McEachern - 2000 - Figures of Fidelity Believing in King Lear

Figures of Fidelity: Believing in "King Lear"Author(s): Claire McEachernSource: Modern Philology, Vol. 98, No. 2, Religion, Gender, and the Writing of Women:Historicist Essays in Honor of Janel Mueller (Nov., 2000), pp. 211-230Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/438933 .Accessed: 01/02/2014 23:32

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Figures of Fidelity: Believing in King Lear

CLAIRE McEACHERN

University of California, Los Angeles

This article explores how the female figures of King Lear address the nature of Reformation believing. By "figures" I mean both the characters and tropes of female identity. By "believing" I mean the experience of inhabiting and being inhabited by some idea concerning the world, the otherworld, or another person. I seek, in effect, to use this play to probe an analogy and a complicity between faith in affective objects and spiritual ones: Why and how do convictions concerning erotic objects resemble those concerning salvation? More to the point, how does the anxiety attendant upon a Calvinist God play itself out in the plane of social knowledge, and why does the failure of faith in the reciprocity of human love comport itself much like soteriological crisis? More generally, why do these two experiences share in the literature of this period a vocabulary, affect, and evidentiary structure? And what does that resemblance tell us about not what, but how, believing occurs in this moment: What kind of an activity is it? What are its objects, subjects, habits, and representations?

Much of our recent investigation into early modern thought has concerned itself with what people believed (the Elizabethan world pic- ture? witches? monarchy? liberalism?). Such inquiries have been chiefly concerned with political identities and beliefs conceived of as a matter of dissent or assent. A Renaissance subject in such work is, for example, either "for" social order or against it, contained by it or subversive to it (usually the former). Histories of Reformation religious identities often operate along similar lines, asking, for example, was Christopher Marlowe an atheist, or was Shakespeare a Catholic? Such investigation first identifies a thinkable thought and then searches the thinker, via his text, for signs of its presence, which tends to be imagined as an

The author wishes to thank coeditor Joshua Scodel, whose comments on drafts of this article displayed a truly Muelleresque acuity.

? 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2001/9802-0003$02.00

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212 MODERN PHILOLOGY

absolute or thorough effect. Contemporary theorists resemble early modern social analysts (e.g., antitheatrical polemicists) who naively view the social transmission of ideas as a simple mimetic process: to see a dra- matic representation, for instance, risks enacting it oneself. This notion of what it means to believe in something is especially odd given that Reformation England was a place where religious identities were multiple and difficult to discriminate, and where the Calvinism informing the English church discouraged enthusiastic certainty. Calvin recom- mended to the faithful not an absolute conviction concerning their election, but a kind of cognitive dissonance: faith is "not an assurance which is never affected by doubt, not a security which anxiety never assails, we rather maintain that believers have a perpetual struggle with their own distrust."'

So, women (and children) first. In thinking about the female figures in King Lear, I wish to begin with a low point: what William Empson calls the sex horror of Lear-his tirade in act 4, scene 6, which occurs at the apex of his madness and which culminates in the notorious attack on the ethical and physiological duplicity of women: "Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the Gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend's: there's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption!" (4.6.121-25).2 Women here are terrible and double, cloven by the distance between public behavior and private appetite-their faces no measure of what lies between their forks-and their duplicity affects form, gender, geography, and moral referent. Among the many apoc- alyptic images of cosmic disarray that Lear bodies forth in his duress, this one stands out for its savagery and locality, its pointedness of object and attack.

In some respects this imagery is perfectly typical of tragic heroes. In turning on and to female chastity as the source and metaphor of all the world's false promises, as if the seal of universal order were an invio- late hymen or marriage vow, Lear recalls the cries of Hamlet and Oth- ello and the disconcertingly long list of those other characters who echo them. (Were it not for its operatic virtuosity, we might detect a failure of writerly resourcefulness in Lear's speech.) Lear is true to literary type, to gender, and to culture. Shakespeare's men in crisis turn to the topic of female fidelity because it was a lynchpin of both property and patriarchal selfhood in the early modern period.3 Nor are the

1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rap- ids, Mich., 1995), p. 484. Hereafter this edition is cited in the text parenthetically as In- stitutes, followed by page number and then book, chapter, and section.

2. I cite William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (London, 1996), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

3. See Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1996).


Claire McEachern o Figures of Fidelity 213

lurid details of Lear's vision uncommon in this period's vocabulary for epistemological duplicity. The Revelations-inspired image of a crea- ture that is half-woman and half-beast (Rev. 17:3) informs Edmund Spenser's images of Error and of the Roman church and Thomas Dekker's and John Milton's, after Spenser, of Sin. John Foxe writes in his Acts and Monuments of papist historians that "although they in part expresse some truth.. . yet in suppressing another part, they play with us ... as Appeles did in Pliny, who, painting the one half of Venus coming out of the sea, left the other half unperfect . .. and ut- terly untold."4 In each of these cases the female figure expresses false representation. The fact that boy actors played Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia would have given a literal and duplicitous body to Lear's monstrous allegory, much as it fueled Puritan suspicion of false signs.

Despite such typicalities, however, critical response generally finds Lear's speech both incongruous and discomfiting because of its pre- sumed indecorousness in the mouth of Lear. The Arden 2 editor, Kenneth Muir, lists this speech among the play's "improbabilities," but goes on to reassure us that Lear "inveighs against sex partly because, as Elizabethans knew, certain kinds of madness are accompanied by such an obsession."5 William Empson, on the other hand, finds the speech beyond defense and labels it a lapse of decorum: "surely," he writes, "we are to reflect that it is ridiculous and rather sordid when a very old man finds this topic so exciting."6 The implication is that Lear, in his senescence, ought to be beyond this particular vocabulary of crisis. Indeed Empson sounds a bit like Regan, when she says to her father "O sir! you are old: / Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of her confine. You should be ruled and led / By some discretion that discerns your state / Better than you yourself (2.2.335-39)."

While I agree that the speech is unseemly, I differ as to why. For it is not age but object that sets it apart. Unlike Hamlet or Othello (no youngster himself), Lear's disappointments are not sexual but filial: it is not his wife but his daughters who have undone him. What seems unhinged about the speech is that Lear seemingly speaks so wide of his mark, as far as his grievances are concerned. However much one may credit the incest drive as a motive force in Lear's affections, as in his initial desire to set his rest on Cordelia's "kind nursery" (11.124) or finally to sing with her "alone ... like birds i' the cage" (5.3.9), its frustration hardly seems to warrant the terms of a disappointed lover or husband. One might argue that filial disappointment returns Lear,

4. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 2 vols. (London, 1583), vol. 1, sig. iiiv. 5. See the editor's introduction to Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear, by William Shake-

speare (London, 1952), p. liv. 6. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951), p. 138.



ultimately, to the figure of his absent wife-he calls Goneril a "degener- ate bastard" (1.4.245) and tells Regan that if she were not pleased to see him "I would divorce me from my mother's tomb, / Sepulchring an adultress" (2.2.320-21). But I do not think we are meant to understand Lear's tirade as calling the paternity of his daughters into question. On the contrary, the driving and cumulative occasions of this speech are that all three of his proud daughters are, as he knows, too much his own, "my flesh, my blood, my daughter. / Or rather a disease that's in my flesh, / Which I must needs call mine," however much "a boil, / A plague sore, or embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood" (2.2.410- 14). "Judicious punishment," he realizes, "'twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters" (3.4.73-74). As are, indeed, both of Gloucester's sons his own. The variety and enigma of maternity in this play never calls paternity into question. Indeed, the Fool jests that, in giving away his land, Lear has made his daughters his mothers-the one filial relationship free of doubt (1.4.154).

The deranged quality of this speech is mitigated somewhat if we recall that the mad Lear speaks to Gloucester, whose first self-identification in the play is as a blushing adulterer. But even this context calls into question the appropriateness of Lear's tirade, as he ultimately inveighs against not the male partner in adultery but the female, and indeed not against the one instance of adultery in question, but against the global female origin of sexual sin. Lear is not alone in this assignment of blame. Gloucester's initial acknowledgement that Edmund's "breed- ing hath been at my charge" is quickly followed by his attribution of "fault" first to "this young fellow's mother," who "had indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed" (1.1.13-15), and then to the "whoreson" Edmund himself, "who came something saucily into the world before he was sent for" (1.2.20-22). So, too, throughout the play the Fool declaims punctually on woman's falseness, "For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass" (3.2.35). Kent describes his forty-eight years as "Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, / not so old to dote on her for anything" (1.4.37- 38). With a savagery surpassing Lear's, Edgar tells Edmund that he was "got" in a "dark and vicious place" (5.3.170). The powers of Fortune and the goddess Nature are, like Edmund's mother, "arrant whores" (2.4.52). Goneril (the "gilded serpent"; 5.3.85) and Regan, in their shared lust for Edmund, animate these conventions: "Each jealous of the other as the stung / Are of the adder" (5.1.57-58). Even Cordelia, in her return from France, displays an unsettling duality of loyalties not only to men but to countries. Certainly it is not only women who confuse and betray in this play; if we are to trust Goneril, for instance, the "epicurism and lust" of Lear's retinue renders a "graced palace" "more like a tavern or a brothel" (1.4.235-36). But it is Edgar alone



whose pronoun makes "our pleasant vices" (5.3.169) a gender-neutral problem, although his sanctimony seems to beg his own exemption.

What we find indelicate in Lear's speech, and those of others in the play, is the awkward displacement: the relocation of agency and adultery away from fathers. Both the way the speech seeks to attribute sexual sin exclusively to women and the way in which it cannot quite success- fully do so are unseemly. A kind of category confusion is at work: Lear speaks the language of sexual disappointment even though his disappointments are not strictly sexual, or rather they are sexual at a most global level, a level which reflexively (if subliminally) implicates fathers after all. (In fact, this global scope contributes to the sense of this speech's excess: it departs from but ultimately overruns the occasion of the squinting Gloucester, that pathetic mockery of Cupid). Children, precisely because they are so undeniably one's own, are bound to dis- appoint in that they reflect so uncannily parental imperfection, and so, recalling original sin ("my corrupted blood"), destroy any hope that they might better their kind. Lear's vision of a monstrously ambivalent female physiognomy thus speaks not only to the double ethical character of his offspring (two "unnatural hags," one so kind), but to the confounded character of Cordelia herself, whose "most small fault" shows so ugly (1.4.259). This ambiguity is recapitulated politically, in the paradox of Cordelia's foreign military leadership in the service of filial duty. As if to testify to the way in which sexual sins come home to roost, Lear's attacks on women are rivaled by his own acknowledgment of the womb errant within himself: "O how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow. / Thy element's below" (2.2.246-48). According to Edgar, Edmund is a tool of the gods to "plague" (5.3.169) Gloucester with his own sexual sin. Try as they might, these fathers are implicated in the sin they would scapegoat.

In a way, then, we could say that Lear's disappointments are indeed sexual and that they are less displaced here than they seem. His attack on sexual error is in fact a form of self-criticism in both a specific and a general sense, insofar as it is an acknowledgement of original sin. What rings strange in Lear's speech, then, is also its utter convention- ality, the fact that it both is a generic complaint and concerns a fault common to all humankind. Stanley Cavell reads this play as a meditation on the difficulties of knowledge, of both self and others: "the mo- tivation which manipulates the tragedy throughout its course [is] ... the attempt to avoid recognition, the shame of exposure; the threat of self-revelation."7 Lear's speech in this light can be read as reflexive, despite its outward correlative, and applies not only to Gloucester but

7. Stanley Cavell, "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 57-58.



also to himself. (For Cavell, Lear's speech is an instance of his "furiously telling himself that what was wrong with his plan was not the debasement of love his bargain entailed, but the fact that love itself is inherently debased").8 A similar reflexivity haunts his attacks on the "wretch," "bloody hand," and "Caitiff" (3.2.51-55): Does Lear speak to his com- panions or to himself? Yet however much we can understand such moments as acts of displacement, the question of the medium of such relocation-its wayward directionality-remains. Why is the acknowledgment of sin routed, rhetorically and ethically, through the female (a speech about deviancy, it itself travels wide from its mark)? Why does the displacement or projection of error occur through gender difference? Why do men blame women when they really mean to blame themselves?

The answer may be as old as Eve. Certainly the question we must ask about Lear's speech is one that might be asked about all the other tragic heroes; namely, why does loss of faith in human loyalty and cosmic order so often express itself as the loss of faith in female constancy? Lorna Hutson has answered this question in terms of the way women figure the mysteries of a burgeoning market economy.9 As the term "displacement" suggests, my own account so far has relied on a loosely psychoanalytic understanding of human habits of blaming. Now, however, I would like to address the habits of gendered metaphorizing in the domain of religious identity. Why does Lear's loss of faith take the form of a loss of faith in women? What, in other words, does the duality and deception of woman as a figure reveal about faith itself in Shake- speare's England, that place not only of multiple and competing faiths, but also of a Protestantism which had embedded within itself, in the crux of double predestination, a mystery whose contemplation could provoke not only a crisis of belief and representation but also of faith in divine beneficence? '0 How do you know, in such a system, whether God wants you? How do you know whether you are elect or not, and what counts as proof thereof? The problem that bedevils the fathers, and sons, of King Lear (more than the women) is how to know whether you

8. Ibid., p. 61. 9. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Six-

teenth-Century England (London, 1994). 10. Debora Shuger observes that "Calvinist anthropology, which derives from Erasmus'

tripartite division of the psyche into sinful flesh, self-protective maternal nature, and the spiritual law of the Father, seems less an early version of Cartesian dualism than a precursor of the Freudian allegory of id, ego, and superego." See The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), p. 190. For more rigorous psychoanalytic accounts of what Janet Adelman terms "an equally terrifying femaleness within [Lear] himself," see her Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest" (New York, 1992), p. 104; and Coppelia Kahn, "The Absent Mother in King Lear," in Rewriting the Renaissance: Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago, 1986), pp. 33-49.



are loved, and by whom. King Lear stages the mysteries of a Reformation God and the self who would seek to understand Him.

The Christian dimensions of King Lear have been in critical dispute since Samuel Johnson flinched before the prospect of Cordelia's death. Debate turns on the question of whether the play is pagan or Christian, a discussion in which the roles of suffering and redemption are key determinants. If the play presents suffering as redemptive, then it is Christian; if not, pagan. William Elton, for instance, has argued that to assert that suffering is redemptive in Lear is to import an anachro- nistic divine attentiveness into a context that Shakespeare intended as pre-Christian.11

Certainly, there is the possibility for this antithesis in the play. Char- acters suffer and, depending on your point of view, the God(s) either inflict such suffering for a reason or inflict it for their sport (itself a reason of sorts). But I would argue that the dichotomy which attributes absence of redemption to the presence of paganism in the play demon- izes (or scapegoats, as it were) paganism as what is prior to the grace of Christian salvation in order to purify Christian theology of a God that might be less than thoroughly merciful. For the true anachronism here is the description of an early modern Christian universe as one unproblematically committed to redemption. Cavell writes, "Christian- ity, like every other vision of the play, is not opted for, but tested."'2 Such testing occurs in Reformation culture itself.

English Protestantism in the early seventeenth century is internally riddled by the anxiety over whether God was thoroughly merciful, and, if so, to whom. As Calvin admitted in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, "great and difficult questions immediately arise, questions which are inexplicable, when just views are not entertained concerning election and predestination" (Institutes, p. 202 [3.21.1]). Calvin's project was in large part devoted to establishing '"just views," but the extent to which they needed to be repeatedly reestablished throughout the period testifies to the ontological and evidentiary difficulty this doctrine posed. As he wrote, "the human mind, when it hears this doctrine, cannot restrain its petulance, but boils and rages as if aroused by the sound of a trumpet" (Institutes, p. 225 [3.23.1]). Contemporary discussions of how to detect your own election are animated by the bewildering spectacle of a God who might save all if he chose to, but did not; of determining whether or not one's internal condition displayed the right proportions of confidence and humility requisite for faith; whether one's faith was

11. William Elton, "King Lear" and the Gods (San Marino, Calif., 1966). In a similar fashion John Danby imagines the tension in the play as one between beneficent and Hobbesian views of nature in his Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of "King Lear" (London, 1949).

12. Cavell, p. 74.



temporary; whether one's fear of God was the right kind of fear; and, most vexing of all, whether a truly faithful person should even ask about these kinds of things. William Perkins, for one, thought that "it is indeed a grace peculiar to the man elect to try himself, whether he be in the estate of grace or not."'13 Calvin, on the other hand, warned, "look at the narrowness of your own mind, and say whether it can comprehend the decrees of God ... believing ignorance is better than presumptuous knowledge" (Institutes, p. 230 [3.23.5]).

The degrees and varieties of Calvinism in Tudor-Stuart culture- the extent of its permeation, instantiation, and dissemination-are chronologically, demographically, doctrinally, and temperamentally de- termined. Peter White, for instance, notes that few university library collections "included much of either Luther or Calvin before 1580. Calvin's commentaries were more widely used than his Institutes, and in the early part of the reign libraries were more likely to contain works by Philip Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr, or the Loci Communes of Wolfgang Musculus than those of Calvin."14 Such information urges caution in generalizing about doctrine during this period; indeed, our hermeneutic difficulties (what can we believe about belief?) recapitulate those of contemporaries when it came to defining the exact contours of the phenomenon, whether as a theology or a social practice. "Calvinism" is at best a trope for the difficulties of a culture where soteriological concerns are emptied of human agency but not human anxiety. However, testimony to that anxiety is the fact that if Calvin was scarce on the ground, responses to him were not: Kendall notes that Perkins witnessed seventy-six editions of his own work in his lifetime (1558-1602), seventy-one after 1590.

Wondering what to believe about belief is perhaps made doubly difficult when the object in question is not a soul but a literary text; and religious referents in this culture are either so ubiquitous that adducing them in any discourse generates a contentless reading, or so specific that it produces an excessively local one. For instance, one way to prove the preoccupation with a Calvinist scheme of salvation in King Lear might be to search the play for verbal signals of Shakespeare's concern with it. The "fickle grace" (2.4.198) of Goneril, wherein Oswald dwells, looks highly promising; and Burgundy's rejection of the dowry-

13. William Perkins, A Treatise Tending unto a Declaration whether a Man be in the Estate of Damnation or in the Estate of Grace (1588), in The Works of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Berkshire, 1970), p. 357.

14. Peter White, Predestination, Policy, and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992), p. 84. See also Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988).



less Cordelia-"Pardon me, royal Sir, / Election makes not up in such conditions" (1.1.206-7) -lends this character a much needed charisma. France's reply, on the other hand, makes him the critic's white knight as well as Cordelia's: "Sure," he objects to Lear, "her offence / Must be of such unnatural degree / That monsters it, or your fore-vouched affection / Fall into taint, which to believe of her / Must be a faith that reason without miracle / Should never plant in me" (1.1.219-24). With their acknowledgment of the precarious and unknowable quality of Lear's "fore-vouched" affection, these lines point to a reading of Lear's own dragon-like wrath as a type of divinity, sudden and damning, a typology that would certainly be seconded by the prerogatives of kings and fathers expressed in Tudor-Stuart homologies and homilies.

However, at its worst this kind of evidence only proves that bane of critical ambition: seek and ye shall find. At best such evidence demonstrates that the words that trigger our recognition are part of the texture of Shakespeare's language, meant to imbue the play with res- onance, not part of a systematic pattern of reference or allegory. In- deed, the last of the suggestions I just listed-Lear's own resemblance to a wrathful God-hangs in fact on a character type rather than on a verbal trigger. But the problem with even this insight is that it over- looks the fact that the only character in the play who is convinced that Lear is a type of God ("everything," as he's been told) is Lear himself, and then only temporarily. Furthermore, the rage wreaked on Cord- elia, Lear's "disclaiming of paternal care, / Propinquity and property of blood" (1.1.114-15), is prompted by his own inquiry into the amount of herlove for him, a question which is met with an answer that such a question inevitably produces: nowhere near enough. The very structure of such a question can produce no other answer, for the fact that it needs to be asked reveals the insatiability and exorbitance of the desire that motivates it.

It is here, of all places, that we need to look for the conjunction of women and God in King Lear.

in his test of love, his request for its display, and in the answer that he receives-Cordelia's "nothing"-an answer that ultimately returns him to himself. The affective structure of proof, the uncertainty of our knowledge of love, the need for evidence of it, and the utter inadequacy of the possible proofs forcefully summon the dilemma of the Protestant soul in suspense over his or her own salvation. Female fidelity and divine election share an evidentiary paradox: in both cases even to question their existence is tojeop- ardize their possibility. In both instances the subject craves the display of signs despite the knowledge that such signs are potentially false and the desire for them a form of carnal weakness. The problem with



seeking proof of love (as Othello, too, discovers) is that you can never prove that somebody loves you, only that they do not.

The vagaries and varieties of predestinarian thought are perhaps nowhere more vexed than around the question of the knowledge of one's own election. Most thinkers were agreed that however "enraged," in Calvin's term, the human mind might be by the doctrine, the theo- logically correct response should first be to exonerate God of all incon- sistency or arbitrariness and then to redirect any imputation of fault away from God and toward ourselves-or rather, to realize that the urge to blame God is, in fact, a redirection of blame away from ourselves. Discussions of how to know correctly one's own salvation are rife with the mechanisms of displacement. Luther wrote that "inasmuch as He is the one true God, wholly incomprehensible and inaccessible to man's understanding, it is reasonable, indeed inevitable, that His justice should also be incomprehensible. ... what perversity is it on our part to worry at the justice and the judgment of the only God, and to arrogate so much to our own judgment as to presume to comprehend, judge, and evaluate God's judgment! "15 For Calvin, our relative ignorance had in fact a pedagogical function: "involved in the mists of error, we attain not at all.... With this curb God keeps us modest.., .that every teacher, however excellent, may still be disposed to learn" (Insti- tutes, p. 472 [3.2.4]). God's unknowable mystery was thus designed to redirect us back to the frailty of our own ways of knowing. Any confusion of God's ways should indicate to us reflexively our own fallen nature, as well as the resulting inadequacy of our own epistemological capacities. Accompanying this should be an understanding that human agency bears not at all upon which category-elect or reprobate-the soul in question belonged to, and furthermore that the two are difficult to distinguish, especially for the soul in question.

It is when one turns to the question of how-even if-a self deter- mines its own soteriological status that diversity among theologians emerges most strongly. The diversity of opinion turns on the nature of proof itself and on readings of 2 Peter 1:10: "Give all diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things ye shall never fall." Resulting discussions impinged upon the evidentiary status of human action, affect, self-knowledge, and the knowledge of others: To what extent can the fallen self serve as a site of inquiry and knowledge? R. D. Kendall has sketched a variety of possible positions in English Calvinism with respect to this question. Calvin, he argues, believed that to seek reflexively within oneself, that is, in the nature and conduct of

15. Martin Luther, "Bondage of the Will," in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writ- ings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York, 1961), p. 200.



conscience, was to risk anxiety and even damnation; ultimately, self- reflection reintroduced the human will and willfulness which Protes- tantism had outlawed as a papist heresy."16 Calvin thus directed the curious soul away from its own affective resources: "the human mind, when blinded and darkened, is very far from being able to rise to proper knowledge of the divine will; nor can the heart, fluctuating with perpetual doubt, rest secure in such knowledge. Hence.... the mind must be enlightened, and the heart confirmed, from some other quarter" (Institutes, p. 475 [3.2.7]). Calvin believed that even to ask for proof of God's distinctions is to risk identifying oneself as a reprobate: a spiritual variant of the maxim that if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

By contrast, the English Puritan William Perkins, whom Kendall terms the father of "experimental predestinarianism," elaborated the theology of self-examination into an entire practice of scrutiny and inquiry, both autobiographical and social. His Whole Treatise of the Cases of Con- science (1606) embarks from the paramount question of, "How may a man be in conscience assured, of his owne salvation?"'7 To answer this question, Perkins generates a host of hypothetical contexts by and in which one might verify the authenticity of human identities, in which metaphysical anxieties generate practices of self-knowing. For instance, in answer to the question of Psalm 15-"Who of all the members of the Church, shall have his habitation in heaven?"-Perkins generates a checklist for the criteria of genuine identity based on the psalm itself:

One is, to walk upright in sincerity, approving his heart and life to God: the second is, to deale justly in all his doings: the third is, for speech, to speake the truth from the heart, without guile or flatterie ... [not to] take up or carrie abroad false reports and slanders ... in our dealings not to doe wrong to our neighbour, more than to ourselves ... to contemne wicked persons worthy to be contemned ... honour them that feare God ... sweare and not change: that is, to make conscience of our word and promise, especially if it be confirmed by oath ... not to give money to usurie: that is, not to take increase for bare lending, but to lend freely to the poor. The last is, to give testimonie without briberie or partiality. 18

16. See R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979), p. 24. 17. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, Distinguished into Three

Bookes (Cambridge, 1606), p. 73. Perkins published his "first" case in 1592. While Kendall argues for Theodore Beza's influence on Perkins' evidentiary ideas, Robert Letham attributes the subjectivizing of assurance exclusively to the English Puritans. See his "Faith and Assurance in Early Calvinism: A Model of Continuity and Diversity," in Later Calvin- ism: International Perspectives, ed. W. Fred Graham (Kirsville, Mich., 1994), pp. 371-72.

18. Perkins, The Whole Treatise, pp. 78-79.



This list moves from the realm of knowledge of God to the realm of social and self-knowledge; the dislocation risks but ultimately skirts rat- ifying the efficacy of human agency in securing election (one's self, like one's works, is to be understood as demonstrative rather than active). Richard Hooker, who has been identified as among the most starkly opposed to Calvin in his hopes for self-assurance and self-description, has an even more economical response to the question of how one can answer the doubts concerning election: "No man can love the things which in his own opinion are not. And if they thinke those things to be, which they show that they love when they desire to beleeve them, then must it needs be that by desiring to beleeve they prove themselves to be true beleevers."19 Here, human anxiety is itself a form of proof: because you doubt, you can be certain. The very instability of affect serves as a warrant of faith; we are far from Calvin indeed.

The differences among authors on the merits and profits of self- examination are not always as clear (?!) as they appear here. Perkins is careful not to credit excessively the assurance thereby gleaned: "When a man hath found out the estate of his heart by searching it, he is further to observe and keep it with all diligence, that when the hour of death or the day of trial shall come, he may stand sure and not be de- ceived of his hope."20 Nor is Calvin above making the occasional claim for a secure faith, so long as it is not an effect of human effort (and which he finds most rooted in the Word): it is "a firm and sure knowledge of the divine favour toward us, founded on the truth of free promise in Christ, and revealed to our minds, and sealed on our hearts, by the Holy Spirit" (Institutes, p. 475 [3.2.7]).21 Writings on predestination and self-knowledge are haunted by the balancing act of avoiding the heresy of human agency while simultaneously encouraging the possibility of a secure faith in the self. The problem with the necessary reabsorption of God's apparent injustice into our own human sinful- ness-the relocation of divine fault to ourselves-is that it makes the reflex of self-examination return to extremely dubious ground indeed. If our own selves are unreliable grounds for knowledge, it is partly because all signs are suspect and because faith is more narrative than metaphorical, in that we will not be confirmed in our election (or lack

19. Richard Hooker, "A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certaintie and Per- petuitie of Faith in the Elect," in The Folger Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1977-81), 5:69. On Hooker's dissent from Calvinist predestination, see Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), pp. 74-75.

20. Perkins, The Whole Treatise, p. 361. 21. David Foxgrover argues for the paradoxical nature of self-examination in Calvin

in his "Self-Examination in John Calvin and William Ames," in Graham, ed., pp. 451-70.



thereof) until the end. Not only is God unknowable, but so are we. The contemplation of God's judgments may return you to yourself, but even that domain of and for knowledge is an inscrutable one. Yet, conversely, a questionable faith returns the seeker to the mysterious inequity of God's judgments.

So if the differences and internal contradictions among these positions on the possibility of self-assurance confuse us, such controversy also clarifies that confusion is itself the point, in that it is the turn inward that becomes so charged a matter of dispute. Even thinkers who are the most comfortable with the self-as-evidence are always haunted by, and need to ward off, its potential heresy-a danger present if only by virtue of the polemical nature of religious discourse. The self in soteriological thought is both a potential ally and an enemy in the quest for God's favor. It is simultaneously a subject and an object of knowledge, a domain of inquiry both estranged and intimate, reliable and untrustworthy, a potential site of secure identity, and a potential traitor to it. As such, it risks calling into question faith itself, and thus, indirectly, the comprehensiveness of God's own benevolence. The search for knowledge of God's love thus presents us with a complex cir- cuit of inquiry and discontent, moving both toward and away from God, both toward and away from the self. The subject first turns to God, but finding Him inscrutable and unknowable, he turns to himself, so that the inquiry about God actually becomes a form of self-knowledge (of original sin). Curiosity about God's decisions thus becomes curiosity about the self and its capacity to demonstrate. But insofar as the incomprehensibility of God reminds one of one's own fallen nature, the self is itself rendered dubious as a ground of knowledge, itself both knowable and inscrutable, and faith a matter of dispute. Insofar as the murkiness of the self reminds one of God's power to inculcate (or not) faith, the unreliability of the self returns one to the discriminations of God. Though Calvin, for one, would recommend that such frailty should redirect the subject back to God, the loss of faith calls God's own dispositions into question. Even genuine faith is, in such a system, not an absolute knowledge but, as Calvin puts it, a kind of "diffidence" with respect to one's own convictions concerning the self and the world: it is a psychological motion of approach and retreat.

The way in which the self is simultaneously close and distant in such formulations, both knowable and other, perhaps sheds light on why the female figure serves as a potent trope of selfhood in religious discourse. By way of searching to cement the link between the love of a good woman and that of God, we can turn partly to the precedents of Scripture and its paraphrases in seventeenth-century poetry. On the one hand, we can perceive a relatively simple analogy between the search



for God's love and the knowledge of female love: much as, for instance, the Petrarchan female serves to solicit and yet frustrate long- ing. God's own distant display of choice is a mystery and a frustration for the seeking subject. Though Donne, for instance, models his hopes of communicating with God on his earthly marital relationship, he confesses that God is more of a mystery: "Here the admiring her mind did whet / To seek thee God; so streams do show the head, / But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed, / A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet."22 Yet like the Petrarchan lover who always ends up speaking more about himself than his beloved, the turn of the religious lyric is ultimately inward, and it is God who is the jealous husband and the soul his wayward bride: "Why should I beg more love," Donne asks, "when as thou / Doest woo my soul, for hers offer- ing all thine / ... in thy tender jealousy dost doubt / Lest the world, flesh, yea Devil put thee out."23 Indeed, as Michael Schoenfeldt has pointed out, "the God of Reformation Protestantism ... became pro- gressively masculinized, as a gender-specific corollary to the theological stress on the absoluteness of divine power."24 Thus a second, more textured, analogy is that by which the female self figures the dubious status of the self in search of its own salvation: an evidentiary site both profitable yet dangerous, familiar yet alien. As Janel Mueller has written in a wide-ranging study of the female subject in metaphysical lyric, "The otherness of God's kingdom requires.. . a total recasting of the poetic speaker's identity that forces the self to become an other."25

In this second analogy, the female self has a double aspect. The most familiar is the pejorative one, in which the female figure conjures the bodily, and hence untrustworthy nature of the self: that familiar fleshli- ness from which we must distance ourselves. (Calvin writes that Christ "is given to us for sanctification, that he may purge us from all iniquity and defilement, and bring us to the obedience of divine righteous- ness ... which cannot exist unless the lusts to which these men would give loose reins are tamed and subdued"; Institutes, p. 520 [3.3.14].) Erotic faith and faith in God are bound in this literature by the frequent imagination of Christ as the husband of the church or the soul, which are in turn figured with all the vulnerability and variety of women.

22. John Donne, Holy Sonnet 17, lines 5-8 in John Donne, Selected Poetry, ed. John Carey (Oxford, 1996), p. 207.

23. Ibid., lines 9-14. 24. Michael Schoenfeldt, "The Gender of Religious Devotion: Amelia Lanyer and

John Donne," in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge, 1997), p. 210.

25. Janel Mueller, "Women among the Metaphysicals: A Case, Mostly, of Being Donne For," Moden Philology 89 (1989): 142-57, quote on p. 152.



God is the faithful husband, and spiritual infidelity the province of the sinning bride of Christ, who, according to John Bale, must "do off the filthy old man with all his works" ("For what else" but a woman, writes Bale in an attack on Catholic representation, "beareth out the malignant muster in their copes, crosses, oils, mitres, robes, relics, ceremonies, vigils, holy days, blessings, censings, and foolings, a wanton... vain- glorious pomp?"26) And hence, while there may be no male and female before God, the typical assignment of adulterous idolatry in such poetry is to a female subject, which in its vulnerability and bodily per- meability signifies the frailty of human fidelity. This assignment sec- onds theological discourse's careful rerouting of any suspicion of God's perversity to the frailty of human understanding. As Calvin writes, "the human heart has so many recesses for vanity, so many lurking places for falsehood, is so shrouded by fraud and hypocrisy, that it often deceives itself" (Institutes, p. 478 [3.2.10]). The sonnet sequence published in 1560 under the name of Anne Locke as A Meditation of a Peni- tent Sinner... upon the 51. Psalme demonstrates the depths to which sheer carnality can drag one: "Washe me, O Lord, and do away the staine / Of uggly sinnes that in my soule appere / ... Washe me againe, yea washe me every where, / Both leprous bodie and defiled face."27

Yet while the female figure represents the frailty of human fleshli- ness, the same carnal and affective vulnerability renders the feminized self a potential ally in the search for divine identity and identification. In a discussion of the Magdalene narratives, Shuger has written about the role of the female figure as both subject and object of religious knowledge, a vehicle of spiritual desire as well as human depravity, and hence a potential site of affective spiritual authenticity: "the deferred and dilating desires of abandoned women correspond not 'merely' to the affective experience of the devout soul but also to the intellective movements of the inquiring mind."28 So, too, Mueller sees in Richard Crashaw the "conviction that souls in female bodies and social positions, like Teresa of Avila's, are best situated to experience the onset of divine love and to surrender themselves to it."29 This is an aptitude

26. John Bale, The Image of Both Churches (1545) in Select Works ofJohn Bale, ed. Henry Christmas (Cambridge, 1849), pp. 494-96, 583.

27. Anne Locke, A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner... upon the 51. Psalme (London, 1560), sig. A4r. The sonnets are bound with translations of sermons of Calvin upon Ezekiel 38 and Locke explains that "I have added this meditation folowyng unto the ende of this boke, not as a parcell of maister Calvines worke, but for that it well agreeth with the same argument, and was delivered me by my frend with whom I knew I might be so bold to use and publishe it as it pleased me" (sig. Al).

28. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible, p. 187. 29. Mueller, "Women among the Metaphysicals," p. 143.



which derives not only from the affinity between women and Christ, both feminized in their powerlessness, but also from the very female insufficiency that makes women the figure of sin.

The Protestant poet Aemilia Lanyer expressed a vision of femininity not unlike Crashaw's. Lanyer, in her Salve Deus RexJudaeorum (1611), invokes female powerlessness and carnality. The daughters of Jerusa- lem, for instance, are alone in soliciting Christ's attention to them: "Thrice happy women that obtaind such grace / From him whose worth the world could not containe; / Immediately to turne about his face / ... To comfort you, whose teares pow'rd forth apace ... / Your cries inforced mercie, grace, and love / From him, whom greatest Princes could not moove. ... / Yet these poore women, but their pit- eous cries / Did moove their Lord, their Lover, and their King, / To take compassion, turne about, and speake / To them whose hearts were ready now to breake."30 Here, Christ's sympathy derives not only from male chivalry, but also from identification with the women, and they with him, which transports the latter: "Your tearfull eyes, beheld his eies more bright; / Your faith and Love unto such grace did clime, / To have reflection from this Heav'nly Light" (lines 988-90). With a similar dexterity, Lanyer also invokes female frailty to both excuse and embolden her own authorial voice: after invoking a conventional trope of authorial modesty, that of the Phaeton-like weakness of her own "wit on fire," she goes on to say, "But yet the Weaker thou doest seeme to be / In Sexe, or Sense, the more his Glory shines / That doth infuze such powerfull Grace in thee / To shew thy Love in these few humble lines" (lines 289-92). Such a statement (like the Locke sonnets) demonstrates a kind of theological correctness in its emphasis on the frailty of human ambition and the corresponding reliance upon God's own power. But, at the same time, Lanyer makes a virtue of female frailty: however feeble, it also has an unadorned and hence unabashed authenticity. She compares her frailty to "The Widowes Myte . . , / Her little All more worth than golden mynes" (lines 293-94). The female body may be especially carnal, but as such it is an honest representation of our fallen condition.

The female gender in these spiritual formulations thus identifies the self as, on the one hand, especially intimate and corporeal and, on the other, estranged and inscrutable, knowable (like women to a patriarchal imagination) only from the outside, if at all. An alien being built

30. The Poems ofAemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford, 1993), p. 93 (lines 969- 84). Subsequent passages of this poem are cited parenthetically in the text by line number. On the kinship of Lanyer's Christ with women, see also Janel Mueller, "The Feminist Poetics of 'Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,'" in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington, Ky., 1998), pp. 112-13.



from a rib, woman is both far and near, identical and estranged, and her invocation can serve to convey the unknown as well as the authentic. Against Lear's denunciation of the unruly "mother that swells up toward my heart" (2.2.247), we can range Cordelia's lament that she "cannot heave my heart into my mouth" (1.1.91). The former identifies the mobile body as an unruly female, an internal traitor to Lear's mas- culine reason; the latter, as a site of authentic identity. Cordelia's own body is the paradox of a "little-seeming substance" (1.1.199): she is both not worth note, insufficient in her femininity, yet also free from guile, one who knows not seems (the same goes for her voice, both "low" and "excellent" [5.3.271]). Throughout the play Lear's reflection upon his own feelings appears as a remonstration of the feminized and unruly body which is both traitor and truth teller: "Let not women's weapons, water drops, / Stain my man's cheeks" (2.2.466-67); "O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down!" (2.2.310; to which the Fool replies: "Down, wantons, down!" [2.2.314]). Insofar as the dual identity of the self is also a form of representational instability, its feminization further serves to express the degree to which this duality appears as hypocrisy: hence "yon simp'ring dame, / Whose face between her forks presages snow, / That minces virtue and does shake the head / To hear of pleasure's name / The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to't with a more riotous appetite" (4.6.116-21). Lear has two kinds of daughters, but both kinds-the faithless and the faithful-reflect him to himself.

The very variety of the female figure-as a God both true and '"jealous" and as the self both reliable and unreliable-perhaps only under- scores its ultimate currency as a figure of representational duplicity and warns us against securing its meanings. But I would argue that the fact that the female figure both invokes and repels identification is not a contradiction but a condition of believing, and as such the figure expresses the vagaries, or "diffidence," involved in the knowledge of self and divinity. The doubled self that haunts theological discourse also informs King Lear, a play that dramatizes a search for knowledge that begins outside of but ultimately returns to the self, and, disappointed there, ultimately converges upon the cosmos itself. (One of the reasons Lear's speech moves so rapidly from the local to the global-from Gloucester to gynophobia-is that the doubleness of the self-elect and reprobate, subject of proof and doubt-so quickly returns us to the doorstep of a capricious God.) Like the Protestant soul in search of his own status, Lear begins with a question about the love of others- "Tell me, my daughters... /Which of you shall we say doth love us most?" (1.1.48-51)-and rebounds ultimately to a question about self- knowledge: "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" (1.4.221). The play opens with a request that love show itself, and it devolves into the



spectacle of so few loves being known, an ignorance that calls the very beneficence of the universe into question.

To the objection that the dowry competition is intended to be cere- monial, that the assignments of lands and powers have been predeter- mined before the scene opens, I would respond that the objections confirm my analogy: Lear asks for a display, a demonstration which could make that which is inward and unknowable socially active and efficacious. Our discomfort with his request is partly due to the usual reasons-with the vanity that requires flattery or with the power that requires a final act of submission from his children before it is relinquished. But these only gesture toward the real unseemliness of his behavior, which lies in the impropriety, indignity, and necessity of asking whether one is loved. The answers of Goneril and Regan, however ful- some, themselves point to the unanswerability of the question: "Beyond all manner" (1.1.61); "I profess myself an enemy to all other joys / Which the most precious square of sense possesses" (1.1.73-74). Both of these answers are variants of Cordelia's "nothing." The very form of Lear's question-"Which of you shall we say doth love us most?" (1.1.51) -reveals the dependence of their answers upon Lear's own internal phrasing of them, the fact that they will be only as good as he can speak them to be. Cordelia's "nothing," in this respect, as well as the mockingly precise terms of her other answers-"no more nor less" and "half" her love (1.1.87, 93, 102) -reply to Lear that his question is not just unseemly but unanswerable. Not merely because hearts and tongues are not the same weight, but because even if verbal proof were given, it cannot compel belief, especially from one so doubting as to ask.

Lear's movements toward and away from himself can be tracked through his relations with his daughters, which are characterized by a kind of diffidence, a back and forth dance of acknowledgment and denial. Lear's daughters are both strangers and too much his own. He disinherits Cordelia in a curiously self-reflexive phrase: "Here I give her father's heart from her" (1.1.127); and he estranges her beyond the most self-consuming of aliens: "He that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom / Be as well neighboured, pit- ied, and relieved, / As thou my sometime daughter" (1.1.118-21). He calls them bastards, yet knows full well they were "got 'twixt the lawful sheets" (4.6.114); he is "false persuaded [he] had daughters" (1.4.224- 25), but wishes upon Goneril "a child of spleen" like unto herself (1.4.274). This diffidence is true even of those moments when Lear is most forthright: "I did her wrong" (1.5.24) comes in the midst of a se- ries of the Fool's jokes about emasculating daughters and cuckholded fathers, by which the latter seeks to point out Lear's errors even as he distracts him from them. His ultimate catharsis of self-knowing comes



as a statement which acknowledges its own epistemological fragility, with a combination of precision and provisionality: "I am a very foolish, fond old man, / Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less, / And to deal plainly, / I fear I am not in my perfect mind. / ... Do not laugh at me, / For as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia" (4.7.60-70). Significantly, Lear's recognition of himself is accompanied by a knowledge of Cordelia as both estranged and intimate, "this lady" and "my child."

The problem, of course, with this play is that if asking about love seems unseemly, not asking seems no better: consider Gloucester's im- mediate belief in Edmund's lies about his brother and Edgar's ready assumption that he must flee because of Gloucester's supposed anger toward him. Human love in this play begs to be inquired after and dis- closed, but there seems little way to do either. Our own experience throughout the play is of waiting for demonstrations of love and their acknowledgment, for recognitions and proofs of who loves whom. Will Lear recognize Kent? Does he really recognize Cordelia? Why doesn't Gloucester recognize the voice of Poor Tom? Why does Edgar stage the discovery of his identity to Albany and Edmund as an elaborate "machination" (5.1.48) of self-disclosure, but withhold it so long from his father? Why are we not privy to the latter discovery, but, like third- string courtiers in The Winter's Tale, learn about it only by report? Ed- mund seems grotesquely alone in the comfort of knowing that "Edmund was beloved" (5.3.238), and the pitiable quality of this assurance only highlights how a similar knowledge goes begging elsewhere. The act of knowing whether you are beloved in King Lear, like Reformation believing, is a precarious combination of intimacy and estrangement, posses- sion and rejection, ownership and alienation. Indeed, knowing is not a single act at all, but a necessarily repeated action. Tellingly, Lear's fantasy of a final respite from the trials of recognition, his response to Cordelia's question, "Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?", is a repu- diation of such mundane ambiguities in favor of a glimpse of the ultimate distinctions among persons, a divine vision: "Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out-And take upon's the mystery of things / As if we were God's spies" (5.3.15-17).31

Let me finish by raising and trying to answer two objections to the analogy I am sketching between the proofs of God's love and of female

31. R. A. Foakes, the play's Arden 3 editor, points out that the phrase "God's spies" is, both in production and in play texts, aurally and lexically ambiguous-it is either the play's single reference to a Christian God ("God's spies"), in which case Lear imagines himself and Cordelia as spying on behalf of the one God, or it is a reference to "gods' spies." I would submit that either case also invokes spies who spy upon God/s as well as with him/them.



love in Lear. One is that a truer analogy would require that the daughters do the asking of their father, given Protestantism's commitment to God as father. 32 But I think it is the peculiar vulnerability of parents to their children that most resembles the mysteries of a divine love: because children are bound to a parent by necessity, the love of a child seems both to go without asking and oddly gratuitous. No wonder that Lear, "this child-changed father" (4.7.17), inquires after it at the moment that he relinquishes his material hold over his daughters: How is it, he wonders, different from a need they will no longer have of him? The same mystery of grace governs the love of a divinity for humans who have long relinquished their right to such love.

The second objection is that the analogy between the faith in woman's faith and in divine love is only an analogy. That, I would argue, is the point: our only way of knowing divine love, of measuring this quantity of which we will never have earthly proof, is by measuring it against those loves we do know, or think we know, and yet must always take on faith.

32. See Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh, 1978).


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Issue Table of ContentsModern Philology, Vol. 98, No. 2, Religion, Gender, and the Writing of Women: Historicist Essays in Honor of Janel Mueller (Nov., 2000), pp. 171-362Front MatterPreface [pp. 171-174]Puritan "Disciplina" and Elizabethan "Rhetorica:" or, Why Is This Woman Wearing "Broidures"? [pp. 175-182]Nature's Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness [pp. 183-210]Figures of Fidelity: Believing in "King Lear" [pp. 211-230]"A Labyrinth of Sin": Marriage and Moral Capacity in Thomas Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness" [pp. 231-250]"Mony Choaks": The Quaker Critique of the Seventeenth-Century Public Sphere [pp. 251-270]Gender, Disguise, and Usurpation: "The Female Prelate" and the Popish Successor [pp. 271-298]Cartesian Bodies [pp. 299-319]Characters: Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Stal[pp. 320-338]Marianne Moore and the Women Modernizing New York [pp. 339-362]Back Matter

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McEachern - 2000 - Figures of Fidelity Believing in King Lear