A Cultural Materialist Reading Of Shylock In The Merchant Of Venice

Cultural materialism is an alternative critical method that deviates from the tradition of liberal humanism.It is initiated by Raymond Williams who,based on Althusser’s theory of hegemony,classifies culture into three aspects:the dominant,residual and emergent.To enhance its power,the dominant is involved in a continuous process of containing the subordinate elements.Paradoxically,however,this process produces the dissident elements which could manage to articulate themselves,challenge,and potentially subvert the order.A text is a contesting ground where representations of different cultural aspects converge.Cultural materialism is aimed to identify incoherence in a text and figure out how dissident elements articulate,challenge and possibly subvert the dominant.The Merchant of Venice is a controversial play whose variety of themes and ambiguous and conflicting attitudes towards religion,race,gender,sexuality,marriage and family,love and law,etc.,provide possibilities for cultural materialist readings.The play was written in the late-sixteenth century of England when Britain was undergoing economic,political and cultural transformation.At home,oppression of dissidents and heretics made the country more unified.And colonialist expansion of its power abroad was still underway.The Merchant of Venice was unavoidably involved in a discourse of colonialism that was supposed to legitimate authority and operation of colonialist power.But amid such discourse of harmonization,discord can still be found that may constitute potential subversion.After dealing with a series of conflicts,the play ends in harmony with conversion of the pagan and happy reunion of the Christians.However,under the comic appearance,tragic factors persist.In the Christian-dominated society,the Jew Shylock is the marginal other.Under the colonialist discourse,Shylock is produced by power of civility as the Other characterized by irreformability,savagism and barbarity.He fights a lost battle,but in this process he stimulates discord in the harmonious union of Bassanio and Portia and foregrounds Antonio to be the threatening other in their marriage,social institution that perpetrates the current order.Furthermore,through his articulation of dissidence in the trial,Shylock is able to demystify power clouded in the masque of romance,disturbing the final formal incorporation of the Other by Christian narrative power.