Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Ophelia (/ oʊ ˈ f iː l i ə /) is a character in William Shakespeare's drama Hamlet (1599–1601). She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes and potential wife of Prince Hamlet.
Hamlet and Oedipus is a study of William Shakespeare's Hamlet in which the title character's inexplicable behaviours are subjected to investigation along psychoanalytic lines. [ 1 ]
Polonius forces Ophelia to return Hamlet's love letters to the prince while he and Claudius secretly watch in order to evaluate Hamlet's reaction. Hamlet is walking alone in the hall as the King and Polonius await Ophelia's entrance. Hamlet muses on thoughts of life versus death. When Ophelia enters and tries to return Hamlet's things, Hamlet ...
Hamlet caresses Ophelia and kisses her fingers and arm. Then, alone, Hamlet says: "Now, Horatio, you are mine". Part four: Hamlet's antagonistic feelings towards Ophelia leak out: the prince brushes her off in person and writes a letter calling her a numbskull. Hamlet's father urges the prince to avenge him in a dream.
Eliot targeted Hamlet's disgust with his mother as lacking an "objective correlative"; viz., his feelings were excessive in the context of the play. Questions about Gertrude and other minor characters were later taken underwing by the feminist criticism movement, as criticism focused more and more on questions of gender and political import.
Eliot writes that Hamlet's state of mind is a direct result of his confused emotions and the lack of external representation for these emotions in an objective correlative. He goes on to say that Hamlet's initial conflict is a disgust in his mother, but his feelings regarding the situation are too complex to be represented by Gertrude alone ...
In Act II, Hamlet refers to Polonius as a "tedious old fool" [3] and taunts him as a latter day "Jephtha". [4] Polonius connives with Claudius to spy on Hamlet. Hamlet unknowingly kills Polonius, provoking Ophelia's descent into madness, ultimately resulting in her (probable) suicide and the climax of the play: a duel between Laertes and Hamlet.
Eliot uses Lady Macbeth's state of mind as an example of the successful objective correlative: "The artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion….", as a contrast to Hamlet. According to Eliot, the feelings of Hamlet are not sufficiently supported by the story and the other characters surrounding him.