Viola, Lost in the Friend Zone

 

"Twelfth Night" as the teenpic "She's the Man"

This past semester as I read student essays on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:What You Will, I encountered three women who all identified with Viola in her relationship with Orsino—which is to say, they had been the “best friends” of guys who were in love with other girls.  All three dutifully gave advice while thinking, with Viola,

I’ll do my best
To woo your lady.  [Aside] Yet a barful strife!
Who’er I woo, myself would be his wife.

Or girlfriend, anyway.

In one of the essays, Jasmine used a term I hadn’t encountered before.  Viola, she said, was in a “friend zone.”

If literature can change our lives, then there should be something in the play that would help get these women out of their friend zones.  Imagine Twelfth Night reframed as a “Dear Abby” column dispensing relationship advice to young adults.  It might go something like this:

Dear Mr. Shakespeare,

There’s this guy I’m in love with but he just sees me as one of his guy friends.  He’s unclasped to me the book of his secret soul, but he’s in love with this other girl, who he thinks is filled with “sweet perfections” (can you hear my eyes rolling?).    He’s put her on a pedestal and thinks she is ultra-refined and constant.  I know she’s none of these things because she’s been hitting on me, for God’s sake. But obviously I can’t tell him that.

Sometimes I think he’s starting to warm up to me, and I’ve tried broad hints—“My father had a daughter loved a man as it might be perhaps I should your lordship”—but he just doesn’t get it.  I even went so far as to tell “her” story:

She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud,
Feed on her damask cheek.  She pined in thought;
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.  Was not this love, indeed?

But that’s as close as I got.  So what should I do?

P.S.  One other thing.  When I say that he sees me as one of his guy friends, I mean that literally.

Lost in a Friend Zone

Dear Lost in a Friend Zone:

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.

Dear Mr. Shakespeare:

That’s kind of vague.  Can’t you be more direct?

Dear Lost in a Friend Zone:

Let me tell you something about guys. They may think they want Ms. Ultra-Refined, but actually they want somebody they can talk to.  Just keep on being there for him and he’ll come around.  Some day he’ll see the woman underneath the friend.

Dear Mr. Shakespeare,

Do you think there’s something I should be doing?  Like wearing heels and miniskirts?

Dear Lost in the Friendzone:

Here’s what you need to know about relationships: ultimately what people desire in a partner is balance. If you want a happy ending, you must embrace both your guy side and your girl side.  So sure, don’t be afraid to don women’s weeds.  If you’re afraid of acknowledging yourself as a woman, are you surprised that he’d have trouble seeing you as one?  But above all, to thine own self be true.  In the end, if he can confide in a Viola and shoot hoops with a Cesario and they turn out to be the same person, why would he look elsewhere?

And by the way, it sounds as though your guy has some balance issues of his own, like he’s struggling between being either a macho hunter of harts or a heart-sensitive wimp, no middle ground. Until he realizes he can be both, I’d steer clear of him. Then again, he might be inspired by your balance to seek balance of his own.

Dear Mr. Shakespeare,

I know what you mean about balanced guys.  It would be nice if he were like my twin brother, who can hold his own in a duel but whose bosom is full of kindness and who is so near the manners of our mother that he will cry at the least provocation.  But I can’t fall in love with my brother.

Dear Lost in the Friend Zone,

No, you can’t.

 

One can understand why Twelfth Night lends itself to a successful teenpic, as it has done with She’s the Man. Often my students, reading the play for the first time, will find it vaguely familiar. (In the film, Viola and Sebastian keep their names and Ilyria is the name of their high school; the Duke Orsino, meanwhile, has been renamed “Duke.”) I invite readers to imagine the letters that Orsino, Olivia, Antonio, even Malvolio might write to Mr. Shakespeare and theanswers that (based on the play) they might get back. Release your imagination and come up with “what you will.”  It’s all in the spirit of the play.

 

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