Atwood’s Gertrude: A Rewriting of the Wicked Mother in Hamlet

Mahinur Akşehir
LITFICTION’13: Literary Fiction Conference on Innovation,
Difference, Irregularity, İstanbul, 21-23 November, 2013.
Published in Innovation, Difference and Irreguarity. (November
2013). 34-38.

The period after the World War II, has been an era when certain
traditional cultural values are intensely questioned. It was arued
that the values that were offered as “absolute” were indeed the
values of a dominant group in society, and that the dominant group
being the centre; their values were being imposed on the rest of the
society as universal truths through various instruments of the
dominant group, and literature was considered as one of the most
important of these instruments. However the marginalised groups
started to subvert these so called universals and rewrite the cultural
myths created by this group from their own perspectives.
Especially women writers have preferred to write, in Gayle
Greene’s words, ‘against [the male-oriented stories] but also
within it, finding it both constraining and enabling’ (1991, p. 3).
They rewrite the myths of patriarchal order subverting its discourse
by replacing the dominant male voice with the marginalised female
voice. Margaret Atwood’s short story, “Gertrude Talks Back” is
one of these rewritings that displaces the male voice and replaces it
with a female perspective, retelling Hamlet from Gertrude’s
perspective.
 This revolutionary attitude towards the universally accepted
values of the society occurred as a consequence of the questioning
of the conventions of modernity. Michel Foucault is the one of the
most influential figures that contributed to the shaping of the notion
of power in contemporary culture. In Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of Prison, he suggests that ‘power is everywhere,’ embedded
in our actions, life styles, beliefs and every other aspect of our
lives. What’s more, it is embedded in language and discourse
through which it creates ‘regimes of truth.’ He equates power and
the knowledge of truth because he thinks that power is established
on socially accepted forms of knowledge and suggests that the
concept of truth is a human production and that each society has its
own regimes of truth. Furthermore, the regimes of truth are
imposed on the individuals through discourse. In this sense,
discourse becomes the major guarantor of conformity and
discipline in a society and of teaching people to suit themselves to
the given regimes of truth and behave in expected ways. This kind
of perspective reduces the concept of reality or truth from being a
set of universally accepted, rigid, positive facts to being a set of
relative, flexible, fluid values. As John Searles puts it in The
Construction of Social Reality:
Any system of classification or individuation of objects, any set
of categories for describing the world, indeed, any system of
representation at all is conventional, and to that extent
arbitrary. The world divides up the way we divide it, and if we
are ever inclined to think that our present way of dividing is the
right one, or is somehow inevitable, we can always imagine
alternative systems of classification (1995, p. 160).
Thus, it can be said that what people call ‘reality’ is, in fact,
interpretations or artificial classifications of what people perceive
out of which man-made orders have been created. This perspective
leads us to see ‘any body of “knowledge” [that] comes to be
socially established, [as a] form of story’ (Berger and Luckman,
1967, p. 15). This kind of thinking highly corresponds to the
perspective of Alasdair MacIntyre who suggests, in After Virtue: A
Study in Moral Theory, that the human being ‘is a story-telling
animal’ (1984, p. 216).
Gordon Pradl asserts in his “Narratology: The Study of Story
Structure” that the words ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ etymologically
means ‘to know’ in the original Greek. Today the denotations of the
two words have no relation with the original meaning. Yet, still,
stories have the same effect on people. People create realities
through myths – national, religious and political – and stories. They
come to know the world through such myths and stories which
construct a system of fundamental values in a society. As Robert
Graves ironically suggests, ‘myth has two main functions: the first
is to answer the type of ‘awkward’ questions children ask, such as
‘who made the world?’ [...] The second is to justify the existing
social system and to account for rites and customs’ (1987, p. v).
Besides, as Nicole Ward Jouve affirms:
we make the otherwise alien world a ‘habitable’ place through
the stories we tell ourselves about it. The process works in two
ways, since what we know of ourselves and can project onto the
world is itself a product of the language and literature we have
received. Story-telling shapes us as we use stories to shape the
world. (1998, p. 187-8)
As a matter of fact, human beings have always been tellers of tales
and makers of myths in order to shape and give meanings to their
lives.
However, in this story telling process or in the process of
creating regimes of truth some marginalised groups such as women
are denied the right to contribute. They are not allowed to create
their own images or truths. ‘[I]nstead [they] must seek to conform
to the patriarchal stadards imposed on them and women who have
a story to tell is monstrous’ (Moi, 1991, p. 57). This being revealed
as a consequence of the revisionist movement in the post-war era,
the women writers started to use literature as a weapon of
resistance and play with the existing discourses of patriarchy. They
demystify the patriarchal myths created by men and subverting the
imposition of gender hierarchy, and suggest that what people call
reality is merely a justification of invented stories and myths,
‘regimes of truth’ in Foucault’s terms. They point out the fact that
every narrative is inevitably manipulated by the narrator and
removed from the reality and present their readers with alternative
realities.
Margaret Atwood, just like the other revisionist woman writers,
looks back and re-evaluates the female stereotype with fresh eyes
and brings a new critical approach to this myth and ‘gives life to
women’ as Adrienne Rich suggests (1985, p. 2045). She takes a
canonical text, puts it under scrutiny, reveals its discourse and
retells these stories from the perspective of a female character
which changes the original story to a great extent. In Alicia
Ostriker’s words she ‘fills the old bottle with new wine’ (1985, p.
13) and becomes one of the ‘female Prometheuses’ (1985, p. 10)
that grant voice to women. Rachel DuPlesis suggests that a female
rewriting should first break the sentence which is the ‘displacement
of attention to the other side of the story … giving voice to the
muted’; and then the sequence, which is the ‘[n]arrative
delegitimation […] a realignment that puts the last first and the
first last has always ruptured conventional morality, politics, and
narrative’ (1985, p. 108). Atwood breaks both the sentence by
giving Gertrude a voice and the sequence by putting her in an
active power position.
In Shakespeare’s version, Gertrude is a very obscure character
that has almost no effect on the flow of the main plot. When she
appears, her presence in the text does not go beyond uttering a few
sentences and she mostly disappears from the play for pages. She is
a silent and mostly non-existent character in the play. The part in
which her presence is felt the most is Act 3 Scene 4. At the
beginning of the scene she has a short talk with Polonius just before
she realizes that Hamlet is arriving. Hamlet enters the scene, keeps
offending her mother for being an immoral, shameless, deceitful
and wicked woman with a heart of stone. Only after the ghost
comes and implies that she might be innocent and that he should
talk to her, he calms down a bit. With this scene her wickedness is
tied to her feminine naivety and to the fact that she really has no
idea about what is going on around her. In other words she is either
a monster or stupid. Eventually she unknowingly drinks the
poisoned drink that is meant for Hamlet and dies. Gertrude as a
female character is portrayed as a passive, silent and meek
character that cannot go beyond being a crutch for the male
characters which is the typical representation of a woman in a
patriarchal regime of truth.
Margaret Atwood, thinking that it is time to change this regime,
rewrites this scene of the play. The story is structured as the
rewritten dialogue between Gertrude and Hamlet but unlike the
original story in which her voice is barely heard, it includes only
Gertrude’s part of the dialogue. What hamlet says does not exist in
the text and we can only assume what he might be saying judging
from Gertrude’s responses. The story opens with Gertrude,
admitting that it is never her intention to call her son Hamlet.
However she had to submit to her selfish husbands bidding. This
opening gives us an idea about the untold experiences of Gertrude
as a woman. From the next piece of speech, we understand that she
responds to the part in Shakespeare’s play, Act 3 Scene 4 where
Hamlet commands her to
Leave wringing of your hands, peace, sit you down.
And let me wring your heart, for so I shall
If it be made of penetrable stuff. (1994, p. 103)
In the original story she responds in a submissive and apologetic
way even though she has no idea about what Hamlet means but in
Atwood’s version, she says: ‘I am not wringing my hands. I’m
drying my nails. Darling, please stop fidgeting with my mirror.
That’ll be the third one you’ve broken’ (1997, p. 15). This is
followed by the part where Hamlet takes her attention to the picture
of his father and his uncle and compares them. His father looks
glorious and noble as opposed to the uncle who is ‘like a mildew’d
ear/ Blasting his wholesome breath’ (1994, p. 104). Atwood’s
Gertrude admits that her first husband is handsomer as Hamlet
proposes but she says:
But handsome isn’t everything, especially in a man, and far be it
from me to speak ill of the dead, but I think it’s about time I
pointed out to you that your Dad just wasn’t a whole lot of fun.
Noble, sure, I grant you. But Claudius, well, he likes a drink
now and then. He appreciates a decent meal. He enjoys a laugh,
know what I mean? You don’t always have to be tiptoeing
around because some holier-than-thou principle or something.
(1997, p. 16)
And lastly in the original story Hamlet accuses her of sleeping in a
dirty and immoral bed saying:
Nay, but to live,
In the rank of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption; honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty. (1994, p. 105)
Gertrude’s response in Atwood’s story to this is striking to the
same extent:
The rank sweat of a what? My bed is certainly not enseamed,
whatever that might be! A nasty sty, indeed! Not that it’s any of
your business, but I change those sheets twice a week, which is
more than you, judging from that student slum pigpen in
Wittenberg. (1997, p. 16)
She suggests him to get a real girlfriend instead of messing with her
business. She says: ‘I must say you’re an awful prig sometimes.
Just like your Dad […] you can excuse that in a young person, they
are always so intolerant, but in someone his age it was getting,
well, very hard to live with, and that’s the understatement of the
year’ (1997, p. 17). Unlike the original Gertrude who is a silent,
passive, and stupid/naive woman with no power to act, Atwood’s
Gertrude is portrayed like a mother who is trying to get her spoiled
adolescent son in line the behaviour of whom she is sick of. Her
intelligence and self-esteem is crowned with sense of humour and
she is strong enough to take control of her own life.
The most striking part of the story is the last part as expected.
Unlike the original Gertrude who is clueless about the scandals
surrounding her and who becomes the victim of a murder plot
intended for Hamlet, Atwood’s Gertrude turns out to be the killer
herself:
Oh! You think what? You think Claudius murdered you dad?
Well, no
wonder you’ve been so rude to him at the dinner table! If I’d
known that, I
could have put you straight in no time flat. It wasn’t Claudius,
darling. It was
me.’ (1997, p. 18)
Unlike the original Gertrude she gets to be a strong and active
woman who can stand up for herself. It is not that Atwood is
suggesting women to kill their husbands when they are not content
but she manages to present her readers a meticulous rewriting of
one of the most influential works of the literary canon and to
replace the weak representation of the mother figure with a capable
and strong female character in a subversive, innovative and comical
way.
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