Sunday, October 11, 2015
Escaping Reality
I'm going to play the devil's advocate for a moment. The more I read King Lear the more I feel that Lear's madness and Gloucester wanting to die are their ways of escaping the reality in which they have ruined. They have both shunned the only family that truly cared for them and have given power to the family that would rather have them dead. Lear's method to escape reality is his decent into madness. When he is out in the storm, his thoughts start to become more irrational but they always lead back to his two horrible daughters. Because of the way his daughters treated him and because he had started to realize what he had done, Lear starts losing his rationality as a coping mechanism to escape the reality that the daughters that he thought loved him didn't and the one who actually did he had sent away. With Gloucester it is similar but he instead wishes for his death as his means for escape. Both men realize that they have made wrong choices in their lives and their immediate reaction is to run away in an extreme way.
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That is a really interesting way of looking at it... So you really could say the Lear and Gloucester can't handle taking responsibility for their choices. Wow. Really interesting!!
ReplyDeleteI agree to using this as a partial explanation for the motivation behind why Lear and Gloucester went mad. However, I think they were mad before things even got bad. Lear tried to give his kingdom away and plunge it into civil war after leading it faithfully for a very long amount of time. I think this move is the beginning of insanity, and nothing bad prompted it. I think that old age, among other things, could be used as an explanation behind his insanity. Though I agree that you could say another reason he went insane was as a result of his realization that he ruined his family and kingdom.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you're playing the devil's advocate-- I've always read the play like this! As Alyssa said, they were going mad before anything went down in the play-- hence Lear getting rid of his kingdom because he recognizes he's aging and his faculties are going-- but I think that part of the descent into madness is to avoid confronting his fault in his current predicament.
ReplyDeleteBut how much can really be levied at the individuals as opposed to the structure? If Shakespeare believes anything it's that societal creates reality.
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