Tuesday, October 23, 2007
"With that suit upon my back will I ravish her" (III.5.135-6)
As is laid out in III.5, Cloten's revenge for his unrequited love and the perceived false character of Innogen is to force her to witness her husband's murder and then rape her while wearing her husband's clothes, which she once claimed to hold in higher regard than Cloten himself. In donning Posthumous's base clothes, Cloten transgresses the social boundaries between court and country, enacting, in an odd way, a sort of revenge that includes Innogen's own transgression of social boundaries in her marriage to Posthumous in the first place. Moving beyond the obvious use of Posthumous's clothes to make the rape more emotionally painful for the victim, how can we understand this intentioned rape since it is to be done in disguise? Is there something more threatening in this proposed act than the violation of Innogen's body? How does the fact that hers is a royal body come into play?
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