Locations of Motherhood in Shakespeare on Film
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Volume 2 (2), 2009 ISSN 1756-8226 Locations of Motherhood in Shakespeare on Film LAURA GALLAGHER Queens University Belfast Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers (1992) appropriates feminist psychoanalysis to illustrate how the suppression of the female is represented in selected Shakespearean play-texts (chronologically from Hamlet to The Tempest ) in the attempted expulsion of the mother in order to recover the masculine sense of identity. She argues that Hamlet operates as a watershed in Shakespeare’s canon, marking the prominent return of the problematic maternal presence: “selfhood grounded in paternal absence and in the fantasy of overwhelming contamination at the site of origin – becomes the tragic burden of Hamlet and the men who come after him” (1992, p.10). The maternal body is thus constructed as the site of contamination, of simultaneous attraction and disgust, of fantasies that she cannot hold: she is the slippage between boundaries – the abject. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject (1982) ostensibly provides a hypothesis for analysis of women in the horror film, yet the theory also provides a critical means of situating the maternal figure, the “monstrous- feminine” in film versions of Shakespeare (Creed, 1993, 1996). Therefore the choice to focus on the selected Hamlet , Macbeth , Titus Andronicus and Richard III film versions reflects the centrality of the mother figure in these play-texts, and the chosen adaptations most powerfully illuminate this article’s thesis. Crucially, in contrast to Adelman’s identification of the attempted suppression of the “suffocating mother” figures 1, in adapting the text to film the absent maternal figure is forced into (an extended) presence on screen. 2 Gertrude, Tamora, the Duchess of York, Lady Macbeth, and the witches each represent variations of the monstrous mother (in both the play-text and developed on screen) – as understood by the male characters/viewers (see Mulvey, 1975). 1 Indeed Adelman (1992, p.10) posits that “before Hamlet, masculine identity is constructed in and through the absence of the maternal”. 2 Often, scenes with female figures are not cut due to the influence of the female audience, and thus seem comparatively more significant characters on film than in the text version. 73 Volume 2 (2), 2009 ISSN 1756-8226 What is most striking is that the abject mother is primarily sited and explored, in these films, in the symbolic locations of the house: the bedroom, stairs, kitchen and in the distance from the domestic, the wilderness. Location thus functions as ideographs for the thematic essence of a scene: “settingimbues the image with graphic properties which comment on story and characters” (Nelmes, 2007, p.68). The bedroom is the location of the mother’s sexuality, of consummation and enacted or suppressed oedipal desires. The various versions of Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier [1948], Franco Zeffirelli [1990], Kenneth Branagh [1996]) and Julie Taymor’s Titus (1995) use this setting primarily to encounter the phallic mother figure, and the bedroom (even when its connotations are disavowed) imparts an extra-textual ideology that imbues the scene with repressed significance. The kitchen with its ideological focus on nurturing and providing is subverted in Taymor’s Titus and Billy Morissette’s Scotland PA (2001) and is instead envisaged as a place of consummation, of desire, of lack and of cannibalism. The stairs, because they transcend allocated room space and function, are the place of negotiation: position on the stairs symbolises the power dynamics between mother/son figures (Orson Welles’ Macbeth [1948], Richard Loncraine’s Richard III [1996]). So too the wilderness because it is located outside the domestic setting, provides the space for the enactment of ritual, of deviant sexuality and witchcraft (Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Welles’ Macbeth and Taymor’s Titus ). These films thus explore the spectrum of the monstrous female as outlined by Creed (1993, p.55): the archaic, castrating mother; the phallic, sexual mother; and the castrated, de-sexualised figure. The absent mother of the text is made present in locations whose ideological significances associate them with mother (kitchen), lover (bedroom) and the places on the boundaries (stairs, wilderness), which represent the complete, yet impossibly limited, spectre of feminine identifications. In associating the maternal with a location illustrates the (male imposed) limits of female roles and denotes her constructed immanence. 3 The Mother in the Bedroom Adelman (1992, p.13-36) demonstrates how, in the play-text, Hamlet’s male subjectivity is centered upon the adulterous, sexualized female body of his mother. With the absence of his father, Hamlet projects his own insecure masculine identity onto his mother’s 3 See Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) theory that in a patriarchal society man equals transcendence and woman is immanence. 74 Volume 2 (2), 2009 ISSN 1756-8226 body. The “contaminated” maternal body is figured as the abject and the site of Hamlet’s anxiety because it is on the boundary between life/death, clean/unclean, self/other. Gertrude in the play-text is sexualized through Hamlet’s interpretation and reading of her body: “why, she would hang on him, /As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” (1.2.143-45). He testifies to the shamefulness of her quick remarriage, her age-inappropriate sensuality (3.4.66-67, 81- 83), and forcefully deems her sexuality to be a “rebellious hell” (3.4.80). Gertrude’s body is thus read as the sign of her betrayal to both Hamlet’s dead father and Hamlet himself, and she embodies his fantasy of maternal sexuality and power. Similarly, the presentation of Gertrude in film versions of Hamlet depends upon the avowal or disavowal of this oedipal subtext – a subtext that, of course, existed before Freud “read” it. Olivier’s Hamlet was consciously intended to be a psychoanalytic, oedipal text 4 and the centrality of the mother is visually signaled by the mise-en-scene. The dark, long corridors, twisting stairwells, empty rooms and the one large central space of Elsinore castle signifies “the womb, the enclosing space inside the mother’s body” (Mulvey, 1996, p.58). It could also represent Hamlet’s confused mind, thereby connecting setting and theme: Hamlet’s mental obsession with his mother’s body. 5 Similarly, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet signals its focus on the maternal with “equally cave-like, undulating interiors” (Lehmann and Starks, 2000, p.3). The intimacy of the film’s castle setting is furthered by the intense, cloying triangular network of surveillance between Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius. The film opens in a “womblike sepulcher” with the three primary characters looking over the body of Old Hamlet (Charnes, 1997, p.9). The claustrophobia of the scene, the replacement of one father figure with another, the corpse of the “true” father laid out within the “womblike” room conveys the associated fears of Gertrude’s maternal function: over-intimacy, lack of differentiation and death. The womb is figured here as a tomb (see discussion of Taymor’s Titus below). So too, in Welles’ Macbeth the low ceilings, empty rooms and tunneled recesses of the dark castle invoke the imposing, inescapable power of the feminine. In contrast, the bright, expansive mise-en-scene of Branagh’s Hamlet – the vast, barren, snow-covered setting, the grand scale of the castle and the epic length of the film – asserts phallic power, thus shunning the horror of the feminine. 4 As Donaldson explores (1990, p.31-35), Olivier was fascinated by the contemporary theories of Sigmund Freud (further developed by Ernest Jones) on Hamlet’s oedipal desires and Olivier consciously interrogated Hamlet’s bond with his mother in his adaptation. 5 The film employs German expressionist techniques – in the 1920s this movement made sets representative of the psychological disturbances of characters (Nelmes, 2007, p.69). 75 Volume 2 (2), 2009 ISSN 1756-8226 The archaic motherhood posited by the womblike setting in Olivier’s Hamlet becomes associated with the phallic mother, due to the innovative use of camera which focuses on the queen’s enigmatic bed. 6 In one single long take, the camera moves from our point of view past a series of spaces “empty of people and yet pregnant with significances we cannot yet fully grasp” (Donaldson, 1990, p.51) as it searches out “something rotten”. The camera eventually lingers on the suggestively shaped, vaginally hooded, and perpetually unmade bed (suggesting it as a site of action) implying that it operates as a metonymy for Gertrude’s perverse sexuality. As Donaldson (1990, p.52) states “this symbol is as kind of declaration of the film’s Freudian intentions”. The repeated directorial decision to reposition the “closet scene” of the play-text in the bedroom highlights the intended reading of the scene as the pinnacle of the oedipal subtext. In contrast, metaphorical significances of the bedroom are disavowed in Branagh’s Hamlet : the “enseamed” bed has been replaced by a chaste day-couch. In Olivier’s closet scene the viewer watches from the door as Hamlet violently shouts at his mother inside; this lingering shot demonstrates the private, intimate nature of the mother’s bedroom. To cross the threshold signals an intrusion, thus Hamlet’s unapologetic entrance is a sign of his phallic intent. Zeffirelli’s film heightens the disturbing depravity of the mother/son incest. Hamlet enters his mother’s bedroom swinging his sword around at crotch level, clearly signifying his phallic intentions and later causes her to stumble when he physically jabs her with it. Upon the bed, after some grappling with their lockets, he lies on top of her as she is face down, tugging at her necklace and getting worked up over her inability to differentiate between the men. 7 The position and frustration vividly reads as rape, and in the next shot, after Hamlet has moved off her, Gertrude speaks off camera, in close up, and appears naked as the shoulders of her dress have been forced down.