Introduction: The play, The Tragedy of Hamlet the Prince of Denmark, follows the story of Hamlet shortly after the murder of his beloved father. Context: Hamlet learns that Claudius, his stepfather and uncle, poisoned his brother and that his father's ghost wants his death avenged. Claudius uses Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, and Polonius' daughter Ophelia to spy on the young prince. This made Hamlet lose faith in his lover, Ophelia, and pretend to be mad to dissuade the spies from his plan to assassinate his uncle and the new king. Hamlet accidentally murders Polonius during his first attempt to kill Claudius, leading Ophelia to go mad herself. Ophelai is considered "...a cult figure embodying her own turbulent hopes" (Romanska 485). Thesis Statement: The significance of Ophelia's madness is to signify that she has lost two of the most important men in her life, Polonius and Hamlet. It is clear that Ophelia is mourning the death of her father, Polonius, when Horatio says, "She speaks much of her father, says she hears..." (Shakespeare IV 4-5), but a secondary cause of the Ophelia's madness may also be due to the failure of her relationship with Hamlet. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayTopic Sentence: Ophelia begins her own descent into madness, as her family possesses and oppresses her feelings, and man whom she loves declares that he did not do it. I will always love him. Additionally, he alludes to the fact that she is a whore as she should "take you to a convent" which has a duality, more than meaning a place of Christian faith, this terminology also meant brothels. Additionally, Hamlet also uses Ophelia to denounce his hatred towards women as a whole, thus reinforcing the patriarchal misogyny of the early modern period. He claims that all women are liars and can't be trusted with painted faces. Therefore, Ophelia's oppression drives her further and further into madness to the point of suicide, and this is the price Ophelia has to pay because she is entirely conformable to those around her. Additionally, her father Polonius treats Ophelia as his possession, and he also believes that Hamlet is not. better intentions for Ophélie. However, although he agrees with Laertes that Ophelia is a "green girl", he takes a different position in relation to his brother's claims. Polonius believes that Hamlet wishes to take her virginity and tries to dissuade her from her love for him, thus introducing a family devotion as Ophelia agrees to no longer see Hamlet; she succumbs to his oppression, declaring: “I will obey, my lord.” Even though "Polonius is deliberately indifferent to what his daughter feels", just like his brother, Ophelia takes on the role of devoted sister and daughter and agrees to call off their romance. Polonius takes his patriarchal oppression further when he insists on listening to Ophelia return the gifts Hamlet gave her during their relationship. This new intrusion from her father shows, once again, his neglect of Ophélie's emotions, who willingly agrees to speak with a man of whom she had not told him for a long time that she had "been so frightened". Evidence and Citation: The evidence suggesting that she is simply mourning her father is clear in the lines of her many songs and proves that she is mourning her father as in the lines “His beard as white as snow…” (Shakespeare IV 190-191). This line refers to his father because he was an older man and because of this detail it shows that Polonius' death took a toll on the psycheof Ophelia, making her sing bitter songs. There are other references to Ophelia's father, such as "I would give you violets, but they all withered when my father died", show Ophelia's broken mental state, as she is constantly obsessed by the death of Polonius, to the point that everything reminds her of his death (Shakespeare IV 180-181). Ophelia's madness overtakes her so much that she cannot even recognize who she is talking to like her brother, Laertes. Polonius was such a vital figure in her life that she is mad beyond help and therefore recognizes neither her own brother nor anyone she speaks to. Commentary: However, the sexual references in Ophelia's songs explain her obsession with the now mad Hamlet, as by "promising her love" to him earlier in the play and then being scorned, she is doubly heartbroken by his absence thus only by the death of his father. Phrases such as "Young men won't do it if they come to it" could mean an oblique reference to a promiscuous man who promises love but reneges after a brief moment (Shakespeare IV 59-60). The line shortly after is: “You promised to marry me…” which could claim that Hamlet is the cause of his deteriorating mental state (Shakespeare IV 62-64). Although the man in the song promised the speaker that they would marry soon, he left her for no apparent reason and, like Hamlet's supposed claims of love and marriage to Ophelia, Hamlet also broke these vows for reasons unknown to Ophelia. It is likely that Ophelia was so obsessed with breaking Hamlet's oath that by not returning his love, Hamlet had broken both her heart and her poor mind. Ophelia exists as a tragic character in Hamlet and quite pitiful due to the unfortunate circumstances she went through. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Concluding Paragraph: Perhaps if Ophelia hadn't lived in a world where social constructs and hierarchies dictated how she should live her life, she wouldn't have had to find peace only in death. It is our responsibility to build a world that is not limited by social constructs such as gender or class, in order to prevent the future deaths of people like Ophelia. It would be impossible to say that it was these social constructs that led to her death without all the natural references in Gertrude's monologue. Stripped of all references, Gertrude's monologue says only that Ophelia, wearing a widely parted dress, has fallen. She sang, and “incapable of her own distress,” she drowned. Everything else that is revealed depends on references to nature that give a deeper insight into Ophelia's connection to nature and the conflicts that led to her distress, madness, and death. This monologue proves that metaphors are important and provide a lot of insight into what's going on just beneath the surface. References Dane, G. (1998). Read The Madness of Ophelia. Examples, 10(2), 405-423. (https://doi.org/10.1179/exm.1998.10.2.405)Bialo, C. (2013). Popular show, large format ballad and madness of Ophélie. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 53(2), 293-309. (10.1353/sel.2013.0014)Camden, C. (1964). On Ophelia's madness. Shakespeare Quarterly, 15(2), 247-255. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2867895) Bostrom, M. (1996). Mad Women: Ophelia and Lady Macbeth. Articulāte, 1(1), 6. (https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/articulate/vol1/iss1/6/)Gates, S. (2008). Assembling the fragments of Ophelia: gender, gender and revenge in Hamlet. Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 34(2),.