The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love… - Germaine Greer

The opposition between women who are people and women who
are something less does not only rest in the vague contrast between
the women of the comedies and the women of the tragedies. There
are more explicit examples of women who may earn love, like Helena who pursued
her husband through military brothels to marriage and honour in
All’s Well, and women who must lose it through inertia and gormlessness,
like Cressida. In The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare contrasted
two types in order to present a theory of marriage which is
demonstrated by the explicit valuation of both kinds of wooing in
the last scene. Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a
world where she is a stale, a decoy to be bid for against her sister’s
higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable,
a scold. Bianca has found the women’s way of guile and feigned
gentleness to pay better dividends: she woos for herself under false
colours, manipulating her father and her suitors in a perilous game
which could end in her ruin. Kate courts ruin in a different way, but she has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio who is man
enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her
spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. He
tames her like he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and she
rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty. Lucentio
finds himself saddled with a cold, disloyal woman, who has no objection
to humiliating him in public. The submission of a woman
like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay
down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity,
married without earnestness or good-will. Kate’s speech at the
close of the play is the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever
written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend,
and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both,
for Petruchio is both gentle and strong (it is a vile distortion of the
p

I know as little about the nature of romantic love as I knew when I
was eighteen, but I do know about the deep pleasure of continuing
interest, the excitement of wanting to know what somebody else
thinks, will do, will not do, the tricks played and unplayed, the short
cord that the years make into rope, and in my case, is there, hanging
loose, long after death.)
And so he lived with me for the last four years of his life. Not all
of that time was easy, indeed some of it was very bad, but it was an
unspoken pleasure that having come together so many years before,
ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured. Sometimes I
would resent the understated or seldom stated side of us and,
guessing death wasn’t too far away, I would try for something to
have afterwards. One day I said, ‘We’ve done fine, haven’t we?’
He said, ‘Fine’s too big a word for me. Why don’t we just say
we’ve done better than most people?

The hallmark of egotistical love, even when it masquerades as altruistic
love, is the negative answer to the question ‘Do I want my
love to be happy more than I want him to be with me?’ As soon as
we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a
pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we ought to know that
our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism. Every
wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband’s favourite
meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense
of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only
friend, to encourage him to reject the consensus of opinion and find
reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops
of steel that will strangle them both. Every time a woman makes
herself laugh at her husband’s often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks
at his woman and says ‘What would I do without you?’ is already
destroyed. His woman’s victory is complete, but it is Pyrrhic. Both
of them have sacrificed so much of what initially made them lovable
to promote the symbiosis of mutual dependence that they scarcely
make up one human being between them.