The Price of Virtue

Portia's Crisis in The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

This essay explores Portia's arch in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice as being characterized by a crisis of identity. It proves how, over the course of the play, external pressure from her agents of socialization leads Portia to doubt her virtue and then compel her to prove it, all to no avail. The essay illustrates how the germination and evolution of Portia's doubt come to guide all her words and acts to fall neatly into psychoanalytic conceptions of maladaptive behaviour. Furthermore, it defines the impasse of Portia's pursuit of virtue as both an internal and societal constraint: an impasse within Portia herself, constrained by cognitive dissonance between virtuous behaviour and virtuous female behaviour (i.e. that which accords with the norms of patriarchal society); and an impasse amongst society--within and without the diegesis--constrained by its incapacity to perceive Portia's virtue outside her gender-role, in spite of the fact that her character is (arguably) the most prominent and intrinsic to the plot arch in The Merchant of Venice.