Janet Adelmans Hamlet Essay -- Essays on Shakespeare Hamlet

Janet Adelmans village Janet Alderman in her essay Man and Wife Is One Flesh critical point and the Confrontation with the Maternal organic structure embraces the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud and Lacan in order to reveal the quadruple-angled relationship of the hamlet monarchy. Focusing primarily on the relationship between Gertrude and her son, Hamlet, Alderman attempts to recast the gambol as a charged portrait of Oedipal disillusionment and Lacanian sexual-abnegation. Appropriately, sexuality provides the nervous impulse for Aldermans argument toying with sex roles and the power of sexuality over family dynamics and identity, she craftily reveals Hamlet to be a sons battle for his mothers purity, a green-eyed 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 maternal automobile trunk as an wrap garden newly breached (Adelma n 263). Adelman frequently refers to Hamlet Sr. and Claudius as collapsing into a single paternal figure both incite and fall aim to Gertrudes sexuality. Hamlet functions in Aldermans analysis as the crusader fighting for his mothers gracious 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 excrete the distinction between the fathers and hence problematizes the sons paternal identification and . . . conflating the beloved wit... ...Gertrude, as does the incestuous Claudius thus, Hamlet places his identity with his mother. Ultimately, Hamlet seeks not to avenge the expiration of his father, but to save his mother from her own destructive sexuality, and by character reference his o wn self-destruction. Of course, Adelman prescribes an existential reason to Hamlets need to rescue 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 stance of an internal good mother (279). Hamlet, now, by trusting her, can dumbfound to trust in himself and in his own capacity for action he can rebuild the masculine identity spoiled by her befoulment (279).