Silent Laughter: King Lear And The Fool Archetype In Twentieth Century American Women`s Writing (2016)

Extracts from Dissertation (King Lear and the Fool Archetype in Twentieth Century Women s Writing): Chapter 2 (Carson McCullers), pg. 2Chapter 3 (Sylvia Plath), pg. 10Conclusion, pg. 17

Chapter 2: McCullers The Heart is a Lonely HunterThe feminine and the fool are united through their relationship to an inherited language, with the oppositional practice of both often taking the form of linguistic manipulation or silence in order to criticise a wider social authority. The inscribing of social codes within language is hugely significant with regards to gender Collecott paraphrases Irigaray s assumption that sexual difference is inscribed in language (qtd. in Collecott 452) and, moreover, language itself is often understood as masculinist. Martin remarks that, In the history of Western patriarchal culture, women have been denied the same means of expression as men and their voices have been suppressed by a cultural tradition that denies their significance (5). This masculinist dominance of language associates women with silence or inarticulation, and indeed Martin quotes Julia Kristeva who says that this makes woman [ ] that which cannot be represented, that which is not spoken locating womanhood outside the borders of a language dominated by men (qtd. in Martin 5). In this way, women are forced into silence, but this silence can itself provide a means of resistance in disrupting the language system which embodies social relations (Olsson 17), as is evident through Cordelia. Notably, Janik associates the potentially subversive voice of the fool with that of the feminine like the feminine voice or the voice of the marketplace described by Bakhtin, it arises from the lower level of a hierarchical opposition, and it is not a voice of opposition but rather a voice subverting the entire hierarchical order (Introduction 19) in that it questions the foundations of language and society.

Further, in their exceeding of the bounds of social convention and the social constructs of language, both the feminine and the fool can be considered grotesque, inviting comparison between them and illuminating the social criticism in twentieth century presentations of the female grotesque. Janik refers to fools as sometimes startlingly grotesque (Introduction 1), and Gleeson-White s paraphrasing of Alan Spiegel s definition of the grotesque as a type of person defined by either physical or mental deformity (qtd. in Gleeson-White, Revisiting 110) contains echoes of Welsford s definition of a fool as one who is distinguished from the normal person by mental deficiencies or physical deformities (55). Further, Bauer remarks that to open up another s discourse is to make it vulnerable to change, to exposure, to the carnival (4). This practice of opening up is exactly what the fool does through his destabilisation of meaning, as he opens up the semantic possibilities of language. Bauer s statement is therefore notable through its suggestion of leakage, and its corresponding echo of the secreting (Russo 8) grotesque. Thus, it could be argued that fools make language grotesque through removing its quality of containment by manipulating its meaning or refusing to conform to typical linguistic systems, correspondingly destabilising the social containment that rests on these linguistic codes. In support of this, Eagleton remarks that what is superfluous or excessive about human beings, King Lear suggests, is nothing less than language itself, which constantly outruns the confines of the body (89). Lear s Fool constantly engages in linguistic excess through his use of repetition and his punning which applies multiple meanings to a single phrase, such as on the meaning of dolours (2.2.244) to indicate both money and sorrow, as suggested by Foakes (241). Similarly, the Fool s line the hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long/That it s had it head bit off by it young (1.4.207) becomes grotesque not just in the savagery of the meaning but in the conspicuous repetition of it , exacerbated by the inappropriateness, in relation to the brutal subject matter, of the baby-talk (Foakes 204) quality this creates. Similarly, with regards to the feminine grotesque, Martin remarks that the grotesque body is characterised by uncensored speech and sexuality and that in the view of the dominant social authority, that which transgresses the sanitised boundaries of the body, including the voice, must be suppressed (6). In this way the secreting (Russo 8) grotesque body relates to the subversion of language because it cannot be contained or categorised within dominant social codes and discourse. Like the fool, therefore, the feminine grotesque is linked to social non-conformity, and to leakage through a failure of containment within social constructs.

Therefore, the concept of the feminine grotesque is intimately bound up with resistance to social constructs of femininity, and the tension between them is presented through the character of Mick Kelly in Heart. Catherine Martin argues that the female adolescent body epitomises (5) Mary Russo s descri ption of the grotesque body as open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple and changing (8), and, indeed, from the opening of the novel Mick s femininity is marked out as physically and socially revolting. At first glance she was like a very young boy (20) and when asked whether she is going to the Girl Scouts she asserts that she doesn t belong to them (20), thus resisting categorisation within a gendered group. Mick s unusual height is constantly referred to, and as a result of it Harry compares her to a freak at a fair (101). The fact that this is observed by a male at a party at which an awareness of gender is at its peak partygoers are split according to gender on either side of the room and the boys thought about the girls and the girls thought about the boys (99) emphasises that the concept of the grotesque is intimately related to social codes and constructs.

Further, Gleeson-White makes an explicit connection between Mick and the fool archetype when she argues that Mick resembles the Bakhtinian fool of carnival in the way she can only approximate womanliness and effectively makes a mockery of idealised femininity through her failure to appropriate it (Gender 89). Gleeson-White quotes Bakhtin s suggestion that the fool or clown is charged with not grasping the conventions of society and so makes strange the world of conventionality (Bakhtin in Gleeson-White, Gender 89). Further, Bauer argues that stupidity in female heroines provides the means of unmasking dominant codes as it makes them vulnerable to interpretation, contradiction and dialogue (Bauer 11). In light of Bauer and Gleeson-White s arguments, the episode in the novel in which Mick made faces at herself in the mirror (40), coming as it does at a point where the tension between Mick and her conventionally feminine sister is drawn attention to, becomes a resistant act of mockery towards socially-approved femininity. When Mick walks into the bedroom Etta is painting her nails and her hair was done up in steel rollers (40), representing the visual focus of socially-sanctioned femininity which Mick refutes by pulling faces.

In this way, McCullers reveals socially-conforming femininity as a mask and Mick, in her failed attempts to be a woman, reveals the gaps in the ideally seamless mask of femininity (Gleeson-White, Gender 89). When leaving the shop at which she works she had to frown a long time to get her face natural again (McCullers 305), in a suggestion of a mask, and echoing a descri ption earlier in the novel that her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight (50). This comes prior to the repetition of I want following the presentation of Mick s internal anxieties over the one person after another (50) that she has had desires for, so that clandestine female sexual desire is related to the slipping of the mask of idealised femininity. Gleeson-White s suggestion that the adolescent fool figure s non-understanding of these feminine constructs enables a deconstruction of them is supported here by the fact that the narration, focalised through Mick, remarks that just what this real want was she did not know (50).

Moreover, not only does Mick play the fool to social constructs, but this foolishness reveals the constructs themselves to be fool s masks in the way that Lear s Fool s linguistic nonsense reveals the folly of Lear himself. Like the Fool in Lear, who represents his performative social role through his coxcomb (1.4.105) and codpiece (3.2.40), Mick s gender role is broken down into signs and gestures. Her initial androgyny is understood through her clothing and her consumption of beer, ice cream and cigarettes. She announces to her sisters that I wear shorts because I don t want to wear your old hand-me-downs (41), the latter phrase suggestive of inherited constructs of femininity and thus her rejection of them. These shorts are discarded after the party, as she decides that no more after this night would she wear them, but the fact that she considers herself too big (105) for them has a metaphorical as well as literal meaning, as her too big-ness that is, her height constitutes part of her grotesqueness and her inability to convincingly assimilate into an ideal feminine role even after she has relinquished the shorts. Similarly, Mick s absorption into socially-sanctioned feminine constructs is understood through gestures and symbols, all of which hint at containment the ear rings, the dangle of her bracelets, and the new way she crossed her legs and pulled the hem of her skirt down past her knees (311). Her ears and hands are shackled, whilst her vaginal area is safely hidden. Ears and hands are both emphasised as areas of expression in the novel, through Mick s reliance on music and Singer s reliance on hand gestures, and so their containment here further presents social constructs as silencing. Moreover, this descri ption of her is focalised through Biff s narration and is the last mention of her in the novel, so that she becomes absorbed into the approving masculine gaze. This pattern of resistance and absorption is essential to an understanding of the function of the literary fool despite being a satirical figure of resistance, ultimately he is unable to break out of, or change, the social code to which he is contingent. Understanding Mick through the fool archetype, then, reveals this dynamic in her attempts to resist a proscri ptive femininity.

Thus, like Cordelia s silence, Mick s attempts at articulation become acts of folly (Gatti 149) in revealing the insufficiency of the existing language system through not grasping (qtd. in Gleeson-White, Gender 89) it. In a continuation of the concept of femininity as a fool s mask, Russo remarks that femininity is a mask which masks non-identity (69). This implies, then, that there is no inherent identity beyond that applied by social constructs so that ultimately, without her mask of femininity, Mick can express herself and her understanding of her own identity only through silence. That is, language and corresponding social codes, which can be understood as masculinist, as previously discussed, are insufficient to articulate her experience. The narrator reports that there were all kinds of music in her thoughts (90) and she wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud (51) in a suggestion of the social inappropriateness of feminine articulation in public. Mick s social silencing is suggested earlier in the novel when she stands on the top of a house and wanted to sing. All the songs she knew pushed up towards her throat, but there was no sound (34). Particularly notably, the big boy who had climbed the week before had started hollering out a speech (34) in a suggestion of the relative speech allowed by society to those of different genders. Martin points out that the words the boy uses are taken from the male literary tradition which express male community and camaraderie (9-10) as they are quoted from Shakespeare. Further, the boy s words represent transcendence unlike pussy , which Mick writes on the wall (Martin 10). In this scene the initial reference to pussy as a very bad word (McCullers 37) suggests that the word itself will not be reported, setting up a tension between silence and enunciation, exacerbated by the fact that this phrase is contained within hyphenation. Further, the word itself is associated with a grotesque femininity in that it refers to a leaking part of the body. Through writing, particularly in writing her initials, Mick is claiming an ability for self-definition, but it is notable that the only way she can express herself is as the grotesque feminine, through socially-dictated language she uses slang and on an anatomical level. The fact that the word she writes anatomically indicates a lack further undermines her attempts at self-definition, revealing that beneath this socially coded language she is able only to articulate a silence a nothing (Shakespeare 1.1.87), in a recall of Cordelia. This echoes Kristeva s suggestion of woman as that which cannot be represented (qtd. in Martin 5), and unites Mick and Cordelia through an inability to articulate themselves through a masculinist language.

Further, the application of the fool archetype to McCullers novel is particularly pertinent with regards to Mick s association with Singer, as she becomes overtly associated with a lack of articulation. Mick s silenced attempts at expressing her own identity are deflected through increasing levels of inarticulation, so that like the criticism of Lear s Fool, her attempts to articulate her own identity outside of this language system are ultimately reduced to silence. When Mick plays the music that symbolises her desires and inner room (145), all Singer can hear is silence, reporting to Antonapoulos that I wish I knew what it is she hears (190). Further, Singer writes to his friend that they come up to my room and talk to me until I do not understand how a person can open and shut his or her mouth so much without being weary (189), thus reconstituting language as meaningless gesture and viewing it as the system of signs that it is. Further, he understands Mick s changing identity through the fact that she used to dress in short trousers like a boy but now she wears a blue skirt and a blouse yet is not yet a young lady (190). Thus, he here divorces the signified from the social signifier, in the way that he divorces the physical gesture of language from its meaning, effectively reconstituting language, a parallel structure to this system of social codes, as silence. Further, Singer writes, with regard to the main characters, that how to put them in words I am not sure (189), suggestive of the reduction of their identities to inarticulation.

In this way, the fool archetype is not just reflected through the character of Mick but permeates the novel s system of silencing. Mick and the other characters open themselves up to Singer, who does not understand them in the way they intend and who in turn re-constitutes their identities to Antonapoulos. Ultimately their identities converge in this figure, who is not only mute but can barely communicate at all, and in whom inarticulation is made grotesque. Grotesqueness in Antonapoulos takes the form of extreme corporality whilst the feminine grotesque leaks, Antonapoulos is understood largely in terms of consumption, and speaks solely to say that he wanted to eat or to sleep or to drink (8). He communicates essentially only with a single finger, making a slow circle in the air (194) and holding it up to get the attention of a nurse (195), the phallic qualities of this image reinforcing the sense of his grotesqueness. This grotesqueness becomes, in the words of Melissa Free, an objection to abjection and silence (429) through its suggestion of the failure of discourse. This spiral of inarticulation reveals the insufficiency of the system of language and social codes in articulating the experience of the socially marginalised, including the feminine. The system of signs by which Mick is understood and presented becomes related to this system of social codes through Singer s reduction of language to gesture, and is similarly revealed as false and insufficient. This resonates with the Fool s repetition of nothing , which indicates the silent void in the heart of language. In the manner of the Fool in Lear, then, language in Heart is reduced to silence, its grotesque core suggesting a resistance and criticism of this silencing, but whilst Lear s Fool reveals this silence through linguistic excess, it is Singer s silence which becomes the vehicle for revealing the insufficiency of language.

Chapter 3: Plath s Daddy Louise Westling links Sylvia Plath and Carson McCullers through their mutual presentation of the conflict between personal creative ambition and the pressure of conventional femininity in The Bell Jar and Heart respectively (114), but the two writers can also be linked through their presentation of grotesque and revolting femininity, and with regard to Plath s poetry rather than novel. In Plath s poems, and especially Daddy , however, this non-conforming femininity is more explicitly tied to issues of voicing in the face of a patriarchal literary tradition. Knickerbocker comments on what he sees as Plath s lifelong effort to achieve poetically a powerful, autonomous voice in a male-dominated world (17). As already suggested, this tension between the individual voice and a dominant authority is one inscribed within language, which is coded with social constructs, and indeed Britzolakis notes that the tools of the father/oppressor [in Daddy ] are above all linguistic (114). Further, it can be argued that Plath conflated the authority of the patriarchal literary canon with a wider sociological pattern of masculinist repression, and Axelrod suggests that it seems possible that [Plath] associated Shakespeare with Hughes himself, just as she associated Hughes with her father (77). This is significant considering Axelrod also suggests that Plath saw Shakespeare as the acme of the male literary tradition (76). It is therefore valid to suggest that the father figure in Daddy is representative not just of marital and paternal oppression, but also the restrictive literary canon, casting Plath s concerns with voicing in her poetry into a relationship with a specific social authority. Notably, Axelrod draws parallels between the language of Plath s Words and the language used by Kent at the end of Lear through which he comments on the difference between Lear s three daughters. Axelrod remarks that Plath s poem interjects Shakespeare s stars that govern into its own language system to provoke a dialectic, even to submerge the Shakespearean rhetoric in the Plathian (76). Therefore, he reads Plath s oeuvre as challenging the patriarchal literary tradition through the use and manipulation of its language, a project that is in evidence in Daddy in less direct but similarly subversive ways.

Plath s poem links this patriarchal oppression to the silencing of the female voice, so that the speaker s oppositional practice mirrors that of Lear s Fool, drawing attention to the silenced feminine in the way that the Fool draws attention to the silence of Cordelia. Britzolakis argues that Plath s Daddy links the paternal figure with linguistic mechanisms of silencing and the deprivation of speech (108). Indeed, Plath s speaker states that the tongue stuck in my jaw (line 25), the use of the definite article rather than a possessive pronoun suggesting the disassociation of herself from her tongue and reinforcing the idea that she does not have control over her own speech. Further, the departure from the initial I in two different directions in lines 34 and 35 I began to talk like a Jew/I think I may well be a Jew - suggest an attempt to expand on or articulate her identity. However, the ultimate arrival in both lines at Jew - which is further repeated throughout the stanza - is suggestive of the fact that she is unable to do this outside of the language of social categorisation that is engendered and monitored by her father, who is represented as a Nazi or Fascist (line 48). Moreover, these lines link speech with identity, as the association of her speech with Judaism then leads her to believe she may well be a Jew (line 35). However, the convoluted syntax of the second line creates a sense of hesitancy and non-committal to the language used, so that although she identifies herself through speech, the syntax indicates the falsity of this speech and suggests a more authentic level of identification that is silenced. This indication of the paternal figure silencing the feminine provokes an interesting comparison with Lear. Axelrod unites Cordelia and her two sisters in a mutual struggle against paternal authority, and in so doing relates this to the protest against a paternal figure in Daddy , suggesting that Lear had strong personal reverberations for Plath in its study of generational conflict (77). It is therefore pertinent to see in the speaker of Daddy an echo of Cordelia s resistance of her father, with both Cordelia and Plath s speaker functioning as fools in their rejection of linguistic systems, but the way in which Plath s speaker plays with language and reveals silenced voices reflects more strongly the speech of the Fool.

Both the speaker of Plath s poem and Lear s Fool use repetition to draw attention to a level of articulation that is silenced, in the latter case that of Cordelia, and in the former that of the woman who is silenced by a patriarchal literary tradition. The repetition of ich (line 27) in Daddy aurally sounds like constricted speech that is stuck (line 25) in her throat, and although it asserts a poetic I , it does so in a language the German tongue (line 16) - inherited from the figure of patriarchal oppression that she is attempting to detach herself from. This therefore suggests that she has had a language forced on her through inheritance, but which is inappropriate to her sense of self and through which she is unable to articulate her identity. However, the repetition of a singular pronoun distorts the meaning of the word itself, so that a linguistic excess undermines language, mirroring the Fool s repetition of nothing , as previously discussed. This suggests that it overlays a true meaning that is, the sense of constriction inherent in the sound implies something that is not said, reinforced by the fact that what is articulated undermines itself and so suggests that it replaces a more authentic articulation that is silenced. As a result, the language of the poem in itself effectively becomes silence through its redundancy as meaningful speech.

The use of repetition, then, forms part of the way in which Daddy and other poems break down language in an attempt at refutation of the patriarchal literary canon and society. The concordance of Jew with the aural patterning of Plath s poem, with the repetition of the oo sound in you do not do (line 1) creating a nursery-rhyme (Lindberg-Seyersted 25) tone, implies that the words are associated on an aural rather than semantic level, like the Fool s series of riddles, causing a questioning of their underlying meaning. Thus, like the Fool, Plath s speaker breaks down the stability of meaning. The Fool remarks that I had rather be any kind o thing than a fool, and yet I would not be thee, nuncle (1.4.176-7). The paradox of this line destabilises patterns of relative values, again effectively subverting the value system on which Lear gave such precedence to language. Further, the only non-paradoxical reading of this line forces an assumption that Lear is a fool, so that social hierarchies are broken down through a linguistic and semantic breakdown. Similarly, Plath s speaker asserts, Daddy, I have had to kill you/You died before I had time (lines 6-7). The second line sets up a paradox that causes the reader to question the meaning of the first, and whether the speaker means kill literally or metaphorically. Further, there is an implicit continuation to line 7 that is ambiguous that is, it is unclear whether she means that she didn t have time to kill him or to repair their relationship. Thus the speaker engages in similar semantic reversals to the Fool, which undoes the stability of the language on which the identity of the patriarchal figure rests.

Further, in the way that the Fool expresses irreverence towards linguistic norms, the incorporation of nonsense words into the language of Daddy collapses a framework of reference and association, undermining social structures of oppression and making the language of oppression ridiculous. The speaker syntactically equates her father s Luftwaffe with his gobbledygoo (line 42) through the repetition of the second person possessive pronoun in application to both, thus suggesting that the former associated with Nazism is as much a nonsense word as the latter. Similarly, the capitalisation of Achoo (line 5) raises an inadvertent sound to the status of a proper noun, placing it on the same level as titles such as Aryan, German and Jew, and so disturbing the hierarchical system of language and indicating its arbitrariness. Further, there is an inherent rebelliousness of onomatopoeia in this context, coming as it does in a discussion of the prohibitions placed on speech, thus inserting an alternative layer of meaning an aural one to the language used and unsettling its semantic stability. This also echoes Janik s remark that fools respond to the world with things that we would dismiss from our own lives (Introduction 1), an irreverence towards associative frameworks that is evident in the language of Lear s Fool, who inappropriately allies the crown of the monarchy with that of an egg (1.4.152), and sings that a king should play bo-peep (1.4.168). The Fool s inappropriateness works on a formal as well as semantic level, as he repeatedly breaks into verse and songs in opposition to Lear s prose, lending a greater status to his language than the king s.

Further, the metaphoric abundance of Daddy also works to suggest a continual deferral of meaning in the manner of the Fool s excessive use of metaphor in Lear, but this metaphoric abundance extends into the speaker s self-identifying. The paternal figure is described through a series of related but varying metaphors, including a black shoe (line 2). ghastly statue (line 8), black man (55) and devil (54). This metaphoric insecurity destabilises descri ptions that have socio-historical grounding, such as the Aryan eye (line 44) and Panzer-man (line 45) in suggesting the imprecision of language. However, Wurst remarks that, In the attempt to break through categories the I in Plath s work will constantly run the risk of being overcome by the forces of language she unleashes (28-9). She continues this argument by discussing the absence of the body in Plath s poetry (Wurst 29), and indeed the speaker s body is constantly displaced in Daddy in a suggestion of how the language breakdown initiated by the speaker has caused a disruption to her own methods of self-definition. Whilst the speaker initially asserts that the tongue stuck in my jaw (line 25) she then asserts that it stuck in a barb wire snare (line 26), and so displaces the body onto a non-bodily metaphor, significant further because the metaphor relates to methods of oppression as used by her Fascist paternal figure. Similarly, the use of a simile in line 3 she has lived like a foot - suggests her detachment from her body, as well as her inability to conceive of herself as a whole, necessitating her physical breakdown into separate parts that she does not even claim as her own. That is, in breaking down language, the speaker becomes subsumed in its possibilities and so is effectively disembodied as she cannot define herself. The fact that ideal femininity is disembodied (Martin 7) compounds the sense that through her linguistic resistance the speaker ultimately conforms to the social constructs she is aiming to resist.

Thus, as with Lear s Fool, this destabilisation of language unsettles the identity of Plath s speaker. The poem s speaker s relationship to her oppressor is similar to that of the Fool in that she is defined largely by opposition and so a refutation of this authoritative force problematises her own methods of self-definition. She refers to her own pretty red heart (line 56) in a syntactic parallel of her father s fat black heart (line 76), and she is pulled out of the sack (line 61) following her suicide attempt in an echo of the image of a bag full of God (line 8) that she uses to define her father. This is suggestive of the fact that she cannot define herself outside of the terms in which she defines the paternal figure, and so her attempts to destabilise the paternal authority through the destabilisation of language necessarily result in a breakdown of her own identity. The I of the speaker becomes more assertive as the poem progresses, initially speaking in the present perfect I have lived (line 3), I have had (line 6) in a suggestion of the fact that she is still very much living in the context of patriarchal oppression. By the end of the poem, however, she speaks largely in the past tense, such as in I thought (line 60) and I knew what to do (line 63). However, this is undermined by the repeated oo sounds throughout Daddy , echoing the initial You (line 1) which refers to her father so that the paternal identity infiltrates the linguistic texture of the poem even as the speaker attempts to reject it. In the context of this aural repetition, then, the use of the past tense can be read as applying to the speaker herself, with her identity increasingly historicised as she breaks down the figure against which she is defined, culminating in I m through (line 80). You comes at the end of the three lines prior to the last one, setting up an expectation of its continued repetition so that the aural parallel in through recalls this second person address to the extent that it suggests the absorption of the speaker in the paternal figure. Indeed, Platizky remarks that the poem simultaneously proclaims and resists closure a partial psychological victory of the self over the other through the repetition of the oo sound (106). Whilst I m through (line 80) could, therefore, be read as a dismissal of the father by the speaker, it can also be seen as signalling that the identity of the speaker is through as her identity has merged with that of her father, so that there is no I in the present tense, only a hybrid of the speaker and the paternal figure.

Thus, like the Fool, Plath s speaker fails to resist social authority and her oppositional practice results in ambiguity and containment. Plath s specific relationship to a patriarchal literary canon results in a more explicit concern with the silenced female voice than in McCullers novel, but she similarly attempts to destabilise social coding and linguistic systems. In the manner of the Fool s linguistic play, the speaker of Plath s poem engages in linguistic breakdown in an attempt to draw attention to a masculinist language and social authority that silences the feminine, but can only define herself against society and so ultimately cannot disengage herself from the masculine figure.

ConclusionIn Shakespeare s King Lear, the eponymous ruler refuses to acknowledge the value of silence when he banishes Cordelia as a result of her refusal to speak. The Fool, linked to Cordelia before he has even appeared on stage, challenges and draws attention to the unstable values of language, suggesting the power and truth of Cordelia s nothing . This interplay of silence and wordplay is a trope that extends throughout the fool archetype, with the fool critically identified as one who can be distinguished by the language he uses. Thus, the fool is unheard because he is made ridiculous, and so unthreatening, by society, and because he relies on society for his definition, so that his expressions of rebellion, criticism or impropriety are ultimately contained.

Despite the fool belonging sociologically and culturally to the Medieval and Renaissance periods, and his usual designation as male, the significance of the fool s linguistic distinction from the rest of society makes him an illuminating point of comparison with the social marginalisation of the feminine in the twentieth century, as explored in the work of Carson McCullers and Sylvia Plath. Critics comment on the way in which social codes and values are held within language, and on the masculinist dominance of language that necessitates a silencing or muting of the female voice, both in society and in relation to the literary canon. Therefore, an application of the fool archetype to these female voices illuminates otherwise overlooked satirical elements to their work and characters. It also reveals a specific dynamic between the socially marginalised, including the feminine, and society specifically, one of opposition, mutually dependent definition and inevitable containment.

In this way the character of Mick Kelly in Heart functions as a fool in that her misappropriation of socially-sanctioned femininity makes it ridiculous and reveals it to be a mask. Further, Mick s relationship to the mute Singer draws out the tension between silence and speech inherent in Mick s struggle against constricting social codes. Thus the fool archetype permeates the text in that the cycles of inarticulation channelled through Singer and Antonapoulos reveal the failure of language, reducing it to silence in an echo of Lear s Fool s reduction of language to the value of Cordelia s nothing .

Whilst the fool archetype is evident in McCullers novel through narrative function, then, it resonates through Plath s poetic voice. Reading the voice of the speaker of Daddy as that of the fool highlights the poem s criticism of social authority and the dominance of a patriarchal literary canon, through drawing attention to Plath s manipulation of language and suggestions of silencing. Like the Fool, however, Plath s speaker can only define herself against social authority, and so her linguistic breakdown destabilises her own identity.

Thus both Plath and McCullers, like Lear s Fool, draw attention to the silence of the socially marginalised and the constrictions placed on them by society through language, and attempt to subvert this language as part of a project of breaking down social authority. One of the defining elements of the archetypal fool, however, is his particular relationship to society, from which he is marginalised but simultaneously dependent for his definition, so, like that of the fool, the subversive voice of non-conforming femininity in the works of Plath and McCullers is ultimately contained.