Abstract
What follows is intended to further two projects of historical reconstruction of the early-modern period: the first involves writing the body into cultural history; the second, deciphering the complex annotation of gender difference in apparently unambiguously gendered characters.1 In this essay these two projects come together through an interrogation of Shakespeare’s use of the bodily signs of blood and bleeding, particularly in Julius Caesar. At certain discursive occasions in the play, these signs function as historically specific attributes of gender, as important tropes of patriachal discourse. The meaning of blood and bleeding becomes part of an insistent rhetoric of bodily conduct in which the bleeding body signifies as a shameful token of uncontrol, as a failure of physical self-mastery particularly associated with woman.
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Notes
Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, MA, 1961), p. 48.
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (1968: rpt. Bloomington, IN, 1984);
Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg’, Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1986), 399–439, and Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982).
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago, 1986), pp. 123–42, esp. p. 126.
I borrow this term from René Girard in Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London, 1977), pp. 49–52. For relevant discussions of Julius Caesar
see the brief but suggestive comments of C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler in The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), pp. 26, 36, and 236
Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens, GA, 1985), pp. 69–78.
Thomas Laqueur, ‘Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology’, Representations, 14 (1986), 1–41, esp. pp. 8–9.
See Ian Maclean’s The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1980).
Gail Kern Paster, ‘Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy’, Renaissance Drama, n.s. (1987), 43–65, esp. pp. 49–50.
Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 47–73, esp. pp. 70–2.
Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, OH, 1982), pp. 49–50. An earlier discussion is Hilda Smith, ‘Gynecology and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Liberating Women’s History: Thearetical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana, IL, 1976), pp. 97–114.
Janet Adelman, ‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus’, in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. Jay L. Halio and David Bevington (Newark, DE, 1978), pp. 108–24, esp. p. 110.
Another instance of the bloody body as female is the murdered Duncan; see Janet Adelman’s recent essay, ‘“Born of Woman”: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth’, in Cannibals, Wilches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissource, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore and London, 1987), pp. 90–121, esp. p. 95. That blood is the agent of gender transformation, however, is only implicit in Adelman’s remarks, which focus instead on Macduff’s reference to Duncan’s body as a ‘new Gorgon’. Perhaps more relevant to my purposes is the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth’s exclamation: ‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ (V.i.38–9).
Albert Tricomi, ‘The Mutilated Garden in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 89–105, esp. p. 94.
For a cogent discussion of the symbolism of vaginal blood and its relation as well to menstrual blood, see the now-classic essay by Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’, in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 31–64, esp. pp. 62–3, n. 44.
See ibid., pp. 49–50; on the cult of Elizabeth, see Roy C. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 1963) and his The Cult of Elizabeth (London, 1977).
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols (Oxford, 1978), vol. 1 (The History of Manners), 53–5.
Richard Wilson, ‘“Is This a Holiday?”; Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival’, ELH, 54 (1987), 31–44, esp. p. 32 [reprinted in this volume, pp. 55–76–Ed.].
This passage from The Life of Marcus Brutus in Thomas North’s Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes [1579] is reprinted, along with several others, in the Oxford Shakespeare Julius Caesar, ed. Arthur Humphries (Oxford, 1984), p. 236.
I thus agree with Madelon Sprengnether that in Portia’s self-wounding, manliness is equated with injury, ‘that the sign of masculinity becomes the wound’ (‘Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus’, in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose [Syracuse, NY, 1986], p. 96). For an extended riff on possible (if improbable) sexual puns in this speech, see Frankie Rubinstein’s entry for ‘thigh’ in A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and their Significance (London, 1984), p. 273.
David Kaula, ‘“Let Us Be Sacrificers”: Religious Motifs in Julius Caesar’, Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), 197–214, esp. p. 204.
Ibid., pp. 421–2. Bynum’s latest discussion of this theme appears in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), pp. 263–5.
Dorothy McLaren, ‘Marital fertility and lactation 1570–1720’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London and New York, 1985), pp. 22–53, esp. pp. 27–8.
The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA, 1918), pp. 3–52, esp. p. 24; quoted also in Stephen Orgel, ‘Prospero’s Wife’, Representations, 8 (1984), 1–12, esp. p. 9.
See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1976), p. 203, who argues for an increasingly class-specific semiosis of nursing.
For a related discussion of the semiotic uses of Caesar’s toga, see Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Reading the signs: towards a semiotics of Shakespearean drama’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London and New York, 1985), pp. 119–43, esp. p. 133.
On woman as object of exchange, see Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York, 1975), pp. 157–210.
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© 2002 Richard Wilson
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Paster, G.K. (2002). ‘In the spirit of men there is no blood’: Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar. In: Wilson, R. (eds) Julius Caesar. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21330-2_8
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