Ophelia Observations
As if a new Taylor Swift album isn’t thrilling enough, The Life of a Showgirl adds yet another Shakespearean female character to the T-Swift oeuvre with the song “The Fate of Ophelia” (joining Juliet from “Love Story”).
Full disclosure: I’m obsessed with Shakespeare in popular culture, and I hope that this blog will be your mothership for riffs, hot takes (and the occasional gasp) at how the Bard still speaks to us.
Ophelia is fascinating because Hamlet’s like a teaser about her complicated teenage-girl inner life. She leaves us with so many unanswered questions! Did she actually commit suicide? (The play leaves it ambiguous.) Was she pregnant with Hamlet’s baby? (In one of her mad ravings, she mentions rue, an herb well-known to be an abortifacient.) In the play, adult men exploit Ophelia for their own dimwitted or downright corrupt ends, and there’s not a single female ally to give her guidance or support. Hamlet has his bestie, Horatio, and his frenemies, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. Ophelia’s got no one. (And no, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, who only acknowledges Ophelia when she’s going mad or dead, doesn’t count.)
People have been hating on “The Fate of Ophelia” as a girl-rescued-by-a-guy revision of Shakespeare’s tragic breakup story that departs (tragically) from Taylor’s usual messaging about female independence. OK, fine, fair enough (“You dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia”). But I just love that Ophelia’s getting all this attention, oh so rightly deserved.