blog




  • Essay / The tragedy of sexuality in Hamlet

    The driving force of Hamlet's experience lies in his ultimate identification with his father in death and the reality of God, including the implicit and favorable judgment supposed to have been granted to the Hamlet's father, in contrast to his mother's vile life with Claudius:Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay O, that this too solid flesh would melt, thaw and dissolve into dew! Or that the Lord had not fixed his canon '' against self-slaughter! O God! God ! How boring, bland, flat and useless! It seems to me that all the uses in this world! Ah, fie! It is a weedless, seed-growing garden: the gross and gross things in nature simply possess it. Let's get there! But two months dead! And so, when Horatio finally announces the wonderful news of his father's visit, the terms in which Hamlet expresses his impatience with Horatio to talk about it are all in keeping with this fundamental motivating inspiration. motivating inspiration: “For God’s sake, let me hear” (1.11.195). However, the Ghost's tale results in a dramatic reorientation of Hamlet's point of view. For from the moment the Ghost begins to reveal himself during the interview, it is established to begin with that the judgment on Hamlet's father was not favorable as Hamlet supposed, which greatly complicates and intensifies the distressed pity that Hamlet already feels following the loss of his son. father in death: Thus was I, asleep, by the hand of a brother, Of ​​life, of the crown, of the queen, immediately dispatched: Cut even in the flowers of my sin, Headless, disappointed, without surveillance: No account taken, but sent to my accountWith all my imperfections on my head.O, horrible! Oh horrible! Very horrible! If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not: (1.5.74-83) The root cause of the murder of Hamlet's father is the suggestion of a horrible inhumanity represented by a murder whose significance is that it was “cut off” in the flowers of his sin. “And that phrase is sort of strange.” Here we get a violent juxtaposition of “sin” with the positive qualities evoked for us by the term “flowers.” But the meaning of this sentence is paradoxical and quite terrible. For the Elizabethans, “nature” almost always implied the sexual correlative. Here, the expression of recognition of a power of judgment reflects the sexual optimism of the Elizabethans. The expression seems to express the tragic confusion of Hamlet's aesthetic sense. But metaphysical events are now revealed to be ultimately punishable in eternity. The “Ghost” speaks at this point of his “love” as being “of that dignity / that it went hand in hand even with the vow / that I made.” with her in marriage,” which seems to suggest a healthy “love.” But in fact, the Ghost here refers to his fidelity: fidelity on his part does not imply the solidity of the relationship; and here we learn that there has been Gertrude's adultery with Claudius, implying that a relationship between Gertrude and the elder Hamlet is no longer strong. But, for Calvin, as for Luther, neither fidelity nor marriage can ever ensure the solidity of the sexual relationship; or as Luther said: “nothing can cure the libido, not even marriage.” And the sudden revelation of the Ghost indeed captures all that is most disturbing about Protestant opinion, namely that such a meaning for sexual love could be known with certainty unless a judgment in the other world. It seems that Hamlet treated the sexual problem as if it were a universal scourge. For the effect of this revelation on Hamlet, wewe assume, must make the fate of his father a universal incarnation of the tragedy of sexuality. Whatever the motivating force of Gertrude's adultery and murder, it is in reality an embodiment of the deepest inhumanity. The significance of such desire is to emphasize desire in all love, involving murder which is itself a violent indictment for sexual violation of love, leading to the eternal punishment of Hamlet's father . In this indictment we find that a darker Lutheran view is now brought into tension with another view which is nevertheless reserved, more lenient and typically Elizabethan, according to which sexual love is innocent and a normal indulgence of nature which must be atoned for and settled through customs. religious rites: Cut even in the flowers of my sin. Without accommodation, disappointed, without supervision: No report was made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head, O horrible! Oh horrible! The most horrible! This is a complex implication of a mysterious psychotic disorder, and we find Hamlet's later hysterical preoccupation with sexuality. This is how Hamlet's original feeling of moral and emotional indignation against his father is finally experienced. Such hysteria should not be confused with the "hysteria" over his mother's sexuality manifested in the first soliloquy which has been exaggerated and, I believe, in any case, misinterpreted. “Hysteria” expresses that there is a gap between his mother's desire for Claudius and the innocent intensity of her sexual love for Hamlet's father. This distinction is not simply reinforced, it is tragically confounded by subsequent revelations about the sexual implications of her father's murder, and the outrage is arguably all the greater. The horror of punishment in eternity calls for complete and immediate vengeance. Hamlet makes a tortured and tragic accusation against Gertrude in the last scene. Such an act which blurs the grace and the blush of modesty: He treats virtue as hypocrite: he removes the rose From the beautiful forehead of an innocent love, And places a bulb there: he makes a marriage. vowsAs false as the oaths of dicers. O, such an act As from the body of contraction tears away The very soul, and sweet religion does it (111, 4, 40-51). A tale of ruined love which could be the cause of Hamlet's complex accusation, presents the relationship between Hamlet's mother and father as well as the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet's behavior must therefore not be explained as a mysterious and fundamental disorder of sexuality, essentially unrelated to the murder: on the contrary, it is precisely Hamlet's disposition in the scene to consider the nature of this relationship strictly in relation to the absolute, sexual implications of murder, particularly its implications on the innocence of love. Hamlet assumes that all love is lust, viewed from the perspective of eternal judgment, as true for Hamlet and Ophelia as for his father and mother. It is not enough to give a full account of Hamlet's peculiar hysteria, which seems at last to emerge from all the paradoxical implications of love in murder. These bring into tragic conflict, alongside the absolute knowledge of love as lust, a persistent feeling of love's fundamental innocence. Hamlet's behavior in the convent scene is ultimately explained by the fact that he knew that he could not, from an eternal perspective, have loved Ophelia with the innocence he supposed. Knowledge itself is endowed with all the pain of a tragic discovery which conflicts with the more immediate knowledge he has made and still has. This is characterized in the play by the love between.