Let us now "track in" for a closer look at the rhetorical, visual, and narrative components of each of these passages in the wall painting scene. In the narrator's first passage (1366-1463) we are gradually introduced to the "skillful painting." The narrator's initial, tentative address to the reader, "These might you see [ … ] / " (1380), "That one might see [ … ] / " (1386), and "You might behold [ … ] / " (italics mine) acknowledge the painting as "mere" representation, of which we are rightly to be skeptical. By the midpoint of this passage, however, by a grammatical shifting from the conditional to the simple past, the language inserts us into that representation.

This process is emphasized in the cinematic movement of narrative focus. Whom and what do we see? The most visual sequence within this passage directs our eye as follows: a "medium shot" on

Ajax and Ulysses, O what art
Of physiognomy might one behold!
                                       (1394);

CUT to a "close shot" on

The face of either cipher'd either's heart
                                       (1396);

CUT to an 'extreme close' on

Ajax' eyes blunt rage and rigor roll'd
                                       (1398);

PAN to

the mild glance that smiling Ulysses lent.
                                       (1399);

CUT to a "medium" on Nestor; PULL BACK to a "long" to bring into frame the silent, listening faces of the soldiers; and follow with a slow "pan" among

The scalps of many, almost hid behind,
To jump up higher seem'd to mock the mind.
                                       (1413-14)

With this there is a shift back, in language, from what occurs in the painting-as-narrative to a look at the painter's technique itself. A subsequent description of the painterly device of overlap intensifies this:

That for Achilles' image stood his spear,
Grip'd in an armed hand, himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of the
 mind[:]
                                    (1424-26)

Space, in effect, is being constructed through an acknowledgement of what perception contributes—our learning to view the real in fragments. Fragments imply gaps; the text signals that what is "left un-seen" is where the reader's role enters, to fill in such space. A whole is merely a consensus among the senses of a thing "they" willfully put together. From the poem's above-noted technical description of painterly special effects there is a further shift to the description of the Trojan mothers' contradictory spectatorship:

And from the walls of strong-besieged Troy,
When their brave hope, bold Hector, march'd
 to field,
Stood many Troyan mothers, sharing joy
To see their youthful sons bright weapons
 wield,
And to their hope they such odd action yield
 That through their light joy seemed to
  appear
(Like bright things stain'd) a kind of heavy
  fear.
                                   (1429-35)

We are compelled to read in both directions here. Our line of sight travels to the walls, and from there to the field, simultaneously reflected back from the "light" of the "bright weapons" to the mothers' eyes. Is vision an intersubjective agency, or an activity by which space invents itself between two sites of seeing? It would seem that we learn not to see how we have learned to see.

This progress of the first passage—a pull back from the painted representation as deep cinematic reality, to a framing of technique, and back again to a framing of the problematics of vision itself—leaves the reader at a considerable distance from Lucrece. We hear and see her identification with Hecuba, yet cannot follow her as she crosses over.

Escalating rhetorical density has a stroboscopic effect on the space this passage produces, as demonstrated in: the piling on of anaphora (1467-8) in her first stanza, the chiasmus (1475-6) in the second, an epanalepsis (1480) in the third, and the combined anaphora and assonance (1487-8) in the fourth, each involving variations on the strategic repetition of key words. Critical opinion has often tended to resist the reflexivity of rhetorical forms, arguing that rhetoric closes down the possibilities for the development of narrative and character otherwise present in a scene. All language, however, has a rhetorical dimension, of which audiences choose to be aware. Lucrece's rhetoricity can perhaps best be read as her awareness of her own transformation. She knows she can step outside her ideologically grounded female space, yet she also knows she cannot escape the similarly grounded expectations her social frame places on her.

The chiasmus of her second stanza warrants more specific attention.

Thy eye kindled the fire that burneth here,
 And here in Troy, for trespass of thine
 eye[,]
                                    (1475-76)

It is Paris's inescapable, space-making eye that activates lust and destruction (of Helen and Troy), piercing, penetrating, fixing on its object: spatial absence as allotted the female. She sees that it is male envisioning that frames a woman's seeing and speech.

In the narrator's second passage Lucrece's intense sorrow over Troy's destruction is initially foregrounded. The literal sympathetic exchange between the silent painted figures and her rhetoricizing voice, "She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow" (1498-9), removes her even further from our view. Her identification with the painting as embodying the Real, as being more than representation, reaches the stage where "Such signs of truth in his [Sinon's] plain face she spied" (1532) are such "That she concludes the picture was belied." (1533) She is seeing, in effect, two paintings—one she assembles in her mind (of which she is a part), and another she can designate as merely "the picture." The emphasis here on separating the painting (as embedded narrative) from Lucrece's viewing of it incites her to momentarily rescript Sinon's role in Troy's defeat. In the last stanza of this passage language rearranges both itself and Lucrece within what is (and is not) spoken.

"It cannot be," quoth she, "that so much
  guile"—
She would have said, "can lurk in such a
  look";
But Tarquin's shape came in her mind the
  while,
And from her tongue "can lurk" from
  "cannot" took:
"It cannot be" she in that sense forsook,
And turn'd it thus, "It cannot be, I find,
But such a face should bear a wicked mind.
                                   (1534-40)

The active past tense is parried by the conditional past, what was spoken by what nearly was, the unspoken "can lurk" by the sense of the spoken "cannot." By the last two lines she recursively participates in the rearrangement of her own speech. With these spoken/unspoken phrases she gasps out her incredulity, her struggle with herself as narratee (after the spatial stroboscopy of the painting).

In her second narrative passage she responds directly to Sinon's treason, and commands herself to

Look, look how list'ning Priam wets his eyes,
To see those borrowed tears that Sinon
 sheeds!
                                    (1548-49)

By the end of this passage she is no longer having her speech rearranged for her, she actively rearranges what she says and sees in a complex series of inversions:

Such devils steal effects from lightless hell,
For Sinon in his fire doth quake with cold,
And in that cold, hot burning fire doth dwell;
These contraries such unity do hold
Only to flatter fools, and make them bold:
 So Priam's trust false Sinon's tears doth
  flatter,
That he finds means to burn his Troy with
  water.
                                 (1555-61)

She takes a certain distracted enjoyment in her ability to manipulate the painting's reality.

In the narrator's third passage her language and sight collide, as

She tears the senseless Sinon with her nails,
Comparing him to that unhappy guest
Whose deed hath made herself herself detest.
                                   (1564-66)

The violence of her action returns her to 'herself; she collapses back into the world of her narrative. Space contracts as, with the arrival of Collatine, Lucretius, and Brutus, the narrator pulls back slightly. A period of time is elided, "But now the mindful messenger, come back" (1583), until Collatine " [ … ] finds his Lucrece clad in mourning black." (1585) When she speaks next, it is to address her husband and his guests.

She has stepped back into her former space, but with a difference. She looks ahead to her suicide from a vantage in which the text conflates the pagan Roman and Augustinian readings of her story.

Though my gross blood be stain'd with this
 abuse,
Immaculate and spotless is my mind;
That was not forc'd, that never was inclin'd
To accessary yieldings, but still pure
Doth in her poison'd closet yet endure.
                                      (1655-59)

She has come to see her pollution in Augustinian terms, that her virtue is untouched, yet the text acknowledges that this is still governed, framed by, her society.

She does not escape through death; nor does she become a symbol of Chastity for others to follow; nor indeed does she become an ironized subject in the text. Her suicide is a reassertion of the differently constructed space she sighted within the painting, and from which she returns, transformed.

Notes

¹ Marius von Senden, Space and Sight (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1960).

² Ibid., 109.

³ Ibid., 130.

⁴ Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 55.

⁵ Senden, Space and Sight, 130.

⁶A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of The Christian Church, Vol. II, "St. Augustin's [sic] City of God and Christian Doctrine" Philip Schaff, ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1956), 13.

⁷ William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1. 104. All subsequent references to the poem will appear in the text of the paper.

⁸ Georgianna Ziegler, "My lady's chamber: female space, female chastity in Shakespeare" Textual Practice 4.1 (1990): 73-90.

⁹ I partially concur with the position Ziegler argues with reference to Stallybrass, however in her conclusion regarding "these two female poles" she seems to essentialize the female grotesque as the authentic pole opposite female enclosure as a constructed normative. Rather, both "poles" are equally such constructions.

¹⁰ Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal territories: The body enclosed", in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 124.

¹¹ Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. by A. Philip McMahon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956), 110.

¹² R. Rawdon Wilson, "Shakespearean Narrative: The Rape of Lucrece Reconsidered," Studies in English Literature 28 (1988): 55.

Source: "Lucrece's Gaze," in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. XXIII, 1995, pp. 210-21.