It’s not easy being a girl, especially a young girl in love. First, you need to worry about what your parents will think about your new guy. Second, you have to figure out how intimately you want to get with said guy. Then, of course, there’s the whole boyfriend-killed-a-relative-and-has-been-exiled thing. Well, that’s how William Shakespeare writes about young tragic 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 kill themselves when they are divided between lovers and families. Of course, those incidents have a tragic effect, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. In fact, Romeo’s Juliet and Hamlet’s Ophelia have become something of a teenage female idol, for better or worse. Juliet, probably the most famous 13-year-old wife of the last 400 years, is often a high school student’s first introduction to Shakespeare’s female characters. Ophelia is also another relatable character, often used as a symbol of disenfranchised teenage 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. Ophelia is often seen as a victim of the good patriarchy, thanks in part to Shakespeare’s sympathetic portrayal. She is completely obedient to her father and brother, who constantly use her as pawns to catch Hamlet or give her instructions on how to protect his euphemized “button,” or flower bud, because a “deflowered” woman is the worst thing. exists.
In fact, a quick study of some selected quotes from Hamlet shows that the play is constantly preoccupied with his sexuality, as well as that of Queen Gertrude, so many literary scholars are eager to point out some incestuous hints in the Danish prince. Most of the prominent quotes, like the famous “take you to a nunnery” diatribe against Ophelia, are accusatory or damning statements by Hamlet, whose misogyny runs rampant in the story about the murder of his father and the fratricide of Hamlet’s uncle. the. In fact, the whole murdered father thing occasionally takes a backseat to Hamlet’s concerns about Ophelia’s and her mother’s sexual purity or lack thereof, which is emphasized as the only value of a woman in the play. .
Let’s go back to Ophelia. After Hamlet unintentionally but unrepentantly kills her father, she goes berserk, delivers symbolic flowers and herbs from the garden (there’s quite a botanical theme here), and then falls into the river and drowns. Whether it was intentional or accidental is not known, but many critics side with the 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 herself. A victim of oppressive patriarchal society.
Juliet has different but equally difficult situations with the men in her life. However, unlike Ophelia, she possesses an unexpected maturity, despite being only 13 years old. Apparently, girls mature faster than boys. She starts out very dependent on her family (again, she’s only 13), but evolves over the course of the play into someone who makes her own decisions, damn her family. 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 is already married (TWIST!) and staying with 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 avoid her family so she can 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, throwing off 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 by choice and with conviction, something that we cannot say of Ophelia. Of course, Juliet had staked her entire family on her relationship with Romeo and she cannot easily reconcile with them, especially since they believe she is dead and also threaten to disown her if she does not 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 theme that surrounds 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 freaks out 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 knowingly from both a male and a female perspective, understood this. Their deaths, caused by lack of support, are the real tragedy.