Chieko Dunham
The role of women in revenge plots, especially in older classic literature, is often a role that is hard to identify. Shakespeare, writer of many brilliant revenges, falls into this trap, affording many of his female characters a lack of agency. However, looking at certain Shakespeare plays with a talionic lens (“the law of retaliation, of tit for tat”) as observed in William Ian Miller’s Eye for an Eye, we are offered a perspective that explains the possible feminine power displayed in these plays (Miller 20). With these observations, I argue that in talionic societies, women serve as devices for revenge through memory creation. To work against their function as memory creation, these women must lose a part of their identity; they must forget a part of themselves.
The foundation of revenge in talionic societies is the ability to remember. Miller points out that memory creation and revenge are linked closely together, making it difficult to succeed in a revenge plot without the memory of what needs to be avenged (Miller 102). The task of remembering in these societies falls onto women most frequently, with many working as grievers or manipulating corpses for bloody tokens to ask for sympathy from possible avengers for their loved ones (91-92). One example of memory creation is mourning, a womanly task, and frowned upon in a masculine context; thus the task of remembering falls into the hands of women. Memory creation and mnemonic devices are created by women as they ask those in their society with more agency (men) to get revenge. The only way to get out of revenge and ask for mercy, however, is to forget. Miller argues that forgetting involves failure to recall “one’s proper place” in society (97). Since women are closely linked to remembering, they are also closely linked to forgetting. If they forget, then they lose their importance in society; they forget their “proper place.” Additionally, Miller points out that forgetting is to “fail in one’s duty,” thus the route to mercy relies on women failing in their duty to remember (98).
The role of women in most of Shakespeare’s plays have been either to aid in or stop the schemes of the male protagonist. Many of these plots are closely related to either getting revenge or halting a revenge plot. Thus, the ability of women to remember or forget in these plays are pivotal. They are assigned one of two roles in Shakespeare’s plays: the creators of memory and the forgetters. I will outline each throughout this paper and provide examples.
It’s not uncommon for the women in Shakespeare’s tragedies to fall into despair, whether it be physically, mentally, or both. This trope leads right into the idea of bloody tokens and turns women into the objects that are needed, creations and physical embodiments of memory for their male protagonists to pursue revenge. Miller defines bloody tokens as a corpse or the parts of a corpse that are “employed to charge a person to avenge it” (91). In the case of Titus Andronicus, Lavinia plays the role of bloody token very vividly, physically becoming a memory of injustice. Demetrius and Chiron are ordered by their mother, Tamora, to act against Titus. To fulfill this duty, they rape Titus’ daughter, Lavinia, cut her hands and tongue off, leaving her a mutilated, living corpse on stage for the remainder of the play (Titus 2.4.1-10). Lavinia, before this heinous act, pleads to be killed instead of raped, as she would be tainted and worthless to her family and other men (Titus 2.3.173-178). The rape of Lavinia, for this reason, turns her into a living corpse, as her reputation is tainted and she is unmarriageable. Her mutilation, however, turns her into a bloody token for her father, Titus, acting as a partial corpse and mnemonic device to aid in his revenge against Tamora.
When Lavinia is shown to Titus for the first time by Marcus, Titus’ brother, he treats her as a corpse, saying to Titus “This was thy daughter,” identifying her as a bloody token (Titus 3.1.62). Titus immediately sympathizes with her, which makes her use as a bloody token, a mnemonic device, effective in its purpose of sparking sympathy in its avenger (Titus 3.1.63). To add more credence to this notion, Titus swears to get revenge at the first sight of her disfigured body (Titus 3.1.91-97). Lavinia, as a bloody token, is employed and charges Titus to avenge her. She succeeds in her duty as a woman by becoming a mnemonic device and creating a memory for her father.
Observed in the same play is an example of a female “forgetter.” I define a forgetter as a woman who loses a part of her identity, effectively failing as a memory creator by forgetting her proper place in society (97). This case is one of forgetting one’s proper place unintentionally, removing the ability to obtain revenge —Tamora, Queen of the Goths. Tamora arrives in Rome as a valuable prisoner of war, Queen of the enemy. Her eldest son is executed in exchange for the twenty-one sons of Titus who had fallen in the war. In her pleas against her son’s death, she urges him to spare her eldest since her imprisonment repays the deaths of Titus’ sons (Titus 1.1.120). Her eldest son is wrongfully killed in her eyes, and her pursuit towards revenge is focused and justified. As a woman, Tamora is equipped with the ability to remember and grieve properly for her son, so acquiring a bloody token is unnecessary in her revenge plot against Titus. Though she is a prisoner, she is still Queen of the Goths. Thus, in the moments directly after the execution of her son, she remembers her proper place despite the shift in her position in society in Rome.
Tamora follows through with her plot to avenge her eldest son, and by extension herself, but she has one fatal flaw in her plot right at the start. Tamora takes the place of Lavinia as Empress of Rome, due to Lavinia’s betrothal to Bassianus, the Emperor’s brother (Titus 1.1.316-329). In her engagement to Saturninus, Emperor of Rome, she “forgets” and loses her place as Queen of the Goths, removing her ability to properly remember. Following through with her revenge despite this makes her plot unjust and unnecessarily cruel as she accrues more debt to Titus. Her sons, Demetrius and Chiron, rape and mutilate Lavinia as an act of brutality against Titus and his reputation as a noble warrior for Rome (Titus 2.4.1-10). Tamora allows her sons, and even encourages them, to do so and unknowingly puts her sons up as collateral to Titus. Titus, equipped with a bloody token, Lavinia, takes full advantage of collecting Demetrius and Chiron as payment and forces Tamora to eat them after he has mutilated them himself (Titus 5.2.180-192). As Empress of Rome, Tamora is unable to avenge her eldest son as she forgets her proper place. She becomes a forgetter and thus loses her ability to avenge as her ability to remember, to be a creator of memory, is lost.
Let’s observe another Shakespeare play, Hamlet, and see if we can spot forgetters and/or creators of memory. One of the most obvious creators of memory comes in the form of Ophelia. By act 4, Ophelia’s father Claudius is killed and her prospective husband is someone she can no longer marry, effectively making her a whore as she sings about the loss of her virginity to him (Hamlet 4.5.46-55). Ophelia’s hopes for a future are gone due to Hamlet’s schemes and she becomes a ghost of a person because of them. She goes mad and can no longer employ herself, as the person in charge of her, her father, is no longer able to guide her. Having sex before marrying Hamlet and then being unable to marry him in the end taints Ophelia as a woman, effectively ruining her reputation. She is a walking corpse, a walking memory of all of the wrongs Hamlet has done to her, in the sense that she cannot advance anywhere in her life and is cast out and seen as dead by society.
When Laertes arrives at the news of his father’s death, he is immediately motivated to avenge his father. Yet when he sees Ophelia, madness overtaking her mind, he refers to scales and payment (recalling the rules of the talion which emphasizes a balancing of scales), saying her “madness will be paid with weight/ Till our scale turn the beam” (Hamlet 4.5.156-157). Ophelia’s madness acts as an effective creation of memory to Laertes, as he immediately strives for payment for his sister’s insanity. Additionally, Laertes has not seen the physical corpse of his father, leaving him without a mnemonic device before Ophelia’s madness is revealed to him. Thus, only once he sees Ophelia is he properly charged to avenge his father along with his sister, as his father’s death is the primary reason for her insanity. In this way, Ophelia redeems herself as a woman in a talionic sense by fulfilling her purpose as a memory creator, putting herself in her proper place. Ophelia, in her madness, charges Laertes to avenge her and their father by becoming a mnemonic device rooted in memory.
A play in which the balance of scales is most important is Shakespeare’s controversial Merchant of Venice. Gravely important to the plot is the clearest example of a forgetter, Portia. In the climactic fourth act of the play, Portia saves the day for her fiance’s best friend Antonio by dressing as a man, specifically a “doctor of law” (MV 4.1.165). By dressing as a man, Portia employs one method of forgetting: she forgets her “proper place” as a woman. It is established throughout the play that Portia is an extremely beautiful woman, so beautiful that many men have put their ability to marry at stake for the sake of winning her as a prize in a grave test of knowledge: a riddle (MV 2.1.15-42). The riddle, written by her father, is a prominent plot point in the play, thus putting great importance onto Portia’s femininity. Dressing up as a man is an act of losing an important part of Portia’s identity. She forgets her proper place and is thus able to forget debts owed to those who desire to be avenged.
Portia exploits the consequences of forgetting her proper place. She forgets the debts Antonio owes Shylock and is able to strongly argue the letter of the law in favor of Antonio, stepping neatly into her role as a “doctor of law.” Shylock argues for the spirit of the law, focusing on the implications of his contract, implications that are explicit about getting revenge for himself. However, Portia chooses to “forget” and ignore the spirit of the law with regards to the contract Antonio signed, and saves him by forgetting his debts for him (MV 4.1.183-332). Portia is actively going against her proper duty as a woman in a talionic society. She no longer works as a memory creator but as a memory destroyer. In destroying memories, she breaks down the avenue for revenge for Shylock, and advocates for forgiveness and mercy for Antonio instead. Portia becomes a forgetter by losing an important part of her identity and by destroying memories and forgetting debts.
Another prominent forgetter is Isabella in Measure for Measure. Isabella’s main goal in the play is to maintain her purity as a woman in order to become a nun. Her ability to become a nun is constantly on the line as the plot to free her brother Claudio from death is centered around seducing Angelo, the villain, and using her body as payment for Claudio’s. Claudio, assumed to be the only man in charge of her, urges her to go through with the plot to gain his mercy from Angelo before she gives her body up to Christ (MM 3.133-136). Defiling her body by giving into Angelo and Claudio’s demands would bar her from becoming a nun, ruining her identity as a woman of purity. The only alternative to giving up her own body is to offer Mariana’s body, effectively turning Isabella into a pimp, still obstructing her purity and closeness to God (MM 3.1.133-273). Either solution to the problem of the play defiles Isabella’s purity, effectively forcing her to accept the loss of her identity, letting her forget her proper place and forget the debts of Angelo, granting her the ability to advocate for mercy.
Once Mariana has been doled out to Angelo and successfully tricked him, Isabella’s argumentation style drastically changes. In forgetting her proper place, she is able to articulate a strong enough argument to grant mercy. At the start of the play, in advocating for Claudio’s life, Isabella argues the spirit of the law, as Claudio has been wrongly imprisoned for consummating with his soon to be wife. She is able to argue the spirit of the law because of her closeness to God. Isabella correctly advocates for mercy in this situation because Claudio has been imprisoned for impregnating a woman he is not married to yet, but will soon marry. She urges Angelo to sympathize with Claudio and tries to show him that if he were in the same circumstance, he would do the same as Claudio (MM 2.2.64-66). Yet, when she advocates for mercy in the case of Angelo, she utilizes the positive, written, man-made letter of the law, showing the progression of her stray from the natural law of God and from her ability to become a nun. She argues with the Duke and frees Angelo from the death sentence as his wrongful intentions to rape her were never fulfilled in his actions (MM 5.1.456-457). When she wrongly advocates for Angelo and grants him mercy, her status as a possible nun is questioned and absent from the conversation, an indication that she has forgotten her proper place. In a Christian sense, Isabella would still be seen as holy for her pursuit of mercy no matter the sinner. However, by the end of the play, her use of the letter of the law and her resignation from nunhood with the marriage proposal from the Duke, in the eyes of a talionic society, indicate that she has lost her identity. Isabella works to destroy memories instead of creating them by losing her identity as a nun, becoming a forgetter. Arguing in a similar fashion to Portia pits Isabella against her function as a woman in talionic society, losing her identity as a nun and forgetting her proper place, for the gain of mercy.
Women play pivotal roles in Shakespeare plays despite their lack of agency, and looking at the plays through a talionic lens creates a clearer picture as to how women achieve such importance without agency. Breaking the function of women in these plays and in talionic society into two roles (memory creators and forgetters) gives women an almost equal amount of power to their male counterparts with regards to the process of getting revenge. They play an even more pivotal part in gaining mercy. In talionic societies, women serve as devices for revenge through memory creation. In order to strive for mercy in talionic societies, these women must lose a part of their identity by forgetting.
In our modern day, we do not live in a talionic society, however, women still hold this skill of memory for the benefit of men. Although not directly related to our discussion of Shakespeare, an argument can be made that the role of homemaker involves a lot of memory in recent discussion regarding the invisible “mental load” of maintaining a household. I’ve seen and read plenty of stories online of women growing increasingly frustrated with the men in their lives forgetting seemingly simple facts about their relationship and their preferences. The list of scenarios where the woman is expected to remember and “know everything” goes on and on. This burden of memory being primarily placed onto women in our modern society may stem from the feminine role of memory creators or forgetters found in the talion.
Bibliography
Miller, William I. Eye for an Eye. New York, NY, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 91-102.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Second Revised Edition ed., New York, NY, Signet Classics, 1998, pp. 4-141.
—. Measure for Measure. Second Revised Edition ed., New York, NY, Signet Classics, 1998, pp. 50-103.
—. The Merchant of Venice. Second Revised Edition ed., New York, NY, Signet Classics, 1998, pp. 21-83.
—. Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens. Second Revised Edition ed., New York, NY, Signet Classics, 2005, pp. 21-105.
