Cordelia

Women in Shakespeare haven’t always been given a fair shake. I’ve mentioned before about Kate in Taming of the Shrew and I’m sure we’re all familiar with the portrayal of Ophelia in Hamlet and Lady Macbeth in her husband’s eponymous play. Of course this isn’t across the board, the Bard’s written plenty of really great and really well developed women too but every one of them there’s two very poor examples of women.

It’s a little hard for me to pick exactly where Cordelia fits in on this scale but I feel it’s safe to say that’s she’s getting a raw deal here. Rather than being allowed to make up her own mind her father is railroading her into accepting his plans her future. This right here is the classic feminist argument, the central point of A Room of One’s Own, that the greatest inequality of men between men and women has been an inequality of choice. Now royals and people of power are infamous for pushing their children into a specific way of life that they’ve chosen for them but Cordelia being a woman she is given less option to rebel against Lear’s wishes. If Cordelia were a male she could have made a name on the field of battle or distinguished herself academically but those routes weren’t afforded to her and thus she is affected by the world with very little ability to have an effect on it.