ABSTRACT
Not until Ophelia is stretched out in her grave does Hamlet move to love her. Though the tides of sexuality wash around her during the play, her sexuality, and her role as a desirable object is frustrated until she is in her grave. Then, the young men are drawn to her. Laertes, after quarrelling with the priest who is burying her, declares: “Hold off the earth awhile, / Till I have caught her once more in mine arms,” whereupon he leaps into the grave (5.1. 233-4).1 Hamlet, watching covertly, responds likewise, leaping in beside Laertes and declaring: “I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / Make up my sum” (5.1. 2546). Lectured to and scorned throughout the play, Ophelia, it seems, becomes an object of desire once she is laid out in her grave.
