willingly assumes the role that Leontes assigns her,
vocalizing the necessity as well as the insolence of her language:
What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
[...]
What old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst? (3.2.175-79)
She recognizes that to speak is to be tortured as a witch. But speak she will, for she
is the only one capable of putting Leontes's crimes into words. Paulina's words
associate her with paganism as well as with witchcraft; she conflates images of
divinity with pagan worship (3.2.210-14). As his spiritual guide, Paulina leads Leontes
to a barren mountain of heirlessness and into the perpetual winter of the play's title.
When they emerge sixteen years later, she still acts as spiritual advisor. She also
serves as political advisor at this point, participating in decisions of state. Leontes
assures her that she has the final say in his choice of spouse. She brings the mark of
witchcraft with her through this assignment, for procurement was considered part of
the witches' career. Her advice continues to mingle the divine with the demonic as
that is simultaneously pagan and divine, speaking of grave-breaking and the dead
infant's return (5.1.35-44). We know, however, that the monstrous appearance of the
child does occur in the next act, even as the oracle speaks true.
Paulina's words, associated with prophecy, invoke faith in the midwife, faith in the
maternal, and, finally, faith in the sorcerer's power to produce life from art. For,
although she continues to deny the use of "wicked powers," she casts her lawful
spells to bring Hermione back to life. With "if this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as
eating" (5.3.111-12), Leontes connects her witchcraft to the power of art but
separates it from the wickedness and evil of the demonized sorceress that he once
accused her of being. Evil still lies with Leontes's accusations and former disbelief,
while art has the magical power of displaying the truth:
Does not the stone rebuke me
For being more stone than it? O royal piece!
There's magic in thy majesty, which has
My evils conjured to remembrance [...] (5.3.37-40)
Leontes suggests that the statue has more life than those alive, a concept reiterated
many times in this final scene:
PAULINA: Prepare
To see the life as lively mocked as ever
Still sleep mocked death. (5.3.18-20)
LEONTES: The fixture of her eye has motion in't
As we are mocked with art. (5.3.67-68)
Life is imitated, or "mocked," by art; it is also "mocked" in the sense of ridiculed and
derided. Like Paulina's witchcraft, which produces life from art, art apparently
produces life. Paulina claims divinity for her artistry; at Hermione's apparent death
If you can bring
Tincture or lustre in her lip, her eye,
Heat outwardly or breath within, I'll serve you
As I would the gods. (3.2.204-07)
She herself conjures heat and breath in the final scene. Or does she? We know from
the text that Hermione has in fact kept herself alive and hidden and therefore is not
revived with witchcraft. Paulina's witchcraft merely imitates/mocks the production of
life. Yet her shrewish incantations also seem to ridicule/mock life with something that
is both more, and less, lifelike than life itself. Her words call down from a stage upon
a stage an actor's body that we believe to be inanimate yet know to be a living body.
The character of Hermione parallels that contradiction: she is inanimate and animate,
long dead and long preserved. From nothing, the theatre has the power to bring life
to the stage with words. Shakespeare argues for the divinity of this power, yet, in the
Renaissance imagination, it was demonic. He does not, however, simply transform
the inherent evil of witchcraft into inherent good; rather, he manipulates a practice
believed to cause material harm to one that is paradoxically purified by eliminating its
material effect. In other words, Paulina conjures Hermione, without actually practising
necromancy, using the lawful magic of the stage.
As part of the taming of the threat of the witch, Shakespeare also gives Leontes
necromantic potential:
LEONTES: Thou speak'st truth.
No more such wives, therefore no wife. One worse,
And better used, would make her sainted spirit
Again possess her corpse, and on the stage,
Where we're offenders now, appear soul-vexed
Leontes saves himself from demonism, however, by following Paulina's spiritual
guidance. She becomes his companion "on the stage" of his previous offense from
which his wife was ejected. The world as a stage is a well-worn Renaissance
metaphor, but Leontes's description also refers to the actual theatrical space, and we
do see Hermione appear again on the stage. The conjuring power, then, lies in the
theatre, where a statue can come to life and an apparently dead woman can speak
again. Catherine Belsey has argued that, paradoxically, the trying of witches offered
women a place from which to speak in public with an atypical amount of authority.
Woman's trials gave them the power of self-representation, which they were usually
denied, and the trials themselves increasingly took on a dramatic and perfomative
nature (Belsey 190-91). Hermione's trial gives her a public voice, the ability to
represent her fidelity, but it is also a play orchestrated by Leontes, in which her voice
will be heard but rejected. At her rebirth, we certainly listen enraptured to her every
word. An early modern audience might be reminded of the theatricality of witch trials.
The stage, Shakespeare seems to argue, gives witches a voice and then shows that
voice silenced, but finally reinvents a voice that both appropriates and purifies the
dangerous theatricality of witchcraft.
The text presents the stage as empowering to the female, giving back the words
taken from her and legitimizing them through prophecy while authorizing female
generativity through rebirth. The barren widow bears the faithful mother, reuniting her
with the maiden daughter. Maid, wife, and widow stand in triumvirate, recreating
Leontes's lost life and regenerating his future. Their words, both of the past and in the
present, become holy prophecy. Of course, women were not present on that stage,
only represented by transvestite male actors and therefore their projected
empowerment occurred through a male voice. The very fact that the male voice and
its corresponding body was dressed up as female, however, implicated the actor in
the crime of witchcraft. Anti-theatrical fears that men might become women if they
dressed as such belies anxieties about gender transformation and the threat of the
female voice, which were both symptoms of witchcraft. The theatre itself creates
something from nothing-a female body where none exists or a battlefield on an empty
stage. Remember that nothing, or naught, or an 0 are Renaissance metaphors for the
stage as well as descriptions of the circle from which witches were believed to
conjure. While Paulina pretends to conjure and claims not to use wicked powers, she
Shakespeare's texts continuously haunt the art of the theatre with the image of
witchcraft-in The Tempest and Anthony and Cleopatra, for example, as well as in The
Winter's Tale. In doing so, they tie the theatre to the crimes of the witch-treason,
perverted sexuality, and demonism. Stephen Greenblatt writes of a "Shakespeare
bewitched" by art, "as if he identified the power of theatre itself with the ontological
liminality of witchcraft and with his own status as someone who conjured spirits,
created storms and wielded the power of life and death" (120). For Shakespeare,
Greenblatt writes, "the presence of the theatrical in the demonic, as in every other
realm of life, only intensifies the sense of an equivocal betwixt and between, for his
theatre is the space where the fantastic and bodily, energia and energeia touch. To
conjure up such a theatre places Shakespeare in the position neither of the
witchmonger nor the skeptic. It places him in the position of the witch" (127). The
union of the witch and the theatre artist was potentially a dangerous one, suggesting
that the demonic was also present in the practice of theatre. Indeed, this accusation
was espoused by anti-theatrical campaigners. Puritans accused the theatre of having
manipulative magical power, lewd and seductive intent, and treasonous potential, all
of which confirmed its participation in witchcraft. Contemporary anti-theatrical tracts
charged that theatrical performance had a dangerous magical power over both the
audience and the actor, a notion that was tied to anxiety about sexuality (Orgel 7-30).
The counterfeit of the stage was thought to inspire lust, a lust that would inevitably
lead to action because of the theatre's sorcery. Simply performing stories, or
observing them performed, transformed and seduced the participant. On the
executioner's scaffold, performance could be contained-the condemned witch was
forced to voice the words of authority and therefore to perpetuate only one system of
beliefs. The theatrical scaffold and the actor's body, however, are not so easily
controlled. Witchcraft interpreted on stage sets belief and disbelief uncomfortably
side by side. The anxieties provoked by witchcraft concern uncontrolled female
sexuality and its effect on reproduction, which parallels uncontrolled representation
and its effect on ideological reproduction. The accusations against the theatre belie a
similar set of anxieties and similarly call on the language of demonized maternity. The fear that theatre is witchcraft is the fear that representations have the power to
cause change in the same way that the words of witchcraft have effect without
tangible means. Silencing the theatre, like executing a witch, is an attempt to
reinstate a single interpretation and therefore to regain authority over the power of
