In spite of the patriarchy, both Woolf and Shakespeare present characters which assume the role of servant and master. However, contrary to conventional views of marriage and female subservience, the women in these texts ascend gender hierarchy to dictate sexual politics. In Orlando, the protagonist is infantilised and intoxicated by the beguiling Queen Elizabeth I – a figure of great power – yet in As You Like It, the enchanting mysticism of femininity, which condemns men to the position of a slave, is a self-affliction. In Orlando, the frequent sexual romps with beguiling women are characterised by play and playfulness. As he encounters the epicene beauty of the Russian princess Euphrosyne, he is compelled into exhibiting hyperbolic displays of infantile whim, like ‘hurl[ing] himself through the summer air’. The subtle sense of fleeting pleasure and whim is echoed in Woolf’s use of naming: ‘euphrosyne’, in Greek mythology, is the goddess of cheer, joy and mirth. Orlando’s sexual vicissitudes, from lover to lover, are mere exercises of his own desire. However, he has total control of each partner – Woolf notes that, with use of passive voice, that ‘The Lady Euphrosyne hung on his arm’, not the other way around. However, Orlando’s relationship with the Queen is uniquely underpinned by a sense of childish wonderment, sexual obsession and more significantly, emasculation and loss of power. Whereas the description of Orlando’s other lovers focus on their appearance, what causes Orlando to ‘sleep all night in ignorance’ is the sexual attraction that he derives from the Queen’s majesty, prestige and power. This is more evident when he initially spots her in the ground, using the metonym of the Queen’s ‘head’ as he ‘deduces’ what might follow on her ‘body’, ‘informed with all the great attributes of a Queen’. Woolf’s rumination on the male gaze here is striking, and an important shift in the depiction of gender performance: Orlando is, through a suspension of disbelief, reimagining Elizabeth’s gender expression, using the power symbol of a monarch’s ‘head’ to construct a false sexual image of domination. He ruminates on her supposedly having ‘a pair of the finest legs that a young nobleman has ever stood upright upon’, willing to submit himself to her beguiling gendered performance of power. Somewhat dovetailing with the Woolf’s depiction, As You Like It uses the conventions of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, such as the notion of love as an insidious disease which brings sexual torment to the lover, to present the male doter as the servant to the mistress – however, Shakespeare more subtly poses that suffering for love is actually self-inflicted and ridiculous. While Orlando’s incompetent poetry conforms to the conventional idea that ‘he should live and die [Rosalind’s] slave’, these sentiments are presented as comic relief. Even Silvius, a forest-dwelling shepherd, assumes the position of tortured lover, asking his beloved Phoebe to notice ‘the wounds invisible / That love’s keen arrows make’. But Silvius’s request for Phoebe’s attention shows that the ensnared partner can loosen the chains of love and that all romantic wounds can ultimately be healed – this declaration of ‘wounds’ and ‘arrows’ is merely a cheap ploy for sympathy. Indeed, As You Like It portrays love as a force for happiness and fulfillment, inviting the audience to ridicule those who revel in their own suffering. This sense of gender performance, as an expression of female power-play, is echoed in Millay’s Collected Poems, especially in I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed and Not in this chamber only at my birth. Initially, the former poem seems to fail to comprehend women and femininity, alienating them through the phrase ‘my kind’, in a regressive and animalistic comparison. However, at the sonnet’s volta, the message of female subservience and passivity yields. Though her physical attraction to him is undeniable, the ‘stout blood’ of her body will not overpower her mind. Millay’s sonnet ends with an arrhythmic use of iambic pentameter and a half-rhyme on the final couplet to suggest a resisting of conformity, the speaker will not simply and hopelessly succumb to male desire. In Not in this chamber only at my birth, the extended metaphor of a ‘chamber’ could either be read as both a mother’s womb, through the ‘mysterious night’ of the gestation period, or the confining domestic space which ‘no other room contain her quite’. Each reading implies an absent yet authoritative male figure has intervened in the speaker’s life, and, in act of renewal and self-discovery, she chooses to reject her fate as domestic woman, ‘gather[ing] up her little gods’ and leaving the man. Similarly, in The Rover, dressing as men gives Hellena and Florinda the agency to change their fate. Two sisters, one a romantic, the other a novice nun, are ruled by a chauvinistic brother, but want to break out of their ‘confinement’ to sample the delights of the Neapolitan carnival and ‘be as mad as the rest’. While Don Pedro has plans for Florinda to marry either rich old Vincentio or his equally rich young friend, Antonio, she favours Belvile, a near penniless cavalier; Hellena, for her part, no longer wants to be hidden in a convent, but would prefer to ‘sigh, and sing, and blush and wish’ as a lover, just like her sister. Seeking revenge after a ‘young English gentlemen’ wooed someone else and then ‘paid his broken vows to [Willmore], Angellica Bianca dons ‘a masking habit and vizard’ and threatens him with a ‘pistol’. Her choice of weapon is ‘symbolic of her attempt to usurp phallic control’ of her own sexual desires, especially significant through use of a male power tool in the 17th century. Instead of feminizing her lust, Angellica masculinizes herself. By dressing as men, both women demonstrate how women may assert the rights associated only with the men of the period: romance, justice and sexuality. Overall, through breaking from stultifying social constructs, these writers depict women who transcend male sexual authority.
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