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Hamlet in speaking with the ghost of his father has been presented with a vision of reality that is at odds with his former perception of reality. Therefore, when he descends from the tower after communing with this unearthly spirit, he has some psychological adjustments to make. Because he has just been hit with a powerful view of corruption at the very heart of his world, he is thrown off balance emotionally. He is thrown from the realm of innocence (relatively speaking) to the realm of experience (in an absolutist sense), so quickly that his vision of corruption takes over his emotional life completely. In his extreme state, he sees everything around him as corrupt, including, and even particularly, those who are hardly more than victims of the corruption at the heart of the system. And those most victimized in this male-dominated, hierarchical, repressive system are the women. However, because Hamlet views all life as corrupt, the most direct source of life, woman, is the source of the corruption. He projects this unbalanced, reactionary attitude onto both Gertrude and Ophelia, and his admonition to Ophelia to not become a "breeder of sinners" is particularly revealing. As for Gertrude, his conflict is more intense because while he must love his mother, he is simultaneously repulsed by her: a classic love-hate relationship that explains his words and actions in the closet scene when he switches from love to excoriation in the blink of an eye. Of course, he is still being haunted by his vision, the ghost of his father that appears to him in his mother's bedroom as a reminder of his intensely conflicted condition. So the Oedipal conflict is unavoidable here, although not so much in the Freudian sense as in the sense of Oedipus himself, whose identification of the corruption within himself extended to his mother-wife, or vice versa. So Hamlet's vision of corruption extends to himself and, by identification, through himself to his mother, or through his mother to him. Now I'm confusing myself. At any rate, he projects his self-hatred onto his mother and other women because he identifies most closely with them as victims of the system. And it's kind of a case of identifying with the oppressor before he's able to adjust to a more balanced attitude. I hope all this makes some sense. I'm still trying to work all this Oedipal stuff out, too.Posted by Mak on April 14, 1997 at 08:05:51
In Reply to "does anyone have information on the relationship between hamlet and gertrude?" posted by Charlie Gordon on April 09, 1997 at 15:14:20
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