CLASSICS: Lavinia speaks up (monologue and critical analysis)
By Amber Frizzell
Give a (louder) voice to one of the characters in the Aeneid that you have met and been intrigued about in the course of your study so far. Write a letter/monologue on their behalf.
Lavinia is alone on stage. She holds a copy of the Aeneid. She flicks through the pages in the later half of the Epic stopping occasionally to scoff lightly at parts. This should go on for around 1-2 mins. Her first lines are her reading from the pages. When the actress is ready, she begins.
Lavinia:
Maiden Lavinia. My wife Lavinia. Lavinia, his bride. Lavinia will raise him in the forest. My wife… is stolen. Lavinia is your wife now. Lavinia tore her bud-bright hair. Dashing across the heat of crimson blushes. The tears came pouring down her flaming cheeks. Lavinia. My wife. Lavinia.
She closes slams the book shut and throws it on the floor. Pause.
The woman who never speaks. That’s how you want me isn’t it? Rosie cheeked, hot from the wine and the firelight. Do you think of me like this, hands between my thighs, skin sticky with oil? How do you want me? Would you like me to be softer? Would you like me to be tighter? The women who you take to the bed chambers. The woman whose light you snuffed. Would you like me to be quiet? Pause. You call me a woman but I am barely that. Twice my age, am I not a child to you? 19 years of age. The woman who never speaks. And yet I am the woman to blame. Pause.
It is at moments like this when I think of Helen. A mirror of me from across the seas, abducted by the man whose name I will call Ego. Like me, Helen was separated from her family; forced to marry a man from another land. Ego took her and made it so her name would be remembered as Helen of Troy and as the bards and poets sang this name to the skies, she died with no part of her true self left. She died with the layers of opinions shading her skin. I am told that you spared Helen the night your beloved Troy was seized. Spared her from a brutal rage, and instead, you gave her a choice, gave her that little bit of freedom. Is it not such a damn right shame you could not afford me the same choices? But I will sing for Helen of Sparta, the fiercest of the lot. And I hope that she hears me.
Who will speak for the others? Who will speak for African Dido, Queen of Carthage? Her mind is distorted by the person you call mother. For it was the Goddesses’ touch that drove her mad and impaled her upon your sword. Yet another silenced. Who will speak for Creusa? You unfolded a story where you claim fate left the dutiful wife to die as the city of Troy grew ablaze. We do not hear from her. For wild Camilla? Who succumbed to her feminine flaw for shiny things you say? Is this how she will be remembered? Each of these women you took advantage of when you made a narrative that spoiled their names and shifted your blame to them.
And who will speak for my beloved mother? Sometimes all I want to do is lie down and cry. Pray that the salt streams are enough for me to float away on a little boat. I feel sick to my stomach. Thinking of the sound of my mother’s suffocated scream as the noose severed her soul, with no one around to catch it. Like Dido, she will forever be a shade, committed to the wonderings of Dis for eternity. And it is because of you that these shades will never be at peace. It is because of your twisted ideas of fate and the Goddess you call mother.
I used to wish I was born like her, from the sea foam and the salt. For if I am your creation, why have I been silenced? I am no creation of man. You wrote me into existence, but I wish I could have been born the way your mother was, though I despise her for it. I envy her. Goddess of beauty, born from the sea foam and the salt. No creator but herself. But this is not the fate you planned for me. But my mother… my mother had a cowardly death. And you dared to say I was blushing. Blushing as some newfound romance. Cheeks stained with wine, face touched with scarlet, eyelids kissed with roses. Blushing at my love for my cousin, as he called my mother his own? NO. No. This blush that you see before you is not a kiss from love. It is the hot, burning anger that comes from fire.
She angrily picks up the book and flicks quickly to Book 7, as if she knows exactly where she is looking. She speaks quickly and angrily.
You say it yourself, “the tears came pouring down her flaming cheeks, dashing across the heat of crimson blushes”. Like the omen that you called good had consumed me once before, everything felt ablaze. I was burning. And yet you couldn’t help but mock my pain. Twist it into something…horrible. You sexualize my pain and call it art, comparing my blushing cheeks to a defiling rape. The words are akin to each other and stain the blush with violence against me. Though some dispute this, I know what you meant. You know the words you use. How can you see me like this? Take accountability. Take it.
And so, I look to the poets of my future. How do they tell my story? I look to Boccaccio, to Le Guin, to Crawford Clawsey in a sweet hope that they bring me justice but all I find are pitiful accounts of my truth. Italian Boccaccio claimed that it was in my soul to live chastely as I retired to the woods to birth my son after you died. I find these accounts dedicate me to celibacy in a desire to keep my reputation clean – the sweet almost-virgin who valued her chastity above all else. And who what end? Why do you defile me with your body, snuff my light, force a child upon me and yet allow others to say I am pure? I hate the lie. It covers your violence. Excuses it. I do not feel pure. I feel dirty. At your touch, I feel I become sick with sadness. How do you think of me?
She takes out a folded paper from within her clothes and reads from it.
And Crawford Clawsey paints me as a victim. “For her dutifully yielded maidenhood. She lacked the imagination to reflect.” Now this poet seems to have fallen into your horrible little hands. You have made it so that in silence, I have no autonomy; I have no power to speak to the injustice. Poor, little Lavinia who knows her place and she allows the man twice her age to take what is rightly his. It is absurd. The idea negates your responsibility. Your brutality. I wont stand for it.
And Le Guin, she is the last and the worst of all. She paints me in such a pastoral idyll, telling stories and singing songs around the fire, making you the love of my life. The love of my life! You were a haven, a rescue and escape from the tortures of life. And she claims I would have died if the poets hadn’t summoned me into existence. I would have rather died with my virtue and truth than be summoned into some lie.
She puts the Aeneid on the floor, takes out matches and sets it alight.
I want to be remembered. Properly. Truthfully. I want my anger to send waves across the world to touch every woman who is silenced by men such as you. You defile my character. You rape her. You allow for the poets to mistreat me. But I know, in my soul, your opinion of me is not my responsibility.
Critical Analysis:
I choose to give a louder voice to Lavinia as, ironically, she has no voice at all within the Aeneid, speaking a total of zero words. She is mentioned by name only nine times throughout Virgil’s poem which struck me as shocking considering the emphasis he places on her character as being so influential in the cause of the war as well as being further known as the mother of the Roman race. Virgil forces her character to have accountability for the events of the Aeneid even though she has very little autonomy of her own. I find similarities here in the way Virgil characterizes her to the way that Homer characterized Helen in The Iliad which highlights to me that the power of female sexuality and the fear it caused has been recurrent through centuries of stories and is something I would like to address.
As a Classics and Drama student, I feel my strengths lie in monologue, which is why I took this form quite literally, imagining my Lavinia performing to an audience within a theatre and using dramaturgical elements such as stage directions and directorial notes on her tone to strengthen the voice I wanted her to have. I wanted Lavinia to be criticizing Virgil whilst also addressing Aeneas at the same time, so I blended this and treated Aeneas as the mouthpiece for Virgil’s darkest desires and characteristics. When Aeneas kills, Virgil kills. When Aeneas takes Lavinia to bed, it is Virgil that rapes her. I felt that, creatively, this holds Virgil more accountable for his unjust depiction of Lavinia as it brings the author into the spotlight and makes his criticisms more direct. I wanted to do so in a tone that mimicked Virgil’s poetic voice which is why I used poetic language in my monologue, something which I can imagine Lavinia would use back against Virgil and Aeneas.
I found Lavinia’s virginity status most interesting to approach in the process, considering that value virginity holds and the reception it gets in both ancient and modern times. I am yet to find either a primary or secondary source that manages to consider the nuances of virginity and depicts Lavinia with freedom. In the poem I found which was included in Vergil and the Feminine, Mary Crawford Clawsey acknowledges Lavinia’s rape, and exposes Aeneas’ brutality in the line “he snuffed the light”, I think the poem fails to view Lavinia outside of her “dutifully yielded maidenhood” which I find problematic. Combined with Crawford Clawsey’s suggestion that “she would have to grant that he had been gentle with her”, this portrays Lavinia as a victim, but still does not give her any agency which I found an issue that I wanted my Lavinia to address. I found a similar account from Boccaccio’s which Lavinia outlines in her monologue and also an outrageous suggestion from Le Guin that Aeneas was Lavinia’s love of her life. Perhaps, my desire for Lavinia’s proto-feminism to grant herself freedom is simply too alien of a concept to put in the context of the Aeneid.
In the same way that Virgil does not allow Lavinia to speak, I wanted to echo this by not allowing the names of Virgil, Aeneas, Turnus or Paris to be mentioned in her monologue, almost like she doesn’t even need to say their names for you to know who she is talking about, which, altogether, draws more attention to them. My intention for this voice of Lavinia, was for her to have a didactic purpose. I want her monologue to make her audience uncomfortable which is why I have begun with alludes to her sexuality from the viewpoint of Virgil/Aeneas. She also serves this didactic purpose by using rhetorical questions which prompt her audience to have empathy for her character as she discusses themes of virginity/maidenhood, women, freedom, anger, and justice. I have allowed space for Lavinia to critique her various portrayals in an attempt for her to reclaim some autonomy and voice.
Bibliography:
Boccaccio, G. (1963), Concerning Famous Woman, (Translated from Latin by Guido A. Guarino) Available at: https://archive.org/details/boccaccio-concerning-famous-women/page/85/mode/2up
Giusti, E. and Rimell, V. (2019) ‘Vergil and the Feminine’, Vergilius, (1959-) Vol 67, Pages 3-9. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26857432#metadata_info_tab_contents
Le Guin, Ursula. (2008) Lavinia. United States: Harcourt United States
Virgil. (2021) The Aeneid (Translated by Sarah Ruden) Yale University Press
