I believe one of the major themes of Hamlet is that the lack of freedom and the feeling of being trapped by one’s situation can lead to extreme actions, such as suicide, in order to escape and regain control. The two biggest examples of this is Hamlet hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet is trapped in a situation where his father was murdered, his mother whom he thought loved his father enters into an incestuous marriage quickly after he death, he is told to get over the death of his father only months after, and he is forced to live with the killer of his father, his uncle. When he learns of the murder, he simply can’t tell everyone because that would be treason against the king. Everyone around him, including his friends and Ophelia, are used against him by Claudius and he feels he can trust no one, and to top it all off, the ghost of his father assigns him with the task of revenge. He feels that there is no way out of his situation, so he contemplates suicide as a way out multiple times as a way out, with the most famous occurrence being his “To be or not to be” soliloquy”. He can’t even find it within himself to take revenge because he ponders too much, leading him into a death spiral of depression and hopelessness. On the other hand there is Ophelia, who actually goes on to commit suicide. She is trapped in a world where she has absolutely no control. Her own father and the king manipulate her at every turn and force her to be bate in order to trap Hamlet. When she revealed in the beginning that she loves Hamlet, both her father and her brother forbade her from seeing the man she loved, claiming hey knew better than her when it came to her won life. And, she is forced to listen, because she lives in a society where women have no autonomy and are considered the property to the men closest to them. Then after she is forced to bate Hamlet into a trap, he doesn’t allow her to explain and completely blames her. The man she loved and who she thought to love her back tells her he never loved her, and goes on to jeer at her and make sexual puns towards her to put her down even more. When her father is mindlessly murdered by her ex lover while her brother is away, that is her last straw. She goes completely mad and commits suicide. There are many other examples of this throughout the play, but I believe these to be the two major instances.
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Hi Elise! I like your post! I think that another example of a character feeling trapped would be Leonie from Sing, Unburied, Sing. She is in a relationship with Michael because she desperately wants some kind of a connection to her brother, Given. She then had children at a young age, maybe hoping to replace the hole she felt in her heart from her brother's murder. Now, though, she is still stuck in the past and feels unable to be a good mother to her children. Her solution is to try and block out the past and her children, but this has consequences for her and the rest of the family.
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