Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and July Taymor's Titus: Femininized Revenge/Violence and Fearful Mother

Abstract

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594) and July Taymore's Titus (1999), a screen adaptation of the play, despite their time gap of 400 years, share their interest in how violence works in gendered terms and how to break free of the cycle of violent revenge. The title character, Titus, as he first appears on the stage or on the screen, looks as if he embodies Rome's masculine virtues as a Roman hero, but his sacrifice of Tamora's eldest son starts the process of deconstructing his masculine identity and triggers off a long parade of revenge and dissection of bodies. Tamora's revenge on Titus and his family by letting his sons rape Lavinia takes place in the fearful woods, whose central place is the pit into which Bassianus's corpse has been thrown. Both in the play and in the film there appear lots of images of hole or cave which represent mother's fearful womb that not only brings forth but also devours her offsprings to the death. Titus's revenge on Tamora is the very act of materializing the psychological concept of mother's fearful devouring womb by serving up her sons' blood and flesh in a pie for Tamora. The cycle of revenge, therefore, takes place within the conceptual area dominated by the idea of 'monstrous femininity': revenge is no more than a femininized act. Shakespeare's play ends in the hope of reconstruction of masculine Rome with Lucius's election to the emperorship, but it is a superficial solution as a hope since Lucius is a character who started the cycle of violence and revenge and is still believed to be unable to stop the cycle. Taymor does not have faith on Shakespere's hope too. She has given much more weight on Young Lucius and permitted him to experience and observe the cycle of revenge. In the final shot Young Lucius, who has been endowed with a redemptive role, picks up Aaron's black baby out of the cage, which is another image of mother's devouring womb, holds him, and walks out of the Coliseum, a place of 'violence as entertainment,' until he faces the sun-rising landscape. The boy is not yet coming of age; he is of not yet divided gender identity, androgynous one, which means he as a boy takes on a possibility of nurturing good femininity. Both Shakespeare and Taymor see his or her own society as full of graphical violence and present the ways of stopping the cycle of violence and getting free from the fear on mother's devouring womb.