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of women. They won’t let me into the bathroom in the morning to shave.’ […]
Perdie says, ‘He should consider himself lucky that we put up with him.’ She can
get away with a little impertinence, with coltish liberties. She has the haircut for it.
Mirrie, when hard-pressed, looks reproachful. Cordelia is not good at either of these things. But they all play up to him. (249, ch. 44)
Even when pretending to challenge their father, Perdie and Mirrie speakand act within the family power structure in which he rules supreme. The two elder daughters thus win their father’s favours; but Cordelia is unable to cope with him.
Atwood’s and Shakespeare’s Cordelias fall out of their fathers’ grace because they cannot play by the father’s rules. When Elaine visits Cordelia’s family as a child, she notices that the father orchestrates a game. While Elaine too learns to play along in order to earn the man’s approval, Cordelia never manages to master her role. Elaine witnesses Cordelia’s inept attempts to mollify her father:
‘What are you studying these days?’ he says to me. It’s a usual question of his.
Whatever I say amuses him.
‘The atom,’ I say.
‘Ah, the atom,’ he says. ‘I remember the atom. And what does the atom have to
say for itself these days?’
‘Which one?’ I say, and he laughs.
‘Which one, indeed,’ he says. ‘That’s very good.’ This may be what he wants: a
give and take, of sorts. But Cordelia can never come up with it, because she’s too
frightened of him. She’s frightened of not pleasing him. And yet he is not pleased.
I’ve seen it many times, her dithering, fumble-footed efforts to appease him. But
nothing she can do or say will ever be enough, because she is somehow the wrong
person.
I watch this, and it makes me angry. It makes me want to kick her. How canshe be so abject? When will she learn? (249, ch. 44)
Elaine learns the strategies of Cordelia’s father’s game partly by observing Cordelia’s failures. The quoted passage indicates that whatever Cordelia does or says, she will never measure up in her father’s eyes, and the novel illustrates how Cordelia is crippled by her inferior position in her family. Cordelia is ‘less agile’ than her siblings; she is less able to do what she likes than Perdita and Miranda, and generally she is ‘more disappointing’ than her two sisters (73, ch. 14). Her sisters are not only more successful, and more sophisticated than Cordelia; ‘[b]oth of them are beautiful: one dark and intense, the other blond and kind-eyed and soulful. Cordelia is not beautiful in the same way’ (72, ch. 14). As Cordelia fails to maintain relationships and falls behind in school, Perdie and Mirrie ‘are both more charming and beautiful and sophisticated than ever’ (209, ch. 39). The passage above also reveals how easily the suspension of pity and compassion comes to Elaine as well as to Cordelia’s sisters. At this point, Elaine is too young and too emotionally damaged by Cordelia to identify the root of the problem in the father; but the sisters seem to make a mental note of Cordelia’s ‘weakness’ and blame her for failing his standards. Not only do they not protect their younger sister from the father’s abuse, they authorize it by imitating it: Cordelia’s victimized position does not become a cause for empathy for the sisters, but for ridicule and mock-parental speech: ‘“Pull up your socks, Cordelia, or you’ll flunk your year again. You know what Daddy said last time.” Cordelia flushes, and can’t think what to say back’ (210, ch. 39). The favoured daughters thus use their privileged position to denigrate and admonish Cordelia. For Perdita and Miranda, it pays to withhold pity. Like Goneril and Regan, they have nothing to win by taking up ‘what’s cast away’ (I. 1. 255), but they have something to win by maintaining the father’s power and authority: it gives them a semblance of power. Thus, instead of protecting their sister’s interest, they look after the father’s, and in the process they discharge themselves and the father from any sort of complicity in Cordelia’s suffering. In King Lear, the elder daughters’ ability to perform according to their father’s expectations keeps them within the parameters of the kingdom, but Cordelia’s failure to pay lip-service to her father’s power culminates in her banishment from it. The inability to calculate the effects of words on her father, and to support his own view of his position as all-powerful ruler, comes across as disobedience.
A failure at playing her role adequately in her father’s game, Atwood’s Cordelia pursues an acting career, as if the Shakespearean stage might offer her some kind of training ground. Her presence in Shakespearean contexts, however, only adds to her sense of isolation and inability to perform. Working as an assistant in Macbeth, Cordelia is in charge of off-stage matters; at the end of the play, a head of cabbage wrapped up in a towel is to be thrown on stage in order to symbolize Macbeth’s death (245, ch. 44). Cordelia, however, who notices that the cabbage is rotting, exchanges it for a fresh head of cabbage which immediately cancels the tragic effect
on the audience as it bounces off the stage. The ‘curtain comes down on laughter’ (245, ch. 44). Since Cordelia failed to understand the purpose and function of the cabbage prop, she failed in her responsibility to the joint theatrical effort. Speaking the truth is not always right, nor is acting on what is right always the right thing to do. What matters in the context of the Shakespearean family as well as in the theatre is to maintain the (theatrical) illusion. Cordelia’s inability to sustain that illusion – and become recognized as a player on the stage – only makes her situation the more precarious..
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