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Esther Cunningham
Professor Dunn-Hensley
Engl 327
27 February, 2015
Ophelia the Budding Feminist or Ophelia the Angsty Teen?
Right, youre Ophelia! You are a beautiful and independent young woman, and
although it makes you roll your eyes when you think about it, youve fallen in love with a
prince (North 46). This is how Ryan Norths introduces Ophelia in his imaginative chooseyour-own adventure book. He promotes an Ophelia that is full of courage, intelligence, cunning,
and the physical strength to kill everyone in town. But, while this type of presentations of
Ophelia is entertaining, it is actually an imposition of modern thinking onto Shakespeares
Ophelia, not an analysis of what the playwright himself wrote about the character. Norths work
is less of a scholarly analysis and more of a fan fiction where he and other authors can freely cast
their idealistic views of women, specifically of female sexuality and female madness onto a
character from a far off world.
Ever since the first performances of Hamlet, Ophelia has represented all women of her
time. Artists and scholars alike have latched onto Ophelia, stripped her of the choices that
Shakespeare made for her, and transformed her into a projection screen. Every group fights to
ensure that their slide is the one that shines on Ophelia. However, these projections are
manipulations of the text. They ignore what Shakespeare chose for Ophelia to do. They decide
that the Ophelia in the text is not a person worth studying and so they use her much in the way
scholars have condemned her father Polonius for using her. This essay will attempt to evaluate
the role modern youth culture and Young Adult Literature have projected onto Ophelia and

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compare it to the role Shakespeare wrote for her.
In the introduction to Shakespeare and Youth Culture, the authors Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin
J. Wetmore, Jr. and Robert L. York claim that youth is a fundamentally mediated
culture (Hulbert et al. 6). In other words, adolescents select the elements of themselves so they
can control how they are perceived. This is also known as branding. So much of American
popular culture now caters to youth,1 observers Herbert J. Gans (7). specifically to the middle
class (mostly white) teenagers that live in the suburbs (7). These adolescents and their desires
control many of the economic markets in consumeristic America. What they think is hip, cool,
rad (or whatever the buzzword of the day is for them) is what drives the market. And so most
teenagers only know canonical works such as Shakespeare through branding.2
In order for the Shakespeare industry to remain a lucrative business, it must brand itself
in a way that is alluring to the youth culture. They must remove the stigma of stuffiness and
rigidity that the Elizabethan starched collars have conferred on his plays. Shakespeare has
become recognized only as the inspiration behind films such as Baz Luhrmanns Romeo + Juliet
or Shes the Man which is loosely based on his Twelfth Night. As Twitchell points out, Romeo,
Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? and To be or not to be are as known out of context as they
are in contextThey are marketing slogans for the branding of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is
not only an industry and a trade, but it is also a brand.
For Ophelia this branding of the Bard manifests itself in youth culture in two main ways:
Ophelia the Budding Feminist and Ophelia the Angsty Teen. Two promoters of Ophelia the
1

Herbert J. Gans as quoted in the introduction to Hulbert, Jennifer, Kevin J. Wetmore, and Robert L.
York. Dude, Wheres My Bard? Reducing, Translating, and Referencing Shakespeare for Youth: An
Introduction. Shakespeare and Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.. 7.
2

James Twitchell as summarized in ibid. 6.

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Budding Feminist are authors Lisa Klein with her novel Ophelia and Ryan North and his chooseyour-own-adventure book To Be or Not to Be. They take Ophelia in the five scenes that she is in
and turn her into the protagonist for their works, making her strong, capable, determined, and
able to outsmart any man. The creator of Ophelia the Angsty Teen is psychologist Mary Piphers
analysis of modern girls in her New York Times best-seller: Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves
of Adolescent Girls (Hulbert 199). She turns Ophelia into the epitome of every teenage girl.
In the final paragraphs of Lisa Kleins prologue to Ophelia, a retelling of Shakespeares
famous tragedy, her Ophelia protests: I cannot rest while this history remains untold I will
dispel the darkness about me and cast a light upon the truth (Klein 3). For Klein, the truth of
Ophelias story is that she is educated and bright (9), defiant (17), courageous (25), wise and
witty in words (42) but also left alone by her family (9), not taken seriously by those in authority
(10), and a sexual object to boys and men (20, 66). Kleins Ophelia rejects what her culture, a
seventeenth century Denmark meant to represent Shakespeares England, elevates as the ideal
woman, silent, chaste, and obedient and frail and lacking in virtue (38). For the feminist
Ophelia who finds herself in a patriarchal society, humility was a hard virtue for me to
learn (39). This Ophelia is not virtuous virgin. When she first kisses Hamlet, she wanted
more (63). However, she will not allow her patriarchal society to treat women as mere toys for
their amusement. She berates Hamlet when he calls her fellow maid Christina a light one,
undeserving of [the mens] love (80). Kleins Ophelia has the astonishing ability to see through
the inherent sexism of her culture and does not have time to waste trying to fit into the mold
expected of her and so she learns the skill of herbal medicine, becomes pregnant, secretly
marries Hamlet, and fakes her drowning so that she can escape to an all female convent.

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Ryan North in his choose-your-own-adventure adaptation of Hamlet also makes Ophelia
a Budding Feminist. Like Klein, North sets his To Be or Not to Be in a place meant to imitate
Elizabethan England. Unlike Klein though, North couches one of Western literatures heaviest
tragedies in humor and lightness. North, in a play ridiculed for its lack of action, forces the
reader to make a choice on every page of the book. One of the first choices for the reader is
which character they will choose to follow. If the reader select Ophelia, they are choosing an
awesome lady in her late 20s, with a calm, competent, and resourceful demeanor. Shes got a +1
bonus to science, but shes also got a -1 weakness against water, so heads up! (North 4) and a
beautiful and independent young woman who is determined to invent indoor heating and
cooling (46). Ophelia can decide whether or not to let Laertes into her room, disrupting her
valuable science research, and decide whether or not she wants to listen to him warn her about
her physical relationship with Hamlet. Norths Laertes informs Ophelia Look, if you have sex
before marriage, then youll be ruined for other men and nobody will ever want you. Hes only
dating you because he wants sex. Dont sex him because Im youre brother and Im telling you
not to (525). The two option North presents are: Throw him out of your room and slam the
door in his face or sit down beside him, for some reason, and tell him that he makes a lot of
sense (somehow?) and youll do as he says (525), which is the choice that Shakespeare made.
North is incredulous that an independent woman in charge of her own destiny would do
whatever someone else tells you, because anyone other than you probably knows better about
tour own life than you do (550). He pleads with his reader to not obey the advice of Laertes and
Polonius, Please, I beg you, do not choose this option (550). And for the readers dumb enough
to ignore his advice, they flip the page and are greeted with theses words: Listen, Im going to

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cut our losses here. Youre not allowed to be Ophelia for a while. BE HAMLET: turn to page
99 (547). Through this rejection of Shakespeares Ophelia, North shows that the Bards version
of her is weak, pathetic, and not worth understanding or pursuing. Instead, North wants his
readers to follow an Ophelia that is a scientist trying to discover indoor heating (46) or an
Ophelia who decides to ignore her fathers and her brothers advice so that she can make outor
morewith Hamlet whenever she wants (527) or an Ophelia that manages to fight off all the
stupid characters who are trying to promote the patriarchy of Shakespeares time (627).
This powerful, assertive Ophelia the Budding Feminist is strongly contrasted by her alterego Ophelia the Angsty Teen made popular by psychologist Mary Pipher. In her 1994 work
Reviving Ophelia, she creates a backstory for Shakespeares character: As a girl, Ophelia is
happy and free, but with adolescence, she loses herself. When she falls in love with Hamlet, she
lives only for his approval. She has no inner direction; rather she struggles to meet the demands
of Hamlet and her father (Pipher 20). Pipher goes on to claim that Ophelias death is a result of
her efforts to please (20). Pipher only mentions Shakespeares character one other time in her
text, at the very end of her work where she claims that Ophelia died because she could not
grow. She became the objects of others lives and lost her true subjective self (292). The rest of
Piphers work goes on to describe the stories of various adolescent girls she has counseled and
what they reveal about the cultures view and treatment of women. Piphers Ophelia is one that
represents the modern adolescent: a young girl desperately caught between pleasing her parents
and pleasing the boys around her, a girl who does not know what she herself wants because she
is so focused on gaining the approval of those around her, a girl who is lost and confused when
she no longer has that approval.

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Both of these interpretations of Ophelia, while resonant with the modern young girl, do
not follow the Ophelia of Shakespeares text. Hulbert, in her chapter Adolescence Thy Name
is Ophelia!: The Opelia-ization of the Contemporary Teenage Girl, considers both Piphers and
Shakespeares Ophelias. She begins by raising the question: what is the image of Ophelia that
has taken center stage? If teenage girls are meant to identify with Ophelia, who, precisely is it
with whom they are identifying? (Hulbert 205). She continues on by saying that the three main
defining characteristics of Ophelia the Angsty Teen are: the hormone factor, which includes
universal experiences such as acne, overwhelming emotions, and anxiety over ones place in the
world; the burden of American Culture, or sexism, capitalism, and lookism, which is the
evaluation of a person solely on the basis of appearance;3 and, lastly, Americans culture
demand that teen girls distance themselves from their parents emotionally and turn to their peers
for guidance and support (206). This is the Ophelia that Pipher creates.
However Halbert challenges the idea that Piphers Ophelia is the one of Shakespeares
text. Although the Ophelia that Shakespeare presents us with is around nineteen or twenty when
she is first on stage4, she of course has had an unseen childhood and has experienced all the
emotional and hormonal changes that puberty entails and Pipher mentions (207). However the
other two factors that Pipher presents as essential to the modern Ophelia would not have affected

Mary Pipher as quoted by Hulbert, Jennifer. ""Adolescence, Thy Name Is Ophelia!": The Opheliaization of the Contemporary Teenage Girl." Shakespeare and Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006. Print. 206.
4

Nevertheless, it is important to note that Ophelia is in her middle to late teens, old enough to have been
courted by Hamlet for a while, before he left to study at Wittenberg. The age range may seem
insignificant, but in terms of adolescence, it is the difference between a perplexed mess of a 16-year-old
girl in the thick of her teen angst and a recovering, well-adjusted woman of 19 who has pulled herself
through with only a few scrapes and bruises remaining. She argues that this separates Shakespeares
Ophelia from Piphers because Piphers Ophelia is one caught up in the midst of emotions she does not
understand and cannot control in the midst of puberty. ibid. 207.

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Shakespeares Ophelia at all. According to Hulbert, The troubles of the contemporary Ophelia
were not prominent 300 years ago because they are born from a capitalist, commercial, advanced
technological society (209). Shakespeares Ophelia does not suffer in a society whose
unrealistic beauty expectations perpetuate unhealthy views of female bodies. His Ophelia is not
one of the survivors of a culture that has experienced a Feminist Revolution (209).
In order for the New Poetics movement of feminist dramatic criticism (203) to move
past a mere criticism of patriarchal society, postfeminist critique must also support [womens]
liberation from the cultural fictions of the female gender.5 (203). But in liberating the female
characters from the texts, these academics can ignore the intentional choices made by the author.
Shakespeare made specific choices about what Ophelia says. As actors and readers that examine
his work, we must first consider why Shakespeare would choose to treat Ophelia as he did before
we can denounce his choices for her as sexist and controlling.
In Hamlet, Ophelias first line is a question: Do you doubt that? (I.3.5) and as the play
progresses she continues to ask questions instead of giving definitive answers. She is guarded
and cautious in her speech. Unlike Hamlet, whose five major monologues drive the show,
Ophelia is given one chance to comment to the audience on what she is thinking. And even then,
she is commenting on Hamlets downfall (II.1.155-166). Ophelias inner workings are not
revealed to the audience. Only when her father is dead and she is mad do we hear songs that
express the true sorrow Ophelia is feeling.
In the first three acts, Ophelia is only included in the action when it involves Hamlet.
First, her brother Laertes and her father Polonius warn her not to have sex with Hamlet because it

Sue-Ellen Case as quoted by ibid. 203.

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would ruin any future hope of marriage (1.3). Ophelia is next on stage when she is proving to
Polonius that she has followed his commands by informing him that Hamlet is pursuing her in a
new and strange manner. Ophelias obedience to her father reveals to the royal couple the antic
disposition (I.5.190) that Hamlet has assumed. She then participates in her father and the kings
plan to determine Hamlets cause of madness (III.1). Once his madness is confirmed through the
older mens spying, Ophelia treats Hamlet as a madman while watching the Mousetrap with him.
She only offers curt responses to his questions, careful not to say anything that might provoke an
already mad Hamlet (III.2). After Hamlet accidentally stabs her father, Ophelia appears twice
more, both times distraught by the murder of her beloved father. She becomes a foil to Hamlets
madness. Hamlet feigns insanity at the murder of his father; Ophelia truly goes insane (IV.4.21).
She is now a document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted (IV.4.186).
Scholars throughout the ages have fixated on how Polonius uses Ophelia to further his
plans or on how Hamlet uses her for his own physical pleasure. But very few seem to consider
what Shakespeare the author, uses her for. His primary use of Ophelia is not to comment on the
role of women in patriarchal societies. He instead uses her to illuminate and deepen the
audiences understanding of Hamlets response to his fathers murder. Elaine Showalter in her
conclusion to Representing Ophelia asserts that presentations of both Ophelia the Budding
Feminist and Ophelia the Angsty Teen show us how these representations have overflowed the
text. These reinventions of Ophelia overstep their bounds. Authors like Klein and North and
psychologists like Pipher have manipulated Ophelia in a way they had no right to do. By trying
to liberate her from Shakespeares text, they have ignored the voice that she has in Hamlet and
instead used her for their own agendas in the same way Polonius does.

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Bibliography
Hulbert, Jennifer, Kevin J. Wetmore, and Robert L. York. ""Adolescence, Thy Name Is
Ophelia!": The Ophelia-ization of the Contemporary Teenage Girl." Shakespeare and Youth
Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.
Klein, Lisa. Ophelia: A Novel. New York: Bloomsbury U.S.A. Children's, 2006. Print.
North, Ryan, and William Shakespeare. To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-path Adventure.
Breadpig, 2013. Print.
Peterson, Kaara L., and Deanne Williams. The Afterlife of Ophelia. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012. Print.
Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia. New York: Ballantine, 1994. Print.
Ray, Michelle. Falling for Hamlet: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2011. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. New York: Modern
Library, 2008. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of
Feminist Criticism." Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Dana Ramel Barnes. Vol. 35. Detroit: Gale
Research, 1997. Print.