Twelfth Night Women

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola gives two different descriptions of women. The first is a soliloquy and takes place after Malvolio has given her Olivia’s ring, which is when Viola realizes that Olivia has fallen in love with Viola’s disguise, Cesario. Viola’s second description of women is to Orsino, when she tells a story about a “sister” of hers who once fell in love as a way of indirectly communicating her love for Orsino. Viola’s two descriptions serve as complements to each other. In Viola’s soliloquy about women, she describes them as falling easily and deeply in love with men simply because of their appearances. She observes this with the line, “How easy is it for the proper false/in women’s waxen hearts to set their forms.” The metaphor comparing women’s “hearts”, or ability to fall in love, to wax shows how she feels. Wax can be soft and pliable, but it is easily melted and easily hardened into a rigid shape. This parallels what has happened with Olivia and Cesario, as well as with Viola and Orsino. In both instances, the woman
She describes how the woman “pined in thought,/ And… sat like patience on a monument.” The words “patience” and “monument” call to mind images of stone. This implies that the woman has to have “patience” because her love is set in stone. The word “pine” means “to long for something,” but it has connotations that suggest wasting away. The woman in the story is wasting away because she is hopelessly in love with a man who cannot love her back. Viola then goes on to describe men’s love as being “much in our vows, but little in our love.” This means that men usually don’t love women in the same way as women love men because men’s love can change, whereas women become attached to a single man and lose the ability to love any