9.10–Sample Research-Based Literary Essay

Naomi Davidson
Dr. Jane Doe
English 203: Writing About Literature
20 May 2022

“Nothing that is so is so”:
The (In)Sanity of Self-Deception in Twelfth Night

Naomi uses a quotation from the play she is analyzing in her title. This technique is a classic option for titling a literary essay. Note also how the part of the title following the colon provides a quick, initial overview of the paper’s topic. It functions a bit like a precursor to the actual thesis statement.

Appropriately for a play named after a festival, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is full of pranks, jokes, and ruses. Act 3 Scene 4 has perhaps the greatest concentration of deceptions with no fewer than ten cases of mistaken identity (or attempts by characters to deceive others), but these are in truth prevalent throughout the entire play. Many of these instances involve Viola, who has from early on in the play been disguising herself as the young man Cesario. As Cesario, she acts as one of Duke Orsino’s attendants and ultimately falls in love with the duke himself. However, one of Cesario’s duties is to help “his” master woo the countess, Olivia. Ironically, Olivia herself falls for the disguised Viola, whom she believes to be a young man. Yet “Cesario” is not the only person about whom Olivia is being deceived. Her steward Malvolio is tricked into believing that Olivia is in love with him, while the antics he believes she has asked him to perform to win her over make Olivia believe him insane. Both of these characters, Olivia and Malvolio, are being tricked by others, yet they both also demonstrate in the play how they are deceiving themselves as well. Ultimately, these self-deceptions are what allow for Twelfth Night’s comedic conclusion even as they darken the brightness of that conclusion.

In this introductory paragraph, Naomi starts with something that most readers know about the play: Viola’s disguise. Then, she pivots to focus on something that is less obvious: the self-deceptions of Malvolio and Olivia. This approach might be improved by shortening the Viola example or introducing the idea of “self-deception” in relation to Viola to better tie these two points together. Nevertheless, this a good beginning to an essay that goes beneath the surface.

Traditionally, the thesis in a college literary essay will come at the end of the first paragraph. To avoid confusion, Naomi signals her thesis statement with the word “ultimately.” Other writers might use terms such as “I argue” or “This paper asserts” to similar effect.

Olivia is simultaneously the character most aware that she is deluding herself as well as the character least aware of the many ways she is being deluded. In Olivia’s first appearance onstage, Feste gently mocks her excessive grief over the death of her brother, pointing out that “to mourn for [her] brother’s soul, being in heaven,” makes her a fool (1.5.68–69). Though acknowledging her Fool’s astuteness, Olivia does not demonstrate similar insight following this scene. She mistakes the real gender of “Cesario”; she and Malvolio are the sole dupes of the plot by Maria, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Fabian to make Malvolio appear insane; and she completely misidentifies Sebastian. Yet upon being told of Malvolio’s insanity, Olivia remarks, “I am as mad as he, / If sad and merry madness equal be” (3.4.15–16). Olivia refers here to her position of being in love with Cesario, a man who appears wholly uninterested in her, as a kind of madness. The idea of love as madness is commonplace, but Olivia also suggests that deceiving herself into believing Cesario might grow to love her is a form of insanity. In fact, Joost Daalder in “Perspectives of Madness in Twelfth Night” even argues that Olivia may be predisposed to suffer from delusions, which make her particularly susceptible to Viola’s disguise, and that part of the audience’s pleasure derives from not falling victim to these delusions: “the art of illusions may encourage encourage delusion on the part of those who are inclined to suffer from it anyway…Thus, for example, [the audience] can at all times tell that Viola is a woman, but her disguise as a male seriously deludes people like Olivia” (Daadler 106-7).While I agree that the audience watching the play would be aware of the irony that “Cesario” is merely a disguise and not a real individual at all, I contend that an additional layer of irony exists and contributes to the audience’s understanding of Olivia’s self-delusions. Even as the audience revels in recognizing the source of Olivia’s delusions, other characters in the play—unaware of Cesario’s disguise—insist on Olivia’s sanity, which in turn causes the audience to question these characters’ sanity as well. Sebastian, whom Olivia marries under the impression that he is Cesario (apparently their wedding vows do not include an exchange of names), later denies that Olivia could be mad:

Arguably Sebastian, who marries a woman he has met earlier that very day, is not the best judge of what behaviors sane people perform, but his union with Olivia makes room later for the unmasked Viola to marry Orsino.

Good use of brackets to ensure that the quotation fits the sentence!

Once Sebastian reunites with his twin sister Viola—who has been disguised as Cesario—and Orsino, Viola, Olivia, and Sebastian pair off so that the comedy can conclude with its required multiple weddings, Olivia’s self-delusion gives way to a recognition that she might be entering into a loveless marriage with a stranger. In “Love, Disguise, and Knowledge in Twelfth Night,” Maurice Hunt claims that “Sebastian’s miraculous epiphany releases Olivia and Orsino (as well as Viola) from their burdens, making possible the giving up of deceit and dissembling” (Hunt 490). While Hunt is right that Sebastian’s arrival in Illyria allows for Viola to reveal her true identity and for the play’s characters to abandon their self-deceptions, Hunt fails to consider the shadow cast over play’s conclusion by the fact that Twelfth Night could not have concluded with multiple marriages were it not for Olivia’s initial infatuation with the lie that is Cesario. After all, Olivia is demonstrably silent on stage during the revelation of Sebastian and Viola’s identities. After her exclamation of “Most wonderful!” upon seeing both twins for the first time (5.1.236), Olivia does not speak again for 55 lines, and when she does speak, it is not about her partnering with Sebastian. Sometimes the silences of characters speak just as loudly as their words; Isabella’s silence following the Duke’s proposal of marriage in Measure for Measure is similarly striking. Meanwhile, during Olivia’s silence, Sebastian explains to her that she has been “mistook” (5.1.271) and “deceived” (5.1.274), foregrounding the deception (of others and of the self) in the play’s matrimonial conclusion. In a final-ditch effort to sustain the relationship she forged with Cesario, Olivia, upon hearing the nuptial plans for the two couples, does not address her soon-to-husband Sebastian but instead speaks to Viola and addresses the relationship with her that these marriages will solidify: “A sister! You are she” (5.1.344). Olivia thus finds herself “happily” married yet still longing for the fiction she had with Cesario.

Sebastian functions as the connector that allows Naomi to move smoothly from a paragraph about Olivia’s self-delusion concerning Cesario to a paragraph focusing on the specific self-delusion of marrying Sebastian in place of Cesario.

Here, Naomi acknowledges the validity of part of the scholar’s argument while also highlighting the scholar’s oversight. By then turning to the detail that the scholar failed to consider, Naomi adds a new idea to the scholarly conversation in which she is participating.

To strengthen her point about the usefulness of considering a character’s silence, Naomi points to another of Shakespeare’s plays, Measure for Measure, in which a character does not speak when presented with the possibility of marriage. Were Naomi to expand this paper, she could perhaps consider scholarship addressing Isabella’s silence and apply that scholarship to her reading of Olivia’s silence.

Malvolio, too, deludes himself about his chances in romance, even to the point of being declared insane by the other characters, ultimately resulting in his tragic disillusionment. His sexual desire for his mistress leads him to fall completely for the plot laid by Maria and Sir Toby. Believing his fantasies confirmed by Olivia’s purported letter, he finds himself unable to hold any conversation with her without reading too much into her words. She calls him a “fellow” (3.4.66), using the word in its sense of “a friendly or polite form of address to a person of lower social status, esp. a servant” (“fellow, n.” 6a), but Malvolio interprets her meaning as indicative of a peer or even partner: “And when she went away now, ‘Let this fellow be looked to.’ ‘Fellow!’ Not ‘Malvolio,’ nor after my degree, but ‘fellow’” (3.4.82-84). Olivia is calling him after his degree, but Malvolio is too blinded by the letter’s pretense and his own self-aggrandizement to understand what she says.

Notice how a simple transition word here allows Naomi to signal to readers how this paragraph flows logically from the preceding paragraphs.

This paragraph is an excellent example of close reading. Naomi focuses on a single significant word (“focus”) here and its multiple meanings.

Malvolio’s continued faith in the letter—despite Olivia’s response to him and the strangeness of her supposed requests—could be considered a self-delusion that edges into insanity. Using Feste’s description of the three stages of Sir Toby’s drunkenness (1.5), Joost Daalder finds that, in Shakespeare’s play, madness is the middle step on a scale which begins with foolishness and ends with drowning (105-106). If we accept Daalder’s argument, then Malvolio’s actions in the play imitate inebriation: first, he fools himself about the possibility of Olivia loving and marrying him; then he descends into madness (in the view of Olivia herself) with his uncharacteristic behavior; and finally he (metaphorically) drowns in the darkness while Feste pretends to perform an exorcism. As Feste himself predicted early in the play, “the Fool shall look to the madman” (1.5.135-36). Yet that too is a deception; Ivo Kamps points out in “Madness and Social Mobility in Twelfth Night” that “Malvolio is convinced of his own sanity, and… the audience knows he is not mad” (241), just as Feste and the other conspirators do. The only one fooled is Olivia, and although sympathetic to Malvolio’s seeming insanity she does not aid him or even seem to be aware of his plight. These two characters are so focused on their own self-delusions they cannot see past them.

Notice how Naomi takes the scholar’s analysis of another foolish character in Twelfth Night—Sir Toby—and applies this analysis to Malvolio.

The phrase “these two characters” at the end of the paragraph might lead readers to believe that the following paragraph will focus on both Olivia and Malvolio. While Olivia is mentioned in the following paragraph, Malvolio is the primary focus of the following paragraph. Tweaking this concluding sentence could improve the paper’s flow.

The truth of Malvolio’s gulling and of Olivia’s romantic indifference to him casts a shadow over the end of the play. Malvolio’s final line promises general payback, even though the main perpetrators (Maria and Sir Toby) are two of the few characters currently absent from the stage: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” (5.1.401). This line almost concludes the play (excluding Feste’s epilogue-esque song, only ten lines follow it), and Malvolio exits before Olivia can express her sympathy for his state. The moment is notably gloomy in an ending otherwise full of long-lost siblings reuniting and disguises being humorously discarded, and none of the characters appear able to speak to it in any meaningful way. There is no further resolution for Malvolio, and the play moves inexorably on to a comedy’s wedding-filled conclusion. Ivo Kamps suggests that Malvolio as a character is representative of an “aspirant middle class” (242) with a “desire for upward social mobility” (237). But if so, it is important that Malvolio’s arc actually runs along Daalder’s folly-madness-drowning scale. Though earlier in the play Malvolio believed his social status was poised to rise, by its end he discovers he has in fact fallen and lost his previous position. Self-deception causes this fall even as it obscures the truth of Malvolio’s situation from him.

Naomi expertly brings two scholar’s arguments into conversation with one another, thus providing her with a new reading of Malvolio and the relationship between his self-delusions and his desire for social mobility.

Insanity and deceit of all kinds are integral to the plot of Twelfth Night, and without these elements the play would end before it even began. Self-deception, especially regarding love, moves characters to behave in ways that eventually force the comedic ending, but not all of the characters are able to share equally in that ending. None of the marriages that end the play unite characters whose classes differ as much as Olivia’s and Malvolio’s do, suggesting the limits of the play’s comedic pairings to bring happiness to each and every person. Malvolio deludes himself into thinking that his lowly position as a steward is not an impediment to his pursuit of Olivia whereas Olivia’s assumption that she could maintain power in her marriage is as delusional as the fiction of Cesario. Perhaps these high hopes are the biggest acts of self-deception within Twelfth Night. Even as the comedy depends on self-deception, characters who are deceived by both themselves and by others cast a shadow over the purported happy ending. The romance and happiness are diluted by this shadow, causing the audience to question whether any of these marriages will sustain themselves after the play ends—or whether that too is self-deception.

Ideally, you’ll want the first sentence of the concluding paragraph to be a restatement of the initial thesis statement. In this statement, we see the repeated elements of plot and deceit, but insanity (which is discussed at length in the body paragraphs addressing Malvolio) was not included in the thesis. To make this paper even stronger, Naomi should consider revising her thesis statement to include this important point.

This conclusion offers several fascinating thoughts on how Twelfth Night structurally functions. As a reader, I’d like to see these thoughts developed in body paragraphs as they’re crucial to the thesis posited at the end of the introduction.

Works Cited

Works Cited Sources (all primary and secondary) are listed alphabetically by author last name (or title of work if no official author exists); no bullet points, numbering systems, or other organization symbols should be used.