Sunday, January 14, 2018

Honor Killings and "The Rape of Lucrece"

After reading Pushkin's "Count Nulin," I've been working my way through Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece."

Her extended musings and deliberations are painful to read, from a 21st century perspective.  I mean really, why does she blame herself for "submitting" to the rape under threat of violence and (essentially) blackmail?

But the part that caught my attention this morning is this stanza:
My honour I'll bequeath unto the knife
That wounds my body so dishonoured.
'Tis honour to deprive dishonour'd life;
The one will live, the other being dead:
So of shame's ashes shall my fame be bred;
For in my death I murder shameful scorn:
My shame so dead, mine honour is new-born. 
This sounds like exactly the same thinking that must underlie the so-called "honor killings."

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