Gary Waller

Teaching the Late Plays as Family Romance

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To teach the late plays as what Freud called the 'family romance" may, I
believe, get us as close to the continually decentered centers of these
plays as we and our students can. Indeed, I confess that when reading
and teaching them, I find myself, openly or shamefacedly, recuperated by
a humanistic valorization of the text which I sometimes thought to have
expunged from my critical practices. While that is a separate issue of
theory (and teaching), it is not irrelevant to the ways these plays may
help us understand the "tempest. . . birth, and death" (Per 5.3.33-34)
of our lives. Nor to the extent to which Freud's concept of the "family
romance" also focuses on crucial, perhaps permanent, parts of our
individual and collective lives.

Specifically, reading these remarkable plays can produce in their
readers and spectators  an uncanny mixture of what The Winter's Tale
calls "joy" and "terror" (IV.i.1). It thus provides what some
psychoanalysts term a "safe haven" for the acknowledgement and
therapeutic release of pent-up primitive anxieties (Eagle, 212). In
teaching them, however, I do not simplistically suggest that these plays
'reflect' some universal, dehistoricized pattern (although I certainly
point out to students how a Freudian reading can fall into that trap)
but rather try to find ways by which the patterns Freud gestured to in
his concept of the "family romance" are  enacted within different
historical formations and, therefore, different readers' experiences
(see Poster). As a starting point for reading the late plays as family
romances,I usually have my students read Freud's short essay, "Family
Romances" As with most of Freud's essays, it is surprisingly
straightforward as well as highly suggestive and so is appropriate even
for an introductory Shakespeare class. With advanced classes, I
introduce some more recent rewritings of the Freudian reading of the
family, notably the work by Margaret Mahler on separation and
individuation and the psychological birth of the human infant, the
feminist account of the family by Juliet Mitchell, Deleuze and
Guattari's reworking of the oedipal myth, and some extracts from
Theweleit's Male Fantasies. But the Freud essay in itself gives us an
agenda that is uncannily powerful for reading the late plays.

Noting that as a person grows up, the liberation of an from the
authority of parents is "one of the most necessary though one of the
most painful" events of life, Freud describes a number of the family
romance's characteristics.  All involve the desire to change one's
family circumstances-- to have richer or more powerful parents, or not
have to share one's parents' love with siblings, for instance. Other
symptoms include a boy's hostility towards his father coupled with an
intense desire to bring his mother--the subject, says Freud, "of the
most intense sexual curiosity"--into "situations of secret infidelity"
with him. Other connected phantasies may involve incestuous feelings for
siblings, desires to return to fancied (or perhaps real) conditions in
early childhood when the child was unindividuated from the mother, and
the child's "most intense and momentous" general wish, simply "to be big
like his parents." In children, such day-dreams emerge as
wishfulfilments with, Freud says, aims that are simultaneously erotic
and more generally ambitious--not only to to emulate (or seduce) the
parents but to be free of their control. In adults--and here we approach
the specific relevance of the essay to Shakespeare--the symptoms of the
family romance re-emerge in desires to discover or recapture a lost
state of autonomy, which may be projected, negatively or positively,
upon a series of love-objects--lovers, spouses, or children, even (as
one of my students suggested) pets--who thereby become incorporated into
the neurotic patterns that were laid down early in the adult's own
family history.

Contemporary students are aware, perhaps uncomfortably, that our century
has not only given us major revaluations of our understanding of
ourselves as gendered beings, but also as generational subjects, and as
members of that once seemingly stable institution, the family. Like
"gender," the word "family" is what Raymond Williams calls a  "key word"
in our cultural history, one that carries reverberations and
contradictions far beyond its mere dictionary meaning: a verbal site of
cultural struggle, where shades of meaning betray deeprooted ideological
positions. Especially from Freud onwards, our century has seen a marked
preoccupation with the psychological dynamics of the family--with, for
example, the separation and individuation of child from the mother, a
child's discovery of boundary conditions, the development of object
relations, delusions of omnipotence and fears of abandonment, and the
search for a lost, pre-oedipal, polymorphous sexual fulfillment. The
psychoanalytical tradition initiated by Freud provides us with a
powerful vocabulary to talk of these stages and crises of individual and
familial growth. Despite--as many feminists rightly point
out--predicating the psychological narrative upon the development of a
male subject, and despite, too, the temptation to universalize its
categories, psychoanalysis provides suggestive ways by which we can
describe the struggle for differentiation between child and parent,
especially between sons and mothers, or (and this is particularly
relevant to these plays) daughters and fathers. Without such struggles,
the plays seem to assume, there can be no viable identity, no later
close and  meaningful relations with others, no fulfilling sexual
identity.

Shakespeare's male characters, in particular, seem engaged in continuous
struggles within and beyond the family to form a secure gendered
identity, and to find (or reject) a place for women in that identity.
Most particularly in A Winter's Tale, as Copp~lia Kahn has shown in an
essay I make required reading for advanced courses and which can be read
and explained by the teacher him or herself with introductory classes,
the focus is on the self-destructive insecurities that arise from
separation from the mother, here (as elsewhere in the comedies and, not
least, some of the tragedies like Coriolanus or Hamlet) represented by
lost innocence, youth, nature. As a man looks back at his childhood, he
recalls, often unconsciously, the perilous task of separation and
individuation --and transfers some of his ambitions and anxieties upon
his adult experiences.  Within the traditional patriarchal family, a
boy's first object of desire is therefore usually heterosexual, felt in
his growing awareness of his mother's otherness and therefore of his own
lack. His sense of becoming what his society defines as masculine is
always endangered by that primary, profound (perhaps even primeval)
oneness with the mother.  Whether we "remember" that consciously
or--what is certainly the case--try to revert to a core of imaginary
oneness into which we  simultaneously want to escape and to free
ourselves from, we may project these contradictory feelings, often
violently, upon our adult lovers, wives, children.

Various aspects of such patterns may be seen at work in all the late plays.
They provide, for instance, something of an explanation for the motifs
of incest that critics have often pointed to in Pericles, most
especially the relational triangle of Pericles, Marina, and Thaisa.
Carol Neely quotes Levi-Strauss that incest is a dream "that one could
gain without losing, enjoy without sharing," a myth that is "eternally
denied to social man, of a world in which one might keep to oneself In
these plays, Neely notes, incestuous  involves not only literal incest
but to "nonsexual but similar possessive, exclusive, and static bonds
between friends, fathers and children, [and] siblings" (Broken Nuptials,
169). The incest motif is obviously, even crudely, displayed in the
play's clumsy opening scenes, but receives much more subtle and moving
treatment in later acts, as we see a parable of the complications that
arise within the family constellation. Marina exists largely in relation
to her father and we watch his struggles to free himself of his
self-imposed withdrawal from the storms (literal and metaphorical) that
have overwhelmed him through her return as a grown, independent, and (in
her promised, though barely developed, marriage). We can also see the
idealizations and distortions of the family romance in the lost sons and
the father/daughter relations of Cymbeline (even in aspects of Imogen
and Posthumous' marriage, with its strongechoes of mother/child tensions
and demands); in the generational tensions, the clashes between friends
and spouses, sexual jealousy and paranoia, and the losses and returns of
children and mother in The Winter's Tale; and the generational and
familial clashes--not to forget the anger and anxieties of the
patriarchal father--in The Tempest, where sibling rivalry, betrayed
brotherly love, battles over legacies (literal and metaphorical) from
parents (also both literal and metaphorical).

It has often been pointed out that the Freudian model of development
centers on the male. Shakespeare seems to have had a similar obsession
in these plays, focussing especially on the relations between between
the male child and his mother, and upon the adult male and a daughter. I
usually get some ironical smiles--not least from the women--when the
question of men's excessive idealization of their daughters is raised.
But there are other places of entry for women readers. Most important
are the strong women characters: Hermione, Paulina, Imogen, even
(briefly) Marina. Are such figures merely projections of the male's need
for mother figures to simultaneously want to escape and be subject to?
That possibility in itself often provides as spirited a point of
discussion for women readers as father/daughter relations. Why has our
culture produced such a recurring pattern of male loss and searching?
What are the female equivalents? Are such patterns historically
contingent? Or built into our basic biogrammar? Why are so many of the
mothers missing or lostfor so much of the plays? And why is it that a
pattern within the family romance is, as Shirley Garner has asked, the
all too common male fantasy "that  a woman will always forgive  a man no
matter how much he wrongs her"? (In Holland et. al., 147) Cymbeline and
The Winter's Tale are particularly powerful workings-out of this
fantasy: it might be instructive to ask whether the forgiveness and
reconciliation 'represented' by Imogen or Hermione are as noble and
appropriate as tradional critics have argued. Or do we see these
wishfulfilment endings as complex projections of a male desire to
project the all-forgiving and once always available mother upon their
wives and lovers? Are men in our culture to be condemned, pitied,
accepted, for such patterns? Are theyy built into the basic fantasy
structure of being male, or are they characteristic of a particular
phase of the history of the patriarchal family and the romances it has
engendered?

Of all the late plays, it is particularly worth considering how we might
read The Winter's Tale in this context. Shakespeare's interest in this
primitive contradiction within masculine identity focuses on a male
figure, Leontes,  whose separation has been incomplete or
problematic--as one can point out self-deprecatingly, it seems to be for
many men--and for whom anxiety arises when he is called upon as an adult
to be a friend, a husband, a father.  As a husband Leontes finds himself
once again dependent upon a woman to confirm his identity, and he may
easily reenact, either positively or negatively, in displaced or
disguised forms, his early crises of masculine identity.  Clearly,
Leontes can be seen as projecting insecurities upon Hermione that go far
beyond their apparent cause.  For him, in his version of the family
romance, bliss was in childhood, in his myth of an uncomplicated boyhood
friendship with Polixenes, before the threat of otherness represented by
falling in love, marriage, adulthood intervened to both entice his need
to differentiate .  According to this reading, best set out by Kahn, I
think, Hermione, marvelously serene in her (what many of us may be
tempted, however we are thereby caught into a very specific ideology of
the family and gender assignment)  to see as "natural" motherhood as in
her role as wife and friend, seemingly has all the self-completion that
he both yearns for and fears. The irrational rejection of Hermione in
1.2 and 2.1 can be read as enacting such contradictions, while Leontes'
abjection when he believes Hermione to be dead is the extemity of the
child who has destroyed the person whom he most loves and yet from whom
he must assert his independence. In his suspicion and persecution of his
wife, Leontes can be seen as projecting a nostalgic fantasy of a loss of
an undifferentiated world  upon her--attacking precisely what we in the
audience are attracted by, her apparent serene oneness with her unborn
child, her mature sexuality and easy friendship. Whether in
idealization, identification, or envy, we too are likely to be
disproportionately moved by the situation. Leontes repudiates her
because he is threatened by her;  and in his rage he adds to the
arbitrariness of the political tyrant all the destructiveness of the
patriarchally constructed male, along with the irrationality of the
child who finds that he must cut himself adrift from his
undifferentiated mother and yet who resents having to do so. Many of us
are not unaware of our own related feelings--or, in the phrase we use in
my classes, we know a friend who is!

For those teachers or  students for whom meaning has still to be located
somehow 'in' the text or what is supposed to be Shakespeare's own time,
the situations to which a reading of these plays as family romances
points can still be located within the family structures of
Shakespeare's time. The tensions within the patriarchal and specifically
the early modern family is a topic that has been much commented upon by
social historians and recent feminist/ materialist critics.  But a more
fruitful way of using the concept is where today, after all, we read and
enact both the play and our own familial struggles. --in the present.
Many of our students (and maybe not a few teacher), after all, are very
actively caught in their own struggles of individuation and
differentiation.  The utterances and conflicts of all the late plays
speak often of aspects of the family romance as we enact them
today--situations of generational tension, the reliance on and need to
break from family ties, the delusions of omnipotence and fears of
abandonment that we experience as children and project upon our adult
relationships. Today most of us perceive such patterns as an inescapable
part of childhood and the presence of childhood in our later lives. I
have found that my students reverberate to these preoccupations and that
they find the language of psychoanalysis and certain aspects of
developmental psychology both apt and not overly difficult.

Such matters reach, moreover, right into the heart of the remarkable
popularity of the late plays this century, not only among critics but on
the stage. As I tell my students, in 1988, in London and thereabouts,
one was able to see no fewer than two productions of Pericles and  three
each of Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. The remarkable
popularity of these plays--by contrast with their relatively low
reputation, except in the case of The Tempest, in earlier centuries--has
been marked by mant historians of the theater. It would seem these plays
have tapped into something central to the gender, sexual, and familial
preoccupations of our age. We are certainly as concerned within our own
society with the family and its multiple romances as Shakespeare's was.
Yet we should stress (our students will certainly, if encouraged, do so)
that the family is by no means idealized in these plays. Where many
critics used to see the family as a symbol of stability in both the
comedies and romances, it can also be seen as yet another site of
instability, a place of contestation between generations, where often
one parent (usually the mother) is missing, and where its harmonies are
tentative, patched together, and founded on utopian wish rather than
realistic expectation. Even here, in the late plays, which according to
so many critics, serve to valorize reunited families, do so only through
great strains and, as most poignantly in The Winter's Tale, without
restoring all that was lost. The sourness and reluctance many see in
Prospero, too,  is partly built on what he perceives as generational and
familial betrayal. One of my students asserted that Prospero's
simultaneously opposing and favoring his daughter's relationship with
Ferdinand was the behavior of "a typical father." After the widespread
grins of recognition the class (or at least many of the women in the
class) gave her, we needed to pause and probe why that should be.

The assumption here (and, from experience, it seems more of a conclusion
thrust upon readers despite their scepticism about the inherent power of
'literature' or 'art') is that when we respond to and in a sense
re-produce these plays within our own histories, we are led to draw on
some of our most primitive and our most deeply encultured memories. The
continued fascination of the late plays is, I suspect, based on the ways
they draw out our most primitive experiences, whether we describe those
as built into our basic biogrammar or (as some psychoanalysts argue) our
fundamental psychological patterns, or as culturally determined, or as a
mixture of all these. Indeed, if either a combination of
bio-psychological and cultural layering makes up what Freud called the
unconscious, then the late romances are among those works that draw most
deeply on what that often contentious term stands for. That is, of
course,  why we call them 'great'--not because they are somehow
'universal', above the material or psychological details of our personal
and collective histories, but because they are deeply embedded in those
histories and have consequently been read in intriguingly different
ways. The role of the teacher becomes, therefore, that of making
available to his or her students powerful and flexible languages to
describe how those complex and sometimes disturbing experieces are, or
might be, engaged. Seeing them in terms of the family romance is one,
compelling way.


References

Deleuze, Gilles  and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1983.

Eagle, M.N  Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis New York: Basic Books. 1984.

Erickson, Peter. Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama.
Berkeley: University of California Press. 1985

Freud, "Family Romances," The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 9 (1952), 237-41.

Holland, Norman N., Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris, eds.
Shakespeare's Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1990.

Kahn, Copp~lia. Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare.
Berkeley: University of California Press. 1981.

Neely, Carol Thomas. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays. New Haven:
Yale University Press. 1985.

Mahler, Margaret. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis
and Individuation. New York: Basic Books. 1975

Poster, Mark. A Critical Theory of the Family. New York: Pluto Press. 1978

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. trans Stephen Conway et.al. 2 vols.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1987-88.

Williams, Raymond. Key Words. London: Oxford University Press. 1975.