Janet Adelmans Hamlet Essay -- Essays on Shakespeare Hamlet

Janet Adelmans Hamlet Janet Alderman in her essay Man and Wife Is One Flesh Hamlet and the opposition with the Maternal Body embraces the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud and Lacan in order to break out the quadruple-angled relationship of the Hamlet monarchy. Focusing primarily on the relationship amidst Gertrude and her son, Hamlet, Alderman attempts to recast the drama as a charged portrait of Oedipal disillusion and Lacanian familiar-abnegation. Appropriately, familiarity provides the impetus for Aldermans argument toying with sex roles and the power of sex over family dynamics and identity, she craftily reveals Hamlet to be a sons affair for his obtains purity, a covetous attempt to regain a sense of sexual normalcy. Aldermans casts Gertrude as a type of catch-all, garden-of-Eden, original-sin embodiment, who initiates the fall of the paternal and recreates the motherly trunk as an enclosed garden newly breached (Adelman 263). Adelman frequently refers to Hamlet senior and Claudius as collapsing into a single paternal figure both disturb and fall prey to Gertrudes sexuality. Hamlet functions in Aldermans analysis as the reformist fighting for his mothers benign maternal presence (278) and the conqueror repressing his mothers sexual appetite, her sexualized maternal body (271). Adelmans thesis, the quintessence of her study, seems to inhabit these lines Hamlet thus redefines the sons positions between two fathers by relocating it in relation to an indiscriminately sexual maternal body that threatens to annihilate the distinction between the fathers and hence problematizes the sons paternal credit and . . . conflating the beloved wit... ...Gertrude, as does the incestuous Claudius thus, Hamlet places his identity with his mother. Ultimately, Hamlet seeks non to avenge the death of his father, but to save his mother from her own detrimental sexuality, and by extension his own self-destruction. Of course, Adelman prescribes an existe ntial reason to Hamlets need to economy his mother Hamlet needs to recover the fantasized presence of the asexual mother of childhood (277). Hamlet needs to separate his mother from all sexuality in order to reap the stability of her selfhood for his own. After refusing to sleep with Claudius, Gertrude restores herself in her sons eyes to the status of an internal good mother (279). Hamlet, now, by rely her, can begin to trust in himself and in his own cleverness for action he can rebuild the masculine identity miscarry by her contamination (279).