Part I
Leontes’ Jealousy
Fatum est in partibus illis quas sinus abscondit.
Juvenal
Criticism of The Winter’s Tale discloses an almost uniform denial of
significant motivation in the representation of Leontes’ jealousy. Norman
Holland (in his pre-psychoanalytic criticism) writes; "In fact, [Shakespeare] is
really quite perfunctory about the source of trouble; he doesn’t even bother to
motivate Leontes’ jealousy." 1 Frank Kermode thinks that "Shakespeare removes
Leontes’ motives for jealousy."2 G. W. Knight, committed to theological notions
of Shakespeare’s divine inspiration, says "His evil is self-born and
unmotivated." 3 A. D. Nutall, to my mind the play’s most responsive critic, courts
"Freudian" suggestions in the text but tactfully avoids a psychoanalytic reading
of Leontes’ delusions.4 J. H. P. Pafford, the editor of the Arden edition, states
flatly: "Causes of the jealousy are no concern of ours."5 D. A. Traversi speaks only
of "The evil impulse which comes to the surface…."6 Implicit in this dominant
attitude toward Leontes’ jealousy is the proposition that its
specific expressions lack coherent psychological significance. Leontes
simply goes mad without cause. In the language of the French psychoanalyst J.
Lacan, we can say that these critics refuse to take Shakespeare’s metaphors
seriously as "significant."7
Of course, these critics are responding to one aspect of the play’s dramatic
reality. There is no external explanation of Leontes’ behavior provided
for us. What the critics call lack of motivation is lack of rationalization.
Yet, even if there were external motivation, a critical response that denies
unconscious motives would impoverish the power of Shakespeare’s over determined
language.8 In psychoanalytic terms, we can say that the literary creation is
always an attempt to synthesize private and unconscious motives with public
forms of comprehending the meanings of experience. Such a synthesis is what we
mean by symbolic discourse.9 The Winter’s Tale, then, can be understood to
dramatize not "motiveless" jealousy, but jealousy whose motivation is embodied
in the structure of linguistic and personal relationships acted out on the stage
(and in our minds). The function of criticism is to locate the stylistic terms
of its expression and the unconscious significance of those terms.
Three psychoanalytically informed critics have preceded me in the analysis of
Leontes’ jealousy.
J. I. M. Stewart was the first to recognize that Leontes’ jealousy can be
partially explained by applying Freud’s formula to the play: "I do not love him;
she does."10 In this explanation, Leontes converts the sexual motive of his tie to
Polixenes into a perverse relationship between his wife and his friend. Hermione
replaces Leontes and, in his fantasy, acts out the prohibited homosexual role
Leontes repudiates in himself. This seems plausible, although Stewart reaches
far for justification when he accepts Dover Wilson’s suggestion that Leontes
confesses actual "immoralities" to Camillo, his "priest-like" vehicle of
purification. No actual homosexual event need precede the onset of such jealousy
as Leontes’, and the play gives us at best only unspecified suggestions of
boyhood events, as when Leontes, facing Florizel in Act V, says:
Were I
but twenty-one,
Your
father’s image is so hit in you,
His
very air, that I should call you brother,
As I
did him, and speak of something wildly
By us
performed before. (V.i.124-29)11
Besides, even if we hypothesize some actual homosexual violation, a procedure
which seems to me itself to violate the boundary between the play as a work of
art and the play as a transcript of life, we gain little, for the focus of
Leontes’ rage cannot be accounted for if we assume that Hermione is merely a
surrogate for himself in relation to Polixenes. Freud’s formula, taken in itself
and without consideration of the whole dynamics of Leontes’ "disease," has
little heuristic value. It closes off rather than opens up a consideration of
jealousy in the play as a whole.12
C. L. Barber, in his sensitive essay on the play, accepts Stewart’s
application of Freud but goes on to suggest a deeper fabric of motives:
I have found Stewart’s application of Freud convincing and I think one
can make the case even stronger by close analysis of the opening scene. homosexual wish.”
Beneath this level of psychological extrapolation there is another, still
less directly demonstrable, that relates Leontes’ jealousy to very early
levels of infancy, when the child, though he communicates richly with the
maternal side of the mother, fears and hates the father’s power to possess
her sexually. The projective jealousy can put the rival in the position of
the archaic father. An accepted and accepting relation to the father is a
condition of positive relationships to other men, so the onset of jealousy
means as important a loss of relation to the crucial man as to the crucial
woman, crucial in the sense that they are those in whom is invested the core
of love which has its root in childhood and is the ground of piety toward
the larger powers of life which we encounter first through the parents.13
Leontes in his jealousy, then, loses contact with the benevolent aspects of
both parents and, in the concluding scenes, regains access to the maternal
Hermione after first reconciling himself to Polixenes though his intercession on
behalf of the magical pair of children, Florizel and Perdita. The psychology of
this loss and recovery is immensely complex in the play, as Professor Barber
realizes, and I believe that his suggestion, that we need a closer analysis of
the first scenes to see how this complex projective process develops, can be
followed fruitfully. Let me suggest here that the maternity of the mother is not
wholly benevolent; we may find that deeper determining motives than those
involved in the split between mother and father inform the unconscious logic of
the play.
The most extensive discussion of Leontes’ jealousy is Stephen Reid’s
hypothetical reconstruction of the Oedipal dynamics which must underlie so
extensive a breakdown of the capacity for reciprocal relations with others.
Shakespeare, Reid argues, presents us with a pathological condition involving
the following determinants: (1) an original incestuous wish toward the mother;
(2) a subsequent placating attitude toward the father which activates the very
fear of castration it was intended to ward off; (3) a final turning toward the
protective strength of the mother as a defense against the original wish and
subsequent fear. In the departure scene (I.ii), Leontes turns toward the
protective strength of Hermione only to fantasize that she has betrayed him by
reviving the homosexual attraction he has been covertly striving to control.
Reid believes that Leontes’ delusional jealousy centers ultimately in his
inability to accept his "feminine self," and that the rest of the play is
designed to recover, by a mixture of mimetic drama and allegory, the original
bond between the men by embodying the fulfillment of homosexual attraction in
the love of Florizel and Perdita. "Perdita is Leontes’ feminine self; Florizel
is Polixenes’ masculine self. Their union is the fulfillment of Leontes’
homosexual wish."14
Professors Barber and Reid seem to agree that the crucial relationship
restored symbolically and actually is the friendship between Leontes and
Polixenes, whatever name we choose to give it. Yet, neither dwells on the actual
nature of their bond as it is expressed in the text of the play. I believe,
however, that the manifest and unconscious features of that bond reveal a
special kind of relationship which Leontes, even in his jealousy, and the play
as a whole, strive to reconstitute.
In the opening scenes of The Winter’s Tale, before the shock of
Leontes’ jealousy ruptures the intricate web of aggressive playfulness and
formality that characterizes courtly dialogue, Shakespeare offers us two
descriptions of the childhood affection between Leontes and Polixenes. The first
is spoken by Camillo, and it recalls the image of the tree made whole at the end
of Cymbeline:15
Sicilia cannot show himself over-kind to Bohemia. They were trained
together in their childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such an
affection which cannot choose but branch now. Since their more mature
dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their
encounters, though not personal, have been royally attorneyed with
interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies, that they have seemed to be
together, though absent; shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced, as it
were, from the ends of opposed winds. The heavens continue their loves!
(I.l.21-32)
The more we read The Winter’s Tale, the more this speech becomes a
metaphor of the whole. Variations of many words (and the evocation of ideal
relationships in words) recur, gathering significance as their meaning and
suggestiveness metamorphoses in new contexts. The hands, for example, here
metonymic images of union, will shortly become the sign of the bond between
Leontes and Hermione ("And clap thyself my love"). Then, as Leontes becomes
immersed in a fantasy of betrayal, the hands become a symbol of boundary
violation, "paddling palms, and pinching fingers," "virginalling/Upon his palm."
The image of "a vast," an immense space (usually ominous in Shakespeare)
suggests, in its temporal dimension, the "wide gap of time" to which Leontes
refers in the play’s last lines. Just as here the "vast" is bridged by symbolic
gestures which would undo the "necessities" of separation in space and absence
in time, at the end, language, social discourse, fills the gap of time "since
first/We were disserver’d." The story is filled in, and time, like a container,
filled up. In the world of romance and in dreams, space and time are
interchangeable categories.
Interchangeable categories also function to provide the illusion of presence
in The Winter’s Tale. The artifice of culture, "gifts, letters, loving
embassies," substitutes for personal encounters. Interchange of symbols
represents interchange of physical actions, a shaking of hands, an embrace. In
the face of separation and distance, it is the work of art to mediate between
"then" and "now," to express symbolic continuity. Symbolic action, then,
counters the real divisions of "mature dignities and royal necessities." In the
extent of their exchanges, we see the depth of their bond and the need for union
that manifestly informs it.
Yet, for all of Camillo’s emphasis on the efficacy of symbolic exchange, he
is aware that his metaphors are not identical with reality. The embrace, after
all, is only "as it were," and they only "seemed to be together, though absent."
Separation is real, and they have been absent. As he praises the
art of their exchanges, he also makes us aware of the realities which generate
the need for and the limits of that very art. In art, they show themselves the
way they want to seem and to be seen; they take and give symbols and metaphors.
Why? Camillo has an answer for us, if we take the art of his metaphor
seriously. The answer is that they want to preserve by symbolic means a
childhood bond, an affective union at the root of the whole artifice of their
culture. It is the symbiotic nature of this bond that his metaphor expresses,
and even the subtle ambiguity of "branch" (it suggests both separation and
growth) retains the idea of a common root. The process of growth and separation
is here imagined in terms of dual unity.16 Leontes and Polixenes shared a
communion, rooted deeper than their conscious wills; it "cannot choose but
branch now."
Dual unity is a psychoanalytic paradox in which two equals one, as in "The
Phoenix and the Turtle":
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seen
‘Twixt this Turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder. (29-32)
But the turtle here is at one with his queen, not his boyhood friend. The
rooted affection of Leontes and Polixenes is itself rooted ontogenetically in
the mother-child relationship, as we shall see. The myth of childhood affection,
I am suggesting, preserves in masculine form a narcissistic and idealized
version of the mother’s dual unity with the son. Notice how in Camillo’s speech
there is no differentiation of one king from the other, either in image or in
action. The speech implicitly denies any difference between the two. Indeed, the
deepest function of their exchanges is to deny or undo change itself. The denial
of difference (spatial) and the denial of change (temporal) leaves us with the
fantasy of perfect mutuality. The Winter’s Tale is a play about how this
fantasy of perfect mutuality can be made to survive the impact of "great
difference" (I.i.3) and yet remain itself; or, in psychoanalytic terms, how
Shakespeare seeks to realize the wish for oral perfection without the denial of
social and sexual differences either through violence or through individual
infantile regression.
The second description of childhood affection bears out the implications of
Camillo’s metaphor, but its dramatic context extends the consequences of the
wish for dual unity. After being convinced (should we say "seduced"?) by the
power of Hermione’s words ("a lady’s Verily’s/As potent as a lord’s"
[I.ii.50-51]) to remain in Sicily longer, Polixenes responds to Hermione’s
probing of his and Leontes’ boyhoods with a denial of difference and an
assertion of innocence:
Her. Was not my lord
The verier wag o’ th’ two?
Pol. We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk I’ th’ sun,
` nd bleat the one at th’ other: what we chang’d
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, not dream’d
That any did. (I.ii.65-71)
He insists on identity, mutuality, a time prior to the frustration of time
and the vicissitudes of socially categorized guilt. A few lines later he
explicitly dissociates that time from the "hereditary" guilt of original sin:
Had we pursu’d that life,
And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’d
With stronger blood, we should have answer’d heaven
Boldly ‘not guilty,’ the imposition clear’d
Hereditary ours. (71-75)
Polixenes’ language suggests that the fall into post-edenic guilt involves
the "imposition" of phallic desire ("The expense of spirit in a waste of
shame"), with a consequent splitting of their masculine egos:
O my most sacred
lady,
Temptations have
since then been born to’s; for
In those unfledg’d
days was my wife a girl,
Your precious self
had then not cross’d the eyes
Of my young
playfellow. (76-80)
His repeated "then" expresses the tension adhering to this developmental
fantasy. Now, in the immediate relationship with Hermione, he would preserve her
as an idol ("sacred," "precious") even as he imagines her to be the source of
sexual temptations. In her sacredness Hermione embodies for men the antidote to
separation inherent in all religious structures, and this attribute of herself
remains in precarious contact with its opposite, as she points out when she
says, "Of this make no conclusion, lest you say/Your queen and I are devils"
(81-82)The sacred is the realm of infantile desire raised to the level of
collective ideal identities beyond change, but the devil is a shape-shifter in
the minds of men; hence the play’s obsession with forms of constancy, fixity,
with oaths and vows. Polixenes’ metaphor of birth ("born to’s") suggests both
that the men themselves are the source of "temptations" and that they identify
with the woman as a mother. (There is even a hint, in "cross’d the eyes," of the
visual intoxication that will be brought to full expression in the final scene
and reiterated throughout when sacred boundaries are confirmed or jeopardized.)17
Hermione probes Polixenes’ idealization, puts the myth in perspective, so
that we recognize the wish simultaneously with the actuality of the present.
They are not innocent, and the heritage of they myth is the ambivalence it
denies. The realm of the sacred is inseparable from the realm of guilt; the
obverse of the wish for communion with a narcissistic version of oneself is a
defensive splitting of the ego. The myth of "twinn’d lambs" is a retrospective
idealization of boyhood in the interest of clinging to a paradisal version of
pre-Oedipal existence when confronted by the temptation toward sexual contact.
Michael Balint points out that "a truly narcissistic man or woman is in fact a
pretense only. They are desperately dependent on their environment, and their
narcissism can be preserved only on the condition that their environment is
willing, or can be forced, to look after them." 18 In their attempt to arrest time,
the men of the play are forced to seek the image of the past in every present
gesture. This explains why Polixenes so readily acquiesces to Hermione’s verbal
manipulations. He will not risk the loss of her as a "kind hostess" (I.i.60).
His constancy consists in the capacity to change in ways that preserve her
sacred status, or, to put it negatively, to change in ways that express his
ambivalence while preserving him from its consequences.
Leontes and Polixenes may be manifest opposites in Act I, but latently they
remain as identical as twins, each a mirror image of the other. Great
difference, on one level, is no different at all. Each is absolutely dependent
on external sources of narcissistic supplies, each projects a split image of
woman (the maternal nourisher becoming a malevolent seductress when they feel
deprived of signs of love), each succumbs to change in the interest of
validating the identifications and values he believes he shares with the other.
Polixenes avoids contact with Leontes’ jealousy in a way which affirms the
system of internalized controls that Leontes sexualizes:19
This jealousy
Is for a precious creature: as she’s rare,
Must it be great; and, as his person’s mighty,
Must it be violent; and as he does conceive
He is dishonour’d by a man which ever
Profess’d to him; why, his revenges must
In that be made more bitter. (I.ii.451-57)
From the perspective of the internalized taboo. Leontes must become
violent and seek the restoration of purity through vengeance. Within the
structure of the sacred myth he acts out a psychologically appropriate
pathology. He contains the disease which corresponds to the religious therapy
the play as a whole acts out.
In respect to narcissistic self-definition and the split conception of woman,
Polixenes, Loentes, Antigonus and Camillo are doubles of one another. Each
reflects a specific orientation toward the taboo on sexualized touch which is an
integral part of the Platonized conception of woman. Camillo "cannot/Believe
this crack to be in my dread mistress/(So sovereignly being honourable)"
(I.ii.321-23). And Antigonus offers us a version of masculine pathology second
in its primary process logic only to Leontes’ confusions:
Be she honour-flaw’d,
I have three daughters: the eldest is eleven;
The second and the third, nine and some five;
If this prove true, they’ll pay for ‘t. By mine honour
I’ll geld ‘em all; fourteen they shall not see
To bring false generations; they are co-heirs,
And I had rather glib myself, than they
Should not produce fair issue.20 (II.i.143-150)
In this confusion of his own potency with feminine loyalty, in the view of
women as the guarantors of masculine honor, and in his insistence on the
economics of moral debt, Antigonus duplicates the dynamics of the disease he
manifestly repudiates. He becomes, therefore, the surrogate for his mater and
the carrier of Paulina’s curse (II.ii.76-79), the vehicle for Shakespeare’s
displaced exorcism of Leontes’ jealousy.
In his paranoid delusions of betrayal, Leontes acts out the whole range of
pathological boundary violations that define the lower half of the circle of
grace. Unlike his double, who avoids conflict until Act IV and who,
significantly, never actually has the wife he mentions (even at the end when
three other pairs are created), Leontes becomes the play’s vehicle for the
release of the repressed. Shakespeare condenses in him the fragmented components
on the de-differentiated psyche symbolically represented in Cymbeline by
a whole range of characters—Cloten, Iachimo, Posthumus, and Cymbeline. In his
jealousy, we see the great difference between accommodation of oneself to the
myths of ideal mutuality and feminine sacredness and the precariously contained
psychic realities that give rise to those myths. In The Winter’s Tale,
jealousy and the sacred are dialectical terms; each implies the other, as
separation implies union or winter spring.
In the departure scene (I.ii), Leontes is reticent until he erupts (at line
109), and he seems less than determined to reciprocate Polixenes’ rich
compliments. After Hermione succeeds in retaining Polixenes, he seems defeated
in comparison to her. In lines that seem manifestly designed to compliment her,
he evokes the sense of his deprivation:
Why, that was when
Three crabbed months had sour’d themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open they white hand,
And clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter
‘I am yours forever.’ (I.ii.101-105)
He seems to be analogizing past and present: now, by the power of her words,
she has kept Polixenes’ presence, just as then she vowed her own presence. But
the lines are obliquely accusative, as if to say, "Then you vowed to be mine
forever, but now you have violated that vow in giving yourself to my rival. Then
I felt as deprived of love as a child abandoned by a mother (soured to death)
and now I feel just as excluded."21 Almost immediately after he speaks Hermione
gives her hand to Polixenes, and Leontes is instantly jealous.22
[Aside] Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances,
But not for joy—not joy. This entertainment
May a free face put on, derive a liberty
From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom,
And well become the agent: ‘t may, I grant;
But to be paddling palms, and pinching fingers …
(I.ii.108-115)
As Professor Barber points out,23 "mingling friendship far" is as appropriate
to his relationship to Polixenes as it is a distortion of present reality.
Beneath the myth of ideal masculine correspondence there lies a deeper set of
fantasies in which the brothers are rivals for maternal love, the "fertile
bosom" Leontes imagines violated by sexualized contact. Leontes fantasizes the
loss of the boundary between sublimated forms of erotic involvement and usurped
gratification in defiance of the superego. As his disease develops, we see a
massive projection of the contents of his psyche, an attempt simultaneously to
relieve himself of an inner burden of guilt and to seek punishment for his
forbidden wishes.
Paranoia is a form of psychic imprisonment in which the loss of ego
boundaries makes the external world nothing but a confluence of symbols,
selected according to subjective and ambivalent wishes and fears. For the
paranoid, others become what D. W. Winnicott has called "subjective objects,"
embodiments of psychic realities that exist only in relation t the subject.24
Others lose their otherness. In this sense, paranoia can be seen as a radical
denial of separation, a perversion of the mutuality of the boyhood myth which
shares with it a crucial element. In his delusions Leontes identifies with both
Hermione and Polixenes and tries desperately to exclude himself from the
fantasies he projects on to them.
Leontes surrenders to Polixenes and Hermione the impulses and identifications
he harbors in himself. We can find all of the components previous critics have
identified, but this does not seem to get at the unconscious strategies of his
disease. Polixenes does become the archaic image of the father Leontes fears,
the "harlot king" (II.iii.4) of childhood fantasy.
Fie, fie! No thought of him:
The very thought of my revenges that way
Recoil upon me; in himself too might,
And in his parties, his alliance; let him be
Until a time may serve. (II.iii.18-22)
And Hermione is transformed in his perception into a container of disease, at
once infected by genital penetration and possessed as a narcissistic ornament by
the intrusive other, Polixenes, "he that wears her like her medal, hanging about
his neck …" (I.ii.307-308). In his psychic decomposition Leontes descends, "o’er
head and ears a fork’d one" (I.ii.186), into a nightmare world where the fluid
boundary "twixt his and mine" (I.ii.134) threatens him with the psychotic loss
of the distinction between perception and hallucination, even to the point of
somatic enactment of the punishment he dreads:
You smell this business with a sense as cold
As is a dead man’s nose: but I do see’t and feel’t,
As you feel doing thus; and see withal
The instruments that feel.25 (II.i.151-154)
His ego devolves to the condition of bodily responsiveness; he cannot choose
but branch the horns of the cuckold, nor deny by projection the identifications
within him. Like Posthumus in Cymbeline, Leontes can only expand the
circle of contamination in his effort to rid the borders of his consciousness of
the internalized parents he imagines his wife and friend to be. Paranoia is a
defense which fails at the moment of its enactment, for to externalize what is
internally intolerable is to find it everywhere, and to risk the emptying of the
self in the effort to restore inner and outer purity. It corresponds to the
effort of the infant who projects aggressive wishes on to the sources of
nourishment only to "discover" outside the transformation repudiated by the ego.26
Once projected, the inner wishes and objects seem utterly alien to the ego, and
yet Leontes clings to his fantasy as if his life depended on it:
Is this nothing?
Why then the world, and all that’s in’t, is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, and nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing. (I.ii.292-296)
Love recoils to its opposite when confronted with what seems to be a
challenge to its totality. The fantasy is globalized; on its truth depends the
ontological status of the whole world, as if to lose the bond, however, painful,
with the externalized embodiments of himself were to lose himself entirely.
Paranoia is better than nothing, even if it hinges the universe on the
contingency of a hypothesis. If his delusion is not real, then the world is
empty of identities. And if it is real, then he is excluded from the world of
others, like a child who suddenly perceives that parental intimacy is not just
for him, but has an autonomy of its own.
In his progression from the sudden flooding of his ego in scene ii to the
apparently catastrophic loss of his wife and children in the clamor of Act III,
Leontes grasps simultaneously for external validation of his condition and for
means of annihilating the monstrous conception at its source. It is as if his
disease acts out a grotesque parody of creation itself, a mockery of the larger
fertility Hermione’s generativity symbolizes. "Go, play, boy, play: thy mother
plays, and I/Play too; but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue/Will hiss me to my
grave" (I.ii.187-89). Imagining himself deprived of nurturant relatedness,
hating the violations he fantasizes, yet terrified of losing contact with
symbolic others, Leontes "gives birth" in an abstract version of the primal
scene, the intercourse of something and nothing:
Affection! Thy intention stabs the center;
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat’st with dreams;--how can this be?—
With what’s unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow’st nothing: then ‘tis very credent
Thou may’st co-join with something; and thou dost,
(And that beyond commission) and I find it,
(And that to the infection of my brains
And hard’ning of my brows). (I.ii.138-146)
The disease happens to him; in effect Leontes watches himself get lost and
then finds himself in the fantasy to which he himself has metaphorically given
birth. We witness his regression in process.27 Camillo and Polixenes
confirm the nature of this process even as they avoid its issue:
Pol. How should this grow?
Cam. I know not: but I am sure ‘tis safer to
Avoid what’s grown than question how ‘tis born.
(I.ii.431-433)
Fantasizing the loss of "some province, and a region/Lov’d as he loves
himself" (I.ii.369-370), Leontes fills the vacuum with pathologically conceived
violations of the sacred space Hermione occupies in the minds of the others at
the court. The opposite of symbiotic relatedness is the narcissistic confusion
of self and other by the generation of a pseudo-universe, an autarchic
assumption of omnipotence. Even if he plays a dis-graced part, he writes the
play himself.28
But only to a degree, for Shakespeare does not risk degree in this play, but
keeps Leontes bounded by others’ refusal of collusion in his delusions, and by
structural and linguistic ironies that reveal in instance after instance that
his projections are self-descriptions and that his assumption of autonomy is
based on a sequence of dependency relationships. As he moves toward cloture with
the parental authorities who will subdue his violence by the counter-violence of
the sacred the play is designed to validate. Paulina, and above her, Apollo,
reassert the ontological status of the identities Leontes contaminates.
His jealousy saturates Leontes’ language with overdetermined meanings and
condensed fantasies. Metaphors of violent punishment intrude upon his effort at
self-vindication, making his articulation of imaginary betrayal into a
confession of anxiety related to all psychosexual levels. For example, he says
to Camillo:
Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled,
To appoint myself in this vexation; sully
The purity and whiteness of my sheets,
(Which to preserve is sleep, which being spotted
Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps)
Give scandal to the blood o’ th’ prince, my son,
(Who I do think is mine and love as mine)
Without ripe moving to ‘t? Would I do this?
Could man so blench? (I.ii.325.333)
His effort at rhetorical negation of the fantasy succeeds only in elaborating
the ambivalence he would deny. Anal contamination is denied and expressed,
castration anxiety accompanies the thought of contaminated purity, superego
anxiety leads him to externalize mockery, and doubt of his paternal role is
triggered by the fear of losing possession of the pure woman. On one level,
Leontes fantasizes himself replaced by Polixenes:
Go to, go to!
How she holds up the neb, the bill to him!
And arms her with the boldness of a wife
To her allowing husband! (I.ii.182.185)
Here Polixenes is virtually invited to usurp oral gratification. A few lines
later Hermione becomes his property, the imagery becomes genital, and there is a
clear implication that Leontes identifies with the woman:
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th’ arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic’d in’s absence
And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour, by
Sir Smile, his neighbor: nay, there’s comfort in’t,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open’d
As mine, against their will. (I.ii.192.198)
The genital violation of the woman-as-property is equivalent to homosexual
assault. He is not differentiated from her, nor is his own psychic activity. He
is not differentiated from her, nor is his own psychic activity (for he is
"angling now" [I.ii.180]) differentiated from the fantasized activity of others.
Neither are Hermione and Polixenes differentiated from one another:
Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sight (a note infallible
Of breaking honesty)? Horsing foot on foot? (I.ii.284-288)
Yes, Freud’s formula applies, "I do not love him, she does." But it is only
one of the operative variables. Leontes’ imagery also signifies, "I do not love
her in this perverse and taboo way, he does." And, "I do not identify with her
and her with myself, he does." He substitutes identifications for identities,
assimilating social differentiation of roles to a private system of unstable,
vivid impositions. Finally what Leontes cannot abide is the fact that the sacred
institution of marriage actually requires sexual contact between different sexes
to propagate the human race. At the deepest level of his psyche (which is the
potentially psychotic level of Shakespeare’s psyche), bodily contact itself is
dreaded whenever it is imagined outside the boundaries of institutionalized
legitimacy. Outside those boundaries, mutuality becomes the loss distinction
itself in both its moral and psychological senses.
The extent of Leontes’ psychic decomposition forces us to seek an explanation
of his pathology not so much in a variation of the Oedipus complex, although
there are Oedipal anxieties involved, nor even in an earlier dread of
retaliation for forbidden wishes, but at the deepest level of oral anxieties. At
that level the infant craves love as nourishment and dreads the possibility of
maternal malevolence. Identifying well-being with mother, he finds himself in
the reflections of his surroundings. It is no accident that Leontes shifts
craving confirmation of his manhood from his son to an attempt to elicit
Camillo’s service in the poisoning of his double, Polixenes, to the violence of
infanticide and to aggression directed at Hermione herself. He plays out,
symbolically, a regression that leads to the source of nurturance, and he would
destroy that source in the delusion that the woman and not himself contains the
contamination he dreads.
First he turns to his son. Identifying with Mamillius as a symbolic of
phallic integrity, Leontes seeks to find himself externalized in the image of
his offspring: "Why that’s my bawcock. What! Hast smutch’d thy nose?/They say it
is a copy out of mine" (I.ii.121-122). But as Mamillius’ name implies, Leontes’
masculine image of himself is maternally fixated. Seeking "comfort" (I.ii.209)
in the identity of father and son is a false therapy for him, since the identity
fails to ward off a deeper ambivalence he harbors. Shortly, Leontes turns to
Camillo in his desperation to restore the correspondence of inner desires and
outer actualities. His wish for "servants true about me, that bare eyes/To see
alike mine honour as their profits" (I.ii.309-310), bespeaks his growing
obsession with converting the outside world into the form of his fantasy.
To find a dependency he can trust involves for Leontes the murder of the
external embodiment of himself by oral means. He turns to poison. Camillo, to
prove his oneness with Leontes, must become the instrument of oral violation, "bespice
a cup,/To give mine enemy a lasting wink;/Which draught to me were cordial"
(I.ii.316-318). Polixenes’ death is Leontes’ oral gratification. Through Camillo,
Leontes would act out an identification with an orally catastrophic mother; he
would become actively the figure at whose hands he dreads to suffer passively.
This strategy fails also, as Polixenes, "one condemned by the king’s own mouth"
(I.ii.445), flees the court under the paternal guidance of Camillo, leaving
Leontes to confront mother and child.
In Act II, scene I, Hermione becomes the object of Leontes’ obstinate
substitution of projection for perception. The scene is richly symbolic even
before he enters, for Shakespeare enacts in miniature a version of the
mother-child relationship Leontes has unconsciously failed to integrate.
Hermione first rejects Mamillius:
Her. Take the boy to you: he so troubles me,
‘Tis past enduring. (II.i.1-2)
Soon after, rejection is followed by intimate, seductive acceptance:
Mam. A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one
Of sprites and goblins.
Her. Let’s have that good sir.
Come on, sit down, come on, and do your best
To fright me with your sprites: you’re powerful at it
Mam. There was a man—
Her. Nay, come sit down: then on.
Mam. Dwelt by churchyard: I will tell it softly
Yond crickets shall not hear it.
Her. Come on then,
And giv’t me in mine ear. (II.i.25-32)
The pattern of rejection and return duplicates in the play’s reality
precisely that rhythm which Leontes cannot tolerate in his jealousy.29 When he
storms in, the son is whispering in his mother’s ear ("Is whispering nothing?"
he had asked Camillo [I.ii.284]). Mamillius exists in a symbiotic relationship
with his mother, as his later incorporation of her "shame" shows. Like the
Queen-Cloten dyad in Cymbeline, mother and son exhibit reciprocal
dependencies (but here the import of the relationship is positive rather than
destructive). Leontes comes to rupture this mother-child intimacy. Symbolically,
he wishes to destroy the symbiosis at the center of his own identity. In a
crucial passage he articulates the deepest ambivalence in the play:30
There may be in the cup
A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge
Is not infected); but if one present
Th’ abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.
(II.i.39-45)
The great difference between trust and oral violence is here condensed.
Equating knowledge and visual awareness, Leontes is saying that the
consciousness of the spider (what it symbolizes) breaks the boundaries of
the body itself, and utterly inverts the expectation of nourishment, like the
spider in Donne’s "Twickenham Garden":
But oh, self-traitor, I do bring
The spider love, which transubstantiates all
And can convert manna to gall;
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.
Lacking Donne’s irony, Leontes would violently eject the incorporated object.
The spider symbolizes a fundamental threat to his existence, and its visual-oral
context locates this threat unconsciously in the infantile nursing situation.
Mistrust, helplessness, and the certainty of conspiracy accompany this image.
What vision, then, leads Leontes to divorce the son from the mother with the
line, "I am glad you did not nurse him" (II.i.56)? What does the spider signify?
Psychoanalysis has shown that the spider, like the serpent, is an
over-determined symbol. On one level, it represents the sexually threatening
mother, contact with whom signifies incest. On a deeper level, it signifies the
horror of maternal engulfment, frequently confused with the child’s own
oral-aggressive impulses. The spider often emerges as a symbol when an intensely
ambivalent person needs to ward off a completely break with reality. Melitta
Sperling writes of patients suffering from spider phobThe list of attempted therapiesias:
When the phobic mechanisms as well as the somatic defenses were
invalidates by analysis, the split-off pregenital and potentially psychotic
core symbolized by the spider appeared. The spider was a highly condensed
symbol containing the core fantasies and conflicts from various
developmental levels. … the spider also represented both the patient and the
mother in these fared and deeply repressed aspects.31
In seventeenth century Apulia, a spider scare led those suffering from the
bite of the tarantula to invent songs and rituals designed to cure poisoning.
One song goes like this:
It was neither a big nor a small tarantula;
It was the wine from the flask.
Where did it bite you, tell me, beloved,
where it was.
Oh, if it was your leg, oh mamma!
"The tarantists’ egos," writes Howard F. Gloyne, "tried methods other than
phobia to defend against anxiety: sexualization of anxiety, intimidation of
others, identification with the frightening objects, collection of external
reassurances."32 The list of attempted therapies reads like a description of
Leontes’ paranoid strategies.
Shakespeare knew nothing of this outbreak of tarantism, but the conflicts
embodied in Leontes parallel the tarantists’ disease. We need not go to Apulia,
however, to confirm the maternal significance of the spider in Shakespeare.
Richard II, returning to his motherland after his journey to Ireland kneels to
the earth and says:
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs.
As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favours with my royal hands;
Feed not thy soverign’s foe, my gentle earth,
Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense,
But let thy spiders that suck up thy venom
And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way,
Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet,
Which with usurping steps do trample thee… (III.ii.6-17)
Like Leontes, Richard confuses mother and child in himself, and he would
split the catastrophic mother from her nourishing counterpart. Leontes’ final
strategy, one which leads to Mamillius’ death and his own separation from
Hermione, consists in his attempt to sacrifice the catastrophic mother he
tragically confuses with his child-bearing wife. In vengeance he would fuse
destruction and the re-creation of his bond with her.
… she
I can hook to me: say that she were gone,
Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest
Might come to me again. (II.iii.6-9; italics added)
Finally, the aim of Leontes’ paranoia is to reclaim his bond with the mother
by means of the private magic which is his disease. He would sacrifice Hermione,
paradoxically, to recreate the image of his sacred ideal, and to reclaim his own
repose.33
In the terrible irony of the court scene (III.ii) this strategy, too, breaks
down, as Leontes moves from the wish for vengeance to his vow of ritualized
reparation. His confusion of self and other is absolute: "Your actions are my
dreams" (III.ii.82). attempting public vindication, he stages his own trial,
articulates his own guilt, and, finally, accepts his sentence, to live
without lineage (his "immortality" and his potency) in utter separation from the
"sweet’st, dear’st creature" (III.ii.201) he could not separate from his
infantile fears of her power. Like a child made submissive and ashamed of his
aggression, Leontes exits from the world of the play under the guidance of
Paulina, the representative of Hermione who embodies both her feared and
ethically essential aspects. Mother and son are to be reunited in death, and
Leontes’ rebirth, his "recreation" (III.ii.240), consists in his mourning for
that lost bond.
Leontes’ jealousy is far from motiveless. Shakespeare has articulated through
his character precisely those aspects of his psyche—and, in a larger sense, of
the collective idealizing imagination of Renaissance dramatists—that threaten
the structure of sacred identities. In a sense, we can say that Leontes does
possess a crucial knowledge, the knowledge of maternal malevolence. But his is a
knowledge, like much knowledge we call paranoid, directed at the wrong people,
in the wrong language, at the wrong time. What Freud said of Schreber applies to
Leontes: "The delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological
product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction."34
That process of recovery is the focus of Shakespeare’s theatrical magic in the
sacred personalities of the second part of The Winter’s Tale.
