Department of English

My thesis focuses on Shakespeare’s Roman play Coriolanus, and centers around the question of why Coriolanus adamantly refuses to show his war wounds. My contention is that Coriolanus seeks to construct for himself a classical body, in which he can remain impenetrable and independent while inhabiting a naturally grotesque body—a wounded bleeding body—that paradoxically makes his heroic masculinity and continually threatens to emasculate him. Shakespeare focuses the limelight on his hero’s wounded body to highlight Coriolanus’s masculine anxiety; and, in Coriolanus’s body, he places his tragic hero’s psychological depth and turmoil to present to us not the tragedy of a cold metallic sword, but the greatest tragedy of the wounded man. In this thesis, I highlight how Shakespeare deviates from the Roman custom of publicizing war wounds as a means to prove a man’s masculinity, by emphasizing the masculine anxiety that the open bleeding body brings to his anachronistic early modern hero who seeks, by all means, to privatize his wounded body. By examining Coriolanus’s anxiety of displaying his wounded body, I illuminate how his desire to be impenetrable discloses his natural human condition that longs for a state of wholeness while inhabiting a hollow bodily confinement.