Why I don't like Hamlet...

(http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lets-go-full-crocodile-ladies/)

In the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

“We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons. All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.” (from We Should All Be Feminists)

Behold, I am going on a feminist "rant."

Recently I did a project on the role of women in the play Hamlet (written by Shakespeare in around the 17th century, but you probably knew that). I normally don't cuss unless it is necessary, but I have to say that as I was working on the project, I got really pissed off.

As relevant as this topic of mistreatment of women is in this play—which I will get to in a second—it is equally as pressing today... almost FOUR HUNDRED YEARS LATER. So, yeah, it can be frustrating how slowly change occurs. I am just happy that I am a girl living in this present moment rather than in Shakespeare's time, when women had it even worse.

The project started off comparing the nature of Ophelia's madness with that of Hamlet's—fairly innocent. He was more aggressive and made witty remarks, because he was feigning his madness. Ophelia's was more distant and incomprehensible, because (you guessed it) she was driven to real madness. But can you blame her? The guy she was sleeping with blamed HER for giving up her virginity to him ("get thee to a nunnery") and he freaking murdered her father Polonius. As my peers and I delved a bit deeper into the topic, we observed the language Shakespeare uses when painting the pictures of both Hamlet and Ophelia. Ophelia is pitied and pretty much blamed for her madness when Gertrude (a fellow woman, by the way) says of her, “Poor Ophelia divided from herself and her fair judgement” (1.5.83-84). Hamlet, on the other hand, is simply not blamed at all: “Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it then?”(5.2.208-209) In fact his madness is diagnosed as being this heroic man’s “enemy,” as if to say he is bravely battling this illness (5.2.211). How come he gets to be the hero while she is a pathetic fool?

To tie this topic into the quote from Chimamanda’s book, I want to mention the way Ophelia is treated right from the start of the play. In the first act, third scene, Ophelia is portrayed as a young, stupid girl getting involved with Hamlet, the brooding Prince of Denmark. The play immediately places great emphasis on how she should not being sacrificing her purity through the characters of Laertes and Polonius. Laertes begins by warning her that Hamlet will say he loves her but he won’t be loyal because he is too focused on serving his country and himself. He then delves into this whole thing about how she should protect her “chaste treasure,” and “keep [herself] in the rear of [her] affection, out of the shot and danger of desire” (lines 31-35). He goes on about this for a long time, basically trying to scare her out of choosing to have sex. The funny thing is that she even calls him out for being a hypocrite, saying, “Do not as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,” suggesting that he himself is allowed to do the same thing and yet forbids her to do it. Preceding this, Polonius comes in and asks if she believes that Hamlet loves her when he says he does. Of course she isn’t sure, and so he launches into a speech about how “prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows,” and yet, “extinct in both even in their promise as it is a-making, [she] must not take for fire” (lines 115-120). Basically she shouldn’t try to hide the fact that she lusts after him, and that she should cut it out before things go rotten. Did she ever ask her brother or father for relationship/sex advice? No, actually, she didn’t. Here these men are telling her what to do about another man, and essentially making her feel guilty for sleeping with him and becoming “impure.” I totally understand that these people were ruled by the Protestant religion during this Elizabethan era, which preaches that a woman losing her virginity before marriage is sinful. However, I think I am still allowed to be mad.

Polonius and Laertes are doing exactly what Chimamanda still recognizes is a problem today; they are focusing too much on teaching her to worry about her relationship with Hamlet. And, as you know if you’ve read or seen the play, Hamlet frankly does not care much what Ophelia is up to. He basically sleeps with her, plays with her emotions, and lives his life without repercussions for his actions. He is most certainly “angry,” “aggressive,” and “tough,” but he is praised for being this way because he is a male leader.

I could go on about this topic forever, but I basically wanted to talk about that because it was bothering me and I wanted to give me opinion.

Sorry that I haven’t made any posts about my trip to Normandy or my end-of-the-year-goings-on! I may get to it, I may not.

That’s all for now, folks!