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E
UR
A
MERICA
others
—
including the men that are closest to them
—
is
threatened. Healing is disguised as a form of deception in
The
Winter’s Tale
. Deception is never a negative strategy, a way of
defeating or taking advantage of others for the healer Paulina,
as it can be a form of art that transforms the living into that
which appears to be dead, or which “recreates” the appearance
of death. This art first covers (conceals), then separates (life
from death), and finally presents (new) life
—
the moment of
rebirth.
If Hermione’s (re)birth appears to be holy or divine as
well as magical, there perhaps is an apocalyptic revelation in
Shakespeare’s final scene here: women’s wit, though as
mysterious and uncontrollable as nature, can also heal as
powerfully as nature when it crosses the boundary set
arbitrarily by jealous male competitors.
IV. Conclusion
Shakespeare ends
The Winter’s Tale
with Paulina’s
resurrection of the “dead” Hermione, just as the author
resurrected the images of wise women
32
or women healers in
an era when the practice of medicine was controlled and
circumscribed by male physicians. In Shakespeare’s view, those
“professional” male physicians have failed to provide truly
effective remedies because their knowledge was mostly based
32
William Kerwin has pointed out that women’s acts of healing are generally
absent from the stage of Shakespearean London. He notes that in
An Index
of Characters in English Printed Drama to the Restoration
, there is “only 1
character under the rubric of ‘wise woman’ and 18 listed as ‘midwife,’
compared with 104 under ‘doctor’ and 60 under ‘physician’” (2005: 63).
Kerwin assumes that the absence of historical wise women “seems to be
another instance of the [Shakespearean] drama eliminating a part of early
modern women’s life from the stage” (242). However, in
A Winter’s Tale
Shakespeare seems to give his women healers an unusual degree of
authority and power.