#to be clear im not claiming there’s something inherently wrong about ever asking anyone that question in any situation. what i am saying is

[steelycunt]

system where when i talk to men i start a countdown from ten million and stop at the point they ask me ‘what’s your ethnicity??’ and that’s the amount of money they have to pay me

[twoticky]

hm okay. so i said i was gonna write about this and idk if anyone else actually cares but im Thinking About It.

from what ive seen abt the general tumblr analysis of malvolio (which i certainly dont claim to be an expert on. im just here!), there's a lot of talk abt neurodivergence, particularly autism, as it relates to his character. which is rad obviously! but as someone currently playing malvolio myself, i feel the one of the most important, maybe THE most important factor for me in interpreting malvolio is class, and how he relates to it.

nobility and status is, more broadly, A Thing that comes up in twelfth night. although the primary part of viola's disguise is that she's dressing as a man, she's also a noblewoman dressing as a servant. in shakespeare's time, class lines were pretty strictly defined and relationships between nobility and servants were strongly disapproved of, so viola's position in the class ladder certainly isn't irrelevant to her romantic prospects. (hence why olivia asks about cesario's parentage in 1.5 -- she's not just making small talk, she wants to ensure that he's not impossibly below her). while actual servants having relationships with nobility was considered scandalous, the idea of love as service was common and appears throughout shakespeare's plays; viola calls orsino olivia's servant because of his love for her, for one example, and antonio's extremely homoerotic devotion to sebastian manifests itself through his dedication to service. and of course there's viola herself, who literally serves her love orsino, until her true identity is revealed and she becomes "orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen," the roles of servant and commander switching through their love. and then we get to malvolio!

(from here on out i'm gonna talk a lot about my personal analysis of his character, which you can feel free to disagree with. every actor who plays him does it differently and i think that's one of the great things about his character!) malvolio is frequently considered a parallel to the various lovers in the play, most often compared to orsino as their semi-obsession and courtship of olivia is similar, but i think, because of a lot of the stuff about master/servant relationships i talked about above, he's also comparable to viola in some ways. what makes him different, though, is that his love for olivia is almost secondary to his love for what she can give him -- power and respect. malvolio, presumably, was born to a lower class family, and has attained the rank of steward because of his obedience and commitment to rules. and he believes that through this obedience he will get the status he rightly deserves, that jove and his stars will bestow luck upon him. although many things about the play's class system don't particularly translate to modern times, one thing became clear to me pretty quickly about malvolio: he's kind of a bootlicker. now, don't get me wrong, i love his character! but fundamentally, he is someone who believes he can escape the oppressive class structures of his time and place if he just works hard enough. and he works hard! he dedicates himself to olivia's service, and part of why he hates the fool, or sir toby's entourage, is that they aren't working. they have the luxury to sit around and joke while he's had to work every second of his life to get this far! so while he's, in some ways, sympathetic, it's pretty understandable why so many people hate him.

and then we get to the prank. now, i think it's really important to remember, while sir toby is pretty much a ne'er-do-well, he is nobility. he's olivia's uncle, and although he may not have money, he has status. and in sir toby's mind, the crime malvolio has committed is rising above his station -- he's disrespected toby with his chastisement and threats to kick him out, and he's "disrespected" olivia by desiring her, which of course because of his status is considered inherently predatory. (this is, additionally, why i find lesbian malvolio so interesting as a re-interpretation, adds a lil something to the sense of malvolio being predatory just because of who he is). so, of course, malvolio must have everything he's wanted for so long dangled in front of him, and then have it ripped away. only fair, right?

although twelfth night is a play that challenges convention in a lot of ways, we're still living in the 1600s (1500s? fuck, when was this play written?), and we have to have some approximation of returning to proper social order at the end of the play. orsino marries a noblewoman, olivia marries a nobleman, and malvolio stays where he is. what changes, towards the end of the play, is that malvolio has realized, depressing as it is, that he can't win. he tried to do everything olivia wanted, and this resulted in punishment. in his letter to her in 5.1, he says he has forgotten his station, that he speaks only out of injury, which he certainly would have never done before. and ironically, once malvolio has abandoned his striving his grandeur, the play finally gives him the dignity he's been denied. his lines in the final scene of the play are the only time he ever speaks in verse instead of prose -- speaks in the language of nobility, lovers, sympathetic characters, instead of that of servants and "lighter people."

in some ways the ending of twelfth night is a bit of a bummer -- malvolio storms off, pledging revenge on everyone who has stood there and laughed while he was stripped of his dignity, and as far as we no there is no conclusion, no justice is served. how can we just, like, walk away and be fine with that? i guess to answer that i'd paraphrase an article mentioned in the back of the folgers: the greatest revenge malvolio gets, the greatest victory over all the nobility with which he shares the stage, is being, in the end, the most memorable character in the play.