Trouser Parts

A “trouser part,” in opera, refers to an ostensibly male character played by a soprano or a mezzo-soprano. It is the opposite of the convention, in Elizabethan theater, of having women's parts played by boys. It probably came into vogue because of the need, in the late Eighteenth Century, to fill parts previously played by castrati. But, of course, from Mozart's time on, composers exercised a free choice in creating such roles. My interest here is not in tracing the history of this convention but, rather, in offering a psychoanalytic suggestion about how the convention provides a way of exploring the difficulties of defining “masculinity” and “femininity,” especially in the dangerous territory of adolescence: the two most famous trouser parts, Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier , are adolescent males.

The convention, I would suggest, enacts the possibilities, and the dangers, of identification with the feminine when, with puberty, the young man again feels the pull of actual women, after the hostility toward all females characteristic of later childhood—what analysts call the “latency period.” The psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin has observed that the end of the oedipal phase puts the male child in a painful double bind, losing the early mutuality with the mother as well as the potential for seeing her as a love object:

The boy must renounce not only incestuous love, but also identificatory love of the mother. In this respect the contradictory commands of the oedipal father—“You must be like me” and “You may not be like me”—unite in a common cause, to repudiate identity with the mother. The oedipal injunctions say, in effect: “You may not be like the mother, and you must wait to love her as I do.” (Benjamin, 1988, p. 161)