Abstract
In three of Shakespeare’s tragedies women protagonists are killed by men. In Titus Andronicus Lavinia is killed by her father; in Othello Desdemona is killed by her husband; in King Lear Cordelia is killed by a soldier. While the killing of Cordelia is represented as a cruelly unmotivated murder, Lavinia and Desdemona are killed precisely in order to sustain masculine ideals of honour which each woman is represented as having challenged or exposed. The death of Desdemona follows from her being perceived as willfully unfaithful to the masculine code of sexual fidelity.
Keywords
Masculine Ideal Male Violence Patriarchal Structure Social Alliance Social Recovery
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Notes
- 1.Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 19.Google Scholar
- 3.Lawrence Danson, Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare’s Drama of Language (London: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 12.Google Scholar
- 6.Madelon Gohlke, “‘I wooed thee with my sword”: Shakespeare’s Tragic Paradigms’, Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 180.Google Scholar
- 10.Douglas E. Green, ‘Interpreting “her martyr’d signs”: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (Fall, 1989), 321.Google Scholar
- 11.ibid.Google Scholar
- 12.Catherine R. Stimpson, ‘Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape,’ The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 60.Google Scholar
- 13.See Derek Cohen, ‘The Patriarchal Structure of Jealousy in Othello and The Winter’s Tale’. Modern Language Quarterly, September, 1987.Google Scholar
Copyright information
© Derek Cohen 1993