The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View

Abstract

Who's there? Bernardo's anxious shout, which begins Shakespeare's most problematic play, raises fundamental question of Hamlet's identity. Various male authority figures advance simple answers. For Ghost, Hamlet is a dutiful son who should sweep to his revenge and forget about his mother. For Claudius, Hamlet is a possible rebel who should be either made tractable or banished and killed. For Polonius, Hamlet is heir gone mad through frustrated love of Ophelia, whom Polonius has denied him partly for reasons of state. But for Hamlet, roles of dutiful son, ambitious rebel, or mad lovesick heir are just that: roles, to be played for others but not felt for himself. The Who remains unsettled within and without, the heart of my mystery (3.2.351).1 The mixed and contradictory expectations of these father figures reflect their own divided image of dutiful reason and bestial lust. At times their power seems to be defined by their ability to order women and children around. Hamlet sees Gertrude give way to Claudius, Ophelia give way to Polonius, and himself at last yield to Ghost. But Hamlet also sees duplicity and falseness in all fathers, except perhaps his own, and even there his famous delay may well indicate unconscious perception, rather than unconscious guilt ascribed to him by a strict Freudian interpretation. Hamlet resists his father's commands to obey. Despite his illusory idealization of senior Hamlet as pure and angelic, he senses Ghost's complicity in paternal double-speak that bends Gertrude and Ophelia, indeed bends feelings and body itself, to