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

The Wandering of King Lears fixAfter 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 mother to express his outburst of rage and physical symptom sensations O how this mother 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 mother? Or what is this mother? As many critics have identified, this mother is another(prenominal) 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 grammatical 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 movement of the sulphurous pit within him (114). But still why do we want to focus on this mother after all? One topic 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 social unit play. For our purpose, the mother holds significant 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 publication of A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603). The title of the book suggests the disease called the m... ... to bolster up male identity. Works Cited Adelman, Janet. smother 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 Su ffocation of 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).