Adelman, Janet.  *Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in
     Shakespeare's Plays, HAMLET to THE TEMPEST*.  New York and London:
     Routledge, 1992.  pp. 379.
 
     Contents: Acknowledgments; A Note on Texts; 1. Introduction; 2. Man and
     Wife Is One Flesh: *Hamlet* and the Confrontation with the Maternal
     Body; 3. Is Thy Union Here?: Union and Its Discontents in *Troilus and
     Cressida* and *Othello*; 4. Marriage and the Maternal Body: On Marriage
     as the End of Comedy in *All's Well That Ends Well* and *Measure for
     Measure*; 5. Suffocating Mothers in *King Lear*; 6. Escaping the Matrix:
     The Construction of Masculinity in *Macbeth* and *Coriolanus*; 7. Making
     Defect Perfection: Imagining Male Bounty in *Timon of Athens* and
     *Antony and Cleopatra*; 8. Masculine Authority and the Maternal Body:
     The Return to Origins in the Romances; Notes; Author Index; Index to
     Shakespeare's works; Subject Index.
 
 
     Janet Adelman begins her Acknowledgment by writing, "This book has been
a long time in the making."  The result is well worth the wait, for
*Suffocating Mothers* exemplifies the finest work currently being done in
psychoanalytic criticism.
 
     In *Suffocating Mothers*, Adelman explores the primal psychic ooze of
nascent selfhood, particularly of the origins of masculinity embedded in the
maternal body as represented in the plays from *Hamlet* to *The Tempest*.
Adelman points out that there are a few powerful mothers in Shakespeare's
earliest plays but that these mothers virtually disappear until *Hamlet*.  In
the plays before *Hamlet*, "masculine identity is constructed in and through
the absence of the maternal"; in them, Shakespeare splits his psychic and
dramatic world in two (into heterosexual bonds and father-son bonds),
isolating its elements "from each other and from the maternal body that would
be toxic to both."  However, the occluded mother of these plays returns with a
vengeance in *Hamlet*, and Adelman argues that the plays from *Hamlet* on "all
follow from her return."  The tragic burden of Hamlet and the men who come
after him resides "in selfhood grounded in paternal absence and in the fantasy
of overwhelming contamination at the site of origin."  This burden is not
borne alone; "again and again, it is passed on to the women, who must pay the
price for the fantasies of maternal power invested in them."  *Suffocating
Mothers *explores these fantasies and their cost.
 
     According to Adelman, the return of the mother in *Hamlet* "causes the
collapse of the fragile compact that had allowed Shakespeare to explore
familial and sexual relationships in the histories and romantic comedies
without devastating conflict; this collapse is the point of origin of the
great tragic period."  *Hamlet* is, then, "a kind of watershed, subjecting to
maternal presence the relationships previously exempted from that presence."
Female sexuality in the person of Gertrude undoes the strategy by which sexual
relations in the romantic comedies and *Romeo and Juliet* and father-son
relations in the history plays and *Julius Caesar* are protected, infecting
both kinds of relationships.  Adelman contends that the sexualized maternal
body unleashes for Shakespeare and his male characters' fantasies of maternal
malevolence and contamination, reiterating infantile fears and desires,
leading those males to equate morality with being tainted in the mother's
womb.  Adelman sees *Hamlet* and the plays that follow it as "marked by the
struggle to escape from condition, to free masculine identity of both father
and son from its origin in the contaminated maternal body."
 
     Adelman maintains that "*Hamlet* initiates the period of Shakespeare's
greatest tragedies because it in effect rewrites the story of Cain and Abel as
the story of Adam and Eve, relocating masculine identity in the presence of
the adulterating female."  From *Hamlet* on, the mother becomes the site for
infantile fantasies of maternal power: "Despite Shakespeare's sometimes
astonishing moments of sympathetic engagement with his female characters, his
ability to see the world from their point of view, his women will tend to be
like Gertrude, more significant as screens for male fantasy than as
independent characters making their own claim to dramatic reality; as they
become fused with the mother of infantile need, even their fantasized gestures
of independence will be read as the signs of adulterate betrayal."
Shakespeare's women pay heavily for the fantasies invested in them.  Even
though the female sexual body is dangerous to the males, "the problematic
maternal body can never quite be occluded or transformed: made into a monster
or a saint, killed off or banished from the stage, it remains at the center of
masculine subjectivity, marking its unstable origin.  For the contaminated
flesh of the maternal body is also home; the home Shakespeare's protagonists
long to return to, the home they can never quite escape."
 
     *Troilus and Cressida* and *Othello* investigate the deeply ambivalent
desire for sexual union and the recoil from that desire: both Troilus and
Othello recover their manhood "by taking a terrible vengeance on the woman in
whom it is represented."   Adelman contends that both plays "enact the
contamination of a maternal figure through sexuality; both are versions of the
morning-after fantasy in which the madonna is transformed into the whore."
However, while in *Troilus and Cressida* the source of corruption is located
in the unstable female body, in *Othello* it is situated in the diseased male
imagination.  To Adelman, this relocation reveals "the extent to which
Shakespeare's revision of *Troilus and Cressida* in *Othello* was an attempt
to dissociate himself from the fantasies that motivate Cressida's betrayal."
 
     *All's Well That Ends Well* and *Measure for Measure* play out the
extraordinarily desperate remedies through which sexual union might be made
safe.  Bertram's and Angelo's virginal sexual experiences also fall into the
pattern of the morning-after fantasy; however, Shakespeare, to enable marriage
again, enshrines the morning-after fantasy in the plots of these two plays.
Nevertheless, the marriages at the ends of these two plays "fail to satisfy
the desires of either the characters or the audience"; and their failure
"marks the extent to which comedy is no longer a viable genre for
Shakespeare."
 
     Despite its absence of literal mothers, *King Lear* records the horrific
discovery of the suffocating mother at the center of masculine authority and
the terrible vengeance taken upon her.  Lear's confrontation with his
daughters "leads him to the mother ostensibly occluded by the play: in
recognizing his daughters as part of himself he will be led to recognize not
only his terrifying dependence on female forces outside himself but also an
equally terrifying femaleness within himself--a femaleness that he will come
to call 'mother' (2.4.56)."  Lear's "naked vulnerability" can only be
expressed by simultaneously allowing "the self-preserving and self-enclosing
male rage that provokes it."  According to Adelman, Lear's vulnerability to
Cordelia leads "toward *Antony and Cleopatra* and the great reunions of the
romances," while the enactment of Cordelia's death leads "toward *Macbeth*,
*Coriolanus*, and* Timon of Athens*: toward the excision of the dangerous
female presences--the mothers within and without--that threaten to overwhelm
male authority and selfhood."
 
     *Macbeth* and *Coriolanus* record the attempt to create an autonomous
masculinity to ward off vulnerability to the mother.  Virulent maternal power
unleashed at the beginning of *Macbeth* is contained in the end by eliminating
the female; "mothers no longer threaten because they no longer exist."
However, "this solution is inherently unstable."  *Coriolanus*, on the other
hand, undoes the ending of *Macbeth* by bringing the powerful mother back and
by brutally displaying the failure of attempting to sever the maternal
connection.  With these two plays, "Shakespeare's tragic art seems to have
come to an impasse."
 
     In *Timon of Athens*, Shakespeare exposes autonomous masculinity in its
most naked form; in *Antony and Cleopatra* he attempts to move beyond it, re-
imagining both sexual union and masculine identity in a new relation to the
maternal.  *Timon of Athens* represents Shakespeare's most extreme vision of
the fantasy of male bounty replacing unreliable female otherness.  *Antony and
Cleopatra* seems to answer *Timon* by locating Antony's selfhood and bounty
within Cleopatra's vision of him, returning masculinity to its point of origin
in the maternal body.  By realigning masculinity with the maternal,
"Shakespeare is able to see his way beyond the either/or of *Macbeth* and
*Coriolanus*, and beyond the end-stopped genre of tragedy."
 
     The romances, to Adelman, represent Shakespeare's final attempt to
repair the damage of the legacy of *Hamlet*, in which "the mother's sexual
body is itself poisonous to the father on whom the son would base his
identity."  Still, the romances continue to bear the signs of Shakespeare's
ongoing ambivalence toward the maternal body: "The repeated cycle of doing and
undoing--*Pericles* to *Cymbeline*, *The Winter's Tale* to *The
Tempest*--suggests the deep divisions in Shakespeare's psychic world: even at
the end, he cannot fully join together what he put asunder in *Hamlet*."
 
     *Suffocating Mothers* is the product of twenty years of thinking,
teaching, reading, studying, and writing.  The effort has coalesced into a
major work of scholarship: a third of its 379 pages are notes, several in the
1000 word range.  Adelman gives us a formidable and coherent psychoanalytical
reading of Shakespeare's work from *Hamlet* on.  I found the chapters on
*Hamlet*, *Lear*, and *Antony and Cleopatra* the most impressive.  Throughout
the study one also discovers gems of individual insights into such issues as
Cressida's inconstancy, Bertram's flight, Coriolanus's relation with Aufidius,
and Leontes's jealousy.
 
     In *Suffocating Mothers*, Adelman compels us to look into the psychic
recesses of Shakespeare's characters, of Shakespeare himself as far as his
personality can be recover through his works, and of ourselves.  Adelman
herself is not exempted from this internal reflection as the following passage
from her chapter on *Lear* that deserves to be quoted in its entirety reveals:
 
          Insofar as the Cordelia of 1.1 is silenced, insofar as we feel the
     Cordelia who returns more as an iconic presence answering Lear's
     terrible need than as a separate character with her own needs,
     Shakespeare is complicit in Lear's fantasy, rewarding him for his
     suffering by remaking for him the Cordelia he had wanted all along;
     Shakespeare too requires the sacrifice of her autonomy.  This is a very
     painful recognition for a feminist critic, for any reader who reads as a
     daughter.  As feminist critics, we may once again note wryly that this
     sacrifice is regularly required of Shakespeare's tragic women, and
     perhaps of women *per se*; and yet the cases of Cressida and Desdemona
     are not comparable.  For how can we experience this play and not want
     Cordelia to return to Lear?  And yet how can we want what Lear--what
     Shakespeare--does to her?  It is easy enough simply to dissociate
     ourselves from Lear's need, to gender it male and thus escape its traces
     in ourselves; it is easy enough to mobilize anger against both the
     fathers--literal and literary--that require Cordelia's sacrifice.  And
     yet, if we allow the anger we mobilize to cut us off from the heart of
     longing embedded in Lear's suffering, do we not replicate Lear's own
     attempt to mobilize anger against vulnerability (2.4.278-80)--this time
     our own?  For the fantasies that determine the shape of Cordelia's
     return are, I think, only in part gendered; in part they spring from the
     ground of an infantile experience prior to gender.
 
          When Cordelia insists that she cannot love her father all, she
     creates a rage in Lear that we might agree to call oedipal, and to
     gender male, insofar as it seems to have its roots in the son's
     frustrated desire for the mother's exclusive sexual attention; this is,
     I think, the stratum of desire played out, for example, in Goneril's and
     Regan's voracious sexuality, especially insofar as that sexuality is
     triangulated, adulterous.  But this (gendered) rage at female sexuality
     in part figures and in part covers over and defends against the more
     primitive pain of preoedipal betrayal, the betrayal inherent in
     individuation itself; and though the expression of this pain will be
     inflected by gender, we cannot ultimately distance ourselves from it by
     gendering it male.  For the fantasies enacted in Cordelia's loss and
     return--in Lear's terrible hunger and isolation, in the blissful fusion
     of his walled prison--derive from the very beginnings of nascent
     selfhood, before consciousness of the gender divide.  Even while I
     understand the urgency of Cordelia's refusal to be all to her father, I
     share with Lear--and with Shakespeare--the stratum of desire that brings
     her back all his; and to the extent that I share in their desire, I
     cannot shelter in the anger that would allow me to make their need
     alien, gendering it male.  For I too inhabit the terror of finitude and
     the desire for merger with the infinitely kind nursery that can undo the
     pain of separation; I too long for her return.  And if so, then I
     participate with them in the destruction of Cordelia's selfhood;
     daughters as well as sons require this sacrifice from those we make our
     mothers.
 
Although this excursion into the personal is not a characteristic of the work
as a whole, it does, I believe, represent what goes on as one reads this
compelling psychoanalytic investigation.  We are forced as readers to confront
Shakespeare's, his characters', and our own infantile fantasies, fears and
desires.  In *Suffocating Mothers*, Adelman takes us on a journey into the
deepest regions of consciousness, and what a journey it is.
 
Reviewed by Hardy M. Cook, *The Shakespeare Newsletter* 42.2 (no. 213,
Summer 1992): 29-30.