COMEDY

72 GENDER AND SEXUALITYThe representation of women in Lysistrata is largely symptomatic of therepresentation of woman in Western comedy as a whole, where she isrelegated to a generic purpose, the butt of a joke, or a caricature to bepresented by men in drag. Susan Carlson writes that,In the comic plays populated by women, two features proscribewhat comedy’s women can be: a basic inversion and a generallyhappy ending. To understand these two aspects of comic structureis to understand the limitations of comic women. Women areallowed their brilliance, freedom, and power in comedy onlybecause the genre has built-in safeguards against such behavior.(Carlson, 1991:17)Women are therefore used for two reasons: to provide an hystericalvision of the world-turned-upside down, and to enable male order to bere-established through the subjugation of women in marriage. Thiswould certainly be the most satisfactory way to explain the absolutetransformation of Katherine in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew(1593–94) from a ‘shrewd ill-favoured wife’ (Shakespeare, 1989:1.2.59), to a compliant woman who argues that a husband should be ‘thylord, thy life, thy keeper/…thy sovereign’ (Shakespeare, 1989:5.2.146–147). Kate’s volatile behaviour is permissible in the context ofcomedy because it is both temporary and necessary if it is to be finallyovercome. The play’s characterological incoherence is explainedbecause comedy’s view of women is formulaic. It is entirely appropriatethat the first wife we meet in the play who conforms to Petruchio’sideal (‘My husband and my lord, my lord and my husband/I am yourwife in all obedience’ (Shakespeare, 1989: Induction, 2. 104–105)), is amale, the page Bartholomew in disguise, underlining the extent to whichplay-acting and male fantasy override anything like the realisticportrayal of women (Leggatt, 1998: 121).Marriage could be described as the main reason for the participationof women in comedy, as well as one of the primary conditions underwhich men and women are seen to interact. Marriage also serves as theconclusion towards which traditional comic narrative inevitably moves,a cultural symbol of the harmonious symmetry and the resolution oftroubles. In addition, female characters in comedy are outstandinglysusceptible to ideological versions of the male concept of women,largely defined in terms of their suitability for marriage. Particularlycommon is the representation of women as either virgins or whores,with little room for ambiguity. In the early modern period the official