PUR Final Spring 2006 nB.indd - Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review ...

The Pittsburgh Undergraduate Rewiew Spring 2006 Vol. 12, No. 1
The Pittsburgh
Undergraduate Review
Spring 2006
Vol. 12, No. 1
University of Pittsburgh Honors College

The
Pittsburgh
Undergraduate
Review
~Advancing Innovative Undergraduate Scholarship~
Spring 2006
Vol. 12, No. 1
Published by the University of Pittsburgh
Honors College

Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief
Assistant Editor
Anna M. Quider
Tanya Keenan
General Editors
Mary Binker
Steven Danna
Richard Fiorella
Alexandra Fuentes
Janelle Greene
Amanda Gregg
Julie Kleinman
Benjamin Meriçli
Alexandra Nicholson
Eleanor Ott
Josh Rigney
Theresa Smith
Michaelangelo Tabone
Audrey Vanim
Administrative Support
Faculty Advisor
Dean of the
Honors College
Asst. to the Dean
Dr. Nathan Hilberg
Dr. G. Alec Stewart
Karen Billingsley

Contents
Letter from the Editor
Anna Quider
6
Historical Exegesis: Otto Dix’s
Allegories from the Third Reich
Travis W. English
Edythe Portz Prize Recipient
8
Argumentus Interruptus:
Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus
Rob Goodman
40
Benjamin Rush and the
Redefinition of Bicameralism
Ashvin Kamath
79
On the ‘the Artist’ in Modern
Society: A Reading of Michel
Foucault
Nicholas R. Monnin
106
General Policies
122

• Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Letter from the Editor
“Advancing Innovative Undergraduate Scholarship”
— this motto, adopted by the present Editorial Board of The
Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review (PUR), has served as a
guide for developing the PUR throughout the past academic
year.
The PUR has recently undergone many structural
changes. Acknowledging society’s growing reliance on the
internet, the PUR has updated and restructured its website
and submission policy, leading to a record number of
submissions this year. In order to reach both a national and
international audience, the PUR will publish this issue online
as well as distribute hard copies to hundreds of universities,
libraries, and individuals throughout the United States. The
updated layout of this issue was designed to enable readers to
easily interact with the text through larger line spacing and
margins.
The four works chosen for publication represent
original undergraduate research at its finest. The level of
scholarship and the contributions of each work to their
respective disciplines are impressive accomplishments
for even the most decorated of undergraduates. Of the
approximately sixty submissions considered for this issue,
only those presented here met the unique and challenging
standards of the Editorial Board and faculty referees. The
Edythe Portz Prize was created to further distinguish an
exceptional work within each issue; this prize is awarded
to Mr. Travis W. English for his insightful and provocative
work entitled Historical Exegesis: Otto Dix’s Allegories from the
Third Reich.

Letter from the Editor •
This issue is indebted to the many people whose
hard work has carried the PUR through its periods of both
non-publication and unprecedented success. The University
of Pittsburgh Honors College has been a constant source of
financial support and encouragement. The former editors
and staff of the PUR have laid the foundation for our present
success and we hope the work done this year will further
the goal of consistently providing a forum for showcasing
exceptional undergraduate research. This publication
would not be possible without the voluntary efforts of the
University of Pittsburgh faculty referees who lend their time
and expertise to providing feedback on candidate works.
Most importantly, this publication owes its existence to
the many undergraduate students throughout the United
States and around the globe who are working to improve
their communities, both social and intellectual, through their
dedication to pursuing original research. It is in recognition
of their efforts that the PUR was created and persists today.
It is with great pleasure that I present the Spring
2006 issue of The Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review. May
this issue highlight the integral role that undergraduates
hold in piecing together our understanding of ourselves and
our world; further, may it inspire readers to do their part
in solving the puzzles of our time. In short, may the reader
become dedicated to pursuing and advancing innovative
undergraduate scholarship.
Anna Quider
Editor-in-Chief

• Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Historical Exegesis: Otto
Dix’s Allegories from the
Third Reich
Travis W. English
Travis W. English is a first year graduate student in the Art
History and Criticism Ph.D. program at Stony Brook University.
In May of 2005 he received his B.A. in Art History from Hiram
College, where he completed this work under the direction of
Prof. Lisa Bixenstine Safford. His current interests are Marxian
aesthetics and questions of artistic value in contemporary art
and he intends to pursue teaching and writing.
Note: Figures 1 through 5 are located on pages 59 – 62.
Introduction
From 1933 until 1945, Otto Dix (1891-1969) painted at
least one allegory each year. Dix’s technique and style in painting
these allegories mimicked that of the Old Masters, as he had done
consistently in his paintings since the early 1920s. However, he
added to this long-standing practice a new citation of German
Renaissance subject matter, imagery, and most importantly, a
use of allegory as a means of expression. Visual allegories are
the expression of an idea through a seemingly unrelated image;
the correspondence between the idea and the image is based
solely on convention. There are various reasons for Dix’s choice
For a detailed analysis of Dix’s oil and tempera technique, see
Bruce F. Miller, “Otto Dix and His Oil-Tempera Technique,” Bulletin
of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74 (October 1987), 332-55.

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich •
to paint allegorical images. Most obvious is that Dix’s more
overtly socially critical art fell victim to suppression by the
Nazis’ oppressive Reichskulturkammer, headed by Reichsminister für
Volksaufklärung (People’s Enlightenment) und Propaganda, Josef
Goebbels. As a result of the Nazi regime’s efforts to cleanse
German culture of its “Bolshevik” degeneracy, Dix was stripped
of his professorship at Dresden’s Prussian Academy, as well as
banished from exhibiting or selling his work. Therefore, it was
necessary for him, in order to continue working, to hide his
social criticisms behind citational conceptions of Renaissance
allegories.
At a time when many artists either went into exile or
stopped producing work altogether, Dix remained in Germany,
choosing “inner emigration,” and continued to create drawings,
etchings, and paintings. However, to remain in Germany
and still create art, Dix had to change artistic direction. His
allegories are the result of a shift away from the overt criticism
of bourgeois decadence and warfare that made him famous as
a leader of Die neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) towards
a veiled criticism of the Nazi regime and its cultural policies;
Dix’s new direction took the form of a criticism concealed
within art historical prototypes.
As this project will explore, Dix’s use of citation – his
placing of his art between art historical quotation marks – creates
a problematic rupture within modernism’s historical narrative.
This disdain for modernism’s “cult of the new” was present in
Dix’s Neue Sachlichkeit work of the twenties. Die neue Sachlichkeit,
characterized by sober, realistic, intense, linear, and seemingly
objective – yet often times, very critical – representations of
German urban life, was a direct affront to modern art’s drive
towards abstraction and newness. Specifically though, Neue
McGreevy, 2001, 369

10 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Sachlichkeit artists, with Dix at the forefront of the movement,
were reacting to Expressionism’s abstraction, utopianism, and
primitivism. Dix once noted, “The Expressionists produced
enough art. We wanted to see things totally naked and clear,
almost without art.” In more general terms, published in
Berliner Nachtausgabe on December 3 rd , 1927, Dix stated, equally
polemically,
In recent years, one catchphrase has motivated the
present generation of creative artists. It urges them
to ‘Find new forms of expression!’ I very much
doubt, however, whether such a thing is possible.
Anyone who looks at the paintings of the Old
Masters, or immerses himself in the study of their
works, will surely agree with me.
His rejection of modernism’s compulsive “search for the new”
was the catalyst for his chosen stylistic vocabulary as well as
the choice of subjects he depicted. Dix’s interest in the Old
Masters not only shows his skepticism towards the artist’s
ability to find these “new forms,” but also represents a rejection
of modernism’s unyielding, amnesiac, forward march. Nowhere
else in Dix’s art is his intense interest in the work of the Old
Masters more evident than in his allegories from the era of the
Third Reich.
This rupture with modernism’s progressive ideals
deserves close consideration; the iconographic tension in Dix’s
allegories between full-fledged historicism and a concern for
Quoted in Robert Storr, Modern Art Despite Modernism, exh. cat.
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 58.
Otto Dix, “The Object is Primary” (1927), Art in Theory: 1900-2000,
2d ed., Ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA:
Blackwell), 978.

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 11
critiquing his historical moment begs a new consideration of
their significance, one that views them not as anomalies created
out of necessity, but as important commentary on German
culture at one of its most crucial moments. After all, Dix’s
allegories, in their seeming antimodernism, invoke the modern
simply by their sharp contrast to it. As Robert Storr writes,
“The aura of the past was always a reminder of the present,
and the antimodern artists who tried to evoke that aura were
trapped into being modern despite themselves.” In the case
of Dix, allegory is not symptomatic of historicized escapism, or
simply a pragmatic means to hide his criticisms, but a powerful
tool of resistance and critique during a period of unprecedented
flux and crisis.
This historical and critical analysis requires a shift
away from a conception of modernism as an aesthetically and
ideologically homogenous movement towards a more open and
nebulous system of competing notions. In other words, the
avant-garde was not always a streamlined united front; at times,
various avant-gardes were waging battle against one another.
Whereas the history of modernism in twentieth century art
usually signifies the triumph of abstraction over representation,
the development of an art of pure form over one of mimesis,
a closer examination of art produced under the rubric of
modernism shows that such distinctions were not so clear.
Realism, for example, was seen at least in Germany as the most
advanced and socially engaged form of art, culminating in Die
neue Sachlichkeit. And even within this notion of realism, there
were various groups and factions arguing over what realism
meant, as can be seen in the debates between Györgi Lukács,
Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht. Realism was by no means
a regressive alternative to abstraction; at times it was actually
Robert Storr, 29

12 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
the preferred form of avant-garde production. For an artist like
Dix, as cited above, the question was not in how to represent, but
in what to represent. Critical engagement with modern society
in all of its flux and instability, decay and decadence was the
goal of a new realist art. It is here where realism marked its
newness and social necessity as the modern art.
However, the most widely accepted narrative of
modernism – a formalist reading that begins with French
Impressionism and continues along a trajectory through
abstraction, ending with Minimalism’s pure, nihilistic
objects – diminishes possibilities for critiquing Dix’s brand
of questioning. Rosalind Krauss, one of formalist theory’s
staunchest proponents, offers a schema of modernist aims in
her essay, “A View of Modernism.” She writes:
The syllogism we [formalist critics] took up was
historical in character, which meant that it read
only in one direction; it was progressive. No á
rebours was possible, no going backward against
the grain. The history we saw from Manet to the
Impressionists to Cézanne and then to Picasso was
like a series of rooms en filade. Within each room
the individual artist explored, to the limits of his
experience and his formal intelligence, the separate
constituents of his medium. The effect of his
pictorial act was to open simultaneously the door
to the next space and close out access to the one
behind him.
For Krauss, this view of modernism grew out of her own
Rosalind Krauss, “A View of Modernism” (1972), Art in Theory:
1900-2000, 2d ed.

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 13
experience as a “disciple” of Clement Greenberg. One senses in
her words a feeling of disenchantment with formalism’s limited
methodological ability to examine much of the most pertinent
art of the time, which is to say the art that was opening many
previously closed doors, prognosticating the rejection of
modernism’s stratigraphic, totalizing, and thus exclusionary
conceptualization of its own evolution that was to occur by
the 1970s. Tied to this notion of the existence of an art which
outgrew formalist sensibilities is the reality that modernist
criticism, in its linear historical narrative, marginalized artists
such as Dix, labeling them as regressive, reactionary, and
essentially anti-modern. A historical and critical analysis
that focused on formal innovation tended to marginalize
representation as a viable form of modern art. In hindsight,
however, we can see that Dix’s appropriations, citations, and
use of allegory were predicative by at least thirty years in his
opening of those doors closed by modernism.
Artistic practice that existed outside of the canonical
modernist avant-garde was seen as marginal, less important,
pathological, and thus, problematic and even threatening to
modernism’s totalizing aims. However, rather than dismissing
Dix’s allegories as merely “anti-modern” examples of artistic
retrenchment in the face of Nazi cultural policy, untrue to the
social criticism that was a hallmark of his work prior to the Third
Reich, we should follow the lead of Robert Storr, who asked in
Modern Art Despite Modernism, “Why such a raft of antimodernist
art was produced from the 1920s to the mid-1950s is a complex
question that must be answered decade by decade, place by
Matthew Biro, “History at a Standstill: Walter Benjamin, Otto
Dix, and the Question of Stratigraphy,” in Res (no. 40) (Cambridge,
MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard
University, Autumn 2001), 175.

14 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
place, tendency by tendency, and artist by artist.” Therefore,
both Dix and these works are better served by placing them
within their specific historical and iconographical context. It
would be difficult and rather tedious to discuss every allegory
from the time period, so a selection of the most representative
works has been made.
The Iconological Foundation of Dix’s Allegories
By 1933, Otto Dix, once the leader of Die neue Sachlichkeit
and the most sought after portraitist in Germany, was stripped
of most of his rights as an artist by the Nazi regime. After he
and his work were labeled entartet (degenerate), Dix was forced
to resign his teaching position at the Dresden Academy. The
reasons cited for his dismissal were common for artists deemed
degenerate by the Nazi regime, summarized in the Lehrverbot,
which forbade an artist from teaching. It reads, “Apart from
the fact that some of your paintings are a gross offense to
moral feelings and therefore a danger to the German people’s
moral regeneration, you have also painted pictures that are
likely to impair the people’s will to defend themselves.” Other
deprivations the Nazi regime placed on artists included the
Ausstellungsverbot, which forbade an artist from exhibiting his/
her work, and the most severe of punishments, the Mahlverbot,
which forbade an artist to even paint. To be cited with any of
these restrictions was to be labeled entartet. 10 Dix was spared
only the Mahlverbot, being allowed to paint only for private
commissions and for foreign sales.
Dix commented in 1966 on his dismissal from the
Dresden Academy with these words: “I was informed that
Storr, 34
Quoted in McGreevy, 2001, 363
10 Linda McGreevy, The Life and Works of Otto Dix (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research, 1981), 81.

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 15
I was no longer to set foot in the academy. But I still had all
of my work there. Nevertheless: I had to get out right away!
In Saxony, things grew sinister: they’re particularly fanatical
there, on the one hand; and on the other, they’re friendly, as
it were.” 11 The contradiction in this statement between the
growing sinister fanaticism and the friendliness of the people
of Dresden at this time is ambiguous. Perhaps Dix meant that
the people of Saxony, although polite in a provincial sense,
were at the same time more prone to the developing sway of
Nazi ideology. Following his abrupt dismissal, Dix occupied a
studio in Löbtau, a working-class district of Dresden. 12 Shortly
thereafter, due to the growing fanaticism in Dresden, as well
as pressure from friends concerned for his safety, Dix moved
himself and his family to rural Lake Constance, in Germany’s
southwest. Schloss-Randegg, a property owned by Dix’s
brother-in-law, Dr. Hans Koch, became the temporary home of
Dix, his wife Martha, and their children Ursus and Nelly.
According to Eva Karcher, the years spent at Schloss-
Randegg were difficult for Dix; he was far removed from the
city life that was his artistic subject throughout the twenties. 13
In 1936, Dix and his family moved permanently to a newly
built house overlooking Lake Constance, in Hemmenhofen,
near Switzerland, and although their level of physical comfort
increased, the psychological burdens of “inner emigration”
continued for Dix. Isolation from the decadence that served
as his muse, as well as isolation from other artists, and the
stifling label of degeneracy were all especially hard for Dix. His
situation was similar to that of most of the artists who made the
decision to stay in Germany during this dangerous and difficult
11 Quoted in Karcher, 169
12 Hartley and O’Brien Twohig, 171
13 Karcher, 2002, 170

16 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
period. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt describes the dire situation
of degenerate artists during the Nazi regime:
Many more of them survived than one would have
guessed, but they survived in isolation, cut off from
other artists, unable to communicate with their
friends, living constantly under the threat of the
concentration camp, deprived of the tools of their
trade and of space in which to work. They went
underground. [. . .] But this isolation from other
painters and from any kind of appreciative public
had a paralyzing effect: a damming up of the sources
of creation. 14
Like many artists who remained in Germany, Dix did not
disappear into total obscurity during the years of the Third
Reich. However, his direct and exacting critical eye was
irrevocably changed with the advent of Nazism and its control
over all forms of cultural production. Fortunately, Dix was able
to smuggle art supplies from neighboring Switzerland, where
he was even able to exhibit some of his work. 15 But the loss of
his specifically German, urban subject and audience dealt a dire
blow to Dix’s creative drive.
In contrast to the loss of an appreciative audience, eight
works from Dix’s oeuvre were included in the infamous Entartete
Kunst exhibition, which began its tour through Germany and
Austria in 1937, greeted by record numbers of museum goers-
-one of the great ironies of Nazi cultural ideology. 16 The
14 Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1973), 84.
15 McGreevy, 2001, 374
16 Peter Selz, Beyond the Mainstream (Cambridge: Cambridge University,
1997), 180.

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 17
works selected for the exhibition were crammed together on
the walls, inflammatory placards and statements surrounding
them, and pamphlets were printed showing art works beside
medical images of physical abnormalities for the purpose of
drawing comparison between “degenerate” art and what the
Nazis viewed as physical “degeneracy,” both of which were to
be eradicated. Thus, in this context, Dix was exhibited to the
public (more people saw his work in Entartete Kunst than had
ever seen it before), albeit humiliated as a degenerate, his work
decried as the product of “Cultural Bolshevism.” 17
The Iconography of a Selection of the Allegories
It seems that even before 1933 Dix had anticipated the
restrictive and reactionary nature of Nazism. His allegory The
Seven Deadly Sins (1933, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe) (Figure
1) was left unfinished in his studio at the Dresden Academy
All in all, the Nazis confiscated from Germany’s public collections
16,000 works by 1,400 artists. 650 of these works were
exhibited in the Entartete Kunst exhibition, which began its tour in
Munich’s Archaeological Institute. As Selz points out, “the original
Degenerate Art exhibition turned out to be the forerunner of the
big museum blockbusters, and its attendance record has still not
been equaled.”
17 Not all who attended Entartete Kunst were supporters of Nazi ideology.
For certain, some people attended the exhibition knowing
that it may well have been their last opportunity to see the
work of Germany’s modern masters. As Lehmann-Haupt writes,
“The exhibition attracted huge crowds, not only party members
and masses of the curious and the casual but also large groups of
friends of modern art, who could do no more than pass through
the halls in utter silence with faces of stone” (80). Interestingly,
Alfred H. Barr, then director of New York’s Museum of Modern
Art, attended some of the earlier, smaller exhibitions that led up to
Entartete Kunst. In writing about this experience, Barr mentioned
the removal of “Paintings by five of the best known artists in Germany,”
(Dix’s Worker was mentioned as one of the works removed)
from Stuttgart’s State Gallery (McGreevy, 2001, 365).

18 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
when he was abruptly forced to vacate. 18 This speaks to the
possibility that Dix did not paint allegories due solely to Nazi
repression, begging the question of whether these allegories
were Dix’s next planned artistic direction, even despite Nazi
oppression. This work is typical of Dix’s Third Reich allegories
in its religious and traditional allegorical subject matter, as well
as in Dix’s oil and tempera technique, which refers back to the
Northern Renaissance tradition from which these religious
allegories are derived. Dix chose these religious, allegorical
subjects “for their ability to carry coded messages about [his]
hopes and fears for Germany,” using a technique and style firmly
planted in Northern tradition. 19
In The Seven Deadly Sins, Dix paints the personifications
of the sins as a macabre carnival troupe tumbling in a chaotic
parade diagonally across the canvas from right background to
left foreground, leaving apocalyptic ruin in their wake. In the
front is an old crone – the personification of Avarice – carrying
a masked child-like figure on her back, the personification of
Envy. Interestingly, the Hitler-like mustache was not added to
Envy’s mask until 1946, after the danger of Nazi retribution had
passed. 20 Behind Avarice and Envy are Death, with his heart
torn out, wearing a skeletal costume and carrying a scythe;
Anger as a demonic beast carrying a knife; and Lust, a brightly
clothed woman who grabs her exposed right breast and
lasciviously licks her syphilitic lips. 21 Behind Lust is a rotund
child, carrying a pretzel and wearing a large pot-like mask. He
is Gluttony. To his left is a figure wearing a huge head-shaped
mask, held up with its hand, which pokes out of the mask’s ear.
18 McGreevy, 2001, 366
19 Hartley and O’Brien Twohig, 196
20 Karcher, 2002, 170
21 Hartley and O’Brien Twohig, 209

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 19
This enormous head, with its nose in the air and an anus for its
mouth, is Pride.
Inscribed on the ruined wall behind the figures is a
quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a text of which Dix
was particularly fond. 22 It reads: “The Desert Grows. Woe to
him who conceals Deserts.” 23 The inclusion of a quotation from
Nietzsche is a reflection of Dix’s admiration for the philosopher,
whose ideas were to Dix, “the only true philosophy.” 24 The
quotation adds a modern element to an otherwise historicized
representation, and leaves no doubt that Dix was criticizing his
own contemporary moment, rather than making a generalized
statement about wrongdoing; it becomes a very direct warning
to a society on a course toward ruin. Both Nietzsche and Dix
use historical forms – allegory for Dix, parable for Nietzsche
– to critique the present.
Dix’s use of carnival performers as allegorical
personifications has its prototypes in sixteenth century
Northern painting, especially in the work of Pieter Bruegel the
Elder (c.1530-1569). Bruegel’s The Combat Between Carnival and Lent
(1559, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) is a representation
of the sort of celebration that took place on the eve of Lent, but
it is also an allegorical representation of the battle between vice
and virtue, worldly folly and divine piety. Dix’s carnival figures
act in much the same allegorical way; under the indifferent,
decadent, and frivolous surface of Weimar culture dwelt the
ever-growing threat of Nazi power. Interestingly, Bruegel leaves
the battle’s outcome ambiguous. For Dix, however, there is no
22 In 1912, Dix created a large plaster bust of Nietzsche (whereabouts
unknown). Also, Dix took a book of Nietzsche’s writings to the
trenches in World War I.
23 Hartley and O’Brien Twohig, 209. The original German is, “Die
Wüste wächst, weh dem, der Wüsten birgt!”
24 Quoted in Karcher, 1987, 8

20 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
battle. In a world where virtue is already decimated, the Sins
need only parade through its ruins in their triumphant march.
In 1934 and 1935, while living at Schloss-Randegg, Dix
painted The Triumph of Death (Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart) (Figure
2). In this allegory, Death is not the costumed carnival figure
of The Seven Deadly Sins, but a very real and menacing skeleton,
in the tradition of Hans Baldung Grien (c.1485-1545) as well as
the Black Plague era frescoes in the Camposanto in Pisa. 25 There
is also here a marked stylistic shift towards a more Romantic
rendering of the figures and their surroundings, pointing to
what was a necessary shift towards a style more accepted by
the Nazis, if not an ironic appropriation of their aesthetics, a
notion which I will discuss later. As Linda McGreevy writes,
Triumph of Death, Dix’s vanitas, is typical of the artist’s
developing Third Reich style, combining a
scrupulous adaptation of High Renaissance formal
elements, lurid color, and a moralizing program
that would avoid the possibility of a problematic
reception by its very historicism. At this time, Dix’s
allegories are formally florid, iconographically
extravagant, and laboriously finished. 26
Dix paints a ruined church within a very Northern Renaissanceinspired
landscape. Death, with rotten skin hanging from his
bones, is in his royal cape and crown, poised and ready to strike
a disparate assembly of individuals with his scythe. Dix’s image
of Death is historically similar to Breughel’s in his Triumph of
25 Ibid, 198. The Triumph of Death in the frescoes of the Camposanto
(cemetery) in Pisa is the first known representation of this theme,
and dates to circa 1350, contemporaneous to the Plague of 1348.
26 McGreevy, 2001, 371

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 21
Death (c.1560, The Prado), which depicts a skeletal Death as
Grim Reaper, the harvester souls.
The other individuals Dix paints represent the ages of
man. In the center foreground is a baby, curiously prodding
at some poppies, symbols of sleep and indifference; the child is
ignorant of Death’s close proximity. To the right of the baby are
young lovers – a mainstay in Northern Renaissance depictions
of the theme – as unaware as the child, but for wholly different
reasons. At their feet a rosebush grows, symbolizing love and
passion. To the left of the baby is a crippled old crone, who leans
over as she digs in the ground. She has tilled the ground her
whole life, but only thistles grow at her feet, crowding out any
useful crops. Behind the old crone is a soldier, in a typical World
War I German artillery uniform. He stands guard with his gun,
but his attention is not on Death; his gaze is directed enviously
at the young lovers. The only figure who acknowledges Death
is the blind, legless beggar, perhaps a reference to Dix’s earlier
paintings of war cripples. The beggar’s dog, his only companion
in a world full of people otherwise distracted with their own
selfish pursuits (whether pleasurable or toilsome), recoils in
fear at Death’s arrival. The inevitable outcome of this scene is
that Death will take them all in one quick slash of his scythe.
Eva Karcher observes that the themes of Eros and
Death are present throughout Dix’s oeuvre. They are present
as early as 1911, in his prescribed, rather formulaic Flowers and
Decay (Stadtmuseum, Bautzen), where Dix paints a skull and
a vase of flowers on a windowsill. They are especially profuse
in Dix’s critical work from the twenties, in etchings on the
subject of the Lustmord, or “sex murder,” and in paintings such
as Unequal Couple (1925, Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart), where
he paints an older man and a younger, extremely voluptuous
woman in an awkward sexual embrace. These themes are

22 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
given allegorical significance in The Triumph of Death, with the
inclusion of the young lovers. And although the child in the
foreground is perhaps the result of the lovers’ activities, Death
will still prevail.
Perhaps more hopeful among Dix’s allegories is The
Temptation of St Anthony (1937, Zeppelin-museum Friedrichshafen)
(Figure 3). Interestingly, for having painted so many religiously
themed works, Dix did not subscribe to the Christian faith.
About Christianity he said, “I am not a Christian, because I can’t
and won’t keep the great essential commandment ‘Follow me’.” 27
In spite of this, Paul Westheim, on hearing of Dix’s allegorical
paintings, wrote in a letter to George Schmidt, Director of the
Kunstmuseum Basel, dated July 19 th , 1939,
In the last few weeks I’ve been told that Dix has
become a Catholic – out of protest, like many
intellectuals at this time in the Third Reich! He has
painted several St Christophers and, at the moment,
is painting a ‘Temptation of St Anthony’. In other
words, he’s now trying to get out of his system – in
a disguised form – in a temptation of St Anthony,
what he got rid of in his war painting. 28
However, Dix’s representation of St Anthony’s temptation
has less to do with his faith in Catholicism (or lack thereof)
and more to do with Dix’s uncompromising faith in the Old
Masters.
Here, as in his other allegories, Dix paints a theme
popularized during the Northern Renaissance. The theme
of St Anthony’s temptation was painted again and again by
27 Hartley and O’Brien Twohig, 202
28 Quoted in Hartley and O’Brien Twohig, 203

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 23
Hieronymus Bosch and others, but it is in Matthias Grünewald’s
depiction of the theme in the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16)
(Figure 4) that Dix found his most compelling visual influence. 29
His St Anthony is quite similar in appearance to Grünewald’s,
as are the monsters that tempt the Saint away from his sacred
focus. Dix represents St Anthony’s struggle with extreme
psychological and spiritual intensity, unlike Grünewald’s more
physically violent interpretation of the theme, where it almost
seems that St Anthony is kicking and screaming to get away
from his monstrous attackers. Here, however, Dix paints a
group of no less horrid, but perhaps slightly gentler demons,
intent on distracting the saint by their close proximity.
However, St Anthony does not look back; in his heavenward
gaze, he continues with his prayers and is granted a misty vision
of the head of the crucified Christ, with its real crown of thorns.
This ethereal vision acts as a strong counterpoint to the crucifix
towards which St Anthony was focused in his prayers.
The overall composition, however, has its main
prototype less in Grünewald’s picture and more in Dix’s earlier
The Seven Deadly Sins, with the figures moving forward from right
to left. 30 Another more iconographic element reminiscent of
Dix’s earlier painting is the inclusion of a lascivious woman;
only here the woman fully exposes her sexualized body from
beneath her garish candy-colored drapery. The composition is
also similar to The Triumph of Death, with its very German setting;
not the desert along the Nile, which would be in keeping with
the story of St Anthony, but a rocky outcropping, looking
out over Lake Constance in the distance. This adheres to the
Northern Renaissance tradition of placing Biblical and religious
subject matter within a contemporary context, but it also links
29 Hartley and O’Brien Twohig, 202
30 Ibid

24 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
the subject directly to Dix’s own experience, living in a sort of
exile on the shores of Lake Constance.
On a biographical level, Dix may have found correlation
between his own experience with “inner emigration” and the
struggles of St Anthony, the latter “having withdrawn to the
desert to live a life of prayer, poverty, and good works.” 31 Dix
could have given up painting altogether, or succumbed to
“temptation” and become a Nazi-approved artist. And although
not a Christian, Dix did have a certain pragmatic and personal
interest in religious themes and subject matter. Reflecting back
on his career in the 1960s, he said,
The idea for the Christian pictures was not hatched
in the studio. My own life gave me plenty of
opportunities to see the Passion acted out or
experience it myself. “Job,” “St. Christopher,” “The
Prodigal Son,” “St. Peter and the Cock That
Crowed” – it was not just a passing interest that
led me to those themes. They are all parables of my
own experience and that of humanity as a whole.
That is what prompted me to deal with them. But
apart from that, there is another thing that
fascinates me: the task of creating something new
out of subjects that have been done to death, of
renewing art in the same way that Christianity is
continually renewed. Christian motifs offer
complete artistic freedom. [. . .] Christian themes
are relevant to the present, as well as the past and
future: They have a timeless quality. 32
31 Ibid
32 Karcher, 1987, 81

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 25
So for Dix, Christian subjects did not necessarily appeal to him
on a spiritual basis, but on a more physical, experiential level.
Dix found a correlation between his own life and experience
and the stories of Christianity. He viewed Christian stories as
one would view classical mythology; that the parables have a
certain personal, but also universal appeal that transcends the
time and place in which they were created. And for Dix, it is
this historical transcendence that gives them their power as
subjects worthy of artistic merit.
More importantly, religious themes, although not allegorical
in their own right, served an allegorical function for Dix. As
stated above, Dix’s interest in religious themes had less to do
with any sense of religiosity on his part and more to do with the
nature of religious themes as allegories of the human condition.
The power of religious themes lies in their prescribed nature;
as is the case of allegory, meaning in Christian art is based on
accepted and conventional depictions of Biblical or Apocryphal
narratives. Their more universal acceptance allowed Dix to use
religious themes in an allegorical manner. Aside from recounting
a Biblical narrative, Dix was formulating social criticism in his
religious allegories.
Another of these Christian-themed works is Lot and
His Daughters (1939, Städtisches Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum,
Aachen) (Figure 5). Dix portrays the point in the Old Testament
tale when Lot’s daughters are making him drunk, so as to sleep
with him and preserve his line. Lot’s clothed daughter eagerly
gives him another glass of wine and exposes herself to him,
evidenced by her bare leg, while Lot appears to be well past
the point of refusing, naked, drunk, and helpless against his
daughter’s advances. His other daughter, nude and looking out
towards the viewer, seems almost overly eager to continue with
the incestuous act. She is yet another of Dix’s personifications

26 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
of Lust. Again the motif of sexual temptation appears in one of
Dix’s allegories, perhaps not only as a personification of Lust, but
as a critique of Nazism’s allure to the German public. The harsh
corporeality and sexualized demeanor of Lot’s daughters is very
similar to the image of Lust in The Seven Deadly Sins, as well as
the seductress in The Temptation of St Anthony. Lot’s drunkenness
can be viewed as a symbol of human frailty and weakness. In
this case, one can read Lot’s daughters as representations of
Nazism, and Lot as a German society “drunk” on the allure of
Nazi ideology, oblivious to its destructive nature.
Dix once again places the scene within a German
setting. In an almost prophetic depiction, the burning city
in the background is not Sodom, but Dresden, which would
burn due to Allied bombing in 1945. And although Dix would
not have known that Dreseden would actually be destroyed
in 1945, his burning Dresden serves as a metaphor for the
destruction of German culture by the Nazis, stemming from his
own experience in the city, of being forced out of the academy
and into artistic isolation. Dix’s warning is simple; if Germany
continues to treat its artists and culture in this way and is led
further astray by Nazism, destruction is indeed inevitable.
But another contradictory interpretation can be
forwarded regarding Dix’s depiction of the Lot narrative, one
that is more closely linked to Dix’s artistic experience. 33 In the
Biblical narrative, Lot’s daughters, in thinking that their father
and they were the only people who survived the destruction,
raped their father as a means to perpetuate their line. In this sense,
their incestual activity was blameless. They can possibly be
read in Dix’s painting as an attempt to preserve German culture
33 I thank Lisa Safford for raising the question of other interpretations
for this work, and her original ideas about formulating these
interpretations.

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 27
in the face of its destruction. Dix himself can be interpreted
as practicing artistic incest, by repainting traditional German
art in order to preserve it. Rather than seeking out “new forms
of expression,” Dix reworked the old ones, viewing himself as
heir to the German tradition, propagating that tradition via the
work of his artistic fathers. Representing a world grotesquely
turned upside-down, Dix in a sense, becomes Lot’s daughters,
blamelessly committing incest in order for German art to
survive. However implausible this interpretation might seem
given the prevalence and presumed meaning of the motif of the
lustful woman in his work, it does point to the possibility of
multiple levels of signification and meaning characteristic of
Dix’s veiled criticisms.
The use of bright lurid color in Lot and His Daughters is
similar to its use in The Temptation of St Anthony, but is all the
more garish. Eva Karcher sees Dix’s use of color in these works
as yet another level of criticism. She writes, “Dix’s distaste for
the megalomania of the period is reflected in the deliberately
overstated coloring with its strong hint of kitsch, the excessively
sentimental portrayal of the female figures, and the bombastic
depiction of the landscape, which is redolent of the operas of
Wagner.” 34 Therefore, Lot and His Daughters, and to a lesser
extent The Temptation of St Anthony do not only act as criticisms
of German society, but also wittily attack Nazi aesthetics. Paul
Westheim, who was in exile in Paris during World War II,
called Nazi art International Kitsch, describing it in Mendacious
Realism as a
Romantic flight into a pathos-filled, theatrical
world of illusion . . . the real salient of Hitlerian art.
. . . The fact that it is, albeit to an inconceivable
34 Karcher, 1987, 63

28 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
degree, tasteless, kitschy, academically dull and
meager in terms of craftsmanship is something it
has in common with the lower middle class and
philistine creations of producers of kitsch in all
countries. ... In this respect it is simply international
kitsch, the least national style that could ever
exist. 35
Dix not only used the style of Nazi art, but also threw Nazism’s
interest in historicized subjects back in its face. Rather than
representing a heroic theme in his own version of kitsch, Dix
chose to represent a tragic, destructive theme, alluding to the
destructive nature of Nazi cultural policy. In this sense, Dix’s
allegories critique a wide range of practices and institutions;
through their historicism, allegorical subject matter, and style,
Dix was able to take on a number of his chosen themes in these
works, producing multiple levels of meaning in his allegories.
Allegory as Exegesis
What, then, is the significance of Dix’s use of allegory as a
mode of representation? On a basic level, we can see that “Dix
was expressing his continued, albeit covert, opposition to the
Nazis’ corrupt allure,” as Linda McGreevy writes. 36 However,
to only accept this answer is to evade the critical importance of
allegory as a discursive practice that has value in its own right.
To truly understand the importance of Dix’s use of allegory
during the Third Reich, it is necessary to step away from a solely
historical and iconological approach, and consider allegory
through a theoretical lens. By briefly examining allegory’s place
within modernist aesthetics and artistic practice, we will see
35 Quoted in McGreevy, 2001, 382
36 McGreevy, 2001, 384

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 29
that Dix’s use of allegory plays an important role in his ongoing
skepticism towards modernism.
Prior to the emergence of Romanticism as an artistic
movement, allegory was a popular form of artistic practice.
From Giotto’s allegorical figures of the Virtues and Vices among
the frescoes of the Arena Chapel (1305-10) to the vanitas themes
of seventeenth century Dutch still-life painting and beyond,
allegory saw its profusion in the visual arts. However, with
the birth of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, the
distinction was made between the allegorical and the symbolic;
the symbolic represented by, in the words of Craig Owens, “the
work of art as pure presence.” 37 And although this idea “of the
art work as informed matter” had existed since antiquity and the
origins of aesthetics, the Romantics reinvigorated it, “[providing]
the basis for the philosophical condemnation of allegory.” 38
As Hans-Georg Gadamer points out, “the aesthetic contrast
between allegory and symbol—which seems self-evident to
us—is only the result of the philosophical development of the
last two centuries.” 39 The Romantics founded their aesthetics in
the notion of the symbolic, thereby relegating the allegorical to the
dustbin of historical naiveté. Goethe, as a prominent leader of
German Romanticism, was the first to elaborate the distinction
37 Owens, 324
38 Ibid
39 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by Garrett Barden
and John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982), 65. In pages
63-73, Gadamer discusses the distinction between symbol and allegory
and its origin in Romantic aesthetics. On page 65, Gadamer
gives the example of Winckelmann to show how the concepts
were used even as late as the eighteenth century. “It is clear that
Winckelmann, whose influence on the aesthetics and philosophy
of history of the time was very great, used both concepts synonymously
and the same is true of the whole of the aesthetic literature
of the eighteenth century.”

30 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
between symbol and allegory. His ideas influenced not only
A.W. Schlegel, Fredrich W.J. Schelling, and others in Germany,
but also Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and
Thomas Carlyle in England. 40 In his Werke, Goethe delineates
the difference between symbol and allegory:
1. Symbolism transforms appearance into an idea,
the idea into an image in such a way that the idea
remains always infinitely effective and unreachable
in the image and remains ineffable even if uttered in
all languages.
2. Allegory transforms appearance into a concept,
the concept into an image, but in such a way that
the concept can be grasped and can be had
completely as something delimited in the image
and can be expressed in it.
3. It is a big difference whether the poet looks for
the particular in the general or whether he sees the
general in the particular. The former produces
allegory, where the particular has validity only as
an example of the general; the latter, however, is
the actual nature of poetry; it expresses the
particular without thinking of the general or
without pointing at it. He who grasps this particular
vividly gets the general with it at the same time
without being aware of it, or only late. 41
40 Vance Bell, “Falling into Time: the Historicity of the Symbol,” in
Other Voices: the (e)Journal of Cultural Criticism (vol. 1, no. 1) (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 1997), http://www.othervoices.
org/vbell/symbol.html
41 Quoted in Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 31
Goethe’s categories grew out of his dissatisfaction with the
landscapes of Friedrich and others which he saw as becoming
allegorical. Joseph Leo Koerner writes that “what specifically
disturbed the 68-year-old Goethe about this new and young
Romantic brotherhood was the artificiality of its art, as well
as its tendency to conceive of content as somehow separable
from form.” It is from this separation that Goethe saw allegory
emerging, and so against it, “Goethe set the vision of a ‘fitting
unity of the spiritual meaning and sensual evocation’ wherein
‘true art celebrates its triumph.’” 42
For Goethe, the symbol represents in material
particularity a universal idea so that the two are intertwined
in an indissoluble unity; the apprehension of the form and the
idea become one. Allegory, on the other hand, separates the
form and the idea, where the form has significance only as a
representation of a general idea. The form points to the idea only
through representational convention. In this sense, the idea can
essentially be expressed on its own terms, without allegorical
representation; one can be exchanged for the other as long as
their arbitrary relationship is understood. An allegorical form
and the idea which it expresses bear an unnatural relationship
to one another, since this relationship is necessarily an external
one. The relationship between form and idea in the symbol,
however, is one of inwardness and essential significance. 43
The Romantic privileging of the symbol was inherited
without question by modernist aesthetics. As McGreevy writes,
“What Modernist art theory focused upon was a recurrence of
and Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1991),
88.
42 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape
(New Haven: Yale University, 1990), 139.
43 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 67.

32 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
the desire for [a] […] unity of form that necessitated a disregard
of subject matter as too topical and chaotic, a desire that gave rise
to universalized abstraction…” 44 Benedetto Croce, influential
to Expressionism for his belief that art is linked with intuition
rather than any physical, objective reality, wrote harshly about
the perceived weakness of allegory in his Guide to Aesthetics of
1913:
The insurmountable difficulties of allegory are well
known; so is its barren and anti artistic character
known and universally felt. Allegory is the extrinsic
union or the conventional and arbitrary
juxtaposition of two spiritual facts – a concept or
thought and an image – whereby it is posited that
this image must represent that concept. [. . .] For
given the juxtaposition of thought and image,
thought remains thought and image remains image,
there being no relation between them. So much so
that, whenever we contemplate the image, we
forget the concept without any loss, but, on the
contrary, to our gain; and whenever we think the
concept, we dispel, likewise to our advantage, the
superfluous and annoying image. 45
Croce’s emphasis on the duality of allegory, as opposed to the
implied unity of the symbolic, is similar to Goethe’s conception.
For Croce, allegory creates a duality that is antithetical to the
unity present in a, for lack of a better term, “true” work of
art. The idea of concept sublimates the image, and vice versa,
making each unnecessary for the comprehension of the other.
Furthermore, allegorical representations derive their meaning
44 McGreevy, 2001, 2
45 Benedetto Croce, “What is Art?”, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000, 2d ed.

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 33
from convention. And if there is anything that modernism – in
its progressive, originality-driven narrative – was opposed to, it
was convention of any sort.
However, even within the timeframe of modernism,
specifically in the context of World War I and its aftermath,
modernism’s linear quest for newness and originality was
being questioned. This skepticism is especially evident in Die
neue Sachlichkeit, as stated above, and its use of historical modes
of representation. Matthew Biro writes, “certain artists and
critics during the Weimar Republic experienced their time as
a moment of radical crisis and, in response, worked to produce
an ‘allegorical’ form of modernism: a mode of appropriationist
representational practice that attempted to identify the future
of the contemporary moment, the new world that was emerging
out of the old.” 46 The upheavals of World War I and its aftermath
brought about a sense of urgency, a renewed interest in social
and political engagement for German artists during the Weimar
Republic, and it is Otto Dix who exemplified this new concern
for having a critical eye, focused both forward and back. As
Peter Selz rightly puts it, “now in the daily postwar chaos, there
was no longer the need for visions.” 47 Utopian expressions were
no longer possible. The shift towards uncertainty in Europe
required a reevaluation of the utopianism, abstraction, and
introspection of modernism and its now seemingly disconnected
values. Again Selz writes, “Individuality was no longer held as
a sacrosanct value by many artists in the postwar period who
thought of themselves as social beings.” 48
It is at these moments of uncertainty and skepticism
46 Matthew Biro, “Allegorical Modernism: Carl Einstein on Otto
Dix,” in Art Criticism (vol. 15, no. 1) (Stony, Brook, NY: SUNY Stony
Brook, 2000), 46.
47 Selz, 79
48 Ibid, 83

34 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
throughout history that allegory comes into play as a viable form
of expression. Craig Owens observes, “Allegory first emerged
in response to a […] sense of estrangement from tradition;
throughout its history, it has functioned in the gap between a
present and a past which without allegorical reinterpretation,
might have remained foreclosed.” 49 Certainly World War I, the
period of the Weimar Republic, and especially the rise of Nazism
and World War II – when Dix painted his allegories – qualify
as examples of periods of historical flux, in the destructive gap
between a seemingly distant past, an almost hopeless present,
and an utterly uncertain future.
Owens’s ideas on allegory have their origins in the
theoretical writings of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) who,
according to Owens, is “the only twentieth-century critic
to treat the subject without prejudice, philosophically.” 50
Benjamin experienced the same social, political, and cultural
upheavals as Dix, and shared a similar worldview; one focused
on a skepticism towards modernism’s progressive aims. In his
“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin’s last work
before his suicide in 1940, 51 he presents his view of history in its
most essential form: “The concept of the historical progress of
mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression
through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept
of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the
concept of progress itself.” 52 Reacting to the upheavals of the
49 Owens, 315
50 Ibid, 316
51 Walter Benjamin, doubly condemned under Nazism as not only an
anti-fascist but a Jew, was forced to expatriate to Paris. While in
Paris, he worked on his unfinished Arcades Project. Hoping to escape
to America after the German occupation of France, Benjamin
committed suicide while being held-up by French authorities on
the Franco-Spanish border.
52 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Ger-

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 35
early twentieth century, Benjamin brought into question the
idea of linear historical time, favoring instead a constellational,
ruptured, deconstructed view of history, where the past presents
itself in heterogeneous fragments, of which it is the critic’s or
artist’s task to assemble them into meaningful, critical form.
For Benjamin, this critique must be allegorical in
nature; in other words, history is no longer viewed as linear
and progressive, but as, to again quote Biro, “material to be
appropriated – potentially useful but in no way universally
binding – in whichever ways and through whatever media the
politically engaged artist deemed appropriate.” 53 The material
of history is used by the artist or critic to develop a sort of
exegesis – an allegorical critique – which appropriates the nearly
forgotten for the purpose of informing, critiquing, and creating
dialogue with the present in an allegorical manner. By placing
them within the context of the present crisis, fragments of
history produce a dialectical, allegorical relationship to it.
Benjamin’s theory of allegory is presented most
extensively in his Origin of German Tragic Drama, written circa
1927. In this exceedingly abstruse text, Benjamin not only sets
out to reform the task of criticism, but to recover allegory and
aesthetics, which had “been subject to the tyranny of a usurper
who came to power in the chaos which followed in the wake of
Romanticism.” 54 This usurper is the Romantic preoccupation
with a notion of the ideal unity of form and content in the
symbolic. For Benjamin, “[t]he introduction of this distorted
conception of the symbol into aesthetics was a romantic and
destructive extravagance which preceded the desolation of
man 20 th Century Philosophy: The Frankfurt School (vol. 70, The German Library)
Ed. By Wolfgang Scheimacher, Trans. by Harry Zohn (New
York: Continuum, 2000), 77.
53 Biro, 2001, 153
54 Benjamin, OGTD, 159

36 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
modern art criticism.” 55
Through his analysis of German Baroque Mourning
plays, which had been long held in disdain as weak derivations
of Classical tragedy, he attempted to rescue allegory from
critical oblivion, and to show that “Allegory […] is not a playful
illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech
is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is.” 56 Drawing on
linguistics, Benjamin shows that allegory is not only as basic
and necessary a form of expression as speech or writing, but
that it is no more arbitrary as either in its relationship between
the sign and the concept. Benjamin also shows that allegory is
not simply an alternative, if not debased form of representation,
but that “the symbolic eventually becomes distorted into
the allegorical.” 57 One example Benjamin cites is Johann
Winckelmann’s discussion of the Classical Belvedere Torso.
Wincklemann, in his effort to analyze the symbolic power of the
torso actually performs an allegorized reading of it, analyzing
it “part by part and limb by limb.” 58 According to Benjamin,
in Winckelmann’s analysis, the torso’s “beauty as a symbol
evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. The
false appearance of totality is extinguished.” 59 Wincklemann’s
analysis of the torso furthermore dissolves its symbolic nature
by destroying the notion that the truly symbolic work of art
transcends conceptualization. 60
55 Ibid, 160
56 Ibid, 162
57 Ibid, 183
58 Ibid, 176
59 Ibid
60 Gail Day, “Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics” in
Oxford Art Journal (vol. 22, no.1) (Oxford: Oxford University, 1999),
109.

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 37
Benjamin saw in allegory the ability to express what the
Classical symbol could not, that is, “Everything about history
that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful,
unsuccessful […].” 61 The symbol’s preoccupation with beauty
and unity precluded the true nature of existence as conflict and
tension in the gap between concept and material, noumenal
and phenomenal, history and the present. Benjamin’s perfect
allegorical image for the course of human history is the
“death’s head.” “And although such a thing lacks all ‘symbolic’
freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity
– nevertheless, this is the form in which man’s subjection to
nature is most obvious […].” 62 Allegory’s ability to express
ruin, loss, and estrangement from the past makes it a powerful
form of expression; its outlook as a weakly redemptive form of
expression shows the true nature of the human condition under
the effects of unrelenting history. It represents a worldview
appropriate for modern times. As Biro writes, “[…] allegories
undermined all readings of history as a linear narrative and,
instead, promoted a rethinking of the relationship between past
and the future.” 63 In its dialectical tendency, allegory critiques
the present via the past, which is lost to modernity. Again Biro
observes, “By stopping narrative movement, and examining
actions from more than one socio-historical perspective,
allegories attempted to remind their readers of all that they had
lost through modern, rational ‘progress’.” 64 Specifically within
the context of the first half of the twentieth century, allegory
provided a mode of historical exegesis that modernism in its
amnesia could not.
61 Ibid, 166
62 Ibid
63 Biro, 2000, 51
64 Ibid

38 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Conclusion
By understanding the critical and theoretical
significance of allegory as a mode of expression, we can see that
Dix’s use of it was not only necessary due to Nazi repression,
but also served as the most powerful expressive tool for Dix to
critique his own moment of historical crisis. Barring all hope
for a Utopian future, Dix was left to resuscitate history and its
forms of representation, not in a vain hope for a return to the
values and ideals of the past, but to bring attention to what was
lost with modernity. And it is through allegory that Dix created
powerful visual statements about the upheavals of his time.
With the emergence of each new modernist movement
in art came a growing tendency to identify with the past solely
through its negation. In contrast to modernity’s drive to break
with the past, Dix expressed through allegory the desire to
remember and appropriate the past which modernity rejected.
With allegory history is no longer linear and teleological; it is a
collection of circulating fragments, to be used and appropriated
by the artist or critic for their purposes. Allegory exposes as
simple rhetoric the modernist pretense of a progressive break
with the past and instead provides a model of time not as linear
but as a loop; history, in this post-stratigraphic model, can be
repeated. The present now enters into a dialectical relationship
with the past, where history can potentially inform the crisis of
the present.
The power of allegory lies in its ability to draw attention
to a fragmented, ruined past through its appropriation of it, for
the purpose of critiquing the present. As Owens writes,
Allegorical Imagery is appropriated [emphasis mine]
imagery: The allegorist does not invent images but
confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 39
significant [emphasis mine], poses as its interpreter.
[. . .] He does not restore an original meaning that
may have been lost or obscured; allegory is not
hermeneutics. Rather, he adds another meaning to
the image. If he adds, however, he does so only to
replace […]. 65
Dix was not working with a sense of idyllic nostalgia for the
past. In his allegories, he shows us that death and destruction
mark the course of history. His allegories are by no means
optimistic; his worldview is similar to Benjamin’s in that both
show us the significance of allegory to represent the endless
destruction of humanity. If this implies a resignation on the
part of Dix, then so be it. It is through his acknowledgement
of our inevitable mortality despite our ever-growing hubris
that his commentary makes its most powerful point, not only
about his contemporary moment of crisis, but also about the
unchanging human condition of destruction.
Frequently Cited Sources
Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. by John
Osborne (London: Verso, 1998).
Hartley, Keith and Sarah O’Brien Twohig, “Catalogue Entries,” from
Otto Dix, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1992).
Karcher, Eva, Otto Dix (Cologne: Taschen, 2002).
McGreevy, Linda F, Bitter Witness: Otto Dix and the Great War (New York:
Peter Lang, 2001).
Owens, Craig, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,”
in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Ed. by
Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University, 1998), 315-328.
65 Owens, 317

40 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Argumentus Interruptus:
Inconclusiveness in
Coriolanus
Rob Goodman
Rob Goodman is an English and history teacher at a charter
school in Tucson, Arizona. Last year, he received his B.A. with
High Distinction in English from Duke University, where he
completed this work under the direction of Prof. Joe Porter. He
is looking for work as a speechwriter or graduate student. He
can be reached at goodman1@gmail.com
This is the strange death of Caius Martius Coriolanus:
He is hacked to death by a mob in an enemy town, some of the
citizens yelling, “Tear him to pieces!. . .Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!”
and some pleading, “Peace, ho! no outrage, peace! / The man is
noble, and his fame folds in / This orb o’th’earth” (V.vi.120-130).
Even at this last extremity, in Act V of a five-act play, Coriolanus
(referred to by the cognomen throughout this paper) is a walking
object of debate; the mob cannot kill him without argument,
and even those dead-set against him have a way of changing
their minds—his chief killer immediately repents, almost.
Coriolanus’s death is an unsatisfying conclusion because it leaves
the debate entirely unresolved. But in so doing, it is a fitting
end to an unsatisfying play. Indeed, if William Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus has a consistent theme, it is inconclusiveness: The
protagonist defies judgment, the plot accomplishes little, the
All Coriolanus citations are from The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Philip
Brockbank.

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 41
language confuses as often as it clarifies—it is a world of flux,
paradox, and uncertainty. I intend to examine how Shakespeare
creates that inconclusiveness; observe how different kinds of
inconclusiveness interact with and reinforce one another; and
speculate on Shakespeare’s reasons for using his formidable
resources in the service of such a strange play. In the end, we
should find that inconclusiveness is at the heart of Coriolanus’s
deep tragedy.
Inconclusiveness in Characterization
In his introduction to Christopher Marlowe’s plays,
J.B. Steane writes that “conflict in Tamburlaine takes a special
form, involving reactions and judgments” (Steane 17). Similarly,
conflict in Coriolanus is not just dramatic, but evaluative: running
in a vein beneath the play’s series of battles and political intrigues
is a single, insistent question about the protagonist’s character.
In fact, much of Coriolanus’s political tension is contained in
that one question: What do you think of this man? Valorous but
coldhearted, sustaining the state with his military exploits
but threatening it with his incivility, Coriolanus is a natural
target for conflicting reactions. And if the audience has severe
difficulty working out that tension, the play’s speakers fare no
better: for all the wealth of judgments offered on Coriolanus’s
character, no conventional wisdom, no certainty, emerges. It is
as if Shakespeare designed the question to resist an answer.
That Shakespeare wants the question at the forefront
of the audience’s mind is suggested by simple volume: again and
again, his characters, major and minor, offer their unvarnished
opinions of Coriolanus. These opinions go beyond appraisals
of specific actions: Rome and Rome’s enemies appear obsessed
with judging Coriolanus as a whole and with stating their
judgments directly. The evaluative theme is established early,

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as rioting plebeians shout, “[Proceed] against [Coriolanus]
first. He’s a very dog to the commonality” (I.i.26). The plebs
are out for corn, but their hunger is quickly displaced by
judgment, and their riot turns into a debate on the patrician.
Later in the scene, the tribunes of the people act similarly, as the
figure of Coriolanus eclipses not just the corn mutiny, but an
approaching war with the Volsces. As soon as they are alone on
stage, they turn from policy to the man himself: “Was ever man
so proud as is this Martius?” asks the tribune Sicinius. “Such a
nature, / Tickled with good success, disdains the shadow which
he treads on at noon” (I.i.251, 258-260). And only then does
he turn to the war. One scene into the play, Shakespeare has
already established the centrality of character-evaluation—it
is a political proxy, the litmus test of its time. More negative
judgments of Coriolanus are offered at II.i.1-19 and, of course, in
the banishment scene at III.iii, when the question of character
consumes the entire polity—valor is weighed against incivility,
and incivility proves heavier.
Thus, a whole philosophical debate is centered on one
man. But as Reuben A. Brower says, “There is another view, as
always in Coriolanus”; and those on the other side, the patricians,
also tend to define their identity in terms of their position on
the protagonist (Brower 371). The senators—those who are
“noble” and “best”—place their emphasis on valor and find in
Coriolanus something of a class archetype. It is fitting, then,
that Coriolanus defeats the Volsces almost single-handedly—in
so doing, he becomes victory incarnate. And in praising him, the
patricians can simultaneously celebrate their militaristic ethos
and their opposition to the plebs. This is the deeper meaning of
the consul Cominius’s post-battle encomium:

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 43
If I should tell thee o’er this thy day’s work,
Thou’t not believe thy deeds; but I’ll report it,
Where senators shall mingle tears with smiles,
Where great patricians shall attend, and shrug,
I’th’end admire; where ladies shall be frighted,
And, gladly quak’d, hear more; where the dull
tribunes,
That with the fusty plebeians hate thine honors,
Shall say against their hearts, “We thank the gods
Our Rome hath such a soldier.” (I.ix.1-9)
In the patrician formulation, the people and the tribunes are not
those who riot for corn or resist war or deprecate valor—they
are those who “hate [Coriolanus’s] honors.” Senator Menenius
is getting at the same point when he tells the tribunes, “Yet you
must be saying Martius is proud: who, in a cheap estimation,
is worth all your predecessors since Deucalion, though
peradventure some of the best of ‘em were hereditary hangmen”
(II.i.89-92). Menenius is not arguing facts: he chooses not
to deny the charge of pride, but rather to downplay it. He is
stating the patrician values and the patrician evaluation—valor
is the prime virtue—and he cannot help but insult the people
in the same breath. Like Cominius, and like the tribunes, he
reduces the class struggle to one man. With each of these
statements, Shakespeare increases the dramatic weight borne
by Coriolanus; but he also continually focuses our attention on
character-evaluation as a key to the whole play.
Coriolanus is a class-polarizer, and it is no surprise that
he evokes passionate disagreement from the Roman factions.
It is perhaps more interesting that he brings about the same
response even in parties outside the class struggle. Aufidius,
In Brockbank’s notes, “a gesture of incredulity.”

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the Volscian general, is obsessed with Coriolanus; and just as
intrastate politics are personal for the Roman senators and
tribunes, interstate warfare is personal for Aufidius:
My valour’s poisoned
With only suff’ring stain by him: for him
Shall fly out of itself. Nor sleep, nor sanctuary,
Being naked, sick; nor fane, nor Capitol,
The prayers of priests, nor times of sacrifice—
Embarquements all of fury—shall lift up
Their rotten privilege and custom ‘gainst
My hate to Martius. Where I find him, were it
At home, upon my brother’s guard, even there,
Against the hospitable canon, would I
Wash my fierce hand in’s heart. (I.x.17-27)
Maurice Hunt argues that, for Aufidius, the fixation on
Coriolanus is “as strong as the ties of patriotism” (Hunt 311).
Indeed, the speech is as haunted by an unseen Coriolanus—
in the form of “him” and “his”—as Aufidius’s mind must be.
Just as Coriolanus serves the plebeians as a stand-in for the
whole patrician class, he serves Aufidius as a stand-in for the
entire Roman state. After hearing Aufidius speak, one might
assume that the Volscian foreign policy is as subject to personal
resentments as it is to the demands of realpolitik.
Evaluations of Coriolanus even turn up where they
are irrelevant to the plot. At the opening of II.ii, two evidently
unaffiliated “Officers” enter the Capitol; their purpose is to
advance the plot by establishing that Coriolanus is expected to
win the consulship, but Shakespeare furnishes even them with
opinions:

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 45
First Off. [Coriolanus is] a brave fellow; but he’s
vengeance proud, and loves not the common
people.
Second Off. . . .For Coriolanus neither to care whether
they love or hate him manifests the true knowledge
he has in their disposition, and out of his noble
carelessness lets them plainly see’t.
First Off. . . .But he seeks their hate with greater
devotion than they can render it him, and leaves
nothing undone that may fully discover him their
opposite.
Second Off. He hath deserved worthily of his country.
. . (II.ii.5-24)
None of that has any bearing on the drama; the Officers exit
and are not heard from again. But when Roman and Volscian,
patrician and plebeian and none-of-the-above all have opinions
on Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s evaluative atmosphere is
complete.
But his framework is destabilized as soon as it is built. If
the play is crying out for opinions on Coriolanus, those opinions
prove eminently malleable and constantly uncertain. It would
be an oversimplification, then, to characterize the plebeians
as entirely anti-Coriolanus and the patricians as entirely pro-;
rather, the attitudes of each group, and of Aufidius besides, are
shifting, compromised, and subject to continual argument. We
saw argument among peers in the Officers’ dialogue, but it is
even more frequent with the plebeians. Even in the play’s first
scene, in the midst of a rabble set on Coriolanus’s blood, there
is dissent. Though the majority agree that Coriolanus is “chief
enemy to the people” and “a very dog to the commonality,”
one citizen steps forward to disagree, and his arguments are

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immediately taken up; the transition from mob to debating
society is somewhat jarring:
Second Cit. Consider you what services [Coriolanus]
has done for his country?
First Cit. Very well, and could be content to give him
good report for’t, but that he pays himself with
being proud.
Second Cit. Nay, but speak not maliciously.
First Cit. I say unto you, what he hath done famously,
he did it to that end. . . .
Second Cit. What he cannot help in his nature, you
account a vice in him. You must in no way say he is
covetous.
First Cit. If I must not, I need not be barren of
accusations. He hath faults, with surplus, to tire in
repetition. (I.i.30-45)
So in the very earliest lines of dialogue, Shakespeare has
signaled that argument, and uncertainty of opinion, will be a
dominant theme. We know from these lines that Coriolanus is
important—but whether for good or for ill, no decisive answer
is given. And the pattern of inconclusiveness persists.
Even when the plebs are essentially unified in their
opinion, there is no telling just what that opinion will be from
one moment to the next. At I.i, the plebs are largely ready to
kill Coriolanus. At II.i, when he is triumphantly returned from
battle, they fawn over him: “All tongues speak of him, and the
bleared sights / Are spectacled to see him. Your prattling nurse
/ Into a rapture lets her baby cry / While she chats him. The
kitchen malkin pins / Her richest lockram ‘bout her reechy neck,
/ Clamb’ring the walls to eye him” (II.i.203-208). At II.iii.154,

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 47
they appear ready to acclaim Coriolanus consul; but objections
to his rudeness emerge, and in some 50 lines, Brutus and
Sicinius have convinced the crowd to revoke their votes. By III.
iii, the plebs have come full circle, and they banish Coriolanus
by acclamation. At IV.vi, when Coriolanus has turned traitor
and is on the brink of sacking Rome with the Volscian army,
the citizens unanimously repent the banishment. And in the
final scene at Rome, V.v, the threat is removed, Coriolanus’s
mother Volumnia is celebrated for bringing peace, and
Coriolanus—almost parenthetically—is invited back. If one
were to ask, after all of this, what the plebeians actually think
of Coriolanus—there could be no clear answer.
Of course, Shakespeare is to some extent ridiculing
plebeian fickleness, just as he does in Julius Caesar. But there
is reason to think that he is doing more. The patricians have
their own fickleness: their private opinions of Coriolanus are
more compromised than the unalloyed praise they give him in
public. At III.ii, as they tutor him in retail politics, Volumnia
and the senators criticize his excess of pride; and though their
advice is friendly, their complaints essentially resemble the
tribunes’. “You are too absolute,” says Volumnia, and when her
son refuses to listen, she makes the criticism personal: “Do as
thou list. / Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’st it from me,
/ But owe thy pride thyself” (III.ii.39, 128-130). True, this has
something of the standard maternal guilt-trip to it; but at the
same time, Volumnia is admitting the substance of the tribunes’
charges, even while minimizing Coriolanus’s credit for his own
valor. This is much more nuanced than the public utterances of
Cominius and Menenius, and it adds another layer of confusion
to the mix. The patricians are similarly conflicted in their
response to Coriolanus’s attack with the Volsces on Rome.
Take Cominius’s immediate reaction:

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He is their god. He leads them like a thing
Made by some other deity than nature,
That shapes man better; and they follow him
Against us brats, with no less confidence
Than boys pursuing summer butterflies,
Or butchers killing flies. (IV.vi.91-96)
In those lines there is something of the old admiration—but
it is transmuted into awe, almost worship, and combined
with fear and self-loathing. Cominius’s speech calls to mind
something similar from Tamburlaine: “What God, or fiend, or
spirit of the earth, / Or monster turned to a manly shape. . . /
Whether from earth, or hell, or heaven he grow. . .” (II.vi.15-16,
23). In both speeches, the constant is uncertainty—Cominius’s
implication is that Coriolanus, like Tamburlaine, has passed
beyond comprehension. So it is true that the patricians’ attitude
toward Coriolanus wavers less than the plebeians’—but in its
eloquent, aristocratic way, it wavers nonetheless.
Finally, it is Aufidius who outdoes all the Romans—if
not in the frequency of his vacillation, then in its vehemence.
We have already seen the extremity of his hatred for Coriolanus
at play’s beginning. But when the banished Coriolanus enters
his house at Antium and offers to join forces, the about-face is
instantaneous and complete. Aufidius’s speech of welcome is
startling in its sudden intensity:
O Martius, Martius!. . .
Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke,
And scarr’d the moon with splinters. Here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 49
As hotly and as nobly with thy love
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,
I lov’d the maid I married; never man
Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars! (IV.
v.102, 107-119)
Hunt believes that the praise goes so far as to be nearly sexualized:
“The erotic overtones of Aufidius’s speech welcoming exiled
Coriolanus define the magnetism bonding former enemies.
. . .Aufidius’s comparison of his love for Coriolanus with that
felt for his wedded mistress on his bridal night disturbs most
modern audiences” (Hunt 312). Disturbing or not, the speech
shows us that not even Coriolanus’s enmities are certain: if we
thought that, however the Romans held him, we could always
measure Coriolanus by the opposition of the Volsces—we are
wrong. Aufidius is particularly subversive where he expresses
love with reference to the weapons of war, “my grained ash. .
.The anvil of my sword.” After his speech, not even peace and
war are clearly distinguishable.
But, two scenes later, Aufidius’s turn from love back to
calculating hatred is just as abrupt. Meeting with his Lieutenant,
Aufidius vaguely notes that Coriolanus “hath left undone, /
That which shall break his neck or hazard mine / Whene’er we
come to our account”—as if the Volscian is suddenly taking for
granted a final reckoning with his ally (IV.vii.24-26). Aufidius
then launches into a long speech half in praise and half in
criticism of Coriolanus, finally concluding, “When, Caius, Rome
is thine, / Thou art poor’st of all: then shortly thou art mine”

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(IV.vii.56-57). Aufidius now plans on relating to Coriolanus as
a Machiavellian rather than a brother-in-arms, but the reason
for the turn is left blank (not so in Shakespeare’s source—see
below). It has only taken a few days of successful campaigning
to turn Aufidius from the rapture of Scene V to the plotting of
Scene VII, and unless we are willing to credit him with Iagolike
duplicity and call the fulsome threshold speech an act, we
have to conclude that his opinion of Coriolanus is the same as
everyone else’s—it simply cannot stay put.
In subsequent scenes, Shakespeare allows Aufidius to
expand on his new mindset only slightly. In an Act V aside
after Coriolanus repents and abandons his attack on Rome,
he says, “I am glad thou hast set thy mercy and thy honour /
At difference in thee. Out of that I’ll work / Myself a former
fortune” (V.iii.200-203). Where Shakespeare conveys the
shock of Aufidius’s first turn through effusiveness, he conveys
the shock of his second turn through excessive brevity. And
even when, in Antium, Aufidius explains his new-old hatred in
somewhat more detail, his speech is still quite terse, lacking all
the emotive power of his first outburst:
Being banish’d. . .[Coriolanus] came unto my
hearth,
Presented to my knife his throat; I took him,
Made him joint-servant with me, gave him way
In all his own desires. . . .
At a few drops of women’s rheum, which are
As cheap as lies, he sold the blood and labour
Of our great action. Therefore shall he die,
And I’ll renew me in his fall. (V.vi.30-33, 46-49)
As an added twist, Aufidius refers to Coriolanus intimately, by the
praenomen, at the very moment of betrayal.

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 51
Not only is Aufidius prepared to kill Coriolanus (this time
not in open battle, but by subterfuge), his just-the-facts style
suggests a comprehensive change in attitude: whatever once
inspired love is now irrelevant.
One might argue, as Hunt does briefly, that Aufidius’s
changes of heart are less a series of about-faces and more a
consistent pattern of love-hate toward Coriolanus—in effect,
that Aufidius does not actually change at all. But however
true that may seem in retrospect, it is less likely to appear so
to an audience, which sees a violent succession of attitudes in
Aufidius and only has the luxury of psychoanalyzing him once
the play has ended. Moreover, at least one change in Aufidius
is unidirectional: that from the “heat” of his first speeches to
the “coldness” of his last. For whatever reason, events have
convinced him that it is acceptable to stab Coriolanus in the
back—something the Aufidius of Act I would never have
countenanced.
Thus, we have seen that no attitude toward Coriolanus
remains fixed; some gain in nuance, some jolt from one extreme
to another, but there is never consensus. The result of all these
swirling judgments is a mounting tension that begs for some
resolution at the play’s close, some confirmation that someone,
anyone, was right. Shakespeare could have given it to us—that
he does not tells us that Coriolanus’s profound inconclusiveness
is a deliberate choice. At V.vi, Aufidius has finally killed
Coriolanus, and he speaks briefly over the body. Instead of
resolving the play’s evaluative tension, Aufidius’s final words
take that tension to the furthest extreme:
My rage is gone,
And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.
Help, three o’th’chiefest soldiers. I’ll be one.

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Beat thou the drum that it speak mournfully;
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he
Hath widow’d and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.
Assist. (V.vi.146-153)
It is an eight-line bundle of contradictions. Aufidius is
immediately sorrowful after a fit of rage, though he does not
say why. (And was he really enraged to begin with, or simply
calculating?) We also see tension between Coriolanus’s
depredations against the Volscians and the “noble memory”
they grant him nonetheless. Even if we call Aufidius’s speech
standard chivalric praise of a vanquished enemy, the sheer
speed of the turnaround—murder to sorrow in an instant—is
unnerving. The sense of incompleteness and dislocation is
heightened by the fact that the last words come in a foreign
town—not in the Rome that had been so consumed with this
man—and by the speaker’s uncomfortable curtness: “Take him
up”; “I’ll be one”; “Assist.” If the speech has any message, it is
that a final, unified, God’s-eye-view judgment on Coriolanus is
impossible.
And Aufidius’s words are even more remarkable in the
context of Shakespeare’s usual mode of ending plays. Quite
often, the “victor,” or the new source of state authority, has
the opportunity to offer words over the notable corpses that
remain on stage. And quite often these words are a summation,
a final pronouncement on and a wrapping-up of the dead.
Embellished or opportunistic as they are, they are at least aimed
toward closure. Take Fortinbras’s speech over Hamlet:

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 53
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his
passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him. (V.ii.416-421)
However accurate Fortinbras’s sentiments, they are at least
unified: “Hamlet will be remembered so-and-so, and no other
way.” So are Cassio’s for the dead Othello: “This [suicide] did
I fear, but thought he had no weapon, / For he was great of
heart” (V.ii.358-359). Out of a hugely complex man—noble,
suspicious, emotive, courageous—Cassio chooses to isolate
one quality for his epitaph: his greatness of heart, his pride or
high-spiritedness. In the same vein are Antony’s and Octavius’s
words over Brutus:
Antony. This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world “This was a man!”
Octavius. According to his virtue let us use him,
With all respect and rites of burial. (V.v.68-77)
Antony may be dissembling, but at least there is one final
thought, one which much of the audience will be ready to
accept.
Coriolanus receives no such pat eulogy—in that
respect, Shakespeare is setting him apart from the other tragic

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heroes. Hamlet, Othello, and Brutus are all, of course, complex
men. But their complexity never keeps their successors from
summing up. Nor is their complexity so insistently called to
our attention. There is much more to Othello than the act of
evaluating Othello; in Coriolanus, as I have argued, evaluation is
the central act.
Aufidius’s last speech seems less like those above and
much more like Henry Bolingbroke’s at the conclusion of Richard
II—like Coriolanus, a play of political turmoil and fragmentation.
Henry has ordered the death of the deposed King Richard, but
when the executioner returns in hopes of a reward, Henry
responds thus: “They love not poison that do poison need, / Nor
do I thee: though I did wish him dead, / I hate the murderer, love
him murderèd.” Henry captures some of the contradictions we
also find in Coriolanus—the conflicts between the state and the
heart, and between necessary and desired courses of action.
Having vacillated over an entire play between hate and love for
Coriolanus, Aufidius finally cannot choose; both are true. And
if the final formulation is somewhat nonsensical, Shakespeare
could hardly have intended it otherwise.
How, then, has Shakespeare handled his evaluative
tension? He has shown us, early and often, just how central
judgments of Coriolanus are to the world of the play. They are
a political proxy, they reflect and drive the class struggle, they
control the foreign policy of Rome and Antium—and just as
importantly, no one can stop offering them. Having aggressively
focused us on character judgments, Shakespeare then
methodically makes those judgments contradictory, debatable,
shifting, and in all ways unfixed. And instead of resolving
the tension at play’s end, Shakespeare lets it remain—even
places it last in the audience’s mind. The result is a profound
frustration.

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 55
But our examination of characters’ reactions to
Coriolanus is only scratching the surface of the play’s
inconclusiveness. Indeed, Coriolanus is full of uncertain and
paradoxical characterization, especially in the case of the
protagonist. Like Aufidius’s final speech, Coriolanus is a walking
bundle of contradictions—and if many of those contradictions
go uncommented-on by other characters, they are no less real
to the audience. “The primary paradox of Coriolanus,” writes
Stanley D. McKenzie, “centers upon the title character; the
great military hero with his unbounded sense of personal pride
and absolute standards of unyielding honor proves twice to be
a traitor” (McKenzie 189). It is as if the overarching pattern
is designed to confuse audience response; and a host of smaller
paradoxes fail to make things any easier. Coriolanus’s valor is by
turns attractive and repulsive. If he is the nonpareil of warriors,
it is because he is “most certainly a mechanical engine of war,
a remorseless, flailing Talus. His family and friends make the
associations (I.iii.34-37; I.iv.56-61; Iii.158-61; II.ii.107-22; V.iv.18-
21) and intend them as flattery, but the cumulative effect is
to dehumanize Coriolanus and leave the audience appalled”
(McKenzie 190). Whether or not “appalled” is too strong a
term—and I have trouble believing that Coriolanus sustains such
an extreme reaction for long—McKenzie is right that the play
conflates praise and blame, just as Aufidius conflates peace and
war. Similarly, Coriolanus is praised for his “nobility,” a value
the audience may come to find distressing when it signifies a
“death-force,” indiscriminate destruction in battle (Knight
181).
I should note that I’m especially indebted to McKenzie’s article
for several of my main themes, as well as for pointing me in the
direction of many of my other sources.
Knight also notes I.iii.67: Volumnia describes how Coriolanus’s
son recently tore the wings off of a butterfly, and Valeria responds,

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“Man” and “boy” are two more concepts that exist in
uneasy tension, as we see in Coriolanus’s speech before his
murder at Antium; here he is responding to an insult from
Aufidius:
Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. “Boy”! False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, ‘tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it. “Boy”? (V.vi.112-117)
To Brower, this dying speech represents the central paradox of
Coriolanus’s self-conception. “In ‘Alone’ we recognize his cult
of independence. . . .But we hear also the opposite theme. . . .He
is in part behaving like a boy. . . .The single word recalls a long
history of boyish irresponsibility and lack of control” (Brower
371). So Coriolanus’s dependence is recalled to the audience
precisely when he is attempting to assert his independence—
after all, nothing is more boyish than loudly asserting one’s
manhood. One might add that Coriolanus is at his most
independent—measured in terms of his willingness to ignore
the consequences—when, outside Rome, he submits to his
mother.
With all of these conflicting values struggling for
primacy, it is no wonder that audience reaction to Coriolanus
is prone to Aufidian fluctuations. For Katherine Stockholder,
Coriolanus’s virtues and vices are inseparable—his pride is
the cost of his valor, or rather, both pride and valor emanate
from the same soldierly quality. But the result of this mixture
is equal parts tragedy and comedy: “Perhaps more emphatically
“Indeed, la, ‘tis a noble child” (emphasis added).

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 57
than for any other Shakespeare hero, Coriolanus’ limitations
and blindnesses cause both his greatness and his fall, but what
especially distinguishes this play. . .is that the hero’s limitations
and blindnesses are depicted in a form that permits them to
appear ridiculous as well as awesome” (Stockholder 228).
According to Stockholder, Coriolanus wavers continually
between the type of the miles gloriosus and a genuine tragic
hero, depending on context. When Coriolanus repeatedly
responds to the plebeians with “Hang ‘em!” he is loudmouthed
and ridiculous; when he rallies those same plebs in battle and
single-handedly captures Corioles, he is awesome. When
Coriolanus proves unable to function in peacetime society, he
is ridiculous; when he stoically accepts his banishment in IV.i,
he is again approaching tragic-hero stature. His last stand at
Antium, as noted by Brower, has in it something of both the
ridiculous and the awesome; it can certainly be played either
way, or with an attempt at both. In sum, “the play makes us see
Coriolanus alternately as a dwarfed and comic figure ignorant
to his context and, when the plebs and tribunes seem to deserve
all his scorn, as a colossus towering above them. This shifting
point of view, which explains the different presentation of
the plebs at different points in the play, keeps Coriolanus
simultaneously tragic hero and comic type” (Stockholder 235).
The audience’s difficulty in fixing Coriolanus in one mode or
the other is hardly helped by his lack of a full-length soliloquy
(Datta 97).
We have, then, paradox upon paradox; and the end
of all of them is to put the audience of Coriolanus in a situation
analogous to the that of the characters. It is a play that, with its
constant arguing, cries out for a judgment of its central figure
and then makes judgment impossible. In evaluating Coriolanus,
we are confronted with paradoxes of peace and war, praise and

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blame, nobility and ignobility, manhood and boyhood, comic
and tragic—and all are unresolved. Shakespeare simply hands
us inert opposition. The result is an evaluative paralysis, in
which the audience comes to resemble Aufidius: we can say that
Coriolanus is valorous and prideful and noble and destructive
and manly and boyish, but we cannot reduce the terms to one,
as Fortinbras and Cassio and Antony seem to do so easily.
Everything in Coriolanus begs for an evaluative conclusion;
everything in Coriolanus militates against a successful one. What
do we think of this man? We find ourselves, most likely, unable to
say.
Inconclusiveness in Plot
So Coriolanus is a play in which a great deal is said about the
protagonist, to little lasting effect; it is also a play in which
a great deal happens, to little lasting result. Just as much as
it is marked by inconclusiveness of evaluations, it is marked
by inconclusiveness of action—by which I mean that, after a
tumultuous play’s worth of happenings, Rome essentially finds
itself right back in the miserable position where it started.
McKenzie observes in Coriolanus a pattern of reversals
and circularity, one that he connects with the paradoxes in the
protagonist’s character. Little moves in a consistent direction,
and few events are free of contradiction:
Coriolanus betrays first Rome and then the
Volscians; Aufidius in turn betrays Coriolanus,
who dies with the cry of “traitor” ringing in his
ears. The fickle Roman plebeians admit it would
be monstrous not to make Coriolanus consul, but
within an hour of giving him their voices, they deny
him the position; after hounding him from Rome,

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 59
Figure 1: Otto Dix, The Seven Deadly Sins. 1933
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

60 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Figure 2: Otto Dix, The Triumph of Death. 1934-5
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Figure 3: Otto Dix, The Temptation of St Anthony. 1937
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Otto Dix’s Allegories from the Third Reich • 61
Figure 4: Matthias Grünewald, The Temptation of
St Anthony, from the Isenheim Altarpiece. 1512-16

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Figure 5: Otto Dix, Lot and His Daughters. 1939
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 63
they later disclaim responsibility for his banishment.
(McKenzie 191)
Similarly, McKenzie claims, the tribunes accuse Coriolanus of
flouting the law, put the law aside themselves in calling for his
execution without trial, successfully argue for his death, and
then reverse course in favor of banishment. The play’s state of
affairs, then, is in as constant a flux as its opinion of Coriolanus.
Eventually, the web of alliances, betrayals, and contradictory
affinities becomes too complex to manage; the audience lacks a
consistent focus of sympathy or even a fixed point of reference.
But though McKenzie is quite right in pointing out individual
contradictions and circularities, I believe his analysis can be
taken further.
The entire plot is circular: other than the death of
Coriolanus, there is not a single lasting change of import.
Coriolanus is banished; Coriolanus leads an army against Rome;
Coriolanus is moved to change his mind; Coriolanus is killed.
Rome and the Volsces are still in a state of war, and the Volsces
are no less powerful than they were at the play’s beginning.
There is still a grain shortage. The plebeians and patricians are
still at each others’ throats. Rome’s political settlement is still
unstable. Coriolanus makes a circle, away from and back to
Rome, and so does the plot; Coriolanus excepted, the status quo
at V.vi is identical to the status quo at I.i. Shakespeare could
have provided a more definitive ending, but again he chooses
not to; rather, he puts a potential ending—a new political
settlement between plebeians and patricians, resulting in the
creation of the tribunes—at the beginning.
And rather than hiding the inconclusiveness,
Shakespeare foregrounds it with a bitterly ironic V.v. News has
arrived that Volumnia has averted the sack of Rome, and the

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Roman ladies enter in a triumphal procession; a senator speaks
their praises:
Behold our patroness, the life of Rome!
Call all your tribes together, praise the gods,
And make triumphant fires. Strew flowers before
them;
Unshout the noise that banish’d Martius;
Repeal him with the welcome of his mother:
Cry, “Welcome, ladies, welcome!” (V.v.1-6)
This is our last view of Rome, and the triumph rings hollow.
The Romans celebrate the removal of a problem of their own
creation: if Coriolanus had not been banished, he would not
have attacked the city. Now that the attack is called off, they
welcome him back—little knowing that he is, at the very
moment, on the way to being butchered in Antium. And even
as the Romans celebrate their escape from the consequences
of their diseased political system, all of the system’s structural
flaws remain. It took the threat of collective extermination to
unify patricians and plebians. With that threat removed, we
have every reason to believe that the class war will resume
tomorrow, on yesterday’s terms. But the Romans seem capable
of nothing other than blind turmoil or blind celebration. It is
our last view of Rome, and Rome has learned nothing.
Nor should the removal of Coriolanus ultimately make
much difference. As we have seen, the polity proves incapable
of coming to a consensus on him—and with him, a consensus on
the martial ethic and the competing claims of valor and civility.
Rome is unable to make a coherent response to Coriolanus.
And should another Coriolanus come to the fore—and we
are primed to expect as much, both by a circular plot and by

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 65
a picture of a society built on military conquest—we have no
reason to believe that Rome will manage a coherent response
then, either. To put it crudely, five acts have passed and nothing
has happened.
This inconclusiveness of action is highlighted, and
perhaps symbolized, by a recurrent theme: inconclusiveness of
argument. It is not simply that Rome fails to reach a conclusion
in its debate; it is that no less than four arguments are physically
interrupted. At I.i, when the mob is disputing over the merits of
Coriolanus, the anti-Coriolanus side is cut off by “Shouts within.”
The citizens hear noise from the other side of the city and prepare
to rush off to storm the Capitol, when they are interrupted by
the entrance of Menenius, who takes the conversation in a new
direction. Further on in the scene, when Coriolanus is busily
insulting the plebs, the stage direction reads “Enter a Messenger
hastily”; the Messenger ends the conversation by declaring that
the Volsces are in arms and turning the topic to the coming war.
At II.i, an argument over Coriolanus between Menenius and the
tribunes is interrupted by the entrance of Volumnia, Virgilia,
and Valeria, who command Menenius’s attention (though he
may have been wrapping up with the tribunes at any rate). And
at II.ii, the argument between the Officers is stopped by the
entrance of a procession honoring Coriolanus; cut off, the First
Officer manages “No more of him; he’s a worthy man: make way,
they are coming” (II.ii.35-36).
Taken individually, any of these interruptions may
be seen as a coincidence, meant to simulate the bustle of city
life and move the action along. But taken collectively, four
interruptions of the same basic argument—Coriolanus versus
the plebs—suggest a deliberate pattern. And it is a pattern we
have seen before, one of impotence and paralysis. Rome cannot
form an opinion of Coriolanus; Rome cannot fix its political

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system; Rome cannot even properly conduct an argument.
The same debate repeatedly broached, cut off, and resumed by
different voices suggests a sort of tired stasis—one that, like
the plot, appears to move and in fact goes nowhere. With
each resumption of the argument, the tension mounts and the
hope for a conclusion grows; but as we have seen, the hope is
a false one, and the tension lasts. Coriolanus is a play without a
conclusion.
Inconclusiveness in Language
Shakespeare also designed Coriolanus’s language without a solid
foundation. Just as Coriolanus’s shifting persona and Rome’s
circular political events deprive the audience of a solid handhold,
the language of the play is intended to negate and confuse.
According to McKenzie, Shakespeare creates in Coriolanus “an
environment of all-pervasive mutability. . . .The rhetoric of
virtually every line in the play contributes to this uncertainty”
(McKenzie 193). Again, one or two instances of uncertaintycreating
rhetoric could be written off as coincidence; but when
several critics agree that Shakespeare is deploying a specific set
of image systems and rhetorical figures across the breadth of
the play, we are right to suspect something intentional and to
investigate the effect.
To begin, the play’s imagery is radically unfixed:
“Iterative imagery, which usually shapes and clarifies audience
responses in Shakespeare’s plays, is paradoxical in Coriolanus
and serves only to confuse; the three commonly analyzed images
of food, disease, and animals are associated so indiscriminately
in positive and negative contexts with the different characters
that they simply negate themselves” (McKenzie 193). Food
imagery, for instance, is applied to the state (in the fable of
the belly), the plebeians (“Go get you home, you fragments!”

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 67
or leftovers from a meal), those who shirk battle (if Volumnia
had a dozen sons, she would rather have “eleven die nobly
for their country than one voluptuously surfeit”), and mandevouring
war itself (Charney 143-157). Just as evaluations of
Coriolanus shift too often to settle decisively in the audience’s
mind, images flit from good to bad and back until they lose
their power to add evaluative meaning. Or, as Maurice Charney
puts it, Shakespeare’s desire to balance the claims of plebeians
and patricians means that he is obliged to divide favorable and
unfavorable images between both sides of the conflict (Charney
143). And as Matthew N. Proser has noticed, even images that
seem at first glance to be favorable can turn out to have ugly
connotations: Coriolanus calls himself an “eagle,” or a “lonely
dragon,” but without recognizing “that eagles and dragons. .
.are predatory creatures, which kill their prey, not for the sake
of honor, but because it is in their nature to kill” (Proser 144).
The images are as paradoxical as their speaker: meant solely for
self-praise, they come off more nuanced than intended, giving us
suggestions that Coriolanus would certainly deny were he given
the chance. On the whole, Shakespeare’s shifting image systems
contribute to his inconclusive characterization; it is difficult to
judge when we are stripped of judgmental language.
Shakespeare’s rhetorical figures serve much the same
purpose—confusion, instability, and awkward juxtaposition.
According to McKenzie, “Coriolanus reverberates with rhetorical
figures of contrast and irony.” These include oxymoronic
contrapositum, such as “valiant ignorance” (IV.vi.104) and
contentio, both overt—“You have deserv’d nobly of your country,
and you have not deserv’d nobly” (II.iii.88-89)—and in the
form of metaphors and similes: “Triton of the minnows” (III.
i.89), “crows to peck the eagles” (III.i.139), “When steel grows
soft as the parasite’s silk” (I.ix.45) (McKenzie 195). Judging

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from McKenzie’s sample, the dominant theme in Coriolanus’s
oxymorons is the juxtaposition of the great and the small, or
the strong and the week. One or two such juxtapositions may
simply create striking images. But when great and small are
yoked again and again, and the audience begins to expect the
yoking, the frame of reference is shaken—great and small begin
to lose their meaning. And that is no coincidence in a play in
which great and small, patrician and plebeian, are constantly,
uncomfortably, inconclusively yoked in the polity.
In my reading, then, oxymoron is a sort of metaphor for
the play’s action. According to Lawrence N. Danson, the figures
of metonymy and synecdoche fill a similar role: they are “figures
of fragmentation and usurpation—of parts representing the
whole and of the whole absorbing its parts—and. . .Coriolanus
itself is a play about the relationship of the individual to the
community, of the community to its constituent members,
and of the association of man with man, and of man with the
elements that compound him” (Danson 30). By Danson’s
reckoning, metonymy and synecdoche predominate in the
language of Coriolanus, and those figures come to shade the
play’s meaning: “Coriolanus is a world of ‘fragments’. . .populated
not by men but by parts of men.” A “great toe” speaks to a
crowd of “scabs” (I.i.154, 165), an “Amazonian chin” drives “The
bristled lips before him” (II.ii.89), and the tribunes become
“The tongues o’the’common mouth” (III.i.22) (Danson 30-31).
Metonymy and synecdoche convey the fragmentation of the
commonwealth, and they also recall a discomfiting aspect of the
play that we have already discussed. Judgments of Coriolanus
have difficultly achieving unity—that is, they consistently fail
to capture the whole man; and by the same token, metonymy
and synecdoche quite literally make the same failure. As
Danson puts it, they signify a (deliberate) failure to transcend:

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 69
“Both metonymy and synecdoche, the figures of contiguity,
are confined to ‘movement within a single world of discourse’.
. .while both metaphor and simile, the figures of comparison,
bring together worlds ordinarily not joined, performing the
work of fusion” (Danson 41). Largely as a result, many critics
find Coriolanus “uncomfortably narrow”; but figures of fission
are perfectly suited to a world of unfused judgments and
unreconciled paradoxes. Here as elsewhere, Shakespeare
chooses the language not purely to be beautiful, but first of all
to fit the play. Coriolanus is uncomfortable and uncertain, and so
are its words.
Departures from Plutarch
Thus far, I have taken pains to note where Shakespeare’s
deliberate authorial choices—in plotting, in emphasis,
and in language—create Coriolanus’s special atmosphere
of inconclusiveness. But to the objection that the story of
Coriolanus is taken from history and that the play’s atmosphere
simply derives from the uncertainty of “real life,” I can reply
that Shakespeare made several key changes to the historical
record—and that these changes all advance his artistic goal.
Shakespeare lifted the plot of Coriolanus from North’s translation
of Plutarch’s Lives, and play and history match up quite well.
But where Shakespeare takes liberties with Plutarch, it is most
often to the end of complicating the character of Coriolanus
and enhancing the uncertainty of his plot.
The first significant departure comes after the battle of
Corioles, when the consul Cominius publicly lauds Coriolanus
and proposes to reward him. Here is Plutarch’s rendering:
[Cominius] willed Martius, he should choose out of
all the horses they had taken of their enemies, and

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of all the goodes they had wonne (whereof there
was great store) tenne of every sorte which he liked
best....Besides this great honorable offer he had
made him, he gave him in testimonie that he had
wonne that daye the price of prowes above all
other, a goodly horse with a caparison, and all
furniture to him. . . .But Martius stepping forth,
tolde the Consul, he most thanckefully accepted
the gifte of his horse, and was a glad man besides,
that his service had deserved his generals
commendation: and as for his other offer, which
was rather a mercenary reward, then an honorable
recompense, he would none of it, but was contented
to have his equall parte with other souldiers.
(Plutarch 325-326).
Plutarch’s Coriolanus graciously declines his general’s offer,
and nothing more is made of it. Shakespeare, by contrast, aims
for a more complex effect. Coriolanus starts in humility and
ends in petulance, and by the time he is through declining the
gifts, he has insulted the entire army. A cheer and fanfare go up
in response to his original refusal, and then he bursts out with
May these same instruments, which you profane,
Never sound more! When drums and trumpets
shall
I’th’field prove flatterers, let courts and cities be
Made all of false-fac’d soothing!. . .
No more, I say! (I.ix.41-44, 46)
In making Coriolanus fundamentally unlikable at his moment
of greatest victory, Shakespeare is asserting that his valor

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 71
and pride are inseparable. As G. Wilson Knight puts it,
“Coriolanus’s fault lies in pursuing honour as an end in itself.
He does not even like praise and thanks. This, too, is a kind of
pride. . . .Partly, perhaps, because he knows his deeds are not
done for Rome. . .and, partly, because the giving and receiving of
praises is a kind of payment, a leveling of differences, a mingling
with inferior beings” (Knight 168-169). Coriolanus is certainly
a proud warrior in Plutarch, but this special brand of petulance,
this arrogant self-sufficiency, is Shakespeare’s invention, and it
above all makes Coriolanus’s virtues difficult for both characters
and audience to acknowledge.
Shakespeare’s next deviation also casts Coriolanus in a
poor light, this time vis-à-vis the tribunes. In Plutarch, Brutus
and Sicinius take the greater share of the blame for Rome’s
civic unrest: “Now when this warre [against the Volsces] was
ended, the flatterers of the people beganne to sturre up sedition
againe, without any newe occasion, or just matter offered of
complaint” (Plutarch 328). Here, the tribunes stir up sedition
because stirring up sedition is what seditious tribunes do. In
Shakespeare, the blame is shared more equally: Coriolanus’s
mishandling of his election to the consulship sets off the chain
reaction of social unrest, in which each side overreacts to the
other. In his account the tribunes are still unscrupulous; but
the broader implication is that Rome’s whole political system
is broken and that Coriolanus’s arrogance cannot be sustained.
In the ensuing dispute, Plutarch’s Coriolanus, if proud,
irritable, and reactionary, still has his reason intact. Rather
than gratuitously insulting the plebs, this Coriolanus rises in
the Senate and makes a reasonable case against concessions on
corn prices:
Therefore sayed he, they that gave counsel, and
persuaded that the corne should be geven out to

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the common people gratis, as they used to doe in
cities of Græce, where the people had more absolute
power: dyd but only nourishe their disobedience,
which would breake out in the end, to the utter
ruine and overthrow of the whole state. (Plutarch
334-335)
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus does make a similar argument, but it
is lost in a hail of class-warfare slurs; take, among any number
of instances, his very first speech:
He that will give good words to thee, will flatter
Beneath abhorring. What would you have, you
curs,
That like not peace or war? The one affrights you,
The other makes you proud. (I.i.166-169)
In Plutarch, Coriolanus shows a statesmanlike concern for the
body politic; in Shakespeare, he is simply a bigot.
Shakespeare’s departures also extend to the judgments
of Coriolanus we discussed at length above. Recall that
Aufidius’s decision to betray Coriolanus is baffling in its
unexplained suddenness; it demolishes the possibility of
On the other hand, Shakespeare also enhances the distastefulness
of the plebians. His proles never show the self-restraint or eloquence
of Plutarch’s when, say, they evacuate the city to demand
fair representation: “The poore common people. . .all forsooke the
cittie. . .offering no creature any hurte or violence, or making any
shewe of actual rebellion: saving that they cried as they went up
and down, that all Italie through they should finde aire, water, and
ground to bury them in” (Plutarch 319). Shakespeare’s emphasis
on plebian fickleness and violence makes Coriolanus’s bigotry
more understandable—though his parties’ extremism also heightens
a sense of social breakdown.

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 73
fixed character-evaluation, if it wasn’t demolished already. In
Plutarch, Aufidius’s second change of heart is much betterexplained
and thus much less dramatic:
Among [the Volsces that most envied Coriolanus,
Aufidius] was chief: who though he had received
no private injurie or displeasure of Martius, yet the
common faulte and imperfection of mans nature
wrought in him, and it grieved him to see his owne
reputation bleamished, through Martius great fame
and honour, and so him selfe to be less esteemed of
the Volsces, then he was before. (Plutarch 354-
355)
As the narration notes, envy is in the natural course of events,
and one could easily imagine an envious Aufidius reasserting his
superiority by stabbing his rival in the back. The possibility of
envy as a motive is broached in Shakespeare, but never spelled
out so clearly. In denying Aufidius such an obvious motive,
Shakespeare is effectively making his play more opaque, thereby
contributing to its mood of uncertainty.
Finally, Shakespeare omits Plutarch’s epilogue, which
brings to a close the struggle of the Romans and Volsces:
Now Martius being dead, the whole state of the
Volsces hartely wished him alive again. . . .The
Romaines overcame them in battell, in which Tullus
[Aufidius] was slaine in the field, and the flower of
all their force was put to the sworde: so that they
were compelled to accept most shamefull conditions
of peace, in yelding them selves subject unto the
conquerors, and promising to be obedient at their
commandement. (Plutarch 368)

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So in the end, the Romans, for all their internal struggles,
emerge as victors, well on their way to dominion over Italy.
By choosing to end immediately with the death of Coriolanus,
Shakespeare achieves a completely different mood. As I argue
above, the circular plot is intact, and the Romans and Volsces
remain locked in what appears to be perpetual enmity. The
omission of the epilogue means that nothing is learned, gained,
or resolved—the whole story is essentially meaningless. Or,
at least, fully disgreeable in its return to an uncomfortable,
unstable status quo. Had Shakespeare wanted a satisfying
play, he would have held to Plutarch’s largely sympathetic
Coriolanus and largely tidy ending. He evidently did not want
a satisfying play.
Shakespeare’s Purpose
So we have seen Shakespeare using every tool at his disposal
to make Coriolanus as unsatisfying as possible. The obvious
question remains—Why? I can offer two speculations, one
political and one artistic.
McKenzie finds Coriolanus a primer on “the unsettling
realities of Machiavellian politics in a disordered world”
(McKenzie 201). Indeed, much of the play’s discomfort comes
from its pervasive sense of tumult, its ambiguities in character,
plot, and language preventing the reader from latching on to
anything amidst the chaos. In this respect, Coriolanus can be read
as a testament to deep-seated political cynicism or as a warning
Granted, the Rome of Coriolanus is on the way to great success—
imperial domination, no less—and Shakespeare’s audience was
surely aware of the fact. But it is also significant that the playwright
never draws our attention to it. He deliberately highlights
the city’s political instability and turmoil, giving us a Rome that
seems to do nothing but squabble internally and fight inconclusive
local wars. The Rome of Coriolanus hardly looks like the future
capital of an empire.

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 75
against imitating the Roman model of glorified militarism
and ossified class-hatred. Either reading can be justified with
reference to contemporary political events, as the reign of
King James, with its growing absolutism and corruption, was
proving unpalatable to many British subjects. If Coriolanus
were in fact an engagement with the monarchy, it would not
be alone: Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, another Roman dramatization
of political decay, dealt with the same themes. According to
James Loxley’s Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson:
[Sejanus closely] follows its main source, the Annals
of the Roman historian Tacitus, both a popular and
a contentious read in the early modern period. . .
.[Tacitus] offered an engagement with contemporary
politics. . .in the climate of incipient absolutism
fostered in many of the European monarchies at the
time. To dramatise Tacitus was to participate in a
Tacitism that was clearly identified as “vehicle for
discontent.” In painting a picture of a realm riven
by rumour and fear. . .where plotting and conspiracy
are the order of the day, Jonson produced a work
that might give the discontented matter off which
to feed. (57-58)
Of course, the parallel between Coriolanus and Sejanus is hardly
perfect; the former is set in a republic, for instance, and the latter
in imperial Rome. But Coriolanus does dramatize a realm riven
by plotting and conspiracy, and it does indict its protagonist’s
absolutist tendencies. Shakespeare was no propagandist, so
Coriolanus comes off as more enigma than villain; nonetheless,
a political reading would help explain the departures from
Plutarch that make Coriolanus less savory, as well as the play’s

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implicit criticism of Rome’s self-congratulation in the face of
continued civic illness. At any rate, a play so steeped in politics
can hardly avoid altogether contemporary associations in the
minds of its readers; so even if Coriolanus was not conceived
with a political message, the political implications cannot have
been entirely absent from Shakespeare’s mind.
But a political reading, while possible, is not sufficient;
it cannot explain the extreme care Shakespeare puts into
making his play as inconclusive as possible. It would help us
to realize that, even if Stockholder is correct and Coriolanus
is only tragic by fits and starts, the world of Coriolanus is tragic
from start to finish. That is, the world of Coriolanus is one of
absolute flux: the plot is circular, nothing is redeemed, no
judgment or reaction stands for long. It is among Shakespeare’s
most meaningless worlds. And the play’s emptiness is central
to its tragedy: “A sense of loss. . .lies at the heart of tragedy,”
writes McKenzie; and what we lose in Coriolanus is fixity itself
(McKenzie 200). In this, Coriolanus is unique:
His other tragedies (whether placed in pagan or
Christian settings) all have at least some kind of
operable natural law of inherent value. Even in the
nihilistic world of King Lear, we are left with a sense
of the intrinsic worth of the bonds which Lear
violates, thus precipitating the tragedy. Only
Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s final tragedy, is devoid of
any absolutes whatsoever; in this respect it most
clearly resembles the “comic” Troilus and Cressida, a
similarly unpopular pagan-world play where
absolute ideals succumb to degenerative mutability.
. . .Coriolanus. . .leaves us in a moral vacuum.
(McKenzie 201-202)

Inconclusiveness in Coriolanus • 77
We should hardly be surprised, then, by Coriolanus’s historically
poor popular reception: it is practically designed to repel.
By the time he wrote Coriolanus, Shakespeare had
already produced the bulk of his great comedies and tragedies.
He was capable of pathos and uplift such as had never been
seen. But Coriolanus must have taken all his skill. It is a play
whose central figure is neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic,
or both, whose plot is an elaborate nothing, whose language
undermines judgment and certainty. In subverting so many
rules of the theater—someone must be likeable, something
significant has to change—Shakespeare has nearly given us an
un-play. And so Coriolanus is a significant achievement of both
conception and technique: of conception, because no one had
envisioned a tragic world so empty; and of technique, because
Shakespeare takes every measure to leave his audience deeply
and completely cold.

78 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Works Cited
Brower, Reuben A. Hero & Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic
Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Charney, Maurice. Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the
Drama. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Danson, Lawrence N. “Metonymy and Coriolanus.” Philological Quarterly.
52.1 (Jan. 1973): 30-42.
Datta, Pradip K. “The Paradox of Greatness and the Limits of Pragmatism
in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.” CLA Journal. 38.1 (Sep. 1994):
97-108.
Hunt, Maurice. “Violentst-Complementarity + Contrariety of Characters
in Shakespeare—The Double Warriors of Coriolanus.” Studies in
English Literature 1500-1900. 31.2 (Sep. 1991): 309-325.
Knight, G. Wilson. The Imperial Theme. London: Methuen & Co., 1931.
Loxley, James. The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson. London: Routledge,
2002.
Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine. In: The Complete Plays of Christopher
Marlowe. Ed. J.B. Steane. New York: Penguin, 1969.
McKenzie, Stanley D. “‘Unshout the noise that banish’d Martius:’
Structural Paradox and Dissembling in Coriolanus.” Shakespeare
Studies. 18 (1986): 189-204.
Plutarch. “Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus.” Thomas North, trans. In:
Coriolanus. Ed. Philip Brockbank. London: Methuen & Co., 1976
Proser, Matthew N. The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.
Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Ed. Philip Brockbank. London:
Methuen & Co., 1976.
Steane, J.B. “Introduction.” In: The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe.
Ed. J.B. Steane. New York: Penguin, 1969.
Stockholder, Katherine. “The Other Coriolanus.” PMLA. 85.2
(Mar. 1970): 228-236.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 79
Benjamin Rush and
the Redefinition of
Bicameralism
Ashvin Kamath
Ashvin Kamath is a fourth year undergraduate student from
Princeton University, where he will receive a B.A. in History
with a concentration in “War, Revolution, and the State.”
This paper resulted from an independent study with Prof.
Daniel Rodgers, who is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of
History at Princeton University. His current interests are
legal and jurisprudential history and he intends on attending
law school with the goal of becoming either a professor of
constitutional law or a constitutional historian.
Governmental institutions, such as the upper house
of bicameral legislatures, were questioned, re-considered,
and for some, re-invented during the American revolutionary
period. Considering the wide range of suffrage requirements
for both voters and members of the upper house, citizens in
each of the colonies had different, if not widely divergent,
conceptions of the senate and what that institution could have
represented in society. In the state of Pennsylvania, Benjamin
Rush engaged in debates regarding political theory through
both his public and private correspondence. Considering
republican virtue, the effects of democracy, and legislative
representation, Rush and his contemporaries debated political
ideas during a crucial time when they could more readily shape
the institutions around them. But Rush and his countrymen
were not free from their historical context; their personal

80 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
experiences with revolution and injustice shaped their
political views on governance. Not only influenced as citizens
living in a nation during and after rebellion, Pennsylvanians
also encountered internal state political revolution and social
unrest. Accordingly, Rush saw events unfold around him as
both a prominent Presbyterian physician from Philadelphia
and a moderate Whig leader in the movement for American
independence. But Rush also grappled with, as a result of his
personal friendships and position within society, the classical
origins of government. In order to better understand the ways
Rush perceived the political ideas around him, it is important
to examine this influence.
American constitutional theory, argues renowned
historian Gordon Wood, has its philosophical roots in the
mixed and balanced government of classical theory. Wood
portrayed John Adams, a close friend of Rush, as a figure
so engrossed in the science of politics that he was unable to
adapt to the new ways Americans were thinking about
their government. In A Defense of the Constitution, Adams
provided his countrymen with what he saw as the original
justifications for the structure of their federal government.
Adams saw the basic conflict of society as that between the
aristocracy and the people, or, in other words, the rich and
the poor. Consequently, for Adams, the perfect constitution
recognized and incorporated distinct social orders into its
structure. Under Adams’ interpretation of classical political
theory, the governmental forms of democracy, aristocracy,
and monarchy represented a distinct social order, and the
lasting and stable government had to maintain a tripartite
balance between them. Such balance would restrain the
oppressive tendencies of each social class and both maximize
the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of each order. In

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 81
this way, Adams stressed the differences between classical
republics and representative democracies. He distinguished
between the institution of the senate and democratic
assemblies by the way each derived its power. Thus the
senate or upper house, as it was understood from classical
political philosophy, derived its power by representing the
aristocracy in government. Yet Wood showed that by 1789,
Adams’ inability to assimilate the developments in American
political thought created a vast intellectual chasm between
Adams and his fellow countrymen who mostly rejected this
classical interpretation. However, the symbolic meaning and
practical purposes of the upper house were brought to the
forefront of political debates in Pennsylvania, between 1776
and 1790, precisely because this state’s government previously
had no such institution.
The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which brought
an end to the chartered Proprietary Government and its single
Assembly, retained a unicameral structure but established
stronger democratic traditions. The people themselves were
intended to check the legislature since the document created
a plural executive branch with no veto powers. Legislative
proceedings were made public, and laws were checked for
their constitutional consistency by the Council of Censors, a
body elected by the people from each county. The Council of
Censors, which met every seven years, was also the only body
with the power to call a convention to amend or replace the
Constitution. Given supremacy within the government, the
unicameral legislature represented a broader electorate than
the colonial Assembly. The Constitution of 1776, as shown
Wood, Gordon S. Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787. Chapel
Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1969,
565-592.

82 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
by historian J. Paul Selsam, was the product of an internal
state political revolution in which the Continental Congress
legitimized the overthrow of conservative and pacifistic
Quaker rule by previously disenfranchised radical Whig
leaders, urban artisans, western frontiersmen, and military
Associators. The Constitution of 1776 abolished all property
requirements for both the electorate and the elected in a move
that eliminated the permanent allocation of power among
the wealthier, more aristocratic Quakers. With proportional
representation of taxable inhabitants, the Constitution of 1776
endorsed the notion that even poor free men had the ability
to make virtuous decisions. As the culmination of long held
grievances and anti-aristocratic sentiments, the democratic
Constitution of 1776 endorsed both the egalitarian notion that
all freemen had an equal right to suffrage regardless of wealth
and property and the concept that social distinctions should
not be formalized into governmental structure. Predictably,
the Constitution of 1776 became the target of attacks by the
men whose influence it diluted or outright eliminated.
One such person was Dr. Benjamin Rush who, as
renown historian Eric Foner argued, was someone “whose
position [ against the Constitution of 1776 ] reflected … his
social position and personal associations.” One of America’s
founding fathers, Rush participated in both the state and
national politics. The established Philadelphia physician
was among the moderate Whigs of Pennsylvania in that he
supported independence from Britain but did not endorse
the political upheaval brought about by the Constitution of
Selsam, J. Paul. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776: A Study in Revolutionary
Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1936, 189.
Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976, 136.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 83
1776. Along with the other moderate Whigs who soon formed
the Republican Society, Rush was subsequently swept out of
power after the Constitution’s adoption. The Pennsylvanian
Republicans, including Rush, opposed the unicameral
legislature of Pennsylvania in favor of a bicameral structure.
Indebted to President Adams for political teachings as well
as his appointment as Treasurer of the U.S. Mint, Rush
struggled to introduce Pennsylvania to a more classical
theory of government from 1776 to 1790. In doing so, Rush
confronted those who drafted, supported, and maintained
the strongly democratic Constitution of 1776.
A significant figure in American revolutionary
history, Rush has been, at times, idealized by historians.
Rush was described by Lyman Butterfield, editor of Letters
of Benjamin Rush, as a visionary who sought to inject morals
into republicanism. Dagobert Runes, editor of The Selected
Writings of Benjamin Rush, wrote that Rush’s dedication
to political and social democracy was so strong that it
inevitably led him into conflict. To make these assertions,
however, would not only be an oversimplification to the
point of inaccuracy, but also neglectful of Rush’s skill as a
political rhetorician. Rush understood Pennsylvania’s class
consciousness limited the force with which he could express
his ideas and consequently adapted his classical political
theories. Moreover, Rush debated and wrote during a time
when mainstream American political thought was shifting
from its classical origins to its more modern, representative
Rush to John Adams, Feb. 12, 1790, Butterfield, L.H., ed., Letters
of Benjamin Rush: Volume I: 1761-1792. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press for the American Philosophical Society, 1951, 530.
Butterfield, lxix.
Runes, Dagobert D., ed., The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush. New
York: Philosophical Library, 1947, vi-vii.

84 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
form. Rush publicly defined republican virtue as civic
involvement and morality but privately associated it with
wealth. In this way, virtue, for Rush, occupied the space
originally allocated for the aristocracy in the classical theory
of mixed government. Though he occasionally resorted to
classical theoretical arguments, Rush redefined the purpose
of an upper house as a check on the unrestrained power of
the assembly with an argument that occluded the political
ambitions of the wealthier classes. Finally, in endorsing a
theory of balanced and representative government, Rush
supported a governmental structure that resembled classical
theory but was justified in its representation of the people. In
doing so, Rush and his fellow Republicans brought about a
symbolic victory but the loss of the senate’s classical meaning
in the process.
Disagreements over the 1776 Constitution, regarding
both its symbolic meaning and actual structure and function,
split the moderate and radical Whigs into a division codified
by the formation of loose political parties. On one side, the
Constitutional Society represented the radical Whigs who
had facilitated the overthrow of the Proprietary Government
and supported the Constitution of 1776. The power of this
group, which strongly defended the unicameral legislature,
reflected the relatively new politicization of the urban
artisans and western farmers who were struggling to
maintain their newfound influence. On the other side, the
Republican Society, which included Rush, represented the
moderate Whigs who were chiefly interested in American
independence from England and opposed the adoption of
the Constitution of 1776. Republicans bitterly contested the
unicameral legislature and worked for years to amend the
Foner, 134.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 85
Constitution to implement a bicameral structure. Lacking
numbers and strength, Republicans worked within the
political framework and never initiated conflict in order to
achieve their goals. Between 1776 and 1790, control of the
government was influenced by external factors such as the
influence of the Continental Congress, the fear of British
invasion, and the economic troubles exacerbated by war.
Though intimately related to power politics, the debate
between the two Whig factions involved questions of
governmental representation; the nature of society, virtue,
and wisdom; and ways to prevent tyranny. Naturally, the
terms of this discourse were affected both by philosophical
ideals, whether classically mixed government or political
egalitarianism, and by the domestic political climate.
Class consciousness intimately shaped the latter.
Tension had, at times, progressed to the point where violence
seemed possible even among the Whigs. Selsam stressed that
the long-term grievances and lack of political representation
under the former Proprietary Assembly had intensified class
rivalry and the sectional split even before the Constitution
of 1776. The internal strife was initially so bitter that the
radical Whigs’ hatred for the old ruling class was fiercer than
their hatred for the English. In 1776, military Associators
were addressed with egalitarian messages by their leaders. 10
These egalitarian sentiments, which exacerbated class
consciousness, continued under the radical government. For
example, during the economic troubles from 1778 to 1780,
the poorest classes blamed the wealthy for their worries
Brunhouse, Robert L. The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania. Harrisburg:
Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1942, viii.
Selsam, 214.
10 Foner, 129.

86 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
and attempted to use guns and clubs to drive Republicans
out of Philadelphia. 11 Likewise, Quakers feared mob
uprisings because their properties were, at times, targeted
for destruction during riots. 12 Republicans reacted to these
threats by gaining the protection of the Light Horse, the
city’s “silk-stocking brigade.” 13 These defensive precautions
were indicative of class tensions continually cemented by the
politicization of resentment.
Constitutionalists, for instance, attempted to
undermine Republican objectives by emphasizing their
opponents’ elitism. Constitutionalists were known to
remark that the Republicans opposed the Constitution of
1776 because, “they will not be governed by leather aprons.” 14
By charging that Republicans would not be governed by the
common classes, Constitutionalists used the pre-existing class
tension to inspire support for their group. Furthermore, they
attacked the Republican city charter movement by calling
it, “aristocratical.” 15 The radical Whigs’ choice of language
demonstrated their understanding of the devastating political
impact that attacks of elitism could evoke. Moreover, the
radical Constitutionalists threatened that “the better born may
be separated from the common countrymen” if the counterrevolutionary
Constitution of 1790 was implemented. 16 The
radicals used the fear of the crystallization of social class for
their political advantage. With Constitutionalist strategies
that were effective in mobilizing class tension, Republicans
had little public recourse but to limit their elitist reputation.
11 Brunhouse, 68.
12 Ibid., 70.
13 Ibid., 75.
14 Ibid., 20.
15 Ibid., 153.
16 Ibid., 223.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 87
Meanwhile, class conflict was accompanied by
increased private contempt for democratic institutions
on the part of the Republicans. Almost as soon as the
Constitution of 1776 was implemented, Rush himself feared
that it was “too much upon the democratical order, for
liberty is apt to degenerate into licentiousness as power is
to become arbitrary.” 17 Rush anticipated the degeneration of
legal and moral restraints. These fears were confirmed by the
bloodshed he witnessed. Rush concluded in 1779 that, due to
the Constitution of 1776, the state of Pennsylvania was not
led by a democracy, but instead, a “mobocracy.” 18 Rush later
expressed similar observations and sentiments within the
context of national politics. In On the Defects of the Confederation,
a pamphlet which endorsed the federal constitution, Rush
argued, “In our opposition to monarchy, we forgot that the
temple of tyranny has two doors. We bolted one of them by
proper restraints: but we left the other open, by neglecting
to guard against the effects of our own ignorance and
licentiousness.” 19 In presenting the dangers of licentiousness,
Rush suggested a form of balance, or restraint, to counteract
overly-democratic institutions. He believed that simple
democracy provided the materials for its own destruction. 20
Rush was unforgiving in his attacks because he saw a clear
remedy to their instability and immorality.
Publicly, the solution for Rush lay with the infusion
of virtue into government. Rush’s conception of virtue in a
republican society included morality and civic involvement.
“Virtue,” wrote Rush in 1786, “should in all cases be the
17 Rush to Anthony Wayne, Sept. 24, 1776, Butterfield, 114-115.
18 Rush to Charles Lee, Oct. 24, 1779, Butterfield, 243.
19 Runes, 26.
20 Ibid., 33.

88 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
offspring of principle.” 21 By stressing its conscious nature,
Rush argued that virtuous actions were not haphazard or
random. Instead, they had to be consistent with acceptable
community-based tenets since he saw a relationship
between responsibilities in republican government and
religious principles. He wrote to Adams, “Republican forms
of government are more calculated to promote Christianity
than monarchies. The precepts of the Gospel and the maxims
of republics in many instances agree with each other.” 22 This
shows that Rush saw a consonant relationship between
the fundamental precepts of Christianity and the virtue of
republican citizens. Furthermore, Rush publicly explained
that he saw a good republican as one who promotes virtue
and knowledge within the country. 23 Rush wrote, “Every man
in a republic is public property. His time and talents – his
youth – his manhood – his old age – nay more, life, all, belong
to his country.” 24 For Rush, the essential components of
republican virtue were conscious, diligent efforts to advance
public interest and morality, even when they contradicted
one’s private interests. It would have been challenging indeed,
given the social and political climate of the time, to find
Rush’s sense of virtue as public morality within the general
populace.
Rush doubted that all of Pennsylvania’s citizens
were capable of such virtue. Rush privately argued that
there were the internal, natural distinctions among the
people’s virtues and, consequently, their abilities to govern.
In his autobiography, Rush explained that men came in three
21 Rush to Thomas Percival, Oct. 26, 1786, Butterfield, 404.
22 Rush to John Adams, July 21, 1789, Butterfield, 523.
23 Runes, 30.
24 Ibid., 31.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 89
classes: savages, barbarians, and civilized men. 25 It is doubtful
these “savages” and “barbarians” were capable of meeting
Rush’s exacting standards of virtue. Rush expanded upon
this classification scheme by describing the various settlers
of Pennsylvania. For Rush, the first settlers were those most
likely to participate in a “licentious manner of living,” that
is, work towards their own private liberty, and fight against
government and laws in general. The second wave of settlers
would tolerate, but not facilitate, civil government by resisting
taxation. The final set of settlers were men of both property
and good character who paid their taxes, valued the law,
participated in schools and churches, and generally exhibited
a benevolent public spirit. 26 This letter clearly shows that
Rush saw internal distinctions within Pennsylvanian society
and recognized that some citizens were more virtuous and
better leaders than others. But as this quality was not equally
distributed within the population, the question becomes
where did Rush think he would find it.
Rush privately correlated virtue with wealth; he
seemingly never mentioned virtue or wisdom without
mentioning wealth or property. In 1774, Rush explained that
business and commerce drove merchants to become proindependence
and that “Our merchants are alive to sentiments
of liberty and public virtue.” 27 Wealthy merchants, for Rush,
seemed to engage in virtuous behavior, even if it was out
of self-interest. Furthermore, Rush wrote that under the
Constitution of 1776, the state “cannot be happy or united
under its present form of government. The wealth and the
25 Corner, George W., ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His
“Travels Through Life” together with his Commonplace Book for 1789-1813.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948, 71.
26 Rush to Thomas Percival, Oct. 26, 1786, Butterfield, 401-403.
27 Rush to Arthur Lee, May 4, 1774, Butterfield, 85.

90 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
sense of the state, together with a great majority of the people,
are in favor of some alterations in the Constitution.” 28 This
suggests that “sense” is closely associated with the wealthy
and distinct from the general populace. Similarly, Rush
wrote of the “Episcopalians, Quakers, Lutherans, Menonists,
and moderate Presbyterians” that “[t]hey are in general the
ancient inhabitants of the state and are distinguished for their
wealth, virtue, learning, and liberality of manners.” 29 Rush’s
political party, the Republican Society, was associated with
groups known for their wealth and aristocratic ways, such
as the Episcopalians and Quakers. Moreover, this private
letter implied these long-established groups in Pennsylvania
had both virtue and wealth in amounts far greater the
Constitutionalists and commoners did. Rush’s perception of
a close connection between virtue and wealth had important
political consequences.
Rush saw the need for representation of virtue
and wealth in government. As early as 1769, Rush argued
certain representatives “are naturally supposed to have more
property in the state, and therefore have a better right to give
it away for the purposes of government.” 30 It was important
to Rush that representatives who made certain kinds of
governmental decisions, such as those regarding taxation,
possessed property themselves. He was consequently upset
with the Constitution of 1776 and complained:
The Constitution [ of 1776 ] is wholly repugnant
to the principles of action in man, and has a
direct tendency to check the progress of genius
28 Rush to John Bayard, July 2, 1783, Butterfield, 303.
29 Rush to Charles Nisbet, Aug. 27, 1784, Butterfield, 336-337.
30 Rush to Catharine Macaulay, Jan. 18, 1769, Butterfield, 71.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 91
and virtue in human nature. It supposes perfect
equality, and an equal distribution of property,
wisdom and virtue, among the inhabitants of
the state. 31
According to Rush, not having a mechanism to discriminate
between those with and without virtue, the Constitution of
1776 limited human political advancement. In 1782, he argued
wealth was not fatal to liberty and that properly designed
republican governments could exist for centuries. 32 Rush
worked to implement this notion during the Pennsylvania
constitutional convention of 1789-1790. He argued, in the
words of historian Joseph Foster, that the “apportionment
of the national legislature should have been based upon
population and wealth.” 33 With the implementation of the
counter-revolutionary Constitution of 1790, Rush happily
informed Adams that power and wealth would no longer
be separated. 34 Rush had long valued the representation of
wealth and property in government. Even as early as 1768,
Rush felt emotional and reverent when he visited the House
of Lords, but felt upset and frustrated when he saw the House
of Commons. He blamed the latter for both the usurping of
royal powers and participating in colonial tyranny. 35 This
incident from his younger years demonstrated Rush’s notion
that those with wealth and property made better decisions
31 Runes, 55.
32 Rush to Nathanael Greene, Sept. 16, 1782, Butterfield, 285.
33 Foster, Joseph. “The Politics of Ideology: The Pennsylvania Constitutional
Convention of 1789-90.” Pennsylvania History: Quarterly
Journal of the Pennsylvania Historical Association. 59.2 (1992): 126-
127.
34 Rush to John Adams, Feb. 24, 1790, Butterfield, 532.
35 Rush to Ebenezer Hazard, Oct. 22, 1768, Butterfield, 67.

92 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
than those without wealth. From Rush’s perspective, bodies
that more closely resembled the people deserved more blame
for unjust or flawed policies. These views influenced the
way Rush saw the institution of the senate in bicameral
legislatures.
Before exploring the ways Rush understood legislative
structure, it is important to examine the assumptions of and
symbolic associations made by the proponents of unicameral
government. Foner explained that though everyone agreed
government needed representation and frequent elections,
there was little consensus on how actually to construct
effective government. 36 Issues of governmental representation
and legislative structure were intimately related to political
philosophy and class. In general unicameralists felt a
single legislative structure would create an undivided and
harmonious polity by emphasizing the interest of the people
while, a bicameral legislature would destroy American
harmony by representing distinct societal interests. 37 However,
this did not mean unicameralists did not fear the power of the
legislative body. After all, the radical Whigs constructed the
Constitution of 1776 so that the legislature would be limited
through mandatory public deliberations, weekly publication
of bills, annual elections, and term limits. An additional
body, the Council of Censors, would be elected by the
people in order to strike down unconstitutional laws every
seven years. 38 Essentially, unicameralists wanted the people
to act as a check on the legislature. Behind these structural
features lay an assumption that political ability was equally
36 Foner, 119.
37 Kruman, Marc W. Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution
Making in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University
of North Carolina Press, 1997, 148.
38 Kruman, 150.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 93
distributed within society. 39 Constitutionalist leader George
Bryan argued that men were free and equal in their ability
to see wisdom and that wealth did not give men qualities
such as virtue or wisdom. 40 To think otherwise, thought the
Constitutionalists, was to participate in elitism that was
offensive to the revolutionary spirit of the times. 41 These
Constitutionalist assumptions had significant consequences
in the way their proposals were initially perceived and later
co-opted.
The unicameral legislature came to symbolize the
dominance of the common classes in government. Tom Paine,
a supporter of Pennsylvanian unicameralism, took a stance
on an issue that was based upon the question of whether
common people could rule themselves. 42 Conservatives
subsequently denounced Paine because they did not believe,
as they thought he did, that an illiterate mechanic was
equally equipped to judge government. 43 By purporting that
a unicameral structure gave the uneducated masses a say
in government, these critics demonstrated the connection
between legislative structure and class rule. Joseph Foster
explained that, for Constitutionalists, the single legislative
body was central to their philosophy because it gave society’s
numerous interest groups equal weight and prevented any
one group from receiving special constitutional advantages. 44
In doing so, the unicameral structure also generated a sense of
39 Foster, Kristin. Moral Visions and Material Ambitions: Philadelphia
Struggles to Define a Republic, 1776-1836. Oxford: Lexington Books,
2004, 37.
40 Ibid., 30.
41 Ibid., 25.
42 Foner, 122.
43 Kruman, 120-122.
44 Joseph Foster, 124.

94 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
political equality that fueled resentment among the wealthier
members of society. As a consequence, Paine worked to assuage
their worries by telling the rich that the Constitution of 1776
was actually in their best interest. 45 However, the notion
that unicameralism diluted the influence of the wealthy was
important, not only because it frustrated the wealthier classes
but also because it shaped the ways bicameralists presented
their own arguments.
Rush himself argued that the Constitution of 1776
facilitated legislative tyranny by creating a single, unicameral
legislature with unrestrained power. In 1777, Rush complained
that the Constitution of 1776 produced, “A single legislature [
that ] is big with tyranny. [ … ] They will soon become like
the 3[0 Tyrants of] Athens. Absolute, unc[onditional power]
should belong only to God. It requires infinite wisdom
and goodness to direct it.” 46 Despite checks by the people,
the unicameral legislature of Pennsylvania, according to
Rush, lacked the virtue to resist tyrannous behavior. Rush
later publicly reiterated his qualms about giving supreme
legislative power in Pennsylvania to a single body of men. 47
The significance of absolute power came from what the
legislature was so swiftly able to accomplish. Rush argued
that under the 1776 Constitution, “the whole of our liberty
and property, and even our lives, may be taken from us, by
the hasty and passionate decision of a single Assembly.” 48
Giving absolute power to a single legislature, according to
Rush, allowed it to deprive the people of their rights and their
property swiftly and without contemplation. The masses,
45 Foner, 142.
46 Rush to Anthony Wayne, May 19, 1777, Butterfield, 148.
47 Runes, 57.
48 Ibid., 68.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 95
recently represented by the Constitutionalists, lay beneath
Rush’s frustration with the government’s structure.
This is seen from the way that Rush attacked the
novelty of the Constitution of 1776. In a public pamphlet,
Rush referred to this document when he argued:
No regard is paid in it to the ancient habit and
customs of the people of Pennsylvania in the
distribution of the supreme power of the state,
nor in the forms of business, or in the style of
the Constitution. The suddenness of the late
revolution, the attachment of a large body of the
people to the old Constitution of the state, and
the general principles of human nature made
an attention to ancient forms and prejudices a
matter of the utmost importance to this state in
the present controversy with Great Britain. Of
so much consequence did the wise Athenians
view the force of ancient habits and customs in
their laws and government, that they punished
all strangers with death who interfered in their
politics. They well knew the effects of novelty
upon the minds of the people, and that a more
fatal stab could not be given to the people and
safety of their state than by exposing its laws
and government to frequent or unnecessary
innovations. 49
By criticizing the “suddenness” of the political change in the
state, Rush revealed how much he detested the realignment
of power in the state’s political revolution. The passage
49 Runes, 55.

96 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
illustrates Rush’s tie to the “ancient habits” of Pennsylvania
which empowered a distinct set of interests. Furthermore,
Rush’s attack upon the “unnecessary innovations” of the
Constitution of 1776 presumably pointed to the Council of
Censors which helped his political opponents maintain
their power. Rush’s complaints about the Constitution of
1776 stemmed from his frustration with the re-allocation of
political power within the state.
Rush argued a bicameral legislature was the solution
that would address these problems. An upper house would
restrain the absolute power of the legislature by acting as a
check on its power. In 1776, Rush claimed that if there was
a “council in the new Constitution of Pennsylvania [ that ]
possessed a negative upon the proceedings of the assembly,
the government would have derived safety, wisdom, and
dignity from it.” 50 An upper house’s veto power would
apparently provide for better government. Furthermore, Rush
referred to the upper house of the bicameral legislature when
he wrote that, “Wisdom, learning, experience, with the most
extensive benevolence, the most unshaken firmness, and the
utmost elevation of soul, are all called into exercise by the
opposite and different duties of the different representations
of the people.” 51 Rush publicly argued that the upper house
also represented the people at large, rather than an elite,
aristocratic subsection. By emphasizing that the institution
derived its power from the people, Rush was free to make
riskier claims. He asserted that there were “opposite and
different duties” arising from “different representations of
the people,” even though he had come to accept the basic
unicameralist assumption of a single societal interest. In
50 Rush to Anthony Wayne, Sept. 24, 1776, Butterfield, 114-115.
51 Runes, 69.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 97
doing so, Rush cleverly maintaining the upper house’s
legitimacy while reasserting the presence of distinct interests
in society. Moreover, he argued bicameral government would
allow for the expression of qualities such as wisdom and “the
utmost elevation of soul.” Rush’s private correlation between
virtue and wealth suggests that he saw the upper house as
a representation of wealth acting as a check on the general
assembly.
Yet Rush publicly denied that the upper house would
represent and strengthen the power of the wealthy. In order
to silence objections to double representation, Rush argued
that under unicameral legislatures, poorer men were at risk
of having their power diluted. Dividing the legislature into
two houses would, according to Rush, divide the power of
the rich. Rush claimed that under the Constitution of 1776,
Pennsylvania’s government was not one of the poor but of the
rich. 52 By focusing on ways to strengthen the relative influence
of the poor over the rich, Rush worked to turn popular support
against the Constitutionalists. Furthermore, Rush argued
that mixing a council of the wise with a popular assembly
would cloud debate or lead to the regrettable situation
where the wise were outvoted. 53 But if wisdom was a quality
somehow related to wealth, as Rush privately believed, then
the argument he put forth publicly was disingenuous since
he would truly be working to maintain the influence of the
elite.
Rush’s manipulation of ideas, like virtue and wisdom,
is indicative of larger Republican incoherence and debate
on the issue. Historian Joseph Foster explained that during
the Pennsylvania constitutional convention of 1789-1790,
52 Ibid., 63.
53 Ibid., 64.

98 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Republicans debated the issue of the:
Senate and whether it should represent
population, wealth, or a political system that
established an exclusive group of senators elected
by an intermediary body of popularly-chosen
electors. The debate was not simply over form, but
in fact reflected two irreconcilable perceptions
of republicanism. On the one side stood the
traditional philosophy of mixed government; on
the other, an emerging ideology that challenged
previous assumptions over representation and
argued for a mixed government based on a more
inclusive democracy. This ideological clash
had significant political reverberations, deeply
dividing the majority party at the convention. 54
According to Joseph Foster, Republicans were divided on
the meaning of the upper house though they lent the body
their support. Some Republicans, like William Lewis who
emphasized the importance of wealth, property, and social
discrimination within government, connected the body with
its cousin from classical mixed government. 55 Others wanted
the senate’s legitimacy to come from the people. In light of
this debate, Rush worked to accommodate both Republican
factions. By alluding to the wisdom and virtue different
representations of the people would provide, Rush borrowed
from those who supported mixed government. By stressing
that institution’s legitimacy came from the people, Rush also
emphasized the upper house’s representative, democratic
54 Joseph Foster, 123.
55 Ibid., 139.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 99
nature. This debate over bicameralism indicated an important
conceptual transition in American political thought by
employing both the language of classical mixed government
and representative democracy.
Rush dealt with this transformation by arguing for
the implementation of balanced government. Detesting both
monarchical and legislative tyranny, Rush sought checks and
balances to restrain both. In a 1781 letter, Rush expressed his
contempt of monarchy in any form and his love of Republican
ideals. 56 Moreover, in a letter to John Adams from 1789, Rush
feared the adoption of aristocratic titles in America. 57 These
letters show Rush’s contempt for the crystallization of class
and monarchical rule. Rush also argued that the securities
of representation and inter-body checks provided effective
deterrents against abuse. 58 He suggested that instead of a
“self-balanced legislature,” a government of three branches
was the best. 59 Rush asserted the notion of balance in a letter
to Adams:
I repeat again that republicanism has never yet
had a fair trial in the world. It is now likely to be
tried in the United States. Had our government
been more completely balanced, that is, had the
President possessed more power, I believe it
would have realized all the wishes of the most
sanguine friends to republican liberty.
Licentiousness, factions, seditions, and rebellions
have not been restrained by monarchy even in
56 Rush to Horatio Gates, June 12, 1781, Butterfield, 263.
57 Rush to John Adams, June 4, 1789, Butterfield, 513.
58 Rush to David Ramsey, March or April 1788, Butterfield, 453-
455.
59 Rush to John Adams, Jan 22, 1789, Butterfield, 498.

100 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Great Britain. [ … ] The factions, seditions, and
rebellions of republics arise wholly from the want
of checks or balances and from a defect of equal
representation. The wisdom of modern times has
discovered and in part remedied these evils. We
may hope therefore that our republican forms of
government will be more safe and durable than
formerly. 60
Rush saw republicanism as an ideal that would lead to
political stability. He saw the importance of strengthening
the executive branch in a balanced government. A system
representative of the people and employing such “checks or
balances,” Rush argued, would restrain licentiousness and
maintain liberty. Unlike Adams, who supported classical
mixed government, Rush stressed the importance of
balanced government that was representative of the people in
general, rather than the distinct social orders. Yet Rush and
Adams seemed to have more in common than their language
implied.
Though he supported a balanced and representative
government, Rush worked to re-invent the notion of classical
mixed government. By advocating a structure resembling
classical theory, Rush retained its symbolic values, such as
the representation of social orders. In a public pamphlet, he
wrote:
It is one thing to understand the principles, and
another thing to understand the forms of
government. The former are simple; the latter are
difficult and complicated. There is the same
60 Rush to John Adams, July 21, 1789, Butterfield, 522.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 101
difference between principles and forms in all
other sciences. Who understood the principles
of mechanics and optics better than Sir Isaac
Newton? And yet Sir Isaac could not for his life
have made a watch or a microscope. Mr. Locke is
an oracle as to the principles, Harrington and
Montesquieu are oracles as to the forms of
government. 61
Rush tried to mask the symbolic meaning of the structure
of government with an argument about its complexity. The
forms of government, so it seemed, could be overwhelmingly
difficult to understand so that one might not recognize the
principles at work. Rush endorsed the views of two political
philosophers, Harrington and Montesquieu, who previously
laid the groundwork for classical mixed government, and he
persuaded others to accept the structure of mixed government,
even if they would not accept its classical justification.
Eventually, Pennsylvania did just that. With what
has been called the Counter-Revolution of 1790, the state
again used the momentum and influence of national politics,
as they had previously done with the revolutionary fervor of
1776, to replace its constitution. The debate over the Articles
of Confederation and the Federal Constitution led to a strong
Republican victory in state elections. Delegates, including
Rush, were sent to the ratifying convention in 1787. As the
federal constitution incorporated many structural features
long endorsed by Republicans, ratification was seen as not
only a huge Republican victory but also as an indication
that, as Brunhouse explained, “Times had changed. Men of
wealth, social prestige, and respectability were coming to the
61 Runes, 78.

102 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
front.” 62 The stage had been set for yet another internal state
political revolution. Aiming to replace the radical regime,
the Pennsylvanian constitutional convention of 1789-1790
produced the Constitution of 1790, which implemented a
structure resembling that of the federal government. The
Constitution of 1790 replaced the weak plural executive,
unicameral Assembly, and formerly subservient judiciary
with a bicameral legislature, a single executive with veto
power, and tenure and fixed salaries for judges with good
behavior. 63 Despite these victories, the political situation
was fundamentally different from pre-revolutionary times,
since the Republicans made no attempts to limit suffrage or
re-implement the property qualifications. The document reaffirmed
direct election of the governor and legislature based
upon the population. 64 Still, the Constitution of 1790 gave
the Republicans “a form of government under which they
could feel safe from the excesses which characterized the
State under the Radical regime.” 65 This new constitution, as
Kirsten Foster has argued, did not resolve the philosophical
meaning of republicanism and the revolution but only solved
the structural debate that plagued the state for fourteen
years. 66
The Constitution of 1790 was, after all, adopted in the
midst of ideological transformation. Kirsten Foster argued
that Republicans saw the document as one that reinforced
their notion of natural distinctions within society and social
hierarchy, but refrained from crystallizing them with artificial
62 Brunhouse, 221.
63 Ibid., 226.
64 Joseph Foster, 123.
65 Brunhouse, 227.
66 Kirsten Foster, 40.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 103
titles. 67 Though the counter-revolutionary 1790 Constitution
was debated “on the basis of aristocratic versus democratic
theories of government”, 68 the results were “a definite
movement away from both the ‘radical’ precepts of the 1776
Constitution and traditional Whig philosophy” in that they
found a consensus in grounding their constitution on popular
democracy. 69 A bitter defeat for both advocates of classical
mixed government and advocates of political egalitarianism,
the Constitution of 1790 did forge a compromise between
ideological extremes. Though symbolically a victory
for Republicans, the new constitution brought about a
fundamental redefinition of bicameralism within the state of
Pennsylvania. The Constitution of 1790 had abandoned the
senate’s classical definition as a body representative of the
aristocracy by granting the body with legitimacy derived
from the people.
By 1790 Pennsylvanians generally understood their
bicameral structure as one that balanced, restrained, and
checked an otherwise omnipotent legislature. 70 The upper
house no longer seemed to represent the wealthy aristocracy
since it, like the Assembly, derived its power from general
suffrage. Bicameral structure, originally found in classical
mixed government, was therefore reinterpreted with the
unicameralist assumption of an undivided, harmonious polity
with a single homogeneous interest. The Pennsylvanian
Republicans not only succeeded in implementing their
desired political model but did so in a time when class tensions
limited their discourse. By publicly stressing the importance
67 Kirsten Foster, 39-40.
68 Brunhouse, 226.
69 Joseph Foster, 138.
70 Kruman,145-148.

104 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
of checks and balances, republican virtue, and representation
of the people within government, Rush publicly justified the
structure of government from classical theory with distinctly
modern terms. In doing so, he found a way to give the
upper house of Pennsylvania both conservative and modern
interpretations.

Benjamin Rush and Bicameralism • 105
Primary Sources
Butterfield, L.H., ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush: Volume I: 1761-1792.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press for the American Philosophical
Society, 1951.
Corner, George W., ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His
“Travels Through Life” together with his Commonplace Book
for 1789-1813. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1948.
Runes, Dagobert D., ed., The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush.
New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.
Secondary Sources
Brunhouse, Robert L. The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania.
Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1942.
Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
Foster, Joseph. “The Politics of Ideology: The Pennsylvania Constitutional
Convention of 1789-90.” Pennsylvania History: Quarterly
Journal of the Pennsylvania Historical Association. 59.2
(1992): 122-143.
Foster, Kristin. Moral Visions and Material Ambitions: Philadelphia
Struggles to Define a Republic, 1776-1836. Oxford: Lexington
Books, 2004.
Kerber, Linda. “The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation.”
American Quarterly. 37.4 (1985): 474-495.
Kruman, Marc W. Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution
Making in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill,
North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Selsam, J. Paul. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776: A Study in
Revolutionary Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1936.
Wood, Gordon S. Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press,
1969.

106 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
On ‘the Artist’ in Modern
Society: A Reading of
Michel Foucault
Nicholas Richard Monnin
Nicholas Richard Monnin is a fourth year undergraduate student
from Bowling Green State University, where he will receive
a B.A. in Philosophy with a concentration in contemporary European
philosophy. His advisor for this work was Dr. Donald
Callen. He will begin his M.A. in Philosophy at the University
of Toledo in the fall and intends on obtaining a Ph.D. in continental
philosophy and with the goal of becoming a professor of
philosophy. He can be reached at nik_monnin@yahoo.com.
Introduction
Michel Foucault’s works expose the creation and
development of the various forms of subjectivity in Western
societies. In doing so, Foucault developed a theory of power
which attempts to show the emergence of these forms of
subjectivity as contingent on a series of complex power
relations. As power relations often appear to be convoluted
and polymorphous, understanding these relationships, for
Foucault, requires an inquiry into their historicity. Thus,
following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Foucault advances a
genealogy which attempts to elucidate the intricate network
of such power relations in Western societies. This genealogy
tries to show that the various modes of subjectification are the
critical component for the production and survival of the various
forms of truth that exist in Western societies. Consequently,

A Reading of Michel Foucault • 107
Foucault claims that “truth isn’t a reward of free spirits…nor the
privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves.
Truth is a thing of this world; it is produced only by virtue of
multiple forms of constraint.”
Foucault describes these forms of constraint as having
operated in a silent and insidious manner throughout the
history of Western society, but nonetheless as permeating the
bedrock of Western institutions. These claims have attracted
much criticism, such as that from Charles Taylor who, in
his essay Foucault on Freedom & Truth, argues that Foucault’s
conception of power is paradoxical in that for Foucault “power
can be understood only within a context; and this is the obverse
of the point that the contexts only in turn can be understood
in relation to the kind of power that constitutes them..” The
following criticism of Foucault will not be as adverse to the
Foucauldian notion of power as Taylor’s, but nonetheless
will argue that even if we grant that truths are in some sense
produced through such forms of constraint, there still exists a
local area of truth production which is not contingent on these
forms of constraint.
The key to this phenomenon of “restraintless-truth
production” is to be found in, what I will call ‘receptivity.’ The
details and implications of the phenomenon of receptivity in this
context will be explored later, but to preliminarily define the
term, let us take it to signify a mode of awareness by which one
is able to experience the world from perspectives that are not
determined by the homogenizing effects of power-relations, but
Foucault, Michel. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon,
1980, p. 131
Taylor, C. (2000). Foucault on Freedom and Truth. Political Theory,
12(2), p. 171
To use Foucauldian terminology, we can take “restraintless truth
production” to designate a “non-disciplinary form of power.”

108 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
rather are determined from the direct perception of phenomena.
With a developed sense of receptivity, the artist looks into the
world with eyes of a child, and exposes truths that mirror the
fundamental dynamics of life. Inasmuch as the artist is situated
within a tradition of art, a further problematization surfaces
within Foucault’s thesis that would seem to suggest that truths
can be produced without constraint not only on the level of the
individual, but perhaps even on the level of institutions. That
such a individual can grow out of the various institutions of art,
puts a great deal of pressure on the notion that truths can only
originate from constraint. I will claim that receptivity can only
occur outside of the Foucauldian framework of restraint. To be
sure, each institution possesses the capacity for the development
of “creative-receptivity” to a different degree, and perhaps there
are some institutions where these characteristics are nonexistent.
However, I will argue that many examples of creative
receptivity can play a fundamental role within institutions in
western societies. In this essay I will focus on exposing this
element as it exists in the institutions of the modern visual arts.
If such institutions could be revealed, first as having the status
of an institution and second as having this capability of assisting
the development of a non-coercive production of truth, then
Foucault, for reasons which will be explored later, seems to have
painted an inadequate picture of modernity. To consider this in
more detail, I will begin by articulating the various ways which
Foucault describes “power relations” as creating our notion of
subjectivity, after which I will move on to consider whether or
not his description of modernity is accurate, by contrasting it
with the various institutions of the modern visual arts.
Although in this essay I will focus on the visual arts, I would argue
that the scope of creative receptivity permeates many western
institutions from music, to philosophy.

A Reading of Michel Foucault • 109
One
The question of subjectivity for Foucault is first and
foremost a political question. Unlike the many philosophers
who have postulated an immutable essence, or soul, which
constitutes the ontological structure of an individual, Foucault
proposes subjectivity to be merely a social creation which
is designed to regulate the individual. By understanding
subjectivity as such, his philosophical objective shifts from
discovering what is true about the subject to exposing the
various ways by which truths about the self are produced. Thus
Foucault constructs a critical history, by which he attempts to
unmask “the different modes by which, in our culture, human
beings are made subjects.” Through this critical history, he
focuses primarily on three modes of objectification, which he
calls “the modes of inquiry which give themselves the status of
sciences,” “dividing practices,” and “the way a human being
turns him- or herself into a subject.” Let us use these three
modes of objectification as a point of departure to our goal of
understanding the relationship between “pastoral power” and
autonomy.
In his historical analysis of these three modes of
objectification, Foucault argues that a new form of power, which
originated and developed from Christian institutions over the
past few centuries, played an increasingly important role in the
objectification of the individual. This newly developed form
of power, which he terms “pastoral power,” coincides with
Foucault, Michel (1994). Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault
Volume 3. James D. Faubion (Ed.) New York, NY: The New Press.
p. 326
Ibid p. 56
Ibid p. 56
Ibid p. 56

110 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
the emergence of technologies of universal surveillance, and
has helped create a “disciplinary society.” Foucault has often
considered the model for this type of power to be exemplified
by Jeremy Benthamn’s invention of the Panopticon. Foucault
describes the Panopticon as:
A ring shaped building in the middle of which there
is a yard with a tower at the center. The ring is
divided into little cells that face the interior and
exterior alike. In each of these little cells there is,
depending on the purpose of the institution, a child
learning to write, a worker at work, a prisoner
correcting himself, a madman living in his madness.
In the central tower there is an observer. Since
each cell faces both the inside and the outside, the
observer’s gaze can traverse the whole cell; there is
no dimly lit space, so everything that the individual
does is exposed to the gaze of the observer who
watches through shuttered windows or spy holes
in such a way as to be able to see everything without
anyone being able to see him. 10
For Foucault, the link between individuals and
institutions is exemplified in this model. Equipped with a wide
array of technologies of subjection, a space is created within
the framework of institutions for the universal surveillance
of individuals, which serves as a homogenizing power and a
social corrective. By not knowing when this “gaze” is being
cast on them, each individual must continually examine their
behavior, in order to make certain that it complies with the
Ibid p. 57
10 Ibid. 58

A Reading of Michel Foucault • 111
expectations of “the observer.” Thus, the goal of this design
is to produce self-regulating individuals. This process of ‘selfexamination’
11 allows the individual to adjust his own behavior,
so that the coercive technologies of violence are not necessary.
In this regard, Foucault characterizes this new form of power in
opposition to the methods of coercion through violence, which
were used throughout the seventeenth century, and famously
described in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish.
Along with the development of this new model of
society, Foucault describes the emergence of a new form of
power, which he terms ‘pastoral power.’ Pastoral power,
which has its origins within Christian institutions, is seen as
a fundamentally different form of power from political power,
in that it brings forth new codes of ethics, along with newly
developed technologies for the preservation of those ethics. Of
this new form of power Foucault says, “[pastoral power] is a
form of power that looks after not just the whole community
but each individual member in particular, during his entire
life.” 12 In looking after the individual, which can be translated
as “ensuring the salvation of the individual,” 13 pastoral power
is thus linked with the emergence of the technologies of selfexamination
and confession. Through these technologies, the
11 Much of the time Foucault cites examples of such “self-examination”
as developing from the institutions of Christianity. In a lecture
entitled Christianity and Confession, Foucault claims, “…every
Christian has the duty to know who he is and what is happening
to him. He has to know the faults that may have been committed.
He has to know the temptations to which he is exposed. And
moreover, everyone in Christianity is obligated to say these things
to other people, to tell these things to other people, and hence, to
bear witness against himself.’ p. 169
12 Foucault, Michel. (1999). Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault. J.R.
Carrette (Ed.) New York: Routledge p.333
13 Ibid p. 333

112 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
individual explores his soul and reveals his innermost secrets to
the various authorities within his local network of the totalizing
power structure. Pastoral power is therefore not to be seen as
merely an active force within the institutions of Christianity,
but as permeating all institutions of western societies.
On this point, Charles Taylor paraphrases Foucault as
saying “there is no escape from power, for such systems of power
are coextensive with human society. We can only step from
one into another.” 14 One question that arises here concerns the
extent to which one can think and act outside of such complex
networks of surveillance and objectification. To be more
precise, it is a question of whether this new form of power has
gained enough force so as to permeate the consciousnesses of
individuals to the extent their thoughts and actions are merely
homogenous productions of it. Let us consider this in more
detail by examining a few conceptions of the artist.
Two
The institutions of modern art tend to differ from the
majority of Western institutions, in that unlike institutions
which are designed to ensure their own preservation, they
actively challenge their own limits. Through its various
movements (e.g. Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Abstract
Expressionism, etc.) modern art has called for a break from
traditional modes of expression by challenging the artist to think
and act discursively, while retaining an element of receptivity.
In other words, to think and act in a way that is not merely
reactionary to forms of oppression, but rather which takes
place outside of the games of oppression. For example, Paul
Klee, in a lecture given in 1924 entitled On Modern Art, claimed
14 Taylor, C. (2000). Foucault on Freedom and Truth. Political Theory,
12(2), p. 153

A Reading of Michel Foucault • 113
that “[the artist] neither serves nor rules – he transmits…his
position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own.
He is merely a channel.” 15 By neither “serving” nor “ruling” it
seems that the modern artist transcends, perhaps only for a
moment, the intricately woven power structures, as they exist
in western cultures. By designating the artist as a channel, Klee
seems to suggest to us that through the creative process, the
artist transmits both his unique perceptual/conceptual image
of the world and in turn the unique combination of elements
which comprise the artist’s subjectivity. This conception of the
modern artist challenges the Foucauldian thesis by defining the
artist as one who transcends power relations in order to create
a clear channel by which he can transmit. This inconsistent
with Foucault’s depiction of the reach of pastoral power, in
that it seems to downplay the difficulties that arise when one
attempts to transcend power relations, Moreover, it purports
that the modern artist has the possibility transmitting an
impression of reality by virtue of a receptivity that precludes
the omnipotence of ‘pastoral power.’
As Klee’s account of the modern artist depicts the
transcendence from these subjectifying power relations as an
act of neutrality, where one is neither serving nor ruling, many
theoreticians have depicted a complex struggle. One can find
such a formulation of ‘the artist’ in various places throughout
the history of philosophy, but perhaps most readily in the
works of Nietzsche. In the first speech in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
entitled On the Three Metamorphoses, Zarathustra tells how “the
spirit became a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion finally
a child.” 16 At the stage of the camel the spirit bears the weight
15 Herbert, R. (Ed.). (1964) Modern Artists on Modern Art: Ten Unabridged
Essays. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. p. 89
16 Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1978) Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None

114 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
of the world, and thus flees into the desert. One can take the
“weight of the world” to signify something akin to the effects
of power-relations as Foucault articulates them. In the next
metamorphosis the sprit becomes a lion, who will “conquer
his freedom and be master of his own desert.” 17 It is thus, that
the lion seeks to fight his last master, the great dragon named
“Thou shalt.” For the lion, this dragon signifies century old
values, which inhibit him from becoming who he is. Foucault
would seem to suggest that the spirit cannot advance beyond
the stage of the lion, as ‘the dragon’ has become far too large to
defeat. In any case, Nietzsche maintains that the spirit is able
to defeat the dragon, and when it does so, it transforms into a
child. In the words of Nietzsche:
The child is innocence and forgetting, a new
beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a sacred
“Yes.” For the game of creation, my brothers, a
sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own
will, and he who had been lost to the world now
conquers his own world. 18
This third and final metamorphosis culminates in something
akin to the characteristic of receptivity that I argue the artist
possesses. By seeing the world anew, the child is able to create
new values, and thus give meaning to his or her world outside
of the reign of the great dragon. Yet, throughout Foucault’s
writings one gets the feeling that modern man is stuck at the
stage of the lion, immobilized by the dominance of the great
and All. Walter Kaufmann (Tr.) Viking Penguin Inc. New York:
NY. p. 25
17 Ibid. 26
18 Ibid. 27

A Reading of Michel Foucault • 115
dragon. It is therefore difficult to understand him when he
makes claims such as “we have to promote new forms of
subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality
that has been imposed on us for several centuries.” 19 It seems
that where Nietzsche wants to slay the dragon, Foucault wants
to refuse it; and where Foucault wants to promote new forms of
individuality, Nietzsche wants to create them.
Although Klee and Nietzsche’s depiction of the
dynamics of creation are different 20 , they are congruent with
regard to their conceptions of receptivity. Both theories
suggest that when one accesses such receptivity, his awareness
of the world is not solely conditioned by social technologies,
but is rather a product of a fresh perspective. This conception
of receptivity may sound a bit awkward to some ears, as it may
seem that this faculty must necessarily involve an element of free
will. After all, one might argue, so long as the world operates
in deterministic ways, this notion of receptivity must be able to
be reduced to the mechanisms which caused the individual to
perceive the particular phenomena in a particular way, whether
they be biological, psychological, or as Foucault would like to
have it, social. Seen from this perspective, this conception of
receptivity, as being able to produce new visions of the world,
would seem to only be a mere illusion that would be impossible
for any human being to possess.
In response to such an objection, it could be said
that receptivity is not inconsistent with such deterministic
positions. Receptivity is a faculty by which an individual
19 Foucault, Michel (1994). Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault
Volume 3. James D. Faubion (Ed.) New York, NY: The New Press.
p. 336
20 In that Nietzsche’s model of expression can be said to depict
“active-expression”, whereas Klee’s model suggests “passiveexpression.”

116 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
becomes aware of phenomena in the world. For example, the
reader of this paper is probably not aware that in this moment
that he is breathing. Yet when it was mentioned, there was,
perhaps, a certain amount of attention focused on his breathing.
In this example, the individual is now receptive to his breath,
but it is important to note that his shift in consciousness can
still be reduced to physical, psychological, and biological
mechanisms. The important factor is that the receptivity that
was brought to the breathing does not seem to owe to any
social technologies of coercion. This awareness of the world, by
virtue of receptivity, falls outside of the mechanisms of society
and allows the individual to see phenomena in a way that is
more sensitive to the way that the world actually operates,
even though it may still be a subjective interpretation. To be
clear, possessing this faculty does not necessitate the autonomy
of the individual, for such an individual is always determined
by his biology/psychology. What possessing this faculty does
amount to, however, is seeing the world from a perspective
that is not socially determined. It is by virtue of a heightened
receptivity toward phenomena in the world, that one is able
to let the world unfold in front of one’s eyes without placing
the phenomena of his perception into socially constructed
categories of the mind while externalizing the phenomena
through creative expression.
Three
It might be argued that that these articulations of the
artist are romantic, in that they might seem to underemphasize
the facticity of the context in which the artist works, while
overemphasizing his potentialities. For example, Foucault
might have claimed that the development of receptivity within
the artist is not significant enough to liberate him from his

A Reading of Michel Foucault • 117
cell in the panopticon. It would be difficult to maintain that
receptivity has the capability of allowing the artist to think and
act in a completely autonomous manner, outside of any social
influence. Yet inasmuch as the development of receptivity
seems to be the sole precondition for the creation of new and
different values from those which subjugate individuals, the
value of receptivity is reconciled. It is in this manner that the
modern arts, as social institutions which seek the development
of receptivity, need to be considered as important resources
for understanding the world in which we live. That said, it
is important to understand the facticity of the context of the
artist in order to determine the extent to which his receptivity
is textured by the institutions of modern art. In examining
these facticities, I will focus on the extent to which the modern
visual arts can be considered as functioning as institutions.
If it is true that the modern visual arts cannot be considered
institutions, then the thrust of my argument would seriously
loose momentum, inasmuch as I try to show Foucault’s thesis
as limited by revealing a characteristic of certain institutions
which he has overlooked.
Four
According to the Institutional Theory of Art, as
developed by George Dickie, modern art not only functions
as an institution, but it is only by understanding it as an
institution that we can comprehend both the necessary and
sufficient conditions which provide the answer to the question
“what is art?” In his analysis of this institution, Dickie claims,
“the artworld consists of a bundle of systems: theater, painting,
sculpture, literature, music, and so on, each which furnishes
an institutional background for the conferring of the status

118 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
on objects within its domain.” 21 By establishing the existence
of art as an institution, Dickie proposes that “art” is merely
a status which has been conferred by some member of the
artworld. Dickie’s analysis of the ‘artworld’ brings to light the
various ways in which the artist does not act independently,
but rather works within an institutional framework which
places expectations on the artist.
For example, most artists today develop their
capabilities within the framework of modern education
systems, by getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. This degree,
among other things 22 , helps to prepare the artist to integrate
into the gallery system. The artist, in turn, must adapt to this
social integration and create works of art that are suitable to
the expectations of certain galleries, or the artist will simply
not thrive. This is only one example, among many that could
be cited, which sheds light on the institutional character of the
modern arts. In this regard, there seem to be some significant
parallels between Foucauldian institutions and the institutions
of modern art. That said, the institutions of modern art need to
be seen as fundamentally different from the Foucualdian notion
of institutions, in that the modern arts assist the development
of receptivity in the artist. By having a developed sense of
receptivity, the artist is able to create works of art, which are
not merely given shape by the expectation of others, but rather,
are given shape by the artist’s own unique interpretation of
phenomena.
This articulation of the institutional character of
modern art is similar to a formulation of the ancient Greek
21 Dickie, G. (1974). Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis.
London: Cornell Univerisity Press. p. 33
22 Such as the audition system of the performing arts, associations of
graphic artists, etc…

A Reading of Michel Foucault • 119
philosophy which Foucault gave in a lecture entitled On the
Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self. In this lecture Foucault
claims “the goal of Greek philosophy was to give the individual
the quality which permitted him to live differently, better, more
happily than other people.” 23 In short, Greek philosophy is to
be seen as an institution which aimed at the transformation of
the individual. Later in this lecture, this notion of an institution
is contrasted with a form of institution which Foucault sees as
the one which we encounter in our lives. These institutions,
as already discussed, are based on pastoral power; instead of
seeking a transformation in the individual, they are oriented
around the coercion of the individual. Understood in this way,
the institution of modern art strongly resembles the Greek
institutions of philosophy.
To be sure, there are instances throughout Foucault’s
writings which vaguely point towards the conditions of the
possibility of restraintless truth production. For example, near
the end of Two Lectures Foucault states:
If one wants to look for a non-disciplinary form of
power, or rather, to struggle against disciplines and
disciplinary power, it is not toward the ancient
right of sovereignty that one should turn, but
toward the possibility of a new form of right, one
which must indeed be anti-disciplinarian, but at
the same time liberated from the principle of
sovereignty. 24
23 Foucault, Michel. (1999). Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault. J.R.
Carrette (Ed.) New York: Routledge. p. 163
24 Foucault, Michel. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon,
1980, p. 108

120 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
Again, a similar instance can be found in a lecture entitled
Christianity and Confession where Foucault claims:
Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover
what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not
to discover a positive self or the positive foundation
of the self. Maybe our problem is now to discover
that the self is nothing else that the historical
correlation of the technology built into our history.
Maybe the problem is to change those
technologies. 25
Yet in regard to the possibility of truth being produced outside
of the mechanisms of power, some of the most revealing
moments in his writings can be found in the work of the
latter part of his life, 26 which are concerned, in part, with the
function of Ancient Greek philosophy. In that, the closest that
Foucault gets to accounting for the possibility of restraintless
truth production is when he points back to the institutions of
philosophy in Ancient Greece. It seems that although he was
certainly aware of the possibility of the truth production which
is given shape through ‘receptivity’, he had underemphasized
the real possibility for its existence in western societies today.
Conclusion
The goal of this effort was to bring to light a
characteristic of modernity which Foucault has left out of his
genealogy. By not accounting for the possibility of such “escape
routes” within modern institutions, Foucault’s critical history
25 Foucault, Michel. (1999). Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault. J.R.
Carrette (Ed.) New York: Routledge
26 In particular, see Foucault’s work throughout the late seventies
and the early eighties.

A Reading of Michel Foucault • 121
is in danger of being too selective. This compromises the aim
of his methodology in that a genealogy’s function is to reveal
the evolution of the illusions by which we live our lives while
taking heed not simply to propagate new ones. Inasmuch as
he conceived of his genealogy as a work of fiction, it is clear
that Foucault was not intending to create a universal history.
Nonetheless, to the extent that Foucault describes his work
as “a diagnosis of the present in which we live” we must ask
ourselves whether or not Foucault has misdiagnosed “the
present” by omitting such possibilities for the development
of a subjectivity that is different from those identities which
are created from homogenizing effects of power relations. I
do not mean that because Foucault has omitted an important
characteristic of western institutions from his historical
analysis, that the validity of the developments he unearths by
way of his genealogical account is seriously compromised. On
the contrary, Foucault’s genealogy seems to resonate in some
important ways with ‘the present.’ Yet, to the extent that he
omitted these potentialities from his genealogy, he can still
misdiagnosed “the present.” I am not claiming here to have
turned Foucault’s thesis on its head, as much as I am expressing
hesitation about the accuracy of Foucault’s depiction of the
world in which we live.
Frequently Cited Sources
Foucault, Michel. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.
Foucault, Michel. (1994). Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault Volume
3. James D. Faubion (Ed.) New York: The New Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1999). Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault. J.R. Carrette
(Ed.) New York: Routledge.
Taylor, C. (2000) Foucault on Feedom and Truth. Politcal Theory,
12(2).

122 • Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review
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