Public Privates
Edit Page
Report
Scan day: 01 December 2019 UTC
50
Virus safety - good
Description: Al Cacicedo's preliminary notes for a longish essay on gender identity in Shakespeare.
Public Privates Al Cacicedo [The following are some very preliminary notes for a longish essay on gender identity in Shakespeare.] The centrality of women in Shakespeare's work, and in particular of the question that appears as the title of Mary Beth Rose's influential essay, "Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare?"1, has become a commonplace of recent studies of Shakespeare. On the other hand, as a participant in a recent SAA seminar put it, given the relative scarcity of mothers in the plays, perhaps one ought to focus attention on the fathers in Shakespeare.2 Immediately, however, one runs into profound ambiguity. Consider, for instance, Lear's words as he begins to understand just how thoroughly he has lost status and control: O how this mother swells up towards my heart! Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element's below. (2.4.56-58)3 The Riverside edition glosses "mother" as hysteria, but then "hysteria" is the womb itself.4 Perhaps one should understand the term figuratively, as meaning that Lear begins to feel the "errant womb" that signals his impending madness. And yet my inclination is to take the passage literally: Lear really does feel the female organ inside himself, displaced from its properly submerged position and rising to strangulate him. To Rose's question, then, I answer as Juliet does when the Nurse, coming from her conference with Romeo, irrelevantly asks where Lady Capulet is: Where is my mother! why, she is within, Where should she be? (2.4.58-59). I first came across a literal reading of Juliet's remark in an avowedly psychoanalytic context, an essay by Elenore and Robert Fliess.5 Recent work, however, has allowed me to reconceive the psychological perspective of the Fliesses in a more material and historical mode. Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex has demonstrated in detail the physiological and medical ideas that underlie Renaissance assumptions about female and male genitalia. [To be developed.] My point of departure is that although such ideas about the genitals of the two se
Size: 2048 chars
Contact Information
Email: —
Phone&Fax: —
Address: —
Extended: —
WEBSITE Info
| Page title: | |
| Keywords: | |
| Description: | |
| IP-address: | 143.52.5.74 |
WHOIS Info
| NS | Name servers: ns0.ja.net. ns2.ja.net. |
| WHOIS | |
| Date |