roofbeams:

not to be like shakespeare was a feminist but shakespeare was obviously very intentional about onstage vs offstage deaths and I don’t think it’s an accident that we never see ophelia’s dead body and that gertrude is the one who describes it: after having been defined only by hamlet, laertes and polonius for the whole play she’s suddenly described by another woman for the first time, which minimizes the extent to which the description of her death (unlike every other description of her) is focused on her fetishized sexual purity. it’s ironic therefore that the image of Dead Ophelia has been THE icon of sexualized female death for literally all of western cultural history since then