In Bruce R. Smith’s chapter “As It Likes You” in his book Phenomenal Shakespeare, Lacan’s ideas about how identity is constructed through language are featured. He observes that the “gap between imago and language in Lacan’s scheme opens up… a space for phenomenology, for knowing-through-the-body that has a fraught, perhaps tragic relationship to knowing-through-language” (25). Yet how can we discuss this “knowing-through-the-body” without looking at how the body, particularly the gendered body, fits into the Lacanian scheme? Smith rightly identifies that there is a space for phenomenology along those shared borders, particularly within Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and its troubling (and yes, perhaps tragic) figure of Isabella.
Lacan once infamously claimed that “la femme n’existe pas” (“woman does not exist,” or perhaps more precisely, “the woman does not exist”) (Seminar XXI, March 1973). Lacan’s central idea on gender, then, is that “there is no signifier for, or essence of, Woman as such. Woman can thus only be written under erasure: Woman” (Fink 115). As there is no Lacanian signifier for Woman, it may also be useful to read Isabella in similar terms because she cannot precisely be said to exist unless she can be read through a referent: as Lacan postulates Woman, Shakespeare can perhaps be seen to postulate Isabella. Considering this component of Lacanian thought lends nuance to the subjective nature of “knowing-through-the-body” and can yield fruitful discourse about phenomenology. To push it to the extreme, it may even be possible to apply object-oriented ontology to the concept of Isabella; she is so powerfully yoked to patriarchal structures, she seems to exist in relation to the men around her almost exclusively. The same can be read into the other female characters in the play: (1) Mistress Overdone’s brothel; (2) Juliet’s pregnancy; and (3) Mariana’s sexual fungibility.
Smith observes that in “Lacan’s scheme of psychic development, perception through and of one’s own body comes before speech” (25), but an ambiguity lies therein. Perception through one’s own body is clear enough, but whose perception of that body really matters? It might be Isabella’s own, but it could just as easily be the Duke’s, or Angelo’s, or her brother’s, or even the nuns’. Furthermore, if this perception is meant to come before speech, Isabella’s silence in the closing scene takes on a new meaning.
If we are to adhere to the Lacanian framework and if we continue to consider that Isabella can be read as Isabella under erasure, then it stands to reason that her silence is the beginning of her identity’s partial dissolution. At the play’s beginning, she is loquacious and persuasive, sure that she can convince Angelo to free Claudio. As affairs progress, she gradually quietens and ceases to trust that she will be believed at all. As Smith points out, “Lacanian psychoanalytical theory maintains that there is nothing natural about personal identity, that it is scripted by language, and that language is in turn scripted by culture. We speak a different cultural language; therefore we know a different cultural reality” (23). Using Isabella’s experiences, it is possible to work backwards through Lacan’s theory. Her cultural reality is stripped from her through a series of shocking experiences that culminate in the revelation that the brother she thought dead is in fact alive. She also learns that the friar she believed to be an ally and trusted confidant is actually the Duke, a man who had the power to put a stop to her suffering at any time, yet wants to marry her now (and they lived uneasily ever after, like Walter and Griselda). After all of that, her silence is only natural. She does not have the language for the new cultural reality that has overtaken her old one, and if personal identity is scripted by language, then in a Lacanian sense, her identity as she knew it has effectively been erased.
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Print.
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