Self-Impersonation in World Literature

Author(s): Wendy Doniger

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 2004), pp. 101-125
Published by: Kenyon College
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4338587 .
Accessed: 13/10/2012 11:25

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Kenyon Review.

http://www.jstor.org
WendyDoniger

SELF-IMPERSONATION
IN WORLD LITERATURE

I n OscarWilde'splayTheImportanceof BeingEarnest,Jack,who has

pretended for years to be named not Jack but Ernest, suddenly dis-
covers who his true parents are and learns that his name is really
Ernest after all. He says to his fiancee, "It is a terrible thing for a man to
find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the
truth. Can you forgive me?" And she replies (no one who has heard Joan
Greenwood say the line can ever hear it in any other voice), "I can. For I
feel that you are sure to change."' This inadvertent truth-telling need not
be a joke; it has tragic results in a Japanese story:

A mountain ascetic named Kongo-indisturbed a fox's nap.

In revenge, the fox allowed himself to be seen changing
into the semblance of Kongo-in by a group of the priests'
colleagues. When the fox next appeared to them in the
form of Kongo-in, they beat him viciously. Only when he
was nearly dead did they realize that he was not the fox at
all, but the real Kongo-in.2

This is a twist on the story of the boy who called wolf when there was no
wolf, so that no one believed him when there really was a wolf. In this tale,
there really was a fox, but not masquerading as a human, as people
thought.
The mythological texts are fantastic (foxes changing into men)
and the psychological texts often seem farfetched (women changing into
other women to seduce their own husbands). "How is it possible that he

101
The Kenyon Review

did not recognize his own wife?" we ask. Yet myths often present in a
grotesquely exaggerated form situations that are quite common in real
life.3 Though few of us actually put on masks that replicate our faces, it is
not uncommon for people to become unrecognizable travesties of them-
selves, particularly as they age. The recognition of these sad, sometimes
tragic, human truths is what fuels the constant re-creation of the often
happier, sometimes comic, fantasies of self-impersonation.
Do we, ourselves, always know, consciously, when we are engaging
in self-parody? I think not. We often slip carelessly across the permeable
boundary between the un-self-conscious self-indulgence of our most idio-
syncratic mannerisms and the conscious attempt to give the people who
know us, personally or publicly, the version of ourselves that they expect.
The literature of self-imitation demonstrates that this is a basic human
way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity. These stories
are related loosely by historical contact and even more loosely by endur-
ing human nature. The literary record offers us merely the extreme
examples, so exaggerated as to be obvious, of what we common folk do,
unconsciously, every day in ways that we do not notice, both because they
are more muted and because we are blinded by self-deception. Terry
Eagleton has remarked, with his postmodern tongue in his impudent
cheek, that "self-parody... is the closest we can come to authenticity."4
And there are situations in which we are particularlyprone to self-imitate;
for instance, anyone who dances a tango nowadays is willy-nilly imitating
someone else doing the tango. Tango-dancersmove about within a haze of
inverted commas, constantly quoting themselves, situating themselves in
the midst of some invisible discourse that they are playing to an invisible
audience.
People masquerade as themselves all the time; the mythology of
self-imitation stretches from ancient India to Hollywood and prevails in
real life as well as in fiction, which is sometimes, contrary to public opin-
ion, stranger than truth. Through a kind of triple-cross or switchback, a
person pretends to be someone else pretending to be precisely what he or
she is. To take just a few examples from world fiction: In MarkTwain'sThe
Pin,ce and the Pauper, the prince's friends, thinking that he is a mad pau-
per, pretend that he is the king, to tease or humor him, but he really is the
king. The Hindu god Krishna, pretending to be a human cow-herd, teases
the naked cow-herd girls by making them pretend that he is a god-which

102
Wendy Doniger

he is-and forcing them to worship him by raising their cupped heads in

a gesture that simultaneously reveres the god and lets the naughty boy see
their nakedness.5 When, in Kleist's play, the god Jupiter impersonates
Amphitryon with Amphitryon'swife Alemena, in the course of his double
talk he says, "Pretend that I'm Jupiter."

Nature Imitating Art Imitating Nature

The cliche that "Natureimitates art" already conceals an implica-

tion of self-imitation, for the ironic punch comes from our assumption that
art imitates nature. What the cliche is saying, therefore, is that nature is
itself already an imitation of the imitation of nature by art. A notorious
example of this phenomenon is what has been called "the Werthereffect":6
in 1774, Goethe was inspired, by the suicide of K.W.Jerusalem and his
own frustrated passion for Charlotte Buff, to write a novel (The Sorrows
of Young Werther),in which Werther commits suicide because of his frus-
trated passion for Charlotte. The novel became a sensation; the two figures
were portrayed on bread boxes and Meissen porcelains, and "all over
Europe large numbers of young people committed suicide with a copy of
the book clutched in their hands or buried in their pockets."7 Goethe
eventually said he wished he could destroy his creation,8 but it had
become real now, and out of his control as a work of art. In our day, the
closest parallel is found not in high art but in journalism: lurid crimes are
reported in lurid tabloids, inspiring copycats to commit lurid crimes that
only a journalist could have cooked up.
Nature often imitates art in the plastic arts. Escher's famous image
of the hand (surely Durer'shand?) drawing the hand that is drawing it is
a marvelous visualization of this insight. Artistic forms often produce self-
imitating illusions: in Euripides'Alcestis, Herakles says to Admetus, "I'll
make an image of your wife for you," but then he actually produces the
real wife. So, too, in Shakespeare'sA Winter's Tale, what is said to be a
statue of Hermione turns out to be the real Hermione, just as, in Much Ado
About Nothing, the "fake"Hero tums out to be the real Hero pretending
to be the fake Hero. These representations of women are replaced by the
women they pretend to be representing, but some myths argue that peo-
ple began as statues and then were brought to life, so that any statue is

103
The Kenyon Review

ultimately a self-imitation-an imitation of a human who is an imitation

of the original human, a statue.9As Roland Barthes remarks of the statue
of an ideal woman, "This relation, in the opposite direction, gives us the
Pygmalion myth: a real woman is born from the statue."'1
In Honor"de Balzac'snovella Sarrsine, a Frenchman (Sarrasine)
mistakes an Italian castrato, La Zambinella, for a woman. As Balzac tells
the story, we first encounter a painting that depicts La Zambinella as a
man; we then learn that the painting was not made from life but copied
from a sculpture that depicted La Zambinella as a woman. As Balzac says,
"But that great painter never saw the original and maybe you'd admire it
less if you knew that this daub was copied from the statue of a woman."''l
Commenting upon this passage, Barthes remarks: "The duplication of
bodies is linked to the instability of the sexual paradigm,which makes the
castrato waver between boy and woman. The picture was copied from a
statue, true, but this statue was copied from a false woman. In other words,
the statement is true with regard only to the statue and false with regard
to the woman." When Sarrasine finally sees the statue of the woman he
cries out "It'san illusion,712 and Barthes comments:
lIflthe statue... is an "illusion,"
this is not becauseby artificialmeans
it copiesa realobjectwhosematerialityit cannotpossess(banalpropo-
sition) but because ... the internal hollownessof the statue...
reproducesthe centraldeficiencyof the castrato:the statueis ironically
tr...... The painting, by contrast, may have a back, but it has no
inside: it cannot provoke the indiscreet act by which one might try to
find out what there is behind the canvas.13

The duplicative chain is, on one level, the chicken/egg pendulum from
human to art (painting) back to human and then back to art (sculpture),
but on a deeper level it turns out to move from castrato-as-castrato to
castrato-as-woman-as-painting-as-manto castrato-as-woman to castrato-
as-woman-as-scultpure-as-woman. The argument for the validity of the
statue seems to be that, just as two wrongs make a right, or two negatives
a positive, two unreals make a real, or, more precisely, two hollows make
a full, canceling out the false middle terms. Statues usually lie (they are
not filled with flesh and blood), but since this is a statue of a lie, hollow like
the "woman"it portrays, it is a true copy, unique among works of art. So,
too, since one cannot examine the painting to see if the man is a "full"
man, since it is in a sense merely two-dimensionallike the apparentvirility

104
Wendy Doniger

of the man it portrays, the painting, too, is a true copy. Art is a lie that tells
the truth, as Picasso once remarked. And in the fourth Duino elegy, Rilke
says: "I don't want these half-filled masks; I'd rather have the doll; it's
full. 14

The Quen WVho Mistook

the Kingfor the King

People in stories can't seem to help masquerading as themselves.

Through a kind of triple-cross or switchback, a person pretends to be pre-
cisely what he or she is, by pretending to be someone else pretending to
be him or her. This pattern is particularlyprominent in stories about mar-
riage:wives triple-cross their double-crossing husbands by substituting for
the mistresses who are substituting for the wives, so that the man commits
adultery with his own wife. The perpetrators of these double-back
bedtricks"5are pretending to be the sexual partners that they secretly
know they are but cannot openly claim to be in any other way. This sort
of self-impersonation has always been a natural theme, particularly in the
theater, since impersonation is built into the primary processes of the
stage.
The eternal triangle-a married woman, her husband, and the
woman he has just fallen in love with-becomes a polyhedron in India.
This figure is the subject of a complex cycle of classical Sanskrit texts sur-
rounding the mythical figures of King Udayana, his wife Vasavadatta,and
his several co-wives. In two Sanskrit dramas attributed to King Harsha,
who ruled much of North India in the seventh century C.E.,16the author
employs the erotic equivalent of Realpolitik, a cross between Machiavelli
and Boccaccio-or, more precisely, of the Arthashastra (the ancient
Indian political textbook) and the Kamasutra (the ancient Indian erotic
textbook), which have much in common. In the first play, the Ratnavali,
the wife inadvertently masquerades not merely as the mistress but as the
mistress masquerading as the wife, while in the second, the
Priyadarshika, the king advertently masquerades as the king. A Cli&s
Notes version of the two plots would go like this. First, the Ratnavali:

105
The Kenyon Review

Queen Vasavadatta,fearing that the king was fallingin love

with a younger woman named Sagarika,gave one of her
servant women some of her own clothes as a bribe to get
her to guard Sagarika. The servant woman, however,
dressed Sagarika in the queen's clothes and arranged for
the King to meet Sagarikawhen Sagarikawas disguised as
Vasavadatta. But Vasavadatta,learning of this plan, went
there herself, dressed in her own clothes. The king mis-
took Vasavadatta for Sagarika-as-Vasavadattaand made
love to her with words, addressing her as Sagarika.When
the king attempted to kiss Vasavadatta-as-Sagarika-as-
Vasavadatta,the queen threw off her veil in fury. The king
begged her to forgive him, but she ran off. Then Sagarika-
as-Vasavadattastarted to hang herself with a creeper, in
shame that her secret love had been found out. The king,
thinking that she was Vasavadatta trying to commit sui-
cide because he had made love to another woman,
embraced her, but addressed her as Vasavadatta.At that
moment, the queen returned and found them together.
The king, looking at her in embarrassment and confusion,
replied, "My queen! Don't accuse me without cause. I
thought that this woman was you; it was a natural mistake,
because she was wearing clothes just like yours. So forgive
me." This time the queen stayed mad for a long time, but
in the end she relented and blessed the kings marriage to
Sagarika.

Vasavadattabegins the masquerade inadvertently when she gives her own

clothes to her rival'sfriend, but then the reins are taken out of her hands
when the clothes are used to deceive her. When Vasavadatta uncon-
sciously impersonates Sagarikaconsciously impersonating Vasavadatta,as
David Shulman remarks, "The queen, in being herself, is playing at being
another who is as herself."'7Through a kind of triple-cross, in which the
king mistakes his queen for the Other Woman and the Other Woman for
the queen, he actually makes love to his queen when she is undisguised,
thinking she is someone else pretending to be herself.
The king cannot tell his women apart, yet he shows remarkably

106
Wendy Doniger

unconscious self-awareness from time to time, and drops remarks that

wonderfully summarize the position of a man who is the victim of a self-
masquerade. At the end, when he calls out to the queen, forgetting that
she is beside him, he remarks, "Howis it that, in my extreme agitation and
confusion, I didn't notice that the queen was right here beside me"-an
unconscious comment on his stale marriage. But the queen is even more
perceptive than he is, when she remarks, "I really am Sagarika.You imag-
ine that everything seems to be made of Sagarika."l8The king does not
seem to masquerade here, but the queen says of him, when he behaves in
a characteristically adulterous manner, "Yourmajesty, this is just like your
majesty."The word she uses, sadrisham, more specifically refers to some-
thing that looks just like something else. She means that he is true to type,
but she says that he gives the appearance of being himself.
This idea of the kings self-imitation is taken into new realms of per-
formance in Harsha'sother play on this theme, the Priyadarshika. Now it
is the man, not the woman, who is split up and impersonates himself-or
in Shulman's words, "undergoes triplication."19 This is the plot:

Queen Vasavadatta, worried that she had lost the kings

affections to a young girl named Aranyika, decided to stage
a play that a woman friend of hers had composed about
Vasavadattaand king Udayana when they first fell in love.
Aranyika was to play the queen, while her friend
Manorama was to play the king. Vasavadatta gave
Aranyika the ornaments from her body, and she gave
Manorama the ornaments that her father had given the
king at their marriage, including the ring. She said, "Wear
them on stage, so that you'll look just like the king." But
Manorama, without Aranyika's knowledge, colluded with
the clown so that the king took Manorama'splace, taking
from her his own costume and omaments. Manoramasaid
to herself, "Since the queen keeps Aranyika far from the
king's gaze, this is how they can meet: let him come and
himself play the part of himself."
The play began, and when the king made his first
speech the queen said, "Bravo to the king!" rising sud-
denly to her feet. The king said to himself, "What! The

107
The Kenyon Review

queen has recognized me!" but the playwrightsaid to the

queen, "Calm down. It's just a play." And Vasavadatta
replied, "What! It is Manorama! But I thought, 'It's the
king.' Bravo, bravo, Manorama! Well acted!" The play-
wright said, "Your majesty, truly Manorama made you
mistake one for another. Look: the form, garments, gait,
voice-this clever woman has presented the king to us
before our very eyes."
As the play progressed, the king took Aranyika's
hand, and Aranyika said (to herself, not knowing that it
really was the king), "No, no! The touch of Manorama
affects my limbs beyond reason." Vasavadatta suddenly
stood up again, saying, "I can't bear to see another falsifi-
cation." The playwright insisted, "But it's just a play,
theatre, spectacle. It'snot proper to leave the theatre at the
wrong time and break the mood." But Vasavadattawalked
away and discovered that the king himself had played the
part. Eventually, she relented and blessed the king's mar-
riage to Aranyika.

The play within the play is a vehicle for jealousy and deception. As Shul-
man remarks, the "simultaneous expansion and embodiment of the self
takes place in the most deeply 'inner' or embedded mode, the play within
the play."20Shulman is speaking of the embodied self of the king, but
Vasavadattaand Priyadarshikaare also caught up in this innermost level.
What did the queen hope to accomplish by having her rival impersonate
her? Did she think that the king would transfer back to her the love that
he had apparently transferred from her to the new girl? How bitter must
her humiliation have been when she realized that her ruse had backfired
in such a way that she herself had made it possible for the king to make
love to her rival, right before her eyes. As for Aranyika,the king'sduplicity
forces her to express publicly (and unknowingly!) her love for him, a love
that she had intended to keep a secret. This duplicity is Cartesian:her mind
thinks she is touching the hand of Manorama,but her body knows she is
touching the hand of the king. In this sense, the king "outs"Priyadarshika
without her permission or her conscious knowledge.
For the king, the play within the play is not only a double

108
Wendy Doniger

impersonation but a double change of gender, a double-cross dress, a dou-

ble drag that cancels itself out; the king pretends to be a woman
pretending to be him. The complexities are multiplied when the play is
produced by one of those Indian traditions-perhaps alluded to in this
very play-in which women play the parts of men: at such a moment, one
could imagine a woman playing the part of the king playing the part of
Manorama playing the part of the king.2"The Kamcsutra tells us that
kings, faced with an entire harem to satisfy, often resort to the ultimate
sexual surrogate, a dildo; but sometimes a king will substitute himself for
the substitute dildo in order to sleep with a wife that he particularly
desires.22Here, with a smaller harem but a similar problem, the king sub-
stitutes himself for the substitute.
As in the tale of Ratnavali, but this time on purpose, Vasavadatta
begins the masquerade, casting her rival as herself, making her rival
impersonate her. But, once again, Udayana refuses to follow the part that
she has written for him: he takes over the casting, reversing the queen's
intention (to bring him close to her) by using her play to stage his own infi-
delity. The two fantasies intermingle as his fantasy becomes hers, his
vision overpowers hers, and she sees not what she wants to see (her stray-
ing husband making love to her as she was when he loved her) but what
she fears to see, actually sees, and allows herself to be talked out of saying
that she sees: her husband making love to her rival. She stages her dream,
and the king stages her nightmare. The queen moves, and the king check-
mates her.
We may read these plays with an eye to the different consequences
of the triplication of the woman (Vasavadattain the Ratnavali) and the
man (Udayana in the Priyadarshika). For instance, the fact that (in the
P7iyadarshika) Vasavadattaimmediately recognizes the king when he is
disguised, while Udayana (in the Ratnavali) wrongly takes Vasavadattafor
Sagarika-as-Vasavadatta,is typical of the literature of sexual masquerade,
which generally depicts women as more often tricking, and less often
tricked, than men.23In both of Harsha's plays, even though Vasavadatta
fails in her goal of keeping the kings love for herself alone, she is the least
deluded character, and he the most deluded. In the Ratnatvali he thinks
he is the trickster (disguising his mistress as his wife), but still he is the
one who is fooled. In the Priyadarshika, where he again engineers the
trick (disguising himself as himself), the queen sees through it (though

109
The Kenyon Review

Priyadarshikadoes not). His ignorance and confusion torment her, but her
poignantknowledgeof what is going on torments her even more. While most
women, in Hindu mythology and elsewhere, find it hard enough to watch
their men replace them with women who replicate them (often in the fonn
they had when they were young), Vasavadattain the Pliydarshika must lit-
erally watch her role usurped by her younger understudy.
Who is stagingthe drama?Who is in control? We might make a dis-
tinction between active dreams and passive nightmares, conscious and
unconscious tricksters.The active masqueradersare the manipulators,like
Queen Vasavadattaat first both in Ratnavali and in Pniyadarshika,and like
Udayana later in that play, while the passive, unconscious masqueraders
would include bewitched and possessed charactersin myths, but also people
who discover that, without willingit, they have been masqueradingas them-
selves, like Vasavadattalater in the Ratnaali. Yet even (or especially) the
active masqueraders,of both genders, tend to get caught up in their own
tricks and discover a frame outside (or inside) the one that they themselves
construct to impersonatesomeone else, a frame in which that someone else
may be impersonatingthem, or they themselves may unknowinglybe imper-
sonatingthemselves. This is what happens to both Udayanaand Vasavadatta.
Readersfamiliarwith opera will by now have been reminded of the
plot of TheMarriageof Figaro, both in Beaumarchais'splay and in Da Ponte's
libretto for Mozarts opera. The Countess Rosina masqueradesas her maid,
Susanna,and the Count Almavivamakes love to Rosina-as-Susanna,mistak-
ing her for Susanna.TheMarrige of Figaro does not followthe Indianplays
to the final step, in which the rejected noblewomanactuallymasqueradesas
herself;Rosina wears Susanna'scloak, not her own, to fool Almaviva.But in
the light of the Indian materialswe can see that the final step is implicit in
the extant scenario of the Mozartopera, too: by masqueradingas Susanna,
Rosinais impersonatingthe woman that Almavivaloves, the woman that she
once was and wishes to be again-herself.24

Gender as Theater,
Or, Call Me Rosalind

In ancient India, women often played the parts of men, as we saw

in the play within Harsha'ssecond play. Within the frame, this situation

110
Wendy Doniger

involves not only a switch-back impersonation (a double-back) but a dou-

ble change of gender, a double-cross-dress or trans-transsexual
masquerade, in which Udayana impersonated himself, and this was fur-
ther complicated when the play was produced by a troop of women. In The
Marriage of Figaro, too, a female singer impersonates a young man who
disguises himself as a woman. And in the plays of Shakespeare, as in some
early operas, men played the parts of women, so that when such a char-
acter masqueraded as a man, a man was playing a woman playing a man.
Shakespeare explicitly acknowledged the reinforcement of the two paral-
lel frames on several occasions,25 and Shakespearean audiences were
clearly aware that men-preferably young boys whose voices had not yet
changed-were playing the parts of women-sometimes the parts of
women playing men. Yet they suspended that awareness, or, rather, half-
suspended it. Tom Stoppard'sfilm Shakespeare in Love adds yet another
twist to the spiral: a girl (Gwyneth Paltrow) plays a boy playing a boy
(Romeo) and then playing a girl (Juliet), the final twist inspiring Shake-
speare with the idea for Twelfth Night (in which a boy actor played a girl
playing a boy); it might better have inspired the counterpart to that play,
As YouLike It (where that final boy doubles back to play a girl). Here are
the bare bones of that plot:

Orlando and Rosalind have fallen in love, but Rosalind dis-

guises herself as a boy, Ganymede, ostensibly in order to
avoid being raped or otherwise attacked if it is known that
she is a mere woman, and also to escape from a malevo-
lent ruler. In the Forest of Arden, Ganymede encounters
Orlando, for whom she openly "pretends"to be Rosalind,
in order, she says, to dissuade Orlando from the love of
women in general and the love of Rosalind in particular-
all the while, of course, using her wit and charm to make
him fall deeper and deeper in love with "her"in her male
persona. As Ganymede she also inadvertently attracts the
love of a shepherd girl, Phoebe, whom she tries in vain to
dissuade and to encourage to marry the shepherd boy, Sil-
vius, who loves her. In the end, Rosalind reveals herself
and marries Orlando, and Phoebe marries Silvius.

111
The Kenyon Review

When Orlando tells Rosalind-as-Ganymede of his love for Rosalind, she

promises to cure him of his love, "if you would but call me Rosalind and
come every day to my cote and woo me." And when he says, "Withall my
heart, good youth," she reminds him, "Nay,you must call me Rosalind."
(3.2.415-421). But Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalindis not the same
person as Rosalind tout court; Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalindis more
daring, more playful, more flirtatious, more confident, emboldened both
by the double mask and by the level of masculinity embedded in the third
personality, able to say things to Orlando that she was not able to say to
him when she met him as Rosalind.
Rosalind at the start is fond of word games (she puns on "hem"
and "him,"joking about getting Orlando out of her system), but she plays
them only with Celia. Face-to-face with Orlando, Rosalind-as-Rosalindis
almost as tongue-tied as he is; their romance goes nowhere at all. Orlando,
too, can express his love for Rosalind-as-Rosalindonly in her absence and
in poems so bad that they would have failed even Orwell'stest for good bad
poetry.26 Rosalind herself mocks the terrible verses, though not to
Orlando's face (3.2). Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind,however, can
play her witty word games on Orlando himself, and draw him out of his
own paralyzing love-sickness. Near the the end of the play (5.2 and 5.4),
in three rhetorically parallel passages, Rosalind-as-Ganymede uses her
supple verbal devices to trick Orlando into admitting his love for both Ros-
alind-as-Ganymede and Rosalind-as-Rosalind, expressing in words his
subconscious realization that Ganymede is, in fact, Rosalind. The fun is in
the joke, but who is in on the joke, and who is its butt? The audience and
Rosalind are in on the joke against Phoebe and Orlando, but the audience
alone is in on yet another joke,2"and this time Rosalind is the butt: for the
Elizabethan audience alone knew that she was being played by a male
actor.
The plot parallels between As YouLike It and Shakespeare'slater
tragedy,King Lear, are striking. Shakespeare acknowledges in As YouLike
It that the tale of the man with the three sons is an "old story," but so is
the substance of the plot: three competing sisters flanked by two warring
half-brothers in Lear, and three competing brothers (sons of Rowland de
Boys: Orlando, Jacques, and Oliver) flanked by two warringbrothers (the
Dukes Senior and Frederick) and two loving "sisters" (the cousins Celia
and Rosalind) in As YouLike It. In both plays, the protagonists flee from

112
Wendy Doniger

the court to the forest, from culture to nature, where they discover human
nature, what people are really like-but that nature is Hobbesian in Lear,
Rousseauvian in As YouLike It. They uncover the truth about themselves
througha series of transfornations and masquerades.In the tragedy,human
nature seems polite enough at court but the forest reveals how brutal it truly
is. In the comedy, it is the court that is brutal,while the forest brings out a
kindness and camaraderie.Orlandosays, "Ithought that all things had been
savage here," and is pleasantly surprised.Duke senior boasts (2.1) that the
winds that bite him "feelinglypersuade me what I am." If the true self is the
self discoveredin the forest, then all of the charactersare reallyforest people
who usually pretend to be courtiersand now pretend to be forestpeople, like
MarieAntoinette in her petit trianon; they are not real foresters.The firsthalf
of As YouLike It is Lear-like in its human darkness and bleakness; the sec-
ond half is pure carnival, mocking its own too-easy resolutions, its
unbelievable conversions of all the villains from evil to good. Arden is the
place of magic, the other world,as the forest is in Indiandramas,too, a genre
and place that one Indologistsaw as "comparableto the more idyllic come-
dies of Shakespeare,and ... surely not farfrom the Forestof Arden."28 In this
world, in which evil can instantly be transformedto good, female can easily
be transformedto male, and back again.
AngelaCarter'sThe Passion of New Eve invokes Rosalindwhen Eve
(a transsexual transvestite,formerlya man, now a woman wearing a man's
costume) looks in the mirrorand sees
the transformationthat an endless series of reflections showed me was a
double drg.... It seemed at firstglance, I had become my old self again
in the inverted world of the mirrors.But this masqueradewas more than
skin deep. Under the mask of maleness I wore another mask of femaleness
but a mask that now I would never be able to remove, no matter how hard
I tried, although I was a boy disguisedas a girl and now disguised as a boy
again,like Rosalindin ElizabethArden.29

Makeupbecomes a mask that becomes a face, and Eve in Eden becomes Ros-
alind in (The Forest of / Elizabeth) Arden. As Garber remarks, "'Rosalind'
becomes here a sign word for that reflectingmirror,that infinite regress of
representation,of which the transvestite (always, in one sense, 'in double
drag')is a powerfuland inescapablereminder."30 That infiniteregressof being
"in Drag,in Drag,"as the New Yorklimes headline proclaimedin reviewing
the 1995 musical Victor/Victoia, thus operates both on and off the stage.

113
The KenyonReview
Appointnwnt in Samsara

The inexorable drive toward self-impersonation, the concept of a self

that cannot be escaped even by people who try to be someone else, flows
like a read thread through many of these stories. It is well expressed in an
Orientalist parable based on an ancient Arab tale (though one not
included in the Nights),3"a tale that was retold by Somerset Maughamin
his play Sheppey (1933) and cited, a year later, by John O'Harain a novel
to which he gave the title, Appointment in Samarra. The story goes like
this:

[Death speaks:] There was a merchant in Baghdad who

sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little
while the servant came back, white and trembling, and
said, Master,just now when I was in the marketplace I was
jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw
it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made
a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will
ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to
Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant
lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug
his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop
he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-
place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came
to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture
to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was
not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of sur-
prise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad,for I had an
appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

The phrase, "Appointmentin Samarra,"has come to signify the inevitabil-

ity of death, but there are also other appointments from which we flee in
vain, other selves from which we try, futilely, to escape as Alice tried to get
out of the Looking-Glasshouse, only to find that every path that seemed
to lead out into the garden, in fact brought her back into the door of the
house.
In our stories, this particular brand of fatalism argues that the

114
Wendy Doniger

hope of getting away from oneself is always doomed to failure. Oedipus

learned this lesson the hard way: the prediction about his mother and
father made him run away ... to his mother and father. These stories tell
us not merely that we can't run away from some impersonal fate, some
malevolent gods, some old ladies snipping threads up in Zeus's heaven or
a veiled woman who makes a sign to us across a crowded marketplace, but
that we cannot run away from ourselves, from the people we are now; we
cannot become someone else. When we have a chance to pretend, to
become someone else, we still end up as the selves we were, reinventing
the same wheel-the wheel that is the metaphor that Hindus and Bud-
dhists use for the process of reincarnation, the cycle of sarnsara. This
relentless wheel rolls, juggernautlike, over the hopes held out by the cur-
rent trend of reinvention, plastic surgery, therapy, self-help programs,
twelve-step programs, change your nose, transform your life, get a life.
These less optimistic texts, by contrast, do not necessarily imply that no
one can ever change; people try, and some succeed, all the time in these
tales and in real life. But there is a deep, strong undercurrent pulling
against it, and you cannot step twice into that same river. As F. Scott
Fitzgerald says at the end of The Great Gatsby, "So we beat on, boats
against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."
There are, however, several positive variants of the myth of self-
imitation that challenge the fatalism of the appointment in samsara:
(1) The first piece of good news is that each of us is already a lot
of people, that we have all these people inside us. And so, when, failing to
be the other person we hoped to change into, we return to our default posi-
tion, we find a different form of ourself, a different one of our many selves.
We are indeed imprisoned in our self, but it is a very big prison. When we
put on a mask we have a choice, like Lon Chaney, of a thousand faces, and
in a very real sense they are all our own. There are limits: we cannot, per-
haps, choose to be Einstein or Marilyn Monroe. There are people who
believe we can only choose to be Jekyll or Hyde, but I think there is a lit-
tle more wiggle room in there.
(2) The second variantof the good news is that the mask may prove
to be more real than the face, the surface more real than the depth. Some
stories locate another, more precious self in the mask itself. William Butler
Yeats may have had such stories in mind when he wrote, "There is always
a living face behind the mask.... I think that all happiness depends on the

115
The Kenyon Review

energy to assume the mask of some other self; that alljoyous or creative life
is a rebirth as something not oneself, something which has no memory and
is created in a moment and perpetually renewed."32The postmodem exal-
tation of the copy over the supposed originalhad already found a delightful
expression in Oscar Wilde, who often played upon the paradoxical dou-
bling-backof appearance and reality (as in the case of Emest, the man who
meant to lie but accidentally told the truth). Lord Henry, in the Picture of
Darian Gray, remarks, "It is only shallow people who do not judge by
appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
In other words, things are the way they seem, only more so (or, as the case
may be, less so). This insight was turned on its head by a woman in a novel
by Peter de Vries. When the narratorremarks to her that a particularman
"has a lot more depth," she replies, "Only on the surface. Deep down, he's
shallow."33Later,another character in the de Vries book expands upon this
theme. When one person remarks,"Hubertthfinkseverything is affectation;
he takes nothing at face value," another replies, "Butnothing can be taken
at face value. Least of all pure naturalness. That's the ultimate affectation.
It's the attempt to cover our masks with a bare face."34De Vries and Wilde
may have been inspired by Nietzsche, who remarked that all that is deep
loves the mask, needs a mask,35and who praised the Greeks for knowing
how to "stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore
appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of
appearance. Those Greeks were superficial-out of profudity."36 Lord
Henry'sbon mot introduces the premise that the surface-in this case, the
mask-is the real image, the face beneath it the false image. On the inter-
personal level, this tells us that the normal social face is a mask; the mask
over that face is the truth beneath the mask.
(3) The passage in Nietzsche opens up another permutation:
"Deception, far from distorting truth, operates a double negation by ...
concealing the secret that there is no secret."37This is a third variant, a
third bit of good news: sometimes the mask turns out to have been the
same as the face all along. Others, too, have capitalized upon this counter-
intuitive intuition. Groucho Marx, in Duck Soup, remarked, "Chicolini
may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: he
is an idiot." Sir Rudolf Bing (tyrannical director of the MetropolitanOpera
for many years) stole this line when he remarked of himself, "Don't be
misled; behind that cold, austere, severe exterior, there beats a heart of

116
Wendy Doniger

stone."38There are particular times when conscious self-imitation comes

in very handy indeed. A person will often imitate herself after a trauma
which is like a death, when she feels as if she had become a different per-
son and tries to keep going by pretending to be who she was, through a
kind of Stanislavski approach, method-acting, trying to behave as she
knows she used to behave, until she can remember how it actually feels to
be who she is. This works for stage-acting, too. A Balinese dancer who
works with masks once told me that the face inside the mask must be the
same as the mask; the dancer has to generate the emotion within himself
and project it through the mask. A mask must reveal the face concealed
by the face of the mask.
(4) If the normal face is already a mask (good news [21), then the
mask may free the true self, lure it out of its repression, create a safe-house
for it to live in; this is good news four. The fantasy is of the right to speak
freely, to spill our secrets, to reveal our secret selves. There is a South
Indian saying that you can say anything when you wear a mask over your
face. The attendant who demonstrates oxygen masks on airplanes before
takeoff used to promise, "An attendant will tell you when it is safe to take
off your mask"-but no one ever does. For most of us, it is never really
safe-or true to take off the mask. We prefer, rather, merely to glimpse
the reality in the mask, in the myth. The particularlyhidden or repressed
or subversive parts of the self may emerge most easily in a masquerade,
which makes accessible parts of experience that are not always available.
This is what Henry Abramovitch has called "the transformationof identity
through disguise-how we must appear as we are not, in order to become
more truly who we are.... [The appropriate disguises] allow surface to
touch depth."39We wear a mask because we feel vulnerable, and, para-
doxically, want to attract the one person who will love us without our
mask; this is the double bind. We project our best self outside of ourself,
trying to present to the world a better self. Upwardhypocrisy can be a very
good thing. We all need masks; if we always tried always to be one single
self, the world would grind to a halt.
(5) But what happens when the mask reveals an unconscious
truth? Then to take off the mask might be to get further from the truth,
not nearer. Sometimes the mask is more of the truth than the truth,
because it covers up the conscious lie and reveals the unconscious lie. But
when you think you're lying you're actually revealing something, too. The

117
The Kenyon Review

mask also tells the truth, and the confession does actually peel away one
layer.What if that false face were to become the real mask? This is the fifth
piece of good news, the hope that wearing a mask can change you, not into
the mask but into a face that has been transformed by the experience of
wearing a mask. A man in Kobo Abe's novel, The Face of Another, forced
to wear a handsome mask over his hideously deformed face, says: "I
prayed for the fairy-tale miracle of awakening one morning to find the
mask stuck firmly on my face, to discover it had become my real face....
But the miracle, of course, did not happen."40It does happen, however, in
a whimsical story by Max Beerbohm, "The Happy Hypocrite," which
argues that the face, not the mask, undergoes a transformation to make
the mask coincide with the face. Here is the plot:

Lord George Hell was wicked. He fell in love with a good

woman named Jenny Mere, but she said, "I can never be
your wife. I can never be the wife of any man whose face
is not saintly. Yourface, my Lord, mirrors, it may be, true
love for me, but it is even as a mirrorlong tarnished by the
reflexion of this world'svanity... .That man, whose face is
wonderful as are the faces of the saints, to him I will give
my true love." Lord Hell went to Mr. Aeneas, the mask-
maker, who gave him the mask of a saint - "spiritual,yet
handsome." He had it altered a bit so that it was also "a
mirror of true love . . . the mask of a saint who loves
dearly."He determined to wear it for the rest of his life. But
his old girlfriend,La Gambogi, still recognized him imme-
diately, and called him by name, saying, "Icannot let go so
handsome a lover ... Why, you never looked so lovingly at
me in all your life!" He pretended not to know her. Jenny
Mere instantly loved him. He told her his name was
George Heaven. They married and lived together in a cot-
tage in the woods. After a month, La Gambogi found them.
She said to him, "Yourwife's mask is even better than
yours." She begged him, in front of the astonished and
uncomprehending Jenny, to unmask just once for her, to
show her the dear face she had so often caressed, the lips
that were dear to her. When he refused, she clawed at his

118
Wendy Doniger

face; the mask came off, and his face was revealed: it was,
line for line, feature for feature, the same as his mask had
been, a saint'sface. At first he thought he must still have his
formerface, and he told Jenny to forgethim, but she said, "I
am bewilderedby your strangewords. Why did you woo me
under a mask? And why do you imagine I could love you
less dearly, seeing your own face?" He looked into her eyes
and saw in them the reflection of his own face. He was fHlled
with joy and wonder.She said, "Kissme with your own lips."

Lord Heaven'smisgivings,at the sight of his masked reflection in a stream,

express the paradox of self-imitation:
A greatshamefilledhim thathe shouldso cheatthe girlhe loved.Behind
that fairmask there wouldstill be the evil face that had repelledher.
Couldhe be so base as to decoy her into love of that most ingenious
deception?He was filledwitha greatpity forher,witha hatredof him-
self.Andyet, he argued,wasthe maskindeeda meantrick?Surelyit was
a secretsymbolof his truerepentanceandof his truelove.Hisfacewas
evil,becausehis life had been evil. He had seen a graciousgirland of a
suddenhis verysoulhadchanged.Hisfacealonewasthe sameas it had
been.It wasnotjust thathis faceshouldbe evil Still.41

This is the face-liftrationale:my face is not my real face; my real face is the
face in my high school graduationphoto; this surgery is removing the lie of
my old face and replacingit with the truth of my young face. And indeed the
mask of Lord Hell-as-Heavenhas some of the unfortunate side effects of
botox: "The mask could not smile, of course. It was made for a mirrorof true
love, and it was grave and immobile."42There is a danger here, of course.
One must distinguish between putting on a mask of what you already are
and becoming a mask you do not intend to become.4 The belief that by
wearinga mask we may become the mask is a significantmodificationof the
more simplistic paradigmwith which some variants of the tale operate. It is
the only one of our five optimistic paradigmsthat actually allows for inten-
tional self-transformation.

TheMask beneaththe Mask

What does it all mean? We must seek the answer in our texts. We
assume that masquerades lie, and they often do, at least on the surface.

119
The Kenyon Review

Often they tell a deeper truth, that masquerading as yourself reaffirmsan

enduring self (or selves) inside you, that does not change even if your mas-
querades, intentional or helpless, make you look different to others. Some
stories begin and end with the relatively simple assumption that the mask
is false and that the face underneath it is real. Never venturing beyond this
first level, these stories give us a happy ending: you find the true self, take
off the mask, and all ends well. The "real"self at the core is revealed when
the many superficial layers are torn away. This is the conventional recog-
nition story. In C. S. Lewis's book for children, The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader, the boy Eustace commits a series of sins and becomes a dragon,
a condition he desperately wants to escape from. Aslan, the lion who is
God, takes him to a cool pool and tells him to undress. He finds he can
peel the skin off, and is delighted until he sees that he still has another
dragon skin under that, and another and another. Then Aslan says, "You
will have to let me undress you," and he does it and it hurts, this time, but
Eustace gets down to his own skin again.4"And when Salome strips away
the last veil, you see the real Salome, the naked Salome.
Some stories reject the ultimate reality either of the mask or of the
face beneath it and move on to other insights. We see in them an implicit
belief in a self that is revealed and concealed in complex ways, but we also
see glimpses of dual and, occasionally, multiple "authentic"selves. These
selves are manipulated by, but also manipulate, self-imitation and an infi-
nite regress of self-references, all connected, all different, each inspiring a
different piece of the total narrative puzzle.
Many of our stories seem to assume a mere duality of selves: self
versus mask. Some of these dualities are mutual referents of one another,
such as two genders, or nature/art, nature/culture, yin and yang; others,
however, break open the single theme of identity to reveal an infinite pos-
sibility of variations. The polarized variants are fairly easy to play with:
Jekyll to Hyde, virgin to whore. It may be, as many have argued, that it is
naturalfor humanbeingsto think in twos,45 but not all importantthings
actually come in twos. Many of our stories deconstruct the toggle-switch
model of the self, or the cybernetic on-or-off that makes life seem like a
game of Ping-Pong.Some reveal or suggest a less dualistic, more multiple
model of the self. The trickier ones are the multiple selves, the modified
selves, the combined selves. VirginiaWoolf, in Orlando (a name that con-
jures up the layers of gender reversals in As YouLike It), wrote of the role

120
Wendy Doniger

of the name in discerning one particular self among many selves:

[Ilf there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the
mind at once, how many different people are there not-Heaven help
us-all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?
Some say two thousand and fifty-two. . . . Hence the astonishing
changes we see in our friends. But . . . the selves of which we are built
up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, have
attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of
their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there
is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room
with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there, another if
you can promise it a glass of wine-and so on; for everybody can mul-
tiply from his own experience the difficult terms which his different
selves have made with him-and some are too wildly ridiculous to be
mentioned in print at a.... [Sometimes], for some unaccountable rea-
son, the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has the power to
desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some people call
the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we have it in
us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self,
which amalgamates and controls them all.46

Since we really do have all these masks, personae, selves, within us, how
foolish we are to let "Captainself' lock them all up; how foolish we are to
tell lies in order to preserve the one mask that we think is who we really
are, and/or who we should be perceived as.
Robert J. Lifton, in The Protean Self, posits a multiplicity of selves
within us that leads us to identify with other selves that transcend us,
selves outside us, so that we are doubly not one, inside (a multitude) and
outside (connected to a multitude).47The protean self, moreover, "can
draw images from far places and render them its own 'memories."'8 So
you can steal memories from other places and make them your own, as
the villains do in science fiction films. The stories teach us that even when
we seem to meet the same self again and again, dovetailed in among the
alternating layers of masks, like the filling in a mille-feuille or a napoleon,
it is not the same self. Even the dualistic toggle, if it happens more than
once, destabilizes the dualistic paradigm. In As You Like It, Rosalind
plucks out one of her selves as Rosalind, and then another as Rosalind-as-
Ganymede-as-Rosalind. All the selves are you, but not all selves are
created equal, and you may come back to the same line on a point farther
on. So the trick is to convert the dualistic paradigm into the open-ended,
multiple kind, by decentering the conventions of the self, and this is what

121
The Kenyon Review

masquerading does. As Lacan wisely remarked, after a transformative

experience you cannot always go back to being who you were, and a great
part of your truth is recognized in the alternative state.49
The multiple selves are therefore stacked like a deck of cards: we
discover one by pushing aside another. There is always a stage, and a self,
beyond the one we inhabit at any minute. The selves nest within one
another like so many Chinese boxes or Russian dolls or Indian stories5"';
one by one we peel them off, only to discover that the innermost doll is
the same as the doll on the outside. Ultimately,we must admit that all the
masks are real; the person is not a coconut or a lobster or an oyster, with
an outer hulk that must be peeled to release the delicious heart, nor an
avocado, where the heart alone is inedible. Nor, as some have suggested,
is the self an onion, composed entirely of things you strip off, all edible, but
with no center.5'Onion-soul stories deconstruct the ideal, demonstrating
not only that you can't find the real self, but that it doesn't even exist. But
other myths tell us that the person is an artichoke-you can eat the
leaves, and the heart, too. (Though there always remains the choke, the
inedible parts of the personality, that cannot be wedged into any totalizing
system. The French say of a person with many lovers, "IIa un coeur d'ar-
tichaut."52)
As we go deeper and deeper through the alternating layers of
masks and faces, we never reach a core; the depilatory process is endless,
always shedding a self, as snakes slough their skins, a cross-cultural sym-
bol of rebirth. The infinite artichoke resonates in world mythology. In the
great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, the villains take the heroine, Drau-
padi, and drag her into the great assembly hall of the palace, where they
attempt to strip her; as they tear away each silk layer, another miracu-
lously appears beneath it, until there is a great pile, and they let her go."3
In contrast with the tale in which Salome strips down to the real Salome,
here, presumably, there are still potentially infinite layers of silk left to go;
you will never get to the naked Draupadi. Where lust revealed a single
Salome, chastity conceals multiple Draupadis.In this vision, the self is like
Draupadi; it is "tortoises all the way down"-the fabled retort of the
informant replying to a question about the foundation of the world (which,
he said, rests on a platform that rests on the back of a tortoise, which rests
on the back of another tortoise, ad infinitum).54Perhaps this tortoise is
being chased by Achilles and cannot escape from Zeno's (and Lewis Car-

122
Wendy Doniger

roll's55)paradox: every time you take off a mask you get halfway closer to
a true self, and another and another, but you never reach it because it does
not exist. In the hall of mirrors, it is selves all the way down. You never get
to the final tortoise, the last mirror in the hall of mirrors, what Russell
Hoban (in The Mouse and His Child) called "the last visible dog."
Yet you are always truer without the latest mask; every time you
take one off you have stripped away a conscious or unconscious lie. So
putting on the mask gets you closer to one self and farther from another,
and so does taking off the mask. Since every lie covers up a truth, a series
of masks passes through a series of lies and truths; perhaps, then, the best
bet is to wear as many as possible, and realize that you are wearing them,
and try to find out what each one conceals and reveals. If you just stand
there with your unconscious mask on your face, like egg in the saying, you
never learn anything about the selves.
What if it is appearances all the way down?-" What if both the
alternating selves and the masks are simply appearances? The stories with
the double twist bring you back to the position where you don't seem to
have a mask, which is where most people think they are all the time. But
the memory of the double journey out and in, unsettling the assumption
that you are either masked or unmasked, reminds you that you are never
unmasked, never at rest, and opens the possibility of multiple selves, the
infinite regress of infinite self-discovery.

Notes
1Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, in The Porable Oscar Wilde (New
York:Viking/Penguin,1946, 1976) 506. Joan Greenwood appeared in the 1952 film version
directed by Anthony Asquith.
2KunioYanagida,Japanese Folk Tales:A Revised Selection, trans. Fanny Hagin Mayer
(Taiwan:Asian Folklore and Social Life Monographs, 1972) 30-31.
3WendyDoniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 2000) 3-4.
4TerryEagleton, "Maybehe made it up," review of Nick Groom, The Forger'sShadow,
London Review of Books (6 June 2002), 3.
5Bhagavata Purana, with the commentary of Sridhara(Benares: Pandita Pustakalaya,
1972) 10.22.1-28; O'Flaherty,Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook, translatedfrom the Sanskrit
(Harmondsworth:Penguin Classics, 1975) 228-31.
6John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero
(Grand Rapids:William B. Eerdmans, 2002) 9.
7Walter Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy
(New York:Delta, 1975) 161.

123
The Kenyon Review
8Stuart Pratt Atkins, The Testament of Wertherin Poetry and Drama (Cambridge:
HarvardUP, 1949) 2.
9Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Anciern Greece and
India (Chicago: U Chicago P and U London P, 1999) 73-77; Pliny,Natural History, 160.
?0RolandBarthes, W. An Essay, trans. Richard Miller(New York:Farrar,1974), 208.
'Balzac, Sarrasine, in Barthes, ?7, 73.
12Balzac 194.
13Barthes 208.
14"Ichwill nicht diese halbgefiflltenMasken, / lieber die Puppe. Die ist voll."
'5For evidence that the bedtrick is cross-culturally attested, see Wendy Doniger, The
Bedtrick.
16This Harsha, who is not the Shriharsha who wrote the Naishadhiyacarita in the
twelfth century, is also known as Sri-Harsha,Harsha-Deva,or Harshavardhana.He is best
known from a long biographicalpoem, the Harsha-Charitra of Bana.
17DavidShulman, "Embracingthe Subject: Harsha's Play Within a Play"Journal of
Indian Philosophy 25 (1997): 79.
18tvampunah saagarikotskiptahrdayah sarvam eva saagarikaamayam preksyase.
Or, as David Shuiman translates it, "I am really Sagarika.For you, my lord, see her every-
where, your heart being entirely in her grip."Shulman 79.
19Shulman80.
20Shulman 83.
21Therewere, and are, also other traditions in which men play the parts of women.
22Kamasutra (The Kamasutra of Vatsayana, trans. Wendy Doniger and Sudhir
Kakar.London and New York:Oxford WorldClassics, 2002) 5.6.4.
23Doniger,The Bedtrick, 194.
24Thefilm, The Rules of th Ganm (1939), explicitly invokes The Marriage of Figaro
in various inversions, but with a tragic ending: both a man and a woman inadvertently
masquerade as their servants, and the man is killed by the maid's jealous husband, who
mistakes him for her lover.
25Antonyand Cleopatra 5.2; Hamlet 2.2; A Midsummer Night's Dream 1.2; epilogue
of As YouLike It; 7kelfth Night 1.4, 1.5. At the start of The Taming of the Shrew, a page is
dressed as a woman to trick a man.
26GeorgeOrWell,"Good Bad Books." In Shooting an Elephant, and Other Essays.
(New York:Harcourt Brace, 1950).
27Theaudience, as MarjorieGarber points out, is "very much in on the joke," though
this "didnot mitigate, but rather confirmed, the remanding of women back to their proper
places at the end of the play."MarjorieGarber,VestedInterests: Cross-Dressing and Cul-
turadAnxiety (New Yorkand London: Routledge, 1992) 72.
28A.L. Basham,The WonderThat WasIndia (London:Sidgwickand Jackson, 1954) 440.
29AngelaCarter,The Passion of New Eve (London:BloomsburyPublications,1993) 132.
30Garber76.
31RobertIrWin,The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Allan Lane, 1994) 195.
32WilliamButler Yeats,TheAutobiography of WilliamButler Yeats(New York:MacMil-
lan, 1938) 340-41.
33Peterde Vries, The Tunnel of Love (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949) 35. I'm grateful to
Robin Burgess for chasing down this quotation for me.
34deVries 114.

124
Wendy Doniger
35FriedrichNietzsche, BPnyd Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:Vintage Books, 1966) 40.
36FriedrichNietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman, (New York:Random
House, 1974) 38.
37Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New
Yorkand London: Routledge, 1991) 57.
380bituary for Rudolf Bing, New YorkTimes, 3 Sept. 1997: D25.
39HenryAbramovitch, "TlurningInside Out: Disguise as a Transition to Homecoming."
Paper presented in Chicago at the meetings of the Jung Association, 27 Aug. 1992: 1 and 7.
40KoboAbe, The Face of Another, trans. from Japanese [1966] by E. Dale Saunders
(Tokyo, New York,London: Kodansha International, 1992) 210.
4'Max Beerbohm, "The Happy Hypocrite," in Selected Prose, ed. Lord David Cecil
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970) 37-38.
42Beerbohm47.
43SlavojZizek, "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?" in The Sublime Object of Ide-
ology (London: Verso, 1989), 11-54, here 28-29.
44C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the DawnmReader (London: Puffin Books, 1965) 96.
45GeoffreyLloyd,Polarity and Analogy; Claude Levi-Strauss,Structural Anthropology.
46VirginiaWoolf,Orlando:A Biography (New York:HarcourtBrace, 1928) 200-01, 204.
47RobertJ. Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resiliene in an Age of Fragmentation
(New York:Basic Books, 1993) 226.
48Lifton230.
49Jacques Lacan, "The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze," in The Four Funda-
mental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:Norton, 1978) 76.
50Or, as often as not, Indian dolls, or Russian-American dolls. The sexual doll
metaphor came to life in the New YorkAYmes,Monday, 18 Jan. 1999, which reported on a
new set of nested dolls: President Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Hillary Clinton,
and a saxophone. In that order.
51Aprogram on British television, "SpittingImage,"during the Thatcher regime once
showed a Nancy Reagan puppet, who pulled off one mask after another until she had no
head at all.
52I'm grateful to Marina Warner for this fact; personal communication, London, 10
Oct. 2002.
53Mahabharata2.61.
5Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:Basic Books, 1973) 28-29.
55Lewis Carroll,"Whatthe Tortoise Said to Achilles,"Mind 4, 14 (April 1895), 278-80.
56FromLorraine Daston's remarks, Einstein Forum, 9 Dec. 1997.

Wendy Doniger [O'FlahertY]graduated f-rom Radcliffe College and received her Ph.D.
from Harvard University and her D.Phil.from Oxford University She is the Mircea Eli-
ade Distinguished Servie Professor of the History of Religions at the Universitty of
Chicago and the author of many books, most recently Splitting the Difference:Gender and
Myth in Ancient Greece and India and The Bedtrick:Tales of Sex and Masquerade.

125