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Method to Grading Critical Essay Evaluations: 50% summary/analysis; 50% grammar, mechanics, college-level writing, staying focused, avoiding repetition, flow/transitionsGarner, Shirley Nelson. “The Taming of the Shrew: Inside or Outside of the Joke?” The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. Dympna Callaghan. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.The question is can an evaluation of whether or not a piece of art is good be based on one’s political stance on gender/race/sexuality/class? For example, Ernest Hemingway’s Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms and Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises are characters that one could use to prove he’s a misogynist. Do you think that makes his literature bad? Can it still be good?1980s: feminist criticism hitting its stride, in full swing, and all these male critics have been making value judgments and revering male-authored texts over female-authored ones. So Garner’s claim that The Taming of the Shrew is a bad play aims to overturn these commonly held notions in the canon that Shakespeare is some kind of literary god. Hunter College even today more or less ascribes to the old view that Shakespeare should be taught in ENG 220 despite there being a number of other excellent playwrights out there. What makes a play, or any work of literature, good? [list on board]Do you think The Taming of the Shrew is bad? Or maybe not as great as other plays? Why?“Presumably Petruchio puts on an act to tame Kate; he pretends to be more shrew than she [4.1.70]. … But Kate’s ‘shrewishness’ only allows Petruchio to bring to the surface and exaggerate something that is in him to begin with” (213). -- This more or less essentializes Petruchio’s bullying, following what Susan Bordo would claim is a false presumption that “boys will be boys” – Masculinity and bullying are as socially constructed as Kate’s supposed “shrewishness” which Garner so kindly puts in quotation marks to denote, which she also does for Petruchio’s “shrewishness” but her argument is that Petruchio-as-shrew is more socially acceptable than Kate-as-shrew and that they are not treated equally. Given what we know from a post-Henry VIII, Elizabethan England, that’s a pretty accurate representation of a time when there were social anxieties about marriage and shrewsFinally, she says that in Padua their language games are humorous, but as soon as we get to Act IV, the play loses its humor and she gets a “sinking feeling”. Okay, me too! But she also says that Petruchio deserves to be slapped by Kate, and she ignores the violence of Kate’s abuse toward others—which subsequently leads to her ignoring the fact that Kate’s final speech could, in fact, be Kate’s own voice, using her own language to chide Bianca, which we know Kate loves to do. Kate’s intentions are to be favored by her father and by others and she hates her sister, so the fact that she gets the final word over her is a personal achievement. BUT, Garner also points out that this poses women against each other in the play, and that, from the beginning, has been true and problematic. So, turning it back on the patriarchy—men bidding on women puts women in competition against each other, even sisters. So, Garner stands “outside of the community the joke is intended to amuse” (218), and who could blame her? She says, “Taming is responsive to men’s psychological needs, desires, and fantasies at the expense of women.” So she says that the play is dated—as opposed to timeless—and that makes it “less good” and when reading it that way, that’s a fair assessment. However, beyond the 1980s, and in 2015, I would argue that the play as representative of what she names “men’s psychological needs, desires, and fantasies”—that, I would argue, are still unaddressed today—does make it timeless and maybe even a useful text to dissect the patriarchal structure or social conditioning that oppresses men. She even points to the fact that Shakespeare tries to unite “man-haters” and “woman-haters” in his plays, so I would posit that Garner’s blind spot is one I find in a lot of 1980s feminism: you can’t have a successful, lasting revolution when you exclude half the population. That’s why I ascribe to the view that Emma Watson has about eliminating man-hating. ................
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