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| Okay, so this really doesn't have to do with my paper but this is a picture of the Bell X-1, which was the first manned plane to break the sound barrier! Pretty cool! Creative Commons: dctim1 |
Thesis:
When asked what genre is most true to life, most people would answer tragedies. We have a tendency as a society to believe that the worst is going to happen, and hoping anything positive will is wishful thinking. Romances, however, are a mix of tragedy and comedy, and while Shakespeare's romance The Winter's Tale has been criticized since its beginning as being unrealistic, Leontes' experience with the oracle within the play becomes a metaphor for the audience's rejection of The Winter's Tale, seemingly based on a desire to be realistic, but in reality predicated on an inability to see recognize the romantic elements of life.
Body of the Paper:
Leontes
wants to hear from the oracle not because he believes the oracle will acquit
his wife of the charges against her, but because he believes the oracle will
validate his jealousy. He claims that
his excitement to hear the words of the oracle is that he wants the truth: “The
great Apollo suddenly will have / The truth of this appear. Prepare you, lords,
/ Summon a session . . . [Our lady shall] have / A just an open trial” (Act 2,
scene 3, l. 198-203). But his choice of
words to describe Hermione in this same speech, before he has heard from the
oracle, reveals that Leontes is not as impartial as he would like to appear,
and that his trial for Hermione will not be either. Leontes calls Hermione “disloyal” (Act 2,
scene 3, l. 201). He has already passed
judgment on her actions, negated any thought that she is true to him. Bruce Young, a professor of English at Brigham
Young University, explains that Leontes’ jealousy is a sort of fear
fulfillment: “At root, Leontes’s jealousy is an expression of insecurity. This insecurity manifests itself in his
difficulty believing that Hermione actually loves him . . . [and] in his not
believing her to be as good and gracious as she seems. [He is] blinded by these
failures of belief.” Instead of being
motivated by a search for justice, Leontes is blinded into thinking he will be
happiest when Hermione is proven guilty.
When the oracle does come, Leontes cannot
believe that he is telling the truth because the answer Leontes has been given
is not the answer he expected. The
officer reads the oracle’s words: “Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless,
Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly
begotten, and the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not
found” (Act 3, scene 2, l. 130-33). In this moment, Hermione is expunged from all
blame and Leontes’ friend Polixenes has been proven his true friend once again.
But Leontes does not join in with the actors
who play the spectators here, who cheer for the oracle multiple times (Tatspaugh).
His reaction to Hermione’s supposed innocence is incredulity, not relief. “Hast thou read the truth?,” he asks of the
officer who speaks the oracle’s words (Act 3, scene 2, l. 134). His emphatic repetition of his distrust of
the oracle reinforces Leontes’s loss of judgment: “There is no truth at all i’
th’ oracle. / The sessions shall proceed; this is mere falsehood” (Act 3, scene
2, l. 137-8). Because the source he
looked to and trusted in has not validated his jealousy, he regards that source
as duplicitous. It is his own distrust
of the oracle that proves he himself cannot be trusted.
This is a good start Rachel! I'll admit I read the opening line of your paper and I thought "dang that's a broad statement, have fun defending it..." but you did, and you did so well. I'm interested to see where this is going, when I read your thesis in the other paper I was a little nervous about it. Clearly you can defend yourself on your argument about Leontes not accepting the oracle. It's going to be more difficult to defend yourself about people not accepting the play in a similar parallelism without merely speculating.
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