Schedule / Horaire
Thursday 24 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.
Room: Maison des Mines, salle AB.
Leaders / Organisatrices
Ariane M. Balizet, Texas Christian University (USA) and Marcela Kostihová, Hamline University (USA)
Participants
- Leah Adcock-Starr, University of Washington-Seattle (USA)
B.F.F.’s and the Bard: Reclaiming the Importance of Female Friendship in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Sara Eaton, North Central College (USA)
‘Shaping Fantasies’: Courtly Love and Twentieth-Century Movies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Natalie K. Eschenbaum, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse (USA)
Juliet’s Narcissism - Jennifer Flaherty, Georgia College and State University (USA)
Is there a Doctor in the House of Capulet? - Preeti Gautam, Government Raza Post Graduate College (India)
Encoding the Language of Girlhood: A Study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Erica Hateley, Queensland University of Technology (Australia)
Antipodean Impulses: Making Sense of Shakespearean Girls in Twenty-First Century Australia - DeLisa D. Hawkes, North Carolina Central University (USA)
Displacement and Delusion: Comic Reflexivity in A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Celi Oliveto, Mary Baldwin College (USA)
Challenging Gender Stereotypes through Production - Shannon Reed, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
A Twenty-Line Trap?: Shakespeare Enacted by Young Women - Paris Shun-Hsiang Shih, National Chengchi University (Taiwan)
Shakespearean Spice Girls?: Untangling Postfeminist Girlhood in She’s The Man and Ten Things I Hate About You - Lori Lee Wallace, Pacific Lutheran University (USA)
Patriarchal Idealism and The Merchant of Venice - Deanne Williams, York University (Canada)
Global Girls in Shakespeare’s Late Plays
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Leah Adcock-Starr, University of Washington-Seattle (USA)
B.F.F.’s and the Bard: Reclaiming the Importance of Female Friendship in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
As written, William Shakespeare’s popular A Midsummer Night’s Dream relies upon the agency and actions of a pair of girls. Unsophisticated and irresponsible choices made in cutting, casting, and conceiving the play for mass consumption not only devalue Helena and Hermia and their pivotal role in the plot, but are indicative of a neglectful attitude towards the experiences and relationships of young women. Rigorous textual analysis and considered production choices have the potential to reclaim A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a significant contribution to a theatrical canon in which depictions of complex female relationships are much needed and seldom seen.
2. Sara Eaton, North Central College (USA)
‘Shaping Fantasies’: Courtly Love and Twentieth-Century Movies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Twentieth-century movie adaptations of Midsummer Night’s Dream replicate Courtly Love’s definitions of courtship. While Slavoj Zizek’s discussions of Courtly Love’s ideology focus on its tragic applications, this essay will explore how Courtly Love works in the comic mode. Courtly Love is invoked to shape the various romances in the playtext; the result is the acting out of sado-masochistic responses to “love,” registered as fantasy by the play’s end. Twentieth-century film productions repeat this pattern as well as the ideology.
3. Natalie K. Eschenbaum, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse (USA)
Juliet’s Narcissism
This paper considers what the characterization of Juliet in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation teaches girls about selfhood, love, and death. Luhrmann links the story of the “star-cross’d lovers” to Ovid’s tale of “Narcissus and Echo”; he uses mirrors and reflections, through glass and water, to suggest that Romeo and Juliet’s love for one another is similar to narcissistic self-love. Juliet is the one who attempts to shift the relationship from love of the self to love of an “other,” but doing so necessitates their death. Luhrmann’s Juliet shows that girls’ love holds great power, but that self-love defines this power.
4. Jennifer Flaherty, Georgia College and State University (USA)
Is there a Doctor in the House of Capulet?
My paper addresses Romeo’s Ex and Saving Juliet, novelizations of Romeo and Juliet. Counteracting the glamorization of Juliet’s star-crossed romance and suicide, each author introduces an alternate heroine (who balances a healthy romantic relationship with a desire to work in medicine) as Juliet’s foil. Both authors encourage young readers to de-romanticize Juliet’s secret love and early death. These novels are part of a continuing trend in young adult adaptations that reframe Shakespeare’s stories, calling attention to the challenges faced by young women (past and present) and offering solutions for contemporary readers.
5. Preeti Gautam, Government Raza Post Graduate College (India)
Encoding the Language of Girlhood: A Study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The paper advances the argument and offers an insight into how in delineating girlhood, Shakespeare deviates from scripting the conventional femininity codes and construction of girlhood in renaissance. While dramatizing gender tensions, the play also seems to suggest how girls are used as symbols of social collapse, besides underscoring the social and cultural assumptions of the potential of girlhood for disruption and subversion. The paper argues that renaissance practice to engage in social critique led to challenging the culturally imposed gender inequality. The play influences immensely the discourse of girlhood and offers a cultural redefinition of female youth.
6. Erica Hateley, Queensland University of Technology (Australia)
Antipodean Impulses: Making Sense of Shakespearean Girls in Twenty-First Century Australia
Shakespeare retains an ambivalent status in Australia as an artefact of British imperialism and as a site of potential resistance to historical hierarchies of nation, culture, or gender. Such ambivalence informs recent Australian depictions of Shakespearean girls. In film, prose and graphic-novel adaptations of Macbeth and Hamlet, girls’ bodies are mobilised to disrupt assumptions about the authority of Shakespeare in Australia. In young adult appropriations of Shakespeare, female protagonists make sense of themselves by making sense of Shakespeare, and thus cultural agency and authority remain rooted in Shakespeare but are made the purview of girlhood.
7. DeLisa D. Hawkes, North Carolina Central University (USA)
Displacement and Delusion: Comic Reflexivity in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Displaced, or inverted reflection exists in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Considering characters outside of the lovers, displacement occurs when what we expect to occur in one character occurs in another, and inversion turns the “normal” upside down. Shakespeare uses an inverted reflexivity to mask notions which arouse the ire of the censors. This view probes the Helena-Bottom contrast rather than the Puck-Bottom antithesis while addressing the socio-political aspects of the displacement of fools with location of form and settings. This festive comedy analyzes Shakespeare’s ideas on who fools were with respect to their political identity, gender, and social condition.
8. Celi Oliveto, Mary Baldwin College (USA)
Challenging Gender Stereotypes through Production
This paper explores student experiences watching Mary Baldwin College’s Masters of Fine Arts Shakespeare and Performance company Rogue Shakespeare’s non-traditional, primarily female Shakespeare company. American classrooms largely ignore the issue of Shakespeare’s gender inequality and consequently may reinforce stereotypical expectations of male and female behavior for students. . This paper argues that seeing women playing lead male roles will lead students to question assumptions about gender typed behavior. This project surveyed student audiences before and after the cross gender cast production to gather feedback concerning student expectations and changes concerning expectations of male and female behavior.
9. Shannon Reed, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
A Twenty-Line Trap?: Shakespeare Enacted by Young Women
Professional actors assemble a toolkit of monologues with an obligatory “Shakespearean monologue” of around 20 lines. But female actors are at a disadvantage, with less than 150 women in a repertoire of over 1100 characters to choose from. Girl actors are even more so, if the powerful and complex older female roles are removed, leaving only a few dozen appropriate speeches. What effect does this limited canon have on young women actors? Here, I’ll reflect upon my own participant observer experience as a girl actor and present ethnographic research on how other women who played Shakespeare’s young female characters reflect on their experiences. Their words point to the dual, contradictory nature of this limited canon, proving both its limitations and opportunities, along with suggestions for change.
10. Paris Shun-Hsiang Shih, National Chengchi University (Taiwan)
Shakespearean Spice Girls?: Untangling Postfeminist Girlhood in She’s The Man and Ten Things I Hate About You
This paper uses two modern Shakespeare film adaptations to examine how certain Shakespearean young female characters are turned into postfeminist figures and how postfeminist girlhood is represented. In She’s the Man, we see how Viola manages to play with different gender roles with the help of commodities, and how she alienates herself from prescribed gender identity with critical awareness. In Ten Things I Hate about You, we see how Bianca is turned into a postfeminist girl and how she embodies “girl power.” Bianca’s overt female sexuality and her knowledge in girl fashion turn her into an unruly girl.
11. Lori Lee Wallace, Pacific Lutheran University (USA)
Patriarchal Idealism and The Merchant of Venice
Theorists have examined the patriarchal agenda of timeless literary pieces for decades. Lois Tyson has stated that the female characters in texts will fall into one of two simple categories: the “good girl” or the “bad girl.” Jill Dolan suggests that female characters in classic plays are marginalized as objects there to enhance the view of the audience. In this paper, I shall demonstrate how Shakespeare’s female characters are often responsible for driving the plot of the play, behaving as strong-minded women who cannot be so easily categorized as “good girl” or “bad girl.”
12. Deanne Williams, York University (Canada)
Global Girls in Shakespeare’s Late Plays
This paper considers the girls of Shakespeare’s late plays in a global context. The stories of Marina, Perdita, and Miranda — even Imogen – are shaped by international travel, and I will explore the possibilities of thinking about these characters as travellers, and place them in discussion with some recent theoretical discussions of cosmopolitanism, which provides an alternative to paradigms of colonial (and postcolonial) nationhood. I will consider the implications of these diverging models of girlhood, the cosmopolitan vs. the colonial, in Shakespeare. How do the competing, even contradictory, affiliations of Shakespeare’s global girls address questions global citizenship and/or national identity?