r66 CATHERI,\E BELSEY

surroundings; it differs from them in a distinct way, however infinitesimally.

Every time it is recognised, it is capable of being seen in a new light, or related
to different knowledges. The post structuralist reader remains the destination of
the text, but is at the same time differentially located in relation to it. If we main-
tain the sense of a dialogue between what we bring and what we find, the reading
that results is likely to make - or to come to make - sense to other people, to be
admissible, at least in the end, as interpretation, and not free association.

(V)

Any specific textual analysis is made at a particular historical moment and from
within a specific culture. In that sense, the analysis is not exhaustive: it does not
embrace all the possible readings, past and future. At the same time, it is able
to be new. Suppose 'lye return to the painting and analyse it from the specific
point of view of the historical differences it inscribes. Is there anything there
that seems to modern eyes to need accounting for? There is the costume, of
course, and the bedding ... but those differences are only to be expected. What
else might we find?
One feature of this picture does seem odd. I have described Lucretia as
naked. She is evidently already in bed, and she is now apparently attempting to
get out of it, though Tarquin's body blocks her escape. But she is wearing at
least one earring, a pearl necklace and two quite substantial bracelets, as well as
a wedding ring. Surely this jewellery is very slightly out of place? Do people
normally sleep in their portable property in this way? Not these days, I think.
What, then, do we make of it? Even if Venetian woman habitually wore their
jewellery in bed in r 570, the presence of these bracelets, the necklace and the
earring seems to me potentially significant.
In the first instance, they might cause us to reopen the question of the overall
project. This body is decorated, adorned, and to that degree correspondingly
spectacular, an object of the gaze. Second, the jewels indicate Lucretia's wealth.
Do other textual details confirm this? The bedlinen is very fine, almost translu-
cent; is it silk perhaps? The valance is certainly silk. The edge of the pillow
facing the viewer is delicately embroidered. Behind the figures, a looped bed-
curtain also implies propriety and taste.
By now, our researcher, self-consciously outside the painting, and outside
the historical moment when this story would have been familiar, will certainly
have been prompted by secondary material to investigate its classical sources, 12
acknowledging in the process the degree to which 'a text is made of multiple
writings'. In this instance, the picture retells a well known story; it cites - with
an inevitable repetition, and an equally inevitable difference - a narrative that
enjoyed wide currency at the time. The sources will have revealed that, while

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 TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AS A RESEARCH METHOD r67

Tarquin "vasthe heir to the kingdom in the early days in Rome, before it became
a republic, Lucretia was the 'wife of his friend and comrade-in-arms,
Collatinus, who was evidently therefore of noble blood himself Does the paint-
ing make a relation between rape and rank? Is the intensity of this image linked
with the fact that the victim belongs to the rapist's own social class?
Lucretia's wedding ring is critically placed on the canvas, exactly at the
centre measured horizontally, and one-third of the way down vertically. She is
married, the spatial relations emphasise - and married to her rapist's friend,
the story confirms. A new aspect of the research project I have sketched begins
to surface in response to these observations, and it concerns the historical
specificity of rape. Is it more culpable in Renaissance Italy if the victim is aris-
tocratic and married? Regrettably, I think the answer is yes. The Oxford English
Dictionary indicates that rape is etymologically theft ('rapacity' still indicates a
propensity to lay hands on other people's goods). In medieval law, rape was a
crime against the property of the husband or father. Consent came into the
question in the first instance in order to distinguish between rape and adultery.
It was not until humanism began to invest women with a will of their own that
their wishes in the matter became the central issue. The virtue of aristocratic
wives must have been a distinctly valuable object. Tarquin's theft of Lucretia's
is correspondingly disgraceful.
Lucretia herself, whose propriety was part of what inflamed Tarquin in the
first place, refused to live with the dishonour, but went on to reinstate her name
in the high Roman fashion. Some of the interest the story seems to hold for the
early modern period attaches, no doubt, to this subsequent affirmation of her
own autonomy in her suicide.P How far does this painting align itself with a
new humanist interest in the will of the victim?

(VI)

Without pursuing an answer here, I am suggesting that, while research entails

unearthing information, it is the textual analysis that poses the questions which
research sets out to answer. The reverse process tends to distort the text. And
since the project of cultural criticism is to understand the texts - or rather, to
read the culture in the texts - or since, in other words, the texts themselves con-
stitute the inscription of culture, the appropriation of the text to illustrate a
prior thesis seems to miss the point. Of course, in practice, it is never quite that
simple: once the knowledge is lodged in your mind, it becomes part of what
you bring to the text. But in principle, my idea is that the text has priority;
ideally, the text sets the agenda.
So, let us get back to ours. Tarquin is fully, though informally, dressed, even
if his disordered state is evident in the rolled-up sleeves and collapsing right