Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest

ISBN-13: 9780415900393 / Angielski / Miękka / 1991 / 392 str.

Janet Adelman

Opis

Reading each of Shakespeare's plays from Hamlet to The Tempest, Janet Adelman illuminates Shakespeare's negotiations with mothers, present and absent - not only Gertrude, Volumnia, and Hermione, but also Lady Macbeth, Lear's daughters, and the exiled witch Sycorax. In her original and highly charged account, Adelman traces the genesis of Shakespearean tragedy and romance to a psychologized version of the Fall, in which original sin is literally the sin of origin, inherited from the maternal body that brings death into the world. In Adelman's account, Shakepspeare's confrontation with maternal power has devastating consequences both for masculine selfhood and for the female characters in whom that power is invested, the suffocating mothers who must themselves be suffocated.

Spis treści

Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Man and Wife Is One Flesh: Hamle. and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body; Chapter 3 “Is Thy Union Here?”: Union and Its Discontents in Troilus and Cressid. and Othell.; Chapter 4 Marriage and the Maternal Body: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well that Ends Wel. and Measure for Measur.; Chapter 5 Suffocating Mothers in King Lea.; Chapter 6 Escaping the Matrix: The Construction of Masculinity in Macbet. and coriolanu.; Chapter 7 Making Defect Perfection: Imagining Male Bounty in Timon of Athen. and Antony and Cleopatr.; Chapter 8 Masculine Authority and the Maternal Body: The Return to Origins in the Romances; note Notes; Author Index; Index to Shakespeare's Works; Subject Index;

O autorze

Adelman Janet