Ophelia, who appears in only five of the play’s twenty scenes, has been represented as dutiful daughter, beloved beauty, mad woman, and drowned innocent. She has seemed to be symbolic and iconographic as probably the most frequently illustrated and cited of Shakespeare’s heroines. One of the most striking elements of the Hamlet film adaptations is their treatment of Ophelia as an innocent victim trapped in the most tragic circumstances. In this article I wish to examine how Ophelia’s transformation is effected visually through eight notable Hamlet films directed by Laurence Olivier, Grigori Kozintsev, Tony Richardson, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Kline, Michael Almereyda, and Campbell Scott.
Ophelia is represented as the projection of male characters that set aside her statements about herself and constrain her to obey. Her sole preoccupation is her relationship with Hamlet, but he regards her as a jilt and a dissembler, and projects upon her the guilt and pollution he has found in his mother’s sexuality. Film directors develop a tendency to focus Ophelia’s alienation and her sense of oppression when she is trapped by circumstances outside her control.
The question of genuine love between Hamlet and Ophelia has often been disregarded or overlooked, but in recent films directors seem to try to give a new interpretation of the Hamlet/Ophelia story. In many textual criticisms Ophelia, innocent and immature on the brink of sexual commitment, has become null and dissolved as a love object that Hamlet is pursuing. In film versions, however, she presents herself as a sexual being or moves towards her sexual unconscious that connected her essential femininity.
For Ophelia has become the cultural icon of femininity, her madness is now seen in more contemporary terms, as schizophrenia, as the erotomaniac was in the seventeenth and the hysteric in the nineteenth. She has become emblem or icon by Gertrude whose willow speech gives the description of Ophelia’s drowning as art objects or as objects of the gaze. Film directors seem to transform the image of the drowned Ophelia from aesthetic emblem to the realistic submerged body or to show her dead body in her funeral scene without description of her drowning scene. Nevertheless Ophelia’s challenging images and controversial characters offer a new perspective on her action as protest and rebellion.