Ophelia in Hamlet? (20 characters)?

This was one of the reasons I wrote my own version of the play (link in the citation), with an Ophelia who can hold her own against Hamlet.

I'm totally on board with judging Shakespeare by modern feminist standards. Feminists have been around forever; Socrates was a feminist. Juana Ines, in a 17th century environment that was even more repressive than Elizabethan England, managed to write feminist plays and poetry that still work today. Shakespeare doesn't do great if you score him on this curve. He seems to have been much better at seeing past the racial prejudice of his day than at seeing past gender prejudice. He does get much better at writing female characters, but he could never have written Buffy.

The best that can be said about Ophelia is that she's not completely unrealistic, given the culture she's in--if you see her not as a role model, but as a cautionary tale about paternal oppression, you may find her more palatable.

Classmate is right.

The thing is, when the play was written in the 17th century, life was very different for girls.

A girl had no option but to obey her father, then her husband.

Women had no rights, they couldn't have a career, they very rarely had any independence at all.

A father or a husband would be well within their rights to beat her severley if she disagreed with them, argued, disobeyed, defied them - anything.

Worse still, they could force her to marry the man of their choice - whether he was 5 years old or 75, nice or seriously nasty.

They could also disown her and disinherit her, leaving her without a penny in the world, and all she could do then was go into a nunnery or become a prostitute.

There was nothing she could have done about it.

Yes, she's not a feminist's dream - but consider the world she was living in.

There were no feminists. Females had no rights.

Although England was ruled by a strong Queen during much of Shakespeare's lifetime, that era in history was indeed a feminist nightmare by today's standards. There are female characters in Shakespeare's plays who are not all about obedience and victimhood, but it would be difficult to make the case that Ophelia is one of them.

If you know the times it's set in then you'd understand.