The G.V.V for power of the woman in King Lear

Red=Examples
Yellow=Making a point
Black=Analysis
Orange=Question
Blue=Quote

Introduction

Why do women possesses a deeper and more emotional role in King Lear ?

The role of women in “King Lear” Introduction King Lear is deservingly considered to be the one of the greatest works by William Shakespeare. A representation of the attractive and strong personalities of the main heroes is so bright that no reader stays indifferent after reading the play. The play makes us think about the deepness of people’s inner world. The difficult temper of King Lear is depicted along with the true and deep feelings of love. Love is a feeling, which is brightly expressed due to the most emotional creatures of the world – women. Women can feel deeply and like to brightly express their emotions. Women’s soul reflects all the humans’ feelings. In the play King Lear women help the king realize what true love really is. 

 

This can be seen as she calls off the French attack on England as readily as she instigated it. Cordelia was thus the ideal women in the play, respectful and dignified but still powerful. Cordelia's honesty and integrity contrast with her sisters' hypocrisy. Goneril and Regan were the two elder daughters of King Lear. After the banishment of Cordelia, Lear divides his kingdom between both these women. Throughout the play, they misused their power and continuously devised malevolent plans against their father. Shakespearean women were considered to be quiet, shy and submissive, which is the complete opposite of these two women. Their vicious and aggressive nature brings out the male characteristics in them, making them the ideal villains. Goneril was portrayed as the more cunning of the two, but as the play proceeds, Regan becomes just as vicious. Regan even suggested to plucking out Gloucester's eyes towards the end of Act 3.

Comparative essay

In King Lear, I thought the fate of Lear, Gloucester and Cordelia was extremely traumatic and I felt it was out of proportion to their faults. Lear had, in his foolish arrogance, insisted on his daughters publicly declaring their affection for him to gain land and power and to bolster his vanity, ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’ Cordelia decides to ‘Love, and be silent’ and is subsequently banished. This unleashes a series of catastrophes not only for the central characters, but for society as a whole. The vision presented was bleak, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’.

Lear loses his sanity and becomes a ‘ruined piece of nature’. Although in the concluding scenes, he is reunited with his beloved Cordelia and is longing for the moment when ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage’, his and our hopes are cruelly dashed. Cordelia is executed, ‘She’s gone for ever’. Similarly, Gloucester, who banishes his loving son, is blinded in one of the most gruesome scenes in any drama, ‘Pluck out his eyes’; ‘let him smell/ His way to Dover.’ Here I considered the vision of the play as bleak and pitiless, ‘Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.’ 

Yet Shakespeare presented another contrasting view. Through profound suffering, a character comes to a recognition and understanding of the truth about himself and his relation to others. Lear confronted by Poor Tom empathises with the poor, ‘Is man no more than this?’ – just ‘poor naked wretches’. But this insight I felt came at a terrible price, the loss of his sanity. The blinded Gloucester also gains insight, ‘I stumbled when I saw’, in the midst of his suffering. This terrible anguish aids the moral and spiritual development of these characters.

I found the relationships in the play not only dysfunctional but poisonous. Lear’s ungrateful elder daughters abandoned the old man, ‘unbonneted he runs’. But he also behaves terribly for a father, cursing Goneril with sterility, ‘Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend/ To make this creature fruitful!’ Even the relationship between lovers is nasty. Edmund cynically evaluates Goneril and Regan, ‘Which of them shall I take?’

Shakespeare also uses animal imagery to present the play’s dark vision, with references to ‘wolfish visage’ and ‘monsters of the deep’ contributing to this harsh world. I feel when I look at the modern world and the cruelty, violence and lack of justice, the inequality between the haves and have-nots, I can understand the view that ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come/ To this great stage of fools.’