As I was thinking all of this, I wondered if Lear's agreement with his daughters is really so different from typical parent-child relationships. Parents and their children have a similar, though unspoken, bond: they will clothe you, feed you, and give you shelter, and the underlying expectation is that you will appreciate them by showing them love and appreciation, and perhaps return the favor by taking care of them in their old age. Lear's request is basically the same thing - he asks simply to stay with them during the year. I see Lear's fatal flaw as having the need to question what is supposed to be an unspoken bond between parents and children. When he asks "Which of you shall we say doth love us most?" (Shakespeare 1.1.49), he is inviting false flattery from his children. I wonder if Goneril and Regan do not love him less than Cordelia, but love him the same: as a father. If so, they probably felt confused by Lear's questioning of their love, which leads to their misdeeds later on. Though the agreement between Lear and his daughters is only of many important elements in the play, the question keeps haunting me: when pressed, I wonder how many other sons and daughters would admit that they only love their parents as just that - as parents?
New Paltz Students Blogging about Shakespeare
Monday, April 19, 2010
The Trade-off: Money In Exchange for Love
The part of King Lear that I find myself mentally returning to is the notion of Lear giving money and property to his daughters in exchange for their love. The more I consider this, I realize that it's not such a novel concept. People have been conducting these types of exchanges since the beginning of time; marriages used to center around gaining land and money for one's family, instead of being based on genuine love for another person. However, I never thought about this idea in the context of a family. It occurs to me that I can sort of understand Feinstein's incestuous take on the play in her play Lear's Daughters, because one typically thinks of exchanges of money for love only in the context of a marriage; here, it occurs between a father and his daughters. Another thought that comes to my mind is how immoral this trade-off is; clearly genuine love cannot actually be received simply by giving another person material goods.
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2 comments:
What gets me about the whole thing is the idea itself. Lear needs to hear it said that his daughters love him. That's just a wild idea (he has been around them for...their collective existences), that he would need such thin reassurance. Truth is a parent needs to be more than a parent to their children in order to be truly successful.
This is a really elegant and thoughtful post, Hannah, and I love the way that you draw the analysis of "exchange" out into a comparative interpretation of "Lear's Daughters," as well. Something Shakespeare is very good at doing is taking a commonly held custom or idea and turning it out so that we can analyze it more carefully. Think about anti-Semitism in Merchant, or even sexual purity in Measure. Upon closer examination, we start to see the strangeness of human custom, even its brutality.
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