Joseph’s post on “Shakespeare’s Innocent Victims,” which I read just now, made me think—for some reason—of Carson McCullers’ novel, The Member of the Wedding (I won’t offer an explanation of that connection.) By way of explaining to a reader the role of the innocent Paris in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Joseph names several innocent victim characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies; Ophelia in Hamlet is iconic.

Outside literature, inside “real” life, it’s a topic that has fascinated me a good deal. There are people who see other people as characters in stories or plays about themselves. I’ve been cast many times. Everyone has, no doubt, but some of us are more likely than others to be drafted as players in other people’s plays. I’m one of those. It’s happened to me so often, in fact, that I’ve had to ask myself why.

One reason I’m such a likely candidate for casting by others is that I’m unconnected. Moreover, I’m a woman, and women especially should not go around unconnected. This isn’t a feminist complaint, just a description of a psychic, social, cultural reality. Women are identified with an apostrophe “s” far more universally than men—and for a good reason. A woman is someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. That’s a good thing, because a woman who is not identified with an apostrophe-s can be whatever you want her to be; she has not been safely affixed somewhere, and that makes her available to function as your whatever. Apart from any moral significance of this, however, it means that people in general (not just men) tend to project on her whatever they like. She is unprotected by attachment that would identify her, leaving her like a blank sheet of paper, vulnerable to anyone who wants to write a script on her.

Another reason is that I never reject anyone. I don’t know why, it just seems cruel to me. I’m one of those people who always return phone calls, respond to all invitations, all correspondence, and I will be anyone’s friend—literally, anyone’s. Naively, for most of my life, I thought everyone was like that, but I’ve been shocked to see persons I thought to be very generous, open, and charitable, who’ve cruelly rejected overtures of friendship from others, and who barely mask the contempt they feel for someone whom they find unattractive in some way. Likely this trait of never rejecting anyone makes me more vulnerable to being cast—kind of like an actor who shows up for every audition.

There are other possible reasons, due to events in childhood, events in my personal history. But whatever the reasons may be, the consequence of a lifetime of such experiences has been an especially well-developed instinct to see how people apply that apostrophe-s both to others and to themselves, how they apply possessive pronouns, for example, in first, second, and third persons: my wife, his father, their daughter, her child, or a member of that club, group, class, staff, faculty.

It’s noteworthy that women are much more likely to identify themselves as someone’s wife than men are to identify themselves as someone’s husband, though each refers to the other as “my” husband/wife. And of course, we have the adoption of the husband’s surname in marriage as a social and legal indicator of identity transferal—a very sensible custom for the sake of offspring, regardless of how it antagonizes feminists, who use the pejorative term of “property” transferal—though I don’t think it ever meant that.

I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to parents of students, complaining about “their” child. Sometimes, I admit I’ve become frustrated with the apostrophe-ses, which are like lenses through which people sometimes seem to see the whole world. He’s not your child. He’s not even my student. He’s a sovereign creature of God and belongs to Him alone. So are we all. There may be many people present when we’re born and when we die, but we are born alone and we die alone. We are alone before God, whether we like it or not. We appear before Him with no apostrophe-ses, not in front of us or behind us.

Paris is an innocent bystander in the The Wreck of Romeo and Juliet, accidentally killed in the collision of ego (Romeo’s “play”) and reality. Like so many of us who are caught up in other people’s dramas, he never knew what hit him. But Ophelia? No, she’s not that kind of “innocent victim.” The Tragedy of Ophelia isn’t, as psychologists say, a case of having no sense of “self”; or as feminists say, a case of having no personhood independently of men. And it certainly isn’t a case of unrequited “love.” It’s a case of someone (who could as easily have been male in “real” life) who requires an apostrophe-s in order to function, to play a role, in order to exist at all. Ophelia is not kin to Cordelia; she is more kin to Lear. The difference is that she didn’t survive her heath. One doesn’t fault poor Ophelia with this understanding; she functions as the character she was intended to play. It is their role—they are who they are by virtue of their being someone’s daughter (Polonius, now dead) or Hamlet’s wife (but he rejects her). Unfortunately, she didn’t follow his advice (“Get thee to a nunnery.”) There is, quite literally then, no one for her to BE; therefore, she ceases to be.

So many people write plays about their lives, and they draft persons to act out some role in their play. I’ve been blindsided by scripts of which I was unaware, and cast into parts without my knowing about it. I’ve also been caught in the crossfire between Capulets and Montagues more than once—becoming a casualty in a war I didn’t know was going on. I’m still unconnected, and I still accept everybody who comes along, but I’ve also become quite reclusive, not venturing out much. Sometimes the only safe company one can keep is one’s own. There are a lot of nice people out there who can kill you.