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“There is no tongue that moves”
5
tradition.
3
However, although the present study is also
concerned with female voice,
language
and
rhetoric
, it focuses
on the ways in which woman’s rhetoric can be beneficial, even
curative (i.e. for human relationships), and thus can be seen as
a sort of magical medicine
—
just as Shakespeare associates
Paulina’s power of words with her power of healing.
4
This mysterious feminine power of speech is clearly
linked to other ancient, mythical male perceptions of women’s
power, most obviously the magic power of fearful, witch-like
figures like Medusa or the Theban Sphinx,
5
a power which
threatens men as individuals and also threatens the whole
“male order” of society. Leontes’s judgment here is as
incomprehensible to his wife, the faithful listener, as his
language, and yet this court scene, featuring the accusation of a
female subordinate by a male authority, is all too familiar in
3
My approach differs in several respects, though we both focus on the use of
“female speech” in Hermione’s trial scene and Paulina’s final resurrection of
the queen. However, while Enterline interprets Pauline’s “lie” in terms of
“the
effects
of language
—
particularly female and theatrical language
—
in
relation to the fugitive truth of the female body and the ‘old tale’ it tells”
(2000: 215)
—
I view it as a necessary strategy for a woman disturbed by the
force of male dominance and wishing to ensure the completion of a healing
process. Other essays discussing female rhetoric and the effects of language
include: Huston Diehl’s “‘Does not the stone rebuke me?’: The Pauline
Rebuke and Paulina’s Lawful Magic in
The Winter’s Tale
” (2008), which
looks at the theme of “mingling” by associating Paulina with the Biblical Paul
and the power of speech/rebuke; and Michael Taylor’s “Shakespeare’s ‘The
Winter’s Tale’: Speaking in the Freedom of Knowledge” (1972) which shows
how mature speakers like Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita can freely express
their knowledge, unlike the early Leontes and Polixenes, for whom
remaining “in perverse innocence” “is a sin” (1972: 51) that infects
language.
4
Though Patricia S. Gourlay’s “’O my most sacred lady’: Female Metaphor in
The Winter’s Tale
” (1975) also emphasizes the healing magic of the females
in the play, my analysis centers more on Paulina as a female Paracelsian
medical practitioner.
5
The latter, whose riddle Oedipus solved, is a hybrid creature: serpent-and-
bird with a woman’s face.