Ophelia’s Road to Madness
Ophelia comes off as a powerful image in the feminist imagination. The start of Ophelia’s madness is contributed through examination of her relationships, and soon adding up the the loss of her loved ones, her father Polonius, her brother, Laertes, and her lover Hamlet. Ophelia intrigued me as a character, while reading Hamlet I was thinking to myself, was what happened to Ophelia too much for her to handle, or was she this unstable person all along and never really had anything happen to her to help trigger her madness until now? What happens to her are the impulses of the men who control her. The alternative to her way of expressing her self is through madness and later on death.
From the beginning of Hamlet Ophelia was a pure, genuine, happy person and had found her true love. Ophelia’s brother warns her to stay away from Hamlet because he is just going to hurt her and that he is never going to really love her, she is to be obedient and follow what they say,
Laertes: “ For Hamlet and the trifling of this favor, Hold it a fashion, and a toy in blood, A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute, No more.”
Ophelia: “ I shall th’effect of this good lesson keep As watchman to my heart. But good my brother, Do not as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, Whiles like a puffed and reckless libertime Himself the primrose path of dalliance trends, And recks not this own rede” ( I. III. 1-135).
Ophelia relies greatly on her father and her brother direction and guidance. Therefore, it is out of respect that Ophelia feels compelled to follow her father’s direct request to abandon her feelings...
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...ife has been is constantly being pushed around by men with her having to keep the expectations of society. The defenselessness to try and fix her life is what makes Ophelia’s death an important part of Hamlet and her madness was well logical.
Works Cited.
Campbell, Erin E. "Sad Generations Seeking Water": The Social Construction Of Madness In O(Phelia) And Q(Uentin Compson)." Faulkner Journal 20.1/2 (2004): 53-70. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Dec. 2012.
Carroll, Camden. Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1964), pp. 247-255
Shakespeare, William, Richard Andrews, and Rex Gibson. Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.
Teker, Gulsen Sayin. "Empowered By Madness: Ophelia In The Films Of Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, And Branagh." Literature Film Quarterly 34.2 (2006): 113-119. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Dec. 2012.
The title of her book comes from the story of Ophelia, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, shows the destructive forces that affect young women. Ophelia was happy and free when she was young, but she loses herself in adolescence. When she falls in love with Hamlet she pushes aside her own wants and needs, and wishes only to please him and gain his approval. For the rest of her brief life she struggles to please others, mostly her father a...
Ophelia in the fourth act of Hamlet is demonstrably insane, but the direct cause of her slipped sanity is something that remains debatable, Shakespeare uses the character Ophelia to demonstrate how women during this time were unable to break away from social norms. While it is evident that Ophelia is grieving over the death of her father, Polonius, as Horatio says of her “She speaks much of her father, says she hears / There’s tricks in the world, and hems, and beats her heart” (4.5.4-5), as lines from one of her many “songs” points towards grieving over an aged relative, “His beard as white as snow / All flaxen was his poll” with flaxen indicating a white or grayed head of hair (4.5.190-191).
It is impossible to get around Hamlet's murder of Polonius being a trigger for Ophelia's decent into madness. However, upon closer examination it is not this trigger alone that is the cause for her madness and it is surely not only this that leads to her eventual suicide. Ophelia is expected to be a perfect lady, which in part meant following the orders of the men in her life. In addition to that pressure and cruelty is the added cruelty of how often those men change their minds about her and what she should do. Adding to that the repeated abandonment and the murder of her father by her lover, it is no wonder she went into a madness that ended in her death.
This madness was preventable, the men in her life caused it and Gabrielle Dane’s article “Reading Ophelia’s Madness” explains this excellently, what is written in the article gives clear and straight forwards facts and examples on what is the cause of her madness. The cause of her madness started with her controlling father, brother, and lover. All three of these men told her what to do, when to do it, and how she should carry it out, and the things they tell her to do always have to benefit them, they didn’t care what would happen to Ophelia’s mental or emotional state in the process. With the men’s constant abuse they each start telling her different things. Unsure of whom to listen to, she starts to get confused and starts losing herself. When finally there was no one there to tell her anymore she goes mad, and in the brink of her madness she ends up killing herself. Throughout all these events no one stops to think of her as an actual person but instead like a rag doll they could just toss around. The play Hamlet itself was discussed without any bother of Ophelia for nearly four hundred years before scholars started to think of her and read the play with a Feminist view point. Today more and more articles are being written about Ophelia’s treatment by the other characters in the play and her madness. Even though most would see suicide as a cowardly act, Ophelia’s death may be the only rational one in the death-filled
Throughout Hamlet, Shakespeare makes it evident that Ophelia is very unstable. She continuously changes her mind about the way she feels. Laertes and Polonius command her to do things that she does not agree with, but she does them with no argument. Afraid to stand up for herself, she stands back and watches everyone else control her life. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia is treated as a marionette with her strings in the hands of the people around her; however, Kenneth Branagh portrays her as independent and innocent, ignoring Shakespeare's representation of her as feeble-minded through complete male dominance in her thoughts and actions, her indecisiveness, and digression into madness.
In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is the most static character in the play. Instead of changing through the course of the play, she remains suffering in the misfortunes perpetrated upon her. She falls into insanity and dies a tragic death. Ophelia has issues surviving without a male influence, and her downfall is when all the men in her life abandon her. Hamlet’s Ophelia, is a tragic, insane character that cannot exist on her own.
In conclusion, Ophelia’s personality had often been ignored or conceived just as a secondary character. However, with the passing of time, she started to draw the attention of many critics who understood how significant she was. The evolution of Ophelia’s representation affected her appearances, her personality, her madness and death. Still connected to her tragic fate, she has become a woman more and more linked to her femininity and sexuality. As John Updike and Graham Holderness show, she has travelled throughout cultures but can still be considered interestingly up-to-date.
Leaving her only with the response saying “I shall obey, my lord”(1.3.145 ). Why Ophelia is unable to say more than a few simple words is made clear by societal expectations of the time. During this time daughters were the property of their fathers and were obligated to do their bidding. Campbell says “if she refuses Polonius, she risks social ostracism and grave insult to the man who capriciously controls her future” (58). Ophelia fears the backlash of disobeying her father, believing there is no other choice than doing what he has asked her to do. Even though a woman's virtue is a sacred and a very personal choice, her father leaves Ophelia with one option: to do what he says. “The issue of Ophelia’s chastity concerns Polonius as a parent and a politician—a virginal Ophelia has a better chance of attaining Hamlet’s hand in marriage” (Floyd-Wilson 401). This relationship Ophelia has between her father is very one-sided and unhealthy. It is formal and proper with very few emotions attached to each other. However, because Polonius is the only parental figure Ophelia has and loves him, his death was extremely difficult for her. Her father, hasn’t left her like Laertes and hasn’t rejected her like Hamlet. Making his unexpected death the final straw to her losing her sanity. Without someone to guide her, she is lost. She is unable to blindly follow a man but is to racked with emotion to think clearly.
...She had lost her father and her lover while her brother was away for school, and she was no longer useful as a puppet in a greater scheme. Ophelia was displaced, an Elizabethan woman without the men on whom she had been taught to depend. Therein lies the problem - she lacked independence so much that she could not continue living without Polonius, Laertes, and Hamlet. Ophelia's aloneness led to her insanity and death. The form of her death was the only fitting end for her - she drowned in a nearby river, falling beneath the gentle waters. She finally found peace in her mad world. That is how Ophelia is so useful as a classic feminist study - she evokes imagery of the fragile beauty women are expected to become, but shows what happens to women when they submit as such.
It is widely believed that “Living life without honor is a tragedy bigger than death itself” and this holds true for Hamlet’s Ophelia. Ophelia’s death symbolizes a life spent passively tolerating Hamlet’s manipulations and the restrictions imposed by those around her, while struggling to maintain the last shred of her dignity. Ophelia’s apathetic reaction to her drowning suggests that she never had control of her own life, as she was expected to comply with the expectations of others. Allowing the water to consume her without a fight alludes to Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia as merely a device in his personal agenda. Her apparent suicide denotes a desire to take control of her life for once. Ophelia’s death is, arguably, an honorable one, characterized by her willingness to let go of her submissive, earth-bound self and leave the world no longer a victim.
For a character that only appears in five of the 20 scenes in Hamlet, Ophelia has garnered a great deal of attention from analysts, critics, artists, actresses, fiction writers, psychologists, and adolescent girls alike. Readers are consistently struck by her character that seems relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Ophelia is many times viewed as only important in relation to Hamlet and the effect she has on him. Ophelia is not just important in this respect, but also in respect to what she tells us about the society she came out of and the society we live in today. First analyzing Shakespeare and his precursors then concentrating on the modern day prominence of ...
“Pretty Ophelia,” as Claudius calls her, is the most innocent victim of Hamlet’s revenge in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Hamlet has fallen in love with Ophelia after the death of his father. Ophelia “sucked the honey of his music vows” and returned Hamlet’s affection. But when her father had challenged Hamlet’s true intentions, Ophelia could only say: “I do not know, my lord, what I should think.” Ophelia was used to relying on her father’s directions and she was also brought up to be obedient. This allowed her to only accept her father’s views that Hamlet’s attention towards her was only to take advantage of her and to obey her father’s orders not to permit Hamlet to see her again.
Ophelia trusts the advise given and her obedience is very evident in this matter as she avoids contact with Hamlet until she is told by her father, with the King and Queens approval, to meet up with him by 'accident' in the lobby. Deceit not being in her nature, believing that her father, the king and queen are right and true; that Hamlet is mad; and probably curious to know if Hamlet is "mad in love" with her the young, obedient, powerless Ophelia does her part to search out the truth. But tragically this one forced step outside of her true character begins her downfall. In a precarious predicament, loyalty to her father compelled Ophelia to lie to Hamlet when he asked about her father?s location at that moment saying he was at home instead of behind a tapestry right the...
Ophelia loves Hamlet; her emotions drive her to perform her actions. Some would say that Ophelia’s emotions could have actually been what ended her young
Ophelia's insanity is driven by the fact that she has basically been cut out of Hamlet's life. " Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh,/ That unmatched form and feature of blown youth/ Blasted with ecstasy" (III.i. 158-160).Her role as an "innocent lady" is to complete the picture of faithfulness and obedience. Without Hamlet, it is difficult for Ophelia to fulfill her role. Ophelia is completely pushed over the edge whe...