King Lear, Femininity and Female Disorder

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King Lear, Femininity and Female Disorder

In Act I, Scene 2 of King Lear, Shakespeare in the mouth of Gloucester affirms the

predominant role of chaos and its ruinous offspring in the tragedy of King Lear.

Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bonds crack'd, … The King falls from bias of nature; there's father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. (Act I, Scene II, L.111)

Harold's Skulsky posits in his work, King Lear and the Meaning of Chaos, that "Lear shatters such smiling and harmonious consort with cacophony and discord. It is a dance of death and devils, in which the dominant repeated images are of disease and decease, …animality and disorder". What can be added to that stance is that chaos and confusion unfold from the moment that power moves from man's rule to women's dominion. Evil, chaos and disorder are even personified and gendered female in the tragedy. The disorder of nature, rule, relationships, health and religion equate to female sway and discordance of the spheres. The harmony of the spheres is broken. King Lear the patriarchal head of England has the position of king, ruler - a divinely ordained responsibility. The most important significance of Lear’s playlet is the way in which it ensures continued disorder through the precedent it establishes,” (Some Facets of King Lear pg. 29) and that disorder remains in force through female rule and representation. When he decides to divest himself of authority, disharmony, discord and moral depravity invade and pervade the land. The government and natures go awry. The fall and the decline of Lear's kingdom are attributed to female interference in administration therefore chaos and evil are feminised.

Sexual disorder and sexual immorality in Lear are more ascribed to the female. The whore and the adulteress are dissolute women given to desire and lust - objectionable qualities in women. At Gloucester's castle, the "bastard Edmund" (Act I, Scene II, L.17) denounces himself and proudly boasts that his mother was a whore who gives birth to a deviant, bastard child. Goneril refuses to accommodateLear's one hundred knights for she fears that the palace be degraded to a "brothel"(Act I, Scene IV,L. 237. This opinion is loaded with irony since she prostitutes herself for power and later for her paramour, Edmund. The palace is already tainted with whoredom. Blind Fortune who curses and dooms the downtrodden at her very caprice is called "that arrant whore who ne'er turns the key to the poor"(Act II, Scene IV,L. 57). Likewise Cordelia calls blind Fortune "False Fortune" (Act V, Scene VI, L. 6) which signifies that she is an adulteress who is unfaithful to her conjugal pledge. Fortune is false to the oppressed subjects of England by endowing propitious lots to the undeserving and unfavorable lots to the good. Lady Justice or simply Justice is the Roman goddess of Justice. She is the embodiment of justice, fairness, and legal order. In Lear, Justice has degenerated into "false justicer"(Act III, Scene IV, L. 56). This retrogressive standard of justice means that in England, the principles of fairness, virtue, morality and reason no longer rule. The transition from order to disorder is illustrated by the change of rule from Lady Justice to False Justicer. False Justicer has sexual implications for when a woman is false, she is unfaithful to her husband and disloyal to her marital vows. So False Justicer is an adulteress who pollutes the land with disorder by issuing false judgments. Lear is so repulsed by the loathsome attitude of his daughters that he wishes to divorce his dead wife "sepulchring an adultress" (Act II, Scene IV, L. 139).

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Critic Kenneth Muir who authored The Tragic Sequence asserts that "evil is the most powerful dynamic force of the play". In Lear, allusions to devils, evil spirits and devil worship are all represented as female. Hecate is the goddess of the wilderness, childbirth, sorcery and witchcraft. The dark meaning attached to the goddess implies that during the period of Goneril's and Regan's rule, she reigns also making the reign an ominous trinity of chaotic rulers over England. Mahu is a creator goddess who is associated with the sun and the moon. This goddess has an incestuous relationship with her brother which ...

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