She had become the obsession and muse of another pre-raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who consumed her not just through his work but also through his flawed love. Critics often compare her life with Ophelia. She was a vibrant young woman who was an artist and a poet too. One of the most talked-about artworks of this era is the portrayal of Ophelia by John Everett Millais, the model immortalised in the painting is Elizabeth Siddal. Shakespeare’s Ophelia paved the way for another version of Ophelia, which we can understand through an artist, poet, and model by the name of Elizabeth Elenor Siddal.ĭuring the Victorian age, there were a couple of artists who went by the name of pre-raphaelites, they believed that art should be depicted how it is as opposed to the Raphelian understanding of art which heavily relies on grandeur. I have read Hamlet more than any play I have ever read, and I think this vapid feminist reading of her character takes away responsibility from the people who gaslit her, slut shamed her, and oppressed her. It has been suggested that Ophelia giving up her life was a way to stand up to the unjust patriarchal standards that she didn’t want to live up to. Shakespeare’s Ophelia, contrary to popular belief, is not a feminist icon. Her grave is what the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stands on. Ophelia’s story is eminent to Hamlet, but she does not exist without him she exists to serve the ideals of men and, in failing that, has to pay the price with her sanity and then her life. These two polarising men and their behaviour towards her quite literally drove her to madness, and yet her depiction in five scenes of Hamlet is merely seen as a tragic story of a young girl who is either infantilised or sexualised, but most of all, her conviction for love for pleasure is often overshadowed by fetishising her picturesque death. She was forced to choose between her love for Hamlet and her duty as a daughter. Her boyfriend had madness that the culture suggests had a method in it, and her father’s expectations of her are read as the product of their time. Ophelia was Hamlet’s girlfriend who was forced to choose between her toxic boyfriend and her strict idealistic father. Even the gendered lens of understanding Hamlet has also seen her as one-dimensional. In the initial readings of Hamlet, one may not strike a lot of complexities in her persona. The word Ophelia means “to offer”-Ophelia was an eternal lover who is used as a metaphor for being a fool in love, often neglecting her conviction and individual story. More often than not, this eternal assistance to the hero’s narratives is also portrayed as the all-consumable muse-a trope that’s been overdone but has finally come close to its expiry date. Ophelia walked so that Tara from Tamasha could run.
One thing that is often lost in translation is how Shakespeare created the heroine Ophelia as a road map for the manic pixie dream girl complex in our culture.
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