Affirmation of the Gendered Stereotypes in William Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Gender and Feminist Critique

Affirmation of the Gendered Stereotypes in William Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Gender and Feminist Critique

                                                                         -Rajan Gautam

       This essay reads William Shakespeare's Hamlet  taking the basic insights from the Gender and Feminist Criticism which hold a view that "patriarchal ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature" (Abrams, 89), and that literary texts use the recurrent images and stereotypes that need to be identified and analyzed so as to understand the ideology of the time. Shakespeare's Hamlet also abounds with these stereotypes and images. My contention is that Shakespeare subscribes to the sexism of the age by affirming the gender binaries: presenting the male characters as strong, rational and independent of females and the female counterparts as weak, emotional and subservient to males. He uses the images of sickness, disease, rotten flesh and poison in relation to the female characters and female subjectivity, and also gives more room for the male characters and less for the female ones to speak and express themselves.   

            In the play, a close association has been maintained between a 'man' and 'strength', a popular belief that  men are both emotionally and physically strong. For instance, Claudius asks Hamlet not to mourn for his father's death for long because this is "unmanly" (Shakespeare I.1, 94). He is suggesting him to practice stoicism and self-restraints which are the masculine traits. He associates emotion with femininity when he mentions that the Prince's attitude at the moment is not appropriate for the male kind thus: "A will most incorrect to heaven,/ a heart unfortified, a mind impatient" (I.1.95-96). The king is making the prince wary of the emotions as they debilitate the mainly traits in him. Similarly, Laertes associates the weakness of shedding tears  over one's pain and sorrow with women and by implication to weakness. For example, when he hears the news of his father's and sister's death, he says: "Let shame say what it will. [Weeps] When these are gone,/ The woman will be out (IV.7. 188-189). These lines show the discourse of  the time: 'men should not cry'. Even though he breaks into tears at the moment because of the heavy blow of losing his dear father and sister in a very short span of time, he makes a resolution to get rid of this emotion and to perform his duty towards his father and his sister by avenging their deaths.  The same discourse of  men are strong is used by the male members in the play to take  almost all decisions about the women's lives without ever consulting them. Whenever the women have taken their decisions, they have been criticised and even stigmatized.  Hamlet's objection to Gertrude's re-marriage with Claudius is an instance of it. He finds her marriage disgraceful. He questions the judgement of a mature queen thus: "Why, she would hand on him/ As if increase of appetite had grown/ By what it fed on; and yet within a month--" (I.2, 144-146). Hamlet's use of "appetite' in relation to his mother's decision to marry Claudius relates to his view of women as weak creatures.  Polonius aligns himself with Hamlet in this view when he compares Ophelia to a "woodcock" (I.3, 115) that cannot protect itself  because she is a girl and thus weak.  

            Female characters are presented as negative stereotypes and this is achieved through the extensive use of images. In Act II, Scene 2, while regretting his delay in avenging his father's murder, Hamlet compares this inaction with the actions of a whore--a woman. He says, rather than acting promptly in defence of his dead father's honour, he is going around "like a whore, unpack my pack with words,/ and fall a-cursing like a very drab" (72-73). Here, he associates the negative attributes such as cowardice and betrayal with women. The negative characterization persists in his description of women in different episodes of the play. For instance, in his conversation with Polonius, Hamlet compares female body to a dead and putrefying flesh and pregnancy to rotten meat infested with grubs: "the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a/ good kissing carrion" (181-182). He further suggests Polonius not to allow his daughter Ophelia to walk openly outdoors lest she should be pregnant: "Let her not walk in the sun. Conception is a blessing, but/as your daughter may conceive--friend, look to't" (II.2. 184-185). By using the images of 'rotten' flesh, he is implicating the rotten character of Ophelia although he says all these things in his stage of madness that the audience know is feigned.

            The play has given less room for the female characters to speak and express themselves. Even when they speak, their voices are silenced. By assigning most of the vocal dialogs to either Hamlet or other major male characters, Shakespeare allies himself with the sexism of the time. Hamlet's dialogs are vocal and powerful where as Ophelia's are quieter and less powerful. In fact, Ophelia's most dialogs either mirror the interlocutors by naming their qualities as in, "You are as good as a chorus, my lord" (III.2, 235) or express her acquiescence, obeisance and obedience as in "So please you my lord.../ I do not know, my lord, what should I think/....I shall obey, my lord" I.4, 104, 136). Juxtaposed against her soft and repressed voices are Hamlet's noisy and vocal soliloquies that help him to discover his self and verbalise his feelings as in his first soliloquy:

                        O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

                        Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,

                        Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

                        His canon against self-slaughter. Oh God! God!

                        How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

                        Seem to me all the used of this world! (I.2, 129-135)

This soliloquy shows what Hamlet is thinking about: suicide. And when we read the rest of the lines, we come to know the reason for his melancholy and his desire to commit suicide. However, Ophelia soliloquizes only once in the play and that comes as her comment on the changed nature of Hamlet's mind after the nunnery scene: "O, what a noble mind is here o,erthrown!.../ And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,.../T'have seen what I have seen, see what I see" (III.1, 150-161). Soliloquies help Hamlet, a masculine hero of the play, to explain himself, justify, find faults with himself, insists on himself and struggles to be true to himself. Unlike Hamlet, she cannot explain herself; rather she find herself explained by others and faulted by others. By limiting Ophelia to one soliloquy, and not giving any to Gertrude, Shakespeare has done injustice to these female characters. Ophelia's dialogs are staccato, her responses are broken, and her utterances are full of fear where as Hamlet can communicate freely. Shakespeare renders some voice to Ophelia in her song in which she presents the story of an unfaithful lover who "Let in the maid that out a maid/ Never departed more" (IV.5, 54-55. But this act of giving voice itself is ironical in that she is already mad and the credibility of  a mad person's points is hardly established.      

            To sum up, by presenting the gender binaries and the gender stereotypes, and also by giving less room for the female characters to speak and express themselves, Shakespeare,  in Hamlet, affirms the sexism of the contemporary time.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. Glossary of Literary Terms. US: Heinle & Heinle, 1997.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Canada: Oxford University Press, 2011.