The changes that led to the birth of an emerging middle class that supported the artist's career also affected social relations and gender issues. Ophelia, the lover of Shakespeare's Hamlet, became the subject of many paintings exhibited at the Academy. To the Victorians, Ophelia was a symbol of the juxtaposition of inherently innocent women, with an aversion to unbridled sexuality and mental instability. The scene in which Millais painted Ophelia is a fictional depiction of her suicide by drowning, mentioned in Hamlet but not present on stage. Using a subject from a literary source became a common theme in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, where they often created an image with careful detail in the written words. Ophelia is the embodiment of young Victorian girls expressing the grieving heart. It was the social norm for a woman who had been rejected or cast aside to accept a fate of death by drowning or decline rather than face the shame of rejection. For Millais, the scene in which he painted Ophelia was as important as the figure. The scenario he chose was only accessible to him with the massive expansion of the railways in England, which allowed him to travel outside the city of London to find a scene closely resembling that described by