volume 1.1, 2000
Karen Tatum - Lavinia and the Powers of Horror in Titus Andronicus
I make of Her an image of Death so as not to be shattered through the hatred I bear against myself when I identify with Her . . . Thus the feminine as image of death is not only a screen for my fear of castration, but also an imaginary safety catch for the matricidal drive that, without such a representation, would pulverize me into melancholia if it did not drive me to crime. No, it is She who is death-bearing, therefore I do not kill myself in order to kill her but I attack her, harass her, represent her.
-Julia Kristeva, Black Sun
In her article "'I can interpret all her martyr'd signs': Titus Andronicus, Feminism, and the Limits of Interpretation," Cynthia Marshall argues that rather than interpreting Lavinia's disturbing silence, even with the best of feminist intentions, which would replicate the ways in which patriarchal, Andronici power usurps Lavinia's speech, the analyst of Lavinia needs to interpret rather the causes for the horror of Lavinia's mutilation, silencing and rape (205). Marshall eventually posits fear of the feminine as a reason for the characterization and silencing of both Tamora and Lavinia which operate as a binary that becomes merged in several ways (194-5). While Lavinia and Tamora as the primary female characters in the play at first appear to represent the traditional dichotomy virgin/whore, both are linked by male projections onto women, fear of feminine sexuality and fear of the maternal. As Marshall puts it, "the play's polarized images of female possibility--the vicious, sexually voracious Tamora, and the powerless, chaste Lavinia-- offer a compelling, but no longer surprising, instance of the way a misogynistic vision constructs its own reality" (193).
This paper analyzes the ways in which fear of the Maternal manifests itself in Titus Andronicus, what is done to restore order after such resulting violence, and whether or not the horror that the rape evokes in the process is effectively purged from both the reader and the text. I will look at what I see as repetitious acts of Lavinia's rape rather than the rape itself which is and is not in the play: her betrothal to Saturninus, then Bassianus; act 2, scene 4, in which her male guardians imprint her silenced body with their interpretations; and finally Lavinia's seeming to reveal her rapists by guiding the stick in her mouth, which I see as another metaphorical rape on her male relatives' parts, who instruct her in the act. In the process of looking at these repetitious acts of literal and figurative rape and violence, I will explore the language that both represents and reinforces them, how Shakespeare represents Lavinia before and after her rape, as well as how the language reveals this fear of the Maternal and ultimately supports and reinstates it, even though such representations of "death-bearing woman" have caused all these tragic outcomes.
Kristeva's theory of the male speaking subject's abjection of the Maternal, outlined in Powers of Horror, proves useful, I think, not to revise Lavinia, but to figure out the mechanisms underlying Shakespeare's depiction of Lavinia's sacrificial suffering, silence, and suppression for the re-establishment of effective Roman order, and whether or not this kind of purgation works. As Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror, male identity is founded on and maintained in a phallocentric symbolic order through the simultaneous separation from and desire for the maternal. Identity is maintained this way through "incorporating a devouring mother, for want of having been able to introject her and joy in what manifests her, for want of being able to signify her: urine, blood, sperm, excrement . [. . .] the advent of one's own identity demands a law that mutilates" (Powers 54), a law founded on sacrifice of the feminine and maternal that threatens to subsume such founding. A law dependent on this sacrifice, separation and repression of the maternal, necessitates them by eroticizing this loss and displacing it onto the figure of Woman in the symbolic order, who becomes a figure to be both rejected and sought after in order to maintain the subject's identity and autonomy in the symbolic order. Given the disarray of Titus' symbolic order in the beginning of the play, however, it is no wonder the stakes of separation have become so incredibly high and thus the results so incredibly violent. Kristeva explains the rationale behind the ruins of a symbolic which must then confront the feminine thus: "No, it is she who is death-bearing, therefore I do not kill myself in order to kill her but I attack her, harass her, represent her" (Black Sun 28).
Representations of "death-bearing woman," such as cannibalistic Tamora and bleeding, mutilated, "ravished" Lavinia, attempt to both fill the void of this lost mother and justify horrible deeds towards them. Sweet, chaste Lavinia can easily become "that ravenous Tiger Tamora" (5.3.194), not only because both are manifestations of misogyny, but also because the male speaking subject was once part of a maternal body, and his loss of identity effects a safety shield through such representations. Kelly Oliver explains this unstable identity: "The male child feels rage against his mother because her having carried him in her womb compromises his identity. How can he become a man when 'he' was once part of a woman's body?" (Womanizing Nietzsche 138). In order to maintain his identity as distinct and autonomous from the mother, the male child must abject her before he can symbolize her as woman. Abjection both stems from and results in various forms of an ambiguous, tenuous laying of borders between child and mother, as well as what represents or constitutes the child's relation to its mother, primarily bodily drives and functions, which pre-linguistic, maternal authority controls and orders. Excretions such as blood, urine, feces become impure and disgusting to the subject, precisely because of this maternal connection, and especially when his autonomy is threatened; these excretions are reminders of the permeability of borders he has worked so hard to distinguish. Finding himself alone in his antiquated beliefs about Roman order, Titus says to himself, "Titus, when wert thou wont to walk alone, / Dishonoured thus and challenged of wrongs?" (1.1.336-7). Confrontation with the maternal becomes threatening when borders between semiotic and symbolic are unstable, as they are in the beginning of this play. Titus has no idea what kind of reactions his actions will provoke next. In the epitome of this threat and instability, the child excretes these manifestations of connection to the mother, in order to purify himself, to redraw the lines. The abject is always comprised of both fascination and disgust directed towards the mother's body (as the incest taboo and castration threat reflect), which prohibits the child from the mother's body so that he can become independent--one way in which the symbolic supports this process of individuation, abjection. This ambiguous, paradoxical relationship to the abject remains throughout subjecthood, founded on, "a fascination with the figure of the mother as both attractive and repulsive; the womb [as] both devouring and horrifying and procreatively powerful," to use Kelly Oliver's words (Womanizing Nietzsche 138). Kristeva notes that "it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (Powers 4).
Abjection is a relationship to these borders of what threatens to engulf the subject's identity stemming from the lost Maternal, "a threat issued from the prohibitions that found the inner and outer borders in which and through which the speaking subject is constituted" (Kristeva, Powers 69). Kelly Oliver explains that "the abject is what threatens identity. It is neither good nor evil, subject nor object, ego nor unconscious, but something that threatens the distinctions themselves" (Reading Kristeva 56). The speaking subject must maintain his autonomy from the mother through "repression" of the maternal, a repression which, however, does not exclude and continues to haunt the subject from the limits of the symbolic. As Kristeva says, "The sign represses the chora and its eternal return"; it represses, but does not prevent such return (Powers 14).
Kristeva explores several remnants of this preoedipal bond with the mother that must be abjected to maintain the subject's "purity and cleanliness," which by the same token, maintains his separation from the mother: excrement, menstrual blood and corpses. Excrement symbolizes "the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside [Tamora], life by death" (Powers 71). Menstrual blood threatens the distinction between the sexes. It reminds the male subject that he was once fed and nourished by this blood, by the umbilical chord. Both excrement and menstrual blood are linked to maternal authority in the preoedipal phase, which becomes repressed but not excluded in the speaking subject. In this phase, maternal authority, signaled through contact with her body and voice, orders chaotic, libidinal drives, and mediates between semiotic (drives) and symbolic (law and order) modalities. Semiotic, bodily drives threaten to destroy the child, because they are "on the path of destruction, aggressivity and death" (Revolution 28) without such maternal authority . The mother's preoedipal authority preconditions and prepares the child for the father's symbolic authority, which necessarily signifies repression of such a primary, maternal influence (Powers 72).
The child must be significantly threatened (castration, incest) in order to separate and remain separate from the mother of whom he was once a part, who gave him life and to whom he clings for life. Part of the initiative in adopting a symbolic order that demands such separation is that he will be able to re-present her in language, which can be used as a means of obtaining and possessing the erotic symbol for the mother, woman. The more he is threatened, the more he can either idealize or monstrosize her, two sides of the same coin. Thus a paradoxical desire for the mother and denial of the mother must always be healthily balanced and maintained. Kristeva explains in Black Sun: "For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non of our individuation" (27-8). Matricide, like castration, serves as a metaphor depicting the severity of the stakes--engulfment, death. Woman should not be prohibited; rather, the mother whom woman becomes the erotic object for should be prohibited: "one sees everywhere the importance, both social and symbolic , of women and particularly the mother" (Powers 70). Thus, it seems that the male's identity, because he came from this mother who then in turn threatens his autonomy, needs to be more firmly established: "the masculine [sex], apparently victorious [over the feminine sex in gaining social authority], confesses through its very relentlessness against the other, the feminine, that it is threatened by an asymmetrical, irrational, wily, uncontrollable power" (Powers 70). When the social order becomes unstable as it certainly does from the very beginning of Titus Andronicus, the subject's autonomy is even more threatened and the attacks against the feminine, woman, who represents the maternal in the symbolic order, become even more severe.
Kristeva points out that corpses pose the ultimate threat because they are a direct confrontation with the ultimate realization that "refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. [. . .] It is no longer I who expel, 'I' is expelled" (Powers 3-4). Titus Andronicus begins with a parade of corpses. The emperor has just died; authority is at stake. However, perhaps more disturbing are Titus' "five-and-twenty valiant sons" (1.1.79), whom he brings home to a Rome "victorious in thy mourning weeds!" (1.1.70). As act 1, scene 1 progresses, Titus slays his son, as well as Tamora's, in the Roman name of honor. By the time Lavinia is raped and mutilated in act 2, scene 4, thirty dead bodies, including that of her husband, Bassianus, have "made their entrances and exits" on the stage of this horrifying spectacle. This proliferation of bodies that begins Titus shakes the stability of the state and propels the tragic, horrific spectacle of female mutilation and voracious, cannibalistic mothers that ensue. Representations of death-bearing woman and the violence enacted against her as a result of these representations, escalate to the point that Titus Andronicus becomes abjection itself, as its critical history and canonical status depict. Katherine Maus tells us that the play "delighted audiences of the 1590's, but several centuries of critics since then have deplored the play's gratuitous violence and its generally 'un-Shakespearean' character" (371).
The horror of Titus Andronicus is both repulsive and fascinating--abject. Blood and gore stare us in the face through every turn of this play, and yet, Lavinia's rape, dismemberment and brutal silencing receive almost no attention or credence at all. She is more of a vehicle for enhancing and revenging the many woes that make up Titus' "most lamentable tragedy." Starting with act 2, scene 4, in which Lavinia first appears after her rape, Lavinia becomes a body or text for her male relatives to interpret as they please. But representation cannot effectively cover the horrifying silent spectacle of her bleeding body and "stumps," that in themselves signify rape, a mutilation and dismemberment that all the powerful males around her seem powerless to discover--or are they? The scene erects a paradox in which these characters' speeches idealize a woman standing in front of them virtually bleeding to death. Neither Marcus, nor Titus, nor Lucius can face Lavinia's blood and its connection with, as Kristeva puts it, "menstrual blood," which "stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual)," and "threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference" (Powers 71). Because the mouth, issuing blood, serves as a symbol for her vagina (Marshall 201), Marcus, Titus and Lucius efface, re-present, the horror of Lavinia's bleeding body, which they invoked, by turning her into a discursive ideal. Such a feat seems to border on the level of farce as this great warrior, Titus, his Tribune brother, Marcus, and his son Lucius (who will one day join with the Goths and take over the Roman empire), cannot associate Lavinia's bleeding, mutilated appearance with the thought of rape. The truth these males apparently seek, which is only symbolized through the link with Philomel, occurs to Marcus when he first encounters Lavinia, but he never raises this possibility to Titus or Lucius, even when his speculations pan out in 4.1. All of this seeing and not seeing serve to prolong both Lavinia's and the viewer's (particularly the female viewer) torture. The male Andronici are both repelled and fascinated by Lavinia's rape, suspending the confrontation with it only so they can then in turn seek it, giving them a figure by which their male identity appears to remain intact--only the world around them is crumbling, not a crumbling from within, which they project onto Lavinia.
When Chiron and Demetrius throw "the ravished" Lavinia back out into the world after having destroyed her reason for being, her chastity, they mock her inability to tell her tale with "So, now go tell" (2.4.1); "Write down thy mind" (3); "play the scribe" (4); "See how with signs and tokens she can scrawl" (5); "call for sweet water to wash thy hands" (6). One might expect such blatant jest from sons of Tamora, the tigress, but Marcus' verbal abuse operates on a level of ghostly horror, ghostly because displaced by his apparently sweet and concerned parental care. Both Cynthia Marshall and Mary Laughlin Fawcett, in analyzing this scene, focus their attention not on the horrific spectacle of Lavinia, but on Marcus. Indeed, though, Shakespeare's eroticized language seems to beg the same. While Fawcett points out that "the language does not match the context," she later claims "the compliments to [Lavinia's] features are horribly accurate," because Marcus dissects Lavinia's once beautiful parts just as they have been literally dissected by Chiron and Demetrius. While Fawcett admits that she is "haunted" by this scene, her analysis goes on to similarly displace the horrific reaction demanded by rape, by emphasizing Shakespeare's "ingenuity" in courtly love eroticization of a woman who incidentally happens to be standing in front of all of us bleeding profusely (273). A point that both Fawcett and Marshall center on is Fawcett's claim that the "language is arousing because it calls attention both to itself and, through its excesses, to the erotic possibilities for the image of a bloody mouth" ( Fawcett 273; Marshall 198). This paradox in language that encompasses both a beautiful and bloody mouth, an inviting and devouring vagina, enables Marcus to make the association with rape, blood and menstrual blood. His eroticized speech moves from hands to lips to vagina and back to lips: "But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee / And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue" (2.4.26-7). Dorothea Kehler points out the Elizabethan association between a woman's verbal and sexual excesses (Kehler 324). If Lavinia can't talk she must not have been raped. If Tamora's power lies precisely in her words which manipulate a primary part of the action, she must be sexually devouring as well. And of course "deflower" is both a reference to the vagina and Lavinia's value as a woman based on her chastity. As Carolyn Williams points out, up until 1597, rape was treated as a crime of theft; rape was stealing a woman from her male guardians' control and thereby decreasing her exchange value (100). And according to Karen Cunningham, "figures accused of a crime could offer no witnesses in their defense; to speak for the accused was to speak against the interests of the king," especially if one was a woman guilty of being raped by virtue of the fact that it happened (146). While Fawcett seems to want to divert attention away from the horror of Lavinia's rape by discussing the eroticized language, she does say that this language "is too elegant and decorous; there is something garishly pretty about this description of her bloody mouth" and that something is this bloody mouth that Marcus does and does not notice (273). The combination of horror and beauty in this scene is its own kind of abjection, for the author who composed it, for Marcus (the viewer in the text), and for the reader as well.
Further paradox rests in Marcus' reaction and treatment of Lavinia in this scene when he mourns her bloody mouth and commands her to speak at the same time. It can be interpreted from the text that Marcus really doesn't know Lavinia's tongue has been cut out until the third time he asks her to speak in line 21, so, as Marshall says, "until Lavinia locates her Ovidean text in 4.1, [Marcus] does not and cannot know if she has in fact been 'deflowered'" (199). The knowing and not knowing of the horror must be drawn out, displaced onto idealizations of Lavinia which magnify Titus' aggrandizing woe, until sufficient proof can be obtained for symbolic justice to remain in tact. Lavinia's experience is continuously abjected until it can be ultimately ejected through the ultimate death of the female intended to ease the father's anguish. As Marshall puts it, "the rape achieves the goal of ensuring that Lavinia will not be powerful [as the threatening, sexual Tamora], but will be frozen in a posture of dependence and humiliation" (194). This dependence and humiliation of the female standing in for the maternal in symbolic discourse, ensures the symbolic's oppressive dominance and perceived stability.
So Marcus demands that Lavinia speak; he can effect concern when it is absolutely safe for him to do so, when she has no tongue. Although, the textual illusion suggests Marcus has no idea she has been raped because she can not articulate it, the language undercuts this notion with his reference to Philomel, and makes the paradoxical combination of raped and not raped seem taunting and mocking towards Lavinia by virtue of the contrast. Even after he realizes the bloodstained spectacle she represents, he repeats "Speak, gentle niece" (2.4.16). And then again "Why dost thou not speak to me?" before the "crimson river" appears (2.4.21). Almost directly after this in 3.1, when Titus first encounters what he himself refers to as "this object," he says to her "Speak, Lavinia" (66). Then to ridicule her even more, Lucius, directly after Titus' lengthy response, says to her "Speak, gentle sister, who hath martyr'd thee" (81). Marcus' leap from rape to martyrdom here quietly signifies in the gap the loss of Lavinia's only value as a woman in this system, her chastity. "Who hath martyred thee?" is more of a decree than a question. Using the word "martyred" instead of "raped" assumes that, like Lucrece, because Lavinia has been raped, she is already sentenced to death for the cause of woman's chastity. Using the word "martyred" instead of "raped" also glorifies the horror and violence of rape, usurping woman's horrifying experience of being raped. Rape does not mean the terrifying, relentless attack against the feminine that it must be, it means the male's safety in martyrdom, the illusive trope that envelops us all in a cloud of ambiguity, horror and eroticism, separated by a thin veil of what drives us back. Jane Gallop states: "It is terrifying to lift the mantle of the law and encounter the father's desire" (78). The law veils its desire for the mother represented by daughter/woman in the social order with the incest taboo, governed by an economy based on the exchange between men of women whose chastity increases their value, and men's desire. "Violation would lose its meaning and its attraction were the body no longer represented as 'virginal-solid-closed, to be opened with violence'" (Irigaray qtd. in Gallop 81).
The disturbing suggestion of the Philomel myth and the tragic-to-the-point-of-comic manner in which these Roman heroes bumble and dance around the glaringly tattered appearance of Lavinia which screams rape, leads me to believe that Marcus does indeed know what's happened to his niece, but the challenge and the goal of getting her to break her silence, when they have silenced her, is both a fear and a desire, excitement and incitement. In this sense, getting that long awaited expression brings about her death, since her only purpose for living in the first place was as Titus tells her when she first appears in 1.1, to "live; outlive thy father's days / And fame's eternal date, for virtue's praise" (1.1.167-8), meaning, as the footnote points out "may the praise of your virtue outlive eternity" (n.1, 383). When Titus stabs her, he says "Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, / And with thy shame thy father's sorrow die" (5.3.45-6). Even here Titus has to refer to Saturninus (the emblem of Roman law that played a part in bringing about his tragedy) for consent. Further consent is given by the reference to Virginius who "slay[ed] his daughter with his own right hand / Because she was enforced, stained, and deflowered" (5.3.37-8). Through continuous references to Lucrece, Philomel and Virginius, Shakespeare remains loyal to the vow, as Lucrece puts it, that "no dame hereafter living / By my excuse shall claim excuse's giving" (line 1714-15). Shakespeare continues the example and precedence his exemplar set, purging the uncontrollable feminine through the masculine masquerade of the martyr. As Katherine Maus puts it, "Lavinia's story, then, is an amalgam of classical rape narratives. Her terribly mutilated body condenses a long history of sporadic violence against women into a single, intensely imagined brutalization"(373), but in that single instance, such brutalization, through such proliferation, could last a good four hundred years and surely longer .
Titus, as well as Virginius, stabs his daughter with his right hand, the hand that writes and is associated with masculine goodness as opposed to evil, left-handed female sexuality. Such left-handed connection also signifies textual perpetuation of Lucrece's tale. The right hand purges the evil sexuality of the left. Barbara Walker points out that "all myths agree that the right hand was male and the left hand was female" (531). The etymology of "left" ranges with associations of "clumsy, stupid [French], deceitful [Italian], perverse [German], worthless [Anglo-Saxon, lyft]," all characteristics traditionally associated with the female (531). When Titus first sees "this object [that] kills me," his raped and bloodied daughter, he wants to know "what accursed hand / hath made thee handless in thy father's sight" (3.1.66-7), and demands "give me sword, I'll chop off my hands too" (72). His wish soon comes true. As we discover in 3.2, it was his left hand that he cut off: "This poor right hand of mine / Is left to tyrannize upon my breast" (7-8). Significantly, the left, although abjected, absent, still "tyrannizes" over the male right. Titus amputates his hand directly after seeing the "ravished" Lavinia, whose hands have been cut off as well, both right and left, masculine and feminine, devoid of all sex. Kristeva says "because it hence decks itself out in the sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word" (Powers 208). This Crisis turns to tragedy as there is no unveiling of the abject but a continuous veiling, a continuous veiling of eroticism over horror. Lavinia, the chaste, bleeds through three acts of the play and manages to blush while she's doing it. As Marcus perceives of the ravished Lavinia when he first sees her,
Ah, now thou turns't away thy face for shame,
And notwithstanding all this loss of blood,
As from a conduit with three issuing spouts,
Yet do thy cheeks look as red as Titan's face
Blushing to be encountered with a cloud. (2.4.28-31)
She is both ashamed and as innocent as the clouds, evil, left, symbol for the lost thing that threatens from the margins, that ambiguous relationship that is and is not, abjection, "a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling" (Kristeva, Powers 13).
It is both Lavinia's "terribly mutilated body" and this "long history of sporadic violence against women," as Maus puts it, literal and figurative violence, that not only horrifies the audience members of Titus, but Titus as well. Cast off his left as he might, Titus can't escape the horror that confronts him in the figure that was his daughter (3.1.62). One of Kristeva's examples of abjection is a nauseating repellment to food: "Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection" (Powers 2). Abjection appears when the reaction to food produces "a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire" (2-3). Bodily excretions are signs of both the subject's autonomy from the mother and connection as well, signs of "the abject," which "simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject" (5).
Titus' identity as Roman warrior and hero, the strength of his identity, is threatened by the sight of both the cause and the result of his fear--Lavinia's "ravished," dismembered body, the uncanny left hand that has come back to haunt him after he desperately chopped it off. The outside and inside borders of his identity, war and the state (outside), maternal and home (inside) have collapsed, which Titus' "weeping welkin" speech just after he cuts off his hand shows. Here Titus first posits himself as the sea, but the very next sentence drowns this stance out as the sea clearly becomes a "her" whose "sighs doth blow" away, "overflow and drown," whatever position Titus takes, be it sea or earth (3.1.224-8). Titus' "deluge" becomes "overflowed and drowned," which positions him as a space to be filled rather than the one who deluges, a word which takes on an odd form here (228). The force with which he tries to hold back his own deluge in response and can't, the sign and connection with this threatening maternal which becomes abject as a result, explodes in the form of his bowels. The act of vomiting, in which exterior and interior boundaries merge, becomes not just a metaphor in the language but the exact force with which the language is produced, a vomiting deluge that enacts the vomiting, excreting of words it metaphorically evokes in description. As Kristeva explains, "The body's inside . . . shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside" (Powers 53).
As the borders of Titus' identity are drowned out by this deluge, his "bowels cannot hide her woes," and thus, "like a drunkard must I vomit them"--abjection (3.1.229-30). In the early modern period, bowels were considered to be the seat of compassion. But compassion appears to have turned into a force so strong it causes his bowels to explode. Thus, the language depicts a boundary giving way to a force it can no longer contain. The momentum of the speech builds until Titus is forced to vomit it to an end: "like a drunkard must I vomit them. / Then give me leave, for losers will have leave / To ease their stomachs with their bitter tongues" (230-2). Given the force of the sea that threatens to overtake any position he takes in this speech, and given the fact that Titus' identity as noble warrior and hero of Rome has melted into imbecility by this point, the stability of his identity is virtually null. As a result, the threatening, engulfing maternal on which his identity was founded confronts him. His abjection of the impure "bowels" is initiated by the horrifying spectacle of his daughter, raped and mutilated, both the cause and the effect of the sacrifice on which his identity is founded. Thus, he vomits a proliferation of discourse at warp speed in order to "preserve himself from severance . . . ready for more--flow, discharge, hemorrhage. All mortal" (Kristeva, Powers 55). The force of such a site is enough to cause him to loosen his bowels and witness the proof of both the link and the separation from the maternal--his daughter. As Kristeva says, "The body's inside, in that case, shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside" (Powers 53). "The inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being" is the loss of the mother who he continuously desires and must continuously abject himself from (Powers 5).
Lavinia's rape, however, does not just occur in 2.4. From the very beginning Lavinia seems merely to be a female body that walks and talks devoted ramblings of idolatry for her father and full acquiescence to the male-dominated symbolic order of this play (a sort-of pre-rape). As Karen Cunningham says, "Initially a peripheral figure in this martial tale, she is progressively transformed through violence into the focal point of the play's insistent appeals to justice" (142). Lavinia's first lines, 156 lines into the play, are repetitions of her father's words:
TITUS: In peace and honor rest you here, my sons.
LAVINIA: In peace and honor live Lord Titus long. (1.1.156-57).
All total, Lavinia has 57 lines, is not finally, literally abjected from the stage until 5.3.46 (when she dies), and her body may or may not be brought back on stage when Lucius, the new emperor kisses his father three times before the sentences on Aaron and Tamora are pronounced. Yet she is spoken of and talked to at length, most infamously in 2.1 where Aaron instructs Chiron and Demetrius in her rape, a sort of perverted fatherly advice on wooing scene. Marshall points out that "Lavinia's silence punctuates the reiterated questions which Marcus must begin to answer for himself" (197). Her silence speaks louder than words as she stands in front of Marcus, Titus and Lucius in act 3, punctuated, as they try to "interpret her martyred signs" (3.2.36). Marie Wynne-Davies views Lavinia's holding the bowl for Chiron and Demetrius' blood as her "foremost instrument in the initiation of revenge against her rapist" (145). But Lavinia's actions are results of performatives directed towards her by her male guardians throughout the play. She marries Saturninus in silence; she marries Bassianus in silence; she is raped in silence; she carries home her father's left hand in silence; she draws her attackers' names in the sand in silence; she holds the bowl in silence; until finally she dies a martyr, forever silenced and troped into the textual production of her creator, author of the symbolization founded on the violence of Lucrece, Philomel, Virginius, in which Lavinia now plays a part.
Lavinia has had her tongue cut out, been raped, mutilated and disembodied before the play even begins, an act that enacts the series of performatives that culminate in the horrific, silenced spectacle she becomes which speaks louder than words. As Wynne-Davies points out, "The Roman citadel and state are envisaged as a headless feminine body" (139). Images of mutilated females emerge from the very beginning of the play. When Saturninus is crowned emperor, Titus states, "A better head her glorious body fits / Than his that shakes for age and feebleness" (1.1.187-8). Even though Lucius' reign may seem to be founded on the murder of Saturninus and thus the purgation of such evil, we are left with the disturbing image of Tamora outside the city gates and her son living within, which suggests that order is still established on a sacrifice that may or may not respect boundaries. Lucius' becoming emperor doesn't suggest a righting of the wrong that Titus should have been emperor in the first place, or as Wynne-Davies points out an analogy of Lavinia's body and the body politic (139), it suggests the violent sacrificial rape and mutilation, on which this corrupt state is founded, the beheaded female Lavinia, from which The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus ensues. For how can Lavinia be put back together any other way than the symbolic order's neat knitting back together, to use Marcus' metaphor (5.3.69); she was "ravished," not raped. Lucius pronounces Lavinia a martyr, "Speak, gentle sister, who hath martyred thee" (3.1.81), when he first sees her bleeding body; it is this martyrdom, this repetitious sacrifice of the female, that allows him to become emperor, but the horror that remains suggests the beginnings of another tragedy.
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva analyzes the two prohibitions that society is founded on, murder and incest:
Incest prohibition throws a veil over primary narcissism and the always ambivalent threats with which it menaces subjective identity. It cuts short the temptation to return, with abjection and jouissance, to that passivity status within the symbolic function, where the subject, fluctuating between inside and outside, pleasure and pain, word and deed, would find death, along with nirvana. (63-4)
To keep the subject from floating back into this death and nirvana, he must incorporate this memory of the mother into his signifying process through a mediation of semiotic and symbolic modalities. The semiotic is the pre-linguistic, repressed memory of oneness with the mother that must be incorporated into symbolic discourse. If the subject represses the semiotic; it drives him into psychosis where violent representations of this "death-bearing mother" emerge in order to protect him from the death he imagines she is capable of. Kristeva says "I make of her an image of Death so as not to be shattered through the hatred I bear against myself when I identity with her, for that aversion is in principle meant for her as it is an individuating dam against confusional love" (Black Sun 28). Shakespeare's language in this play is filled with paradoxes of love and violence against the feminine, puns and plays on tomb, womb, receptacle, the "abhorred pit" as Tamora calls it, representative of the devouring female (2.3.98). Lavinia's rape occurs in the woods where, as Aaron points out, the angels fear to tread, while her husband Bassianus lies dead in a pit, an "unhallowed and bloodstained hole" (2.3.210), which her brothers Lucius and Martius are soon sucked into, while trying to pull him out, all of which seem to be synonymous for a much-feared, devouring womb that the actual rape of Lavinia erupts into. "Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, that patrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing" (Kristeva, Powers 77). Tamora's literal eating of her sons represents this fear of the Maternal in the allegory and incarnation of a devouring mother, not to mention the fact that Tamora orders her own son's death directly after his birth, maybe the most blatant and literal representation of "death-bearing woman," who gives birth and by virtue of that fact, death. As Wynne-Davies puts it, "The association of hell, death and consumption with the womb clearly evokes a concept of woman's sexuality that is both dangerous and corrupting" and must be repeatedly controlled through the means of violence" (135).
Karen Cunningham sees a kind of female agency, "self translation," in 4.1 where Lavinia finally seems to reveal her rapists (151). However, once again, Lavinia's expression depends on male sanction. She first has to discover a parallel in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which as Marshall points out is a male version of rape (199), not Lavinia's actual experience of being raped. Secondly, she waits for Marcus' instructions, who continuously makes appeals to a higher paternal authority in this scene, the heavens. But perhaps the greatest irony, shall I say, or paradox or ambiguity, the strangest abjection in this scene, is that the same hatred and representations of "death-bearing mother" that effected this rape which they are at such pains and excitement to reveal, crop up again in the language through references to, again, tomb/womb: "so foul a den" (4.1.58); a dam who feigns innocence, lays on her back to deceive the lion, until he sleeps and she can pounce on him (4.1.96-9). These ring of the same metaphors Lavinia uses to describe and then appeal to Tamora before her rape: "O, keep me from their worse-than-killing lust / And tumble me into some loathsome pit" (2.3.175-6). Lavinia wishes to be swallowed in the same pit that is the representation of her as devouring and death-bearing, acting not as agency for the feminine, but the female body with a male head she has been from the beginning of the play.
Even after Lavinia seems to be avenged in revealing her rapists, the patriarchal Andronici must continue to perpetuate such representations of devouring female that brought about the rape in the first place. The manner in which she is forced to reveal her attackers, reenacts the rape itself in the process, although orally, but the connection between mouth and vagina has already, hopefully, been made. Marcus demonstrates the process as her male family members watch and cheer her on, a re-enactment of Chiron and Demetrius' gang rape as well. As Titus begins to articulate his revelation of the rape through the Philomel connection, he says "Forced in the ruthless, vast and gloomy woods? / See, see. Ay, such a place there is where we did hunt-- / O, had we never, never hunted there" (4.1.53-5). Yet he is the one who planned the hunt there which brought about his daughter's "ravishment" and "defilement"--"Stuprum" (4.1.77).
With the horror of the rape their fear and obsessive abjection of the maternal has invoked, the patriarchal Andronici are at great pains to distance and trope such horror at all costs. Marcus makes continuous appeals to heavenly authority for revenge, not of Lavinia's woes, but those of "old Andronicus!" (4.1.128). Titus makes continuous appeals to young Lucius to watch, observe and learn the masculine way to the point of provoking the response: "I say, my lord, that if I were a man / Their mother's bedchamber should not be safe" (4.1.106-7). How will killing the mother revenge his aunt's violation? There's a strange way in which this honored glory on the young Lucius' part eroticizes and reenacts--as does the responses of Marcus, Titus and Lucius to the horrid spectacle of Lavinia--the rape of Lavinia by Chiron and Demetrius once more. Titus trains the young Lucius to repeat his glorious deeds (a hunt in the woods that results in rape and death?): "Ay, that's my boy! Thy father hath full oft / For his ungrateful country done the like"(4.1.109-10), and the implication is, so will young Lucius .
A rather strange allusion occurs in this scene, not just to the male Andronici's practically obsessive depictions of a ravenous, devouring feminine, but to Shakespeare's. After Titus laments the hunt that he enacted, he claims these "ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods," were "Patterned by that the poet [Ovid, who] here describes, / By nature made for murders and for rapes" (4.1.53, 56-7). "Patterned by the poet " suggests the textual production of Lucrece's tale, "the amalgam of classical rape narratives" Katherine Maus says Lavinia encompasses. Then Marcus responds with a question that seems to be more of a statement posed as a question: "O, why should nature build so foul a den, / Unless the gods delight in tragedies?" (4.1.58-9). Nature doesn't make so foul a den as "the swallowing womb" (2.3.239), "this unhallowed and bloodstained hole" where a woman is "surprised by an uncouth fear" (2.3.210-11); images like these are "patterned by that the poet here describes" (4.1.56), fear of that maternal who gave life and thus threatens to bear death as well. As Kristeva asks, "Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-parings to decay, represent--like a metaphor that would have become incarnate--the objective frailty of the symbolic order?" (Powers 70).
Lavinia is one such metaphor for a frail symbolic order, a horrifying spectacle, particularly for the female audience member, because the revelation of the horror of her experience, the lifting of the mantle of the law that reveals the father's desire, as Gallop puts it, is so close and yet continuously denied, always taken from us after it was enacted on us by the paternal trope "ravishment," as Lucius recounts the lamentable tragedy that includes the horrors of rape. This kind of exclusion by a male order, this trope, makes it difficult to dissociate the woman from the symbol. For she is indeed not so much "a real woman" as she is a vehicle and receptacle, in the Platonic sense, for the male characters' projections of their own fears and aspirations, the continuous reveiling as opposed to revealing. So Lavinia becomes one other woe that makes Titus "lamentable" and the play a tragedy. But maintaining these distinctions is not so easy in the female spectator's imagination. For somewhere lingers the unspoken horror that yet speaks louder than words, that in fact screams tales of a woman who was raped, beheaded, mutilated and then martyred, the sacrifice on which a new order is erected by the next generation of Andronici who stage the hunt. Somewhere lingers the threatening spectre of what will happen if you step out of line and speak this horror, and what may happen even if you don't. The power of suggestion is formidable, as both the tragedy of Desdemona and the comedy Much Ado with its preserved Hero who only suffers a fictitious death show us. And somewhere in the midst, there lingers a female reader, watcher of these events, who without the help of a Kristevan map to decipher the underlying causes of "this map of woe" (3.2.12), may or may not be able to interpret the martyred signs of a masculine order so in love with, so fascinated and repelled by (and she would be shocked if she knew), her power to create life and thus death, the power that provoked these myths of Lucrece, Philomel and Lavinia in response, in horror.
The University of Alabama
© Karen Tatum, 2000
Works Cited
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Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
---. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
---. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
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---. Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to the "Feminine." New York: Routledge, 1995.
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