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4
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I understand not” (3.2.76). His words seem absurd, irrational,
and incomprehensible to her. In fact she is at a linguistic as
well as moral impassé, as Leontes has wrongly accused her of
being morally impure and unchaste, and of having an unclean
body due to the effect of her words. The insulting words he
speaks to the “innocent”
2
Hermione certainly intensifies the
absurdity of his jealousy. In this scene, we may interpret
Leontes’s unjustified, even mad jealousy as being primarily
grounded in the war between the sexes, although he
rationalizes it as being based on the more tangible, traditional,
moral and “legal” issue of a wife’s chastity. More specifically,
what really vexes Leontes is his male anxiety about the
mysterious and persuasive power of women’s speech that
seems to transgress the boundary of his sovereignty.
Though a number of scholarly criticisms on
The Winter’s
Tale
center on female language, and though Shakespeare
explicitly tells us that Paulina delivers “words as medicinal as
true” (2.3.36), the investigation of woman’s voice in terms of
its therapeutic importance in the play has somehow been
neglected. Lynn Enterline, in her article, “’You speak a
language that I understand not’: the rhetoric of animation in
The Winter’s Tale
,” focuses on the analysis of the female
(embodied) voice and subjectivity within the Ovidian-Petrarchan
2
However, regarding Hermione’s innocence of adultery, Howard Felperin
asks “on what authority do we assume . . . that Hermione is in fact innocent
of Leontes’s suspicions in the opening act? Why do we take for granted, . . .
what can never be proved but only denied. . . ?” This gives us a contrasting
viewpoint and has led to speculation about the legal basis for determining
that a particular act is a crime. For Felperin, Hermione’s case is grounded in
Pauline Christianity: “We have proceeded on the ‘conventionalist’ grounds
delimited on the one side by Anglo-Saxon law (which presumes formal
innocence until guilt is proved) and on the other by Pauline Christianity
(which is based precisely on the evidence of things not seen)” (1990: 190).