Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (7 page)

Friedländer, wrote
against
Jews in
defense of
homosexuals, claiming that it was Jews who falsely impugned the manliness of homosexuals as a way of defam- ing Aryan virility.
24

Friedländer’s animus was at least in part a reaction against the followers of Magnus Hirschfeld, the homosexual rights reformer who was also a Jew. Yet the strategy of pitting one minority against another, even (or especially) when one might be thought of as a member of
both
groups, is a familiar device for self-exoneration. “Self-hatred,” an attitude all too easily ascribed to both ho- mosexuals and Jews, is often claimed as the underlying rationale for figures like Friedländer, Rathenau, and especially Weininger, whose suicide is read as proof of his internal struggle. Whatever the psychological truth of this claim, the de- sire to move from outsider to insider status, to resolve category crises by dis- placing blame onto a minority group from which one can distance oneself, seems to have operated with uncanny effectiveness in the recoding of the Jew as a “woman,” the ostensible opposite of the “manly” Aryan—and the “manly” homosexual.

That Jews were “fantastic,” “Oriental,” and “especially female”
25
—that they were, in fact, whether by social oppression or biological inheritance, “no more than degenerate, masturbating women” (Gilman,
Sexuality
, 267)—was a common charge in the early years of the twentieth century, against which Freud and others struggled by attempting to articulate universal, as opposed to racially separate, human characteristics. As I have pointed out elsewhere, “Jew” and “woman” are both entities of difference for Freud, against which he defines himself.
26
This desire, not to be categorized and stigmatized as a fem- inized Jew, is one factor that motivates Freud’s typologies of sexuality and his desire
for
the universal.

For example, as Sander Gilman notes, it was alleged by some in the early Church that Jewish men menstruated; Freud and his friend Wilhelm Fliess theorized a male as well as a female periodicity that was universal, and not specific to Jews. Fliess became—briefly—celebrated as the theorist of the nose as a site of primary sexual neurosis; a “suspicious shape to the nose” was thought (by Fliess, at least) to be the result of masturbation, and he frequent- ly performed operations on the noses of patients to relieve neurotic symp- toms.
27
It is almost surely no accident that the nose was a legible marker of Jewishness—especially for Jewish
men
. Moreover, the most obvious “sign” of Jewish “feminization” was the practice of circumcision, the ritual practice that most directly and visibly offered a threat to “manhood.” As Gilman points out, “the late nineteenth-century view associated the act of religious circum- cision with the act of castration, the feminizing of the Jew in the act of mak- ing him a Jew” (Gilman,
Sexuality
, 265). Fliess’s obsession with nasal sur-

gery—and Freud’s enthusiastic endorsement of it—might be regarded as a displacement upward, as well as a displacement away from the Jewish-specific and toward the medical-universal. That some of Fliess’s most troubled cases were the cases of
women
whose noses were said to evince neurotic signs sug- gests the lengths to which this mechanism of displacement could go, to dis- tance the male Jewish physician from the specter of Jewish effeminacy, and from the haunting fear of the Jew-as-woman.

Stanley Cavell locates the shadow of this fear in
The Merchant of Venice
, in the possibility that Shylock, bargaining for the pound of flesh to be “cut off and taken, in which part of your body pleaseth me” (
MV
1.3.146–147), might be intending “to do to him what circumcision, in certain frames of mind, is imagined to do, i.e., to castrate,”
28
and thus to perpetrate on the body of his double the marking of his own difference. We might, indeed, sus- pect that representations of Shylock over the years would have touched on this slippage between “Jew” and “woman,” from the “Jewish gaberdine” to the constant taunt of questionable manhood (Shylock “gelded” of his daughter and his ducats, his “two stones, two rich and precious stones” taken by Jessi- ca so that she becomes, in his unwary phrase, and at his cost, the phallic woman: “She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats” [
MV
2.8.22]). (Here it is not without interest that it is the
Jewish woman
who gelds or castrates her own father; as with James Joyce’s Bella Cohen—or indeed with the stereotyp- ical “Jewish American Princesses” of macho-Jewish writers like Roth and Mailer—the fantasized Jewish woman crosses over into the space of “mas- culinity” which is put in question by the ambivalent cultural status of the Jew- ish man.)

The stage Jew’s false nose and wig as well as his skirtlike “gaberdine” (a garment, incidentally, worn elsewhere in Shakespeare only by Caliban) offer a panoply of “detachable parts,” of which the circumcised penis is the invisi- ble but nonetheless dominant sign, the index of anxiety—and consequently of a certain recurrent risibility. The
nose
fixation is much more overtly played out in Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta
than in Shakespeare’s
Merchant
, for Barabas, the Maltese Jew, keeps a Turkish servant who revels in the length of his own nose, and declares that it is sure to please his master.

The
wig
question, however, has preoccupied some chroniclers of
Mer- chant
onstage to what seems a surprising degree: did Burbage wear a red wig—and a long nose—when the play was first performed by Shakespeare’s company? Why was Edmund Kean the first to wear a black wig after so many others had—perhaps in imitation of the traditional iconography of Judas Is- cariot—worn red ones? (Because he was poor, and probably had only a black and a gray wig in his collection of stage props, runs the accepted answer.)
29

The wig, in other contexts a shorthand sign of male-to-female gender imper- sonation, here attaches itself to the question of signatory Jewishness. Attach- es, and detaches, for the wig is a quintessentially detachable part, yet another index of the displacement upward of anxieties of loss. In a way the Shylock wig might be compared to the beards of the female transvestite saints: as si- multaneously superfluous and necessary, defining and putting in question identities of gender, religion, and belief.

Moreover, we might note that in the Orthodox Jewish tradition it is
women
, and not men, who wear wigs after marriage, as a way of concealing their looks, a sign of modesty and domesticity like the veil. The Orthodox Jewish woman of Eastern Europe cut her hair off after marriage so that she would no longer be attractive to men (other than her husband). Over her shorn hair she wore a wig, called a
sheitl
—a device that could still be seen on immigrant women in New York’s Lower East Side in the early part of this cen- tury. The
sheitl
looked like a wig; that was part of its function, since an at- tractive and deceptively “natural” hairdo would defeat the purpose.

This emphasis placed upon Shylock’s wig by nineteenth-century theater historians—and by the actors themselves—may thus reflect a displacement from a stereotype of the Jewish woman—at least the “Oriental” or Eastern European variety, very “foreign” in appearance to Western European eyes— onto the stigmatized Jewish man, who is once again coded “as” a woman by this preoccupation with the style and type of his wig.

In terms of stage history, although representations of Shylock have ranged from comic to tragic, from racist to sympathetic, from red-wigged to black- and gray-bearded, Shakespeare’s Jew has not been overtly “feminized,” despite the standard shrugs and the occasional lisp affected by actors in search of “au- thenticity.” Twentieth-century productions have tended to be wary of Shy- lock’s dignity; Olivier played the part as if he were Disraeli, in frock coat and top hat. In light of the connection between the cross-dressed woman and the Jew, it seems to me significant that the two most notable stage Shylocks in re- cent years, Antony Sher and Dustin Hoffman, have both achieved success in cross-dressed roles: Hoffman as “Dorothy Michaels” in
Tootsie
, Sher as the transsexual hero of the 1987 film
Shadey
.

There was also quite a vogue for
female
Shylocks, that is to say, actresses playing the part of Shylock, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1820s Clara Fisher was praised in both England and America for her interpretation of the role. The celebrated American Charlotte Cushman, who had played Portia to the Shylocks of William Macready and Edwin Booth, achieved considerable success in the part of the Jew in the 1860s. As with Cushman’s other male Shakespearean roles—as Romeo, Hamlet, and Iago—

her performance was assessed on its own terms, not as a curiosity, and this seems also to have been the case with the Shylock of Mrs. Catherine Macready, the eminent Shakespearean’s wife.

A few years later, however, the oddness of a woman playing Shylock dom- inated at least some of the reviews; when Lucille La Verne played the role in London in 1929 the
London Times
critic commented that “this Shylock occa- sionally left the Rialto; never the Contralto.”
30
Appearing as it did on the eve of the U.S. stock market crash, this glib dismissal of the female Shylock among the money-changers has its own ironic and defensive tone.

Female
children
also played Shylock in the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury: Jean M. Davenport, Lora Gordon Boon (with her sister Anna Isabella playing Portia), and the infant prodigies Kate and Ellen Bateman; at four years of age, Ellen’s Shylock and her six-year-old sister’s Portia played to first- run theaters as well as to lecture halls. The nineteenth century’s penchant for both child actors and male impersonators makes these Shylocks less anom- alous than they might seem at first (Ellen Bateman, for example, also played Richard III and Lady Macbeth), but the phenomenon is nonetheless worthy of mention.

The theme of castration that could be readily discerned beneath the sur- face of the play also led to at least one pertinent drag production of
Merchant
by Harvard’s all-male Hasty Pudding Theatricals, a 1915 show entitled
The Fattest Calf
, in which the intactness of Antonio’s padded, outsize, elaborately measured lower leg is preserved against Shylock’s designs by a double-cross- dressed Portia, a male student playing a woman playing a boy.

It is, in fact, this particular mechanism of displacement which gives such force to the transvestite transformation of Leopold Bloom in the Nighttown section of Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Gilbert and Gubar, in discussing Bloom in Night- town, never mention his Jewishness; for them the fantasy of Bloom in corsets, petticoats, and fringes suggests that “to become a female or to be like a female is not only figuratively but literally to be de-graded, to lose one’s place in the preordained hierarchy that patriarchal culture associates with gender.”
31

Yet the key passages in this phantasmagoric section of
Ulysses
point to a relationship between Bloom’s Jewish identity and his role as “the new wom- anly man.”
32
Diagnosed by “Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist,” as “bisexu- ally abnormal,” with “hereditary epilepsy . . . the result of unbridled lust,” showing “marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism” and “prematurely bald from selfabuse” (
Ulysses
, 493), he is endowed with many of the “symptoms” of supposed Jewish degeneration. In the next sequence he becomes not only a woman but a mother, giving birth to “eight male yellow and white children”

who “are immediately appointed to positions of high public trust” and high finance (
Ulysses
, 494), as Bloom is asked whether he is “the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David.”

The domination sequence with Bella/Bello Cohen in which Bloom turns into a “soubrette” who will be dressed in lace, frills, and corsets is likewise cross-cut with anti-Semitic stereotypes; Bella herself, “a massive whoremistress,” has “a sprouting moustache” and an “olive face, heavy, slightly sweated, and fullnosed, with orange-tainted nostrils” (
Ulysses
, 527)—all parodic traits of the “Jewess.” Her transformation into Bello, “with bobbed hair, purple gills, fat moustache rings round his shaven mouth, in mountaineer’s puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport skirt and alpine hat with moorcock’s feather” (
Ulysses
, 531), is not so much the por- trait of a man, despite the male pronouns that now describe “him,” as it is the caricature of a mannish lesbian.

As for Bloom, now “a charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, leering mouth” (
Ulysses
, 536), the nose is, once again, the giveaway—the nose and the gesticulating hands. It is “with hands and features working” that he offers his exculpatory “confession”: “It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female imper- sonator in the High School play
Vice Versa
. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister’s stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids” (
Ulysses
, 536).

Bello, poking under Bloom’s skirts, compares his “limp” penis to Boylan’s “fullgrown . . . weapon,” and suggests that he take up the style of the effemi- nate cross-dresser: “the scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a potent weapon. . . . Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis XV heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing . . . Pander to their Go- morrahan vices . . . What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you?” (
Ulysses
, 540). And Bloom, as he “simpers with forefinger in mouth,” per- forms the specific act of sensual finger sucking that Freud, citing the Hun- garian pediatrician Lindner, read as the pathological, masturbatory, and auto- erotic “image of the female as child.”
33