『햄릿』 속 죽음의 장소를 통해 보는 죽음의 근대사

Abstract

Based on the history of the Western view of death and the division of the times analyzed by French historian Philippe Ariès, this paper examines how the modernization of Western attitudes toward death is reflected in the ways the main characters of Hamlet mourn the dead and in the places where its characters died. Hamlet is a work that metaphorizes the emotional confusion and trauma experienced by the British Renaissance people during the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era with the main characters’ complex inner emotions. With mourning as the core theme, this work allows a multi-layered observation of the process of modernization of Western attitudes toward death which was in line with the personalization of modern minds. In this paper, by examining the place where Hamlet's father and Ophelia died and the way they were mourned according to Ariès' chronological classification, the process of “the Tame Death” being transformed into “the Death of the Self” and into “The Death of the Others” again; that is, the process of modernization of medieval death. This paper aims to read it again as a typical representation of the evolving modern spirit, not the remnants of the medieval spirit left to modern people, by reading Hamlet's mourning as a characteristic of the process of modernization of death based on Ariès' analysis.