Ophelia's Suicide

The dramatic importance of Ophelia’s funeral is that this is where Hamlet finally reveals his love for Ophelia. Hamlet says, “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers/Could not with all their quantity of love/Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?”(5.1.247-249). This is dramatic because, throughout the whole play, this was the only scene where he confesses that he loves Ophelia. In most of the play, he was mistreating and rude to Ophelia.

Allowing herself to continually feel her grief without support and guidance causes Ophelia to lose her mind. King Claudius says of her, “O, this is the poison of deep grief: it springs/ All from her father’s death…; Poor Ophelia/ Divided from herself and her fair judgement,/ Without the which we are pictures”(4.5.74-75,83-83) Without her father and his ability to reason and tell her what to do, Ophelia loses the little control she has over herself. Previously, she could rely on Polonius to speak for her, but her only support is gone, and her coping strategy is ineffective and detrimental. By being separated from “herself and her fair judgement”, Ophelia is no longer herself, and the girl who she used to be has been destroyed.

Hamlet was deeply in love with the recently departed fair Ophelia, daughter of Polonious, who also sadly is not with us. He loved her much more than he expressed, and it is unfortunate that his inability to express his love for her could have been part of her downfall. Although he treated her scornfully and rudely I know that he loved her more than anyone could imagine. Hamlet, I remember, at the dear Ophelia’s funeral, you told the whole world of your love. “I loved Ophelia. 40 thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love make up my sum,” you said. I cannot help but think that if you had expressed your love for the fair maiden, both her and quite possibly you would still be with us today. He loved his mother, Queen Gertrude. Although he held her in disdain for her hasty marriage to Claudius, who he despised, he still loved her with all his heart

There are a variety of factors that can contribute to one’s demise. In the context of the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare many possibilities can be identified that pertain to Ophelia’s sudden death. Ophelia’s death was triggered by her mental breakdown due to the loss of her father. In the midst of her inner turmoil, her depression worsens as she learns that Hamlet, the man she loves departs to England. When she dies, Gertrude reports her death to Claudius and Laertes. Gertrude, The Queen of Denmark, is responsible for Ophelia’s death. By looking at Gertrude’s over protective relationship with Hamlet, her lack of initiative on the situations around her in a time of tragedy, as well as her vivid account of Ophelia’s death, evidence that

Even in death, she displays yielding and passive behavior: Ophelia does not have the intention of committing suicide, though she fails to save herself from sinking. She is essentially a casualty of a society that enforces unreasonable expectations for its women and is never afforded the liberty of thinking for herself and making her own judgments and decisions. Her passive death represents the lack of control she has over her own person and the dependence she has developed on other people. Therefore, Ophelia is mentally unstable and not capable of realizing that her life is on the line. Ophelia is trained by the men in her life to be compliant with their demands, preventing her from practicing her autonomy and enabling her to be easily manipulated by Hamlet.

   Poor Ophelia, she lost her lover, her father, her mind, and, posthumously, her brother. Ophelia is the only truly innocent victim in Hamlet. This essay will examine Ophelia's downward spiral from a chaste maiden to nervous wreck.

Ophelia is Hamlet’s love interest throughout the entire play. However, in an attempt to be strategic, Hamlet feigns insanity in order to be deceiving and in turn breaks Ophelia's heart. His sudden disinterest towards her coupled with her father Polonius and brother Laertes’ commands to stay away from Hamlet composes a dire internal conflict within Ophelia's mind. She is torn between her undying love for Hamlet versus her desire to be an obedient daughter and sister. In addition, Hamlet unintentionally murders Polonius rather than Claudius, which also adds to Ophelia's insanity. To make matter worse, Ophelia has no mother figure within her life. So taken all together, she is stuck in a constant battle within herself with nobody who is there for her. “I hope all will be well. We must be patient/ but I cannot choose but weep/ to think they would lay him/ i' th' cold ground” (Hamlet v, iv). This quote from Ophelia demonstrates her deep sorrow towards her father's death, as well as the start of her path to insanity. Her lack of a maternal figure leaves her with nobody to discuss her feelings and troubles with. Because of this constant battle within her life, Ophelia finds herself in a confrontation with her emotions, which ends in her official decision of suicide. Which one could argue makes her decisive in the end which may be true, but her internal struggle leading to her choice of suicide is what makes her a great example of a character struggling with uncertainty during times of

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

Ophelia’s role in Hamlet is a very tragic one, because in all honesty, she was one of the most innocent characters of them all. She loved her father dearly, but he was taken away from her by complete accident. As Ophelia’s story progressed, her composure slowly started slipping away from her when she sang to Gertrude and Claudius about her father’s death and starts taking off her clothes (Act 4, scene v). When

In Act 4, Ophelia is told by the king that her father has died. Ophelia also acts insane in because of this and can no longer take the time to grieve. Ophelia sings a lot to try to forget the death of her father, but it does not work. Ophelia kills herself and Hamlet does not know because the king sent him away to be killed once they found out that he had killed another friend. Hamlet and Horatio are in the woods when the run across a grave digger digging a grave, but hamlet does not know it is for. When hamlet hears people coming him and Horatio hide behind a tree to see who it is. When Hamlet is talking to Horatio about what it is going on he says, “Twas of some estate” ( Act 5, Scene 1 Line 228). When Hamlet says this is saying that whoever is in the casket has a lot of money because of the people that is there. Hamlet becomes insane when he jumps from behind the tree yelling, “What, the fair Ophelia”, because he is surprised that Ophelia is dead. This brings out the hidden emotions that he has had for Ophelia. Talking to everyone at the funeral, hamlet says with much emotion, “I loved Ophelia, Forty thousand brothers” (Act 5, Scene 1 Line 285). This is showing that he loved his girlfriend with all his heart, even though he may have never expressed enough to her and anyone else. This hurts hamlet because he did not know that the grave, he was viewing was for her. This is showing him insane because he

Ophelia’s death was a suicide because she felt alone and betrayed by those around her. She began to give flowers to her brother and King hamlet. “There’s Rosemary,that’s for remembrance, pray you love, remember, and there is posies, that’s for thoughts” (Shakespeare 191-192). In this quote, Ophelia is explaining the meaning of each flower. Rosemary for her brother because Laertes, her brother forgot about her.

First, her death seems to be passive: rather than straight-up committing suicide, as Gertrude tells us, she accidentally falls in the water and then simply neglects to save herself from sinking. This seems to be a metaphor for the way Ophelia lives her life towards the end of the play, going with the flow, doing what her father tells her to do, rather than making decisions for herself. "In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest sorrow, but never the agonized cry of fear or horror which makes madness dreadful or shocking. And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful" (Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy). Even when Ophelia's garments "pull" her down, as if they had a mind of their own, while she is drowning, we find this beautiful.

During act 1 the gravediggers argue on whether Ophelia deserves a proper Christian burial in a churchyard due to her taking her own life, which is seen as a sin: undeserving of a christian burial in the religious doctrine. Yet she is buried in the place of another man in just that fashion. This is a moral criticism on how the death of person due to suicide shall be handled, which is clearly thought of different in the contemporary world when compared to that time period.

But she has had prayers read for her and is dressed up like a pure virgin, with flowers tossed on her grave and the bell tolling for her” (V.i.200-209). The only reason Ophelia was having the right to be buried in the church graveyard was that she was an innocent soul even after she had gone insane. Before her death, she was locked away for her own safety. She was a female so the male characters believed that Ophelia was weak since she went insane so quickly after a death. Ophelia was

character. Ophelia’s dependence on others is, sadly, what lead to her death. She could not