Abstract
Shakespeare’s Hamlet constructs one of the most troubling images of motherhood in literature: the character of Gertrude, a too-present mother. Much critical attention has uncovered how Gertrude’s characterization exposes patriarchal undercurrents embedded in the Western ideology of motherhood. This chapter, however, seeks to unearth the mirror, or double to Hamlet’s mother, the mother of Ophelia, never mentioned, never referenced, and never invoked, yet made present through absence as her daughter’s tragedy unfolds. Ophelia’s interactions with Laertes, Polonius, Hamlet and Gertrude bring into sharp relief the specter of the mother-not-there. She is constructed as the deus ex machina that fails to appear; that could have offered protection, true guidance, wisdom, all that Ophelia needed to survive the violence and chaos around her. Like a mirror, Ophelia’s mother functions as a similar yet antithetical image to Gertrude. ‘Mother’s reason’, equated with nature’s reason, is set against woman’s appetite. The analysis is extended to larger considerations of how ‘mother’s wisdom’ is imagined through the negated mother of Ophelia, through connections to other expressions of ‘mother’s reason’ in Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who characterize nature as embodied motherhood and yet absent. Ophelia’s death implies her attempt to join an absent mother configured as nature. This interpretation is underscored by the graveyard scene, which questions whether Ophelia will return to her father in heaven, and challenges her receiving a Christian burial as a suicide. In the scene, her grave remains empty.
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Notes
- 1.
Coppélia Kahn takes up how the ‘absence of the mother points to her hidden presence’ in King Lear, which underscores a critique of the limits of patriarchal power.
- 2.
This absent mother is related to the mothers who might physically appear on Shakespeare’s stage, but appear ‘absent’ because they are usually in the background, lost in ensemble casts, have the smallest of roles, or have no speaking parts, as in Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, or The Winter’s Tale. On absent or lost mothers in Shakespeare, see Kahn (1986); Rose (1991); and Schotz (1980).
- 3.
All references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt (2008).
- 4.
- 5.
While all conduct books of the period address parental duties generally, several books were written specifically for women raising daughters, notably, Juan Luis Vives’s (2000) The Instruction of a Christian Woman, Edmund Tilney’s (1568) The Flower of Friendship, and Thomas Salter’s The Monument of Matrones. Advice books written by mothers to daughters—such as Frances Aburgavennie’s (1582) prayer book or Elizabeth Russell’s (1605) A Way of Reconciliation of a Good and Learned Man—are notable conduct books as well.
- 6.
On women’s duty of ‘keeping’ in early modern households, see Korda (2002), especially her introductory chapter.
- 7.
‘What’s the matter?’ is a question asked throughout Shakespeare’s dramatic canon and, perhaps on the surface, is not unusual in Hamlet. However, as a reading of a Shakespeare concordance would reveal, it is a question that is asked with more frequency in plays with ambiguous maternal characters, including Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. We argue, then, that there is something even more telling about the appearance of this question where a missing mother is at stake.
- 8.
- 9.
Even before her burial, the play associates Ophelia with a positive, generative nature figure by using language choices that are often set against Laertes’ and Polonius’ language of machinery or economics. Hers is an organic world; for example, in one of her longest monologues before her madness, Ophelia asks Laertes to avoid hypocritical advice, otherwise, like an ‘ungracious pastor,’ he will ‘show [her] the steep and thorny way to heaven/ Whilst…Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads/And recks not his own rede’ (1.3.48–51). Other characters describe Ophelia in such natural terms, discursively aligning her as nature’s child. Specifically, Laertes, in advising Ophelia to protect her chastity, describes her ‘chaste treasure’ as a ‘violet in the youth of primy nature’ (1.3.7). When Ophelia goes mad, Laertes says she is ‘the rose of May,’ noticing, too, that she has a new-found power through which she can turn ‘thought and affliction, passion, hell itself’ into ‘favor and prettiness’ (4.5.156, 183–184).
- 10.
Two aspects of natural science in Renaissance Europe bear on this discussion, particularly in regards to Francis Bacon’s work. Michael Clody (2011), Guido Giglioni (2014), Eric Langley (2014) and Julianne Werlin (2015) address the convergence of the mother nature metaphor in Bacon’s work, his rhetorical use of it, and the tensions that usage has in capturing an atomistic view of the natural world. Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve (2011) provides an excellent historical account, and has been significant in inspiring interest in the topic.
- 11.
According to Sandra Harding (1986), the shift toward an atomistic view of nature that is promulgated by Bodin’s later contemporaries, such as Francis Bacon, replaces the view of nature as ‘an active power in the universe [that] was associated with the alive nurturing mother earth’ with a material nature of ‘passive, inert matter and indifferent to explorations and exploitations of her insides’ (1986: 114–115, emphasis added). Carolyn Merchant points to the language of the Renaissance new science as displacing the organic and holistic representations of natura as an active and powerful agent of God, inviolate and maternal (Merchant 2006, 2008).
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Potter, R., Mackay, E.A. (2017). Ophelia’s Mother: The Phantom of Maternity in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In: Åström, B. (eds) The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49037-3_8
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