The Female Body as a Political Territory in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

‘’‘Rape’ call you it, my lord, to seize my own-/
my true betrothed love, and now my wife?/
But let the laws of Rome determine all;/
Meanwhile I am possessed of that is mine.’
(Act 1, Scene 1, l.402-405) 

The representation of the female body as a political territory can be seen throughout Shakespeare’s gruesome tragedy Titus Andronicus; specifically, the politicising of the feminine form is explicitly shown through the brutal rape and maiming of Lavinia, Titus’s only daughter. Lavinia’s reduction to her basest form, a body, comes to symbolise Ancient Rome’s social patriarchy, a symbol that prevails throughout the entirety of the play. Her mutilation at the hands of her rapists, Chiron and Demetrius, leaves her with arms ‘lopped and hewed…thy body bare’ and ‘her tongue cut out’, ‘ravished’.1 Through this act of extreme male violence, patriarchal social codes are inscribed onto her body; she becomes a ‘map of woe’ (III.ii.l.12), whose bodily mutilation represents the decay of Rome’s political infrastructure. Throughout the play, Lavinia is determined completely by the men around her, who seek to seize her body as their territory, regardless of her compliance. Bassianus, upon accusation of sexual misconduct, declares ‘rape, call it you, to seizeth but my own?’(I.i.l.280-281). The verb ‘seizeth’ in the latter sentence accentuates the notion of Lavinia being little more than an object of ownership; she is seized as property, never escaping male domination. As Eisaman Maus argues, at no point ‘is Lavinia’s consent an issue: she becomes the property of whoever happens to carry her off by force.’2 It was not until after the Act of 1597 that ‘a woman’s body was legally understood as being her own possession and not that of her nearest male relative’3. Before this, a woman’s body was seen as merely an extension of their husband; A husband’s role was to ‘govern her [the wife] in all duties that properly concern the state of marriage, in knowledge, in wisdom, judgment, and justice.’4 Conduct books that circulated in the Elizabethan era, such as John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s A Godly Form of Household Government, proved incredibly popular in endorsing the notion of the woman as merely an object to be owned and guided by her husband. Titus Andronicus, written around 1593, can therefore be viewed in light of Elizabethan views of rape as an act committed against the male patriarch.

Yet Lavinia’s physical rape also inscribes her into Roman history; she is one of a number of rape victims associated with Ancient Rome. Perhaps the most prolific of these is the tale of Philomena within Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Lavinia’s rape is based upon this classic tale, in which Philomena is raped by brother-in-Law, King Tereus, and maimed by having her tongue cut out. It is only upon weaving a tapestry that illustrates her barbarous rape that the truth is revealed.5 Lavinia’s tale can clearly be read in light of this; As Eisaman Maus continues to argue, ‘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.’6 Even in her horrific personal rape, then, Lavinia becomes homogenised into a history of violent female oppression; she becomes indistinguishable from other rape victims, claimed and historically conquered through her bodily torment. Lavinia’s rape, however, and subsequent dismemberment acts in turn as a metaphor for the penetration of Titus’s own familial territory, which is entirely obliterated by the end of the play. As Peter Stallybrass remarks, ‘unlike most property, this property [the woman] can bring dishonour to the landlord even as he possesses it.’7 In Lavinia’s grotesque deflowerment, Chiron and Demetrius defile Titus’s own property, invading his territory as father and protector. It is this territorial invasion that sets Titus’s revenge in motion, accentuating the importance of the female body as a symbol of the family.8 Once damaged, Lavinia has no functional role; her body, once seen as a way of attaining power and prestige through marriage, is useless to the Andronicii family. She is told to ‘die’ along with her father’s ‘shame’ (V.iii.l.45-46), emphasising her use only as a physical form and an objectified territory. In death, as in life, she becomes nothing more than expression of the territorial claims imposed on her by the surrounding male figures.

References

Featured Painting: Samuel Woodforde, Titus Andronicus: Act II, Scene III, Tamora, Lavinia, Demetrius and Chiron, 1793, Oil on Canvas, 72.5 x 58cm, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Warwackshire, UK.

1 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, II.iii.16-18, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008). All further references to Titus Andronicus are to this edition.

2 Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Titus Andronicus: Introduction’ in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), pp.399-407, p.404.

3 Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.231.

4 Robert Cleaver, ‘A Godly Form of Household Government: For the Ordering of Private Families’ in Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance: An Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents, ed. by Lloyd Davis (Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 1998), pp.183-212, p.194.

5 See Ovid, Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

6 Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Titus Andronicus: Introduction’ in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt, pp.399-407, p.404.

7 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W.Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1986), pp.123-145, p.128.

8 Revenge in Titus Andronicus becomes entirely based on the female body; this is shown literally through the rape of Lavinia and the subsequent invasion of Titus’s familial territory, yet more literally through Tamora. As the mother of Chiron and Demetrius, Tamora literally births the avenging actions of the play. Her role as a mother literally positions her as a sexually fertile and reproductive body, in the same way as Gertrude in Hamlet.

Written by Steph Reeves
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