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 dentate a 'sulfurous 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 genitalia 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).

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).

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).

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 uncertainty 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).

“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).

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).

A turnover has happened and the state will be sustained on a changed foundation:

"It is the nature of a thing to be inert; oh how our alchemists must coax and wheedle the things to kindle spirit in it, and then whoosh goes the vapor out of the chimney, leaving behind a bit of treacle in a jar. We study to be things, impressed by their steadfastness. Why, you can swallow a stone, and find it in the toilet bowl in the morning, unchanged; we dream of such obduracy. But that is not our nature, we are built to slump, trickle, and run; waters sluice through us.." (MA 29).