In William Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece,” Lucrece appears as the ideal Roman wife– beautiful and chaste, but also sensual and romantic; however, as Collatine describes her in ekphrastic detail, Lucrece becomes more of a painting than a human being. Moreover, Roman society does not only venerate Lucrece for her beauty, but also for her violent rape; while Lucrece personifies virtue before her assault, she becomes the image of martyrdom and the Roman code of honour after her rape and subsequent suicide. That said, the narrator alternatively uses ekphrasis to capture Lucrece’s authentic self and palpable trauma. The narrator particularly demonstrates this subversion after Tarquin’s offense, whereupon Lucrece compares Tarquin to a shallow…show more content… If the speaker attempts to expose or repurpose the shallow tendencies of ekphrasis, than words and language are as culpable as images. That said, the poem nonetheless seems more confident in its ability to convey values through words rather than images. In Writing and Filming the Painting, Laura Sager explores the hierarchical nature of language and visuals in ekphrasis, and, in doing so, attempts to ascertain what words contribute to a visual image. She cites several classical examples, such as Augustine, who prioritizes the intellectual labour of poetry over the manual labour of painting. (Saber 11-12) While poetry is not inherently more morally or intellectually valuable than visual art, it is the more effective medium for Lucrece. Given that Tarquin’s assault is as much about ownership as it is about lust, Lucrece’s tragic flaw is ultimately her lack of agency or influence over the men in her society. Furthermore, as the men’s visualize Lucrece as an object able to be raped, visual art only detracts from her agency. The poem therefore asserts that, in Lucrece’s quest to discover individual will, images are not enough; instead, Lucrece requires a medium that will give her a voice of her own. While the poem also preserves Lucrece’s trauma within an artistic medium, it nevertheless allows Lucrece to express her…show more content… In her essay, “Lucrece’s Time,” Alison Chapman explores the shifting temporality throughout the poem, arguing that the assault regulates the exposition’s unstable temporality. (Chapman 3) For Chapman, Tarquin instigates this temporal confusion, as he simultaneously “goes to quench the coal which in his liver glows” and has “arrived” (Shakespeare 46; 50) at Collatium. Tarquin occupies both past and present and, as a result, represents timelessness. (Chapman 5) Lucrece, however, also embodies timelessness, as Collatine describes her appearance as “heaven’s beauties,” or an immortal grace that is “fortress’d from a world of harms” (Shakespeare 13; 28) or time. Moreover, as the speaker associates Tarquin with the present tense and Lucrece with the past, Tarquin represents agency and action while Lucrece embodies stagnation. Because of her timelessness, Lucrece appears distant to the reader, as if she exists in an unreachable place of idealized beauty. According to Chapman however, the rape regulates this sporadic temporality; as Tarquin now “stands disgraced” and Lucrece “there remains a hopeless castaway” (718; 744), they both occupy the same temporal realm; set in the present tense, Lucrece appears more immediate to the reader, who is now able to sympathize with Lucrece rather than just observe her. That said, Collatine’s
