Hamlet (Vol. 44) | Janet Adelman (essay date 1992)
Janet Adelman (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "Man and Wife Is One Flesh: Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body," in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, Routledge, 1992, pp. 11-37.
[In the following essay, Adelman explores the way in which Gertrude disrupts the familial and sexual relationships in Hamlet, and argues that her presence disables the son's relationship with the father.]
In Hamlet, the figure of the mother returns to Shakespeare's dramatic world, and her presence causes the collapse of the fragile compact that had allowed Shakespeare to explore familial and sexual relationships in the histories and romantic comedies without devastating conflict; this collapse is the point of origin of the great tragic period. The son's acting out of the role of the father, his need to make his own identity in relationship to his conception of his father—the...
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