Ophelia's Insanity

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Ophelia's state of mind is much more overwhelming and

painful. "Shakespeare is ambiguous about the reality of Hamlet's insanity and depicts him as on the border, fluctuating between sanity and madness" (Lidz 156). Hamlet mourns for his father, but it is the bitterness and ill-will that he harbors towards his mother for her hasty marriage to his uncle that is his most reoccurring occupation. His thoughts of Ophelia are secondary at best. When it happens that Hamlet accidentally slays Polonius, he does not appear to be thinking of the potential effect of his actions on Ophelia. Hamlet has sealed her fate, and along with the "vacillations in [his] attitude and behavior toward her could not but be extremely unsettling to …show more content…
We are able to discern that his harsh attitude toward his daughter at the beginning of the play may not be cruel for cruelty's sake; Polonius may actually be showing signs that he is overly protective of Ophelia and instructs her to deny Hamlet's "tenders" because they represent a threat toward his position as her father. We might also infer that as Ophelia's only parent for such a great duration in her young life that Polonius may actually favored her -letting her act as the replacement for her mother in her father's life. These ideas are not to implicate their relationship as an abusive Oedipal ci! rcumstance. It is interesting that the same situation can correspondingly be applied to the relationship that Hamlet shares with his mother. Hamlet is fatherless. While this is a more recent position for him, it is interesting to note that rather than have his loss bring him and his mother closer, it only serves to bind him in his melancholy and agony. He battles within himself of doing harm to his mother. Hamlet may very well see his mother's infidelity to his father's memory as …show more content…
Ophelia has nothing to do with this emotional inadequacies, and is nonetheless a victim of them. Her death is the responsibility of Hamlet, who at her gravesite "exhibits some temporary marks of a real disorder" (Mackenzie 903). It is short-lived, however, and Hamlet again retakes his vengeance upon his father's murderer --using his ! melancholy as a dull weapon. "He realizes that his emotions are often going to rush beyond his control [and] the fiction that he is mad will not only cloak his designs against the King, but will also free him from the rest of the play" (Campbell 104). It is his fiction that is the leading cause of Ophelia's demise as well as his own. There is no way out of the created situation for either of them. One could imagine that if this were a different play, Hamlet could ask for Ophelia's forgiveness, but that is not the play. The melancholy, grief, and madness that Hamlet suffers from may well have been the propelling force for all of his unfortunate action in Shakespeare's play. It is worth allowing that the first of the two are real; his melancholy and grief are not counterfeit. Ophelia is the more tragic of the two because her madness is not feigned,
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