The Wandering of King Lear’s Mother Essay -- King Lear Essays

The Wandering of King Lears beat subsequently he knowledges all kinds of humiliation done by Goneril, and finds his messenger Kent in the stocks, King Lear, in Act 2 Scene 4, conjures up the obtain to express his outburst of rage and physical symptom sensations O how this spawn swells up toward my heart Hysterica passio down, thou climbing sorrow Thy elements below. Where is this daughter? (II.iv.56-58) Who is this yield? Or what is this spawn? As many critics become identified, this mother is another name for the womb, matrix, or uterus. That the mother swells up points to the disease called hysteria. Yet, who is responsible for the rise or wandering of Lears mother? Does Lear experience some sort of gender confusion by conjuring up the mother? As Janet Adelman keenly points out, The bizarreness of these lines has not always been comprehended in them Lear quite literally acknowledges the presence of the sulphurous pit indoors him (114). But still why do we want to focus o n this mother after all? One thing is certain that the (m)othering of the mother is overwhelmingly sophisticated, to the extent that the mother is located in the inside of Lears body and her implicated wanderings can be traced throughout the whole play. For our purpose, the mother holds significant clues to our interpretive enterprise and her (m)othering must be handled with extreme care. 1. gateway In Renaissance England, medical interest in hysteria dates from Edward Jordens publication of A Briefe Discourse of a distemper called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603). The title of the book suggests the disease called the m... ... to bolster up male identity. flora Cited Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeares Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. natural York Routledge, 1992. Camden, Carroll. The Suffocation of The Mother. Modern words Notes, 63.6 (June., 1948), 390-393. Jorden, Edward. A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation o f the Mother (London 1603). In Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London. Ed. & introd. Michael MacDonald. London Tavistock/Routledge, 1991. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare. Ed. Kenneth Muir. London Methuen, 1972. Notes1 As Carroll Camden argues, Apparently a male who presented choking as a nervous symptom was, by analogy, said to be suffering from the same disease (393). Carroll Camden, Modern Language Notes (June 1948).