Ophelia The Character | hsa-photography

The Character

Ophelia – The young female love interest in the shakesperean play Hamlet, she is driven mad by a combination of her controlling father and Hamlets demands. Ophelia completely loses her sanity after her father’s death and drowns herself in a river.

Use in my project, I decided to depict Ophelia photographically after looking at pictorialist references for the third shoot in my project. This led me to read the play, discovering the background of her suicide and to continue portraying Ophelia. The character and her madness soon became the focal point of my project.

Description of Ophelia's death from Hamlet.

GERTRUDE:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them.

There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,

And mermaid-like a while they bore her up,

Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element. But long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

Ophelia's doomed perfection:

Ophelia, is a very tragic character as she does nothing wrong but is driven to suicide by the society she lives in:

Firstly she is orderend to cut her ties with Hamlet, by her very controlling father and does so "I must obey my lord"the use of "must"is significant - this society is patriachial,Ophelia's, father controls her life untill she is married ( when her husband will control her life).
Secondly she is ordered ( again by her father, Polonious) to get close to hamlet in order to spy on him. Hamlet, then verbally abuses her accusing her of being"a breeder of sinners" along with the rest of women and telling her she will make her husband a "Cuckold" ( slang for a man who is cheated on by his wife) a serious offense for a woman to make , it would ruin her reputation if there was a rumour she wasnt a virgin so the accusations Hamlet makes are very hurtful and dangerous. Hamlet finished by cruelly telling Ophelia "I loved you not" which crushes her emotionally as she did actually truely love him.
Ophelia's father dies which is the straw that breaks the camels back of Ophelia's sanity.
Ophelia sings bawdy songs to Gertrude( the Queen), Claudius( the king) and Horatio. The songs tell of a young girl whois tricked into losing herviginity perhaps symbolising how Ophelia looses her innocence( though she doesnt loose her viginity)
Ophelias father and hamlet are abusive and manipulative towards her, as they can be , Ophelia is a very passive character (even her death is passive) she symbolises the perfect woman of that society . She follows the wishes of the men who control her, but shakespeare shows the danger of this through his text - the society in which Ophelia lives is the one that eventually drives her mad and is ultimately responsible for her death.

One of the songs ophelia sings:

Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day,

All in the morning betime,

And I a maid at your window,

To be your Valentine.

Then up he rose, and donned his clothes,

And dupped the chamber door.

Let in the maid that out a maid

Never departed more.

By Gis and by Saint Charity,

Alack, and fie, for shame!

Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t.

By Cock, they are to blame.

Quoth she, “Before you tumbled me,

You promised me to wed.”

He answers,

“So would I ha' done, by yonder sun,

An thou hadst not come to my bed.”

Ophelia : Kalliope Amorphous