Finding the woman within: a feminist reading of Hamlet - Essay Example

FINDING THE WOMAN WITHIN: A FEMINIST READING OF HAMLET The sustained popularity of Hamlet owes much to its multidimensional intricacies and complexities which continues to facilitate multiple and diverse readings of this play. The major focal point of this tragic ambivalence and doom is, of course, the tortured and guilt-ridden mind of the titular character. The narrative conflict in Hamlet begins with a complex series of injunctions of prescribed actions and their related codes of honour. The self-imposed silence that tortures the bereaved hero and his constitutional inability to articulate his true intent, through action or words, to either his friends or his lover, are the primary sources of conflict, confusion and the battles of conscience that pervade the entire play. An analysis of Hamlet’s characterization is, therefore, an immensely complex and difficult exercise. Interestingly, these tropes of silence, self-questioning and self-negation within the text show a particular affinity to a feminine as well as feminist reading of Hamlet the play, as well as Hamlet the man. Hamlet, like all other plays of Shakespeare, is a study of human weaknesses, which manifest themselves in so many different forms and so many different ways within the span of a lifetime, with a hero whose guilt-ridden mind is relentlessly torn between duty and conscience, love and justice, madness and reason. The unmatched poetic grace and tragic nuances of the play, which find their most striking expressions in the famous soliloquies of the titular character, express with unmitigated agony the rambling musings of a grieving son, an indecisive heir to the throne and a soul tortured by its own inactions. In terms of a feminised representation of the prince, these vacillations, procrastinations and continued self-abuse become prominently visible and pertinent. The Elizabethan system of philosophies and knowledge, the man-woman binary can be said to have spawned a variety of related dualities: man as a symbol of action, reason, brevity, harshness, strength, justice and the woman becomes a metaphor for inaction, madness, indecision, softness, weakness and emotion. Since feminist theories have addressed these metaphors of lack represented by the traditional figures of women in literatures of all ages and tried to account for this masculine bias through extensive reworking of patriarchal tales, a character analysis of Hamlet’s ‘feminine side’ offers a radical vision of a woman trapped within a man’s body – a duality he famously expresses in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Act 3, scene 1, lines 56-89. Indeed, “To be, or not to be, that is the question”. (Ham. III.i.56) Hamlet’s psyche and soul is torn between the man-woman duality within his own self – a self that is perpetually and permanently torn between ‘being’ (“to be”) and ‘non-being’ (“or not to be”). When seen in context of the Elizabethan theatre and stage history, this man-woman binary within Hamlet may be attributed to a common strategy of the age, wherein young adolescent males were recruited to play the parts of women as well as young male characters. These actors therefore were skilled in the art of impersonating the opposite sex and thus, perhaps, acquired a kind of feminised, gender-neutral body language out of necessity. The young prince of Denmark, it may be assumed, would be played on numerous occasions by such an actor. The feminisation of the role on stage, however, stems from the nuances of female ‘negatives’ of the text itself. The lack of motivation in the prince to take action, the reluctance to enforce vengeance, the hesitance to perform an act that an Othello or a Macbeth would have performed without any scruple, the utter incoherence of his mind which finds expression in his speeches as well as his misogynistic relationship with Gertrude and Ophelia in particular, point towards a man who is not comfortable with his own identity as a dutiful son, potential heir and a faithful lover. Hamlet’s justification for inaction is not merely the philosophical debate between right and wrong, but also his inability to perform. This aspect of functionality and performance, therefore, becomes the bane of Hamlet’s existence – his “sins” to be “remember’d”. (Shakespeare 278) His inability to perform the expected gender role of a prince, a man and a son foreshadows his tragic end. He is forever in between a man and a woman, and thus, a willing prey to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Shakespeare 278). In fact, interestingly, all the responsibilities feared, abhorred or denied by Hamlet at various points of time within the play are definite markers of traditionally defined “manhood”. By declining to exact revenge or act on his love for Ophelia or destroying himself with self-inflicted abuse and pain, Hamlet implicitly and subconsciously tries to escape the duties imposed upon him by the codes of men and masculinity. Thus, a deconstructive feminist reading positively identifies in his actions and words the hidden agenda of escapism and a process of ongoing de-masculinisation. Shifting, changing, fluid gender transformations through impersonation, cross-dressing and such similar devices are a common trope in Shakespeare. One may cite the illustrious examples of Viola in Twelfth Night, Rosalind in AsYou Like It among others. The assumption of cross-gender roles occurs, in a much more complicated manner, in Hamlet as well. However, while the shifting of gender roles has strengthened the female characters in Shakespeare, the woman within Hamlet weakens him. Instead of a deliberate, overt and physical transformation, Hamlets feminisation is psychic and rooted in his frequent outbursts of hysteria, anxiety and hallucinations (notably, evident in his interchanges with the Kings ghost) as well as his desperate attempt to elude the responsibilities of "manhood" by assuming the role of a mad man (which, in the contemporary tradition signified, a damaged, deformed mind - and thus rendering the individual somewhat less of a man). His inability to accept the woman within himself seals Hamlet’s tragic fate. Ophelia had flirtatiously commented during her exchange with Hamlet at the opening of ‘The Mousetrap’, “You are naught, you are naught.” (Ham. III.II.143) Nothingness, in every sense of the word, pervades Hamlet’s actions and his self-characterizations, and ‘nothingness’, therefore, must be his ultimate end. References: Shakespeare, William. The Arden Shakespeare: Hamlet. Surrey: Thomas Nelson & Sons. 1997. Print. Read More