Ophelia a friend whom he trusted and she lied to him. After Hamlet storms out, Ophelia makes her "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown" soliloquy. The next time Ophelia appears is at the "Mousetrap Play", which Hamlet has arranged to try to prove that Claudius killed King Hamlet. Hamlet sits with Ophelia and makes sexually suggestive remarks; he also says that woman's love is brief. Later that night, after the play, Hamlet kills Polonius during a private meeting between Hamlet and his mother, Queen Gertrude. At Ophelia's next appearance, after her father's death, she has gone mad, due to
Ophelia complex in her "Reviving Ophelia" of 1994. There she argued for a view of Shakespeare's character as lacking inner direction, and externally defined by men (father/ brother); and suggested that similar external pressures were currently faced by post-pubescent girls. The danger of the Ophelia syndrome was that of abandoning a rooted childhood self, for an apparently more sophisticated but over-externalised facade self. G. Bachelard, "L'Eau et les reves" (Paris 1942) 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