"The Lusty Stealth of Nature": Sexuality and Anitifeminism in King Lear
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Atlantis Vol. 11 No. 1 Fall/Automne 1985 "The lusty stealth of nature": Sexuality and anitifeminism in King Lear Claudette Hoover Queen's University Human sexuality is an acknowledged crux of even when it is considered (as in analyses of the play King Lear. Aside from numerous uni• Lear's sex nausea), it is typically approached as a versalizing and derogatory references to sexual• symbol of human brutality, rapaciousness, and ity, there is the puzzling relationship between hypocrisy.2 Without denying the symbolic value Gloucester's sin of adultery and the sins against of the play's stress on sexuality, I will argue that him, the significance of Goneril and Regan's King Lear is much more concerned with lust in lust for Edmund which is introduced into the action than with lust as symbol and that an plot so surprisingly and so late, and the dramatic understanding of this fact clarifies at least two of function, if any, of the king's obsession with its much debated and interrelated problems. carnality. Closely connected to these matters is First, it shows that the king's movement from his the remarkable extent to which sexual appetite egocentric love of the first scene, through anti- controls the events of both the main plot and the eroticism and anti-femininism, to disinterested echo plot. Not only does lust contribute directly love (that is to say, his progression from Eros to to the downfalls of five of the major characters Agape) is required before his awakening to Cor• (Tom O'Bedlam1, Edmund, Gloucester, Goneril, delia and involves rejecting both his early ideali• and Regan), but even Edgar, Albany and Corde• zation and his later condemnation of women. lia whose sexual natures are scarcely an issue, And second, it reveals the relevance of the var• suffer from the carnality of others. At the center ious sex dramas and fantasies of other male of this sexual turmoil stands King Lear himself characters to Lear's experience by showing how who dies because Albany is distracted from his they not only foreshadow his transformation but safety by the rivalry between Goneril and Regan. are contained and to some extent resolved in the king himself. Finally, to this complex vision of human sexuality, Edmund stands out as a nota• In its emphasis on carnality King Lear resem• ble and menacing exception. bles Othello whose characters either voice or act out their view of Eros. Yet, while this aspect of the play is much discussed in Othello criticism, In the first scene of Act I Lear challenges it is largely ignored in studies of King Lear, and Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia not just as child- ren who ought to love him, but as children who all the terror of his language, directly at their ought to love him in a certain way because they femininity. Goneril must never have "A babe to are daughters. In doing so he reveals unambigu• honour her!" (II. iv. 290) and the "fen-suck'd ously that his initial assumption about the fogs" must "Infect her beauty" (II. iv. 167-68). In nature of women is based on the myth of the the end both daughters are passionately dis• "eternal feminine," the female who is nurturing, missed as "unnatural hags" (II. iv. 280). Although selfless, changeless, and mothering.3 Lear's ques• false to his own roles as father and king, Lear's tion, "Which of you shall we say doth love us parting words juxtapose Goneril and Regan's most?"4 is indeed ritualistic, but it is too often unnatural rejection of their presumed roles as forgotten that he decided to give where he found daughters with the most common noun for most favor only because he had no sons to inherit female fiend,6 and thus emphasize his astonish• the kingdom.5 Although none of the male wit• ment at their behaviour as women. nesses to the ritual objects to the nature of the question as addressed to daughters, it is impossi• One need not resort to Freudian cries of ble to envision their reactions had Lear made a "incest" to explain Lear's disillusionment. In similar demand of sons and equally difficult to his plans to abdicate he had relied on the imagine how sons would respond to it. Cer• humane characteristics of self-sacrifice and gen• tainly, if they agreed to respond at all, their tleness which the patriarchy had long demanded declarations would differ from those of Goneril of women, and he holds the belief so strongly and Regan which are determined by the fact that that to relinquish it requires Goneril and Regan's dowries are at stake and by their awareness of powerfully symbolic seizing of hands as they Lear's need for solicitous cherishing by women. confront him with their united resistance to his Goneril cleverly vows her love in feminine terms demands in II, vi. With his doubly directed of "grace, health, beauty, honour" (1. 58), and words, "O Fool! I shall go mad" (1. 288), Lear Regan swears that she is only "felicitate" in the abandons forever the myth of the "eternal femi• love of her father (1. 75). No husband can rival nine" and replaces it with a virulent misogyny him. When Cordelia, for whom both husband that will endure until his awakening to Cor• and dowry are at risk, calls Lear's assumptions delia. about feminine nature into question, she is dowered with his curse and with his vow that Lear's desperate need to supplant a cherished "pride, which she call plainess, [may] marry belief with a more viable one is psychologically her." (1.129) Had Lear been dealing with sons, understandable, and that he should reflexively tragedy may well have ensued, but it would rely on yet another myth about women, the myth undoubtedly have taken a significantly different of the "insatiable strumpet,"7 is unsurpising. form. Although in Jacobean drama this reaction is especially predictable from characters who sup• In the aftermath of Lear's blind judgment, the pose themselves cuckolds, any sort of female phrases which the king uses about his daughters treachery may unleash the formulaic condemna• show his stubborn reliance upon the myth of the tion of women. Thus that Lear has been betrayed "eternal feminine." Of Cordelia, he had "thought and that the betrayal is by women is enough to to set [his] rest/On her kind nursery" (I. iv.315). account for his condemnation of their sexuality Unlike Goneril, Regan will be "kind and com• and for his inversion of the "eternal feminine." fortable" (I. iv. 315); her nature is "tender- hefted" and her eyes "Do comfort and not burn" Lear hints at the myth of the "insatiable (II. iv. 173-75). When he at last sees both of their strumpet" quite early when he responds to natues truly, he directs his epithets and curses, "Goneril's accusations with "Degenerate bas- tard!" (I. iv. 262) and later when he tells Regan That female lustfulness is the downfall of man that should she not be glad to see him he would and that woman's body serves the purposes of divorce himself from her "mother's tomb, / Satan was a commonplace of medieval Christian Sepulchring an adult'ress" (II. iv. 132-33). True thought.10 Yet Lear's compulsive and violent to her sex, the late queen was unfaithful. Clearly transformation of the classical centaur myth Lear finds the conventional response a comfort• from males to females and his combining of it ing necessity, but for him the myth has the addi• with the Christian view of women as satanic tional benefit of moral evasion. His blatantly suggests his desperate need to believe his own desperate need to avoid the responsibility of imaginings and to project his self-hatred onto paternity is manifest in his grim variant of a woman.11 As Ferrante has so perfectly said of favorite Shakespearean joke about the inevitable misogynist medieval poetry, "Woman, as the uncertainty of fatherhood, with all its implica• most obvious object of male concupiscence, is tions about female sexuality and to retain his made to represent lust and thus is held responsi• illusion of innocence, he will malign the mother ble for it; the object of temptation becomes the to the child. It is indicative, however, of the cause."12 tumult in Lear's mind that he is unable to sus• tain the illusion for long. In his first encounter Recently scholars such as Stilling and Kahn with Tom O'Bedlam he confesses that his flesh have demonstrated persuasively that the anti- 'begot/Those pelican daughters" (III. iv. 74-75), feminist statements in the tragedies derive prin• and he adamantly admits to Gloucester that his cipally from self-anger, self-loathing, and the daughters were "Got 'tween the lawful sheets" pain of disillusionment.13 And Bamber has (IV. vi. 119). Yet, although as Riebetanz has observed that by the end of the tragedies the hero noted, both Gloucester and Lear "come to has ceased projecting and can now "distinguish acknowledege their children with their sins,"8 a good woman from a bad one (Othello, Lear) or Lear's restoration of his wife's honor does not has lost interest in the issue altogether (Hamlet, preclude a more general condemnation of woman Antony ir Cleopatra)."1* In my view the second as, in the same scene, he indulges in a painfully observation is far truer of King Lear than the ironic tolerance of the moral anarchy that engulfs first. Lear may have learned to distinguish one him.