Untimely breathings in The Rape of Lucrece

Abstract

This article is concerned with the emotional economy of the events that unfold in Lucrece’s bedroom overnight as represented by the breath and captured in the text’s pneumatic vocabulary. It demonstrates how, at crucial moments in the poem, the protagonists experience unsettling breathlessness registered in sighs, disrupted speech, and loss of voice altogether. The domestic site of the rape itself, the bedroom, conjures a lingering asphyxiating atmosphere that permeates bodies and space in the poem. The first and middle sections of this article centre around the disturbed circulation of breath in the poem, presenting a model of embodiment structured on the specificities (gender, spatial, physiological, and rhetorical) of the inhaled and exhaled air: how does Tarquin’s breath differ from Lucrece’s? How does Collatine’s breath compare to his wife’s? How are gender boundaries loosened or affirmed by the breath? The final section of the article draws on recent scholarship on voice and reading aloud in the early modern period to make the case for an alternative, embodied, reading of Lucrece. It proposes a reading in which the reader’s breath is affectively involved in the events, and charts, via reference to Levinas, the ethical challenges that this involvement presents them with.