Killing the Idealistic Dreams of Young Activists

One of the common contemporary methods of interpreting Gallathea is as a forerunner of the modern gay rights movement, or even more boldly, as proof that some of our modern concerns about gender, sexuality, and trans* bodies have always already been present in literature. While I believe that there is enough evidence in Gallathea to support an argument along these lines, I am wary of this kind of heady interpretation because it can lead to undergraduate students thinking that it is okay to dismiss cultural and historical influences before they have mastered them. I do not believe that new historicism is the answer to all early modern literary criticism, but in my experience, undergraduates who fail to learn the value of cultural and historical influence on early modern texts cannot develop the skills to eventually move on from new historicist readings to other schools of criticisms.

The teaching idea that I am sharing would hypothetically be taught to an undergraduate English literature course. I find Armstrong's Foucaldian analysis in "Gender Must Be Defended" to be the best argument by which to teach undergraduates about the problems of reading modern culture onto early modern texts (even though Armstrong focuses entirely on 19th-century works, which disproves my concern for historical accuracy, but let's pretend that didn't happen.... and in fact, it might be helpful to look at these Victorian novels because odds are more undergraduates have read them than have read Gallathea). After a lengthy analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Armstrong says that "being an individual and having a gender amount to pretty much the same thing. As the heroines of sensation fiction demonstrate, the minute one leaves the protection of the household, she ceases to be a 'woman' and loses the protection and support owed a gendered body" (544). While Gallathea and Phillida's escape to the forest and donning of masculine attire may seem thrilling and powerful to modern students who enjoy breaking down gender barriers and binaries, Armstrong's article would interpret their forest adventures differently. Gallathea and Phillida are not self-empowered by their ambiguously-gendered bodies, instead, they lead to both girls' anxieties about their relationship to the "youth" they see before them, and fear that they will eventually be discovered and sacrificed or murdered anyway. The forest is not a green world in which they can escape from society and live outside gendered constraints, rather gender becomes even more important while in the forest because it is so maddeningly ambiguous, and the girls begin to obsess over it.

Armstrong again analyzes Jane Eyre to prove an important point about gender and society:

Readers are fond of noting that Brontë cuts Rochester down to size and feminizes him before she can imaginatively incorporate him into a traditional household. Readers do not tend to notice, however, that this move virtually condemns to death anyone who cannot enter their charmed circle. If, as Foucault suggests, the biopolitical turn translates class warfare into a matter of biological difference, then it follows that the masculine protection of traditional femininity produces the negative femininity that identifies certain people as those who can be allowed to die. (545-46)

From this perspective, the gods' promise to change one of the girls into a man at the end of the play is not an early modern imagining of the transgender body as much as it is a way of imaginatively reinforcing society's values and maintaining the status quo of class warfare. The main plot of Gallathea does not feature your typical upper/middle/lower class warfare, but the relationship between humans and the gods may suffice as a form of class warfare. The conflict between humans and gods led to the demand of a sacrifice, which, like Jane Eyre, is based on a gendered, biological difference: only beautiful, virginal young women can be sacrificed to Neptune. The language of the play sexualizes these virgins in such a way that it is difficult to call them children, and yet their virgin status makes it impossible to call them wives. Because of their liminal existence outside of these two traditional roles of femininity, they are categorized as "those who can be allowed to die."

The marriage between Gallathea and Phillida, then, is the logical conclusion of such biopolitical powers at play. Because the plot cannot allow for their deaths, they must be assimilated into what Armstrong calls the "charmed circle" of the traditional household. Like Jane Eyre's assimilation of Rochester, the assimilation of Gallathea and Phillida requires imagination and creativity. But as radical as Neptune's promise of a change in sex may appear to modern audiences, it is actually the most conservative option available. By incorporating Gallathea and Phillida into a heteronormative union, Lyly reinforces social constructs of marriage, gender, and class.

The moral of the story? If you want to start a cultural revolution and bust up the status quo, don't look to early modern comedies for inspiration, kids. They almost always disappoint.