13 / 148
“There is no tongue that moves”
13
II. The Silenced vs. the Outspoken:
The “Tongue-tied” Queen and Tongue-freed
“Mankind Witch”
Indeed, Shakespeare presents in
The Winter’s Tale
two
contrasting historical images of early modern women healers:
the “tongue-tied” queen Hermione as a silenced and powerless
woman healer, and Paulina, a self-proclaimed “physician,” as a
wrathful, witch-like, threatening one (2.3.54). The humiliated
Hermione might embody a persecuted historical woman healer,
one who must be her family and society’s primary caretaker, as
shown in the scenes where she merely obeys her husband’s
commands and cares for the young child; however, she is
falsely accused due to the success of her powerful rhetoric,
even though it should have helped to maintain the friendship
between Leontes and Polixenes. On the other hand, the
witch-like healer Paulina can represent a historical woman
practitioner with her restorative powers, just like a magician-
artist figure who can transform base metals into gold.
At the beginning of
The Winter’s Tale
, Leontes’s Sicilian
court is overwhelmed with the language of illness, with
“infection,” “disease,” “sickness” and the madness of the king’s
sudden jealousy, his delusion that his wife has been unfaithful
to him, and the fatal effects of that madness on both his son,
Mamillius, and (apparently) his wife. Leontes’s charges that the
innocent queen is an “adulteress,” a “bed-server” and a
“traitor” in the same scene (2.3) are fantasies with no basis in
fact; his sending her to jail is a purely arbitrary act of the sort
we see in numerous cases of innocent, and perhaps also wise,
early modern women who were accused of witchcraft and
other sorts of “impurity.” In other words, Hermione’s trial is
solely the product of, in Paulina’s words, “[t]he anger of the
King” which was sparked by “the trespass of the Queen”
(2.2.62-63). This was a female
trespass
or “crossing,” an