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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:
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[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)
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DEVOLVE
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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).
--Membrum--
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BODY
and
TEXT
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“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).
--Limb-- |
(un)STABLE
REPRESENT-ATION |
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:
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BOUNDS,
FORESTS, RIVERS, MEADS,
LINES. |
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)
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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).
--Clause--
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).
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MONSTROUS
WOUNDS |
--Clause--
In a violent gesture, Albany suggests that he will silence and
control female sexuality/organs 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).
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INSIDE/
OUTSIDE
THE
BODY
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“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).
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