Saturday, December 8, 2018
Hamlet and Kate Chopin's The Awakening
SO this is a bit of a throwback to sophomore English when we read The Awakening by Kate Chopin but as I was reading Act 4 Scene 7 ***stop now because there are SPOILERS if you haven't read yet**** I immediately thought of a similarity between Ophelia's supposed suicide/death of drowning into the river because her clothes were too heavy and Edna's suicide into the ocean with rocks in her pocket. I remember the ambiguity of Edna's suicide, whether it was an act of rebellion or a submission to the hurt and difficulty in her life, but for the purposes of comparing it to Ophelia's death, I think I would say it is submission. Ophelia definitely lost herself to Hamlet and grew mad, so whether her death was a suicide or an accident she already submitted herself long before, unfortunately like Edna as well.
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Farah, that is a really cool comparison that I would've never thought of!!! I think it's interesting that you bring up the different interpretations of these WOMEN'S suicides, and I think that they beg an important question: what do these suicides say about how Chopin and Shakespeare portray women in The Awakening and in Hamlet, respectively?
Although I'll concede that Edna's suicide was somewhat ambiguous, I think it was ultimately an act of rebellion. Of course, I don't agree with her decision to take her own life; however, I do think that this act represented her rejecting societal roles (as a wife, as a mother, etc.). She uses suicide as a means to escape the world because she is suffering but also because she wants to deny the world power over her. She will no longer allow society (specifically the men in her life) to define her.
I think this speaks to the progressive (and controversial) message Chopin attempts to disseminate. In many ways, I think The Awakening is supposed to be a feminist novel; at the very least, it calls attention to the suffering of women during the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, Ophelia's suicide is quite different. I agree with you Farah that her death is, in a way, a submission. She, like all of the women in Hamlet, seems powerless. Shakespeare doesn't focus on the women in this play. But, the women Shakespeare does include are controlled (mentally and physically) by the men in their lives. We don't find out much about Gertrude, but she seems to have been bound by men for her entire life; after her true "love" King Hamlet died, she quickly remarried to Claudius. What does this instance say about women? Similarly, Hamlet's rejection, Ophelia's father's death, and Hamlet's betrayal (as the murderer of her father) tear Ophelia apart; these factors ultimately lead to her suicide. Of course, these dire circumstances might drive anyone to kill themselves. However, we must note that without men to support Ophelia, she falls apart. Furthermore, she falls into a state of despair so quickly because men have so much power over her; she virtually has no control over her own well-being.
Likewise, in Shakespearian (Elizabethan and Jacobian) times, women were often oppressed by men, robbed of many legal and social rights...despite the fact that there was an unmarried queen on England's throne for many years!
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