Inferences on the Absence of Cupid in Venus and Adonis by Shakespeare

Inferences on the Absence of Cupid in Venus and Adonis

Shakespeare broke Gender norms in the epic poem, Venus and Adonis, although the omnipotent, androgynous narrator of the epic love poem introduces what the reader expects to be a male fantasy.  Adonis faces a Goddess who’s extroverted sexually and wants him.  Although Venus embodies the ideal female corporeal, she does not fit the typical feminine personality.  Venus can be perceived as an “aggressive” or assertive woman in light of traditional gender roles. Venus, who portrays herself as a sexual object does not overturn the common gender roles that society expects of women assuming that Venus would not have complete control over her chosen love object.  She also just desires instant sexual gratification.  In this epic poem, she does:  “…sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, / And like a bold-faced suitor ‘gins to woo [Adonis]” (Shakespeare 635, 5-6).  Typically, women are expected to desire more than just sexual gratification.  They are expected to desire friendship, companionship, something more than erotic love (altruistic, fatherly, or motherly).  

Adonis, likewise, fits the ideal physique for his gender.  He loves to hunt, and he would seem like he embodies the perfect heterosexual male.   However, he is weak in the field of battle: “Upon this promise did he raise his chin, / Like a divedapper peering through a wave / Who, being looked on, ducks as quickly in” (Shakespeare 637, 85-88).  So the typical hero archetype attributed to him goes contrary to heroic form.  In other English epics such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero has substantial strength and overcomes difficult tasks.  This is not so in Venus and Adonis or in The Tragedy of Coriolanus, where the soldier-hero is murdered. 

In Shakespeares’s day, relationships were traditionally initiated by the male.  Adonis does not, however, pursue Venus.  After he did not kiss her, Venus is unhappy. “’O puty,’ ‘gan she cry, ‘flint-hearted boy! / ‘Tis but a kiss I beg-why art thou coy?’” (Shakespeare 637, 95-96).  But Adonis desires mainly to hang out with his friends within the homosocial environment: in the end, Adonis appears to be a weak, uninterested, uncharismatic man who dies an unmanly death.  And despite being weak, he insists that, “I have been wooed as I entreat thee now / Even by the stern and direful god of war, / Whose sinewy neck in battle ne’er did bow / Who conquers where he comes in every jar” (Shakespeare 637, 97-99); the God of War, Mars, has influence over him.  Adonis claims to “favor reason” over “lust” (Shakespeare 653, 792).  Although, Adonis’ obssesion about his reputation with the God of War seems the most irrational of either Venus or himself despite his preference for reason in terms of normative gender roles. 

Shakespeare, exceptionally, does not overturn gender roles when it comes to male interest in war.  This results in tragedy because Venus’ aggression fails to protect Adonis, which flips the female role on its head.  The absence of Cupid can be said to lead to this tragedy, because if he had been present, he would have shot an arrow into Adonis, and Adonis would have fallen in love with Venus.  Then Adonis might have heeded her warnings from her premonition:

“…I thy death should fear;

And more than so, presenteth to mine eye

The picture of an angry chafing boar,

Under whose sharp fangs on his back doth lie

An image like thyself, all stained with gore,

Whose blood upon the fresh flowers being shed

Doth make them droop with grief, and hang the head” (Shakespeare 650, 660-6)

In this premonition it shows the weakness of Adonis: that he is incapable of killing a measly, smallish creature.  A stereotype of men, and expectation, really, of contemporary society (because of Nationalism) can be devolved as follows: men go to war or hunt and women do not (until recently).  This separation of spheres that Shakespeare breaks indicates that men are weak, also, and do not fare well all the time as expected.  The poem makes a subtle plea to the audience: are all men who cannot go to war, let alone hunt successfully, and succeed, undesirable?  Yet, Shakespeare says this is not so, because Venus claims she loves Adonis.  Regardless, he does not believe that she truly loves him—that her “love” for him is in fact an infatuation of some kind:

“If love have lent you twenty thousand tongues,

And every tongue more moving than your own,

Bewitching like the wanton mermaid’s song,

Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown;

For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear,

And will not let a false sound enter there” (Shakespeare 652, 775-80) 

Venus plays dead in order to kindle some kind of love from within Adonis: “And at his look she flatly falleth down, / For looks kills love, and love by looks reviveth…” (Shakespeare 646, 463-4).  Venus’ playing-dead trickery also sets up the reader for the real death of Adonis later on in the narrative.  In a way, Shakespeare uses this binary opposition—that of make-believe and that of real life.  The reader takes away this belief about love from the epic poem.  For a female lover, Venus, who is unrequited, she must evoke fantasies and delusions in Adonis if she will take him to bed.  In terms of gender reversal in terms of roles, typically the male dies instead of the female both in an earlier point in life (women live longer), and also, men sacrifice themselves in war for their significant other (as well as country).  The moral message of the epic poem, as indicated by the following stanza, suggests that idealized love can only be realized through death.  Only through the violent, physical touch can one snap the deluded Venus back into life:

“He wrings her nose, he strikers her on the cheeks,

He bends her fingers, holds her pulses hard;

He chafes her lips a thousand ways he seeks

To mend the hurt that his unkindness marred” (Shakespeare 646, 475-8).

Here, violence is shown to have a place in love, which is actually reflective of heteronormative sexuality; however, this is one of the few instances in which gender roles are not reversed. 

Cupid’s absence from the epic poem symbolizes the importance of true love rather than the necessity of a mythological figure, Cupid, to initiate it.  The “true love” described in the poem is initiated by Venus, the female, herself, in such a way that she is said to “conquer” Adonis: “Now quick desire hath caught the yielding prey, / And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth. / Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey” (Shakespeare 647, 547-8).  There they proceed to have sexual intercourse:

“And having felt the sweetness of the spoils, with blindfold fury she begins to forage. 

Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil,

And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage,

Planting oblivion, beating reason back,

Forgetting shame’s pure blush and honour’s wrack” (Shakespeare 648, 553-58). 

Were Cupid in the poem, Adonis would without a choice love Venus ‘till he dies at an old age, as wished for by Venus earlier on in the poem.  Shakespeare’s convenient omission of Cupid suggests a loss of power on behalf of Venus, who typically commands Cupid.  In terms of gender roles, this loss of power, according to the moral message of the play, suggests that women should not expect men to lay before them at an instant.  This may or not be a gender role reversal as it highly depends on the woman in question and her personality.

In terms of breaking gender norms, nature’s preference for either sex with egalitarianism in mind, and nature’s preference of humans over other animals in monotheism, nature prefers Venus.  Venus’ uncanny ability to communicate with animals and understand things that Adonis cannot, either in the form of promonitions, (which is a common motif in Shakespeare’s plays such as Julius Caesar, where Caesar’s wife has a vision that he will be murdered), compensates for her “natural” weakness as a female.  This power over nature for it to grant her clues has many symbolic meanings.  The grasping of her leg by the plant can indicate nature’s sensitivity to her; nature does not want her to grieve; or nature does not want her to prevent the death of Adonis, which is predestined: 

“And as she runs, the bushes in the way

Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face,

Some twine about her thigh to make her stay. 

She wildly breaketh from their strict embrace,

Like a milch doe whose swelling dugs do ache,

Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake” (Shakespeare 655, 871-6). 

Also, in that quote, the narrator calls Adonis a fawn, which is notably an animal: so Shakespeare’s diction makes use of the opposite of personification, or dehumanization.

            Adonis’ death reinforces the theme of gender reversal and another moral message: gender role reversals can lead to tragedy when a man ignores a loving woman’s advice.  Since Adonis has faulty reasoning, he goes to hunt the boar and then Venus finds him dead in a delusion: “If he be dead—O no, it cannot be,” (Shakespeare 656, 937).  The moral appears to be this: although the female lover may appear to have delusions, be weak, or seem stupid, she rightfully has them.  This, even though society seems to put pressure on the male, who stereotypically desires a sane, stable woman.  Venus later finds out that she had a delusion, not a vision of the future that proved correct, so events can prove that the delusional are not in fact delusional:

“O Jove,” quoth she, ‘how much a fool was I

To be of such a weak and silly mind

To wail his death who lives, and must not die

Till mutual overthrow of mortal kind!” (Shakespeare 658,1015-8). 

But in Venus’ delusion, it later proves that she was correct; also, Venus believes she can woo Adonis and does.  Again, likewise, Venus speaks with animals and they respond.  Adonis, though, in actuality, died, as she had feared:

“And in her haste unfortunately spies

The foul boar’s conquest on her fair delight;

Which seen, her eyes, as murdered with the view,

Like stars ashamed of day, themselves withdrew” (Shakespeare 658, 1029-32).

In the last line above, note that the narrator alludes to stars, entities that refer to destiny or fate, a common theme throughout with respect to the gender reversal between men and women: Adonis and Venus rejected heavenly-sanctioned gender roles, and the result was therefore fated to be tragic. 

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. “Venus and Adonis." The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford

Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen.  New York: Norton and Company, 2008, 635-662. Print.

Chapters 1-3 Summary of Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (1934 edition)

Chapters 1-3 Summary of Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (1934 edition)

On the nature of the stock market:

1)      Graham uses the metonymy of the stock market as not a “weighing machine,” but instead, as a “voting machine.”  As a voting machine, the market has “countless individuals [who] register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion” (Graham 23).

a.       It is this emotion that the stock analyst refers to as the irrational behavior of the stock market. 

2)      The sources of information on all companies that issue stocks/bonds can be simplified to the following list and are required to provide some basic information to the NYSE/Nasdaq/Other stock exchanges:

a.       Monthly statements (not all companies issue this and the following mentioned except the last one).

b.       Quarterly statements.

c.       Semiannual reports.

d.       Annual reports (all companies issue these).

3)      Most companies do not break the law when providing the facts so just assume that they will not.

4)      All predictions made by other reputable brokerage firms are done by solely (as well as some qualitative research) looking at the above reports made by companies to their stockholders.  Usually you can find this information on their website.

Important points made throughout the aforementioned chapters:

1)      Always consider investing with the intention to minimize loss and not to maximize profits.

2)      Any kind of analysis of a stock or bond will always need to be updated upon itself; in other words, do your analytic work of a stock frequently: do not count on a single analysis made, say, one month ago, since circumstances and environments change.

3)      There are two kinds of analysis: quantitative and qualitative.

a.       Quantitative data includes: “capitalization, earnings and dividends, assets and liabilities, and operating statistics

b.       Qualitative data includes: “the nature of the business; the relative position of the individual company in the industry; its physical, geographical, and operating characteristics; the character of the management; and finally, the outlook for the unit, for the industry, and for business in general” (Graham 34).

4)      In the many types of reports that companies provide to investors, you should paint a picture of the statistics of a company.  Look for this in a report:  

5)      Not all companies have their information reports made public, therefore, you should ask why you think they don’t?  Is the business a seasonal business?  Do they wish to conceal important information?

6)      If a stock answers to another group, such as OPEC/US. Government Trade Commission/any other institution, then it is important to do research on the reports that these groups provide on the company in question.   

7)      You might learn something that most other people do not know if you look for facts in hard-to-find locations.

8)      Graham’s interpretation of what it means to be a security analyst:

9)      Deciding upon which stock to invest in by looking rather than actual investing in a stock/bond can be more dangerous to the stock analyst than to the thorough analysis through quantitative and qualitative approaches.

10)   You must have standards of excellence when making a judgment on a stock/bond of which typically concerns itself with its “soundness and practicability.”

11)   Always ask the question: is the price of the security (bond/stock) too high or is it low compared to its intrinsic value?  Also take into account the irrational behavior of a stock market: try to predict what emotions people are having about it.

12)   While doing research on potential candidates for stocks, ask not about its name or brand nor dwell on its market price.  Instead, ask, “In what enterprise?” meaning: what industry does this security belong to?  Does the industry itself have a lot of potential?  Is it going to experience a boon or is it going downhill in terms of demand for its services?

  

General statistical tendencies in the stock/bond market:

1)      If a stock is worth more than its market price, it will correct itself; meaning, the stock will match its worth even though this worth might be at a different value from one moment to the next.