this is based on adelman’s analysis.
Adelman asserts that Hamlet is fundamentally about Hamlet's reaction to his mother’s remarriage, which symbolizes for him a deeper confrontation with her body and sexuality. Hamlet’s disgust with Claudius, she argues, is less about Claudius the man and more about what Claudius represents: the sexualized mother.
Adelman writes:
"At the heart of Hamlet's dis-ease with his task, at the heart of his confrontation with Claudius, is his confrontation with the contaminated maternal body, which he feels in some sense part of, his need to separate himself from that body and purify it." (Adelman, p. 11)
In Hamlet, we see Hamlet’s disgust with his mother’s marriage in his first soliloquy:
"Frailty, thy name is woman!
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears—why she, even she—
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!" (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2)
Here, Hamlet conflates Gertrude’s remarriage with a lack of mourning, suggesting that her rapid move from mourning his father to marrying Claudius is not just a betrayal but a profound violation of his moral and psychological order. Adelman emphasizes that Hamlet’s sense of betrayal is inseparable from his anxiety about Gertrude’s sexual nature.
Adelman explores how Hamlet feels trapped by his identification with Gertrude, unable to fully distance himself from her. Her remarriage threatens to engulf him, suggesting a return to the maternal, a state of incorporation that Hamlet fears.
Adelman argues:
"Insofar as Hamlet's father has been displaced by the mother's sexuality, he fears that he too will be displaced—that his own boundaries will dissolve into the feminine, the corporeal, and the maternal." (Adelman, p. 12)
This anxiety manifests in Hamlet’s obsession with his mother’s body, as seen when he confronts her in the "closet scene" (Act 3, Scene 4). Hamlet’s intense disgust comes through in his graphic description of her sexual relationship with Claudius:
"Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!" (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4)
Adelman suggests that this confrontation with Gertrude’s body reveals Hamlet’s deeper psychological horror at the blurring of boundaries between himself and the maternal body. His language reflects a visceral disgust, not just with her marriage, but with the imagined physical act itself, symbolizing the threat of his own incorporation into the corrupt body of his mother.
According to Adelman, Hamlet’s project is ultimately to purify or cleanse the image of his mother in order to assert his own identity. His struggle with Claudius is secondary to his deeper need to symbolically cleanse Gertrude and restore her to the pedestal he had her on when she was married to his father.
In the "closet scene," Hamlet pleads with Gertrude to regain her purity:
"Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds,
To make them ranker." (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4)
This language of confession, repentance, and compost suggests that Hamlet sees Gertrude’s sexuality as something that must be morally and physically cleansed. Adelman interprets this scene as Hamlet's attempt to regain control over his mother’s body, and by extension, over his own psyche: