Portia’s Dissimulations Unveiled in The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

This study explores Portia’s motives behind her humanitarian acts in The Merchant of Venice. Portia’s dormant subversive traits are carefully planned and craftily manifested in dissimulations played out by her. Her strong desire to assert her power in all walks of her life pushes her into realms that were not accessible to women during the early modern period. Her dissimulations go beyond Belmont, the wealthy home that Portia has inherited, to Venice, the center of intense mercantile activities marked by a dominant patriarchal order, into the court governed by the strict Venetian rule. Her actions contravene the period’s patriarchal ideology and the existent social order, but she carefully maneuvers her way through every ordeal by having recourse to dissimulations. When Portia senses any kind of threat encroaching on her autonomy, she employs dissimulations to fend off the principal agent of the threat. Her dissimulative tactic is to bestow benevolence on the alleged threat, feigning genuine altruism or kindness, and eventually locking their relationship into a claim-obligatory relationship. She draws upon her resources, wealth and high intellectual capacity, to put herself in a more superior position. By resorting to dissimulations she usurps the prerogatives of Bassanio, Antonio, and Shylock and holds her position as the hegemonic power.