Hamlet by Janet AdelmanJanet Alderman in her essay "'Man and Woman Are One Flesh': Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body" embraces the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud and Lacan to reveal the quadruple -angular relationship of Hamlet's monarchy. By focusing primarily on the relationship between Gertrude and her son Hamlet, Alderman attempts to reformulate the drama as a fraught portrait of Oedipal disillusionment and Lacanian sexual self-denial. Rightly, sexuality constitutes the driving force of Alderman's argument; playing with gender roles and the power of sexuality over family dynamics and identity, she astutely reveals Hamlet to be a son's fight for his mother's purity, an eager attempt to regain a sense of sexual normalcy. The alderman presents Gertrude as a sort of catch-all incarnation, garden of Eden, original sin, who initiates the fall of the father and recreates the “maternal body like a newly pierced walled garden” (Adelman 263). Adelman frequently refers to Hamlet Sr. and Claudius as "collapsed" into a single father figure; both incite and fall prey to Gertrude's sexuality. Hamlet functions in Alderman's analysis as the crusader fighting for his mother's “benign maternal presence” (278) and the conqueror repressing his mother's sexual appetite, her “sexualized maternal body” (271). Adelman's thesis, the quintessence of his study, seems to inhabit these lines: Hamlet thus redefines the positions of the son between two fathers by displacing him in relation to an indifferently sexual maternal body which threatens to annihilate the distinction between the fathers and thus problematizes the paternal identification of the son; [And] . . . confusing the beloved spirit with...... middle of paper...... Gertrude, just like the incestuous Claudius; thus, Hamlet places his identity with his mother. Ultimately, Hamlet seeks not to avenge his father's death, but to save his mother from her own destructive sexuality and, by extension, her own self-destruction. Of course, Adelman gives an existential reason for Hamlet's need to save his mother; Hamlet needs “to rediscover the fantasized presence of the asexual mother of childhood” (277). Hamlet must separate his mother from all sexuality in order to reap the stability of her identity for his own. After refusing to sleep with Claude, Gertrude regains the status of “good inner mother” in her son’s eyes (279). Hamlet, now, by “trusting him, can begin to have confidence in himself and in his own capacity for action; he can reconstruct masculine identity spoiled by its contamination »." (279).