Hamlet Father Figure

The International Dictionary of Psychology defines a "father figure" as "a man to whom a person looks up and whom he treats like a father.” In this essay I am going to be addressing the significance of this figure by comparing the characters presented in three different pieces of literature: ‘Hamlet’ by William Shakespeare, ‘Daddy’ by Sylvia Plath and ‘The God of Small Things’ by Arudanthi Roy.

Critic, Anna Clarke, suggests that “Roy’s novel can be read as a radical literary strategy that evades and challenges society’s mono-logic tendency to control narrative meaning, and structure our perception through forms of linguistic order”. The multi-perspectival style of the novel is important in order to fully understand the complexities of the characters,

His loyalty to his father explains why Hamlet cannot fathom how his mother had married his uncle who was “no more like my father than I to Hercules.” During the Elizabethan era, incest included marrying your in-laws and so by marrying Gertrude, Claudius had broken the church’s laws of affinity. Also, Elizabeth I, the queen at the time, was the daughter of Henry the eighth and Anne Boleyn who got divorced on the grounds that their relationship was incestuous. Thus, Hamlet objecting to the marriage so boldly in the play by calling his mother “to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets” could show Shakespeare being ironic about what constitutes incestuous relations. On the other hand, it could convey the sense of duty Hamlet feels towards his father, and how he believes that his uncle is not worthy to replace his father. Throughout the play Hamlet perceives his father as gallant and oh “so excellent a king.” The audience sees his father through his military victories with “an eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury”, rather than actual memories of him with Hamlet. Justin Dathan Anders Drewry states in ‘Hamlet’s fathers: an analysis of paternity and filial duty in Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ that despite lacking “any actual knowledge of his father, in his first soliloquy Hamlet imagines his father to have a power over nature: “That he might not beteem the winds of heaven/ Visit her face too roughly.” Thus, it can be interpreted by audiences that Hamlet does regard his father with great esteem; and, it is this admiration and loyalty to his father that incentives the story, so that he can seek revenge on his