A (Feminist) Cultural Materialistic Approach to Shakespeare's Plays through Bakhtin's Discourse of the Grotesque Body: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Julius Caesar

Abstract

'The essential principle of grotesque realism', Bakhtin writes, 'is degradation', but he is also insistent that this degradation is not merely a negative process. On the contrary, Bakhtin stresses the ambivalence of carnival imagery and its use in Rabelais. The degradation enacted in carnival and in carnivalized writing-the incessant reminders that we are all creatures of fresh and thus of fool and faeces also-this degradation is simultaneously an affirmation, for even 'excrement is gay matter', linked to regeneration and renewal. Related to this conception of grotesque realism is distinction hat Bakhtin draws between the 'grotesque body' and the 'classic body'. This is another of his evaluatively charged distinctions, and, like all of his aesthetic preferences, is linked to some of his profoundest philosophical predispositions. Where the body of classical art is an achieved and completed thing, the grotesque body of Rabelais and the kind of art which he represents appears unfinished a thing of buds and sprouts, the orifices evident through which it sucks in and expels the world. The grotesque body celebrated by Bakhtin is a body in which becoming rather than completion is evident, a body whose openness to the world and the future is emphatically symbolized by the consuming maws, pregnant stomachs, evident phalluses and gargantuan evacuations that make it up. Much of the bawdy humour in Romeo Gild Juliet revolves around the grotesque body. The Nurse seems to epitomize Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque, especially in her repeated allusions to copulation, conception, genitalia, and her own body. During the course of the play the Nurse seems to take a vicarious pleasure in anticipating Juliet's sexual encounters. Bakhtin argued that the grotesque mode could be used to counteract or undermine the status of the 'classical', high, or orthodox; it can puncture the gravity and grasp of dominant discourses and ideologies (systems of belief and expression). Applied to the Nurse, we might say that her discourse of sex challenges, and arguably undermines, the idealization of romantic love voiced by Lady Capulet (and indeed Juliet) and the notion that marriage is principally a status issue, voiced by Capulet. While the Capulets mask the presence of sexuality within marriage, the Nurse exposes it. But in the Dream, the ass's head distinguishes itself from comic props and animal masks in general, and becomes part of a complex structural pun, and the lower bodily parts are ennobled. Bottom is not only the bottom of the social hierarchy as the play represents it, but also the 'bottom' of the body when seated, literally the social or arse. Shakespeare and his contemporaries took for granted that ass, as the vulgar, dialectical spelling of arse, was the meeting point of a powerful set of linked concepts. Shakespeare used ass to pun on the that gets beaten with a stick and the arse that gets thumped sexually, the arse that bears or carries in intercourse. In Julius Caesar, 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. The image of blood is interpreted as a trope of gender and the open and bleeding body of Caesar's corpse is associated with feminine blood. The Petrarchan vocabulary Antony deploys in signifying Caesar's corpse, first in the capitol and later in the forum, accedes to the idea of femaleness as a source of Caesar's difference but refigures his body as a discursive site not of contempt or anxiety but of desire.