A

GARBER, Marjorie

Born 11 June 1944

Daughter of Allen H. and Rhoda Kanner Garber

English professor and Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber graduated with the highest honors from Swarthmore College in 1966 and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969. She served as assistant professor of English at Yale University from 1969 to 1975 and associate professor from 1975 to 1979. Garber then accepted a position as professor of English at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and worked there for two years before moving to Harvard University's English Department in 1981. In her current position, Garber is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Harvard, the Associate Dean for Affirmative Action, and a member of the Academic Deans' Council.

Garber has also been the director of Harvard's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) since 1986. The CLCS was founded in 1984 with an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant and provides a place for interdisciplinary study and discussion on topics ranging from history to philosophy to archaeology. The CLCS sponsors ongoing faculty-graduate student seminars as well as lectures, conferences, and workshops for Harvard and Boston-area graduate students and scholars. Among Garber's awards and honors are a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1966, a Morse Fellowship for Younger Scholars in the Humanities in 1972, and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships in 1977 and 1989.

Garber is well known at Harvard for her popular Shakespeare courses, and the Bard also formed the subject of her first three books: Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (1974), Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981), and Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Casualty (1987). Shakespeare has also been the subject of many of Garber's articles, which have been published in journals and newspapers like Harper's, the New York Times, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Hebrew University Studies in Literature, Yale Review, and Mosaic. Garber has also contributed essays on Shakespeare and other topics to works edited by other scholars.

In Garber's fourth book, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), she explores the practice of cross-dressing by discussing examples from films, history, popular culture, music, literature, and anthropology. The vast quantity of data and her theories support her assertion that "the definition of the grounds of human gender will always involve more, and less, than any clearly decidable bottom line." Garber notes that cross-dressing blurs the dresser's gender, challenging the natural human tendency to categorize individuals as male or female. She cautions against dwelling on the reasons for cross-dressing (economic, social, cultural) in order to explain it away. Instead, she argues for a recognition of the cross-dresser as a "figure that disrupts" because it cannot always be explained with logic. As David Kaufman wrote in his review of Vested Interests in Nation: "Garber suggests that the transvestite is rather symbolic of an Otherness, 'a third term' with the inherent capacity—if not necessarily the ambition—to upset more normal or regimented assignments imposed by social and cultural structures as well as by political systems. This is what the 'cultural anxiety' in her subtitle alludes to and what her recurring focus on a 'category of crisis' is about."

Garber manages the difficult task of making her theoretical arguments accessible to the lay reader not only through her clear prose, but through the tie-ins with popular culture. Her examples—from Yentl to Tootsie to Phantom of the Opera—are familiar ones and ground her arguments in a way accessible to the layperson.

Garber's next work, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1996), continues some of the arguments advanced in Vested Interests but focuses primarily on the concept of bisexuality. Once again, she cautions against the tendency to classify individuals into one of two categories—in this case heterosexual or homosexual. She does not believe, however, that bisexuality is a third category on a par with heterosexuality or homosexuality. She asserts instead that bisexuality can be an acceptable, adult way of living one's sexual life rather than a period of confusion or experimentation, as is often supposed.

Garber believes that bisexuality reveals the continuum of sexuality from heterosexual to homosexual along which many individuals move throughout their lives. Garber uses examples from her own experiences as a bisexual and from the lives of musicians, actors, artists, and writers to show the ways individuals can move along this continuum of sexuality. After discussing the marriage of a well-known bisexual actor, for example, Garber writes that "bisexuality is not a fixed point on a scale but an aspect of lived experience, seen in the context of particular relations." Although most critics praised the accessibility of Vested Interests and Vice Versa, some complained that it presupposed a knowledge and experience of literary criticism beyond the layperson's grasp. Other critics believed that Garber too easily dismissed the human tendency to categorize individuals as something that can be easily vanquished from the reader's mind.

Garber switched gears with her next title, Dog Love (1996), which focuses on the cultural obsession with canines. Garber—the owner of two golden retrievers—looks at the myths and misconceptions about dogs and the human-dog bond. She discusses the seldom-asked question of why humans spend so much money keeping their dogs healthy and happy when there is so much suffering elsewhere that could command our attention. Garber also traces the dog's relatively recent rise in popularity and looks at some famous canines in literature and film. Her general argument is that society relies on dogs to bring out its humanity. Although not a new argument, Garber's wit and clear prose make for enjoyable reading.

Garber's latest work, Symptoms of Culture (1998), is yet another departure from her earlier books. Each chapter presents a new look at an American cultural phenomenon or "symptom" representative of American culture. Garber writes that each symptom reveals "a fantasy of control…of a powerful agency, divine or other… .The political logic of this is as disturbing as its psychology." Among the chapters or "symptoms" Garber discusses are Richard Nixon, the Wizard of Oz, Charlotte's Web, anti-Semitism, the Promise Keepers, and the theory of evolution from the Scopes trial to the present. Although too theoretical for a mainstream audience, Garber's light touch with these difficult and touchy subjects has appeal for the scholarly reader.