Topic > Sexual and Gender Identities in Twelfth Night

As cross-dressing and mistaken identity are a central theme in many of Shakespeare's plays, so too is gender ambiguity, with many female characters cross-dressing as men. The fact that young male actors played these characters, turning them into a boy dressed as a woman dressed as a boy, further increases this ambiguity. This ambiguity then extends from gender to sexuality in Twelfth Night with a true love triangle between Orsino, Olivia and Viola (or Cesario as Olivia knows her). This love triangle could be completely heterosexual, if one interprets Olivia's character as attracted only to "Cesario" as male, it could be simply bisexual, or it could be "sexually fluid", defying easy categorization and reveling in the complexities of androgyny. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay When talking about sexuality in any of Shakespeare's works it must be noted that the concepts of sexuality were different from the modern perception of rigid, gender-specific identity labels and sexuality. Casey Charles neatly summarizes the Renaissance perspective in his article “Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night” by stating that Shakespeare's plays, including Twelfth Night, were written in “a modern culture in which the categories of homosexuality and bisexuality were neither fixed nor associates". with identity" (121). This lack of fixed sexual and gender identities in this era means that it would be meaningless to apply such labels retroactively to characters or even historical figures of the era as they would not have been conceived or intended as such. However we still can and should try to categorize characters' behavior and how this relates to their contemporary attitudes about gender and sex. Indeed, there are people like Lorna Hutson who states in her article “On Not Being Deceived: Rhetoric and the Body in Twelfth Night” that it is a mistake to contemplate “how characters negotiate their individual desires in plays as if they were real people nor even partly figures of a persuasive speech or agents of a conspiracy” (146). Analyzing the sexual behaviors of the characters is important to analyze the perspective of the work as a whole, since none of their actions are incidental to the plot and therefore to the message of the work. Aside from the absence of the concept of sexuality as an identity in the Elizabethan era, another important attitude towards sexual behavior and gender is illustrated in Plato's Symposium. Having been educated during the Renaissance, Shakespeare was very familiar with both the original classical writings and the perspectives they brought to society. In his article “'Maid and Man' in Twelfth Night” William WE Slights describes the tale of the Symposium in which humans originally had two faces, four arms and four legs but were divided by the gods and left to search for their other halves. This fable explains the different possible sexual orientations, as some of these original humans were fully male (children of the sun), fully female (children of the earth), or androgynous (children of the moon), being half male and female (331 -332) . The detail that androgynous humans were those who represented heterosexual union illustrates a difference from the modern perspective that associates gender ambiguity with homosexuality. Because of their concern with classical ideals, people during the Renaissance also held the perspective illustrated in the Symposium where androgyny is associated with heterosexual unions,meaning that a character's androgyny would not be linked to homosexual behavior, and instead could be seen to represent a perfect heterosexual union. In Twelfth Night, therefore, early Elizabethan audiences would not necessarily have associated Viola's cross-dressing with lesbian behavior. As Jessica Tvordi argues in her essay “Female Alliance and the Construction of Homoeroticism in As You Like It and Twelfth Night", "The activities of female transvestite, however, tend to highlight the potential for male characters - As You Like It by Orlando and Orsino from Twelfth Night, for example – to push erotic boundaries through their interactions with the figure of the transvestite rather than illuminate discussions about the representation of female sexuality” (115). Tvordi's argument is therefore that female cross-dressing in Shakespeare's plays is not about women's sexuality, but instead only represents an opportunity for male characters to explore their sexuality. However, it could be argued that this is a sexist interpretation which states that female sexuality is rendered unimportant or at least only the object of male sexuality once male sexuality is also present. In fact, Viola affirms her sexuality, particularly in her interactions with Olivia, completely foreign to the context of male sexuality. Charles states: Limiting the consequences of theatrical cross-dressing to the evocation of male homoeroticism ignores the ambiguities created by cross-dressing and reinstates the restriction of the gender binary in the discussion of homoeroticism. Women were present at the Globe, and there is no reason to ignore female homoeroticism as part of the disruptions explored by cross-dressing. (132)Just because male homoeroticism is an aspect of the sexual ambiguity presented by Viola's cross-dressing does not mean that the homoerotic behaviors between Viola and Olivia cannot also be an aspect. Viola's actions while cross-dressing can be further questioned, especially if her actions while dressed as a man actually called into question her role as a woman. While Tvordi and also Charles argue that Viola “does not use her disguise to gain power, but only to secure her position as a dutiful wife. She never actually challenges the patriarchy” (Charles 135), I would argue that Viola’s actions are subversive. For example, in Act I, scene v, when he courts Olivia for Orsino and improvises instead of reciting what Orsino has written. In this scene, Viola has Olivia read a poem by Orsino that follows the traditional masculine model of referring to the female subject in the poem as subject only to the actions of the male speaker, not to her own desires. Olivia asks Viola about her feelings, Viola improvises, acknowledging Olivia's desires and by extension her own. In “Glimpsing a 'Lesbian' Poetics in Twelfth Night,” Jami Ake describes this moment as a breakdown of “Petrarchan conventions [that] require…female silence” (379). This scene provides an opportunity for the poem's normal female subjects to speak on behalf of themselves and their desires. Ake notes that Viola's speech is particularly interesting in that she, "situating herself imaginatively as Olivia's suitor, does not conceive of herself as simply a substitute for the duke, but as a lover... with the same kind of erotic intensity as Orsino." (380) . This is the scene where Olivia falls in love with Viola as Cesario and in her essay "Do Not Be Deceived: Rhetoric and the Body in Twelfth Night", Lorna Hutson states that Olivia's attraction to Viola as Cesario " it resides less in the androgynous beauty of the body, than in the body conceived as a means of.