Desiring the Perfect Marriage

Desiring the Perfect Marriage

The Taming of the Shrew and Gone Girl

In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare uses Petruchio to show how a husband could "train" his undesirable wife to be something he would seem fit through his actions with Katherine. By “training” her, Petruchio is able to put Katherine into submission by suppressing her free will and her former unpleasant self. David Fincher's Gone Girl takes a similar approach to marital manipulation through Amy. In the story, she would constantly manipulate Nick's emotions to the extremes as a consequence of him cheating on her with Andie by framing him of a crime he initially has no idea of.

In both The Taming of the Shrew and Gone Girl, marriage would revolve around control and infatuation rather than the actual love between two people. In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio would rather change Katherine rather than love her for who she is and in Gone Girl, Nick would get emotionally manipulated by Amy while having to come to terms that she is not the person he initially thought she was. Although deception is still prevalent in marriages, the thought of romantic love is maintained through the perception one has for another, which is infatuation. However, unlike The Taming of the Shrew, besides the swap in gender when it comes to who is in control of the relationship, even though Amy is the one in the marriage who is orchestrating Nick's life against his will, she desires a Nick who is not necessarily his real self. From that, this shows that when it comes to marriage today compared to back then, women can be deceptive as men in relationships and in love while being able to choose the men they want to have.

"Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,

And for thy maintenance commits his body

To painful labor both by sea and land,

To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,

Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,

And craves no other tribute at thy hands

But love, fair looks and true obedience—

Too little payment for so great a debt.

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

Even such a woman oweth to her husband."

- Katherine (Act V Scene 2 lines 155-165).

This is noted by Katherine at the end of the play when her husband bets that she would be the most obedient wife compared to Bianca and the widow. After experiencing the torment Petruchio would put her through such as not letting her sleep at night or not allow her to obtain a dress she ends up liking, Katherine has no other choice but to submit to her husband. This is evident to the reader when she states, “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee.” By referring to him with terms such as “lord”, “keeper”, and “head”, she submits to Petruchio’s dominance over her will in their marriage by the end of the story. With the choice to have no one else to love her or have a man who would destroy her former self, there is no doubt that Katherine will choose the latter when it comes to being with the only man she could ever have, not because her actual self would be loved by that man.    

Like Katherine, in this situation, Nick has no choice but to submit to Amy’s pressure. This scene is where Nick announces on national television that he and Amy will be having a child. When he states, “We’re honest with each other,” it tells the audience that their marriage mainly consists of lies since they have been deceiving each other and have been dishonest to each other the entire movie, but Nick has no choice but to lie. Throughout the movie of Gone Girl, Amy deceives Nick into getting caught for committing a crime he initially has no intentions of perpetrating. As for Nick, with the accusations of how horrible of a person he is for cheating on his wife and how he might be the culprit for the alleged death of Amy, Nick cannot do anything else or express himself. Due to that pressure, he has to pretend to the masses that he and Amy are a happy couple. Amy, unlike Katherine, does not have to worry about her husband leaving him since she is the one in control of the marriage.  

"Look, if you love me, stay."- Katherine

(Act III Scene 2 line 176)

"Grumio, my horse."- Petruchio

(Act III Scene 2 line 177)

The quotes that are stated by Katherine and Petruchio occur during their wedding. In this scene, Katherine wants to stay at the wedding while Petruchio wants to leave. When Petruchio refuses to stay despite Katherine claiming that he is in love with her if he chooses to stay, it shows that Petruchio does not love Katherine for who she actually is. He does not care about what Katherine wants and would commit to actions that would harm her for her “own” sake. As a result of taking Katherine along with him even though she wants to stay, Petruchio proves how he would manipulate her into committing to matters she would not initially oblige to.

In this scene, Amy tells the audience her thoughts of the murder and her plans to ruin Nick. This is reminiscent to Petruchio manipulating Katherine to coercing to things she does not want since in Gone Girl, Nick does not want to be framed for murder and Amy knows this to be the case but she still orchestrates it to get Nick arrested. However, unlike The Taming of the Shrew, Amy deceives Nick to get revenge on him for cheating on her, not necessarily to make him a better person like what ends up happening in Katherine’s case. When Amy states, “He actually expected me to love him unconditionally,” the audience could see how Amy has Nick fooled to believing that and how she would not actually love him unconditionally despite being married to him. This can explain why she is willing to have revenge on him and why she is willing to hurt him: she does not love his actual self.

“You lie, in faith, for you are called plain Kate,

And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst,

But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,

Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate—

For dainties are all Kates—and therefore, Kate,

Take this of me, Kate of my consolation:

Hearing thy mildness praised in every town,

Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded—

Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs—

Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.”

- Petruchio (Act II Scene 1 lines 179-189)

During Katherine’s first encounter with Petruchio, Petruchio claims that people refer to her as Kate, not Katherine despite her denial. In addition to denying her words as true when she states that people call her by the name of Katherine instead of Kate, Petruchio compliments to her in outlandish ways like calling her “bonny Kate”, “the prettiest Kate in Christendom”, and the “dainties are all Kates”. Despite it being the first time where he actually talks to her, it is clear that Petruchio idealizes Katherine rather than trying to understand her true self because if he is actually in love with Katherine, he would have trusted her when she states that people call her Katherine rather than pushing it aside as a lie. To add up to his idealization of her, without any thoughts or incentives to understand her, it shows how Katherine as a person is no valuable to Petruchio compared to his desire to marry her. Although it could be argued that Katherine is actually value to him since he is willing to marry a person who has a bad and undesirable reputation in the story, if he is truly in love with Katherine, he should try to get to know the person he is marrying instead of fantasizing about her while not trusting what she says.   

Similar to Petruchio, Amy ends up falling in love with Nick’s persona on television, not Nick himself. After coming back from hiding, Amy only realizes that Nick is not the person from his persona on television and that he wants her back so he would not be seen as a murderer in the masses, not that he actually has any affection towards her. This leads to her being somewhat different from Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew because although she has been manipulating Nick to the point where Nick has to be desirable to her to get her back to him similar to how Petruchio tries to manipulate Katherine to winning her affection, she has known what Nick can actually be like as a person due to her long marriage with him. In addition to knowing that Nick is not as desirable as she has wanted to believe prior to her life with him, she knows that Nick has been hiding his affair with Andie from her and has tried to lie about it on TV. Despite knowing Nick as an actual person, his past, and how dishonest he can be, she ends up getting fooled anyway when she comes back to Nick solely because of her idealization of him on TV.

In a lot of ways, characteristics in marriages back then are still around today like manipulation, conceit, and idealization. With many changes to societal norms such as women being given more opportunities now than ever before, this can be surprising to those who have expected society to be a lot different than before. Although there is no doubt that times have changed long after Shakespeare’s times, now that women have more marital rights, women like Amy can potentially be Petruchio when it comes to maintaining traditional characteristics of what marriage has always been. This changes how people see courtship today since with Amy actually being the one taking control of her marriage with Nick instead of the victim of that abuse, people can no longer assume that Amy is the damsel in distress while Nick is the villain without ignoring the implications that can have to victims of domestic abuse like Nick. Overall, to leave on a final note, when Nick tells Amy, “Yes, I loved you and then all we did was resent each other, try to control each other. We caused each other pain,” Amy replies, “That's marriage.”

Works Cited

“The Taming of the Shrew.” SparkNotes, SparkNotes,

nfs.sparknotes.com/shrew/page_246.html.

Milchan, Arnon, et al. Gone Girl. Twentieth Century Fox, 2014.

“The Taming of the Shrew.” SparkNotes, SparkNotes,

nfs.sparknotes.com/shrew/page_138.html.

“The Taming of the Shrew.” SparkNotes, SparkNotes,

nfs.sparknotes.com/shrew/page_90.html.