Ophelia's Overcoming Events In Hamlet

  In Shakespeare's tragedy, Hamlet, the audience finds a docile, manipulated, scolded, victimized young lady named Ophelia. Ophelia is a foil to Hamlet. Plays have foils to help the audience better understand the more important characters in the play.  The character of Ophelia is necessary so that the audience will give Hamlet a chance to get over his madness and follow his heart.

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.

Not only is Ophelia's death marked much less significant than the other male deaths noted in the previously mentioned articles, but Ophelia’s death is articulated as a passive accident, one that happened to occur, to no avail. Every other death in the play is met with vigorous analysis and criticism, unphased by the death of Ophelia, inadvertently caused by men. Ophelia is also described as “mermaid-like” adding to the previously set notion that women are sexual objects- even at death. At this point of the play, Hamlet proclaims in a bipolar and seemingly fraudulent manner that he has always loved Ophelia (although he ordered her to “get thee to a nunnery” and was the root of her abrupt madness and suicide), while Laertes threatens that he loved Ophelia more. The attention and passion are still not recognized and respected with Ophelia even after her death but is used as a game between two men to satisfy their guilt and build their ego, competing for the love of Ophelia that was only disrespected when she was

Midway through Hamlet, Ophelia is well under the control of Polonius and Hamlet. They are both manipulating and using her as a pawn as to get what they want and she has little to no say about it. Act 2, scene 1 serves as a turning point, as it is when Ophelia begins to realize the manipulation she faces at the hands of both her father and Hamlet, and that she can only truly gain her freedom when she herself descends into madness. Polonius’ manipulation, Hamlet’s control and Ophelia’s own thoughts and actions demonstrate her descent, and the aftermath.

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,

Who Hamlet loves the most throughout the play is Ophelia even though he changes his mind multiple times about his love. In Act 3 of the play when Ophelia and Hamlet meet to discuss their love for one another, Hamlet says that beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than honesty translate beauty into likeness as he “did love [Ophelia] once”(III.i.125). When Hamlet says this, he means that he “did” love her which means that since the time he had feelings for her, he has changed her mind. Furthermore, this establishes a relationship between the characters of Ophelia and Hamlet as he never mentions loving another woman besides her. Later in the play in Act 5, Hamlet says that he loved Ophelia as “forty thousand brothers”

As soon as Ophelia acknowledges her father’s death at the hands of Hamlet, her sanity is killed by despair. Her most spiritual assets are gone for ever: the dear father and the love for Hamlet. Ophelia and Gertrude are very unlike; Ophelia is just a victim of conventional moral standard. She is so weak to fight for her love, and her mind is easily bendable by her father and her brother. In her madness, she sings a Valentine song about a girl appears early in the morning at the window of a man to be the man’s Valentine (All in the morning betime… To be your Valentine.). The man then takes advantage of her (Let in the maid, that out a maid), promises to marry her, and after that he pulls a trick on her. He would have married her, if (thou

Denmark is in a state of chaos shown by the opening death of the true

By his cockle hat and staff and his sandal shoon.” (V. IV. 23-26) This shows how Ophelia has became crazy over Hamlet’s inability to show affection towards her and him rejecting her. Ophelia’s madness soon spirals into her commuting suicide by drowning herself in the river. This can be linked to Nietzche’s statement that there is some madness in love, as Ophelia’s love for Hamlet caused her to become crazy. Hamlet also shows signs of madness due to his relationship with Ophelia. Throughout the play it is unknown to the audience if Hamlet truly has feelings for Ophelia. It is not until Act V that the audience becomes aware of Hamlet’s true feelings when he finds out about Ophelia’s death, Hamlet states, “ I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?” (V.I. 255-257) This shows how Hamlet become mad with rage and sorrow as he hears of her death, finally revealing his true feelings. This relates to Nietzche’s statement that there is some madness in love, as Hamlet has not been able to show his true feeling for Ophelia, and once he become aware of her death he is filled with sorrow. This madness is shown when Hamlet develops a plan to fool everyone to thinking he is crazy.

Ophelia experiences alienation throughout Hamlet, although she ends her life with suicide, unlike Hamlet. The queen places blame on Ophelia for Hamlet's madness and states: "...for your part, Ophelia, I do wish that your good beauties be the happy cause for Hamlet's madness..." (Shakespeare 140). The queen lightens her feelings of guilt for the murder and places the guilt upon Ophelia. Gertrude, the queen, knows that she has committed something wrong with the plot of killing Old Hamlet and therefore finds an outlet through Ophelia. Also, to try to discover Hamlet's cause of insanity, Claudius and Polonius use Ophelia to get closer to him and find out that perhaps they could conclude that his

William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet had readers on the edge of their seats. From the murder of Hamlets father to the murders of the royal family, this isn’t a traditional story. In the mist of all this one girl in particular took the greatest fall of all time. Ophelia, Hamlet’s secret lover, was driven to death as a result of a master plan put together to seek revenge. Ophelia’s death was a suicide.

However, Hamlet proceeds to murder and hide the body of Polonius, which leads to Ophelia’s insanity and the scene where everyone dies, as well as the completely senseless murders of minor characters Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. Speaking of Ophelia’s madness, it becomes apparent to the audience that she is well and truly insane, when she enters, singing, “They bore him barefaced on the bier;/Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;/And in his grave rain'd many a tear:--/Fare you well, my dove!” which, even by the archaic standards of Shakespeare, is complete and utter nonsense. Ophelia, apparently, due to rejection by Hamlet, her boyfriend, and the death of her father, had become hysterical, possibly having PTSD. PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a mental disease commonly found among soldiers, but can be caused by the murders of close family members, and does result in delusions. Whatever the case may have been, Ophelia later commits suicide by drowning herself in the river, possibly due to delusions, or out of depression over her father’s death. Whatever the case may be, both Hamlet and Ophelia are prime examples of insanity and madness within Shakespeare’s writings.

In order to understand whether Ophelia is central or peripheral, we must first of all examine her family situation, her position within it and the people in her life who could perhaps see her as such. In the play, Ophelia has a father, Polonius and a brother Laertes. Her mother is dead and never mentioned, she has no known female companion and the only female role model in her life is Gertrude, who does not seem to understand the importance of such a figure, and has far too many of her own complications to be helpful. More importantly, Ophelia has virtually no understanding or experience of love. It is not love but duty which binds her to her father, and although her brother has been a friend in childhood, they have been brought up increasingly

When someone that have the today’s mentality reads Hamlet, Ophelia is seeing as a submissive, sweet, naive and obedient woman whose only goal is to serve the men to whom she is bound by blood or marriage. However, in the final of the play Shakespeare shows her, after all, unhappy within that limited universe. In almost everything, Ophelia's trajectory obeys traditional values. Paradoxically, only his death is transgressive, because suicide was taboo, especially according to Christian thought that the suicide would go to hell.

After Hamlet kills Polonius, and Ophelia learns about his death and “cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i' th' cold ground” which pushes her over the edge towards insanity (4.5.74-75). At this point Ophelia is “deranged” and is “singing songs about sexual promiscuity, abandonment, and death” to grieve for her father (“Critical Interpretations of Shakespeare's” 201). Hamlet’s accidental killing of Polonius is the indirectly causes Ophelia’s insanity. Ophelia can no long handle everything that is going on around her and “[falls] in the weeping brook” where she “lay[s] to [her] muddy death” (4.7.200-208). It is unclear “Whether her death is accidental or a suicide” Hamlet’s actions are what causes her to be in that situation (“Critical Interpretations of Shakespeare's” 206). All of Ophelia grief can is traced back to Hamlets decisions. Whether it is directly or indirectly Ophelia is dead because of Hamlet’s