JAMES GOFFIN EAS 2 VICTORIA HOWELL MARCH Literature & Desire. A Freudian reading of Shakespeare s Hamlet

Transcription

1 JAMES GOFFIN EAS 2 VICTORIA HOWELL MARCH 1999 Literature & Desire A Freudian reading of Shakespeare s Hamlet

2 JAMES GOFFIN EAS 2 VICTORIA HOWELL A Freudian reading of Shakespeare s Hamlet Hamlet is a play rich in Freudian imagery, ranging from the Oedipal-like relations between Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude, and similar triangles between other characters, to the potentially narcissistic tendencies of many of the characters, to the playfulness of the play-within-the -play and its resonance with Freud s theories of theatre as dream. But what does a Freudian exploration of Hamlet tell us about the play, and in what ways might the play change our relationship to what Freud suggests? The most obvious Freudian reading of the play concerns the Oedipus complex. The first application begins before the action of the play: Claudius, acting as the son (with Gertrude and Old Hamlet as the national mother and father), envies the king and desires the queen. He acts out his desires and murders Denmark, symbolically his father, and joins with Gertrude in his place. Once we are inside the text, a more traditional Oedipus triangle shows itself in Hamlet s relations to his mother and step-father. Hamlet clearly has nothing but hatred for Claudius, motivated both by his robbed ambition of kingship and, after meeting with his father s ghost, his fully realised knowledge of the bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! that is his uncle. In the Oedipal vein, he may also be motivated by a suppressed desire for his mother, and anger that his less-well known ambition to become his mother s lover has also been stolen away. The best evidence for this unspoken desire is in the manner in which Hamlet addresses Gertrude, with a consistent barrage of sexual terms, particularly in the closet scene ( ): HAMLET to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty. Not Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed, Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse, And let him for a pair of reechy kisses, Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers, 1 1 Shakespeare, Hamlet, & of 9

3 Less unseemly evidence for this central Oedipus complex can be found in Hamlet s association with his dead father. It is a narcissistic association; Hamlet sees himself in the dead king, and vice versa, and so revenge for Old Hamlet and is revenge for Young Hamlet too. As Narcissus saw his reflection in the water, Hamlet sees his in his father: HAMLET My father, methinks I see my father HORATIO Where my lord? HAMLET In my mind s eye, Horatio 2 And later, when he meets the ghost: HAMLET Thou com st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. I ll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane. 3 He clearly identifies himself with his father, and as such, it is he that should rightfully take the place beside Gertrude, it is he she should hang on as if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on. Hamlet should be sharing the enseamed bed, not his uncle. The Oedipal relationships established, we are still left with the question of why, when Hamlet is normally assumed to be around 30 years old, does he still carry Oedipal impulses, when the complex should have been dissolved much earlier? According to Freud, the dissolution is brought about two experiences: When the (male) child s interests turns to his genitals he betrays the fact by manipulating them frequently; and he then finds that the adults do not approve of this behaviour. More or less plainly, more or less brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part of him which he values so highly will be taken away from him. to begin with the boy does not believe in the threat or obey it in the least The observation that finally breaks down his unbelief is the sight of the female genitals. The child has a view of the genital region of a little girl, and with this, the loss of his own penis becomes imaginable, and the threat of castration takes its deferred effect. 4 Following from this, we must conclude that Hamlet fails to experience one or both of these situations, and therefore his Oedipus complex continues unresolved. Although there is no tex- 2 Hamlet, Ibid, Freud, On Sexuality p of 9

4 tual evidence, we can assume that a prince would be afforded an abnormal amount of freedom, and that those surrounding him would be unlikely to question his actions. Hamlet is also an only child, and so would have had no reason to come into contact with a little girl s genital regions, and so enforcing the truth of any castration threat. 5 As a result, the Oedipus complex has remain unresolved in Hamlet s mind, leaving him fixated on Gertrude, even to the expense of other possible lovers, Ophelia being one. The complex is further encouraged by the jealousy Hamlet feels towards Claudius, who, in taking the throne and the queen, has done what Hamlet has always longed to. Freud put it thus: Shakespeare s Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex In Hamlet, it remains repressed; and just as in the case of a neurosis we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences The plot of the drama shows us that Hamlet is far from incapable of taking any action Hamlet is able to anything except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized The distaste for sexuality expressed by Hamlet in his conversation with Ophelia fits in very well with this. 6 There are also other Oedipal relationships at work within the play, perhaps the most interesting being those involving Polonious, Ophelia and Laertes. Before Hamlet is overtaken with his desire for revenge, the relationship between him and Ophelia is clearly set up, with Polonious and Laertes acting as father/husband figures preventing the union: LAERTES For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour, Hold it a fashion, and a toy in his blood, A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute, No more. 7 POLONIOUS I would not in plain terms from this time forth Have you so slander any moment leisure As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet. Look to t I charge you. 8 5 Although it is often assumed, there is no direct textual evidence for any sexual contact between Hamlet and Ophelia. As far as we can tell, Hamlet s friends (Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern) are exclusively male. However, there are a number of puns on the female genitals that indicate Hamlet knew what they were for it not what they are. 6 Freud, Interpretation of Dreams p Hamlet Ibid, of 9

5 Polonious has no wife, and it would therefore be natural for Ophelia to take on, at least symbolically, that role within the family unit. As a result, if Hamlet wanted to embark in sexual relations with Ophelia, it would be necessary first for him to kill Polonious, and possibly also Laertes. This fits in with the theory that, later, in the closet scene Hamlet knowingly kills Polonious, to clear the way for his relations with Ophelia. Towards the end of the play, he vows to kill Laertes to prove his love even for the dead Ophelia, taking the Oedipal complex beyond the grave and to the tradition of married couples being buried side by side: HAMLET Why, I will fight with him upon this theme Until me eyelids will no longer wag. Be buried quick with her, and so will I 9 As I have already touched on briefly, narcissism is another strong psychological element in Hamlet. One of the many problems that Hamlet has to deal with after his father s murder is his complete isolation from events. Up until now, the prince has always been quite literally His Majesty the Baby 10 to use Freud s phrase. As a prince he has been afforded a large degree of autonomy, as Polonious notes, he is a young / And with a larger tedder may he walk / Than may be given you [Ophelia] 11. His world, that of Denmark and Wittgenstein, have fulfilled his every need, as the external world is totally fulfilling of a baby s whims and desires. To overcome this, rather than look to the external world as a child might normally go on to do, Hamlet instead remains introspective, reflecting his lack of development with regards to his Oedipus complex. His parts in the play are heavily punctuated with soliloquy, inward looking and self-indulgent. Is his inaction in gaining revenge for his father s murder a result of uncertainty about the facts ( The spirit I have seen / May be a devil - and the devil hath power / T assume a pleasing shape 12 ) or fear of what the consequences may hold for him ( Thus conscience makes cowards of us all 13 )? Perhaps Hamlet is (not) acting to protect himself rather than rightfully avenge his father; his super-ego is reining in his id, fearful of the social ramifica- 9 Hamlet & Freud, On Metapsychology p85 11 Hamlet, Ibid, Ibid, of 9

6 tions. Strangely, Claudius, could be said to actually conforms to Freud s idea of the ideal anaclitic type love, rather than the self-serving narcissistic love displayed by Hamlet. A person may love: (1) According to the narcissistic type: (a) what he himself is (ie. himself), (b) what he himself was, (c) what he himself would like to be, (d) someone who was once part of himself. (2) According to the anaclitic (attachment) type: (a) the woman who feeds him, (b) the man who protects him, 14 Claudius matches the 2a type of love. Gertrude provides nourishment for Claudius in terms of providing Denmark; she brings to him something that is entirely separate from himself. If looked at in these terms, Claudius is actually psychologically more developed than Hamlet; although the murder of Old Hamlet was an impulse-, id-driven act, it had rational consequences. Gertrude feeds him with the wealth of the country. 15 Freud s ideas about theatre, and its relation to dreams, is another theme that is predominant in Hamlet. In Art & Literature, he explores the idea that creative literature is in essence the same as normal dreams, the expression of wish fulfilment. There are a number of similarities between a play and a dream. Both take place in a darkened environment, the first in the cossetted comfort of a theatre, with lights dimmed, and the second at night in our beds. Both involve characters whose actions can be fantastical and need bear no strict relation to time or space; a character can fly, like Peter Pan, or be transformed in to an ass, like Puck. Crucially, both also allow us to express, in a disguised or distanced form, thoughts and feelings that we would be unable to satisfactorily deal with in our normal waking life; the desires of the id, unmoderated by the ego and super-ego. 14 Freud, On Metapsychology p84 15 If we are uncomfortable with this depiction of a murderer as psychologically mature, we could use Hamlet s assertion that Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh, and so my mother to imply that in coveting Gertrude, Claudius was in fact directing his libido towards Old Hamlet, and therefore what he himself would like to be, a narcassistic type. 6 of 9

7 Being present as an interested spectator at a play does for adults what play does for children, whose hesitant hopes of being able to do what grown-up people do are in that way gratified. The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a poor wretch to whom nothing of importance can happen, who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to be a hero. And the playwright and the actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with the hero. They spare him something too. his enjoyment is based on an illusion; it is someone other than himself acting and suffering on stage, and, secondly, after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security. 16 A play, then, can be thought of like a bad dream an audience can be reassured as a mother reassures her child, Don t worry, it was only a dream. The pretend or imagined allows us to embrace ideas and ambitions that normally we would damp down, or rather displace. Hamlet is particularly interesting in relation to Freud s theories. Not only is it a play itself, but it contains the play-within-the-play, exposing the audience to both the experience of watching, and a demonstration of that experience that is to say they see themselves in a very real sense, as an audience on the stage, separate from any association they might make with individual characters. Hamlet devises the play-within to catch the conscience of the king 17, with the implication that the play we are watching, Hamlet could do the very same to us; any parricidal (or, less likely, regicidal) guilt we are harbouring could be drawn out by this false fire 18. Within the text of Hamlet, Shakespeare directly states Freud s dual view of drama as being simultaneously both a harmless release and a powerful tool. 19 CLAUDIUS Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in t? HAMLET No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest, no offence i th world. 20 HAMLET I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim d their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak 16 Freud, Art & Literature p Hamlet Ibid It should be remembered that Shakespeare often included such lines as politically expedient escape clauses 20 Hamlet of 9

8 With most miraculous organ. 21 As the above quotation states, murder has no tongue, because, like other taboos, it is something that is repressed by our conscious mind as unconducive to social behaviour. In real life, such a topic could not be considered in normal conversation, but a play has added legitimacy for discussion because, paradoxically, it has less legitimacy; it is fiction, it is dream. Paedophilia and incest are too topics that today could not openly be discussed in a positive light because our conscious censoring super-ego recognises the social implications, but in a work of fiction such a portrayal could take place, because the unconscious is in control, and can be easily dismissed. Freud was adamant of the importance of his theories to Hamlet, going so far as to say that it is only in the application of them to the play, that the text s full meaning could be discovered. It was not until the material of the tragedy had been traced back to the Oedipus theme that the mystery of the effect was at last explained. But before this was done, what a mass of differing and contradictory interpretative attempts [that] rather incline us to view that its magical appeal rest solely upon the impressive thoughts in it and the splendour of the language. And yet, do not we feel the need of discovering in it some source of power beyond them alone? 22 The apparent predominance of Freudian theory in literature, and especially Hamlet, is at the heart of the paradox of psychoanalysis. Almost any of the relationships within the play could be portrayed, with enough rhetorical spin, as Oedipal; most of the characters could be portrayed as pursuing both narcissistic and anaclitic libido-objects; plays and dreams are both harmless releases of steam and carthartic portrayals of uncomfortable truths. We are left with two equally possible solutions to the paradox. The first is that if Freudian theory is spread so thinly in its application as to encompass everything, then it probably lacks substance if something is equally true of all things, how useful is it to apply it to any one particular? The second is that the ideas that combine to make a Freudian reading of a text are correct in their assumptions, and the dynamics at work are deeply engrained, hence their ubiq- 21 Hamlet Freud, Art & Literature p255 8 of 9

9 uity. Any denial of their truth is simply further evidence of the self-censoring and repressive activities of the constituent parts of our mind. In terms of Hamlet at least, we should be careful of following Freud to closely. His position that the conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed that it was left to me [Freud] to unearth it is a self-aggrandising one that is ill supported by the play. Tom Stoppard neatly sums up the conflict in Hamlet without reference to Freud in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead: ROSENCRANTZ To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popper on to his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner? 23 Hamlet s power is in part due to the scenario, but its endurance is also due to the poetry of the text. Why do we need Hamlet when we already have Oedipus Rex? Because the three hours of stage craft add to the power of the story, add subtlety and beauty. Freud s interpretation is an interesting and valuable one, both in terms of the particular play and its resonance as a literary theory, but it is not, as Freud seems to assume, the only valid one. 23 Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead Bibliography Freud, Art & Literature (London: Penguin, 1990), Interpretation of Dreams (London: Penguin, 1991), On Metapsychology (London: Penguin, 1991), On Sexuality (London: Penguin, 1991) Shakespeare, W Hamlet: Prince of Denmark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber & Faber, 1967): 9 of 9