Eric Webster Mrs. Black English 12 28 October 2014 William Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be seen as an exposé of the conflict between the id, ego, and superego within the play’s characters. As defined by Freud, the id is the primitive and instinctive side of the personality that drives us toward satisfying our own pleasurable desires (Mitchell 26). The ego is the realistic part of the brain responsible for a sense of personal identity. The superego is the part of the personality that incorporates the values and morals into an image of oneself and can essentially override the id to control anti-social impulses (McLeod 1). In Hamlet, Ophelia, a young motherless noblewoman, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, and girlfriend of Hamlet struggles …show more content…
When speaking to her father in the beginning of the play, she says “I do not know, my lord, what I should think” (Shakespeare 1.1 113). She believes her father should form opinions for her, because she has no reason to believe that she has the power to think for herself. With a strong female role model, Ophelia might have learned to become an independent woman despite the surrounding repressive male forces that wanted her to remain naïve, innocent and submissive. In such a state, men easily manipulated her for their purposes. Hamlet, who takes advantage of Ophelia’s affection throughout the play, sees her as a sexual object and enlists her help to maintain his image of madness. In Act II, Polonius uses the alluring Ophelia as bait to discover why Hamlet had been behaving so curiously. Even Ophelia sees and accepts herself as an object defined by the men around her, depicting herself as a “passive object of Hamlet’s actions” (Fischer 5). In Act 2 after meeting with an emotionally disheveled Hamlet, Ophelia describes their interactions, saying “then goes he to the length of his arm….he falls to perusal of my face” (Shakespeare 2.1 101-102). She describes the scene as a third-party observer and does not seek to explain her emotional state. Ophelia essentially has no voice as it has been repressed by the way in which she has been raised. She envisions herself as the woman her father and brother want her to be. It is not surprising then that her father dies at the hands of Hamlet, the conflict it sets up in Ophelia’s mind plunges her into