II

Masculinity, Self-Help Culture and what we can learn from Hamlet

 

Though by no means uniquely masculine, defending the self by developing independence and ‘resilience’ is perhaps most common among men. We might investigate this particular phenomenon by looking at extreme examples such as the internet phenomenon Andrew Tate and the related world of ‘Incels’. However, we might look at what appear far more benign examples such as a recent smart phone app dedicate to ‘men’s wellness’. ‘Mettle’ has been launched by Alex George – the UK’s Youth Mental Health Ambassador, who is a medical Doctor and a former contestant on Love Island – and the ‘adventurer’ Bear Grylls, though it appears to be the brainchild of Neil Smith, a ‘creative’ whose most significant other invention was a reality TV show called Snowflake Mountain. Mettle is a fascinating name for this product. The word is an Elizabethan variant spelling of metal. Both forms of the word were used interchangeably by Shakespeare in the literal sense and in the figurative one which meant something like ardent masculine temperament, spirit and courage, because of metal’s association with armour. The psychological resilience thus conjured is martial. It is difficult to imagine a less felicitous image of mental health. Men are being encouraged to prepare for battle, to encase themselves, to make themselves impregnable. The danger of male self-help culture is always how it can reinforce those curiously masculine psychological defences of individualism, autonomy, and self-reliance and make what men genuinely need – interpersonal connection, collaboration, and vulnerability – that much harder to achieve.
 

Perhaps the most culturally significant manifestation of this world is Jordan Peterson and his book Twelve Rules for Life. I decided to read this book because several of my male patients were mentioning it. I found it deeply disturbing.

The full title of the book is Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. In the first few pages we receive a gloss on this title: ‘Order’, Peterson tells us,

is typically portrayed symbolically – imaginatively – as masculine. It’s the Wise King and the Tyrant, forever bound together as society is simultaneously structure and oppression.

               Chaos, by contrast, is where – or when – something unexpected happens. […] As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented as imaginatively feminine.

The book is thus positioned as an antidote to the feminine, or at least as something conceived of in Peterson’s imagination as feminine. A little later he riffs on the nature of chaos as ‘the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the sickness of your child.’ It is odd to see this list comprised in part of a sort of dog-whistle right-wing anxiety, but also including the deep-seated fear of the mother’s ‘hidden anger’. There is something here which feels uncomfortably revealing. Peterson is always keen to situate his tendentious attitudes in ‘science’ or in a collective unconscious. But these associations to chaos are his, not those of any mainstream culture. The world is inevitably chaotic and unpredictable, and much though Peterson and his followers might want to believe it, naming that unpredictability as feminine will do nothing to end or control it.
 

Indeed, one of the problems of the view he embodies, is that he assumes there is a ‘human nature’ collective and timeless, and that there are given qualities associated with gender, behind the various historical manifestations of being human. My daughter, whose culture valorises gender fluidity and the careful consideration of emotional life, asked, when I read sections out to her: ‘When was this written?’ It felt absurdly remote from her lived experience. Peterson’s book speaks directly to a subculture of men that finds relating to other people very difficult. This difficulty is especially pronounced when emotional depth is required. It is far easier when relating occurs with other emotionally inarticulate heterosexual men. The patients who have mentioned reading this book, were men trying to pick themselves up after failed relationships with women. What Peterson tells them, and what they so badly want to hear, is that their inability to relate sensitively is not the problem. The problem is the increasing power of women. ‘Girls’, he tells us, ‘aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys’. I think the most problematic element in this mind-bending passage is the subclause ‘whatever that means’; he apparently cannot conceive of a friendly, non-adversarial relation between the sexes. His sense of women always looking for the mythical ‘Alpha Male’ feeds the paranoiac sense many men feel of their own inadequacy and the corollary that their failure can only be because women are power-focused and (a mirror to the selves they fear) without emotional depth. ‘Boys’ interests,’ he also informs us ‘tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people. […] This isn’t a debate. The data are in.’ But despite Peterson’s doubtlessly reputable ‘data’, what does he make of all the people who do not fit this absurdly bifurcated paradigm, not least the vast numbers who do not conceive of themselves as heterosexual or even cis men or women? It is of course apt that men in Peterson’s world are object-driven; they feel out of their depth in the world of womanly feelings, of relating to people not things. He ends up generalising this into a strange speculation: ‘the so-called oppression of the patriarchy was instead an imperfect collective attempt by men and women, stretching back over millennia, to free each other from privation, disease and drudgery’. The implication of his views for women is continued oppression, and for men, emotionally stunted attempts to control women and refuse to accept a shifting set of social relations which have changed forever the ways in which people relate.
 

Woman as pollution in Hamlet

Peterson’s view of gender relations is tragic, in the sense that it will never end happily. Indeed, an analogy to Peterson’s view of men can be seen in Hamlet. One thing we might learn from the comparison is that the time when men were real men is always just behind us, casting its shadow and deforming men’s lived emotional lives. Much of the psychological richness of Hamlet revolves, not around existential questions or mortality, (think of the hackneyed image of an Edwardian Hamlet gazing mournfully into the empty eye-sockets of a skull), but rather is to do with masculinity and femininity. Hamlet’s speculations, and many of the other characters’ key speeches, often revolve around the need men feel to police their own and women’s behaviour and the threat that women represent to the masculine world of self-respect and honour, the dread they sense of their own feelings of sadness and vulnerability. In particular, men in the play try to banish emotions, often thought of as dangerously feminine, in order to focus merely on violent action.

Processing the news – and poetic representation by Gertrude – of Ophelia’s death, Laertes comments:

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,

And therefore I forbid my tears: but yet

It is our trick; nature her custom holds,

Let shame say what it will: when these are gone,

The woman will be out. Adieu, my lord:

I have a speech of fire, that fain would blaze,

But that this folly douts it.  IV.vii, (184-189)

Water is often regarded as the feminine element, and Laertes’s initial comment – that Ophelia has had ‘too much of water’ – seems to indicate that her death might be as the result of an excess of femininity as well as of drowning. As we know from King Lear, hysteria – ‘hysterico passio’ – was considered a disease caused by the movement of the womb, so the madness that polluted Ophelia and gynae itself are inseparable in Shakespeare’s tragic consciousness. What remains of the speech explicitly links the feminine element to the weakening effects of emotion. Laertes’s ‘nature’ – ‘our trick’ in the sense of the way of human experience – is to respond to pain with emotions, expressed through weeping. Laertes is aware that this is profoundly shameful, so he reframes these tears as the purgation of pollution: ‘When these are gone,/ The woman will be out’. The watery world of emotion is, for Laertes, pure feminine ‘folly’ and it douses the potential ‘speech of fire’ which will set his revenge ablaze. Once feelings are done with, he can fulfil his role as avenging son and reclaim his place in the world of masculine honour.
 

Hamlet is a victim of a similar allying of emotions to femininity in Act 1 Scene 2, where first his mother then his stepfather berate his prolonged mourning:

[..] your father lost a father;

That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound

In filial obligation for some term

To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever

In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief […] . I.ii (89-94)

Claudius’s conception of grief is as a ‘filial obligation’, something done as a result of duty rather than because of feeling. He envisages a baton passed from generation to generation, whereby they are ‘bound’, apparently against their will, to mourn for ‘some term’. Hamlet’s grief in the midst of the celebrations of Claudius’s and Gertrude’s marriage and new regime is out of place and must annoy Claudius. He chooses his way of getting back at his stepson carefully; the grief is significantly ‘unmanly’. This is perhaps not only because of its ‘obstinate’ duration, but because of its sincerity. Death of fathers is ‘common’ as Gertrude has reminded her errant son; but Hamlet is not merely performing a ritualised custom as Claudius would prescribe, but goes beyond the ‘inky cloak’ and other ‘trappings’ which are the accoutrements of a ‘part a man might play’, the performance of a ‘filial obligation’. He has ‘that within which passeth show’: true sadness at his father’s death, an ‘unmanly’ display of emotion. Claudius’s taunt apparently goes right to the heart of Hamlet’s own anxieties. As John Kerrigan has pointed out ‘Hardly has [the play] begun than it pauses to celebrate Old Hamlet as a representative of that lost and epic age in which political issues were decided by fierce, single combat’. In the soliloquy that follows Claudius’s critique of his mourning, Hamlet repeats Horatio’s celebration of the man who ‘smote the sledded Polacks on the ice’; Hamlet’s father is ‘Hyperion’, Claudius is ‘a satyr’, the Sun God as opposed to a base beast. But later, when reaching for a similar way of discriminating his father from his uncle, he reveals one of the deep truths of the play:

Married to my uncle; my father’s brother,

But as like to my father as I to Hercules.

In this equation Old Hamlet and Hercules are one side, Hamlet himself is sided with Claudius. Hamlet is profoundly unlike his masculine father and the customs he represents. Since Ernest Jones’s Freudian reading of the play, much has been made of the way Hamlet identifies with his adversary, Claudius; in murdering Old Hamlet and marrying Gertrude, he has achieved what Hamlet unconsciously desires. But perhaps, bearing Kerrigan in mind, we can make of this a temporal as well as a psychological division. Old Hamlet and Hercules belong in the deep heroic past, when men, as I put it earlier, were real men; Claudius and Hamlet, for better or worse, share the ambivalent new world of the renaissance, where, as Kerrigan puts it, ‘kings take power by poison and combat is a courtly exercise played with bated foils’. Despite Claudius’s attack on Hamlet as ‘unmanly’, they are both part of a world which has left the medieval warrior code behind and is endangered by ‘womanly’ reflection.
 

We are once again in the world Freud described in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. The problem with Hamlet’s mourning is that it cannot end, it goes nowhere. Gertrude may not fully understand but she has some sense of this: ‘Do not forever with thy vailèd lids/ Seek for thy noble father in the dust.’ To be fair to young Hamlet, it is particularly hard for him to prove to himself that his father is dead, since his ghost returns and demands revenge. Hamlet’s ambivalence about his father may not just be about warrior masculinity and renaissance thought; it may have some very material conditions. When Hamlet speaks to the Gravedigger a series of things emerge.

HAMLET How long hast thou been grave-maker?

GRAVEDIGGER Of all the days i’ th’ year, I came to ’t that day that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.

HAMLET How long is that since?

GRAVEDIGGER Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was that very day that young Hamlet was born—he that is mad, and sent into England.

For one thing we discover that the Gravedigger has been burying the dead since the day that Hamlet was born. The sense that Hamlet is, as G. Wilson Knight calls him, an ambassador of death, is symbolised by this temporal coincidence. More importantly we learn that Hamlet was born the very day Old Hamlet slayed Old Fortinbras. The great warrior was at his own deathly business as Gertrude gave birth to his son. If Old Hamlet was not much of a father, we are supplied with another figure who perhaps was more paternal a few lines later. The Gravedigger throws Hamlet a skull and tells him it belonged to the jester Yorrick. Hamlet, horrified and fascinated in equal measure, comments: ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.’ Perhaps it is unsurprising that Hamlet has such an ‘antic’ nature, that his imagination works better in sardonic jest than in blunt rage, since it was the jester, not the king, who was his true father, who played with him and gave him love. It is interesting that in this scene Hamlet seems to have given up jesting; it is the Gravedigger who plays with words as Hamlet has been apt to up to this moment.
 

As is sadly so often the case, Hamlet’s profound insecurity, in particular about his own masculinity, manifests itself in virulent attacks on the women in his life. That they stimulate desire means that they have a crippling power over men, whose self-containment proves catastrophically illusory. They are the chaotic force that undermines even ordered Hyperion. In Act 3 scene 1 he tells Ophelia ‘to a nunnery, go!’; rather like Jordan Peterson, there is no room in his imagination for a loving relationship between man and woman; women are either paragons of sexless chastity or prostitutes (nunnery being Cheapside slang for a brothel). To marry is to become a ‘monster’, that is a horned cuckold, the figure of the beastly emasculated husband of an unfaithful wife. (The image of the cuckold works, as Coppélia Kahn pointed out, by Freudian displacement and compensation: ‘It is not that I have an inadequate penis,’ the Cuckold says. ‘I have two, and they’re on my head!’) This emasculation by infidelity, of course, is what has happened (even if beyond the grave) to Old Hamlet, that hyper-masculine warrior. If Gertrude can emasculate Hyperion, what might Ophelia do to poor unmanly Hamlet?!
 

Shakespeare links exactly this complex of masculine anxieties in Laertes’s retort to Gertrude, when she suggests the raging young man be ‘calm’ when he returns with a rabble having discovered his father’s murder:

That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard,

Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot

Even here, between the chaste unsmirched brow

Of my true mother.

Honour depends here on the ‘chaste unsmirched brow’ of Laertes’s mother; she is the guarantrix of Polonius’s virility and Leartes’s own legitimacy. The honour of his mother means that Polonius was not a cuckolded ‘monster’ and that Laertes can bypass sadness and proceed directly to the only emotion men are allowed to show in the play: anger.

To return to Hamlet, while Laertes is certain about his parentage and about himself as a revenger, (when asked by Claudius how he could prove himself a good and dutiful son to Polonius, his retort is that he would ‘Cut [Hamlet’s] thoat I’ th’ church’) Hamlet worries that he is not the man for the job. As Act 1 scene 5 closes and Hamlet reflects on the words of the Ghost, he comments: ‘The time is out of joint; oh cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right.’ The Ghost has placed on Hamlet precisely the demand of ‘filial obligation’, but not to mourn, to revenge. This is a wonderfully literal version of Freud’s ‘shadow of the object’, making the processing of grief impossible. He initiates the dialogue by demanding: ‘If thou didst ever thy dear father love-- … Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.’ He repeats this construction in case Hamlet didn’t get it:

If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest.

If Hamlet has ‘nature’, in this case the correct and natural responses to the demands of honour, he will perform his filial obligation and enact revenge against Claudius. But he doesn’t. Even with these words ringing in his ears, he cannot muster the rage that Laertes finds so natural. I quote from Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act 2 scene 2 at some length because it captures so perfectly what I have been describing: that mixture of the demands of filial obligation, polluted by something womanly:

ere this

I should have fatted all the region kites

With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

O, vengeance!

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,

That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,

And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,

A scullion!

Hamlet uses the language of revenge, if anything, with greater vehemence than Laertes. The image of the kites feeding on Claudius’s carcass, his list of epithets which spill over the iambic pentameter in the thirteen-syllable line ‘Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!’, all seem to indicate a man out of control about to commit a brutal act, as Catherine Belsey puts it, ‘in excess of justice’. But, while for Laertes word and deed are linked together, bound in the world of uncomplicated filial obligation, Hamlet is still polluted by femininity. His words take him away from deeds into emotion; he ‘unpacks his heart’, the seat of his feelings, ‘like a whore… a very drab, a scullion’.
 

The play might go on forever, with Hamlet crippled by womanly emotions, but a change comes over him at the end of Act 4 and the start of Act 5. I think the play turns on the words he utters as he leaves Denmark: ‘O, from this time forth,/ My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.’ This is, of course, a demand for him to think of violence, but it is, perhaps more importantly a desire for a change in humour. At the end of the soliloquy we have just been looking at in Act 2 scene 2, Hamlet comments on his ‘melancholy’. For Shakespeare’s audience this is an excess of black bile, the symptoms of which are a thoughtful sadness. Of course, in the context of my argument, it brings to mind Freud and the failed mourning Hamlet has been stuck in from the play’s opening. He is calling now for bloody thoughts, thoughts more ‘sanguine’ in temperament. The symptoms of an excess of blood are confidence, optimism, rashness, violence; he is dismissing the watery influence of the melancholy Saturn and calling on the war-like power of Mars, the planet linked to blood. C T Neely comments that melancholy was a ‘fashionable’ state for Elizabethan men; however, in this play, it is melancholy that makes of Hamlet a womanly, emotional figure, incapable of violence. What I agree with entirely is her claim that:

By acting out the madness Hamlet feigns and the suicide that he theorises, the representation of Ophelia absorbs pathological excesses open to Hamlet and enables his reappearance as a sane autonomous individual and the tragic hero in the last act. Then he appears detached from family and from sexuality, seemingly free from passivity and loss of control, capable of philosophical contemplation and revenge, worthy a spiritual epitaph and a soldier’s funeral; his restored identity is validated - symbolically as well as literally - over Ophelia's grave: ‘This is I/ Hamlet the Dane’ [5.1 250-1].

Just as Laertes had to purge the woman, so too does Hamlet. We have noted how the Gravedigger seems to draw off Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’. Symbolically another act must complete his journey to ‘sanity’ in the very same scene; he must stand over Ophelia’s dead body, burying the womanly emotional world that was open to him so that he can claim his place in the honourable world of masculinity and die a vengeful soldier.

Fortinbras’s final lines encapsulate what has happened to Hamlet in the play:

Let four captains

Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;

For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,

The soldiers' music and the rites of war

Speak loudly for him.

There is a strange return of the language of performance at this moment. Hamlet’s body will be placed on ‘a stage’ – surely like an actor, not ‘like a soldier’ as Fortinbras claims. And he comments about what Hamlet might have been like had he lived: ‘For he was likely, had he been put on,/ To have proved most royally’; ‘put on’ like a play, not a king. This takes us back to the play’s opening and Claudius’s criticism of Hamlet’s failure to enact manly grief as a dutiful performance – ‘a part a man might play’. When Hamlet demands his ‘thoughts be bloody’ these words end the soliloquys; as well as the watery world of emotion, Hamlet is bidding adieu to his interiority so expertly examined in Shakespeare’s essay-like personal asides. From this point on he is exterior only, he performs masculinity as it is demanded in the warped world of Elsinore. He has consigned the needy, vulnerable part of himself to a death in Ophelia’s grave and created a false identity to carry him towards the tragic deathly conclusion. His fatalism, which is often interpreted as a Christian tragic realisation or anagnorisis, looks from this perspective more like a deliberate suicide. This is a fate that too often befalls men who are not allowed to explore and thus accept their vulnerability.
 

Perhaps, then, this is the true tragedy of Hamlet and what makes it so enduring. We watch, in the first acts, someone capable of feeling. What David Leverenz describes as having happened to Ophelia, arguably has happened also to Hamlet:

She becomes the mirror for a madness-inducing world… Through her impossible attempt to obey contradictory voices, Ophelia mirrors in her madness the tensions that Hamlet perceives […]. Her history is another instance of how someone can be driven mad by having her inner feelings misrepresented, not responded to, or acknowledged only through chastisement and repression.

Hamlet is someone who might, potentially, if supported rather than chastised, engage with people in a way that opened itself to the broader humanity that includes the ‘womanly’ realm of emotion, someone who can feel what others feel and who can grieve fully and openly. But the play shows this to be impossible. To feel is to be mad. To be sane is to be a violent death-driven soldier, celebrated and commemorated by the state.
 

To leave the blood-soaked world of Elsinore and return to clinical experience in the twenty-first century, the problem men face is to find ways of expressing their vulnerability. They need to avoid installing an overarching interior voice – the melancholy ‘shadow of the object’ – who criticises their weakness and makes them ashamed of their feelings. If relationships dissolve, they should avoid reaching for Jordan Peterson, for the demand to be invulnerable, to show their ‘mettle’, to take revenge. Men need to accept their own needs and desires, complicated as they are, and see the vulnerabilities and needs of those around them.