The Renaissance Literature:paper-1

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NAME: Dodiya Meghana J.

ROLL NO: 13

SEMESTER: 1

COURSE NAME: The Renaissance Literature

ASSINGMENT TOPIC: Hamlet in Feminist

                                        Approach

EMAIL : mdodiya26@gmail.com

SUBMITTED TO: Department Of English

v     Introduction of writer:-

     William Shakespeare has become the most famous and influence author in English. He wrote thirty-eight plays, one hundred fifty-four sonnets and two epic poems. Her famous play is Hamlet.

Very little is known about Shakespeare’s early life. He was born around 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon to a middle-class merchant family. He had become a successful actor and playwright in London and was famous among Londoners for the popularity of his plays. The plays are often categorized as tragedies, comedies, or histories.

v     Introduction of Feminist Theory:-

         Feminist theory is the extension of; feminism into theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women’s social roles experience, interest chorus and feminist politics in a variety of fields. Such as anthropology and sociology, communication, psychoanalysis, home economies, literature, education and philosophy.

         Feminist theory focuses on analyzing gender inequality. Themes explored in feminism include discrimination, objectification,(especially sexual, objectification),oppression, stereotyping art history and contemporary at end aesthetics art and aesthetics.

    Feminist theory also closely examines the role of women in the development of popular culture, explore the question of whether a particular female language can be said to exist.

      A number of theorists rejects a number of the fundamental notion of psychoanalysis and contend that such is male-biased, anti-women, and patriarchal.

v      Application in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

        A feminist theory based interpretation of Hamlet would focus, most particularly, upon the characters of Ophelia and Gertrude. A feminist theoretical reading of Hamlet might argues that Ophelia-who is driven to seeming madness throughout the play and, possibly ,eventual suicide-is figured as being repressed, abused, ignored, and renounce by male characters throughout the play because of her gender.

  Introduction:-

    The construction of female characters in Shakespeare’s plays reflects the Elizabethan society he also puts their representations into question, challenges, and also revises them.

v   Hamlet: Feminist Approach:-

   The play Hamlet applied in feminist theory .The title of essay Frailty, thy name is Hamlet: Hamlet and women ‘that applies theory of feminism in “A Handbook of critical Approaches to literature” by Wilfred l .Guerin et al demands details discussion.The authors metamorphoses one of the famouse dialogues by Hamlet which originally reads,

          “Heaven and earth,

          Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him

        As if increase of appetite had grown

        By what is fed on, yet, within a month-

         Let me not think on’t-Fraity, thy name is Women!”

              It is spoken in anger to Gertrude due to her hasty marriage.

·    By replacing women with Hamlet, it seems to me, the authors consider Hamlet’s inability to act as a feminine trait. Are the proponent of feminism themselves being anti-feminist? For me, simply “Hamlet and Women ‘title would be enough.It proves that to bring out someone’s fault, one has to relate him with feminine quality.

·    He is crushes under the burden of moral dilemma. Not only by means of title, Hamlet is psychologically castrated by his oedipal attitude and his act of letting loose his anger upon two father images, one is good and strong and another is bad and strong. Hamlet unnecessarily attacks on woman around him because he can’t act on his powerful uncle cum father Claudius.

·    Another reason her mother’s overhasty marriage and Ophelia’s support to his scheming father, unknowingly. It is very strange that her mother can’t get married in two three months of her husband’s death. After all, who is he to decide whom and when she should remarry? He is adult but still behaves like a kid. He still wants to have a control over his mother’s decision.

·    There is no ‘true’ Ophelia for whom feminist criticism must apart speak, but perhaps only a realistic Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of all her parts.

·     Inessential to say, most of the character analysis of Hamlet focuses on the character of Hamlet himself. As we see in the section on religious interpretations of Hamlet Claudius and Polonius also are taken as having an freedom existence. Most often, this is not the case with Ophelia. She is most customarily inspect  in relationship to Hamlet, and her inspiration seems influence by the characters with whom she is interacts  until she is spins free  in her madness.

·    Otherwise, she seems to be a supportive and appealing pawn of the drama. The Freudian critic, Jacques Lacan provides us with an excellent example.

      I announced that I would speak

      Today about that piece of bait

       Named Ophelia, and I’ll be as

       Good as my word.

·    What is the point of the character Ophelia? Ophelia is obviously essential .She is linked forever, for centuries, to the figure of hamlet.

·    This attitude has caused no small amount of consternation amongst feminist critics such as professor Elaine Showalter of Princeton university.

·    The bait-and-switch game that Lcan plays with Ophelia is a cynical but not unusual instance of her deployment in psychiatric and critical texts. For most critics of Shakespeare, Ophelia has been an insignificant minor character in the play, touching in her weakness and madness but chiefly interesting, of course, in what she tells us about Hamlet…

·     A central encumbrance to declare Ophelia’s existence as an  independent character is that she is appear to have no past. With Hamlet, we know through exposition of his education, and we see him in relationship to old friends. However, we have none of these cues to gives us a sense of Ophelia’s past.

·    Shakespeare gives us very little information from which to imagine a past for Ophelia. She appears in only five of the play’s twenty scenes; the pre-play course of her love story with hamlet is known only by a few ambiguous flashbacks.

·     Recent feminist critics saw Ophelia’s lack of an independence will as representative of a suppressive double standard rooted in our traditions.

·    Polonius dispatches his son to the university to sow his wild oats, to learn through his errors how to be true to himself, and thus to other men.But his daughter must not rely on her own Judgement. Her conviction of hamlet’s sincerity arouses contempt: Affection.pooh! you speak like a green girl/unsifted in such perilous circumstance’ He advises her to Laertes expects Ophelia to heed his counsel that ‘best safety lies in fear’. Her whole education is meshed to relying on other people’s judgment, and to placing innocence and reputation for innocence above even the virtue of truthfulness.

·     Ophelia has no chance to develop an freedom conscience of her own, so stifled is she by the authority of the male world.

·    In an effort to conceive of Ophelia as a character with her own richness and goodness, interpreters of the role have often felt constrain to ascribe a past to her which is not evident from the text of Shakespeare’s hamlet itself’.  

·    Like many critic, victorians went  to the actual sources of the Hamlet story which were the probable ancestor of the Shakespeare version- to saxo grammaticus’Historia Danica and to Francois de Bellforest’s The Hystorie of Hamblet(1576).

·    Employing a mixture of these texts and imagination, they came up with their own Ophelia- including a past.

     Ophelia—poor Ophelia!

      Oh, far too soft, too good,

      Too fair, to be cast among

      The briers of this

       Working –day world, and

        Fall and bleed upon the

      Thorns of life! What shall

       Be said of her? For

       Her! Like a strain of sad,

       Sweet music, which

       Comes floating by us on

        The wings of night and

         Silence…..

         The love Ophelia,

         Which she never once

         Confesses, is like a secret

         Which we have stolen

          From her….

·      The situation of Ophelia in the story is that of a young girl who, at an early age is brought from a life of privacy into the circle of a court -- a court such as we read of in those early times, at once rude, magnificent, and corrupted. She is placed immediately about the person of the queen, and is probably her favourite associated. The devotion of the wicked queen for this gentle and innocent creature is one of those beautiful and redeeming touches, one of those penetrating glances into the secret springs of natural and feminine feeling which we find only is Shakespeare. 

·     

We can see this tendency, for example with the portrait of Ophelia created by Helena Faucit Martin.

Ophelia was one of the pet dreams of my girlhood - partly, perhaps, from the mystery of her madness.  - Helena Faucit .

•   It hurts me to hear her spoke of, as she often is, as a weak creature, wanting in truthfulness, in purpose, in force of character, and only interesting when she loses the little wits she had. And yet who can wonder that a character so delicately outlined, and shaded in with touches so fine, should be often gravely misunderstood?  -                                                                                                                                       Helena Faucit      Martin    played Ophelia against William Charles Macready's Hamlet in Paris, goes further in imagining a childhood for Ophelia. This imagined experience serves as a background for actually creating the part herself. "I had lived again and again through the whole childhood and lives of many of Shakespeare's heroines, long before it was my happy privilege to impersonate and make them, in my fashion, my own."  Here's the account of Ophelia's childhood that emerges from this process.

I pictured Ophelia to myself as the motherless child of an elderly Polonius. His young wife had first given him a son, Laertes, and had died a few years later, after giving birth to the poor little Ophelia. The son takes much after his father, and, his student-life over, seeks his pleasures in the gayer life of France; fond of his little sister in a superior way, in their rare meetings, but neither understanding nor caring to understand her nature.

The baby Ophelia was left, as I fancy, to the kindly but thoroughly unsympathetic tending of country-folk, who knew little of "inland nurture." Think of her, - sweet, fond, sensitive, tender-hearted, the offspring of a delicate dead mother tended only by roughly-mannered and uncultured natures! One can see the sweet child, with no playmates of her kind, wandering by the streams, plucking flowers, making wreathes and coronals, learning the names of all the wild flowers in glade and dingle, having many favourites, listening with eager ears when delight or lulled to sleep at night by the country songs, whose words (in true country fashion, not too refined) come back again realistic to her memory, with the fitting descant, as such things strangely but surely do, only when her wits have flown...

When we first see her, we may fairly suppose that she has been only a few months at court. It has taken off none of the flush of her beautiful nature. That remains pure and fresh and simple as she brought it from her country home. One change has taken place, and this a great one. Her heart has been touched, and has found its ideal in the one man about the court who was likely to reach it, both from his rare and attractive qualities, and a certain loneliness in his position not very unlike her own. How could she help feeling exalted - drawn towards this romantic, desolate Hamlet, the observed of all observers, whose "music vows" have been early whispered in her ears? On the other hand, what sweet repose it must have been to the tired, moody scholar, soldier, prince, bothered with the world and all its ways, to open his heart to her, and to hear the shy yet expressive talk which he would woo from her - to watch the look, manner, and movements of this aesthic child of nature ...  


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