Beatrice's gaze revisited: anatomizing 'The Cenci.' - by Percy Shelley

The naturalized notion of family bonding is continuously put into question as Beatrice raises epistemological questions: "What thing am I" (III.i.38); "Thou are not what thou seemest . . ." (III.i.58). Cenci condemns his murdered sons as "most unnatural sons" at the banquet scene and in his conversation with Lucretia (II.i.133); Lucretia and Beatrice speak of Cenci's "unnatural pride," "unnatural desire" and unspeakable violence, and reevaluate sacrosanct codings; finally, Giacomo declares that "She [Beatrice] . . . alone in this unnatural work [parricide],/ Stands like God's angel ministered upon/ By fiends" (V.i.42-45; emphasis added). Here dialectical movement allows the whole incident to be seen from an alternative perspective, in which Beatrice alone is an avenger of the "unnatural" world.

The Cenci certainly questions the roles of home, family, and father in the Count's crime through laying bare the disruption and fragmentation of socially assumed identities and subject positions, and through resituating family as a social construct that also organizes individual subjects [daughters, wives] according to the interests of patriarchal structure. Giacomo offers a textual test-ground for family organization: as the inverse of Cenci, meek and pusillanimous Giacomo lives with a disillusioned family romance. Irrevocably tarnished by Count Cenci's manipulation, Giacomo's family resentfully enacts hollow repetitions of coded activities:

It is my wife complaining in her sleep: I doubt not she is saying bitter things Of me; and all my children round her dreaming That I deny them sustenance.

(III.ii.80-83)

Indeed when he realizes that because of his father's exploitation he cannot live up to the fiction of an affective family, he declares, "I looked, and saw that home was hell" (III.i.330). In this light, an altercation between Orsino and Beatrice, where Orsino asks "what is he who has thus injured you?" and Beatrice answers, "The man they call my faher: a dread name," not simply condemns the Count as a "bad" father. More subtly, she puts the father's name itself into question. Beatrice's ambivalence toward the signifier "father," her glimpse at the realm of fathers, and her unarticulated imaginary aspiration beyond such, are remarked when Lucretia asks, "My dearest child, what has your father done?" Beatrice retorts, "Who art thou, questioner? I have no father" (III.i.37-40; emphasis added). Beatrice then makes an "impossible" attempt at surpassing the law of the father and dreaming a space "outside" the hegemonic order through the parricidal plot and its execution.

Yet the text also suggests that the father's name works as the "transcendental signifier," not an easy target to be refuted or dismantled. At the pivotal parricide scene, for example, Marzio approaches Cenci in sleep and is overwhelmed by the operation of the-name-ofthe-Father:

. . . now my knife Touched the loose wrinkled throat, when the old man Stirred in his sleep, and said, 'God! hear, O hear, A father's curse, What, art thou not our father?' And then he laughed. I knew it was the ghost Of my dead father speaking through his lips, And could not kill him.