men’s forsaken masculinity.16 Her chastity displaces gender— Tarquin’s and her own—in the face of tyranny’s threat on male autonomy. Her chastity is also what resolves this jeopardy by returning her, in death, safely to feminine passivity and giving Brutus his “manhood” (virtus) back.17 However, Lucretia’s masculine assertion over her own death is the very means by which she can reclaim her narrative and be an idealized monument of female chastity. She leverages both her silence and her speech to manipulate her appearance, narrate her own story, and accomplish an immortality, all as a function of her chastity. Lucretia is a woman, the possession of her husband, whose own masculinity is compromised when Tarquin rapes his wife. That Lucretia is raped at all reinforces her object status, and that she must die intimates that she must bear this guilt nevertheless. Everything about her—her beauty, her grace, her concern for her husband, her kind treatment of her guest, her shame, and her death—seem to point to the ultimate, objectified female subject. But something about her does not quite fit this picture. It is not just how she dies, but rather, how she chooses to die that is noteworthy. Lucretia chooses, autonomously and despite the pardon of her family, to kill herself. If she were going to die anyway, why would Lucretia not just avoid the rape altogether, and instead, be killed alongside the slave, as Tarquin threatened?18 And if the rape was inevitable, why must Lucretia still choose to die by suicide? Death is certain in either case, but what she does ultimately choose—that is, to tell her husband and father the truth—allows her to control her narrative. In Lucretia, we learn that chastity is not simply an innocence. Rather, appearance is what matters. Lucretia exercises control over her appearance throughout lines 739 through 852 of Book 2. When we are first introduced to her, we listen to her voice her chaste, matronly concerns over weaving and her military husband. But, as King suggests, the fantasy of the warrior she 16 King, Desiring Rome, 219. King says that Brutus’ taking of the sword from her body is as though “manhood could be transferred with the sword from Lucretia to Brutus.” 17 Ovid, Fastii, 2.844. 18 Ovid, Fastii, 2.807-9.
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