SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...
SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...
SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...
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<strong>The</strong> mental burden of incestuous desire and murder prove too much for his psyche. <strong>The</strong><br />
wolf counters the blind man with the compulsion to shed light on what has happened by<br />
digging up the corpse that the man would have kept buried. By preferring blindness and<br />
animalism, Ferdinand is surely losing his touch with reality and with his own human<br />
nature; he manifests beastly, primal urges and is lost to reason. <strong>The</strong> horrific plot of this<br />
play is more violent and gruesome than A King, and No King, in which events resolve<br />
themselves into a restoration of traditional social values. Ferdinand’s madness results in<br />
destruction of his family and the lineage of the ruling class in Amalfi; the heir to the<br />
throne is the son of Antonio, not the son of an aristocrat, and this ruling family is no<br />
more. <strong>The</strong> shock value of the bloody events may serve to inflame the fears of those in<br />
the audience who fear the very encroachment of lower classes into the upper classes that<br />
they have just witnessed, and the lesson is clear—defenses around existing social<br />
structures must be strengthened.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Duchess’s murder “exploit[s] the age-old association between eros and<br />
thanatos, coupling, and killing” (McCabe 253). Freud speculated that this is “part of a<br />
fundamental need in all organic life, which was to return to an earlier condition, and<br />
ultimately to the original inanimate state which corresponds to homeostasis, the complete<br />
absence of tension in the organism. <strong>The</strong> erotic impulse therefore contains within it the<br />
desire for a kind of homeostatic death for, in seeking sexual union with the other, it<br />
represents an attempt to return to a primordial genderless state” 9 (Panagopoulos 138).<br />
This association may also explain the metaphor of climax as death, and the symbolism of<br />
9 See Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. 1930. NY: W.W. Norton, 1989.