Lucrece as subaltern text

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her work "Can the Subaltern Speak?" writes of a young Hindu woman who commits suicide because of her failure to complete a political assassination. She deliberately waits until she is menstruating to die because she knows that it will be assumed her suicide was out of shame over an illicit affair. In doing so, Spivak asserts that she "rewrites the social text of sati-suicide." It is interesting to me that although Spivak says that the subaltern cannot speak (and certainly I think one could contend that most women could be considered subaltern at this time), there is this idea of women's bodies becoming political text. They cannot truly voice opinions or step outside of their roles in society, but through death they become a symbol. This is an idea I need to flesh out a bit more in relation to this poem, but I feel it relevant. I wanted to include, however, two different depictions I found of Lucrece.

The first is by Philippe Bertrand. I find I generally respond more to sculpture than paintings, and his work certainly struck me. I was unable to find many images of Lucrece's suicide, and that seemed to be the most important aspect of the poem. Others that I did find were rather unviolent and thus unrealistic. In committing suicide, she is reclaiming dominion over her selfhood in a way that she is unable to do in the bounds of regular society.

The second is from Reuben Nakian, which I shared in class. The other images I found of the rape seemed almost celebratory of beauty and some had an erotic edge I found quite uncomfortable. The reduction to movement and chaos takes away any erotic appeal that the depiction of a nude body and a sexual act could have and more truly echoes the violence of Tarquin's act.

A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri,

hanged he self in her father's modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926.

The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhuvaneswari was menstruating at the

time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy. Nearly a decad~ later, it

was discovered that she was a member of one of the many groups Involved

in the armed struggle for Indian independence. She had finally been en-

trusted with a political assassination. Unable to confront the task and yet

aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself.