Portia in The Merchant of Venice, (a play rife with positions of marginality and bondage), begins as a woman 'castrated' by a patriarchal society. She will have to marry and spend her life with any male who happens to open the right casket containing her picture. Her father, now dead, took away from her the right to choose a life partner to her liking. She conforms to the expectations that a patriarchal society has from an obedient daughter − by submitting to the lottery drawn over her life, her happiness. Trying to salvage some redeeming features about Portia from this situation, it could be said, however, that she has the power to love (and not to question), even if it is a tyrannical father. It is this power to love that later on gives her strength to do something unusual for a woman of her class at that time in the Venetian society. Thus it is that her love for Bassanio enables her to perform a 'reversal' of the gender roles. It is not that she puts on the dress and appearance of a young man in a not- so-serious frame of mind somewhat in the manner of Rosalind in AsY ou Like It. As she carefully thinks out her procedures, there is a playful attitude in her, infecting Nerissa, too (cf. Act 3, Sc.4). But then there is an exigency behind that move of hers. Where the learned, efficient, empowered males are failing to rescue her husband's dearly loved friend, she must achieve that feat. And her society would not allow her to even try to do that in her capacity as a woman. She therefore determinedly ventures into the social space in the disguise of a man. It is like an adventure for her, exciting and challenging at the same time. Portia successfully executes the 'much-needed reversal' of the roles of the sexes. But Shakespeare does not allow her story to stop there. There is another dimension to her character that is revealed at this point in the play. Strengthened by her love for her husband she can confidently put him to a test of fidelity. She raises issues of her “worthiness” and his “own honour” vis-à-vis their marital relationship (cf. Act 5, Sc.1). Now it is she who determines and defines the bond between herself and her husband, in sharp contrast to her situation earlier, when she was in a relationship of 'bondage' traditionally enjoyed and wielded by Portia's father between her and himself. My paper would be a study of Portia's gradual emergence as a New Woman in the play