What I Learned From The Fate of Ophelia About Hidden Languages
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Welcome to What I Learned From… “There with fantastic garlands did she come of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples…Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet What I Learned From …When Taylor Swift drops a track called “The Fate of Ophelia”, you can bet a whole corner of the internet is about to discover Shakespeare the hard way. For some, it’s the first time hearing the name outside a CliffsNotes summary. For others, it’s like déjà vu: oh right, the drowned girl in the pretty dress. Either way, Ophelia has been waiting in the wings for centuries, and she deserves more than tragic energy. Because here’s the thing: Ophelia wasn’t just a sad girl with a crush. She was a pawn caught between her father Polonius (the king’s advisor), her brother Laertes, her mercurial boyfriend Hamlet, and the not-so-innocent King Claudius. Every man in her orbit had a plan for her. She was to report on Hamlet…reject Hamlet…seduce Hamlet…distract Hamlet…in case you can’t tell, most of this scheming was really about Hamlet. She wasn’t so much a character as a chess piece, moved around until she cracked under the pressure. By the time Hamlet kills her father (a rather fatal mix-up, he thought it was his evil stepfather King Claudius), Ophelia has lost the only constant in her life; even if that constant was bossy and manipulative. And then she shows up at court, disheveled and singing some bawdy tunes that make the proper ladies blush as she goes through it grieving the loss of her father, while talking to these imaginary flowers in her hands. To the casual eye, it looks like madness: a girl unraveling, babbling, tossing imaginary herbs around like confetti. But Shakespeare wasn’t writing nonsense; he was writing code.
Sure, the delivery might have seemed gibberish, but it was actually precision. Ophelia lost her place in the court’s script, so she grabbed “a bunch of flowers” and wrote a monologue of her own. And this is where Swift and Shakespeare start sounding like kindred spirits. Taylor has trained her fans to catch every Easter egg: the capital letters in liner notes, the nail polish in a video, the suspicious number of chairs at a table. A scarf is never just a scarf. Shakespeare’s audiences were no different, they knew what fennel “meant.” Watching Ophelia hand those flowers out in court was like decoding a bridge lyric and realizing, “Oh, she’s talking about that.” Symbolism and Easter eggs are just two sides of the same secret language, designed to reward the people who pay close attention. This clicked for me early on, in my senior year of high school. Rereading Pride and Prejudice, I started pestering my teacher about why flowers kept popping up in odd little places. She handed me her encyclopedia of symbolism and said, “Here…go nuts.” Reader, I did. I scoured every page. By college, I was so obsessed with hidden meanings that I built my first website around it: Ophelia’s Webb. The tagline was “Not-So-Average Girl Next Door,” which tells you everything you need to know about me in my 20s. Symbolism became my secret language. At one point, I even had a side hustle interpreting dreams for five bucks. And honestly? That’s not far from Ophelia’s bouquets or Swift’s Easter eggs. The fun of it wasn’t just in the symbol itself, it was the puzzle of uncovering what the dreamer couldn’t quite say directly. It was all hidden in the subtext (and this right here is why I’m a damn good editor.) Of course, Shakespeare didn’t invent this trick. Flowers have been coded for millennia. Ancient Greeks immortalized them in myths (Daphne fleeing Apollo by becoming a laurel tree, Persephone trapped in the underworld with her pomegranate seeds, another of Apollo’s lovers Hyacinth–his blood immortalized in the flowers that bear his name.) In Japan, hanakotoba turned blossoms into confessions. Victorian lovers passed tussie-mussies (small “talking bouquets”) to whisper their adoration or naughtier sentiments. Even modern literature carries the thread: Daisy in The Great Gatsby, Proust’s water lilies, Dorothy collapsing in a lethal poppy field in Oz. Flowers rarely “just look pretty.” Which brings us back to Ophelia. Shakespeare leaves her death ambiguous: did she fall by accident, singing snatches of old songs as her clothes dragged her down? Or did she finally decide to stop playing everyone else’s game? Either way, she went out garlanded in crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples; her final act woven with symbols no one could erase. For writers, symbolism isn’t decoration; it’s a strategy. It’s how you say two things at once…you write for the casual reader and for the careful decoder. Maybe your “flowers” are recurring images, or repeated colors, or a character who always hums the same tune. Maybe they’re Easter eggs hidden for your future self. As long as you aren’t overusing them, they add inside secrets that pull a reader in. Whatever form they take, symbols let you smuggle in depth without ever announcing it outright. Ophelia didn’t get to escape her fate, but she refused to exit silently. Instead, she left us with a language sharp enough to cut through centuries. One Shakespeare’s audience could read, and one Swifties might now be decoding all over again. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Freshly Forged …Inside Patreon: what's new, what's coming, and how to be part of it.
The fire’s always burning. You can join the free tier or back the work at any level right here. Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “Now the word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does…I think that for the fiction writer himself, symbols are something he uses simply as a matter of course. You might say that these are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction.” — Flannery O’Connor in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Look back at something you’ve written (a paragraph, a post, an essay) and see if you can find a hidden motif or pattern you didn’t realize you’d included. What was your subconscious trying to tell you? Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Florilegium [FLOH-rih-LEE-jee-um] (n.) — the medieval habit of clipping the best bits from other people’s writing and calling it an anthology. From the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather), it was how monks made mixtapes, picking only the choicest blooms of Aristotle, Augustine, and whoever else was flourishing that season. Later, it went fully botanical, and became the word for fancy flower books. It’s the scholarly ancestor of your Notes app full of copied paragraphs and highlighted passages. Sorta synonyms: commonplace book, anthology, a writer's spice rack Use it for: gathering sparks from your reading life, curating the sentences that make you swoon, building a literary bouquet you can’t bear to throw away. Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Buffer: I use the free version of this social media scheduler, and have for 40 weeks straight. It lets you connect up to 3 accounts and you can schedule up to 10 posts on each. (I’ll be sharing more about how I use it to get hundreds of thousands of views in Behind the Forge this week!) The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Don't these people know I'm a writer? I don't do speaky-words! ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - This essay was written and scheduled before the release of The Life of a Showgirl. Let’s see what Dr. Swift has in store for us with “The Fate of Ophelia.” |