Of course hands can’t just be hands. What would Freud say?

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.