『리어왕』에 재현된 억눌린 자의 귀환

Abstract

The mother occluded in Shakespeare's early plays returns with a vengence in Hamlet; and it is the thesis of this paper that the plays from Hamlet on all follow from her return. For the masculine selfhood discovered and deflected in Richard III — selfhood grounded in paternal absence and in the fantasy of overwhelming contamination at the site of origin — becomes the tragic burden of Hamlet and the men who come after him. And they do not bear the burden alone: again and again, it is passed on to the women, who must pay the price for the fantasies of maternal power invested in them. In this paper, I will explore these fantasies and their cost. It may at first seem perverse to understand King Lear as in part the adumbration of fantasies about maternal power, particulary given the entire absence of literal mothers in the paly; at first glance King Lear seems overwhelmingly about fathers and their paternity rather than about mothers. The play gives us the uncanny sense of a world created by fathers alone. This text about fathers insistently returns to mothers: discovering what he is father to, confronting the implications of his own paternity, Lear is brought to acknowledge their absent presence; and even Gloucester, unproblematically father to sons, is made the victim of their awesome power. Much of the play's power comes, I think, from its confrontation with the landscape of maternal deprivation or worse, from the vulnerability and rage that is the consequence of this confrontation and the intensity and fragility of the hope for a saving maternal presence that can undo pain. In the characteristic way of the return of the repressed, the excision of the mother that seems initially to allow for a fantasy of male parthenogenesis ends by releasing fantasies far more frightening than any merely literal mother could be.