The Insanity Of Ophelia In Shakespeare's Hamlet

As she enters onto the scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia shines with a pure, youthful radiance against the backdrop of corrupted Denmark. This immediate, untainted sense of joy and contentment fade, however, as she, in her traditionally feminine and submissive nature, begins to bend under the weight of the male forces seeking to dominate her. After enduring Polonius and Laertes’s abuse to her free will to love and Hamlet’s blatant disregard for the sanctity of their mutual affection, Ophelia’s idyllic conceptions of the world around her crumble, and her newfound discontent, exacerbated by her father’s passing, breeds madness within her. The bawdy songs that Ophelia bitterly sings while in the midst of this madness do not indicate her sexual …show more content…
Ophelia must serve as the pawn for selfish men’s intentions within the first half of the play as she becomes a chaste possession to control, a piece of bait to tempt Hamlet with, and a hapless victim of false insanity. Stripped of innocuous endearment by the whims of a brother and father and deprived of an innocent worldview by men desperately seeking to control a situation that she may not view, Ophelia cannot help but discard the tenderness which hitherto defined her character. Gates asserts that Ophelia’s lunacy serves as a direct attack on Hamlet and the other domineering forces in her life as she performs “a literal enactment of Hamlet’s loss of humanity” to repay for those grievances she suffered by hands that would consider her only a tool to utilize (234). These men become incarnated in the singular man that ravages Ophelia in her shocking song, and she describes herself as a naïve girl who, forced into corrupt circumstances and powerless to act, “out a maid never departed more” (4.5.53-54). In her startling rejection of polite femininity and reserved forbearance, Ophelia finds a way to contest the limitations on her free will and reject the notion that she scarcely deserves any morsel of respect or consideration. Indeed, by committing suicide soon after performing her crazed melodies, she commits the ultimate act of self-determination and desecrates her …show more content…
Supposedly of the feebler sex, Ophelia must nevertheless stomach the wavering states of the two men. She initially sees Polonius shift from maintaining an obdurate opposition towards her budding relationship with Hamlet to feeding her directly to Hamlet’s whims in an attempt to serve Claudius’s desires. Later, she must witness Hamlet’s rapid reversal of affections as he pines after her, denies his love for her, and then assails her with sexual innuendos. These fickle and ambivalent reversals of character frustrate Ophelia, disabling her from accurately gauging what remains true of her formerly optimistic conception of others. Given reason to distrust the father whom she dearly loves as well as the man whom she may once have adored, Ophelia grows increasingly disillusioned with men in general and voices this sentiment as she tells of the dishonorable man who “promised [the maid] to wed…hadst [she] not come to [his] bed” (4.5.62-65) She blatantly criticizes the inconstancy and hypocrisy that she witnesses and even embraces the ambiguity which resides within her sexuality in that “she expresses emblematically the gap between the free world…and the unsavory world of Denmark” (Lyons 70). This rift manifests itself in the incongruity between Ophelia’s initial ideals of purity and love and the dishonest, selfish reality which she falls