Chaucer, Shakespeare, The Treachery of Women, And Modern Man – What If Anything Has Changed?

Chaucer may not have been the first to write about the duplicity and treachery of women, but he was the first to write about it so eloquently.  In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, he is quite explicit.

Lo, here plainly of woman may you find
That woman was the ruin of mankind.
Then read he out how Samson lost his hairs
When sleeping, his mistress cut them with her shears;
And through this treason lost he either eye.
And nothing escaped him of the pain and woe
That Socrates had with his spouses two;”
“Of Clytemnestra, for her lechery,
Who caused her husband’s death by treachery,
He read all thus with greatest zest, I vow.
“Of Livia and Lucia told he me,
For both of them their husbands killed, you see,
The one for love, the other killed for hate;
Then did he tell how one Latumius
Complained unto his comrade Arrius
That in his garden grew a baleful tree
Whereon, he said, his wives, and they were three,
Had hanged themselves for wretchedness and woe.
‘Dear brother,’ Arrius said, ‘and did they so?

Of course women acted like this.  In the face of patriarchy, male supremacy, chauvinism, and a social system designed to keep women in their place, what other recourse did they have?  The idea that there is something inherently treacherous in female nature is ridiculous; and only an expression of persistent, puerile male fantasies.

Shakespeare was eloquent when it came to strong women.  His Volumnia, Dionyza, Tamora, Lady Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan not only outdid men at every turn but neutered them.  These women were not content with acceding to the throne (e.g. the wives of Henry II, Richard II, and Henry VI, and Cleopatra) but unmanning them.  One can either read Shakespeare’s plays as hymns to strong women, or thinly-veiled expressions of male mistrust of them. 



Volumnia could have both promoted her son, Coriolanus, and achieved her ambitious ends without sending him to his death and claiming all credit and honor for herself.  Tamora, Queen of the Amazons, needed not to provoke her sons to the rape and dismemberment of Titus Andronicus’s daughter to regain his favor.  Dionyza need not have plotted to murder Marina, daughter of Pericles. 

Lady Macbeth was a succubus, intent on engineering the murder of the king, challenging her weak husband to show what little manhood he had. Goneril and Regan were ambitious harridans who would do anything for power, wealth, and empire.  Cleopatra toyed with Antony, had little respect for him, led him to humiliating defeat at the Battle of Actium, and never thought twice about him when pleading her case before Augustus.

The women of the Comedies are less brutal but no less dismissive of men.  Rosalind, Viola, Portia and others toy with their suitors, unhappy with all of them, consigned to live with the best of a bad lot.  The scenes in The Merchant of Venice where Portia discusses the ridiculousness of the men courting her with her servants is as catty and dismissive as Cleopatra with Mardin.



More than half of Shakespeare’s Sonnets are written to ‘the lady in black’, another devouring vixen who challenges the young man’s sexuality, manhood, and desire.

Ibsen and Strindberg created strong female characters – Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, Hilda Wangel, Laura, and Miss Julie – but their strength was at the expense of men.  Perhaps the best example of such misandry was that of Laura, wife of the Captain in Strindberg’s The Father.  To gain full control of her daughter in patriarchal Swedish Victorian society, she uses women’s most potent weapon – doubt of paternity.  The Captain, infected by her innuendoes and suggestions that their daughter is not his, goes mad and institutionalized, thus granting her full rights over their daughter.



Were these playwrights champions of women in a highly repressive Victorian age, acknowledging treachery as an armament of sexual war? Or were they convinced of women’s castrating nature?
Shakespeare seemed to leave no doubt when he created Othello who, at the end of the play, having been convicted of the murder of Desdemona, says that he did a service for his prosecutors and indeed for all men, ridding life of a lying, deceitful, treacherous woman.



Flaubert was equally eloquent about women’s treachery when he created Emma Bovary, a woman, like others of her age, bound by male patriarchy but who angrily and determinedly refused to subject herself to it.  Emma, however, despite her understandable frustration, is not an admirable woman.  She is just as treacherous, duplicitous, and destructive as the heroines of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg.

The unmanning, dominant, woman has been a staple of popular culture well into the 20th century.  Double Indemnity, Body Heat, and a hundred other noir films show women at their treacherous worst – using their sex, allure, charm, and intelligence to not only get what they want but to destroy men while getting it.  The Kathleen Turner character in Body Heat kills the one person who can expose her and sends the other to life imprisonment while she leaves the country with her murdered husband’s millions.

Men would probably have not kept women in such bondage if they did not fear their sexual power.  In the old days the concern was paternity – confirmed fatherhood was not only a matter of pride but economics. Why would a Medieval peasant or royal courtier agree to work and risk his life for a son which might not be his? So bondage, imprisonment, and enslavement of women were not surprising. 
The Saudis are a visible example of the inescapable suspicion on women’s fertility.

Can this doubt have persisted to this day and is it responsible for men’s continuing suspicion of women? Of course.  Whether a K Street lawyer or a member of the court of Louis XIV, paternity is always an issue; and as long as only women can know the paternity of their children, they will continue to rule.

Despite ‘inclusivity’, multicultural tolerance, feminism, and the woke culture of today, the paternity of children still does matter.  Paternity, heritage, heredity, social sanction, and position have not disappeared with love and compassion.

Even when paternity, Victorian oppression, and systemic male supremacy are put aside, there is still the question of genetic gender difference.  No matter how many trucks are given to little girls in the playground, they still prefer dolls; and no matter how stringently non-violence is enforced on the playground, boys will still shoot each other with carrots and sticks.   Men are, by nature, genes, and conditioning the pursuers of women who, in turn, must choose mates and prospective fathers to assure genetic superiority.  That natural diffidence, selectivity, and standoff-ness, so necessary for the future of the species, is also a potent weapon in the gender wars.  Except for the most confident, alpha males, most men put up with classic female opera - women who look like and act like divas to attract as many men as possible, then dismiss all but the most promising.  Darwin was accurate and prescient for the entire animal kingdom.

D.H. Lawrence wrote persuasively about sexual dynamics.  He understood that regardless of Victorian social mores, the fundamental attraction and antagonism between men and women would ensure conflict; but that such conflict was not a bad thing, for out of it could come epiphany – a sexual union with implications far beyond simple satisfaction or ‘love’.  He took for granted the differences between male and female, wrote that such differences would never be resolved, but that parity of wills – a balance of dominance and submission – would be liberating and final.



In other words, sexual nature – male and female – does have its inevitability; but such polarity can lead to epiphany.  There is no problem with female ambition, duplicity, or even treachery; nor with male aggressiveness and desire for control – if sexual parity, sexual equilibrium, can be achieved.

Edward Albee understood this when he wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, perhaps the most explicit work about sexual dynamics since Lawrence.  George and Martha 'flay each other to the bone’ to rid themselves of duplicity, lies, and pretension and to return to a more complementary and stable marriage; but their marriage has been nothing bu duplicity and resentment.  It has been the classic, universal, perennial marriage of sexual wills; and nothing in the play suggests that the future will be otherwise.  We are hardwired, said Albee, destined to play out our sexual destiny in a discouraging repetitiveness. No epiphanies in Albee.



The war between the sexes – or to put it more objectively, the solution to Lawrence’s and Albee’s quadratic sexual equation – shows no sign of truce; and if they are to be believed, nor should it.  Only out of sexual dissension and resolution comes sexual resolution.

Easier said than done. Men continue to cheat on their wives; wives continue to take their pound of flesh from unrepentant husbands; and  the battle of sexual wills continues in bathrooms, bedrooms, and playgrounds.  No signs of truce, accommodation, or compromise. 

The progressive solution – the creation of a gender spectrum where male-female sexuality gives way to sexual fluidity – is fanciful at best.  Millennia of human society have confirmed sexual bi-polarity.  Old and New Testaments, the Koran, the Ramayana, and the Tao have been expansive in their confirmation of it.  If Lawrence, Albee, Shakespeare, the Kama Sutra, the Song of Solomon, and common sense are right, such hopeful philosophical meanderings are temporary distractions at best.

So, Albee rules – fight until we get past the bone to the marrow.  Accept sexual predicates.  Given in to Darwin, Lawrence, and inevitability.

The Efficiency Of Memory–Why We Never Remember Insignificant People

A colleague at the World Bank tells the story of how one day he was called by a woman who wondered if they might have lunch. “It has been so long”, she said, “and it would be lovely to catch up”.  My colleague could not place the woman’s name or voice, but assumed that since she obviously knew him well, once they met, she, their relationship, and their experiences would all come back to him.

On the day of their lunch, he waited for her in the lobby of the main building, not knowing whom to look for, but assuming that she would quickly recognize him and the puzzle would be solved.  A few minutes after noon, an attractive woman – early forties, informal but stylishly dressed, tall, blonde, and smiling – came over to him, gave him a big hug, and told him warmly that she had been looking forward to the lunch since their call.

He, however, felt that he had never seen her before.  There was nothing  about her face, her figure, or her manner that was in the least familiar or recognizable.  It was clear from her warmth and eagerness that they in fact had met and perhaps much more; and embarrassed by his ignorance, he said nothing, certain that after a few minutes’ conversation, he would remember everything.  She put her arm through his and they walked out into the October sunshine.

Yet, even after their walk to the restaurant, and despite her chatty inquiries about his work, his family, and his health, he remembered nothing.   He asked about her work, how she was finding it, and if she had continued to spend much time in Africa – an educated guess since he worked in the Africa Division of the Bank and had travelled to Mali, Burkina, and Senegal at least three times a year, and the probability of their meeting there was high.

“I haven’t been there in donkey’s years”, she said, “couldn’t stand the flies in the beer.”  Asia was her beat, she went on, “Same old, same old” with no clues about her work, her profession, or her bosses.  She was not being evasive.  It was just that her breezy familiarity took a lot for granted – he knew, she assumed, what she had been doing for all these years, with whom, and where, and there was certainly no point in spoiling a delightful lunch talking business.

By the time they had finished their first course – a cold vichyssoise and a tomato bisque – he was no closer to recognizing her than when the first met in the Bank lobby; but since now he was so far into the conversation, the renewed acquaintance, and the meal, he was too embarrassed to come right out and admit his ignorance.  To do so would to say clearly that despite her interest in him, her obviously warm feelings, and apparent friendship for him, she meant nothing.

There was no ‘Aha!’ moment, not even a scintilla of recognition, not through the soup course but the bouillabaisse, profiterole, coffee, and cognac.  Thanks to the scandals in the White House and the fall of the dollar, they were no different than any other power couple on K Street.  There was no need nor time for anything more personal.   After the meal they embraced warmly, promised to meet again, this time sooner than the long years which had passed since their last meeting, and said goodbye.

For weeks after their meeting my colleague parsed every line of the conversation at Le Diplomat, explored ever nuance and every reference; but still could come up with nothing.  The fact that he had forgotten – or worse never remembered – this woman was troubling.  Was this a Freudian moment? Or simply a distraction – a meeting in difficult circumstances that at the time was incidental and unmemorable?

He never did remember who she was; and since she had never, not surprisingly, called him again, he forgot her. Forgot whom, exactly? There was as little substance in her silhouette as anyone, and he remembered only the lunch, the prickly situation, and his embarrassment.

Had the woman not called, their original meeting – he admitted that there must have been one – would have been lost in space, never saved to his memory, never recorded or filed.  It would have been as if she never existed and the meeting never happened.

One of the classic misunderstanding between older married couples is the husband’s lack of recollection.  “How could you possibly not remember that?” says the wife; but of course the husband has no recollection of her incidental stories, her rattling on about bits and pieces of family members who had drifted in and out of sight over the years without consequence, not even a blip on the radar.  It is selective, efficient memory at its best.  Without perception filtered by predisposition,  life would be a chaotic jumble of indecipherable things.

It isn’t  a question of storage.  The human brain has the capacity of a thousand supercomputers but not the computing power.  Memory is more a function of character than of function.  What we remember is conditioned by who we are.  A person attuned to, concerned about, and interested in others as a matter of genetics, is likely to remember love affairs, marriage, sickness, profession, and unhappiness in great detail.  For one who is not so sensitive, the same people only occupy space temporarily, without notice and are gone without a trace.

Memory, or the lack thereof, is not neutral – an individual affair with no consequence.  Lack of recollection – drawing a blank – is a sign of indifference.  Everyone expects one’s personal zone of being to be of interest to everyone else – s question of mattering, of validation; and without recognition, one exists less.

Memory becomes particularly important as one ages.  Alzheimer’s and dementia loom.  Nabokov, a self-described memorist, knew from childhood that remembering the past was important.  In fact the past was what defined human experience.  The present was no more than a few milliseconds of awareness, the future only possibility, but the past increasing with years, was the only real, palpable, existential element of being.  If memory of the past disappears, than one disappears.  The dementia patient who first cannot remember, then creates irrational, impossible memories, then finally forgets everything, ceases to exist.  It was as though their lives had never been led.

Older people without dementia are also governed, by memory.  Since their lives are more and more circumscribed and limited by illness or frailty, and since the future becomes less and less relevant, it is only memory that sustains them.  Yet at the same time they are less interested in storing new memories.  They pay less attention to the lives of others and more to their own increasingly liable ones.  One dies alone, as Tolstoy wrote in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and only one’s past – the only validation of having lived – remains.

So it was quite ordinary that my World Bank colleague had no recollection of an insignificant woman.  Most of our lives are filled with insignificant people and things.  Perhaps the most aware of us realize this, make no apologies for it, and focus on the only thing that matters – oneself and one’s final moments.

Marriage, ‘Rabbit At Rest’ And The Unsung Heroism Of The Defiant Male Everyman

Rabbit Angstrom, the main  character in John Updike’s tetralogy (Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit At Rest) is Every Man – hardworking, a belief in American expectations, sexual ambition, love of women, suspicious of them, but inevitably bound to them, resentful of societal norms and imposed values yet faithful to them, dismissive of religion but hopelessly spiritual.

He has married Janice out of duty and responsibility, realized that such an enforced marriage has had its benefits – bourgeois wealth and position in his small Pennsylvania town, secure employment, some authority, and the advantages of a comfortable income – but is unhappy, restive, and impatient.  Life which began with adulation (an early career as a star athlete) but which which saw all signs of uniqueness or minor celebrity disappear quickly in the poverty of the Pennsylvania mining town in which he grew up, has, by the time of the fourth novel (Rabbit At Rest) become barely supportable.  He is angry with himself for having ‘done the right thing’, married pregnant Janice, lived off the largesse of her wealthy father, eased so complaisantly into an automotive sales job, put up with his wife’s drunken, careless, murder of their firstborn, and retired from an expectant life to a deeply depressing one.



Rabbit (Harry) Angstrom is a misanthrope.  As he sees it – strip malls, Florida snowbirds, used cars, jelly beans, theme parks, mothers-in-law and the tedium of Rust Belt Pennsylvania and Florida monotony – life is no better than death; and while he complaisantly accepts his fate, he refuses to go quietly.  He refuses to accept responsibility for his drug-addicted, weak, anti-social son; for his own infidelities and out-of-wedlock paternity, his wife’s alcoholic nonsense, or the inevitable course of the demise of a working class, ambitious, talented, insightful man. 

In a censorious age bound and determined to enforce rectitude, right behavior, and moral purpose, Harry Angstrom is an outlier, an offender, a retrograde male chauvinistic boor.  Yet to anyone trapped in a marriage arranged by convention, moderated by feminist claims to equality, and bound and determined to be good, engaged parents, Rabbit is a hero.  He flees his wife, his hopelessly ignorant son, and the philosophically sedentary life of ‘the lot’. He chooses to die as he came into the world – alone, with no excuses, no explanations, and no justification.

Rabbit engineers his own death because he knows after his heart attack that his fat, sedentary, indulgent life is untenable.  The one-on-one game he plays in the slums of Deleon is the best possible end – going out as he came in – an athlete, a man to be noticed.  His life may have been ordinary, predictable, and entirely expected; but his death was nothing of the sort.  It was his and his alone, and in this choice, this conscious repudiation of all that had defined and controlled him, he was a hero.

Rabbit is Every Man because of this defiance, this angry refusal to be feminized and socialized – to refuse be a  good husband, a good father, a good citizen.  ‘We all die alone’, he knew and knew well, perhaps the only moment when we must face our creation, our end, and the meaning of our lives without interpretation, without mediation.  Many face death in panic, fearful, unprepared, unwilling to let go of a life which, in the best of circumstances was only incidental but which is considered eternal.



Rabbit is hero because he was born with little, brought up with less, and settled for the best that a working class, high-school-educated boy in Appalachian America could hope for.  His story is not about the American Dream or fulfilling promise, talent, and ambition.  It is about facing it, never settling for it, and moving beyond it.

The older one gets – Harry is middle-aged but feeling older – the more one reflects on what one has done and not done.  Not so much accomplishments or acclaim, but fulfillment.  Have we had the life we wanted or expected? Have we been the confident, assured determined, and aggressive males were brought up to be? Have we made the best of opportunity and chance?

Harry felt that his super-stardom on the high school basketball court would be his meal ticket, the one thing that distinguished him from his classmates, from others.  His sense of beauty, perfection, elegance, grace, and purity would somehow have to last beyond the hardwood.  For Harry, or for anyone of early talent, the comedown is abrupt and surprising.  How could this be?

Why Harry Angstrom is a hero is because he neither lived in the past nor whined about his fall from grace.  Victory over the inescapable, push-and-shove , ugly, under-the-basket, sharp-elbowed present was the only game in town.  Most of his teammates made the elision from stadium to nowhere job without complaint – complaisant, diffident, easily accepting this fall from possibility as a matter of course. Not Harry.

Everyone else puts up with Harry’s world without complaint and with no resistance, but not him.  He is honest about how distasteful his ‘mutt’ of a wife is, how dumb, how clueless, and how ignorantly blissful she is about her simple, unquestioned life.  He should have married Thelma who loved him, never put up with him but felt at home with his misanthropy, his determined out from a cohort of seals flip-flapping their way to and from the water’s edge without any sense of why or wherefore, with only a few Jews to guide him.

Harry does not expect any love or compassion from anyone – wife, children, lovers, or friends.  No one ever knows you, and one dies alone; so why rely on the solace and comfort of those who are on the same singular, spare, and unknowable paths?  Better to wise up to this aloneness business, to prepare, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, to a solitary death.

There are few men who don’t look at their aging wives and wonder who they are and why they ever married them. As one ages, past lovers become more palpable, not less.  “If only” is the operative byword of older men for whom life, if anything, is a saga of missed opportunities; and whose memories of the bungled ones keep them up at night.

Sanity and a good night sleep should prevail.  “She has been a good mother, patient with my indiscretions, tolerant of my wanderings, solid, never spend-thrifty, parsimonious, organized, and dutiful to her family", one might say to stay the dreams; but no sage auto-advice suffices.

Yet most men are not like Rabbit Angstrom who face facts – a pasty, clueless wife; bratty grandchildren; and a loser of a son – accept them, and move on with neither guilt nor remorse.  They are beaten lifeless, and can look forward to nothing more than what has been.

Suicide? For that was exactly what Rabbit was doing when he played one-on-one in the ‘hood – not reliving the past but choosing the past as a way out.  A statement.  A conclusive period to his life.

There are few men who even consider making it to the basketball court, let alone playing in a winner-take-all game of one-on-one.  They are cowards, tied to their wives or a slave to their parents living or dead; altar boys, Eagle Scouts, and good citizens.  For the few, the Harry Angstroms, there is no looking back, no excuses, and no second thoughts.   Harry dies on the basketball court with no thought of his wife, his son, his parents, or his friends.  We all die alone, said Tolstoy, and the sooner we realize this the better.  Harry Angstrom did.