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Yet, in both narratives, the commonality is that the breast is a seat
of passion. Consider the line in the Old English poem, Judith, “hāte
on hreðre mīnum,” where the eponymous heroine pleas for the Lord to
avenge the hot passion in her breast. Here the word hreðre takes on the
multiple meanings of heart, mind, and breast (Baker 268). In this note,
it is through the transformation of the breast into a spiritual entity that
Agatha reaffirms her passion and faith for her Lord (Christ). Kannagi’s
breast is a site of passion and rage that translates to the destructive fire.
The forceful removal of the breast in the former and the voluntary
ripping in the latter have distinct ends and meanings; yet both instances
underline the role of the breast as an agent of purity for the woman.
Agatha retains her chastity despite the extraction, and Kannagi, already
the personification of chastity, destroys the city as a result of the act. As
Horner insists, “although she may be breastless, Agatha can never be fully
masculinized” (Horner 32). The removal of the breast draws attentions
to the femininity of the body, and therefore, I argue, by extension,
femininity of chastity.
Nursing, Humanity, and Monsters
Agatha said to him, “O thou most wicked! / Art thou not ashamed to cut off
that which thou thyself hast sucked? (Skeat 202)
“While we are not to assume that Quintianus has literally sucked
from Agatha’s breast” (Horner 32), what Agatha implies here is that
Quintianus has suckled from the breast of a woman – his mother. The
breast as a site of nursing achieves importance through this imagery.
More importantly, the meaning of nursing extends to humanity.
The colonial belief that the world was in the shape of a breast perhaps
underscores the connection between the ideologies of nursing and
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humanity. Catherine Keller perceives this vision of the world as “forbidden
fruit … the mother breast ready to suckle death-ridden, oppressed and
depressed Europe into its rebirth (Keller 63). But this interpretation can
be taken a step further. The Colonial exploration was carried out not just
to discover wealth and uncharted lands but also to establish the existence
of a non-Euro-centric humanity. It was this world, this breast, which
nurtured and nourished this alternate community, the one that colonial
recorders were in search of. Keller raises a pertinent point at this juncture.
She notes the “symbolic matriphobia” that Columbus flees from upon his
realization of the metaphor of the breast in one of his colonial expeditions
(63). And this is reflected, centuries later, in the colonial intervention in
the breast-feeding practices of the Belgian Congo.
Nancy Hunt’s essay on colonial interference in the indigenous
familial practices of African life engages in language that highlights the
ambivalence brought about by this matriphobia that Keller observes
above. Hunt explores the puzzlement of colonizers at the decline in
population of the Belgian Congo following colonization which was
attributed to the practice of the indigenous culture of the people to
space out the births of children through sexual abstinence and prolonged
breast-feeding. The colonial beliefs that infant mortality was partly caused
by breast-feeding and their efforts to alter this practice and encourage
alternate forms of nourishment employ the ideology of matriphobia in
mixed ways: it promotes maternity to improve population count (that is,
motherhood), but at the same time, it discourages maternal nourishment
(that is, nursing through breast milk).
“The colonial remedy was to make other food available to children,
by distributing milk and milk products so mothers’ milk would be
dispensable” (Hunt 409; emphasis mine). The colonial insistence on the
dispensability of breast milk is of major significance to my argument.
It acquires an almost eugenic tone; it highlights the breast as a site of
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