Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (5 page)

Mandy Patinkin, the (“other”) male lead, remarked of Streisand’s per- formance, “I never thought of her as a girl. She was a guy, period.” On the other hand, he said Streisand-as-director was “demanding, yet flexible and compassionate, with the gentleness of a woman” (Considine, 344). On screen, Patinkin’s Avigdor is at first horrified, then attracted, as is the norm in contemporary cross-dressing films (compare James Garner’s King Marchand

in
Victor
/
Victoria
). “I should have known,” he says, as he admits his love for her. An active, learned, acceptably transgressive figure (as contrasted with the unliberated Hadass, who cooks, bakes, and smilingly serves the men their fa- vorite dishes), Yentl is the “new woman” of the eighties, a fit partner for a scholar—if she will only renounce her ambitions.

But the mechanism of substitution that is almost always a textual or dra- matic effect of the transvestite in literature is again in force. Streisand as Yentl declines to marry Avigdor because she wants to be a scholar more than she wants to be anyone’s wife. Happily, however, Avigdor’s first love Hadass is still around, now educated through her “romantic friendship” or homoerotic transferential reading experiences with “Anshel.” As the film ends, the trans- vestite “vanishes” and is dispersed; Avigdor and Hadass will marry and have a better—i.e., more modern and more equal—marriage than they would have if both had not fallen in love with “Anshel.” Yentl herself, now dressed like a woman, is on a boat going to America, where she can presumably live the life of a scholar without disguising her gender identity.

Thus, instead of
class
substituting for gender,
national culture
does so. The transvestite is a sign of the category crisis of the immigrant, between nations, forced out of one role that no longer fits (here, on the surface, because a woman can’t be a scholar; but not very far beneath the surface, because of poverty, anti-Semitism, and pogrom, Jewish as well as female) and into an- other role, that of a stranger in a strange land. Streisand’s own cultural iden- tity as a Jewish musical star, with unWASPy looks, a big nose, and a reputa- tion in the business for shrewdness (read, in the ethnic stereotype, “pushy”), redoubles this already doubled story. As a Jewish woman in a star category usually occupied by gentiles (despite—or because of—the fact that many male movie moguls were Jews) she is Yentl/Anshel in another sense as well, “masquerading” as a regular movie star when in fact she differs from them in an important way.

Critics of the film have wished that it could be more progressively femi- nist than it is, given its date. “It is not,” writes one observer, “so much a film about women’s right to an education as it is a personal statement by Streisand about her own determination to exert influence in a world still dominated by male power structures.”
4
The glee in certain quarters when Streisand was “stiffed” in the Oscar nominations, nominated for neither Best Actress nor Best Director (though she had campaigned for the attention of both Jewish and women voters in the Motion Picture Academy, and had earlier been given the Golden Globe award for Best Director), seemed to reinforce this male ambivalence about her career path, and to emphasize her insider-outsider po- sition. “The Oscar nominations are out and Barbra Streisand didn’t get any,”

gloated Johnny Carson on the
Tonight Show
. “Today she found out the true meaning of
The Big Chill
.”
5

Yet this analysis leaves out her Jewishness, which, in a plot line chosen presumably for its at least glancing relevance to her personal situation, is ex- tremely striking. The unusual spelling of Streisand’s first name, “Barbra” with- out the conventional third “a,” is a kind of marker of her implicitly defiant difference. Nor is it surprising that the expression of difference should mani- fest itself in a transvestite vehicle. In fact, that transvestism here should be not only a sign of itself, and its attendant anxieties, including pan-eroticism (both Avigdor and Hadass fall in love with “Anshel,” the transferential object of de- sire, who then strategically and inevitably subtracts “himself ”), but also of other contingent and contiguous category crises (oppression of Jews in East- ern Europe, and the need or desire to emigrate; oppression or at least a cer- tain “attitude” about female Jewish artists in Hollywood, and about women in the producer’s role—the role so often occupied by Jewish
men
) is a com- pelling illustration of what I take to be the power of the transvestite in litera- ture and culture. Streisand, who displaces both WASP women and Jewish men in her dual roles as star and producer, lobbied long and hard to get this particular property to work as a film. Her first public appearance on behalf of the film took place, perhaps significantly, at the annual United Jewish Appeal dinner in New York, where she was designated the UJA Man of the Year.

Yet on the surface Streisand’s
Yentl
presents itself not as a disruption but as a progress narrative, the story of a woman’s quest for education—in fact, the story of two women’s quests. For Hadass is another version of the “nor- malized” Yentl, a sympathetic figure who—like Celia in
As You Like It
— comes to conclusions about the gender dissymmetries of love and power very similar to those of the cross-dressed woman. According to this reading, Yentl learns something both
for
and
from
Hadass, just as Celia profits from Ros- alind’s cross-dressing, and Nerissa from Portia’s.
Yentl
thus becomes a story of female bonding or sisterhood, as well as a story of heterosexual love in con- flict with professional fulfillment. As we have noted, Streisand aggressively de- nied any
non
-heterosexual possibilities encrypted in her text (“It was like kiss- ing an arm”; “Howard! Anshel is taken”).

Although her film makes much of the threat of cutting implied in the tai- lor scene, Streisand herself refused the unkindest cut, the loss of her long hair. Despite the alacrity with which many film actresses shed their locks on the way to movie stardom (Bette Davis and Glenda Jackson as the bald Eliz- abeth I, Meryl Streep in
Sophie’s Choice
, Vanessa Redgrave with her scalp shaved as Fania Fenelon in
Playing for Time
), Streisand wore a wig, and cut
it
, not her own hair, when she transformed herself in the film’s key scene into

a boy. “As a boy,” reported a makeup artist who was on the scene, “she wore a short wig throughout the entire movie. There was no way she was going to part with those Medusa curls of hers. She loved her long hair” (Considine, 361–62).

The barb in “Medusa curls” is clear, whatever the makeup artist’s knowl- edge of Freud. Streisand was—in this view—a self-made phallic woman, and one who refused to decapitate or castrate herself. Freud, writing of “the
phal- lic
mother, of whom we are afraid,” notes that “the mythological creation, Medusa’s head, can be traced back to the same
motif
of fright at castration,”
6
and remarks upon the paradoxical empowerment of the terrifying spectacle:

The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect! For be- coming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.
7

Streisand herself offered a physiological interpretation of Orthodox Ju- daism’s division of labor between men and women. “I think it has to do with erections,” she said. “A man is so capable of feeling impotent that what makes him able to have an erection a lot of the time is the weakness of women” (Considine, 341). “It’s not law,” she said, “It’s bullshit. Men have used these things to put women in their place.” In view of these comments, it is perhaps not surprising that I. B. Singer failed to admire her interpretation of his tale. Singer spoke out angrily in the “Arts and Leisure” section of the Sunday
New York Times
, lamenting the addition of music to his story and singling out the star for blame: “My story was in no way material for a musical, certainly not the kind Miss Streisand has given us. Let me say: one cannot cover up with songs the shortcomings of the direction and acting.” Above all he criti-

cized the ending, which differed sharply from the original.

“Was going to America Miss Streisand’s idea of a happy ending for
Yentl
?” he asked with withering contempt. “What would Yentl have done in Ameri- ca? Worked in a sweatshop twelve hours a day when there is no time for learn- ing? Would she try to marry a salesman in New York, move to the Bronx or Brooklyn and rent an apartment with an icebox and dumbwaiter?” “Weren’t there enough yeshivas in Poland or in Lithuania where she could continue to study?”
8
The gravamen of his charge was that the film was too commercial— and that Streisand was no Yentl, lacking “her character, her ideals, her sacri- fice, her great passion for spiritual achievement.”

The Yentl of Singer’s 1984 blast at Streisand was, then, apparently a nice Jewish girl with a passion for Talmud, who needed, above all, a time and place for study—not the spoiled and materialistic Jewish Princess that he (and Johnny Carson) perceived in Streisand. But the Yentl of Singer’s 1962 story is something rather different: a figure of ambivalence, complex subjectivity, and erotic power, who resembles a scholarly version of Gautier’s Théodore as Ros- alind. In fact, Yentl as transvestite contravenes both Streisand’s reading of the story and Singer’s own. To see how that happens, and what its theoretical con- sequences may be for the progress narrative, it may be useful to return to the text of I. B. Singer’s story, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.”

In Singer’s story, Yentl, the daughter of a Jewish scholar, longs to study the Torah. Forbidden to do so by Jewish law, she studies secretly with her father until he dies. “She had proved so apt a pupil that her father used to say: ‘Yentl—you have the soul of a man.’ ‘So why was I born a woman?’” she asks, and he answers, “‘Even heaven makes mistakes.’” “There was no doubt about it,” says the narrator,

Yentl was unlike any of the girls in Yanev—tall, thin, bony, with small breasts and narrow hips. On Sabbath afternoons, when her father slept, she would dress up in his trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skull-cap, his velvet hat, and study her reflection in the mirror. She looked like a dark, handsome young man. There was even a slight down on her upper lip.
9

After her father’s death Yentl cuts her hair, dresses herself in her father’s clothes, and sets off for Lubin. She takes a new name, “Anshel,” after an uncle who had died, and joins up with a group of young students. (The replacement of Singer’s “uncle” with Streisand’s “brother” adds pathos—since the brother would have to have died in childhood—and also allows for the possibility of a ghostly “double” on the model of Viola’s brother Sebastian.) Befriended by Avigdor, who takes “Anshel” with him to his yeshiva and chooses “him” for a study partner, she soon finds herself in a characteristic and problematic predicament: secretly in love with Avigdor, she is urged by him to marry his former fiancée Hadass.

“Stripped of gaberdine and trousers she was once more Yentl, a girl of marriageable age, in love with a young man who was betrothed to another” (Singer, 169). In this situation Yentl/Anshel sounds once again a little like Rosalind—“Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose?” (
AYLI
3.2.219)—and even more like Viola—“ . . . and I (poor monster) fond as much on him” (
TN
2.2.34)—but with a disconcerting psychosexual twist.

For she dreams that “she had been at the same time a man and a woman, wearing both a woman’s bodice and a man’s fringed garment. . . . Only now did Yentl grasp the meaning of the Torah’s prohibition against wearing the clothes of the other sex. By doing so one deceived not only others but also oneself ” (Singer, 169–70). With consternation, Anshel (as Singer refers to the cross-dressed protagonist throughout his tale) finds herself/himself proposing to Hadass, and only afterward rationalizes the proposal as something that she (or he) is really doing for Avigdor.

After the wedding the bride’s parents, according to custom, inspect the wedding sheets for signs that the marriage had been consummated, and dis- cover traces of blood. As the narrative informs us, with an infuriating lack of specificity, “Anshel had found a way to deflower the bride.” “Hadass in her in- nocence was unaware that things weren’t quite as they should have been.” This cool, almost detached tone is quite different from Streisand and Irving’s highly eroticized scene of displaced instruction. Meanwhile “Anshel” and Avigdor continue to be study partners, taking up—all too pertinently—the study of the Tractate on Menstruous Women (Singer, 179).

But all is not perfect. Anshel begins to feel pain at deceiving Hadass, and, besides, “he” fears exposure: how long can he avoid going to the public baths? So Anshel stages a scene of self-revelation to Avigdor, proclaiming “I’m not a man but a woman,” and then undressing in front of him. Avigdor, who at first doesn’t believe a word of this story, and indeed begins to fear that the disrob- ing Anshel “might want to practice pederasty” (Singer, 183), is swiftly con- vinced by what he sees, though when Yentl resumes her men’s clothing Avig- dor thinks for a moment he has been dreaming. “I’m neither the one nor the other,” declares Yentl/Anshel. (Compare this to Théodore’s declaration, “In truth, neither sex is really mine.”) “Only now did [Avigdor] realize that An- shel’s cheeks were too smooth for a man’s, the hair too abundant, the hands too small” (Singer, 185). “All Anshel’s explanations seemed to point to one thing: she had the soul of a man and the body of a woman” (Singer, 187). “What a strange power there is in clothing,” Avigdor thinks (Singer, 188). He, and later others, even suspect that Anshel is a demon.