바이올라의 남장과 동성애적 욕망 :『십이야』

Viola's Crossdressing and Homoerotic Desire in Twelfth Night

In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Viola's Crossdressing in male attire is a means of refuge in order to escape the constraints and the vulnerability of the feminine. Nevertheless, her transgressing of sexual boundary can be regarded as threatening. Shakespeare lived in the Renaissance period when gender differences were a controversial issue, and Twelfth Night presented the collective fear or anxiety of blurred sexual boundaries. The anxieties in the Renaissance theater and psychological schizophrenia were inscribed in both the existences of boy actors in the Renaissance stage and the presentation of female Crossdressing in Twelfth Night. Theatrical conventions of crossdressing might have produced a homoerotic object of desire for the male spectator. However, the potential homosexual relationship of boy actors and male spectators was considered less threatening than the female sexuality represented by female characters. As a result, women were banned from the stage in the Renaissance period, and boys took women's roles in female apparel until the 1660s. The ending of the play, Twelfth Night, with the recovery of a transvestite heroine as a woman seems to be a reassertion of patriarchal order and sexual differences. Nevertheless, the blurring of sexual difference through the female crossdressing offered the possibility of subverting the patriarchal domination over women and interrogating the boundaries of gender. Therefore, Viola's crossdressing could be a mode of transgression. The convention of boy actors also illuminated the fictitious relationship between feminity and masculinity, making the audiences interrogate the nature of gender identity. As a result, the phenomenon of boy actors and transvestite female characters in the Renaissance theater can be read as an expression of a general fear and anxiety of blurred social and sexual boundaries.