"Look to Her, Moor, if Thou Hast Eyes to See:/ She Has Deceived Her Father, and May Thee." Do Defrauding Daughters Turn Deviant Wives?

Brabantio’s warning (to the Moor in Othello) on the changing nature of female loyalty cues the present paper. Closely examining daughters caught in the conflict between anxious fathers and husbands-to-be, this paper sets out to explore female deliberate deviancy and its legal and dramatic implications with reference to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice.

I will argue that Lavinia’s, Portia’s, and Jessica’s struggle to evade male subsidiarity results in their conscious positioning on the verge of illegality. Besides occasioning productive exploration of law and justice ‘within the dynamics of human desire and of social institutions’ (Morss 2007:183), I argue that their self-exclusion reconfigures the male domain by affording the inclusion of previous outsiders (Bassianus, Antonio, Bassanio and Shylock) but only to reassert the status quo – one in which women maintain their deviant role.