“Every Man Kills the Thing He Loves”: Object-Use and Potential Space in The Winter's Tale

The final moments of The Winter's Tale, in which Hermione, wife of King Leontes of Sicily, returns from the dead as a statue-come-to-life, offer audiences of the play an occasion for “wonder” (, 5.3.22) that is almost unprecedented in Shakespeare's work. The wonder is at the fact of Hermione's corporeal presence, her aliveness, as expressed in Leontes' amazement at her touch: “O, she's warm!”—warmth, along with breath, being synonymous with life itself. This is one of those “post-Christian” (Bloom, 1998, p. 518) moments in Shakespeare's drama, in this case a moment like the death of Cordelia in King Lear, which seems to recall aspects of the Jesus story, while at the same time insisting on its radical difference: in this instance, as in Lear, on the purely human experience we are witnessing, its happening in this world and in this world alone.

This paper will offer a “reading” of the final scene of The Winter's Tale that is indebted to Winnicott's theory of object-use, in which destructiveness leads, provided the object of attack survives (or does not retaliate), to a new kind of psychic clarity, a new appreciation of the object's “value” (Winnicott, 1969, p. 90) as part of “a world of shared reality” (, p. 94). The final scene of the play creates what Michael Eigen (1981) has called an “area of faith” (p. 109) (appropriately presided over by a character named Paulina) that the audience both on and off the stage