(RE) Definition: Shattered Language
Lear starts the disconnection between word and sense: "His decision to retain the name but to forsake the function of king, and at the same time to make his daughters his mothers, inverts the oedipal law of participation in the social order. Thus he engenders a dispensations of...empty words and primitive, even monstrous, hunger." (Stern 302). Lear moves from being an active author(ity) of the state to a passive child that asks to be fed by his daughters Regan and Goneril. The reversal from scripting to consuming is a crucial one that is highlighted by other characters in the play. Edmund is perhaps the most sinister and compelling example of the power to (re)define the sense of words. As a writer (of letters and names), Edmund attempts to redefine several powerful words (legitimate 1.2.16-21; unpossessing and bastard (2.1.65-77). Edmund literally scripts the voices of others (Edgar’s ‘hand’ is impersonated) in order to take control of language and sense. Glouchester, convinced by Edmund’s “inventions,” changes his own text: this father also claims he “would unstate myself” (1.2.98) and ultimately erases his own child by saying “I never got him” (2.1.79). Glouchester acts as a mirror of Lear—both are deceived by a belief in the truth or stability of external representation (spoken and written text). The degree to which ‘social order’ is transgressed and inverted leads to physical and psychological madness. Lear’s madness seems to authentically match renaissance doctor’s accounts (whereas Edgar’s takes on the form of ‘popular’ or fictional accounts) and oddly casts him as a female (Bennett 141).

Madness: Historical Context and Mapping the Sexed Body
The Fool repeatedly attributes female body parts to Lear and as early as Act I, scene 4, the Fool reveals the reversals of identity: “thou madest thy daughters thy mother” and thus “thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides, and left nothing i’the middle’ (166-189). Both Kent and the Fool focus on ‘differences’ and fail to convey to Lear a distinguishing eye. Instead, Lear’s wit is scripted as empty female genitalia with “nothing i’the middle.” Lear names his own madness “Hysterica passio” (2.4.55), representing his madness in a way that suggests an official scientific terminology for his condition and also tellingly uses a name associated with females. Lear’s words script him as “a male hysteric, [he] fears that he harbors within himself the internal organs of the despised female body" (Rudnysky 295). The words ‘hysterica’ and ‘mother’ name associated maladies: “Hysteria, thought to be caused by a malfunction of the womb, was called familiarly 'the mother,' as in Lear's passionate attempt to master his imminent madness...Like the rising gorge to indicate vomiting, the rising 'mother' is an unpropitious physiological sign" (Charney 451-2).
While it was understood in Shakespeare’s time that only women had wombs, anatomical illustrations of the time suggest that there was an understanding of woman’s internal structures as derivative from or correspondent to the male’s (Laquer 81). The wide proliferation of anatomical illustrations and the appearance of some reports on the condition of madness suggests an attempt to control and know:
By theorizing and representing madness, the Renaissance gradually and with difficulty began to try to separate human madness from the supernatural...and from the sheerly physical...and began to try to map the normal, 'natural', and self-contained secular human subject. Attempting to define what remained, the period began to separate mind from body, man from woman, insanity from both sanity and from other types of aberrance such as poverty, heresy, and crime.
(Neely 318-9).
In anatomical illustrations women’s sexual organs were visually mapped out in a way that seeks to make them legible to the male viewer: “A whole world view makes the vagina look like a penis to Renaissance observers” (Laquer 83). The female body became a text that was used rhetorically—in King Lear the tension of differences is perhaps most striking over the issue of sex itself. The idea of a ‘monster’ or illegible body is at the center of patriarchal fear: at the trial scene from the quarto version, Lear calls for them to “anatomize Regan; see what breeds /about her heart” (3.7.76-7). Female love, sexuality and innards are a mystery to Lear that he desires to rip apart in order to discover the science behind her workings. Albany shares Lear’s desire to tear apart the female body to reveal the monstrous innards: “Were’t my fitness /To let these hands obey my bood, /They are apt enough to dislocate and tear thy flesh and bones” (4.2.63-6). Although division of the body was seen as a sort of violation (legally troubling and used also as torture), the dissection can be revealing of the darkness imagined inside the body. There is a sort of mastery to be found in ‘knowing’ the body piece by piece: “To know our enemies’ minds, we’d rip their hearts, /Their papers, is more lawful” (4.6.259-60). The connection of meaning, sense, or emotion to physical parts of the body is mapped out by physiological studies of the time: "the soul [is placed] in the brain, [a theory which] was known to Shakespeare" (Cruttwell 85). Anatomical illustrations can also suggest a secularization of the body, a movement that is also present at the heart of the play: “One sees the tension...[between] a craving for freedom and a deep need for control…in Edmund's ridiculing of astrology...[he] is not only criticizing a false belief, he is also throwing off a spiritual control” (Cruttwell 86). As Cruttwell acknowledges, the meaning of throwing off the astromonical beliefs is troubling because of Edmund’s negative status within the play—while it may not ultimately align with Shakespeare’s own perspectives, the ‘throwing off’ does seem to give Edmund new access to individual control and power.

Fragmentation: Powerful Organs
The literal fragmentation of the body is the anxiety of King Lear, but it is also a source of (corrupt?) power. Body parts resonate with sexual tension, but can also misrepresent the whole when they are ventriloquized by another or do not perform as expected. When the body is fragmented and is expected to perform metonymically, strange and monstrous scripts can flourish. The process begins and ends with Cordelia’s mouth. In "The Absent Mother in King Lear," Coppelia Kahn convincingly argues that "The play is full of oral rage: it abounds in fantasies of biting and devouring, and more specifically, fantasies of parents eating children and children eating parents...When Cordelia doesn't feed [Lear] with love, he thinks angrily of eating her" (302). In a troubling gesture, Lear calls for Cordelia to pledge all of her love to him before she is to be married—Cordelia instead chooses division. Her refusal to speak for Lear opens the wound in the text out of which monsters will pour: “Nothing, my lord. /Nothing? /Nothing. /Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.” (1.1.87-90). She refuses to stage her love, calling forth a grotesque vision by claiming that she “cannot heave /My heart into my mouth” (1.1.91-2). Mouths continue to figure (alarmingly separate from the rest of the body in description) throughout the text, partly due to the connection between mouths and vaginas, silence and sexual control. During the first act of the play, Cordelia’s focus upon the mouth and the eye mirrors the mapped out divisions of the state—both carry deep anxieties over accurate and stable representations. While Cordelia’s own tongue refuses public representation because her love cannot be translated into language, she is able to see the contrasting nature of her sisters commercially appealing bodies: Goneril and Regan wield “A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue /As I am glad I have not” (1.1.233) while “my love’s /More ponderous than my tongue” (1.1.78). As the name ‘King’ is stripped of its significance, Lear finds that daughter Regan “struck me with her tongue” (2.4.157) and he begins to understand the danger of calling women to speak. Edgar also reiterates the dangers of mingling male body parts with fiendish females: “Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lender’s books, and defy the foul fiend” (3.4.93-5).

BODY, LANDSCAPE AND TEXT: UNruly Significations
Lear’s concerns over female sexuality and control extend outward to both land and national identity: "Denied mothering, his rage is such that he would destroy the round maternal belly of the very earth itself and abort its gestating contents" (Stern 306). The storm that Lear experiences at the height of his madness is connected intimately with the Other or the unknown:
[Lear] brand[s] the female dentata a 'suplhurous pit' [in 4.6.120-7]... The anatomical references here retroactively warrant a sexual reading of Lear's apostrophe to the storm as 'You Sulph'rous and Thought-executing Fires'…Indeed, if the storm represents nature as an unleashed female body wreaking its destructive havoc, it seems plausible to interpret Lear's exhortation to blow 'Till you have drench'd our Steeples, drown the Cockes'…as a depiction of the endangered male organ. (Rudnytsky 300-1)
The smell of the ‘pit’ that is female genetalia marks both as something monstrous. While Lear once upheld gender division with his discussion of male anger versus female ‘tears,’ these categories begin to collapse as he justly finds that Regan and Goneril are “not men o’their words” (4.6.103, emphasis mine). A vision of them as something other than men, results in a rescripting of himself as “not ague-proof” and not “everything.” Facing emptiness as a body devoid of signification, Lear crosses the borders to stand outside of society, but there is something to be found in the unruled, empty heath. Divested of clothing and sense to mark him as a King, Lear is able to understand his own frailty and see his stability shatter in the fierce storm of his fears: “Here I stand your slave, /A poor infirm, weak, and despised old man” (3.2.19-20). Lear’s broken body (3.1.282-4) and mental chaos/emptiness are fully realized in the landscape and in Shakespeare’s text, as even the diction devolves into “wild phonic stuff” (Calderwood 6). Just as nothing can become something, something can also become nothing: Lear is doubled as infantile (naked and “child-changed”) and close to death (cold and mortal). The paradoxical doubling is mirrored again by Shakespeare's style: “Shakespeare does not merely divest Lear of his clothing; he also strips his own theatrical art to a kind of nakedness” (Calderwood 7). Just as Lear would destroy the earth’s rotundity with a masculine thrust of thunder, he seems to regress to a point of origin with both dress and language: “O! O!” (3.2.24); “A king, a king!” (3.6.11); “So, so, so” (3.6.84).
Unruled female sexuality is at the heart of his fear, as he cannot control “his daughter's unbearable desire of the other, of France. Thus he characterizes it horribly in imagery associated with syphilis, in terms, that is, of the venereal infection Shakespeare's countrymen called the French disease" (Stern 303). The figure of France mirrors the national threat that was felt by England in Shakespeare’s time. More stuff here… Interesting in terms of taking the local and making it universal. what does it mean for england's people/territory to become a map of universal themes?

“any thing” out of Nothing: ReCONSTRUCTING Authority
In the Quarto version of King Lear, law functions as "a powerful metaphor for man's attempt to order and control his expereince, as in the trial on the heath in King Lear" (JDE 433). Just as Cordelia is able to disrupt Lear’s ordered sanity with her “Nothing,” control of the something that is created by structure and language can make sense: “Man has developed formal legal process to deal with disorder in society, [to] harness the threat of chaos by constructing context within which we can begin to control it. The trial ends the long, wild sequence on the heath, and after it Lear, for the first time, is able to sleep" (431-2). The fragmented body of Lear may be able to assume wholeness again: “This rest might yet have balmed thy broken sinews” (3.6.98). The love trial scene suggests that Lear “hath ever but slenderly known himself" as he calls for a demonstration of what should be a part of his own self-knowledge. Both Goneril and Regan condemn Lear’s own blindness as "The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash...." (I.i.292-95). Lear begins to more critically interrogate himself and those around him in a way that reveals a belief in mutability. “What art thou?” becomes the crucial question of the text that undoes any prior sense of stability. Words unravel: “Are you our daughter?...Doth any here know me? This is not Lear…Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (1.4.220-24). The words king, daughter, fool, Lear all fall into question—and Lear looks to others to tell him. As Edgar demonstrates, the power to construct your own meanings is certainly something: “That’s something yet! Edgar I nothing am” (2.3.21).

Mapping and Silence
King Lear begins the territorial division of his kingdom with a visual representation of unity: “Give me the map there” (1.1.16). The land is understood as made of differing parts that would assumedly be represented on the complete map of ‘Albion.’ Lear finds it necessary to catalog the different aspects of each piece:
Of all of these bounds, even from this line to this,
With shadowy forests and with chaplains riched,
With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,
We make thee lady… (1.1.62-5)
As the kingdom is represented in the abstract, Lear must point to a “line” on the map that will serve as a symbolic division of the state. Even within the “line” distinctions are made between types of landscape, bounded together into a separate ‘whole.’ The categories with visual representation give the King authority and control over the landscape and the Lady. The ‘flaw’ in Lear’s own plan is his belief in representation’s stable truth value. Anxiety and uncertaintly appear immediately with Cordelia’s refusal publicly submit to Lear’s (sexual/oral) control. The “Nothing” that she speaks acts as a sort of psychological black hole: just as the ‘divided’ state begins to unravel, so does the image of the body and language. Lear, Albany and Edgar are ultimately repulsed by the “pit” of the female and speak misogynistic lines against women (“Like monsters of the deep” (4.2.49). The unknown darkness that lies in the sexual organs of the woman is something that Lear and Albany want to excavate, but find that women are “shield[ed]” by false exteriors. The king is given nothing by his monstrous daughters and offered anything by other men: “You shall have any thing.” Control and silence of the female body a repeated enforcement at the end of the play, as order begins to be restored: Albany confronts the sexual treachery of Goneril by telling her to “Shut your mouth, dame, /Or with this paper shall I stople it…Most monstrous! Oh” (5.3.154-158). Female sexuality is fighting for freedom, but in a violent gesture Albany suggests that he will silence and control it by shoving something in the void. Cordelia’s lips haunt the play in life and death, but her voice was mostly unheard: “Her voice was ever soft, /Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in a woman” (5.3.272-3). Order begins to be restored as Lear again knows his daughter “as I am a man, I think this lady /To be my child Cordelia” (4.7.70-1). And while all of the ‘monstrous’ characters who were able to achieve power from a system turned on its head are dead, the system has still been shocked. The instability will continue to haunt the ‘state’ as it remains wounded and divided: “you twain /Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain” (5.3.319-20).

CONNECTION TO JACKSON
Shelley Jackson’s collection of short stories entitled The Melancholy of Anatomy works through many of the naturalizing narratives (of gender and sex) that Butler’s Gender Trouble addresses, in a parallel effort to reject the idea of a subject outside (or prior to) language and to call into being a different perspective within the ‘matrix of power.’ Butler’s concept of the body itself as a socially constructed ‘space’ is embraced by Jackson with just the sort of ‘hyperbolic’ eye that she suggests denaturalizes social narratives. Jackson’s collection of stories also suggest that constructions have materiality. Jackson’s experimental stories play with the performative nature of scripting the body or embodying the script, enabling her to unveil the construction behind the cultural narratives, inviting the chance for reconfiguring narratives and bodies. Like Butler, Jackson also uses texts against themselves in order to create/reveal gaps in the natural scripts encircling them. Jackson also plays with texts by fusing them in a recursive spiral that parodies any sense of stability or ‘return.’ Jackson engages Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, which she quite literally turns on its head by instead moving to “spiritualize anatomy.” The shock to the script—beginning with the mere reversal of the title’s words—‘expands rather than limits’ through altered repetitions. No escape from the ‘naturalized’ and powerful narratives it uses in changing the script is attempted by the collection, nor does it call for a return to a ‘natural’ state. Melancholy insists upon its own performativity through overt uses of film directions and scene descriptions, taking on Butler’s critical stance of “self-conscious” performativity. The collection examines acts of constructing the subject (and the body) through uncanny (laughable) juxtapositions of the ‘natural’ and supernatural. Akin to Butler’s vision of the masquerade (without foundation), Jackson troubles ‘boundaries’ between body/language, material/immaterial, inside/outside. While Jackson’s fiction may enact a denaturalization, Butler urges caution with the ability to know the result of this rupture. Parody and the hyperbolic are also upheld through enlarged sexual organs and bodily excretions ‘writ large’ within Jackson’s fictional world. How does the collection enact something different than Butler’s description of the agenda of the genetic biologist? Melancholy embraces an infinitely recursive sense of performance. Jackson’s stories expose the ‘naturalization’ of the body as an infinite process of fictional construction used for regulation (border patrol). Jackson applies Butler’s theories to fictional genres serving to destabilize the ‘natural’ form of ‘distinct’ narrative genres. Jackson enacts the sort of play and parody Butler envisions in Gender Trouble to ‘denaturalize’ narratives of gender, sex, textual form and the body. Jackson’s stories embrace materiality to a degree that Butler’s text seems to refuse. The immaterial and material are always already linked, but for Jackson the material body (its parts) also has voice. Is Jackson’s move of giving voice to the body part of the uncharted territory that Butler calls for in the boundless realm of The Symbolic (not a closed system)? Do material objects (the body) have voices and lives of their own? Can we translate/hear the body’s voice—or is this the melancholic failure that Butler and Jackson both stub their toes on? What is the use of thinking through objects?
“The only way we can hope to understand what is happening, or what has already happened, is by way of a severe and unnatural dissociation of sensibility” (Birkerts 205).

Shelley Jackson's The Melancholy of Anatomy (MA) is a printed collection of stories that hyperbolize the body and its "humors." Her collection is experimental in form-including film direction, intermission, reading notes, interviews, appendices, etc. Perhaps less violently than her hypertext, MA defamiliarizes its readers from traditional, internalized practices of reading. Ultimately, Jackson shocks us with calm tone and scientific language applied to 'understanding' the body--she rips open the body and looks at it under a microscope to reveal the construction these 'natural' things always (already) undergo.

The book enacts a sort of spoof on the sterilizing capability of scientific language and often the way in which the body is a socially constructed and regulated space. Issues of PLAY are crucial to this piece! It is both playfully funny and a staging of the body on an enlarged scale. The message is a critical one: play with form and play with language can be methods for expanding consciousness. "This is the real world, I said to myself. Pay more attention to it" (MA 66).

Through Jackson's extensive use of 'perverted' vision in The Melancholy of Anatomy, she takes body parts and explodes the socially ingrained texts that go along with them. When the conventional becomes wild, and the wild conventional--both seem to fall flat as visions of 'reality.' Indeed, language, body and text all seem to become fictional scripts that regulate power between people.

“A blue dildo is for remembrance, a red one for truth, the rare silver dildo is for the first-born son on reaching his majority. In ancient texts it may be seen that a dildo of Moroccan leather is suitable for a lady of the merchant class, while her husband may sport one of Cordovan leather. If it be made of pigskin, the lady is said to be ‘high on the hog.’ Gentlewomen, however, use ivory if their husbands can afford it…” (MA 85).
While Joyce recognizes the fear that some have about the destabilization of absolute signifiers, he finds that: "The fear of losing the world is a fear of dismemberment; we close ourselves off into the zipped, conservative ground of the male gaze and colonial vista alike. Against such a fear of loss there is the countervailing play of surfaces, the joy of several worlds at once, passing and multiple"(94).

While reading Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, it becomes clear that the reader experiences problems of reading an electronic text: its non-linearity and even the restraint in portability are radically different than delving into most printed texts.
“The comparison between a literary composition and the fitting together of the human body from various members stemmed from ancient rhetoric. Membrum or ‘limb’ also signified ‘clause’” ("Body of the Text", PG).
Shelley Jackson’s texts raise consciousness—joining in Haraway’s ‘spiral dance’ by shifting meanings of reader/author and male/female through the vehicle of the body. The body (and textual form) are exaggerated and hyperbolized in a way that defamiliarizes the reader from some of our most internalized ideologies (regulation and control of the body and the autonomous self). Each text is an experimental fiction that through different forms plays with the performative nature of reading and writing the body. Jackson and her readers together rip open the scripts we are familiar with to allow other patterns to take shape.
“What did they do? Well, isn’t it obvious? Someone had to go down and clean out all that blood. In some parts of town you can still see the hatches…The city called them manholes, same as the other kind, but we right off renamed them ladyholes, that being the cleanest version of the name I can report to you, sir, and that was because we was almost all women who did the work, women being small boned and, as I said less inclined to get funny about the blood” (MA 142).