Violence and violation: A Palestinian reading of rape and revenge in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper employs the methodologies of feminism, new historicism and presentism to argue that Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is a conflict between patriarchal and matriarchal voices. From a feminist standpoint, the verbal and physical violence the play enacts emanates from male figures’ deafness to the female voice. Shakespeare dismantles the virgin-whore dichotomy in the figures of Lavinia and Tamora, who mimic patriarchal prescriptions on female speech and silence and, in the latter case, the patriarchal speech of authority. Reading Titus alongside its historical context, I argue that this tragedy endorses the conventional association of woman’s speech with wantonness possibly in connection with cultural anxieties about Elizabeth’s public, often spectacular role. Titus Andronicus prefigures the new historicist ideology of containing opposing voices. The dominant male powers deliberately foster the subversive behaviour of others (Tamora, Lavinia, and Aaron) in order to crush them publicly and so assert their dominance. In addition to these methodologies, I deploy the critical thread of presentism to reveal trans-cultural and trans-historical continuities between the fictional world of Titus Andronicus and contemporary Palestine. For Palestinian scholars of English, this tragedy speaks of the gendering of nationalism as female in Palestinian national narratives, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, honour killing, and the construction of nation as narration.