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Rosalyn Stilling

Drowning in Womanhood: Ophelia’s Death as Submission to the Feminine Element

For Shakespearean heroines, a most fascinating, yet critically dismissed, character

is Ophelia from Hamlet, the Danish prince Hamlet’s lover who goes mad and drowns

after Hamlet murders her father. For generations, Ophelia has captivated artists, critics,

poets, and musicians alike, who revive her spirit within their creative works, allowing the

mystery and tragedy of her death to live on. Within the text, Ophelia struggles with

womanly duty and obtained agency over her own life. She is constantly silenced and

disregarded by the characters for no reason other than her youth and gender. No matter

how she communicates, through words or physical symbols, she is misunderstood,

ignored and called “mad,” which ultimately leads to her watery demise. Ophelia’s

drowning is the consummate representation of an eternal retreat into the feminine, trading

an individual voice for eternal silence in union with feminine essence. In turn, her death

expresses the danger of reducing an individual to his or her gender and disregarding the

voice of the marginalized. The silencing of Ophelia has surpassed her textual death given

the amount of critics that see her as flat, under developed, and used only for emotional

upheaval.

A majority of Ophelia’s critical reception precipitates the quashing of her voice

by disregarding her actions within the text. Critic Linda Welshimer Wagner critiques

Ophelia’s character by stating, “It would appear that Ophelia has two primary purposes in

her ingenuous role—that of providing a convenient hinge for several of Hamlet’s

analytical scenes, and of providing […] emotional impact for the audience […]

Apparently Shakespeare intended for her to be a minor character, using her sparingly and
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almost forgetfully throughout the plot” (94). Wagner’s reading of Ophelia is problematic,

particularly considering Wagner’s attempt at definitively explaining authorial intent, an

impossible task. That reading fails to allow the text to take on a new life under analysis

because she views it under a scope that is impossible and irrelevant. She views Ophelia

only in relation to Hamlet’s actions, effectively reducing Ophelia to a plot device rather

than a dynamic character in her own right. Wagner’s reading directly mirrors the

dismissive treatment Ophelia receives within the drama, which perpetuates the silencing

of her character from the world of the play into the world of critical analysis. When

viewing Ophelia as a character in her own right rather than an object hinged to Hamlet’s

character development, she has much more significance and depth than simple emotional

upheaval.

In a more sensitive way, C.K. Resetartis posits, “The majority of critics have

viewed Ophelia as a weak character, in both form and function, and many have dismissed

her as a woman […] who couldn’t stand by her man” (215). Resetartis recognizes the

injustices towards Ophelia’s character by critics because of their focus on Hamlet’s

character development and how she affects it, rather than her own development.

Resetartis goes on to admit, “Most studies have quickly turned to Ophelia's flowers,

madness, death, or nymphomaniac tendencies rather than trying to understand her unique

character and how it might function in the play” (215). This sentiment addresses the

largest problem of the critical reception of Ophelia—the constant sexist misreading and

disregarding of her character. By breathing new life into Ophelia through an analysis of

her life in the text, her death and the loss of her individuality therein becomes expressly

clear.
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Within the play, Ophelia’s voice is noticeably minor. Ophelia is talked at, not

conversed with, by her father Polonius and brother Laertes. When she is able to engage in

conversations with Hamlet, he simply insults her in a dismissive or an aggressive way.

Polonius and Laertes dominate the first scene she appears in, and Ophelia only speaks

eighteen lines of the 136 lines of the scene, most of which are short replies (Resetarits

216). Polonius and Laertes lecture her about their disapproval of her relationship with

unmarriageable Hamlet, commanding her to guard her virginity like a precious treasure.

Ophelia is spoken to, not conversed with and not allowed to speak or express herself, for

she is the receiver of the words and wisdom of Polonius and Laertes. Her forced

receptiveness in conversations with males represents the patriarchal idea of a woman’s

position of receiving male initiative. Her life is not her own; it is owned by every man and

powerful figure around her. She tries to be the passive, obedient and submissive maiden

society demands of her, but in doing so, she loses her agency and identity because she is

not free to discuss her relationship with her family.

In conversation with Hamlet, she is disrespected in a different manner. He

hatefully speaks to her by commanding, “Get thee to a nunnery, wouldst though be a

breeder of sinners?” (3.1.122-3). He reduces Ophelia to a vessel of pleasure, denying her

reproductive capabilities, given the double entendre of "nunnery" in Elizabethan slang-- a

whorehouse and an actual nunnery. If she cannot serve those purposes, she should be

locked away forever to save men from her innate infidelity in an actual nunnery. Within

this conversation, Hamlet rails on Ophelia for the ills of womankind not for anything

Ophelia has necessarily done. Hamlet does not see Ophelia as an individual; rather, she is

the embodiment of “woman,” a stand-in for her entire sex. After his unnecessary abuse,
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Ophelia is left only to lament the “noble mind that is here o’erthrown,” remembering the

former Hamlet that sent her tokens of his love rather than unkind barbs about her sex

(3.1. 149). Her sensitive reaction to Hamlet’s unkindness shows her kind-heartedness and

innocent nature. She is not an outspoken, assertive heroine, and that sense of demure

sensitivity and open-heartedness is part of the reason Ophelia eventually turns to suicide.

The catalyst that brings Ophelia to her end is Polonius’ death by Hamlet’s hand.

Ophelia’s estranged lover killed her father on a whim, thinking he was a rat behind a

tapestry. At this point in the drama, Ophelia has no recourse or protection. Her father is

dead, her lover has abandoned her, and her brother is thousands of miles away. Every

mode of male guidance and protection for her is gone. Although it can be seen as a

liberating moment to a twenty-first century audience, the circumstances of her freedom

are anything but truly freeing, especially given her timidity and innocence in a society

that demands male guidance. Her subsequent actions express the anguish of her

compromising situation, and her attempt at finding a voice.

Ophelia’s madness is much more multifaceted than face value allows. “Madness”

is a term used here loosely because there is little that is disjointed in her actions and

songs upon inspection. In 4.5, Shakespeare describes how Gertrude does not want to talk

to Ophelia, but the gentlemen insist that she see Ophelia because “her speech is nothing,

/Yet the unshaped use of it doth move/The hearers to collection” (4.5.7-9). Ophelia is

insistent that she see Gertrude, quite unlike the usually obedient Ophelia that would likely

have left upon Gertrude’s command. Queen Gertrude, realizing the revolutionary power

of Ophelia’s words, no matter how “disjointed,” invites her in. If Gertrude is threatened

by Ophelia’s “mad” utterances, there must be a level of truth to her words. Ophelia’s
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songs and “ramblings” are key elements to understanding Ophelia’s mental state and

realizing her actual sanity.

Gertrude believes her to be mad because Ophelia does not do what she is told.

Gertrude says, “Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song?” (4.5. 27). Instead of

answering directly, Ophelia responds in a short verse about her dead father. Ophelia

responds,

Say you? Nay, pray You mark.

He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
O, ho! (4.5.28-32).

Gertrude tries to interrupt her song, but Ophelia demands that she be heard rather than

spoken to; it is her time to tell her story. Ophelia is considered mad by Gertrude because

Ophelia finally defies proper expectations, disobeying the command of the queen.

Gertrude may also call her mad to discredit the factual nature of her songs because of

their ability to make the Danish people think there is something wrong in Denmark’s

leadership.

Ophelia then sings about a woman who loses her honor to an inconstant lover by

singing,

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,

All in the morning bedtime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn'd his clo'es
And dupp'd the chamber door,
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more […]
Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed.'
He answers:
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'So would I 'a' done, by yonder sun,

An thou hadst not come to my bed.' (4.5.47-64)

This song can be seen as Ophelia expressing her relationship with Hamlet, subtly

admitting to the loss of her honor to Hamlet and his hasty abandonment. Instead of

responding directly to Gertrude’s and Claudius’s questions, Ophelia's songs are all

applicable to her life, which should not be the case for someone supposedly mad. In this

way, the ever-obedient Ophelia, through experiencing heartbreak and abandonment,

breaks the chains of her receptive and timid nature by choosing to say what she wants

rather than what Gertrude wants.

After singing, Ophelia gives flowers to Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes, and the

meaning of each flower correlates to their secrets, transgressions, or character in general.

She says,

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance […]

And there is pansies. That’s for thoughts […]
There’s fennel for you, and columbines: there’s rue
for you; and here’s some for me […]
There’s a daisy. I would give you
some violets, but they withered all when my father
died (4.5.173-4, 177-181)

Each flower indicates different attributes that one or more of the characters exhibit.

According to the footnotes of the Norton Shakespeare Anthology, columbines were

related to marital infidelity, fennel with flattery, and rue to repentance, which can be

related to Gertrude and Claudius’s extramarital affair and hasty marriage (Greenblatt

1762). Additionally, daisies are related to “dissembling seduction” while violets are

related to faithfulness (Greenblatt 1762). Rosemary, violets, and daisies can be related to

Ophelia’s strife with Hamlet and her father.

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Ophelia’s madness is not a psychological disturbance because the language of her

flowers is so directly related to the figures around her. They represent fact, and madness

is intrinsically linked to a disassociation with reality. Ophelia's “madness” is her way of

expressing her objectification, abandonment, helplessness, and sorrow over her lost father

and lost virtue, a moment of disobedience she certainly now regrets. 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. Scholar Elaine Showalter notes,

“Ophelia's symbolic meanings, moreover, are specifically feminine” (3). Flowers are

intrinsically linked to femininity, not only in form but also in cultural symbolism. The

form of a flower, its petals that gracefully crinkle at the edges and curve open or fold

around one another, resembles the female sex. Likewise, Polonius calls Ophelia a “green

girl,” linking her to flora (1.3.101). Showalter expresses this sentiment, stating, “Her

flowers suggest the discordant double images of female sexuality as both innocent

blossoming and whorish contamination; she is the ‘green girl’ of pastoral, the virginal

‘Rose of May’ and the sexually explicit madwoman who, in giving away her wild flowers

and herbs, is symbolically deflowering herself” (3).

Working in tandem with flowers, song can also be symbolically linked to

feminine expression and seduction. For instance, the idea of a siren’s song, as noted in

Homer’s The Odyssey, is an example of a female being using song to her advantage.

Ophelia’s songs are meant to express her womanly troubles when plain speech does not

work. In this way, Ophelia is able to harness her overwhelming femininity through
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flowers and songs to express herself completely-- her sorrow, her troubles, and her

knowledge.

She takes her songs and flowers and gives them to those around her, as if saying,

“If all you see is this womanly body, let my very hindrance, my womanhood as seen in

these flowers and songs, tell you my inner thoughts.” Her message, though, falls on deaf

ears and blind eyes. Gertrude, Claudius, and even Laertes dismiss her as a madwoman

with no further consideration for her motives. Even in harnessing her womanhood, she

cannot escape it, for no one can see past it. After realizing that her voice does not matter

to those around her, Ophelia’s suicide becomes her ultimate act of obedience to her

oppressors by permanently silencing herself through drowning.

Water is the final important component of the triad of feminine symbolism for

Ophelia. Water is related to femininity in its relationship to feminine sensuality,

reproductive capabilities, and its alignment with emotion. Camille Paglia addresses the

feminine link to water, explaining, “Female experience is submerged in the world of

fluids, dramatically demonstrated in menstruation, childbirth, and lactation” (91).

Additionally, Showalter explains the significance of water by stating,

Drowning too was associated with the feminine, with female fluidity as opposed
to masculine aridity. In his discussion of the ‘Ophelia complex,’ the
phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard traces the symbolic connections between
women, water, and death. Drowning, he suggests, becomes the truly feminine
death in the dramas of literature and life, one which is a beautiful immersion and
submersion in the female element. Water is the profound and organic symbol of
the liquid woman whose eyes are so easily drowned in tears, as her body is the
repository of blood, amniotic fluid, and milk. […] The romantic Ophelia is a girl
who feels too much, who drowns in feeling (3-5).
Shakespeare even recognizes this connection when Laertes notes, “Too much of water

hast thou, poor Ophelia,/And therefore I forbid my tears;[…] When these are gone,/the
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woman will be out” (4.7.157-161). The feminine link to water is evident, thus aligning

Ophelia’s death with the feminine.

After Ophelia’s body is found, Gertrude explains the circumstances of her watery

grave to Laertes and Claudius by stating,

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,[…]

There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb'ring 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, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
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,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death. (4.7.137-154)

In this account, the iconography of Ophelia’s death is extremely poignant. Enveloped in

the waters of the river, a feminine space, Ophelia is again given the female symbols of

flowers and mermaids. Her connection to mermaids and sirens not only links her to song

but, more specifically, to the way in which the song of the sirens is related to femininity

and sexual power. In her attempts to be heard and fight against her ruination, she was not

regarded; her voice failed. She no longer uses song and flowers to explain herself or to

fight back; Ophelia gives in—she relents to her fate. In this preordained death, she

embraces and surrenders to her inescapable femininity through completely submerging

herself with the consummate symbol of womanhood. Her song becomes a swan song, a

funeral dirge, and her flower garlands are her mortuary bouquet. Every aspect of her

womanhood, even her clothes, an outward signifier of her sex, envelops her until her life

is extinguished.
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Through theses motifs, Ophelia relinquishes her individual femininity, becoming

one with the feminine. She becomes woman instead of Ophelia, just as Hamlet saw her.

In the glass-like coffin of the flowing brook, she freezes herself as a symbol of woman--

as art-- and effectually prevents herself from changing or aging. Shrouded in mystery, her

image, the ideal she represents, and truth of her situation are crystallized in her watery

death, and this immortality is, no doubt, why she continues to live on in art, song, and

poetry. In this way, Ophelia’s drowning, surrounded by flowers with her last breath in

song, is her surrender to her overwhelming femininity.

In an ironic twist, her watery suicide, which plunges her into the impersonal

eternal female essence, works to remind the characters of her humanity and individuality.

After her death, they begin to regret the loss of their lovely Ophelia. Hamlet is reminded

of his love for her, and Laertes mourns the loss of his beloved sister. Queen Gertrude

bitterly concedes that she wishes to be strewing flowers around Ophelia and Hamlet's

marriage bed rather than on Ophelia's fresh grave, a painfully tardy revelation in light of

her previous disapproval of their union. The characters no longer see her as woman

because her absence reminds them of her uniqueness and individuality. Her cries for help

went unnoticed, and the characters realize this only too late. Ophelia, then, in character

and action, is a warning against a reductionist treatment of human beings. Ophelia’s

death transforms from an accident in the throes of madness to a conscious decision to

symbolically relinquish her identity to overwhelming womanhood by drowning.

The character Ophelia represents the dangers of silencing individuals by a

reductionist dismissal of one's thoughts, feelings, insights, hopes, and fears. Her death is

a conscious, final act of submission to the inescapable nature of her femininity, expressed
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in the bounty of feminine symbols surrounding her death, from flowers to song. Although

the iconography of her death is visually stunning, the beauty of innocent Ophelia’s death

only further heightens the pain and tragedy of her loss. By viewing her in this light,

calling Ophelia a cheap trick for emotional effect in an otherwise loftily intellectual play

is a gross underestimation and disservice to her character. By reviving Ophelia through a

character-centered analysis, she takes on a new life within the text as a symbol of

reductionist views on womanhood. Ophelia's suicide is a reminder that beneath the

physical body, caged by gender, is a mind and a soul that are longing to be recognized

and understood.

Works Cited

Paglia, Camille. "Apollo and Dionysus." Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from

Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. 72-98. Print.
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Resetartis, C.R. "Ophelia's Emphatic Function." Mississippi Review: The Hamlet Issue

29.3 (2001): 215-17. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 03 Apr. 2015.

Shakespeare, William, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine

Eisaman Maus, and Andrew Gurr. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W.

Norton, 1997. Print.

Shakespeare, William, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine

Eisaman Maus, and Andrew Gurr. "Hamlet." The Norton Shakespeare. New

York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 1683-784. Print.

Showalter, Elaine. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of

Feminist Criticism." Ed. Dana Ramel Barnes. Shakespearean Criticism 35 (1997):

77-94. Print.

Wagner, Linda Welshimer. "Ophelia: Shakespeare's Pathetic Plot Device." Shakespeare

Quarterly 14.1 (1963): 94-97. JSTOR. Web. 04 May 2015.