control of women’s sexuality. For example, Othello
believes Iago’s lies about his wife Desdemona’s chas-
tity because Othello is too preoccupied with what
other men think of him. This need to protect his
honor leads him to first murder his wife and then
to commit suicide. Similarly, the play’s women are
too trusting of the men and refuse to see their faults
clearly. For example, Neely implies that if either
Desdemona or Emilia had been able to be honest
with themselves about the limitations of their hus-
bands, Othello and Iago respectively, before Othello
murdered Desdemona, the play’s tragic ending
would have been averted.
Despite their shared interest in gender roles
and issues of race and ethnicity, a key difference
between Topdog/Underdog and M. Butterfly and
Shakespeare’s Othello is that in the two former plays,
the authors and today’s readers are responding to the
same contemporary cultural issues and influences
that help to shape gender. In the case of Othello, the
distance in time between author and reader means
that the modern reader will almost certainly not
share the same assumptions regarding gender roles
and gendered behavior as the author. Critics such
as Ania Loomba, following the historicist theories
of Stephan Greenblatt (a school of thought often
referred to as New Historicism, which holds the
premise that literary study has to be based on the
historical beliefs of the author’s time period), has
argued that the critic always needs to keep in mind
the attitudes toward gender and race in the author’s
time. Indeed, the historicist argument has so reso-
nated within the academic community that today
it is the dominant factor in studying gender. Future
study is likely to continue these trends, balancing the
need to assess what are common gender roles over
time and geographic space and what roles are more
specific to one time and one place.
See also Achebe, Chinua: anthiLLs oF the
savannah; Alvarez, Julia: how the García GirLs
Lost their accents; Aristophanes: Lysistrata;
Atwood, Margaret: handMaid’s taLe, the;
surFacinG; Austen, Jane: pride and preJudice;
sense and sensibiLity; Behn, Aphra: oroonoko;
or, the royaL sLave; Brontë, Charlotte: Jane
eyre; Brontë, Emily: wutherinG heiGhts; Cao
Xueqin: dreaM oF the red chaMber; Chaucer,
Geoffrey: canterbury taLes, the; Cisneros,
Sandra: woMan hoLLerinG creek and other
stories; Dos Passos, John: u.s.a. trilogy; Doug-
lass, Frederick: narrative oF the LiFe oF Fred-
erick douGLass, an aMerican sLave; DuBois,
W. E. B.: souLs oF bLack FoLk, the; Euripides:
Medea; Forster, E. M.: passaGe to india, a;
Gaskell, Elizabeth: north and south; Gil-
man, Charlotte Perkins: yeLLow waLLpaper,
the; Glaspell, Susan: triFLes; Harte, Bret:
“Luck of Roaring Camp, The”; Hemingway,
Ernest: sun aLso rises, the; Hurston, Zora
Neale: their eyes were watchinG God; Ibsen,
Henrik: hedda GabLer; Irving, John: worLd
accordinG to Garp, the; Irving, Washington:
sketchbook oF GeoFFrey crayon, the; Jacobs,
Harriet: incidents in the LiFe oF a sLave GirL,
written by herseLF; Kingsolver, Barbara: bean
trees, the; Kingston, Maxine Hong: woMan
warrior, the; Lawrence, D. H.: rainbow, the;
woMen in Love; Lessing, Doris: GoLden note-
book, the; Malamud, Bernard: naturaL, the;
McMurtry, Larry: LonesoMe dove; Morrison,
Toni: suLa; Naylor, Gloria: woMen oF brew-
ster pLace; O’Brien, Tim: thinGs they carried,
the; Pope, Alexander: rape oF the Lock, the;
Rhys, Jean: wide sarGasso sea; Rowlandson,
Mary: narrative oF the captivity and restora-
tion oF Mrs. Mary rowLandson; Shakespeare,
William: Much ado about nothinG; taMinG
oF the shrew, the; Shaw, George Bernard:
pyGMaLion; Stoker, Bram: dracuLa; Tan, Amy:
Joy Luck cLub, the; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs daL-
Loway; to the LiGhthouse.FURTHER READING
Abrahamson, Myka Tucker. “The Money Shot: Econ-
omies of Sex, Guns, and Language in Topdog/
Underdog.” Modern Drama 50, no. 1 (2007): 77–97.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated and
edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge,
1990.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans-
lated by Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (1976):
875–893.
Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1971.42 gender