Hamlet Invisible Man

Female and male are two fundamental sectors of humanity. Anima and animus are psychologist Carl Jung’s way to describe the feminine and masculine halves of the personality. Just like the ambiguity of gender orientation, anima and animus coexist within the individuals of the global population. The blurred border between these subdivisions implements the need to search for . In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Ellison’s Invisible Man, the feminine character traits of the protagonists are alluded to as the cause of their failures, which supports the idea that the inward battle between masculinity and femininity exist as the characters journey closer to their identity.

“It has been generally believed that males stand as opposed to females physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Man is supposed to be strong, courageous, rational and sexually aggressive; while woman is weak, timid, emotional, and sexually passive.” (Guo 2009) The aforementioned beliefs sprout from the deceptively repetitive statistics that male is the dominant gender. However, the audience of “Hamlet” encounters the similar idea of inept femininity through Hamlet’s struggle to accept his indecisiveness, that causes the delay of his father’s revenge, an action in which he has “cause, and will, and strength, and means,/ To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort” (Hoy 1992). In the renowned soliloquy “to be or not to be”, Hamlet explicitly designated his excessive thinking as the seed to his inaction:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action. (1992)

Eve...

... middle of paper ...

... as he turned his head to shout, ripping through both cheeks, and saw the surprised pause of the crowd as Ras wrestled with the spear that locked his jaws.” (1953 p. 560) In the end, Invisible Man’s masculinity manifests and evokes an awakening, where the narrator stops looking for justifications of his existence and crawl into a black hole.

It can be argued that Invisible Man is the reincarnation of Hamlet without the dramatic cries and pitch of emotions. Hamlet and his love of thinking parallel Invisible Man and his love of rationality. However, their stimulated consciences are like the pits of wells; the deeper they are,

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts. 9th Ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. Print