Volume 30, Number 12 · July 21, 1983
What's a Girl to Do?
By Anne Barton
The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations
by Ian Donaldson
Oxford University Press, 203 pp., $27.50
Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels
by Rachel M. Brownstein
Viking, 332 pp., $17.95
The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson
by Terry Eagleton
University of Minnesota Press, 109 pp., $25.00; $9.95 (paper)
In Livy and Ovid, Lucretia is a model and submissive wife. While other Roman matrons are idling away their evenings, she is to be found industriously spinning among her maids. The very exemplary quality of her life, not simply her beauty, inflames Tarquin. Only his threat to kill her, and then pretend he surprised her in bed with a slave, forces Lucretia to submit to rape. The next morning, she summons her husband, her father, and their friends, tells her story piteously to this all-male audience, and, despite their reassurance that she is in no way at fault, stabs herself in order to free her husband Collatine from shame—and also, as she insists, to prevent lewd women from using her as a precedent to escape punishment.
Review, 3721 words
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