Book contents
7 - Tears, Rain, and Shame : King Lear, Masculine Vulnerability, and Environmental Crisis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2024
Summary
Abstract
Deepening the argument of This Contentious Storm (2017), the chapter revisits representation of water in relation to the king's emotions in King Lear. Specifically, I explore the king's refusal to cry and his openness to the rain in relation to his intention to “Unburdened crawl toward death” (1.1.40). The play thus becomes a feminist fable about the difficulty of exposing one's self as vulnerable in a masculinist culture that prizes pride and strength. The affective struggle of inhabiting one's own mortal vulnerability—the fear or shame one may feel in the face of it—complements and complicates ideas in environmental humanities that underline the importance of openness to earthy mortality and vulnerability, on one hand, and the imperative for new communities of care, on the other.
Keywords: affect, King Lear, masculinity, water, queer feminism, Ecocriticism
Introduction
The idea of “holding space” for hard feelings is a wellness culture cliché in the 2020s. “Holding space” means creating a safe and comfortable zone for someone to express, process and purge negative affects and emotions. The feeling might be anger, grief, shame, fear or a combination of all of them; it might be felt in the self or in relation to others. The space held open could be in home, a park, a clinic, a classroom, a community hall. When done well, holding space allows someone to express hard feelings and continue to live comfortably within the limitations or enabling constraints of their circumstances. Holding space is an act of care that allows for a difficult affective process to unfold.
A tragedy creates a spatial and temporal zone for the representation of a story about the expression of negative human emotions too. These are often big, incorrigible, and negative ones. In addition, because it is a tragedy the space is held badly in the sense that circumstances are intended to go awry. As a queer feminist ecocritic interested in the representation of affect as it relates to environmental questions, I’m not just seeking to point out that things go badly in tragedies, but more specifically in the granular details of how, and how it might be otherwise.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature , pp. 157 - 176Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2024