Comparing Mulan And Twelfth Night

“That is the strangeness of language; it crosses the boundaries of the body.” Gender in today’s society supplies humans with limitations specific to their gender, but it is through the use of language that humans are limited even further, despite language being labelled as ambiguous and able to defy these boundaries. It is because of what we can see before us that we are limited in our language and create these boundaries we wish to destroy. Through the use of songs in Disney’s “Mulan” and the language from Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’, the audience is able to see the stereotypes of the time and how those stereotypes have limited the characters in their views depending on the gender of the characters.
Disney’s ‘Mulan’ was set somewhere between
The song is sung by the men as they head off to war after being trained. They are singing about women they would like to marry to lift their spirits. Though the instruments used are quite dainty, the deepness of their voices contrasts the music quite a lot. The lyrics used in the song are quite like those in ‘Honour to Us All’, they don’t talk much about the personality of women, only that she has good looks, cooks well and marvels at him. But when it is Mulan’s turn to talk about what she would like in a woman she sings “How 'bout a girl who's got a brain, who always speaks her mind?” which is something she, as a woman, would like men to think about instead. This line is dramatically ironic as the other men believe Mulan to be a man but the audience knows that she is a female and when she sings about something she would like in a woman that is instantly dismissed by the others, the audience can see that Mulan has been limited by what men want and when given the chance to share her thoughts, she did. Another character that uses dramatic irony to prove that gender is limited by language, especially when talking about feelings, is Viola from ‘Twelfth Night’ but in this instance, she is dressed as Cesario. When Orsino is talking to Cesario/Viola about love, Viola describes her lover as a woman older than her, as old as Orsino himself when in reality, she is describing Orsino. Orsino instantly dismisses this love as wrong by saying “Too old by heaven. Let the woman take an elder than herself. So wears she to him, so sways the level in her husband’s heart (2.4.28-30)”. In these lines, Orsino is telling Viola that a woman must be younger than the man so that she can adjust to her husband’s wants. This conversation proves the limitations language has on gender due to the fact