Ophelia is one of the most complex characters of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. She serves to reveal the dual essence of woman nature, which Shakespeare obviously wanted to emphasize. There is an enormous quantity of theories on what the role of Ophelia in the play is, how her character influences the plot, what author’s ideas and thoughts she introduces to the play. The images of an innocent child, a spy, subduing wordlessly to own father, a young woman revealing her sexuality through subtle signals, a lover and a traitor, are all confusing each other, uniting into an impressive, full of hidden meanings, character.

According to Amanda Mabillard, the purpose of having Ophelia in the play is to reveal Hamlet’s character development, his transformation into a man who is convinced that all women are “whores”, that even those who look innocent from outside are corrupted and spoiled inside. “The extent to which Hamlet feels betrayed by Gertrude is far more apparent with the addition of Ophelia to the play. Hamlet’s feelings of rage against his mother can be directed toward Ophelia, who is, in his estimation, hiding her base nature behind a guise of impeccability” (Mabillard). However, the author insists that despite Hamlet’s treatment to the young girl, despite his rage and disapproval, we perceive Ophelia as someone very different from what he claims her to be: “To those who are not blinded by hurt and rage, Ophelia is the epitome of goodness” (Mabillard). Her unhappy fortune is the result of youngness, naivety, pureness, tenderness and inability to protect herself from harshness of life, unprepared for world’s brutality. Her weak soul and mind go insane but “even in her insanity she symbolizes, to everyone but Hamlet, incorruption and virtue”. (Mabillard)

Susan Lamb centers her attention upon Restoration and eighteenth-century dealings with Ophelia’s sexuality. Her research proposes that early Ophelia’s “reveal the dark side of the assumption that open expressions of sexual desire and freedom from oppression are one and the same thing” and also “demonstrate the way in which an exclusive focus on women’s sexuality can in fact erase or obscure the place and influence of women in the public sphere” (Lamb, 106). The author claims that Ophelia’s character was for a long time misinterpreted because of the attempts to de-sexualize her, which actually was only arousing interest to her sexuality, suppressing the true reasons of her madness, and the role of social factors in the young girl’s misfortune. “It is not woman’s sexual desire but the place of women in the social and political web that is problematic. Ophelia’s position as the daughter of a powerful courtier, the lover of the Prince who kills her father, the sister of a man with considerable political power, and as a woman whose speech in madness has political implications for her hearers is lost in what has become a long-term focus on her sexuality” (Lamb,117).

In his article Steve Henderson arouses the question of influence of patriarchal society on the plot of the play and on the Ophelia’s character in particular through the close examination of feminist argument. Referring to the sexual innuendos in the dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia, he suggests that Ophelia’s insensitiveness to Prince’s bawdy hints can simply be explained by the fact that “the author is male in a male-dominant culture, and is representing the dialogue from his point of view, not necessarily from the way a cultured woman would think or feel about such humor” (Henderson). According to the author, the play is probably full of such blunders, which confuses our percept of Ophelia, being treated as both a “whore” and a naïve child. Thus the author claims that “the patriarchal society of the Western world had powerfully negative implications for the freedom of women to express themselves, and in turn the psyche of the woman was almost exclusively subsumed (artistically, socially, linguistically, and legally) by the cultural psyche of the man” which made the “sexual objectification” a question open for discussion. (Henderson)