Viola's gender roles in Twelfth Night.
The fluidity and ambiguity with which Viola presents gender is central to the drama of Twelfth Night. But to what extent are Viola's gender roles essential to the comedy of the play?
The arrivals of Viola and Sebastian in Illyria serve as the catalysts for drama in Twelfth Night. The presence of twins of different sexes yet identical in appearance is a dramaturgical device crucial to the comic resolution, whilst being somewhat farcical. It is the misunderstandings which Viola’s cross-dressing inevitably causes which make her inverted gender roles so essential to the comedy of the play. Through her disguise, she assumes typically male roles such as of the ‘fool’, and the comic value of her double identity is heightened through the questioning of the gender conventions of Shakespearean theatre. Yet, Viola’s disguise brings with it a strain of melancholy, lessening her assumed gender roles’ comic impact on the play.
Viola’s cross-dressing subverts normality in the respect that she abruptly assumes typically male roles such as that of the Fool. Her first meeting with Olivia as a messenger of Orsino’s love is marked by her different approach to courtship. She launches into a preprepared speech of compliments with a poetic apostrophe: ‘most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty’, only to break into prose to check that she is indeed speaking to Olivia. Viola’s repeatedly her speech as conventionally courtly, as it is ‘excellently well penned’ and ‘tis poetical’; yet, these comments essentially refer to its artificiality. In fact, juxtaposed to the opening of the play, this whole meeting is a parody of Orsino’s cliché approach and indeed the conventions of courtly love. Viola deflates the romantic pretensions of Orsino’s embassy, and such ridicule of the ‘male archetype’ by a woman is highly comical for its suspension of the accepted inferiority of women in society. Yet, somewhat more absurd is the fact she has also unintentionally assumed his positions of Olivia’s
The arrivals of Viola and Sebastian in Illyria serve as the catalysts for drama in Twelfth Night. The presence of twins of different sexes yet identical in appearance is a dramaturgical device crucial to the comic resolution, whilst being somewhat farcical. It is the misunderstandings which Viola’s cross-dressing inevitably causes which make her inverted gender roles so essential to the comedy of the play. Through her disguise, she assumes typically male roles such as of the ‘fool’, and the comic value of her double identity is heightened through the questioning of the gender conventions of Shakespearean theatre. Yet, Viola’s disguise brings with it a strain of melancholy, lessening her assumed gender roles’ comic impact on the play.
Viola’s cross-dressing subverts normality in the respect that she abruptly assumes typically male roles such as that of the Fool. Her first meeting with Olivia as a messenger of Orsino’s love is marked by her different approach to courtship. She launches into a preprepared speech of compliments with a poetic apostrophe: ‘most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty’, only to break into prose to check that she is indeed speaking to Olivia. Viola’s repeatedly her speech as conventionally courtly, as it is ‘excellently well penned’ and ‘tis poetical’; yet, these comments essentially refer to its artificiality. In fact, juxtaposed to the opening of the play, this whole meeting is a parody of Orsino’s cliché approach and indeed the conventions of courtly love. Viola deflates the romantic pretensions of Orsino’s embassy, and such ridicule of the ‘male archetype’ by a woman is highly comical for its suspension of the accepted inferiority of women in society. Yet, somewhat more absurd is the fact she has also unintentionally assumed his positions of Olivia’s