THE FATHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BOWEN FAMILY SYSTEMS THEORY

Abstract

King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, describing a father’s sorrow over his daughters’ unfilial or disobedient behavior. Although the father-daughter relationship in the play is often studied, to date, this relationship has not been investigated from the perspective of the Bowen family systems theory. Thus, the present study adopts the new interdisciplinary research method, the Bowen theory, to interpret the father-daughter relationship in King Lear. The focus of this article is to analyse the level of self-differentiation of Lear and the three daughters, namely Regan, Goneril, Cordelia in King Lear. It will thoroughly investigate the fusion and differentiation in their interactions with their original and nuclear families and examine the projection of Lear’s chronic anxiety on his daughters. Chronic anxiety due to social factors, such as humanism, feudalism, and patriarchy, and their impact on the father-daughter relationship in the tragedy, will also be investigated. It argues that the father-daughter relationship in King Lear is dysfunctional due to the lower level of differentiation of self between Lear and his three daughters, the projection of Lear’s anxiety onto the daughters, and the chronic anxiety brought about by societal regression. Hence, through the lens of the Bowen family systems theory, the study of the father-daughter relationship in the play can provide a new method for examining the dysfunctional family relationship in literary works.