‘Hamlet’s love for Ophelia is deformed, though not obliterated, by his distrust of all women because of his disillusionment with his mother’ – Theodore Lidz
In Hamlet, the female characters hold significance in their relationships with their male counterparts, such as in the triangular relationship between Hamlet, Ophelia and Gertrude, and also in their madness and/or deaths; as such, the female characters are moreso an 'absence of character', rather than characters in their own right. The women of Hamlet therefore betray the male-dominated realm of the Elizabethan theatre, and the dichotomous character and purpose that women in the wider society were supposed to embody – the Madonna/whore dichotomy, and the conflicting roles of mother and wife.
In Hamlet, Gertrude is clearly significant in the dichotomies and parallels that found her character, being wife and mother, sexual object and Queen; Hamlet’s ‘disillusionment with his mother’, thus affects his understanding and treatment of the ‘female’, including Ophelia, Lidz suggests, this reaction having being caused by what he deems his mother’s falsity – which, perhaps, was more her attempt at reconciling the many Elizabethan images of femininity that she would have been expected to embody as the woman of the royal household. In Act 2 Scene 2, Hamlet’s disdainfully compares Gertrude to the Trojan queen, Hecuba, suggesting that his mother’s grief was false, and that she has not responded appropriately to King Hamlet’s death, by getting married, in comparison to Hecuba, whose grief was so profound that it ‘would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven/ and passion in the gods.’; ironically, by the comparison of his mother to another mythological female standard, Hamlet exacerbates his own disillusionment, cultivating his distrust due to the many different forms of femininity – which seem ‘Other’ to him due to the centrality of maleness. Furthermore, Hamlet uses the image of Hecuba, a non-living woman, in order to measure the traditional images of wife and mother against his own mother, who is living through the dichotomy – rather than simply being an image of such. Similarly, Hamlet’s disillusionment with his mother stems from a supernatural reinforcement of the patriarchy, from the ghost of King Hamlet: Hamlet believes his duty is to uncover the truth of his father’s murder, but seemingly focuses on the sexual image of his mother’s bed, ‘in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed / stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love / over the nasty sky’, portraying her as the ‘damned, smiling villain’ rather than the active murderer, Claudius. Hamlet’s devout focus on the ‘adultery’ of his mother can be viewed as an Oedipal obsession, him believing that not only his father has been wronged, but he himself has been wronged by Gertrude’s unnatural deference to Claudius, when Hamlet is the heir apparent to both the throne and perhaps to his mother. However, Hamlet’s obsessive focus on his mother may stem from his suspicion of the many faces of femininity and her role as Queen, and his father’s own mourning for his lost wife which Hamlet appropriates as the ‘living Hamlet’.
In Act 5 Scene 1, Ophelia’s funeral exacerbates the continuous establishment of patriarchal beliefs, with her corpse being objectified and de-personalised, ‘that was a woman’, in comparison to Yorick, who is fundamentally less than a corpse, simply a skull, but is still considered an autonomous and conscious being by Hamlet, and he retains his name: ‘Alas poor Yorick!’. As such, Hamlet’s role over fighting Laertes for the possession of Ophelia post-mortem mirrors his perception of his mother as an object to King Hamlet, Claudius and perhaps even himself; his love for Ophelia is ‘deformed’ and doesn’t take a natural space due to his conditioning of the patriarchal perception of women, and more specifically, his mother. In life, the character of Ophelia was definitively less ‘fleshed out’ than her male counterparts, and her identity is often seen as only emergent from Hamlet’s and Polonius’, her emotions being the ‘frail’ womanly emotions of fear and love, mimicked also in the Player Queen of The Mousetrap. Similarly, not only is Ophelia seemingly contingent on the male characters, but because of this, she then is forced to take on the contradictory patriarchal expectations of women, such as being a chaste woman versus and a sexual object – thus leading to the dissolving of the opposing facets that create her character, and leading her to madness and death. Ophelia, the role itself traditionally being played by a boy, therefore represents the historical silencing of women in the national-domestic setting, but also the contrary social expectations of women. In 5.1, her corpse and grave is invaded by both Laertes and Hamlet, who ‘leap into the grave’, continuing the persistent objectification of her death scene, the white dress being ‘transparent’ in the water, sexualised, in comparison to her lifeless body. The conflation of sex and death, Lidz would argue, forms a ‘mermaid-like’ depiction of her death: Ophelia being both a sexual object and a tragic figure, in the same way that a mermaid is half-woman and half-fish.
Comments