Saturday, November 22, 2014
Gertrude and Jocasta
When reading the confrontation between Gertrude and Hamlet, I noticed similarities between Gertrude's response to Hamlet and Jocasta's response to Oedipus. In Hamlet, Gertrude pleaded with Hamlet to stop flooding her ears with her faults. She couldn't stand to hear what she had done because the guilt was unbearable. Similarly, when Oedipus told Jocasta that she had married her son without knowing, the guilt was too much for her to bear. She pleaded with Oedipus to stop, because she couldn't stand to hear what she had done. Gertrude and Jocasta are both similar, yet different in their faults. Jocasta was unaware she had married her son after her husbands death, while the reader is unaware if Gertrude knew Claudius killed the King. Gertrude is definitely a more mysterious character, in that we don't know her before the death of the king. She could have been cheating
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1 comment:
Jocasta did know that she had married her son. She urged him to stop searching for the truth after she herself figured it out. I think that she could have lived with he truth as long a the truth stayed hidden from Oedipus and the general public.
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