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 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