61 pages • 2 hours read
Jodi PicoultBy Any Other Name
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Struggle for Female Autonomy
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses antisemitism.
A theme that unites both the historical and present-day sections of the novel is the struggle for female autonomy. In Elizabethan England, Emilia’s gender means that she is a second-class citizen who must depend on men for economic survival. She understands that she is “a decorative object” to adorn Hunsdon’s home and must make the best of her lot as his mistress. Though Hunsdon is kind, he, like Alphonso and the other men in her life, sees her as less important than a man. Emilia thinks, “Men believed that women were meant to exist on the fringes of their lives, instead of being the main characters in their own stories. But why would God have given her a voice if it wasn’t meant to be used?” (112-13). She struggles to write her own stories, both in the form of the plays and in her own life. However, her freedom is drastically curtailed by being “owned like a wife” by Alphonso (243), who repeatedly abuses her and is legally allowed to do so.
Eventually, Emilia comes to see the struggle for autonomy as a generational battle, beginning with Eve and ending sometime in the future. She tells a young pupil the story of a bird of prey who broke its neck flying into the window, but in the process permanently damaged the window. She tells her student, “Escape may not be possible in my lifetime. Mayhap I am like that bird, beating against the window for naught. But you—or your daughter, or your daughter’s daughter—may be the one to fly through the hole” (443). Emilia knows that women in her current society will not fully attain freedom—which is ironic, considering that at the time, a powerful woman rules England. However, she hopes that the small steps taken by her and other women will result in more freedom for the women who follow them. In addition, Picoult highlights the plight of Bess, Emilia’s servant, who never learns how to read and is condemned to a life with her mistress alongside the abusive Alphonso. Unlike Emilia, she does not have the written word or a secret lover to escape to.
Many years in the future, Melina lives in a world where women have more autonomy than in Elizabethan England. However, she still struggles to succeed. Professor Bufort and Felix Dubonnet represent men who harass or ignore women, believing that they are not equal to men. She tells Andre that to be a woman is “being judged constantly […] being told to speak up for yourself in one breath, and to shut up in the next. It means fighting all the fucking time” (59). Melina’s anger reveals that women in the modern era are still fighting for an equal chance and to live their lives free of harassment. To her, Emilia’s story resonates because it is not that different from Melina’s own.
The Invisibility of Women’s Work
Both arcs of the novel highlight the theme of the invisibility of women’s work. In Mary Sidney’s workshop, she reveals her invention of invisible ink to Emilia while telling her that for a woman to put on a play, she would have to be invisible. Emilia counters by saying, “A woman who makes herself invisible, by definition, gives up her voice. You speak in riddles” (120-21). The idea of invisible ink is a paradox—ink that hides the owner’s writing. However, this invention highlights Sidney’s ingenuity and foreshadows Emilia’s solution of publishing her plays under Shakespeare’s name. Later, Melina imagines her work about Emilia as “the resurrection of an erasure, like the reveal of Mary Sidney Herbert’s invisible ink. Just the fact that history books hadn’t included this version of events didn’t make it untrue; it merely underscored who’d controlled the narrative” (157). Emilia’s work must be invisible because of the social status of women at the time, and Melina’s play thus performs a work of recovery, revealing what the invisible ink has hidden.
In history class, Melina’s professor shows them an early calendar that marks off 29 days and points out that, though this calendar was attributed to men, it is more probably a woman’s way of marking off a menstrual cycle. She tells her students, “History is written by those in power” (3). By Any Other Name reveals the ways that this kind of history is self-perpetuating. Women were not allowed to write publicly, so there are no works under a woman’s name. Because there are no works by women, people claim that women are not capable of producing great work. Melina faces a similar problem when she realizes that work under her own name is pigeonholed as female and uninteresting, whereas when she uses a male pseudonym, her play is seen as exciting and innovative.
Ultimately, Melina argues that the only way for marginalized voices to be heard is for people to recognize the prejudice they are bringing with them. She says that this work is passed on because “[t]hey say it’s because the stories they tell are ones they can relate to. But when they keep prioritizing those kinds of stories, the result is there are so many others that don’t ever get told” (57). Jasper and his partner at the Athena Playhouse realize that the solution is to build a bigger table and offer a place for diverse voices. Only then can the invisible ink be revealed.
The Power of Authorship and Voice
The novel’s characters pursue theatre because they realize the power of authorship and voice. Melina believes in theatre’s ability to build an audience’s empathy and thinks of the pause before the applause as “the proof that they’d taken a journey; and that they’d come home changed” (481). She wants By Any Other Name to make women’s lives and contributions visible. Similarly, Andre believes that his work can make his community visible and understood. To them, writing’s power is that it gives voice to communities that are not always heard.
In Elizabethan England, the Puritan faction protests the theatre, claiming that it is immoral. Emilia understands “the true motivation: a play might make its viewers think. And when people thought, instead of blindly following the Gospel, they escaped from your control” (178-79). She uses theater to critique unfair gender norms as well as to humanize Jewish people. She “had canted justice on its side and shook it to better understand mercy. She had poked at religion until it snapped back. She had used comedy to tease out the tragedy of what it meant to be a woman in a world run by men” (364). Her plays give voice to hidden thoughts as well as persuade their viewers to entertain ideas they have never encountered. She thinks, “It was the headiest feeling, to think you might change the world under the guise of entertainment” (282). In a society where women have no right to vote or choose their husbands, she can influence ideas through her writing.
In addition to societal changes, writing offers Emilia a feeling of power and freedom. As Alphonso’s wife, she is his legal dependent and subject to his whims: “Alphonso could lock her up, he could beat her, he could squeeze the air from her throat, he could even kill Emilia—but there was one thing he would not be able to do. Silence her” (246). Her determination to keep writing is a declaration of her selfhood. This is the one thing no one can take from her, and the one way she can be free. It offers her a chance at immortality. Though her body may die, and her name may be lost, her words live on. In the future, through Melina’s efforts, Emilia’s name is remembered, and she is finally recognized as the genius she was.
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