| The Winter's Tale dramatizes a crisis in marriage on two levels. At the level of the plot, we see the story of the failure and the restoration of Leontes' marriage with Hermione. At the level of the play's structure, we see the recurring motif of a crisis in female marital roles. Leontes' specific distrust of Hermione and his general mistrust of marriage provoke questions about the woman's role in marriage in every marital relationship represented in the text. Leontes questions whether a man can trust his bride or wife, or whether women can even be understood according to the categories of "maid," "bride," or "wife." Shakespeare specifically connects this problem of classification in female marital categories to authorship by frequently connecting the wife's production of children to an author's production of issue, print, and copies. According to the logic that Leontes establishes, a true wife will produce fair issue, and an adulteress will produce foul issue. Leontes tries to read the text of Perdita (whom we assume is actually his daughter) according to the category into which he's placed her mother (adulteress), which causes him to misread Perdita as a bastard, or foul issue.;Paulina teaches Leontes to abandon this reading practice over the course of the play, which echoes Shakespeare's relationship to his audience. Whereas Leontes' reading of his child is shaped through the way his wife's gender is conditioned by marriage, the audience's expectation of the play's outcome is shaped through genre, especially tragedy and comedy. This essay argues that Shakespeare uses the character of Paulina, a woman who resists being understood according to her status as wife or widow, as a stand-in for the author who resists fashioning a play that can be understood according to facile generic categories like comedy or tragedy. Within the text, Leontes tries to fashion his own tragic narrative, but Paulina subverts his tragedy and demonstrates to Leontes and the audience that we must awaken our faith in an alternate kind of story telling in order to appreciate the miracle of Act 5. |
