Nature as Female Subjectivity: Deconstructing the Romantic Sublime in Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet explores a couple who have endured the tragic loss of their child and examines how grief shapes both their individual identities and their relationship, while simultaneously foregrounding their inner struggles. Their lost child, Hamnet, serves as the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s world-famous play Hamlet and functions as a central point of reference for both Agnes and her husband, William Shakespeare. Although the couple might appear to constitute the narrative’s primary focus, O’Farrell’s deliberate choice never to name Shakespeare, referring to him only in relation to those around him, as “Hamnet’s father” or “Agnes’ husband”, shifts the novel’s centre of gravity toward its true protagonist, Agnes. It is Agnes who emerges as the bearer of her family and, ultimately, of her husband’s artistic legacy, her character defined by a nature that is at once accepting and fiercely autonomous.

This essay examines how Hamnet engages with the central question of whether postmodernism carries within it the characteristics of Romanticism. The novel employs distinctly Romantic aesthetics such as its lyrical language, deep sentimentality, and a pronounced emphasis on nature, while simultaneously, through the figure of Agnes, deconstructing the traditional Romantic understanding of nature as a separate, awe-inspiring, and terrifying force distinct from humanity. Rather than positioning Agnes as an observer of nature in the Romantic tradition, O’Farrell presents her as nature itself. Agnes does not perceive nature as the Sublime; instead, she accepts it as the force that resides within her. In doing so, the novel challenges the male gaze that underpins Romantic thought and gives voice to a female subjectivity that dismantles the very ideological structures Romanticism erected.

In order to appreciate fully how Hamnet deconstructs Romanticism, it is first necessary to consider the Romantic idea of nature and the extent to which it is rooted in the male gaze. Emerging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a reaction against the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism, as practised by figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, was premised on the conviction that cities were destroying the human soul and that nature alone offered access to the divine and to the self. For the Romantics, the natural world was not merely a physical environment but a spiritual temple: a pure, divine, and organic “Other” that existed beyond the corruption of human society.

Romanticism is equally characterised by its obsession with the individual self. The Romantic poet ventures into nature not to commune with it as an equal but to learn about himself; the landscape functions as a metaphor for human emotion, and nature is instrumentalised in the service of the male subject’s self-discovery. This framework is inseparable from the concept of the Sublime, which depends upon distance because the understanding of it provokes terror for the human being. Therefore, there must be a gap between the observer and the object. The perceiving subject, which is figured as “Man”, stands before the mountain as a spectator of its vast power, and this spatial and ontological separation produces a hierarchy in which humanity gazes upon nature from without.

Historically, this Romantic spectator was almost invariably male. Caspar David Friedrich’s celebrated painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog offers a symbolic image: a solitary man surveys the world from a rocky summit, “conquering” the view with his gaze. Correspondingly, in traditional Romantic poetry, nature is frequently personified as feminine, as “Mother Nature”, something to be worshipped, described, and penetrated by the male intellect, yet never engaged with on equal terms. The female and the natural are both othered, both subjected to the organising male gaze, and both denied interiority or agency.

When a reader first encounters Hamnet, its lyrical language and sentimentality invite the expectation of a Romantic novel. Yet O’Farrell’s lush and sensory descriptions do not serve to depict Agnes looking at nature; they serve to depict Agnes as nature. Where the Romantic male spectator experiences awe before the natural world, Agnes experiences something entirely internal. She does not admire nature from a distance; she inhabits it from within. Agnes does not merely love nature as a Romantic poet might: she is the biological extension of it. The otherness that the society around her constructs on account of this oneness with the natural world is not her weakness; it is her fundamental identity.

This distinction is materialised most powerfully in the contrast between Agnes’s workspace and her husband’s. In Romanticism, nature is an idea, a philosophical and aesthetic category. In Hamnet, for Agnes, nature is labour. While her husband deals in the ink and parchment of London, Agnes works in mud and marrow. Her still-room is a place of drying skins, crushed roots, and pungent smells, a space that deconstructs the Romantic notion of a pure, clean, and distant nature. The dirt is literally beneath her fingernails, one with Agnes in its very earthiness. Her knowledge, moreover, is not acquired from books but is the inherent knowledge of nature itself, a bodily and intuitive understanding that stands in direct contrast to the Latin learning of her scholarly husband.

A further illustration of this distinction is provided by Agnes’s relationship with her kestrel. A Romantic poet (Keats, for instance) might interpret a bird as a symbol of freedom or transcendence. Agnes, by contrast, keeps a kestrel because it is a predator. She does not regard it as a metaphor; she respects its nature as a killer. When she holds the bird, the boundary between the human and the animal thins, and it is precisely this quality: an animal intuition that defies human social logic that frightens the townspeople of Stratford. In this way, the scene in which Agnes and William first meet is not merely an encounter between two individuals: it is an encounter between William and his antithesis. Through his interaction with the kestrel, he meets nature itself, and in meeting nature, he meets Agnes.

In postmodern theory, “the Other” designates those who are marginalised by dominant social structures. Agnes is marginalised by the people of Stratford, who call her a witch, a forest-dweller, a “wilding.” Yet O’Farrell’s treatment of this marginalisation enacts a crucial reversal: Agnes accepts her otherness. By embracing the role of the “Other,” she escapes the constraints of sixteenth-century womanhood. Indifferent to the gossip of the town, she is tuned to a different frequency: that of the seasons and the soil. O’Farrell thus aligns the “female” with “nature” in order to reveal that both have been misunderstood and othered by a male-centric world. But this otherness is not Agnes’s weakness; her simultaneously accepting and fierce nature is precisely what enables Shakespeare to become Shakespeare. She understands her husband’s needs so completely that she lets him go to London, defying all social expectation, because she carries within herself the fierceness of nature.

The most powerful evidence for Agnes’s identification with nature itself is her “sight”: her ability to feel the “space between the thumb and forefinger” of those around her. This capacity is not presented as magic but as a heightened biological awareness; it is a sensitivity to the physical state of others so acute that they seem part of her own body. If the Romantic man apprehends nature as a separate being, Agnes demonstrates that human beings are nature. Human pulses, human sicknesses, and human deaths are not separate from the trees or the plague; they belong to the same system. Agnes’s sight, in this sense, is not a supernatural gift but a confirmation of the fundamental continuity between the human and the natural; a continuity that the Romantic tradition, with its insistence on distance and separation, had worked to deny.

The most striking formal choice in the novel is O’Farrell’s decision never to name William Shakespeare. He appears only as “the husband,” “the father,” or “the son.” Shakespeare’s name has carried the weight of an entire cultural mythology still to this day. By stripping him of that name, O’Farrell deconstructs this legend and reduces him to a secondary character in his own life. He becomes a satellite orbiting Agnes, visible only through his relationships to those around him. This narrative strategy simultaneously foregrounds Agnes: a strong female figure who is in direct contact with her emotional life, rather than processing experience through the vessel of art, as her husband does.

The contrast between the two characters is thus also a contrast between two modes of being. Shakespeare represents ambition, the city, and the intellect; Agnes represents acceptance and nature. His genius fails him when he must confront the grief of his lost child directly, while Agnes inhabits the spiritual dimension of grief entirely on her own terms, without recourse to sublimation or artistic mediation.

A key moment of postmodern deconstruction occurs in the chapter that traces the journey of the plague. A Romantic author might have described the plague as a dark cloud or a judgment from the heavens, as a grand metaphor expressive of divine wrath or the terrifying Sublime. O’Farrell instead tracks a flea. She describes, in precise and unsentimental detail, how Judith contracted the plague that ultimately killed Hamnet. This is postmodernism at its most characteristic: it rejects the grand narrative of a divinely ordered or symbolically meaningful nature and replaces it with the cold, hard truth of biology. Agnes’s response to this biological reality is equally telling: while the town panics and her husband flees, she remains. She treats the symptoms because she knows, with the certainty of someone who is herself nature, that the natural world is simultaneously the giver of life and the bringer of rot. She does not judge the flea; she endures the consequence.

The final scene at the Globe Theatre represents the collision of these two contrasting sensibilities and their ultimate, hard-won reconciliation. Unable to face the death of his son directly, as a man of the city and of intellect, unable to fully comprehend the ways of nature as Agnes does, Shakespeare bids farewell to Hamnet through art. He switches places with his son: he becomes the ghost, and through the play, he gives his son one last form of life. Agnes, who initially cannot understand this act, eventually comprehends the motivation behind her husband’s play. And once again, as a woman who is one with nature, she accepts that her husband belongs to a different species: his needs are different from hers, and his way of mourning is different. Just as she sent him to London the first time, she sets him free once more. In this respect, Shakespeare also figures the postmodern male who is isolated from the female and from nature, and unable to fill that void, drifting apart. It is Agnes who bridges the distance, and it is Agnes who grants absolution.

In conclusion, Hamnet is a postmodern novel that employs the characteristics of Romanticism in order to deconstruct them. Through the figure of Agnes, O’Farrell dismantles the Romantic understanding of nature as an external Other to be gazed upon and feared, and dismantles equally the male gaze through which that understanding was constructed. Agnes’s oneness with nature, her acceptance of her own otherness, her fierce autonomy, and her role as the spiritual and emotional centre of the novel together constitute a powerful challenge to the patriarchal framework that Romanticism both reflected and reinforced. By giving voice exclusively to Agnes and making her the novel’s true protagonist as she subordinates even Shakespeare himself to her perspective, O’Farrell simultaneously deconstructs traditional Romanticism’s relationship to nature and its male-oriented understanding of genius, power, and the self.