 |
| Ankita Sen |
Ankita Sen
Abstract The
paper proposes to read Hamlet’s antagonist attitude towards the female
characters (namely, Gertrude and Ophelia) in the play through an ecocritical
lens. Drawing on Simon C. Estok’s theoretical concept of ‘ecophobia’, the paper
seeks to locate the root of Hamlet’s misogyny in his androcentrism. By
inquiring into Hamlet’s feeling of intense dislike for both women and the
natural world, the paper attempts to arrive at an ecocritical interpretation of
his character. In context to Gertrude, the paper will focus on how Hamlet’s disgust
becomes a common denominator through which the volatility of Gertrude’s sexual
desire and the unpredictability of the environment is simultaneously addressed.
In case of Ophelia, the paper will pay attention to her discourse to
conceptualise Hamlet’s ecophobia in the face of the environmental
incomprehensible.
Keywords
ecophobia, female desire, unpredictable, incomprehensible, madness, patriarchy
Hamlet by William Shakespeare is a
play that delves deep into a pervasively complex world of conspiracy, deception
and moral ambiguity. Written somewhere between 1599 and 1601, the play has its
titular character ricochet endlessly between haste and hesitation, with the
past haunting him and the future immobilizing him. A few months after the death
of his father, Hamlet returns home only to discover “something is rotten in the
state of Denmark” (1.4.90). He is deeply disturbed by his mother’s hasty
remarriage and this sense of disturbance is further escalated when he is
visited by the ghost of his father. It claims to be the victim of a political
conspiracy in which Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, has usurped the throne by
poisoning Hamlet’s father and seducing his mother. Unlike other Shakespearean
tragedies Hamlet is neither packed with raging actions nor sweeping
romances, but what it derives its strength from is an intense exploration of
the psychological depth of its tragic hero.
Besides many things, the use of melancholic
monologues, layered characterisation and a problematic ethical standpoint, make
this play a critic’s favourite. As a result, there is no dearth of research on
it, Hamlet has been extensively and exhaustively looked at and explored
from varied theoretical perspectives; ranging from the psychoanalytical to the
phenomenological, from the feminist to ecocritical. This paper seeks to focus
on one aspect of ecocriticism, namely ‘ecophobia’ to re-think Hamlet’s piquing
misogyny in the play. Even at the cost of committing an anachronistic fallacy,
it is tempting to trace a connection between Hamlet’s perception of women and
his relationship with the natural world. The paper tries to read Hamlet’s
disgust for the female sex through an exploration of his androcentric
tendencies. By paralleling Gertrude and Ophelia with environmental
unpredictability and environmental incomprehensibility, I try to offer an
alternative understanding of Hamlet and his misogyny.
Ecocriticism can serve as a vantage point for the
emergence of a new approach in the field of Hamlet studies by laying
bare the antagonistic underpinnings of Hamlet’s relation to nature, in
juxtaposition to the female characters’ proclivity for all things natural. Both
nature and women serve as deconstructive forces in the play that not only evidence
the fault lines running through the structure of patriarchal domination, but
also anticipate its disintegration. The natural world revolts Hamlet because he
happens to see in it a manifestation of what he believes to be the ‘innate
impurity’ of the female sex. Even a cursory reading of the play reveals that
Hamlet’s evocation of imageries from the natural world is undercut, by his
strong sense of disgust for it. The world for him is an “unweeded garden / That
grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature” (1.2. 135-36); the bountiful
earth is perceived by him as “a sterile promontory” while the very air he
breathes is “nothing to [him] but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”
(2.2.299-03); the descending night impresses upon his psyche as “hell itself”
that “breathes out / Contagion to this world” (3.2.395-97); and each one of
Claudius’s “crimes broad blown” in their abject brazenness strikes Hamlet
ironically, “as flush as May” (3.3.81). Likewise, Hamlet’s relationship with
Gertrude is sustained by a similar sense of loathing. He deems her marriage
with Claudius to be an exercise in desecration which unless atoned “will skin
and film the ulcerous place / Whiles rank corruption, miming all within, /
Infects unseen” (3.4.148-50); her assertion of desire and agency nauseates
Hamlet to the point of envisioning her steeped “ in the rank sweat of an
enseamed bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over a nasty
sty” (3.4.94-96); she is often regarded to be at the root of the nation’s moral
bankruptcy, “Importing Denmark’s health, and England’s too, / With ho! Such
bugs and goblins…” (5.2.21-22); and in case she fails to “Repent what’s past.
Avoid what is to come;” the “compost on the weed” of her presumed vice will
make the place “ranker” (3.4.151-53).
Disgust as a potent literary trope in Hamlet has been
extensively studied by critics such as Wilson, Paglia, and Mack. For instance,
Wilson claims that “the world of Hamlet is drenched in filth” (Wilson 111). He
draws on the theories of Freud and Kristeva to show how Hamlet’s contact with
literal and metaphorical filth allows him to project his guilt and shame
through the expression of disgust. Maynard Mack, in his illuminating analysis
of several aspects of the narrative space Hamlet inhabits, analyses upon the
theme of disgust in context to infirmity and disease (Mack 58). He claims that
Claudius is the polluting factor in the play, whose singular act of regicide is
the “fatal centre from where the unwholesomeness spreads out till there is
something rotten in all Denmark” (58). Camille Paglia traces the trajectory of
Hamlet’s repugnance as it shifts from his “suicidal self-disgust”, to his
“thoughts of the world” as a “rank and gross” place and culminates in his
“lurid visualisation of his mother’s sex life amid rumpled ‘incestuous sheets’”
by the end (Paglia 93-94). Her theorization of disgust is an attempt at rooting
Hamlet’s desire for death in his propensity for acute self-condemnation.
Hamlet’s fixation with filth is articulated through
his sense of disgust that is simultaneously anti-environmental and misogynist
in nature. This implies the intersectionality between gender and nature. An
ecocritical investigation of the curious overlapping of these mutually
exclusive discourses can help us read Hamlet as an essentially androcentric
force in the text, that seeks to render both women and nature, passive. Thus, Hamlet’s
disgust can be interpreted as a manifestation of what Simon C. Estok claims to
be, the “ecophobic” tendencies of his character. To quote Estok, “Hamlet
ecophobically condemns the natural world. This is a man whose strong concerns
with purifying his social world result in a discursive putrefying of the
natural world. (Simon 87-88). Coined by Estok back in 1995, the term ‘ecophobia’
“denote[s] fear and loathing of the environment in much the same way that the
term ‘homophobia’ denotes fear and loathing of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals”
(Estok 213). In the process of unpacking mankind’s ontological fear of the
natural world, Estok elaborates on how such a fright is primarily based on our
collective inability to predict the ways of nature. Although Estok’s essay does
a commendable job in voicing out the ecophobic concerns in Hamlet yet it fails
to see how the tragic hero’s contempt for the natural world is also an
essentially gendered one.
Women in the play are just as unpredictable as nature
itself and consequently, a constant source of challenge and fear to the
patriarchal power structure. To quote Hamlet, “O most pernicious woman! O
villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! […] That one may smile, and smile,
and be a villain. At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark” (1.5.105-08).
Proclamations such as this abound in the narrative and are primarily suggestive
of Hamlet’s conception of women as ontologically erratic and volatile creatures
with a natural predilection for tricking men. Nine out of ten times a male
character elaborates on the theme of deception and duplicity, he takes recourse
to misogyny. For example, Claudius likens his act of lying to that of a
“harlot” applying colours on her face; “The harlot’s cheek, beautified with
plastering art, / Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it / Than is my deed
to my most painted word. O heavy burden!” (3.1.51-54); Hamlet pondering on the
futility of physical appearances with Yorick’s skull in his hand philosophises,
“Now get to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch / thick, to
this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that” (5.1.189-92). In a way,
besides foregrounding the play’s thematic preoccupation with the disjunction
between appearance and reality, the recurrent references to this ‘feminine’ art
of using cosmetics also underscore its bionomic concerns. Man’s inability to
read the signs of nature and foresee environmental changes alongside his fear
of being victimized by ecological disharmonies causes him to distrust nature
and loathe it. Likewise, a failure on part of men like Claudius and Hamlet to
reconcile with the existence and assertion of female sexuality is integral to
their understanding of women. Elsewhere, in his reading of The Winter’s Tale
Estok argues that in Shakespearean plays the dichotomy between good and evil is
often played out in terms of the equation female characters share with nature.
To quote him, “the environment is a viscous space of bears and wolves, or else
a beautiful place of fertility and abundance; women are liars, shrews, and
lechers all, or else they are chaste, guiltless, or otherwise guileless” (93).
In the fictional world of Hamlet, both nature and women are rendered
passive and loathsome because its tragic hero is unable to decipher either.
The symbolic refusal of Gertrude to be categorized by
Hamlet’s extremely parochial and masculinist perceptions of gender roles causes
him to blaspheme the entire female sex: “Frailty, thy name is woman” proclaims
he, quite early on in the play (1.2). Estok contends “theorizing ecophobia
means recognizing the importance of control” humanity has over the natural
world (5). According to him, “Human history is often a history of controlling
the natural environment” and the prospect of ever losing that control instils
in humans a sense of fear. Every time environmental unpredictability is
foregrounded through some natural disaster, mankind’s presupposed superiority
over nature suffers a crisis and it ends up painting “Nature [as] the hateful
object in need of control, the loathed and feared thing that can only result in
tragedy if left uncontrolled” (6). Likewise, Gertrude stands for an open
signifier in Hamlet’s phallocentric system of symbolisation. He simply cannot
fathom how after having a husband comparable to Hyperion himself, could she
possibly stoop so low as to take Claudius for her man, who is no better than a
satyr, “Look you now what follows: here is your husband [Claudius] like a
mildewed ear, blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? Could you on this
fair mountain leave to feed and batten on this moor? (3.4. 71-74). The presence
of Gertrude’s gendered and sexualised body which simultaneously desires and
evokes desire upsets Hamlet at an existential level. At this point, one can
draw a parallel between the environmental unpredictability and the idea of
women as non-interpretable, ever-evolving entities, since both are equally
potent in subverting the patriarchal power structure. In context to his
inability to come to terms with this multifaceted, indefinable, indeterminate
and unpredictable world of female desires Hamlet notes “I have heard of your
paintings well enough. God hath given you one face and you make yourselves
another [...] it hath made me mad” (3.1.143-48).
Estok traces Hamlet’s persistent perception of the
natural world as a rotten, filthy place to his androcentric anxieties in face
of the environmental unpredictability. To quote Estok, “What makes rot of such
concern to theories about ecophobia is—among other things—its imagined
unpredictability, its willy-nilly transgressions and blurring of borders, and
its perceived alliance with an antagonistic nature” (87). This nexus of disgust
and ecophobia is also played out within the corporeal limits of the female
body. As the narrative progresses, we realise that Hamlet perceives the female
body as a site of proliferating pollution. In one of the most critically
acclaimed scenes of the play, Hamlet asks Ophelia: “Get thee to a nunnery, why
wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (3.1.121-22). The dialogue highlights
how a patriarchal mode of contemplation culturally encodes the womb as a
polluting source which if left ungoverned will contaminate the entire human
race. The rhizomatic dispersion of foulness from the infectious centre of
Gertrude’s “nasty sty” to the rest of Denmark, becomes a potent imagery for a
contagious disease that has fed on mankind, rendering it sick to the core. In
one of Hamlet’s ribald soliloquies concerning Gertrude’s re-marriage with
Claudius, she is portrayed as an embodiment of disease: “Why, she would hang on
him as if increase of appetite has grown by what it fed on” (1.2. 143-145). As
can be inferred, the multiple ruptures in the structure of womanhood as
constructed and appropriated by phallocentric discourses are primarily
channelled through fear, paranoia, anxiety and disgust in the play. The reading
of Gertrude’s character in this light exposes how the easy susceptibility of a
gendered body to patriarchal invasion invests it with the dual connotations of
both a disease-producing agent and the disease itself. This interstitial state
of being suspended between categories that threaten to destabilize
distinctions, is perhaps what makes female bodies such apt sites of pollution
in the popular imagination.
Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) argues that the idea of pollution
can be explored in a cultural context to understand how boundaries are shaped and
sustained between different communities (120). Estok cites her in his claim
that, “The polluting person is always in the wrong” and likewise the space
s(he) inhabits is labelled as filthy and exclusive (114). In line of this
contention, it becomes clear that Gertrude’s actions in the narrative are
always already predicated on her identity as an outsider and Other. In the
text, she is framed as an ontologically impure creature who by default happens
to be a wrongdoer. Ironically, even Gertrude at some points seems to indulge
Hamlet in his misogynistic theories about women. For instance, when Hamlet
holds her guilty of committing a mortal sin, she confesses “Thou turnest mine
eyes into my very soul, / And there I see such black and grained spots / As will
not leave their tinct” (3.4.90-92). This is a very convenient move on part of
patriarchy because it renders reductive the question of Gertrude’s agency in
the entire narrative. If her status as a ‘pollutant’ is biologically sanctioned
by her sexual orientation as argued by Hamlet, the possibility of ever reading
Gertrude’s actions as a feminist assertion of her right to libidinal
gratification is already negated. Likewise, Hamlet’s tendency to vilify the
natural world at the cost of promoting androcentrism can also be read as an act
of denying nature its agency. To quote Estok, man’s relationship with nature is
one “of first imagining agency and intent in nature and then quashing that
imagined agency and intent” to assert his superiority (6). Similarly, in Hamlet’s
vision, nature exists not as an actant force, but as a passive response to the
human condition. His inability to break away from the typically humanistic
inclination to look at and think of things with the self at the centre prevents
him from noticing the agency of nature in human lives: But I have that within
which passes show/ These but the trappings and the suits of woe”, says he (1.2.
85-86). In his study of The Winter’s Tale, Estok has encapsulated the
discussions on agency, women and nature by arguing:
If nature is made to resemble people in the psychology
that is ascribed to it, we do not see pain or suffering similarly ascribed to
nature. When it suits the play to anthropomorphize, it anthropomorphizes.
Nature may be manipulated and exploited (cross- breeding is the chief example
in this play), but it does not suffer or complain. Not so, for people who are
manipulated and exploited (Estok 96).
What tempts one to insert an ecophobic angle in the discursive
relationship between pollutants and the female body, is how both tend to
encroach on boundaries set by man. Just as the body is vulnerable to
patriarchal impregnation from outside, similarly the state of balance in
ecology can be usurped via potentially impregnating agents like pollutants. Such
a reading upturns the masculinist/androcentric claims that women/nature are
hostile opponents of man/civilization by implying that it is patriarchy that
pollutes. By the end of the play we realise that little of the rottenness of
Denmark derives from either women or nature, rather it is the male characters’
anxieties about maintaining power within a corrupt political elite that is
projected on women and nature.
Hamlet’s ecophobia can also be analysed from the
perspective of his relationship with his conscious object of desire in the
play, i.e., Ophelia. Although she occupies an almost peripheral space in the
narrative yet her presence and subsequently her absence, play significant roles
in determining the tragic import of the play. Although with the pre-Raphaelites
Ophelia did emerge as a potent cultural trope in the 19th century, her
resurrection was restricted essentially to the realms of aesthetics and she did
not transcend into the field of Shakespearean criticism. Unlike the sustaining
focus on her visual presence in the play, she as a literary figure is mostly
rendered invisible within the critical domain. In many ways, the male
interventions exclude Ophelia from the central actions of the play alongside
determining her material fate. She is manipulated by Hamlet, dictated on her
virtue by both her father and brother, and exploited as a device to stay in the
King’s favour by Polonius. Deprived therefore of thought, autonomy over her
sexuality and finally even language, afraid of her relations, her love and
life, she is driven to madness.
Laertes
defines Ophelia’s discourse as “A document in madness: thoughts and remembrance
fitted” as she goes on listing names of flowers hardly making any sense
(4.5.178-179). This particular scene has played a pivotal role in the tradition
of ecocritical reading of Ophelia’s character. Bridget Gellert Lyons reads the
flower symbolism as an articulation of the disjunction between the vitality of
natural wilderness and the sterility of urbanised civilisation. To quote her,
the flora imagery establishes a “difference between […] an ordered world of
shared symbolic meanings and the murky world of intrigue and mental disorder
that exists in Denmark; between a mythical world of natural fertility and
innocence, and an urban or courtly world of deception and calculation” (63).
Rebecca Laroche de-codes the flora imagery by charting out the medicinal
properties of the flowers mentioned in Hamlet to seek an alternative
ending to the play. She argues that Ophelia’s flowers hold the promise of an
antidote to the “poison” that has permeated Denmark. To quote her, “Ophelia
belongs to another, perhaps more simple, herb-filled world, in which plants can
restore one’s stability of mind and can ease pain and are not used for, but are
rather used against, poisoning” (220). Although Martha C. Ronk interprets the
flowers as symbolic of Ophelia’s functioning sexuality and susceptibility to
physical violation by aligning her arguments with Freudian theories on the
libido and the ‘Thanatos’, at one point she notes: “Within the play itself her
[Ophelia’s] iconography is contradictory as she appears both as the goddess of
nature and a debased version of the same” (24). Reina ANAMOTO’s work can be
referred to as an insightful investigation of Ophelia’s psyche through an
exposition of the traditional Elizabethan meanings behind each flower she
mentions. But most of the ecocritical studies of her character focus on the
interplay between nature and the female experiential reality. But since my
argument is centred around Hamlet and his ecophobia, I have tried to trace the
elements of the environment in the incoherence, incomprehensibility,
inconsistency, and confusion of her discourse, because language happens to be a
significant ground on which androcentrism differentiates itself from
environmentalism.
Language, therefore, becomes a tool in the hands of
androcentric forces to consolidate their power over the natural world. Hamlet
takes pride in man’s ability to yield linguistic authority as opposed to other
non-human animals. This, he believes gives man an upper hand in his
relationship with nature. To quote him, “What is a man, / Is his chief good and
market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? / A beast, no more. / Sure He
hath made us with such large discourse [...] That capability and godlike reason
/ To fust in us unused” (4.4.32-39). In this context, if we focus on the
relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia then we can gain further insight into
his ecophobia. For a man like Hamlet whose virility resides in language, the
subjects of his domination, i.e., women and the environment must ideally lack a
voice. But Ophelia as an embodiment of nature itself threatens to unhinge
Hamlet’s language control by simply escaping symbolisation. Intended or
otherwise, there is a lack of communication between them: “You jig and amble,
and you lisp. You nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your
ignorance” says Hamlet of Ophelia and further adds “Go to, I’ll no more on’t.
It hath made me mad” (3.1.145-148). He is clearly exasperated and seems too
eager to terminate the conversation. This is interesting given how Hamlet needs
little encouragement to indulge in verbosity. Perhaps Ophelia stands for the
incomprehensibility innate in natural phenomena and consequently is a factor
responsible for aggravating Hamlet’s ecophobia. Ecocritical readings have often
elaborated on the human tendency to enter into a hostile relationship with
nature only to seek in it an idealisation of the self. A similar possibility
occurs in the play when one realises that whatever Hamlet aspires to be,
Ophelia already is. Whether it is his dissembling madness, desiring to become
incomprehensible or wishing to die, Ophelia without even trying to,
accomplishes all three of these.
David Laird notes in his analysis of Leontes from The
Winter’s Tale, “To control language, to exercise the power to name,
categorize, and classify is an essential weapon in the arsenal of things
Leontes uses to control his world” (27) and the same can be said of Hamlet.
Thus, when Ophelia faces him with a discourse where there is infinite scope for
meaning to proliferate in absolute ambiguity, his fear of the unknown is blown
out of proportion. Unlike the complex multi-voiced import of Hamlet’s speeches
which is performative, in the case of Ophelia’s it is ontological. This is made
quite clear in the following exchange between them: OPHELIA you are as good as
a chorus, my lord / HAMLET I could interpret between you and your love, if I
could see the puppets dallying” (3.2.254-56). The word “chorus” is noteworthy because
it draws attention to Hamlet’s discourse as not only rhetorical but also
theatrically designed. Here we see a precarious patriarchal discourse trying in
vain to hold its ground against the disruptions of a non-phallocentric
linguistic force. Bruce Boehrer in his book Shakespeare Among the
Animals: Nature and Society In the Drama of Early Modern England (2002) has
argued extensively against what he calls the ‘absolute anthropomorphism’ of
Hamlet. To quote him, “this sense of human superiority, founded in the
capacities for reason and speech, helps frame the natural world as a consumable
asset: in effect as human property, to be employed for the human community’s
convenience and advantage” (14).
In
conclusion, it is important to understand that doing ecocriticism with
Shakespeare is firstly and foremost an anachronistic move. There are several
limitations to such a reading some of which have been quite rightly pointed out
by Greg Garrad. He argued in his seminar on “Green Shakespeares” (2005), that
most of the Bard’s plays are not overtly concerned with the natural world or
non-human animals and secondly, there were hardly any environmental issues
affecting the ecological balance in his times unlike ours, that could have
influenced Shakespeare. Estok has countered the latter part of the argument by
citing the perils of air pollution that Elizabethan England had suffered for a
long time. It is keeping these shortcomings in mind, that I have tried to zoom
in on some selected scenes in the play concerning Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia
to understand if an intersectional reading between female oppression,
anti-environmentalism and the functioning of oppressive patriarchal power
structures is possible. In the case of Gertrude, I have
focussed on how the experiential trope of disgust as a response to Gertrude’s
assertion of sexuality can be interpreted as Hamlet’s ecophobia. While with
Ophelia, I have paid attention to her discourse to conceptualise Hamlet’s
ecophobia in the face of the environmental incomprehensible.
Works
cited
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Reina. “The Symbolic Use of Flowers and Herbs in Hamlet: through
Gertrude’s Realization of Her Sin and Ophelia’s Madness”. 2005. Seijo
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Boeherer,
Bruce. “How to Do Things with Animals”. Shakespeare Among the Animals:
Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England. Palgrave
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Simon C. “Doing Ecocriticism with Shakespeare: An Introduction”. Ecocriticism
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David. “Competing discourses in The Winter’s Tale”. Connotations,
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Rebecca. “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of the Violets”. Ecocritical
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Lyons,
Bridget Gellert. “The Iconography of Ophelia”. ELH, vol. 44, no. 1, John
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Mack,
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Paglia,
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Martha C. “Representation of ‘Ophelia’”. Criticism, vol. 36, no. 1,
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10 Dec 2022.
Shakespeare,
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Wilson,
Robert Rawdon. “Its Lair: The Representation of Filth”. The Hydra’s Tale:
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Accessed 28 Nov 2022.
Bio: Ankita Sen is interested in popular culture (cinema and web-series),
contemporary feminist fictions, culinary culture in literature and gender
studies.
