Department or Program
English
Abstract
This thesis examines the intersection of motherhood, identity, visibility, and race in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus, focusing on how these texts construct and deploy the stripping of women’s identities to interrogate societal hierarchies. Across these works, motherhood emerges as a contested site, simultaneously defining and devaluing women, while racial and sexual anxieties manifest through the fetishization and erasure of their bodies. These dynamics illuminate the mechanisms by which patriarchal systems maintain power and marginalize women. In The Tempest, Sycorax’s motherhood is reduced to a narrative device used to justify the enslavement of her son, Caliban, while her body becomes a focus of both fear and fascination, reflecting anxieties around racial and sexual differences. Antony and Cleopatra highlights the precariousness of visibility, as Cleopatra’s hypersexualization and public persona are leveraged to strip her of maternal and political power. In Titus Andronicus, Tamora’s maternal identity is weaponized against her, while her actions expose the cycles of violence tied to patriarchal and racial fears. Lavinia’s brutalized body becomes a symbol of purity lost, rendering her unfit for the roles of wife and mother within Roman ideals. Ultimately, I argue that by fetishizing the maternal body, colonial powers attempt to simultaneously erase aspects of motherhood, while reducing women to its construction, perpetuating a cyclical and self-serving logic.
Level of Access
Open Access
First Advisor
Adkison, Katie
Date of Graduation
5-2025
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Recommended Citation
Tune, Mary Elizabeth Wray, "The Absented Maternal: The Colonial Fetishization of the Racialized Maternal Body in Shakespeare" (2025). Honors Theses. 482.
https://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/482
Number of Pages
109
