Hamlet, on the other hand, accuses her of faithlessness, of whoring. He tells her to get her to a nunnery, a statement that implies that she is no better than a whore. When he meets her in the corridor and asks her where her father is, he knows she cannot answer. He knows Old Polonius is standing nearby, but she cannot reveal his whereabouts. Ophelia answers feebly, "At home, my lord," and her answer throws Hamlet into a frenzy because she has answered dishonestly. He has set her up. She has no other choice but to say that her father is at home; she is forced to lie and thereby to incur Hamlet's disapproval.
In her essay "The Warrant of Womanhood, Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism," Ann Thompson points out that male characters in Shakespeare have a limited perception of the female characters. Shakespeare, says Thompson, is sympathetic to women in this area; the playwright goes so far as to let his audience know that he intended for the male character to misunderstand the female, that the male character is often dead wrong about the female. The men completely misread their women, and the consequences are often tragic.
Such is Ophelia's case. Her men are wrong about her. They make assumptions and then they make demands based on those assumptions, but there is no way Ophelia can meet the demands because the underlying assumptions are flawed.
