| This dissertation begins with the notion that identity is a discursive formation, that we are produced by and limited to the kinds of things that are said or can be said about ourselves at any historical moment. Stories about cross-dressed women in early modern literature seem to represent an awareness of the constructed nature of gender and identity, and even some anxiety about the ability of social forces to define a person in any stable or natural way. In plays that represent the cross-dressed woman working in some way (the familiar "girl-page," for instance), we can better understand the drama's contributions to society if we consider work or "service" as one of the major social forces that creates subjectivity, gives a sense of identity, and helps to define gender. Although cross-dressing is often looked at as a recurring phenomenon in a survey of the Renaissance literary scene, this is a more narrowly focused reading of three English plays with transvestite hero/ines representing a range of class status and dramatic technique.;By placing the issue of cross-dressing within the historical context of women's work in the Renaissance, we can see it as more than a psycho-sexual phenomenon, but as a way of affecting a woman's value in society. Social historians suggest that the growing separation of private households and public workspaces contributed to the oppression of early modern women. The cross-dressed hero/ines in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, and Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl challenge public/private and masculine/feminine dichotomies, and perhaps even binary thinking itself, as they take active serving roles and make themselves necessary to their communities. If work is a social force that helps to shape us as subjects, it is important to consider cross-dressing as, at least in part, a strategy by which women avoided passivity and commodification, whether as ornamental wives or as overworked, underpaid drudges. These plays suggest that cross-dressing can be read as an implicating gesture that "subjects" a woman to service while allowing her to assert a kind of subjectivity usually reserved for men who serve their society. |
