SOURCE: Marshall, Cynthia. “‘I Can Interpret All Her Martyr'd Signs’: Titus Andronicus, Feminism, and the Limits of Interpretation.” In Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, edited by Carole Levin and Karen Robertson, pp. 193-209. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Marshall claims that Titus Andronicus offers a profoundly misogynistic view of male-female relations through its presentation of women as estranged, alienated, and silenced.]

Titus Andronicus presents special problems for a feminist critic. We are familiar with patriarchal societies like the Rome of Titus Andronicus, composed of tier upon tier of brothers, who openly barter women in their political maneuvers. Likewise, the play's polarized images of female possibility—the vicious, sexually voracious Tamora, and the powerless, chaste Lavinia—offer a compelling, but no longer surprising, instance of the way a misogynistic vision constructs its own reality. Kathleen McLuskie signals the dilemma: “Feminism cannot simply take ‘the woman's part’ when that part has been so morally loaded and theatrically circumscribed” (102).¹ Certainly Tamora, “the blot and enemy to our general name” (2.3.183),² rebuffs any tentative identification; she seems uncannily to mock early feminist demands for “strong” female characters. Lavinia, however, issues a unique challenge. Brutally raped, rendered handless and tongueless, Lavinia figures as the emblem of the voiceless woman and hence seems to invite our expression of her stifled rage and pain. Yet the act of interpreting “all her martyr'd signs” (3.2.36) itself carries political and ethical implication. In this paper I will consider some questions that Lavinia's definitive voicelessness raises about the peril of co-optation, questions about the directions our critical path might take and those we might wish to avoid.

In granting Lavinia an extra-textual integrity as a character, I am appealing not simply to the text of the patriarchal bard but to Lavinia as femininely embodied in the modern theater. As Deborah Warner's 1987 production of Titus Andronicus at Stratford-upon-Avon demonstrated, Lavinia remains a devastatingly powerful stage presence even when (or especially when) she can no longer speak. Sonia Ritter's Lavinia effectively revealed the need for feminists and others to negotiate a response that steers around the standard distancing techniques of laughter and aesthetic superiority, but also avoids reproducing Titus's appropriating claim to “interpret all her martyr'd signs” (3.2.36). “It is not an unproblematic project,” writes Toril Moi, “to try to speak for the other woman, since this is precisely what the ventriloquism of patriarchy has always done” (67-68).

I

The revenge play structure is used to enact a fantasy that separates overt sexuality, linked with violence, from the family and extreme family loyalty.

(Barber 119)

Titus Andronicus enacts a male terror of female power, conceived primarily in sexual terms. The pathological splitting of affectionate, familial emotions (directed toward Lavinia) from troubling sexual responses (directed toward Tamora) evinces what Freud called “the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love.” Freud attributed the construction to a male desire to protect the early idealized image of the mother from the perceived taint of sexuality (“Tendency” 186). In Titus Andronicus, the sister, Lavinia, is idealized, while Tamora, the mother who is also “other” (because a Goth), is the focus of projected anxieties about sexuality and encompassing power. Tamora literally becomes the devouring mother, eating her children in the final scene. Lavinia is in effect punished, by rape, for her nascent sexuality and independent voice. The rape fixes her, within the play, within the theater, and within the critical discourse, as an object of pity. Thus the rape achieves the goal of ensuring that Lavinia will not be powerful, but will be frozen in a posture of dependence and humiliation.

The opposition between the two characters builds rapidly upon an initial difference. Lavinia enters as a daughter whose first action is to kneel at her father's feet, while Tamora identifies herself as a mother in her opening speech (1.1.104-120). The freighting of these familial positions with political meanings becomes rapidly apparent. Titus presents his daughter as “prisoner to an emperor” (258), and she does not protest this marriage match, although Bassianus and her brothers do. Tamora, on the other hand, enters as a captive but by late in the first scene has won power over the emperor, her new husband:

My lord, be rul'd by me, be won at last …
You are but newly planted in your throne …
… Then let me alone:
I'll find a day to massacre them all.

(1.1.442-450)

Tamora is evidently old enough to be her new husband's mother (331-332). This fact, emphasized by the presence of her grown sons, does not prevent Tamora from embodying an image of unrestrained sexuality. Motherhood here carries full sexual connotations, and is presented without the usual sanctification of marriage—no mention is made of an earlier marriage, and Tamora's affair with Aaron mocks the licit connection with Saturninus. Lavinia illustrates the opposite paradox of virginity in spite of her marriage to Bassianus;³ on three occasions her rape is spoken of as a “deflowering” (2.3.191;2.4.26;5.3.36-38). I will return to the significance of this particular image shortly; my point here is to underscore the primitive labelling of the women as sexual or virginal, independently of their marital status or their behavior. These two extreme and confining scripts for female identity motivate the fear that leads to Lavinia's being mutilated and eventually killed, lest she evolve into another Tamora.

Contemporary feminist theory would deconstruct the binary logic behind this conceptual scheme. Indeed, the opposition between Lavinia and Tamora is less significant than their somewhat occluded function as symbolic doubles. In 1.1 first Lavinia, then Tamora, is proposed as wife for Saturninus. Saturninus's odd remark about “new-married ladies” (2.1.15) reminds us that the two women are married on the same night. Tamora proposes sexual “conflict” (2.3.21) with Aaron during the hunt; later in the same scene Lavinia is raped. The parallels suggest that on some level of imaginative projection, the lives of the two women are linked. Moreover, Lavinia's sexuality and her relative outspokenness would appear to discomfit both her male relations and her traditional critics. Significant energy is devoted within the play and in critical responses to the cause of purifying and protecting Lavinia. But even though the virgin-whore opposition between her and Tamora has been exaggerated, the near hysteric drive toward these powerful female stereotypes should alert us to the gender-based opposition in the play: women are simplified, objectified, and controlled by their assignment to categories. As Catherine Belsey puts it, “Stereotypes define what the social body endorses and what it wants to exclude” (165). Lavinia, then, is endorsed as the obedient, virginal daughter, while the dominant, sexual Tamora is excluded. But of course stereotypes belie life's complexity; they are “inevitably subject to internal contradictions and so are perpetually precarious” (Belsey 165). Perhaps for this reason, the contrast between Lavinia and Tamora is subsumed within another “ethical binary” (Jameson 115), the configuration that opposes men as brothers to women as Others.

The enmity on which the plot depends, that between Romans and Goths, crumbles during the course of the play. Not only does Tamora abandon her position as Queen of the Goths to be “incorporate[d]” (1.1.462) as Rome's empress, but the avenger, Lucius, restores order to Rome at the head of a troop of Goths. The political conflict seems to be an encoded distraction, diverting attention from the revelation of intestine disorder, the awareness that the barbarian is within the gates. State organization yields to a more primitive social organization, the tribal order of brotherhood. Tribal loyalty provokes the revenge plot: Alarbus is sacrificed in 1.1. “Ad manes fratrum” (“to the shades of [our] brethren”) (98). The web of brothers (Saturninus-Bassianus, Titus-Marcus, Chiron-Demetrius, Titus's sons) creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, for brotherhood, even in the face of quarrels and competitions, confers the mantle of membership. Of the major characters in Titus Andronicus, only Tamora, Lavinia, and Aaron (who is associated not only with sexuality but with filling the traditionally female role of infant caregiver) lack vindication in the male league of brotherhood. Aaron the Moor, like the female characters, is not brother but Other. In a familiar gesture, the Roman band of brothers projects fearful or threatening qualities onto those it defines as Other.

II

Enter the empress' sons, with Lavinia, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish'd.

(2.4.1 sd)

In the Warner-RSC production, Demetrius and Chiron squirm, wormlike, into view after the offstage rape, “their hands hidden in their sleeves, sickeningly parodying their mutilation of Lavina” (Woudhuysen). Their insensate (indeed nearly invertebrate) response helps to make sense of Marcus's historically problematic speech upon discovering his niece. Marcus's highly mannered rhetoric, regularly criticized on grounds of stylistic impropriety,⁴ provides a bizarrely inadequate but nevertheless welcome contrast to the taunts of the empress' sons. Language is in both cases misused, but an audience might differentiate between aggressive misuse of words (“Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands” [2.4.6]) and the desperate rhetorical excess with which Marcus attempts to comprehend the sight before him. In this tense theatrical moment, the disjunction between linguistic capacity and the emotion provoked by the mutilated Lavinia is symptomatic of a larger breakdown of social meaning. The action of Titus Andronicus in general ponders possible responses to inutterable horror; Marcus's response is that of the aesthete, struggling to take shelter in his poetry.⁵

The syntactical logic of this dialogue of one deserves further attention. Lavinia's silence punctuates the reiterated questions which Marcus must begin to answer for himself:

Who is this?
Where is your husband?
                    What stern ungentle hands
Hath lopp'd and hew'd and made thy body bare
Of her two branches [?]
Why dost not speak to me?
Shall I speak for thee? Shall I say 'tis so?
What will whole months of tears [do to] thy father's eyes?

(2.4.11-55)

The questions move from generality through specificity to speculation, presenting in sequential order Marcus's realization—which could occur in a single moment—of the three separate crimes signified by the stage direction: “hands cut off,” “tongue cut out, and ravish'd.” Marcus comments first on the most obvious wound, the severing of her hands, “those sweet ornaments, / Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in” (18-19). In Marcus's assessment, Lavinia's hands served decorative or “ornamental” purposes; his reference to “kings” sexualizes the discourse unnervingly. He next focuses attention on her mouth, answering his own question, “Why dost not speak to me?” with the famous lines:

Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.

(2.4.22-25)

Marcus's excursus on Lavinia's mouth accomplishes two opposite linguistic functions, one expressive, one veiling. By comparing the bloody mouth to objects to which it bears only a tenuous resemblance—“a crimson river,” “a bubbling fountain”—Marcus denies the visible reality he ostensibly describes. Mary Laughlin Fawcett remarks that the “language is arousing because it calls attention both to itself and, through its excesses, to the erotic possibilities for the image of a bloody mouth” (273). This image leads him to deduce that Lavinia has been raped: Marcus leaps to the conclusion, “But, sure, some Tereus hath deflower'd thee” (26). Lavinia's damaged mouth thus signifies her rape.

An audience shares something of Marcus's stunned horror when he attempts to describe the spectacle before him. Lavinia stands as illustrative text throughout Marcus's lengthy description of her ravished condition, yet his language seems nevertheless oddly unsynchronized with its task. References to the loss of her “sweet tongue” (49), her “pretty fingers” (42) and “lily hands” (44), are concrete and expressive, although the enumerated physical details of her mutilation can only remind us of the unbroached violence of the rape itself. Later Titus, like Marcus, will distract himself from the sexual locus of the rape by paying excessive attention to the severed tongue and hands (3.1.65-80; 91-114). These wounds the men can see and comprehend; Titus will shortly share with Lavinia the severance of a hand. But the crime of violent entry remains, for several reasons, unspoken.

Aided perhaps by the “erotic possibilities” Fawcett detects, aided certainly by the mythological parallel, Marcus makes a guess about Lavinia's condition that proves true. But until Lavinia locates her Ovidian text in 4.1, he does not and cannot know if she has in fact been “deflower'd.” And the audience, having heard Aaron incite the rape (2.1), heard Demetrius and Chiron boast of it to their mother (2.3), heard them brag of it afterwards (2.4.1-10), nonetheless shares Marcus's ignorance in one important regard: Lavinia does not and cannot tell her story. The narrative of the rape, bracketed by silence, exists as material for aghast consideration. Meditating on the off-stage rape, one confronts the impossibility of knowing another's pain. Lavinia's eventual discovery of the Ovidian text comes as a great relief to her family and to the audience, but satisfaction that she has found a mythological parallel can distract us from her continued silence. Ovid does not tell the story unique to Lavinia, nor indeed could any teller, no matter how sympathetic she or he might be. Lavinia's story, the story Lavinia might have told, is irrecoverably lost. So clearly does language figure power here that to presume knowledge of Lavinia's experience, to speak for her, would enact a species of verbal rape. What might we legitimately say of Lavinia? Pain and silence make her proof against Marcus's knowledge—proof also against ours. The equation changes, however, if we imagine what might be said to Lavinia. Differentiating a response to the problematic of suffering from the one presented on stage opens a possibility for feminist orientation. Simultaneously recognizing a degree of kinship with the mute woman ratifies this orientation.

In the scenes following Lavinia's rape we witness erratic bursts of sympathy, but a sustained inability to grant her any remaining integrity. In one exchange that chillingly illustrates patriarchal attitudes, Marcus presents Lavinia to Titus as ruined property:

MARCUS:
This was thy daughter.
TITUS:
Why, Marcus, so she is.
LUCIUS:
Ay me, this object kills me!

(3.1.63-64)

A fitting “tribute” (1.1.251) for an emperor has been ruined. Marcus, Titus, and now Lucius deny Lavinia's identity as a person in order partially to deny the horror of her experience. The Andronici erase Lavinia as subject, through a psychological defense mechanism akin to that by which torturers deny the humanity of their victims. Lavinia becomes the object of both the gaze and the rhetoric of horror. For the Andronici, the rape is an incentive to further violence: as Fawcett writes, they “stimulate themselves to revenge” by “think[ing] of the rape as a deflowering” (276n). Thus they fix her in the position of ruined virgin. Tamora, however, as well as Marcus and Titus, speaks of Lavinia's “deflowering” (2.3.191; 2.4.26; 5.3.36-38). The imagistic term recurs, I think, because it is the closest the text can approach to naming the vagina, the hidden signifier. The absent term, the unspoken word, signifies Lavinia's private experience, which the play at once constructs its action upon and cannot acknowledge.

Yet it is not dramatic propriety alone that prohibits Marcus, Titus, or Shakespeare from specifying the horror of Lavinia's violation. The lapse is symptomatic of a general discontinuity in the play between Lavinia's experience and the possibilities of communication.⁶ Marcus begins in 2.4 the project of appropriation, the self-assigned task of “speak[ing] for” (33) Lavinia. Titus claims likewise:

                    I understand her signs:
Had she a tongue to speak, now would she say
That to her brother which I said to thee.

(3.1.143-145)

Both men substitute their own meanings for Lavinia's muted ones, as Marcus unwittingly acknowledges when he says, “O, that I knew thy heart, and knew the beast / That I might rail at him to ease my mind” (2.4.34-35). Eventually Lavinia is able to reveal the plot and the central villains of her tragedy, though she can never “ease [her] mind” by speaking.

A perverse oversight results when critics ignore Lavinia because she is silent. Albert Tricomi, for instance, writes: “The one horror the dramatist could not depict upon the stage was the fact of Lavinia's violated chastity, which loss was to Titus the worst violation of all …”(17). The silent woman becomes invisible in the text, but not on the stage: the Warner-RSC production made it impossible to regard Lavinia's rape as merely her father's “loss.”

III

A number of post-Victorian critics influential in our century were made uneasy by the jibes Lavinia directs to Tamora at 2.3.66ff, shortly before the rape. Her remarks, not merely contemptuous but sexually knowing (“let her joy her raven-coloured love; / This valley fits the purpose passing well” [83-84]), disrupt the critical stereotype of Lavinia as pure virginal sacrifice. She has been understood, at worst, to be asking for it.⁷ Dover Wilson, evidently troubled by some such possibility, saved Lavinia's reputation by splitting her in two—he posited one tender, delicate victim and another “species” of “insinuating hussy” (lix) who surfaces momentarily to mock Tamora.⁸ Lavinia in fact demonstrates on several occasions before the rape her spirited self-assertiveness. She marries against her father's will: Titus is surprised to learn of her betrothal to Bassianus (1.1.276-286). Saturninus's taunt about the early hour is calculated to embarrass her with its sexual innuendo, but Lavinia responds forthrightly (and Bassianus trusts her to do so) (2.2.16-17). We glimpse a trace of this self-assertiveness later, when she pointedly revises Marcus's instructions for writing in the sandy plot (4.1.69-77). But the rape defines Lavinia as sexual object and deletes her as speaking subject. Her wounded mouth—a mouth converted to a vagina—symbolizes the transformation.

In praising the silent woman and rebuking her forward double, Wilson participates in severing Lavinia's tongue. Theater reviews praising her eloquent silence are similarly implicated. We are secretly glad, I suspect, all of us, not to hear what Lavinia would say, and grateful that the story of the rape is channelled into mythological allusion—distant, bookish, unreal. Lavinia's stark communication, the three words “Stuprum, Chiron, Demetrius” etched in the sand, is distanced by its Latinity (Fawcett 268). The revelation, moreover, is directed toward the revenge plot; it is purposeful, rather than expressive, communication. The demand for revenge, what one might assume to be Titus's interpretation of Lavinia's experience, substitutes for her own inarticulated response.

To what extent does Lavinia share the Andronican desire for revenge? In establishing a parallel with the Philomel story and in supplying the names of her assailants she advances the revenge plot. She also joins the kneeling circle who swear to take “Mortal revenge upon these traitorous Goths, / And see their blood, or die with this reproach” (4.1.93-94). Nevertheless, Lavinia's acquiescence in the plot cannot be seen as a purely volitional act, for she is trapped by the relentless mechanism of revenge. The sole alternatives available to her are madness and death, and as Titus says, “What violent hands can she lay on her life?” (3.2.25). The mutilated accomplice is a victimized woman without voice, utterly dependent; she has no choice but to participate in her father's plot. The “insinuating hussy” has been silenced, and no chance remains of knowing Lavinia's thoughts or feelings.

The first banquet scene, evidently a late Shakespearean addition, offers a keen illustration of sympathy's power to obviate the victim. As Titus serves just enough food to “preserve … so much strength in us / As will revenge these bitter woes of ours” (3.2.2-3), he rambles wildly, self-aggrandizingly, punningly, madly. Much of his frantic discourse advances his claim to “interpret” Lavinia's “martyr'd signs” (36):

Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought;
In thy dumb action I will be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers:
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet,
And by still practice learn to know thy meaning.

(3.2.39-45)

Although acknowledging that she has a “meaning” of her own, Titus arrogates to himself an ability to “pluck out the heart of [her] mystery” (Ham. 3.2.351-352), to “wrest” a logic, a system from her gestures. His elaborate rhetorical excess is silently countered by Lavinia's empty mouth. Either of his plans—forcing his verbal and experiential construction upon her, or “wrest[ing]” her unspoken words—would constitute an act of violence. Neither would acknowledge the unhappy validity of her silence.⁹

A text, of course, must privilege speaking characters; nevertheless, the tyranny of the word is disturbing realized. Lavinia's silence is particularly haunting because of the distance (which may be spanned by an imaginative reader or in the theater by the performance of a talented actress such as Sonia Ritter) between the appalling experience assigned the character and the relative ease with which she can be labelled (“ravished,” victimized,” “cause for revenge”) and dismissed, as the action continues and attention turns to the tragic hero, Titus. Lavinia's experience of violence and ensuing muteness comprehends the history of too many women to be thus contextualized. But to acknowledge Lavinia authentically is not simply to confront evidence of a sad chapter of women's history. The theatrical experience here is itself vexing, for we are confronted by mute suffering, asked to assimilate uninterpretable pain, and critical discourse is ill suited for this task. The resulting wish to fix Lavinia within an interpretive framework uncannily reproduces the stereotypes operating in Titus Andronicus's Roman society.

Some claim it is the task of tragedy to denote the uninterpretable. Stephen Booth, for instance, argues that dramatic tragedy is fundamentally an experience of the audience, rather than a formal quality of a represented action. “We use the word tragedy,” he writes, “when we are confronted with a sudden invasion of our finite consciousness by the fact of infinite possibility” (85). Definitions or theories of tragedy are thus attempts to limit (and partially to deny) tragic possibility. Dramatic tragedy, enacting tragic events within a controlled, fictional framework, serves similar limiting functions. “The whole subject exists to cope with human nervousness at the fact of indefinition” (Booth 85). Booth calls for an increased openness to tragic experiences enacted on stage; his approach can lead to heightened awareness of how our fears and uncertainties, our pain, are inscribed in tragedy's characters. I submit, however, that Lavinia, as the woman raped and silenced, is unique among Shakespeare's tragic victims. For instance, following Booth's approach, we might say that the experience of King Lear consists in empathizing with the king's psychic pain, as well as in feeling the play's events to impinge upon ordered expectations of the behavior of children and subjects, to the extent that comforting notions of metaphysical order are shaken. Because Lear articulates his anguish, a reader or audience member may justify a sense of sharing the tragic hero's suffering without undue anxieties about appropriation; we find ourselves invited to understand Lear, and similarly to understand the tragic hero of Titus Andronicus. But an audience's or reader's relationship with Lavinia must be qualitatively different: we confront her across a great divide of mute suffering.

Lavinia's place in the play and in the critical discourse illustrates the capacity of physical pain to destroy language, in Elaine Scarry's sense. A victim in extremity reverts “to a state anterior to language” (4), but Scarry argues further that an apparently universal inability to express pain betrays the impossibility of comprehending another's suffering. “Though indisputably real to the sufferer, [pain] is, unless accompanied by visible body damage or a disease label, unreal to other” (56). Pain's victim, dehumanized by an inability to communicate, is condemned to an experience incomprehensible to others. “This profound ontological split is a doubling of pain's annihilating power: the lack of acknowledgment and recognition … becomes a second form of negation and rejection …”(56). Hence it is no surprise that, despite the “visible signs of [her] bodily damage,” Lavinia's suffering seems partially unreal to the characters in the play. Silenced, suffering, female: Lavinia is in many respects unknowable.

Scarry's analysis of the problematic of suffering suggests that even a sympathetic response to Lavinia must acknowledge her essential unknowability, and stop short of either defining or interpreting Lavinia. As Moi writes, “to define ‘woman’ is necessarily to essentialize her” (39). To define or label Lavinia would perpetuate the play's drive to stereotype female experience, to put it in the service of the supposedly fuller and more interesting experience of males. McLuskie urges replacing the concept of interpretation, which treats the play as a “transparent view” of historical reality, with that of “constructed meaning,” which attends primarily to theatrical experience (95). When Lavinia is exposed, humiliated, victimized, we are moved, like Titus, by anger and grief. The Andronican response illustrates, however, the potentially self-serving quality of anger. Perhaps even more to the point, a feminist awareness of the extent to which language equals power will limit any claim to “speak for” Lavinia. Lavinia is indeed fixed outside the bounds of discourse, as D. J. Palmer recognized some years ago in labelling the rape “unspeakable.”¹⁰Titus Andronicus sets a peculiar trap by enticing us to anger, which is then revealed as a ghostly reflection of Andronican revenge. Lavinia instructs us to recognize the word- and world-shattering power of pain and of rape. One of our best recourses may be to examine the causes of Lavinia's radical silence by uncovering “the conditions in which [the play's] particular ideology of femininity functions” (McLuskie 106).

IV

Wherever primitive man has set up a taboo he fears some danger and it cannot be disputed that a generalized dread of women is expressed in … rules of avoidance. Perhaps this dread is based on the fact that woman is different from man, for ever incomprehensible and mysterious, strange and therefore apparently hostile. The man is afraid of being weakened by the woman, infected with her femininity and of then showing himself incapable.

(Freud, “Virginity” 198-199)

The Thyestean banquet scene parallels and revises the earlier banquet in 3.2. In each case, attention is directed toward the woman's mouth—Lavinia's hungry but silent, Tamora's “daintily” consuming the flesh of her sons (5.3.61). The cognate scenes link the punishments devised for each woman. In serving the unholy meal, Titus takes revenge not only on Tamora but also on the ruined Lavinia, whose physical hunger is demonstrated in 3.2, and therefore, it might be said, on female hunger or desire in general.¹¹ Tricking the empress into “Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (5.3.62), Titus indicates his assessment of the encompassing scope of female appetite: Tamora, “Like to the earth[,] swallow[s] her own increase” (5.2.191).

The association of women and appetitiveness is both symptomatic and constructive of patristic and medieval definitions of the female as matter (not spirit), sensual (not spiritual), and passionate (not rational). The construction pervades Renaissance drama: one thinks of Webster's “apricockes,” of Jonson's Ursula the pig woman. Shakespearean examples include Achilles' complaint in Troilus and Cressida of a “woman's longing, / An appetite that I am sick withal” (3.3.237-238), and Orsino's confidence to Cesario that women's love is “appetite, / No motion of the liver, but the palate” (TN 2.4.96-97). Appetites are notoriously strong and voraciously indulged throughout Cleopatra's Egypt. The complication of this standard misogynistic nexus of ideas in Titus Andronicus is ultimately related to a pervasive attitude of distrust of the body. Bodies are “lopp'd” (2.4.17), cut, chopped, bled, baked, and eaten: the sheer physicality of the tragic action and the sheer disrespect shown the physical self are unsurpassed. Not only are the primal laws of civilized society violated (cannibalism, rape), but the basic integrity of the human form is disregarded. Unattached hands and heads figure on stage, and Titus and Lavinia appear mutilated throughout much of the action. Apologies for Elizabethan taste or suggestions of elemental farce cannot mask the deeply lodged revulsion with the human body expressed in Titus Andronicus. It is no great imaginative or symbolic leap from hatred of the body to hatred of the body's maternal begetter. Barber and Wheeler write that “the outrageous revenge in the play is directed primarily at maternal sexuality, conceived and represented symbolically as a ruthless, devouring power” (136).

Hatred of the mother and hatred of the body are joined symbolically by the theatrically dominant image of the tomb or pit. Both 1.1 and 2.3 depend for much of their action on a gaping hole in the stage. “[T]he tomb of the Andronici is opened to gape like the jaws of some god appeased by devouring its offspring,” writes D. J. Palmer (327). Barber and Wheeler, more attuned to the gender of that god, sardonically remark that “it obviously needs no Freud to tell Shakespeare what this hole is” (142). The pit of 2.3, the scene which opens with Tamora's lyric of desire and ends as Lavinia is raped offstage, is powerfully symbolic. Willbern identifies it as “both womb and tomb, and vagina, but it is also and most importantly a mouth, as its description clearly reveals” (171). Quintus, fearful of “the swallowing womb / Of this deep pit, poor Bassianus' grave” (2.3.239-240), impacts the various associations. Both tomb and pit are, in a different but related symbolic universe, secularized versions of Hellmouth (Palmer 327).¹² In Titus Andronicus Hellmouth has been cut loose from its religious moorings; devils no longer drag men into it. In secularizing (and sexualizing) hell, man has not, however, come to accept the tomb as his home. Instead, hell has been objectified onto the Other, the female who will “Like to the earth swallow her own increase” (5.2.191-193).¹³

Titus Andronicus binds misogyny with the ethos of revenge in numerous ways. The violence directed toward Lavinia punishes her threatening sensuality and her bent toward self-assertion. Tamora, who has herself launched the machinery of revenge, is punished for her power and its constitutive qualities—unrestrained sexuality and unusual articulateness. Both women arouse anxiety because their presence challenges male illusions of self-creation and self-sufficiency; both are subjected to anger displaced from the ominously gaping tomb. To rationalize this anger, women are ascribed such drives as pride, lust, appetite, and in a final gesture, revenge itself. Ordinarily in revenge tragedy a ghost from the underworld would appear to spur the action on. Titus Andronicus features instead the metadrama of Tamora's masquerading as a personified Revenge. In a fulfillment of the misogynistic vision, not only generally negative qualities but the specific destructive force plaguing Roman society must be, and is, objectified in the figure of a woman.

Finally, and most tellingly, desire and appetite are inalienably linguistic in the play. Chiron and Demetrius wish to silence Lavinia even as they desire to possess her sexually. Titus and Marcus desire to speak for her. (We might note that Bassianus, whom Lavinia has chosen to marry, asks: “Lavinia, how say you?” [2.2.16].) The peripeteia of the central acts centers on Lavinia's quest to communicate. Tamora's fate as well depends largely on speech acts. Her murderous plot is conceived in response to Titus's spurning her eloquent formal plea on Alarbus's behalf (1.1.104-120). Her desire, rhetorically deployed, is rebuked. She demonstrates her rhetorical powers again at 2.3.91ff by convincing her sons that Bassianus and Lavinia are about to kill her. The patent falsity of the speech is signalled by her extended description of the “barren detested vale”—the same setting which she lauded as “gleeful” (11) and “sweet” (16) in her earlier words to Aaron. Tamora exercises her linguistic powers to create a fearful mood. She similarly attempts to overwhelm with words when she appears to Titus as Revenge. It is unusual in Shakespeare for a disguise to be penetrated by another character, but Titus recognizes Tamora immediately. She depends not on her disguise, then, but on the strength of her stated conviction:

Know thou, sad man, I am not Tamora;
She is thy enemy, and I thy friend:
I am Revenge. …

(5.2.28-30)

Titus, as in 1.1, resists the power of her tongue. His resistance of Tamora, and ultimate defeat of her, constitute Titus's heroicism.

The play thus posits as admirable the man who overcomes woman by disallowing her meaning (Lavinia) or by resisting her words and profaning her appetite (Tamora). Titus's anger and dread of Tamora, whose mouth is projected as vagina dentata, seems logically appropriate, but his response to Lavinia's helpless, indeed infantile, needs is more difficult to comprehend: after assuming the role of caretaker, he destroys her in the final scene. Titus seems terrified not simply of women, but of the traditionally female role of nurturing, protecting, and nourishing a dependent. Aaron's ability to take on this role points up Titus's failure, his decision instead to incorporate Lavinia into his own priority, revenge.

The misogyny of Titus Andronicus is strongly overdetermined: women are violently punished whether they are powerful, dependent, or (in the case of the Nurse) neutral. One explanation for such rampant misogyny is a collective male terror of female power, the anxiety Freud refers to in “The Taboo of Virginity” and elsewhere. Titus Andronicus offers the example, rare in English literature, of a woman controlling her society (though only temporarily), and Tamora wields sufficient strength to provoke real fear in the men around her. The danger of this construction, however, is that acknowledgement of Tamora's control can be used to authorize the play's pathological vision of women. Howard Bloch, for instance, seems to read misogyny as a backhanded compliment to female power:

if misogyny is the symptom of men's fear of the real power of women, then the more misogynistic a culture is, the stronger the females can be assumed to be; in this way antifeminism represents not the derogation of women but an expression of their material enfranchisement.

(21-22n)

Bloch's statement in fact mirrors the condition it would diagnose: he sees misogyny as a logical, if not appropriate, response to women's “real power.” But it is ludicrous to suppose that denigration of women is a reasoned response to an objective assessment of power distribution in a society. Misogyny creates its own context, its own reality. And this is precisely what Shakespeare shows us in creating the tight configurations of gender opposition in Titus Andronicus. While I hesitate to claim that Shakespeare purposefully exposes the dynamics of misogyny in Titus Andronicus, the play nevertheless presents the issues of gender, sexuality, and power in dialectical terms that argue against the author's wholesale investment in the projected female stereotypes. Any apparent valorization of the Andronican view of women suggested by Titus's heroicism is denied by the plot, which affirms that this system of gender opposition produces no winners.

In Titus Androncius women are seen as the source for anxieties about desire, dependence, and death—anxieties properly attributable elsewhere, most broadly to the general condition of being human. The play's presentation and treatment of female characters is overdetermined, misogynistic, and clearly lamentable. Yet outrage comes easily, perhaps too easily, with this play, and we should be wary of responding in kind to the play's excesses. Merely to condemn the aggressive, patriarchal system that leads to Lavinia's rape and results in her continual silencing would be to reenact the dynamic of revenge, to forget the victim while prosecuting the crime. Feminist awareness and sympathetic productions like Warner's help to alter the balance. For a new generation of audience members, Titus Andronicus is no longer “a ridiculous play” (Cross 823), nor one whose lingering horror stems from the hero's madness or the quantity of blood on stage. Instead it is the ghostly echo of Lavinia's brutally enforced silence that rings in our ears.

Notes

1. McLuskie writes with specific reference here to King Lear.

2. Quotations from Titus Andronicus refer to the Arden edition by J. C. Maxwell (1968); those from other Shakespearean plays refer to the Penguin Complete Works (1969). All are noted parenthetically.

3. See David Willbern 164n: “Such a mirror-relationship suggests the typical unconscious dual perspective on the ‘maternal prototype’ as both virgin and whore.”

4. Dover Wilson comments that “a woodman, discovering an injury to one of his trees, would have shown more indignation” (1i) than Marcus does at 2.4.16-19. S. Clark Hulse contends that “Marcus might be describing a broken water main, not his niece” (110).

5. Eugene Waith calls it “a desparate effort to come to terms with unbearable pain” (“Ceremonies” 165).

6. Lawrence Danson, noting how “the image of the silenced Lavinia haunts the play,” writes that “Suffering humanity is faced with an expressive imperative—to make known its pain and thus (by the act of making it known) its humanness to gods and fellow men—yet is successively deprived of its ‘proper and peculiar speech’” (7). Danson sees the potentially “ludicrous” events of the play as “intentionally conceited, emblematic—and each related to the same basic problem of expression needed but denied” (12).

7. So Arthur Symons (whom Wilson quotes) believed “her punishment becomes something of a retribution instead of being wholly a brutality” (Wilson lvii).

8. The critical discomfort resembles that surrounding Desdemona's sexual banter with Iago (Oth. 2.1.109-163). In each case Shakespeare unsettles preconceived notions of female character, specifically the assumption that innocence forbids speech.

9. Danson asks “what has become of Lavinia” when the fly-killing episode interrupts Titus's “effort to ‘wrest an alphabet’ from her gestures” (18). Douglas E. Green observes that in this scene Titus simultaneously “acknowledges the integrity and otherness of Lavinia's experience and intentions and yet claims the power to determine their meaning—along with her whole system of signs” (324). Green and I have arrived independently at similar readings of the play, but his insightful essay retains a traditional focus on Titus as tragic protagonist, and in that regard our readings differ radically.

10. “Lavinia's plight is literally unutterable” (322).

11. Palmer notes the same connection, although he does not acknowledge the extent to which the Andronici participate in depriving Lavinia of speech: “The action of the play as a whole seems to turn upon the dual nature of the mouth that utters and devours: Lavinia's deprivation of speech is finally avenged by a banquet of uneatable flesh” (335). The flesh is, of course, eaten.

12. Hulse observes that “if we take seriously the pun that Act II made on hell-mouth,” then Lavinia's etching in the sandy pit “re-enact[s] her own violation” while it “enact[s] fellatio” (116). Barber and Wheeler (142) also note a connection with Hell-mouth.

13. Willbern (172) quotes King Lear 4.6.127-128 to illustrate the perceived link between female sexuality and hell: “There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit.” Also relevant to my argument are 11.121-122: “The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't / With a more riotous appetite.”

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