The Taming Of The Shrew - The Sexual Epiphany Of A Bitch And The Key To A Happy Marriage

In Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Kate thanks Petruchio for having found her, opened her heart, and given her the happiness in love she always desired, and in return gives him honor, respect, and the promise of fidelity 

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience

Too little payment for so great a debt. 

Such duty as the subject owes the prince
Even such a woman oweth to her husband...

Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,

My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

  

Marfa Potter read these lines at Brown and was disgusted, tossed her annotated volume of Shakespeare's Collected Works in the trash, and withdrew from Professor Harold Simmons' class with this note:

Shakespeare and you are disgruntled, unhappy misogynists without any sense or sensibility about women.  You, Professor Simmons, continue to propagate the distortions and sexual myopia of men under cover of Shakespearean 'greatness'.  He, for all his poetic wizardry and historical flair, was nothing but a raging bigot...

And here she went on to cite the many references of vile hatred of women in the plays - Posthumous, Othello, Cymbeline, Leontes, and Richard III - dismissed Romeo and Juliet as an adolescent wet dream, and consigned the Bard to the dustbin of some academic's hapless and hopeless ambition. 

Without realizing it, she had become as vixenish, shrewish and impossibly man-hating as any woman since the Gorgons, Greek sisters who could petrify any man who looked upon them; and in this punishing, vitriolic letter to Prof. Simmons, finally came out of the feminine closet.  No more complaisance and obeisance to male patriarchy.  No more bowing and scraping to immature, puerile male sexuality.  No more saccharine smiles, no more demure, virginal deference. 

Epiphanies come in all sizes and colors, and the outing of this nasty, ill-considered, bitch was one of the most exhilarating and transforming.  From that moment on Marfa went on a tear.  No male dominion was safe from her hurtling viciousness, no man innocent of censure.  In a short time even the radical feminist campus organization, Cunts!, kept her at arms length. 

Marfa had become a whirling dervish of rancor, hate, and resolute misandry; and while she was at it took on every seemingly benign expression of male subjugation.  The happy family, that faux ideal of a bad Norman Rockwell painting, that throwback to frilly aprons and turkey dinners, that procreative gulag was but one of her targets, and everything followed - the church, that universal male autocracy, capitalism the redoubt of greedy, sexually impotent men...Her targets were endless, her scorn and retributive anger unhinged and frightening. 

 

No one wanted to go near her, not even the bull dyke transfers from Bernal Heights, the truck-driving, jackbooted tough girls whose scorched earth policy of extermination frightened the most resolute of campus gender activists.  She was the Genghis Khan of the university, and the spiked heads of her victims were arrayed from pillar to post. 

After graduation from Brown, her life was a peripatetic journey of radical feminism, with stops in all the underground, armed-and-dangerous cells of bad, angry women, far right cabals of razor-wielding anarchists from coast to coast. Here she felt at least comfortable, if that bourgeois, accommodating term could ever be used in a hostile, male-hating environment.  The women in these clusters were truly nasty, bitter, and ugly.  Nothing that came out of their mouths was anything but spewing rants of viciousness. 

Now Marfa, despite her bad bitch, bull dagger persona was actually as straight as an arrow, and although she would never admit it to herself let alone her sisters in arms, she wanted a man.  No dildo, fingering, cunt-licking hijinks would do; and this caused her to up the ante, howl and scream invectives even louder in hopes of quieting the voices in her head. 

Yet she knew that the louder she cursed and yelled, the slimmer the chances of meeting Mister Right, and the greater became her confusion.  What kind of a feminist was she to even entertain such patently bourgeois, ignorant thoughts?  The very idea of a cock deep into her, sending her into paroxysms of delight, rocking her into oblivious ecstasy, was anathema, unthinkable, and disgusting. 

But there it was, indelibly and ironically placed somewhere in her psyche, and as hard as she tried, the thought kept occurring.  To counter it she slept with one woman after another, but each and every time  she extricated herself from her partner's cunt by cunt scissor grip, she found herself wondering, 'What on earth am I doing here?'. 

And so it was that she met her Petruchio, a man out of the blue who found this untamed wild woman attractive - or rather a challenge.  He like his Venetian counterpart had bedded untold women but had found their complaisance insipid, their affection girlish and unwanted, and their feigned love and affection transparent.  One after another, one by one, he left them on the curb, sobbing emotional  wrecks. 

There was Marfa, defiant and impatient, arm in arm with some butch, striding down Broadway, the two of them in work boots and overalls like hod carriers or steel workers, but who turned away and gave him a look that betrayed her interest, a look like all women gave him, or at least those who were sexually attuned to unrepentant and unapologetic men like him. 

If one was a true Bardolater, loving Kate's taming by Petruchio or simply a savvy male who understood women's need for strength, direction, and conclusive sexual interest and took well advantage of it, there would be no surprise in Marfa's quick turnaround. 

At first she couldn't believe the young man's insolence and indifference, his dismissiveness and inattention.  Interests and ideas clashed - she hated him for his male superiority and assumption of misogynistic potency but was attracted to him because of it.  What did he want? and why did he want it? She was the example of lesbo defiance, couldn't he see that? She belonged in Bernal Heights not in the bed with this sexual troglodyte. 

But there it was, and a seeming flash, she had jettisoned every last one of her female associates and became his lover, his servant, his dutiful, adoring partner.  

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?

They became an item, a princely couple. D.H. Lawrence would not have been surprised at the affair. He understood sexual equilibrium and channeled Shakespeare when he wrote of sexual epiphany, a perfectly balanced sexual encounter.  To the phooey of his critics who branded him a sexual illusionist and romantic dreamer, he asked that they simply look around them; and indeed what they, or any generation of men had seen, was a measure of complicity in women, that sexual, self-interested, shared centrism that he talked about.

 

Those women who had known her were sure that she would quickly tire of this dalliance, this out of character temporary fugue, this adventure; but she did not.  She was last seen in Chillicothe, Ohio, the young man's hometown, working a farm with him and their four children. 

Go figure, said those who thought they knew her but had been so caught up in gender identity cant that they overlooked human sexual nature, let alone Lawrence and Shakespeare. Too bad, Marfa thought, reflecting on the happy circumstances of her life.