Literary references or allusions aside, there are in fact a
number of thematic elements which seem to recur across the length of Mercy Otis
Warren’s The Adulterer whose
prevalence and significance ought to be marked. Perhaps the most striking – in
the context of Warren’s larger body of work as well as in the immediate – is
the frequent use of blood-based imagery. Indeed, Warren’s sanguinary fixation
is in some ways a defining element of the tone and style of her freshman
attempt at political theatre. To some degree, this was surely intended to
achieve an immediate, visceral effect. Confronted by characters who spoke of
drenching their sword, “In the tyrant’s blood, then on the pile / Of bleeding
freedom, pour the rich libation [,]” a contemporary reader would surely have
been struck by the vibrancy – if not also the ghoulish brutality – of the
image. Taken as a whole, however, there would seem to be something more to
Warren’s often gory style of verse than a simple desire to shock or unsettle. Variations
upon the image of blood and bodily harm that occur within the text of The Adulterer appear to fall within a
set of fairly cohesive moral themes. Employed to convey a sense of personal
sacrifice, destruction and loss, or hard-won triumph, these motifs were
arguably intended to help illustrate the dangers facing contemporary Massachusetts,
those factors that urged action over extended deliberation, and the means by
which innocent suffering could eventually be redeemed.
Consider,
by way of explanation, the first of the three motifs named above – i.e. blood
as symbolic of willing personal sacrifice. Brutus and Cassius in particular
speak often and freely of the glory and nobility of shedding blood for one’s
country, generally in the context of personal frustration over Servia’s ongoing
plight. Act I, Scene I contains but the first of many such instances. Therein,
Brutus seeks to rouse his countrymen to overcome their fears by declaring,
‘Tis not a conquest, merely, leads to fame.
The attempt enobles. Yes, the suffering patriot
Towers while he bleeds and triumphs while he dies.
In his estimation, is seems,
shedding blood in the act of rescuing a suffering people renders a person
something more than merely human, even if the act itself fails. Indeed, failure
– in the form of death – appears to Brutus an even surer claim to victory – or
fame, or ennoblement – than success. In this, Brutus – and through him, Warren
– appears to reveal something about the Patriot understanding of the
relationship between morality and action. Brutus is willing to fight and to
suffer – to bleed – whether or not he achieves his stated goal. What matters to
him, therefore, more than the goal itself would seem to be the conviction
behind it – the reason for the attempt rather than the outcome of the attempt.
In the mind of Brutus and his contemporaries, then, to act rightly is to act
with conviction, with blood as the most personal – most vital – symbol thereof.
This conviction would seem to be
confirmed by a later affirmation uttered by Brutus’ in Act II, Scene III. “That
man dies well who sheds his blood for freedom,” he declares, roused to anger
following the massacre of his fellow citizens at the hands of Bagshot’s
soldiers. Again, the outcome appears less celebrated than the motivation that
seeks it. Brutus does not declare to his fellow citizens that the man who “shed
his blood for freedom” lives well, or that, having won freedom, the misery
endured in the process will have been justified. “That man dies well,” he says,
rather seeming to admit that an uncertain outcome should not deter one from
acting, and suffering, in pursuit of said outcome. Fellow Patriot Junius voices
his agreement with Brutus later in the same scene when he states that, “He, who
bleeds in freedom’s cause, expires illustrious.” The cause, it seemed, matters
more than its fulfilment to Warren’s benighted Servians, and blood – one’s own
blood – is evidently the symbol they most closely associate with personal
fealty to the same. Thus, The Adulterer
finds Brutus in Act V, Scene I, alone, dejected, professing to his beloved
Servia, “I’ve waked and wept and would have fought for thee, / And emptied
every vein, when threatened ruin.” Though he does not speak the words, the
implication of death – of willing suicide in defence of the motherland – is
clear enough in this vow. Even when the loss of life in not in the offing,
however, blood serves the same symbolic purpose – i.e. a sign of one’s dedication
and loyalty.
Act V, Scene III – the finale of The Adulterer – shows the young and
optimistic Servian Marcus very much in this mode. Stirred by the selfless words
of his countryman Brutus, Marcus declares that, “In such a cause, pleased could
I bare my bosom, / And pour my choicest blood [.]” While one may debate the
precise meaning of the phrase “choicest blood,” the willingness to suffer death
declared by characters like Brutus and Junius is notably absent. Marcus, it
seems, is entirely willing to bleed for his country, but not so willing to die.
Perhaps this is meant to symbolize his optimism – willing to suffer for the
land of his birth, he yet envisions a time when Servia and its inhabitants will
not be subject to the will of a self-aggrandizing tyrant. Granted, death is not
completely absent from the thoughts of young Marcus. When Brutus advises him
that wealth and power could yet be his upon an embrace of Rapatio and his
coterie of sycophants, Marcus scorns the very idea. “Better live a poor man
[,]” he affirms, “And die so too [.]” And yet, a willingness to die in poverty
and obscurity for having rejected temptation is a thing apart from embracing
death in the cause of freeing one’s country.
While his countrymen seem resigned
to fight for the sake of fighting – to shed blood for a cause they know to be
just without necessarily believing they will meet with success – Marcus joins
his readiness to suffer bodily loss with an evident conviction that the years
to come may hold some hope. Asserting to Brutus his aforementioned belief that
dying unknown and honest is better than living celebrated and corrupt, Marcus
accordingly declares that, “Though hate and malice / May shoot their shafts
against me, better thus / To make my exit, while the soul with comfort /
Reviews the past and smiles upon the future.” Granting once again that the
difference between fading into obscurity and expiring illustriously for the
cause of freedom is rather vast, it is nonetheless remarkable that Marcus seems
capable of envisioning the future at all, let alone one that he might smile
upon. His fellow Servians rarely appear capable of seeing past the end of their
own machismo – a noble death is the most they are capable of imagining for
themselves, and the bloodier the better. And yet, despite his optimism –
perhaps Warren’s attempt to add a glimmer of hope to the proceedings – Marcus
draws the same symbolic connection between personal conviction and personal
suffering. He, too, would willingly shed blood for his country, as it seems
would every one of Warren’s Servians who think themselves a Patriot.
As discussed above, however, blood
did not only symbolize willing personal sacrifice within the text of The Adulterer. Indeed, it quite often
seemed to represent something altogether unwilling and unwelcome – i.e. the
loss and destruction of innocent life. In this mode, blood stands in for
needless slaughter, the brutal impulses that cause it, and the injustice that
attends. Consider, to that end, a passage from Act II, Scene I. Having
witnessed the death of an innocent Servian youth at the hands of one of
Rapatio’s supporters – a reference to the killing of one Christopher Seider
(1758-1770) by a Boston Customs House official named Ebenezer Richardson –
Cassius recounts the scene to an anguished Brutus, concluding that, “One youth,
unhappy victim fell – he lies / Reeking in gore, and bites the hated ground.”
As a stand-in for blood, the word “gore” is here used to indicate needless
suffering rather than voluntary sacrifice. The youth in question was not a
willing casualty – he did not offer his blood in service of a particular cause
– but rather an “unhappy victim” whose sacrifice was inflicted from without.
Thus, whereas the image of blood often seemed to connote fealty and integrity
in the context of the struggle between Patriots like Brutus and Cassius and
their oppressor Rapatio, at other times it seemed to represent the damage daily
done to the people of Servia by unopposed tyranny. The response offered by
Brutus to the cited passage would seem to confirm this characterization. “Oppression
strews / Her earliest paths with blood [,]” he exclaims, “Gods! are we men? /
And stand we still and bear it? Where’s our sense?” Far from symbolizing
personal conviction, here blood appears to signify both the barbarism of
Rapatio and his cohorts and the failure of men like Brutus himself to offer
resistance.
Subsequent instances arguably
sharpened the rhetorical distinction between Warren’s uses of blood as symbol
of personal covenant and blood as marker of oppression and failure. Act II,
Scene III, for instance, finds Brutus lamenting the willingness of men to draw
the blood of their neighbors at only the slightest urging. Though unnamed, he
points clearly enough to Rapatio as the cause of such behavior in suffering
Servia. “Deaf to the call of nature pleading in him,” he declares, the villain,
Imbrues his hands in blood – ten
thousand join him.
The soldier heated by the cursed
example,
His poniard whets,
And swear to fill these streets
with blood and slaughter.
In this instance, the blood being
shed is connected to a specific individual or group – i.e. the Governor who
imbrues (or stains) his hands with it or the soldiers who whet (or sharpen)
their poniards (or daggers) to draw it. It is not, however, their own blood
that these people seek to extract. While Patriots like Brutus, Cassius, and
Marcus speak of emptying their veins and bleeding for their country, here the
vital fluid is being drained as a consequence of the actions or moods of a
separate party. This can be particularly inferred from context – as part of a
reflection upon the thoughtlessness of man, the invocation of blood and
slaughter by Brutus thus takes on an aspect of waste and pointlessness.
Rapatio’s hands are stained with the blood of his subjects, not because they
volunteered to suffer for their country but because he sought to impress his
will upon them. The soldiers follow suit out of heated temper, visiting their
rage upon a people who neither asked for nor deserved it.
The
difference between bleeding nobly and bleeding piteously, it seemed, was
essentially a matter of choice. Those who elect to bleed – Brutus, Cassius, and
their Servian compatriots – wear their blood with pride. To them – and
evidently to Warren – it symbolized the willingness of the individual to bear
up under the threat of death in pursuit of something sacred. Those whose
hemorrhaging was forced upon them, however, gained no such exaltation by being
so drained. Far from towering while they bled, these innocents reeked with the
gore that was drawn from their bodies. Their suffering was not heroic, but
rather synonymous with carnage – even cannibalism. Act II, Scene IV expressed
the latter, wherein Brutus describes the wounds of his slain countrymen as
speaking to, “The sport of every ruffian, / Who plays with death and thirsts
for freemen’s blood.” So too did a passage in Act III, Scene I, which saw
Cassius pronounce these same murdered Servians the, “Unhappy victims to inhuman
ruffians; / Who wish to drink this country’s richest blood, / And crush
expiring freedom [.]” Within the context of The
Adulterer, it would appear that blood unwillingly extracted was tantamount
to the most wretched crimes imaginable. And this appeared to be true whether it
adorned the streets upon which those innocents formerly resided, or marked the
person of the parties responsible. Thus did Junius express his outrage at the
slaughter of his countrymen in Act II, Scene III by stating that, “The inhuman
soldiers stamp the hostile ground, / His garments stained with blood, / The
streets of Servia sweat with human gore.”
Even
the villains of Warren’s The Adulterer
conform to this symbolic association, and in so doing give it strength. Rather
than characterize their efforts to maintain control over Servia, and the
suffering inflicted as a result, as unfortunate and unintended, Rapatio and his
minions speak quite frankly of – indeed, seem to revel in – the unwilling blood
they have drawn. Thus, in asking his supporters to falsely affirm that they
have been the victims of a foul conspiracy, the Governor of Servia demands they
swear, “That long before that night, / In which we snuffed the blood of
innocence, / The factious citizens, urged on by hell, / Had leagued together to
attack the solider [.]” As depicted by Warren, Rapatio makes no effort to
equivocate, obscure, or minimise what he and his clique have done – rather, he
makes their crime viler yet by admitting it so freely. And while the phrase
“the blood of innocence” is not spoken with anything like the reverence attributed
to it by Brutus and his compatriots, the connotation for the audience remains
the same. Indeed, it is reinforced.
Consider, in that vein, a passage
from Act IV, Scene III. In the midst of an extended monologue, Hazelrod attempts
to explain the regard he feels for his master Rapatio by declaring of him,
When
the ties of virtue and thy country,
Unhappy
checked thy lust for power – like Caesar,
You
nobly scorned them all and on the ruins,
Of
bleeding freedom, founded all thy greatness.
Not only were Warren’s villains
characterized by their opponents as thirsting for blood – as might an animal
who responds to the urgings of its nature – but they themselves believed that
the suffering they inflicted formed a key part of their own prestige. Act V,
Scene II saw Hazelrod again draw this connection, this time in the form of a
reassurance to an imprisoned ally. Addressing the jailed E___r – a stand-in for
the aforementioned Ebenezer Richardson – the Lord Chief Justice promises him
that,
You
therefore
Shall
one day leave this dismal tenement,
Again
with pleasing scenes of blood and carnage,
To
glut our vengeance – yes – by heaven we swear [.]
Laying aside the implications of the
cartoonishly evil persona Warren attributed to the character of Hazelrod – a
matter for another time, rest assured – his symbolic usage of words like
“blood,” “bleeding,” and “carnage” is very much in keeping with the motif
established by more virtuous characters like Brutus and Cassius. Whether
celebrated or mourned, therefore, blood that is unwillingly drawn within the
context of Warren’s The Adulterer
possesses the connotation of some of the vilest crimes imaginable. By lamenting
the very thought of it, Patriots like Brutus, Junius, and Marcus affirm their
status as men of compassion, integrity, and honor. And by revelling in the promise
of it, Rapatio and his minions make known the extent of their depravity,
cruelty, and viciousness.
No comments:
Post a Comment