Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest.

Janet Adelman. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. xii + 379 pp. $49-50 cloth; $15.95 paper.

This is an extraordinary book, perhaps the most impressive example so far of the psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare. Adelman manages the difficult feat of speaking intelligently and insightfully about Shakespeare from a highly developed psychoanalytic point of view. Specifically, Adelman emphasizes the objects-relations approach of D. W. Winnicott. She is also highly indebted to Richard P. Wheeler and C. L. Barber, who are cited almost everywhere, as well as to a large number of psychoanalytic and feminist critics, including Carol Neely, Madelon Sprengnether, Coppelia Kahn, Peter Erickson, Stanley Cavell, Ruth Nevo, Murray Schwartz, and Arthur Kirsch. There is an astonishingly long section of footnotes, more than half the size of the text, which acknowledges intellectual and personal filiations of more than twenty years, including debts to students and personal asides -- on page 353 there is a wistful remembrance of the late Joel Fineman. Adelman's book is extremely learned and authoritative in its formulations, at once complex and lucid.

The psychoanalytic thesis is very simple in its constant restatement: that Shakespeare's tragedies (beginning with Hamlet), and problem plays (Troilus and Cressida, All's Well, and Measure for Measure), are preoccupied with "the nightmare of femaleness that can weaken and contaminate masculinity" (4). This includes fantasies of maternal malevolence and the corrupting effect of the maternal body. One of the strong pressures in the tragedies is "to free the masculine identity of both father and son from its origin in the contaminated maternal body" (17). The late romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, with some support from Antony and Cleopatra) represent an attempt to repair the damage of Hamlet and to present idealized mothers (Winter's Tale, Pericles) and fathers (Cymbeline). This is accomplished, however, only in part. Cymbeline, for example, unsexes and revirginates Imogen at the end in order to free Posthumus from his contamination by the "woman's part."

Let us look at the exciting chapter on Hamlet. As a psychoanalytic critic, Adelman emphasizes the "buried fantasy" (24) of the play, its "deep fantasy" (24-25, 27), its "fantasy-structure" (31), its "covert drama" (31), and its "infantile fantasy" (35). What this really means is that the author needs to reimagine the play that Shakespeare wrote so that she becomes his silent co-author or co-worker. In Adelman's play Gertrude becomes the central character rather than Claudius, "for the play localizes its pervasive boundary panic in Hamlet's relationship with his mother, whose contaminated body initially serves him as the metaphor for the fallen world that has sullied him" (29). Adelman projects two fathers in Hamlet, Claudius and his brother, who have much more in common with each other than critics usually allow. Thus the infantile male impulse in Hamlet, and in all of Shakespearean tragedy, is to free masculine identity "from its origin in the contaminated maternal body" (17).

There are many points to argue with in this controversial book. Adelman is sometimes psychoanatically formulaic in a way that overrides our sense of the characters as they appear in the performed play. The malignity of Lady Macbeth, for example, is blackened at the expense of the effort we are asked to make to understand the horror of her unsexing. Adelman omits the early scene of Macbeth's letter, in which we see Lady Macbeth as a keen analyst of her husband's hypocrisy. In All's Well, the dramatic character of Bertram as it is established in the play is ignored in favor of a more sympathetic view of him, fleeing, like Bunyan's Christian at the beginning of Pilgrim's Progress, the sins of his immediate family circle, especially incest. In Measure for Measure, do we really feel, as audience, that the union of Claudio and Juliet is illicit and that all sexuality therefore illicit in the play? The dramatic issue is much more complex than that and even Angelo has his moment of human appeal to the audience. I could go on caviling with Adelman's Presentation--including the evocation of the ghost of Othello's mother--but these are minor matters in relation to such an intellectually challenging and brilliant book.