Lucrece's Gaze | Ii
II
The story of Lucrece would have been well-known to Elizabethan audiences. Its passive/active linking of her rape/suicide was left largely unquestioned. The presumed choice presented in the poem between death or shame was a foregone conclusion. The theological position counseled choosing shame, of which one could be shriven, over suicide, a mortal sin. Preferring death implied that rape was necessarily, regardless of the purity of mind, a pollution of the body's chastity, an effect which could not be undone. The Elizabethan audience could imagine, and perhaps praise, a woman's choosing a public transformation of unchastity through death, over the private shame of bodily pollution, however technically virtuous of mind she remains. A gap opens up here socially between an audience's deploying of a secular discourse within the larger theological context. The former produces a reading of female space as that which needed to be kept enclosed, unseen,...
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