Blog post 10

 First off I have been thinking about the structure of my paper for Shakespeare so I believe it would be beneficial to articulate it first. I am going to use as my major frameworks the aspects of husbandry and nation to set up my paper. Thinking of how land management relates to the beginning thoughts of nation. In addition, Race, will be included into nation and husbandry as something utilized to define those who can inhabit within the national space. This very general frame will help me begin to express some of my ideas of Titus Andronicus which I will divide into several sections. The first two will focus on the aspect of Rome and the wilderness as spaces and establish two scenes, the arrival of Titus victorious and Bassinius and Lavinia catching Aaron and Tamora in the forest, as events that show the saturnalia (reversal) and the inability to separate the wilderness from civilization. Then I will move forward in analyzing the separate families or groups in relation to their conflict with each other to formulate the nation. First, Royalty or Saturninus and his attempt to consolidate his power in ways that make him procreative. Second, Citizen through the Adronici family and how they challenge the aspects of divine rule or traditional allegories of the king as the proper husbandman. Third, the racialized “other” through Tamora and Aaron and how their virility conflicts and instead of healing the wound, something that Arthur little discusses as that this play is a play of wounds, opens it more. And finally, and the one I am most unsure about is the aspect of progeny, Aaron’s child with Tamora and the many intersection of these three groups found with the birth of the child and Lucius as well and what his return and subsequent reign means. Ultimately this paper is still a work in progress but that is at least the idea I have for this paper.

                 Now with that in mind Ill discuss one thing I am still thinking through this paper, race and blood. Originally, I thought of blood through the form of husbandry and botany, With Titus’ blood literally spilling for the rising state of Rome, feeding and reproducing for the city honor and glory while Saturninus could not. Ania Loomba, discusses blood in relation to race by stating that race through Shakespeare’s plays presents “two meanings that would become important to imperial usage of the term- that of a bloodline or heredity, and that of a hierarchy between different bloodlines” (23). Loomba’s insight helps clarify how the characters immerse themselves, partake, or are just plain bleeding throughout the play, mixing with eachoher’s blood lines. What Loomba suggests that the term race exists to show differences in blood, not only in who is considered family but in class. That is why Saturninus is concerned with Titus’ blood, he is afraid that his bleeding as a citizen for the state will mix corrupt his hereditary ruling of Rome, While Tamora and Aaron’s bloodlines ultimately turn the state of Rome inside out bringing about loss of distinction between what is foreign and what is part of the state. This in turn relates to something Loomba expresses about how Colonial ambitions of countries attempt to define what is not part of the nation or to relieve anxieties of it. Titus Andronicus through blood shows that that anxiety in never relieved.