Musing on Forgiveness: A Response to Roy Schafer

King Lear, a play of exceptional harshness and brutality, in which even the gods seem to enjoy the spectacle of human suffering— “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,” says Edgar; “They kill us for their sport” (IV.i.36-37)—is also a play without mothers.

Queen Lear has been so long absent that she is never alluded to— almost as if Lear's daughters, like Athena, had sprung full-grown from their father's brain. Edmund's mother, the subject of the conversation between Kent and Gloucester that opens the play, is mentioned blushingly by Gloucester, who had “good sport” (I.i.22) with her in the conceiving of his bastard son Edmund, but she herself does not appear. The legitimate Edgar, who refers to Edmund's mother only by reference to her sexuality—“The dark and vicious place where thee he got” (V.iii.173)—says nothing about his own maternal heritage. In a world of men and tough-minded daughters, who enact the worst stereotypes of masculine self-interest and aggression, Cordelia stands out—both in her refusal to lie for personal gain and in her capacity for loving forgiveness. Her “No cause, no cause” (IV.vii.75) in response to Lear's acknowledgment that she has reason to wish him harm, appears to wipe clean the slate of Lear's wrongdoing. How does she arrive at such a transcendent capacity for forgiveness—or does she? This is the question Roy Schafer poses in his subtle and thought-provoking essay.

I raise the question of mothers because Schafer invokes them in his reference to Melanie Klein (1946) and the importance of the depressive position (where hatred and aggression can be held as internal objects, instead of being split off and projected onto a persecuting other) for the achievement of the ability to forgive, as well as the desire to make reparation for one's own destructive wishes and impulses. Implicitly, in Klein's paradigm (as more explicitly in object relations theory), the quality