This essay interrogates early modern notions of female beardedness in its various literal and metaphoric permutations. If early modern English male facial beards signaled privilege in both economic and erotic registers, then how did bearded women figure for that same culture? By considering representations of the female beard in a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, including the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, personal accounts, illustrations, and paintings, this paper argues that bearded women presented early modern English culture with a profound contradiction that symbolically threatened patriarchal ideology with the specter of both economic and sexual castration. The female beard's subversive power, then, could be mitigated only one of two ways: either through reinscription of the female body or through annihilation.
This book makes a significant and important contribution to studies of fetishism, masculinity, embodiment, early modern drama, ideology critique, and Lacanian theory. Johnston argues that the historical contingency of the meaning of the beard reveals and illuminates the nature of fetish while advancing a thesis that the fetishization of the beard in early modern England involved a process of "imbricative naturalization. " The merits and weakness of the book rest neatly on either side of the fault line of this phrase. The term "imbricative values" refers to the fact that the values accorded to the beard work on multiple registers, which do not always align perfectly. This emphasis allows Johnston to make several nuanced, provocative, and innovative readings of early modern texts. On the other hand, Johnston's command of a variety of early modern texts lends his argument a suppleness that makes for an odd juxtaposition to its theoretical rigidity. His insistence on a historically inflexible drive to justify domination by naturalizing ideology leads Johnston to make claims that often lead to a distorted view of early modern experiences.Johnston gives a synchronic reading of beards from the reign of Henry VIII to the death of Charles I, with occasional forays into the Restoration when it serves his purpose. He opens with a chapter summarizing scholarship on theories of the fetish and their applicability to early modern societies. He proceeds to a detailed examination of the variety of ways beards signified manhood. His chapter on beardless boys significantly advances our understanding of the way early moderns inflected biological sex through age. A chapter on bearded women discusses first women' s pubic hair and then the exhibition of bearded women. Finally, he delves deeper into the complications of the semiotics of the beard by examining half beards and hermaphrodites. Throughout his argument, he is primarily concerned with disrupting seemingly unified meanings of the beard by attending to contradictions between and within various registers of signification. In his view, such slippery meanings regularly occasioned patriarchal anxiety over the fragility of the semiotic system that grounded male subjectivity as approaching a natural perfection over against the deficiencies of various "Others.
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