61 pages • 2 hours read
Jodi PicoultBy Any Other Name
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Women in Elizabethan England
The England of Emilia Bassano’s time was ruled by a powerful woman, but law and custom offered few rights and protections for most women in society. In general, women in the Elizabethan era were expected to be subservient to men. They could not inherit titles (with the exception being the crown) and were raised to become homemakers and mothers. Both medical science and religion of the time enforced these ideas. Medical knowledge, stemming from the Greeks, “held that female humans were essentially incomplete or unfinished males” and thus, as the weaker sex were “more prone to psychological and physical ailment and in need of supervision, control and at times restraint by the one true sex, men” (Garcia, Lucas. “Gender on Shakespeare’s Stage: A Brief History.” Writers Theatre, 21 Nov. 2018). Religion was also used to justify male control. Though there are “conflicting messages about sex and gender in the Bible, it was deployed by Early Modern English society to enforce the idea that women were in need of domination and stewardship by men” (Garcia). In her poetry defending Eve, Emilia Bassano points out that this misogynistic understanding of the Bible is not necessarily supported by the text, but these ideas were still widespread.
Women of the middle and upper classes were often educated in this era, partially inspired by the example of Elizabeth I. However, despite an education, the expectation was still that women would marry and bear children. The girls in Emilia’s school represent this irony, since they are learning French and to read and write, but still are only valuable to their families in a marriage exchange. Once married, women had little power. The husband was the head of the household and could legally beat and rape his wife. Divorce was not possible, only annulment. Picoult’s female characters reveal the limited choices for women as well as the myriad ways women made the best of their situations. Shakespeare’s plays also offer female characters who passionately and angrily point out the double standards of the day, including Othello’s Emilia and The Taming of the Shrew’s Kate.
Literary Context: Women’s Writing and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
Though By Any Other Name engages most obviously with the works of Shakespeare, another important inter-text for the novel is Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own. At the time Woolf wrote this essay, women in the UK were just beginning to attend a few women-only colleges, including Newnham and Girton at Cambridge University. However, detractors said that educating women, especially at the college level, was a useless pursuit since women could never be geniuses. In the essay, Woolf answers this accusation that there have never been great female writers. She tackles the question in two ways. First, she points out the immense social cost to women signing their work, and famously asserts, “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” claiming that many unsigned ballads, poems, and works of art could have been written by women (Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Penguin, 2000, pp. 50-51). This section also alludes to the famous Victorian women who wrote under male pseudonyms, including George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans, author of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch) and Charlotte (Jane Eyre), Emily (Wuthering Heights), and Anne Bronte (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), who initially published as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Woolf’s second argument takes the form of a thought experiment. She imagines that William Shakespeare has a sister, equally gifted, named Judith. She asks what would have happened to such a young woman in the Elizabethan era, and concludes that she would have struggled for an education, been mocked for her gift, and would die penniless and alone. Woolf predicts that such a woman would be forgotten, and that she “lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop” (Woolf). Ultimately, Woolf concludes that the “lack” of female geniuses is not due to women’s incapability, but to a lack of circumstances that allow women to flourish. By Any Other Name performs a version of Woolf’s thought experiment by imagining the gifted Emilia Bassano and asking how she could have survived and nourished her gift despite the odds against her. Though Picoult constructs a narrative where Emilia can write her work and have it performed, she must do so anonymously and thus loses all public recognition of her genius.
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By Jodi Picoult
