How Does Polonius Receive Ophelia's Identity?

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What if people were exact replicas of their parents and lacked their own thoughts and identities? That world would be static and horribly boring. In the classic play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare, one gets a glimpse of this kind of life with Ophelia and Polonius’s relationship. Polonius instructs his daughter on what to do about Hamlet’s loving feelings towards her, however, the way Polonius goes about advising Opheliaz is very detrimental to her. The way Polonius parents Ophelia effects her psychologically. Polonius strips Ophelia’s ability to think and figure out who she is as a person by his parenting style.
Polonius takes away Ophelia’s ability to think about who she wants to be as a person by making …show more content…

She mirrors men because she lacks a strong female role. Dane blames Ophelia’s failure to create an identity because of the lack of female role models. She states “Ophelia has clearly been bereft of maternal fostering, exiled on a barren island of male circumscription. Seeming to absorb the general absence of belief in her own intelligence, virtue and autonomy, Ophelia is left with an identity osmotically open to external suggestion” (Dane 406). Male and female minds differentiate greatly, and with Polonius treating her needs like his own, Ophelia loses her connection with femininity. Having only Polonius, she is shaped by male demands and relationships with them instead of what she needs to identify with female culture. Furthermore, there are no heroic female roles in her life. The male oriented environment leaves Ophelia confused, insecure with herself, and struggling to find an interesting …show more content…

Ophelia mirrors Polonius as a result of him always giving her answers. In the scholarly article An Act of Methodology: A document in madness—writing Ophelia by Steinnes goes into detail about the logic Ophelia uses to justify her lack of creativity. Steinnes states “If the methods used are deemed trustworthy with respect to reliability and validity, we would like to think that our gems of knowledge also ought to be trusted” (Steinnes 819). Ophelia justified taking Polonius’s ideas because she trusted him as a father. Polonius made Ophelia a clone of himself by feeding her his ideas instead of letting her formulate her own. Ophelia lives as a copy of her father taking away any importance of her character and any possibility to be anything but bland and unnecessary. She never learned to challenge and distinguish herself. She blends in and bores. This kind of lifestyle restricts her happiness. It also leads to insecurity because without someone there to imitate, she loses every bit of identity she has because she never built one for

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