The tragic downfall of Lucretia in Shakespeare's 'The Rape of Lucretia' can be largely attributed to male competition. His unfortunate story begins with a contest to determine which man has the most chaste woman, "among whom Collatus praised the incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia." After Lucretia is proclaimed the most devoted, Sextus Tarquinius, Prince Tarquin and Collatine's friend, becomes "inflamed by Lucretia's beauty... treacherously sneaks into her room, violently rapes her and flees early in the morning. In the rhetoric of masculinity in the modern era, female chastity is a cause for great concern, because although it is the basis of male honor, female chastity is ultimately beyond male control. resolve their anxiety by making chastity a public virtue and the basis of a woman's social reputation; women have a stake in their own chastity Because of the public importance of chastity, she is both a figure. of approval and attack – and, as such, becomes a closely guarded resource in the world of male rivalry. Collatine's honor depends on Lucretia's ability to hide her body from other men. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"?Get the original essay "Lucretius" is a text that is both literal and metaphorical - like the body of the poem, the body of the character of Lucretius is also intended for publication. Shakespeare's poem, written from a male perspective, suggests to a male readership lines such as "their sweet sex are often disposed to weep" (1237). Likewise, Lucretia's chastity, the basis of Collatine's masculine identity, is inscribed on her body and is used in "Lucretia" as an exchange between men. In addition to being a woman, Lucretia is also a commodity in the male economy, where male competition manifests itself as desire and metaphors of invasion and conquest are symbols of male power. Lucretia's body is her currency in this commercial market. In “The Rape of Lucretia,” the chaste wife brings honor and prestige to her husband. Men are judged by other men on their ability to maintain control over their wives and keep her chaste. This is a contradictory norm because it stems in part from men's ability to sexually please their wives so that they refrain from finding sexual gratification elsewhere. This also comes in part from their ability to impose on their wives a code of conduct in which chastity is a moral value that women must also embody in one way or another: it is a norm written and applied by the female body. Men are expected to maintain control over their wives' bodies and have the power to turn female sexuality on or off like a switch. To exercise power over the female body, men must maintain strict transparency in their relationships with their wives. To prove which woman is more virtuous, Tarquin's men surprise their wives with "late night" visits, as if the only method of validating a woman's honesty is to surprise her while her guard is lowered - which already suggests intense distrust. . If men viewed women as naturally chaste, female chastity wouldn't even be a topic of discussion, much less something that needed to be tested or proven. Women, when left alone and outside the control of men, could easily be found "in many sports." The relationships betweenGenders in the early modern period were deeply complex, and the complexities stemmed in part from the misogynistic notion that women would only adhere to chastity if their husbands enforced it. this on them. It was unthinkable that women would have free will to decide whether or not to follow the mores of society. Collatine is considered exceptionally lucky “In possession of his beautiful companion; / Estimating his fortune with such pride / Kings might be married to greater fame, / But king nor peer with so matchless a lady” (18-21). Shakespeare's pun on the word "peer" indicates the omnipresent nature of this notion: Lucretia is without a "peer", because her husband does not need to constantly "scrutinize" his wife's private space to gauge her honesty. Both his incomparable worth and Collatine's fortune derive from Lucruce's intrinsic virtue. Fear of the feminine mystery, of what women do when left alone in their feminine space, causes a lot of anxiety in men, and men constantly invade feminine space to "control" feminine behavior. The metaphor of invasion is omnipresent in "Rape of Lucretia", as the story takes place during Tarquin's invasion of Ardea. The meta-narrative of “Lucretius” is already a story of conquest; Lucretia, wife of a nobleman, lives under and within the grand narrative of a male power struggle. For the men of “Lucretius,” invasion is the natural method of asserting their power. When Tarquin invades Collatine's house and Lucretia's feminine space, he is depicted as a soldier, and Lucretia is depicted as his battlefield, whose beauty is "a silent war of lilies and roses / Which Tarquin saw in the field of her beautiful face” (71 -71). As a battlefield, the violence of conquest is exerted on and through it, but even if the war is fought for it, it is not the cause. Rape is not a sexual act, but an exercise of power - and since women in Roman and early modern times had little power of their own, Tarquin's rape of Lucretia is essentially an exercise of power over Collatine. Tarquin threatens Lucretia with Collatine's dishonor to obtain her submission, stating that if she does not acquiesce, "your surviving husband will remain / The scornful mark of every open eye; / Your parents bow their heads before this disdain." Mark Breitenberg explains: In short, Tarquin gains honor by raping the wife of a man as powerful as Collatine at the same time as he destroys his own honor. This contradiction is certainly made explicit in the poem through Tarquin's tortured psychomania between the preservation and corruption of his own honor...it seems...that his irresistible and inescapable desire actually supersedes the contradictions inherent in a system in in which men receive honor from their peers in reciprocal relationships... while also receiving honor in their conquest of the same peers. The idea of ​​public versus private dishonor is central to “Lucrece,” and the way the various characters approach this conflict is representative of their virtue and integrity. While Tarquin is content to assume that the rape will not be revealed, Lucretia cannot live with the idea that she is somehow reduced as a person, and she views her ultimate suicide as his only hope of redemption. “My blood will cleanse my slander of evil; / The ignoble act of my life, the beautiful end of my life will free it” (1207-1208). Although Lucretia only causes pain to herself and others by making her rape public, her courageous honesty is portrayed as righteous, while Tarquin's stealth is an act of cowardly shame. The importance of transparency in gender relations isonce again emphasized in Lucretius' disclosure. Public recognition is crucial because women can only honor their husbands if their chastity is publicized, but extolling a woman's virtue trivializes her and makes her an object of desire in the eyes of other men. This simultaneously empowers men while making them vulnerable to power usurpation. This paradox presents an underlying problem in the system. Shakespeare writes: “Or why is Collatine the publisher / Of this rich jewel which he should keep unknown / From the ears of thieves, because it is his own” (33-35)? Although he writes within a patriarchal system, Shakespeare seems to offer a critique of this patriarchy, because perhaps if Collatine had not felt the need to affirm Lucretia's chastity, if he had recognized it as inherent, he would not have provoked Tarquin's desire and desire. the tragic rape could have been avoided. Shakespeare describes how, if revealed, Lucretia would be like morning dew under the sun, a “date canceled before well begun. / Honor and beauty in the arms of the owner / Are weakly protected from a world of dangers” (26-28). Although seemingly demarcated, the notions of “public” and “private” space share blurred boundaries within an ideology that so closely links chastity. to honor. It is precisely because female chastity is so carefully guarded that it becomes a prime target for invasion and conquest. The concept of Lucretia's personal, guarded space is evoked in Tarquin's invasion of her private apartments. When he seeks it, even the supernatural comes to him. Lucretia's help comes in the form of wind, locks and closed doors, and Tarquin is continually dissuaded. The constant postponement of pleasure, however, only excites Tarquin more, and he proclaims: "These let you wait for time, / Like little forests that sometimes. threatens the spring, / To add greater rejoicing to the bounty / And give the captured birds more reason to sing" (330-333). Lucrezia captivates Tarquin because she is refused to him. She is in her personal room, a space where only her husband is allowed to enter, and Tarquin's excitement comes not so much from his desire for Lucretia as from his desire to enter a space that is expressly forbidden to him Shakespeare does not linger on. act of rape itself, but focuses instead on the chase: Lucretia is the hunted, Tarquin is the hunter, and the thrill - for both Tarquin and the reader - is in the chase. Michael Hall writes: The long description of the. Tarquin's journey to Lucretia's room is full of martial images and suggestions of stealth, power and mastery. These images ensure that Tarquin's assault will be seen in the traditional form of the conquest narrative. there will be the thrill of the chase that results. After Tarquin rapes Lucretia, it is as if she has lost all her appeal; he has satisfied his desire, committed the ultimate act of power and has nothing left to prove. Hall elaborates: The basic form by which hunting, fighting, and rape were all represented is both simple and familiar: a man or group of men selects and attacks an object...which resists and is ultimately defeated ...Individual men could play. These were tales of conquest, but the reason these stories needed to be told was to establish group identity and affirm the values ​​associated with masculinity. So, when stories are about individuals, the goal is to reinforce the identity of the male group. Tarquin's singular act of rape is an affirmation not only of his power over Collatine, but also of his superiority over other men, who are denied the thrill of the hunt.because Tarquin deflowered Lucretia's marital chastity. In this sense, rape is a profoundly social act. In the male economy, Lucretia's market value derives from the forbidden nature of her chastity. Once conquered by Tarquin, once the lines are crossed, its value collapses, not only for Collatine, but for all men. Lucretia is fundamentally caught in the patriarchy of her time. Its moral system centers on two contradictory patriarchal ideologies: Roman and Christian theological notions of morality. Roman ideology states that if a woman is raped, she is somehow reduced as a person, and as a result she has been defiled. There is no duality between the mind and the body, because a woman is her body, and even if her mind is innocent of rape, her body bears the pollution. A woman can, however, regain her virtue by literally purging herself of her dishonor; she can commit suicide. Christian theological ideology states that it is immoral for Lucretia to commit suicide, because suicide is a sin against God. Despite her corrupt body, Lucretia's spirit is free from all sin and she is therefore free from all blame. Shakespeare gives Lucretia the choice to see herself after the rape, but it is a choice based on masculine terms. Lucretia's free will is limited by two contradictory patriarchal discourses: she must adopt one of two incompatible notions, and her inner conflict is evident in lines such as: "If, Collatina, your honor rested on me, / From me by a violent assault he is deprived: / My lost honey, and I, drone-like bee, / I have no more perfection of my summer” (834-837) and “Though my gross blood is stained by this abuse, / My spirit is immaculate and without stain” (1655-1666). Lucretia realizes that she is caught in a paradox, but she cannot escape it: “My body or my soul, which was dearer, / When the pure one the mother deified” (1163-1166)? Breitenberg writes: "Although Shakespeare clearly intended to show the emptiness and self-destructiveness of Tarquin's rapacity, there is little suggestion of a way out of the wolf market in which male desire is driven to the extreme by the fetishization of chastity. » Lucretia's misfortune comes partly from her lack of action, but also from the anxiety of choice, from the fact that her only recourse is to adopt an ideology that she does not understand. Lucretia spends the last half of the poem literally wondering what to do with herself. Even though she decides almost instantly after Tarquin leaves that she must kill herself, her internal monologue is fundamentally contradictory until the very end. In fact, she goes so far as to ask Collatine and his men: "That my pure spirit can absolve me from the dastardly act, / my weakly declined honor to advance?" May words absolve me of this luck” (1704-1706). She commits suicide only after “they all began to say / The stain on her body, her unbroken mind cleared” (1709-1710). Despite her awareness of being a victim and not a perpetrator, Lucretia ultimately commits suicide because she cannot live with her body. Lucretia's mind may be pure, but she is convinced that the evidence of the rape has forever scarred her person and, therefore, Collatine's honor. Lucretia's failed chastity and Collatine's compromised honor are inscribed on her body, and this knowledge causes Lucretia so much distress that she chooses to die. Lucretia's body is, throughout the play, a symbol that is not hers, that she does not control. In early modern gender politics, women's bodies were a political symbol and women's concerns were mocked on their bodies as emblems. Lucretius refers to the figureof Hecuba in the tapestry representing the fall of Troy, because “In her, the painter had anatomized / The ruin of time, the ruin of beauty and the reign of sinister care; / Her cheeks with chops and wrinkles were disguised, / From which no semblance of her remained" (1450-1453). Hecuba, like Lucretia, physically records her sorrows. But as Jonathan Crewe points out, "she cannot fully identify with the old Queen Hecuba as a tragic victim, and does not want to be identified with the suspicious Helen... The character she fixes on in a surprising but telling way is that of Sinon, the traitor who caused the fall of Troy. Lucretia feels like she has betrayed Collatine, even though she knows that her soul is beyond reproach. It is as if the transparency that men impose in their relationships with their wives externalizes in one way or another the female psyche on their bodies, perpetuating the myth according to which a woman cannot hide anything from her husband; his body is not his, but his. Lucretia's body is seen as a text, and she laments: Do not object to the revealing day; The light will show on my brow the story of the decline of sweet chastity, The unholy violation of the sacred vow of marriage; Yes, the illiterate people who don't know it. how to encrypt what is written in scholarly books, I will cite my repugnant intrusion in my looks. (806-812) The female body is never simply a body; it still represents a resource for masculine exchange. At the beginning of “The Rape of Lucretia”, her body serves as a token of honor for Collatine, but after her rape, it bears the badge of scandal and shame. At the end of the poem, Lucretia's body becomes a symbol of the unification of Rome, when Collatina and his men appeal to the Roman people to banish the Tarquins. To the modern reader, Collatina and his men seem terribly unsympathetic in their decision to use Lucretia's suicide as an excuse to unite Rome. However, this decision is not surprising, as the political significance of the body is a pervasive theme throughout the play. A further indication of Lucretia's position as a politicized male object lies in her importance as a bearer of the Collatina lineage. She is his vessel: her duty is to reproduce, and the male child that Lucretia is supposed to give birth to will act as an extension of Collatine's power. Lucretia's place in the house and in society is that of wife to her husband and mother to her son. The importance of women as bearers of the paternal line is a cause of great unease in modern literature. Women, not men, determine lineage, because even if women have children, men cannot prove their legitimacy – it is a matter of faith. The importance of chastity is all the greater because a chaste woman cannot have children other than those of her husband, and since chastity is the only virtue that guarantees a legitimate patriarchal lineage. Tarquin is fully aware that by raping Lucretia, he could impregnate her: “I have debated even in my soul/What evil, what shame, what sorrow I will engender” (498-499). Rather than serving as a deterrent, it is a source of sadistic pleasure: “Yet I strive to embrace my infamy” (504). To abort the possibility of bearing Tarquin's child and polluting Collatine's family line, Lucretia's suicide is a virtual necessity. “This bastard will never grow; / He will not boast of whom they have polluted / That you are the beloved father of his fruit” (1062-1064). Margo Hendricks uses the analogy of race when stating: "The ironic paradox, of course, is that this sign is invisible except as it affects the imaginative threads of this place of.