SOURCE: “Lucrece's Gaze,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 23, 1995, pp. 210-21.

In the following essay, Carter argues that once Tarquin has defined Lucrece in traditional, patriarchal terms by raping her, she redefines herself by placing her consciousness within the painting of Troy on a wall in her home, identifying with the painting's subjects and thereby preparing herself for her suicide at the close of the poem.

I

In Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece Tarquin's and Lucrece's acts of seeing precede their speaking. I shall argue that a specific, constructed experience of social space produces their ability to speak through a sequence of narratable actions. This spatial figuration projects along gender lines. How vision is socially put together reveals the linguistic means by which Lucrece, Tarquin, ‘their’ narrator, and the narrative's audience come to be screens for the imaginal projection of gender.

A useful beginning may be to investigate the phenomenological...