The Gnawing Vulture: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus

The dramatic rise in favor of Titus Andronicus among critics and directors has—perhaps not coincidentally—closely paralleled the growth of feminist Shakespeare criticism. ¹ While feminists have not been the only critics writing about this play in the past twenty years, they have contributed substantially to the expanding body of commentary on it. Prominent among their concerns have been the play's vivid representation of Lavinia's victimization and rape; its foregrounding of patriarchal attitudes; its monstrous, sexualized mother, Tamora; and its imagery of womb, tomb, and pit. ² This feminist work has highlighted the many ways in which the play is informed by gender ideology. The Rome of Titus Andronicus is an almost exclusively male world; its two female characters, their roles sharply circumscribed by patriarchal norms, are both dead by its end, and few other women are even referred to in passing. As Coppélia Kahn has recently written, in Shakespeare's plays and in the traditions Shakespeare inherited, "Romanness is virtually identical with an ideology of masculinity." ³

Seldom, however, has feminist criticism taken a close look at what genre and tradition have cited as the play's main concern: revenge. To the extent that feminists have confronted the issue, they have tended to downplay women's participation in revenge, emphasizing instead their role as victim. In such readings Tamora's excessive cruelty and violence is held to have its ultimate source in male fantasy; Lavinia's insulting treatment of Tamora in Act 2 and her active participation in her family's revenge plot in Acts 3 through 5 are either ignored or viewed as imposed on her; and Titus and the other male members of his family are represented as reducing Lavinia to an object, silencing her, or subjecting her to a patriarchal script. ⁴ The play as a whole is taken to be structured around the spectacular display of the female body, written on by violence, while violence against the male body is ignored. ⁵

Such readings may speak to a wish to construct the violence of revenge as a purely "male" problem or an effect of patriarchy. ⁶ They are consistent with a tendency in a good deal of feminist writing beyond the domain of Shakespeare criticism. Women are the nonviolent sex, far more likely to be victims of violence than its perpetrators. When they do fight back, it is often argued, their violence is a justifiable act of self-defense. Yet if feminist writing has usually ignored women's participation in revenge, there are exceptions in which revenge has been subject to open and uncritical embrace. Feminists such as Andrea Dworkin have advocated vigilante violence in response to rape or other instances of patriarchal oppression; mainstream films such as Thelma and Louise or Eye for an Eye, along with many slasher films, now feature female revengers as heroes; books such as 8 Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters describe in harrowing detail the retaliatory violence practiced by contemporary girl gangs. ⁷ The revengers described or imagined in these texts go beyond mere self-defense, actively promoting vigilante killing and other forms of retaliatory violence, at times even encouraging spectatorial delight in the infliction of pain on the perpetrator's body.

Perhaps, then, feminists will benefit from a closer look at revenge tragedies and their conventions. It matters how you fight back. Early modern dramatists considered revenge from multiple viewpoints and examined it in the context of changing notions of honor and shame. They wrestled in sophisticated ways with the unstable relation of revenge to justice and repeatedly asked what the "private man" should do in response to a wrong when the gods are silent and the state too weak or corrupt to bring about just solutions. Their answers were typically ambivalent: revenge is a nearly irresistible response, yet it is also a source of escalating violence and new wrongs. Driven to excess in some...