While Hamlet Jr. may be the star of Hamlet, he would seem far less vibrant without
the help of his supporting actors. Characters who are roughly the same age as
him – Ophelia, Laertes, and Fortinbas – serve as foils to Hamlet. While
Laertes, Fortinbras and Hamlet all wish to avenge their fathers’ deaths,
Ophelia parallels Hamlet in a more subtle, yet more arguably more powerful,
way. Like Hamlet, Ophelia encounters “madness”….but only after her father,
Polonius, is murdered and her lover, Hamlet, tells her he never loved her.
While Hamlet’s madness consists of perpetual scheming and connivery, Ophelia’s madness
is more piteous and innocent. She has an air of genuineness that Hamlet lacks,
making her madness seem more reasonable and her eventual suicide more
justifiable. “Madness” is a key element of Hamlet in the sense that each
character has it, but no character reacts in the same fashion to it. The
variety of actions and emotion – grief, anxiety, lunacy, childishness,
plot-making, and hallucinating – serve as extensions of the sensations real
people encounter after tragedy, making Hamlet
one of the most relatable and enduring works of all time.
Ophelia’s madness consists of singing nonsensical
songs and drowning the world out…and eventually drowning herself. Of course,
Ophelia was not always crazy; she entered lunacy as a response to the many
outside forces that acted against her. From the very beginning, she is severely
passive and obedient. When Ophelia’s father instructs her to stop seeing
Hamlet, she automatically heeds his orders; when Hamlet scathingly commands her
to “get thee to a nunnery,” she does not
lash back with cruel words of her own; and when she finally falls into the
water, she does not resist the weight of her clothes, but compliantly succumbs
to death. Her passive death is extremely significant in the context of Hamlet, seeing as the play’s male
characters tend to correlate death with passion, fervency, vengeance, and deep
sorrow. By welcoming death with such agreeability, Ophelia validates the role
of women in this play as complacent objects rather than real, sentient people.
Furthermore, Ophelia’s madness is a direct result of
her desire to please others. For years, she tolerated domination and abuse by
the male figures in her life – Polonius, Laertes, and Hamlet. In Act I, Ophelia’s
brother attempts to call the shots on his sister’s body, as he advises her not
to get physical or too involved with Hamlet. By claiming that a non-virgin is a
woman with damaged goods, Laertes implies that Ophelia will lose her worth if
she has sex before marriage. Time and time again, Ophelia is treated as an
object of sexual desire rather than a person with intricate thoughts and
feelings. She has no control over her body, relationships, or decisions, so it
comes as no surprise that she finally snaps under the pressure she has endured her
whole life. By remaining voiceless in the presence of men, she loses her sanity
when her actions fail to please the men – Hamlet, Polonius, and Laertes – who
assign worth to her.
Even when she goes mad in the final Acts, Ophelia
maintains a girlish, childish, and innocent appearance. Instead of plotting to
kill or honoring the death of her father, she regresses into her youth. She
sings songs, she acts like a toddler…but she also gives away flowers. This is a
literal “deflowering” that represents her singular role to men as a sex object,
no matter the state of her mind; it signifies that no matter how tortured she
is, her thoughts will always meaningless to those around her.
No comments:
Post a Comment