The Return of Women in Howard Barker’s Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good

Abstract

Recent feminist criticism on Shakespeare's King Lear, led by psychoanalytic critics such as Coppelia Kahn and Janet Adelman, has attempted to excavate 'the maternal subtext,' disclosing patriarchal ideology and the hidden mother inscribed in Lear's inner psyche. Concentrating on the complete absence of literal mothers in the play and exploring male anxieties and fantasies about maternal presence, the feminists examine the way in which a repressed femaleness called 'the mother' returns. In a similar vein, Howard Barker's Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good, a prequel to King Lear, stems from the observation that maternal characters are completely absent from the Shakespeare play. Tracing the development of Lear from a boy to a tyrant, Barker's bold adaptation puts a central question of why the mother is expunged from memory, and why she is reduced to the object of an 'unjust but necessary hatred' from Lear. Interpreting this absence as a deliberate form of oppression, Barker tries to restore the motivations and histories of the female characters subsumed into a narrative dominated by Lear in King Lear. Focusing on the contradictory relationship between goodness and politics and the issues of ethical responsibility in a patriarchal world, this paper explores how Barker's adaptation deals with the effect of the missing mother from a feminist perspective. Barker subverts the classical tragic (and misogynist) rhythm inscribed in the text through the unsympathetic characterization of Lear, his repressive relations with his daughters and the introduction of the missing queen, Clarissa. First of all, Barker sees Lear as a man veering between social conscience, embodied by the Gaol, a collective of the unjustly imprisoned, and the corrupting influences of Bishop, an authoritative father figure to Young Lear. The process of Lear's gradual absorption into patriarchal ideology is explored through his complicity in inventing his own version of abuse by the 'wicked' daughters. In Barker's adaptation, Lear's incestuous desire towards Cordelia, suggested by Kahn and Adelman, is further developed and expanded through Lear's repressive relationship with Prudentia, his mother-in-law and the very site where his sexual needs are unfold. Above alt, Barker's missing queen, Clarissa, embodies the qualities of moral integrity totally lacking in Lear himself. Establishing her final expulsion as a clear sign of Lear's moral inertia and degradation, Seven Lears moves further than the psychoanalytic insights provided by Kahn, who saw Lear's madness as a product of the rage at being deprived of maternal presence. Barker suggests Clarissa's unflinching honesty and political perception as a constant attempt on Lear's sanity as welt as a real reason for his anxiety.