The Character of Ophelia in Hamlet
Ophelia is a beautiful and simple-minded woman, easily molded by the more powerful opinions and desires of others. The thoughts of her father and her brother influenced her the most. The love letters from Hamlet also swayed her opinions and confused her mind. Ophelia wasn't able to realize herself because of all the pressures exerted on her to be something she's not. That weakness of mind and will, which permitted her obedience to her father and thus destroyed her hope for Hamlet's love, finally resulted in her insanity and death.
When her father had challenged the honor of Hamlet's intentions, Ophelia could only reply "I do not know, my lord, what I should think" (III, iii). Used to relying upon her father's direction and brought up to be obedient, she can only accept her father's belief, seconded by that of her brother, that Hamlet's "holy vows" of love were simply designed for her seduction. She was to obey her father's orders not to permit Hamlet to see her again. Her father also wanted to prove Hamlet's madness to the king. He used Ophelia as bait so he and the king could listen to Hamlet's words. Ophelia willingly obliged to her father's desires. By not thinking for herself and only doing as her father wished, she ruined her chances of love with Hamlet.
Hamlet put pressure on Ophelia by expecting her to surpass his mother's shortcomings and be an epitome of womankind. He searched her innocent face for some sign of loving truth that might restore his faith in her. He took her mute terror for a sign of her guilt and found her to be a false person, like his mother. In his letter to her, he addressed the letter to "the most beautified Ophelia" and he terminated the letter with "I love thee best, O most best, believe it" (II, ii). He used the word "beautified" to display a sincere tribute, and it is apparent he still loves her. His attempts to win her affection are not triumphant. Ophelia is still too much under the influence of her father to question his wisdom or authority, and she has no mind of her own to understand how much she has made her lover suffer. No matter how much it pained her to not see Hamlet, all she could see in his present behavior is the madness that terrified her.
“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.
By not speaking anything, Hamlet at once strengthens his image as a madman, as well as shrouding his real intentions towards those around him. Just following this passage comes a place in the text where we can see how the character of Ophelia has been manipulated by Polonius. After his "hint" that he might be doing this out of frustrated love, Ophelia says that that is what she truly does fear. (87) Her feelings of pity and concern are shaped by her father in order to fit his case of madness against Hamlet.
As the play opened, Hamlet and Ophelia appeared as lovers experiencing a time of turbulence. Hamlet had just returned home from his schooling in Saxony to find that his mother had quickly remarried her dead husband's brother, and this gravely upset him. Hamlet was sincerely devoted to the idea of bloodline loyalty and sought revenge upon learning that Claudius had killed his father. Ophelia, though it seems her relationship with Hamlet is in either the developmental stage or the finalizing stage, became the prime choice as a lure for Hamlet. Laertes inadvertently opened Ophelia up to this role when he spoke with Ophelia about Hamlet before leaving for France. He allowed Polonius to find out about Hamlet's courtship of Ophelia, which led to Polonius' misguided attempts at taking care of Ophelia and obeying the king's command to find the root of Hamlet's problems. Ophelia, placed in the middle against her wishes, obeyed her father and brother's commands with little disagreement. The only time she argued was when Laertes advised her against making decisions incompatible with the expectations of Elizabethan women. Ophelia tells him, in her boldest lines of the play:
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.
When reading the text, one can comprehend that Ophelia is caught in the middle between two opposite sides. Her family (father and brother) believe that Hamlet is a womanizer rather then the philosopher that he is. They also believe that he will use her in order to achieve his own purposes, and that he would take her precious virginity only to discard it because he would never be her husband. But, Ophelia's heart mesmerized by Hamlets cunning linguistics is set on the fact that Hamlet truly loves her or loved her, even though he swears he never did. In the eye of her father and brother, she will always be a pure, wholesome girl, an eternal virgin in a sense, (due to a parents nature to always see their offspring as a child) they want her to ascend into her stereotypical role in life as a vessel of morality whose sole purpose of existence is to be a obedient wife and a committed mother. However, to Hamlet she is simply an object used to satisfy and fulfill his sexual needs. He also seems to hold her at a distant which suggests that he may...
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is an interesting piece of literature that has been analyzed and reviewed by many scholars throughout the years. Something that is often brought to attention are the gender roles. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway makes a stronger woman and a more feminine man, this is something that had not yet been seen in literature. A few authors had made female and male characters in their novels that were different than the norm, but none to the extreme of Hemmingway. In Hemingway’s novel, his female character, Brett, does not care about obeying the societal gender role set forth for her during the time period she lives.
This novel brings to mind many hard issues that face the individual within mankind. Hemingway shapes his characters and their actions to show the beliefs of those that follow the existentialist philosophy. It is a novel of the struggles of one man to overcome the hardships he faces in this world. Its' depiction of humankind is both ironic and triumphant. Just as the Book of Ecclesiastes explains that man's comprehension is limited by his understanding of the magnitude of time and space so does The Sun Also Rises show us the smallness of humanity in reference to the universe.
The reader is left guessing on Hamlet’s true feelings for Ophelia through his various insults, sexual innuendos, and admitted desire. Hamlet’s claim, “God hath given you one face, and you / Make yourselves another.” (3.1.155-156) is laced with irony and hypocrisy given Hamlet’s own deception regarding true feelings. This proclamation comes at the end of a lengthy tirade against Ophelia and womankind in general for their conniving deceit leading men astray. The fact that Hamlet cannot see this duplicity in his very own actions shows the double standard he holds for females. Ophelia’s immediate reaction is one of shock and defense due to the aggressive nature of Hamlet’s attack. She calls out “O, woe is me!” (3.1.174) in distress to the ferocity of Hamlet and is unable to form a particularly coherent response akin to the ones seen against Laertes and Polonius. She does show her intelligence and rebellion from this assumption of power by Hamlet in her songs while Hamlet is gone. While many attribute her madness to the death of her father, a large portion of her instability should be attributed to Hamlet and his earlier actions. In her first introduction as insane she sings, “And I a maid at your window, / To be your Valentine. / Then up he rose and donned his clothes / And dropped the chamber door, / Let in the maid, that out a maid / Never departed more.” (4.5.55-60). Due to her references to sexuality and deceit the
Throughout the 20th century there were many influential pieces of literature that would not only tell a story or teach a lesson, but also let the reader into the author’s world. Allowing the reader to view both the positives and negatives in an author. Ernest Hemingway was one of these influential authors. Suffering through most of his life due to a disturbingly scarring childhood, he expresses his intense mental and emotional insecurities through subtle metaphors that bluntly show problems with commitment to women and proving his masculinity to others.
Mikhail Lermontov's protagonist, Grigory Pechorin, belongs to that group of literary characters known individually as the 'superfluous man.'; Generally an intelligent, educated individual, the superfluous man would appear to be one who has been either unjustly treated or outcast by society in general. The superfluous man attempts to find a place for himself in the world, but perhaps due to the combination of his talents, upbringing, personality and intelligence, continually finds himself on the outs with his peers.
Two of Ophelia’s difficulties arise from her father and brother. They believe that Hamlet is using her to take her virginity and throw it away because Ophelia will never be his wife. Her heart believes that Hamlet loves her although he promises he never has (“Hamlet” 1). Hamlet: “Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but not the time gives it proof. I did love you once.” Ophelia: “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.” Hamlet: “You should not have believed me, for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock ...
In Hamlet, Ophelia is unaware of the evil is spreading around her. She is an obedient woman, and is naive in that she takes what people say at face value, which makes her an innocent lady. "You should not have believed me, for virtue/ cannot so inculate our old stock but we shall relish of/ it. I loved you not." (III.ii. 117-119). Hamlet says these lines as a mask of his madness, but Ophelia does not understand his true motives and takes Hamlet's words very seriously to heart. The words that Hamlet says to Ophelia both confuse and hurt her greatly. Hamlet's lines are what eventually lead Ophelia to insanity, and Ophelia's insanity is what causes her death by drowning.
A vision quest is when a spirit, normally an animal, comes to give advice or to protect (Vision quest). It is meant to discover who you really are as a person, and spiritually. This will mean you have to be young enough to still be finding your place in the world (Vision Quest). You have to go into a secluded area and pray without eating or drinking for the time being. Then they would wait until they had a dream,
At a very young age it was apparent to those around him that Hemingway really was something special. Many marveled at how he was able to create such a dynamic story. Not many knew at the time that the majority of his ideas for his writings were coming from his own personal experiences. For example, he always wrote of death by violence in his writings, and this came to him through the hunting trips with his father (The Cycle of American Literature 200). The violence he witnessed out there in the fields with his father influenced him enough to write a detailed story of such conduct. The events to transpire throughout Hemingway’s life would allow him to write short stories unimaginable to the average person.
The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway’s first momentous literary work. It is a story about the lives of a number of Americans who were living in Europe after World War I. An American World War I expatriate and journalist, Jake Barnes, tell the novel’s storyline. The themes that are depicted by Hemingway in this novel include purposelessness of the ‘Lost Generation’, masculine insecurity, communication breakdown, binge alcohol consumption, and fake friendships. Nonetheless, as essential as the premise and the context of the novel are, the characters are the heart and soul of the Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises