SOURCE: "Is Man No More Than This?," in Lear's Self-Discovery, University of California Press, 1967, pp. 115-35.

[In the following excerpt, which traces Lear's increasing self-discovery, Jorgensen focuses on Lear's views of female sexuality, which bring him to a fuller understanding of human nature.]

ARE YOU OUR DAUGHTER?

Lear's education in the nature of man is … not confined to the theme of "The art of our necessities." There are several insights, more or less separate from this theme, which help answer the question "Is man no more than this?" One thinks immediately of one of Lear's first recognitions that man is limited by his body. When Cornwall will not admit him, Lear breaks off his anger with the reflection that the Duke may not be well: "nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind / To suffer with the body" (II.iv.109-110). A comparable, though reversed, relationship of mind and body is driven home personally and powerfully to Lear during the storm when he acknowledges that when the mind is free the body is delicate (III.iv.11- 12). And, to take but one more example, he learns also from the storm the frailty and ineffectual quality of his kingly body. Wet by the rain and made to chatter by the wind, he "smelt" out his flatterers and learned that he was not "argue-proof' (IV.vi.102-107). The imagery of the lowly sense of smell, and what it here and elsewhere connotes in the play, reinforces the importance of the body in Lear's education and supports Mrs. Nowottny's fine perception [in "Lear's Questions," Shakespeare Survey 10, 1957]: Shakespeare "has brought home to us Lear's belief that all a man can know is what he knows through the flesh." But we must go beyond this statement. Lear not only learns through the flesh; he learns about the flesh and its limitations, its vileness. And this brings us to the substance of the present section, which is what Lear learns about man's, and his own, tainted body through woman.

Except for Cordelia, all references to women in the play are highly unpleasant. King Lear is, in fact, so rank with the most revolting depictions of women and—even worse—woman, that it has been held, even by some conservative critics, to suggest the nadir of a period of sexual nausea through which Shakespeare himself was suffering. This conclusion has been generally based, for King Lear at least, upon the supposedly gratuitous nature of the sexual passages, by the manner in which they exceed dramatic and thematic requirements of the play. There seems to be little in the first part of the play to prepare for Lear's darkly clinical examination of a woman's body. He has not earlier, with one exception, used sexual imagery, and the vileness of sex seems to have little to do with either the reason for his tragedy or the nature of his ordeal. My explanation for Lear's sexual nausea is not meant to be exclusive of others. All I have tried to do is explore the problem in the context of our subject, Lear's self-discovery, and perhaps in the context of its ultimate conclusion: "Is man no more than this?"

Man's naked body proved for Lear to be grimly instructive. But it stressed for him mainly what a pathetically grotesque creature man was. It did not make man seem revoltingly tainted in flesh. For the ultimate in Lear's discovery of man's naked condition Shakespeare turned to the body and appetites (as opposed to the needs) of woman. "Let them anatomize Regan" is then merely another stage in Lear's study of man's debased condition, but it is the final stage. Such a view makes less gratuitous the role of sex in the play. The anatomy of the female is not introduced because Shakespeare was sick—possibly not because Lear was sick—but in part because Lear was in his self-discovery investigating man's condition, and only woman's body could suffice to illustrate the full depravity of man.

But there is still another reason why we should not regard the theme of sex as an isolated and extradramatic aspect of Lear's characterization. It is placed in context. To appreciate how central it is to the play, we must know both that it is important to Lear's discovery of himself through man, and that the exposure of the sexuality of man (and woman) does not suddenly emerge in the mad scenes, but is in some ways prepared for earlier by other characters and by Lear's own actions and nature.

To Lear's education in the sexuality of woman, two other characters serve, very early in the play, as foils. Both Gloucester and Edmund have completed most of the curriculum, the latter with honors. In the twenty-fourth line of the play, Gloucester has learned that "the whoreson must be acknowledged." And we have already seen how he has become "braz'd" to his sexual life and remembers chiefly that "there was good sport at his making." Gloucester perhaps suffers as a result of his callous sensuality. Edgar later comments to Edmund:

The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
                                    (V.iii.172-173)

But this recognition never comes to Gloucester himself. Unlike Lear, he never broods over man's mortality in terms of the "dark and vicious place." For all practical purposes within the play, Gloucester's education about sex is completed by the first scene.

Edmund's conception of the sexual element in man's nature is equally prompt and is more natively a part of his temperament. He suffers no disturbing disillusionment about the ideal nature of man and woman because he has never had any illusions. He is in this respect the perfect foil to Lear. Edmund is from the beginning happy with the "fierce quality" (I.ii.12) of sex. It is he who deplores the "evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star" (I.ii.137-139), and he talks freely and happily about one of the subjects most painful for any sensitive youth (such as Hamlet) to contemplate: How "My father compounded with my mother" (I.ii.139-140).

For both Gloucester and Edmund the sexuality of life is fully, even gladly, conscious. With Lear it seems to be largely unconscious, but of course not absent. Lear's most shattering experience will be the answer to one of his many seemingly innocent questions: "Are you our daughter?" (I.iv.238). The final answer to this question will not be that the daughters are ungrateful, but that they are in the fullest physiological sense women. And not all of this discovery will come from any change in the behavior of the daughters; it will be the emergence of an aspect of himself which he had not known was there. He is discovering himself as well as his daughters. One does not have to subscribe to the theories of psychoanalysis to proceed from the premise that most of our knowledge is unconscious and that much of what we learn about others is in fact a disclosure of what is within us, unrecognized.

The first scene of the play, the "love scene," is a tempting one for the purpose of showing Lear's un-acknowledged sexual attitudes. He is of course an extremely old man, and society—particularly its younger members like Hamlet—likes to think that old age, like infancy, is securely free from sexual needs or even interests. Shakespeare need not have been a modern, versed in the bookish theoric of psychoanalysis, to know that this is not so. This one play, in its sexual scenes, is ample proof of Shakespeare's "modern" awareness. Here we need take only one incidental passage, a kind of choral comment by the Fool: "Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold" (III.iv.116-118).

Now Lear is not an old lecher; and the comment is not applied to him. But most of the Fool's remarks do have some point in the play as a whole, and one is justified in seeing them as at least choral. At any rate, some "small spark" may be present in Lear's anxious attitude toward his daughters' protestations of love. There may be latent incest, as there is in many men, in his wish for the unshared love of his daughters. Goneril and Regan verbally oblige, the latter even suggesting a sexual devotion in her avowal:

           … I profess
Myself an enemy to all other joys
Which the most precious square of sense
 possesses.…
                                   (I.i.74-76)

Although Kenneth Muir cites, in his Arden edition, several less disturbing (but not convincing) meanings of "the most precious square of sense," Neilson and Hill are probably right in glossing the expression as the "most exquisite region of my senses." Imagery such as this is not out of character for Regan as we later come to know her. It is she who will refer to "the forfended place" (V.i.11). However this may be, an expression of sexuality is not, as I shall presently argue, by any means what Lear wants to hear; but what would please him about the speech is the daughter's preference of his love for the pleasure a husband could give her. It is, however, Cordelia's response that he most needs, and so what angers him about it is that a daughter should be willing to share her love for him with a husband. Thence comes a part of Lear's resentment toward France, and his fantasying the successful suitor as "hot-blooded France" (II.iv.215). Latent feelings of incest could, therefore, possibly account for the violence of Lear's rejection of Cordelia: he himself has been rejected. But I am very doubtful about this explanation, which I have presented as sympathetically as possible. I cite it, like the Regan image, only to show the possibility—badly needed to explain his subsequent outbursts—that Lear at the beginning of the play may be more concerned with sex than conventional critics (for whom furred gowns hide all) have recognized.

My own interpretation of Lear's desire in this scene—besides the need for identity through love—is I think based more closely on the text and is more compatible with the painfulness of Lear's self-discovery in terms of a sexual body. What Lear wants from the women in his life is their exclusive devotion to him shown in the form of solicitous cherishing. He gives a clue to what he has wanted, and to the reason why he has preferred Cordelia, when he says:

I lov'd her most, and thought to set my rest
On her kind nursery.
                                               (I.i.125-126)

Cordelia had signified for him, not sexuality, but comfort. As contrasted probably with her fierce, passionate sisters,

          Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low; an excellent thing in
  woman.
                                  (V.iii.272-273)

And when Goneril has failed to give him his "kind nursery," he turns to her sister, "Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable" (I.iv.328). Whereas Goneril's eyes "are fierce," Regan's "Do comfort and not burn" (II.iv.175-176). What Lear will above all resist, loathe, and fear in women is a sexuality that goes beyond the gentle.

There is of course no decisive sexual meaning in the brutal rejection of Lear by Goneril and Regan. The closest hint of it is in the perversion suggested by the daughters as flagellating mothers (ironically related to "kind nursery"). Goneril says:

         Now, by my life,
 Old fools are babes again, and must be
  us'd
With checks as flatteries, when they are seen
 abus'd'.
                                    (I.iii.18-20)

And once more there comes to mind the Fool's image of Lear, unbreeched, being spanked by his mother-daughters (I.iv.187-190). But this does not get into Lear's own imagery. His gradual disillusionment with his daughters is expressed, except for "Degenerate bastard!" (I.iv.275), mainly in terms of imagery of animals and of a diseased human body: "Detested kite!" (I.iv.284), "thy wolvish visage" (I.iv.330), "Most serpent-like" (II.iv.163), and

            a boil,
A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,
In my corrupted blood.
                               (II.iv.226-228)

Although these images show that the daughters are becoming in his mind monsters of depravity, in a bodily sense, the responsibility for his shifting their vileness to sexual terms is Lear's own. He does not know of their lustful passion for Edmund (which at any rate comes later in the play).

He first becomes obsessed with Goneril as a breeder. This is partially understandable in view of her unkindness to the man who begot her. He would not have his unnatural daughter bear a child, and if she must have one, let the child be to her as she has been to him. What is not fully understandable is the violence and clinical precision of the curse in which he prays for Goneril's sterility. This anatomizing of Goneril comes, it should be remembered, early in the play. It is the first sustained expression of his outrage against his daughter, and it is significant that his early revulsion against an act of ingratitude should be concerned primarily with "the organs of increase" and "her derogate body." This early concern at any rate makes less extraneous his final and repellent anatomy of the female in Act IV.

What I think it shows mainly is that the "filth" of the texuality is partly within Lear himself. The imagery of the play as a whole would support the interpretation of a vile imagination projecting its own image on the world, and of concealed vileness breaking from its bounds and disclosing itself. In his mad speech on sex, Lear himself attributes it to his imagination: "good apothecary, sweeten my imagination" (IV.vi.132-133). But other passages in the play are equally illuminating. Lear speaks of "Close pent-up guilts" riving their "concealing continents" (III.ii.57-58). Cordelia also stresses the idea that filth will disclose itself (as it does in the way she predicts): "Who covers faults, at last shame them derides" (I.i.284). And Albany points perhaps most explicitly of all to the source of foul imaginations: "Filths savour but themselves" (IV.ii.39). Lear is, then, in a manner both dramatically and psychologically convincing, discovering—though at first it is more exposing than discovering—some unsavory truths about himself. He is revolted and yet fascinated by the sexual female, as opposed to the kind whose voice is ever soft, gentle, and low.

What, however, is the agent that brings about this exposure? If he were mad, like Ophelia, it would be understandable. But he is still sane. He is, to be sure, in his rising hysteria moving toward madness. It is only a little more than a hundred lines later that he cries:

O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet
   heaven!
Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!
                                  (I.v.50-51)

But it should be stressed that the curse, unlike his later anatomy of woman, is, though intense, cruelly controlled. The sexual imagery is even here close enough to the surface to emerge without madness. It is, then, a fairly conscious part of his growing awareness of sexuality and the horror of the corrupt female body.

And what increases the horror for him, and also shows his early interest in the female body, is that these monsters are seemingly fair creatures. He twice emphasizes their youth and beauty. The child of spleen is to stamp wrinkles in Goneril's "brow of youth." The fen-sucked fogs are to "infect her beauty" (II.iv.168). And they have the outward form of woman ("Thou art a lady," "gorgeous" in dress), which makes their vileness all the more terrible, even as man's furred gowns enhance the guilt that they conceal. Albany later expresses what is doubtless Lear's far more intense disillusionment:

Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
So horrid as in woman.
                                      (IV.ii.60-61)

Lear's own steps in the way of sexual discovery are, as we note in the preceding chapter, materially assisted by the Fool, whose imagery and songs are full of references to sex and to the sexual nature of both men and women. Here again one is tempted to see the Fool as a part of Lear himself. Another catalyst is Poor Tom, who (like the Fool appearing only when Lear is ready for his lesson) not only teaches Lear about unaccommodated man, but helps him, through provocative suggestion, to fantasy genteel ladies seducing curly-headed servingmen to sate their lust. "Let not," he cautions further, "the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets …" (II.iv.97- 100).

But despite these catalysts, it is Lear's own imagination that is responsible for his ultimate anatomy of woman in Act IV. Early references to female sexuality have partially, but not fully, prepared us for this savage outburst. And doubtless if we had been prepared for it, it would have been, as would Ophelia's sex in madness, far less dramatic.

I need not run through all the details of Lear's speech on the anatomy of woman beneath the waist. This is more painful to the senses than the scene of the blinding of Gloucester, for, unlike stage business, imagery cannot be wholly or partly concealed. I suspect, of course, that this speech is usually not "explicated" in college classrooms. This is understandable. I would emphasize, however, that the speech is not pornography; it is philosophy. There is a profound distinction that separates sex in this play from the bawdy of the comedies. Curiously, King Lear is Shakespeare's only tragedy that is, like the happy comedies, a play of "generation." But whereas talk of generation in the comedies takes the spirited, lighthearted, and expectant form of bawdy, in King Lear it is humorless, unprovocative, and pessimistic. In the comedies, generation stands for the joyous vitality and renewal of life, the future of all that the courtship plots are about. In King Lear, generation not only breeds monstrous children; it points toward mortality and sin. It is finally not an agent of renewal, but a fantasy in the mind of a man near death. Critics and teachers who scant Lear's anatomy of woman have the doubtful virtue, then, of silencing not prurience but philosophy. They miss the important aspect of generation in "we came crying hither" (really the tragic sequel to the gay courtship of the comedies), and they miss what Shakespeare's contemporaries may well have considered the play's deepest and darkest view of the nature of man.

What I should like to stress further about the speech, besides its comment upon man, is why the fantasy is the most painful one that Lear could conjure up for himself. For Lear the painful part of the image is not just the horror of "the sulphurous pit," but the fact that this is a usually disguised part of seemingly gentle woman. What revolts him—and this goes back to his preference for the mild Cordelia—is the exposed sexuality of

           yond simp'ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name.…
                               (IV.vi.120-123)

As with man, Lear has now anatomized woman, and he has done so "down from the waist." In both instances, what repels him is the nakedness beneath the sophistication. As the Renaissance treatises recommended, he had discovered part of himself through unaccommodated man. But with woman he reaches one step further and sees not just the weakness but the vileness of humanity. It is perhaps this that leads him, when Gloucester asks to kiss his hand after the speech about woman, to say: "Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality" (IV.vi.136).

It may be objected that, because Lear is mad in this scene, he achieves little valid self-discovery. Actually, however, it is not, as we have seen, the complete lack of reason found in Ophelia's exhibitionism. It is more accurately described by Edgar as "reason in madness" (IV.vi.179). Moreover, earlier in the play, while he was still sane, Lear had reached a recognition of his own share in his daughters' vileness, a recognition that in part is merely fulfilled by his fantasy concerning woman during his madness. The "reasonable" part of his perception during Act IV—amplified to be sure by a powerful projection through his imagination—is that his daughters are but extensions of himself. He had told Goneril:

… yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my
  daughter;
Or rather a disease that's in my flesh.…
                                        (II.iv.224-225)

And, a little later, when he is verging on madness, he had been able to recognize that

'Twas this flesh begot
Those pelican daughters.
                              (III.iv.76-77)

To at least this extent, therefore, he has sanely participated in his final anatomy of woman. And for our purposes he has made an equally important step toward self-discovery, for he has not simply externalized the vileness in some form apart from himself.

But, as at the end of the last section, we must again face the fact that Lear's mad scene does not conclude the play. Having been through this purgatory of self-discovery, he returns to full sanity momentarily and before his final defiance becomes a humble, relatively tranquil man, his "rage" gone. Once more he wants, it would seem, to retire to Cordelia's "kind nursery" when the two are taken to prison. This is dramatically, but not philosophically, a logical outcome of the pilgrimage he has been through. He cannot sustain indefinitely the intensity of his vision. His spiritual pilgrimage, unparalleled in Shakespeare elsewhere, has been accomplished so far as an old man, and so far as Shakespeare looking through an old man's eyes, could accomplish it. There was no more in this tough world for him to learn. What remained was, in Webster's words, "another voyage."

Peter Erickson (essary date 1985)

SOURCE: "Maternal Images and Male Bonds in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear," in Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 66-122.

[In the excerpt below, Erickson examines the power of male bonding in King Lear, contending that, in contrast to earlier Shakespearean tragedies, male-male relationships are less important in King Lear than male-female relationships.]

King Lear elaborates further the dramatic possibilities of the two extreme versions of women between which Othello shuttles. The opening scene makes clear that Lear himself is the major source of this splitting, for he initiates the contest that provokes the division into good and bad daughters. Though they respond differently to this provocation, all three daughters share the common purpose of protecting themselves against the father's total claim on them. Lear subsequently satisfies his need to make a total claim through the absolute, unquestioning loyalty and devotion of the disguised Kent. Frustrated by women, Lear "sets his rest" on the "kind nursery" of male bonding (1.1.123-24).

Although Gloucester's programmatic pessimism tells us that "friendship falls off, brothers divide" (1.2.106-7), his own actions provide strong contrary evidence. At the risk of his life, Gloucester makes the commitment to "relieve" Lear with "charity" (3.3.14, 16). This male "kindness" (3.6.5) specifically includes nurturance: "Yet have I ventured to come seek you out, / And bring you where both fire and food is ready" (3.4.152-53). When the two are reunited after Gloucester has lost his eyes for protecting Lear (3.7.56-58), their shared suffering exemplifies "bearing fellowship" (3.6.107). In a more positive sense than Goneril intended, "Old fools are babes again" (1.3.19), as Lear and Gloucester are now in a position to survey their existence from the perspective of birth: "we came crying hither. / Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air / We wawl and cry" (4.6.178-80). For a brief but moving moment, the two men succor each other.

The comfort of male bonding is a powerful force in the play's final scene. Edgar recounts his reunion with Kent:

        With his strong arms
He fastened on my neck and bellowed out
As he'd burst heaven, threw him on my
  father,
Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him
That ever ear received.
                                   (5.3.212-16)

Edgar, who "by the art of known and feeling sorrows" has been made "pregnant to good pity" (4.6.222-23), also has a "most piteous tale" to tell about "nursing" Gloucester's "miseries" (5.3.181-82). Even Edmund is drawn into this circle of male sympathy when he is affected by his brother's narration: "This speech of yours hath mov'd me, / And shall perchance do good" (200-1). His otherwise implausible conversion—"Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature" (244-45)—is given cogency by his abandonment of the alliance with Goneril and Regan and his return to the all-male family. Edgar's brotherly gesture of "exchanging charity" (167) completes the process of male purification initiated by the rite of single combat whereas the source of evil is regarded as the female site of Edmund's begetting: "the dark and vicious place where thee he got" (173).

Edmund himself is separated from female contamination because the play treats the three conspicuously evil characters differentially by gender. Goneril and Regan engage in a comical and self-destructive competition for Edmund's body, striving to outdo each other in their haste to promise Edmund the obedience and solicitous care they deny Lear. The sex-role reversal with which Goneril taunts her husband's "milky gentleness' (1.4.341) dissolves when she succumbs to Edmund: "O, the difference of man and man! / To thee a woman's services are due" (4.2.26-27). Unlike Gonerial and Regan, Edmund is not compromised by the ironies of their love triangle, which he is allowed to view with bemused detachment:

To both these sisters have I sworn my love;
Each jealous of the other, as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
Both? one? or neither?
                                   (5.1.55-58)

Edmund's detachment from the women's love is enacted when he ignores Goneril's cue to dismiss the single combat with the disguised Edgar as "practice" (5.3.152). Edmund does not have to say "Shut your mouth, dame" (155) because another male says it for him, but he willingly binds himself to the integrity of this male trial and its outcome. While Goneril stonewalls (161), Edmund imagines "forgiveness" for his "noble" rival (167, 166). Though he has represented the manhood inspired by "the lusty stealth of nature" (1.2.11), Edmund, like Lear, at last gains access to manly pity.

To counter his daughters' "unkindness" (3.2.16), Lear assembles a ragged band of brothers and fashions a male refuge on the exposed heath. Kent, the Fool, and Edgar are Lear's shadows, who try to tell him who he is (1.4.230-31). In Kent's version, Lear's authority rests on masculine firmness backed by the willingness to use force. Kent devotes himself to restoring Lear's "frame of nature" to "the fix'd place" of "manhood" (268, 269, 297). As Lear's surrogate, Kent displays the aggressiveness in which Lear himself has been deficient. Kent's aggression in the service of goodness is instantly recognized by Lear as "love" (88) and rewarded (94) when the disguised Kent trips up the "base football player" (86) Oswald, Goneril's steward. Kent again courts violence with the verbal and physical attack on Oswald (now "the son and heir of a mungril bitch" [2.2.22]) that lands him in the stocks. Kent's antagonism, which elicits the "violent outrage" "upon respect" (2.4.24) and forces Lear into acute awareness of his diminished power, is described by both sides as a product of blunt manliness: "put upon him such a deal of man" (2.2.120) and "having more man than wit about me" (2.4.42). This manhood carries an antifemale note, for Kent's lack of vulnerability to women is one of the qualities by which he recommends himself to Lear's service: "Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old to dote on her for any thing" (1.4.37-38).

In the Fool, Kent's aggressive action takes the form of aggressive wit. The Fool baits both Goneril ("the Lady Brach" [1.4.112]) and Lear to bring home the powerlessness Lear has brought upon himself by disordering the traditional gender hierarchy. Relentlessly exposing Lear's weakness the better to push him toward a renewal of manhood, the Fool mocks Lear's sex. Having given "the rod" (174) to his daughters, Lear's penis is "a sheal'd peascod" (200), an empty symbol of masculine power that makes him a woman: "now thou art an O without a figure" (192-93). The Fool's pointed humor has a misogynist edge: "For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass" (3.2.35-36). Edgar, the third member of Lear's male chorus, picks up the antifeminist line when he warns against "the act of darkness" (3.4.87): "Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels; thy hand out of plackets" (94-97). However, while Kent and the Fool press their single-minded attempt to shore up Lear's masculinity, Edgar evokes in Lear a more complicated response.

Lear's immediate identification with Edgar—"Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?" (3.4.49-50)—can be explained in part as a projection that reinforces tough-minded hostility toward women. But Edgar's status as a beggar implies vulnerability—his "presented nakedness" hopes to "enforce their charity" (2.3.11, 20)—as well as defiance. Edgar answers to the self-image of beggar that Lear has already begun to adopt for himself:

              "On my knees I beg
That you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and
  food."
                                        (2.4.155-56)

Why, the hot-bloodied France, that dowerless
 took
Our youngest born, I could as well be
  brought
To knee his throne, and squire-like, pension
 beg
To keep base life afoot. Return with her?
Persuade me rather to be slave and
  sumpter
To this detested groom.
                                      (212-17)

O, reason not the need! our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous
                                           (264-65)

Once on the heath, Lear ceases to resist the beggar image and instead seeks it:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed
  sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend
  you
From seasons such as these?
                                              (3.4.28-32)

Lear's prayer (27) is answered by Edgar's voice calling from within the hovel and, shortly, by the actual presence of his "uncover'd body" (102), a physical state to which Lear exposes himself: "Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork'd animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here" (106-9). In his guise as beggar, Edgar performs a service for Lear, of which neither Kent nor the Fool was capable, by facilitating Lear's openness to vulnerability.

Nonetheless, this openly acknowledged vulnerability exacerbates the distrust of women. This moment in act 3, scene 4, can be too easily cited as evidence that Lear learns from his suffering according to the beneficent tragic view: "The art of our necessities is strange / And can make vild things precious" (3.2.70-71). But the newfound preciousness of "unaccommodated man" bespeaks a humanism that coexists with hatred of women, for Lear has two separate visions of the human body depending on whether "the thing itself is male or female. One crux of the play lies in the juxtaposition of the "poor, bare, fork'd animal" that Edgar presents with the "simp'ring dame, / Whose face between her forks presages snow" (4.6.60-67) that Lear "anatomizes" (3.6.76) with all the sanctimony he can summon:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends': there's hell,
  there's darkness,
There is the sulphurous pit, burning,
  scalding,
Stench, consumption.
                                   (4.6.126-29)

Just as the Edgar who occasions Lear's humanist revelation becomes the "most learned justicer" (3.6.21) who helps Lear prosecute Goneril and Regan in the mock trial on the heath, so Lear uses the Gloucester who "sees feelingly" (4.6.149) as an ally in taking revenge against women. Lear's critique of justice—"Why dost thou lash that whore?" (161)—applies to his own rhetorical assault on the female body, but he is blissfully unaware of the self-application.

The "darkness" (4.6.127) of the vagina is synonymous with heterosexual intercourse: "the act of darkness" (3.4.87) is the woman's "dark and vicious place" (5.3.173). Displaced from the male body and projected exclusively onto the female, sexuality becomes female sexuality; "copulation" (4.6.114) becomes a province for which women, not men, are responsible. In this view, the normal superiority of civilization to nature is reversed, transposed into an opposition between male necessity and female "luxury" (117); and between Edgar's salutary nakedness and the bad daughters' "plighted cunning" (1.1.280), literally imaged in their extravagant clothes (2.4.267-70) or in the verbal flattery by which Regan's "most precious square of sense" (1.1.74) disguises her "sulphurous pit" (4.6.128). Male perturbation with sexuality is greater here than in Othello because the sexual act is bound up with procreation. However repulsive the image of "making the beast with two backs" (Othello, 1.1.116-17), however convulsed Othello is by the thought of Desdemona "topp'd" (3.3.396)—"It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips" (4.1.41-42)—there is nothing in Othello so alienated as Lear's life-denying curse against Goneril.

Lear takes revenge in a direct attack on her powers of gestation. Into her "sulphurous pit," he would "convey sterility" (1.4.278). If he cannot make her infertile, he condemns her to reproduce the filial ingratitude she has inflicted on him: "Turn all her mother's pains and benefits / To laughter and contempt" (286-87). Lear's earlier curse against Cordelia also strikes against procreation: "Better thou / Hadst not been born than not t' have pleased me better" (1.1.233-34). Lear finds particularly galling the physical intimacy of the blood connection that makes parent and child one flesh: "But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter—/ Or rather a disease that's in my flesh, / Which I must needs call mine" (2.4.221-23). He employs several stratagems to try to sever this indissoluble bond. First, he banishes and disinherits: "Here I disclaim all my paternal care" (1.1.113). Cordelia is now "my sometime daughter" (120), "Unfriended, new adopted to our hate, / Dower'd with our curse, and stranger'd with our oath" (203-4), "for we / Have no such daughter" (262-63).

Second, he attempts a mortificaiton of the flesh, analogous to the self-mutilation proposed by Edgar—"Strike in their numb'd and mortified arms / Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary" (2.3.15-16). When Lear calls the storm down upon his head, he punishes his body in order to purify it while at the same time destroying the universal power of procreation that corrupted him: "Crack nature's moulds, all germains spill at once" (3.2.9). Ultimately, the separation of male spirit from female flesh is achieved by the death of the woman. The play comes to rest when the threat posed by the female body is ended: "Produce the bodies" (5.3.231), "seest thou this object?" (239). The potency of the "sulphurous pit" has been canceled, as the exhibition of silent bodies bears witness.

The motif of the missing mother is only a decoy, for the play's "darker purpose" produces mother figures to fill the vacuum left by the absence of Lear's wife. He asks for trouble by turning his daughters into mothers, as the Fool indicates after the fact. Lear's divestment of his authority initiates the dismantling of patriarchal order and the reinstatement of maternal power. A confusion in the ideal of male beneficence emerges: Lear retains the self-pitying image as "Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all" (3.4.20), when actually he had used giving all as a means to receive all. He makes clear, in retrospect, the terms of the bargain when he desperately appeals to "tender-hefted" Regan to show "The offices of nature, bond of childhood, / Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude" (2.4.178-79) by immediately reminding her of the gift by which he purchased these dues: "Thy half o' th' kingdom hast thou not forgot, / Wherein I thee endow'd" (180-81). But more often Lear suppresses the logic that connects "So kind a father" (1.5.32) to his desire for "kind nursery" (1.1.124). In the candor prompted by extreme disappointment, Lear admits that he was maneuvering "to set my rest" (123) on Cordelia's care of him. Instead of the maternal comfort he had sought, he inadvertently recreates the pain of maternal abandonment. When he renounces Cordelia after she has denied her undivided affection, Lear elevates his rage to the heroic proportions of the "barbarous Scythian" (116) and the "dragon" (122). But Lear's image of the angry, devouring father is preceded by his invocation of a dangerous goddess—"The mysteries of Hecat and the night" (110)—who modulates into the powerful mother whose victim is Lear.

Lear defends against this mother by standing on the ceremony of manliness (2.4.276-78). But once he has entered the open heath in a stormy night "wherein the cub-drawn bear would crouch" (3.1.12), he gives in to the all-consuming experience of his infantlike vulnerability. This is the burden of Lear's beggar imagery: the infant's needy dependence on a mother's care. Edgar as the embodiment of beggary evokes a whole range of feelings associated with this dependence—from the fear of deprivation to the hope of survival. The "unfed sides" of "poor naked wretches" (3.4.30,28) whose destitution Lear commits himself to share refers in part to the basic necessity of maternal nurturance. Yet Lear short-circuits awareness by attempting to recover an image of benevolent paternal bounty:

                      O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to
   them,
And show the heavens more just.
                                       (32-36)

Patriarchal liberality that redistributes the superflux is not the appropriate "physic" for Lear's central problem; this fantasy of reparation by a reformed male authority cannot serve as a substitute for the absence of maternal generosity, the "kind nursery" to which Lear has pinned his "unburthen'd" self (1.1.41). Male bounty, independent of women, cannot be sustained.

The crucial importance of women for a sane social order is underscored by Lear's inability to release himself from misogynist rage. Only Cordelia's intervention provides him with the "sweetened imagination" he needs (4.6.131). Cordelia is the "daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to" (205-7) because she is both maternal and virginal. The elimination from the play of her husband (4.3.1-6) ensures her exclusive devotion to Lear. Her "organs of increase" (1.4.279) are not at issue because, despite her maternal ambience, she is kept from association with literal child bearing. Upon her reentry to the play, she obliges Lear in the role of the good, comforting mother, to which he had originally assigned her. The maternal aspect of her rescue is implied by her image as "Our foster-nurse of nature" (4.4.12); this physic is hers to bestow, not the doctor's. Cordelia's reference to "our sustaining corn" (6) is linked metaphorically to the natural restorative power of her tears: "All blest secrets, / All you unpublish'd virtues of the earth, / Spring with my tears; be aidant and remediate / In the good man's distress" (15-18).

The image of a patriarchal "pomp" that makes restitution by "shaking" its "superflux" cannot hold a candle to Cordelia's maternal kindness, so necessary to Lear's restoration. However poignant the relations among Lear's company of supportive men, this male bonding is finally a minor resource compared with the unequivocal centrality of Cordelia for Lear—a centrality that dominates the play after her reappearance in act 4, scene 4. This is the significance of Lear's non-recognition of Kent (5.3.279-95) and of his inattention to the Duke of Albany's scheme for patriarchal justice (297-305). Such consolations are irrelevant to Lear's desolation: Cordelia's death makes it impossible for him to "taste" her "cup" (303, 305). The gods do not exist who can revive the "miracle" of her life so as to "make them honors / Of men's impossibilities" (4.6.55, 73-74). In contrast to Othello, King Lear places greater structural emphasis on the final phase in which the male protagonist regains his perception of the woman's innocence. The dramatic potential is increased because Lear is permitted, as Othello is not, to reunite with her while she is still alive and to ask her forgiveness.

This is not to say that Lear's reconciliation with Cordelia is entirely positive; on the contrary, it is irredeemably tragic. The play cautions us against false optimism by undercutting Edgar's premature, sententious "The lamentable change is from the best, / The worst returns to laughter" (4.1.5-6). But Edgar's optimism is incurable; he thinks he can "cure despair" (4.6.33-34; 5.3.192) and returns "the worst" to laughter by means of an upbeat narrative closure: "Burst smilingly" (5.3.200). The main plot, however, defies Edgar's efforts to fashion a happy ending. In Lear's case, the comic rebirth prepared for him "closes the eye of anguish" (4.4.15) in a way that has negative as well as positive implications. Gloucester, misapprehending Lear's madness, desires it to escape his own "ingenious feeling" (4.6.280):

               Better I were distract,
So should my thoughts be sever'd from my
  griefs,
And woes by wrong imaginations lose
The knowledge of themselves.
                                            (281-84)

But for Lear the reverse is more nearly true. His madness has shown the way to sharpened awareness; his "repose" (4.4.12) leads to some loss of this acute consciousness.

The correct identification of "good" and "bad" daughters is not enough because Lear proceeds to take advantage of Cordelia's goodness. In the reconciliation scene, Lear discovers that he is to "drink" not the "poison" of Cordelia's revenge as he had expected (4.7.71) but rather her unconditional mercy. Yet the play's final scene begins with Lear's transformation of the original moment of forgiveness into a commemorative routine: "We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage; / When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness" (5.3.9-11). His momentary openness to human contact—"Be your tears wet? Yes, faith" (4.7.70)—is superseded by a withdrawal into the hollow posture of omnipotent fantasy, hollow because it denies not only Edgar's reality but also Cordelia's. Authentic communication between father and daughter has ceased. To Cordelia's gentle nudge "Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?" (5.3.7), Lear can offer only flat resistance: "No, no, no, no!" (8). Cordelia is subsumed in the escapist vision Lear constructs for both of them; she is not consulted: her part is once again to "Love, and be silent" (1.1.62). This appropriation of Cordelia is not an act of love but a violation of it that echoes and repeats Lear's ritual of possessiveness in the opening scene.

The sacrificial nature of Cordelia's role is explicit: "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee?" (5.3.20-21). Her compliance thus caught, verbal assent is un-necessary: Cordelia accepts her "plight" (1.1.101) by crying. But Lear insists that she stifle her tears as he lapses into the mode of vengeful defiance that blots self-awareness: "Wipe thine eyes; / The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell, / Ere they shall make us weep! We'll see 'em starved first" (5.3.23-25). Having secured the maternal symbiosis of "kind nursery," Lear redirects the mother's punishments of "starving" and "devouring" against his enemies. Superficially, the tragic ending is the result of external evil forces now beyond Lear's control. Yet the tragedy cannot be made to hinge on the technicality of failing to save Cordelia in time (237-57). To give credence to the possibility of a last-minute rescue is to hold out too much melodramatic faith in a benign resolution and to avoid feeling the depth of the tragic horror. Lear's entrance with Cordelia dead in his arms answers directly to his own evocation of "sacrifices" at the beginning of the scene. Though we are moved by the agony of Lear's deprivation, we must nonetheless question the particular way in which he had expected her to "redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt" (267-68), as his ready conversion of Cordelia's forgiveness into her sacrifice has just demonstrated. Lear recognizes his immense loss and his initial error, but he repeats the error and never fully understands his contribution to the tragic outcome nor acknowledges his responsibility. He can win from one daughter a suspension of tragic causation—"No cause, no cause" (4.7.75). But another speaks the harsh truth: "The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters" (2.4.303-4). The play's rigorous tragic logic insists on the necessity that Lear pay the price for the continuing self-evasion exemplified by the dream vision of imprisonment with Cordelia. Though Lear does not want to hear the lesson taught by the stern schoolmaster tragedy, we must.