Part 10 (B): Ophelia via Elaine Showalter’s 1985 “Representing”
Excerpts from Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism” [1]:
…Though she is neglected in criticism, Ophelia is probably the most frequently illustrated and cited of Shakespeare’s heroines.(282)
…Why has she been such a potent and obsessive figure in our cultural mythology? [...] how should feminist criticism represent Ophelia in its own discourse? What is our responsibility towards her as character and as woman?
…Shakespeare gives us very little information from which to imagine a past for Ophelia. [...] Her tragedy is subordinated in the play; unlike Hamlet, she does not struggle with moral choices or alternatives. [283]
[PF note: Showalter’s essay is an important one, but on this point I would disagree: Ophelia struggles to know what to think of Hamlet’s love and perhaps her good fortune, to grasp what it may mean to become Denmark’s next queen; she struggles against disapproval of her brother and father, against her brother’s hypocrisy, and against Hamlet’s denials of his love; in her madness, she struggles against the refusal of the court to mourn, and more.]
…Deprived of thought, sexuality, language, Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O--the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation. (284)
[PF note: For Ophelia to be the “mystery of feminine difference” is one thing; to be a cipher to be deciphered is to be a code, not a mystery. A true mystery will always have a surplus of meaning and can never fully be “deciphered,” unlike a cipher or code.]
…I would like to propose [...] that Ophelia does have a story of her own that feminist criticism can tell; it is neither her life story, nor her love story, nor Lacan’s story, but rather the history of her representation. (285)
[PF note: Some critics locate meaning more in a text or its origins; others more in the reader or audience. Some locate it in a dialogue between these. But here Showalter locates Ophelia’s meaning in changing representations, even if these are more projection than insight, like Ophelia’s listeners who “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” (4.5.12)]
…I will be showing first of all the representational bonds between female insanity and female sexuality. (285)
…for Ophelia [madness] is a product of the female body and female nature, perhaps that nature’s purest form. (286)
…[Ellen] Terry was the first to challenge the tradition of Ophelia’s dressing in emblematic white.[...] whiteness [...] made her a transparency, an absence that [...] made her a blank page to be written on or over by the male imagination. (293)
…in 1949, [Ernest] Jones argued that “Ophelia should be unmistakably sensual, as she seldom is on stage. She [...] is very aware of her body.” (294)
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SOURCE NOTE: Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in the Norton Hamlet, ed. Robert S. Miola, 2011, W.W. Norton and Company. 281-297. (It was good to see this included in the 2011 Norton edition of Hamlet, but for some reason it was omitted from later Norton editions, perhaps because of controversy some of Showalter’s other essays generated, or perhaps because of a male bias.)
The British Library has an article by Showalter that was adapted from this essay, and for which there is free access: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/ophelia-gender-and-madness
Showalter does not attempt to summarize or speak for all feminist critics, although she expresses criticism of some.
See also:
Juliet Dunsinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 1975, 1996.
Katharine Goodland, Female mourning and tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama, 2005.
The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, Carol Thomas Neely, 1980.
Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, 2001.
Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether, 1996.
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More from Showalter below, with some comments:
Extra quote 1
According to [Theodore] Lidz, Ophelia breaks down because she fails in the female developmental task of shifting her sexual attachment from her father “to a man who can bring her fulfillment as a woman.” (294)
[PF note: This is problematic in Lidz, not Showalter quoting him: Notice how Lidz displaces the blame for Ophelia’s madness, exonerating Claudius of responsibility for the wide-ranging effects that his murder of his brother and usurpation of the throne have on the court, and making it merely a matter of a failure on Ophelia’s part. I suppose this is because psychiatrists are not political analysts, so they attempt to help people one at a time as they struggle to cope with difficult circumstances?]
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Extra quote 2
...I want to suggest that the feminist revision of Ophelia comes as much from the actress’s freedom as from the critic’s interpretation. When Shakespeare’s heroines began to be played by women instead of boys, the presence of the female body and female voice, quite apart from details of interpretation, created new meanings and subversive tensions in these roles, and perhaps most importantly with Ophelia.(285)
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Extra quote 3
On the Elizabethan stage, the conventions of female insanity were sharply defined. Ophelia dresses in white, decks herself with “fantastical garlands” of wild flowers and enters[...] “distracted” playing on a lute with her “hair down singing.” Her speeches are marked by extravagant metaphors, lyrical free associations, and “explosive sexual imagery.” (286)
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Extra quote 4
All of these conventions carry specific messages about femininity and sexuality. Ophelia’s virginal and vacant white is contrasted with Hamlet’s scholar’s garb, his “suits of solemn black.” Her flowers suggest the discordant double images of female sexuality as both innocent blossoming and whorish contamination; she is the “green girl” of pastoral, the virginal “Rose of May” and the sexually explicit madwoman who, in giving away her wild flowers and herbs, is symbolically deflowering herself. The “weedy trophies” and phallic “long purples” which she wears to her death intimate an improper and discordant sexuality that Gertrude’s lovely elegy cannot quite obscure. In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the stage direction that a woman enters with disheveled hair indicates that she might either be mad or the victim of a rape; the disordered hair, her offence against decorum, suggests sensuality in each case. The mad Ophelia’s bawdy songs and verbal license, while they give her access to “an entirely different range of experience” from what she is allowed as the dutiful daughter seem to be her one sanctioned form of self-assertion as a woman, quickly followed, as if in retribution, by her death. (286)
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Extra quote 5
Drowning too was associated with the feminine, with female fluidity as opposed to masculine aridity. In his discussion of the “ Ophelia complex,” the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard traces the symbolic connections between women, water, and death. Drowning, he suggests, becomes the truly feminine death in the dramas of literature and life, one which is a beautiful immersion and submersion in the female element. Water is the profound and organic symbol of the liquid woman whose eyes are so easily drowned in tears, as her body is the repository of blood, amniotic fluid, and milk. (287)
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Extra quote 6
Clinically speaking, Ophelia’s behavior and appearance are characteristic of the malady the Elizabethans would have diagnosed as female love-melancholy, or erotomania. From about 1580, melancholy had become a fashionable disease among young men, especially in London, and Hamlet himself is a prototype of the melancholy hero. Yet the epidemic of melancholy associated with intellectual and imaginative genius “curiously bypassed women.” Women’s melancholy was seen instead as biological and emotional in origins.
On the stage, Ophelia’s madness was presented as the predictable outcome of erotomania. From 1660, when women first appeared on the public stage, to the beginnings of the eighteenth century, the most celebrated of the actresses who played Ophelia were those whom rumour credited with disappointments in love. (287)
[PF note: Shakespeare has characters ridicule popular ideas blaming psychological states on humors of the body; if we look for the meaning of Ophelia’s madness in medical books of the time, while it may shed light, is there not a chance we might be looking in the wrong place? While Shakespere lived in those times, we should be careful not to attribute all the ideas of the time to Shakespeare and his plays.]
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Extra quote 7
In the Shakespearean theatre, Ophelia’s romantic revival began in France rather than England. When Charles Kemble made his Paris debut as Hamlet [...] in 1827, his Ophelia was a young Irish ingénue named Harriet Smithson. Smithson used “her extensive command of mime to depict in precise gesture the state of Ophelia’s confused mind.” In the mad scene, she entered in a long black veil, suggesting the standard imagery of female sexual mystery in the gothic novel, with scattered bedlamish wisps of straw in her hair. Spreading the veil on the ground as she sang, she spread flowers upon it in the shape of a cross, as if to make her father’s grave, and mimed a burial, a piece of stage business which remained in vogue for the rest of the century. (288)
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Extra quote 8
Whereas the romantic Hamlet, in Coleridge’s famous dictum, thinks too much, has an “overbalance of the contemplative faculty” and an overactive intellect, the romantic Ophelia is a girl who feels too much, who drowns in feeling. The romantic critics seem to have felt that the less said about Ophelia the better; the point was to look at her. Hazlitt, for one, is speechless before her, calling her “a character almost too exquisitely touching to be dwelt upon.” While the Augustans represent Ophelia as music, the romantics transform her into an objet d’art, as if to take literally Claudius’s lament, “poor Ophelia/ Divided from herself and her fair judgment,/ Without the which we are pictures.” (289)
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Extra quote 9
Top: La mort d'Ophélie, 1840 / 1860, Delacroix, Eugène, The Louvre, public domain via https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010059387
Bottom: The Death of Ophelia, 1843, Eugène Delacroix, The Met, public domain via https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/337351
Smithson’s performance is best recaptured in a series of pictures done by Delacroix from 1830 to 1850, which show a strong romantic interest in the relation of female sexuality and insanity. The most innovative and influential of Delacroix’s lithographs is La Mort d’Ophèlie of 1843; the first of three studies. Its sensual languor, with Ophelia half-suspended in the stream as her dress slips from her body, anticipated the fascination with the erotic trance of the hysteric as it would be studied by Jean-Martin Charcot and his students, including Janet and Freud. Delacroix’s interest in the drowning Ophelia is also reproduced to the point of obsession in later nineteenth-century painting. The English Pre-Raphaelites painted her again and again, choosing the drowning which is only described in the play, and where no actress’s image had preceded them or interfered with their imaginative supremacy.(289-90)
[PF note: While Delacroix's painting and lithograph were clearly popular and influenced other, similar works, it's hard to believe Delacroix's Ophelia could have drowned, hanging on to the branch...]
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Extra quote 10
…In the Royal Academy show of 1852, Arthur Hughes’s entry shows a tiny waif-like creature--a sort of Tinker Bell Ophelia--in a filmy white gown, perched on a tree trunk by the stream. The overall effect is softened, sexless, and hazy, although the straw in her hair resembles a crown of thorns. (290)
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Extra quote 11
…Hughes’s juxtaposition of childlike femininity and Christian martyrdom was overpowered, however, by John Everett Millais’s great painting of Ophelia in the same show. While Millais’s Ophelia is sensuous siren as well as victim, the artist rather than the subject dominates the scene. The division of space between Ophelia and the natural details Millais had so painstakingly pursued reduces her to one more visual object; and the painting had such a hard surface, strangely flattened perspective, and brilliant light that it seems cruelly indifferent to the woman’s death. (290)
[PF note: Some interpret Millais's painting as portraying Ophelia still alive, afloat, still singing before death. Some interpret her posture as Christ-like ("Into your hands I commend my spirit"?). Some interpret it as erotic.]
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Extra quote 12
There is no “true” Ophelia for whom feminist criticism must unambiguously speak, but perhaps only a Cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of all her parts. (296-7)
[PF note: An interesting statement in itself, but also in light of more recent controversy regarding the sexism of Picasso, perhaps the most famous of all Cubists, but also problematic in light of Hamlet’s preoccupation with the idea of getting the story aright: Yes, there can be many insightful interpretations, but there are also many poor, sloppy interpretations that are perhaps more projection than interpretation. // We might also note that Showalter locates Ophelia and her meaning, not in the play text, nor exactly in audiences in the broadest sense, but rather in trends of various images and play productions, or in other words, she locates Ophelia in the history of "elite" interpretations. One might consider this problematic.]
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Extra quote 13
A degree of humility in an age of critical hubris can be our greatest strength, for it is by occupying this position of historical self-consciousness in both feminism and criticism that we maintain our credibility in representing Ophelia, and that, unlike Lacan, when we promise to speak about her, we make good our word. (297)
[PF note: I would agree, but I’m not so certain that Showalter embodies that credibility and faithfulness to her word, to speak about Ophelia: Perhaps her essay might have been named, “Representing Ophelias,” as it represents an effort to tell the story of the historical record of the efforts of many to use Ophelia as an occasion to project their biases and assumptions about her, about women, about madness?]
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(original part 10) TOP COLLAGE IMAGES:
Left: Ophelia (1880), Madeleine Lemaire (1845-1928), public domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ophelia_(1880),_de_Madeleine_Lemaire_(1845-1928).jpg
Center: Ophelia, 1880, Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). Fair use. Image via
https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2017/erotic-passion-desire-l17322/lot.1.html
Right: Ophelia, 1896, Joseph Kirkpatrick (1872–1936). Public domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Kirkpatrick,_1896_-_Ophelia.jpg
New collage (for this post, part 10 B):
Left: La mort d'Ophélie, 1840 / 1860, Delacroix, Eugène, The Louvre, public domain via https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010059387
Right: Ophelia, 1896, Joseph Kirkpatrick (1872–1936). Public domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Kirkpatrick,_1896_-_Ophelia.jpg
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INDEX OF OPHELIA POSTS:
My 2023 series on Ophelia, and earlier Ophelia posts:
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2023/10/index-of-ophelia-posts-2023-series-and.html
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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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Thanks for reading!
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