Muller 's Hamlet Machine and Death Assessment

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Hamlet MachineThe aspect of sex in Heiner Muller’s Hamlet Machine (1977) is very pronounced and is coupled with a graphic allusions to death and destruction in ways that suggest that Hamlet and Ophelia and caught in a vortex of schizophrenic emotions and ideas regarding the nature of life and love. Hamlet at one point says that he wants to be a woman, and Ophelia at the end of the play exclaims horrifically, “I expel all the semen which I have received. I transform the milk of my breasts into deadly poison. I suffocate the world which I gave birth to, between my thighs. I bury it in my crotch. Down with the joy of oppression. Long live hate, loathing, rebellion, death. When she walks through your bedroom with butcher’s knives, you’ll know the truth” (Muller 8). The message that Ophelia appears to be sending could be interpreted as a response to Hamlet’s own conflicted feelings about identity, sex and gender. Hamlet earlier in the play states that he wishes his “mother had one [hole] too fewer,” (a reference to her vagina), implying that he wishes his mother had been sexless and thus both incapable of intercourse and of bearing Hamlet (Muller 1). The death of Hamlet’s father has shaken him: he does not know who or what he is and does not want to be alive.

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In his confusion he seeks…

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…coping with his confusion, rage, and identity-crisis. In the final monologue, Ophelia denounces sex and love and asserts that only “hate, loathing, rebellion, death” shall from here on out be the things that live (Muller 8). In other words, as Hamlet can no longer understand himself, he can no longer love, and since he can no longer love, Ophelia has no reason to live, and no reason for the world to go on. Thus, her response is to reflect the destabilizing sentiment implicit in Hamlet’s orientation: her threat of “walking through the bedroom with butcher’s knives” suggests that she may have to cut off Hamlet’s manhood in an act that, ironically, might restore the “truth” of who….....

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