Tragedy and Gender
Angelica Lockerbie
Class of 2014

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a very controversial play about the betrayal of love and the betrayal of war.  The play very much puts out the idea that love is all about sex, war is all about betrayal, women are allowed to speak, but that doesn’t mean they will be heard, and men are not as honorable as they seem.  Understanding such gender related differences is difficult, but it can be done.  Shakespeare proved that in clearly showing in the play how women and men have such different roles in life.  His retelling of the Trojan War seems to instill Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of "homosociality," in which social bonds between men are secured through the bodies of women.  The Greeks are fighting to restore the marriage bond that homosociality is guaranteed, such is the reason why Cressida was moved from the Trojan camp to the Greek camp suggesting that Cressida is in every way comparable to Helen.
                Hector had asked, “If we have lost so many tenths of ours, to guard a thing not ours, nor worth to us, (had it our name) the value of one ten, what merit's in that reason which denies the yielding of her up?”  They say that Helen is “not ours” both because she is a Greek and a woman.  During the prisoner exchange, in the love for his own men, Diomedes finds the only possible common ground with his enemy; he appeals to Paris on the grounds that the Trojans love Trojan men as much and in the same way as the Greeks love Greek men. It is a love that cannot easily be reduced to the geometries of homosociality. 
                Fatigue with homosocial ties represents a desire for an idea of sexuality that leaves the orbit of homosociability. According to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, sexuality as such does not arise until the nineteenth century and then it does so as a personal identity--sexual desire becomes an inner truth that defines one as heterosexual or homosexual or any of the nineteenth-century species of sexuality Foucault discusses. To scholars of the early modern period, a period when desire had not yet evolved into personal identity, the notion of homosociality has seemed valuable precisely because it foregrounds the continuity between sexual relationships between men and social bonds between men screened by women. Sexual expression could then inhabit a whole range of social relationships not specifically designated as sexual. As Jonathan Goldberg puts it, in the early modern period "sexuality . . . does not stand apart as a separate domain." But by allowing warriors on both sides to openly express fatigue with homosocial ties, Shakespeare announces a desire to emphasize sexuality and produce knowledge about whatever distinguishes it from a whole range of social experiences.
                The ideas of sexuality that emerge in Troilus and Cressida occupy a tenuous space. On the one hand, it must distance itself from the homosocial ties on which Shakespeare's patriarchal society depends; but on the other hand, it does not attack homosociality in a way that would make sex seem aggressively antisocial or even revolutionary. Shakespeare goes to considerable lengths to distinguish sexual ties from sodomy--the feared category of relationships dangerous to the homosocial order. But whereas in the modern context nonpublic but non-dangerous sexual relationships might simply be located in a private sphere characterized by intimacy, Shakespeare presents sexuality as a category of unique public relationships that are neither social nor antisocial, but which proceed at a tangent to normal social conventions, including homosocial ties.
                The relationship between Troilus and Cressida refracts this basic outline, seeming sexual because it is caught in the contradiction between an aristocratic worldview and the emerging norms of a humane relationship. When long-desired consummation with Cressida is finally within sight, Troilus imagines not secured sociable intimacy but something dangerous, something as dangerous as a battle that he is losing.  Imagining sex with his beloved, Troilus fears "That I shall lose distinction in my joys, / as doth a battle, when they charge on heaps / the enemy flying". But what seems like a simple case of the bourgeois fear of sex, in which the brutishness of sexual pleasure threatens the dignity of the individual (what Troilus calls his "distinction"), is in fact the opposite, the fear that an exalted style of love will threaten Troilus's brutish self. Troilus repeatedly claims to be utterly simple and without sophistication and asserts that Cressida is unimaginably more sophisticated than he. Troilus claims that the moment when his "watery palates taste indeed / Love's thrice-reputed nectar" will spell death: “Death, I fear me, Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine, too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness, for the capacity of my ruder powers. I fear it much.”
                “Their loving well composed with gifts of nature, and flowing o'er with arts and exercise. How novelty may move and parts with person, alas, a kind of godly jealousy-- Which, I beseech you, call a virtuous sin-- Makes me afeard.”  In Troilus's eyes, Cressida belongs with the Greeks because she is as civilized as they are. René Girard glosses this passage as follows: "Everything Troilus says confirms the mimetic nature of his relationship to the Greeks. He certainly wants to acquire the talents and achievements that he admires in them. Which young man in love would not?"  The only way out of fear and jealousy for Troilus would be "a Greek education," an education that Girard thinks impossible only because it would take more time than Troilus has at this moment of crisis.
What I want to point out is that Troilus's fear of being cheated on is also a fear that the asocial, specifically sexual domain defined by the impossibility of entering into a humane relationship with Cressida, will be closed off as Cressida establishes functional ties with the Greeks (to whom she is "naturally" similar anyway). To try to preserve the sexual bond, Troilus actively refuses to imagine a program of reeducation that might gradually undo the differences that divides him both from his beloved and from his enemy. Troilus treats the civility of Cressida and the Greeks as permanently out of reach, as though they possessed it by birth. This fact allows Troilus to preserve a sexual relationship with Cressida even after she moves into the Greek camp by declining to compete with or emulate the Greeks who now possess her. In Girard's view, loving Cressida is merely a cover for the love and aggression that Troilus bears toward the Greeks; Girard indicts Troilus for not loving Cressida enough.  But in prescribing real heterosexuality as the antidote to a love that is directed toward one's enemies, Girard misses how the sexual relationship between Troilus and Cressida is essentially identical to the competition between men across the faultiness of civilized social life--but minus the social consequences.
                These experiences of sexuality help explain the speed and ease with which Cressida embraces the role of coquette once she has been removed to the Greek camp. When the Greek leaders paw at her minutes after she has left her lover, Cressida coolly plays with their desires. Her coquettishness does not get her far (it elicits an aggressively misogynist reply from Ulysses), but Cressida may be making the most of an extremely weak hand. This realistic resignation sets Cressida up for the charge of faithlessness, yet there is a sense in which it allows her own desire for Troilus to remain more or less intact, something dangerous that resides inside the self and threatens at every turn to undermine even Cressida's tenuously held position in the Greek camp. This may account for Cressida's profound struggle with herself when she accedes to Diomedes request for a favor. What is surprising here is not that Cressida finally gives in but that she comes close to holding out; this would surely be something of a suicidal gesture. When Cressida tells Diomedes that the pledge he has just taken from her belonged to one "that loved me better than you will”, it sounds as if she is resigning herself to the claims of reality. For if Troilus loved her better than Diomedes, Diomedes can certainly protect her better now that she is in the Greek camp. Cressida is essentially choosing a homosocial relationship over an erotic one. If she preserves an erotic connection to Troilus as an unrealized potential, she simultaneously condemns him to the homosocial exchanges from which he had felt pleasurably excluded under the pressure of his passion for Cressida. Witnessing Cressida's apparent betrayal while secretly spying on her and Diomedes, Troilus exits vowing revenge upon his rival.                 The problem of how one can enter into a relationship with pride defines one important component of the sexuality Shakespeare explores in this play. As is the case with Troilus and Cressida, social impossibility points to the specificity of the sexual. Ajax himself transfers the disgust Achilles makes him feel into the sexual register: "I do hate a proud man as I hate the engendering of toads”, an image also used by Othello to describe the disgust he feels at the thought of Desdemona's sexual infidelity. What makes pride and the encounter with pride look sexual is precisely that it makes society look impossible. To encounter pride is to feel useless, to feel more or less supplementary, and to feel like the subject of a sexual relationship as Shakespeare seems to understand it. If fear marks a state of social emergency, then pride threatens to institutionalize that state of emergency by providing an alternative matrix of male-male relationships. While Achilles’ expression of pride defines all relationships with him as sexual, that pride itself exhibits an alarming tendency to replicate itself in others.

Works Cited

Girard, René: "The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985)

Goldberg, Jonathan: ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1994).