Titus Andronicus – Bitch Flicks

Rape Revenge Fantasies: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for Rape Revenge Fantasies Theme Week here.

Revenge Is a Dish Best Served…Not at All? by Angelina Rodriguez

Tarantino’s Kill Bill narrative requires The Bride to murder her rapist and to defend herself with some of the masculine characteristics that are used as institutionalized power to oppress women, such as physical strength and aggression. The film insists that she seek revenge, instead of demanding that men simply do not rape. This is barely better than teaching rape avoidance. It dictates that women must assimilate to a male culture of violence in order to have autonomy over their own bodies.

Irreversible: Deconstructing Rape Revenge by Max Thornton

Irreversible deconstructs the ethically dubious pleasures of the rape revenge genre through its structure as well as its plot. Its reverse chronology inverts the formula of rape-then-revenge, thereby robbing the viewer of any sense, however questionable, of justice done, and subverting the whole economy of violence.

“I’ll Make You Feel Like You’ve Never Felt Before”: Jennifer’s Power in I Spit on Your Grave Sophie Besl

No movies ever had to justify a cowboy going on a rogue revenge kick after his log cabin was burned to the ground or his family was killed; certain sufferings of injury, murder of loved ones, robbery, etc., have been accepted throughout cinematic history to merit revenge at all costs. I Spit on Your Grave was a large part of a relatively new phenomenon, possibly born out of the feminist movement, to add rape—based on the woman’s experience of rape, whether validated by law or not—to that list of worthy harms, which is an important statement in our rape culture.

When Biopics Go Awry: Bandit Queen As Rape Revenge by Colleen Lutz Clemens

When considering female agents of violence in a film, there is a troublesome tendency that plays to the audience’s anxiety about a women disrupting the essentialist notion that women are naturally gentle and nurturing: the tendency to have the woman acting in response to sexual violence, that only after a woman is overpowered and assaulted can she find a place of violence in her. Once the naturalness of a woman is disrupted by an outside force—a (usually male) perpetrator—she is no longer required to be viewed as “womanly.”

The Fractured Rape/Revenge Fantasies of Julie Taymor’s Titus by Rebecca Willoughby

Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of Titus Andronicus then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.

Women As Perpetrators of Violence in Freeway by Ren Jender

In films, as in life, women aren’t supposed to be violent. Women make up the majority of violent crime victims (domestic violence, assault, rape, and murder) but they rarely retaliate in kind. Even in the relatively rare film where a woman seriously injures or kills a rapist, like Thelma and Louise she does so with lots of tears and anguish–in that film both from the woman pulling the trigger and the one who the man attempted to rape. The unwritten rule in movies seems to be that in order to justify a woman killing or even assaulting someone, we need to see her or some other woman suffer, a lot, beforehand. Contrast that rule with the male heroes of action films who leave dozens of corpses in their wake, and not one of the dead, usually, has raped or otherwise tortured the hero beforehand–though the hero may be avenging some great wrong the dead guy (or guys) did to his wife or daughter.

Cowboy Justice: Rape Revenge in Mainstream Cinema and TV by Morgan Faust

So maybe what had looked like a trend toward marginalizing rape survivors was actually a move toward bringing them into the fold of the American action hero? This is a move that discloses a terrible truth about the handling of rape cases in our legal system, but can be viewed as a genuine attempt to find a way to make the cowboy narrative, and the catharsis that comes with it, available and relevant to survivors of rape.

What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Rape Culture by Leigh Kolb

In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is brutally raped and disfigured (including having her tongue cut out so she couldn’t speak). This nod to Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses echoes the themes of the brutality of rape and the need for revenge. The women needed to name their rapists and share their stories (Lavinia writes in the sand; Philomela weaves a tapestry that tells her story). The women have as much power as they can in the confines of their society, and we the audience are meant to want justice and revenge.

On Milk-Bones, Toothed Vaginas, and Adolescence: Teeth as a Cautionary Tale by Colleen Lutz Clemens

But when Dawn learns that Ryan has bedded her as part of a bet while he is still inside of her, Dawn’s evolutionary adaptation intercedes and Ryan is punished for his use and abuse of Dawn. So now two trusted boyfriends and a doctor have initiated Dawn into the world of oppressive sex and violence, and all three times her vagina—the thing that has left her most vulnerable—has acted as a protector.

The “Rape Turns Ladies Into Superheroes!” Trope by Melissa McEwan

More than being shitty to watch, it just pissed me off to 10 because I hate with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns the ubiquitous trope that surviving sexual violence (or attempted sexual violence) turns women into superheroes.

Trespassed Lands, Transgressed Bodies: Horror, Rage, Rape, and Vengeance Within Indigenous Cinema by Ariel Smith

By forcing the subconscious fears of audiences to the surface, horror cinema evokes reactions psychologically and physically–that is its power. This power can serve and support uncensored Indigenous expression by allowing Indigenous filmmakers the opportunity to unleash dark, unsanitized allegorical representations of the abhorrent, repugnant, violent abomination that is colonization.

Rape, Lies, and Gossip on Gossip Girl by Scarlett Harris

Her banishment by Blair when she finds out what transpired between Jenny and her on-again, off-again lover is typical of the punish-the-woman mentality Gossip Girl is so fond of. Instead of shaming her partner for taking advantage of a teenage girl, Blair blames Jenny for ruining her proposal. And when Jenny returns the following season to help Chuck take down Blair (keep up, people!), she should really be seeking revenge on her rapist, wouldn’t you say?

Girl Gang Fights Rape Culture in Firefox by Elizabeth Kiy

Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang, have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive. and the experiences of girls and women within it are sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives, instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or frightened by a man following too close on our heels.

Agency and Gendered Violence in Thelma and Louise by Jenny Lapekas

These characters challenge our gendered assumptions about sex, trauma, and vengeance, which can make audiences uncomfortable. I was likely too young when I first watched Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991). However, I remember the surge of adrenaline I felt when Louise shot and killed Thelma’s rapist, how incredibly good it felt to idolize these convict women who had had enough with their monotonous lives, at an age when I couldn’t possibly comprehend patriarchal oppression, the comforts of solidarity and sisterhood, or the concept of escapism utilized not necessarily to run away but rather to find your wildest, most genuine self.

What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Rape Culture

In ‘Titus Andronicus,’ Lavinia is brutally raped and disfigured (including having her tongue cut out so she couldn’t speak). This nod to Philomela in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ echoes the themes of the brutality of rape and the need for revenge. The women needed to name their rapists and share their stories (Lavinia writes in the sand; Philomela weaves a tapestry that tells her story). The women have as much power as they can in the confines of their society, and we the audience are meant to want justice and revenge.

Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee

O, could our mourning ease thy misery! (2.4.56-57)

Shakespeare’s depictions of rape are too familiar today. However, his messages about patriarchy and rape aren’t familiar enough.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

When a story about a girl who was raped and subsequently shunned and blamed breaks, I’m no longer surprised. It’s familiar. Townspeople gathering behind the rapists–just like in Steubenville–seems like the natural course of things in our toxic rape culture. She shouldn’t have been so drunk. She couldn’t say no. These boys are promising young athletes.

The rapists in Julie Taymor’s *Titus*–Demetrius and Chiron–are wild young men obsessed with violence, depraved sexuality and video games.

When Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece in the late 1500s, women were quite literally the property of men (their fathers, then their husbands). The rape culture that plagues us in 2014 was essentially the same, although laws of coverture have dissolved and women are no longer legally property.

And Shakespeare understood the horror of rape. Shakespeare–more than 400 years ago–seemed to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

I read about the Maryville case with the familiar dread that accompanies these too-frequent stories. When it happens in my state in a town that looks like mine, it’s even closer. But I’m never surprised.

As I was watching Titus with my Shakespeare class just a few days later, I readied myself for the rape scene (which Julie Taymor handles brilliantly). When Lavinia’s uncle, Marcus, finds her brutalized, he delivers a long monologue, mourning the sexual violence that she has gone through.

At the end of the monologue, he says as she turns away,

“Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee

O, could our mourning ease thy misery!” (2.4.56-57)

It took my breath away like it hadn’t before, and I checked the text to read the exact quote. I paused the film and asked my students if they’d heard of the Maryville case (in which the victim and her family were basically chased out of town after the case against the perpetrators was dropped). They hadn’t. I explained, and re-read out loud the final couplet of Marcus’s monologue.

Is this how we respond to women who are raped in our culture?

No.

What if we did? What if we rallied behind not the rapists, but the one who was raped? What if we never said, “I am not saying she deserved to be raped, but…“

What if all of this happened immediately and swiftly in our own communities, and not after a case gets national attention?

In Shakespeare’s texts, it’s clear that the rapists are sub-human and villainous. Even when rape isn’t part of the plot, he shows the figurative and literal violence of patriarchy.

Hermia’s father is willing to kill her if she doesn’t marry who he wants her to marry in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (“I would my father look’d but with my eyes,” she says.)

Hamlet‘s Ophelia commits suicide when she descends into madness from being pushed and pulled by patriarchal pressures. (She says to her brother after he advises her to be chaste and virtuous, “Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; / Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, / And recks not his own rede.”)

Emilia’s views on the patriarchal constraints of marriage and sexuality in Othello seem radical today.

Shakespeare understood.

Why can’t we?

Lavinia writes the rapists' names in the sand. The men surrounding her are not unlike Anonymous in the Maryville case. — Lavinia writes the rapists’ names in the sand. The men surrounding her are not unlike Anonymous in the Maryville case.

Shakespeare’s epic poem The Rape of Lucrece also follows a young woman who is raped and seeks revenge (although her speech is left intact).

While the death of the women at the end of the plays seems problematic to 21st-century feminists, we must remember that in Shakespeare’s Roman fictions, self-sacrifice or honor killing was honorable and dignified, thus leaving the women with as satisfying an end as they could hope for. There are cultural differences, of course, but the anti-rape and anti-misogyny messages in these centuries-old texts are gripping.

In these texts, the following messages are clear:

• Rapists are depraved misogynists who want some kind of power.

• Silencing of women is evil.

• Women aren’t always allies (see: Tamora, who mothers and encourages Rape and Murder) .

• Retribution is necessary for justice.

Four-hundred years later, we still can’t seem to grasp these realities.

We look to media for social norms and values. If we see objectification of women on screen, we can clearly see the if this objectification has deeper feminist implications if we are supposed to villainize the objectifiers. (This is, incidentally, why the sexism in The Big Bang Theory makes my skin crawl and Sons of Anarchy–in all of its vengeful Shakespearian glory–is one of my favorite shows.) Shakespeare’s women–who are victims of violent patriarchies–are the ones the audience is supposed to sympathize with. The tragedy of these tragedies is that this patriarchal social order creates hell on earth for many women.

At the beginning of Titus, Lavinia pours a vial of her tears in her father’s honor as he returns home from war. She mourns and rejoices with him and is able to express her emotions surrounding his losses and his victories.

Mourning with him comes naturally. It’s what we expect when men encounter battles.

And just as Marcus says that they must mourn with Lavinia, she must not withdraw, we need to learn to mourn with those whom rape culture affects so deeply.

Four-hundred years later:

• Rapists are still misogynists who do not want sex, but want power.

• Women are still silenced. (And when they speak out, it is not without consequences.)

• Women still aren’t always allies.

• Retribution is still necessary, although we must fight to see it happen (and rely on online hackers and internet outrage to open up cases). Far too often we must wait for justice, if it ever comes.

When we can look to fiction from centuries ago and see common and familiar–almost radical–representations of the violent outcomes of restrictive patriarchies, we are doing something wrong.

Because the masses still don’t seem to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

See also at Bitch Flicks: The Fractured Rape/Revenge Fantasies of Julie Taymor’s Titus

__________________________________________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

The Fractured Rape/Revenge Fantasies of Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus’

Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of ‘Titus Andronicus,’ then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

It might seem a bit archaic to look to a Shakespearean text for an answer to any question about rape/revenge fantasies—that is, unless you’re a student of Shakespeare. As Leigh Kolb has already usefully pointed out, it seems the Bard knew a thing or two about the deeply affecting rage felt by survivors of sexual abuse, and how patriarchy perpetuates that rage by blocking their ability to feel that justice is served in their honor. He knew about it so well, in fact, that even during the time of performances of Titus Andronicus, a play penned relatively early in Will’s career that revolves around rape and revenge, stage productions included a strange conglomeration of historical periods, all of which were oppressive to women in varying degrees. Witness the Peacham drawing, an early-modern representation of the costuming and staging of Titus Andronicus, and you’ll see a combination of classical Roman and Elizabethan garb, where Titus Andronicus, the play’s titular general, appears in traditional Roman costume, and his soldiers appear in armor worn in Shakespeare’s day. Both the classical Roman and Elizabethan periods were two moments in time when women (with the possible exception of the Queen) were literally the property of their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and had little recourse of their own if they were misused in any way, except through these societally approved male allies.

So it’s not truly surprising that the raped woman in this play, Titus’s daughter Lavinia, has to rely on her male relatives to enact revenge for her violation. After all, this isn’t I Spit on Your Grave. It’s more like The Last House on the Left, which—like Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring—is after all based on a 13^th century ballad about a girl raped by ruffians who then arrive for a respite at her family’s home. When her parents find out about her rape, they torture and kill her rapists in retaliation. If this origin story tells us anything (at least initially) about rape revenge narratives, it’s the unfortunate fact that sexual violence has been around for a long, long time.

Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of Titus Andronicus, then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.

Taymor’s answer to these challenges is to mimic the pastiche represented in the Peacham drawing, with a bit of updating: her film, Titus (1999), is a lush visual mash-up of classical Roman architecture, iconography that vaguely recalls both Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany, avant-garde symbolism, Fellini-esque mise-en-scene, and even Degas ballerinas. The influence of the Peacham sketch draws attention to the fact that the classical setting of Titus Andronicus reflects the violence of the Elizabethan period of the play’s production, as well as bringing to mind the violence of classical Rome, the coliseum as a theatre of violence, and the excessive, often despotic rulers of the classical period. The overall look of Taymor’s film, with its naturalistic color palette, its blending and layering of historical periods and iconic imagery, and its direction and photography lends itself to a mode in which the grotesque is presented with utmost beauty, unsettling the viewer and increasing the tension between what the audience knows to be real and fiction. Each of these symbols, referents, and cultural touchstones emphasize the powerlessness of women in those cultures (and, by extension, our own), and the fragility and repression that can characterize the feminine experience. But perhaps most importantly, this approach destabilizes any complicity the audience might bring to these representations of violence. Taymor wants her viewers to FEEL these wrongs, and feel them deeply.

Enter what Taymor calls the “Penny Arcade Nightmares.” Although the film is brimming with gorgeously realized but horrifying images happening in the play proper—such as Marcus’s discovery of Lavinia that has been much discussed—these sequences are the most obviously symbolic, and are meant to illustrate the intense emotions surrounding the events that drive the revenge plot: the supposed honor-killing of Goth Queen Tamora’s eldest son; her younger sons’ subsequent rape of Lavinia in retaliation; Titus’s murder of Chiron and Demetrius in vengeance; and finally the epically terrifying final scenes, where Titus has ground the boys’ bones “to dust” and baked them into pies, which he’s fed to their mother Tamora, whose enraged husband slaughters Titus (but not before Titus kills his own daughter to save her from “surviv[ing] her shame”)… yeah. Pile of bodies on the stage at the end of the play: check. Taymor takes these remarkable cruelties, mingles them with horror’s libidinal audience reactions, and controls those reactions through unexpectedly stunning imagery to produce an increase of empathy. In Taymor’s adaptation, each act of violence is an image that is hauntingly beautiful and still highly disturbing. The Penny Arcade Nightmares illustrate not only acts of torture, dismemberment and cannibalism, but also their internal consequences, their effects on those who execute them, and how victims and those close to them are changed by such extreme violence.

Lavinia’s rape, though it occurs “off-stage,” is represented in one of these stylized vignettes. Bathed in icy hues of blue, white, and grey, Lavinia appears at once as a sort of Old-Hollywood female icon, a suitable eye-rest for the male gaze, but also as a wounded deer, with a deer head placed atop her head, and deer hooves replacing her dismembered hands. Twisting and cowering on a pedestal as if she’s trapped within a snow globe, she dodges the sharpened claws of Chiron and Demetrius, represented as man-tigers bent on consuming their herbivore prey. Chaotic rock music and fast-paced editing underscores the brief scene, highlighting the jagged edges of Lavinia’s memory of her trauma, evoking her anger and her frustrating helplessness. It’s also significant that this moment appears in the film as her male allies encourage her to write the names of her rapists in the sand, revealing their heretofore elusive identities in order to facilitate vengeance—by performing an act that will lead to justice for the violated girl, she is violated again by her own memory of the event.

But what can this film teach us about rape culture? The film and its source material are chock full of horrible acts of violence, including rape. The problem is not that Lavinia doesn’t get justice—she does. The problem is that this justice is achieved through additional violence, a fact that Taymor emphasizes by placing the final bloodbath in the setting of an arena, populated with viewers. They signify us, those watching at home, and implicate this violent justice through their blank faces and silent stares. They do not cheer. Lavinia’s plight is finished, but the cycle of violence has claimed nearly everyone on “stage.” Taymor’s revision leaves the children to potentially clean up the massacre. Taymor’s insistence on unmooring our expectations of representational violence through her painterly compositions, and her use of the audience suggest that she not only wants to change our ideas about rape culture and revenge, but about violence in general. The very construction of the term “rape culture” includes that word, “culture”—a concept that is all-inclusive, encompassing all people, regardless of your place on the sexual spectrum.

Lavinia’s attack and subsequent mutilation is a horrifying, physical manifestation of how broken we are as a society in regards to rape and other forms of sexual violence, and Titus’s attempt at justice—however well intentioned—doesn’t really solve the problem. The problem is not only rape culture. In Shakespeare’s text Lavinia is our center of empathy, the character through which we experience tragedy on a grand and grotesque scale. But Titus himself is guilty of perpetuating the cycle of revenge that ends with that pile of (albeit mostly despicable) bodies on stage, and the layered representation of various historical moments in original performance and the contemporary film speaks to the agonizing continuation of these flawed approaches to healing. Extreme? Sure. But this text seems to ask audiences through the centuries: is more violence really how we want to handle terrible, soul-crushing, self-negating violence? With everyone dead, does anyone really learn a lesson? In her modern re-vision, Taymor’s use of the coliseum audience seems to refute the idea that rage unleashed in additional violence is any kind of cure for deeply felt pain. Their silence, and perhaps ours, is a thoughtful one, one that might include some consideration of alternatives to perpetuating the cycle of violence that leads down a deep rabbit-hole to oblivion.

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Rape Culture

When Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece in the late 1500s, women were quite literally the property of men (their fathers, then their husbands). The rape culture that plagues us in 2013 was essentially the same, although laws of coverture have dissolved and women are no longer legally property.

And Shakespeare understood the horror of rape. Shakespeare–more than 400 years ago–seemed to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee

O, could our mourning ease thy misery! (2.4.56-57)

Shakespeare's depictions of rape are too familiar today. — Shakespeare’s depictions of rape are too familiar today. However, his messages about patriarchy and rape aren’t familiar enough.

Written by Leigh Kolb

The rapists in Julie Taymor's Titus--Demetrius and Chiron--are wild young men obsessed with violence and video games. — The rapists in Julie Taymor’s *Titus*–Demetrius and Chiron–are wild young men obsessed with violence, depraved sexuality and video games.

When Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece in the late 1500s, women were quite literally the property of men (their fathers, then their husbands). The rape culture that plagues us in 2013 was essentially the same, although laws of coverture have dissolved and women are no longer legally property.

And Shakespeare understood the horror of rape. Shakespeare–more than 400 years ago–seemed to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

Last week, I read about the Maryville case with the familiar dread that accompanies these too-frequent stories. When it happens in my state in a town that looks like mine, it’s even closer. But I’m never surprised.

As I was watching Titus with my Shakespeare class, I readied myself for the rape scene (which Julie Taymor handles brilliantly). When Lavinia’s uncle, Marcus, finds her brutalized, he delivers a long monologue, mourning the sexual violence that she has gone through.

At the end of the monologue, he says as she turns away,

“Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee

O, could our mourning ease thy misery!” (2.4.56-57)

Is this how we respond to women who are raped in our culture?

No.

What if we did? What if we rallied behind not the rapists, but the one who was raped? What if we never said, “I am not saying she deserved to be raped, but…“

What if all of this happened immediately and swiftly in our own communities, and not after a case gets national attention?

In Shakespeare’s texts, it’s clear that the rapists are sub-human and villainous. Even when rape isn’t part of the plot, he shows the figurative and literal violence of patriarchy.

Hermia’s father is willing to kill her if she doesn’t marry who he wants her to marry in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (“I would my father look’d but with my eyes,” she says.)

Hamlet‘s Ophelia commits suicide when she descends into madness being pushed and pulled by patriarchal pressures. (She says to her brother after he advises her to be chaste and virtuous, “Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; / Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, / And recks not his own rede.”)

Emilia’s views on the patriarchal constraints of marriage and sexuality in Othello seem radical today.

Shakespeare understood.

Why can’t we?

Shakespeare’s epic poem The Rape of Lucrece also follows a young woman who is raped and seeks revenge (although her speech is left intact).

In these texts, the following messages are clear:

• Rapists are depraved misogynists who want some kind of power.

• Silencing of women is evil.

• Women aren’t always allies (see: Tamora, who mothers and encourages Rape and Murder) .

• Retribution is necessary for justice.

Four-hundred years later, we still can’t seem to grasp these realities.

Mourning with him comes naturally. It’s what we expect when men encounter battles.

And just as Marcus says that they must mourn with Lavinia, she must not withdraw, we need to learn to mourn with those who rape culture affects so deeply.

In 2013:

• Rapists are still misogynists who do not want sex, but want power.

• Women are still silenced. (And when they speak out, it is not without consequences.)

• Women still aren’t always allies.

When we can look to fiction from centuries ago and see common and familiar–almost radical–representations of the violent outcomes of restrictive patriarchies, we are doing something wrong.

Because the masses still don’t seem to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

__________________________________________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Titus the Tight-Ass: Julie Taymor’s Depictions of the Virgin and Whore

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

Trigger warning: frank discussion of rape & PTSD

Julie Taymor’s Titus (based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus) is a highly stylized production, involving elaborate costumes, body markings, choreography, era prop mash-ups, and extravagant violence. I tip my hat to Taymor for the scope and splendor of her vision, and I also applaud her for paving the way for other talented female directors in Hollywood. Though Taymor updates much of the Shakespeare play (using cars, guns, and pool tables alongside swords, Roman robes, and Shakespearean language), Taymor does little to re-interpret the female roles in an effort to make them more progressive and complex.

The only two women of note in the film are the captured Goth queen turned Roman empress, Tamora, portrayed by Jessica Lange and Lavinia, the gang-raped and dismembered virgin daughter of Titus, played by Laura Fraser.

First, there’s Tamora, the barbaric queen of excess and unnatural sexual appetites.

Tamora: all-around orgy party gal

In college, I wrote a psychoanalytic paper on her called, “The Earth and Tamora: The Cannibalistic Vagina in Titus Andronicus (Or Chomp, Chomp: The Little Vagina that Could)”. Though it was a lot of fun to write, it focused on the unhappy subject of the demonizing of the Goth queen for her sexuality. Neither the play nor the film seem particularly concerned with sympathetically portraying a woman who’s lost her country, her eldest son, and been forced to marry the odious emperor who conquered and colonized her land and people. Instead, Tamora is exoticized and condemned as a bad mother who uses her boundless sexuality as her power. She uses this power to seduce the emperor, which opens the door for her to inflict her revenge on the Andronici.

Tamora is the unnatural mother with unnatural appetites, which is literalized at the climax of the film when Titus feeds her a meat pie filled with her murdered sons. Taymor shows Tamora’s relationship with her two surviving sons as bizarre and borderline incestuous. Her sons are wild, over-indulged, and psychotic. We see them knife fight each other all around the palace, bickering over which one of them will get to rape the virginal Lavinia. Tamora caresses and shares lingering kisses with them. Not only that, but she lounges in bed naked with them. Her sexuality is so gross and excess that it spills over onto her sons, which Taymor implies warps them into narcissistic mama’s boys who go around raping and dismembering girls for funsies.

This would be an awkward scene to walk in on.

Tamora lacks an appropriate maternal instinct. She’s either too overbearing and clingy with her children, which reveals itself in her sexual attitude toward them, or she is a cold and immoral figure as is evinced by her desire to murder the infant son born from her affair with Aaron the Moor. (Even her relationship with Aaron, her black lover, is meant to be another example of her unnatural appetites, which is hella racist and could be the topic of a whole other post.) Lavinia pleads for Tamora to just kill her without letting her sons rape her, but Tamora is unmoved. This is another lost opportunity to show Tamora as having complex, compassionate, or even conflicted feelings at the sight of another woman begging for mercy in a mirror image of Tamora kneeling at Titus’ feet, weeping that he spare her son. Lavinia says to the sons, “The milk thou suck’dst from her did turn to marble,” and, at that point, the audience is inclined to agree, especially since Tamora is apparently so turned on by all this raping and murdering that she declares she’s going to find Aaron and have sex with him.

Then there’s Lavinia, the dutiful, virgin daughter.

Lavinia: post-rape with her arms cut off then stuffed with branches and her tongue cut out

Taymor hammers home Lavinia’s obedience by showing her meekly, willingly switching her betrothal from one brother (Bassianus) to the other (Saturninus) upon Titus’ instruction. This is another missed opportunity to complicate the personhood of a woman who is not treated as human, who is always depicted as a piece of her father’s property and a reflection of his honor.

Lavinia is raped, her arms hacked off then cruelly stuffed full of tree branches and her tongue cut out so that she can’t name her assailants. There is so much that a director could do to articulate the inhuman atrocity that’s been inflicted upon Lavinia. It is the epitome of victim silencing, literalizing the struggle many survivors face after their attack. Unfortunately, Taymor renders the rape of Lavinia in the same lavish, stylized manner as everything else. When Lavinia sees her attackers for the first time after her rape, Taymor uses an abstract hallucination sequence to symbolize the rape. Lavinia is wearing a deer head atop her own as two tigers leap towards her from either side.

W…T…F

The sequence is bizarre, trippy, and kind of pretty, but it in no way expresses the horror of rape (not to mention the unimaginable horror of being dismembered). With all the stylizing and symbolizing Taymor’s doing, Lavinia’s rape is effectively trivialized.

When Titus first sees Lavinia after the attack, he says, “My grief was at the height before thou camest,
And now like Nilus, it disdaineth bounds.” Her father monologues about how her attack hurts him. Even Lavinia’s grief and her rape are not her own because Titus egotistically can only fathom his own pain, pride, and outrage. Throughout this scene and the rest of the film, Lavinia is a background adornment. As Titus bemoans his plight, Lavinia stands there without emoting or interrupting. The camera only shows her as meek and solemn. The only exception is a strange scene in which she is given a long stick in order to write the names of her attackers in the sand. Lavinia moves to put the tip of the stick in her mouth, and the audience recoils at the image that echoes fellatio (nobody wants to see a rape survivor performing simulated fellatio). Instead of putting the stick in her mouth, though, Lavinia frantically carves out the names as she is accompanied by discordant music. Instead of documenting her reaction to writing out the names (relieved? angry? exhausted?), the names themselves are focused on in an overhead shot, once again removing Lavinia’s agency and subjectivity.

Lavinia’s life and her death are both symbols. Her life is symbolic of her father’s honor, and after she’s raped, her lost chastity (puke) is symbolic of his shame. Her chastity, Titus insists, is more precious than her hands or tongue (projectile puke). In his mind, Titus must kill her in order to alleviate his own shame. Even Lavinia’s death at her father’s hands is meek and willing. The logic is that she’s so shamed, so “martyred” that death is preferable. It’s true that survivors may go through a host of emotions following their attack, and thoughts of suicide are not uncommon. Lavinia behaves as a doll, though, being positioned placidly for Titus to snap her neck. One could even defend her lack of emotions as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), but I contest that Lavinia doesn’t have any real emotions because Taymor gave her very little depth of character, and Lavinia’s docile nature is more for convenience that to articulate the range of responses a survivor might have.

What’s the saying? “Like a lamb to the slaughter.”

Tamora and Lavinia fit solidly into opposite camps of the virgin/whore dichotomy. Tamora = whore. Lavinia = virgin. The beauty of working from a play as source material is that a director has such incredible freedom to interpret character and setting appearance as well as character tone of voice, emotions, and actions. Though Taymor’s reboot is flashy and gritty, it doesn’t do much work to creatively re-imagine the inner life of its characters. In fact, it doesn’t appear to give much inner life to its female characters at all. In Taymor’s defense, the Shakespearean play does cast its women as virgin and whore, not allowing for much in the way of range. I just can’t accept a contemporary filmmaker (especially a woman) so cavalierly putting her only female characters in the same box as a 16th century white man, a box out of which women still struggle to climb today.

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