Hamlet: From the perspective of feminist & psychological approach

v     Psychological approach:-

                        Although Freud himself made some applications of his theories to art and literature, it remind for an English disciple, the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, to provide the 1^st full – scale psychoanalytic treatment of a major literary work. Jone’s Hamlet, originally published as an essay in The American Journal Of Psychology in 1910, was later revised and enlarged.

                               Hamlet’s much – debated delay in killing his uncle, Claudius, is to be explained in terms of internal rather than external circumstances and that the “ play is mainly concerned with a hero’s unavailing fight against what can only be called a disordered mind”. Jones points out that no really satisfying argument has ever been substantiated for the idea that Hamlet revenges his father’s murder as quickly as practicable. Shakespeare makes Claudius’s guilt as well as Hamlet’s duty perfectly clear from the outset – if we are to trust the words of the ghost and the gloomy insights of the hero himself. The fact is, however, that Hamlet does not fulfill this duty until absolutely forced to do so by physical circumstances – and even then only after Gertrude, his mother, is dead. Hamlet displays throughout the play, especially as it is directed against Ophelia and his almost physical revulation to sex – this misogyny also elucidates by Jones.

                                  The attitude of the child towards his father is dramatized in the characters of the ghost and Claudius, both of whom are dramatic projections of the hero’s own conscious – unconscious dilemma towards the father figure. The apperition of king Hamlet represents the conscious ideal of fatherhood, the image that is socially receivable.

See, what a grace was seated on his brow:

Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,

An eye like mars, to threaten and command,

A station like the Herald Mercury

New – lighted on a heaven – kissing hill,

A combination and a form indeed,

Where every God did seem to set his seal,

To give the world assurance of a man:

This was your husband.

                         On the other hand, his view of Claudius represents Hamlet’s hostility for his father as a rival for his mother’s affection. The new king – father is the symbolic perpetrator of the very deeds towards which the son is impelled by his own unconscious motives: murder of his father and incest with his mother. Hamlet cannot bring himself to kill Claudius because to do so he must, in a psychological sense, kill himself.

                               A corollary problem in Hamlet is the pronounced misogyny in Helmet’s character. Because of his mother’s abnormally sensual affection for her son, an affection that would have deeply marked Hamlet as a child with an oedipal neurosis. He has in the course of his psychic development repressed his incestuous impulses so severely that this repression colors his attitude towards all women. The famous “Get thee to a nunnery” speech has even sinister overtones than are generally recognized, when we understand the pathological degree of Hamlet’s conditions and read “nunnery” as Elizabethan slang for brothel.

This theme relates ultimate to splitting of the mother image which the infantile unconscious effects into two opposite picture: one of a virginal Madonna, and the other of a sensual creature accessible to everyone……when sexual repression is highly pronounced, as with Hamlet, then both types of women are felt to be hostile. Misogyny, as in the play, is the inevitable result.

                       Although it has been attacked by the anti – Freudians and occasionally disparaged by the neo – Freudians. “Both as an important seminal work which led to a considerable re – examination of Hamlet, and as an example of a thorough and intelligent application of psychoanalysis to drama”.

v     Feministic Approach:-

                      As we see in chapter 6, Hamlet is afflicted. The death of his father and the “o’erhasty marriage” of his mother to his uncle so threaten Hamlet’s ego that he finds himself splintered, driven to action even as he resists action with doubts and delays. He is a son who must act against his “parents”, Gertrude and Claudius, in order to revenge his father and alleviate his own psychic injury, a symbolic castration. A feminist reading indicates a solution: for Hamlet, delaying and attacking the feminine is a handy substitute for avoiding Claudius. Many times Hamlet’s speech signals his perhaps unconscious thoughts that it is his mother’s fault for being an object of competing male desires whether she actually had a hand in the king Hamlet’s murder or not.

                        The feminism is based upon Hamlet’s loathing of his mother and all feminine subject as well. His fear and hatred for women turn inwardly and destroy him. Hamlet contends with the women’s body, his mother’s, and he finds its sexual proclivities disgusting, as he rails at her in her chamber. He loathes himself for being born out of the female body; his own sexual conflicts and confused desires threaten him from the unconscious. Hamlet condemns his mother’s incestuous union with Claudius but mirrors the incest in his own oedipal desire for his mother – Gertrude.  

                                  The play reflects the role of women in Elizabethan society, from the way Ophelia must obey her father – Polonius without question. But the cultural roles of such women of the court are not applicable to women of all classes in Elizabethan time or our own, what women stand for psychologically and sexually in ‘Hamlet’.

                                 The night from which the apparition of king Hamlet initially emerged is described in female terms, compounding the fear of unrest in general with fear of feminine. Claudius has taken his wife “our sometime sister, now our queen……with mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage”.

                                Gertrude pleads with Hamlet to stop mourning his father, and Claudius ask him to think of him as a new father. When Hamlet thinks of himself, he thinks first of “this too to sallied flash”, which he would destroy had “the everlasting not fix’d”. If his flesh is sullied, his mother’s polluted: in the monologue he blames his mother’s “frailty” for exchanging “Hyperion” for a “satyr”. She is “unrighteous” in her lust.

                          Hamlet’s meditation upon his mother’s fault and his later assault upon her keys to understanding his torment, but while many critics have been content to move through the play seeing Gertrude only through her son’s angry eyes, Carolyn Heilbrun has provided an important feminist revision of Gertrude. Gertrude expresses herself well throughout the play. She is solicitous of Hamlet, asking him to sit near her tie give him a sense of belonging to the new court, and her speech to Laertes upon Ophelia’s death is a model of decorum and sensitivity, one instance in which her usual directness would not be appropriate. As Hamlet rails against his mother and even violently seizes her in act – III, she betrays no knowledge of the murder. She thinks Hamlet mad and promises she will not betray him, and she does not. We do not know her motives for marrying Claudius – perhaps she feared for her life and really did not have a choice.- but she is honest enough to admit that sex had something to do with it. It is interesting that he assumes she had a choice in marrying Claudius; perhaps he sees her as much more powerful than she really is in the situation.

                            Let us contrast the distorted image of the mother Hamlet projects upon Gertrude with these evident dimensions of her character. Their relationship is important for feminism; Gertrude is the literal and symbolic ground of all the conflict in the play; her body and soul are contested by her son – Hamlet, her husband and courtiers. The king Hamlet’s ghost desire for leniency with his wife is not matched by similar sentiments of other male characters in the play. And when Laertes warns Ophelia about Hamlet’s intention, she jibes him about his own sexual escapades with women. Ophelia is a more sympathetic – and more reliable – character compared to her hypocritical brother and scheming father. She also seems to be a better judge of Hamlet’s strange behavior. We can say that queen’s behavior was very different with compared to her husband, as he drinks and carouses into the night.

                               Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” speech follows these shifting scenes of falsehood and betrayal. Ophelia interrupts him and is greeted as “nymph”; Hamlet ask her to pray for him, but then begins to berate her savagely, the 1^st time he has really let his emotions go in front of someone else. In the play – within –the play, the poison used to kill the king Hamlet is described as a “Hecat’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected”. The witch Hecate is a dark feminine image from early Greek mythology.

                               The final act begins with Hamlet and Laertes fighting in Ophelia’s newly dug grave, after which Hamlet confesses his love for her, a question that has been left hanging until now. Perhaps her death awakened in him his true nature as a lover of women instead of a victim of them, but we must remember it was his habit of misdirected anger that led to her despair and suicide. Hamlet and the two women he loved join his two fathers and Laertes in death.

Conclusion:-

                        Through ‘Hamlet’ we attracted by feministic approach because in real world also it happened everywhere as same in this movie both the female character.