- Gohlke, Madelon. "'I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms."
- Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1980. 170-187.
Thesis: Gohlke's main purpose is to drive psychoanalytic discourse (about anything) in a feminist direction by redefining the assumed norms of the human psyche. For example, it's not really a norm for little girls to feel that they are deprived of something and experience penis envy. Or, in Gohlke's jargon-burdened terms:
Gayatri Spivak has lately been suggesting that what we need is something like a Copernican revolution: from the phallocentric formulation of femininity as absence to a gynocentric language of presence. If it makes sense that the male child should perceive his own sex as primary and difference as an inferior version of himself, then it makes as much sense that the little girl should also initially perceive her sex as primary. (183-184)Along the way to this supposed intellectual revolution, Gohlke has some brief comments on Macbeth, most of them to the effect that Macbeth is spiritually destroyed by striving to be the most macho man possible, violent and uncaring. In Gohlke's words: "Macbeth reads power in terms of a masculine mystique that has no room for maternal values, as if the conscious exclusion of these values would eliminate all conditions of dependence, making him in effect invulnerable" (176). But, "in this play, it is procreation rather than violence that confers power" (177). Thus Gohlke enlists Shakespeare on the side of gynocentrism.
Evaluation: What causes difficulty for me is sheer amazement that anyone has ever thought that penis envy is a norm of the human psyche; every little girl I've ever known has taken it as a given that girls rule and boys drool. I'm also amazed that Gohlke thinks it's a revolutionary act to say that Macbeth affirms feminine values.
Bottom Line: Nothing new about Macbeth.