This morning's mystery

I'm off to read 'The Rape of Lucrece' for Mrs. Dalloway and it strikes me as a pretty grim task. I was summarizing Cymbeline yesterday, trying to describe how Imogen's husband makes a bet that she is faithful, sets up a friend to test her, and he sneaks into her bedroom and spies on her while she's asleep. Later he pretends to have raped her.

Then, I spent all that time re-reading Clarissa last spring which is all about rape.

And the other Clarissa in literature is the rapist's accessory in 'The Rape of the Lock.'

And Jane de Gay's book pointed me to the links between Clarissa's thought that there will be no more marrying and Hamlet's 'Get thee to a nunnery' speech.

So why, I want to know, is Clarissa Dalloway's happy memory of love also Othello's feeling? Why, when she remembers feeling in love, does she remember the feeling of a lover who will become a murderer, a man who will go mad from suspicion of his wife's infidelity?

Looked at from this angle, the violence and the threat of rape seems to be in too many places with no one untainted.