The Question of Agency: The Paradox of Self-Creation in Coriolanus
Doohyun Park

Coriolanus is one of the most interesting Shakespearean tragic heroes in the sense that the value that he places on his private self and the value that other members in his society place one him are always incompatible. His pursuit of private perfection, confronting the volatile contingent situation, vividly shows that without acquiescing to social demands in some way, he cannot sustain his absolute self-ideal. The play shows that the contingency of social value demands some flexibility in individual identity. The uneasy relation between the public sphere and his private perfection represent his difficulty of self-creation: a tension between the demands of circumstance and of individual character. While the Roman scenes in the play show a multilayered tension in which self-interest and class values conflict with each other, Coriolanus, who remains solitary in the structural tension, celebrates a forthright effort to achieve his self-ideal through his struggle with the contingent situation that highlights the spectrum of society. Coriolanus in his own meaning sees the tribunes’ and the plebeians’ demand for political and economical reform, which the Roman society happens to have at the time of transition, as incompatible with his staunch nobility. Furthermore, interestingly, his process of self-creation under the Roman situation in which economic and political values are in conflict allows us to see his effort for independence from social interaction. Thus, what the character vigorously attests is that there could be an unbridgeable gap between individual meaning and communal value. In a time of social transition, the social value of a system often might require some chameleon-like figures to maintain the social equilibrium. Coriolanus, because of his unique personality that ties himself to the aristocratic pride, fails to read the political and social delicacy that exists in the Roman society. However, we should not condemn him for this quality because he definitely could be an invaluable figure in another particular situation (for example, in time of war). The actions Coriolanus has carried out, in this sense, show a paradox of his individual personality.

So I will explore how he reads his own circumstance and how the circumstance damages his political and ethical autonomy, concentrating on his particular personality and on what degree to which his actions could be rationally justified in the Roman society.

We are able to see in the play that ideology in a given society might often push an individual virtuous character to a state of dysfunction. So what makes the play conspicuous is a philosophical dilemma between self-elimination and self-idealization: the paradox of self-creation. However, to see Coriolanus’s individual characteristics as his main tragic flaw is to ignore the contingency of value. Sometimes community members in a particular situation tend to consider individual beliefs and convictions as unsuitable or eccentric. In other words, qualities that are in some situations considered as virtuous could be vicious at other times. Thus Coriolanus’s meaning of self-creation implies that what determines whether an individual quality is effective or not in a society depends chiefly on some particular perspectives whereby the contingency of selfhood and community is subtly mixed.

In Coriolanus, Shakespeare assesses the relative worth to Rome of the nobility and commonality. The play paradoxically shows that our perception of the two differences depends on some contingent situations rather than on absolute objectivity. So the social structure of Rome is an important element to assess Coriolanus’s agency mainly because he is placed as the center-figure for highlighting the structure. In the opening scene the socioeconomic delicacy of Rome could give rise to the volatile circumstance:

First Citizen: . . .They ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich; and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; there’s all the love they bear us. (I, i, 77-84)

The plebeian’s complaint implies that a new stage should be reached in the political and economical structure of Rome. The Roman people, if politically unsophisticated, would be rational individuals who can think for themselves. The way they think is often fickle, but motivational, especially in economical terms. Values that the plebeians pursue are different from those of the patrician and the tribunes. For the plebeians the supreme value is fair distribution of wealth which should be regarded as economic justice in their position. The need for economic reform to sustain their lives is, in fact, so impending that they are on the verge of revolt against the politically upper level group whose self-interest, they believe, puts them into hunger and starvation. Since they believe that the distribution of wealth is inequitable, without any solution for it they probably question social justice. Class conflict in the society could produce a more complicated value system than one that exists in a world where the meaning of human action can be explained as military terms like valor, invincibility, and dignity.

 However, for Coriolanus, the existence of common people and their demands are simply threats to Roman progress. He is not willing to acknowledge the fact that the change of the economic and political environment may bring about the restructuring of social justice. He sees the Roman people as their own worst enemies, insatiable and irrational in their demands, and instinctively envious of their betters: “Who deserves greatness / Deserves your hate; and your affections are / A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that / Which would increase his evil” (I, i, 175-8). He believes that redistribution of social justice (for example, the fact that the tribunes have established their prerogatives) is nothing but treacherous to the Roman social ideal and its future vision. He worships the aristocratic value he bears in his mind without acknowledging the reality:

     Thus we debase

The nature of our seats and make the rabble

Call our cares fears, which will in time

Break ope the locks o’ the Senate and bring in

The crows to peck the eagles. (III, i, 138-42)

Basically his concept of social justice stems from his nobility and from a quasinatural hierarchy whereby any artificial restructuring is hardly likely. So the way Coriolanus reads social change is quite monolithic, and he ignores the significance of social collaboration. He also sees the change of political environment, which moves from aristocratic to democratic polity, as the destruction of hierarchical order:

Five tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms
Of their own choice. One’s Junius Brutus,
Sicinius Velutus, and I know not-’Sdeath!
The rabble should have first unroofed the city
Ere so prevailed with me. It will in time
Win upon power and throw forth greater themes
For insurrection’s arguing. (I, i, 215-6)

He has his own resources in an environment that might need social collaboration. If self-knowledge requires a person to analyze and to appraise his social environment in terms of the degree to which it permits him to make decisions and to take action providing opportunities for many human beings, Coriolanus’s knowledge is limited to the view that reads the radical social process as merely a threat to stable order. His aristocratic pride is most meaningful when the common people are excluded from state business. Because he thinks in this way, the wide gap between his self-knowledge and social structure never makes it possible for there to be even accidental coincidence between public need and his own resources. Conversely he lacks, in his private attempt at self-creation, a sense of solidarity with which to negotiate with other members of the society.

This double worship—
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other
Insult without all reason, where gentry, title, wisdom
Cannot conclude but by the yea and no
Of general ignorance— . . . (III, i, 145-9)

From his point of view, the democratic process by the participation of the plebeians can never lead the society to progress because he believes that the common people are unqualified to pursue Rome’s political vision, which, he believes, should be a purely aristocratic one. However, the tribunes see Coriolanus’s conviction as tyranny, and they also see that they successfully can present Coriolanus’s aim as tyranny as Sicinius mentions: “From Rome all seasoned office and to wind / Yourself into a power tyrannical” (III, iii, 69-70). So what matters is the fundamental difference between him and other members in terms of political value. He is not willing to admit that the existence of the tribunes who were elected by the common people is now a political fact.

As regards his personality, Coriolanus has an absolute sense of selfhood: belief in the virtue of his warrior code with his proud notion of honor and valor; as his mother Volumnia mentions: “You are too absolute” (III, ii, 41). War for him is a time when the individual can shine and be true to himself. Therefore, in his own meaning the plebeians and the tribunes are the obstacles to the Roman social ideal. He tries to exert his own meaning only in time of war as he states when a messenger addresses the attack of the Volscian: “I am glad on’t / Then we shall ha’ means to vent / Our musty superfluity” (I, i, 226). Unlike Menenius who tries to be tactful and conciliatory in a desperate situation, Coriolanus never makes any concession to the plebes and tribunes: “For the mutable, rank-scented meiny, let them / Regard me as I do not flatter, and / Therein behold themselves” (III, i, 68-71). Only Coriolanus believes that a single individual constitutes Rome’s best.

The contrast between the political and the essentialist concept of virtue is rehearsed in the dialogue between his mother and himself. Volumnia explicitly advocates the conspiratorial deception of the plebeians in the interest of her own class, suggesting that Coriolanus combine honor and policy:

If it be honor in your wars to seem
The same you are not, which for your best ends
You adopt your policy, how is it less or worse
That it shall hold companionship in peace
With honor as in war, since that to both
It stands in like request? (III, ii, 48-52)

Volumnia’s pragmatic advice, to some degree, appeals to Coriolanus’s humanity. So he reluctantly agrees with the revealing words: “I’ll mountebank their loves / Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved” (III, ii, 134-5). He is blind to the ideological imperative of society. Although he is partially persuaded by his mother, he never gives up his individual conviction. That is, Coriolanus refuses to compromise with the needs of a given situation. For him, “the world is seen in terms of the absolute and the determining essence; for Volumnia the absolute is displaced by a social network of relative interactions, one in which intervention not essence is determining” (Dollimore 219). Perhaps when he is reluctant to accept his mother’s request (to let him go to marketplace), he already knows that he cannot compromise with the plebeians: “Let them accuse me by invention; I / Will answer in mine honor (III, ii, 145-6). However, this scene informs us that the familial relationship could prevent Coriolanus from achieving his autonomy.

Besides their different concepts of virtue, the relationship between Coriolanus and Volumnia highlights Coriolanus’s limitation of agency: his dependence on familial bond. Janet Adelman observes that Coriolanus cannot succeed psychologically in separating himself from his mother, his masculinity being constructed by virtue of maternal power (146-161). For Coriolanus her intervention in his process of self-creation may be the biggest obstacle to his autonomy. That is, if he capitulates to his mother’s pressure he may have to give up his authorship of himself, and this process could be described as potency and aggressive independence. This means that he falls into a dilemma that he should make a choice between autonomy and dependence. Indeed, until before his mother arrives at the Volscian camp to persuade Coriolanus in scene iii of act V, he still believes that his sense of action depends on his being able to see himself as a self-sufficient creature. Therefore, his mother’s persuasion confuses him about his sense of self-identity. As Adelman explains, there seems to be his confusion between role and self (153). In a way his process of self-creation is concerned with his manhood about which he is not able to be fully conscious. Coriolanus’s capitulation to his mother’s pressure also shows that individuality has to do as much with human biological kinship as with social process. In other words, his process of self-creation cannot be free from familial bond. When his mother appears in the Volscian camp, he is afraid of her pressure: “out, affection! / All bond and privilege of nature, break!. . . but stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin” (V, iii, 24-5,35-7). After all, he, though he feels almost god-like, had to admit his identity as a member of family and community. His failure in adjusting his identity to new environment tells us that he should have learned that his values, reputation, honor, and truth, operate better through social interaction.

More importantly, what Coriolanus’s actions show pose a question about how a subject who has certain unique personality creates himself in the contingent situation that demands an ability to read another complicated structure. However, the way in which he deals with social problems is quite peremptory. For example, when he speaks of peace or war in social problem, he offers a warrior’s solution to the popular riots:

     They say there’s grain enough?
Would the nobility lay aside their ruth
And let me use my sword, I’d make a quarry
With thousands of these quartered slaves as high
As I could pick my lance. (I, i, 195-9)

Since he has warrior logic as his self-knowledge in which war can heal social wounds, his occupational knowledge allows him to believe that only war can solve the difficulty of Rome, though this belief is, to some degree, true. Coriolanus is so immersed in his occupational fantasy of self-ideal, being convinced that the aristocratic people like himself construct Rome’s ideal vision. By fantasy I mean his private obsession with virtues in the time of war. He is identified with characteristics such as probity, temperance and continence, high-mindedness and great courage. Such sense of his self-identity has been formed ever since his childhood. Plutarch writes about his qualities as follows:

Martius, being more inclined to the wars than any other gentleman of his time, began from his childhood to give himself to handle weapons, and daily did exercise himself therein: and outward he esteemed armour to no purpose, unless one were naturally armed within. (2)

Human habit is never changed overnight. Coriolanus’s fantasy life is incompatible with the radical social process in which individuality is overshadowed by far-reaching public opinion. His struggle with his society then means that he has made an effort to sustain his distinctive and private life in his contingent situation in the Roman society.

Coriolanus’s absolute sense of self does not allow him to make a sensible judgment about the essence of the plebeians’ anger. For example, when the plebeians demand fair distribution of economical value and social justice: “What authority surfeits on would relieve us,” (I, i, 15-6) Coriolanus sees their demand as characterized by their hunger and ignorance:

They said they were an-hungry; sighed forth proverbs
That hunger broke stone walls, that dogs must eat,
That meat was made for mouths, that the gods sent not
Corn for the rich men only. (I, i, 204-8)

Coriolanus’s beliefs isolate him from the political world where all kinds of calculation and self-interests are prevalent. Paradoxically this alienation suggests that he refuses to yield up his subjectivity for the occasion.

 From another angle, Coriolanus’s cynicism toward the tribunes and the plebeians implies that each group of the society is bound to linguistic practices.

As for my country I have shed my blood,
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay against those measles
Which we disdain should tetter, yet sought
The very way to catch them. (III, i, 78-82)

The above shows that his use of language is pretty assertive. This also suggests that his linguistic force goes against the norms of community (Fish 206-16). In other words, he attempts to maintain his proud independence from the community, which means that he resists the ideology of community in the sense that he intentionally detaches himself from other members through his expression. For example, when the tribunes order him to be banished, he refutes it in a rage: “As the dead carcasses of buried men / That do corrupt my air, I banish you” (III, iii, 133-4). He is fully aware of his powerful force of language, and its capacity to give meaning to his actions by the standards of a public sphere that he rejects as unworthy of his personal merit. What Coriolanus’s linguistic force also shows is the conflict of languages between individuality and community. For example, his linguistic practice in conversation with his military colleagues, including Cominius and Lartius is quite different from the attitude that he utters toward the tribunes and the plebeians in terms of linguistic power. In this sense, Coriolanus’s linguistic practice is another unconscious effort to differentiate himself from others within the community.

In addition to the antagonistic use of language between Coriolanus and other members in the community, the relationship between the tribune and the patrician is antagonistic dependence upon which the political ideology of Rome is complicatedly interconnected. When the tribunes condemn Coriolanus’s aristocratic insolence, Menenius retorts against Brutus:

I know you can do little alone, for your
helps are many, or else your actions would grow wondrous single. Your abilities are too infantlike for doing much alone. (II, i, 35-8)

Menenius as a patrician is different from Coriolanus since Menenius has a conciliatory idea that all members of the community need collaboration to achieve the social ideal, as his fable about the body politic shows (I, i, 94-103), Coriolanus sees the social dependence and cooperation as nonsense or absurdity. For Coriolanus, civic responsibility is never compatible with something honorable like military duties: “Your dishonor / Mangles true judgment and bereaves the state / Of that integrity which should become’t” (III, i, 160-2). The communal collaboration indicates a political manipulation to destroy the true ideal of Rome.

The socially antagonistic dependence between the tribunes, the patricians, and the plebeians, in fact, affects Coriolanus’s position. He needs the plebeians as an inferior class, so that he can prove himself to be superior to them. For example, when the citizens agree to help Coriolanus to be elected as a consul in scene iii of Act II, he is obliged by Roman custom to thank them for their support despite his cynical attitude toward them: “Most sweet voices! / Better it is to die, better to starve / Than crave the hire which first we do deserve” (II, iii, 112-4). These lines indicate that his identity within the society proves to be insecure and unstable without the presence of other social classes. This excerpt also suggests that Coriolanus’s holistic essence, the law of honor and truth, is to some degree vulnerable to social process. The fact that Volumnia’s advice prevents him from maintaining his autonomy also can be understood as his part of social process.

 Nevertheless, he still sees the social reality as pretentious. For Coriolanus, the existence of the tribunes is nothing less than the hypocritical group whose aim is to instigate the ignorant plebeians to overturn the state order and to break the patrician authority as he states cynically: “What are your office? / You being their mouths, why rule you not their teeth? / Have you not set them on?” (III, i, 37-9). He sees the social justice of Rome as corrupt and tarnished by the political machination of the tribunes. So when he appears before Aufidius’s house after his banishment, he mentions: “The painful service / The extreme dangers, and the drops of blood / Shed for my thankless country are requited / But with that surname” (IV, v, 73-6). He is mad at the unreasonable reality (in his meaning) because the tribunes and the plebeians distorted the hierarchical order, and his self-sacrifice for Rome could never be translated into the loftier form of social justice.

 We also can see that the patriotism Coriolanus pursues has much to do with self-sacrifice that has little to do with individual self-interest. For him true patriotism should aim to protect Rome from all kinds of chaos, including alien incursion because he believes that the tribunes are dissipating state power on the ground that their political platform helps the state to be balanced. So from Coriolanus’s view, the tribunes which were elected by the common people are simply cliques that come together to promote their self-interest by making use of the plebeians. He is mad at the tribunes’ accusation against him:

     Thou injurious tribune!
Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,
In thy hands clutched as many millions, in
Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say
“Thou liest” unto thee with a voice as free
As I do pray the gods. (III, iii, 74-9)

From his point of view, the current difficulty of Rome is caused by the self-interest of a political group. While Coriolanus feels this way about the tribunes, the tribunes seem to consider Coriolanus as a deadly weapon in peacetime. However, in some ways Coriolanus needs to have a sense of reality about what kind of leader is appropriate for the Roman public in peacetime. Lars Engle points out that members blind to cherished values believe that Coriolanus “disrupts community solidarity, espouses violence as a method of resolving disagreements, exacerbates class conflict, and becomes in some sense a traitor” (173). His unique personality allows him to have patriotism only in his private meaning.

The hero stands for Roman honor, but his ideal is still critical to the public. His heroism prevents him from deliberating how he is dedicated to Rome as a patrician, not as a warrior. In other words, as Anne Barton precisely points out, “never. . . has it occurred to him that the two motives, the public and the private, might under certain circumstances conflict, or that the one might require adjustments and concessions from the other” (144). His fantasy of self-image does not make his actions effective in the public sphere, since a particular situation usually demands another subject transformation.

Coriolanus’s problem arises as much from the inherent contradiction of the social political group as from his internal conflict. Both parts of the political group may need a scapegoat for their social order and balance. In other words, as Barton observes, “men like Coriolanus are a threat to the balance of the state, to an evolving republic which must try to take them with it” (139). So his conflict, to some degree, is squared with the political nature of Rome, which means that all his beliefs which are central to a person’s self image are incompatible with the social reality. The environment indicates that individual virtue hardly can be interpreted as a socially meaningful one.

 On the other hand, Coriolanus fails to read the circumstances even if he knows that his views are out of fashion. One of the reasons for his failure is that he internalizes the value of Rome, foregrounding himself. For example, when he is banished to Aufidius’s house, he describes the internal contradiction of Roman culture:

so fellest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep
To take the one the other, by some chance,
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends
And interjoin their issues. So with me . . . (IV, iv, 18-22)

Coriolanus shows, in this sense, some paradoxical relationship between the hero and the world surrounding him. He has a contradiction at the core of his being as much as the Roman culture has. Nonetheless we can hardly condemn him because his actions obviously have been carried out with good motives and intentions:

I have done
As you have done-that’s what I can;
Induced as you have been-that’s for my country.
He that has but effected his good will
Hath overta’en mine act. (I, viii, 15-8)

Furthermore, he never could be rated morally worse than the other patricians and plebeians because they have different concepts of value from those of Coriolanus. As regards his character, he is very honest and modest, refusing all spoils of war except those to which his fellow soldiers are entitled. Moreover, he hates to hear others praise him. He, as a warrior, has some conviction to protect Rome against chaos. In other words, he has his own reasons to hate the plebeians and the tribunes. When he tries to stick to his conviction, he believes that he is doing something right for Roman development.

Coriolanus’s vision of Rome for a true society is based on his patriotic attitude. Therefore, from his point of view, the patrician and the plebeians are simply rabbles who are against his patriotic vision. His conviction is just incompatible with the demand of time, as his counterpart Aufidius admits: “he has a merit / To choke it in the utterance. So our virtues / Lie in th’ interpretation of the time” (IV, vii, 48-50). Indeed, Aufidius who could share heroic qualities with Coriolanus notices that Coriolanus’s faults are inseparable from his virtues. In other words, Aufidius knows that virtues are socially constructed rather than intrinsically possessed, which means that individual identity depends on contingent nature:

     Whether ‘twas pride,
Which out of daily fortune ever taints
The happy man; whether defect of judgment,
To fail in the disposing of those chances
Which he was lord of; or whether nature,
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From th’ casque to th’ cushion, but commanding peace . . . (IV, vii, 37-43)

Aufidius’s interpretation of political relativism proves that the relation between Coriolanus’s personality and the society can never be interpreted as compatible. Therefore, Coriolanus’s identity helps us to differentiate the individual private self from its public meaning. Thus, his virtues should be understood in relation to the contingent situation of community where individual values depend on the need of circumstances.

One of the important points to assess Coriolanus’s actions is that public force scarcely has damaged his will to create himself even if he was not free in several situations. The way he reads the plebeians and the tribune, and even more, Rome’s future, sounds reasonable. In other words, when he attempts to create himself in the world, he reads the reality differently from the way other members do. His love of distinction made him reject all conditions of peace in public. No one blames his aristocratic pride and patriotism. We need to admit that his virtues were kinds of excellence that many common people scarcely possess. However, the real political world makes his virtues change into a vicious refusal to accept change. Thus, Coriolanus’s effort for self-creation shows that idiosyncratic fantasies need to be understood as something that every human being happens to have because Coriolanus was able to see and to understand the reality with his own view. In a sense, the death of Coriolanus indicates a failure of Roman democracy.

To what degree should his actions be rationally justified? He views the Roman plebeians and the tribunes as morally wrong, as seen by his contemptuous attitude toward them. If he is lucky enough in terms of circumstance to possess sufficient ability to control the plebeians and the tribunes and to find circumstances in which his ability can flourish, his banishment and death might have been avoidable. Further, if he had succeeded in being reelected as a consul in Rome after he joins hands with Aufidius, his integrity and innocence might have been glorified and rationally justified by the common people because his unique personality could have been sanctioned by his success. On the other hand, perhaps he already knew his views were out of date. And he believes that his duty in peacetime is to appease popular demands. He is a patriot in his meaning. He might have thought that to suppress popular demands and to remain uncompromising with the tribunes were the best means to achieve Roman development. Therefore, he had to persist in his old-fashioned views because he believed that his convictions would be reasonable for Roman vision if his beliefs had been carried through.

The dilemma then is that the public wealth will continue to be founded in part on the virtue of men like Coriolanus. His virtue was not regarded as a good quality in the political world. Is he just a silly hero? Rather, as we see him consciously or unconsciously acting out his idiosyncratic fantasy, we can see his distinctiveness for the particular purpose of a particular object, event, or situation. Aufidius states:

     Though in this city he
Hath widowed and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory. (V, vi, 157-60)