Cannibalizing Mothers: Pre-Oedipal Horror in Hannibal and Titus Andronicus

[Trigger Warning: brief discussions of sexual assault.]

It’s been nearly ten years since Bryan Fuller’s TV show Hannibal (2013-2015) debuted. Since then, it has garnered a cult viewership and a devoted online fanbase, often referred to as “fannibals.” However, to their (and my) chagrin, the show was preemptively cancelled after Season 3. As a late-comer to Hannibal (in that I’ve only just started watching it), the past several weeks of my life have been consumed by the drama’s cinematographic beauty, eloquent writing, and, of course, its artistic depiction of cannibalism. Furthermore, as an aspiring early modernist, I’ve also been doing my fair share of comparing Hannibal with the early modern English texts I study. One of these, William Shakespeare’s 1594 play Titus Andronicus, bears particularly strong similarities to the show.

Despite the approximately 400-year gap between them, Hannibal resonates strongly with Titus. In tracing their thematic entanglement, I hope to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s gory revenge tragedy illuminates one of the more veiled elements of Fuller’s show, namely Dr. Lecter’s figurative role as a pre-Oedipal horror: the cannibalizing mother.

Before we begin, you must all be warned. Nothing here is vegetarian. Bon appetit.[i]

In Hannibal, as in many of Shakespeare’s plays, mothers seem to get left out of the picture. Take the character Abigail Hobbs, for instance, whose main story arc elapses during Season 1. The show depicts Abigail’s mother as having little to no consequence on the drama, whereas Garrett Jacob Hobbs, Abigail’s father, is spotlighted as the first serial killer that Will Graham is called on to apprehend. Likewise, Will’s character engages in a similar kind of maternal erasure, claiming that he “never knew” his mother but that his father single-handedly molded him into a drifter:

HANNIBAL
Tell me about your mother.

WILL GRAHAM
That’s some lazy psychiatry, Dr. Lecter. Low hanging fruit.

HANNIBAL
I suspect that fruit is on a high branch, very difficult to reach.

WILL GRAHAM
So’s my mother. I never knew her.

…

HANNIBAL
Did your family have money, Will?

WILL GRAHAM
We were poor. I followed my father from the boat yards in Biloxi and Greenville to lake boats on Erie.[ii]

If Hannibal’s mothers are “very difficult to reach,” to quote Dr. Lecter, then the show’s fathers seem to be the “low-hanging fruit” of Will’s metaphor. Abigail’s father is not only sensationalized as a cannibal-murderer, thus rendering his wife less important by comparison, but his hereditary influence over his progeny completely overshadows the maternal. In brief, Abigail frequently expresses concern over becoming a murderer like her father, fearing the mix of genetics and nurture that seem to have made Will into the image of his own father. What’s more, the show develops its paternal motif even further when Will subconsciously (and, in some ways, involuntarily) slips into the role of Abigail’s father:

HANNIBAL
Teaching her [Abigail] how to fish. Her father taught her how to hunt.

WILL GRAHAM
That’s why I thought better of it.

HANNIBAL
Feeling paternal, Will?[iii]

So, if Hannibal has so much to do with fathers, especially throughout Season 1, then what does it have to do with mothers? To illuminate the maternal power that figuratively lurks in the show’s shadows, I turn to a somewhat dated piece of psychoanalytic literary criticism where author Alan B. Rothenberg provides a telling (if problematic) analysis of Shakespeare’s Titus.

In Rothenberg’s view, “A strong ‘pattern of the past’ underlying [Titus] seems to be the pre-Oedipal fear of being smothered, buried alive, and eaten by the breast or mouth of a cannibalistic mother.”[iv] Drawing on Freudian Oedipal theory, Rothenberg argues that Titus is a metaphoric manifestation of Shakespeare’s infantile fear that his mother, whom (according to psychoanalysis) an infant Shakespeare would have regarded as an all-powerful life-giver, will cannibalize him. I would add that this fantasied act of maternal cannibalism seems to be coded as an inverse act of childbirth – the bringing on of death via entry into the mother’s body. Of course, psychoanalytic criticism such as this is rife with Western-heteronormative biases and erroneous claims about authorial intention. However, Rothenberg’s observations offer a compelling interpretation as to why Tamora has so often been regarded as the play’s central, most terrifying monster (whether she truly deserves this title or not).  I’d like to suggest that Rothenberg’s essay can also shed some light on the comparatively shrouded role played by maternal powers in Hannibal.

In Titus, the central antagonism exists between the Romans, that is Titus and his fellow Andronici, and the Goths, of whom Tamora is the queen. Throughout the play, the Andronici and Goths exchange blows. The Andronici incite this gory back-and-forth by sacrificing one of Tamora’s sons. In retaliation, Tamora encourages her remaining sons, Chiron and Demetrius, to rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter – “Rome’s rich ornament” (1.1.52)[v] – Lavinia. As Lavinia begs to be spared, Shakespeare engages his characters in an argument about nature versus nurture, ending with the dreadful revelation that Chiron and Demetrius are just like their mother:

LAVINIA
When did the tiger’s young ones teach the dam?
O, do not learn her wrath; she taught it thee.
The milk thou suck’st from her did turn to marble.
Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny.
Yet every mother breeds not sons alike.
Do thou entreat her show a woman’s pity.

CHIRON
What, wouldst thou have me prove myself a bastard? (2.3.142-8)

Despite Lavinia’s hopeful appeal to nurture (“O, do not learn [your mother’s] wrath; she taught it thee”), Chiron’s succinct response implies that to violate Lavinia is to prove his hereditary linkage to Tamora. Shortly thereafter, Tamora appeals to a similar logic when she goads her sons to “use [Lavinia] as you will; / The worse to her, the better loved of me” (2.3.161-7). In other words, Tamora asserts that the more violent her sons’ behavior is, the greater her maternal love for them will be. This is the key threat that Tamora poses in the early modern imaginary – a loose, volatile woman by (prude) early modern British standards, she threatens to propagate children in her corrupted image who then stand to infiltrate and debase the purity of the Roman (read British) polis.

In Hannibal, Abigail may fear her father’s influence, but I think that she and other characters ultimately face a more dangerous threat, namely Dr. Lecter’s “maternal” power to mold people’s behavior. Just as Tamora rears her sons to emulate her, Dr. Lecter psychically drives those around him – encouraging his clients to commit murder (and in one case, suicide), hypnotizing Will into (briefly) thinking he is a killer, and much more. Of course, Dr. Lecter also engages in just the sort of pre-Oedipal maternal monstrosity with which Rothenberg is concerned: cannibalism and, thus, anti-birth.

In Titus, Tamora famously eats pies in which her children Chiron and Demetrius are baked, though, as Titus’s gloating indicates, she does not do so by choice:

TITUS
Why, there they are, both bakèd in this pie,
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
’Tis true, ’tis true! Witness my knife’s sharp point.
He stabs the Empress. (5.3.61-4)

Here, Titus forces Tamora to eat her sons, making her, in his own words, “Like to the earth swallow her own increase” (5.2.195). Finally, he stabs her, heaping injury upon the ultimate insult. I interpret this moment as, first, Titus’s oral rape of Tamora followed by his phallic-coded penetration into her body – in all, a double assault. Circling back to Hannibal, this moment in the play complicates the relationship between Tamora and Dr. Lecter. Whereas Tamora unknowingly “swallow[s] her own increase,” Dr. Lecter systematically consumes those around him whom he deems “rude.”[vi] Tamora is orally violated; Lecter has a cannibalizing philosophy. But despite these differences, both characters either willingly or forcedly come to embody a pre-Oedipal maternal monster. Not only do they “rear” and thus mold the behavior of their literal and metaphoric kin, but they also threaten and, in some cases, enact the consumption of those very kin.

Much like Titus’s Romans and Goths, Dr. Lecter and Will are Hannibal’s central adversaries. Yet, despite the show’s superficial paternal motif, analyzing it alongside Titus leads me to believe that Dr. Lecter does not become Will’s father or lover but his mother, and a pre-Oedipal monster-mother at that. As mentioned above, Dr. Lecter psychically drives Will at the same time that he offers him emotional guidance, albeit guidance that is rooted in an unequal blend of deception and affection. Maternal ambivalence, anyone? Much like Titus, I find that Hannibal (or what I’ve watched of it, anyway) engages in a thought project about identity. Among many questions, it asks, “Who are we, and how much of our identity is under our control?” Further, “Where bonds and family ties are concerned, how free are we to engage in or break free of them?” And, of course, “What is the horrific capacity of one who can consume the very being(s) that they have birthed, reared, and loved?”

Jack Crawford:
What kind of victim forgives the killer at the moment of death?

Will Graham:
A mother.[vii]

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[i] “Sorbet.” Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller, season 1, episode 7, Sony Pictures Television, 2013.

[ii] “Oeuf.” Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller, season 1, episode 4, Sony Pictures Television, 2013.

[iii] “Oeuf.”

[iv] Rothenberg, Alan B. “Infantile Fantasies in Shakespearean Metaphor: I. The Fear of Being Smothered.” The Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 60, no. 2, 1973, pp. 205-22.

[v] Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus from The Folger Shakespeare. Ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library, October 1, 2021. https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/titus-andronicus/

[vi] “Tome-wan.” Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller, season 2, episode 12, Sony Pictures Television, 2014.

[vii] “Oeuf.”