The King & the Adulteress: A Psychoanalytical and Literary Reinterpretation of Madame Bovary and King LearDuke University Press, 1998 - 162 pages The King and the Adulteress brings together two essays that propose radically revisionary readings of two of the most important literary works in the Western canon, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Shakespeare's King Lear. In offering a new understanding of a deeply sadomasochistic relationship and of an authoritarian pathology, renowned psychoanalyst Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca combines psychoanalysis with literary studies to challenge the conventional judgments of readers and the stereotyped interpretations of literary critics to these masterpieces. Approaching the characters in Bovary and Lear from both an analytic and a critical viewpoint, Speziale-Bagliacca reinterprets many issues and events that involve archetypal figures of modern literary mythology. In fact, he reverses much of the received opinion about them. Charles Bovary, for example, far from being a victim of his wife's neurotic restlessness or the epitome of a passive imbecile, is a masochist of the highest order who makes a decisive contribution to Emma's miserable end. Lear, rather than a tragedy involving the sweet Cordelia, noble Kent, and the Fool as good and loyal supporters of an old king driven to madness by his overbearing evil daughters, is precisely the opposite. The sympathetic understanding of the reader should go, Speziale-Bagliacca suggests, also to Regan, Goneril, and Edmund, while the king, whose crisis is interpreted in the light of psychoanalytic findings on depression, finally becomes the true unbeloved "bastard" of the play. Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca is a psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychotherapy at the Medical School of the University of Genoa. He is the author of On the Shoulders of Freud and many other works. |
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Page 6
... Charles's personality without attempting to describe or even hint at the depth of Charles's soul through either his words or his actions ; he would rather have us accept as truth the occasional piece of information he gives us about him ...
... Charles's personality without attempting to describe or even hint at the depth of Charles's soul through either his words or his actions ; he would rather have us accept as truth the occasional piece of information he gives us about him ...
Page 17
... Charles picks up other people's cigars and smokes them ; he expresses his feelings like clockwork . He annoys Emma by kiss- ing her like a petulant child and turns his back on her while she dances in the Viscount's arms ( he is not ...
... Charles picks up other people's cigars and smokes them ; he expresses his feelings like clockwork . He annoys Emma by kiss- ing her like a petulant child and turns his back on her while she dances in the Viscount's arms ( he is not ...
Page 34
... Charles seems to be going in for the kill : " Why are you surprised ? He goes off like that from time to time for a ... Charles and Emma had decided to bring everything out into the open . But this is not the end of the scene . As soon ...
... Charles seems to be going in for the kill : " Why are you surprised ? He goes off like that from time to time for a ... Charles and Emma had decided to bring everything out into the open . But this is not the end of the scene . As soon ...
Contents
A Wholly Fictitious Story | 54 |
An Essay on King Lear | 81 |
The Barbarous Scythian | 106 |
Copyright | |
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