A Comparison Of Love In Hamlet And The Awakening

When an individual thinks about the concept of love, positive thoughts come to mind such as affection, romance, and passion. Love is usually not associated with the negative possible outcomes. Love is often an important part of a story; it builds up excitement and gets the plot going. In William Shakespeare 's Hamlet and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the emotion of love is portrayed to drive a character insane. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia’s love for Hamlet ultimately leads to her madness. In order for Ophelia to build her relationship with Hamlet, she must go against her father’s orders considering he strictly prohibited her from seeing him. Hamlet then breaks up with Ophelia saying, “I did love you once,” and then tells her to go “to a nunnery,” causing Ophelia to feel a great amount of betrayal. Ophelia is already heartbroken, and now Hamlet murders her father which was too much for her to handle. The love Ophelia had for Hamlet was one that is considered as infatuation; Ophelia was young and did not know much about love,

What makes their deaths different is that Ophelia was inferior to the men in her life while Edna was an empowered woman who seemed to be in control of the men in her life. Ophelia’s death is questionable to whether it is a suicide or not; I believe it was a suicide considering she had nothing to her without the two important men in her life. On the contrary, Edna’s suicide was something that she was finally doing for herself after living a life attempting to please society. The ocean where Edna took her own life symbolizes her rebirth, a new life for her. Evans says, “her death can be viewed either as a defeat (as the end of any possibility of genuine renewal and rebirth) or as a victory...It is part of the artistic greatness of The Awakening that Chopin, by opening up the possibility of both of these interpretations” Moreover, the blurred mental state caused the characters to commit