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- Title
Physical Trauma and (Adapt)ability in Titus Andronicus.
- Authors
Lamb, Caroline
- Abstract
The homology between the fragmented body politic and its suffering physical bodies in Titus Andronicus seems to suggest that Shakespeare represents physical disability negatively: as corruption, disorder, incapacity. By relying upon a corporeal metaphor of fragmentation to characterise the political state of Rome, Shakespeare makes the traumatised or dismembered body bear a negative ideological burden; political inefficacy seems to be equated with the violated body. Inversely, and to the same effect, Titus and Lavinia's violated bodies seem to render their access to political and social agency difficult, if not impossible. However, at both the metaphorical and material level, Shakespeare endows the dis-abled body with the capacity to heal or adapt itself under the most extenuating circumstances. Overcoming physical barriers to communication and action, Titus and Lavinia enable themselves to enact revenge. This essay argues that the adaptability of the political and physical body in Titus suggests a potentially affirmative way of reconceptualising the physically incomplete body – not as a disabled entity but as a body that can suffer partial losses and still survive, succeed even, if its constituent parts form their own internally coherent body.
- Subjects
CRITICISM; SHAKESPEARE, William, 1564-1616; TITUS Andronicus (Play : Shakespeare); ADAPTABILITY (Personality); PEOPLE with disabilities in literature; ENGLISH drama (Tragedy) -- History &; criticism; HUMAN body in literature
- Publication
Critical Survey, 2010, Vol 22, Issue 1, p41
- ISSN
0011-1570
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.3167/cs.2010.220103