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Sara Appel
English / Philosophy

Barbara Andrew, Mentor

A Whore in Waiting: Commodified Women and Failed Phallic Representation in Troilus and Cressida

As William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida opens, Helen is sleeping with “wanton Paris” in the Trojan camp, having been wrongfully “ravished” from the Greeks (prologue, lines 9-10). Yet the battle is not being fought to reclaim her honor. Helen represents, and her subsequent seizure threatens, a claim to masculine power and dominance for the camp which possesses her. Moreover, to remain “valuable” as the ultimate representation of social status, she must relinquish any claim that she may have to her own desires and drives. Thus the true struggle for power in Troilus and Cressida occurs not between the Greek and Trojan armies, but between men and women, threatening to unmask a fantasy in which woman functions only as the “phallus”—a signifier of masculine power—in a ruthlessly competitive game of king of the mountain. In this project, I discuss how socially sanctioned control of women exposes male anxieties concerning the possibility of female subjective assertion, and how the use of women to signify “phallic” power reveals cultural taboos. My analysis focuses on passages that highlight power struggles associated with the “phallic” trade economy, referencing theories from thinkers such as Marx, Luce Irigaray, Jaques Lacan, and Judith Butler.