For this week’s blog post, I decided to talk about the readings for As You Like It and Twelfth Night. One of the things I find so interesting between these two plays is the way that the main characters utilize gender in different manners. Both Viola and Rosalind are placed in a situation where they need to disguise themselves as men. Rosalind dresses up as a man to provide protection for her cousin as they flee to Arden while Viola has washed ashore on an island and cannot find her family so she dresses up as a man–Cesario–in order to live on the island without her family.
What’s so interesting with Rosalind, in particular, based off of both these excerpts and my prior knowledge of As You Like It, is that after she reaches Arden, she could take off her disguise, yet she doesn’t. There is an argument to be made that she remains a man so that she can gain back the agency that was taken away from her by the duke after her father was banished to Arden. She may also choose to stay dressed as a man so that she hold some gendered control over others, such as Orlando who is desperately in love with Rosalind. Rosalind dressed as a man gives her agency and control over another man that she would not have had if she were outwardly seen as a woman. Viola, on the other hand, dresses and acts as a man for survival. This is evident throughout the play because the audience never knows what Cesario’s real name is until the end.
It is worth noting the way that both of these characters play around with gender in terms of survival, agency, and in general, identity. By the end of both plays, it is unclear whether or not the two characters still see themselves as women or if they feel more like men, or possibly both. Viola, in particular, never changes out of her disguise when the play ends, meaning though the characters and audience know she is Viola, she still looks like Cesario. And while Rosalind does change out of her disguise by the end of the play, her epilogue contains the phrase “if I were a woman”, suggesting that Rosalind may no longer she herself as a woman, but rather as a man.
There are interesting similarities and differences between both of these characters in terms of the way they use their disguise as a man to their aid and how they feel about their gender identity by the end of the play. This shows how the outward body is very connected to inward identity.
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