Sex and women-hood seem to be of deep concern within this play and love seems to take a very distant back seat. Within most of Shakespeare’s plays there has been a certain emphasis on love and women. Whether that be that they are breaking the mold in the sense they are more bold that most women during that time period. Within “Mid-Summer Night’s Dream”, for example the focus was on love but more about who was in love with whom. When we find out that Hamlet and Ophelia are “in love” there is little talk about whether or not they “should” be in love but more focus on the physical attraction that Hamlet is more focused on.
I found this quite interesting that this seems to be a very untouched subject within Shakespeare’s plays. There was little talk about with within “Much Ado About Nothing” when Hero was supposedly seen fraternizing with another man but there isn’t much talk on the importance of staying a virgin up until this point. I can’t help but think of those old television shows when you hear the adult woman telling the young women how “men are only after one thing”. Yet, this is the only time that I have found this talk occur within Shakespeare plays. During the time Shakespeare was writing, it was of the utmost importance for women to keep their virginity in order for them to be of any use when the father had to marry off his daughter. Those who weren’t virgins before they married were not going to marry any one “good” or more importantly marry anyone.
I personally am interested in focusing on why Ophelia is the first female character that Shakespeare focuses on to keep her woman-hood away from Hamlet. Because, he cannot love her he only wants to woo her for sex. Later on in the play do we also have the famous line of “Get thee to a nunnery”, which as most of us are aware the nunnery was for a place of whores. Why Ophelia and why not someone like Hero (though the idea of the sanctity of virginity was touched upon for her). Perhaps due to the unstable Hamlet this was meant to be a warning to Ophelia, perhaps Shakespeare was using her virginity to warn her off before her lover went completely mad. Either way it will be interesting to closely follow the importance of virginity/purity within the rest of this play.
New Paltz Students Blogging about Shakespeare
2 comments:
Hi Victoria! I never thought too much about the emphasis Shakespeare placed on the virginity of this one character as being important until you brought it up. It's like I just glanced over it! The idea of virginity is brought up in a few plays, just not as blatantly as in Hamlet. I think it would be interesting to explore this further. Why is it so important for women to be a virgin? Were all women really virgins? Is Shakespeare trying to warn women that all men really want from them is sex? Is he trying to save Ophelia from this fate by trying to get her to a nunnery? Wouldn't going to a nunnery be a sort of death for her since she would not be able to have children in one? There are so many unanswered questions that come about from this post, and I, too, would like to see where it goes!
Tori and Steph both do a nice job of calling our attention to Ophelia (whom we'll be talking about more in the coming classes). But I would just like to echo Amy's point here that virginity and chastity are objectified in Shakespeare--a woman is a valuable commodity insofar as she is pure and marriageable. This is the sad undercurrent to Laertes's and Polonius's words to Ophelia.
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