Coincidentally, we're also doing Hamlet in English and I actually checked the blog in the midst of putting off my commentary on Claudius' confession scene. I won't pretend to be a Freud scholar, but from what I've picked up I think it's best not to read too deeply into how Freud came up with his terms, because he never meant anything so profound that's worth your precious insight. The terms 'Oedipus complex' and 'Electra complex' are named only after the most basic gist of the stories - i.e. Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother, nothing else (but of course such acts were products of Oedipus' own Oedipus complex according to Freud). Freud gave his ideas fancy names pretty much for the commercial effect of using fashionable Greek names - what he called the life instincts / death instincts (sex drive / aggression drive) for example he chose to call "eros" and "thanatos" over sex and death so that they'd sell. And they did.

The supposed Oedipal nature of Hamlet has been explored quite a bit, though. Our (Kiwi) English teacher had us watch (consecutively) three different versions of the queen's bedchamber scene - [Sir] Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson, and Kenneth Branagh - and the Olivier version, where the queen looks more like his daughter than his mother, has some slight Oedipal tones (maybe only because our English teacher made us look for them - "Naityce the draipery on the beeed! What des it remoind ye of? No, reilly, what des it look like?"), whereas Gibson goes all the way with it, it's the most disturbing thing. You have to watch it to know, it had us all dumbstruck.

Ugh, back to the commentary.

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [7:23 PM]

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