Ophelia's Madness Essay

The story of Hamlet is a morbid tale of tragedy, commitment, and manipulation; this is especially evident within the character of Ophelia. Throughout the play, Ophelia is torn between obeying and following the different commitments that she has to men in her life. She is constantly torn between the choice of obeying the decisions and wishes of her family or that of Hamlet. She is a constant subject of manipulation and brain washing from both her father and brother. Ophelia is not only subject to the torture of others using her for their intentions but she is also susceptible to abuse from Hamlet. Both her father and her brother believe that Hamlet is using her to achieve his own personal goals.

There are volumes of critical analyses devoted to William Shakespeare's Hamlet. As the title indicates, Hamlet is the main character of the play, but there are other characters who are also important to the plot. So much attention has been given to Hamlet's antics that characters such as Ophelia remain relatively unexamined. Ophelia is a key figure in the play, and to understand her reactions to the patriarchal society in which she lives through her relationships with the men in her life adds more depth to the play. Ophelia's character is revealed through her relationships with her father, Polonius, her brother, Laertes, and her lover, Hamlet, and their characters in turn are revealed through their

Polonius teams up with King Claudius and once again places demands on Ophelia which require her to disregard her own self to fulfill their wishes of deceiving Hamlet into revealing the cause of his erratic behavior. And once again, it is Ophelia’s duty to her father and this time to the king to be obedient. Disobedience to the king and his advisor are not an option. Polonius wants the king to look on him in good favor and he is willing to step on his daughter to get this admiration. He neglects Ophelia’s feelings by not even thinking of how his requests will affect her. He feels at liberty to request whatever he would like. He is purely worried about himself. Polonius holds a position of unquestioning authority over his daughter. He treats her as though she is not intelligent enough to make her own decisions and he knows that she will inherently obey him. To him her feelings are irrelevant and immature which he states when saying “Affection, puh, you speak like a green girl.”(1.3.101) Following her fathers instructions, she loses her lover and a piece of her happiness.

In William Shakespeare’s tragic play Hamlet we are introduced to the young prince’s lover, Ophelia. Ophelia is a young noblewoman of Denmark. She is a very beautiful young woman who’s in love with the prince Hamlet and a potential wife for him. She is the daughter of the chief counsellor of the king, Polonius. She is also siblings with Laertes who dies trying to avenge his father's death and protect his family's name, by killing Hamlet who he wounds with a poisoned sword. With no mother to guide poor Ophelia, she becomes dependent on what the men who surround her, Laertes, Polonius, and Hamlet, tell her. She ends up going mad, singing songs about flowers, and finally drowning in the river surrounded by the flower garlands she had gathered. Ophelia was an obedient and was lovestuck on prince Hamlet in this tragic play. She happened to just need some help or advice in this fairly mere of a romance she had going on in her life.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is one of Shakespeare’s most tragic plays. Most of the characters in this play suffered a heartbreaking death, although, all of the characters faced anger, regret, madness or distress. Madness was a reoccurring theme in this play, two characters portrayed this more than others. Ophelia and Hamlet faced similar fates, with similarities and differences along the way, all to do with their madness.

Ophelia tries to obscure the truth because she is afraid of disobeying her father. It is obvious that Hamlet is already well aware that Polonius is watching after he states “Let the doors be shut upon him, the he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house.”(3.1.132-133) Ophelia could have easily told Hamlet the truth, but due to her undying love for her father chooses to deceive Hamlet. Ophelia’s deceit leads Hamlet to start questioning her honest nature. Hamlet begins tearing apart by Ophelia because he is so irritated with her for being insincere to him. He states to Ophelia that “you should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.” (3.1.117-119) Hamlet states that he does not love Ophelia because he believes that through this scheme, Ophelia will reveal the truth that Polonius is in fact behind their “unplanned” meeting. Ophelia had betrayed Hamlet by lying to him, thus Hamlet felt the need to betray her. If Ophelia had just been honest with Hamlet he would have not become so discourteous towards her, but she was not which resulted in him denying his love for her. Just as Hamlet was deceived, Ophelia was also because it was her lies that led to the ending of their love. Ophelia’s dishonesty resulted in her becoming a mockery of Hamlets antic disposition. Hamlet uses Ophelia to uncover

In Act III scene i, Polonius and the King hide behind Ophelia's curtains and eavesdrop on the conversation between Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet goes on to scold Ophelia and accuse her of not being chaste "Ha, ha! Are you honest?" ... "Are you fair?" ... "Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be / a breeder of sinners?" Hamlet goes on to say "...This was sometime a paradox, but now / the time gives it proof. I did love you once." Ophelia replies with "Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so." Her heart must have torn in two when Hamlet came back with "You should not have believed me, for virtue / cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish / of it. I loved you not." Hamlet admits that he was deceiving her the whole time. This was likely a major factor in Ophelia's descent into madness and eventually, death. Again, Ophelia is the victim.

Throughout the play, Hamlet and Ophelia have a very strong love connection. They loved each other and wanted to eventually get married. Hamlet and Ophelia hit some bumps in the road in their relationship but they always secretly wanted to be together. In Act 1, Scene 3, It was hard for Ophelia to comprehend when Polonius told her that he thought Hamlet's love for her wasn’t real, but she didn’t know what to believe. When Hamlet could no longer see Ophelia he began to get mad a frustrated, to add on also that he was going crazy over his own father's death.

Ophelia, ever since her introduction, has been introduced to be a sweet and sympathetic person, providing the play with emotional moments, but her death was used as a bait and switch by Shakespeare towards audience members who had expected her to change the play’s somber mood to more hopeful one, which in turn makes the play even more tragic. After she had been visited by an apparently crazed Hamlet, she tells Polonius about the visit, prompting him to believe that the young prince is crazy in love, and goes out to tell the king. After it was explained to Claudius, and Hamlet’s former friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern failed to find the underlying cause of his madness, Polonius makes Ophelia approach Hamlet while he and the king hide and monitor his behavior.

           Ophelia allowed herself to become a sort of marionette in Polonius' schemes toward understanding the seemingly mad prince. While her relationship with Hamlet was on the line, she allowed Polonius to commandeer the strings that determined her actions. Polonius was determined that Hamlet's supposed madness stemmed from lovesickness for Ophelia. He convinced Ophelia that her betrayal of Hamlet was a necessary evil and she began to relay all of Hamlet's messages and attempts at communication to him. He told the king and queen:

When Polonius tells Ophelia to repel Hamlet's advances, she promises to obey. And it is only after their fathers are killed that Hamlet and Ophelia begin to act mad.

Hamlet loves Ophelia from the bottom of his heart, but the situation that Hamlet has been put into forces him to break this relationship. The fact that Hamlet is the heir to a kingdom and Ophelia is of a lower social class shows that this is not just a superficial relationship. Polonius questions the sincerity of Hamlet's love and argues with Ophelia over it. In response to Polonius, Ophelia explains that, “He hath importuned me with love/ In honorable fashion” (1.3.109-110). Ophelia tries to explain to Polonius that Hamlet is honourable and that the love that he expresses towards her is not fraudulent in any way. Ophelia and Hamlet have a very loving relationship, in which the two of them are happy. In Hamlet's pursuit of killing King Claudius, their relationship collapses. Hamlet knows that if he is to kill the king, then he must separate himself from Ophelia. When Hamlet encounters Ophelia he acts very impolite and insults Ophelia so that she will not associate with him anymore. Hamlet says, “To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell” (3.1.139-140). With this phrase, Hamlet is telling Ophelia to leave and to get away from him. Hamlet purposely pushes Ophelia away to save her; he wants to ensure that she will not be hurt emotionally when Hamlet finally goes ahead with his plan, and that she will not get in trouble for having a connection with a conspirator. When Ophelia passes away we see that Hamlet is struck with grief and sorrow. At

When Ophelia tells Polonius, her father, what she and Laertes were talking about, Polonius reiterates exactly what Laertes said and forbids her from seeing Hamlet, saying later that the prince is “out of [her] star (II.2.150).” Yet, Gertrude later, at Ophelia’s funeral, says that she had hoped that Hamlet and Ophelia would marry, which shows that whether Hamlet, Ophelia, and her family knew it or not, Ophelia would have been approved by the King and Queen for Hamlet and was not considered beneath him, at least not by the Queen (V.1.255). Though, there may be some indication that the Queen was beneath Hamlet’s father’s station as well, so she would be more excepting and sympathetic to Ophelia and her feelings (I.5.55-59). But, when the ‘adults’ discuss the cause of Hamlet’s madness, no one listens to the Queen’s astute understanding that her son is unhappy about her marriage, and the King listens instead to the other man in the discussion, Polonius and Polonius’s idea that Hamlet is mad for love. When Ophelia is sent to talk to Hamlet in Act III, both the King and Polonius hide behind a tapestry instead of trusting her to tell them what was actually said. Perhaps the reason Hamlet is so horrible to her after his soliloquy is because he realizes that the King and Polonius are listening in on them and he feels betrayed.

Ophelia is a terminal character in Hamlet, whose death is caused by a lack of self-control and self-knowledge. Her father controls her life, and when he dies, her life is essentially over. This poses the question: why does the death of Polonius bring on the complete collapse and destruction of Ophelia? Polonius controls Ophelia, and does a substantial amount of her thinking. Without him, she has no direction in her life and no way to express herself as she has been so suppressed her entire life, and all of a sudden she is free. She does not know what to do with herself. It is possible that Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia contributes to her madness, it is possible that her not being a virgin contributes to it, and it is also possible that she has lost all control due to the series of events that have proven her lack of worth in this patriarchal society. This essay will argue that with her father gone, Ophelia no longer knows what to do with her life, and has no intended purpose since no one is invested in her life anymore.

Ophelia honestly and truly wants to help Hamlet but she still feels the sting of him ignoring her so their talk begins somewhat cordial. She continually addresses him as my lord or lordship rather than by his name which is what lovers would do. (III.1.99,102,106,112,114,116,119,126) However, she does not address him as my lord after Hamlet says he did not truly love her and she replies, “I was the more deceived.” This is the point where her heart first begins to break and the wound only deepens the more Hamlet talks and insults her. By the end of his mad talk Ophelia is in absolute turmoil. “And I, of ladies most deject and wretched” entails she believes him when he says she turns men into monsters and should go to a nunnery. (III.1.169) “