Gertrude as a Character of Intersection in Hamlet

Abstract

Dympna Callaghan in her introduction to Shakespeare Without Women notes that in Hamlet,

Hamlet positions his mother as the origin and cause of a complex chain of absence and substitution with which he is incestuously obsessed. Claudius is his absent father’s substitute not only on the throne but also in his mother’s bed. These circumstances fuel Hamlet’s misogyny and articulate a crucial alignment between representation and femininity in which the woman’s own body, the female orifice—what Hamlet terms the woman’s “nothing” (as opposed to the phallic “thing”)—contains the site of her absence.¹