Muller's Hamlet Machine and Death

Hamlet Machine

The 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. In his confusion he seeks out of his skin and sex and dons the dress of a woman. This confusion in turn exacerbates Ophelia, who reacts with fury, decrying their love and romance and shutting out Hamlet’s seed from her own loins.

Hamlet’s struggle with identity is linked with his struggle with sex. He is uncomfortable with both and his revulsion for his mother’s seeming callousness at so quickly falling into his uncle’s bed after her husband has died makes Hamlet angry, to put it mildly. He lashes out towards his mother, saying, “I’ll make you into a virgin again Mother so that the King has a bloody wedding” (Muller 2)—a double entendre that refers to the breaking of the hymen as well as to the fact that Hamlet wants to kill the new king for displacing his own father.

Ophelia responds to Hamlet’s unhinged psyche by identifying her own isolation: when Hamlet was whole, she too was the same—at least, such can be inferred from the text. If it were not the case, it would seem unnecessary for Ophelia to describe herself in these terms: “I am alone with my breasts my thighs my lap” (Muller 3). When Hamlet was sane, he most likely would have ensured that Ophelia was indeed not alone. But now that he is consumed with bloody thoughts and sexually confused on top of it, Ophelia lashes out as well, feeling offended and hurt by Hamlet’s apparent instability, and superficiality: “I smash the Window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photographs of the men who I loved and who used me on the Bed on the Table on the Chair on the Floor. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire,” she cries (Muller 3). All of this leads to the final monologue of Ophelia, following Hamlet’s dance with Horatio, in which the title character seems to explore a new gender identity while 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 he is.