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Volumnia is Coriolanus’s powerful and overbearing mother. She raised her son to be a warrior, thereby realizing her own fascination with war through him. Volumnia clearly takes pride in Coriolanus’s victories, and she ultimately hopes to see him reach the peak of political power: the consulship of Rome. Her enthusiasm for war challenges traditional notions of femininity. It also has a disturbing edge that blurs the traditional boundaries between mother and son. As she tells her daughter-in-law Virgilia early in the play, “If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honor than in the embracements of his bed” (1.3.2–5). Essentially, she’s saying that she prefers a man’s honor to his physical affection—a sentiment that underscores her personal attraction to war. Yet the phrase, if my son were my husband, also contains more than a hint of incestuous desire. The conflation of motherhood and the eroticism of violence returns in her later image: “The breasts of Hecuba, / When she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier / Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood / At Grecian sword” (1.3.43–46).
The quasi-erotic nature of Volumnia’s dominance over Coriolanus keeps her son dependent on her, so much so that she is able, at the end of the play, to succeed where all his male peers have failed. Neither Cominius nor Menenius can convince Coriolanus to forgive the Romans and spare Rome from destruction; only Volumnia can accomplish this feat. For her success, she is hailed as her city’s savior, while her son, the great warrior, slinks off to die in the very city of his former triumph, Corioles—an ironic reversal, yet a triumph for maternal and female strength. In the end, the intensity of feeling she exudes onstage shows how a strong-willed woman can have an impact in an otherwise male-dominated society. This fact has caused her reputation among audiences to rise and fall on the alternating tides of female empowerment and patriarchal oppression. Even so, Volumnia is a magnificent dramatic character, and undoubtedly one of the great female roles in all of Shakespeare, worthy of consideration alongside Lady Macbeth from Macbeth and Goneril from King Lear.
