Their lack of personality is not what makes this a serious need for feminism, instead it is how Hamlet views these two women in his life and his abuse towards them in response to their lack of identity. What is important to understand is that women were viewed as lowly, emotional, and animalistic. Except this is not as accurate as Shakespeare leads his audience to believe. Men were the ones that put women in these roles of dependency and inconspicuous Stockholm Syndrome where submission is key and insubordination was punishable. This translated throughout all classes. Any “shrew,” outspoken woman, would have been shunned, humiliated, or fixed, because the “ideal woman” was “prim and proper” and “quiet and respectful”(Cloud, “Gender Roles of
