SOURCE: “Lucrece's Gaze,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 23, 1995, pp. 210-21.

[In the following essay, Carter argues that once Tarquin has defined Lucrece in traditional, patriarchal terms by raping her, she redefines herself by placing her consciousness within the painting of Troy on a wall in her home, identifying with the painting's subjects and thereby preparing herself for her suicide at the close of the poem.]

I

In Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece Tarquin's and Lucrece's acts of seeing precede their speaking. I shall argue that a specific, constructed experience of social space produces their ability to speak through a sequence of narratable actions. This spatial figuration projects along gender lines. How vision is socially put together reveals the linguistic means by which Lucrece, Tarquin, ‘their’ narrator, and the narrative's audience come to be screens for the imaginal projection of gender.

A useful beginning may be to investigate the phenomenological acquisition of sight as documented in clinical situations. When patients who had been blind from birth first started receiving cataract operations, records of the doctors' reports on the patients' progress were collected in a study by Marius von Senden.¹ As it turned out, such “newly sighted” patients were not merely confronting a surfeit of new, different data. Their task was to learn a thoroughly new intellectual skill: how to put together the vast sensory experience contained in even the simplest, smallest movement of one's body through space. Their experience constitutes persuasive evidence that we are “taught” to posit not only an objective world outside ourselves, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a curiously objective gender inside, inseparable from our experience of being subjects. “I showed her my hand,” wrote one of the doctors of a patient,

and asked her what it was; she looked long at it, without saying a word; I then took her own hand and held it before her eyes, she said with a deep sigh: ‘That's my hand.’ A blind person has no exact idea even of the shape of his own body; so that I first had to hold her own hand before her in order for her to recognize mine as a hand also.²

The patient could be described as passing through Lacan's mirroring ego-ideal stage; she emerges on this side of what she sees, as a subject—opposite to and abstracted from a constructed tableau. To see, in a sense, is to be the author of oneself. Another patient described seeing

an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion. He could not distinguish objects.³

In the course of time, however, by trial and error s/he learns to pick out such static patterns of nonmovement from the swirling of forms and colors: objects. This, as noted above, can be interpreted as the initiating, establishing event in subjectivity, setting in motion all of a life's subsequent events. Like vision, then, being a subject is an acquired mental process, a process of mirroring. A subject/object grid is deployed between observer and observed, such that vision does not merely interpret, but organizes, in effect produces, our social, gendered reality.

This process of linking with one's reality effects a cognitive “lack of being,” the recognition that one's “realization lies in another actual or imaginary space.”⁴ Such a patient, like Lacan's infant,

only sees [his] form as more or less total and unified in an external image, in a virtual, alienated ideal unity […]⁵

—in a mirror. The “gendered Other” gazes at his/her untouchable virtuality. Male/female as Other only knows itself by the mediating image(s) it has of the mirror-subject. It knows what it is by what it is not. This “lack of being” is initiated by, produced, and grows with one's capacity for sight. A patient's lack—this “rushing in” of gender—occurs in the act of making himself real in an imaginary space.

In The Rape of Lucrece this spatial metaphorizing of gender is apparent in the linguistically partitioned actions, and therefore the identities, of the two primary characters, Lucrece and Tarquin. I shall focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the scene of Lucrece “reading” the wall painting in which Troy's defeat is depicted. I shall argue that in her surveying of the painting—in her return from a journey into sightedness—she constructs herself as a rhetorical, gendered Other, whom she then projects back into herself as subject. As a subject she becomes a “newly sighted” space that frames what might be termed her former feminine unseen-ness. By examining the tension between the rhetorical and painterly registers in this passage (spoken by Lucrece and the narrator), in the context of its ordering of narrative voices, I shall reconstruct the means of her transformation.

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, pure—within a larger, allegedly protective male space. The latter, however, produces a reading that condemns Lucrece's actions as, in St. Augustine's view, a failure to see

that while the sanctity of the soul remains even when the body is violated, the sanctity of the body is not lost; and that in like manner, the sanctity of the body is lost when the sanctity of the soul is violated, though the body itself remains intact.⁶

Shakespeare's text intriguingly anticipates and conflates these two readings. Lucrece's choice of suicide is not presented as the automatic secular choice it was assumed to be. The process of her reaching her decision is represented as a discursively critical task in which she challenges the casting of her rape as bodily pollution. The Elizabethan audience was potentially being made aware of its emphatically split reading: that she courageously chose and acted on a theologically incorrect reading, for which she could not be held responsible given the Roman setting of the story.

III

The activity of her “looking at” the wall painting occurs within a larger terrain of envisioning modes. These take many forms in the poem: the mutable register of Tarquin's gaze at Lucrece and Collatium's interior, and similarly of Lucrece's “regard” (for Tarquin, the Apostrophic objects, and the painting); the mind's eye of lust and shame, which as signifieds, look inward at their objects; the varied surfeit(s) of what is seen (focalized); and the presence of “painted” eyes within, and looking back from, the painting.

The narrator gradually escalates the activity of Tarquin's ‘seeing’ of Lucrece: from his “wanton sight,”⁷ to “lustful eye” (179), to “greedy eyeballs” (368), to “willful eye” (417), to “a cockatrice' dead-killing eye” (540). Such rhetorical anaphora proliferate in tandem with the violent expansion of Tarquin's envisioning space; his license to “look,” to penetrate with ever greater intensity, inscribes his movement across and into the female space of corridors, doorways, and the bedchamber of Collatium, which enclose the chaste, untrespassed inner female space of Lucrece's body. The nature of his seeing—surveying and violently reaching out—is being employed here to construct a version of incursive male space.

Female space is possessed within the envisioning male, whether Collatine or Tarquin. As the signified within Tarquin's mind's eye, she contracts.

Within his thought her heavenly image sits,
And in the self-same seat sits Collatine.
That eye which looks on her confounds his wits:
That eye which him beholds, as more divine,
Unto a view so false will not incline [,]

(288-92)

Her eye (as his signified) “which him beholds” proceeds to, but not beyond the boundary of his inner gaze.

But she that never cop'd with stranger eyes,
Could pick no meaning from their parling looks,
Nor read the subtle shining secrecies
Writ in the glassy margents of such books.
She touch'd no unknown baits, nor fear'd no hooks,
          Nor could she moralize his wanton sight,
          More than [that] his eyes were opened to the light.

(99-105)

Her enclosed passivity here seems to preclude any worldly understanding of what waits there to be read (or not) in his eyes and looks. Imposed chastity works to contain vision; it reverses the seeing/speaking progression for the female such that Lucrece literally does not see Tarquin's lust until he speaks it. Tarquin however is allowed to cross the boundary of his gaze, to pierce his own inner outrushing “look.”

Then looking scornfully, he doth despise
          His naked armor of still-slaughtered lust [,]

(187-88)

An ineffectual armor against fear, his lust self-reflexively slaughters even as he inwardly gazes on its self-replenishing object.

Who does Tarquin rape? He rapes Collatium, the home and room, as female space. His vision precedes his movement through its corridors and doorways, pushing him steadily deeper into “her.” He proceeds “As each unwilling portal yields him way” (309); he forces “The locks between her chamber and his will” (302); he ignores that “The threshold grates the door to have him heard” (306). He rapes as he sees.

Now is he come unto the chamber door
That shuts him from the heaven of his thought,
Which with a yielding latch, and with no more,
Hath barr'd him from the blessed thing he sought.

(337-40)

What he sees/rapes is nothing less than the patriarchically programmed, enclosed, inrushing space of the constructed feminine. Georgianna Ziegler⁸ draws on Peter Stallybrass's useful analogy between Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque, and the Renaissance reading of female vision—the grotesque as transgressive, anti-hierarchical, unfinished, obscene.⁹ Such potentiality within female space is normatively constrained by patriarchy—“her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house.”¹⁰ Rape becomes a rending of gendered space; what undergoes pollution is not a body, but a patriarchal construction of female space her “body” occupies.

IV

What is our response upon viewing an effectively conceived and executed visual representation? Writing on narrative painting, Leonardo da Vinci states that if the work

represents terror, fear, flight, sorrow, weeping, and lamentation; or pleasure, joy, laughter and similar conditions, the minds of those who view it ought to make their limbs move so that they seem to find themselves in the same situation which the figures in the narrative painting represent.¹¹

(italics mine)

As an audience before the Troy painting Lucrece herself does this, and more. We need to observe, however tritely, that she must have walked by this artwork, glanced at it, and doubtless viewed it at length on countless occasions during the years she lived at Collatium. Yet on this occasion she deliberately seeks it out. Faced by a representation-as-event, one that exerts a gradually intensifying, cathecting hold on her, she experiences herself mimicing and voicing the physiological and emotional states of its varied characters. In doing so she temporarily steps into the representation. Not surprisingly, the meaning she makes of herself in the painting is to a considerable degree determined by the remembered image of the violence of her rape—an image, some critics argue, unduly “stimulated” by her own language.

“Narratives,” as R. Rawdon Wilson claims, can “catch, hold, illude, and frequently delude their narratees.”¹² The painting-as-narrator tells Lucrece her own story. Moreover, being “caught” by an ostensible illusion can work no less genuine a transformation on a viewer/listener than that worked by a real sight. The Trojan figures she moves among open up and frame Lucrece's own narrative, that is the internal struggle between the two poles of violence she endures, rape and suicide. The gaze of the text-as-narrator at the painting (over Lucrece's shoulder) directs, constructs, and contains her (and our) gaze.

Let us take a brief, initial “wide-angle” look at the sweep of narration, Apostrophic address and prosopopoeic voice that speak in this scene of the “skillful painting.” First the narrator throws his peripatetic, focalizing eye here and there over the painting in a cinematic manner—panning, cutting, tracking in and back, tilting—that gradually escalates. The linguistic effect of installing vision in this way intensifies the very reality (not the realism) of the representation, opening up a space in her own enclosed image of self.

It is during her first narration of (and address to) the painting that Lucrece, in effect, crosses over into what she sees, and also into herself as representation (Other). Indeed, the rhetorical features of her speech in this passage emphasize an emerging detachment from female space.

In the narrator's second passage, half the length of the first, Lucrece's impassioned response from within the painting is narrated. The text implements Simonides's aphorism mentioned earlier when Lucrece prosopopoeically gives language to the silent, painted figures, who in turn give to her her own movements and expressions. The narrator's language rearranges Lucrece's reality within her reading of the painting and herself. However, in her second passage, in which Lucrece responds emphatically to the artist's perjury of Sinon's face (linking Sinon to Tarquin), she takes control of her own seeing by the linguistic rearranging of what she sees.

In the narrator's third passage Lucrece is represented as having pulled back from her former rage, directed not only at Sinon/Tarquin, but also at the circumstances of her own (now oblique) “story.”

The possibility of conferring worldhood on her own story, a place to which she returns from the embedded narrative of the painting, undergoes an anachronic shift. The space Lucrece's newly sighted eyes now project has little in common with her former world. At the moment of her death her language, actions, and seeing have a curious unity that allows us in, while holding back the males present in the scene.

V

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 unseen” 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 she 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.

6. A 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.