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Peace-Weavers And The Soldiers Who Court Them: The Sexual Development Of Women In Shakespear's Plays, Sara Ben-David

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper moves beyond current psychoanalytic readings of the women in Shakespeare's plays as either Mother or Other to consider instead the extent to which their sexual development from girlhood into womanhood rehearses what Jacques Lacan describes as man's progression out of the Mirror Stage, through the acquisition of language and the recognition of sexual difference, and into a unified subjectivity. The author argues that Shakespeare's own understanding of sexual difference is predicated, in the case of femininity, upon the model of the feminine peace-weaver which he would have found in Greek mythology, particularly in Ovid's Heroides. It is with …