Volume-XII, Special Issue, April 2026 |
Eating Revenge: Cannibalism, Gendered Violence, and the Body Politic in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus Sambrita Bhattacharyya, Independent Researcher, Rajarhat, Kolkata, West Bengal, India |
Received: 05.04.2026 | Accepted: 07.04.2026 | Published Online: 10.04.2026 | Page No: 366-374 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.specialW.305 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
This paper examines the trope of cannibalism as prevalent primarily in the Shakespearean revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus, whereby it collapses into a site where revenge, gendered violence, and the politics of the body are juxtaposed. Harking back to Ovidian and Senecan engagement with the theme of cannibalism and body politics, Shakespeare's examination of cannibalism in the play acts as a dual metaphor for spectacular violence and a sustained analogy for the patriarchal consumption of the female body. The paper accordingly argues about the ramified possibilities of political inspection of the acts of ingestion, dismemberment, and the event of the Thyestean banquet within the play, beyond them being just carriers of disruptive potential for the aesthetics of shock. This paper further explores Shakespeare's invocation of and departure from classical sources to explore the facets of sexual violence and compromised feminine agency within a staggering patriarchal order, the turpitude of revenge as a misogynistic displacement of culpability upon the female maternal body, as well as the attribute of "othering" as both a climactic symptom of the relentless hunger for consumption and the symbolic regurgitation of the feminized and racialized bodies within a colonial and necropolitical economy. Ultimately, a close reading of the play will draw on intersecting frameworks of feminist literary criticism, Body Studies, classical reception, Gothic affect, and colonial libidinal theories to contend that cannibalism becomes the primary rhetorical, theatrical, political, and literary device in the play through which Shakespeare dramatizes the disruption of paradigms and boundaries between civilization and savagery, self and the other, and victim and the perpetrator, whilst revealing the impossibility of redemption and resolution within a world strewn by revenge and destruction. | ||
Keywords: Cannibalism, Swallowing womb, Ingestion, Otherness, Dismemberment. |