The roles of women in the Shakespeare's plays that we have been studying so far are key for the plot of the plays. Juliet, Portia, and Viola were women who immediately knew what they had to do when facing problems; the three of them could be considered the outsiders of the places where they lived since they looked at things with certain distance, objectivity, and witty, they thought in a different way in comparison with the ones who surrounded them, they had the power to decide on their own future -whether the outcome was tragic or not. In Hamlet we have a huge difference in the roles of women if we compare Ophelia with the aforementioned ones.
According to Hamlet, Denmark is a place of masks, appearances, where nothing is what is said to be; Hamlet sees that problem and becomes the outsider as his vision of reality is completely different to the one of the inhabitants of Denmark. From this point of view of the outsider, a first difference between the Juliet-Portia-Viola team and Ophelia can be drawn. To beging with, at the beginning of the play Ophelia cannot be considered as outsider since she doesn't seem to feel much uncomfortable with her life; she perfectly fits with the whole that is Denmark. Since she is not an outsider, she just goes with the flow of a city full of appearances and comidity, something that prevents her from taking her own decisions regarding her life.
Nonetheless, as we advance in the reading of the play, Ophelia becomes a semi-outsider character. If Ophelia wouldn't have continued to follow the masks imposed in the society she is immersed in, maybe her fate would have been different. Shakespeare, created in Ophelia an obedient daughter who fell in love with the outsider, making her wonder what would be the best thing to do. Since the power of the mass is bigger and she must follow the role that is imposed on her, Ophelia agrees to wear another
After reading at least three plays where women were the great heroines of the stories, I was expecting Ophelia to be one more of the group, but instead she became one of the greatest victims in Hamlet. The point that I want to make here is that the fact of Shakespeare portraying Ophelia as one more who follows the conventions, the lies, and appearances that reign in Denmark, prevents her to be one more heroine who could have stoop up along with Hamlet. Therefore, it can be concluded that --obviously-- the mass of masks tend to drown people not letting them show their great potentiallity but they are allowd to show only those features that are convenient for the sea of masks to work well, but at the end the sea of lies works neither for the liers nor the semi-outsiders nor for the outsiders.
If things would have been written differently, we could have had a happy ending like the one in Lion King.
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Sources
*Mabillard, A. Ophelia. Shakespeare online. 2000. Retrieved from http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/hamlet/opheliacharacter.html
*Frailty, thy name is woman. Shakespeare in Hamlet. Retrieved from http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/bierman/elsinore/women/womenFirst.html
As you pointed out, Ophelia is a different character in comparison with other Shakespeare's female characters that we have studied, she is not the heroine of the play, but she is also an important and complex chatacter in the plot of Hamlet. Ophelia is the one who represent the obedience of Portia (as both accept their own father's will) but she lacked the stubborness of Juliet. I think Ophelia shows the other side of women in Elizabethan times, she is fragile and that is why she is manipulated by the one who surround them, especially her father and the current King. Finally, as our teacher said in one of our classes, Shakespeare always places the wrong character in the right play, or someting like that. Do you imagine Juliet, Portia or Viola playing the role of Ophelia? Clearly the play would have been different.
ResponderEliminarMy dear,
ResponderEliminarAs Josefa mentioned before, Ophelia is a different and, to me, a coward character in the play. She does not follow her heart and her feeling when we talk about love. I think that the concept of wearing masks is an issue that not only Shakespeare expresses in one of his book, but Woolf too. In this point, I would like to say that we are living in a world in which masks are everything. We are judge as the way we are in society: clothes, attitudes, wealthiness, beauty, etc. So, in that matter, I think that people prefer to show a different face, a more suitable one, I must say. That is why I think that social network is one of the platform that allows to do this. In this sense, I do believe that if Facebook or Twitter had existed in Shakespeare time, Ophelia would have used it in order to be someone else, cooler that she really was.