Chapter 1 Cavell on Cordelia in King Lear – an Example of Moral Incapacity
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Cordelia's moral incapacity in King Lear. Abstract: Cordelia's moral character is hotly contested in King Lear criticism. I offer a new, Cavellian reading of her words and deeds in the tragedy's opening scene, showing them to be expressive of a morally inflected inability to harm her father. This portrait of Cordelia is contrasted with those in two major interpretative traditions: one, following Coleridge, that views her as proud and wilful; another, after Johnson, that insists on her otherworldly, sainted goodness. Both reading are shown to be flawed, in a debate which also elucidates the ethical notion of “moral incapacity” and yields lessons about methodology in moral psychology. 1. Cavell, King Lear and moral incapacity Stanley Cavell's great essay “The Avoidance of Love” is an important contribution to the rich corpus of critical thought on King Lear.1 The paper concentrates on a reinterpretation of Lear's central metaphor, the dual image of sight and blindness, but in doing so it casts new light over much of the play. Cavell develops this reading along multiple axes: resolving interpretative puzzles; connecting Lear to the deep cultural undercurrents of modern scepticism; and reflecting on the possibilities of expressing, depicting and effecting human presence in the theatre. For my purposes the most important aspect of Cavell's reading informs a novel understanding of the ill-fated interaction between Cordelia and Lear in the play's opening scene. This moment is the breaching-point from which the terrible flood of calamity, chaos and destruction which makes up the rest of the play gushes forth. Importantly, Cavell's interpretation reveals that Cordelia's simple “Nothing, my lord.”, the words 1 Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 1 which precipitate the catastrophe, is the expression of a moral incapacity; an inability to perform a perceived wrong, in which Cordelia's moral nature, character and distinctive fineness show themselves. The notion of moral incapacity is developed in Bernard Williams' eponymous paper, Harry Frankfurt’s “Rationality and the Unithinkable”, and other recent work in moral psychology on “volitional necessities.”2 A moral incapacity is a volitional limit pertaining to intentional action, i.e. what can be done knowingly by a person, which holds as a matter of their moral character and which partly gives their character its colour, shape and style. Put at its plainest, the idea of moral incapacity is the idea that certain of the things I cannot do are what makes me the kind of a person that I am. The concept is hard to make clear in the abstract, and as a central aim of this paper is to elucidate the notion by means of a case-study, it will be best to turn our attention to the example of Cordelia and her “Nothing, my lord.” Surveying the critical literature on the tragedy, one is struck by how deeply divided commentators are on this moment. In particular, there are deep rifts in how to understand Cordelia's words in the opening scene, and her character as expressed through them. As Anna Jameson puts it: Speak of Cordelia to a critic... all agree in the beauty of the portrait...; but when we come to details, I have heard more... opposite opinions relative to her than any other of Shakespeare's characters – a proof... that, from the simplicity with which the character is dramatically treated, and the small space it occupies, few are aware of its internal power or its wonderful depth of purpose.3 2 Williams, Bernard. Making Sense of Humanity: And Other Philosophical Papers 1982-1993. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Frankfurt, Harry G. The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press, 1988. See also: Taylor, Craig. “Moral Incapacity.” Philosophy 70, no. 272 (1995): 273–85, and Taylor, Craig. “Moral Incapacity and Huckleberry Finn.” Ratio 14, no. 1 (2001): 56–67; Gay, Robert J. “Bernard Williams on Practical Necessity.” Mind 98, no. 392 (1989): 551–69; Furrow, Dwight. “Schindler’s Compulsion: An Essay on Practical Necessity.” American Philosophical Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1998): 209–29; and “Volitional Necessities” in Watson, Gary. Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press (2004). 3 Extracted from Jameson's “Shakespeare's Heroines” (1832), in Bruce, Susan (Ed.), Columbia Critical guides: William Shakespeare King Lear Columbia (1998), p.91. 2 Having given my reading of Cordelia, I will contrast it with two important and conflicting traditions in King Lear interpretation to which Cavell also saw himself as responding. Although each tradition has distinguished origins, in the works of Coleridge and Johnson, I will take issue with both. I disagree with Coleridgians over the matter of whether Cordelia truly cannot or rather will not flatter her father. On the other side, I argue that despite their moral admiration for Cordelia, Johnsonian readers misinterpret her inability to do as Lear demands, and are thereby led to a distorted picture of her character which does her a serious disservice. Each of these critical contrasts reveals significant aspects of moral incapacity in itself, and in relation to our broader conception of human nature and the moral life. The distortions of the Coleridgian reading, which mistakes her incapacity for a refusal, demonstrate the depth of difference between these two concepts, and the degree to which it impacts judgements of character. The error in Johnsonian readings, in contrast, is that of confusing Cordelia's moral limit (a matter of character and her nature as a distinctive, located human actor) for an abstract form of conceptual impossibility. The failures of this reading illustrate the importance of keeping an intimately personal conception of the moral agent – as human being and liver of a life – at the centre of our thoughts about character. 2. Cavell's hermeneutic proposal – the central metaphor of King Lear Before turning to Cordelia's “Nothing”, it will be necessary first to do a little stage-setting regarding Cavell's reading of Lear's agenda as the play opens. Cavell’s re- reading of the play concentrates on its central metaphor, that of sight and blindness, 3 concepts which not only permeate the language of the play but are also enacted in one of its most visceral moments, the appallingly protracted and interrupted blinding of Gloucester. Cavell's revolutionary interpretation centres on the innovation of turning Shakespeare's metaphor on its head; reading these notions not as primarily concerned with the act of seeing and its failure, but as being about vision in its passive aspect of being seen and being hidden from view. This has particular resonances for Lear, who Cavell proposes we understand as a man governed by an overwhelming desire to avoid (hide or flee from) the penetrating gaze of love. This illuminates Lear's behaviour in the opening scene, which is strange on any account. He demands that his three daughters profess their love for him before the royal court, performing an act of courtier's flattery, in order to “win” their inheritance (a third of his kingdom). This is motivated, Cavell argues, by a deep-seated dread of being seen by another with the eyes of love. The connection between being seen and being loved is that to be seen by someone who genuinely loves you is to be seen for what you really are, in your entirety, with all of your successes and strengths, and all of your faults, failures and weaknesses. Appearing to another’s loving gaze is a form of appearing naked before them. This exposes Lear's fear of being seen as, at bottom, a fear of an encounter with himself – of being forced to confront what he now is, what he has become. His attempt to hide from love is the expression of a powerful drive to self-deception.4 For Lear, being seen with love means being seen stripped of the armour of 4 This turns the metaphor of sight into being seen for what one really is, in something like the sense of, “She saw right through me.” And its companion idea of blindness becomes about hidden-ness, being protected from the gaze of others, perhaps in the way that young children cover their eyes with their hands so as to become “invisible.” This is a pertinent image to apply to Lear, because what is so terrifying about him is the tension between his fierce and violent power, and the childish fear and weakness at his core. The fool also harps on Lear's having assumed the role of a child with respect to his daughters. 4 political power and a reputation earned in battle and by harsh rule, and exposed as the increasingly feeble and dependent old man he has become. Cavell's reading sheds an entirely new light on the significance of, and intention behind, Lear's demand: He feels unworthy of love when the reality of lost power comes over him. That is what his plan was to have avoided by exchanging his fortune for his love at one swap. He cannot bear love when he has no reason to be loved, perhaps because of the helplessness, the passiveness which that implies, which some take for impotence. And he wards it off for the reason for which people do ward off being loved, because it presents itself to them as a demand.5 Behind Lear's demand, then, is his intention “...to avoid recognition, the shame of exposure, the threat of self-revelation.”6 And driven by this, he tries to engineer a situation in which it will be impossible for his daughters to confront him with real love.