Water and Woman: Ophelia’s Femininity in the Elizabethan Age

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201215.433How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Ophelia, Shakespeare, femininity, water, woman

Abstract

To further the studies about Shakespeare’s Ophelia in the play Hamlet, this paper will discuss Ophelia and her femininity by looking at the association between water and woman. By exploring the attributes of the dew and Ophelia’s womanhood, as well as the connection between the two, we can find the implied features of Ophelia’s femininity including the delicacy, hollowness, and the duality of purity and eroticism in the femininity. Moreover, the paper will correspond Ophelia’s womanhood to the Elizabethan expectations for woman. Ophelia thus can become an example for the female victims who were much required and expected by the patriarchal gender ideology. As for the methodology, this paper will mainly employ close-reading to look into Ophelia’s character and her interactions with other male characters including Hamlet and Polonius.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyi Chen
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/17
TI  - Water and Woman: Ophelia’s Femininity in the Elizabethan Age
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 250
EP  - 256
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201215.433
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201215.433
ID  - Chen2020
ER  -