Essay On Femininity In Shakespeare's Hamlet

With particular reference to Hamlet, feminist critics might explore the characters of Ophelia and Gertrude and how they challenge—or fail to challenge — the domination of male characters. Feminist critics would also be interested in exploring how the play expresses ideas about femininity that were common in Shakespeare's lifetime and how complicit Shakespeare is in Hamlet's personal misogyny. … Elaine Showalter's essay "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism" explores the difficulties, even embarrassments, that feminist critics have had in approaching Ophelia. The problem is that Ophelia has tended to be overshadowed by Hamlet, even by feminist critics, who then feel the need to liberate Ophelia from obscurity. However, even liberated Ophelia is problematic for she suggests some potentially troubling connections between femininity, female sexuality, and madness.

Three Feminist Approaches

Ophelia as the archetypal mad woman

Showalter asks: Does Ophelia represent a "document of madness (as Laertes claims) or does she represent the textual archetype of woman as madness or madness as woman?" The issue that Showalter is exploring here is the issue of how closely Ophelia's madness is connected to her

femininity. Showalter is asking if Ophelia's image is so powerful that her madness has set a precedent for all female characters. This would suggest that our culture makes some intrinsic connection between femininity and insanity, as if to be female is in some way to be insane.
Ophelia as the impossible subject
French feminist theorists take this a bit further and suggest that Ophelia's madness suggests the inability of male language to really represent femininity—so that female characters are inevitably represented as fractured, broken, insane, and reduced to nothing. This is a sweeping claim. These critics are not claiming that Shakespeare failed to represent Ophelia fairly but that because all language is male centered it is quite literally impossible to represent a whole female character using any existing language past or present. Instead, Ophelia can only be represented as silence, madness, incoherence, and nothingness. As Ophelia says: "I think nothing, my Lord."
Ophelia as the exiled feminine
Feminist critics accounting for Ophelia's madness and death have also suggested that she represents the female side of Hamlet which must be rejected and killed.

In this reading, as Showalter describes it: "Hamlet's disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women and into his brutal behaviour towards Ophelia." Certainly there is a tradition of seeing Hamlet as rather “feminine” and a number of female actors have taken on the role, believing that they could more fully explore this side of his nature. It is also true that Hamlet berates himself for behaving in a too feminine manner asking why he is unable to act but must instead, "like a whore, unpack my heart with

words."