The Wandering of King Lear’s Mother Essay

The Wandering of King Lear’s MotherAfter 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”

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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 Lear experience some sort of

gender confusion by conjuring up the “mother”? As Janet Adelman keenly points

out, “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 “mother” after all? One thing is certain

that the (m)othering of the “mother” is overwhelmingly sophisticated, to the extent

that the “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 “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 “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. “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, “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).