Essay: The Tempest' and 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman': Exploring Patriarchy Through Performance.

Terry Eagleton describes ideology as without a “single adequate definition” and that in compressing the meaning into such a definition would be “unhelpful even if it were possible”.1 Instead he lists several random definitions all with an equal weight in meaning. One of these is that ideology is a collection of “false ideas which help legitimate a dominant political power.”1 Using this definition of ideology we can begin to understand the question. However, it is not a matter of analysing how two texts portray gender and how this reflects the ideology but instead the complete reverse. Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles (1990) argue gender as a social construct: “gender is not a noun […] gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purposed to be.” Using this understanding of gender, and our previous definition of ideology, we can begin to deconstruct how the two texts of The Tempest, by William Shakespeare and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft use the concept of gender as re-enactment of ideological norms
Considered by many to be the first great piece of feminist writing, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman highlighted the issues with the hegemonic ideas and notions about women during the 18th Century. Wollstonecraft argues that part of the reason why women are subdues by men is because they are not inherently unequal to them, as men may have suggested in the 18th century, but instead that they are taught from a young age what it means to be a woman and thus know no better.
“That a girl, condemned to sit for hours together listening to the idle chat of weak nurses, or to attend at her mother’s toilet, will endeavour to join the conversation is, indeed, very natural; and that she will imitate her mother or aunts, and amuse herself by adorning her lifeless doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is undoubtedly a most natural consequence.”
Here Wollstonecraft argues that women are what they are because they are taught by society how to live, act and present themselves in a certain way. She even argues that “Girls and boys, in short, would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference”. Here she is clearly arguing that gender is not something that you are inherently born with but instead is a social construct of the society that you grow up in. She plays with the notion that personality is not what defines gender as children are taught how to behave as men and women respectively and thus they are merely performing all they have been taught or seen from their “mother or aunts”. This is again compounded by Wollstonecraft when she clearly says that:
“Women are told from their infancy and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.”
This coupled with Wollstonecraft’s notion that girls are “Taught from their infancy that beauty is women’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison” highlights how ‘feminine’ traits are not intrinsic, but something adopted and accepted by girls as grow up. This quote also alludes to the idea that are taught to submit to the patriarchy and not merely falling into the “divine right of husbands”. Interestingly the quote can also be interpreted in a way that alludes to both men and women learning how to portray their respective genders. Men in the 18th century too could be subject to gender performity, being taught that male characteristics include defending and honouring your wife. The text plays with this concept that gender is more than just an intrinsic character but instead a compounded staged presentation of what society expects of humans’ male or female orientation. To argue that this is an ideologically driven performance would not be absurd as the whole text itself directly challenges the subjection of women in society. Women are taught to be weak and feeble beings, taught to please and in turn men are taught, by other men, to act as the protective males to exert their control over submissive women, and thus maintain the status quo.
When analysing ideology and how it affects gender, in A vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft discusses how women are denied the same education as men. Using Terry Eagleton’s defining of gender, we can argue that by denying women equal education, men are able to perpetuate their patriarchal agenda upon women and thus force them to behave in what men determine to me idealistic of females and therefore help them maintain their power over women.
In The Tempest, by William Shakespeare there is a significant absence of female characters. Miranda is the one physical female character throughout the play and thus any analysis of gender must include her character. Miranda does not “know one of my sex; no woman’s face remember, save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen more that I nay call men than you” This quote raises two points worth noting. The first is that she does not know of any other women. She lacks the teachings of other women that Wollstonecraft claims dictates a child’s perception of gender.