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Women in Hamlet and King Lear

ery. Ophelia, meanwhile, the quintessential tragic victim, is the focus of the sharpest tragic irony in Hamlet and a poignant emblem of the waste implied by tragic momentum because of her innocence. She is crushed by circumstance and a father who suppressed his daughter's will and natural intelligence.

Hamlet's apocalyptic theme touches Gertrude inasmuch as she can be characterized both as queen of a corrupt court--literally a poisoned one--that is doomed and as a wife and mother whose conjugal and maternal sense has been seduced out of her. She takes Claudius's part and offers small support when the new father criticizes Hamlet's mourning of his father as "unmanly grief" (I.ii). His entire experience of home and family disrupted, he sees his home as an unweeded garden and the marriage as incestuous sheets.

The intensity of Hamlet's grief and the sense of betrayal caused by the marriage makes it possible to interpret his relationship with Gertrude in Oedipal terms, and indeed Freud attributes Hamlet's delaying the revenge to "realization [of the consequences of] the repressed desires of his own childhood" (Freud 306). But the text of the closet scene per se focuses less on displaced Oedipal feelings than on the residue of filial piety and the confused feelings of disappointment and embarrassment at seeing one's mother in a state of cosmic sin. Even the Ghost does not blame Gertrude for the murder, telling Hamlet to "leave her to heaven / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge" (I.v). The Ghost explains that Gertrude was virtuous but helpless before the power of Claudius's lust. But Hamlet, with an almost winsome innocence, wants to fix what is wrong with Mama: "Confess yourself to heaven; / Repent what's past; avoid what is to come; And do not spread the compost on the weeds, To make them ranker" (III.iv.149-52).

Hamlet taunts Gertrude with the incestuous character of her new marriage, and it is difficult for her not to ad...

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Women in Hamlet and King Lear. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:19, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683081.html