Reading Rape in Livy's History of Rome, Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and J.M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country

<p>Mieke Bal argues that rape "takes place inside. In this sense, rape is by definition imagined; it can exist only as experience and as memory, as image translated into signs, never adequately 'objectifiable'" (100). In this thesis, by critically examining some ways in which rape has been made to seem objectifiable in literature, I argue that rape cannot simply be 'seen' from a "point-of-viewless" (Rooney 89) perspective. My argument supports Catharine A. MacKinnon's call for a rethinking of rape-related "legal process as one involving a choice between incommensurate meanings rather than one of uncovering a (temporarily hidden) fact, the Truth" (Rooney 90). I argue that, in Livy's History of Rome and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, rape is portrayed as an objectifiably visible spectacle; the rape victim's description of rape functions in a capacity analogous to testimony, supporting "rape law's assumption that a single, objective state of affairs existed" (MacKinnon 654); and the rape victim's post-rape, self-inflicted violence functions as a form of self-punishment which references historically specific correlations between female unchastity and socio-political calamity. In contrast, I argue that, in J.M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country, the narration discourages readers from accepting the objectifiability of the rape which it relates; the narrator's "meditations" (Gallagher 82) deviate from the conventions of testimony, expressing instead the "incommensurate meanings" (Rooney 90) that rape holds for the victim herself; and the descriptions of violence, abuse, and victim response present the chance for readers to interpret the aftermath of rape in a manner other than that which "conveys the idea that the victim is responsible for her own destruction" (Bal 100).</p>

Reading Rape in Livy's History of Rome, Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and J.M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country

<p>Mieke Bal argues that rape "takes place inside. In this sense, rape is by definition imagined; it can exist only as experience and as memory, as image translated into signs, never adequately 'objectifiable'" (100). In this thesis, by critically examining some ways in which rape has been made to seem objectifiable in literature, I argue that rape cannot simply be 'seen' from a "point-of-viewless" (Rooney 89) perspective. My argument supports Catharine A. MacKinnon's call for a rethinking of rape-related "legal process as one involving a choice between incommensurate meanings rather than one of uncovering a (temporarily hidden) fact, the Truth" (Rooney 90). I argue that, in Livy's History of Rome and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, rape is portrayed as an objectifiably visible spectacle; the rape victim's description of rape functions in a capacity analogous to testimony, supporting "rape law's assumption that a single, objective state of affairs existed" (MacKinnon 654); and the rape victim's post-rape, self-inflicted violence functions as a form of self-punishment which references historically specific correlations between female unchastity and socio-political calamity. In contrast, I argue that, in J.M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country, the narration discourages readers from accepting the objectifiability of the rape which it relates; the narrator's "meditations" (Gallagher 82) deviate from the conventions of testimony, expressing instead the "incommensurate meanings" (Rooney 90) that rape holds for the victim herself; and the descriptions of violence, abuse, and victim response present the chance for readers to interpret the aftermath of rape in a manner other than that which "conveys the idea that the victim is responsible for her own destruction" (Bal 100).</p>

‘So Much Grief and not a Tongue’: Trauma and Intertextuality in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece

In her 2008 monograph Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage, Patricia A. Cahill argues that critics of Renaissance literature have thus far failed to ‘reckon with the fact that early modern traumatic experience is defined not only by its subject matter … but also by what can be described as its “belated” and “latent” temporal structure’. Which is to say that the hallmark of trauma – both early modern and modern – is the delayed manifestation of the signs and symptoms that evince the originary experience having taken place; as such, trauma is defined by the period of latency that follows the instigating event, known only by the belated arrival of symptoms attesting to it. Since then, scholars have begun to interrogate the ways in which early modern literature appears to anticipate later cultural and theoretical configurations of trauma. By examining the significance of trauma and intertextuality in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), this essay builds on the insights of a strong and diverse body of research that continues to attend to the complex role of trauma in early modern literature. By reading The Rape of Lucrece in the context of and also through Shakespeare’s Ovidian source material, this essay suggests that the very act of returning to Ovid formally encodes the distinctive and disturbing structure of trauma into Shakespeare’s depiction of responses to extreme experience.

Raison d’état, Religion, and the Body in The Rape of Lucrece

With an emphasis on the religious figuration of its heroine’s chaste body, the present essay explores the political dynamics of The Rape of Lucrece. The poem draws on Roman religion and Christianity: Lucrece is an emblem of purity, with echoes of the flaminica or Vestal virgins, and her spotlessness anticipates Christ’s. Seeing these qualities allows us to engage the poem’s gender dynamics and its politics, with both of these being centered on issues of property. While The Rape of Lucrece has been enlisted as an artifact of late Elizabethan republican culture, its depiction of the expulsion of the Tarquins need not lead us to that conclusion. It is nonetheless a product of the political anxieties of Elizabeth’s final years.