Liminality, Promise, and Projection

In The Winter&s;s Tale , Perdita should be, by early modern logics, a figure of disorder: a young woman in an unapproved relationship whose filial identities mix class categorizations and who is (mis?)represented as the daughter of a Black man. Instead, Perdita&s;s arrival in Sicilia enables the restoration of order. This chapter explores that apparent paradox through the relationships of order and control, especially as raced and gendered terms offering points of access for seeing the myriad colonialist, imperialist, and white disorders in the play—as well as for framing Perdita as a site of response. The passive—and potentially dehumanizing—terms there reflect an issue in the play&s;s use of Perdita. While her identities bring a regenerative space into the play&s;s disordered world, Perdita is less often an actor who creates alternatives than a new site for others&s; stories. However, that abstraction may also multiply Perdita&s;s power, rendering her resistance as a necessary part of her difference-as-identity rather than as an outcome of personality. Perdita offers a vision of a future improved, rather than threatened, by a more comprehensive and inclusive vision of generation and power distribution, but her own subjecthood is compromised by others&s; insistence on determining her identifications.