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

The Wandering of King Lear’s Mother After 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 â€Å"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 element’s below. Where is this daughter? (II.iv.56-58) Who is this â€Å"mother†? Or what is this â€Å"mother†? As many critics have identified, this â€Å"mother† is another name for the womb, matrix, or uterus. That the â€Å"mother swells up† points to the disease called hysteria. Yet, who is responsible for the rise or wandering of Lear’s â€Å"mother†? Does Lear experience some sort of gender confusion by conjuring up the â€Å"mother†? As Janet Adelman keenly points out, â€Å"The bizarreness of these lines has not always been appreciated; in them Lear quite literally acknowledges the presence of the sulphurous pit within him† (114). But still why do we want to focus on this â€Å"mother† after all? One thing is certain that the (m)othering of the â€Å"mother† is overwhelmingly sophisticated, to the extent that the â€Å"mother† is located in the inside of Lear’s body and her implicated wanderings can be traced throughout the whole play. For our purpose, the â€Å"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 Jorden’s 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 â€Å"m... ... to bolster up male identity. Works Cited Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Camden, Carroll. â€Å"The Suffocation of The Mother.† Modern Language Notes, 63.6 (June., 1948), 390-393. Jorden, Edward. A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation 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. Notes 1 As Carroll Camden argues, â€Å"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).