Play Hamlet Ophelia example essay topic

Ophelia: What Does She Represent? To begin looking at Ophelia we first have to understand that the easiest way to do this is from a feminist point of view. There are three types of feminist theories: the French, British, and American. "The French feminists have tended to focus their attention on language, analyzing the ways in which meaning is produced" (Wofford 208). "American feminist critics have shared with the French critics both an interest in and cautious distrust of the concept of feminine writing" (Wofford 210).

"British Feminists tend to distinguish themselves from what they see as an American overemphasis on popular art and culture. They regard their own critical practice as more political than that of the American feminists" (Wofford 212). Elaine Showalter is an American feminist critic who in 1985 wrote an essay about Ophelia. In her essay she probes a number of questions that have to deal with Ophelia. In looking at these questions a lot of different ideas can be formulated about the character Ophelia however, she specifically looks at the links between femininity, female sexuality, insanity, and representation (Showalter 31). "Ophelia is probably the most frequently illustrated and cited of Shakespeare's heroines.

Her visibility as a subject in literature, popular culture, and painting... ". (Showalter 31). Her visibility can be seen in a lot of different places. Some of the most common things that you may see are paintings.

A lot of artists have spent time in giving us their versions of Ophelia drowning. In a spoof of Shakespeare entitled Shakespeare's Ladies Ophelia is one of the ladies that come to help the young Juliet. Even though in the play Hamlet Ophelia is not a major character that you see in each scene, she actually could be labeled as an invisible character, in popular society she has become very visible. Showalter goes on to quote Carol Neely as she describes Ophelia as our proper role Neely states: "As a feminist critic, I must 'tell' Ophelia's story". (Showalter 32). What is Ophelia's story?

From the text we are given very little background information on Ophelia. Out of the plays twenty-five scenes she only appears in five of them. "The pre-play course of her love story with Hamlet is known only by a few ambiguous flashbacks. Her tragedy is subordinated in the play: unlike Hamlet, she does not struggle with moral choices or alternatives. Thus another feminist critic, Lee Edwards, concludes that it is impossible to reconstruct Ophelia's biography from the text: "We can imagine Hamlet's story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet". (Showalter 32).

I would have to agree with Lee Edwards. In the text that we are given Shakespeare doesn't give us a lot of information about Ophelia that would allow us to say that she was doing this or that before Hamlet returned when his father died. However we do know that Hamlet was away at school. We are left to only speculate what Ophelia was doing before Hamlet returned to Denmark. "In French theoretical criticism, the feminine or "Woman" is that which escapes representation in patriarchal language and symbolism; it remains on the side of negativity, absence, and lack. In comparison to Hamlet, Ophelia is certainly a creature of lack.

"I think nothing my lord", she tells him in the Mousetrap scene, and he cruelly twists her words: Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs. Ophelia: What is, my lord? Hamlet: Nothing. ( . ii. 117-19) In Elizabethan slang, "nothing" was a term for the female genitalia... ". (Showalter 32).

In this being the case then when Hamlet says "nothing" he is basically referring to Ophelia sexually. Then later on when Ophelia is mad Gertrude says that Ophelia's speech is nothing. Therefore Ophelia's speech represents the horror of having nothing to say. So Ophelia is being deprived of thought, sexuality, and language. "Ophelia's story becomes the Story of O - the zero, the empty circle or mystery of famine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation" (Showalter 32). If Ophelia was nothing and had nothing then why is it that she is even in the play?

I agree that she is a woman of mystery in that we don't even know where she has been, when she actually had time to meet with Hamlet other than the five scenes that she is in or why she killed herself. That is to say if she even did kill herself by drowning. "According to David Leverenz, in an important essay called "The Women in Hamlet", Hamlet's disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women, and into his brutal behavior towards Ophelia. Ophelia's suicide, Leverenz argues, then becomes "a microcosm of the male world's banishment of the female, because 'woman' represents everything denied by reasonable men" (Showalter 32).

If this is true then Ophelia has and is everything that Hamlet wants however, he cannot have it because he would then seem to be an unreasonable man. By this point in the play it wouldn't have mattered because everyone seems to think that Hamlet has gone mad anyway, therefore according to Leverenz's theory there would have been no reason for Ophelia to die in the course of the play at all. Throughout the course of the play Ophelia is dressed in white, has wild flowers, and enters according to the distractions with her hair down swinging. Her speeches are marked by extravagant metaphors, lyrical free associations, and explosive sexual imagery. She sings wistful and bawdy ballads, and then ends her life by drowning. All of these conventions carry specific messages about femininity and sexuality" (Showalter 33).

What are these messages? Well the color white represents her innocents and that she is a virgin. The flowers can be seen as representing the female sexuality as both innocent and whorish. When she gives away these flowers and herbs it is as if she is deflowering herself. To go on there are scenes in which Ophelia enters with her hair messed up. This can mean one of two different things, either she has gone mad or she has been raped.

Her songs are a way for her to get away from her duties as a daughter. Finally, we have her drowning. Drowning was also considered to be feminine in that it was representative of female fluidity. All throughout literature drowning has been seen as a truly feminine death. "Water is the profound and organic symbol of the liquid woman whose eyes are so easily drowned in tears, as her body is the repository of blood, amniotic fluid, and milk" (Showalter 33). Showalter goes on to explain how Ophelia and the way that she was portrayed allowed for the psychological term of hysteria to be called or referred to, as the women acting like Ophelia.

Throughout these times images of Ophelia were very popular. They were so popular that there was one artist that would take and pose patients into Ophelia like poses. So in order for the actors to defend the actions of Ophelia they invented a story for her drawn from their own experiences, grievances, and desires. (Showalter 35) "The most famous of the Victorian feminist revisions of the Ophelia story was Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, published in 1852. Unlike other Victorian moralizing and didactic studies of the female characters of Shakespeare's plays, Clarke was specifically addressed to the wrongs of women, and especially to the sexual double standard. In a chapter on Ophelia called "The rose of Elsinore", Clarke tells how the child Ophelia was left behind in the care of a peasant couple when Polonius was called to the court at Paris, and raised in a cottage with a foster-sister and brother, Jutha and Ulf.

Jutha is seduced and betrayed by a deceitful knight, and Ophelia discovers the bodies of Jutha and her still-born child, lying "white, rigid, and still" in the deserted parlor of the cottage in the middle of the night. Ulf, a "hairy loutish boy", likes to torture flies, to eat songbirds, and to rip the petals off roses, and he is also very eager to give little Ophelia what he calls a bear-hug. Both repelled and masochistically attracted by Ulf, Ophelia is repeatedly concerned by him as she grows up; once she escapes the hug by hitting him with a branch of wild roses; another time, he sneaks into her bedroom "in his brutish pertinacity to obtain the hug he had promised himself", but just as he bends over her trembling body, Ophelia is saved by the reappearance of her real mother. A few years later, back at the court, she discovers the hanged body of another friend, who has killed herself after being "victimized and deserted by the same evil seducer". Not surprisingly, Ophelia breaks down with brain fever - a staple mental illness of Victorian fiction - and has prophetic hallucinations of a brook beneath willow trees where something bad will happen to her. The warnings of Polonius and Laertes have little to add to the history of female sexual trauma" (Showalter 35-36).

From this background that was made up about Ophelia a lot of actors started to play the role of Ophelia as a girl who was basically terrified of her father, her lover, and of herself. The first person to do this was Ellen Terry. According to one reviewer, her Ophelia was "the terrible spectacle of a normal girl becoming hopelessly imbecile as the result of overwhelming mental agony. Hers was an insanity without rage, without exaltation or paroxysms". This performance also inspired other actors to rebel against the conventions of invisibility and helped in making Ophelia a visible character.

(Showalter 36) So, with giving Ophelia a background that the actors could relate to, the performances of the character became more real and actually drew the audience to the character instead of the character being the feminine side of Hamlet, Ophelia was becoming her own character. She was then either played as an innocent girl who went mad over the love of Hamlet or a girl that was one with her sexuality and knew exactly what she was doing and may have been even sleeping around. What does Ophelia represent? Overall, Ophelia is in the play to represent that which Hamlet cannot, that being the frailty that he actually has as well as the weaknesses that he refuses to show to everyone. Therefore, she represents the feminine side of Hamlet as well as being a very sexual character in the way that she is portrayed on the stage with her costumes and props that are actually symbolic of other ideas that are associated with Ophelia. "For many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against the family and the social order; and the hysteric who refuses to speak the language of the patriarchal order, who speaks otherwise, is a sister" (Showalter 37).

Bibliography

Showalter, Elaine. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism" Shakespearean Criticism 59 31-39. Wofford, Susanne L. Hamlet. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994.