Janet Adelmans Hamlet Essay -- Essays on Shakespeare Hamlet

Janet Adelman's Hamlet    Janet Alderman in her essay "'Man and Wife Is One Flesh':   Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body" 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 drama as a charged portrait of Oedipal disillusionment and Lacanian sexual-abnegation.   Appropriately, sexuality provides the impetus for Alderman's argument; toying with sex roles and the power of sexuality over family dynamics and identity, she craftily reveals Hamlet to be a son's battle for his mother's purity, a covetous attempt to regain a sense of sexual normalcy.   Alderman's 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 "body as an enclosed garden newly breached" (Adelman 263).   Adelman frequently refers to Hamlet Sr. and Claudius as "collapsing" into a single paternal figure; both incite and fall prey to Gertrude's sexuality.   Hamlet functions in Alderman's analysis as the crusader fighting for his mother's "benign maternal presence" (278) and the conqueror repressing his mother's sexual appetite, her "sexualized maternal body" (271).      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Adelman's thesis, the quintessence of her study, seems to inhabit these lines:    Hamlet thus redefines the son's positions between two father's by relocating it in  Ã‚   relation to an indiscriminately sexual maternal body that threatens to annihilate the  Ã‚   distinction between the fathers and hence problematizes the son's paternal  Ã‚  Ã‚   identification;   [and] . . . conflat[ing] the beloved wit... ...Gertrude, as does the incestuous Claudius; thus, Hamlet places his identity with his mother.   Ultimately, Hamlet seeks not to avenge the death of his father, but to save his mother from her own destructive sexuality, and by extension his own self-destruction.   Of course, Adelman prescribes an existential reason to Hamlet's 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 son's eyes to the status of "an internal good mother" (279).   Hamlet, now, by "trusting her, can begin to trust in himself and in his own capacity for   action; he can rebuild the masculine identity spoiled by her contamination" (279).