Hamlet's Grief - Parents Just Don't Understand

While I love the article and its interpretation (I’ll come back to it in a moment), I still agree with Lacey that Hamlet is still going a little crazy.

First of all, holy cow this article changed my way of thinking. I really enjoyed how O’Rourke even analyzed Hamlet’s language. His run on sentences and muddled metaphors point to how he does not know how to commutate his grief. The one I particularly enjoyed was O’Rourke’s discussion of Hamlet’s puns. In almost all serious, stressful, or sad situations, I have personally seen many people resort to a common thread of humor. Humor distracts, brightens the mood, takes away the pain temporarily. Hamlet is desperate for the release of this pain and he uses the commonalty of humor.

Thinking about Hamlet struggling because everyone sees him as crazy makes my heart hurt. Super duper reader response-y Jessica was right! Now I sympathize because instead of picturing Hamlet as a crazy, sexual, and cowardly man, I see him as a young boy longing for a father. Ahhh conflicting images!

Back to Lacey’s point, it is possible all of the social rejection has led Hamlet to madness, but lets keep in mind he still has killed a dude. I almost want to give Hamlet a temporary insanity bargain, but I know worse is in store. How far are we willing to excuse Hamlet’s violent and inappropriate behavior for grief? I don’t know the answer, but I’m hoping to form an opinion as we read on.

I am of those who were not greatly impressed upon by O'Rourke's article. I believe that there are aspects of Hamlet's complexity that cannot be explained away by grief for his father's death, not even for the slightly more complicated situation concerning the loss of his throne. The change in Hamlet reminds me of Gregor's metamorphosis, from human to cockroach. Not to say that Hamlet is now utterly repulsive or difficult to empathize with, rather, his reality has been transformed and we are watching him cope with it while he is alienated by those who loved him. Pieces of Hamlet that do not seem to be explained by simple (albeit powerful) grief include his remarks to Ophelia, his reaction to his mother, and his eventual need for blood. His reality not only sharpened, seeing "the world more accurately" as the article describes O'Rourke's personal change, but it's turned around to somewhere he does not recognize. Acknowledging the power of grief and not downplaying it while reading Hamlet is a wonderful benefit to reading the article, but this play needs a more complex answer.

I found the most interesting part of the article to be O'Rourke's choice of phrasing. She writes, "Strangely, Hamlet somehow made me feel it was OK that I, too, had 'lost all my mirth.'" Now, I totally agree that works like Hamlet that allow you to find some way to reflect upon your own grief can help you feel much better. I think she overlooks, though, the very events she acknowledges occur in Hamlet.

To me, at least, Hamlet's grief isn't a good thing. It's an understandable thing, but it's not a positive trait. Under O'Rourke's interpretation, it leads to his anger at those around him, it leads to his withdrawal from Ophelia (causing them both sadness), and it leads to him "accidentally [killing] with a dagger." O'Rourke sums up Hamlet's life nicely with her choice of the word "disintegrated." So why, then, would Hamlet, which illustrates some of the worst-case scenarios this grief can cause, make her feel that things would be "OK" for her, feeling the same grief?

Maybe I'm too harsh on O'Rourke here—it's been a few years since I've experienced the sort of grief she talks about—but I think the power of Hamlet to comfort and heal the grieving lies not in its "capture" of a total picture of grief. Rather, I think it's something she briefly mentions near the end of her article: "It is, to be honest, strangely comforting to see my own worst thoughts mirrored back at me—perhaps because I do not feel likely to go as far into them as Hamlet does" (emphasis mine).

I'd say the "locus of power" in Hamlet and any similar work viewed through the lens of grief is not that it depicts grief, but to what extent and with—to borrow a gov term—what sort of "spin." There are countless books and movies I've read and seen that make me feel more for the main character than I do for Hamlet. Yet these works of art—A Tale of Two Cities, Titanic, Tuesdays with Morrie—don't necessarily take grief to its fullest extensions. We see a heroine who names her kids after another who sacrificed, or a main character who has long moved on and is looking back with nostalgia, or a narrator who tries to put an uplifting spin on the tragic ending. We don't often see Hamlet and its blatant, unabashed picture of just how much grief can tear apart.

Somehow, for reasons I'm probably not qualified to speculate on but will anyway, seeing how awful someone else's grief is seems to temper our own. O'Rourke's article suggests it's not the caring but not-grieving friends who help us eventually recover, but those in a worse situation. We don't want to be told to keep our chin up, told that things get better, told by every other person we meet that the sun will come up tomorrow regardless. We know that's so, at some level, even if we temporarily forget it or force it from our conscious mind. I think we need to see how bad it could get, and then realize that's now how we want to end up. And then, sans any moralizing message, we begin to slowly self-correct.

I agree with Madison that O'Rourke's argument was based off of emotion and not grounded in text that was specific to her point. Regardless of her use of Hamlet quotations and references to run-on sentences, I feel there is not quote specific enough to really back-up her point. But, I think she does a wonderful job of evoking empathy in her readers, and that is what drives her point. As for my experience, because I could feel her grief and somewhat understand it, I could transfer that emotion to empathize with Hamlet and understand his perspective a little more clearly. It is lines like, "Grief can also make you feel, like Hamlet, strangely flat. Nor is it ennobling, as Hamlet drives home. It makes you at once vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive," that contain a certain sincerity that really help me feel both O'Rourke and Hamlet's perspective.
I also would like to discuss Hamlet's relationship with his father. It's been mention both on the forum and in class that the entire story would change if we only knew what kind of relationship Hamlet had with his father. But, in this interpretation, I feel his level of closeness doesn't even matter. After pondering parental death I've come to the conclusion that regardless of the kind of relationship a child has with his parent, he ail still feel a profound loss when his parent passes because of the biological connection to a parent. Now I cannot back up this point with text, but it just seems logical to me. We are born with a deep understand that our parents are there to protect us, and to a lose a parent means losing a sense of safety. So I can understand that Hamlet's reaction to death could drive him relatively crazy, as he is suddenly abandoned and alone, and trapped by a societal expectation of revenge. O'Rourke says, "And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief—that to do so would be taboo somehow. Hamlet is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly." Just as Hamlet is stuck, unable to openly express his grief, I theorize that he feels trapped in his level of nobility, in his relationship with ophelia, and within his own mind as he is pulled between the slowness of grief and the aggression of revenge.

My favorite line of O'Rourke's piece was, "Hamlet is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief, Shakespeare understands, is a social experience." Something about the idea of grief as a social experience, and not merely an internalized, individual feeling clicks with me. It appears to be human nature to make evident ones grief, often as a means of attention. If the grief is real, that attention can lead to easier help by not requiring the griever to go asking for it. Both for Hamlet and people today, grief changes the actions of those around you. It almost seems as though Hamlet's reaction to his father's death shapes Gertrude's character--her interactions with Hamlet in particular. It is a truly peculiar idea to think that one's emotions can completely alter the actions of those around him.

I also really like what Gary concluded with, as it was a conclusion I was considering myself. Gary posed and attempted to answer a deep question: "Are we not always in an infinite tumultuousness of ideas and mind? Constancy would then be inconceivable and we would then really have no permanent ideals because although we may hold certain items closer to heart, our opinions of them would always differ." Hamlet's (or any human's) emotions at any given time not only affect his surroundings, but also the way he interprets the things around him. In that sense, finding any sort of congruencies in one's ideals would prove difficult, seeing as how at any given time, one ideal could be perceived in a different manner. The best way for me to overcome the sense of hopelessness such an idea provides me with is to posit that although emotions may alter perspectives, some part of us supercedes our emotional tumultuousness and hangs on for dear life to the things we believe in most, also leaving us with a more concrete ground from which to analyze from.

I think one of the reasons Hamlet is so canonical, even after four centuries, is that the protagonist really isn't a detestable character. Personally, I've always read Hamlet's depression as being brought on entirely by his father's death, not by philosophical anxiety, but O'Rourke's article really lights up how understandable, how human, Hamlet's character is. It's easy to forget, especially near the end of the play, that Hamlet's problems are brought about by the great wrong that's been done him. By the end of Act IV, it's hard not to think of Hamlet as the guy who murdered Polonius and drove Ophelia to her death. At the same time, however, it's crucial to remember that the root cause of Hamlet's behavior is his grief and its subsequent repression. One has to feel sympathy for the prince when his own mother tells him to "cast [his] nighted color off" after the death of her own husband. Hamlet is hopelessly alone, trapped as the only one who remembers his father. This is a completely understandable emotion; all of us have felt or will feel true grief at some point in our lives. I once felt upset when I found similarities between myself and Hamlet, but O'Roarke makes me feel better about it. Hamlet is still legendary today because in a way, it reflects all of humanity both in Shakespearean times and today. It's an beautifully tragic image of the human form when all the supports are kicked out from under it. The largest thing I took away from O'Rourke's article is that Hamlet is an understandable character with a reason for his actions; he's not just a madman who incites trouble in Denmark.

The question this line of reasoning poses, then, is that of fault. A bunch of people die in Hamlet. Whom do we blame? King Hamlet's death is horrible, but does that really excuse all of Hamlet's subsequent actions? I'm not sure the fact that Prince Hamlet is wronged in the start of the play allows me to fully forgive him for murdering a person who wasn't directly involved in the regicide and driving another to commit suicide. To what extent, then, do our circumstances excuse our actions? Is past trauma a legitimate justification for present sin? We feel sympathy for Hamlet when we read his play, but we also feel distanced from him because of his negative actions. How much of this is Hamlet's fault, and how much of it is a product of the world he lives in? The same can be said for the other characters. Ophelia certainly intends no harm, Laertes goes berserk only after his entire family is slain, Fortinbras is only avenging his father's death. Even King Claudius doesn't want any of the deaths that actually occur in the body of the play. Maybe this is the true definition of a tragedy: when horrible things happen, even if they're not necessarily anyone's fault.