[In the following essay, originally presented in 1976, Adelman examines the psychology of Coriolanus in Shakespeare's play of the same name, illuminating his desire for masculine self-sufficiency and dependency on his mother.]

Coriolanus was written during a period of rising corn prices and the accompanying fear of famine: rising prices reached a climax in 1608. In May 1607, "a great number of common persons"—up to five thousand, Stow tells us in his Annals—assembled in various Midlands counties, including Shakespeare's own county of Warwickshire, to protest against the acceleration of enclosures and the resulting food shortages.¹ It must have been disturbing to property owners to hear that the rioters were well received by local inhabitants, who brought them food and shovels;² doubly disturbing if they were aware that this was one of England's first purely popular riots, unlike the riots of the preceding century in that the anger of the common people was not being manipulated by rebellious aristocrats or religious factions.³ The poor rioters were quickly dispersed, but—if Coriolanus is any indication—the fears that they aroused were not. In fact, Shakespeare shapes his material from the start in order to exacerbate these fears in his audience. In Plutarch the people riot because the Senate refuses to control usury; in Shakespeare they riot because they are hungry. Furthermore, the relentlessly vertical imagery of the play reflects the specific threat posed by this contemporary uprising: in a society so hierarchical—that is, so vertical—as theirs, the rioters' threat to level enclosures implied more than the casting down of particular hedges; it seemed to promise a flattening of the whole society.⁴ Nor is Shakespeare's exacerbation of these fears merely a dramatist's trick to catch the attention of his audience from the start, or a seventeenth-century nod toward political relevance: for the dominant issues of the uprising—the threat of starvation and the consequent attempt to level enclosures—are reflected not only in the political but also in the intrapsychic world of Coriolanus; taken together, they suggest the concerns that shape the play and particularly the progress of its hero.

The uprising of the people at the start of the play points us toward an underlying fantasy in which political and psychological fears come together in a way that can only make each more intense and hence more threatening. For the political leveling promised by the contemporary uprising takes on overtones of sexual threat early in Shakespeare's play:⁵ the rising of the people becomes suggestively phallic; and the fear of leveling becomes ultimately a fear of losing one's potency in all spheres. In Menenius's belly fable, the people are "th' discontented members, the mutinous parts," and "the mutinous members" (1.1.110,148): an audience for whom the mutiny of the specifically sexual member was traditionally one of the signs of the Fall, and for whom the crowd was traditionally associated with dangerous passion, would be prone to hear in Menenius's characterization of the crowd a reference to a part other than the great toe (1.1.154). In this fantasy the hitherto docile sons suddenly threaten to rise up against their fathers, the Senators (1.1.76); and it is characteristic of Coriolanus that the contested issue in this Oedipal rebellion is food.⁶ The uprising of the crowd is in fact presented in terms that suggest the transformation of hunger into phallic aggression, a transformation that is, as I shall later argue, central to the character of Coriolanus himself: when the first citizen tells Menenius "They say poor suitors have strong breaths: they shall know we have strong arms too" (1.1.58-60), his image of importunate mouths suddenly armed in rebellion suggests the source of Coriolanus's rebellion no less than his own.

If the specter of a multitude of hungry mouths, ready to rise and demand their own, is the exciting cause of Coriolanus, the image of the mother who has not fed her children enough is at its center. One does not need the help of a psychoanalytic approach to notice that Volumnia is not a nourishing mother. Her attitude toward food is nicely summed up when she rejects Menenius's invitation to a consolatory dinner after Coriolanus's banishment: "Anger's my meat: I sup upon myself/ And so shall starve with feeding" (4.2.50-51). We might suspect her of having been as niggardly in providing food for her son as she is for herself, or rather suspect her of insisting that he too be self-sufficient, that he feed only on his own anger; and indeed, she has apparently fed him only valiantness ("Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'st it from me" [3.2.129]). He certainly has not been fed the milk of human kindness: when Menenius later tells us that "there is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger" (5.4.28-29), he seems to associate Coriolanus's lack of humanity not only with the absence of any nurturing female element in him but also with the absence of mother's milk itself.⁷ Volumnia takes some pride in the creation of her son, and when we first meet her, she tells us exactly how she's done it: by sending him to a cruel war at an age when a mother should not be willing to allow a son out of the protective maternal circle for an hour (1.3.5-15). She elaborates her creation as she imagines herself mother to twelve sons and then kills all but one of them off: "I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country, than one voluptuously surfeit out of action" (1.3.24-25). To be noble is to die; to live is to be ignoble and to eat too much.⁸ If you are Volumnia's son, the choice is clear.

But the most telling—certainly the most disturbing—revelation of Volumnia's attitude toward feeding comes some twenty lines later, when she is encouraging Virgilia to share her own glee in the thought of Coriolanus's wounds: "The breasts of Hecuba / When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier / Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood / At Grecian sword contemning" (1.3.40-43). Blood is more beautiful than milk, the wound than the breast, warfare than peaceful feeding. But this image is more disturbing than these easy comparatives suggest. It does not bode well for Coriolanus that the heroic Hector doesn't stand a chance in Volumnia's imagination: he is transformed immediately from infantile feeding mouth to bleeding wound. For the unspoken mediator between breast and wound is the infant's mouth: in this imagistic transformation, to feed is to be wounded; the mouth becomes the wound, the breast the sword. The metaphoric process suggests the psychological fact that is, I think, at the center of the play: the taking in of food is the primary acknowledgment of one's dependence on the world, and as such, it is the primary token of one's vulnerability.⁹ But at the same time as Volumnia's image suggests the vulnerability inherent in feeding, it also suggests a way to fend off that vulnerability. In her image, feeding, incorporating, is transformed into spitting out, an aggressive expelling; the wound in turn becomes the mouth that spits "forth blood / At Grecian sword contemning." The wound spitting blood thus becomes not a sign of vulnerability but an instrument of attack.

Volumnia's attitudes toward feeding and dependence are echoed perfectly in her son. Coriolanus persistently regards food as poisonous (1.1.177-78, 3.1.155-56); the only thing he can imagine nourishing is rebellion (3.1.68-69,116). Only Menenius among the patricians is associated with the ordinary consumption of food and wine without an allaying drop of Tiber in it; and his distance from Coriolanus can be measured partly by his pathetic conviction that Coriolanus will be malleable-—that he will have a "suppler" soul (5.1.55)—after he has had a full meal. But for Coriolanus, as for his mother, nobility consists precisely in not eating: he twice imagines himself starving himself honorably to death before asking for food, or anything else, from the plebeians (2.3.112-13; 3.3.89-91).¹⁰ And the transformations in mode implicit in Volumnia's image—from feeding to warfare, from vulnerability to aggressive attack, from incorporation to spitting out—are at the center of Coriolanus's character and of our responses to him: for the whole of his masculine identity depends on his transformation of his vulnerability into an instrument of attack, as Menenius suggests when he tells us that each of Coriolanus's wounds "was an enemy's grave" (2.1.154-55). Cominius reports that Coriolanus entered his first battle a sexually indefinite thing, a boy or Amazon (2.2.91), and found his manhood there: "When he might act the woman in the scene, / He prov'd best man i'th' field" (2.2.96-97). The rigid masculinity that Coriolanus finds in war becomes a defense against acknowledgment of his neediness; he attempts to transform himself from a vulnerable human creature into a grotesquely invulnerable and isolated thing. His body becomes his armor (1.3.35, 1.4.24); he himself becomes a weapon "who sensibly outdares his senseless sword, / And when it bows, stand'st up" (1.4.53-54), or he becomes the sword itself: "O me alone! Make you a sword of me!" (1.6.76). And his whole life becomes a kind of phallic exhibitionism, devoted to disproving the possibility that he is vulnerable.¹¹ Anger becomes his meat as well as his mother's: Volumnia's phrase suggests his mode of defending himself against vulnerability, and at the same time reveals the source of his anger in the deprivation imposed by his mother. We see the quality of his hunger and its transformation when, after his expulsion from Rome, he reminds Aufidius that he has "drawn tuns of blood out of thy country's breast" (4.5.100). Fighting here, as elsewhere in the play, is a poorly concealed substitute for feeding (see, for example, 1.9.10-11; 4.5.191-94, 222-24); and the unsatisfied ravenous attack of the infant on the breast provides the motive force for warfare. The image allows us to understand the ease with which Coriolanus turns his rage toward his own feeding mother, Rome.¹²

Thrust prematurely from dependence on his mother, forced to feed himself on his own anger, Coriolanus refuses to acknowledge any neediness or dependency: for his entire sense of himself depends on his being able to see himself as a self-sufficient creature. The desperation behind his claim to self-sufficiency is revealed by his horror of praise, even the praise of his general: ¹³ the dependence of his masculinity on war-fare in fact makes praise (or flattery, as he calls it) particularly threatening to him on the battlefield; susceptibility to flattery there, in the place of the triumph of his independence, would imply that the soldier's steel has grown "soft as the parasite's silk" (1.9.45). The juxtaposition of soldier's steel and parasite's soft silk suggests both Coriolanus's dilemma and his solution to it: in order to avoid being the soft, dependent, feeding parasite, he has to maintain his rigidity as soldier's steel. And the same complex of ideas determines the rigidity that makes him so disastrous as a political figure. The language in which he imagines his alternatives as he contemptuously asks the people for their voices and later as he gives up his attempt to pacify them reveals the extent to which his unwillingness to ask for the people's approval, like his abhorrence of praise, depends on his attitude toward food: "Better it is to die, better to starve, / Than crave the hire which first we do deserve" (2.3.112-13); "Pent to linger / But with a grain a day, I would not buy / Their mercy at the price of one fair word" (3.3.89-91). Asking, craving, flattering with fair words are here not only preconditions but also equivalents of eating: to refuse to ask is to starve, but starvation is preferable to asking because asking, like eating, is an acknowledgment of one's weakness, one's dependence on the outside world. "The price is, to ask it kindly" (2.3.75): but that is the one price Coriolanus cannot pay. When he must face the prospect of revealing his dependence on the populace by asking for their favor, his whole delicately constructed masculine identity threatens to crumble: in order to ask, a harlot's spirit must possess him; his voice must become as small as the eunuch's or the virgin's minding babies; a beggar's tongue must make motion through his lips (3.2.111-18). Asking, then, would undo the process by which he was transformed from boy or woman to man on the battlefield. That he imagines this undoing as a kind of reverse voice change, from man to boy, suggests the extent to which his phallic aggressive pose is a defense against collapse into a dependent oral mode, when he had the voice of a small boy. And in fact, Coriolanus's own use of language constantly reiterates this defense. Flattery and asking are the linguistic equivalents of feeding (1.9.51-52): they are incorporative modes that acknowledge one's dependence. But Coriolanus spits out words, using them as weapons. His invective is in the mode of Hector's wound, aggressively spitting forth blood: it is an attempt to deny vulnerability by making the very area of vulnerability into the means of attack.¹⁴

Coriolanus's abhorrence of praise and flattery, his horror lest the people think that he got his wounds to please them (2.2.147-50), his insistence that he be given the consulship in sign of what he is, not as a reward (1.9.26), his refusal to ask—all are attempts to claim that he is sui generis. His attitude finds its logical conclusion in his desperate cry as he sees his mother approaching him at the end:

I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.

(5.3.34-37)

The gosling obeys instinct and acknowledges his kinship with mankind; but Coriolanus will attempt to stand alone. (Since Coriolanus's manhood depends exactly on this phallic standing alone, he is particularly susceptible to Aufidius's taunt of "boy" when he has been such a gosling as to obey instinct.) The relationship between Coriolanus's aggressive pose and his attempts to claim that he is sui generis are most dramatically realized in the conquest of Corioli; it is here that Coriolanus most nearly realizes his fantasy of standing as if a man were author of himself. For the scene at Corioli represents a glorious transformation of oral nightmare ("to th' pot" [1.4.47] one of his soldiers says as he is swallowed up by the gates) into a phallic adventure that both assures and demonstrates his independence. The dramatic action itself presents the conquest of Corioli as an image of triumphant rebirth: after Coriolanus enters the gates of the city, he is proclaimed dead; one of his comrades delivers a eulogy firmly in the past tense ("Thou wast a soldier / Even to Cato's wish" [1.4.55-56]); then Coriolanus miraculously reemerges, covered with blood (1.6.22), and is given a new name. Furthermore, Coriolanus's own battlecry as he storms the gates sexualizes the scene: "Come on; / If you'll stand fast, we'll beat them to their wives" (1,4.40-41). For the assault on Corioli is both a rape and a rebirth: the underlying fantasy is that intercourse is a literal return to the womb, from which one is reborn, one's own author.¹⁵ The fantasy of self-authorship is complete when Coriolanus is given his new name, earned by his own actions.¹⁶

But despite the boast implicit in his conquest of Corioli, Coriolanus has not in fact succeeded in separating himself from his mother;¹⁷ even the very role through which he claims independence was designed by her—as she never tires of pointing out ("My praises made thee first a soldier" [3.2.108]; "Thou art my warrior: / I holp to frame thee" [5.3.62-63]). In fact, Shakespeare underlines Volumnia's point by the placing of two central scenes. In 1.3, before we have seen Coriolanus himself as a soldier, we see Volumnia first describe her image of her son on the battlefield and then enact his role: "Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus: / 'Come on you cowards, you were got in fear / Though you were born in Rome'" (1.3.32-34). This marvelous moment not only suggests the ways in which Volumnia herself lives through her son; it also suggests the extent to which his role is her creation. For when we see him in the next scene, acting exactly as his mother had predicted, we are left with the impression that he is merely enacting her enactment of his role. That he is acting under her direction even in the role designed to insure his independence of her helps to explain both his bafflement when she suddenly starts to disapprove of the role that she has created ("I muse my mother / Does not approve me further" [3.2.7-8]), and his eventual capitulation to her demand that he shift roles, here and at the end of the play. When he finally agrees to take on the role of humble supplicant, he is sure that he will act badly (3.2.105-6) and that he will lose his manhood in the process (3.2.111-23). For his manhood is secure only when he can play the role that she has designed, and play it with her approval.¹⁸ He asks her, "Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me / False to my nature? Rather say I play / The man I am" (3.2.14-16). But "I play the man I am" cuts both ways: in his bafflement. Coriolanus would like to suggest that there is no distance between role and self, but in fact suggests that he plays at being himself. Given that Volumnia has created this dilemma, her answer is unnecessarily cruel—but telling: "You might have been enough the man you are, / With striving less to be so" (3.2.19-20). Volumnia is right: it is the intensity and rigidity of Coriolanus's commitment to his masculine role that makes us suspect the intensity of the fears that this role is designed to hide, especially from himself.

The fragility of the entire structure by which Coriolanus maintains his claim to self-sufficient manhood helps to account for the violence of his hatred of the plebeians. Coriolanus uses the crowd to bolster his own identity: he accuses them of being exactly what he wishes not to be.¹⁹ He does his best to distinguish himself from them by emphasizing his aloneness and their multitudinousness as the very grounds of their being. ²⁰ Throughout, he associates his manhood with his isolation, so that "Alone I did it" becomes a sufficient answer to Aufidius's charge that he is a boy; hence the very status of the plebeians as crowd reassures him that they are not men but dependent and unmanly things, merely children—a point of view that Menenius seems to confirm when he tells the tribunes, "Your abilities are too infant-like for doing much alone" (2.1.36-37). His most potent image of the crowd is as a common mouth (3.1.22,155) disgustingly willing to exhibit its neediness. He enters the play identified by the plebeians as the person who is keeping them from eating (1.1.9-10); and indeed, one of his main complaints about the plebeians is that they say they are hungry (1.1.204-7).²¹ Coriolanus himself has been deprived of food, and he seems to find it outrageous that others should not be. His position here is like that of the older brother who has fought his way into manhood and who is now confronted by an apparently endless group of siblings—"my sworn brother the people" (2.3.95), he calls them—who still insist on being fed by mother Rome,²² and whose insistence on their dependency threatens the pose of self-sufficiency by which his equilibrium is perilously maintained. Indeed, the intensity of his portrayal of the crowd as a multitudinous mouth suggests not only the neediness that underlies his pose, but also the tenuousness of the pose itself: his insistent portrayal of the plebeians as an unmanly mouth, as feminine where they should be masculine, in effect as castrated, suggests that his hatred of the crowd conceals not only his own hunger but also his fears for his own masculinity.²³ It is char-acteristic of Coriolanus's transformation of hunger into phallic aggression that the feared castration is imagined predominantly in oral terms: to be castrated here is to be a mouth, naked in one's dependency, perpetually hungry, perpetually demanding.²⁴

Coriolanus's absolute horror at the prospect of show-ing his wounds to win the consulship depends partly, I think, on the complex of ideas that stands behind his characterization of the crowd. In Plutarch, Coriolanus shows his wounds; in Shakespeare, the thought is intolerable to him and, despite many promises that he will, he never does. For his wounds would then become begging mouths (as they do in Julius Caesar[3.2.225-26]), and their display would reveal his kinship with the plebeians in several ways: by revealing that he has worked for hire as they have (that is, that he and his deeds are not sui generis after all); by revealing that he is vulnerable, as they are; and by revealing, through the persistent identification of wound and mouth, that he too has a mouth, that he is a feminized and dependent creature. Moreover, the exhibition of his wounds to the crowd is impossible for him partly because his identity is sustained by exhibitionism of another sort. The phallic exhibitionism of his life as a soldier has been designed to deny the possibility of just this kinship with the crowd; it has served to reassure him of his potency and his aggressive independence, and therefore to sustain him against fears of the collapse into the dependent mode of infancy. To exhibit the fruits of his soldiership not as the emblems of his self-sufficiency but as the emblems of his vulnerability and dependence, and to exhibit them precisely to those whose kinship with him he would most like to deny, would transform his chief means of defense into a proclamation of his weakness: it would threaten to undo the very structure by which he lives.²⁵

Behind Coriolanus's rage at the plebeians, then, stands the specter of his own hunger and his own fear of dependence. But this rage is properly directed toward his mother: and though it is deflected from her and toward the plebeians and Volscians for much of the play, it finally returns to its source after he has been exiled from Rome. For Rome and his mother are finally one:²⁶ although in his loving farewell his family and friends are wholly distinguished from the beast with many heads, by the time he has returned to Rome they are no more than a poor grain or two that must be consumed in the general fire (5.1.27). (Even in his loving farewell we hear a note of resentment when he consoles his mother by telling her, "My hazards still have been your solace" [4.1.28].) And as he approaches Rome, we know that the destruction of his mother will not be merely incidental to the destruction of his city. For in exiling him, Rome reenacts the role of the mother who cast him out; the exile is a reliving of the crisis of dependency that Coriolanus has already undergone. Coriolanus initially meets this crisis with the claim that he himself is in control of the independence thrust upon him, a claim akin to the infant's fantasy of omnipotent control over the forces that in fact control him: "I banish you!" (3.3.123). He then attempts to insure himself of the reality of his omnipotence by wishing on his enemies exactly what he already knows to be true of them ("Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts! / . . . Have the power still / To banish your defenders" [3.3.125-28]): few curses have ever been so sure of instantaneous fulfillment. Having thus exercised his rage and assured himself of the magical power of his invective, Coriolanus finally makes his claim to true independence: "There is a world elsewhere!" (3.3.135). But he cannot sustain this independence, cannot simply separate himself from the world of Rome; the intensity of his identification with Rome and with his mother forces him to come back to destroy both, to make his claim to omnipotent independence a reality by destroying the home to which he is still attached, so that he can truly stand as if a man were author of himself. The return to Rome is an act of retaliation against the mother on whom he has been dependent, the mother who has cast him out; but it is at the same time an acting out of the child's fantasy of reversing the roles of parent and child, so that the life of the parent is in the hands of the omnipotent child. For Coriolanus can become author of himself only by first becoming author of his mother, as he attempts to do here: by becoming in effect a god, dispensing life and death (5.4.24-25), so that he can finally stand alone.

But Coriolanus can sustain neither his fantasy of self-authorship nor his attempt to realize a godlike omnipotent power. And the failure of both leaves him so unprotected, so utterly devoid of a sense of self that, for the first time in the play, he feels himself surrounded by dangers: for the capitulation of his independent selfhood before his mother's onslaught seems to him to require his death. Indeed, as he cries out to his mother, he embraces his intuition of his own death with a passivity thoroughly uncharacteristic of him:

O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But for your son, believe it, O, believe it,
Most dangerously you have with him prevail'd,
If not most mortal to him. But let it come.

(5.3.185-89)

His attempt to ward off danger by pleading with Aufidius is strikingly half-hearted; and when he says, "Though I cannot make true wars, / I'll frame convenient peace" (5.3.190-91), we hear the tragic collapse of his personality. We of course know by this time that the self-sufficient and aggressive pose by which Coriolanus maintains his selfhood is as dangerous to him as its collapse, that Aufidius plans to kill him no matter what he does (4.7.24-26, 56-57). It is a mark of the extent to which external dangers are for Coriolanus merely a reflection of internal ones that he feels himself in no danger until the collapse of his defensive system. But Volumnia achieves this collapse partly because she makes the dangers inherent in his defensive system as terrifying as those which it is designed to keep at bay: her last confrontation with her son is so appallingly effective because she invalidates his defenses by threatening to enact his most central defensive fantasies, thereby making their consequences inescapable to him.

The very appearance of his mother, coming to beg him for the life of her city and hence for her own life, is an enactment of his attempt to become the author of his mother, his desire to have power over her. He has before found her begging intolerable (3.2.124-34); when she kneels to him here, making the role reversal of mother and child explicit (5.3.56), he reacts with an hysteria that suggests that the acting out of this forbidden wish threatens to dissolve the very structures by which he orders his life:

What's this?
Your knees to me? to your corrected son?
Then let the pebbles on the hungry beach
Fillip the stars. Then let the mutinous winds
Strike the proud cedars 'gainst the fiery sun,
Murd'ring impossibility, to make
What cannot be, slight work!

(5.3.56-62)

At first sight, this speech seems simply to register Coriolanus's horror at the threat to hierarchy implied by the kneeling of parent to child. But if Coriolanus were responding only—or even mainly—to this threat, we would expect the threatened chaos to be imaged as high bowing to low; and this is in fact the image that we are given when Volumnia first bows to her son as if—as Coriolanus says—"Olympus to a molehill should / In supplication nod" (5.3.30-31). But Coriolanus does not respond to his mother's kneeling with an image of high bowing to low; instead, he responds with two images of low mutinously striking at high. The chaos imaged here is not so much a derivative of his mother's kneeling as of the potential mutiny that her kneeling seems to imply: for her kneeling releases the possibility of his mutiny against her, a mutiny that he has been suppressing all along by his exaggerated deference to her. His response here reveals another of the bases for his hatred of the mutinous and leveling populace: the violence of his images suggests that his mother's kneeling has forced him to acknowledge his return to Rome as a rising up of the hungry and mutinous forces in himself. With her usual acumen, Volumnia recognizes the disarming of potential mutiny in Coriolanus's response and chooses exactly this moment to assert, once again, his dependence on her: "Thou art my warrior" (5.3.62).

The living out of Coriolanus's forbidden wish to have power over his mother had seemed to Coriolanus impossible; but now that protective impossibility itself seems murdered, and he is forced to confront the fact that his wish has become a reality. Nor are the hungry and mutinous forces within himself content to murder only an abstract "impossibility": the murderousness of the image is directed ultimately at his mother. And once again, Volumnia makes Coriolanus uncomfortably clear to himself: after she has enacted his terrifying fantasy by kneeling, she makes it impossible for him to believe that her death would be merely an incidental consequence of his plan to burn Rome.²⁷ For she reveals exactly the extent to which he has identified mother and Rome, the extent to which his assault is on both. Her long speech builds to its revelation with magnificent force and logic. She first forces him to see his attack on his country as an attack on a living body by accusing him of coming to tear "his country's bowels out" (5.3.103). Next, she identifies that body as their common mother ("the country, our dear nurse" [5.3.110]). Finally, as she announces her intention to commit suicide, she makes absolute the identification of the country with herself; after she has imagined him treading on his country's ruin (5.3.116), she warns him:

thou shalt no sooner
March to assault thy country than to tread—
Trust to't, thou shalt not—on thy mother's womb
That brought thee to this world.

(5.3.122-25)

The ruin on which Coriolanus will tread will be his mother's womb—a warning accompanied by yet another assertion of his dependence on her as she recalls to him the image of himself as a fetus within that womb.

If Coriolanus's mutinous fantasies are no longer an impossibility, if his mother will indeed die as a result of his actions, then Coriolanus will have realized his fantasy of living omnipotently without kin, without dependency. In fact this fantasy, his defense throughout, is articulated only here, as he catches sight of his mother (5.3.34-37); and its expression is the last stand of his claim to independence. Throughout this scene, Volumnia has simultaneously asserted his dependence on her and made the dangers inherent in his defense against that dependence horrifyingly clear; and in the end it is the combination of her insistence on his dependency and her threat to disown him, to literalize his fantasy of standing alone, that causes him to capitulate. Finally, he cannot "stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin"; he must become a child again, a gosling, and admit his neediness. The presence of his own child, holding Volumnia's hand, strengthens her power over him: for Coriolanus seems to think of his child less as his son than as the embodiment of his own childhood and the child that remains within him; even when we are first told about the son, he seems more of a comment on Coriolanus's childhood than on his fatherhood. The identification of father and child is suggested by Coriolanus's response as he sees wife, mother, and child approaching: "My wife comes foremost; then the honour'd mould / Wherein this trunk was fram'd, and in her hand / The grandchild to her blood" (5.3.22-24). Here Coriolanus does not acknowledge the child as his and his wife's: he first imagines himself in his mother's womb, and then imagines his child as an extension of his mother. Even Coriolanus's language to Menenius as he earlier denies his family reveals the same fusion of father and son: "Wife, mother, child, I know not" (5.2.80) he says, in a phrase that suggests that his own mother is the mother of the child, and the child he attempts to deny is himself. Volumnia had once before brought Coriolanus to submission by reminding him of himself as a suckling child (3.2.129); now virtually her last words enforce his identification with the child that she holds by the hand: "This fellow had a Volscian to his mother; / His wife is in Corioles, and his child / Like him by chance" (5.3.178-80). But at the same time as she reminds him of his dependency, she disowns him by disclaiming her parenthood; she exacerbates his sense of himself as a child, and then threatens to leave him—as he thought he wished—alone. And as his fantasy of self-sufficiency threatens to become a reality, it becomes too frightening to sustain; just as his child entered the scene holding Volumnia's hand, so Coriolanus again becomes a child, holding his mother's hand.

The ending of this play leaves us with a sense of pain and anxiety; we are not even allowed the feelings of unremitting grief and satiation that console us in most of the other tragedies. The very nature of its hero insists that we keep our distance. Coriolanus is as isolated from us as he is from everyone else; we almost never know what he is thinking, and—even more intolerably—he does not seem to care what we are thinking. Unlike an Othello or an Antony, whose last moments are spent endearingly trying to insure our good opinion, Coriolanus makes virtually no attempt to affect our judgment of him: he dies as he has tried to live, heroically mantled in his self-sufficiency, alone. Nor is it only our democratic sympathies that put us uncomfortably in the position of the common people throughout much of the play: Coriolanus seems to find our love as irrelevant, as positively demeaning, as theirs; and in refusing to show the people his wounds, he is at the same time refusing to show them to us. In refusing to show himself to us, in considering us a many-headed multitude to whose applause he is wholly indifferent, Coriolanus denies us our proper role as spectators to his tragedy. The only spectators that Coriolanus allows himself to notice are the gods who look down on this unnatural scene and laugh, who are so far removed from men that they find this human tragedy a comedy. And as spectators we are in danger of becoming as distant from human concerns as the gods: for Coriolanus's isolation infects the whole play and ultimately infects us. There are very few moments of relaxation; there is no one here to love. We are made as rigid and cold as the hero by the lack of anything that absolutely commands our human sympathies, that demonstrates to us that we are dependent creatures, part of a community. Even the language does not open out toward us, nor does it create the sense of the merging of meanings, the melting together, that gives us a measure of release in King Lear or Antony and Cleopatra, where a world of linguistic fusion suggests the dependence of all parts. Instead, the language works to define and separate, to limit possibilities, almost as rigidly as Coriolanus himself does.²⁸ And finally, the nature of our involvement in the fan-tasies embodied in this distant and rigid hero does not permit any resolution: it also separates and limits. For Coriolanus has throughout given free expression to our desire to be independent, and we delight in his claim. But when he turns on his mother in Rome, the consequences of his claim to self-sufficiency suddenly become intolerably threatening to us. We want him to acknowledge dependence, to become one of us; but at the same time we do not want to see him give in, because to do so is to force us to give up our own fantasy of omnipotence and independence. Hence at the final confrontation we are divided against ourselves and no solution is tolerable: neither the burning of Rome nor the capitulation and death of our claims to independence. Nor is the vision of human dependency that the play allows any compensation for the brutal failure of our desire to be self-sustaining. In Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, dependency is finally shown to be what makes us fully human: however much the characters have tried to deny it, it finally becomes their salvation, and ours, as we reach out to them. But dependency here brings no rewards, no love, no sharing with the audience; it brings only the total collapse of the self, the awful triumph of Volumnia, and Coriolanus's terribly painful cry: "O mother, mother! / What have you done?"

Notes

¹ John Stow, Annales (London, 1631), p. 890. See Sidney Shanker, "Some Clues for Coriolanus," Shakespeare Association Bulletin 24 (1949): 209-13); E. C. Pettet, "Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607," Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950): 34-42; and Brents Stirling, The Populace in Shakespeare (New York, 1965), pp. 126-28, for discussions of the uprising and its political consequences in the play.

² Stow, Annales, p. 890.

³ See Edwin F. Gay, "The Midland Revolt and The Inquisitions of Depopulation of 1607," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n.s., 18 (1904); 195-244, for valuable contemporary commentary on the uprising and an analysis of it in comparison with earlier riots of the sixteenth century. See also Pettet, "Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection," p. 35.

⁴ The participants in the uprising were commonly called "levelers" and their activity "leveling," in startling anticipation of the 1640s. The common use of this term suggests the extent to which their fight against enclosures seemed to threaten hierarchy itself (See, for example, Stow, Annales, p. 890, and Gay, "The Midland Revolt," pp. 213 n. 2, 214 n. 1, 216 n. 3, and 242.) The vertical imagery is so prominent in the play that it scarcely needs to be pointed out; at its center is Cominius's warning that the stirring up of the people is "the way to lay the city flat, / To bring the roof to the foundation, / And bury all which yet distinctly ranges / In heaps and piles of ruin" (3.1.201-5). The threat of the people to rise and cast Coriolanus down from the Tarpeian rock, Coriolanus's horror of kneeling to the people or of his mother's kneeling to him, and ultimately the image of the prone Coriolanus with Aufidius standing on him—all take their force partly from the repetition and intensity of the vertical imagery throughout.

⁵ Shakespeare had in fact just used the word level to suggest a sexual leveling at the end of Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra laments: "The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls / Are level now with men" (4.15.65-66).

⁶ Coriolanus himself occupies an odd position in the psychological myth at the start of the play: though he is a father, we almost always think of him as a son; though the populace considers him prime among the forbidding fathers, he himself seems to regard the patricians as his fathers. His position midway between father and sons suggests the position of an older sibling who has made a protective alliance with the father and now fears the unruliness of his younger brothers. Instead of fighting to take possession of the undernourishing mother, he will deny that he has any need for food.

⁷ Menenius's words point to the rigid and ferocious maleness so prized by Rome. The ideal Roman woman is in fact one who denies her womanhood, as we see not only in Volumnia but in Coriolanus's chilling and beautiful description of Valeria (5.3.65-67). (Indeed, Valeria seems to have little place in the intimate family gathering of 5.3; she seems to exist there largely to give Coriolanus an excuse for speaking these lines.) The extent to which womanhood is shrunken in Roman values is apparent in the relative unimportance of Coriolanus's wife, Virgilia; in her the female values of kindly nurturing have become little more than a penchant for staying at home, keeping silent, and weeping. (Given the extreme restrictions of Virgilia's role, one may begin to understand some of the pressures that force a woman to become a Volumnia and live through the creation of her exaggeratedly masculine son. Gordon Ross Smith ["Authoritarian Patterns in Shakespeare's Coriolanus," Literature and Psychology 9 (1959): 49] comments perceptively that, in an authoritarian society, women will either be passive and subservient or will attempt to live out their thwarted ambition via their men.) At the end, Rome sees the consequences of its denial of female values as Coriolanus prepares to deny nature in himself and destroy his homeland. When Volumnia triumphs over his rigid maleness, there is a hint of restitution in the Roman celebration of her as "our patroness, the life of Rome" (5.5.1). But like nearly everything else at the end of this play, the promise of restitution is deeply ironic: for Volumnia herself has shown no touch of nature as she willingly sacrifices her son; and the cries of "welcome, ladies, welcome!" (5.5.6) suggest an acknowledgment of female values at the moment in which the appearance of these values not in Volumnia but in her son can only mean his death. Phyllis Rackin, in an unpublished paper entitled "Coriolanus: Shakespeare's Anatomy of Virtus" and delivered to the special session on feminist criticism of Shakespeare at the 1976 meeting of the Modern Language Association, discusses the denial of female values as a consequence of the Roman overvaluation of valor as the chiefest virtue. Her analysis of the ways in which the traditionally female images of food, harvesting, and love are turned to destructive purposes throughout the play is particularly revealing.

⁸ The association of nobility with abstinence from food, and of the ignoble lower classes with excessive appetite for food in connection with their traditional role as embodiments of appetite, was first demonstrated to me by Maurice Charney's impressive catalogue of the food images in the play ("The Imagery of Food and Eating in Coriolanus," Essays in Literary History, ed. Rudolf Kirk and C. F. Main [New Brunswick, N.J., 1960], pp. 37-54).

⁹ Hence the persistent identification of mouth and wound throughout the play (most striking in the passage discussed here, and in 2.3.7); hence also the regularity with which images of feeding are transposed into images of cannibalism and reveal a talion fear of being eaten (1.1.187, 257; 2.1.9; 4.5.194). At the center of these images of vulnerability in feeding is Menenius's comparison of Rome to an "unnatural dam" who threatens to eat up her own children (3.1.290-91).

¹⁰ In fact, Coriolanus frequently imagines his death with a kind of glee, as the final triumph of his noble self-sufficiency; see, for example, 3.2.1-5, 103-4; 5.6.111-12.

¹¹ The extent to which Coriolanus becomes identified with his phallus is suggested by the language in which both Menenius and Aufidius portray his death; for both, it represents a kind of castration ("He's a limb that has but a disease: / Mortal, to cut it off; to cure it, easy" [3.1.293-94]; "You'll rejoice / That he is thus cut of f [5.6.137-38]. For discussions of Coriolanus's phallic identification and its consequences, see Robert J. Stoller, "Shakespearean Tragedy: Coriolanus" Psychoanalytic Quarterly 35 (1966): 263-74, and Emmett Wilson, Jr., "Coriolanus: The Anxious Bridegroom," American Imago 25 (1968): 224-41. Charles K. Hofling ("An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus" American Imago 14 (1957): 407-35) sees Coriolanus as a virtual embodiment of Reich's phallic-narcissistic character. Each of these analysts finds Coriolanus's phallic stance to some extent a defense against passivity (Stoller, pp. 267, 269-70; Wilson, passim; Hofling, pp. 421, 424).

¹² David B. Barron sees Coriolanus's oral frustration and his consequent rage as central to his character ("Coriolanus: Portrait of the Artist As Infant," American Imago 19 (1962): 171-93); his essay anticipates mine in some of its conclusions and many of its details of interpretation.

¹³ Most critics find Coriolanus's abhorrence of praise a symptom of his pride and his desire to consider himself as self-defined and self-sufficient, hence free from the definitions that society would confer on him. See, for example, A. C. Bradley, "Coriolanus," reprinted in Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London, 1964), p. 229; G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London, 1965), p. 169; Irving Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1960), p. 190; Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), p. 131; and James L. Calderwood, "Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words," Studies in English Literature 6 (1966): 218-19. There are dissenters, however. Brian Vickers, for example, finds a concern with political image-making at the center of the play: in his view, the patricians' praise of Coriolanus as a war machine serves their own propagandistc class interests and should be rejected by the audience as a false image of him; Coriolanus's rejection of this praise is therefore perfectly justified, not an indication of his pride (Shakespeare: "Coriolanus" [London, 1976], pp. 23-25).

¹⁴ In his discussion of Coriolanus's cathartic vitupera-tion, Kenneth Burke suggests that invective is rooted in the helpless rage of the infant ("Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction," Hudson Review 19 [1966]: 200).

¹⁵ To see Corioli as the mother's womb here may seem grotesque; the idea becomes less grotesque if we remember Volumnia's own identification of country with mother's womb just as Coriolanus is about to attack another city (see above, pp. 117-18). Wilson ("Coriolanus: The Anxious Bridgroom," pp. 228-29) suggests that Corioli represents defloration; specifically, that it expresses the equation of coitus with damaging assault and the resultant dread of a retaliatory castration.

¹⁶ The force of this new name is partly corroborated by Volumnia, who delights in reminding her son of his dependence on her: she has trouble learning his new name from the start (2.1.173), and eventually associates it with the pride that keeps him from pity for his family (5.3.170-71). But several critics have argued convincingly that the self-sufficiency implicit in Coriolanus's acquisition of his new name is ironically undercut from the beginning by the fact that naming of any kind is a social act, so that Coriolanus's acceptance of the name conferred on him by Cominius reveals his dependence on external definition just at the moment when he seems most independent. See, for example, Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, pp. 130-32; Lawrence Danson, Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language (New Haven, Conn., 1974), pp. 150-51; Calderwood, "Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words," pp. 219-23.

¹⁷ The father's role in the process of individuation and the consequent significance of Coriolanus's fatherlessness have been pointed out to me by Dr. Malcolm Pines: the father must exist from the start in the potential space between child and mother in order for separation from the mother and hence individuation to take place; the absence of Coriolanus's father thus becomes an essential factor in his failure to separate from his mother.

¹⁸ Volumnia's place in the creation of her son's role,and the catastrophic results of her disavowal of it here, have been nearly universally recognized. For a particularly perceptive discussion of the consequences for Coriolanus of his mother's shift in attitude, see Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford, Calif, 1963), pp. 247-54. In an interesting essay, D. W. Harding suggests Shakespeare's preoccupation during this period with the disastrous effects on men of their living out of women's fantasies of manhood ("Women's Fantasy of Manhood: A Shakespearean Theme," Shakespeare Quarterly 20 [1969]: 252-53). Psychoanalytically oriented critics see Coriolanus as the embodiment of his mother's masculine strivings, or, more specifically, as her longed-for penis: see, for example, Ralph Berry, "Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus," Studies in English Literature 13 (1973): 302; Hofling, "An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus," pp. 415-16; Stoller, "Shakespearean Tragedy: Coriolanus," pp. 266-67, 271; and Wilson, "Coriolanus: The Anxious Bridegroom," p. 239. Several critics have noticed the importance of acting and the theatrical metaphor in the play: see, for example, William Rosen, Shakespeare and the Craft of Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 171-73, and Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence (London, 1972), pp. 184-85. Harold C. Goddard in The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. 2 (Chicago, 1951) discusses acting specifically in relation to the role that Volumnia has cast for her son (pp. 216-17); Berry ("Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus" pp. 303-6) points to the acting metaphors as a measure of Coriolanus's inner uncertainty and his fear of losing his manhood if he shifts roles. In an interesting psychoanalytic essay, Otto Fenichel discusses the derivation of acting from exhibitionism; like all such derivatives, it is ultimately designed to protect against the fear of castration. This argument and his discussion of the actor's relationship to his audience and of shame as the characteristic emotion of an actor at the failure of his role seem to me to have important implications for Coriolanus, especially given both Coriolanus's fear that a change of role here would make him womanish and the shame that he feels later when his role begins to fail (5.3.40-42); see Fenichel, "On Acting," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15 (1946): 144-60.

¹⁹ It is telling that Coriolanus tries unsuccessfully to assert that the people are not in fact Roman, hence are no kin to him ("I would they were barbarians—as they are, / . . . not Romans—as they are not" [3.1.236-37]): he insists on their non-Romanness as simultaneously a condition contrary to fact and a fact; and his unusual incoherence suggests the tension between his fear that he and the crowd may be alike and his claim that there is no resemblance between them. Goddard (The Meaning of Shakespeare, p. 238), Hofling ("An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus," p. 420), and Smith ("Authoritarian Patterns in Shakespeare's Coriolanus," p. 46), among others, discuss Coriolanus's characterization of the crowd as a projection of elements in himself that he wishes to deny, though they do not agree on the precise nature of these elements.

²⁰ And so does Shakespeare. In Plutarch, Coriolanus is accompanied by a few men both when he enters the gates of Corioli and when he is exiled from Rome; Shakespeare emphasizes his isolation by giving him no companions on either occasion. Eugene Waith, in The Herculean Hero (New York, 1962), p. 124, and Danson, Tragic Alphabet, p. 146, emphasize Coriolanus's position as a whole man among fragments.

²¹ Barron ("Coriolanus: Portrait of the Artist As In-fant," pp. 174, 180) associates Coriolanus's hatred of the people's undisciplined hunger with his need to subdue his own impulses; here as elsewhere, his argument is very close to my own.

²² See n. 6 above. The likeness of the crowd to younger siblings who threaten Coriolanus's food supply was first suggested to me by David Sundelson in conversation.

²³ Given the importance of Coriolanus's phallic self-sufficiency as a defensive measure, it is not surprising that he should show signs of a fear of castration. This fear may help to account for the enthusiasm with which he characterizes Valeria, in strikingly phallic terms, as the icicle on Dian's temple (5.3.65-67): the phallic woman may ultimately be less frightening to him than the woman who demonstrates the possibility of castration by her lack of a penis. The same repudiation of the female and hence of the possibility of castration may also lie behind his turning away from Rome and his mother and toward a relationship with Aufidius presented in decidedly homosexual terms (4.5.107-19, 199-202). Shakespeare takes pains to emphasize the distance between the Aufidius we see and the Aufidius of Coriolanus's imagination: the Aufidius invented by Coriolanus seems designed to reassure Coriolanus of the reality of his own male grandeur by giving him the image of himself; his need to create a man who is his equal is in fact one of the most poignant elements in the play and helps to account for his tragic blindness to his rival's true nature as opportunist and schemer.

²⁴ The fusion of oral and phallic issues in the portrayal of the crowd, and throughout the play, is confirmed by the image of the Hydra. The beast with many heads was of course a conventional analogue for the populace, but the extent to which Shakespeare intensifies and sexualizes this conventional image can be suggested by the grotesqueness of the context in which it first appears overtly in the play, a context of monstrous members and tongues in wounds (2.3.5-17). The beast with many heads becomes in this play a beast with many mouths; at one point it is even a multiple bosom, digesting (3.1.130). The phallic threat of the crowd, felt in its power to level, is thus mitigated by the insistence on a multiply castrated beast; but the tenuousness of this mitigation is suggested by the insistence on tongues in each mouth (3.1.155).

²⁵ Stoller ("Shakespearean Tragedy: Coriolanus," p.268) and Wilson ("Coriolanus: The Anxious Bridegroom," p. 230) associate Coriolanus's wounds with castration; for Barron ("Coriolanus: Portrait of the Artist As Infant," p. 177) his wounds are a mark of his dependence on his mother. Coriolanus's unwillingness to show his wounds may derive partly from a fear that in standing "naked" (2.2.137) and revealing himself to the people as feminized, he might be inviting a kind of homosexual rape—a fear amply justified by the Third Citizen's remark that, "If he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them" (2.3.5-8; see also Barron, p. 178). Dr. Anne Hayman has suggested to me that Coriolanus's fear of his unconscious homosexual desires, particularly of a passive feminine kind, is essential to his character; she sees his fear of the wish for passive femininity as part of his identification with his mother, who shares the same fear. I am endebted to Dr. Hayman for her careful reading of this paper and her many helpful comments.

²⁶ Donald A. Stauffer, in Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, 1949), points out that Rome is less patria than matria in this play; he discusses Volumnia as a projection of Rome, particularly in 5.3 (p. 252). Virtually all psychoanalytic critics comment on the identification of Volumnia with Rome; Barron ("Coriolanus: Portrait of the Artist as Infant," p. 175) comments specifically that Coriolanus turns the rage of his frustration in nursing toward his own country at the end of the play.

²⁷ Rufus Putney, in "Coriolanus and His Mother,"Psychoanalytic Quarterly 31 (1962), finds Coriolanus's inability to deal with his matricidal impulses central to his character; whenever Volumnia threatens him with her death, he capitulates at once (pp. 368-69, 372).

²⁸ G. Wilson Knight discusses the hard metallic quality of the language at length; he associates it with the self-containment of the hostile walled cities and distinguishes it from the fusions characteristic οf Antony and Cleopatra (The Imperial Theme, p. 156). In a particularly interesting discussion, Danson associates the rigidity and distinctness of the language with the play's characteristic use of metonymy and synecdoche, which serve to limit and define, in place of metaphor, which serves to fuse diverse worlds (Tragic Alphabet, pp. 155-59).