At the May meetings in Philadelphia, the Program for Spouses focused, appropriately enough, on the topic “Spouses and Partners in Shakespeare.” Chaired by Stanley J. Coen, the panel included Elio J. Frattaroli, Harriet Joseph, and Jeffrey Stern, with Henry F. Smith as discussant. Joseph, Professor of Literature at Pace University (Westchester), and Stern, Lecturer in Psychiatry, English, General Studies, and Humanities at the University of Chicago, were special invitees.
Coen began with a double caveat. He asked that the audience be skeptical regarding the relation between psychoanalysis and literary criticism, and that they be on guard lest the panelists stray too far from the data. He then suggested that psychoanalysts and literary critics work similarly: “Each goes looking for problems: inconsistency, contradiction, ambiguity, incomprehensibility, gaps, traps, and so forth.” A good reader, Coen elaborated, is a conservative reader, one who can raise questions regarding the text without “destroying the pleasures of reading by penetrating and dominating it with theory.” Psychoanalytic clinical work aims, as does psychoanalytic criticism, “to influence through focusing on those feelings, wishes, needs, conflicts, and protections which are most affectively available.” Finally, Coen suggested, we should ask how well our interpretations work in shaping the reading experience of others.
Harriet Joseph began her paper, “Gertrude: Silence and Mystery,” by declaring her intention to raise more questions than answers. “What has always struck me,” she said, “is what Shakespeare doesn't tell us about Gertrude,” leaving us to “ponder what we don't know, rather than what we do.” Joseph pointed out that what we do know about Gertrude and her first husband's feelings for each other—and that is very little—we learn only through Hamlet's biased eyes. At no point does Gertrude say anything of her feelings for her first husband, or for Claudius, her second. She says nothing about whether she knows her second husband killed the first, or whether she was sexually involved with the second, who was also her brother-in-law, while the first was still alive.
Also shrouded in mystery are Hamlets reasons for considering his mother's second marriage incestuous. Here Joseph can only speculate; in Judaic law as laid down in Leviticus, she noted, marriage to a brother-in-law was so considered. However, although the ghost refers to Claudius as “adulterate,” he urges Hamlet to spare Gertrude and, “leave her to heaven for judgment” (act 1, scene 5). Why? A member of the audience suggested in the discussion that it may well have been customary for a widow to marry not only within the family, but to marry her husband's brother in particular, in acknowledgment of the precariousness of a widow's economic position.
Joseph referred to still other mysteries in Hamlet. Why, for instance, does the hero procrastinate, and why is Ophelia so “strangely submissive” to her father Polonius? Reviewing the erotic content of the “closet scene,” Joseph agreed with Ernest Jones that the source of Hamlet's conflict is his oedipal attachment to his mother. What we do know about Gertrude is that she married in haste; she has deep love for what is apparently her only child; she is caring with regard to life's cruelties; and she has insight into the reason for her son's state of mind. “The rest is silence” (act 5, scene 2).
Jeffrey Stern began his presentation, “Making Hard Those Hearts: Goneril, Regan, and Lear's Dead Wife,” by reviewing material from an earlier essay that appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly (Fall 1990). There he argued that Lear's distress over Cordelia was the effect of the earlier loss of his wife. In both papers Stern reasoned that the absence of Lear's wife “structures much of the action of the play.” Speaking from a self psychological perspective, Stern proposed that given “Lear's inability to tolerate division in the affection of his selfobjects, Cordelia's love is ideally suited to hold Lear together.” While acknowledging that Lears wife is mentioned only once in the text, Stern suggested that the “idea of the dead mother” nonetheless holds a key to Goneril's and Regan's hard hearts and to the passion they feel toward Edmund.
Stern noted that both women torture their father by denying him mothering, and that since neither is a mother herself, the secret of their cruelty is “bound up with the imago of the dead mother.” He noted also that “Cordelia's birth does everything to redeem the sorrow of Lear's bereavement,” but leaves Goneril and Regan enraged not only at Lear but also at the dead mother, who “replaced Goneril with Regan and both with Cordelia before abandoning them forever in death.” Stern then offered a reconstruction, suggesting that the mother died giving birth to Cordelia.
Drawing on allusions in the text, he hypothesized that Lear had in the past ignored his angry daughters' wishes for “kind nursery” (act 1, scene 1). As a result they infantilize him and attack his “knights” (act 1, scene 3), which Stern hears as a punning attack on his “nights,” the time “when they would most have needed soothing.” The presence of the Fool, Stern suggested, indicates the king's tendency to “depletion and depression”; he surmised that the Fool may have arrived in court at the time of Cordelia's birth—the time, supposedly, of the wife's death. Turning to the blinding of Gloucester, Stern noted that while others have seen this event as symbolic of castration, for him the eyes are plucked out “because they fail to perform their ancient function of recognizing and affirming—of mirroring.” Further, citing Melanie Klein, he proposed that the reference to Gloucester's eyes as “vile jelly” (act 3, scene 7) suggests a fantasied attack “on the contents of the mother's body.”
The passion felt by Goneril and Regan toward Edmund was next tied to the self psychological themes being developed. Stern viewed that passion as ultimately “narcissistic and maternal.” It aroused their transference love for the “powerful, seductive, and elusive mother of infancy… the fickle whore mother.” Hence Goneril poisons Regan, thus to “repeat and repair…her mother's malevolent breast.” And Edmund's death then shatters the “reunion with the imago of the mother and the hope of reparation of her inner world.”
Next was Elio Frattaroli, whose paper was entitled “Lady Macbeth and the Problem of Evil.” Noting that Freud never discussed the value-laden concept of evil per se, Frattaroli suggested that psychoanalysis nonetheless contains an implicit psychology of evil, one related to the problem of envy. He began by describing two types of murder, both of which Macbeth commits. The first, “patriarchally correct” and so considered honorable, involves killing in open battle, the slayer “full of himself and his indomitable power.” The second, secretive, shameful, and treacherous, is murder by stealth, the killer “unsure of himself and so trying to steal the power he feels himself to be missing.”
Frattaroli viewed these two kinds of murder as representing two kinds of evil, “one uniquely male and the other uniquely female”; it was Shakespeare's intention, he argued, to depict them as such. The concepts of the oedipus complex and penis envy, he went on, are Freud's attempts to account for these same two types of evil. But while Shakespeare distinguishes these male and female varieties of murderousness, he also shows them to be “two faces of the same evil.”
What drives this compulsion toward evil? According to Frattaroli, it was for Lady Macbeth
her “passionate desire to be more of a man.” “Come you Spirits,” she implores, “That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty!…Come thick Night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell, / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes” (act 1, scene 5). He suggested that Lady Macbeth here envisions herself as the murderer, a cruel and pitiless man wielding a knife. But she also seems to be picturing Macbeth as her knife, her tool of phallic destruction. “We don't know whether she actually envies his penis,” Frattaroli remarked, “but it is clear enough that she envies his phallic prowess and ability to wield the tools of war.”
Lady Macbeth, unable to murder Duncan, “because he resembled her father as he slept,” comes off in Frattaroli's view as more sympathetic than her husband. She becomes suicidally depressed, whereas Macbeth has “fear of consequences but no remorse.” Frattaroli saw Shakespeare as an “equal opportunity cynic,” deconstructing patriarchal values rather than affirming them.
And if Lady Macbeth is driven by an envy of male power, so Macbeth is driven by an envy of female power, both to procreate and to inspire passion. Thus, Frattaroli argued, he envies Banquo for the fertility (a “female power”) the witches have promised him. Macbeth's need to murder Macduff's wife and children bears the very hallmark of envy, “a need to destroy for others what he cannot have for himself.”
On this reading, Macbeth also unconsciously envies Duncan, the weak and feminine king, not for his phallic power but rather for his symbolic procreative power, a feminine characteristic belonging to kings through the ritual of succession, and for the seductive charismatic power kings have to “launch a thousand ships” while doing no fighting themselves: “Macbeth is torn between wanting to be the woman-king who incites his envious desire and wanting to kill her. By allowing himself to become one with Lady Macbeth in killing Duncan, he succeeds in doing both at once.”
Frattaroli concluded that this “envious rage at the nurturing and seductive power of mother-women is an essential component of oedipal passions.” He added that Freud failed to consider that the male repudiation of femininity could be a defensive denial and hostile expression of a deeper envy of female power.
Observing how literary critics use psychoanalytic theory affords a special opportunity for analysts to learn about their own use and misuse of theory in relation to clinical data. On that note Henry Smith began his discussion. Recalling Freud's comment in “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva”—“How easy it is to find what one is looking for and what is occupying one's own mind”—Smith commented that patients resist, “often with enormous inventiveness and creativity,” and thus provide some check upon the analyst's “flights of fancy.” But works of art and literature, captive “patients” who can't talk back, often seem to invite regression, not simply to outmoded psychoanalytic theory but, more particularly, to outmoded analytic technique, “as if a press on the forehead would produce confirmatory evidence.” We tend to apply idealizations of theories, or of parts of theories, as if they were revealed truths. (In the discussion that later ensued, Stern disputed Smith's suggestion that works of literature are like captive patients. A more apt analogy, he argued, obtains between readers and patients, both of whom assent to or resist our interpretations and determine if they are valid.)
Turning to the individual presentations, Smith praised Joseph's admirable restraint, her hewing to the text and simply asking questions. Regarding how little we know about Gertrude, he commented that in fact we know very little about the previous life history of any of the characters in Shakespeare. They are all presented in the middle of things, in mid-psyche as it were, like patients enacting their histories rather than narrating them. That is part of their appeal for us as analysts, since meaning is conveyed in the consulting room as well as on the stage, not just through words but also through affect and action. Noting Joseph's view that we learn about Gertrude's history only through Hamlet's eyes, Smith remarked that indeed this seems the most “interior” of Shakespeare's plays, as if each character were, like a figure in a dream, an object of the aggrieved adolescent Hamlet's psychic life, his fantasies made manifest.
Stern's paper on Lear Smith admired for the coherence of its argument and for its careful attention to the play's language. But since we know so little about what has happened in these lives before the play's first act, any inferences we may draw, he noted, are by definition reconstructions. And what is the evidence for those Stern offers? Given that a case is made that Lear's wife is not only long dead, but is dead specifically from having borne Cordelia, Smith noted in passing that the original play on which King Lear is based begins with Lear's wife having recently died; indeed it begins following a funeral, as does Hamlet. Smith suggested that while Stern's reconstruction makes sense within his theory, little evidence for it is to be found in the play. Indeed, a variety of plausible hypotheses could be constructed to explain how Goneril and Regan have become so rageful and vindictive, so seemingly neglected maternally, without inferring the literal absence of their mother.
Smith commented that for him some of Stern's readings seem to stretch the evidence to fit a theory that limits rather than enlarges the play's metaphorical reach. Cases in point were the Kleinian reading of “vile jelly,” the pun on knights/nights, and the self psychological interpretation of the attack on Gloucester's eyes for their failure to mirror adequately. Another was Stern's idea that “Cordelia's birth does everything to redeem the sorrow of Lear's bereavement.” Smith noted that Stern here refers to a moment in the play when Lear, thinking the dead Cordelia has returned to life, says, “It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt” (act 5, scene 3). Like the metaphor of sight and blindness, sorrow is a dominant affective metaphor in the play, and it is diminished if we are asked to focus on a conjectured bereavement over the death of Lear's wife. Further, Smith argued, the “redemption” comes not from Cordelia's birth but from her rebirth or resurrection, a theme that will be elaborated in Shakespeare's final plays.
Reprising the caveats entered earlier by Coen, Smith cautioned against the “too facile application of existing theory.” He suggested that “only by allowing the infinite metaphorical possibilities of the text to play on us as readers or as audience, just as we allow the patient's associations to play on us as analysts, can we hope to arrive at any new or surprising thought or modification of theory.”
The theme of sorrow, Smith noted, is profoundly elaborated in Shakespeare. It is sorrow that drives both Lear and Gloucester mad. But sorrow has also the power to heal, a point that brought Smith to contrast Frattaroli's view of envy with Shakespeare's view of evil. Agreeing with Frattaroli's clinical view of women's and men's envy of the other's power, Smith noted that when things go right envy is bound into a partnership through identification and love to create a smoothly functioning “bisexual” team. But he questioned Frattaroli's view of Lady Macbeth. “When she says ‘Unsex me here,‘” he asked, “what do you picture? Does she grab her breasts or her crotch?” He suggested that she was not asking to be more of a man, but less of a woman—“unsexed,” ungendered. She envies men not for what they have, but for what they lack, which is femaleness and the constraints associated with being a woman.
For Shakespeare it is not simply a matter of what drives men and women to do evil, but of what prevents them from doing it. This is a view more complex than Frattaroli's, one that includes the affective components of defense and conscience. What glues the conscience together and prevents people of either sex from doing evil is called the “milk of human kindness,” otherwise known as ruth, meaning pity or sorrow. It is this quality that some women target to shame men into doing evil, but ultimately it can save both men and women from ruthlessness. It is this quality that keeps order in the individual, and a sense of measure, time, and place in the state. Those persons have it who survive to rebuild and re-create after the chaos that is loosed in all three of these great tragedies. And if neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth have enough of it to prevent them from doing evil, in the end sorrow is in fact all they too have left.