Heroic Suicide and Women’s Writing
Pulter’s “Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646” draws on the Stoic concept of heroic suicide by positioning the unnamed lady of the poem as an analogue of two famous female suicides, those of Lucretia and Thisbe.
The classical touchstone for heroic suicide is Cato Uticensis (also known as Cato the Younger), who takes his own life rather than submit to defeat by Caesar. After his death, he is praised by the people of Utica as a “freeman” with an “inuincible minde,” and his enemy Caesar declares:
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romaines
O Cato, I enuie thy death, sithe thou hast enuied mine honor to saue thy life.
The Roman philosopher Seneca describes Cato as an ideal of Stoic freedom:
The gods looked with pleasure upon their pupil as he made his escape by so glorious and memorable an end! Death consecrates those whose end even those who fear must praise.
The story of Lucretia, however, suggests that heroic female suicide has a different basis. In Lucretia’s case, it is an honorable response to the profound dishonor of rape. In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan celebrates Lucretia in a chapter called “Lady Rectitude refutes men who claim women like to be raped.”
Lucretia, however, did not have the fortitude to endure this great shame, so when morning came, she sent for her husband, her father, and her closest relatives, who were among the most powerful people in Rome, and confessed to them what had happened to her, weeping and wailing. Seeing her so distraught, her husband and relatives tried to comfort her, but she pulled out a knife that she had kept hidden under her robe and said: ‘Even if I absolve myself from my sin and show my innocence, I still cannot free myself from my torment or escape my punishment, and no other woman will ever be shaped and dishonored by following Lucretia’s example.’ Having said these words, she plunged her knife into her breast and collapsed, fatally injured, in front of her husband and friends. Enraged, they all rushed at Tarquin. The event caused turmoil in all of Rome: they chased out the king and would have killed his son if they could have found him. There would never again be a king ruling Rome. And some claim that because of Lucretia’s rape, a law was enacted stipulating that if a man committeed rape, he would be executed. That is an appropriate, just, and holy law.
Margaret Cavendish takes up the stories of both Cato and Lucretia in her Sociable Letters. In the excerpt below she offers a skeptical account of the value of stoic philosophy for women of her own time.
I intreated them to Temper their Passions, and to Allay their Anger; and give me leave Ladies, said I, to ask you what Lucretia was to either of you? was she of your Acquaintance or Kindred, or Friend, or Neighbour, or Nation? and if she was none of these, as it was very probable she was not, Living and Dying in an Age so long afore this, nay, so long, as the Truth might Rationally be questioned, if not of the Person, yet of the Manner of the Action, for perchance the clear Truth was never Recorded, Falshood having been written in Histories of much later Times than that of Lucretia; therefore Allay your Passions, for why should you two Ladies fall out, and become Enemies for Lucretia's sake, whom you never knew (Letter 54)
Additional Reading
- Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1982.
- Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1985.