Woman, Language, and History in The Rape of Lucrece

Summary

Recent feminist criticism of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (or Lucrece , as it was titled in its first five quartos) has stressed the extent to which the idea of woman which it represents is one overdetermined by patriarchal ideology, and has typically interpreted Lucrece herself as a sign used to mediate and define men’s relationships to men. While I am partially in agreement with such interpretations of the poem, I want here to question the view that at no point in the poem is Lucrece represented as posing any contradiction, any aporia, within patriarchal discourse. Nancy Vickers, in her celebrated essay, “‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, argues that:

In Lucrece occasion, rhetoric, and result are all informed by, and thus inscribe, a battle between men that is first figuratively and then literally fought on the fields of woman’s ‘celebrated’ body. Here, metaphors commonly read as signs of a battle between the sexes emerge rather from a homosocial struggle, in this case a male rivalry, which positions a third (female) term in a median space from which it is initially used and finally eliminated.

Of course Vickers is right in her assertion that Lucrece, as a third and female term, occupies 'a median space' in the poem. She identifies this inbetween space with Lucrece's body (as Georgianna Ziegler has recently pointed out, this space is also the private domestic space associated with female identity by patriarchal culture). Lucrece's body does indeed begin and end the poem as the object of masculine rhetoric. None the less, it is strange that Vickers, in focusing her influential feminist analysis upon men's use and abuse of language in Shakespeare's poem, failed to discuss Lucrece's own language — her speech at her death, and her more private but much longer rhetorical performance, in the privacy of her chamber, immediately before and after her rape. For Lucrece's 'inbetweenness' can also be related to the importance which her voice assumes at the dead centre of the poem, in a textually constituted space which corresponds to the very depths of night according to Shakespeare's narrative.