Suffocating Mothers

An original reading of Shakespeare's plays illuminating his negotiations with mothers, present and absent, and tracing the genesis of Shakespearean tragedy and romance to a psychologized version of the Fall.

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