The Wykehamist
his audience guessing. Lavinia’ s ultimate death at the hands of her father forces her to remain the passive, relatively innocent victim of the actions of those around her, since she’ s not given the chance to embark upon the cannibalistic road of revenge taken by Philomela and Procne— since Titus also exacts revenge upon Demetrius and Chiron, removing any need for Lavinia to bloody her conscience, thus retaining her feminine innocence.
The importance of Lavinia’ s silence in Titus Andronicus is tragically emphasised by the fact that her final lines in the play are interrupted by one of her later assailants,
‘ Lavinia. No Grace, No womanhood? Ah beastly creature, The blot and enemy to our generall name, Confusion fall—
Chiron. Nay then Ile stop your mouth Bring thou her husband’( II. iii. 189-192)
after which she never speaks again, yet is often onstage as a poignantly silent figure. Contrastingly, what often seems to be one of the key messages in Ovid’ s works is that‘ communication could transcend the human voice, and that women were not that easily silenced’( Beard, 2018): instead, what appears to act as the most effective silencer of women in his Metamorphoses is Procne’ s anguish and fury at discovering her husband’ s crimes.
‘ All speech was choked by her grief. The words that she needed weren’ t there to express her outrage.’( VI. 583-4)
This poignant parallel between the silence of the two sisters suggests that by refraining from speech, both women“ define themselves by their struggle to invent new languages”( Barkan, 1986), and are subsequently able to find a clever but vicious means of communicating their rage against Tereus in place of their lost words, by feeding Itys to his father. In contrast Shakespeare, by making Lavinia an omnipresent but silent onlooker and removing her capacity for revenge, as well as“ her association with the word‘ ornament’, repeatedly calls into question, often ironically, the relationship between women, oratory and rhetoric”( Oakely-Brown, 2005) as although Lavinia is
‘ deeper read and better skilled’( IV. i. 33)
than her male relatives, she is valued not for her speech and thoughts, but for her beauty and value to those around her, much like how Io is silenced by Zeus in her transformation into a heifer, so that
‘ When she opened her mouth to complain, Her own voice startled her; all that emerged was a hideous lowing’( I. 635-636)
This parallel can be found between many of Ovid’ s stories, such as those of Philomel and Io, both of which influence Shakespeare’ s Titus Andronicus: silencing the victim in order to hide the grievous crimes of the men who have raped them. Ultimately, what makes both Ovid and Shakespeare’ s works so powerful is that the passivity of many of their female characters moves their readers to yearn to protect them, to shelter them from the cruelty of the world which they face as victims who have suffered more than any of their male counterparts around them.
Objects of Love
Ovid and Shakespeare both use the concept of women serving as objects to be won, or indeed as prizes, motivating male characters towards certain actions in order to progress the plot. One of the most stereotypical examples of such an archetype would be Briseis, in Agamemnon’ s laying claim to her in order to punish Achilles for demanding his return of Chryseis. In his Heroides, Ovid once more provides a previously unprecedented depth to Briseis’ personality, revealing her devotion to Achilles, and misery at their separation. Yet she remains inarguably passive in his retelling of their relationship, given that she declares:
‘ But if love has turned to weariness, kill me Rather than make me live without you’( Briseis to Achilles)
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