Where I Cringed a Bit. A Lot, Actually.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've been meaning to read this since about 1975. Somehow, the 6th grade teachers at my school got a copy of the 1967 Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie and a projector and brought our classes together to watch it. I remember a couple minutes of PG-13 type action verging on sexytime, but we didn't get far into the movie before they decided Shakespeare wasn't as edifying and elevating as they'd hoped. We went back to our own rooms and no one spoke of it again.

So, it's been awhile. I'd never seen the movie or read the play--until now. And....... it's okayish, as I'm pretty sure Alexander Pope said before me.

Sure, it's funny and all--but it really does promote toxic controlling behaviors (including a husband physically depriving his wife of sleep and food and socialization), emotional and mental abuse (including gaslighting), and general shittyness. I don't hold Shakespeare accountable for all of it. Obviously, English society at that time, and for a long time after, was unabashedly patriarchal, consciously and deliberately treating women as inferior and subservient in every setting, so they would have no problem with a husband using whatever strategies he felt like using to make a woman bend to his will. To a modern mind, though, or to mine at least and I hope many others, his coercion is horrifying, and Katharine's final long speech, where she maintains that women, "soft and weak" and "unapt to toil" should willingly be dominated, treating their husband like a lord and themselves like a servant, just creeps me out.

Blech I say.

Reading the play sure made me think about how long it's taken to dig our society out of this hole. When my grandparents were grown adults starting their families, women still couldn't vote, and that didn't change until about 3 years before my mom was born. Her first teaching contract in the 1940's stipulated that she would not date. (She broke that rule. Lucky for me and my brothers and sisters.) Much later, on that ~1975 day when we started and then aborted watching the movie in class, it was pretty normal for women like my mom to have a job, but we still didn't crack 50% of women entering the workforce until about 1980.

Long, slow slog.

I'm curious to see the movie version, still. Maybe it'll be funny. Or clever. I dunno. But patriarchy (a word I seldom use, btw) is always, in every way, a toxic and destructive institution, and I'll never understand how our culture could have such a fundamentally fucked up idea at the heart of it for so very very long.

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