Topic:- Psychological approach in Hamlet
Name: Krishna K Patel
Course: M.A. English
Semester: 1
Paper no: - 1 The Renaissance Literature
Roll No:-20
Batch: 2018 – 2019
Enrolment no.:- 2069108420190035
Email id: - krishnadobariya08@gmail.com
Submitted to:- Smt.S.B.Gardi Dept. of English MKBU
Introduction:-
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is different from other Elizabethan revenge plays in the sense that the playwright did put much effort in depicting the psychological make up of his hero Hamlet. The way Shakespeare portrays the psychological complexities of Hamlet, the play has become a lucrative text to the critics to Hamlet using psychoanalytic criticism reveals the inward states of Hamlet’s mind. Among the various aspect of Hamlet’s character, the thing that instantly draws our attention is his relation with his mother Gertrude. It is here the psychoanalytic critics opinion that Hamlet as an Oedipus Complex to his mother. Freud developed the theory of Oedipus Complex, whereby, says Freud, the male infant conceives the desire of eliminate the father and become the sexual partner of the mother Hamlet, too has several symptoms to suffer from Oedipus Complex.Oedipus Complex: -
Definition: - The oedipal complex is a term used by Sigmund Freud in his theory of psychosexual stages of development to describe a boy’s feeling of desire for his mother towards his father. Essentially, a boy feels like he is in completion with his father for possession of his mother. He views his father as a rival for her attentions and affections.This idea developed further into the Freud’s theory of the mind and what the difference the conscious mind and unconscious mind is. By 1899 Freud had published the interpretation of dreams in which it is not only lays out the principles of psychoanalytic theory, it also suggest the importance of dreams. As that is, in Freud’s mind, dreams are the way the brain works to understand the minds unconscious offering. From this, the idea that there is a unconscious mind which we repress, comes the thought of repressing thoughts and ideas in which we would not normally act.
“The Spanish tragedy” had a significant after effect in its own time, most famously in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play that adopted the revenge play conventions and turned them inside out. Hamlet is a revenge tragedy that questions every aspects and convention of the revenge tragedy plot while it reproduces them. The Ghost two demands that, “Remember Me” becomes both a terrifying psychological ,: what is he, and why should we believe him, and what, then, should Hamlet do that is right? At the crux of the play is the very nature of tragic action and its causality the divinity that shapes our ends, roughew them we will.
Although Freud himself made some application of his theories to art and literature, it remained for an English disciple, the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, to provide the first full – scale psychoanalytic treatment of a major literary work. Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus , originally published as an later revised and enlarged. Hamlet’s character was very complex. Many literary analysts disagree with applying Freudian psychoanalyticlal principles to literature written before Freud’
Jones bases his argument on the thesis that Hamlet’s much debated delay in killing his uncle, Claudius, is to be explained in terms of internal rather than external circumstances and that the “play is mainly concerned with a hero’s unavailing fight against what can only be called a disordered mind”. In this carefully documented essay Jones builds a highly persuasive case history of Hamlet as a psychoneurotic who suffers from manic depressive hysteria combined with an abulia –all of which may be traced to the hero’s severely repressed Oedipal feelings Jones points out that no really satisfying arguments has ever been substantiated for the idea that Hamlet avenges his father’s murder as quickly as practicable. Shakespeare makes Claudiu’s guilt as well as Hamlet’s duty perfectly clear from the outset- if we are to trust the words of the ghost and the gloomy insight of the hero himself. The fact is, however that Hamlet does not fulfill this duty until absolutely forced to do so by physical circumstances- and even then only after Gertrude, his mother is dead. Jones also elucidates the strong misogyny that Hamlet displays throughout the play, especially as it is directed against Ophelia, and his almost physical revulsion to sex. All of this adds up to a classic example of the neurotically repressed Oedipus Complex.
The ambivalence that typifies the child’s attitude towards his father is dramatized in the characters of the ghost and Claudius, both of whom are dramatic projections of the hero’s own conscious- unconscious ambivalence toward the father figure. The ghost represents the conscious ideal of fatherhood, the image that is socially acceptable:
See what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion’s curls, the front of love himself,
An age like mars, to threaten and command,
A station like the herbal Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven – kissing hill,
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man;
This was your husband.
His the view of Claudius, on the other hand, represents Hamlet’s repressed hostility toward his father as a rival for his mother’s affection. This new king father is the symbolic perpetrator of the very deeds toward which of the son is impelled by his own unconscious motives; murder of his father and incest with his mother. Hamlet cannot bring himself to kill Claudius because to do so he must, in a psychological sense, kill himself. His delay and frustration in trying to fulfill the ghost’s demand for vengeance may therefore be explained by the fact that, as Jones puts it, ‘thought of incest and parricide combined is too intolerable to be borne. One past of him tries to carry out the task, the other finches inexorably from the thought of it”
Norman N. Holland neatly summed up the reasons both for Hamlet’s delay and also for our three hundred years delay in comprehending Hamlet’s true motives:
Now what do critics mean when they say that Hamlet cannot act because of his Oedipus complex? The argument is very simple, very elegant. One, people over the centuries have been unable to say why Hamlet delays in killing the man who murdered his father and married his mother. Two, psychoanalytic experience shows that every child wants to do just exactly that. Three, Hamlet delays because he cannot punish Claudius for doing what he
Himself wishes to do as a child and, unconsciously,
Still wishes to do; he would be punishing himself.
Four , that fact that this wish is unconscious explains
Why people could not explain Hamlet’s delay .
A corollary to the Oedipal problem in Hamlet is the pronounced misogyny in Hamlet’s character. Because of his mother’s abnormally sensual affection for her son, an affection that would have deeply marked Hamlet as a child with an Oedipal neurosis, he has in the course of his psychic development repressed his incestuous impulses so severely that this repression colors his attitude toward all women: “The total reaction culminates in the bitter misogyny of his outburst against Ophelia, who is devastated at having to bear a reaction so wholly out of proportion to her own offense and has no idea that in reviling her Hamlet is really expressing his bitter resentment against his mother”. The famous “Get thee to a nunnery” speech has been even more sinister overtones than are generally recognized, explains Jones, when we understand the pathological degree of Hamlet’s condition and read “nunnery” as “Elizabethan slang for brothel”.
The underlying theme relates ultimately to the splitting of the mother image which the infantile unconscious effects into two opposite pictures: one of a Virginal Madonna, an inaccessible saint towards whom all sensual approaches are unthinkable, and the other of a sensual creature accessible to everyone… when sexual repression is highly pronounced , as with Hamlet, then both types of women are felt to be hostile: the pure one out of resentment at her repulses, the sensual one out of the temptation she offers to plunge into guiltiness. Misogyny, as in the play, is the inevitable result.
Although it has been attacked by the anti- Freudians and occasionally disparaged as “obsolete” by the neo – Freudians, Jones critical tour de force has nevertheless attained the status of a modern classic. “Both as an important seminal work which led to a considerable re-examination of Hamlet, and as an example of a through and intelligent application of psychoanalysis to drama”, writes Claudius C. Morrison. “Jones’s essay stand as the single most important Freudian study of literature to appear in America…”
CONCLUSION: -
Tragedy indeed does not make us choose between an emotional and visceral and an awareness of difference. Instead, it deepens our understanding of the past and of our own lives.Hamlet fulfills the technical requirements of the revenge play as well as the salient requirement of a classical tragedy; that is, it shows a person of heroic proportion going down to defeat under circumstances too powerful for him to cope with. But this will not keep them from recognizing the play as one of the most searching artistic treatments of the problems and conflict that from so large a part of the human condition.
Any discussion of Hamlet should acknowledge the enormous body of excellent commentary that sees the play as valuable primarily for its moral and philosophical insights little more can be done here than to summarize the most famous of such interpretation. Some explain Hamlet as an idealist temperamentally unsuited for life in a world peopled by fallible creature.
References:
(A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Lierature, 2005)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_approaches_to_Hamlet)
(http://vibhutibhatt232013.blogspot.com/2012/11/psychological-approach-in-hamlet.html)
(http://krupalilewlewadebatch2014-16.blogspot.com/2016/03/psychological-perspective-in-hamlet.html)
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