You should not be in this sacred place of rest, reserved for honorable Nordic peoples, but you are. You should not loot the burial urns littering its halls, filled with gold, gems, and armor meant to ease the Nords’ journeys to the afterlife, but you likely will. By this same logic, you should not pick the barrow’s locks or traverse its traps—the express intent of which is to keep outsiders out—but you most certainly will. Thus, “no” in the burial tombs of Skyrim does not mean “no.” Rather, I argue that the “no” imparted by the game’s resistant landscapes fuels the fire of the player’s rapacious “yes.”

Critical gender analyses are never freed from the risk of inadvertently naturalizing the very systems they intend to critique. To focus on binary gender in Skyrim, for instance, comes at the expense of sufficient attention to its representation of nonbinary and other identity formations, including the all-important intersections of gender with race, class, and ability. However, I insist that value abounds in a critical analysis of Skyrim’s dominant gender representations, particularly its portrayal of femininity as a concept that exceeds the category of the human and guarantees bodily violation. 

As Alexander Galloway insists in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006), those who play such video games as Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise are not merely passive consumers of media. Rather, they become “actors” who,

learn[], internaliz[e], and becom[e] intimate with a massive, multipart global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus, to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel ‘allegorithm’). […] In fact, in their very core, video games do nothing but present contemporary political realities in relatively unmediated form. They solve the problem of political control, not by sublimating it as does the cinema, but by making it coterminous with the entire game, and in this way video games achieve a unique type of political transparency.¹

By considering Skyrim as allegorithmic, or a political rather than neutral media object, I suggest that its players “learn, internalize, and become intimate with” the binary gender system while navigating its tombs and pursuing its quest objectives. Galloway’s method trains my gaze at the game’s subdermal gender structures, or the way(s) that binary gender undergirds not only its NPCs but its level design. Whereas Galloway tags global resource management games like Meier’s Civilization as media which “fetishize control,” I insist that Skyrim’s allegorithm similarly fetishizes, and implicitly genders, the act of discovery itself.²

In their relation of early modern European travel narratives to Nintendo games, Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins define the former by their “time-honored representation of [early modern] English voyages [as] a confident, masculine ‘thrust outwards’ and expansion of, among other things, an enlightened English rule.”³ This same ethic, they suggest, drives players of games like Super Mario ever onward into “the frontier” of successive game environs:

“[W]hat never loses its interest [in these games] is the promise of moving into the next space, of mastering these worlds and making them your own playground. […] [An] increased understanding of the geography, biology, and physics of the different [game] worlds makes it easy to return quickly to the same spot and move further into the frontier.”⁴

At the heart of the “promise” that players will gain mastery over game environs, I argue that desire rhythmically pulses. In Skyrim, players’ increased ease of entry into hostile game environments, filled as they are with rewards (e.g. gold, armor, books, etc.), builds the anticipation of future such ease. Cyclically, ease begets action. To plunder a barrow or traverse an earthen cave, to extract their resources and quell the uprising of their opposing inhabitants, is to “play” at self-perpetuating colonialism. 

After fighting their way through the bowels of a tomb, players earn a reward that may initially appear a mundanity: the word “Cleared” permanently appends the location of the “dungeon” (i.e. the barrow, cave, ruin, etc.) on their map. However, this word signifies players’ domination over the environ, marking its transformation from an unknown space into one which has been seen, touched, “mapped,” and thus irrevocably “known.” To refer back to Ulfric’s gendered metaphor, “Cleared” signifies that the player has traversed once-virgin soil and made it theirs.

Returning to Ulfric Stormcloak’s relation of ore extraction to “the raping of Skyrim’s silver mines” (mentioned in part one of this two-part series), the age-old relation of nature and femininity underlies both his metaphor and, by extension, players’ journeys into subterranean space. In her expansive survey of feminine representations of the natural world, Carolyn Merchant explains that, as the West shifted into the Enlightenment era, dominant images of Earth concomitantly shifted from a “nurturing mother and womb of life into a source of secrets to be extracted for economic advance.”⁵ Even centuries prior to the Enlightenment (which spanned the late 17th through 18th centuries in Europe), the Roman poet Ovid charts a similar shift relative to man’s degradation from the Golden Age to the Iron Age. If Earth flourished with freely given abundance during the Golden Age, the Metamorphoses poet suggests, then the Iron Age conditions Earth as a victim of humanity’s rape:

men began to bound

With dowles and diches drawen in length the free and fertile ground,

Which was as common as the Ayre and light of Sunne before.

Not onely corne and other fruites, for sustnance and for store,

Were now exacted of the Earth: but eft they gan to digge,

And in the bowels of the ground unsaciably to rigge,

For Riches coucht and hidden deepe, in places nere to Hell,

The spurres and stirrers unto vice, and foes to doing well.

Then hurtfull yron came abrode, then came forth yellow golde,

More hurtfull than the yron farre, then came forth battle bolde,

That feightes with bothe, and shakes his sword in cruell bloudy hand.⁶

With “cruell,” “bloudy” hands, the poet explains that Iron-Age peoples exhibited an insatiability (“unsaciably”) while tearing into the “bowels” of “[t]he Earth their mother.”⁷ To return to the beginning of this essay, Onmund, it seems, would accord with the poet’s tangible disgust at Iron-Age peoples’ violent, forced entry into Earth’s bowels to extract her veiled “Riches.” Regardless of in-game counterpoints, Skyrim’s dominant script nevertheless trains players in the same sort of rapine practice decried in this centuries-old poem.

1. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 90-2. ︎
2. Ibid, 93. ︎
3. Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins, “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” in CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Stephen Jones, (Sage Publications, 1995), 70. ︎
4. Ibid, 62-67 ︎
5. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (HarperOne 1990), 165. ︎
6.  Ovid, 43 B.C.–18 A.D. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (Dry Books, 2000), 1.151-61. ︎
7. Ibid, 1.180 ︎

The post Representing Women in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Gendering Discovery (Part 2) appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

When you compound Skyrim’s legacy with its massive playerbase, expansive mod capabilities, and capacious open-world format, you get an endlessly mediated game that defies oversimplification. However, this has not prevented analysis of the game’s gender politics, with online threads dating back to its release puzzling over Skyrim’s depiction of women. “Are women in [Skyrim] portrayed in a good light?” asks a GameFAQs user in 2012, to which another user answers, “Women in this game are just as dirty, violent, and nasty as the men.” Another user offers a similar, though relatively tempered response: 

“[I]t’s hard to say. I’m a guy[…] I find that most of the people in the game fall somewhere between ‘mediocre’ to ‘tool’, but there are about as many memorable women as men in my opinion. There are female jarls (rather like Skyrim’s dukes/duchesses), female housecarls, female mercenaries and high-ranking military women. There aren’t any instances in my own time with the game that struck me as sexist, just characters I liked and some I disliked.”¹

Though each user takes a different tack, their replies ultimately harmonize: in Skyrim, men and women are equal because they are equally represented.

This perspective, though not the only one, has been abundantly endorsed online. As in 2012, so in 2020: Aaron Hall’s blog post “Skyrim: The Feminist Friendly RPG” proclaims the game to be the “most feminist-friendly RPG [he’s] played”: “men and women in Skyrim have nearly no differing social expectations. They serve the same functions in society all up and down the hierarchical totem pole. For this reason, I think Skyrim might be the most feminist-friendly RPG I’ve played.” To back his claim, he lists the following observations about the game:

“1. Women often serve in prominent social positions

[…]

2. No sexualization

[…]

3. The main character can be a woman

[…]

4. No helpless damsels

[…]

5. There’s a goddess dedicated to women [“Granted,” Hall qualifies, “there are Nine Divines in the world of Skyrim and only three of them are goddesses”]”²

Hall may be right in asserting that Skyrim is the most “feminist-friendly RPG” that he has played. However, as with the GameFAQs users, Hall interprets Skyrim’s progressivism only in its representation of women. By “representation,” I think it fair to say that he and other forum posters mean “presence.” As one would be hard pressed to equate a literary character such as Aaron the Moor from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus with a breathing, enfleshed Black subject, one cannot collapse the presence of women on-screen into gender activism.

In her book Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (2000), Dympna Callaghan considers the (im)possibility of representing marginalized peoples on the English stage in the 1500s and 1600s. “[C]hange in representation alone,” she insists, “does not bring about political change.” Nor, she asserts elsewhere, is “representation” the same thing as “inclusion”: “presence alone cannot be equated with representation any more than representation can be equated with inclusion.”³ This assertion about early modern stagecraft resonates with the present discussion of Skyrim and its walking, talking NPCs who perform, among other identity categories, gender. 

To equate representation with something like activism is to have what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “faith in exposure,” or the belief that “mak[ing] something visible as a problem were, if not a mere hop, skip, and jump away from getting it solved, at least self-evidently a step in that direction.” But what, she prods, “does a hermeneutics of […] exposure have to say to social formations in which visibility itself constitutes much of the violence?”⁴ Pointing to such examples as US Southern chain gangs, whose labor matters less than their scrutiny under the public gaze, Sedgwick easily problematizes the oversimple equation of representation, or visibility, with ethical inclusion. 

“What won’t feminists bitch about?” one Reddit user asks beneath a 2011 thread titled, “Women in Skyrim – A Feminist Perspective.” “Women aren’t equal! Wahhhh!,’ they mime, “Women are too equal! Wahhh!”⁵ Skyrim may feature a comparable number of women and men. However, to claim in-game equality is to elide key features of its world, including the presence of sexual assault against women. I am always struck, for instance, by the flippant tone with which Sapphire, a female NPC, recounts her backstory of sexual violation:

“Oh, wait…it gets much better. How about the fact that our farm was attacked by bandits, and that they killed my entire family who didn’t even brandish a weapon against them. Here’s the best part. They took me as a prize, and violated me for a fortnight. Tossed me from bandit to bandit like…like…”⁶

Sapphire’s assault may be unspeakable, but it nevertheless shapes her as a character by facilitating her entry into the Thieves Guild, an in-game criminal faction. In other words, violence against women may not occur on screen, but it still permeates Skyrim. To sidestep this incident in favor of a “gender blind” reading of the game would be disingenuous. However, to overdetermine this narrative instance and decry utter gender inequity may be to go too far. What role does sexual assault play in determining Skyrim’s gender politics?

Although we never witness it first-hand, Skyrim’s men are not unschooled in the domination and violation of women. In a settlement called Whiterun, the first major city featured in the game’s main questline, a female NPC named Carlotta can be overheard despairing that “[l]ife’s hard enough with all these men propositioning me. But that bard is the worst.” After speaking with her, players can accept a quest to convince the bard, Mikael, to leave Carlotta alone. After urging Mikael in this regard, he stubbornly responds, “That fiery widow is mine. She just doesn’t know it yet.” While one can read Mikael’s lines as boyish and earnest, they take on a more sinister valence when considered alongside Sapphire’s account of gang rape. 

While celebrating a victory over his enemy, the Empire, the leader of the insurgent Stormcloaks, Ulfric, likewise demonstrates his familiarity with the logic of rape: “Now that the Empire has been driven from the Reach we can put a stop to the raping of her silver mines. That silver belongs in Skyrim.” “Rape,” in this instance, metaphorizes the extraction of natural resources as sexual assault, casting the Earth (i.e. “silver mines”) as a feminine victim of the Reach’s forced entry. Ulfric’s use of the word “rape” also signifies the theft of property, implying the existence of a gendered hierarchy where Hall (quoted above) otherwise sees none. “Rape” belies Ulfric’s belief that he is the capable patriarch charged with protecting the chastity of Skyrim’s vulnerable, feminine body. Skyrim’s silver belongs to him, so his extraction does not bear a rapine quality. The Reach, he reasons, does not own Skyrim, and their extraction is therefore a veritable act of assault. His metaphor thus bespeaks the unspoken: men and women are not equal in Skyrim.

“One thing I never understood,” begins the title of a Reddit thread, “‘It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim.’” In their post, the author explains their confusion:

Olfina Gray-Mane, who lives in Whiterun, always says this to me every time I pass her. If you’re a male, she’ll say “What’s the matter? Can’t stand the sight of a strong Nord woman?” But why? Women have the same opportunities as men: there are several business owners right there in Whiterun alone, there are women in the prestigious Companions faction including the highly respected Aela the Huntress, and there are even female Jarls. Ahlam, Nazeem’s wife, says something similar: “Men are all alike, from Skyrim to Hammerfell. They care only for war and politics, and treat their women like cattle.” Again, that doesn’t make any sense seeing as how there are many women throughout Tamriel that are very much respected and even several examples of a man and a woman working together (Jarl Idrod Ravencrone and her husband and Steward Aslfur come to mind). These are the only two women that seem to complain about something that doesn’t appear to exist. Anyone else find this strange?⁷

Beneath the veneer of Skyrim’s equal representation of men and women lie the gender inequalities of a patriarchal (i.e. male-dominated) system. Stephanie Weaver catalogues such inequalities in a 2017 blog post called “Skyrim & the Unequal Application of Bigotry Pt. 1”: bandits, when snuck upon, can be overheard bemoaning the suspected infidelity of women and illegitimacy of children, a serial killer in Windhelm exclusively targets women, and a necromancer named Arondil kidnaps and sexually enslaves local women who once rejected him, to list a few examples.⁸ Perhaps, as the cultural consensus about Game of Thrones goes, Skyrim’s developers sought to generate a brutal and, thus, realistic world by referring back to strains of gender inequity that players would find familiar. Regardless, it is not only inadequate to source political progressivism in mere representation, but Skyrimdoes show why Olfina Gray-Mane insists that being a woman in Skyrim is not easy.

1.  u/Charybdis, “Are women in this game portrayed in a good light?,” “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” GameFAQs, March 8, 2012. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/62183595. ︎
2. Aaron N. Hall, “Skyrim: The Feminist Friendly RPG,” The Aaron N. Hall Blog (blog), May 11, 2020, https://www.aaronnhall.com/2020/05/11/skyrim-the-feminist-friendly-rpg/. ︎
3. Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2000), 18, 9. ︎
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Reading in Fiction (Duke University Press, 1997), 139-40. ︎
5. u/Rachel_gmrgrl, “Women in Skyrim – A Feminist Perspective.” r/gaming, Reddit, November 12, 2011, https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/mag6e/women_in_skyrim_a_feminist_perspective/. Emphasis added. ︎
6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bethesda Softworks, 2013. ︎
7. u/LaPhantomess, “One thing I never understood: ‘It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim.’” r/skyrim, Reddit, October 1, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/3n6skq/one_thing_i_never_understood_its_not_easy_being_a/ ︎
8.  Stephanie Weaver, “Skyrim & the Unequal Application of Bigotry Pt. 1,” Speculative Rhetoric (blog), July 29, 2017, https://speculativerhetoric.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/skyrim-the-unequal-application-of-bigotry-pt-1/. ︎

The post Representing Women in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Politics of Presence (Part 1) appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

When he reunites with Marina, Pericles requests that his royal advisor, Helicanus, “strike” him:

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me in their sweetness.[2]

To maintain his composure and, concomitantly, his masculinity, Pericles rhetorically begs Helicanus to wound him, to penetrate his flesh and produce an orifice through which to vent the mighty excess of his emotions. Such affective too-much-ness recalls Gloucester’s death in King Lear, as Edgar tells audiences that his father’s weak heart, on reconciliation with his eldest son, was “too weak the conflict to support / ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / [and] Burst smilingly.”[3]

Under the duress of excessive albeit pleasant affective energies, a similar kind of bursting threatens Pericles. But unlike Gloucester, whose excessive, oppositional feelings erupt him, Pericles calls for a curative bodily modification which registers as a metaphoric invagination. Put differently, Pericles seeks to regain and reassert a “Neostoic,” masculine self through a temporary feminization, figured here as the “gash” that would enable him to evacuate the waste of his excessive affect and purge himself into a purified state of rationality. His goal, moreover, figures as anti-queer; he attempts to tidy what Martin F. Manalansan IV calls “queer mess,” which refers to “material and affective conditions of impossible subjects as well as an analytical stance that negates, deflects, if not resists the ‘cleaning up’ function of the normative.”[4] But prior to this “cleaning up,” Pericles is a liminal, queer subject, defined both by masculine rationality and feminine excess.

In seventeenth century Europe, Neostoicism, or the so-called “new humanism,” rose to prominence and filtered into literary texts by discursive osmosis. Not to understate its significance, Richard Tuck writes that Neostoicsm, which is a blend of “skepticism, Stoicism[,] and Tacitism,” became “as all-pervasive as the Ciceronian humanism and the Quattocentro had been.”[5] This ordering philosophy grew in large part out of the sixteenth century writings of Michel de Montaigne, author of Les Essais (1580), and Justus Lipsius. Lipsius published his most famous Neostic text, De Constantia, in two parts in 1583. In it, he blends Stoic ideals with Christine doctrine, yielding a text which, according to Tuck, touts the following tenet: “wisdom comes not through the repression of emotion by reason, but through the cultivation of helpful passions, like plants and a garden.”[6] Therefore, as a man guided by Neostoic principles, Pericles aims not to excise himself of all emotion but to practice a kind of emotional temperance to maintain his composure and, inextricably, his masculinity. For as Lipsius extolls, the “true Mother of Contancy, is Patience / and lowliness of the Mind”:

As for Virtue she ever
marches in the middle path, and is
cautiously heedfull lest there should
be any thing of Excess or Defect in
any of her Actions. For still she directs
her self by the Ballance of right
Reason, and hath that alone for the
rule and square of her Test.[7]

To Lipsius, the ideal Neostoic bears a measured and relatively stable disposition. “Excess” literally has no part in such a body-mind. Rather, it is a weed, like Pericles’s overabundance of joy on reunion with Marina, to be yanked out by the root. Within this philosophical framework, when Pericles is overcome by feeling—nearly drowned by it—he is a queer subject, liminally suspended between Neostoic masculinity and excessive femininity, between total order and senseless chaos.

During the reunion scene, Pericles firmly situates emotive excess within the realm of the feminine, a category that early modern culture constructed as oversexed, irrational, and vulnerable to penetration by external forces. Prior to discovering that she is his daughter, for instance, Pericles’s first look at Marina overcomes him. He figures his surplus joy as a gestational burden that must be delivered, bemoaning, “I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping.”[8] The physical similarities between Marina, a perceived stranger, and Thaisa seem to him an impossibility. Because he cannot reconcile it, and because it likely assaults him with complex feeling, the knowledge must be labored and he, a figurative mother, must lachrymosely deliver it. Likewise, when Pericles learns that Marina is his daughter and asks Helicanus for a “gash,” he figures his emotional surfeit as a superflux of blood that must be painfully let. This image of bloodletting also recalls the purgation of menstrual blood from the uterus, a process understood by early modern culture to maintain humoral balance within the female (i.e. uterus bearing) body. In each case, Pericles figures “too-much-ness” as a feminine something that must be released from the body to arrive at Neostic, masculine stasis.

[1] William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Third Series (New York and London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004): 1.1.131. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition.

[2] 5.1.181-4.

[3] William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Third Series (New York, London, and Ireland: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997): 5.3.197-8.

[4] Martin Manalansan IV, “The Messy Itineraries of Queerness,” Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary, July 21, 2015, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-messy-itineraries-of-queerness: n.p.

[5] Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), https://hdl-handle-net.libezproxy2.syr.edu/2027/heb32217.0001.001: 62-3.

[6] Ibid., 54.

[7] Justus Lipsius, A Discourse of Constancy in Two Books Chiefly Containing Consolations Against Publick Evils, 1679; trans. Nathaniel Wanley, p. 21-2, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A48621.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

[8] 5.1.97.

The post Excess Emotion and Queer Subjectivity in Pericles appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire,  which she  ultimately consummates . She does so via the aid of her nurse, a maternal caregiver who embodies the trope of the “bawd,” or one who prostitutes others. While Myrrha’s mother is away participating in a fertility festival (oh, irony of ironies), Myrrha’s nurse leads her to Cinryas’s bed, lying by omission by telling him that someone “about / The age of Myrrha” wishes to lie with him (10.504-5). There, under the obfuscating guise of night, taboo becomes actualized.

Ultimately, Cinyras discovers the truth, leading Myrrha – heavy with her father’s child – to flee. After wandering far from home, she is stricken with indecision, “Not knowing,” the poet tells us, “what she might desyre, distrest between the feare / Of death, and tediousnesse of lyfe” (10.552-3). In kind, I suggest, with her irreconcilable desire to be a daughter-lover, she prays that the gods place her in an equally liminal state of life-death:

O Goddes, […]
How bee it to th’ entent
That neyther with my lyfe the quick, nor with my death the dead
Anoyed bee, from both of them exempt mee this same sted,
And altring mee, deny to mee both lyfe and death.     

(10.552-9)

Just as her desire for Cinyras contains both eros and storge (i.e. familial love), Myrrha aims to atone for her transgressions by becoming something similarly in-between. Thus begins her “Ovidian petrification” into a Myrrh tree (Bate 187). I argue that, as an in-between subject/object, Myrrha is able, for the first time in her episode, to truly express herself. Paradoxically, she becomes freed from the constraint of either/or – of words or silence – gaining more expressive power than ever before.

To this point, in Arthur Golding’s (1567) and Frank Justus Miller’s (1916) translations of the Metamorphoses as well as in the original Latin (circa 8 AD), Myrrha’s metamorphosis is marked with two identical linguistic shifts. In the first case, despite the total restriction placed on Myrrha’s speech after becoming a tree, Golding’s translation concedes “[y]it weepeth she” (my emphasis 10.574). A few lines later, the poet begins,

But woordes wherwith to tell
And utter foorth her greef did want. She had no use of speech
With which Lucina in her throwes shee might of help beseech.

But then, he concludes,

Yit like a woman labring was the tree, and bowwing downe
Gave often sighes, and shed foorth teares as though shee there should drowne.

(my emphasis 10.580-4)

In both instances, the poet explicates Myrrha’s inability to express herself as she used to due to a loss of “senses” (10.573). What the poet means by this word, however, is appropriately unclear, as Myrrha is still in possession of her mind and sensory apparatuses – she feels “greef,” gives “sighes,” and sheds no end of “teares.” However, through such pained bows and grievous sighs – actions that are at once gendered (“like a woman labring”) and vegetal-kinesthetic – Myrrha successfully beckons Lucina, who then supplies “woordes of ease” and facilitates her labor (10.586). In this moment, the ineffable finds its venting place not through language but through a “repertoire of embodied practice,” including bodily gesture and fluids (i.e. myrrh-tears) (Taylor 18). I argue that Ovid’s Myrrha episode makes a case not for the power of speech or silence but of a third, liminal mode of communication: non-verbal, bodily self-expression. This is but one of several ways that the episode gestures toward ways of living and being otherwise when we attend to liminality.

In nearly all of the metamorphoses illustrated throughout Ovid’s poem, as Heather James summarizes, the “absolute powers” that instigate them “repeatedly visit one special punishment and torture on their victims: that of silence” (7-8). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, silence is frequently defined in relation to human speech – silence strips one’s ability to vocalize and, specifically, voice the ways in which they have been wronged. Given that Ovid was ultimately exiled from the Roman empire (ostensibly as a reaction to his publication of sexually explicit poems), his ruminations on speech and silence have immediate social and political significance. James argues that his major contribution to political thought during the English Renaissance was “his conception of poetry as a site in which parrhesia [i.e. bold, open, ‘free’ speech]could persist even within the limiting structures of empire and […] insist on the liberties of citizen-subjects” (7). However, I suggest that Ovid’s poetry, particularly his Myrrha episode, develops a rather more capacious sense of self-expression wherein speech and silence occupy either ends of a spectrum whose middle zone teems with potential.

Following Myrrha’s incestuous scelus nefas, or “crime of indescribable dimensions,” she is metamorphosed into a myrrh tree and thusly “silenced,” but she is not simply disempowered (Lehmann 104). Rather, her transformation makes it necessary for her to rely on different methods of self-expression – something in between the utterance of “woordes” and stark silence – akin to what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire.” Where the Metamorphoses most explicitly binarizes speech and silence, Taylor’s study charts Western hierarchizations of the archive (i.e. supposedly permanent materials, such as writing) over the repertoire (i.e. ephemeral forms of knowledge such as dance or ritual). Where her work overlaps with the present argument is in its assertion that the archive and repertoire, though often thought of as such, do not actually constitute a binary:

The relationship between archive and repertoire […] is certainly not sequential (the former ascending to prominence after the latter, […]. Nor is it true versus false, mediated versus unmediated, primordial versus modern. Nor is it a binary. […] We need not polarize the relationship between these different kinds of knowledges to acknowledge that they have often proved antagonistic in the struggle for cultural survival or supremacy. (22)

As is true of any dichotomy, uncritical endorsement of a speech/silence binary eclipses the force of tree-Myrrha’s repertoire, namely her vegetal-bodily movements and material secretions. Beyond simply calling Lucina’s attention, tree-Myrrha’s liminal expression even elicits the goddess’s pity, inspiring her to alleviate her pain. These expressive forces are not only powerful, proving just as efficacious for Myrrha as words (if not more), but they can be recuperated by sensitive reading practices which, in turn, can yield new insights about the world. To contend with these forces, the Metamorphoses asks us to linger with liminality – that which crops up in between the clearly defined zones of binaries – and attend to the ontological possibilities to which I believe it gestures.

 Ovid, Publius Naso. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567. Edited by John Frederick Nims, Translated by Arthur Golding, Paul Dry Books, 2000.
*All forthcoming references to the poem will be to this edition.

 Bate, Jonathon. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011, 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183242.001.0001.

Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 1–52, https://doi-org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/10.1215/9780822385318.

James, Heather. Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Tragedy and Dramatic Theater. Translated by Erik Butler, Routledge, 2016.

Image:

Marcantonio Franceschini – The Birth of Adonis, 1690 public domain image

MLA Citation (I think?): ‘Birth of Adonis’, oil on copper painting by Marcantonio Franceschini, c. 1685-90, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.jpg

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Act One of the play introduces audiences and readers to the Nurse, Juliet’s caregiver, confidant, and former wet-nurse. In the play’s third scene, the Nurse recalls a moment in time that is etched in her memory. She recalls when she weaned an infant Juliet from her breast:

“But, as I said,
On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen,
That shall she, marry, I remember it well.
‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,
And she was weaned – I never shall forget it –
Of all the days of the year, upon that day;
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.
My lord and you were then in Mantua –
Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see if techy and fall out with the dug! (1.3.21-34)[2]

In her own words, she retrieves this information from her “brain,” the Cartesian site of rationality. However, as her diction reveals, her body is doing just as much of this retrieval work. Here, Diana Taylor’s concept of the “repertoire” is useful, a term which refers to “embodied practice[s]/knowledge[s]” such as spoken communication, ritual ceremony, and choreographed movements. Unlike archival records, which Taylor describes as “supposedly enduring materials” like “texts, documents, buildings, [and] bones,” the Nurse engages her bodily senses – those fleeting, unprocessed impressions that Cartesian dualism diametrically opposes to impartial rationality – to recall Juliet’s age.[3] Without necessarily intending to do so, she catalogues the sensory inputs that permeate her body during this blip in time, inviting us to inhabit her flesh, if only for a moment. She conjures the warmth of the “sun,” the cooing of the “dovehouse[’s]” inhabitants, and the steady pressure induced by Juliet’s suckling – made discontinuous by the bitterness of wormwood – to access her memory of Juliet’s age.

In contrast to the Cartesian and, thus, heteropatriarchal claim that bodies are sites of illogical disorder, the Nurse’s body produces and stores knowledge in this passage, operating on the same level as comparatively privileged archival information, such as birth records and geological reports.[4] In this moment, both archive and repertoire corroborate one another. Not only does Juliet’s factual age align with the Nurse’s corporeal memory, but the “earthquake” also offers a material trace of that day, whose memorial marks otherwise reside on/in the flesh.

Beyond functioning as an archival counterpart to the Nurse’s repertoire, however, the earthquake also signals the cosmic import of this ephemeral moment. As a play centered on the operations of destiny, perhaps the earthquake presages the doom that will result the next time Juliet’s body unites another’s, namely her “star-crossed lover[’s]” (Prologue.6). In another sense, this pairing opposes the heteropatriarchal binaries that stem from Cartesian dualism – such as mind/body, man/woman, political/domestic, and cosmological/earthly – elevating a moment defined by the female body and domestic care to a level of cosmic significance.

Moreover, the destructive earthquake literalizes the turmoil that an infant Juliet likely feels as her wonted source of comfort transforms into a loathed object. Here, Juliet’s passions, conceived of by Cartesian dualism as unrefined and unproductive, are expressed, whether intentionally or not, in the natural world. They are expressed sans language, the dominant mode of Western knowledge production that Taylor claims “has come to stand for meaning itself” (25). Perhaps the earthquake tells us something more about the Nurse’s feelings, too, who otherwise expresses fondness over her “pretty fool’s” maturation.

The Nurse’s performance harbors all of this and more, if only one takes the time to sense it. However, at the end of her speech, Lady Capulet tiredly commands, “Enough of this. I pray thee, hold thy peace” (1.3.50). Lady Capulet, Juliet’s biological mother, does not perceive the sensuous knowledges contained in the Nurse’s speech, or if she does, she values it as much as heteropatriarchy, the play’s dominant power-knowledge system, does. Of course, the Nurse propagates heteropatriarchal values herself, engaged, as we all are, in the “oppressing resisting”[5] dialectic theorized by Latinx feminist philosopher María Lugones (7).[6] However, the passage quoted above contains multitudes that heteropatriarchal epistemes are blind to, compelling us to attend more sensitively to the Nurse and sensuous knowledges in the play.

Image citation: Romeo and Juliet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, performances by Pat Heywood and Olivia Hussey, Paramount Pictures, 1968.

[1] Lloyd, Genevieve. “The Man of Reason.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 1979, p. 23.

[2] Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Dympna Callaghan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

[3] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[4] Contemporaneous British writers such as Gabriel Harvey wrote about an earthquake around the same time that the Nurse would have weaned Juliet, meaning that historical British documentation also supports the Nurse’s sensuous, fictional knowledge.

[5] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[6] In other words, we are always engaged in a tense relationship between resisting oppressions and propagating them.

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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]

[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.”

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