Ophelia Character Analysis

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McCallum 1 Maya McCallum Ms. D. Salter Honors English 05 December 2010 Ophelia: Character Analysis The character that I have chosen to analyze is Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s famous play, Hamlet. In this essay, I will be focusing on Ophelia’s portrayal in this great work. She was shown as one of the main characters, but one that was rarely around for any of the plot’s pivotal points. In fact, her death was one of the biggest plot points, but she obviously was not around to witness this. Ophelia was not a protagonist, nor was she an antagonist; she was actually more of a catalyst for change. I chose Ophelia to study for this specific purpose. She was a young girl, characterized by her innocence and naivety and one that ended up dying before her full potential was ever realized. Ophelia’s main personality trait is a tie between her innocence, or her purity, and her perfection. She did what she was told without question, even when it went against her own desires, shown when her father ordered her to stop seeing Hamlet, to which she responded with promises that she “shall obey, my lord,” (1.3.136). However, she was not nearly as innocent as she seemed, in my unofficial opinion. Innocence is defined as when one is without guilt, or it can also be thought of as when someone does not have any personal experience with the evil widespread throughout the world. Ophelia’s well of innocence starts to run dry when she confronts her brother, Laertes, on his impending trip to Paris. She says to him, “But, good my brother, Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And reaks not his own rede” (1.3.46-51). In more or less certain terms, she tells him to not tell her

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