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“To This Favor She Must Come”: Tinguely’s Cow and Hamlet’s Mother

In Tinguely’s construction La Vache Suisse—Corso Fleurie [sic], the cow’s head is represented, beneath a floral headdress, by the real skull of a dead cow. Drawing on Freud, the author suggests that the bitterness expressed by La Vache Suisse originates largely in infantile resentment at having received insufficient milk from the mother. This resentment is connected not only to a feeling of betrayal but also to a perception that the mother was unavailable for nursing because she was dead. These dynamics, the author argues, also apply to Hamlet, where one of Hamlet’s grievances against women is that they hide their corruptibility under an artificially beautified appearance. After noting an unconscious identification by Hamlet of the two bad parent figures, Claudius and Gertrude, the author points out, again drawing on Freud, the connection between poison and unconscious memories or fantasies of having been improperly nourished by the mother. Following a brief discussion of poison in Hamlet, the author suggests that Hamlet’s revenge may need to combine an “oral” mode of killing (poison) with a “phallic” mode (stabbing). He concludes that Hamlet’s feelings towards his mother may be less excessive than is sometimes claimed since they combine disgust about her behavior in the present with the anger and resentment caused by oral frustration in the past.