Ophelia Character Analysis

Polonius’s daughter, Laertes’ sister, and Hamlet’s lover. Along with Gertrude, Ophelia is the only other female character in the play, Ophelia’s actions and trajectory are unfortunately defined by the men around her. At the start of the play, Ophelia—who has been in a relationship of undetermined seriousness with Hamlet for an unspecified amount of time—is used as a pawn in her father Polonius’s attempt to help Claudius and Gertrude ascertain the source of Hamlet’s madness. Polonius believes a burgeoning rift between Ophelia and Hamlet is the cause—in reality, Hamlet is, unbeknownst to the others at Elsinore, affecting madness in order to seem less suspicious or threatening as he investigates his father’s murder. Ophelia, however, is ignorant of Hamlet’s plan—and as she interacts with him in service of her father’s plot, Hamlet becomes so hurt by her transparent betrayal that he begins acting like even more of a lunatic towards Ophelia, cruelly suggesting she become a nun and making lewd sexual remarks towards her at every available opportunity. Between Hamlet’s abuses—and his murder of Polonius—Ophelia eventually loses her own mind, succumbing fully to the madness at which Hamlet has only been playing. Ophelia eventually commits suicide, and though Hamlet claims to grieve her, no one—least of all Ophelia’s furious brother, Laertes—believes him. A tragic figure whose life and death alike are coopted by the men around her, Ophelia is nonetheless able to do the one thing Hamlet, for all his musings on his desire to take his own life, is never able to do: she kills herself, reclaiming through a tragic action the only measure of agency she’s had over her own life for as long as she’s lived it.