SOURCE: Oldrieve, Susan. “Marginalized Voices in The Merchant of Venice.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 5, no. 1 (spring 1993): 87-105.

In the following essay, Oldrieve reads both Shylock and Portia as social outcasts alienated from the Christian and patriarchal world of Venice/Belmont in The Merchant of Venice.

I. Introduction

In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock and Portia both represent marginalized groups, the one an ethnic and religious minority, and the other women. As Marianne Novy points out,

Women and Jews could be seen as symbolic of absolute otherness—alien, mysterious, uncivilized, unredeemed. Although women could be praised for being as virtuous or intelligent as men, or Jews for converting to Christianity or behaving as Christians ought, nevertheless femaleness and Jewishness as qualities in themselves had negative meanings in this tradition—both were associated with the flesh, not the spirit, and therefore with impulses toward sexuality, aggression, and acquisitiveness...