MARION A. WELLS

‘TO FIND A FACE WHERE ALL DISTRESS IS STELL'D': ENARGEIA, EKPHRASIS, AND MOURNING IN THE RAPE OF LUCRECE AND THE AENEID

BEGINNING WITH A DISCUSSION of the relationship between Collatine’s Petrarchan praise of Lucrece’s beauty at the beginning of the poem and Tarquin’s rape, I consider the first part of Lucrece as in part a meditation on the destructive power of emotionally charged visual description—or enargeia—within a lyric context. I argue that the critique of lyric enargeia implied by the rape narrative is complicated by the fact that Lucrece is an epyllion, a hybrid genre characterized both by its deployment of vivid description and by its treatment of epic subjects. Shakespeare’s treatment of the space created by lyric enargeia as leading ineluctably to violence encourages the expectation that the "epic" turn in the narrative will coincide with a disavowal of lyric enargeia. However, a close examination of the ekphrasis (the description of the Troy painting) that facilitates a transition from the domestic, lyric space to the political, epic one suggests that epic puts to troubling use the fragments of the lyric image. By analyzing the transformation of the lyric image within the epic ekphrasis, I will examine the ways in which the poem’s critique of lyric enargeia subserves a broader critique of epic’s conversion of the lyric image into an allegorical image with serves its own political ends. Drawing on recent psychoanalytic work on the connection between allegory, mourning and melancholia, I investigate both the relationship urged upon us between mourning and the shift into the epic mode (the painting both represents scenes of mourning and speaks to Lucrece’s own mournful state), and the process of epic’s transformation of the lyric image into an allegory of cultural mourning. In the epyllion’s grim revision of its lyric sources the "face where all distress is stell’d"—the face of a grieving Hecuba—replaces the "clear unmatched red and white" of Lucrece’s lyricised face. In her absorbed identification with Hecuba, Lucrece dramatizes the way in which the female mourner becomes the apotropaic emblem of suffering at the heart of the epic project. I suggest that this displacement of loss onto the now victimized (once idealized) woman and the subsequent appropriation of her mourning role can usefully be understood in terms of the cultural function of melancholia during the period. Epic, as it emerges in this poem, builds itself out of the ruins of Troy as a melancholic narrative predicated on the aestheticisation of loss. With this framework in mind, I argue finally that Brutus’s use of Lucrece’s body as a grotesque Roman monument crucially associates epic’s sublimation and containment of lyric enargeia with the turn from absorbed grief to political action.