Titus Andronicus Play Analysis

Inscribed Bodies in Titus Andronicus
“what it is to know that others, that we, have bodies” –Stanley Cavell

Dr. P. Prayer Elmo Raj
Assistant Professor,
PG & Research Department of English
Pachaiyappa’s College, Chennai-30

Abstract

Titus Andronicus is packed with tormented, mutilated and disfigured bodies. The rape of Lavinia is central to the plot of the play. Bodily disfigurement metaphorically reflects the state of (a headless) Rome. Bodies in this play embody political significance. Systematic violence and torture impregnated against bodies are performative of an overarching power of an empire that foresees a downfall. Patriarchal and vengeful nature of power strategically uses female body as a tool to exert authority over the subjects.

Fawcett observes that even before the loss of Lavinia’s tongue, her language captures her father’s rhetoric through any thoughts of her language:
When we look back on the first two acts, her silence after her mutilation appears to be a development, an increase in eloquence, rather than a stopping or reversal. In the early acts she is not given many words with which to create herself, and these are echoic or censorious…From the words on the page one can feel a kind of disengagement in Lavinia, a refusal of any kind of dramatic interchange, a deliberate muteness… (266).
After the mutilation, Lavinia discovers yet another language that interconnects on to the word around her. However, Lavinia uses symbols and signs to define her newly found language that is scowl. Such a language is “not spoken not written, not closed and not open, not syntactical and yet not meaningless” (Fawcett 261). Lavinia aims to allow the activities to be the symbol of the will to speak and write. Eventually, she develops the new tongue as an alter speech. Moreover, the father’s part in the tongueless mouth of the daughter is the continuance of the

The extremities in the play are identified by Smith as Romans/Self and Goths/Other. The coercive approaches of violence that state employs for the sake of violence remains a tool: “Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms—that is, through the limitation, prohibition, regulation, control and even “protection” of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent and retractable operation of choice” (Butler