Volume 7, Number 3

Saussure’s Sign, Signifier and Signified and ‘Mother’ as a Signifier for Hamlet and Harry Potter

  Authors

Koyel Dasgupta, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India

  Abstract

In this paper we shall evaluate Saussure’s ideas about the Linguistic Sign and the Signifier and Signified, what is the signified when ‘mother’ is the signifier for both Hamlet, the tragic hero of Shakespeare’s renowned tragedy Hamlet and Harry Potter, the leading character of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. We shall analyse how the same ‘signifier’ can produce absolutely incongruous ‘signified’ for these two characters. For better discernment we shall also consider the film Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet while we discuss Hamlet’s Oedipus complex. We shall also see how the idea or the concept associated with ‘mother’ excluding their individual conceptions remains constant for both of them.

  Keywords

Signifier, Signified, Mother, Hamlet, Harry, Oedipus Complex.