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The Wandering of King Lear’s Mother Essay

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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 “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 “mother”? Or what is this “mother”? As many critics have

identified, this “mother” is another 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 Lear’s “mother”? Does …show more content…

“Besides the English name of the mother, or the

suffocation of the mother, the disease goes under several other names” (Camden 391).

As Jorden writes, “This disease is called by diverse names amongst our Authors,

Passio Hysterica, Suffocatio, Prafocatio, and Strangulatus uteri, Caducus matrices,

etc.” (5)

We may wonder what has Lear to do with the mother, since his anatomy is

obviously deficient of such a disease. How does the mother affect Lear as well as

his relationship to other characters? Is Lear a male hysteric?

It is obvious that the mother revealed and represented by Lear’s words is a

complex representational figure, simultaneously “real” and “fantasized”. It is “real”

in the sense that Lear can in no way deny or repress the mother’s urgent emergency

and her terrifying power and wrath. 1

It is “fantasized” in the sense that there is

simply no bodily space to mark her presence.

On the other hand, the mother can be viewed as a metaphor employed by Lear to

express his emotional and physical states. Given the entire absence of literal

mothers in the play, this conjuring up of the mother seems particularly significant and

meaningful.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the theme of hysteria and to trace the

wandering of this mother and its manifestations in Shakespeare’s King Lear from a

feminist perspective. The obscure, restless, and

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