Splitter, Randolph (1981) Something, nothing : space, substance, and sexual identity in Shakespeare. Humanities Working Paper, 58. California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20090812-153756482
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This paper argues that early, "preoedipal" anxieties about dependency, autonomy, the boundaries of the self, the dangerous interpenetration of inner and outer worlds--the outer world contaminating the inner self, the self afraid of losing the precious "substance" that keeps it alive--play a significant role in Shakespeare's plays, specifically Hamlet and King Lear. It argues further that childhood dependence on a mother influences later feelings about the opposite sex and sexual conflicts revive early anxieties about autonomy and independence, so that the attempt to establish a proper balance between inner and outer worlds is inextricably tied (in the plays) to conceptions of sexual identity. In broader social terms, these plays reflect the problem of being (1) a separate, self-conscious individual at a time when the old values of an ordered, hierar"chical society were giving way to a new, middle-class, Protestant ethic of "individualism" and (2) a man at a time when sexual roles were becoming polarized in new ways. As the plays themselves imply--and as the paper tries to show--we can't understand the dilemmas of modern "individualism" without understanding the sexual parameters (learned in early childhood, reinforced by social experience) in terms of which these dilenrnas are lived out.
|Item Type:||Report or Paper (Working Paper)|
|Group:||Humanities Working Papers|
|Official Citation:||Splitter, Randolph. Something, nothing: space, substance, and sexual identity in Shakespeare. Pasadena, CA: California Institute of Technology, 1981. Humanities Working Paper, No. 58.|
|Usage Policy:||No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided.|
|Deposited By:||Lindsay Cleary|
|Deposited On:||17 Aug 2009 17:33|
|Last Modified:||26 Dec 2012 11:11|
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