Hamlet: Gertrude as a Stereotype

Despite Queen Elizabeth’s rule, Shakespeare’s time was a highly patriarchal society.  We can’t be sure whether or not Shakespeare himself supported this view, though many of his plays seem to.  Many of the movies we watched for class on both his life and plays reflects these same ideas, so someone must of thought he did.  In Shakespeare in Love we see Viola being ruled both her father and fiancée and oppressed by the society she lives in.  Romeo+Juliet portrays Juliet as a slave to her father’s will and, in some interpretations, to her own innocence and emotions.  But it is in the movie Hamlet that we are presented with a female character so strongly controlled and reliant on this patriarchal society and so conforming to stereotypical assumptions made about women.  So many of these assumptions can be seen in the first act.

The first scene Gertrude appears in is her husband’s funeral.  Except for her, (as far as I could tell) all the attendees were men, and she the only guest crying.  This goes along with the binary logic of language: male/female, reason/emotion, head/heart.  Because she is a woman, Gertrude shows emotion and is sensitive to the situation while all the “reasonable” men show no emotion at all.  We know from the play that Gertrude marries less than two months after her previous husband’s death.  We don’t know exactly why she married, but we can assume some things.  She most likely married for security, playing into the assumption that women must look to men for protection.  In a following scene with Claudius and Hamlet, Gertrude plays into the French feminist argument that women have two options: to speak, but speak as men, or to remain silent.  Though it’s not necessarily portrayed like this in the play version, in the movie adaptation Gertrude has few lines in this scene.  The ones she does speak are basically echoes of what her husband said before her.  Gertrude does not really speak in much more of the first act.  In the scenes we do see her she is often hanging on Claudius, kissing him or showing some kind of affection for him.  This relates to the French feminists connection between women’s sexuality and women’s language, and the idea that women are only defined by their sexuality.  The little we see of Gertrude at the beginning of this film supports these ideas because the audience has no choice but to define her by what we see—her sexuality. 

Although  there are certainly more examples later in the film (and play), it’s easy to see just by the first act how the character of Gertrude falls in the stereotypes formed by a patriarchal society.