Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex

Hamlet does not have the Oedipus Complex simply because he does not want to be like his father and displays some incestuous feelings towards his mother, but which of none are presented in a sexual manner and are all performed to diminish her love that she has for Claudius. He wanted to be like Horatio, a student from Wittenberg. However, prince hamlet was not free to carve for himself. Filial duty forced him to accept his Royal Inheritance and to take charge of the blood soaked land that was and is the question to these wars. The title “The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” says it all because he is not free to mould his own life. He is subject to the voice of Denmark, which was the voice sent from Hell to speak of the horrors. Hamlet, like all the other major characters in untrue to himself. When he is himself, he is like Horatio, a student from Wittenberg. But as he said, “Horatio, or I do forget myself.” (1.2.161) He does forget himself. He erases himself and his humanist education from his own brain and replaces it there in the book and volume of his brain he writes his war like fathers commandment. Thereafter all of Hamlet’s soliloquies are really debates between the warring sides of his divided soul. Rather than a single mined revenger, Hamlet is a thinker, he is always hesitated on action, but in his mother’s chamber, In Act three scene four he just killed Polonious without thinking, and the single minded blood action is just against his character.

One may note that his unusual behavior towards his mother shows the Oedipus complex in him. Gertrude’s fatal flaw is that she is unable to part from her husband, even to save her own soul. We as the reader discover this when Hamlet states “Why, she would hang on him, as it increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.”(1.2.143-145) The reason Hamlet displays unusual behavior towards his mother is because he is trying to separate Claudius from his mother to save her soul. In one of Hamlet’s soliloquies he states