It’s not easy being a girl, especially a young lady in love. First, you have to worry about what your parents will think about your new boy. Second, you have to figure out how intimate you want to get with said guy. Then, of course, there’s the whole boyfriend-killed-a-relative-and-has-been-exiled thing. Well, this is how William Shakespeare writes about tragic young love: always tense between the loyalty of the child and the family. What’s a young girl to do?
Well, given Shakespeare’s literary record in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, young women commit suicide when torn between lovers and families. Of course, such incidents have a tragic effect, but we are getting ahead of ourselves here. In fact, Romeo’s Juliet and Hamlet’s Ophelia have become something of a teenage girl idol, for better or worse. Juliet, probably the most famous wife of 13 years of the last 400 years, is often high school students’ first introduction to Shakespeare’s female characters. Ophelia is also another relatable character, often used as a symbol of disenfranchised adolescent girls in countless psychological and feminist works, including books from Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia to Sara Shandler’s Ophelia Speaks.
However, what makes these two female characters figures of interest, beyond their emotional passion and tragic endings, is their relationship with the men in their lives and how they cope. Ofelia is often seen as a victim of good patriarchy, thanks in part to Shakespeare’s sympathetic performance. She is completely obedient to her father and brother, who constantly use her as pawns to entrap Hamlet or instruct her on how to protect his euphemized “button,” or flower bud, because a “deflowered” woman is the worst thing that can happen. exists.
In fact, a quick study of a few selected quotes from Hamlet shows that the play is constantly preoccupied with his sexuality, as well as that of Queen Gertrude, which is why many literary scholars are keen to point to some incestuous hints in the prince. Danish. Most of the prominent quotes, such as the famous “take yourself to a nunnery” tirade against Ophelia, are accusatory or damning statements by Hamlet, whose misogyny runs rampant in the story of the murder of his father and the fratricide of Hamlet’s uncle. he. In fact, the whole matter of the murdered father occasionally takes a backseat to Hamlet’s concerns about Ophelia’s and her mother’s sexual purity or lack thereof, which is emphasized as a woman’s only value in the play. .
Let’s go back to Ofelia. After Hamlet unintentionally but unrepentantly kills her father, she goes berserk, delivering flowers and symbolic herbs from the garden (there’s a whole botanical theme here) and then falls into the river and drowns. It is not known whether it was intentional or accidental, but many critics side with suicide, quickly arguing that his death was because the loss of his father destabilized his life so drastically that he was unable to cope and muster personal agency to deal with it. herself. A victim of the oppressive patriarchal society.
Juliet has different but equally difficult situations with the men in her life. Unlike Ophelia, however, she exerts an unexpected amount of maturity, despite being only 13 years old. Apparently, girls mature faster than boys. She starts off being very dependent on her family (again, she’s only 13), but evolves over the course of the play as someone who makes her own decisions, her family be damned. In fact, she decides to choose Romeo over her family, especially after they try to push her to get married in Paris. Little do they know that she’s already married (TWIST!) and getting her man, even though he killed her cousin. While that may seem naive and a bit unhealthy, staying with someone who violently killed a blood relative, she makes her bed and lies in it too. In fact, she has the nerve to fake her own death in that very bed and evade her family in order to live happily ever after with Romeo. However, she’s too bad Romeo didn’t get the whole fake death note. Moral of the play: check your messages.
For a young woman of this time, she is breaking many rules, but she is unapologetic about it, dismissing the demands and restrictions placed on her simply because of her gender. Of course, she does it for a guy, but she does it anyway. When she decides to follow Romeo’s suicide, she does it out of choice and conviction, something we can’t say about Ofelia. Of course, Juliet had staked her entire family on her relationship with Romeo and she can’t easily reconcile with them, especially since they believe she’s dead and also threaten to disown her if she doesn’t marry Paris. In fact, that’s one area where Ophelia and Juliet share something in common: loss of family support and stability. Their shared situation, whether by choice or not, points to the larger issue surrounding these iconic female Shakespearean characters. They operate in a world that is not only unforgiving, but built with a built-in trapdoor in case they go out of bounds. They have no real safety net, no backup plan, no agency, and no survival skills. Ophelia goes crazy at the idea, while Juliet chooses suicide due to a lack of viable options. Shakespeare, a playwright whom Virginia Woolf praised as someone who could write knowledgeably from both the male and female perspectives, understood this. Their deaths, caused by a lack of support, are the real tragedy.
