“Say I Play the Man I Am”: Gender and Politics in “Coriolanus”

The concerns of this essay reflect the particular historical juncture at which we find ourselves as readers. Largely due to the feminist theory and literary criticism of the last decade, we now recognize that dramatic representations of sexuality and gender necessarily foreground political questions and issues, and likewise that what we may constitute as the political dimensions of a play—who wields power in the dramatic situation, how this authority is constructed, upon what it is founded, and by what means it is deployed—cannot be separated from the portraits of sexuality and the distribution of gender roles proposed by the play. Consequently, the questions of how and what we read as literary critics become political questions. I am considering Shakespeare’s Coriolanus not simply because it is distinct in its representation of class politics and in its treatment of sexuality and gender, but because it has elicited a particularly rich critical discussion of these issues. I suggest that the critical responses are engendered, and thus implicated by the play, and that they ought to be scrutinized as parts of the larger text we receive as contemporary readers. While the existing criticism of Coriolanus interprets the play as being either strictly about politics, or strictly about gender, my essay is interested in the manner in which the topoi of politics and gender are juxtaposed and confused within the play. That is to say, the civic strife within the Roman community, and the enmity of Rome and Antium, can be said to have analogues in the story of Coriolanus’s separation from his mother and his fratricidal rivalry with Aufidius. Conversely, the son’s struggle with the mother and his consequent search for male companionship are symmetrical with Coriolanus’s battles with the Roman crowd and his alliance with the Volsces. The opposition of politics and gender, as borne out by the divided criticism on Coriolanus, may be only an apparent structure of opposition, signifying a relationship between the two spheres. The coexistence of political and gender dramas in the play may be understood as a description of how social and political conflicts are both reflected in, and informed by, gender conflict within the family.

Aside from the recent feminist psychoanalytic attention focused upon the relationship of Volumnia and her son Caius Martius, much of the criticism of Coriolanus interprets the play as a dramatic metaphor for England’s political problems during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The Midland corn riots, the Enclosure Acts dispossessing small farmers of their lands, and the conflicts over mixed forms of government, are understood as having been translated into the Roman terms of food riots, patrician and plebian class conflicts, and the establishment of the Roman Tribunate. D. G. Hale, Andrew Gurr, and Patricia Meszaros¹ center their interpretations upon the scenes of the play in which mutinous citizens vent their anger about the famine, the wars between Rome and Antium, the Tribunes’ rebellion against the hero, his expulsion from Rome and his consequent alliance with the enemy, and finally his death at the hands of the rival Volsces and their leader Aufidius. But these interpretations virtually neglect the interjacent scenes which portray the hero’s complex inheritance of the warrior ethos through his mother and the other members of the play’s community,² his horror of the crowd’s hunger, his refusal to show his wounds and to receive his new name (“Coriolanus,” conqueror of Corioles), the manner in which he demands his own banishment from the city, or the homoeroticism of the alliance between Coriolanus and Aufidius. There is a conspicuous exemption of the explicitly sexual and/or anatomical language in the play; there are no discussions of why particular metaphors, images, or references recur, or of how a persistent thematic associating wounds and masculinity is developed. For example, in I.iv, a rape metaphor compares the city of Corioles to a woman, and the warriors use nuptial rhetoric to discuss military conquest. In I.i, the Roman senate is compared to a “belly” and the mutinous citizens to various limbs; later, mouths are conflated with wounds, swords with male organs, and war with devouring.