Mothers, Motherhood and the Feminine in Fiennes’s Coriolanus

Abstract

ABSTRACT The representation of motherhood and the feminine in Fiennes’s Coriolanus has until recently been unduly overlooked. The present investigation provides an analysis of key aspects and crucial scenes of the film, in which the Shakespearean issues of femininity and motherhood are represented, reinforced, metaphorised and/or questioned. This paper argues that the significance of the female dimension is expanded in the cinematic version of the play and recoded in terms manageable and relevant to a new-millennium audience. This amplification of the feminine, and of motherhood in particular, partly redresses the gender balance in the film and figuratively represents what Coriolanus tries to escape but cannot avoid in his blind quest for impenetrable, self-sufficient masculinity, which is revealed as a destructive myth nurtured by the destructive mother culture of contemporary society.