A New Paragraph: Traditional Readings of Sight in King Lear

When I met with Dr. Burton, he suggested that my paper's argument would be stronger if I established more of a counterargument in the traditional readings of King Lear. Here is a paragraph detailing the usual way blindness is read in the play and the problems it brings up for blind studies. The next paragraph I'm going to be putting together is one that takes seriously the unity that might be disturbed in the play with my rereading. I'll take the play more seriously and try to find a new way to establish Shakespeare's parallels if I'm saying that Gloucester isn't be tricked by Edgar the way he's tricked by Edmund.

So anyway, here's the first of the new paragraphs:

The traditional reading of Gloucester’s blindness capitalizes on blindness as a reductive literary symbol. Harold C. Goddard presents a typical reading of the blind Gloucester in his essay on King Lear. Goddard points out the theme of sight and perception throughout the play: “The scene in question [Dover Cliffs scene] . . . is centered on the eyes and eyesight of Gloucester. But consider King Lear as a whole: does not practically everything in it turn on this subject of seeing? Darkness and light; blindness and vision--visions and blindness, indeed, of every kind” (143). Goddard is assuredly right to draw attention to the sight that pervades the text--there is ample evidence and justfication to bring up these parallels--but, published in 1960, his work comes from a critical tradition that does not problematize representations of disability in literature. His writing comes on especially shaky ground by today’s standards of criticism when he says, “In this, his version of The Last Judgment, Shakespeare has demonstrated that hatred and revenge are a plucking-out of the human imagination as fatal to man’s power to find his way in the universe as Cornwall’s plucking out of Gloucester’s eyes was to the guidance of his body on earth” (170). Goddard has gone so far in his textual analysis that blindness has become merely a symbol for him, abstracted as far as the Final Judgment, with no mention of the Gloucester, the actual blind character, except to say that his lack of sight equates to a lack of guidance. Even more recent and informal looks at blindness in King Lear do not push back against the purely metaphorical meaning of blindness. Sylvia Morris, an academic Shakespeare blogger, says, “The most striking [references Shakespeare makes to eyes and sight] occur in King Lear where the physical act of seeing is a metaphor for understanding and self-awareness. Sometimes words aren’t enough, and then Shakespeare translates the metaphor into action.” Even when blindness is enacted onstage, Morris chalks this action up not to character but to an extension of metaphor. It is just these types of analyses that Georgina Kleege rebuffs in her own work as “merely another version of the old story--the blind man as instructive spectacle, useful to everyone but himself” (90). Kleege seems, in essence, to want the blind in literature to be instructive in a different way, to learn how to live without site and thus, by implication, to serve as a model for blind readers. To be able to read blind role models into classic literature, we have to suspend, at least for a moment, our sighted focus on the symbolism of blindness and explore the character presented on the page without this imposed interpretive weight.