The red in the water resembles blood, a colour physically connected to Ophelia as red poppies drop from her lap and into the water. Poppies were considered a highly symbolic flower in England in the 1840s because, in the early nineteenth century, scarlet corn poppies grew over the battlefields from the Napoleonic Wars.
Symbolism. The weeping willow tree leaning over Ophelia is a symbol of forsaken love. The nettles that are growing around the willow's branches represent pain. The daisies floating near Ophelia's right hand represent innocence.
Thomas Francis Dicksee's Ophelia has the long red hair of the Pre-Raphaelite muses, crowned with colorful flowers.
Hughes shows Ophelia as a melancholy young woman with piercing blue eyes and flowing red hair. In her madness, she is gathering flowers to hang on the willow tree; she will soon slip into the stream and drown. Hughes includes the same flowers and plants that Shakespeare chose for their symbolic meanings.
Ophelia uses flowers as symbols of her deep sorrow and grief. She is very upset because her father, Polonius, has just been killed by Hamlet. Being a sensitive and intelligent young woman, Ophelia needs to express herself, and she does so by passing out flowers to the court in her seeming mad state of mind.
Background: Ophelia's syndrome is the association of Hodgkin's Lymphoma and memory loss, coined by Dr. Carr in 1982, while it's most remembered for the eponym in reminiscence of Shakespeare's character, Dr.
Ophelia's final words are addressed to either Hamlet, or her father, or even herself and her lost innocence: “And will a not come again? / No, no, he is dead, / Go to thy death-bed, / He never will come again. / … / God a mercy on his soul. And of all Christian souls. God buy you.” Next, she drowns herself.
However, the explicit sexual references in Ophelia's songs perhaps account for her obsession with the now absent Hamlet, as in “promising his love” to her earlier in the play and then being scorned, she is doubly heartbroken alongside the death of her father.
In recent years, she has become a strong feminist heroine, even surviving Hamlet in some fictional versions of the story, to lead a life of her own.
The genus Ophelia is in the family Gentianaceae in the major group Angiosperms (Flowering plants).
Ophelia looks black because she is black. More precisely she is mixed race, as only her mother was black. Laertes is also mixed race. The creators did a fantastic job of creating a variety of representation for ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
To Laertes, she gives rosemary, for remembrance, and pansies, for thought, suggesting both their shared history and her lost faculties.
Ophelia's drowning is the consummate representation of an eternal retreat into the feminine, trading an individual voice for eternal silence in union with feminine essence. In turn, her death expresses the danger of reducing an individual to his or her gender and disregarding the voice of the marginalized.
Rosemary and Pansies-
Ophelia gives Rosemary and Pansy to her brother Laertes. She herself states that these two flowers are for thoughts, prayers and remembrance.
The penultimate scene of the play begins with the two clowns digging a grave for the late Ophelia. They debate whether she should be allowed to have a Christian burial, because she committed suicide.
While she lives in the same patriarchal society that demands that she subjugate herself to her father and her brother until she is married, Ophelia has fallen in love with Prince Hamlet. There is strong evidence that she has even had sexual relations with him.
Hamlet betrays Ophelia by refusing his love for her and being the cause of her madness with words such as “I loved you not” (III. I. 119) and “get thee to a nunnery” (III.
Suddenly, the funeral procession for Ophelia enters the churchyard, including Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and many mourning courtiers. Hamlet, wondering who has died, notices that the funeral rites seem “maimed,” indicating that the dead man or woman took his or her own life (V.i.242).
Some see Ophelia's death as an accident; others see it as a suicide resulting from the accumulation of a series of unfortunate events: her rejection by her boyfriend, her father's murder, and her possible pregnancy.
SARAH: Ophelia made a wreath of flowers and attempted to hang it on the branches of the willow. While doing so, she slipped and fell into the brook.
The name was most likely derived from the ancient Greek “ōphéleia” (ὠφέλεια) meaning “aid” or “benefit,” but it is best known as the name of Shakespeare's tragic heroine in his play “Hamlet.”
Ophelia's lack of autonomy stems from her treatment by her father and brother. Laertes offers Ophelia advice, though it has a subtext of cruelty to it and implies her ignorance rather than innocence. If her “chaste treasure” were to “open” she would lose what power she had in respectable society.
Tragic flaw: Ophelia has no control over her mind, body, and relationships, she doesn't think for herself.