Rape and Resistance of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus
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Texture: A Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 2017 The Body that Writes: Rape and Resistance of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus Arnab Baul Assistant Professor of English Surya Sen College, Siliguri Abstract The violent rape of a woman is at the centre of Shakespeare’s early tragedy ‘Titus Andronicus’. The gang rape of Titus’ daughter Lavinia unsettles our civilized sensibility in terms of its brutality and raises questions regarding rape’s appropriation in socio-cultural space. The play shows, as I argue here, how the violated body of Lavinia has become a site of contestation representing a struggle between Roman patriarchy’s attempted construction of narrative of shame and Lavinia’s courageous rebuttal. Lavinia’s subversion of this strategy of gender stratification by speaking through language of silence and then using writing as performance, shows a rape victim’s regaining of her lost self.The narrative of rape and revenge thus turns into a narrative of resistance when more than the act of violation it is the consequence of violation of the body and the resultant trauma which is highlighted. This paper further shows that an environment that makes it shameful to speak of rape, disallows a critique of rape and the culture that sustains it. I conclude by suggesting that the death of Lavinia, even after registering her protest, bursts forth the state of crafty amnesia of a society which still is befuddled on the issue of appropriating rape both culturally and psychologically. Keywords: Rape, patriarchy, gender-construction, protest, befuddlement And that deep torture may be call’d a hell, When more is felt than one hath power to tell. —Shakespeare, “The Rape of Lucrece” Rape is the centerpiece of Shakespeare’s fictional history of Rome in Titus Andronicus. The violent rape of Titus’ daughter Lavinia unsettles our civilized sensibility in terms of its brutality and raises questions regarding construction of identity of a rape victim and its appropriation in the early Roman political culture. References to legendary rape stories of Philomela, Lucrece, and Virginus are used as ready reckoner in understanding motives of Vol. 1, No.1. 1 Texture: A Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 2017 characters in association with actions they are involved in. However,the basic narrative structure of Titus Andronicus is patterned on Ovid’s version of the tragic tale of Philomel as occurs in the Metamorphosis, book 13, which Shakespeare replenishes situating rape and mutilation of Lavinia which is the outcome of Titus’ decision of sacrificing Goth Queen Tamora’s eldest son. The motif of rape is not rare to find in Shakespearean canon. He deals with the attempted rape in the final scene of The Two Gentleman of Verona, remarkable rape in Cymbeline where Iachimo fantasizes over the sleeping body of Imogen;rape threat in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or verbal rape in the brothel of Pericles. But rape of Lavinia, it seems, surpasses all instances of violation of women’s body in terms of brutality, for Chiron and Demetrius, two sons of Goth queen Tamora, not only rape her but cut off her hands, and cut out her tongue. Moreover, Chiron and Demetrius do not stop there but start taunting her in the aftermath of rape: DEMETRIUS: So now go to tell, and if thy tongue can speak, Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee. CHIRON: Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so, And if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe (2.4.1-4) “They use language”, as Alexander Leggatt (2005) says, “to tell Lavinia she will never use language again”(8). For Lavinia her silence has become more eloquent than words and endowed her with a rare courage to chalk out strategy of resistance. If for Goth brothers rape is synonymous with expression of their power, what it means for Lavina is “beyond language, beyond imagining”(Leggatt 2005,8). However, in Titus Andronicus, rape is not merely an act of sexual gratification, but a political ploy of raking revenge on the male Andronici. As Pascale Aebischer (2004, 25) says: The rapists double intention of satisfying sexual desire and wreaking revenge on the male Andronici prefigures late twentieth-century debates about whether rape is an expression of sexual desire or power, showing it to be an effect of both: a sexualized technique of warfare. Rape in Shakespeare’s tragedy is thus both personal and Vol. 1, No.1. 2 Texture: A Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 2017 political, a claiming of the women’s body as a sexualized enemy territory to be conquered. It is thus an early instance of women’s body fraught with political dynamics of war among rival groups which exposes strategic use of women’s body for war-time bargain.Here rape has put Lavinia’s identity into crisis. What is she now? How will she negotiate with her new identity as a rape victim? What will be society’s point of observation on this crime? To get proper answer to these questions we must be the witness to commotions that are formed in the network of relationships that form the community of her family because of Lavinia’s self styled fabrication of her personality. We notice here,how against an environment which makes it shameful to speak of rape, Lavinia subverts the attempted fashioning of her persona as a hapless victim of sexual atrocity by ‘speaking’ through her silence and saves herself from falling prey to conventional rape narrative where the victim internalizesthe gendered construction of her identity as a shame object. Hersilence, as I argue here, emerges as the most potent weapon of spontaneous resistance acting as an opposing force against a dominating culture which facilitates disappearance of subjects of sexual atrocities from the annals of dominant social narrative. Rape of Lavinia cannot be viewed as a separate incidentof torture but a part of ongoing feud between the Goths and the Romans.The root of the calamity is ingrained in an event that occurs in the play’s opening scene. Having lost twenty-one of his twenty-five sons in battle Titus prepares for the burial of the last two sons that provides as part of the ritual the sacrifice of Alarbus , the oldest son of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, ignoring the desperate pleading of the mother.Thus we get a report from Lucius that – ‘ we have performed/Our Roman rites: Alabus’s limbs are lopped/And entrails feed the sacrificing fire’(1.1.145-7). This initiates the revenge mechanism that leads to the rape of Lavinia — the sacrificial scapegoat.As recompense to this personal loss of the murder of her son in the name of the ritual,Tamora plans not to murder Titus’ son, nor even that of a daughter, but rather a daughter’s rape and mutilation. Against a patriarchal silhouette of the play the incident of brutal violation of Lavinia’s body takes the centre stage offering a scope to reviewing of women’s role in Rome’s sexual politics. Regarding the nature and scope of rape Claudia Card (1996, 7) writes: Vol. 1, No.1. 3 Texture: A Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 2017 If there is one set of fundamental functions of rape’, writes “it is to display, communicate and produce or maintain dominance which is both enjoyed for its own sake and used for such ulterior ends as exploitation, expulsion, dispersion, murder. Acts of forcible rape, like other instances of torture, communicate dominance by removing our control over what enters and impinges on our bodies. In war torn situation the victim’s body becomes a site of contestation provoking us to read other resonances of this biological act of forceful intrusion.In times of communal conflicts and war, rape produces, as Raphaelle Branche (2012,4) says: “a relationship of inequality between two kinds of men:those who asserts their physical and social virility by committing the assault and those for whom this same act represents a symbolic castration owing to their inability to protect their wives,sisters or mothers”. Tamora’s decision to use rape as a means of revenge is thus aimed for two purposes: first, raping the daughter of Roman emperor will demonstrate the power of Goth as an ethnic group to Romans, who always considered them as “barbarous Goths”(1.1.28), and second, to expose the inability of the male kin of the victim to defend her honour. Together, it is a disgrace for Lavinia’s male kin to have a raped victim as a member of the family. In the play Lavinia’s worth resides in her exchange value as a virgin daughter. She is symbolically important to Roman patriarchy, she is an emblem of what Joplin calls “sacralized chastity”, she is “ the sign of her father’s or husband’s political power”—the power of male kin to control women’s sexual desire and reproductive power(qtd.in Kahn 1997,49). Rape of Lavinia thus causes a rupture to Roman virtus, and purity which Titus vainly attempts to restore by committing the act of filicide.Titus invokes the story Virginia and Apius (5.3.34-52) in justifying the act of killing and feels that he has “a thousand times more cause than he /To do this outrage” (5.3.50-51). The act of rape transgressed the boundaries of female body of Lavinia, polluting it to such a degree as to make it culturally impure for the Roman family. Lavinia’s body becomes a site of twocontrary motifs. In reality her violated body bears the testimony of brutal torture of Goth brothers, and symbolically, her raped body represents contamination of Roman body-politic.