Thursday, May 21, 2015

Does Hamlet display the Oedipus complex?

Hamlet's character is a very complex one and many would say that he does, indeed, display characteristics of the Oedipus complex, when Hamlet is analyzed from within the critical framework of psychoanalytic literary criticism. Bear in mind, though, that many literary analysts disagree with applying Freudian psychoanalytical principles to literature written before Freud's psycho-sexual theories were developed and known of. 


From Hamlet's first appearance and his soliloquy in Act 1.2, Hamlet laments the marriage of his mother to his uncle.  He tells us in his soliloquy in this scene that he's upset because his mother remarried so soon after his father's death and that she married her husband's brother. We can understand this when we know that, in the eyes of the Church, a woman married a man's family as well as the individual, therefore, Claudius was her brother in that sense, hence the reference to "incestuous sheets." 


Even Gertrude recognizes at least some of the source of Hamlet's unhappiness, when in Act 2.2, she says she has no doubt the source is her "o'er hasty marriage."  In Act 3, sc. 4, when Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her chamber after the play, the emotion he's been bottling up explodes. 


Hamlet rants at this mother for her marriage to Claudius.  He questions how could she stand to let him touch her.  He asks her what she sees in Claudius.  This exchange seems to show Hamlet just a little too emotional over his his mother simply remarrying unless we remember that their religion damns her to eternal hell for marrying her husband's brother; this would quite reasonably incense Hamlet. 


Some read into this scene the psycho-sexual lustful love of a youth for his mother, but there is nothing textually definitive to the words spoken by Hamlet; a psychoanalytic interpretation depends solely upon the literary theory approach applied.  Consider also the fact that he has discovered that his father's ghost correctly told him his uncle killed his father and the fact that he has just killed Polonius, and it is seen that it is normal that he would be emotional.

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