Sexuality and aggression in HamletIn "The man and the wife are one flesh": Hamlet and the comparison with the maternal body, Janet Adelman argues that the motivating force behind the he action of the plot in Hamlet is the collapse of boundaries between relationships between individuals, genders, and divisions of public (state) and private (love) life. The root cause of the breakdown comes from bodily contamination spread through overt sexuality, especially maternal sexuality. Janet Adelman affirms her feminism in the sexist vision of psychoanalysis to define contamination as that power of women that men fear. Adelman's argument for border collapse is both its strength and weakness. Ample textual evidence supports his claim for men's fusion, but his choice to ignore women's differentiation is a critical mistake. Gertrude and Ophelia define themselves through sexuality, memory retention, and communication, existing as two individual beings separated by the collapse of the male world. Adelman continues to argue that the power of female sexuality taints all life associated with it. Although sexuality is women's most powerful power, it is the power to give life and sustain it through maternal fulfillment, not to promote death and the further erasure of boundaries through contamination, poison and death. Because madness and death follow immediately after the removal of female sexuality. Shakespeare expresses Freud's concept of sexual and aggressive conflict by assigning traits to female and male characters respectively. The alternation of repression, sexuality over aggression, and aggression over sexuality, manifests itself in Hamlet, ultimately demonstrating their symbiotic relationship. The sup...... middle of paper...... strips away female sexuality, life ends. Aggression does not create life. The eradication of the conflict boundary is a self-sacrificing effort on the part of men, who in doing so deny everyone sexual satisfaction to balance aggression, thus resorting to fatal violence and ending their immortality through procreation. Works Cited Adelman, Janet. "Man and wife are one flesh": Hamlet and the comparison with the mother's body.William Shakespeare: Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Case studies in contemporary criticism. Boston: St. Martin's, 256-282. Calhoun, J. “Personality and Psychoanalytic Theory.” Psychology 1101. UGA. Athens, 6 November 1998.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Case studies in contemporary criticism. Boston: St. Martin's, 1994. Stoppard, Tom. Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. New York: Grove, 1967