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Initiated by its title, The Sound and the Fury invites readers to recall Shakespeare and mental aberration. Despite alluding to Macbeth rather than Hamlet, Faulkner clearly intends us to read with a literal eye on his novel and his South and a figurative one on Shakespeare and his England. In fact, Faulkner remarked petulantly to a group of friends in New Orleans that "I could write a play like Hamlet if I wanted to" (qtd. in Blotner 121). While critics Diane Roberts, Timothy Kevin Conley, and Eric Sundquist validly compare Quentin Compson to Hamlet, I find equally provocative similarities between Quentin and Ophelia. Quentin and Ophelia share a madness spurred by patriarchal limitations, psychologically devastating losses, and unrequited physical love that leads both of them to suicidal drowning. What Coppélia Kahn argues of King Lear, that "we are shown only fathers and their godlike capacity to make or mar their children" (35), equally resonates for both Hamlet and The Sound and the Fury. Ophelia and Quentin suffer conflicted desires to obey their overbearing fathers and must navigate their existences with little or no maternal influence. Their common hysteria evolves from misplaced physical and emotional desire for unattainable partners. Because they are prevented from legitimate integration into their respective cultures, Quentin and Ophelia circumvent the patriarchal limitations of those cultures through suicide. By examining the social construction of their mutual madness, we can read the links between Ophelia and Quentin as cultural currency connecting Faulkner's South and Shakespeare's England. Quentin's rejection of his masculinity, his ultimate desire for the feminine, causes him to become a twentieth-century, peculiarly Southern rewriting of Ophelia in a resented masculine body.

The cultural attitude toward madness in the Renaissance and early twentieth-century America reveals salient links between Ophelia and Quentin. Ophelia suffers from hysteria, a malady often ascribed to upper class women who bide their time in their fathers' homes while awaiting fulfillment of their culturally mandated roles as wives and mothers, according to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (202). Renaissance physician Edward Jorden defines hysteria, or the "suffocation of the mother," as marked by the movement of the womb "whereby it is sometimes drawn upwards or sidewards ..., compressing the neighboring parts and so consequently one another" ( 6), initiating hysterical symptoms of choking or muteness. Ophelia's symbolic choking and cultural muteness stem from her sublimated desires for social agency, somaticized by her wandering womb. A proposed cause of the wandering womb is the cessation of menstruation, due to sexual inactivity. Renaissance physicians believe menstrual fluid is a by-product of sexual intercourse and that lack of sex causes the body to retain rather than release such blood (Jorden 20). Physicians liberally prescribe marriage as one cure for hysteria since regular sexual intercourse is a privilege of the socially sanctioned marital institution and anchors "the wild uterus under the husband's control" (Neely 320), which "declares the necessity for male control of this volatile female element" (Kahn 34). Neither marriage nor its sexual by-product is an option for Ophelia because her father deems her only suitor unsuitable; thus she resorts to a violent and permanent cure for her suffering of the mother. Again, the physicians' cure for this potential violence spawned by hysteria is "speedy Marriages otherwise ... that through Madness and Impatience, [young girls] will make away themselves, either by drowning or hanging" (qtd. in Camden 255). Ophelia's drowning results directly from Polonius's prohibition of any marriage, speedy or otherwise.

This "disease called the suffocation of the mother" functions as a blanket term for several types of physical and mental distress, according to Jorden ( 6). Such an attack characterizes insanity, delirium, melancholy, or furor and appears behaviorally "in such as do dote, in such as are distracted through love, feare, griefe, joye, anger, hatred &c. In some of which they will laugh, crye, prattle, threaten, chide, or sing &c. according to the disposition of the party" (Jorden 14). Ophelia's distraction results from both love for Hamlet and her father coupled with grief over her father's death, exacerbating her expression of the symptoms Jorden describes. She sings and prattles, "hems and beats her heart, / ... winks and nods and gestures" (IV.v. 5, 11), becoming "a document in madness" (IV.v. 176), literally a textbook case of Jorden's definition. As Lawrence Babb asserts, "Lovers necessarily suffer some degree of mental derangement; 'they are very slaves, drudges for a time ... beside themselves'" (136), typified by Ophelia, who is "divided from herself and her fair judgement" (IV.v.82).

While physicians Richard Napier and Robert Burton use melancholy as the umbrella term for different manifestations of madness, Jorden's use of the overarching term suffocation of the mother, with its gendered implications, reveals the pervasive epithet of women as hysterics. Certainly men are not considered immune to the broad types of hysteria Jorden describes, as Kahn argues, "Lear is seized by 'the mother'" (40). Because Jorden creates the rubric of madness based upon female anatomy, however, he suggests culturally accepted links between women and madness and specifically women and hysteria that have yet to be fully eradicated. Carol Thomas Neely argues that "[t]he context of [Ophelia's] disease, like that of hysteria later, is sexual frustration, social helplessness, and enforced control of women's bodies" (325). Women's unruly "mad" natures are controlled by the patriarchal cultural institutions erected for the purpose of screwing a tight lid onto the vessel containing women's natural passions. Madness in women, according to the patriarchy, vindicates the need for imposing severe limitations on them and reminds men of the thin protective wall culture provides them from the nature - read madness - of women.

Provocatively, three hundred years after Jorden's treatises, Freud spends equal effort as his predecessor on hysteria. Anxiety about women and madness certainly did not recede in the intervening centuries between Jorden and Freud, and Freud's influential work on hysteria is unconsciously linked to Renaissance assumptions about madness. Like Jorden, Freud connects the origins of hysteria to disturbed sexual functions, identifying both the physical and mental dimensions of sexuality. Ilza Veith argues that Freud's "hypotheses are vaguely reminiscent of the theories ... of Galen concerning the hysterogenic effect of retained sperm owing to unaccustomed sexual continence, [and are] all the more striking because Freud appeared totally unaware of the historical background and earlier humoral theories" (265).[ 1] Freud's "discovery" of the sexual component of hysteria becomes a reinvention of the suffocation of the mother although certainly doctors no longer hold the wandering womb literally responsible for hysterical symptoms. Although Faulkner denied that he read Freud, "his writings referred to him and showed that, at the very least, he had heard a lot of talk about Freudian psychology" (Blotner 147), evidenced by his creation of Quentin as an hysteric.

Echoing the Renaissance belief that hysteria strikes men and women, early twentieth-century psychiatrists also recognize it as a non-gender specific affliction,[ 2] although hysterical men exhibit "a feminine kind of behavior" (Showalter, Female 172). Male hysterics exhibit "unnatural" sexual behavior, displaying either indifference to intercourse or impotence rather than a virile desire for physical satisfaction (172). This absence of a culturally encoded "normal" male attitude toward sexuality through active interest in and pursuit of a sexual partner underscores the male hysteric's adoption of feminine behavior. Symptoms of hysteria identified in the twentieth century tend to differ from those of the Renaissance in terminology but not essential meaning. Like Jorden's identification of hysteria affecting memory, Freud writes "hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences" ( 16), a symptom Quentin obsessively exhibits. Hysterics tend to be theatrical, subject to irritability, mood swings, depression, and display aberrant sexual behavior classified by gender: overt sexuality in women, uninterest in sexuality for men. In the social construction of madness, then, when men and women reject their culturally ascribed gender patterns and adopt opposite sexual behaviors, they are labeled hysterics.[ 3] Under this rubric, Quentin epitomizes twentieth-century male hysteria, just as Ophelia enacts hysterical symptoms discerned by sixteenth-century culture. Ophelia's hysteria manifests itself in an inversion of silent, demure, and modest female behavior while Quentin's hysteria exacerbates his feminization. Quentin's cultural milieu and its parallels to Renaissance codification further explain his psychological construction and his connection to Ophelia.

The hierarchical kinship relationships in the South reflect many comparable values identified in Renaissance social hierarchy. The Southern patriarch demands allegiance and obedience from his wife, offspring, and servants, fulfilling his culturally dictated authoritative position. The patriarch's word is incontrovertible law in both cultures. The responsibilities of the firstborn son in an aristocratic Southern home are much like those of the Renaissance daughter, evidenced by the literature of both eras. The Renaissance daughter's mandatory allegiance to paternal obedience, sexual chastity, and virtual silence converts to the Southern son's obedience to the will of the patriarch that preserves the cultural values represented by his socially appropriate family name and its perpetuation through primogeniture, silence on behalf of the son's own desires and will, and a social chastity that limits legitimate and public social interaction to those of a reciprocal class and bloodline. As Kahn argues, "[b]ecause the family is both the first scene of individual development and the primary agent of socialization, it functions as a link between psychic and social structures and as the crucible in which gender identity is formed. From being mothered and fathered, we learn to be ourselves as men and women" (35). Their authoritarian fathering and omitted mothering skew both Ophelia's and Quentin's gender identities. Ophelia lacks a mother within the play while Quentin's shrouds herself in hypochondria and class insecurity.

Both characters' fathers demand absolute obedience to their ideologies rather than providing supportive guidance that would ensure concrete formation of their offsprings' identities. Expected to conform to her father's wishes regardless of her own, thus embodying the ideals of female propriety in her silence, chastity, and obedience, Ophelia's essentialized femininity emerges out of subservience to her father that fails to support her identity when he dies. Quentin adheres to a correspondingly impossible ideal of masculinity without any tools to maintain it. Ophelia ultimately rejects her essentialized femininity in madness while Quentin clings to his own femininization born from his inability to wield masculine social control. The cost of unwavering loyalty to their patriarchal social codes, for both Quentin and Ophelia, is madness and subsequent death. Where Ophelia finds a voice and subverts patriarchal discourse through her madness, Quentin achieves silence and a full immersion with the desired other, the feminine, as a critique of his twentieth-century patriarchal experience.

Quentin's madness surfaces as he tries, futilely, to stop time and end his hereditary patriarchal cycle by destroying his watch: "I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser ... and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on.... not knowing any better" (SF 80). With time as a linear progression and the watch a symbol of Quentin's microcosmic patriarchy and filial obligation, Quentin's mutilation of the watch attempts to sever his lineage, to destroy the obligatory compliance with his father and arrest time in order to enact his own desires. Furthermore, Quentin's mutilation of the watch prefigures his desire for castration, pointing to his need for feminization as a nonlinear, nonrational cultural distinction. Diane Roberts notes that "by twisting the [watch's] hands off, Quentin signals his lack of accommodation with patriarchal discourse" (119). As Quentin reveals, "Father said that constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function. Excrement ..." (SF 77). Mr. Compson's time, Father's time, is eliminated and forgotten waste. Quentin's time, conversely, is obsessive, a paradox of madness that attempts to escape it and an adherence to its symbolic honor of which Quentin refuses to acknowledge an emptiness.

Quentin can molest the watch but cannot escape its ticking sound because this attempt to divorce himself from his Compson history is futile. Quentin's simultaneous reverence for and rejection of time contradicts Mr. Compson's cynicism while it embraces the patriarchal reliance on past honor, loyalty, and tradition. John Irwin perceives that the watch "in its passage from generation to generation symbolizes both the transmission of General Compson's failure and defeatism and the burden of remembering a past that paralyzes the present" (64). General Compson embodies the South's defeat in the Civil War, its loss and ineffectualness consigned to his name and his watch. This defeat, symbolizing the feminization of Southern heroes, strikes Quentin at his core. Quentin embraces this feminization as he adheres to the social codes paradoxically created to diminish the vanquishment's taint. The burden of heredity transcends both name and heirloom, by containing and judging all kinship relationships, actions, cultural successes or failures. Like Ophelia, who sublimates her desires in obedience to her father and brother, effectively relinquishing her only chance to actively enter the social order of her birthright, Quentin accepts the watch and its onerous cultural trappings because his allegiance to Southern codes prevents him from rejecting what he knows also stifles him. The watch exacerbates Quentin's feminization because it ultimately represents the burden of past failures, conflating time with primogeniture.

By destroying the watch, Quentin commits his first subversive act against his lineage and his society, similar to Ophelia's subversive sexual self-expression that marks her comparable disobedience. As Jacqelyn Fox-Good argues, Hamlet defines masculinity through time while "it is just such temporality in which Ophelia ceases to participate. She moves on to an 'other scene,' 'outside time'" (223). Existing outside time allows Ophelia to escape her patriarchal codification through her madness. Ophelia's songs herald sexual innuendo, which reverses the social assumption of her innocence and obedience to her father's demand to "[t]ender yourself more dearly" (I.iii. 106). Her meditation upon love becomes a dirge for sexual innocence: "Then up he rose and donn'd his clothes / And dupp'd the chamber door / Let in the maid, that out a maid / Never departed more" (IV.v. 44-47). The rhythm of the song "seem[s] simple, like a child's nursery rhyme ..., expressive of Ophelia's folly and innocence" while its "repetition begins to suggest ... a burgeoning sense of power related to the threat of Ophelia's illicit language (about sex and death)" (Fox-Good 227). By publicly alluding to sexual experience, Ophelia reveals a deeper understanding of worldly issues than an aristocratic virgin should ever admit, rejecting the essentialized female codes her father dictated to her and blurring the demarcations between innocence and subversion.

By echoing Ophelia's impulse and existing outside of time, Quentin can escape not only history but also heredity that contains the codes of masculinity; he becomes self-generating and independent of both nature's and culture's laws, thus approximating the feminine. As Julia Kristeva argues,

There is no time without speech. Therefore, there is no time without
 the father.... [T]he Father is sign and time.... [W]hat
 the Father doesn't say about the unconscious, what sign and time
 repress in the drives appears as their truth ... [which] can
 only be imagined as a woman. A curious truth: outside time, with
 neither a before or an after. (153)

This timeless, feminine truth of Quentin's obsessive desire, denying both past and future, vascillates, however, as Quentin has yet to fully relinquish his ties to the masculine, the Father, revealing"! was in time again" (SF76). Returning from feminine truth to the masculine construct of the watch's ticking obligates Quentin to recount the history and heredity of the watch: "It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience...." (76). By bestowing Quentin with the heirloom accompanied by such a speech, Mr. Compson invests the watch even more completely with the burden of lineage and patriarchal tradition. Despite the watch's functional and symbolic bankruptcy, Quentin must inherit it to sustain that tradition. Mr. Compson's cynicism fuels Quentin's obsession with a past he did not request and cannot control, either through manipulation of language or through destruction of the past's apotheosis: the watch. For similar reasons of filial duty, obedience, and hereditary burden, Ophelia agrees to Polonius's demands that she end her relationship with Hamlet; if she refuses Polonius, she risks social ostracism and grave insult to the man who capriciously controls her future. "Since Polonius is a self-absorbed busybody who regards his daughter as a tool, he gives no thought to the effect that [the forced rejection of Hamlet] will have on Ophelia" (Camden 249), an effect that proves devastating.

Only after Polonius's death does Ophelia express herself for herself as her burden of paternal obedience slips into memory. Her songs confirm both her madness and her rejection of the codes her culture demands from her as a female courtier. Through her songs, Ophelia is "constituting her own story, using her own voice for her own grief, and for rage and protest" (Fox-Good 222). Ophelia's popular bawdy songs and laments express the overflow of emotion identified in Hamlet, and consequently Renaissance culture, as feminine. Leslie C. Dunn argues:

if music arouses excessive "feminine" passions, then it is also an
 ideal vehicle for representing feminine excess. If its meaning
 cannot be controlled, then it can signify a loss of control that
 is perceived as threatening, yet erotically exciting. Music is
 like the "madwoman" in language, releasing the subversive powers
 of self-expression by embodying them in the expressive powers of
 the voice. (59)

Testified by her mad songs, uniting the double threats of music and language, Ophelia becomes exactly what her father, brother, and Renaissance society fear she will be after breaking the shackles of control over feminine overflow: blatantly sexual, excessively noisy, and socially subversive.

Since the "identification of music with the female has been a persistent, and threatening, one through the centuries" (Fox-Good 232), the relationship between Ophelia's madness and her singing signifies the dangers of a surfeit of female verbal expression. Ophelia sings of broken promises between lovers in the voice of firsthand experience: "Quoth she, before you tumbled me, / You promised me to wed. / He answers: / So would I ha' done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not come to my bed" (IV.v. 54-58). Ophelia's songs create an "imagined deflowering [that] preempts and precludes a marriage ritual" (Neely 324). By implying sexual experience, Ophelia excludes herself from her prescribed social pattern of virgin-wife-mother because "women are tainted, rather than empowered as men are, by their sexual capacities" (Kahn 44). Inadvertently free from her father's control and not yet controlled by a husband, Ophelia enters a liminal zone of unbounded possibility. Ophelia identifies herself as a sexual being, overreaching the confines of demure, silent femininity that her father and culture demand. Her performance exposes her sexuality and subsequent rejection of her codification verified by her refusal to return to her obedient silence. The language of madness equals "fragmentation, obsession,... repetition and ... 'quotation,'" where quotation maintains a cultural resonance and such speech links the current mental state of the speaker to her former history, identity, and experiences (Neely 323). Ophelia's quoted language and eroticized singing provide her with a voice that, by its audibility, ravages her socially and patriarchally enforced propriety. As Fox-Good argues, "[m]usic can be threatening and subversive partly because Western culture conventionally views it as benign, without meaning"; however, uniting music with women "reveals the result of its subversive power. For music makes an assertion of that which cannot be rationalized, of the body (and particularly of the female body), which becomes even more bodily in the madwoman" (232). Ophelia's refusal to revert to her previous silence despite Claudius's belittling attempt to contain her through the epithet "Pretty Ophelia" reflects her abrogation of patriarchal control in her lifetime, the fullness of her body that asserts sexuality and subjectivity.

While Ophelia's madness unleashes her voice, Quentin's quoted language provokes his silencing, his desire to lose his voice in death. By quoting his father, the language also reinforces the patriarchal dictum that traps Quentin, linking him to Ophelia. Constantly referring to what Father said, Quentin simultaneously validates his own inability to cope with the changes occurring outside his sphere of power as well as entering into a feminized space, a realm where his own voice is disobedient and unwelcome.

The crux of Quentin's madness materializes when he quotes the formal invitation to his sister's wedding. He remembers "[t] he month of brides, the voice that breathed ... Mr and Mrs Jason Richmond Compson announce the marriage of. Roses. Not virgins like dogwood, milkweed" (SF 77). Quentin acknowledges both patriarchal propriety, confirmed by the wedding invitation, and Caddy's wandering womb, her nonvirgin state necessitating her marriage, which motivates his suicide. Caddy's wandering womb, literally her deliberate promiscuity, sends Quentin into madness, the hysteria that symbolically becomes his suffocation of the mother. Once Caddy is no longer the ideal, inviolable fantasy partner for him, no longer the scion of his honor, Quentin's world collapses, as Ophelia's does upon Polonius's death. Quentin is "caught between the Law of the Father and desire" for his sister, causing him to engage in illicit fantasies (Roberts 118).

Explicitly, Quentin cannot bear Herbert, Caddy's betrothed because he's "[a] liar and a scoundrel" (SF 123) who was expelled from both his club and school for cheating, clearly violating Quentin's code of honor. Implicitly, Quentin cannot abide Herbert because of his own desire for Caddy and his desire to control her so that he can control himself. In Quentin's fantasy, no one is good enough for her except Quentin, and yet Quentin's tainted masculinity renders him useless to her because he is as powerless to stop Caddy's wedding as he was to stop her promiscuity. Quentin enacts the conduct manual maxim that "a brother's affection for his sister should be of a chivalrous character: he should guard her reputation as he would a precious jewel" (Social Culture 72), because he functions as Caddy's courtly lover, elevating her to an unattainable plane. By doing so, Quentin constructs himself as her ideal partner because the tropes of courtly love always already deny physical consummation between lover and object. Quentin's desire for Caddy remains imaginary incest because Quentin cannot conceive of physically tainting his ideal lady love, nor does he want any lesser lover to have physical access to her. As Florence Kingsland asserts, "the Southern man knows that he is, in truth, a courtier" (60), an identity that Quentin unwaveringly grasps.

Quentin clings to this investment in the codes of honor, desperately believing in Southern cultural myths of social superiority meant to offset failure and loss, despite the implicit dishonor of his alcoholic father and prior generations of defeated Compsons. His concept of honor already bankrupted by Caddy's sexual experience, and Quentin himself unable to supplement his code through effective physical violence, he cannot help but fail. "In a society in which chivalry, honor and aristocratic sensibility are but shadowy things of the past, Quentin finds himself pathetically struggling to uphold the role of the Southern gentleman" (Barker and Kamps 384). While Quentin is clearly a gentleman in both social class and behavior, his social codification as a man of honor merely augments his hereditary curse, perpetuating his impotence and ineffectualness. Quentin nourishes an old order of honor while his world advances a more utilitarian code. Quentin fails to uphold traditional masculinity with physical prowess in fighting and sexuality and thus fails to uphold his honor code. Consequently, he embodies the feminization of defeat and the intellectual exercise of idealized courtly love and thus is always already emasculated. John Irwin elucidates this repetitive trap as an "awareness that the memory of what has occurred in the past is at the same time the foreknowledge of what will be repeated in the future, the debilitating sense that time is a circular street and that recollection is prophecy" (70). Quentin's quoted memories collide with the cycle of Compson history that he cannot shatter except through suicide.

Quentin reinforces his powerlessness through his aborted duel with Dalton Ames, compelled to defend his sister's honor by sparring with the man who possibly impregnated her. Within Quentin's ethical code, Ames must be at fault for the seduction because his name "just missed gentility" (SF 92), as it simultaneously implies a sexual prowess Quentin will never attain. Ames's social inferiority exacerbates Quentin's failure in the duel through the agonized memory of his besting by a lesser man who has also possessed Quentin's most treasured object, Caddy's body. Caddy's culpability for the consequences of her desire never enjoins Quentin's idealized image of her or his codified world. When Quentin tells Ames he'll give him until sundown to leave town, he evokes his outdated sense of honor that spawns contempt from other men. He tells Ames, "I say you must go not my father not anybody I say it" (159) in an attempt to garner some influence over the more powerful man. Quentin slaps Ames with a femininely open hand rather than his closed masculine fist, emasculating himself rather than evoking virility. Ames wields the power of the phallus expertly, exhibiting his symbolic potency by exploding a piece of bark floating in the river with his pistol and underscoring his literal potency to impregnate Caddy. Conversely, Quentin faints when Ames offers him the gun and retains his virginity until his drowning. "Significantly Quentin characterizes these failures as somehow feminizing him," Fowler argues ( 8).

Quentin's curious fantasy about being Ames's mother emphasizes the fluidity of his gender identity: "If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining ... watching him die before he lived" (SF 80). This fantasy reveals Quentin's desire for the feminine, with its mysterious power over life and death as well as his desire to erase Ames's identity as Ames essentially has erased Quentin's. Quentin repeats the name Dalton Ames like a mantra, as though acquiring potency through its reiteration. Such potency is as large an illusion as the code that prompts Quentin to say, "Father and I protect women from one another from themselves our women" (96). Father's indifference to the need for such protection accentuates Quentin's lack of the tools for maintaining Caddy's safety, collapsing at the sight of them, as Ophelia, "a green girl," (I.iii.l02) might. Quentin's terror of phallic power, in both literal and symbolic manifestations, reflects his unconscious desire to reject not only his ancestral burden but also his cultural one that demands conformity to impossible codes of genteel Southern manhood.

As a result of this cultural burden, Quentin is continually feminized throughout the text. Where Quentin's desired object Caddy is "always a king or a giant or a general" (SF 173), Quentin is subjected to the role of his roommate Shreve's wife, fomenting a stereotype of submissiveness and impotence. Attempting to quiet Quentin's hysteria, "Shreve's fat hand touched [Quentin's] knee" while Quentin remembers discussing his virginity with Caddy, merging her knees, her face, and her scent of honeysuckle with his own awkward excitement at Shreve's touch (147). When Shreve's "hand touched my knee again [and] I moved my knee again" (147-48), Quentin asserts the valor of feminized virginity, eluding the sexual aggressor as a proper lady must do. Any gentlewoman, Renaissance or Southern, knows she must dissemble an attitude of unwanted male attention by feigning ignorance or tacit avoidance, as Ophelia's reaction to Hamlet's innuendoes when they watch The Mousetrap suggests: "you are naught: I'll mark the play" (III.ii.133).

Like the honeysuckle that gets all mixed up in it, Quentin's desire for Caddy becomes the desire to be the Caddy of his idealized memory: female, protected, and secure, like the "green girl" Ophelia before Polonius's death (I.iii.102). Quentin's conflation of his titillation at Shreve's touch with images of Caddy elicits his desire to merge with his other, to be female. Roberts asserts, "Female 'honor,' that is, chastity, as a verifier of family status, is a Compson fixation" (112). Quentin's obsession with his own virginity feminizes him while upholding codified family honor. Quentin affirms that "[i]n the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. It was men invented virginity not women" (SF 78). Men's invention of virginity as a means of control over women's bodies constructs virginity as a state of being that infuses the patriarchal state with power. Such ideology clearly mirrors that of Renaissance culture, as inscribed on Ophelia, who is cautioned to "tender yourself more dearly" (I.iii.108) because "You do not understand yourself so clearly / As it behooves my daughter and your honor" (I.iii.97-98), indicating Polonius's obsession with her intact reputation, an overt concern which lives primarily in his mind. This mutual obsession with chastity further links Renaissance and Southern societies as well as connecting Ophelia to Quentin since it stems from the verifiable honor of patriarchal demand.

Unlike stereotypes of sexual purity for women, men need sexual experience to assert the Law of the Father, to uphold the patriarchy for success and potency both through offspring and control over patriarchal subjects. As a virgin male, Quentin represents a failed patriarchy; as a feminized male, he subverts the patriarchy because he refuses conformity to its rules. Since "no compson ever disappointed a lady" (SF 178), if Quentin can become that lady, identified as a resurrected pure and virgin Caddy, he cannot be disappointed by himself or his male ancestors. To become female is the ultimate rejection of the social and cultural demands placed on Southern men that paradoxically drive Quentin toward his gendered annihilation.

Ophelia precipitates her self-destruction on obedience to her father, which forces her outside the social order by thwarting her destined fulfillment of the cycle of daughter-wife-mother. With her coerced rejection of Hamlet, Ophelia projects her burgeoning sexuality and emotions onto her father. While Polonius is alive, Ophelia submits to his social control, rejecting, on his demand, the only possible suitor the play affords her. Once Polonius dies, Ophelia laments like a lover spurned, lapsing into the quoted cultural language of bawdy love songs and melancholic signing. The subtext of Ophelia's mad speeches and songs then transfers the desire and lamentation onto Polonius rather than Hamlet. Foregrounding her madness, Ophelia's grief at Polonius's death conflates filial duty with romantic love, explaining her alternation of songs about grief with songs about sexual initiation. Her grief-laden songs mourn a lost lover: "How should I your true love know / From another one? / ... Say you? nay, pray you, mark. / He is dead and gone, lady" (IV.v.23-24, 28-29). Polonius represents this dead lover, as his death removes the social restrictions he imposed upon his daughter. Ophelia's "acts also challenged the social norms set in place by accepted notions of patriarchy, parental authority and kinship" (Fox-Good 231). Thus, without Polonius as the anchor for her womb, Ophelia's madness overtakes her. She responds cryptically to Laertes by saying, "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember" (IV.v. 171-72), corroborating her madness by obsessing upon memories like a classic hysteric of Jorden's patient roster. By her knowledge of flowers and quoted bawdy songs,[ 4] Ophelia subverts the Law of the Father by asserting her sexuality, the expression Polonius fought relentlessly to contain.

Quentin's similar subversion rejects both the phallogos and patriarchal social codification through his inability to lie, in Southern tradition, about his virginity. When he figuratively attempts to relinquish his virginity, Quentin constructs his sister as the desired object because that desire is less about sexuality and incest than it is about his honor code. Quentin's rationale is social since he projects himself as the only appropriate partner for Caddy, her honorable, nonthreatening courtly lover. In his madness, he determines that if he can commit incest with his sister, he can erase her previous, and, in his mind, inappropriate experiences and adopt them for himself since he "will love ... what possesses the excellences which he never had at all" (Freud 101). Even an attempted symbolic coupling with his professed ultimate desired object emasculates Quentin, however: "then I was crying her hand touched me again and I was crying against her ... she lying on her back ... I held the point of the knife at her throat it wont take but a second ... Ill try not to hurt" (SF 151-52). Quentin delays symbolic consummation, afraid of his phallic power, while Caddy demands he "push it ... yes push it" (152). As soon as Quentin asks Caddy to touch the knife, he drops it on the riverbank, acknowledging that for Quentin, penetration, potent masculine sex, is impossible. Anne Goodwyn Jones argues that "penetration constructs and means a focused, purposeful, unified identity, in contrast to an identity that is diffuse, purposeless, fragmented" ("Desire" 149). Quentin's inability to penetrate Caddy or anyone, even with a phallic symbol, attests to his psychological fragmentation and diffused identity. He cannot wield his cultural privilege of Southern genteel manhood to partake in the "ideology of penetration" even symbolically. Quentin is equally as powerless to reverse Caddy's experience as to create his own, to enter into the primal patriarchal moment of sexual penetration that might "cure" his madness. Just as hysteria in the Renaissance stems from a lack of (sanctioned) sexual activity, in the twentieth century, denying an outlet for expressing the "natural instinct" of male sexuality results in mental illness (Jones, "Desire" 151). Quentin's incestuous, albeit unrequited, desire already implies a certain madness although he never approaches sexual expression with any other partner. Like Ophelia, whose lack of a legitimate partner exacerbates her madness and suicide - Hamlet's rejection of her redoubles the pain of adhering to Polonius's mandate - Quentin chooses inappropriately, is unable to consummate any sexual desire, and thus provokes his mimicry of his literary forebear. As Lawrence Babb suggests, "Of all the passions, however, 'Sorrow hath the greatest share.' For love melancholy comes of unsatisfied love" (134); unrequited love spawns madness in Quentin and Ophelia, resulting first in a rejection of their codified gender identities and ultimately in their drownings.

Quentin's strongest drive toward the feminine arises through his relation of Versh's story of castration. Quentin confides that "Versh told me about a man who mutilated himself ... with a razor, sitting in a ditch" (SF 115-16). Roberts explains this story as Quentin's desire to become a woman, not "an androgyne or eunuch or castrated man" (120), while the ditch itself evokes female biological symbolism. Quentin desires "never to have had them then I could say O That That's Chinese I dont know Chinese" (116). Never to have had testicles for Quentin is never to be conflicted about virginity or masculinity, excising the need to uphold the code passed down to him through generations of virile Compson governors and generals. He would never anguish over failing to construct his manhood because he failed to protect his sister (Jones, "Work" 50). Since Quentin already feels an alienation from himself, a madness that confuses not only his gender but also his sexuality, he could validate his emotional state by never knowing what it is to embody (literally and culturally) maleness under a patriarchal rubric. He could be both virgin and nil: female.

Quentin's relationship to language consummates his feminization. He desires the silence that patriarchal society enforces upon women because he acknowledges the tenuous power of language to destroy as well as create. Where Quentin's silence subverts patriarchal codes, Ophelia's speech simultaneously reinforces and destroys her allegiance to her codification. An unnamed gentleman introduces mad Ophelia by stating "Her speech is nothing," devoid of reason and explicit meaning, "yet the unshaped use of it doth move / the hearers to collection" (IV.v.7-9). The gentleman tries to force Ophelia back into her obedient silence by discounting her speech on one hand while he suggests the power of its distracted essence with the other. Ophelia responds to Claudius with the words, "They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be" (IV.v. 40), suggesting her process toward the definition of her subjective and empowered identity. Because her speech and manner are so altered from her previous state - she "hems and beats her heart," and "winks and nods and gestures" (IV.v.5, 11) - Ophelia propels her audience to create sense out of her distracted language. The court finally listens to her, but the price of such attention is her sanity and her life.

Quentin, conversely, longs for the silence that represents femininity under patriarchal control, the silence of Ophelia under Polonius's ever diligent ear. Judith Lockyer suggests that Quentin is "caught between his desire for language to create and preserve experience and the implicit threat in his knowledge that if words empower him they also empower others" (31). Quentin views language as mere rhetoric as he argues with Father: "It's nature is hurting you not Caddy and I said That's just words and he said So is virginity and I said you dont know" (SF 116). If virginity is merely a word, then Quentin's valorization of female purity is equally as empty as the word. If this is true, for Quentin, no absolute state of being exists or can exist. Conversely, if words carry the power of the phallus, the ability to unvirgin and the ability to mend the broken hymen with more potency than just rhetoric, Quentin can utilize them to erase Caddy's experience, redressing her purity and equalizing their experience. When Caddy says, "do you think that if I say it it wont be" (122), she reveals Quentin's adherence to the power of spoken language. In attempting to harness that power in his ultimate battle to make Caddy his own, Quentin fails miserably. In a dialogue with his father, either real or imagined, Quentin endeavors to avow his incest with Caddy: "and he did you try to make her do it and i i was afraid to i was afraid she might and then it wouldnt have done any good but if i could tell you we did it would have been so and then the others wouldnt be so" (177; emphasis mine). When Quentin confronts his father with the power of language to create or destroy reality, Mr. Compson undermines him with his aphoristic patriarchal cynicism. Just as Ophelia's linguistic power is fleeting, marked only by its difference from her previously docile discourse, Quentin wields no true phallic power; thus he cannot attain power in the phallogos either. Quentin can no more erase Caddy's former lovers through language than he can perform a physical sex act with her. Quentin fails completely in the phallogocentric patriarchy, emasculated by language as quickly as the man in Versh's story is by a razor blade. Quentin's only recourse is to merge with the feminine, to become his desired object through the ultimate silencing of drowning.

Throughout his monologue, Quentin equates water with silence. His awareness of silent water rivals his awareness of cacophonous time, describing water as "felt, not seen not heard" and "mute and unseen" (SF 136). Through water, with its blind silence, Quentin can escape time and break the patriarchal cycle of loud masculinity. His memories of his grandfather evoke the deafening spoken word: "they were always talking and Grandfather was always right" (176). For Quentin to embrace the patriarchy, he must live up to such standards of linguistic infallibility. Quentin, however, already distrusts language since he cannot manipulate it to serve his purposes like his forefathers. Instead, Quentin idealizes the silence he identifies with water as he links water to Caddy. Quentin's impetus for drowning is to "isolate [Caddy] out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity and then the sound of it would be as though it had never been" (177), the sound of nothing, an absence, silence. Having foundered so utterly in attaining Caddy through patriarchal power, Quentin can only merge with her through the silent feminine of the water. With the oppressive sexual image of Caddy in the stream linked to Quentin's own desire to subvert patriarchal heterosexual ideology through silencing himself, Quentin finally defines himself through his own actions. As his shadow in the river merges with the memory of Caddy in the stream, Quentin's drowning allows him to figuratively merge with Caddy, his idealized feminine object, to become feminine, to repeat the passive death of Ophelia and unite himself with his literary predecessor whose own drowning redefines her femininity.[ 5] Quentin's final act in life is his one and only act of penetration, accomplished not merely with his penis but with his entire body, breaking the meniscus of the river and surrendering to the symbolic feminine of its fluidity.

In drowning, Quentin succumbs to his madness and saturates himself with the world of the feminine. Elaine Showalter notes: "Drowning ... becomes the truly feminine death ... one which is a beautiful immersion and submersion in the female element. Water is the profound and organic symbol of the liquid woman.... A man contemplating this feminine suicide understands it by reaching for what is feminine in himself ... by a temporary surrender to his own fluidity" ("Representing Ophelia" 81). Quentin permanently surrenders to his fluidity, dying by rejoining the feminine self he could only fantasize about in the material world. Here Quentin is truly a rewriting of Ophelia, united by tragic though intentional drowning, merging beauty with silence, sublimating male into female.

Ophelia's drowning reintegrates her into the society that rejected her in life, although her drowning revokes her power, reneges her voice. In death, Ophelia is welcomed into society because it can now contain her and manipulate her memory to tacitly uphold its values that she criticized while mad - "the falsehood of love, the emptiness of religious formulas, the betrayal of men" (Neely 335). Mad Ophelia finally voices her outrage at the social conventions demanding her voicelessness and blind obedience, as "[s]he narrates the arbitrariness, instability and corruption of love and the family" (335). That madness, manifested in her self-expression, marginalizes her from the society that embraces her, however tenuously, in death. Ophelia's drowning purges her subversive madness as her ritualized Christian burial finally reunites her with the social order. Conversely, Quentin's drowning empowers him by imbuing him with the female silence he has always desired, purging him of his masculinity, and finally enabling him to break the self-defeating patriarchal cycle of Compson history. Quentin's erotomania stems from his inability to anchor his sister's wandering womb, so he merges himself with her symbolically. As Eric Sundquist notes, "Quentin joins the water, the medium always associated with Caddy as though he were lying down with it (one thinks of Millais's Ophelia), his bodily self falling to meet the enchanted corpse"( 18). Quentin not only allies himself in gender with his sister through the medium of water, but he allies himself with Ophelia, his literary predecessor, his historic other. Such lineage is as inevitable for Quentin as his suicide, for "in the water he sees not a man but a nonman, a woman, Little Sister Death, Ophelia" (Roberts 120).

Ophelia's story is renegotiated through Quentin's body. They share an existence in chaotic worlds marked by change over which they have no authority in societies that dread change. Ophelia and Quentin resort to madness to escape patriarchal control. Both characters lack a legitimate maternal influence: Ophelia's mother exists only in the realm of logic while Quentin's mother absents herself through hypochondria and rejects Quentin completely for his "Compsonness," a quality he ironically abhors in himself. Ophelia's loss of the quasi-sexual relationships with her father and Hamlet drives her to madness and rejection of codified femininity as Quentin's similar relationship with his sister prompts his madness and his embrace of that femininity. If when "deprived of thought, sexuality and language, Ophelia's story becomes the story of O - the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of feminine sexuality" (Showalter, "Representing Ophelia" 79), then the rewriting of Ophelia's story becomes the story of Q - the zero with a dysfunctional and resented phallus, a circle with a slash that negates codified masculinity, a hieroglyph that desires innate knowledge of this sexual mystery and drowns for it, Quentin.

1 Renaissance physicians relied on the theory of humors to diagnose and treat any physical or psychological ailment. Additionally, Galen's work initiated the core of the ideas and treatments practiced by Renaissance physicians. See Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization and Duncan Salkeld's Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare.

2 Commonly held nineteenth-century belief identified hysteria as a malady solely affecting women, so the twentieth century's inclusion of men as sufferers of hysteria points to an ideological shift about the issue of mental illness that augments the link between the twentieth century and the Renaissance. See Showalter, The Female Malady.

3 Thomas D. Savill's Table of Diagnosis from 1909 provides clinical insight into the early twentieth-century conception of hysteria. Savill claims: "A patient is born with the hysterical diathesis. The determining cause of its active manifestations is generally an emotional upset or shock. (The patient ] is wayward, hard to please, emotional, restless ... [and] if sad it is transient (excepting in the male).... laughter and tears may alternate with great rapidity...." (qtd. in Veith 242-43). Quentin easily models these symptoms.

4 Ophelia's knowledge of herbs and flowers reflects standard Renaissance female training in the healing powers of common plants. Symbolically, however, Ophelia's choices strike at the heart of her social construction. A traditional Renaissance wedding favor consisted of a sprig of rosemary, dipped in gold and tied with a ribbon (Gallery 108). When Ophelia hands rosemary to Laertes, she condemns his collusion with Polonius in preventing her marriage, which forces her into this state of overwrought emotion and socially unsanctioned sexuality.

5 Curiously, Lawrence Babb cites Du Laurens's Renaissance medical treatise which tells "the story of a lover who paid continual court to his own shadow" (136) because he imagined his shadow was the object of his lady love. Quentin's obsession with his shadow echoes this type of erotomania as his actions physically, and horrifically, manifest it.

WORKS CITED
~~~~~~~~

By Erin E. Campbell, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College

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Accession Number: 17604481

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"SAD GENERATIONS SEEKING WATER": THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MADNESS IN O(PH...: EBSCOhost

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Initiated by its title, The Sound and the Fury invites readers to recall Shakespeare and mental aberration. Despite alluding to Macbeth rather than Hamlet, Faulkner clearly intends us to read with a literal eye on his novel and his South and a figurative one on Shakespeare and his England.

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The decent into madness of Ophelia is a result of patriarchal limitations. These limitations presented challenges for all women during these times since society revolved around men's lives first. At the times, women were expected to uphold certain gender based roles. The patriarchal system caused Ophelia's life and role through the Tragedy to be based around the men in her life, namely her love interest Hamlet and father Polonius. After the loss of her farther and the betrayal of Hamlet, Ophelia is left without purpose in life. Coupled with this, her heartbreak for both men leaves her resentful, melancholy, and hopeless. Another example of this is Queen Gertrude, who is assumed to have remarried in order to not only maintain her previous lifestyle but also satisfy societal standards : that women should be wed and have children. The lives of these women solely surrounding the actions of the men within their lives provides an unstable foundation. Without a part of their lives that is based on their own actions, minor and major changes heavily impact the mind and soul, as well as their day to day lives. In Ophelia's case, she does not recover and soon suffers from hysteria and hopelessness, leading to her suicide. Women who react like Ophelia, with passionate and unladylike emotions to the severe changes to their livelihood are considered weak, as if they had been mentally unstable from the beginning. In reality, the men in this period created this patriarchal system that forced females to depend only on them and is then hypocritical in expecting no outbursts or displays of darker emotions. The idea that these women are fragile is a direct result of the gender roles and privileges set in place to keep women in a place of subservience to men.

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"There's fennel for you and columbines" (4.5.84)

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"There's fennel for you and columbines" (4.5.84)

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As Ophelia spirals into delusion,  she hands out flowers from her garland. Specifically, Ophelia hands fennel and columbine to Claudius. Fennel symbolizes flattery, constituting to Claudius's quick marriage to Gertrude roused by his ill-natured want for the throne. Columbine, with highly poisonous to seeds and roots, is an implication towards  Claudius's murder of the king. Although Ophelia is not aware of his crime, it would be dramatic irony among the audience. Ophelia's statement within giving Claudius these particular flowers was a precarious statement, as inferiority of women and their voicelessness in society made insults towards the patriarch a fairly bold remark.

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Quote 3 - "Get thee to a nunnery" (3.1.122)

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Quote 3 - "Get thee to a nunnery" (3.1.122)

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Explanation: Hamlet throws a temper tantrum during a heated argument with Ophelia and insults her femininity. He releases all his pent-up anger from his mother on her, despite his alleged feelings for her.

Significance: By telling Ophelia to get to a "nunnery", he attacks her sexuality in two different ways. The nunnery, referring to a convent, can imply that Hamlet thinks she needs to purify herself and subject to a life of virginity. The term can also refer to a brothel, which is slang for a whorehouse. This interpretation can further demonstrate Hamlet's idea that Ophelia is sexually impure and corrupt. He projected his issues with Gertrude's sexuality onto her, making it evident that he blames women's vulnerability to love and temptation for their weakness and frailty.

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"The canker galls the infants of the spring/ Too oft before their buttons be disclosed" (1.3.39-40)

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"The canker galls the infants of the spring/ Too oft before their buttons be disclosed" (1.3.39-40)

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During a conversation between Ophelia and Laertes, Laertes advises Ophelia on her love life. This conversation epitomizes the Shakespearean relationships between men and women, embodying women's inferiority and their role to obey the words of the men in their lives. Laertes refers to "cankers", or worms, as her lustful desire to be with Hamlet that will eventually ruin her youth and pure sexuality, symbolized as the "infants of spring". Men found an "unblossomed" and youthful woman to be desirable. Even as Laertes comes across as simply another controlling male figure, he is protecting Ophelia from Hamlet, who he believes to be a corrupt player craving a quick fling.

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Quote 2 - "In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty!" (3.4.94-96).

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Quote 2 - "In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty!" (3.4.94-96).

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Explanation: In act III scene IIII, Hamlet confronts his mother and takes his rage out on her. He is in her bedroom, intensely yelling at Gertrude for what she's done with Claudius and informing her of Claudius' murderous actions. Hamlet uses words "rank" "corruption" and "nasty" to demonstrate his utter distaste for her new, lustful relationship with Claudius.

Significance: This quote ultimately demonstrates Hamlet's obsession with the sexuality of women in the play, showing how their lustful tendencies make them weak. He is angry at Gertrude for "honeying and making love" with Claudius, as it's incestuous and wrong considering what Claudius has done. Once again, Hamlet projects his concerns onto other women like Ophelia, strengthening his belief that all women are frail.

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Explanation: During act I scene II, we see Hamlet express disgust and anger with his mother in the form of a soliloquy. Thinking of his mother's choice to remarry Claudius after the death of his father sparks thoughts of rage. He sees Gertrude as weak for being tempted so quickly into a relationship with the brother of her dead husband. Furthermore, he views the marriage as incestuous and wrong, leading him to blame Gertrude for her being so vulnerable and weak.

Significance: Hamlet's discontent with Gertrude seeps into his other female relationships, as he projects these feelings of disgust onto all women. The quote illustrates how Hamlet views women to be the embodiment of frailty, which dictates his actions and interactions with other women in the play. His feelings progress throughout the play and ultimately help reveal his obsession with women sexuality.

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"Get thee to a nunnery. Why woulds't thou be a breeder of sinners" (3.1.122-123).

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"Get thee to a nunnery. Why woulds't thou be a breeder of sinners" (3.1.122-123).

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Hamlet telling Ophelia to "get thee to a nunnery" is exemplary of him sexually objectifying Ophelia. He wants to punish Ophelia to a life without a husband or sex, indicating that sexuality might be the only beneficial trait of a woman. As he intends to strip her of it, he truly believes that would be the worst punishment he could give her. Ordering Ophelia to a "nunnery" has a second meaning, referring to a brothel. This would be an ultimate punishment in his eyes, surrounded by women, for he refers to them as "monsters" (3.1.140). Hamlet generalizes women, assuming all are terrible, evil, cheating creatures. This is evident in his advice to Ophelia, in which he sarcastically remarks that if she is ever to marry, that she "marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them" (3.1.139-140).

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"Why, she would hang on him/ As if increase of appetite had grown" (1.2.143-144)

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"Why, she would hang on him/ As if increase of appetite had grown" (1.2.143-144)

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In his soliloquy, Hamlet criticizes his mother for her sexual "appetite" and quick remarriage following the passing of his father. As madness takes over him, Hamlet's anger that stems from his resentment towards Claudius for his father's murder is projected onto his mother for her not knowing the real story. His inability to take action and kill Claudius causes more frustration. By his inability to act against Claudius, his anger is directed towards Gertrude, whom he blames for her blindness of Claudius's corruption.

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The motif of women frailty and weakness is common in Shakespearean literature. In another well-known play of his, Julius Caesar, women are portrayed as insignificant and unvalued. Characters Portia and Calpurnia exist to serve their husbands, and have no individual purpose or plot value in the play. Furthermore, their actions are disregarded by men and deemed unimportant. Specifically, Calpurnia warns her husband Caesar of the atrocities set to come after having a nightmare. She attempts to protect him, and while he takes her advice at first, he quickly shifts his train of thought after being persuaded by another man. Brutus undermines the legitimacy of Calpurnia's vision, allowing for Caesar to completely ignore her cries. Women in the play, as in Hamlet, are illustrated as weak, frail, and unimportant.

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The device illustrates Shakespeare's representation of women in society during the time period in which he lived. Culture was dominantly-masculine, and Shakespeare's utilization of this motif reflects the common belief that women were fragile. This presented in the form of Hamlet's anger with the actions of his mother, which he projects on all women, including Ophelia. Hamlet believes Gertrude's frailty stems from a weakness in her moral character. He is ultimately offended by Gertrude's vulnerability to lust through her incestuous relationship with Claudius. In the text, it's evident she is deemed weak as she has a tendency to let her temptation blind her judgement.

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Throughout the play, Hamlet expresses his frustration towards women through harmful statements directed at them and personal thoughts of disgust.

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The theme of belittling women is distinguished throughout Hamlet, effectuated by the men in the play.
Women are sexually objectified and loathed by Hamlet as he projects his madness and anger onto them.

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Dramatic Element - Hamlet's First Soliloquy

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Dramatic Element - Hamlet's First Soliloquy

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In Hamlet's first soliloquy (1.2.27-29), he shares his thoughts and frustration with the audience. For his feeling of contempt, Hamlet ultimately blames his mother. Upset by his mother's weakness and wishing she "Would have mourned longer - married with my uncle" (1.2.151-152),  Hamlet declares, "frailty, thy name is woman!" (1.2.146). Full of rage by his mother's ignorance, he broadens his contempt to all woman. Whether unknowingly or not, as a patriarch, his disdain for women could be contagious throughout Denmark. Women currently had very limited legal rights and through his pronounced opinion, Hamlet could very well make the situation for women in his country worse. Even if not done through laws, the societal aspect could be harmful. As other men seeking power see that the royal Prince Hamlet openly discriminates against women, there could be a domino effect throughout society.

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Throughout Hamlet, flower/nature imagery is typically used towards Ophelia, emphasizing her youth and blossoming sexuality, as well as the misogyny she experiences.

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1602 - Elizabethan Times
Throughout Hamlet, both women in the text, Ophelia and Queen Gertrude, have been suppressed by the males in their lives. Women's inferiority is prominent as men persistently attempt to dictate their sexuality. Women in this society were cherished for their youth, beauty, and purity. Women were praised upon their femininity, which Hamlet criticized of his mother. He believed Gertrude, with her "matron's bones" (3.4.84), was incapable of love at her age and should no longer be acting on her "compulsive ardor" (3.4.87). Without pure sexuality, Gertrude is rendered futile and shall keep to her matronly duties. Ophelia and Gertrude had little to no power or individuality within the social, legal, and sexual boundaries they were  restrained to.
Contrast to women in Hamlet, Queen Elizabeth of England was a strong leader of a major European power. It was at the same time that Hamlet was first staged that Queen Elizabeth's rule was declining. Both of the aging queens regarded the misogyny in distinctly different ways. Queen Gertrude immediately remarried after her husband's passing and was primarily seen throughout the play by Claudius's side, somewhat supporting the male rule. Contrastingly, Queen Elizabeth embraced her femininity. She utilized her sexual female image to maintain her political power, acting as a "mother" to her country. By not marrying, she maintained her authority and the security of England. Queen Elizabeth challenged the widespread mentality of fragility of women by embodying the masculine ruler's intelligence and resilience while strategizing her femininity to get her way.

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Definitions:
1) the quality or state of being frail/the condition of being weak and delicate
2) a fault due to weakness especially of moral character/weakness in character or morals
3) a clinically recognizable state of increased vulnerability resulting from aging-associated decline in reserve and function across multiple physiologic systems such that the ability to cope with everyday or acute stressors is comprised

Connotations:
-Negative connotation, implies weakness and vulnerability