René Girard - Romeo and Juliet - Girard.pdf - Girard - Aisha7

INTRODUCTION

If the tragic crisis is indeed to be described in terms of the sacrificial crisis, its

relationship to sacrifice should be apparent in all aspects of tragedy--either conveyed directly

through explicit reference or perceived indirectly, in broad outline, underlying the texture of the

drama.

René Giard, Violence and The Sacred

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet begins with an overview of the play’s events,

immediately pointing to violence: “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,/ Where civil

blood makes civil hands unclean” (Prologue, 3-4), to fate: “From forth the fatal loins of these

two foes,/ A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life” (Prologue, 5-6), and to the tragic role of

sacrifice in ending a blood feud: “Whose misadventured piteous overthrows/ Doth with their

death bury their parents’ strife” (Prologue, 7-8). These themes of violence, fate, sacrifice, and

tragic misadventure work together to demonstrate the systems at work in Verona, a society

which resembles both Elizabethan English society and our own. In this thesis, I will show that

the text of this play instructs the reader (or audience member) to question the causes of culturally

infused violence, questioning constant references to fate as a cue to ponder its role (or lack

thereof). The violence in the community clearly stems not from chance but from the eruption of

passionate human desire, often exacerbated by indoctrination and cultural obligation. This play’s

misadventures result from adherence to socially constructed ritual and tradition, as well as the

characters’ failure to get important messages, which, I argue, is most significant.

To be civilized is to exercise control over animal desires. Societies (such as the

Elizabethans and our own today) enact rituals to attempt to create and maintain a sense of

civility, including counter-rituals to regulate festive release and keep our base desires in check.

Societal conventions govern most aspects of Elizabethan life, including gender roles, family

loyalty, courtship, the marriage rite, duel protocol, and even a festive masque. Defying

convention still carries consequences today, though perhaps not as severe as banishment from the

safety of the community.

René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred illustrates an anthropological theory of ritual

violence, one that works well to describe this prominent system at work in Verona, whether in

terms of maintaining peace by threatening violence or enacting vengeance in the name of justice,

but especially in terms of sacrificing a scapegoat. While Girard’s approach may be described as

“universalist,” I do not intend to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s work somehow reveals a

universal human nature or reflects an awareness of one. Verona reflects many Elizabethan

aspects of society, and not surprisingly, this play remains relevant to American audiences

because our culture shares a common history, and many of the same features, namely a primarily

patriarchal structure, a capitalist economic and class system, and a taste for violence.

New historicists such as Michael Bristol explain how festive rituals serve the function of

creating and maintaining order, and Girard explains how human societies’ rituals of sacrifice

serve the same function, however tragically. Girard may or may not be accurate in predicting

that, based on human history, we will forever continue to establish and perform sacrificial rituals

and, perhaps unknowingly, create systems of reciprocal violence. But the Montagues and

Capulets and their loyal servants and kin do take part in such a system, seemingly unknowingly,

and Elizabethans and Americans continue to push certain members of society to the margins,

often scapegoating entire groups.

Keeping in mind that we share a common history with the Elizabethans, including a

patriarchal society tied closely to capitalism, Baz Luhrmann’s recent film adaptation, William

Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet demonstrates a continued relevance of the text of this play. Even

with a late 20 th century setting (the time is not specific, but Paris’s astronaut costume at the

masque and elements such as a 35 mm gun for a “sword” suggest it is at least the 20 th century),

the cautionary tale warning against subversion comes through. With the help of a soundtrack

that enhances themes of youthful impetuousness (haste) and shortsightedness (failure to read

carefully), as well as the desire for freedom from oppressive systems (which taps into the meta-

cautionary tale warning I will examine), this film works well to demonstrate how Girard’s

sacrificial crisis does seem to be at work in the Elizabethan society reflected in the text of the

play as well as in 20 th -century American society. Even with significant cuts and updates to

costume and properties, the Luhrmann film preserves the language and major plot elements of

the play, and with these timely updates, the text does not seem foreign to American audiences.

The film’s setting is hard to place in time, allowing the setting itself to function as a

paradox, from medieval throwbacks (Romeo’s knight costume at the masque) to a modern and

almost futuristic mood, with a television anchorwoman reporting the Prologue and Romeo

“dropping ecstacy,” as well as both an old history and a future time beyond ours suggested by

Verona’s ruins in the backdrop. In this film, the play is an old story, a remnant of Elizabethan

society with its rituals and gender distinctions, but it is also a new story, fresh and alive as it

represents American society’s rituals and problems, many of which are similar because of our

shared history.

One element in the film that works particularly well to demonstrate this dual function (of

representing the play’s historical context, as well as placing it in context of our cultural

conscious) is the depiction of the feud as a gang war. Ritualized violence—war—may be a

necessary evil, but to a pacifist, it seems absurd and extreme, even inhumane, and certainly

uncivil. One may question why it is necessary if it is an evil. The tragic losses resulting from a

blood feud, or in the film, a gang war, demonstrates such a system and raises this question.

In simplest terms, Romeo and Juliet bring about their own destruction through a refusal

to enact the necessary public ritual, marriage, to legitimate their familial alliances; their

transgression against their families’, or more specifically, their communities’ system of order,

warrants punishment. However, as this tragic play demonstrates, the punishment seems unjust

and cruel, and the characters become symbolic sacrifices just like the scapegoats literally

selected for sacrifice by human societies across cultures for centuries. Romeo and Juliet,

especially Juliet, become victims like those described by René Girard:

The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it

prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of

dissention scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the

sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice. (8)

Society marginalizes members of society, who become sacrificial victims in the same society’s

attempts to instill order by punishing one (or a group) as a scapegoat. This ritual serves to purge

the community of its own disobedience (and therefore, disorder), restoring the security of order.

Cautionary tales function well within such a system, and Romeo and Juliet cautions against the

transgression of elopement, a serious threat to order in that it denies the community participation

in, and therefore, approval and careful handling of a major change within it. Marriage changes

identity, shifting gender roles into more solid categories and redefining families and alliances.

However, this is only the conventional, obvious cautionary tale that rests on the surface.

This play is more complex. It raises questions about the injustice of vengeance and the

inhumanity of sacrifice. Why is it, if fate is the cause of tragedy, that “the continuance of their

parents’ rage,/ Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove” (Prologue 9-10)? This line

precedes “Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage” (Prologue 11), leading into the play with an

emphasis on how Capulet and Montague need to lose their children in order to reconcile and end

the feud. Therefore, a more significant cautionary tale is this: our enactment of rituals such as

the scapegoat sacrifice in order to end a cycle of what Girard calls “mimetic violence” may prove

tragic rather than cleansing.

As a result of the sacrifice, the scapegoat serves to take the punishment for, and therefore

“end” what René Girard calls “mimetic violence,” but in this play, we see that the entire society

is actually punished. Violence leads to tragic personal loss for entire families when we see

beloved family members and friends die at the hands of contagious reciprocal violence, but more

significantly, the entire community must face the tragic loss of members proven innocent after

the sacrifice. The underlying system of violence is exposed, and the scapegoats who were meant

to absorb and absolve the “dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community”

(8) become doubly tragic victims—victims of the society’s repressive system while living and

victims of sacrifice as they lie dead, but innocent.

However much this play demonstrates the dangers of bucking the patriarchal system, a

regime that is reinforced through institutions such as the government, the church, and, the

family; it is not simply a cautionary tale illustrating punishment for breaking important societal

convention. Disobedience results in punishment to show that one should not be disobedient, but

it also (and much more powerfully) shows the tragic injustice of the rules and the severe and

unfair punishment in store for subversion, thus cautioning against a strict adherence to rules and

roles and a rigid enforcement of the system.

Juliet must choose between marrying Paris or, potentially, dying in the streets. Noble

Elizabethan women did not have much freedom to choose, especially when it came to marriage.

Their fathers chose for them, and if a woman defied her father, she defied the entire system.

Heavy punishment for this defiance conveys the severity of such a subversive act, but the utter

injustice of Juliet’s victimization by such a system evokes sympathy, thereby potentially

undermining playgoers’ unquestioning trust of the system. Ultimately, this play might

encourage deviance; it certainly encourages sentimentality and sympathy and a questioning of

the systems members of society normally follow without much thought. It certainly points to the

ways in which our societal rules are constructed, at least hinting at the possibility of de- or re-

constructing them.

Marriage is the pinnacle of institutional power at work: it gives the community a ritual

role in accepting or denouncing an alliance, and, specifically, it ties together family, money,

religion, and loyalties; but most importantly, ownership rights pass from father to husband.

When individuals attempt to turn marriage into something private, they change the purpose of

the ceremony from a communal rite into one based entirely on the individuals’ choices. Just as

Capulet tells Paris that marriage is really Juliet’s choice but reacts violently when Juliet’s

obstinacy becomes a true threat to his networking strength, the society will turn on the lovers for

their disobedience of the unspoken but clearly understood rule that one must marry in a public

ceremony. Self-serving preservation of wealth-alliance, “ancient grudges,” misogyny, and

prejudice against an “other” based on familial loyalty all play into a construction of the

patriarchy and its reinforcement and a vengeance system of violent retribution. Meanwhile, the

sacrifice of already mistreated and mistrusted members (from the margins) of society drives

home the point that the system is cruel and even potentially counterproductive.

Juliet dies after Romeo as a result of what Girard has called a doubling, or mimetic,

effect. Both lovers experience the profound guilt of knowing (or hastily assuming) that s/he

caused his/her lover’s death, and both destroy themselves as a reaction to losing each other,

possibly as a self-dealt punishment, once again drawing attention to the tragic injustice of such

punishment. Romeo is a most suitable sacrifice, but because he has enacted mimetic violence in

the community (by killing Tybalt and Paris), he cannot end the violence in Verona as an

“innocent” sacrificial scapegoat. Following Girard’s theory, Juliet must be the final victim

whose death purges the community of its cycle of violence. Girard explains that in order to

avoid becoming “contaminated” by a violent person’s violence, arranging for “the culprit

himself” (in this play, Romeo) to commit suicide (27). Juliet’s suicide is an example of what

Girard describes as “a radically new type of violence, truly decisive and self-contained, a form of

violence that will put an end once and for all to violence itself” (27).

More importantly, the danger of binary thinking—the all-or-nothing mentality—is a

metatheme in this play, embodying the dangers of restrictive hierarchy and subservience.

Revenge and destruction are shown to be the inevitable results of such a system. Romeo’s

musings often include oxymoronic descriptions such as “heavy lightness, serious vanity,/

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,/ Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick

health, . . .” (1.1.184-6), which draw attention to events seeming out of sorts. He comments on

the street fight, “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love./ Why then, o brawling love, a

loving hate” (1.1.181-2). This comment suggests that the servants and kin of each household are

fighting against each other out of loyalty to their family (or employer), which is based on love.

This hate in the name of love strongly points to the potential for “flipping” hierarchies and

switching the rules, and to suggest that society’s rules have the potential to create or destroy.

Even when designed to maintain order and peace, the rules of society may actually lead to

destruction. When characters fail to consider observation and explore communication, disaster

ensues. Similarly, the irrational long-standing feud between the Montagues and Capulets leaves

no room for reconciliation and will lead to the most tragic of losses for both families.

By examining the mimetic violence within the community, a cycle which has been

created through distrust and fear, we see the sacrificial crisis at work. An important note in

Girard’s study of the sacrificial crisis is his exploration of the role of the Christ sacrifice in

Christianity: the Christ sacrifice was supposed to be eternal, the end of human scapegoating and

sacrifice. Finally the cycle could be broken with a powerful and perfect scapegoat to end the

need for perpetual scapegoating. Religious imagery saturates the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation,

pointing to the irony that permeates the play: rather than serving to end cycles of violence,

Christian institutions serve to reinforce and uphold patriarchal claims to possession, securing

financial stability and unifying a community in a system of political alliances. The play’s

representation of Verona’s citizens’ religious hypocrisy and misunderstanding of Christ’s

sacrifice help to further the point that the church serves not as a spiritual, but as a secular and

political institution. Luhrmann’s production specifically highlights this theme by placing a

statue of Christ between the towering monuments of the Capulet and Montague empires, as if to

include it among them as simply another symbol of massive corporate power.

Rather than serving as an institution based on upholding Christ’s teachings (such as “love

thy neighbor” or “give your possessions to the poor”), the church ironically works within the

community to reinforce a fundamentally cruel and destructive hierarchy and system of alliance,

in which women are desired, betrayed, mistrusted, and denied agency. Some might argue that

The Church already lends itself to misogyny, but even so, the role of this institution is strikingly

more conducive to reinforcing social balance based on tradition. The patriarchy is in place, and

marriage, which is mostly a political and financial rite, is only possible through the church. By

marrying Romeo and Juliet in secret, Friar Laurence risks repercussions from the community,

too; even though he is well-intentioned, hoping that the marriage will function as a healing

gesture, ensuring an end to the feud, his actions actually lead to tragedy). In very much the

same way that well-intentioned societal rules, upheld by institutions like the church and the state,

are designed to keep the peace but ultimately can lead to individuals’ destruction (whether

through too-severe punishment for deviation or through violence erupting from repression), the

presence of a repressive system itself invites disobedience when human passions (which the

audience recognizes and for which it has sympathy) come into play, and ultimately result in the

destruction of the alliances these repressive actions are meant to control.

In the Luhrmann film, much of the imagery echoes socio-political themes of violence and

the role of punishment in justice that still resonate through our pop culture. One particularly

poignant image is the Christian-icon-saturated altar for Juliet’s death scene, an interesting twist

for added emphasis of the point that she is scapegoated and sacrificed for the sins of the

community. Romeo and Juliet demonstrates the inherent injustice of not only the existence of a

patriarchal, oppressive system (which oppresses both sexes), but the impossibility of living

within such a system without an eruption of contagious violence.

Not only should the audience sympathize the lovers’ “piteous overthrows” (Prologue 7),

feeling outraged at the injustice of the system and sad for the losses in its destructive wake, but if

they do “with patient ears attend” (Prologue 13), they may learn a hard lesson about hastiness

and rigid thinking in the midst of violence. Even though the gang violence depicted in

Luhrmann’s film is internal to the community, in order to quell such violence (whether for the

sake of helping criminals stop hurting themselves and each other, for humanely protecting

innocents in the ghettos, or, at least, for preventing the effects of violence and crime on the larger

community), the society must ask itself why this social problem exists and how to address it.

Automatic thinking, including relying upon the existing justice system with all its corruption and

fallibility, and seeking swift and heavy retribution by reflex, does not seem to be working to end

the violence, often motivated by competition and status.

Juliet’s parents seem devastated by her death, but we see no evidence of a change in their

thinking or behavior, just a sadness and even a thread of continued competitiveness in their

promises to build monuments to honor each other’s dead child (perhaps as masculine bravado, a

demonstration of status and power, or even an attempt to win the feud through non-violent

means): “But I can give thee more,/ for I will raise her statue in pure gold, . . . As rich shall

Romeo’s by his lady’s lie . . .” (5.3.298-9, 303). This hint at the potential for another petty

beginning of another feud indicates that the cautionary tale showing severe consequences for

bucking the system may actually warn more strongly that we should strive to be aware of our

René Girard - Romeo and Juliet - Girard.pdf

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