When he reunites with Marina, Pericles requests that his royal advisor, Helicanus, “strike” him:

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me in their sweetness.[2]

To maintain his composure and, concomitantly, his masculinity, Pericles rhetorically begs Helicanus to wound him, to penetrate his flesh and produce an orifice through which to vent the mighty excess of his emotions. Such affective too-much-ness recalls Gloucester’s death in King Lear, as Edgar tells audiences that his father’s weak heart, on reconciliation with his eldest son, was “too weak the conflict to support / ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / [and] Burst smilingly.”[3]

Under the duress of excessive albeit pleasant affective energies, a similar kind of bursting threatens Pericles. But unlike Gloucester, whose excessive, oppositional feelings erupt him, Pericles calls for a curative bodily modification which registers as a metaphoric invagination. Put differently, Pericles seeks to regain and reassert a “Neostoic,” masculine self through a temporary feminization, figured here as the “gash” that would enable him to evacuate the waste of his excessive affect and purge himself into a purified state of rationality. His goal, moreover, figures as anti-queer; he attempts to tidy what Martin F. Manalansan IV calls “queer mess,” which refers to “material and affective conditions of impossible subjects as well as an analytical stance that negates, deflects, if not resists the ‘cleaning up’ function of the normative.”[4] But prior to this “cleaning up,” Pericles is a liminal, queer subject, defined both by masculine rationality and feminine excess.

In seventeenth century Europe, Neostoicism, or the so-called “new humanism,” rose to prominence and filtered into literary texts by discursive osmosis. Not to understate its significance, Richard Tuck writes that Neostoicsm, which is a blend of “skepticism, Stoicism[,] and Tacitism,” became “as all-pervasive as the Ciceronian humanism and the Quattocentro had been.”[5] This ordering philosophy grew in large part out of the sixteenth century writings of Michel de Montaigne, author of Les Essais (1580), and Justus Lipsius. Lipsius published his most famous Neostic text, De Constantia, in two parts in 1583. In it, he blends Stoic ideals with Christine doctrine, yielding a text which, according to Tuck, touts the following tenet: “wisdom comes not through the repression of emotion by reason, but through the cultivation of helpful passions, like plants and a garden.”[6] Therefore, as a man guided by Neostoic principles, Pericles aims not to excise himself of all emotion but to practice a kind of emotional temperance to maintain his composure and, inextricably, his masculinity. For as Lipsius extolls, the “true Mother of Contancy, is Patience / and lowliness of the Mind”:

As for Virtue she ever
marches in the middle path, and is
cautiously heedfull lest there should
be any thing of Excess or Defect in
any of her Actions. For still she directs
her self by the Ballance of right
Reason, and hath that alone for the
rule and square of her Test.[7]

To Lipsius, the ideal Neostoic bears a measured and relatively stable disposition. “Excess” literally has no part in such a body-mind. Rather, it is a weed, like Pericles’s overabundance of joy on reunion with Marina, to be yanked out by the root. Within this philosophical framework, when Pericles is overcome by feeling—nearly drowned by it—he is a queer subject, liminally suspended between Neostoic masculinity and excessive femininity, between total order and senseless chaos.

During the reunion scene, Pericles firmly situates emotive excess within the realm of the feminine, a category that early modern culture constructed as oversexed, irrational, and vulnerable to penetration by external forces. Prior to discovering that she is his daughter, for instance, Pericles’s first look at Marina overcomes him. He figures his surplus joy as a gestational burden that must be delivered, bemoaning, “I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping.”[8] The physical similarities between Marina, a perceived stranger, and Thaisa seem to him an impossibility. Because he cannot reconcile it, and because it likely assaults him with complex feeling, the knowledge must be labored and he, a figurative mother, must lachrymosely deliver it. Likewise, when Pericles learns that Marina is his daughter and asks Helicanus for a “gash,” he figures his emotional surfeit as a superflux of blood that must be painfully let. This image of bloodletting also recalls the purgation of menstrual blood from the uterus, a process understood by early modern culture to maintain humoral balance within the female (i.e. uterus bearing) body. In each case, Pericles figures “too-much-ness” as a feminine something that must be released from the body to arrive at Neostic, masculine stasis.

[1] William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Third Series (New York and London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004): 1.1.131. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition.

[2] 5.1.181-4.

[3] William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Third Series (New York, London, and Ireland: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997): 5.3.197-8.

[4] Martin Manalansan IV, “The Messy Itineraries of Queerness,” Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary, July 21, 2015, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-messy-itineraries-of-queerness: n.p.

[5] Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), https://hdl-handle-net.libezproxy2.syr.edu/2027/heb32217.0001.001: 62-3.

[6] Ibid., 54.

[7] Justus Lipsius, A Discourse of Constancy in Two Books Chiefly Containing Consolations Against Publick Evils, 1679; trans. Nathaniel Wanley, p. 21-2, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A48621.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

[8] 5.1.97.

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The exact term has murky origins in early 2000s social media, but it can be traced back to a 19^th century literary trope which allowed queer storytellers to make queer stories visible in historical and social contexts hostile to queerness. Haley Hulan’s genealogy of the trope marks Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray as an early example of this form of Bury Your Gays as “refuge,” in which queer storytellers used the trope to protect “themselves, their publishers, and readers from laws and social mandates against the ‘endorsement’ of homosexuality,” making it a mode of queer survival and resistance (24). Hulan argues that our context, unlike Wilde’s, is no longer hostile to queerness, so we no longer have to bury our gays as Wilde did.

However, though queer storytellers today face less risk than in Wilde’s time, and we should celebrate gains in LGBTQ+ rights, grand narratives of progress are dangerous. As current book-banning and anti-transgender legislation makes clear, queer stories and bodies are still threatened (“HRC”; Monteil). To turn away from queer death in our storytelling now would be to ignore reality. In fact, many queer authors are still telling stories of queer death, including Tamsyn Muir in her 2019 novel Gideon the Ninth, which I read here alongside The Picture of Dorian Gray. I reject contemporary usage of Bury Your Gays for shock value by straight storytellers. However, I argue that in reclaiming our buried gays, queer storytellers can deconstruct and “queer” the Bury Your Gays trope with queer voices that speak and act beyond the grave in order to pave a path for queer futurity, whether in 1890 or 2019.

This venture is a big one, so this excerpt is one tiny part of a much larger whole. First, a disclaimer: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gideon the Ninth are very different texts: one is a Victorian fin de siècle novel about a beautiful man who exchanges his soul for eternal youth and the other is a sci-fi epic fantasy novel about lesbian necromancers in space. However, I read Dorian and Gideon as what Jacques Derrida calls “phantom texts,” in which “no text is an independent entity since all are intertextually haunted by others” (Palmer 14). This resonance can be especially relevant for Victorian/contemporary textual comparisons (Mays 446). Dorian and Gideon’s intertextual haunting begins with the unburied gays in both texts—queer figures who appear to die or “be destroyed” but actually transgress and resist the trope by creating rather than erasing queerness, leaving the text queerer than they found it. That is, if they truly leave at all…

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the central queer figure is The Picture, a portrait that Basil Hallward paints of Dorian Gray which seems to take on Dorian’s sins and age after Dorian declares he is jealous of the portrait’s eternal youth and beauty and makes the wish: “Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now!” (Wilde 26). The second, in Gideon the Ninth, is the Lyctor, a saint-like necromancer who is “not born immortal” but “ascends” and is “given eternal life” through a series of challenges which require the teamwork of a necromancer adept, Harrow, and her cavalier,[ii] Gideon (Muir 83).

A key aspect the Picture and Lyctor share is that their immortality is a matter of merging and continued haunting. Dorian is the Picture’s subject, but Basil is its creator. Though both are dead by the end after Dorian kills Basil, and then himself when he tries to destroy the Picture, the Picture remains, lovely and undying. The Picture is both a representation of Dorian’s soul and Basil’s body through the materiality of the painting’s brushstrokes, which Basil recognizes as his own even after the Picture changes (131). Similarly, though Gideon dies at the end of her respective book, she sacrifices herself to save Harrow by offering up her soul to give Harrow the powers of both a necromancer and a cavalier, as well as immortal life and immutable form. The ghost in the Picture and the Lyctor is a promise of what could have been, what could be, and ultimately, that death is not the end of queerness in these stories.     

It is the aesthetic ghost of “that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream” which draws Basil to Dorian in the first place, and Basil says that Dorian “became to me the visible incarnation” of this ideal, embodying this ghost (Wilde 95). Basil lays bare the ghost when he confesses why he never wanted to display the Picture, telling Dorian, “I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it” (96). In returning to the “ideal” Basil originally had for the Picture, Basil emphasizes the honest, vulnerable feeling and beauty originally intended in it. In his confession and desire not to display the Picture, the Picture is also a site of intimacy: its original secret was not that it was hideous and sinful, but that it was too full of Basil and Dorian, too “haunting” and “exquisite” to be seen by others. Yet Basil continues speaking of the ideal, reanimating it in the text and suggesting it may not yet be lost. Even after Dorian kills Basil, this presence lingers as Dorian turns to sketching in order to distract himself from Basil’s murder, unexpectedly channeling Basil’s ghost: “every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward” (136). This suggestion of a ghostly painter lingering after the mortal painter’s death, along with the Picture which remains after both of their deaths, is a refusal of The Picture of Dorian Gray to neatly, fully bury its gays.

Basil and Dorians’s ending is wrought with things left unsaid, but at the end of Gideon the Ninth, Gideon says exactly why she must sacrifice herself to save Harrow when they both find themselves in mortal peril, creating a clearer case of ghostly lingering. Before her sacrifice, Gideon reaffirms their enmeshed queerness with the promise, “There is no me without you. One flesh, one end” (432). “One flesh, one end” is the Lyctoral vow that cavaliers and necromancers make to each other, but in this moment it is also an affirmation that Gideon will not let Harrow die, and as their end will be “one,” Gideon won’t truly die either, but will live on in her in some form, immortally joined. Like Basil and Dorian, this is a messy process, and Harrow’s initial response is one of stunned grief: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it” (437). But the Gideon who lingers with her afterwards in ghostly form guides Harrow to take up her sword in a “strange embrace” and drives Harrow to active resistance, retorting, “Yes you can, it’s just less great and less hot,” and promising, “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then” (437). Gideon tempers Harrow’s grief with her signature bad sense of humor, but she also offers a further suggestion of queer death not being an end to, but an extension of, queer relationality. Lyctors are immortal and powerful but not invulnerable, and by framing mutual death as an inevitable state where they will be fully together again, Gideon queers it.

Ghost Gideon continues this promise of death as just part of their journey together with a Bible verse: “The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee” (438). This verse is Ruth 1:17, when Ruth swears loyalty to Naomi. Her loyalty extends beyond death, as she swears they will find each other in Naomi’s familial burial place, where Ruth wants to be buried, and will live in the underworld together. The verse is a resolution to be together in death, but it is first and foremost an oath to be together in life, as Ruth promises she will remain by Naomi’s side. This verse, coupled with Gideon’s following final words, “See you on the flip side, sugarlips” (438), leaves the reader with the promise that Gideon isn’t gone, and death has done the opposite of parting them.

Gideon the Ninth is just one of many contemporary examples of queer storytelling that seeks a “strange embrace” with queer death and, just as importantly, what comes after. Stories of queer happiness and life are, of course, also important. But let us not forget our ghosts, new and old, for these phantom texts have much to say in their shared echoes and powerful rejection of a trope that, at its inception in Dorian Gray, was about a queer refusal to accept that being buried meant being silenced.

[i] The word “queer” as I use it has a variety of meanings. In part it refers to identities under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, in which the state of “being queer” can represent both an orientation and a community. But to be queer is also to be beyond binaries (i.e. alive/dead), to embrace intersections and fluidity, and to provoke a critique of hegemonic ways of being.

[ii] A cavalier is a necromancer’s knight or bodyguard, essentially serving as the muscle to their magic.

Works Cited

Deshler, Kira. “Not Another Dead Lesbian: The Bury Your Gays Trope, Queer Grief, and The 100.” Honors Theses, Whitman College: Accessible Research Materials in Digital Archives. (April 28, 2017). 1-89.

“Human Rights Campaign Working to Defeat 340 Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills at State Level Already, 150 of Which Target Transgender People – Highest Number on Record.” Human Rights Campaign, https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-working-to-defeat-340-anti-lgbtq-bills-at-state-level-already-150-of-which-target-transgender-people-highest-number-on-record.

Hulan, Haley. “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context.” McNair Scholars Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 2017, pp. 17-24. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1579&context=mcnair

Mays, Kelly. “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Victorians in the Rearview Mirror of Future History.” Victorian Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, Spring 2011, pp. 445-456.

Monteil, Abby. “4 In 10 Books Banned in 2022 Are LGBTQ+-Related.” Them, Condé Nast, 20 Sept. 2022, https://www.them.us/story/banned-books-lgbtq-2022.

Muir, Tamsyn. Gideon the Ninth. Tom Doherty Associates, 2019.

Palmer, Paulina. The Queer Uncanny : New Perspectives on the Gothic, University of Wales Press, 2012, pp. 1-22. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/seattleu/detail.action?docID=1889097.

“Ruth 1:17 Commentaries.” Bible Hub, Bible Hub, biblehub.com/commentaries/ruth/1-17.htm.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism. Edited by Michael Gillespie, W.W. Norton and Company, 2020.

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In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire,  which she  ultimately consummates . She does so via the aid of her nurse, a maternal caregiver who embodies the trope of the “bawd,” or one who prostitutes others. While Myrrha’s mother is away participating in a fertility festival (oh, irony of ironies), Myrrha’s nurse leads her to Cinryas’s bed, lying by omission by telling him that someone “about / The age of Myrrha” wishes to lie with him (10.504-5). There, under the obfuscating guise of night, taboo becomes actualized.

Ultimately, Cinyras discovers the truth, leading Myrrha – heavy with her father’s child – to flee. After wandering far from home, she is stricken with indecision, “Not knowing,” the poet tells us, “what she might desyre, distrest between the feare / Of death, and tediousnesse of lyfe” (10.552-3). In kind, I suggest, with her irreconcilable desire to be a daughter-lover, she prays that the gods place her in an equally liminal state of life-death:

O Goddes, […]
How bee it to th’ entent
That neyther with my lyfe the quick, nor with my death the dead
Anoyed bee, from both of them exempt mee this same sted,
And altring mee, deny to mee both lyfe and death.     

(10.552-9)

Just as her desire for Cinyras contains both eros and storge (i.e. familial love), Myrrha aims to atone for her transgressions by becoming something similarly in-between. Thus begins her “Ovidian petrification” into a Myrrh tree (Bate 187). I argue that, as an in-between subject/object, Myrrha is able, for the first time in her episode, to truly express herself. Paradoxically, she becomes freed from the constraint of either/or – of words or silence – gaining more expressive power than ever before.

To this point, in Arthur Golding’s (1567) and Frank Justus Miller’s (1916) translations of the Metamorphoses as well as in the original Latin (circa 8 AD), Myrrha’s metamorphosis is marked with two identical linguistic shifts. In the first case, despite the total restriction placed on Myrrha’s speech after becoming a tree, Golding’s translation concedes “[y]it weepeth she” (my emphasis 10.574). A few lines later, the poet begins,

But woordes wherwith to tell
And utter foorth her greef did want. She had no use of speech
With which Lucina in her throwes shee might of help beseech.

But then, he concludes,

Yit like a woman labring was the tree, and bowwing downe
Gave often sighes, and shed foorth teares as though shee there should drowne.

(my emphasis 10.580-4)

In both instances, the poet explicates Myrrha’s inability to express herself as she used to due to a loss of “senses” (10.573). What the poet means by this word, however, is appropriately unclear, as Myrrha is still in possession of her mind and sensory apparatuses – she feels “greef,” gives “sighes,” and sheds no end of “teares.” However, through such pained bows and grievous sighs – actions that are at once gendered (“like a woman labring”) and vegetal-kinesthetic – Myrrha successfully beckons Lucina, who then supplies “woordes of ease” and facilitates her labor (10.586). In this moment, the ineffable finds its venting place not through language but through a “repertoire of embodied practice,” including bodily gesture and fluids (i.e. myrrh-tears) (Taylor 18). I argue that Ovid’s Myrrha episode makes a case not for the power of speech or silence but of a third, liminal mode of communication: non-verbal, bodily self-expression. This is but one of several ways that the episode gestures toward ways of living and being otherwise when we attend to liminality.

In nearly all of the metamorphoses illustrated throughout Ovid’s poem, as Heather James summarizes, the “absolute powers” that instigate them “repeatedly visit one special punishment and torture on their victims: that of silence” (7-8). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, silence is frequently defined in relation to human speech – silence strips one’s ability to vocalize and, specifically, voice the ways in which they have been wronged. Given that Ovid was ultimately exiled from the Roman empire (ostensibly as a reaction to his publication of sexually explicit poems), his ruminations on speech and silence have immediate social and political significance. James argues that his major contribution to political thought during the English Renaissance was “his conception of poetry as a site in which parrhesia [i.e. bold, open, ‘free’ speech]could persist even within the limiting structures of empire and […] insist on the liberties of citizen-subjects” (7). However, I suggest that Ovid’s poetry, particularly his Myrrha episode, develops a rather more capacious sense of self-expression wherein speech and silence occupy either ends of a spectrum whose middle zone teems with potential.

Following Myrrha’s incestuous scelus nefas, or “crime of indescribable dimensions,” she is metamorphosed into a myrrh tree and thusly “silenced,” but she is not simply disempowered (Lehmann 104). Rather, her transformation makes it necessary for her to rely on different methods of self-expression – something in between the utterance of “woordes” and stark silence – akin to what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire.” Where the Metamorphoses most explicitly binarizes speech and silence, Taylor’s study charts Western hierarchizations of the archive (i.e. supposedly permanent materials, such as writing) over the repertoire (i.e. ephemeral forms of knowledge such as dance or ritual). Where her work overlaps with the present argument is in its assertion that the archive and repertoire, though often thought of as such, do not actually constitute a binary:

The relationship between archive and repertoire […] is certainly not sequential (the former ascending to prominence after the latter, […]. Nor is it true versus false, mediated versus unmediated, primordial versus modern. Nor is it a binary. […] We need not polarize the relationship between these different kinds of knowledges to acknowledge that they have often proved antagonistic in the struggle for cultural survival or supremacy. (22)

As is true of any dichotomy, uncritical endorsement of a speech/silence binary eclipses the force of tree-Myrrha’s repertoire, namely her vegetal-bodily movements and material secretions. Beyond simply calling Lucina’s attention, tree-Myrrha’s liminal expression even elicits the goddess’s pity, inspiring her to alleviate her pain. These expressive forces are not only powerful, proving just as efficacious for Myrrha as words (if not more), but they can be recuperated by sensitive reading practices which, in turn, can yield new insights about the world. To contend with these forces, the Metamorphoses asks us to linger with liminality – that which crops up in between the clearly defined zones of binaries – and attend to the ontological possibilities to which I believe it gestures.

 Ovid, Publius Naso. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567. Edited by John Frederick Nims, Translated by Arthur Golding, Paul Dry Books, 2000.
*All forthcoming references to the poem will be to this edition.

 Bate, Jonathon. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011, 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183242.001.0001.

Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 1–52, https://doi-org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/10.1215/9780822385318.

James, Heather. Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Tragedy and Dramatic Theater. Translated by Erik Butler, Routledge, 2016.

Image:

Marcantonio Franceschini – The Birth of Adonis, 1690 public domain image

MLA Citation (I think?): ‘Birth of Adonis’, oil on copper painting by Marcantonio Franceschini, c. 1685-90, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.jpg

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Act One of the play introduces audiences and readers to the Nurse, Juliet’s caregiver, confidant, and former wet-nurse. In the play’s third scene, the Nurse recalls a moment in time that is etched in her memory. She recalls when she weaned an infant Juliet from her breast:

“But, as I said,
On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen,
That shall she, marry, I remember it well.
‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,
And she was weaned – I never shall forget it –
Of all the days of the year, upon that day;
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.
My lord and you were then in Mantua –
Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see if techy and fall out with the dug! (1.3.21-34)[2]

In her own words, she retrieves this information from her “brain,” the Cartesian site of rationality. However, as her diction reveals, her body is doing just as much of this retrieval work. Here, Diana Taylor’s concept of the “repertoire” is useful, a term which refers to “embodied practice[s]/knowledge[s]” such as spoken communication, ritual ceremony, and choreographed movements. Unlike archival records, which Taylor describes as “supposedly enduring materials” like “texts, documents, buildings, [and] bones,” the Nurse engages her bodily senses – those fleeting, unprocessed impressions that Cartesian dualism diametrically opposes to impartial rationality – to recall Juliet’s age.[3] Without necessarily intending to do so, she catalogues the sensory inputs that permeate her body during this blip in time, inviting us to inhabit her flesh, if only for a moment. She conjures the warmth of the “sun,” the cooing of the “dovehouse[’s]” inhabitants, and the steady pressure induced by Juliet’s suckling – made discontinuous by the bitterness of wormwood – to access her memory of Juliet’s age.

In contrast to the Cartesian and, thus, heteropatriarchal claim that bodies are sites of illogical disorder, the Nurse’s body produces and stores knowledge in this passage, operating on the same level as comparatively privileged archival information, such as birth records and geological reports.[4] In this moment, both archive and repertoire corroborate one another. Not only does Juliet’s factual age align with the Nurse’s corporeal memory, but the “earthquake” also offers a material trace of that day, whose memorial marks otherwise reside on/in the flesh.

Beyond functioning as an archival counterpart to the Nurse’s repertoire, however, the earthquake also signals the cosmic import of this ephemeral moment. As a play centered on the operations of destiny, perhaps the earthquake presages the doom that will result the next time Juliet’s body unites another’s, namely her “star-crossed lover[’s]” (Prologue.6). In another sense, this pairing opposes the heteropatriarchal binaries that stem from Cartesian dualism – such as mind/body, man/woman, political/domestic, and cosmological/earthly – elevating a moment defined by the female body and domestic care to a level of cosmic significance.

Moreover, the destructive earthquake literalizes the turmoil that an infant Juliet likely feels as her wonted source of comfort transforms into a loathed object. Here, Juliet’s passions, conceived of by Cartesian dualism as unrefined and unproductive, are expressed, whether intentionally or not, in the natural world. They are expressed sans language, the dominant mode of Western knowledge production that Taylor claims “has come to stand for meaning itself” (25). Perhaps the earthquake tells us something more about the Nurse’s feelings, too, who otherwise expresses fondness over her “pretty fool’s” maturation.

The Nurse’s performance harbors all of this and more, if only one takes the time to sense it. However, at the end of her speech, Lady Capulet tiredly commands, “Enough of this. I pray thee, hold thy peace” (1.3.50). Lady Capulet, Juliet’s biological mother, does not perceive the sensuous knowledges contained in the Nurse’s speech, or if she does, she values it as much as heteropatriarchy, the play’s dominant power-knowledge system, does. Of course, the Nurse propagates heteropatriarchal values herself, engaged, as we all are, in the “oppressing resisting”[5] dialectic theorized by Latinx feminist philosopher María Lugones (7).[6] However, the passage quoted above contains multitudes that heteropatriarchal epistemes are blind to, compelling us to attend more sensitively to the Nurse and sensuous knowledges in the play.

Image citation: Romeo and Juliet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, performances by Pat Heywood and Olivia Hussey, Paramount Pictures, 1968.

[1] Lloyd, Genevieve. “The Man of Reason.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 1979, p. 23.

[2] Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Dympna Callaghan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

[3] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[4] Contemporaneous British writers such as Gabriel Harvey wrote about an earthquake around the same time that the Nurse would have weaned Juliet, meaning that historical British documentation also supports the Nurse’s sensuous, fictional knowledge.

[5] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[6] In other words, we are always engaged in a tense relationship between resisting oppressions and propagating them.

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