Ophelia, Sewing in Her Closet

Ophelia recalls that she was “so affrighted” when Hamlet bursts in on her, “as I was sewing in my closet” (2.1.74). Scenes of Ophelia’s madness and drowning, later in the play, surround her with flowers: from the “pansies: that’s for thoughts” (4.5.170) and the violets that “withered all when my father died” (177), to the “crowflowers, nettles, daisies and long purples” (4.7.167) that she makes into garlands before she drowns.Scholarly discussion of Ophelia’s flowers is ample, but little attention has been paid to her sewing. This essay considers Ophelia’s sewing, an activity that she enjoys in the sequestered privacy of what the Folio text calls her “chamber”, within the wider context of early modern girls’ needlework. In dialogue with Roszika Parker’s classic 1984 study, The Subversive Stitch, and in conversation with more recent work by Susan Frye and Anne Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, who draw attention to the connections between needlework and women’s authorship and political agency, I explore the special relationship between early modern girlhood and needlework. An essential part of a girls’ education as well as a popular pastime, girls’ needlework also provides some new contexts for understanding Ophelia’s association with flowers. Floral motifs are ubiquitous in early modern embroidery. Historical examples include the heartsease, or wild pansy, that the teenaged Princess Elizabeth Tudor stitched on the book cover of a translation that she made for her stepmother, Katherine Parr, in 1544. And on the Shakespearean stage, Emilia in Two Noble Kinsmen makes plans to embroider a daffodil on a skirt, at the very moment when Palamon and Arcite fall in love with her. Whether it reflects an aesthetic impulse for adornment, or the expression of an emotional bond through gift exchange, it is easy to imagine Ophelia sewing embroidered versions of the pansies, violets, daisies and other flowers later identified with her madness and death. KEYWORDS: Ophelia; Hamlet; needlework; embroidery; flowers; girlhood