Women’s Corporeality and Slime in Shakespeare: Staging the Anthropocene

The entanglements of environment, misogyny, and fear of slime in Shakespeare’s text and time effectively foreshadow the Anthropocene. To understand this staging, it is necessary first to understand basic theories about slime. Amidst the dearth of such theories are proclamations that it is a transgressive, element-defying matter that generates fear and disgust, matter that threatens degeneration and dissolution even as it remains fundamental to the origin and continuity of life. A central insight of the new materialist theory concerns the agency of nonhuman things, and slime exhibits such agency in ways that evoke various kinds of fear. Jean-Paul Sartre offers interesting insights that become all the more valuable when — in the moment of theorizing slime — he genders it and imbues it with his fears and his version of misogyny. It is necessary to look at this sexist rendering rather than act as a Sartre apologist because so doing helps us to understand how slime is elemental to theorizing about both misogyny and ecophobia. In discussing the early modern period, the most convenient point of entry to these topics is the staging of vaginophobia.

Shakespeare's texts stage an early modern contempt for women that centers on bodily deliquescence, a contempt understood best through an interdisciplinary corporeal theory that engages with new materialist thinking.The misogyny of Shakespeare's texts clearly entangles myxophobia (a fear of slime) with issues of control and ecophobia.It is a misogyny borne out of a contempt for women's agencies (including sexual), a contempt that often finds its locus in the materialities of the vagina.It is a misogyny complicated by the highly charged ambivalences and genderings of slime.The environmental implications of this vaginophobic, myxophobic misogyny, particularly with regard to causes and effects on environmental crises, warrant consideration not only because contempt for the materiality of women's bodies is at root a contempt for Nature, but because the failure to understand and accept women's agency results in a kind of conflation between women and the environment that ultimately (and very ironically) figures women as themselves agents of climate change-agents who were often burned at the stake for it.
Since 1998, when I published the first article linking "Shakespeare" and "ecocriticism," the field of ecocritical Shakespeares has become flooded with scholarship.1For all of this, however, there is little in the way of scholarship linking early modern misogyny and climate.There are important links that need seeing.
It is clear that the early modern period pictured men and women very differently from each other in terms of their fluidity.Many scholars have written on this matter.Gail Kern Paster shows that in "early modern English culture's complex articulation of gender," it is "the weaker vessel as leaky vessel" (Paster 24) that is the dominant notion.Paster explains that this discourse inscribes women as leaky vessels by isolating one element of the female body's material expressiveness-its production of fluids-as excessive, hence either disturbing or shameful.It also characteristically links this liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency.In both formations, the issue is women's bodily self-control or, more precisely, the representation of a particular kind of uncontrol as a function of gender.(25) Clearly one of the issues here has to do with the imagined threat of "uncontrolled" female agency-verbal and sexual; but there is something else going on.Drawing on a treatise published in 1601 by essayist Pierre Charron (one of the disciples of Montaigne), Sophie Chiari offers a new materialist perspective that acknowledges the agency of nonhuman materials and the significance of their interactions with human things.Chiari maintains that "with their vapours, humours, and fluids, men and women's bodies … were comparable to small, independent weather systems.Human passions were liquids saturating the body and in need of control, a little like torrential rains threatening to flood the land" (Chiari 15).This is an insight with profound implications, since if bodies are weather systems writ small, then weather systems are bodies writ large.What this means is that weather systems (and, by implication, climate) are gendered.
In a monumental play such as King Lear, where strange weather takes center-stage, misogyny-growing, as it does, out of the vagina heredeserves attention.Lear, disgusted almost to the point of speechlessness, rants about what he sees as the most dangerous thing in women: Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above.But to the girdle do the gods inherit.Beneath is all the fiends'; there's hell, there's darkness, There's the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, Stench, consumption!Fie, fie, fie! Pah! pah ! (4.6.121-26)The disgust here is palpable, but the source is merely-if emphatically-gestured at.Lear does not mention the vagina as such.Thomas Laqueur discusses "the absence of a precise nomenclature for the female genitals" (Laqueur 96) but misses the obvious point, a point not lost on Michel Foucault in his discussion of sodomy.For Foucault, there is a "tactical polyvalence" (Foucault 100) made possible by the lack of specificity about the term, a point Gregory Bredbeck echoes in claiming that the term "sodomy" is "a way to encompass a multitude of sins with a minimum of signs" (Bredbeck 13).The lack of specificity also, however, prevents any of the "socially legitimate forms of visibility and intelligibility" (Cohen 169) that is enabled by precision and naming.Thus, for Laqueur, "the male and female seed cannot be imagined as sexually specific" (Laqueur 38), either in the body or outside of it (e.g., as menstrual blood).This is clearly a mistake in thinking, since the early modern period most definitely did define women's bodies in terms of the very superfluity that is menstrual blood-a superfluity that becomes a gendered sign of pollution.Menstrual blood, Paster explains, "was readily classifiable as superfluity or waste" (Paster 79).The "sulphurous pit," in Lear's ranting, is precisely this thing that won't be named, this "queynte" thing, as Chaucer called it (and the word "queynte" would in time become the word "cunt"), the vagina.
The disgust in King Lear grows not merely out of a staging of vagina dentate misogyny, a fear of loss of masculine control to the sexual volition of women, a fear that dates back to the ancient Greeks; rather, this disgust is a more profound existential worry that the materiality of the vagina engenders in him-a fear of envelopment, death, and dissolution, a fear that grows out of a kind of myxophobia.Lear is getting on in years, is anxious to put things in order and to secure his place, but everything is falling apart, and at the height of it all, he rants about the vagina, the site and source of so much that he fears.
Shakespeare indeed offers a great many descriptions of female genitalia, often implicitly and in relation to the environment, or, more specifically, to the land-whence, the "loathsome pit" of Titus Andronicus (2.3.193),2 the "sulphurous pit" of King Lear (4.6.125), and the "cold valley-fountain" of Sonnet 153 (l.4).The images are far from uniform, ranging from the "no thing" between a fair maid's legs of Hamlet (3.2.121)-perhaps out of which derives that "indistinguished space of woman's will" (King Lear 4.6.271)-to the "the dark and vicious place" in which Gloucester begot Edmund in King Lear (5.3.173).In the early modern male imagination, the vagina is a place of fluids and slimes that cause corruption, decay, and poisoning.
In her detailed and comprehensive Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England, Sara Read offers an expanded discussion of the various links between menstruation and notions of monstrosity in Shakespeare's day.Read notes that the early modern midwife Jane Sharp draws a linguistic parallel between the words "menstruous" and "monstrous" (see Sharp 215) and argues that this but the tip of a much larger obsession with vilifying the liquid materialities of women's bodies-materialities that center on and extend from the vagina.Lear is hardly peculiar in his time for conceptualizing the vagina as a place of stench and consumption.Indeed, for the time, it is a place of rot that provokes fear and disgust among men, with nothing less than biblical authority promoting the idea.3It is perhaps, therefore, something of an understatement to claim that "there was a degree of animosity towards the vagina in the early modern period" (see Alberti), if King Lear is any example.It is an animosity borne at least in part out of a fear of slime.
Slime in Shakespeare is complicated.Slime-historically genderedthreatens chaos.Because there is such a long history in patriarchal imaginations linking women's vaginas with leakiness and slime, it is urgent to address Shakespeare's vaginophobia within the context of what I have elsewhere called the slimic imagination (see Estók, "The Slimic").Elizabeth Grosz discusses men's fears of women's fluid corporeality as follows: The representation of female sexuality as an uncontainable flow, as seepage associated with what is unclean, coupled with the idea of female sexuality as a vessel, a container, a home empty of lacking in itself but fillable from the outside, has enabled men to associate women with infection, with disease, with the idea of festering putrefaction, no longer contained simply in female genitals but at any or all points of the female body.Here, the vagina is a place of slime, rot, and danger.Although Grosz is not talking in particular about the men in Shakespeare, her comments clearly apply in a general way.Sophie Chairi's more nuanced discussions of the particularities of Shakespeare's stagings reveal the utter complexity of slime in his work: it is at different times associated with filth, at times with death, and at times with fertility.Chiari's discussion of this widely divergent set of significations of slime within the broad context of "signs of wrongdoing" (Chiari 42) is compelling because of how it raises the sense of ambivalence toward the pollution and defilement that slime embodies and toward the subsequent threats it poses.
As Robert Rawdon Wilson explains in The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust, generally "slime suggests something … that has degenerated.Slime is disgusting because it is uncertain, a phase in the dissolution of existence" (Wilson 64).It is a threat of degeneration whose locus within patriarchies has been the vagina.Reviewing misogynist traditions expressed in Swift, Milton, and Sartre, Camille Paglia describes the "squalid womb-world" and "mucoid swamp" of "fishy female jellies" as the "road to Lear's hell" (Paglia 94).Notwithstanding her horrendous mixing of metaphors, Paglia has an important point: there is a long tradition associating women with slime, disgust, and corporeal menace and threat.The threat of degeneration that slime poses is perhaps a part of the ecophobic vision of the return of Nature (about which I wrote in The Ecophobia Hypothesis).It is a "vision of a Nature that will finally conquer humanity, reclaim all of the world, and remain long after we are gone" (66). 4And it is an inevitability that we will eventually die and decompose and become slime.
There are indeed undoubtedly solid evolutionary reasons for myxophobia; yet, myxophobia misunderstands the centrality of slime and its elemental importance to life -all life, including human.Kelly Hurley explains it thus: "the human body at [its] basic level (one imperceptible to the ordinary working of the senses) is a quasi-differentiated mass, pulsing and viscous."(Hurley 34) Even so, slime is the apogee of an imagined hostile agential elementality, one that infects and kills.It is an elemental agency that we imbue with volition.We picture slime as the consummate agent of infection and rot.As entangled with ecophobic fears of nonhuman biological agency as it is with nonbiotic agencies, slime is the unrecognized elemental intruder, the bordercrosser par excellence whose space is as ambivalent as can be."Slime," Shakespearean Dan Brayton reminds us, "occupies the conceptual space where the human imagination begins to grasp, tentatively and tenuously, the materiality of life itself" (Brayton 81).Slime refuses containment, inhabiting sites of disgust and horror as readily as it does sites of eroticism and joy.It is no less the harbinger of life and well-being than of death and disease.Even its elementality is ambivalent.It is the imagined unpredictable and uncontainable agency, however, that makes slime inherently political.It is the agency of slime that produces fear, and given the history of sexist renderings of slime being associated with women, a digression into Jean-Paul Sartre's theorizing on slime is very much in order here.
Sartre offers one of the few serious early theoretical investigations of slime, and his meditations get to the heart of slime's ambivalence.Sartre maintains that slime is matter "whose materiality must on principle remain non-meaningful" (Sartre 772).It is this principle that makes slime an utterly ambivalent site, and this ambivalence makes descriptions of the ecological transformations that took place in Chernobyl, returns in many videos shared on social media showing deer, badgers, wolves and bears walking peacefully through the city streets" (Marchesini 15).Yet, these images-like those in the 2007 film I Am Legend, as in the Animal Planet/Discovery Channel's joint production of the CGI series The Future is Wild (2003), Alan Weisman's 2007 book The World Without Us, the History Channel's Life After People (January 2008), and the National Geographic Channel's Aftermath: Population Zero (March 2008)-remind us of our unimportance.The opening epigraph of the Weisman book is itself horrifying: "Das Firmament blaut ewig, und die Erde / Wird lange fest steh'n und aufblüh'n im Lenz./ Du aber, Mensch, wie lange lebst denn du?" (The firmament is blue forever, and the Earth / Will long stand firm and bloom in spring./ But, man, how long will you live?) (Li-Tai-Po, Hans Bethge and Gustav Mahler, The Chinese Flute: Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth, Das Lied von der Erde, cited by Weisman, preliminary matter).slime both the matter of fascination to children and matter to which they "show repulsion" (772).Sartre's theoretical discussions of slime are unique, compelling, and informative: "Sliminess proper, considered in its isolated state," he argues, "will appear to us harmful in practice."(771) Slime is a threat.It threatens boundaries, and "the slimy appears as already the outline of a fusion of the world with myself" (773).It is a thoroughly ambiguous material: "immediately the slimy reveals itself as essentially ambiguous," and "nothing testifies more clearly to its ambiguous character as a 'substance between two states' than the slowness with which the slimy melts into itself."(774) Slime is a dangerous transcorporeal matter that threatens the very boundaries that it traverses.Hurley has explained that Nothing illustrates the Thing-ness of matter so admirably as slime.Nor can anything illustrate the Thing-ness of the human body so well as its sliminess, or propensity to become-slime.Slimy substances-excreta, sexual fluids, saliva, mucus-seep from the borders of the body, calling attention to the body's gross materiality.[T.H.] Huxley's description of protoplasm indicates that sliminess is the very essence of the body, and is not just exiled to its borders.Within an evolutionist narrative, human existence has its remote origins in the "primordial slime" from which all life was said to arise.(Hurley 4) Seeping from the borders but not exiled to them, at the core and origin of the body and yet a matter of profound disgust and horror, 5 slime is beyond our command, is not the water we so proudly control in our fountains and dams: 6 indeed, as Sartre so colorfully puts it, "slime is the agony of water.It presents itself as a phenomenon in the process of becoming; it does not have the permanence within change that water has but on the contrary represents an accomplished break in a change of state.This fixed instability in the slimy discourages possession" (Sartre 774).It can neither be possessed nor controlled, and, unsurprisingly, fears about slime are entangled with sexism and misogyny-each, to differing degrees, obsessed with power and control.
Lear's ranting starts to make more sense.His loss of power and control (to his daughters, no less) goes against all reason for him, is almost inexplicable-but everything must have a cause, and the cause here is in the unpredictability that for Lear defines women, an unpredictability whose vaginal locus is a slimy place of fluids and danger.Slime's capacity to conceptually shape-shift manifests powerfully in Shakespeare, where it signifies fertility and death, growth and decay, beauty and filth.Theorizing about slime is clearly not an easy matter, but what is surprising is how difficult it has been for people to see the gendering of slime.It seems so obvious.
Susanne Wedlich offers a more contemporary set of theories about slime than Sartre in her expansive 2019 analysis in Das Buch vom Schleim-translated into English as Slime: A Natural History (2021).Wedlich states at the very outset that in literary and scientific discussions of slime, stigmatization of entire groups of people has been common and that "a long and inglorious tradition has seen women forced into this category-as the apparently slimier sex" (Wedlich 9).Central to this stigmatization is a gendered disgust that historically resembles Lear's.Wedlich is clearly aware, however, of the ambivalence of this slimic disgust.The exploration on the topic from Martha Nussbaum's Washington Post article is compelling and well worth quoting at length here for how it encapsulates this ambivalence: Disgust for women's bodily fluids is fully compatible with sexual desire.Indeed, it often singles out women seen as promiscuous, the repositories of many men's fluids.[…] As the great philosopher Adam Smith observed about post-coital disgust, "When we have dined, we order the covers to be removed."Disgust for the female body is always tinged with anxiety, since the body symbolizes mortality.Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.Our president [Mr. Trump] seems to be especially gripped by disgust: for women's menstrual fluids, their bathroom breaks, the blood imagined streaming from their surgical incisions, even their flesh, if they are more than stick-thin.(Nussbaum) It is odd, then, that despite their breathtaking originality, Sartre's comments entirely ignore the gendering of slime.Wedlich cites Sarah Bakewell's theory that "Sartre, if we can judge by the vivid descriptions in his books, found sex a nightmarish process of struggling not to drown in slime and gloop" (Wedlich 24).Even so, Sartre's failure to understand the gendering of slime (in which he participated) has significantly hindered the very theorizing about slime he sought to promote.
Sartre's gender "silence" has not gone unnoticed, and he has been called down for not only missing the chance to comment upon gender but for himself articulating sexist positions in his comments on slime.Constance Mui, for instance, argues that there is "unmistakably sexist language in Sartre's discussions of the slimy and the hole, which he associates with the breast and the vagina, organs that are distinctively female" (Mui 31).Whether or not Sartre is, as Mui claims in an ad hominem attack, a "grumbling misogynist" (31), the language of Being and Nothingness is clearly damning.Hazel Barnes has put it well: "There can be no doubt that a full investigation of the linguistic codes in Sartre's writing would reveal him to be a man comfortably ensconced in a world of male dominance" (Barnes 341); but Barnes-like Margery Collins and Christine Pierce (whose pioneering "Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis" made the first claim about sexist language in Being and Nothingness), and like Mui also-suggests that the sexist contingencies of the language "are [weaknesses that are] at variance with the central philosophy" of the text itself (341).Barnes explains that "the sexism is there but is contingent, relevant to our appraisal of the writer but not essential to our judgment on the philosophy and its potential value as a support to feminism" (341).Mui similarly defends Sartrean philosophy as essentially antisexist (ironic because she does so at least in part through an ad hominem attack): "One cannot infer from the sexist analogies of slime and holes the claim that woman occupies an inferior ontological status.To do so would be to overlook the delightful irony in his ontology: in spite of his ill feelings toward woman, woman nevertheless prevails as a full-fledged consciousness in that ontology."(Mui 32, emphasis added to highlight the ad hominem comment) Yet, it is neither what he does in his personal life with women nor his anti-sexist postures in various parts of Being and Nothingness that is at issue here: what is at issue are his sexist comments about slime.The cherry-picking by scholars seeking to exonerate Sartre of sexism results in pure nonsense.It is sham scholarship to say "X pleases me but Y-even though it contradicts X-is irrelevant."To call Sartre's sexist comments "contingencies of language" is to miss the point entirely, rather like saying that rape and clitorectomies are contingencies of culture.Sadly, this kind of exoneration is what Sartre apologists argue for.Better to get on with it.Better to acknowledge that he clearly wants to support a feminist position but is equally clearly unable to do so.Slime "is like a leech sucking me" (Sartre 773), Sartre explains, adding that "it is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking" (776).Woman as leech?This is sexism enough, but he goes on.Having associated slime with "feminine sucking," he then associates it with "the possessed … dog" (776), "a poisonous possession" (776), a "snare" (776), "a sickly-sweet feminine revenge" (777), and a "sugary death" (777).Implicitly, these are all a part of the feminine sucking that slime is for him.The images Sartre uses in association with women-feminine sucking, possessed dog, revenge, and death-are deeply misogynistic.Perhaps it is possible to write off Lear's vaginophobia, just as it is possible to dismiss Sartre's sexism, as a contingency, but both actions are counter-productive and are clearly not in the interests of feminism-or the environment.
To fully understand the environmental implications of a slime-based sexism (or a myxophobic misogyny), understanding the long-history of slime's gendering (culminating in a giant such as Jean-Paul Sartre) is necessary, as is understanding the notion that bodies are weather systems writ small and that weather systems are bodies writ large; however, these understandings are not enough in themselves.What is required are analyses that bring slime into real discussions about the origins of our current environmental crises and of the realities that we have come to identify as the Anthropocene.Relatively speaking, slime has not been a focus of discussion in the Environmental Humanities.As Anthony Camara noted in 2014, the "topic has received virtually no attention from scholars outside of specialists in the field of mycology" (Camara 9).The observation still largely holds.To bring slime into real Anthropocene discussions, it is necessary to understand our resistances slime, for "as repellent as we find slime today, it has played a significant part in the history of science as the presumed link between the inanimate matter and life on Earth" (Wedlich 105).Slime is essential to everything living and to the decomposition that happens after life.Slime may very well be more a part of women's reality than men's, but the misogyny and ecophobia that this feeds7 requires sustained analysis.For the most part, slime has not been a part of happy imaginings of nature.The propensity to imagine and stage a vengeful, hostile, and consummately gendered nature indeed reaches a weird crescendo with slime, and slime becomes inseparable from this agential elementality that is imagined at core as being antagonistic and deadly.Yet, slime is, in fact, utterly indifferent-and gender-neutral.
Misogyny was in full bloom in the early modern period, as it was in Sartre's day and as it is perhaps indeed in our own, but the weather clearly didn't help things in the period of the Little Ice Age.The "misogynistic paranoia that fueled the European witch-hunts" (Paster 248) intensified under the skies of the period, and the articulations about links between witches and inclement weather were well pronounced.Macbeth's witches and their hurley-burley, their thunder, lightning, rain, and gloomy skies are but the tip of the ice-berg. 8The threat of degeneration, dissolution, and disorder embodied in the witches is part of a larger misogynistic imagination in which all women are threats of degeneration and dissolution, of a return to a feared and loathed nature.It is through the vagina of Shakespeare that the entanglements between misogyny and climate crises take form, finding expression through a staging of myxophobia and ecophobia that leaves a monarch dissolving into incoherence and an age descending into an unprecedented genocide against women.