The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations [Hardcover]

Ian Donaldson (Author)

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About the Author

Ian Donaldson is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English at the University of Edinburgh.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 28, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198126387
• ISBN-13: 978-0198126386
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,099,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Critical Tracing of a Mythical Archetype, March 30, 2000

By 

H. Kwon (Seoul, South Korea) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Hardcover)

This is such an important study that it may be safely said to be a must for every reader interested in how the Western idea of sexual morality came to center on a more or less continued sort of mythical conceptualizing of violence against female virginity. Donaldson's scope and insight are certainly crucial in capturing the link between the mythic prototype and its three literary modifications he successfully tries to show in St. Augustine's "City of God," Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece," and the longest English novel "Clarissa" by the eighteenth-century British writer Samuel Richardson. Donaldson's own words attest to the significance of the beginning and extension of the rape story. "The story of the rape of Lucretia is one of the most familiar of all stories from the ancient world. It tells of events which supposedly occurred more than two and a half thousand years ago, leading to the expulsion of the last of the Roman kings and the establishment of the Roman Republic. To the Romans, it was a story of great political and moral importance, which helped to keep alive certain crucial ideas about the nature of kingly rule, wifely conduct, and personal and political liberty."(v) According to the author, the myth reaches its first turning point as it faces a serious criticism from Augustine regarding the moral validity of "Self-Murder" Lucretia chooses after the rape. The heroine's last monologue is quite symbolic of what people of the old Roman world lived with: "My body only has been violated, my heart is innocent: death will be my witness." Augustine tries to Christianize the story, sensing "that Roman and Christian ideas of moral conduct may be founded upon radically different and irreconcilable principles...." Shakespeare takes over this Christianizing project only to reveal his unique ambiguity and ambivalence by settling for the old narrative course after having incomplete critical reflections on the logic and wisdom of ancient heroism. Although Richardson's fiction, shrouded in its Puritan worldview, shows an acute awareness of "one morally questionable aspect of the Lucretia story (Lucretia's suicide)," it also fails to challenge other aspects "which today may seem too equally objectionable." Donaldson says Richardson seems to believe that the rape of Clarissa is still "a fate that in some sense necessitates death." In this story of "Another Lucretia," the female heroine doesn't kill herself but eventually dies of "wasting grief."

The transformation of the myth doesn't seem to reach an ending point with "Clarissa." As Donaldson wraps up the epistemic process of mythic metamorphosis before the great social upheavals around the French Revolution, its further continuation in the age of Romanticism fails to be included. Critiquing of the myth seems to gain its true depth in the English Romantic spirit.