British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Women’s appropriations of Shakespeare
Saturday 3rd September 2005, 2.00-4.00pm,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 2
Participants
Chair - Mark Dooley, Teeside University
Erica Hateley, Monash University
Mary Cowden Clarke: Teaching Girls
How (Not) to Read Shakespeare?
Sarah Gallagher, Bristol University
‘There she stands as if alive’:
Monumentalising Shakespeare’s Women in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues.
Beatriz Domínguez Garcia, University of Huelva
The Power of Knowledge: rewriting The
Tempest in Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird.
Anna Lindhé, Lund University
Cordelia in Late 20th Century Women's Fiction?
Abstracts
Mary Cowden Clarke: Teaching Girls How (Not) to Read Shakespeare?
Erica Hateley, Monash University
This paper considers Mary Cowden Clarke’s role in the cultural construction and maintenance of a feminine juvenile readership of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. Cowden Clarke is chiefly remembered as a significant figure in the dissemination of Shakespeare as the compiler of the first ever concordance to the Works.
However, as a writer for children, Cowden-Clarke at once ‘interrupts’ and ‘maintains’ received wisdoms about transmitting Shakespearean texts to juvenile readers primarily inherited from the Lambs’ influential Tales from Shakespeare (1807). This paper focuses closely on two key Cowden Clarke works which respond explicitly to this tradition: her fictionalised Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-51), and her article “Shakespeare as the Girl's Friend” (1887). Reading within and across these works reveals a highly ambivalent construction of the female reader of Shakespeare; one which shifts between cultural challenge and maintenance.
The female reader, author and protagonist are involved in a complex negotiation between the potential power in appropriating the cultural capital of Shakespeare, and the importance of socio-cultural cohesion. Reading these negotiations, Cowden Clarke emerges as a key figure in the genealogy not only of ‘Shakespeare for Children’ but of “Shakespeare”, a “privileged site of intersecting codes that reflect and effect discourse production and consumption” (Freedman).
‘There she stands as if alive’: Monumentalising Shakespeare’s
Women in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues.
Sarah Gallagher, Bristol University
A recent revival of interest in Victorian readings of Shakespeare indicates,
but has not yet fully addressed, the extent of Browning’s relation to
Shakespeare. Drawing on intertextual theory and feminist readings of Shakespeare,
this paper argues that ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (1836), ‘My
Last Duchess’ (1842) and The Ring and the Book (1868-9) engage in a poetic
dialogue with Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter’s Tale. Verbal
echoes from Othello suggest an extended and troubled engagement with the ‘monumental
alabaster’ of Desdemona’s body, moments before her death. The ‘restoration’
to life of a statuesque Hermione at the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale
is ironically inverted—and the optimism of that scene subverted—in
‘My Last Duchess’ when the absent Duchess is ‘transformed’
into a work of art. The dramatic isolation of Browning’s male monologists,
and their will to enforce a singular perspective, suggest that not only the
subject matter but also the poetic form of Browning’s most famous monologues
find an origin in Shakespeare’s depictions of marital abuse. By exploring
these poems’ complex indebtedness to a Shakespearean precursor text, this
paper interrogates and unravels such issues, thus fleshing out what is emerging
as a vital and exceptionally fruitful literary relation.
The Power of Knowledge: rewriting The Tempest
in Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird.
Beatriz Domínguez Garcia, University of Huelva
The uses of Shakespearean motifs in contemporary women’s fictions relates to what has been labelled as a “creative and critical practice,” by Desmet and Sawyer. British author Kate Atkinson seems to be quite aware of the power of Shakespearean plots in her novels. However, being a woman writer of undoubtedly feminist background, her appropriation of plots, words or endings call back for revision. Atkinson’s novels are full of remarks which link her characters with a well-known literary tradition. However, it seems that Atkinson’s revision of The Tempest is not an appropriation from the postcolonial point of view, her use of the intertext is a means to display the power of words and the power of knowledge. Sitting in an island, the two protagonists duel against each other, against their histories and against the power of knowledge. Nora’s voice, the voice of the mother, the intrusive voice of the knower, transcends the boundaries of the narrative layers to be over-present, omniscient. It may be that, as it happens in Jane Rogers’ Island, powerful females endanger individuality. Thus, it is my contention that by using intertextuality and appropriation, Atkinson moves beyond the ending and gives both the mother figure and the growing girl the possibility to rewrite the traditional plot and uncover the manipulation of their personal stories.
Anna Lindhé - Abstract: British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference
2005
Anna Lindhé, Lund University
For centuries, women authors have derived inspiration from Shakespeare’s
plays, entering a creative room where they configure alternative worlds in the
process of modifying Shakespeare’s plots and characters. However, women’s
‘counterwriting’ (Moraru 2001: 9) as regards Shakespeare has increased
markedly in recent years, King Lear being one play that has come in for a good
deal of attention from female ‘re-writers’. King Lear is a play
that deals with patriarchal rule and the relationship between father and daughters,
and these factors are often considered to be the main reasons why this drama
holds special fascination for women authors. Even so, King Lear seems to harbour
something that attracts and intrigues many female re-writers apart from the
father-daughter relation. More than any other Shakespeare play, King Lear offers
a broad range of interpersonal relationships between parent and child, but also
between king and subject, between husband and wife, and between siblings of
both sexes. This paper will take a look at three appropriations of King Lear
in late-20th-century fiction: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), Anne
Tyler’s Ladder of Years (1995), and Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s
Eye (1988). It asks how these novels interact with King Lear through different
states of tension on the interpersonal level.
