In one of the most devastating scenes of Titus Andronicus, Lavinia begs Tamora
for a quick death rather than suffer gang rape at the hands of Tamora’s sons.
Hm. Hands. Hands are surprisingly prevalent throughout the play. Lavinia’s rape
is much more gruesome because of the subsequent mutilation: Chiron and
Demitrius cut out her tongue and both of her hands. This was ostensibly done to prevent her from
identifying her attacker, but the removal of Lavinias’ hands is also symbolic
of her lack of agency. Her hands are referred to as “ornaments,” and Marcus
implies their own only purpose was to hold a man “circling shadows kings have
sought to sleep in.” Her hands held a certain kind of power that was lost when
they were severed.
What other body part is representative of a person’s power,
especially power held over others to seduce or “sleep in”? A penis. Or less
specifically, genitals. Yes, Lavinia’s loss of limb was actually a
representation of female castration because they were her source of the limited
power granted to Elizabethan women: to seduce men.
Now, thinking of other body parts as genitalia is not
unheard of. When Oedipus Rex gauges out his own eyes after discovering what he
had done, Freud attributes his self-inflicted punishment as castration and
compares his eyes to testicles. Hands, although not shaped like testicles,
still represent power and human agency similar to a person’s sexuality and the
sexual organs that represent it.
Severed limbs appear later in the plot as well when Titus
dismembers himself as an attempt to save his sons’ lives. Why would Titus
allegorically castrate himself? The emphasis isn’t on the hand lost, but the
hand used to sever the other. By fooling the other characters who want to
donate their hand into leaving the scene to fetch a sword, Titus excises
control over the situation and creates agency guaranteeing his sacrifice in
order to save his sons from the brink of death. The hand doing the actual
sacrificing, representing the power wielded by a hand to bring his children to
life, parallels to the power his penis wielded years before to create the sons
in the first place.
Consider when Lavinia, Titus and company are exiting the
scene of Titus’s dismemberment. Lavinia, who has just been upstaged by Titus
because of the dramatic cutting off of his own hand, is forced to carry Titus’s
hand between her teeth. (“Lavinia,
thou shalt be employ'd: these arms!/Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy
teeth”). Clearly, Titus has dominated this scene and forces Lavinia’s problems
into submission below his own. This is shown most graphically by the phallic
symbol of Titus’s severed hand between her teeth, demonstrating Titus’s
domination over Lavinia as even her sorrows become overlooked with Titus’s scheme.
