Coriolanus’ inward conflicts are veiled from us: “The change that came when he found himself alone and homeless in exile is not exhibited. The result is partly seen in the one soliloquy of this drama, but the process is hidden.”13 Whereas a super-articulate protagonist such as Hamlet is deeply sensitive to tone, verbal nuance, and connotation, for Coriolanus “language is not subject to modification by the requirements of different social situations, not flexible enough to respond in tone and style to the demands of decorum—if it is not a social instrument, neither is it an instrument with which to probe and express the workings of the consciousness.”14

Coriolanus’ belief in absolutes is his downfall: “The hero’s virtue—his passionate sense of honor and allegiance to principles—is also his vice.”15 His betrayal “is bound up with his essential and crippling solitariness, and also with his failure ever to consider how much his heroism has truly been dedicated to Rome as a city, and how much to his own self-realization and personal fame.”16

The individual character cannot be divorced from his communal context. Integrity is defined in the world of this play not just as truth to self but also as truth to Rome (or to the Volsces). For this reason,

The “tragic flaw” analysis is far too simple. It will never do to say that Coriolanus’s calamity is “caused” by his being too proud and unyielding and just that; for one of the play’s central paradoxes is that though Caius Martius appears as a “character” almost unvaryingly the same, yet, for all his rigidity, he is pliant, unstable, trustless: traitor to Rome, false to the Volsces, then true to Rome and to home again, and twice traitor to himself.17

In contrast to Coriolanus,

Aufidius is adaptable … he understands the importance of accommodating one’s behaviour to the times. He has also divined (as, for that matter, did the Second Citizen in the opening scene) that his rival is fatally inflexible … In this judgement, Aufidius is almost, if not entirely, right. Coriolanus in exile is a man haunted by what seems to him the enormity of mutability and change. This is the burden of his soliloquy [in Act 4 Scene 4] … Only the embassy of women can shatter his convictions, force him into a new way of seeing … It is, of course, the moment when Coriolanus finally recognizes his common humanity, the strength of love and family ties. But the victory won here is not … as so often is assumed, that of a private over a public world. Shakespeare is at pains to assert that, in republican Rome, the two are really inseparable. Hence the mute, but important presence of … Valeria … [who] is there to represent all the other women of Rome.18

Women are central to this play in a way that they were not in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s earlier tragedy of Roman conduct and politics. “Subject from birth to the relentless pressure of his mother’s affection, Coriolanus has grown into a man at once capable of the deepest feeling and unable to give it free expression … at once a hero, an inexorable fighting machine, and a childishly naïve and undeveloped human being.”19 Coriolanus’ character and heroism are bound by concepts of masculinity that in turn are, paradoxically, reported to have been formed by his mother. Late twentieth-century commentators, especially feminists and psychoanalytically minded readers, reversed the tendency of earlier critics to idealize Volumnia, and explored how her vision of maternity and masculinity relates to theories of gender:

Woman, excluded from public life, is devalued save as the bearer of men-children; she must seek her primary emotional satisfaction through her son, who becomes a substitute for her absent husband, the vehicle through which she realizes herself … In this play, the father is absent and the mother’s contribution is exposed and exaggerated.20

The juxtaposition of Volumnia the mother and Virgilia the wife offers a striking contrast:

Volumnia’s intense adherence to the masculine code of honor is contrasted to Virgilia’s feminine recoil from it. Virgilia fears wounds, blood, and death because they may deprive her of the husband she loves; Volumnia covets them as the signs and seals of honor that make her son a man, and her a man, in effect, through him. Coriolanus in himself does not exist for her; he is only a means for her to realize her own masculine ego ideal, a weapon she fashions for her own triumph.21

Though Volumnia defines herself primarily as a mother, her values are stereotypically “masculine.” This paradox allows the post-Freudian critics to have a field day with the play’s imagery:

In thinking of the “valiantness” with which she suckled her sons as hers, Volumnia claims to possess the phallus, the prime signifier of masculinity in Rome, but identifies it with a signifier of femininity: mother’s milk. Masculinity belongs first to the mother; only she can pass it on to a son. This construction contrasts with one common to many cultures, and certainly prevalent in early modern England: that the male child must be separated from the maternal environment at a certain age, and definitively located in a men’s world in order to realize his masculinity.22

A psychoanalytic reading of Coriolanus claims that Coriolanus’ strict adherence to masculine strategies is an attempt to separate himself from his mother. Thus for critic Janet Adelman masculinity in Coriolanus is “constructed in response to maternal power.” In the absence of a father, “the hero attempts to recreate himself through his bloody heroics, in fantasy severing the connection with his mother even as he enacts the ruthless masculinity that is her bidding”:

Thrust prematurely from dependence on his mother, forced to feed himself on his own anger, Coriolanus refuses to acknowledge any neediness or dependency: for his entire sense of himself depends on his being able to see himself as a self-sufficient creature. The desperation behind his claim to self-sufficiency is revealed by his horror of praise.… Coriolanus’s battlecry as he storms the gates [of Corioli] sexualizes the scene: “Come on; / If you’ll stand fast, we’ll beat them to their wives” … But the dramatic action itself presents the conquest of Corioli as an image not of rape but of triumphant rebirth: after Coriolanus enters the gates of the city, he is proclaimed dead; one of his comrades delivers a eulogy firmly in the past tense … then Coriolanus miraculously re-emerges, covered with blood … and is given a new name. For the assault on Corioli is both a rape and a rebirth: the underlying fantasy is that intercourse is a literal return to the womb, from which one is reborn, one’s own author. The fantasy of self-authorship is complete when Coriolanus is given his new name, earned by his own actions.23

Concurrently, Coriolanus’ escape from Volumnia and the establishment of his masculinity is defined “homosocially,” through combat—body contact—with other men. “Cominius reports that Coriolanus entered his first battle a sexually indefinite thing, a boy or an Amazon”; the battlefield is a place where he undergoes a rite of passage into manhood. Psychologically, “The rigid masculinity that Coriolanus finds in war becomes a defense against acknowledgement of his neediness; he nearly succeeds in transforming himself from a vulnerable human creature into a grotesquely invulnerable and isolated thing.”24

For Stanley Cavell, “Coriolanus’s erotic attachment to battle and to men who battle suggest a search for the father as much as an escape from the mother.”25 Whether Coriolanus is in search of a father or a lover, there is no doubt that his relationship with Aufidius is charged with the electricity of desire.

The dominance of Volumnia’s maternal presence is highlighted by the language of the play: “The imagery of food and eating is perhaps the most extensive and important motif in the play. It calls attention to the appetitive nature of the plebeians, while the negative (images of temperance and austerity) represents an heroic aristocratic ideal.”26 Key speeches such as Menenius’ fable of the belly in the opening scene repay close attention to the language of digestion employed:

The wording of the [belly] parable tends to the transformation of a political commonplace, a theoretical vindication of natural “degree,” into a criticism, not of this attitude or that, but of Roman society itself. The impression of a general obstruction of all vital activity communicates itself through the unhealthy stagnation of “idle and unactive,” the coarseness of “cupboarding.” These effects are set against the very noticeable livening of the verse when Menenius turns to the “other instruments,” the senses and active faculties of the body which represent, however, not the class he is defending but its enemies. These contrasted elements, thus concentrated, in a manner profoundly typical of the play, upon images of food and digestion, answer to the real state of the Roman polity. Stagnation and mutual distrust, mirroring the ruthlessness of contrary appetites for power, are the principal images by which we are introduced to the public issues of Coriolanus.27

Related to the images of food and the body are those of disease, as when Coriolanus describes the citizens as a pestilence, an infection that endangers the body politic. The tragic irony of his fate is that Rome comes to regard him as the plague that must be driven out. The disease imagery is turned against him: “By a reversal of roles he, and not the plebeians, is now the ‘infection,’ and the Tribunes have become physicians to the body politic.”28 So it is that “Coriolanus’ death is at the same time tragic and ironic. It is tragic in the world created by Coriolanus; tragic according to his mad and absolute system of values.