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WOMEN IN CORIOLANUS

Madelon Sprengnether (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: "Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus," in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, edited by Mary Beth Rose, Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 89-111.

[In the following essay, Sprengnether uses a psychoanalytical approach in exploring the relationship between Coriolanus and Volumnia.]

Whatever else they are about, Shakespeare's tragedies demonstrate, with a terrible consistency, the ways in which love kills. My argument here concerns the structures of homoerotic and heteroerotic bonding that constitute the primary forms of relationship in the tragedies, the assumptions regarding femininity they entail, and the manner in which they combine, with particular deadliness, in the late tragedy Coriolanus. In this play, which reveals a deep fantasy of maternal destructiveness, one can see elements of a preoedipal...

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1. Introduction
2. Overviews
3. Politics And Power
4. Coriolanus
5. Women In Coriolanus
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright