In order to fully understand how Shakespeare confronts madness and suicide in Hamlet, it is necessary to review Ophelia’s life and death. As her brother Laertes departs for France in Hamlet I.iii, he warns Ophelia not to love Hamlet. Shortly thereafter, Polonius also upbraids Ophelia for falling in love with Hamlet and commands her to refuse any further attentions from him. A faithful daughter, Ophelia pledges to obey her father without realizing the effect it will have on her life later. In Hamlet III.i, immediately after Hamlet soliloquizes his famous “To be or not to be” speech, Ophelia enters the room to return to Hamlet some trifles he had given her while he was trying to woo her. Soon, Hamlet realizes that they are being watched, and proceeds to abuse his love for Ophelia with his renowned “get thee to a nunnery” speech. Not long afterwards, Ophelia’s madness is realized in Act IV scene v, shortly after her beloved Hamlet accidentally murders her father Polonius. Two scenes later, Gertrude relays the tragic news that Ophelia drowned when a branch of the willow tree she was sitting in broke off and she fell into the water.
In Shakespeare’s era, madness was frequently referred to as hysteria, the equivalent of modern-day dementia. Madness in women was commonly associated with sexual repression. According to Carol Thomas Neely, “Hysteria was caused, traditional medicine believed, by the pathology of the diseased and wandering womb, hence it was primarily although not exclusively a disease of women” (320). As noted by Elaine Showalter, “A deranged beloved embodies ‘the representational bonds between female insanity and female sexuality’”(Owen 1). It also was generally believed that if sexual desires or menstrual periods were suppressed for extended periods of time without fruition, women would slowly begin to go mad, as sanity and sexuality were considered closely tied in Shakespeare’s age (Neely 320). As a result, marriage was frequently proposed as the antidote for such madness, as it allowed women to have frequent sexual relations in a socially and morally acceptable setting (321). Furthermore, it is critical to note that, due to idleness and general passivity, such hysterical madness was generally more common among “women of the upper classes” and was “linked with marital, sexual, and class status, associated with sexual frustration, and cured by sexual satisfaction” (320).
In some cases, marriage was not an option. Campbell notes that “Neither marriage nor its sexual by-product is an option for Ophelia because her father deems her only suitor unsuitable; thus she resorts to a violent and permanent cure for her suffering of the mother” (2). “Suffering of the mother” is a medical term that describes the suffering state of a girl whose need for sexual activity and child production is suppressed, causing her to experience erotic melancholy known as erotomania (Camden 254). According to Showalter, “Ophelia’s madness was presented as the predictable outcome of erotomania” (3). Neely continues this argument that Ophelia’s madness was due to forsaken love when she contends that, “[t]he context of [Ophelia’s] disease, like that of hysteria later, is sexual frustration, social helplessness, and enforced control of women’s bodies (Campbell 1-2). Consideration of such factors is important when interpreting and critiquing Ophelia’s madness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Shortly after the scene where Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery” and then foully abuses her innocence with excessive sexual language in public during the play enacted to prick Claudius’ guilty mind, the audience learns that Ophelia goes mad in Act III scene i. The cause of her madness, however, is highly debated among literary critics, as some believe that it was the result of grief over the unnatural death of her father Polonius and others attribute it to the volatile and then abandoned love of Hamlet. As noted by Robert Burton in his work, The Anatomy of the Melancholy, “Ophelia suffers from hysteria, a malady often ascribed to upper class women who bide their time in their fathers’ homes while awaiting fulfillment of their culturally mandated roles as wives and mothers” (Campbell 1). In other words, Ophelia’s hysterical symptoms mirror those considered in Shakespeare’s time to be the result of suppressed sexual desire.
Ophelia grows mad out of a need to free herself from the rule of “patriarchal cultural institutions,” which tried to “contain women’s natural passions” (Campbell 2). The audience learns of this when, “by publically alluding to sexual experience, Ophelia reveals a deeper understanding of worldly issues than an aristocratic virgin should even admit, rejecting the essentialized female codes her father dictated to her and blurring the demarcations between innocence and subversion” (Ibid). Furthermore, Ophelia’s symptoms are those of hysterics and erotomania as,
She is mad, cries ‘hem’ to clear her throat because of choking or suffocation, beats her heart to relieve the sensation of oppression around it, weeps, prattles constantly, sings snatches of old songs, is distracted and has a depraved imagination, and ends her life by drowning (Camden 254).
Such speech and actions show that the untimely death of Polonius is not what drove Ophelia to madness, but rather the forsaken love of Hamlet.
The words of mad individuals in Shakespeare’s plays continually play a significant role in the interpretation of the events that take place in the play. Ophelia’s insane musings take the form of an odd jumble of lauds and “bawdy songs” that give the audience insight into the reality of her fate. These“bawdy songs,” which she pronounces during her madness, further supports this idea, as “Ophelia becomes exactly what her father, brother, and Renaissance society fear she will be after breaking the shackles of control over feminine overflow: blatantly sexual, excessively noisy, and socially subversive” (Campbell 3-4). As part of these songs, “Ophelia recites formulas, tales, and songs that ritualize passages of transformation and loss—lost love, lost chastity, and death” (Neely 324). In addition, many of the nearly incoherent lauds she sings shortly before her death are church songs sung during monastic services as praises to God, recalling in the audience’s mind III.i.121 when Hamlet tells her to “get thee to a nunnery” (Chapman 1). In her article, “Documents in Madness: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture”, Neely contended that Ophelia’s madness was “her liberation from silence, obedience, and constraint or her absolute victimization by patriarchal oppression” (332). As a result, contrary to many popular beliefs, rather than out of grief over the murder of her beloved father on the part of her lover, it is appropriate to deem Ophelia’s madness as a result of the need for liberation from masculine rule, as well as the need for fulfillment of her sexual needs and desires coupled with the apparent loss of Hamlet’s love.
Were it to have occurred today, Ophelia’s death would have been considered a tragic accident; however, according to the views of Shakespeare’s era, her accidental death was viewed as a self-destructive suicide. Many apparent suicides were not clear-cut and easily provable. “Drowning was one of the most frequent causes of accidental death in Tudor and Stuart England, and it was obviously difficult in many cases to be sure that the people found drowned in a pond or river had actually committed suicide” (McDonald 311). To understand the death and burial of Ophelia, it is imperative to consider the common views and rituals of Shakespeare’s day concerning suicide and burial in relation to madness.
When dead bodies were discovered, it was almost automatically assumed that they were suicide victims, and therefore were treated accordingly as the laws of the Elizabethan period prescribed. According to Michael McDonald in his article “Ophelia’s Maimed Rites”, “Self-murderers were certainly among those excluded from Christian burial, and refusing rites to them was justified on the basis of their inability to publically repent before their deaths” (314). When cases of suicide or ambiguous cause of death appeared, juries of common people would convene to determine whether the deceased should be considered felo de se or non compos mentis (McDonald 310-311). A felo de se, or “felon of himself” entailed the withholding of traditional Christian burial rites and complete asset forfeiture to the state, in addition to burial of the corpse, impaled on a stake, in the middle of the road during the night. On the other hand, a sentence of non compos mentis, a decision that the deceased was mad and thereby acquitted of any felony, involved the possible allowance for some burial rituals if approved by the church, and without asset forfeiture (Ibid). When in doubt, however, instead of giving the deceased the benefit of the doubt, juries usually sentenced them as felo de se, and even “gentility…was no guarantee of mercy” (311-312). Another verdict used in cases of suicide victims and mentioned in Hamlet by the clown in V.i.10-13, se defendendo was absurdly used to declare individuals to have acted out of self-defense (312). As the views of Shakespeare’s day concerning suicide burials come to light, they may be seen in Ophelia’s own death and subsequent burial.
When Gertrude reports her death, she attributes Ophelia’s fall into the water to the breaking of a limb of a willow tree upon which she is perched. Ironically, this tree is considered to be a symbol of unrequited love in both Shakespearean and Elizabethan Literature (Ibid). German critic Ruth J. Owen states that “Ophelia’s waters are ‘die stummer wasser,’ representing silence. What goes unspoken here is less an individual murder than a force crumbling and eroding civilization” (5). Upon the realization that Ophelia died for love of her beloved, mad Hamlet, the audience sees the desecration of societal traditions, as she disobeys her father’s command to forsake her suitor in this final liberating act of dying on behalf of his love. This supposition is supported when Ophelia gives rosemary, an herb usually given as a wedding present, to her brother Laertes, “condemn[ing] his collusion with Polonius in preventing her marriage, which forces her into this state of overwrought emotion and socially unsanctioned sexuality”(Campbell 8).
Suicide was viewed as an odious felony in the early modern period of Shakespeare’s England. As a result, “[a]mong the coroners’ inquisitions filed in the central courts between 1487 and 1660, only 1.6% of suicides were returned non compos mentis” (Ibid). Because the laws prohibiting suicide were so strictly upheld, “[a]s a rule, they excused only raving lunatics and regarded evidence of lesser mental disorders as proof that a suicide was guilty of his own murder” (Ibid). This evidence supports the idea that the mentally ill or mad, being such, received their due punishment for their actions, though performed in altered states of mind, through the refusal of proper burial and the forfeiture of property.
The audience first learns of Ophelia’s death from Gertrude, who reveals the nature of the incident “as accidental, passive, involuntary, [and] mad” when, in IV.vii.173 she proclaims that “an envious sliver broke” when Ophelia was sitting on a branch of a willow tree singing her mad songs (Neely 326). She continues her report by describing the scene of Ophelia’s drowning, saying,
Her clothes spread wide, and mermaidlike awhile they bore her up, which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and indued unto that element. (Shakespeare IV.ii.175-80).
Through this portrayal of Ophelia’s death, Gertrude, with her words,
[N]either condemns [Ophelia’s death] on religious grounds nor explicitly condones it on medical/legal grounds. Instead she narrates it without interpretation as a beautiful, “natural,” ritual of passage and purification, the mad body’s inevitable return to nature (Neely 327).
As Joshua Cohen points out that, through her announcement of Ophelia’s death, Gertrude “describes the drowning Ophelia as ‘mermaid-like,’ she brings into focus the precise nature of her tragedy, that of a young woman turned away at the threshold of sexual fulfillment, whose maiden love is slandered, rejected, thwarted” (1).
The methods of sentencing suicide victims in Shakespeare’s day were severly flawed. Ophelia’s death presents an excellent case “illuminat[ing] the problems that identifying suicides and burying their bodies presented to the passive drowning of high birth” (McDonald 316). The clown’s mispronunciation of the legal term se defendendo presents an interesting satire of the “arbitrary and subjective methods of coroners’ juries” in such cases. Furthermore,
Shakespeare’s treatment of Ophelia’s death and burial sustains the meditation on the consequences of self-destruction that Hamlet begins in his famous soliloquy…[and] exploits changing attitudes about suicide [of his day] (Ibid).
Although the clown mispronounces the term se defendendo, his and the gravediggers’ reasoning was quite similar to that of the coroners’ juries of Shakespeare’s day (Ibid). The limited burial rites that Ophelia is allowed portray that, although she may have received a verdict of non compos mentis, the “popular conviction that lunacy did not entirely excuse self-destruction” permeated Shakespeare’s writing, as she was buried on the north end of the churchyard with others of questionable death (314).
Hamlet, under close scrutiny, is replete with details that reveal that Ophelia died because of lost love and the subsequent madness that this created. Perhaps Elaine Showalter states it best when she records that “Drowning…becomes the truly feminine death in the dramas and literature of life, one which is a beautiful immersion and submersion in the female element” (3). Ophelia’s death is frequently attributed to “the conjunction of female mental disorder with love for Hamlet” (Owen 1). Although some critics believe that Ophelia committed suicide out of grief over the death of her father Polonius, this seems unlikely, as Claudius suggests this idea while having “his own axe to grind since he wished to stir Laertes up to ridding him of Hamlet” (Camden 252).
In conclusion, although Shakespeare portrays the varying views of his society concerning madness, suicide, and the burial of suicide victims of his day, he easily accomplishes the “task of cultural history…to identify the colors in the spectrum, not to resolve them in a single beam of light” (McDonald 317). Despite the belief of many critics that Ophelia grew mad because of grief over the murder of her father, it is evident that, in reality, she only attained madness out of a singular and unsatisfied love for Hamlet. As a passive drowning victim, her death was misconstrued as suicide when, in reality, she died accidentally while madly pining after her unrequited love. As a result, the maimed burial rites she receives are a great travesty to her honest yet oppressed personage. As noted by Arthur Palmer Hudson, “Tragedy creates a balance of affections… [in which] Shakespear (sic) has shown the mastery of his genius and of his power over the human heart” (68). Although Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, he still pays careful attention to matters of the heart, construing the tragedy of Ophelia as one of love lost.
Works Cited
Camden, Carroll. "On Ophelia's Madness." Shakespeare Quarterly 15.2 (1964): 247-55. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009.
Campbell, Erin E. "Sad Generations Seeking Water: The Social Construction of Madness in Ophelia and Quentin Compson." The Faulkner Journal 20.1-2 (2004): 1-9. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
Chapman, Alison A. "Ophelia's 'Old Lauds': Madness and Hagiography in Hamlet." Ed. Michelle Lee. Shakespearean Criticism 120 (2007): 1-13. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
Cohen, Joshua. "Mermaid-like: The Tragedy of Ophelia." Shakespearean Criticism 56.2 (2006): 1-2. Print.
Hudson, Arthur P. "Romantic Apologiae for Hamlet's Treatment of Ophelia." ELH 9.1 (1942): 59-70. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009.
MacDonald, Michael. "Ophelia's Maimed Rites." Shakespeare Quarterly 37.3 (1986): 309-17. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009.
Neely, Carol T. "Documents in Madness: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture." Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991): 315-38. JStor. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
Owen, Ruth J. "Claiming the Body: The Ophelia Myth in the GDR." The Germanic Review 82.3 (2007): 1-9. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of
Feminist Criticism." Ed. Dana R. Barnes. Shakespearean Criticism 35 (1997): 1-9. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
William, Shakespeare,. Hamlet. Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997. 1189-234. Print.
1 comment:
I really need a good article that is basically dummy proof. It needs to argue if her death was sucide or not. Any suggestions?
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