How does gertrude protect hamlet

The most haunting questions about Gertrude's character revolve around whether she knows that Claudius is a criminal. Is she merely a dependent woman who needs to live through her man? Is she a conniving temptress who used her power to conspire with Claudius to kill King Hamlet and usurp Prince Hamlet's ascendancy?

No textual references are conclusive. The ghost of King Hamlet calls her his "most seeming virtuous queen. Later, the ghost implores Hamlet to comfort her. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive at Elsinore, she tells them that they have been sent for because of the way Hamlet "hath talked of you," and she promises them compensation fit for " a king's remembrance.

Unless, as some critics believe, she drinks the poisoned wine as an act of maternal protectiveness. Does she know the wine is poisoned? When "the Queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet" is she deliberately drinking to prevent Hamlet's death?

If Gertrude has overheard Claudius and Laertes plotting, she would know all. His code of conduct is self-created. I know my Maker sanctions what I do. For the world's judgement--I wash my hands thereof. For man's opinion--I defy it" Jane Eyre p. I see this as an act of courage rather than audacity because, I believe, Rochester is sincere. He is not without his faults, nor is Jane, nor am I. Like Rochester I have defied the religious dogma of my schooling. I have defied the law.

I have defied social convention. That is not to say I reject it altogether or go uninfluenced by it, but to say when sincere reflection leads to unsanctioned actions, they should be done. Wasn't that also Helen Burn's advice? I would add "true" friends.

Jane and Rochester come to different conclusions, however; one is not right and the other wrong. Individual people must make individual choices. Yes, my dear reader, this is a Romantic notion. Legal, moral, religious and social guidelines should be just that, guidelines. If they are adhered to without honest reflection, they lead only to dead ends. It is to one such dead end, personified by Mr. John Rivers that Jane utters,"If I were to marry you, you would kill me.

You are killing me now" Jane Eyre p. It is from St. John that Jane learns to trust her own feelings and to ignore social and religious conventions. John before embarking on a life as a missionary in India has asked Jane to marry him. He admits he does not love her but needs her as his companion in God's work.

He is killing Jane because he wishes to make his vocation hers. Jane has looked in her heart and did not see the vocation of a missionary.

She believed it to be good and noble work, but not her work. As a missionary Jane's social status would have been elevated. Society would have esteemed her in principle, if not in fact. Jane was willing to become a missionary, however, but not to marry St. A loveless marriage was against her moral convictions. She would lose her identity. She had already lost her pride when she had been reduced to begging after leaving Rochester. Pride gone, Jane became surer in herself, liberated from gratuitous concern for the opinions of others.

It was this new found strength, this new blend of moral and spiritual considerations that allowed Jane to reject St. To reject the noble and pious life of a missionary as not Jane Eyre's. Returning to Rochester Jane's new convictions are not tested. Every impediment is cleared and they are allowed to reunite within legal and religious laws'. They reject society and its conventions and live quietly in a remote location. Hedda Gabler has no happy ever after ending.

She has so confused social conventions with morality and spirituality as to replace the latter with the former. Social conventions become her religion. Tired of single life Hedda enters a loveless marriage. She chooses her mate, George Tesman, for his malleability and his bright future as an academic. While Jane refused a loveless marriage, Hedda viewed it as inevitable. She chafed at the restrictions of social conventions.

They were penance, yet there was no atonement. This penance inspired sin. The sins at first are small, venial. Admitting this transgression, this meanness, she explains: "Well, you see--these impulses come over me all of a sudden; and I cannot resist them" Hedda Gabler p.

Hedda can not resist because she is desperate for a release of her anger. Hedda is outraged at the lack of control she possesses over her life. She considers herself the intellectual, superior to her husband, yet he is the one able to have a career. She thinks she can be happy by manipulating Tesman. She seeks to live vicariously through him. But it is not enough. Hedda is bored, bored, bored! Hedda's sins grow in size and number.

She lies, she manipulates, she destroys. She is despicable. She traps an old suitor, Eilert Lovborg, an alcoholic, into drinking. To Mrs. Elvsted, Eilert's new romance, she uses "blockhead" and "you little stupid" as terms of endearment.

Hedda destroys a manuscript of Eilert's Tesman had deemed brilliant for her own entertainment. In truth Hedda is jealous of Mrs. Elvsted and Mr. Lovborg' relationship.

But it is in saying, "I want for once in my life to have power to mold a human destiny" that Hedda reveals her true motivation. As Hedda's cancer of the soul grows, she suggests Eilert commit suicide and provides him with her pistol as means to do it. Hedda is so consumed with bitterness and hate there is nothing left to sustain compassion. Hedda's plans fail to execute as she had anticipated. She might have survived this disappointment if Judge Brack did not have proof of her involvement.

Judge Brack always tossed sexual advances towards Hedda. Before this she had been able to return his volleys. Now he was taking control of the ball. He threatens Hedda with scandal, of which she is "mortally afraid" Hedda Gabler p. Hedda falls into despair. She tells Judge Brack: "A slave, a slave then! No I cannot endure the thought of that! Minutes later Hedda commits suicide. Hedda's suicide is a true act of desperation.

The social conventions of her time strangled her and killed her before her pistol ever touched her temples. It was before her final encounter with Judge Brack,that Hedda had said to her husband: "Oh, it is killing me,--it is killing me, all this! By "all this", Hedda means the powerlessness she feels in the face of social conventions. Hedda did not hate herself only her life.

Why didn't she rebel against the restrictions she felt imposed on her by social conventions? Hedda had no other code of conduct. She lacked any spiritual or moral fortitude. Social convention was all she knew, even if it was all she hated.

Hedda did try to push the envelope of social conventions but she did not even conceive of breaking out of it, because she knew nothing else. This was her "mortal" sin.

There can never be a last word on the correct code of conduct. The codes of are not the same codes of yesterday, nor the same as tomorrow. Social conventions change. Laws change. Interpretations of the Bible vary.

But morality stays the same. Morality is that personal blend which creates an individual code of conduct. Looking outside yourself for morality is futile. It can only be attained by an internal synthesis of experiences, knowledge and honest introspection. Jane Eyre discovered this, Hedda Gabler never will. A black child is born and twelve years later that same child asks, "How do you get someone to love you? MacTeer's songs or in the Maginot Line's description of eating fish together, and even Claudia doesn't know because that question had never entered her mind.

If Claudia had thought about it, she would have been able to explain to Pecola that although she didn't know exactly how you made someone love you that somehow she knew that she was loved. That love was expressed on those cold autumn nights when Claudia was sick and loving hands would gently touch her forehead and readjust her quilt. Those were the same loving hands that told Claudia that they did not want her to die, and those were the loving hands of her mother, Mrs.

Unfortunately, Pecola had no loving hands to comfort her. In America, in the 's, white supremacy reigned and the values of the white dominant group were internalized by the black community in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. These images were reinforced in children's literature, on billboards and even on the giant theater screens.

Although the effects of this propaganda rippled throughout the black community, its most devastating consequences were inflicted by Pauline Williams.

Perhaps it was because she had always been a dreamer and she had to fantasize in order to escape her daily grind that the silver screen was able to captivate her. Once her education was complete, and she had been indoctrinated by the standards of this medium, she could never look at the world the same way again.

Everything was now assigned a category; there was good and evil, white and black, beauty and ugliness, and she would be its judge.

Prior to her instruction, Pauline Williams loved the colors of purple berries, yellow lemonade and the streaks of green the June bugs made in the trees at night.

When she first met Cholly, she felt that her savior had come to take her home and to protect her from all the ravages of the impending storms.

But Cholly was only a man, a man that carried the scars of abandonment on a trash heap by his mother and rejection at a crap game by his father. Cholly, who tried to anesthetize himself with booze, for the humiliation and degradation he experienced by sneering white men, with flashlights, who stole his manhood. In the beginning, filled with the promise of young love, things went well for Cholly and Pauline in the North. However, as time went by, the colors of Pauline's youth begin to fade as her loneliness consumes her, and she is forced into the picture show for her tutoring.

The giant screen allows her to escape her homesickness, Cholly's abandonment and the colored folks meanness. When the screen lights up, Pauline is transported into a world where she sees white men taking good care of their wives and where the women are dressed up and live in beautiful clean houses. The images are white, they are happy, and they are beautiful, and so Pauline devours these false portraits, and consequently coming home to Cholly becomes more and more difficult.

Pauline tries to accept her circumstances, and begins to joyfully look forward to her second pregnancy. This time she convinces herself that things will be different, because she is not afraid and she has vowed to love it, no matter what it looks like. Pauline begins to lovingly talk to her child while it is still in her womb, and she feels good about this baby up until the end.

But when the healthy, smart, baby girl is born, Pauline is repulsed by her looks, and tells the Lord how ugly she is. It would be very easy at this time to blame society, White and Black, for Pauline's predicament, but I cannot accept this, and am unwilling to let Pauline off the hook so easily. She pleads with him to stop, saying that he has turned her eyes onto her soul and that she does not like what she sees there.

Hamlet continues to denounce her and rail against Claudius, until, suddenly, the ghost of his father again appears before him. Hamlet speaks to the apparition, but Gertrude is unable to see it and believes him to be mad. The ghost intones that it has come to remind Hamlet of his purpose, that Hamlet has not yet killed Claudius and must achieve his revenge. Noting that Gertrude is amazed and unable to see him, the ghost asks Hamlet to intercede with her.

Hamlet describes the ghost, but Gertrude sees nothing, and in a moment the ghost disappears. Hamlet tries desperately to convince Gertrude that he is not mad but has merely feigned madness all along, and he urges her to forsake Claudius and regain her good conscience. He urges her as well not to reveal to Claudius that his madness has been an act.

Hamlet reminds his mother that he must sail to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he says he will regard with suspicion, as though they were poisonous snakes, since he assumes that their loyalties are with Claudius, not with him. What is Hamlet trying to do in his confrontation with his mother? Or it may be that Hamlet wants to know whether she was complicit in the crime. Or he may feel that he needs her on his side if he is to achieve justice.

While all of these are possibilities, what Hamlet actually does is urge his mother to repent choosing Claudius over his own father. Sigmund Freud wrote that Hamlet harbors an unconscious desire to sexually enjoy his mother.

Whether or not Freud was right about this is as difficult to prove as any of the problems that Hamlet worries about, but his argument in regard to Hamlet is quite remarkable.