Lear. [to Gloucester, near Dover] Behold yon simp'ring dame,Lear has gone from the complete permissiveness of "Gloucester's bastard son is kinder to his father" than Lear and Goneril are to him, to the view that all sexual intercourse is of the devil, since it is located in the devil's own place, the female sex organs. These organs, he is saying, dominate women whatever they think, for women act differently from their conscious intent.
Whose face between her forks [(1) parts of a headdress; (2) legs] presages snow [coldness]
That minces [coyly affects] virtue and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name--
The fitchew [polecat, proverbial for its stench; slang for prostitute] nor the soiled [lively, skittish, from eating green fodder] horse goes to't with a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle [waist] do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend's: there's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption! Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civit, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination. There's money for thee. IV.vi.116-127)
Shakespeare is not the first to have thought of a woman wearing a forked headdress as demonic, although his words suggest an image that could not decently be represented pictorially. In the Hell panel of Garden of Earthly Delights, Bosch has similar women (Fig. 53, below). One walks--interminably, I think we are to assume--around a circular dance floor with a condemned soul, to the tune of a giant bagpipe (certainly a devilish instrument!).
Another (Fig. 54, below) pours beer for a group of souls, next to a giant pig. One sits on a toad, a Renaissance symbol of sinfulness (Dixon 221f).
What has happened? Here Cardenal is not much help. Cardenal, too, is hard on women:
A man with a woman on his land has war nearby,He can only advise men to protect themselves and give tit for tat:
But nearer still he who has one on his pillow.
When a husband is displeasing to a wife,
Then comes a war worse than that with neighbors…
(Bonner 1972, 198)
(Prop a guerra qui l’a en mieg son sol
Mas plus prop l’aqui l’a a son coissi.
Can lo maritz a la moiller fai dol,
So es guerra peior que de vezi...
(Bergin 1973, 199)
Never will my mistress possess me, Ja m’amia no mi tenraCardenal seems to be defending against a fear of the feminine, a fear that comes from his earlier disillusionment. The recipe, like all prescriptions of vengeance, is one destined to magnify hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and displeasures. It sounds like Lear's attack on his older daughters.
If I possessed her not; Si ieu leis non tenia;
Nor will she have joy of me, Ni ja de me non jauzira
If I had not joy from her. Sieu de leis non jauzia.
I've made a decision, good and sure: Conseilh n’ai pres, bon e certa:
I'll treat her as she treats me. Farai li segon que.m fara.
Then if she deceives me, E s’ella mi galia
She’ll find me a deceiver. Galiador mi trobara,
And if she goes straight for me, E si.m vai dreita via,
For her I’ll go smoothly. Ieu l’irai pla.
(Press 1971, 282-283.)
The Gnostics, too, had their anti-feminine bias. Commendably, it allowed women to be priests—less commendably, they were not allowed to be bishops. In accord with the prevailing spirit of that time, it identified males with spirit and females with matter (Robinson 1988, 138: Gospel of Thomas Logion 114). The Gnostics accounted mythologically for the origin of matter by making it result from Sophia's acting without the consent of her male partner (167) or the “invisible spirit” (110) who reigned above all. This myth echoes the Bible story of Eve's disobedience. In support of the Gnostics, one can only say that intellectuals in late antiquity tended all to believe Aristotle's theory that the male contributes the form of a newborn--its mind, strength, etc.--while the female contributes the matter, the source of imperfections. (Plato's theory, that each gender contributes equally, was not well received in this patriarchal society, even though any horse breeder would have agreed with him.) Moreover, Sophia's disobedience was held to have been in ignorance of the Divine Will (Barnstone 1984, 611). Hence it was excusable and perhaps even desired by that Will, for its divine purpose: that the soul attain the divine realm by free choice, out of knowledge of both good and evil, rather than simply being put there.
For me the image that fits Lear's attack on women best is one supplied by the alchemist George Ripley, whose works, written in Latin at the end of the 15th century, were published in English in 1591, only a few years before our play was written. Nicholl (1980) has applied one of Ripley's works, the Cantilena, to Lear and other plays. I would use a different alchemical poem, Ripley's Scrowle, as discussed by Jung (1968). An accompanying emblem (Fig. 55, below; I take the original colored version off the Web ) shows the adept climbing a tree and confronting an upside-down woman facing him from above. Behind her the woman has a long tale which wraps around the tree. The text of the Scrowle says, "desinit in pisces mlier formosa superne"--"A beautiful woman in her upper part, she passes into a fish below" (Jung's translation, except that he inserts "snake" where "fish" would be the more usual translation of "pisces." Jung says "'Anguis' [snake] is my adaptation for 'pisces'" (1967, 303). Either way, the figure is the archetypal temptress.
For Jung the man in the tree recalls a shaman climbing the world-tree, where “he encounters his heavenly bride” (1967, 303). He comments further: “In medieval Christianity the shamanistic anima was transformed into Lilith, who according to tradition was the serpent of paradise and Adam's first wife, with whom he begot a horde of demons” (1967, 303). As for the tree, Jung notes that "the analogy with the Tree of Knowledge is obvious" (1970, 71-72).
In other words, the woman that the man in the tree confronts is the anima, whose good and bad aspects a man must separate--the sweet from the bitter. To someone used to seeing only the sweetness, the tail is a shock (as for Lear and apparently Cardenal). For Lear as for Ripley's tree-climber, once one gets past the formidable aspects of the anima one finds pure wisdom. Once one has been advised and inspired by the good anima, and been deceived by the bad, then indeed one has acquired some wisdom--if only, as with Socrates, to know that in such a world one knows nothing. As Lear says, "I am old and foolish" (IV.vii.84). The idea is similar to one expressed in the Tripartite Tractate: Only by Adam's encounter with Eve and her fruit will he and his kind experience, in ignorance, the evil they must know before they can attain life eternal, meaning, as the Tractate says, knowledge of the Totalities, the eternal realm.
Even for Lear his calumny against women is strong stuff. At the end of the diatribe, Bloom (1998) has suggested, Lear wants to "sweeten" his imagination because he knows that what he said was an overreaction to his recent experience of womankind. For Lear also has the example of Cordelia, whom he now sees positively. He has overgeneralized, based on his fury at Goneril and Regan. He is thus now ready to look at the positive aspect of the anima, its aspect as Sophia or wisdom. Appropriately, Cordelia's men arrive just then to escort him to her.
It is significant where Lear makes the cut between good and evil in this anima: namely, at the waist, below which the sex organs lie. In this regard the poet Ted Hughes calls this speech "the mythic climax of the drama, and in a sense the climax of Shakespeare's tragic vision; it is Lear's darkest moment" (1992, 263). For Hughes the point is that Lear is experiencing the terror of being born, seeing this world, whose doors are lined with female genitalia, as a hell. At the end of his diatribe, Lear speaks again: "The first time that we smell the air/ We waul and cry" and "When we are born we cry that we are come/ To this great stage of fools." Hughes says that in these later words Lear "emerges as on the opposite side of a Black Hole, into a new universe, punished, enlightened, and transfigured, as a grey-haired babe" (263-264). In other words, he no longer experiences the terror directly; he is one step removed, observing his former self from the point of view of the wizened fool.
Metaphysically, this perspective is one that fits the Cathars. For them, sex served Satan's purpose, in that through the use of the sexual organs souls became incarnated into the material world, the realm of Satan. While the Cathars would not have blamed only women for sexual reproduction, Lear's imagery is consistent with their view in so far as he identifies the female organs as the place, physiologically, where this calamity happens, of souls' leaving the realm of God and entering this world. For the Cathars, there also was a positive aspect to sexual reproduction: Souls already here that had not risen to the Unknown God's realm could have another incarnation and chance at redemption.
The comparison with centaurs was made by the 4th century Christian theologian Basil of Ancyra, who held that God made man like a centaur, his upper parts rational and his lower parts bestial (Williams 1996, 123). It is a theme that continues through Shakespeare’s time. Art historian E.H. Gombrich cites an Italian emblem handbook of 1653, Licirus’s Hieroglyphica, which he translates from Latin: “So the twofold nature of the Centaur Sagittarius is a symbol of the human life which consists of a higher rational and a lower irrational part, the will and the appetite the intellect and the senses" (Gombrich 1972, 216-217) A Renaissance illustration of this idea is the celebrated painting by Botticelli, Pallas and the Centaur (Fig. 56; from http://www.shafe.co.uk/art/Botticelli-_Pallas_and_the_Centaur_(Florence-_Uffizi).asp).
Art historian Barbara Deimling explains that Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, is putting one hand on a centaur's head, while with the other she holds a sentry’s halberd, suggesting that the centaur has entered forbidden ground (45). According to Deimling, his goal is a lustful one, to go after maidens. The arrows, perhaps, are for whoever guards them. Gombrich makes an additional point: Athena is appealing to the Centaur’s reason, seated in the head, to restrain him from his intended hunt, a lustful one. Athena, personifying Wisdom, commends a spiritual love, and we see the struggle between the two impulses on the centaur’s face. Gombrich translates lines from a poem by Lorenzo de’ Medici, expounding the philosophy of Ficino:
Here arises the daughter of the treat ThundererShakespeare could easily have seen an engraving of Botticelli’s painting, or heard about it. It originally hung together with the same painter’s famous Primavera in the Florentine palace of one of the Medicis. If not, he had many other sources to draw on.
who emerged from his head without a mother,
and she proffers her hand to our lowly mind. (Gombrich 1972, 71).
A similar opposition between spiritual love and bodily lust runs through the various Gnostic mythologies as presented by Irenaeus: humanity was begotten in its spiritual core as an emanation of the highest god but created materially in the image of the archons or rulers, with their traits. The rulers’ lust is shown in Irenaeus’s account of the Ophites, in which the rulers “admired” Eve’s beauty, “desired” her, and “from her generated sons who are angels” (Barnstone 1984, 662). (At this point, the original texts elaborate, Eve is still non-material, so the lust is not of a material sort. After the expulsion into matter, Ialdabaoth instills “sexual desire” in Eve, so that he might “seduce” her (Robinson 1988, 118-119) and beget Cain and Abel.) Since Ialdabaoth is also responsible for such traits in humanity as arrogance and foolishness, there is no division at the waist. Sooner or later the spiritual core either dies with the body, goes (in some texts) to the place of the demiurge, or finds its way back to the realm of the God of All, having first experienced that realm, "the place of rest" in this life. In this life, moreover, it is not clear that the body is to be denied; there is evidence that the Valentinian Gnostics commended marriage as a suitable precursor to the union with one’s heavenly twin in the next world.
Blake, too, has his demonic women, in the world of fallen humanity. In Milton there is Tirzah, posing seductively trailing off into a serpent’s tail at both ends (Fig. 57 above; Erdmann 1974, 242), as in Ripley, while one of the sons of Los lies below, despairing in the coils. In a later work, Jerusalem, Blake gives the same stereotypically seductive pose to Vala, his personification of nature, as she pushes down his heroine, Jerusalem, and attracts Albion (Fig. 58; Ela Howard photo from Beinecke Library copy).
Vala has her own webs, and also tree roots, with which she binds Albion (Fig. 59; Ela Howard photo from Beinefke Library copy).
Sexuality in the “fallen” world produces nothing but jealousy and despair; it is as much a trap as religion, in fact each uses the other. Yet for Blake sexuality is merely bound and can be set free. It is all a matter of attitude; sex and the body can be heaven as well as hell, depending on how we use our senses, whether we are bound by them or use them as a gateway to the world of imagination.
No comments:
Post a Comment