LE3 .A278 2019

2019

Slights, Jessica

Acadia University

Bachelor of Arts

Honours

English

English & Theatre Studies

This thesis explores three of Shakespeare’s comic heroines in the context of Sara Ahmed’s concepts of the feminist killjoy and the willful subject. I argue that Ahmed’s contemporary feminist vocabulary reveals the strategies by which Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, and Portia in The Merchant of Venice resist patriarchal oppression in their communities and advocate on behalf of themselves and others. In the first chapter, I argue that Paulina self-identifies as a feminist killjoy and uses her rhetorical skills to mount on Queen Hermione’s behalf a willful advocacy that effectively destabilizes Sicilia’s tyrannical patriarchy. The second chapter explores the notable absence of supportive female friendships in The Taming of the Shrew and proposes that Katherine’s strongest act of feminist resistance manifests in her act of breaking the fourth wall and creating a community of women in her famous final speech. Finally, I argue in the third chapter that when Portia disguises herself as Balthazar, a male lawyer, she resists gendered conventions about intellectual capacity and so disrupts the patriarchal culture of exchange and trafficking that dominates Venice and Belmont’s domestic and economic life. These discussions aim to demonstrate that a contemporary vocabulary is useful in understanding women’s marginalization by and resistance to patriarchy in a wide range of cultural contexts, and can also engage in a process of feminist community-building across temporal and literary boundaries.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:3295