Free English Literature Dissertations - Applying To The Theory Of The Three Caskets And Identifying These Caskets
Applying to the theory of the three caskets and identifying these caskets with three daughters of King Lear, Freud reveals that Lear’s choice causes death of Cordelia, his best beloved daughter.
On a symbolic level, Cordelia is an embodiment of death; stressing Cordelia’s dumbness, Freud draws a parallel between this particular human trait and death. As Freud puts it,
Let us now recall the moving final scene, one of the culminating points of
tragedy in modern drama. Lear carries Cordelia’s dead body on to the stage.
Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and
familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like the Valkyrie in German
mythology, carries away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal wisdom,
clothed in the primeval myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death
and make friends with the necessity of dying29.
Thus, Cordelia is destined to die; identifying Shakespeare’s myth with dreams and regarding both myths and dreams as the projection of the human mind, Sigmund Freud reveals that silence in dreams is a serious psychological state that signifies some forms of death. As Cordelia prefers to keep silence and reveal her devotion to Lear in other ways, she dies at the end of the play, because, according to Freud, the third female in all existing myths is meant to die. Contrary to Montaigne’s vision, Shakespeare’s principal female character does not choose her death; instead she appears to be a victim of the prevalent circumstances and of her father’s wrong choice. As Freud claims, whenever our choice occurs, the choice between the women is free, and yet it falls on death. For, after all, no one chooses death, and it is only by a fatality that one falls a victim to it30. In this regard, Freud demonstrates that Shakespeare substitutes death for love, pointing at the fact that this substitution emerges from the unconscious of a person. Cordelia’s death is necessary for the play; Freud considers that her death brings up the importance of love, and it is this love that helps people to cope with their thoughts of death, but at the unconscious level.
In the denouement of Shakespeare’s play, Lear holds Cordelia’s corpse, demonstrating his realisation of love and his acceptance of death31. As a result, The third of the sisters was no longer Death; she was the fairest, best, most desirable and most lovable of women. Nor was this substitution in any way technically difficult: it was prepared for by an ancient ambivalence32. Unlike the early modern thinkers, Freud reveals that a person is not able to fancy his/her death, all thoughts of death appear in the human unconscious. However, at the beginning of the First World War Sigmund Freud claimed that, despite the unconscious denial of death, people should finally realise that death was a crucial part of their existence.
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