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Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy. By CRISTINA LEÓN ALFAR. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Pp. 254. $46.50 cloth.
In Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy, Cristina Léon Alfar challenges both traditional and feminist views of the "evil" woman characters in Shakespeare. Her central thesis is that Shakespeare exposes rather than reinforces "masculinist fantasies of female evil" (29). This claim is particularly persuasive for Macbeth, although not for King Lear. In all cases, the book offers an interpretation of the socioeconomic basis for these fantasies that is far more nuanced than any proposed to date. Alfar argues that Goneril, Regan, and Lady Macbeth should be analyzed alongside Juliet, Cleopatra, and Hermione, and that Shakespeare uses these characters to make visible the violence of "patrilineal structures of power" (29).
The project is especially valuable in its determined effort to consider gender in the light of early modern social and political formations. For example, Alfar demonstrates that conduct books of the period portray the loss of female chastity as treason. The power of the husband and father reproduces the power of the monarch because all three have the ability to use or destroy the bodies of their subjects. Therefore, when women begin to exercise political power in the plays, their cruelty is another manifestation of the political system that usually victimizes them. ?
According to Alfar, critics who have labeled characters like Lady Macbeth as evil have ignored the complexity of their motivation. In fact they are tragic heroines whose corruption displays the ruthlessness of state power. The interpretation of Lady Macbeth is a compelling new view, and the analysis of Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter's Tale quite convincing. But Alfar gives too much credit to Shakespeare, in my opinion, in her estimates of both his knowledge of the structures of power she describes and his sympathy for the women...