Avenging his father or saving his mother?

• Adulterating female

  • Hamlet in effect rewrites the story of Cain and Abel as the story of Adam and Eve, relocating masculine identity in the presence of an adulterating female.
  • This rewriting accounts for Gertrude's behaviour
  • She is kept ambiguously innocent as a character, but in the deep structure of the play she plays the role of Eve: her body is the garden in which her husband dies, her sexuality the poisonous weeds that kills Old Hamlet and poison the world - and the self - for her son..
  • From Janet Adelman's 'Man and Wife is One Flesh'
• Old Hamlet

  • Old Hamlet is unavailable to him through his death and the complex vulnerability that his death dominates
  • His father cannot protect him and his absence leaves Hamlet in the domain of the engulfing mother, awakening all the fears incident to the primary mother-child bond - the loss of the father turns out to mean the psychic domination of the mother
  • In the end, it is the Spector of his mother, not his uncle-father, who paralyses his will
  • From Janet Adelman's 'Man and Wife is One Flesh'
• Shift of blame

  • The shift of agency from male to female is characteristic of the fantasy structure of Hamlet
  • The ghost sets prime business of the play killing Claudius - he tells Hamlet to leave his mother alone, "Beset only by the thorns of conscience"
  • Gertrude rather than Claudius is to blame and Hamlet's fundamental task shifts; simple revenge is no longer the issue. Despite his ostensible agenda for revenge, the main psychological task that Hamlet seems to set himself is not to avenge his father's death, but to remake his mother
  • From Janet Adelman's 'Man and Wife is One Flesh'
• Virgin mother

  • Hamlet wanted to remake Gertrude as the Virgin Mother who could guarantee his father's purity, and his own, repairing the boundaries of of his selfhood
  • Throughout the play the covert drama of reformation vies for priority with the overt drama of revenge, in fact displacing it both from what we see of Hamlet's consciousness and from centre stage of the play -when Hamlet accuses himself of lack of purpose and failing to remember his fathers business of revenge he may be in part right
  • From Janet Adelman's 'Man and Wife is One Flesh'
• Hamlet's motivation

  • Hamlet seems to be more motivated by his mother than father
  • When he describes Claudius to Horatio as "he that hath kill'd my king and whor'd my mother" the second phrase clearly holding more emotional value than the first
  • He aims to avenge his mother's death not just his fathers
  • From Janet Adelman's 'Man and Wife is One Flesh'
• The shift

  • Hamlet goes from avenging his father to saving his mother which accounts for certain peculiarities in the play
  • E.g. the murderer is given little attention in the device ostensibly designed to catch his conscience and why the confrontation between Hamlet and his mother seems more central than any interaction between Claudius and Hamlet
  • From Janet Adelman's 'Man and Wife is One Flesh'
• The Murder of Gonzago

  • The play within a play is not what Hamlet tells us it is for (to catch Claudius's conscience), but to do so to the queen
  • "A second time I kill my husband dead / When second husband kisses me in bed
  • From Janet Adelman's 'Man and Wife is One Flesh'
• Confronting Gertrude

  • Hamlet trying to catch her conscience follows his unexpected meeting with Claudius - this scene feels more like an interruption than having any fundamental purpose
  • Hamlet having the opportunity to kill Claudius should be the apex of the play but it just becomes an interlude that must be gotten over before the real business can be attended to
  • From Janet Adelman's 'Man and Wife is One Flesh'