#anyway you'll pry padme + ophelia and madness and monstrous femininity from my cold dead hands

[eleutheriana-archive]

wax poetic about padmé + ophelia metaphors / imagery

DID SOMEONE SAY OPHELIA IMAGERY ???

alright, so, let’s talk about padmé and ophelia, aka, let’s just listen to nicole scream incoherently for the next thirty years about ENTER OPHELIA, DISTRACTED. 

ophelia, for those of you who never had to read hamlet in high school, is the tragic heroine ( debatable; most scholars tend to think she doesn’t have enough agency to be the heroine and is therefore merely tragic ) of hamlet. she is the potential wife of hamlet, but is driven mad by a number of components ( hamlet’s rejection and then implied aggressive sexual advances, her father’s and her brother’s control of her life, etc. ) and after a time, drowns in a nearby river, either from falling from a tree, or jumping. 

padmé is, herself, a bit of an ophelia allegory, albeit not necessarily a straightforward one. there are no father / brother figures to force her into a relationship with a mad man or make her decisions for her, but in a lot of ways, padmé’s decisions are not always hers to make, especially not where anakin is concerned. every decision padmé makes is preordained to create luke and leia by virtue of the story that we are being told, and by the fact that it is, of course, already over.

this story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. it is already over. nothing can be done to change it. it is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. it is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst. it is a story about the end of an age. a strange thing about stories –– though all this happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. right here. it is happening as you read these words. this is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. corruption and treachery have crushed a thousand years of peace. this is not just the end of a republic; night is falling on civilization itself. this is the twilight of the jedi. the end starts now. 

                                                                    ––– beginning of the revenge of the sith novelization.

anakin descends into madness because he cannot save padmé. padmé dies because of his actions. the irony here is palpable, especially when combined with the reality that there was no way he could have saved padmé to begin with. she was doomed from the beginning; her story was always, always, already over. she was doomed the moment she met anakin, which is just, honestly, glaring neon lights that read HAMLET + OPHELIA over both of their heads. 

hamlet rejects ophelia by nature of her virtue being above everything else –––––– ‘ get thee to a nunnery ! why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners ? ( … ) i am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than i have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. what should such fellows as i do, crawling between earth and heaven ? we are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. go thy ways to a nunnery. ’ –––––– now, granted, hamlet has a bit more self awareness than anakin does, but the language and the warning is the same. anakin skywalker is proud, revengeful, and ambitious. there is more darkness in him than can be contained or even can be executed before he dies. 

padmé, of course, falls in love with him anyway, because this is how the story goes. this is how the story always goes. 

he then becomes more aggressive in pursuing –––––– ‘ i could interpret between you and your love, if i could see the puppets dallying. ’ ‘ you are keen, my lord, you are keen. ’ ––––– which is more of the anakin we know, and the padmé that we know.  ––––– ‘ please don’t look at me like that. it makes me feel uncomfortable. ’ ‘ we shouldn’t have done that. ’ ‘ i can’t. we can’t. it’s just not possible. ’ ‘ i couldn’t do that. could you, anakin ? could you live like that ? ’  ––––– padmé rejects anakin time and time again, only to fall right into the very relationship she stated, explicitly, would destroy both of them. blatant and heavy handed foreshadowing ? probably. we all know how terrible lucas is with dialogue. but it also suggests a bit of perceptiveness that most people don’t give her credit for. padmé walked into her doom with her eyes open.

she didn’t fall from the tree. she jumped.

ophelia descends into madness –––––– padmé falls out of the frame, unable to adapt to the darkness surrounding her husband. she goes from a beautiful flower with iron thorns on the stem to a wilted rose in just a few years’ time, because for one thing, lucas is awful at writing female characters consistently, and for another thing, because she’s being suffocated by the war and the dark side of the force and the nature of a story that was already written down and decided long before she came along. ( you made flowers grow in my lungs, and although they are beautiful, i can’t fucking breathe. // when i was little i picked up a flower and put it in a vase. after a few days, it died. i asked my mom why and she said: ‘ you can’t force a flower to thrive somewhere it doesn’t belong to. ’ and now i have realized that people are like that too. )

she starts fading at the beginning of rots, and she dies by the movie’s conclusion, which leads us to the most blatant and on the nose ophelia metaphor and imagery –––––– PADMÉ’S FUNERAL. ( or as i like to call it, space ophelia makes nicole cry every time. ) 

when down her weedy trophies and herselffell in the weeping brook. her clothes spread wide, and, mermaid-like awhile they bore her up, which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, as one incapable of her own distressor like a creature native and enduedunto that element. but long it could not betill that her garments, heavy with their drink, pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious layto muddy death. ( 4.7.199-208 )

this is the description of ophelia’s death that we’re provided with in text. who does that sound like ? 

OH YEAH.

another interesting note is that ophelia’s death is the one death in the play that makes every other character sit up and take notice. they all kind of collectively come to the realization of, to paraphrase, holy shit, what have we done to this innocent girl ? which is fitting, given that padmé dies exactly two days after empire day, and it is her death, more even than the fall of the republic, that shocks bail, yoda, and obi-wan to their cores. padmé was beautiful, innocent, kind, and loving, until outside influences strangled her from the inside out, and her death is the catalyst for the next twenty years of death and destruction that fall on what used to be the republic.

ask me questions you have about my bae // always accepting // @aftcrshocks