Sexism in Hamlet

In Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet,” Hamlet has a very negative attitude toward women. However, women play an important role. In the beginning, the female characters seem flat, yet over the course of the narrative, they take on a critical physical importance because of the feelings men have for them emotionally, and more importantly, physically.

Women are the ones the men use in their wicked plots. They are quite easily manipulated and have almost no say in anything. They are portrayed as emotional tools, as was usual during that time. Hamlet makes seemingly sexist comments throughout the play such as, “Frailty, thy name is woman,” but it is very typical of the time. Though the frailty quote is famous, I believe others stand out more boldly as sexism such as “Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them” in a later scene. He makes many other such comments to Ophelia, Gertrude, and even Claudius. However, what he says is not very out of the ordinary.

Professor Linda Bamber comments on this and other related issues in her book, Comic Women, Tragic Men. In it she says

The sex nausea is here, as in the other tragedies, a corollary to the hero's psychological and spiritual suffering. It is isomorphic not with the play as a whole but only with the second phase of the tragic fable. It is present from the beginning because Hamlet actually begins in the middle of the second phase. The first phase has ended with the death of Hamlet's father, two months prior to time present. That death has ended the old world, comfortably centered on the masculine Self and based on an identity of interests between father and son. In the new world the presence of the Other destroys the hero's sense of centrality. Misogyny is a version of the anger the hero directs toward the Other for destroying his old, self-centered world. Hamlet, like other heroes, rages against women when he loses his place in the sun (Bamber...