Sensory Transgression: Literary Representations of Women’s Sight and Hearing in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Sensory Transgression: Literary Representations of Women’s Sight and Hearing in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Author(s): Monika Sosnowska
Subject(s): British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: sensory transgression;literary representations of women’s sight and hearing;William Shakespeare;Hamlet
Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on literary representations of women’s sight and hearing in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It firstly addresses the meaning and significance of sensory perception in Western culture. The emphasis is put on the transgressive usage of the senses and the gendering of sensory perceptions which fulfil many cultural functions: determining our cognition, being the tools of power relations or conditioning our sensations. Sensual perception is examined as an unstable cultural construct undergoing changes in time. The textual analysis of Hamlet presents the way in which Ophelia and Gertrude perceive, revealing the manner in which cultural formations of the senses were constructed in Shakespeare’s works. Linguistic images of transgressive female perception emerge from a comparison between representations of sensual experience of male and female characters in the play.

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