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Journalism of Courage
She floats, eyes lifted, hair fanned across water. But instead of John Everett Millais’s tragic maiden drifting toward death, this Ophelia wears sequins, diamonds and a defiant gaze. Taylor Swift’s forthcoming album, The Life of a Showgirl, set to arrive this October, shows her submerged in a bathtub, jeweled bodice shimmering under water, an unmistakable echo of Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52), the Pre-Raphaelite canvas that fixed Shakespeare’s drowned heroine of Hamlet fame in the cultural imagination.
Where Millais painted passivity, Swift restages the drowning as spectacle. Her sequined body is not sinking but floating on her own terms, not a victim claimed by water but a star using water as a backdrop.
“Taylor Swift has kind of turned that on its head by posing as a kind of quasi Millais figure, but she’s dressed in sequins and she’s in a bathtub, not in a river…” says Shormishtha Panja, a Shakespeare scholar and retired professor of English, Delhi University. “The whole thing is constructed and manufactured rather than a sort of natural setting as they wanted to portray Ophelia.”
At the same time, Netflix’s gothic hit Wednesday is teasing the arrival of “Aunt Ophelia,” an estranged family member confined to an asylum for her visions. Suddenly, Shakespeare’s “mad” drowned girl is seeing a resurgence, resurfacing everywhere, from streaming series to the cover of the year’s most anticipated pop album.
Ophelia is a young noblewoman in Hamlet, the soliloquy-loving protagonists’ love interest and daughter of Polonius, chief counsellor to the primary antagonist Claudius, and sister of the avenging Laertes. And, these relationships defined by the men in her life define her. Interestingly, male literary critics have interpreted her differently. For Voltaire she is “Hamlet’s mistress” and for Samuel Johnson “the young, the beautiful, the harmless, and the pious.”
Shakespeare’s Ophelia rarely speaks for herself. Instead, she is defined by what others tell her. Her father orders her to avoid Hamlet, her brother warns her about love, and Hamlet himself mistreats her. She becomes a symbol of obedience and silence, until grief and heartbreak drive her into madness and, finally, a mysterious drowning. Hamlet’s Ophelia has always been looked at, commanded, warned. Rarely does she speak on her own terms.
Her brother Laertes cautions her against Hamlet’s affections:
“For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood;
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute.”
Her father Polonius is blunter:
“I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Look to’t, I charge you: come your ways.”Story continues below this ad
Whatever the instruction, Ophelia simply answers: “I shall obey, my lord.”
“One of her most famous lines is ‘”So please you my lord I do not know, my lord, what I should think’. That is typical of Ophelia,” says Panja. “She’s being fed stuff about how she should even think by her father Polonius, by her brother Laertes, and of course by Hamlet.”
American Shakespearean scholar Sandra K Fischer, in her essay Hearing Ophelia: Gender and Tragic Discourse in Hamlet (1990), calls Ophelia’s language “an index to her enforced silence and circumscribed self.”
With her brother with whom she is familiar, she is allowed mostly half-lines and questions, and not even that with Polonius. “She is listened to but still not heard. Her sole rhetorical remedy is elliptical, a hermeneutics based on silence, absence, and ambiguity: “Let’s have no words of this, but when they ask you what it means, say you this,” writes Fischer.
That silencing continues to strike a chord with younger readers today. “Ophelia in Hamlet is a doomed, tragic character. She is misunderstood, used like a pawn to further others’ motives and plans, and she has little agency in what is happening around her. Yet she continues to face the consequences for all of it,” said Manisha Sharma, 21, a student at Bharati College, University of Delhi.
“She is rejected by her love, and her family does not understand her. That sense of being persistently misunderstood is what seems to inspire the song on Taylor Swift’s album,” Sharma said.
“Swift has been in the music industry for a long time and has constantly tried to prove her worth as an artist, but she has often been misunderstood. While her songs are about her life, heartbreak, and pain, she has also had to contend with relentless public criticism and judgment.”
For Sharma, Swift’s Ophelia imagery doesn’t only recall Millais’s famous drowning maiden but also evokes the suffocating sensation of modern womanhood. “It’s a universal experience of being constantly judged and misinterpreted,” she said. “It feels like drowning, losing control as things spiral around you, while you are caught in the middle.”
“Ophelia is denied the ‘fiction of selfhood built into the first-person singular and the rules of syntax. In a psycholinguistic world structured by father-son resemblance and rivalry and by the primacy of masculine logic, woman is a gap or a silence, the invisible and unheard sex,” says Fischer.
Her only escape comes in madness.
Madness unshackles her tongue.
“They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
She sings bawdy ballads in public, unladylike, almost defiant:
“Young men will do’t, if they come to’t;
By C***, they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.”
“Now what happens to Ophelia as a result of all this internal programming is that she somehow finds liberation in madness,” Panja says. “Because madness is when you break all those structures that are imposed on you… Ophelia, in her mad speeches, becomes a fully sexual being.”
Carroll Camden, an eminent scholar of Renaissance literature, in On Ophelia’s Madness (1964), reached a similar conclusion: “The overriding cause of Ophelia’s madness is clearly spelled out in the play; it is more ‘the pangs of despiz’d love’ which cause her tragic fate than the death of Polonius… These coarse and uninhibited lines are the sort which might unconsciously and naturally float to the top of Ophelia’s muddled mind if her thoughts had been dwelling on Hamlet’s love and on possible marriage to him.”
That disruption, shocking to early critics but freeing to later ones, is what resonates now. “That may be a reason why women today would relate not to her madness, but to that breaking out of structures that are imposed by society, that are imposed by patriarchy on a woman,” Panja said.
That idea of madness as liberation, rather than collapse, resonates with younger readers too. For Taarini Goyal, a 20-year-old student at Bharati College, Delhi University, Ophelia’s so-called breakdown is an expression of defiance. “Rather than seeing her madness as loss of control, I think of it as a reclamation of agency,” Goyal said. “It’s similar to the madwoman in the attic. Bertha Mason is deemed mad because she does not conform. Madness is subjective, and in Ophelia’s case, it can be a proclamation of agency.”
If Shakespeare sketched Ophelia, John Everett Millais painted her into permanence. His Ophelia shows the maiden floating among violets, daisies, and poppies, eyes wide, lips parted as the stream carries her away. But the beauty was built on suffering. Elizabeth Siddal, a painter and poet in her own right, was asked to model by lying in a bathtub of cold water for hours while Millais worked. She contracted pneumonia during the sittings. A decade later, she died of a laudanum overdose at 32, remembered less for her art than as the “real-life Ophelia.”
“Millais made the model go through extreme pain by actually making her pose… in water for the length of time that he painted that painting,” Panja said. “So again, it’s all about masculinity and nothing about Ophelia.”
London-based art curator and historian Ina Puri adds: “I don’t know how many people will really connect to the subject on the basis of who Ophelia is… But Taylor Swift has done something very interesting because she’s making it into something very now, very trendy, and very Gen Z. She is giving it a totally new dimension.”
When Goyal saw the cover of Swift’s album, she interpreted it as a metamorphosis. “Instead of a drowning beauty, I saw a mermaid-like figure,” she said. “In mythology, mermaids have their scales stripped and sold as treasures, and Swift, especially early in her career, was exploited by the media and the industry. But mermaids when seen as sirens are clever and dangerous. In that sense, the cover nods to her self-reinvention, much like in her Reputation era.”
Goyal is not the only one who compares Ophelia with a mermaid. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character floats temporarily because her clothes fill with air, buoying her up like a mermaid, before becoming waterlogged and pulling her down to her death in a brook.
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like a while they bore her up.
By the late 20th century, feminist critics sought to recover Ophelia’s voice from the silences around her. Fischer argued, “One must listen for the repression of Ophelia’s voice as juxtaposed against Hamlet’s noisy soul-wrenching soliloquies. Hearing Ophelia requires a new set of critical ears.”
Camden reframed her bawdy fragments not as nonsense but as memories. Panja suggested her death may not be suicide at all: “Because suicide suggests a kind of rational thought… whether it is Ophelia in her madness is not in that state anymore. She is wandering by the river and she falls in.”
This reading complicates the “poor wretch” of Gertrude’s speech. Ophelia is no longer a silent flower but a weed, whose troubling presence, language and body resist the roles imposed upon her.
When Queen Gertrude describes Ophelia’s drowning, she turns it into an aesthetic tableau,
“There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
… Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”
That poeticisation, beauty in death, has haunted Ophelia’s legacy ever since.
“The madness of Ophelia is something that male critics have grappled with,” says Panja, “because that has completely run against the whole notion of this poor Ophelia, this little flower… There is that kind of anxiety amongst male critics of a certain generation who want to see Ophelia in a circumscribed role rather than Ophelia breaking out.”
That messiness, that refusal to be contained, is what makes Ophelia ripe for Taylor Swift. Swift has always written in layers of metaphor. Folklore turned heartbreak into gothic balladry. Evermore was haunted by ghosts and madwomen. Her lyrics move easily through literary allusion. She has quoted F Scott Fitzgerald (“I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool,” happiness, 2020), nodded to Emily Dickinson (evermore, 2020), invoked Greek mythology (Midas, Achilles), and, increasingly, drawn on Shakespeare (Love Story, 2020 Fate of Ophelia, 2025).
In Clean (2014), she sings of drowning, “The water filled my lungs, I screamed so loud but no one heard a thing.” Later, the same water washes her heartbreak away: “You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore.”
In folklore (2020), she conjures “the mad woman,” echoing the trope of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. The lyrics go:
And there’s nothing like a mad woman
What a shame she went mad
No one likes a mad woman
You made her like that
And you’ll poke that bear ’til her claws come out
And you find something to wrap your noose around
And there’s nothing like a mad woman
Now, with Ophelia, she makes the literary allusion literal, inhabiting Millais’s iconic frame, only to dazzle her way out of it.
“Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
Ophelia endures because she embodies contradiction. She is silent, yet unforgettable. Chaste, yet bawdy. Fragile, yet disruptive.
As Puri reflects, “Somewhere I do not see Ophelia as a person who’s completely lost. Her love, her devotion, her commitment remain, and that is huge. That is true of women down generations forever. Swift has cleverly made this figure into the figure of every woman, not every woman suffering, but every woman who has had to struggle, who has had to fight with different issues. It is Ophelia’s silence, more than her speech, that keeps speaking back to us.
And in 2025, she is louder than ever, resurfacing in sequins, in streaming series, and in pop lyrics, refusing once again to stay submerged.
