Frailty, Thy Name Is Toxic Masculinity. Gendered Mimesis of the Power Struggle in Hamlet, Ophelia, and The Northman

From Firenze University Press Journal: LEA

Emma de Beus, Columbia University

1. Mimesis and Gender

The familial political struggle in Hamlet offers the standard by which the genre of revenge tragedy is often measured. Shake-speare himself was responding to the genre well-established by Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and other popular revenge tragedies of early modern London — indeed, Hamlet has been called “a highly self-conscious remake of an earlier revenge tragedy (also called Hamlet) that had already come to stand synecdochically for the genre” (Deutermann 2011, 247). However, Shakespeare can, in a way, be seen to adapt the genre to suit his dramatic needs much as he adapts the old legend on which the plot of his play is based. Hamlet, in its turn, has been adapted in numerous ways over the centuries since it was first staged. By positioning Ham-let squarely in the middle of this adaptive process, its mimesis becomes clearer, as demonstrated by the fact that all meaningful adaptations of Hamlet have one aspect in common at their core: the familial, political power struggle. The constant amidst chang-ing details and setting reflects the mimetic properties of Hamlet’s power struggle. Given that “it is hard to imagine a more charged concept in Western literary history than that of mimesis” (Kahn 2006, 1), it is vital to consider the mimetic nature of Hamlet’s core familial and political power struggle. As part of this new way to examine the relationship between Shakespeare and adaptation, it will be necessary and novel to understand the ways in which Hamlet and its adaptations use mimesis in a particularly gendered way.

A gendered consideration of mimesis will enable a re-examination of both the constant and the adapted in Hamlet: Ophelia and Gertrude and the ways in which gendered mimesis allows them to evolve in 21st century adaptations. By focusing specifically on the way the key female characters of Ophelia and Gertrude, and the political and familial conflicts in which they are embroiled, evolve through this adaptive process, it will be possible to come to a new understanding: gendered mimesis.Mimesis can be defined as “the verbal capturing or conveying of experience in such a way as the mental image or meaning created by the words is judged similar, analogous, or even identical to what we know about the world from sense-data directly” (Greene et al. 2012, 1171). This summation is useful when thinking about the relationship between mimesis and gender. Judith Butler has famously written a great deal on this subject, considering issues such as “how gender should be experienced” (2001, 2), how gender is performed, and “what possibilities exist for the cultural transformation” (1988, 521) as a result of considering gender as performance. The notion here is that gender is not determined by biology, but instead is mimetically formed through successive iterations of gender and power constructed historically and culturally.

The revenge tragedy genre is sufficiently codified prior to the advent of Hamlet that the audience is comfortable with the expectations of how the various plot elements fit together are clear to its first audience. Hamlet therefore fits into this definition of mimesis through the political conflict over who will be king, and whether or not that outcome is just, and the familial conflict between father, son, mother, and uncle. Each of these pieces plays a part in setting the stage for an empathetic exemplar of the revenge tragedy genre. Moreover, by considering gendered aspects of the adapted performance of Hamlet in Ophelia and The Northman, a consideration of mimesis akin to Butler’s notions becomes viable. The power struggle in Hamlet, therefore,is a mimesis in that the play is a deliberate re-sponse to the revenge tragedy genre and its constituent tropes. While the familial and political power struggles of Hamlet and its adaptations match the generic expectations, the ways in which the key female characters fit into this power struggle and are adapted show a constant presence, though with a seismic shift. In order to delve into the relationship that can be seen between gender and mimesis through Hamlet, it will be necessary to think about mimesis in a few different ways. There is a tension between the notion that a “conservatizing use of the canon” can “enforce a politics of mimesis, inclusion and exclusion” (Garber 1992, 242) and that mimesis is not just “the object of negative critiques of dramatic art, then; but, rather, mimesis is the subject through which positive and creative possibilities are affirmed via a performative conception of subjective life — this is, in a nutshell, the mimetic hypothesis” (Lawtoo 2018, 310). At this crossroads of conserving the canon and the affirmation of creative possibilities lie adaptations of Hamlet. These works adapt Shakespeare’s renowned play into performances that both repeat and respond to traditional readings of the text, showing both the conservative and generative potential of mimesis.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/lea-1824-484x-13644

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-lea/article/view/13644