Feminist Views in Shakespeare’s King Lear

A Quick Background

King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king. It has been widely adapted for the stage and motion pictures, and the role of Lear has been coveted and played by many of the world's most accomplished actors (Wikipedia.com, 2011).

The play was written between 1603 and 1606 and later revised. Shakespeare's earlier version, The True Chronicle of the History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters, was published in quarto in 1608. The Tragedy of King Lear, a more theatrical version, was included in the 1623 First Folio. Modern editors usually conflate the two, though some insist that each version has its individual integrity that should be preserved (Warren, 1983).

After the Restoration, the play was often revised with a happy ending for audiences who disliked its dark and depressing tone, but since the 19th century Shakespeare's original version has been regarded as one of his supreme achievements. The tragedy is particularly noted for its probing observations on the nature of human suffering and kinship. George Bernard Shaw wrote, "No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear" (Wilson, 1961).

Summary

The play opens with a formal ceremony in which King Lear decides to retire from his throne and divide his kingdom equally between his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, each of whom must pass a “love test” in order to inherit his riches. (It is important to note here that his daughters can’t actually take possession of the kingdom themselves -They have to do it through their husbands because Women couldn’t own property at the time Shakespeare wrote in England, even though the supreme monarch of the time was Queen Elizabeth, a woman.) Lear’s love test requires each daughter to profess her undying love for him. Two daughters (the bad ones, Regan and Goneril) play along competitively with their fulsome terms that they love him more than anything in the world and it pleases him; the third (Cordelia, the good one and his favourite of the three) doesn’t and so she gets cast out of the kingdom and was not given any inheritance by her father as a result. So the kingdom was divided to the two bad daughters of Lear. Kent objects to this unfair treatment. Lear is further enraged by Kent's protests, and banishes him from the country. Cordelia's two suitors enter. Learning that Cordelia has been disinherited, the Duke of Burgundy withdraws his suit, but the King of France is impressed by her honesty and marries her. So this sets up a classic Shakespearean power struggle between Lear’s bad daughters and their diminished King-­‐father for control of the kingdom, its soldiers and riches. This power struggle defines the rest of the play, with predictably tragic outcomes for almost everyone involved. There is a secondary story here that mirrors the first one (this story-­‐within-­‐a-­‐story structure is a common Shakespearean convention). Lear announces he will live alternately with Goneril and Regan, and their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall respectively. He reserves to himself a retinue of one hundred knights, to be supported by his daughters. Goneril and Regan speak privately, agreeing that Lear is old and foolish.

King Lear has a trusted court lieutenant, an old fellow named Gloucester, Who has two sons of his own – one good (Edgar), the other bad (Edmund). Edmund resents his illegitimate status, and plots to supplant his legitimate older brother Edgar. In a parallel story to that of Lear’s, the good son goes into exile while the bad one stays behind and attempts to disable his own father and grab power from him, just like Lear’s two daughters are doing from theirs. Edmund “the bastard son” joins forces with Lear’s daughters to consolidate control of Lear’s kingdom and Gloucester’s riches. Eventually the daughters turn against one another and vie for the amorous attentions of the bad son to help each gain control of the kingdom (even though both of them are already married). Albany. Kent and Cordelia take charge of Lear, whose madness largely passes. Regan, Goneril, Albany, and Edmund meet with their forces. Albany insists that they fight the French invaders but not harm Lear or Cordelia. The two sisters lust for Edmund, who has made promises to both. He considers the dilemma and plots the deaths of Albany, Lear, and Cordelia. Edgar gives Goneril's letter to Albany. The armies meet in battle, the British defeat the French, and Lear and Cordelia are captured. Edmund sends them off with secret orders for execution.

The victorious British leaders meet, and Regan now declares she will marry Edmund. But Albany exposes the intrigues of Edmund and Goneril and proclaims Edmund a traitor. Regan collapses; Goneril has poisoned her. Edmund defies Albany, who calls for a trial by combat. Edgar appears to fight Edmund and fatally stabs him in a duel. Albany shows Goneril's letter to her; she flees in shame and rage. Edgar reveals himself; Gloucester dies offstage from the overwhelming shock and joy of this revelation.

While Lear’s daughters are busy fighting their father and each other for control, there are a number of secondary characters (Kent, the king’s advisor, and Fool, his court clown, and Edgar, Gloucester’s good son in disguise, along with a few others) all out there running about trying to save Lear and Gloucester, each of whom has chosen to wander off into the woods, descending slowly into madness as each is slowly betrayed and stripped of power by his own children. Goneril stabs herself and confesses to poisoning Regan. Dying Edmund reveals his order to kill Lear and Cordelia, but it is too late: Cordelia is dead though Lear slew the killer. Lear carries the dead Cordelia in his arms onstage. Lear recognises Kent. Albany urges Lear to resume his throne, but Lear is too far gone in grief and hardship. Lear collapses and dies. Albany offers to share power between Kent and Edgar. At the end, either Albany or Edgar (depending on whether one reads the Quarto or the Folio version) is crowned King.

Introduction

King Lear is one of the last plays William Shakespeare wrote. It is one of his famous tragedies adapted from a well-known folk tale of the time, so it’s not actually a very complicated story. Along with that, it has exposed a wide range of scenarios like children defy the elders and women as a subject to power and discrimination. However, as the drama ensues, the audience realizes that the women, Goneril and Regan, are really controlling most of the events in the story. Contrary to the cultural standards of his time, Shakespeare portrays women as the "stronger" sex in King Lear.

Feminist Criticism assumes that oppression of women is pervasive throughout the history of literature, and that the generalizations we all make based on various cultural gender stereotypes are inherently problematic, particularly to women. It seeks to examine instances of bias and prejudice in literature (these are often referred to as misogyny and sexism), and tries to expose the various negative effects of that bias in literature and in culture.

Feminist theory, the last body of literary criticism, borrows much of its methodology from deconstruction and applies this in specific contexts that concern how gender roles – the power dynamics between men and women, and the roles those force us each to play – are depicted in culture and in literature. It wishes to examine, among other things:

·         how women and men are (or are not) represented in a given work of literature

·         how and why certain gender stereotypes, archetypes, paradigms are either “written into” our stories or undermined by them

·         What effect it has on a culture when an author or character does or doesn’t bend to the conventional rules of patriarchy (“rules” like Destructive gender definitions or ingrained sexist beliefs).

Feminist theory sees the different modes of literary production (stories, poems, songs, plays) as “sites” upon which we project certain problematic cultural paradigms of what it is to be a woman or a man. It also sees literary works generally as the places from which both destructive and liberating ideas of sex and gender originate. Our literary works help “create” us, but they also reflect us (Christensen, 2011). Moreover, Feminist Criticism is a type of literary theory that wishes to point out how different genders, races, classes, religions, etc. are portrayed in a piece of literature. Feminists critics mainly care about how women are written about, and how women write. They want to know why women's works are rarely included in the canon, which is the group of works that are read, written about, and reprinted most often. They also wish to point out how a work either undermines or perpetuates certain stereotypes about women or other groups. They question how women are portrayed, why they are portrayed as such, and what effect it has on the reader and society as a whole. If negative stereotypes arise, they desire to change these stereotypes which is entirely possible since all stereotypes are constructed, the theory wishes to point out to us. In other words, because stereotypes are just made up ideas that society has about a particular group, it is possible to destroy these stereotypes. Ultimately, they wish to question gender, challenging easy definitions of man and woman, male and female. Gender is not just about biological factors, but about how society assigns certain characteristics to men or women. In fact, since gender too is constructed, it can therefore be deconstructed. This is what feminist critics wish to do.

In Act 1, Scene 4, Goneril is having an argument with her father, King Lear, she says that he has to reduce the number of his knights that follow him around and stay at her house with him. She is clearly the head of the house in this scene, as Albany, her husband, is not even there at first, and when he does show up, he proclaims,

"MY lord, I am guiltless, as I am ignorant / Of what hath moved you"

The reason he does not understand why Lear is upset when he shows up in the middle of Lear and Goneril's argument is because he does not keep track of what his wife is doing: he simply lets her manage the household in whatever way she sees fit. Later on in the scene, Lear, talking to Goneril, says,

"I am ashamed / that thou hast power to shake my manhood thus"

What Lear is saying in this quote is that he is ashamed that Goneril has enough power over him to make him sad, upset, and irrational, which are all traits typically associated with women. Goneril, Lear's oldest daughter, has enough power in this scene to force Lear's knights out of her house and to make him very upset. The men in this scene, Lear and Albany, are belittled by Goneril. Her husband, who has no idea what is going on, is told to stay out of it, and her father is told, without any respect at all, that he needs to get rid of some of his knights. However, this demonstration of power by the supposed "weaker" sex is just the beginning of Goneril's plan. Later in the story she uses her power to achieve much more sinister goals.

 “Either the woman is passive; or she doesn’t exist. What is left is unthinkable, unthought of. She does not enter into the opposition; she is not coupled with father” (Cixous, 2007). Women, in the past, were perceived as obedient and submissive. These characteristic traits were portrayed as favorable and if women lacked these aspects they were considered as non-existent. In Act two, the women, more specifically Regan and Goneril demonstrated the exact opposite of this notion. They utilized deception to gain priority. The sisters strived to completely dethrone their father. The king’s knights represented power and the sisters, acknowledged this fact, demanded the king to release them from their knightly duties. By eliminating the King of Britain, the women gained excessive amount of power and hence became more salient to the world as well as to the male dominating society. Another way in which they eliminated the king from power was when they sent Kent to the Stocks. Even though King Lear asked his daughters to dismiss him from the device, they refused indicating his lack of power.
              Act two can also be perceived as anti-feminist. Man and woman, woman and man are therefore always meeting as though for the first time since they cannot stand in for one another. I shall never take the place of a man; never will a man take mine (Irigaray, 2007). The sisters, in a discrete fashion, strived to become the opposite sex. They could have gained power and rights to the country without striving to deliberately belittle their father. This notion is also perceived through their relationship with their husbands. It seems as if they dominated that relationship as well. They refuse to listen to their spouses when they ask them to treat their father in a more kindly fashion. However, in order to gain power, according to Irigaray, once must remain in their own position and never strive to become the opposite sex.

In Act 3, Scene 7, Regan and her husband Cornwall have captured Gloucester and threaten to pluck out his eyes for being a traitor. One of their servants sees how wrong this is, and he tries to protect Gloucester by fighting Cornwall. Regan clearly does not believe her husband can handle the fight, for she says to another servant,

"Give me thy sword. - A peasant stand up thus?"

Then she runs up to the servant and pierces him in the back, instantly killing him. This is another example of how Lear's daughters take control of several situations in the play. In this case, Lear's middle daughter, Regan, demonstrates her violent nature, first by plucking poor Gloucester's eyes out, and then by killing her own servant. The fact that she kills the servant, instead of letting her husband handle the fight, shows the audience that she has no confidence in her husband or his ability to get things done. All of the attributes that Regan shows in this scene are typically ascribed to males. Shakespeare has turned the tables on his audience, showing them that women can be just as evil, violent, and power-hungry as men.

Another example of the power that these daughters have is in Act 4, Scene2, when Goneril tells Edmund that her husband is a coward, saying,

"It is the cowish terror of his spirit / That dares not undertake"

She also says that

"I must change names at home, and give the distaff / Into my husband's hands"

In other words, she plans to take charge of her household, and wants her husband to play the housewife from now on. In reality, she has been in charge of the household during the whole play, but this is the first time that she admits it to anyone, and she is likely doing so because she wants Edmund to know how she feels about her husband, so that he will become her lover.

Towards the end of the play when Goneril and Regan's troops are at war with France, the two sisters become extremely jealous of each other. Each of them wants Edmund for herself and wants the other sister out of the picture so they can control the entire kingdom. In Act 5, Scene 3, Regan says she is "Sick, oh, sick!" and Goneril, to herself, says,

"If not, I'll ne'er trust medicine"

This clearly implies that Goneril intentionally poisoned Regan. She is so power-hungry that she is willing to kill her own sister to get control of the kingdom, even though that control may be taken away if the King of France wins the battle, which is currently ensuing. Again, Shakespeare sholvs his audience that these two sisters are the "stronger" sex in the play. They are willing to do absolutely anything for power and wealth.

In her words Cordelia appears a pure, chast, innocent woman. In Scene V, the action centres on Regan. She asks Gonerill’s steward why Gonerill writes a letter to Edmund. She makes clear her relation to Edmund:

“My Lord is dead; Edmund and I have talkt;

And more convenient is he for my hand

Than for your lady’s...”

Thus, Cordelia’s chastity of the previous scene is compared to her sister’s lust for Edmund. She is put higher on the scale. She is a saint; her sisters are devil-like monsters. In the seventh scene of the fourth act Cordelia and Lear are reunited and reconciled. Cordelia is again contrasted with her sisters:

“O my dear father! Restoration hang

Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss

Repair those violent harms that my two sisters

Have in thy reverence made!”

Cordelia’s return is a restoration of patriarchy, of the old order. But this cannot be wholly reduced to male power. Cordelia has also power, she has a group of soldiers under her command. She is autonomous and she does not need the King of France to command her soldiers.

Cordelia’s sisters low passions will arrive at their limit in their clash for Edmund, as the following quotes demonstrate:

“I shall not endure her: dear my Lord

Be not familiar with her.” 25

“I had rather lose the battle than that sister

Should loosen him and me.”

The reader notices that Goneril and Regan will end tragically. Their lust for Edmund will destroy them. Thus, Cordelia’s return brings changes and: evil is destroyed; however she will not find a better end; and it may be the great payback for his father if he could have lived.  As a whole, this creates a poetic judgment for the vicious character in the end and mercy for the innocent people.

Conclusion

            Viewing a play like King Lear through the lens of feminist criticism can be a useful way of understanding what some of the conceptions and expectations were that people had of women and men in Elizabethan England, and how an artist like Shakespeare chose to recapitulate – or not – those paradigms in his plays. This kind of study provides an opportunity for us to understand how we as a culture, then and now, define and delimit gender roles – the things we say women and men are allowed to do, and the ways in which we enforce or undermine those rules.

In the play, Lear's two daughters, Goneril and Regan, each display their great motivation to take control of the kingdom and this overwhelming urge is their waterloo that lead them to death. They show many intrinsic characteristics typically displayed by men in order to prove that they are in control of every situation. However, in the end, both of them end up dead. While Shakespeare was indeed trying to show his audience that women can achieve whatever men can, he was also trying to show them that the power that these women sought destroyed them in the end. If these women had acted as women traditionally do, instead of displaying "manly" characteristics, maybe things would have turned out better for them. Thus they may have succeeded in their plans.

Bibliography:

Christensen. (2011). Lear-¬Fem. Skyline English 110 .

Cixous, H. (2007). Sorties.

Irigaray, L. (2007). Anti-feminist Essays.

Shakespeare, W. (2003). King Lear. New York: Spark Publishing

Warren, G. T. (1983). The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-198-12950-9.

Wilson, G. b. (1961). Shaw on Shakespeare. Applause ISBN 1-55783-561-6.

www.wikipedia.com/king_lear