Female Resistances against the Dominant discourse of Patriarchy In Shakespeare's Winter's Tale With Special References to Greenblatt's and Sinfield's Theories

At the dawn of the modern period, the English society was a patriarchal one. In other words, men dominated the society and the family. Patriarchal standards of Elizabethan age introduced women as figures that should be dominated and controlled. In most of Shakespeare's plays the conflict between women and the patriarchal ideology has been shown. Women's resistance is the point of disagreement between Stephen Greenblatt who founded new historicism and Alan Sinfield who is one of cultural materialists in Britain. Greenblatt has a negative understanding of the mechanisms of power relations in which he states that resistances are contained within the standards of the dominant while Sinfield believes in the faultlines of the texts in which the dominant cannot hold the ground. Paulina can be seen as a clear manifestation of the text's gap. This study focuses on this disagreement with special references to the Winter's Tale by W. Shakespeare. It also tries to analyze the how female voices tried to gain power and space to be articulated.