Research has saved me from the fate of Ophelia, but maybe not in the way you might expect.
I have mixed feelings about Taylor Swift’s new song, “The Fate of Ophelia,” even as I find myself unable to stop singing it. I’ve been intrigued by Hamlet’s Ophelia for over 40 years because to me, she is the heart of the tragedy of Hamlet, and Hamlet himself is cruel, brutal.
While Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” paints the literary character as drowning in emotion and succumbing to her despair from not finding true love, I’ve always thought that Ophelia’s melancholy was the specific result of the collapse of Ophelia’s world—losing her lover, her father, her place in society, her future. I still don’t see any evidence in Shakespeare’s play that Ophelia suffered from melancholia—as it would have been expressed in that era—until after all the men in her life gaslit her and used her as pawn in their political games. We all know that Taylor Swift weaves metaphors and emotional snippets together with her personal experiences, and she’s beloved for that, but Ophelia’s story goes far deeper for me than pop references.
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And yes, I do like the song, even if I’m a Tortured Poets’ Department girlie more than I’ll ever be a Life of a Showgirlie.
I first encountered the fate of Ophelia back in high school literature classes, and then again as an English major in college in the early 1980s in my senior level Shakespeare class. I had this one professor who was super tough but what I learned from her in the half-dozen upper level and graduate classes she taught wasn’t something found in the footnotes of my Riverside Shakespeare textbook. Nope.
For my Shakespeare term paper, I chose to focus on Hamlet. In particular, I guess you could say I wrote about the fate of Ophelia and what was happening behind the scenes that led to her death. Back in those days, I couldn’t ask ChatGPT to tell me what drove her to her drowning. I couldn’t dig through the internet because it didn’t exist then. I couldn’t “do my research” via social media, because even the early electronic bulletin boards I haunted–via modems that sounded like robots caught in an electric fence–were still a decade away.
So I did research the “hard” way.
In the university library.
Late at night, sometimes right up until they locked the doors at midnight and I had to walk home with my dorm keys like a bear claw in my grip. When every sound seemed loud because I’d spent hours in a vacuum of any noise at all.
But that was the fun part, and maybe it’s why I write stories about the Secret Lives of Librarians now.
The way I researched my term papers and college projects meant going upstairs in the library to a lonely section of reference guides and microfiche machines. I usually started with The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. These were big, red, soft-covered reference volumes published by The H. W. Wilson Company and served as the master index to magazines and journals for students doing research papers. Once I found a journal article on a subject that interested me, I went on a scavenger hunt for an article that may or may not have been available in the library in the periodical archive.
It was there that I found source material that suggested Hamlet’s famous rebuke to Ophelia to “Get thee to a nunnery!” was exceptionally cruel. One of the sources claimed that a nunnery of that era was synonymous with brothel, not convent. If the word was intended to mean convent, then Hamlet could be seen as telling her to repent for her impurity, likely with him. If the word meant brothel, then Hamlet was insulting her. There’s no hint that he’s concerned about her well-being and trying to send her to safety. Nay, this is just prime-time hatefulness toward a woman who loves him. My personal impression is that Hamlet meant it as a play on the word nunnery, with the dual meaning, but in any case, still as cruel.
And why I have never ever liked Hamlet’s character, and my double meaning of the word character is fully intended.
Another source suggested that the reason for Ophelia’s sudden descent into madness is that she is pregnant and has just lost anyone and everyone who might protect her. Funny, but I always read her that way, too. That her precarious situation, her grief, her despair over losing the man she loved—all of it led to what Taylor Swift refers to as the “Fate of Ophelia.”
But those late night treasure hunts in the library taught me something non-literary that I’ve used ever since.
When I was 18 or 19, the same professor taught an upper level/graduate class called Modern Short Story. I somehow managed to get into the class, even though I was by far the youngest and newest student. She assigned me a project that made a lasting impression during the same time I was untangling my impressions of Ophelia. Not a term paper this time, but an annotated bibliography. I was to follow the same technique for research as I had for Ophelia, but I was to analyze each journal article on the subject of symbolism in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” which struck me most in how Gretta remembers Michael Furey with a fierce tenderness in her youth while the man beside her for decades has never felt that kind of passion.
I still remember exactly where I sat cross-legged on the floor in the reference section of the library and the color of the carpet under me, the archived journal articles bound into a softcover book in my lap as I read yet another opinion on what some scholar or other thought James Joyce meant by using a particular description. This one particular article was so ridiculous that I laughed out loud—and startled the night librarian, the only other person within a hundred silent feet of me.
It was a pivotal moment, reading an over-the-top opinion on a James Joyce story. I could’ve chosen to ignore it, but I’d done the work of reading it in my research, so I described the article in my annotated bibliography and how it descended into apophenia (the human tendency to perceive connections or meaning in random data, which is something Swifties occasionally do) masquerading as literary theory. I added an extra source just in case my professor didn’t like how I balked at this one article because I was a good girl who didn’t want to be in trouble.
I wasn’t in trouble, though. My professor congratulated me on my discernment, for learning not to take everyone’s opinion as fact, and I got an A on the project and the class.
I think often now about that moment. Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” reminded me of it, and of my research into the reason for Ophelia’s end, whether you call it melancholia or madness. We may not have been melancholy before, but many of us are living in a time now when the events around us cause us despair. We’re drowning in the madness of doomscrolling and ridiculous commentary on social media.
Knowing how to research, how to seek reputable sources and discern truth from noise, is what saves me now—from confusion, from despair, from the endless whirlpool of misinformation that masquerades as meaning. It’s the skill that keeps me grounded amid the madness of doomscrolling and commentary that’s as hollow as it is loud.
In the end, it’s what keeps me from drowning.
It’s what saves me from the fate of Ophelia.
When reality-shifting pages erase people from existence, empathic librarian Lilah and the last priest must save a cursed grimoire—and themselves.
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