Ophelia’s madness begins in tandem with Hamlet’s. As his desire both for Ophelia and revenge sends Hamlet spiraling further and further out of control, Ophelia repeatedly finds herself caught in his crosshairs. Much of Ophelia’s early stage time follows her struggle to cope with the dual romantic and social pressures exerted onto her by Hamlet and her family respectively, and it is this pressure, the repeated abuse, her father’s eventual murder– and the possible loss of her virginity– perpetrated by Hamlet which sends Ophelia over the edge.
During her descent, Ophelia is both infantilized and sexualized. In Act 4 Scene 5, Ophelia reportedly “hears there’s tricks i’ th’ world, and hems, and beats her heart, spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt that carry but half sense” (Shakespeare 4.5.4-7). As her speech regresses to riddles and songs, it becomes increasingly sexual, speaking of lovers and valentines and implying that she may have at one point lost her virginity to Hamlet. This degradation continues following her off-stage suicide-by-drowning, the details of which are reduced to how beautiful she looked when it happened, and again when she is denied a “Christian burial” for having “willfully [sought] her own salvation” (Shakespeare 5.1.1). To those in the Court of Elsinore, Ophelia was not a victim, but an object to scrutinize and pity.
In spite of this, Ophelia’s influence on art, media, pop culture, and visual aesthetics, which can be traced from the 19th century into online social media communities, has been the longer lasting and more direct of any of Shakespeare’s characters.
