Ophelia whomever he wants. Ophelia's father, Polonius, who enters while Laertes is leaving, also forbids Ophelia from pursuing Hamlet, as Polonius fears that Hamlet is not earnest about her. In Ophelia's next appearance, she tells Polonius that Hamlet rushed into her room with his clothing askew and a "hellish" expression on his face; he only stared at her, nodding three times without speaking to her. Based on what Ophelia told him, Polonius concludes that he was wrong to forbid Ophelia from seeing Hamlet, and that Hamlet must be mad with love for her. Polonius immediately decides to go to Claudius, the
Ophelia complex Ophelia complex Ophelia complex is the term used by Gaston Bachelard to refer to the links between femininity, liquids, and drowning which he saw as symbolised in the fate of Shakespeare's Ophelia. Bachelard traced in Romanticism a nexus of ideas linking the dissolution of the self - male or female - with immersion in the feminine element of water, as symbolised by Ophelia's drowning. Federico García Lorca explored the image of water and a despairing sexuality, epitomised in the Ophelia complex, throughout his writings. A later, and unconnected use of the terms Ophelia complex/Ophelia syndrome was introduced by Mary Pipher