That she never mentions her husband is itself believed her to indicate a happiness in her marriage. Through this process, she internalizes qualities that she has externalized in the portrait. Her depiction of her cross-dressed self in both words and image is a way of “taking charge” of her form, which she had felt to be “shackled,” as though she were an “ailing crane shut in a cage.” With the writing of this play, she exerted a kind of agency within the limited confines of her situation by visualizing her unwitnessed self and creating a series of witnesses for it. Not only the portrait but also the implied audience of the play provides a witness for that part of herself—the literary talent—that has not been sufficiently acknowledged. It labors in dreams dreamt in vain. Lacking a disciple, she concludes that she will have to summon her own soul. Among the ancients, there were those… who wrote eulogies for themselves…