Gloucester Blinding Scene Flashcards
What does the cruelty emphasise?
- How the world has turned upside down due to the disruption of the chain of being.
Negative betrayal of women
Kathleen Mccluskie feels it is an ‘anti-feminine’ play as it ‘presents women as the source the the primal sin of lust.’ The play forces us to sympathise with patriarchs. She continues to say ‘family relations in this play are seen as fixed and determined, and any movement within them is portrayed as a destructive reversal of the rightful order.’ “The feminine must be made to submit (Cordelia) or destroyed (Goneril and Regan).”
AO3: Blinding as a punishment
Historically, in medieval Europe and England blinding and castration were punishments for sexual crimes.
The symbolic castration of Gloucester, an acknowledged adulterer and somewhat proud of the fact, may be an appropriate punishment, as evidence both within the play and outside indicates.
K.M. Abenheimer, Norman Holland says in psychoanalysis and Shakespeare
“blinding, particularly the tearing out of eyes is as many analysts have pointed out, a symbol for the destruction of one’s manhood - castration.”
Edgar referencing Gloucester’s blinding as a punishment for unlawful fornication
“The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us; The dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes.” - Edgar (5:3, 170-73)
Edgar refers to his fathers eyes as “stones,” a common slang term for “testicles.”
Arnold Kettle on Gloucester
“Gloucester himself is a conventional and blind old man.” He is “hideously punished for his moral laxity”
Elton on Cordelia’s death and Gloucester’s blindness
Elton says that Cordelia’s death and Gloucester’s blindness “are the actions of an upside-down providence in an apparently deranged universe”
Cunningham on Gloucester’s blindness and Lear’s madness
there is hope Gloucester will find “insight through blindness” and Lear “wisdom through madness in the play’s twinned key moral provocations.”
Samuel Johnson on Gloucester eyes
“The extrusion of Gloucester’s eyes… seems an act too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition, and such as must always compel the mind to relieve it’s distress by incredulity.”
