This is one reading though, and it's a choice. Like Gertrude, we don't get to see what happens in Ophelia's head. She could be strong, weak, clever, vapid, meek, secretly rebellious, or any variation on any number of traits--as long as it's a reading supported by the text. (And frankly, the text is vague enough to support many readings.)
So a couple of years ago, in the midst of a lot of media discussion around the public portrayal of women, I found this article on Ophelia which called my own reading into question. And...well, frankly it made me ashamed of being so dismissive. Here's an excerpt:
- "I tried to argue that Ophelia resonated because Shakespeare had made an extraordinary discovery in writing her, though I had trouble articulating the nature of that discovery. I didn’t want to admit that it could be something as simple as recognizing that emotionally unstable teenage girls are human beings. … When Ophelia appears onstage in Act IV, scene V, singing little songs and handing out imaginary flowers, she temporarily upsets the entire power dynamic of the Elsinore court. When I picture that scene, I always imagine Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Horatio sharing a stunned look, all of them thinking the same thing: 'We fucked up. We fucked up bad.' It might be the only moment of group self-awareness in the whole play. Not even the grossest old Victorian dinosaur of a critic tries to pretend that Ophelia is making a big deal out of nothing. Her madness and death is plainly the direct result of the alternating tyranny and neglect of the men in her life. She’s proof that adolescent girls don’t just go out of their minds for the fun of it. They’re driven there by people in their lives who should have known better."
I wonder what you think of Ophelia in light of this reading.
-Mrs. Swan