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

The Wandering of queen regnant Lears MotherAfter he experiences 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 return to have a bun in the oven his outburst of rage and physical symptom sensations O how this get down 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 aim? Or what is this mother? As many critics have 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 creditworthy for the rise or wandering of Lears mother? Does Lear experience close to sort of gender confusion by conjuring up the mother? As Janet Adelman keenly points out, The bizarreness of these lines has not always been appreciated in them Lear quite literally acknowledges the presence of the sulphurous pit within him (114). exclusively st ill why do we want to focus on this mother after all? One thing is certain that the (m)othering of the mother is irresistibly sophisticated, to the extent that the mother is located in the inside of Lears luggage compartment and her implicated wanderings can be traced throughout the whole play. For our purpose, the mother holds world-shattering clues to our interpretive enterprise and her (m)othering must be handled with extreme care. 1. Introduction In Renaissance England, medical interest in hysteria dates from Edward Jordens publishing of A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the suffocation of the Mother (1603). The appellation of the book suggests the disease called the m... ... to bolster up male identity. Works Cited Adelman, Janet. smothering Mothers Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeares Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York Routledge, 1992. Camden, Carroll. The suffocation of The Mother. Modern Language Notes, 63.6 (June., 1948), 390-393. Jorden, Edward. A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (capital of the United Kingdom 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, tell to be suffering from the same disease (393). Carroll Camden, Modern Language Notes (June 1948).