Fatherhood In King Lear

Lear goes to visit Regan next, and he is met with almost the same reception. Although Regan rarely initiates action on her own, she feels safe enough with Goneril on her side that she can tell her father her expectations for him. Regan's copycat attitude towards her older sister is a reoccuring theme throughout King Lear, and it could entirely be correlated with her place in the family. In the context of the play, Regan is generally described as a wantered-down version of her older sister, and it almost make sense when considering they have the same goals, vices, and tragic ends to their stories. In that way, Regan accurately reflects the relationship between real life siblings, where she is the middle child who is often overlooked. Ginder discusses this in her analysis of the play, and she writes “Regan’s actions, though often colored as evil, can be seen as more justified through the lens of the forgotten middle child, reaching …show more content…
Children of abuse often grow up living two separate lives: one at home where they must conform to their parent's expectations or face punishment, and one in the public eye where they must hide all evidence of the former. In this case, what we as the audience witness can be equated with their public lives. The Mayo Clinic describes emotional abuse as “ injuring a child's self-esteem or emotional well-being... such as continually belittling or berating a child — as well as isolating, ignoring or rejecting a child” and says warning signs of abuse include a parent who “consistently blames, belittles or berates the child and describes the child with negative terms, such as "'worthless'" or "'evil'" (“Child Abuse”). When reading that, it's almost impossible not to draw a connection to Lear's consistent outbursts against his children where he does, in fact, injure their self esteem and refer to them as