Hamlet and the Oedipal Complex
Uploaded by uncleungie on Jul 17, 2006 |
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Hamlet and the Oedipal Complex
Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet provides an ideal case study of the Oedipal complex; Prince Hamlet’s confused emotions and mixed loyalties describe the psyche of one whose problems are rooted within his mother. Hamlet yearns to seek revenge on the killer of his mother’s husband and longs to fix his mother in the ways he believes she has faltered. All of his problems stem from her, and her situation as wife of Hamlet’s uncle.
The Oedipal complex which all men experience, the unconscious hostility to kill one’s father for the love of one’s mother, is a source or unrelenting confusion and angst to the subject. In Hamlet’s case, this unrest is peaked by the death of his father; his mother is now available in a way that was never before possible. While he doesn’t consciously have any desire for his mother, he subconsciously wishes to restrain her sexual instinct.
To a boy, his mother is immaculate, without blemish. Hamlet, however, sees his mother as a fraudulent traitor. By marrying his uncle, Hamlet thinks his mother has disgraced herself and him as well. He believes he is the product of two parents: his flawless father, and his mother, whom he has labeled a whore. The fact that both parents, not just the one of his choosing, produced him disgraces his name. Hamlet views his mother’s fall from grace as his own. Furthermore, without his father to protect him, he must relate much more closely to his reprehensible mother. As Janet Adelman deftly states in her Psychoanalytic criticism of the play:
Hamlet’s father has become unavailable to him, not only through the fact of his death but also through the complex vulnerability that his death demonstrates. This father cannot protect his son; and his disappearance in effect throws Hamlet into the domain of the engulfing mother, awakening all the fears incident to the primary mother-child bond. Here, as in Shakespeare’s later plays, the loss of the father turns out in fact to mean the psychic domination of the mother: in the end, it is the specter of his mother, not his uncle-father, who paralyzes his will.
Clearly, Hamlet’s obsession with his mother regulates all of his decisions, thoughts, and functions.
Hamlet, however, has a solution to his problem; he believes that by exacting revenge on his father’s murderer, he will simultaneously bring honor to his father and himself, and restore his mother’s faultlessness. If she were no longer having sexual relations with someone he deemed so low, she would retain her virginal status once again. Hamlet’s deepest desire is to have his mother as only his mother: not as his uncle’s wife, as a queen, or as a sexual being. He however, does have a bizarre obsession with his mother’s sexuality; he protects it from others yet doesn’t desire it himself. Hamlet has taken a more defensive niche of the Oedipal complex. He feels he must correct her promiscuousness in her name, not his father’s.
This shift – from avenging father to saving mother – accounts in part for certain peculiarities about this play as a revenge play; why, for example, the murderer is given so little attention in the device ostensibly designed to catch his conscience, why the confrontation of Hamlet and Gertrude in the closet scene seems much more central, much more vivid, than any confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius (Adelman 275).
Merely murdering Claudius isn’t the central theme of the play; Hamlet could have killed him in Act III, scene iii where he comes across Claudius praying. This wouldn’t suffice, because his mother would still be fouled by her sexuality.
Nor would avenging death regain the mother whom Hamlet needs: once his mother has been revealed as the fallen and possessed garden, she can be purified only by being separated from her sexuality (Adelman 276).
Hamlet fervently desires to correct his mother, and it is this obsession that best emphasizes the Oedipal complex found in the play. The theme is not revenge, but rather one of conflict between mother and son; the revenge of the father is merely used as backdrop. Hamlet endeavors to prove to his mother that she corrupts herself. He compares Claudius and King Hamlet through her marriage, but does not mention the possibility that Claudius killed her husband. He does not hint that he hates Claudius for this, only that he is angry with her for disgracing herself, and hence, him.
On the surface, it appears that Hamlet is a play concerning the loss of a heroic king, Claudius’s evil deeds, and the revenge of an angry son. However, closer inspection reveals that Shakespeare intended for the play to be the struggle between mother and son due to the Oedipal Complex.
Works Cited
Case Studies in Contemporary Criticisms – Hamlet: William Shakespeare.
Edited by Susanna L. Woffard; Buffird Books of St. Martin’s Press, New York.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Edward Hubler. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. |
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