UNIVERZITET U BEOGRADU FILOLOKI FAKULTET - ODSEK ZA ANGLISTIKU

FEMALE CHARACTERS IN ''HAMLET'' Seminarski rad iz Engleske knjievnosti:specijalni kurs

28. 01. 2004 u Beogradu

Suzana Todorovi br. indeksa 1988/586 apsolvent Grupe za engleski jezik i knjievnost

Mentor: dr Vladislava Gordi

Contents: 1) Introduction 2) Gertrude 3) Ophelia 4) Hamlet and Gertrude 5) Hamlet and Ophelia

Introduction Shakespeares's female characters were dramatic fictions produced by a male playwright for performance by male actors, but they still appealed to the tastes of female playgoers in his own time, and they have played important roles ever since in shaping our understandings of women's roles in life. Although female characters in Shakespeare's plays cannot be seen as simple reproductions of actual women in Shakesperare's world, they were shaped by the conventions of dramatic genres of the time, by the material conditions of Shakespeare's theatre, and by the tastes of the audience. There are not many female characters in Shakespeare's tragedies, but they all display reserved behavior and express themselves rather verbally than physically. As much as it is due to the functioning of the play, it also reveals Shakespeare's uncertainty over the ability of young boys to portray the full depth of female characters. Likewise, Hamlet is not abundant in female characters, but the two characters, Gertrude and Ophelia, play very important roles in the plot: Getrude's over-hasty marriage with Claudius is very important for Hamlet's state of mind and contributes to his disappointment in women in general, as Ophelia's madness and tragic death lead to the climax of the play and the final tragedy. Gertrude Being one of the central characters in the play, it is striking how little we know about Gertrude; we don't even know her age. As a mother of a man of thirty, Gertrude has to be probably over forty-five. But that would make her relationship with Claudius quite incredible, plus the boys from the acting companies could hardly present the ripe womanhood and its charm. So she must still be young. Shakespeare gives us in Gertrude the woman who does not mature, who clings to her youth and all that belongs to it. She is a pretty, sensual woman, refusing to grow old. Gertrude has a passive part in the play's action. She moves throughout in Claudius' shadow, we practically never see her apart from

him, and it is plain that she does little except echo his wishes, and that she does not have any political ambitions of her own. For the ghost, as for Hamlet, her chief crime is her uncontrolled sexuality; that is the object of their moral revulsion, a revulsion as intense as anything directed toward the murderer Claudius. Although she is indirectly accused of adultery and incest, the extent of her involvement in the murder of her first husband is left unclear, but the fact is that she remarried within a month of her first husband's death. She knows that in the eyes of the world it was over-hasty, but there is no hint of any remorse for the past. She is a woman more muddled than actively wicked; even her famous sensuality is less apparent than her conflicted solicitude both for her new husband and for her son. At first she seems completely unaware of Hamlet's suffering and her own part in that, but later she proves capable of a certain guilty insight into Hamlet's soul (''I doubt it is no other but the main, / his father's death and our o'er hasty marriage''). When she follows Hamlet's instructions in reporting his madness to Claudius, she seems to enact every son's scenario for the good mother, choosing his interests over her husband's. But she may of course believe that he is mad and think that she is reporting accurately to her husband; certainly her courageous defense of her husband in their next appearance together suggests that she has not wholly adopted Hamlet's view of Claudius. But she does not tell Claudius everything, which opens a rift between them. Here, as elsewhere, the text leaves crucial aspects of her action and motivation open. Even her death is not quite her own to define. She knows that Claudius has prepared the cup for Hamlet, and she shows unusual determination in disobeying Claudius's command not to drink it. Her act of disobedience and autonomous will lead her to her death. But even here she does not speak clearly; her character remains relatively closed to us. Ophelia Ophelia is the other main female character in the play, a young and inexperienced girl with the passive virtues gentleness and self-effacing submission. She is a soft, yielding creature, with no power of resistance; a loving soul, but without the passion which gives strength.

Motherless and completely circumscribed by the men around her, Ophelia has been shaped to conform to external demands, to reflect others' desires. Her name deriving from the Greek word for help, she appears condemned to martyrdom on the altar of male fantasies and priorities. The young woman is used, abused, confused utterly manipulated by the men in her life: father, lover, brother, king. Scoffed at, ignored, suspected, disbelieved, commanded to distrust her own feelings, thoughts and desires, Ophelia is fragmented by contradictory messages. Seeming to absorb the general absence of belief in her own intelligence, virtue and autonomy, Ophelia is left with an identity open to external suggestion; that is, she appears to lack clear psychic boundaries. Both brother and father smother Ophelia in an incestuous stranglehold, each the self-appointed tutor of her moral, intellectual, even psychological development. To Laertes, Ophelia figures as a chaste goddess whom he can place on a pedestal. Until the last, Laertes sees Ophelia only as his ''rose of May'', an aesthetic object to whose specific personal torment he can remain blind. Whereas Ophelia is an angel to Laertes, she is asset to Polonius, a commodity to be disposed of, ideally at the greatest profit to himself. In the third scene of the play, in which Ophelia first appears, Ophelia has to submit to a coarsely-worded sermon from her father, who assures her that the Prince's intentions are dishonourable, and that she must break off all communication with him. Ophelia is spirited enough, but she promises to obey her father. (There is some irony in the fact that although both Laertes and his father assume that the Prince cannot marry Ophelia, Gertrude would have welcomed the match, and there is nothing to suggest that Claudius would have disapproved.) Warning her that should she act for herself she will tender him a fool, Polonius forbids her autonomy of desire, choice, action, even thought. Thus when Ophelia does appear to engage in autonomous action, denying Hamlet a lover's access and returning his letters, Hamlet, feeling that she betrayed him, becomes violently abusive toward her. Ironically, of course, Ophelia behaves not autonomously at all but obediently. Through her filial subservience, Ophelia proves herself the very essence of the honest woman, from a patriarchal perspective (and from Hamlet's perspective, because in Hamlet's universe, for a woman to be honest means that she be both chaste and loyal) one who will dutifully obey first father, then husband.

By parting her from him they have brought the guilt for his behaviour on her, but that is not enough. Ophelia's love is next exploited by Claudius and her father in their attempt to find out the real cause of Hamlet's madness. Polonius eagerly delivers his dutiful daughter up to the Prince, in order to prove his loyalty to Claudius, and perhaps to elevate his social status via a royal union. It is not neccessary to assume that Hamlet overhears Polonius's plot to 'loose' his daughter to him. Ophelia is not a good actress, and her pretence that she is reading a devotional book when she is obviously lying in wait for him, and her trite couplet which implies that Hamlet has broken with her, are enough to arouse his suspicion. He suspects that Ophelia is a decoy; he tests her by asking where her father is, and, when she lies, he assumes she is on the side of the enemy, he says perhaps the cruellest thing he could have ever said to her, a denial that he ever did love her, which is like a blow in her face. Conflicting messages, mostly negative, start to whirl around in Ophelia's mind. Who and what should Ophelia believe? And then comes the killing of her father by the man she loves which acts as the immediate trigger of her madness. Madness becomes Ophelia's last resort, her unconscious revolt. Indeed, what else is left for her to do? Madness releases Ophelia from the enforced repressions of obedience, patience, liberates her from the prescribed roles of daughter, sister, lover, subject. Having found an irrational voice, the mad Ophelia now becomes the one who undermines authority, speaking ambiguously, through pun, allusion, riddle, even veiled threat. Through her madness, Ophelia finally establishes a real dialogue with herself but the listeners, who really listen to her for the first time, are no longer necessary. She needs no reply. She has discovered her own voice, her inner self. Ophelia is the victim of circumstances: called upon like Hamlet to play an impossible part, and succumbing like Hamlet. Hamlet and Gertrude As a child Hamlet had experienced the warmest affection for his mother. Gertrude too, showed passionate fondness for her son. It is indicated in many places in the play, Claudius says, for instance: 'The Queen his mother lives almost by his looks'.

But subsequent events changed all that, at least on the part of Hamlet. She has been false to her husband and to herself, but she has also been false to him, to his faith in her, she has betrayed him for her lover and with faith in his mother's virtue, his faith in all womanhood has vanished. From Hamlet's point of view his mother has become an adulteress and he wants a vengeance, but in his mother's eyes he is simply unreasonable and unkind. His moral indictment when he launches it, bewilders her. What can she have done to warrant such tremendous outburst? And she has no idea of the torment and feeling within him. For long she does not even admit that Hamlet is mad; she never uses the word about him until, in her closet, he sees the thing she cannot see. But from that moment on, she seems tenderer and more protective over her son, although she does not desert husband althogether. In her last moment, though, her thoughts seem to be all for Hamlet; she cannot spare Claudius even the attention it would take to blame him. Muddled, fallible, fully human, she seems ultimately to make the choice that Hamlet would have her make, but stricken himself, he has no kinder farewell for her than a 'Wretched queen, adieu'. Hamlet and Ophelia The exact nature of Hamlet's feelings for Ophelia are left ambiguous. The simplest interpretation is that he loved her deeply before his mother's re-marriage, that he was compelled to give up thoughts of love when he was charged with the duty of avenging his father, and that he ceased to love her when he thought she had deserted and betrayed him. But there are things in the play which are difficult to fit in with this interpretation. Ophelia's relations with Hamlet are very special. In her swift transition from childhood to the rough world of the elder she tries to preserve vitality and humour. Her love is very chaste and at the same time rapturous and physical. Similar are Hamlet's feelings, although the precise nature of his original feeling for Ophelia is a little obscure. We may assume that at least in part it was composed of a normal love for a prospective bride. Ophelia's naive piety, her obedient resignation and her unreflecting simplicity sharply contrast with the Queen's character.

When Hamlet gets tormented by the conduct of his mother and the implications made by the ghost, Hamlet turns to Ophelia, the woman he thought loved him, in the desperate hope of finding some comfort and help in her company, but she has nothing for him. She does not in the least understand Hamlet's grief over his mother's conduct. She observes his depression without divining its cause and, in spite of her compassion for his morbid state, she consents without demur to decoy him into talking with her, while her father and the King spy upon their meeting. She has had to choose between her family and her lover and she has not chosen him. Acting under her father's orders, she has repelled Hamlet's visits and letters, and he thinks she has turned against him because the world has. Disillusionised with her as with her mother, Hamlet vents on Ophelia his disgust with the whole sex. All womanhood is ''frail'' in his eyes. Hamlet's love was mingled with suspicion and resentment, and he was haunted by the horrible idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother. Many careers have been made debating the extent of Hamlet and Ophelia's actual sexual relations, with the majority opinion seeming to side with Ophelia's virginity, but it is not crucial. What is crucial is that Hamlet is emotionally Ophelia's lover, the object of her very real, though circumvented, sexual desire: He had seduced her into giving herself to him completely (whether physically or not), then subsequeantly abandoned her, although his use of Ophelia as part of his strategy against Clauidus may be explained, but not excused, by his belief that she had failed him when he most needed her. Ophelia, meek and docile as she is, does not resent Hamlet's cruelty. She excuses it as a symptom of his madness, which she believes to be caused by her obedience to her father, and which she hopes her love may cure (for the Queen has hinted that she would approve of their marriage), but when he finally lets her know that it was not love for her that had sent him mad and when the man she loves kills the father she loves, her sanity cracks under the burden causing Ophelia's tragic death. In my opinion Hamlet loved Ophelia, but the heavy mission imposed on the prince tore the lovers apart. He had more important matters to attend to and love gradually faded away. There was no room for it in this world. Hamlet's dramatic cry: 'Get thee to a nunnery!' was addressed not to Ophelia alone, but also to those who were overhearing the two lovers. It was to confirm their impression of his alleged madness,

but for Hamlet and for Ophelia it meant that in the world where murder held sway there was no room for love.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, New York, 1997 H. Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare:Third Series, Hamlet, London, 1937 K. Muir, Shakespeare's ''Hamlet'', London, 1964 J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in ''Hamlet'', Cambridge, 1935 G. Dane, Reading Ophelia's Madness J. Adelman, Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body