Lear, King | Coppelia Kahn (essay date 1986)
Coppelia Kahn (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: "The Absent Mother in King Lear" in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 33-49.
[In the essay that follows, Kahn, writing from a feminist perspective, attempts to uncover in King Lear a subtext based on gender. Kahn focuses in particular on the missing maternal figure in the drama.]
Fleeing Goneril's "sharp-tooth'd unkindness," Lear arrives at Gloucester's house in search of Regan, still hoping that she will be "kind and comfortable," although she was inexplicably not at home when he called before. He finds his messenger in the stocks, a humiliation that he rightly takes as directed at him personally. At first he simply denies what Kent tells him, that Regan and her husband did indeed commit this outrage. Then he seeks to...
[The entire page is 7221 words long]
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