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1. The opression of ophelia
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Ophelia |
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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. ... 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. ... 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. ... What is Ophelia’s story? From the text we are given very little background information on Ophelia. ... 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. ... 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. ... We are left to only speculate what Ophelia was doing before Hamlet returned to Denmark. ... In comparison to Hamlet, Ophelia is certainly a creature of lack. ... Ophelia: What is, my lord? ... 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. |
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Title: Ophelia
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