Essay
Can you ever love your mother too much? In an essay of at least 1000 words, compare and contrast the two characters, Oedipus and Hamlet.
Thesis
While love—towards anyone or anything—can be beautiful when passionate, when it hinders on obsession, love can often render more harm than happiness, and in the case of Oedipus and Hamlet, their obsessive love caused their tragic ending. However, in both their cases, it was not the love for their mothers that cause their downfall, and so, it cannot be said that they suffered and caused suffering because of their attachment to their mothers. Moreover, it remains a matter of contemplation whether a tragic flaw in their characters caused their end.
Outline
Aristotle’s definition of hamartia or the “tragic flaw” can be understood either as a dispositional blunder, a fault in character, or as an ethical fault caused by ignorance or ill-formed decisions (Hyde 322). When discussing Sophocles’ tragic play Oedipus the King and the Shakespeare tragedy, Hamlet, the omnipresent question that emerges is do Oedipus and Hamlet have a tragic flaw? If yes, is this flaw inherent in their characters or is it a decision-making error, which is affected by their immoral stance and or their ignorance? However, irrespective of the original intention regarding the concept of tragic flaw by the writers of the plays Hamlet and Oedipus the King, this paper cannot accept the ideology that the Greek hamartia or the tragic flaw is an unethical failing or the failing in an individual’s character. This is because by accepting this notion, the study will caught in the mire of projecting censure and superior thoughts and the analysis of the characters will suffer. Rather, the concept of tragic flaw as an act of ill judgement or ignorance is considered favourable for the purpose of analysis in this paper.
In Oedipus the King, the prophecy that Oedipus would commit patricide and incest is proclaimed by two oracles. There is a constant effort by all the concerned people to escape this fatalistic prophecy, that is, his biological mother and father, Laius and Jocasta attempt to abandon and murder the newborn Oedipus and the adult Oedipus himself flees the country of his adopted parents when he hears the prophesy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Nevertheless, the prophesy comes true, and tragedy befalls on Oedipus, his kin, and his people—the citizens of Thebes. In Hamlet, the title character, Prince Hamlet, is deeply attached to his father, King Hamlet. Thus, the fact that his mother, Queen Gertrude remarries—and that too to his father’s own brother, that is Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius—soon after his father’s death causes him much grievance. However, his grief soon turns to hatred and anger when his father’s ghost tells him that he was murdered by Claudius, who planned to seduce his Queen Gertrude and capture the throne. Thus, blinded by anger Prince Hamlet seeks revenge and in the process causes pain to his own and eventually the death of his mother, his lover and her family, and his friends.
Discussion
Next, the paper considers Oedipus’ case. The play, Oedipus the King is known as a “definitive tragedy,” wherein the convincing particulars provided by Sophocles regarding his characters and his narration skills present a certain amount of authenticity to the incredible foibles of providence (Hall, 1994). In comparison to Hamlet, Oedipus’ tragic flaw completely lay in his ignorance. This idea is in fact reverberated in Sophocles’ play Oedipus at Colonus by Oedipus: “Look through all humanity: you’ll never find a man on earth, if a god leads him on, who can escape his fate (Sophocles(b) lines 266–268). Moreover, unlike in the period and place where Hamlet was written, Oedipus was created in a time when theater was a religious as well as civic association (A Critical Casebook: Sophocles, 1900). The presence of gods and divinity in Greek history, mythologies and hence, plays and stories is colossal; the gods thus stand for every other human emotion and trait (Hack, 1970). Thus, the tragic flaw in Oedipus’ character can also be immoral to certain extent as he ignores the fact that he is destined to commit murder and kills his father in an argument, albeit unknowingly. His ambition seems to affect his judgment. However, the tragic flaw of ignorance seems to play a large part in his tragic circumstances and he himself attempts to flee the tragic prophecy of the oracle, as he states in the play “always running toward some place where I would never see the shame of all those oracles come true” (Sophocles(a) lines 878–80) This seems to makes him somewhat less responsible for his downfall.
Thus, it can be conclusively said that while there exists a tragic flaw in the both the characters. While Oedipus’ flaw fundamentally stems out of ignorance, Hamlet’s tragic flaw stems out immorality. The obsessive love that affects the characters’ judgements and eventually leads to their tragic end is not the love for their mothers. In Hamlet’s case, the love is for honour and his father. In Oedipus’ case, the love is for his self-respect and ambition.
Works Cited
A Critical Casebook: Sophocles. New York: Ablongman, 1900. Print.
Hall, E. “Introduction.” Sophocles: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, 1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print.
Hyde, Isabel “The Tragic Flaw: Is It a Tragic Error?” The Modern Language Review 58.3 (July, 1963): 321–25. Print.
Shakespeare, W. In E. Kean (Ed.), Hamlet: A tragedy, 1818. London: T. Rodwell. Print
Sophocles (a). In R. D. Dawe (Ed.), Oedipus Rex. Boston: Cambridge University Press. A Critical Casebook: Sophocles. New York: Ablongman, 2006. Print.
Sophocles (b). The Three Theban Plays. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Print.
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