Her character in the play represents femininity and fragility. She also seems to serves as a way for Hamlet to express the aggression, which he feels toward his mother. Ophelia is an important character in Hamlet because she shows the audience a frail heart.
Ophelia has limited opportunities as a woman in a patriarchal society and this is what separates her from Hamlet, who has the freedom to change his own fate. Ophelia needs to be obedient and is not allowed to express herself and her true feelings.
Shakespeare liked to use flowers and plants as images to illustrate his ideas. Ophelia uses flowers as symbols of her deep sorrow and grief. She is very upset because her father, Polonius, has just been killed by Hamlet.
Her main value is in being pretty. Throughout the play, she is called beautified Ophelia, pretty Ophelia, fair Ophelia, pretty lady, sweet lady, sweet maid. Her brother speaks of her “ fair and unpolluted flesh” (V, i, 239). And even her death is made to look pretty.
Ophelia is Polonius' daughter and Laertes' sister. Hamlet has been in love with her for a while before the play starts and has given her several gifts during their courtship until her father warns her away from him and tells her not to see him anymore. During the play, he treats her very badly.
Seeing her as a receptacle for his ideals, Hamlet believes his relationship with Ophelia gives him the ability to interact with an embodiment of the abstract.
Hamlet is cruel to Ophelia because he has transferred his anger at Gertrude's marriage to Claudius onto Ophelia. In fact, Hamlet's words suggest that he transfers his rage and disgust for his mother onto all women.
Background: Ophelia's syndrome is the association of Hodgkin's Lymphoma and memory loss, coined by Dr. Carr in 1982, while it's most remembered for the eponym in reminiscence of Shakespeare's character, Dr.
20th-century Freudian interpretations emphasised Ophelia's own neurotic sexual desires, and hinted at her unconscious incestuous attractions to Polonius or Laertes. Around the 1970s, Ophelia on stage became a graphic dramatic study of mental pathology, even schizophrenia, sucking her thumb, headbanging, even drooling.
It is her attempt at gaining agency and a voice in the only way she can—through symbols of her femininity because she is constantly seen as only a woman and not an individual. Ophelia's voice blossoms through her womanhood and through the language of flowers and song, both linked to feminine sexuality.
Perhaps the most descriptive sexualization of Ophelia is when Gertrude describes her dead body as “mermaid-like” (4.7. 201) with “her clothes spread wide” (4.7. 200).
The name Ophelia is an awesome choice. The name was most likely derived from the ancient Greek “ōphéleia” (ὠφέλεια) meaning “aid” or “benefit,” but it is best known as the name of Shakespeare's tragic heroine in his play “Hamlet.”
In Polonius's house, Laertes prepares to leave for France. Bidding his sister, Ophelia, farewell, he cautions her against falling in love with Hamlet, who is, according to Laertes, too far above her by birth to be able to love her honorably.
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 final words are addressed to either Hamlet, or her father, or even herself and her lost innocence: “And will a not come again? / No, no, he is dead, / Go to thy death-bed, / He never will come again. / … / God a mercy on his soul. And of all Christian souls. God buy you.” Next, she drowns herself.
Ophelia is used by two men in the play – her father and Hamlet – as a pawn for them to enact their deceptions. Polonius uses Ophelia to try to determine what the cause of Hamlet's madness is (although Polonius, arrogantly, already assumes he knows that Hamlet is 'mad for [her] love').
By this point, Ophelia would be well aware of her pregnancy, and well aware that she would soon begin to show outward signs of it.
The Nunnery Scene
He goes on to insult Ophelia and tells her to go to a nunnery. He tells her that this will be the best place for her and, by being a nun, Ophelia won't have children and produce wicked men like his uncle.
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.
Ophelia, spurned by her lover and abandoned by the absence of her brother and the death of her father, is driven mad and drowns. Moreover, the portrayal of a woman in various stages of incurring madness stems from a fascination with the concept of victimized womanhood itself.
However, the sexual references in Ophelia's songs account for her obsession with the now mad Hamlet, as in “promising his love” to her earlier in the play and then being scorned, she is doubly heartbroken by his absence alongside the death of her father.
However, Ophelia from Hamlet, is often criticized for not being able to think for herself and her eventual decline into madness. Critics generally perceive her as weak and baseless.
In response to Ophelia's withdrawal from his affections, Hamlet grows furious and unleashes his anger by telling her that he never loved her.
As we have seen, both seem to have genuinely loved each other prior to Old Hamlet's death but after that stage, Hamlet loses his affection for her because of his mistrust towards women which was caused by his mother's haste remarriage as well as by Ophelia's rejection of Hamlet and her betrayal to him by allowing her ...
At the top of Act Three Polonius forces Ophelia to return Hamlet's letters and renounce his affections. Ophelia obeys, but her action sends Hamlet into a fit of misogynistic rage. Soon after, Hamlet mistakenly kills Polonius.